‘What do you fancy?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘It’s got to be Adidas, I think.’ ‘Why?’
‘Because that’s what everyone wears.’
The shoes were displayed according to manufacturer, and the Adidas section of the shop was attracting more than its fair share of shoppers.
‘Sheep,’ said Marcus as they were approaching. ‘Baaaa.’
‘Where did you get that from?’
‘That’s what my mum says when she thinks people haven’t got a mind of their own.’
Will suddenly remembered that a boy at his old school had had a mum like Fiona – not exactly like her, because it seemed to Will that Fiona was a peculiarly contemporary creation, with her seventies albums, her eighties politics and her nineties foot lotion, but certainly a sixties equivalent of Fiona. Stephen Fullick’s mother had a thing about TV, that it turned people into androids, so they didn’t have a set in the house. ‘Did you see Thund…’ Will would say every Monday morning and then remember and blush, as if the TV were a parent who had just died. And what good had that done Stephen Fullick? He was not, as far as Will was aware, a visionary poet, or a primitive painter; he was probably stuck in some provincial solicitor’s office, like everyone else from school. He had endured years of pity for no discernible purpose.
‘The whole idea of this expedition, Marcus, is that you learn to become a sheep.’
‘Is it?’
‘Of course. You don’t want anyone to notice you. You don’t want to look different. Baaaa.’
Will picked out a pair of Adidas basketball boots that looked cool but relatively unshowy.
‘What do you think of them?’
‘They’re sixty pounds.’
‘Never mind how much they cost. What do you think of them?’
‘Yeah, good.’
Will grabbed an assistant and asked him to bring the right size, and Marcus stomped up and down for a while. He looked at himself in the mirror and tried to repress a smile.
‘You think you look cool, don’t you?’ said Will.
‘Yeah. Except… except now the rest of me looks all wrong.’
‘So next time we’ll make the rest of you look OK.’
Marcus went straight home afterwards, his boots stuffed into his school bag; Will walked back beaming at his own munificence. So this was what people meant by a natural high! He couldn’t recall having felt like this before, so at peace with himself, so convinced of his own self-worth. And, unbelievably, it had only cost him sixty quid! How much would he have had to pay for an equivalent unnatural high? (Probably about twenty-five quid, thinking about it, but unnatural highs were indisputably inferior.) He had made an unhappy boy temporarily happy, and there hadn’t been anything in it for him at all. He didn’t even want to sleep with the boy’s mother.
The following day Marcus turned up at Will’s door, tearful, a pair of soggy black socks where his Adidas basketball boots should have been; they’d stolen them, of course.
seventeen
Marcus would have told his mum where the trainers had come from, if she’d asked, but she didn’t because she didn’t even notice he was wearing them. OK, his mum wasn’t the most observant person in the world, but the trainers seemed so big and white and peculiar and attention-seeking that Marcus felt as though he wasn’t wearing shoes at all, but something alive – a pair of rabbits, maybe.
But she noticed they had gone. Typical. She didn’t notice the rabbits, which you never see on feet, but she spotted the socks, which were only where they should be.
‘Where are your shoes?’ she shrieked when he came home. (Will had given him a lift, but it was November, and wet, and during the short walk across the pavement and up the stairs to the front door of the flats he had soaked his socks through again.) He looked at his feet, and for a moment he didn’t say anything: he toyed with the idea of acting all surprised and telling her he didn’t know, but he quickly realized she wouldn’t believe him.
‘Stolen,’ he said eventually.
‘Stolen? Why would anyone steal your shoes?’
‘Because…’ He was going to have to tell the truth, but the problem was that the truth would lead to a whole lot more questions. ‘Because they were nice ones.’
‘They were just ordinary black slip-on shoes.’
‘No, they weren’t. They were new Adidas trainers.’
‘Where did you get new Adidas trainers from?’
‘Will bought them for me.’
‘Will who? Will the guy who took us out to lunch?’
‘Yeah, Will. The bloke from SPAT. He’s sort of become my friend.’
‘He’s sort of become your friend?’
Marcus was right. She had loads more questions, except the way she asked them was a bit boring: she just repeated the last thing he said, stuck a question mark on the end of it and shouted.
‘I go round his flat after school.’
‘YOU GO ROUND HIS FLAT AFTER SCHOOL?’
Or:
‘Well, you see, he doesn’t really have a kid.’
‘HE DOESN’T REALLY HAVE A KID?’
And so on. Anyway, at the end of the question session he was in a lot of trouble, although probably not as much trouble as Will.
Marcus put his old shoes back on, and then he and his mother went straight back to Will’s flat. Fiona started raging at Will the moment they had been invited in and, at the beginning, when she was having a go at him about SPAT and his imaginary son he looked embarrassed and apologetic – he had no answers to any of her questions, so he stood there staring at the floor. But as it went on he started to get angry too.
‘OK,’ Fiona was saying. ‘Now what the hell are these little after-school tea parties about?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Why would a grown man want to hang out with a twelve-year-old boy day after day?’
Will looked at her. ‘Are you suggesting what I think you’re suggesting?’
‘I’m not suggesting anything.’
‘I don’t think that’s true, is it? You’re suggesting that I’ve been… fiddling with your son.’
Marcus looked at Fiona. Was that really what she was on about? Fiddling?
‘I’m simply asking why you entertain twelve-year-olds in your flat.’
Will lost his temper. He went red in the face and started shouting very loud. ‘I don’t have any fucking choice, do I? Your son comes round fucking uninvited every night. Sometimes he’s pursued by gangs of savages. I could leave him outside to take his chances, but I’ve been letting him in for his own safety. I won’t fucking bother next time. Sod the pair of you. Now, if you’ve finished, you can piss off.’
‘I haven’t finished yet, actually. Why did you buy him a pair of expensive trainers?’
‘Because… because look at him.’ They looked at him. Marcus even looked at himself.
‘What’s wrong with him?’
Will looked at her. ‘You haven’t got a clue, have you? You really haven’t got a clue.’
‘About what?’
‘Marcus is being eaten alive at school, you know. They take him to pieces every single fucking day of the week, and you’re worried about where his trainers come from and whether I’m molesting him.’
Marcus suddenly felt exhausted. He hadn’t properly realized how bad things were until Will started shouting, but it was true, he really was being taken to pieces every single fucking day of the week. Up until now he hadn’t linked the days of the week in that way: each day was a bad day, but he survived by kidding himself that each day was somehow unconnected to the day before. Now he could see how stupid that was, and how shit everything was, and he wanted to go to bed and not get up until the weekend.
‘Marcus is doing fine,’ his mother said. At first he didn’t believe she’d said it, and then, when he’d had a chance to listen to the words ringing in his ears, he tried to find a different meaning for them. Maybe there was another Marcus? Maybe there was someth
ing else he was doing fine at, something he’d forgotten about? But of course there was no other Marcus, and he wasn’t doing fine at anything; his mum was just being blind and stupid and nuts.
‘You’re kidding,’ said Will.
‘I know he’s taking some time to settle at his new school, but—’
Will laughed. ‘Yeah. Give him a couple of weeks and he’ll be OK, eh? Once they’ve stopped stealing his shoes and following him home from school everything’ll be great.’
That was wrong. They were all mad. ‘I don’t think so,’ said Marcus. ‘It’s going to take longer than a couple of weeks.’
‘It’s OK, I know,’ said Will. ‘I was joking.’
Marcus didn’t think it was the sort of conversation that jokes fitted into, but at least it meant that someone understood what was going on. How come it was Will, though, whom he’d known for two minutes, and not his mum, whom he’d known for, well, all his life?
‘I think you’re being a bit melodramatic,’ said Fiona. ‘Maybe you haven’t had very much contact with kids before.’
Marcus didn’t know what the ‘melo’ bit of ‘melodramatic’ meant, but it made Will even angrier.
‘I used to be a fucking kid,’ said Will. He was swearing a lot now. ‘And I used to go to a fucking school. I know the difference between kids who can’t settle down and kids who are just plain miserable, so don’t give me any shit about being melodramatic. I’m supposed to take this from someone who—’
‘Ow!’ Marcus shouted. ‘Cowabunga!’
They both stared at him and he stared back. He had no way of explaining his outburst; he had made the first two noises he could think of, because he could see that Will was going to bring up the subject of the hospital, and he didn’t want that. It wasn’t fair. Just because his mum was being dim, it didn’t mean that Will had the right to have a go at her about that. The way he saw it the hospital stuff was more serious than the sweets and trainers stuff, and no one should mix them in together.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ asked Will.
Marcus shrugged. ‘Nothing. Just… I don’t know. Wanted to have a shout.’
Will shook his head. ‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘What a family.’
Marcus hadn’t enjoyed the afternoon’s rows, but when they had finished he could see the point of them. His mum knew about Will not having a kid, which was probably a good thing, and she knew that he visited Will after school most days, which was also a good thing, probably, because he’d had to tell her a lot of fibs recently, and he’d been feeling bad about it. And, most importantly, she knew about what went on at school, because Will had spelt it out. Marcus hadn’t been able to spell it out, because he’d never been able to see the whole word before, but it didn’t really matter who’d done it; the point was that Fiona understood.
‘You’re not going round there again,’ she said on the way home.
Marcus knew she’d say it, and he also knew that he’d take no notice, but he argued anyway.
‘Why not?’
‘If you’ve got anything to say, you say it to me. If you want new clothes, I’ll get them.’
‘But you don’t know what I need.’
‘So tell me.’
‘I don’t know what I need. Only Will knows what I need.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘It’s true. He knows what things kids wear.’
‘Kids wear what they put on in the mornings.’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘You mean that he thinks he’s trendy, and that even though he’s God knows how old he knows which trainers are fashionable, even though he doesn’t know the first thing about anything else.’
That was exactly what he meant. That was what Will was good at, and Marcus thought he was lucky to have found him.
‘We don’t need that kind of person. We’re doing all right our way.’
Marcus looked out of the bus window and thought about whether this was true, and decided it wasn’t, that neither of them were doing all right, whichever way you looked at it.
‘If you are having trouble it’s nothing to do with what shoes you wear, I can tell you that for nothing.’
‘No, I know, but—’
‘Marcus, trust me, OK? I’ve been your mother for twelve years. I haven’t made too bad a job of it. I do think about it. I know what I’m doing.’
Marcus had never thought of his mother in that way before, as someone who knew what she was doing. He had never thought that she didn’t have a clue either; it was just that what she did with him (for him? to him?) didn’t appear to be anything like that. He had always looked on being a mother as straightforward, something like, say, driving: most people could do it, and you could mess it up by doing something really obvious, by driving your car into a bus, or not telling your kid to say please and thank you and sorry (there were loads of kids at school, he reckoned, kids who stole and swore too much and bullied other kids, whose mums and dads had a lot to answer for). If you looked at it that way, there wasn’t an awful lot to think about. But his mum seemed to be saying that there was more to it than that. She was telling him she had a plan.
If she had a plan, then he had a choice. He could trust her, believe her when she said she knew what she was doing; that meant putting up with things at school because they’d turn out all right in the end and she could see things he couldn’t. Or he could decide that, actually, she was off her head, someone who took drug overdoses and then apparently forgot all about them afterwards. Either way it was scary. He didn’t want to put up with things as they were, but the other choice meant that he’d have to be his own mother, and how could you be your own mother when you were only twelve? He could tell himself to say sorry and please and thank you, that was easy, but he didn’t know where to start with the rest of it. He didn’t even know what the rest of it was. He hadn’t even known until today that there was a rest of it.
Every time he thought about this, it came back to the same problem: there were only two of them, and at least – at least- one of them was nuts.
In the next few days he began to notice more things about the way Fiona talked to him. Everything she said about what he could and should watch or listen to or read or eat made him curious: was this part of the plan, or was she just making it up as she went along? It never occurred to him to ask her until she told him to go to the shops to get some eggs for their dinner: it struck him that he was a vegetarian only because she was too.
‘Did you always know I was going to be a vegetarian?’
She laughed. ‘Of course I did. I didn’t decide on the spur of the moment because we’d run out of sausages.’
‘And do you think that’s fair?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Shouldn’t I have been allowed to make up my own mind?’
‘You can when you’re older.’
‘Why aren’t I old enough now?’
‘Because you don’t do your own cooking. I don’t want to cook meat, so you have to eat what I eat.’
‘But you don’t let me go to McDonald’s either.’
‘Is this premature teenage rebellion? I can’t stop you going to McDonald’s.’
‘Really?’
‘How can I? I’d just be disappointed if you did.’
Disappointed. Disappointment. That was how she did it. That was how she did a lot of things.
‘Why?’
‘I thought you were vegetarian because you believed in it.’
‘I do.’
‘Well, you can’t go to McDonald’s then, can you?’
She’d done him again. She always told him he could do what he wanted, and then argued with him until what he wanted was what she wanted anyway. It was beginning to make him angry.
‘That’s not fair.’
She laughed. ‘That’s what life is, Marcus. You have to work out what you believe in, and then you have to stick to it. It’s hard, but it’s not unfair. And at least it’s easy to understand.’
r /> There was something wrong with this, but he didn’t know what. All he knew was that not everyone thought like this. When they talked in class about things like smoking, everyone agreed it was bad, but then loads of kids smoked; when they talked about violent films, everyone said they disapproved of them, but they still watched them. They thought one thing and did another. In Marcus’s house it was different. They decided what was bad and then they never touched it or did it again. He could see how that made sense: he thought stealing was wrong and killing was wrong, and he didn’t steal things or kill people. So was that all there was to it? He wasn’t sure.
But of all the things that made him different, he could see this was the most important. It was why he wore clothes that other kids laughed at – because they’d had this talk about fashion, and they’d agreed that fashion was stupid – and why he listened to music that was old-fashioned, or that no one else had ever heard of – because they’d had this talk about modern pop music, and they’d agreed it was just a way for record companies to make a lot of money. It was why he wasn’t allowed to play violent computer games, or eat hamburgers, or do this or that or the other. And he’d agreed with her about all of it, except he hadn’t agreed really; he’d just lost the arguments.
‘Why don’t you just tell me what to do? Why do we always have to talk about it?’
‘Because I want to teach you to think for yourself.’
‘Was that your plan?’
‘What plan?’
‘When you said the other day that you knew what you were doing.’
‘About what?’
‘About being a mum.’
‘Did I say that?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Oh. OK. Well, of course I want you to think for yourself. All parents want that.’
‘But all that happens is we have an argument and I lose, and I do what you want me to do. We might as well save time. Just tell me what I’m not allowed, and leave it at that.’
‘So what’s brought all this on?’
‘I’ve been thinking for myself.’