‘Good for you.’
‘I’ve been thinking for myself, and I want to go round to Will’s house after school.’
‘You’ve already lost that argument.’
‘I need to see someone else who’s not you.’
‘What about Suzie?’
‘She’s like you. Will’s not like you.’
‘No. He’s a liar, and he doesn’t do anything, and—’
‘He bought me those trainers.’
‘Yes. He’s a rich liar who doesn’t do anything.’
‘He understands about school and that. He knows things.’
‘He knows things! Marcus, he doesn’t even know he’s born.’
‘You see what I mean?’ He was getting really frustrated now. ‘I’m thinking for myself and you just… it just doesn’t work. You win anyway.’
‘Because you’re not backing it up. It’s not enough to tell me that you’re thinking for yourself. You’ve got to show me, too.’
‘How do I show you?’
‘Give me a good reason.’
He could give her a reason. It wouldn’t be the right reason, and he’d feel bad saying it, and he was pretty sure it would make her cry. But it was a good reason, a reason that would shut her up, and if that was how you had to win arguments, then he’d use it.
‘Because I need a father.’
It shut her up, and it made her cry. It did the job.
eighteen
November the nineteenth. November the fucking nineteenth. That was definitely a new record, Will noted darkly. Last year it had been November the fucking twenty-sixth. He hadn’t made it through into December for years now; he could see that when he was fifty or sixty he’d be hearing his first rendition of ‘Santa’s Super Sleigh’ in July or August. This year it was a busker at the bottom of the escalator at the Angel station, a cheerful, attractive young woman with a violin who was obviously trying to supplement her music scholarship. Will scowled at her with all the hatred he could muster, a look intended to convey not only that he wouldn’t be giving her any money, but that he would like to smash up her instrument and then staple her head to the escalator steps.
Will hated Christmas, for the obvious reason: people knocked on his door, singing the song he hated more than any song in the world and expected him to give them money. It had been worse when he was a kid, because his dad hated Christmas too, for the obvious reason (although Will hadn’t realized it was the obvious reason until he was much older – back then, he just thought that his dad was as sick of the song as everybody else): it was a terrible reminder of how badly he had failed in his life. Quite often people wanted to interview his father about ‘Santa’s Super Sleigh’, and they always used to ask what else he had written, and he would tell them, sometimes even play them things, or show them records which featured another of his songs. They would look embarrassed, cluck sympathetically and tell him how hard it was for everyone who was famous for only one thing, a long time ago, and ask him whether the song had ruined his life, or made him wish he’d never written it. He would get angry, and tell them not to be so stupid and patronizing and insensitive, and when they had gone, he would complain bitterly that the song had ruined his life, and say he wished he’d never written it. One radio journalist even went away and made a series called One-Hit Wonders inspired completely by his interview with Charles Freeman, all about people who’d written one great book, or appeared in one film, or written one famous song; the journalist had had the cheek to ask him for another interview and, perhaps understandably, Will’s father had refused.
So Christmas was the season of anger and bitterness and regret and recrimination, of drinking binges, of frantic and laughably inadequate industry (one Christmas day his father wrote an entire, and entirely useless, musical, in a doomed attempt to prove that his talent was durable). It was a season of presents by the chimney too, but even when he was nine Will would gladly have swapped his Spirographs and his Bat-mobiles for a little peace and goodwill.
But things changed. His father died, and then his mother, and he lost touch with his stepbrother and stepsister, who were old and dull anyway, and Christmas was usually spent with friends, or girlfriends’ families, and all that was left was ‘Santa’s Super Sleigh’ and the cheques it carried to him through the snow. But that was more than enough. Will had often wondered whether there was any other stupid song which contained, somewhere deep within it, as much pain and despair and regret. He doubted it. Bob Dylan’s ex-wife probably didn’t listen to Blood On The Tracks too often, but Blood On The Tracks was different – it was about misery and damage. ‘Santa’s Super Sleigh’ wasn’t supposed to be like that at all, but he still felt he needed a stiff drink, or counselling, or a good cry, when he heard it in a department-store lift or through a supermarket tannoy in the weeks leading up to 25 December. Maybe there were others like him somewhere; maybe he should form a Successful Novelty Song support group, where rich, bitter men and women would sit around in expensive restaurants and talk about doggies and birdies and bikinis and milkmen and horrible dances.
He had no plans for this Christmas whatsoever. There was no girlfriend, and so there were no girlfriend’s parents, and though he had friends on whom he could inflict himself, he didn’t feel like it. He would sit at home and watch millions of films and get drunk and stoned. Why not? He was as entitled to a break as anyone else, even if there was nothing to break from.
If the first thing he had thought of when he heard the busker at the tube station was his father, the unexorcizable ghost of Christmas past, the second was Marcus. He didn’t know why. He hadn’t thought about him much since the trainers’ incident, and he’d had no contact with him since Fiona dragged him out of the flat the previous week. Maybe it was because Marcus was the only child he really knew, although Will doubted whether he was soppy enough to swallow the repulsive notion that Christmas was a time for children; the more likely explanation was that he had made some kind of link between Marcus’s childhood and his own. It wasn’t as if Will had been a nerdy kid with the wrong trainers; on the contrary, he had worn the right shoes and the right socks and the right trousers and the right shirts, and he had gone to the right hairdresser for the right haircut. That was the point of fashion, as far as Will was concerned; it meant that you were with the cool and the powerful, and against the alienated and the weak, just where Will wanted to be, and he’d successfully avoided being bullied by bullying furiously and enthusiastically.
But there was more than a whiff of the Freeman household in Fiona’s flat: you got that same sense of hopelessness and defeat and bewilderment and straightforward lunacy. Of course, Will had grown up with money and Marcus had none, but you didn’t need dosh to be dysfunctional. So what if Charles Freeman had killed himself with expensive malt whisky, and Fiona had tried to kill herself with National Health tranquillizers? The two of them would still have found plenty to talk about at parties.
Will didn’t like the connection he had made very much, because it meant that if he had any decency in him at all he would have to take Marcus under his wing, use his own experience of growing up with a batty parent to guide the boy through to a place of safety. He didn’t want to do that, though. It was too much work, and involved too much contact with people he didn’t understand and didn’t like, and he preferred watching Countdown on his own anyway.
But he had forgotten that he seemed to have no control over his relationship with Marcus and Fiona. On November the fucking twentieth, the day after November the fucking nineteenth, when he had more or less decided that Marcus would have to get by without his help, Fiona rang and started saying mad things down the phone.
‘Marcus doesn’t need a father, and he certainly doesn’t need a father like you,’ she said. Will was lost even before they’d started. At this point in the conversation he had contributed an admittedly guarded but otherwise entirely unprovocative, ‘Hello, how are you?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Marcus seems to t
hink he needs adult male company. A father figure. And somehow your name came up.’
‘Well, I can tell you, Fiona, I didn’t put him up to it. I don’t need junior male company, and I definitely don’t need a son figure. So, fine. You and I are in complete agreement.’
‘So you won’t see him even if he wants to see you?’
‘Why doesn’t he use his father as a father figure? Isn’t that the easiest solution, or am I being dim?’
‘His father lives in Cambridge.’
‘What, Cambridge, Australia? Cambridge, California? Presumably we’re not talking about the Cambridge just up the M11?’
‘Marcus can’t drive up the M11. He’s twelve.’
‘Hold on, hold on. You phoned up to tell me to keep out of Marcus’s way. I told you that I had no intention of getting in Marcus’s way. And now you’re telling me… What? I missed a bit somewhere.’
‘You just seem very keen to be shot of him.’
‘So you’re not telling me to leave him alone. You’re telling me to apply for custody.’
‘Are you incapable of conducting a conversation without resorting to sarcasm?’
‘Just explain to me clearly and simply, without changing your mind halfway through, what you want me to do.’
She sighed. ‘Some things are a little more complicated than that, Will’
‘Is that what you phoned me up to tell me? Because I got the wrong end of the stick early on, I think, during the bit about how I was the most unsuitable man in the world.’
‘You’re really not very easy to deal with.’
‘So don’t deal with me!’ He was nearly shouting now. He was certainly angry. They had been talking for less than three minutes, yet he was beginning to feel as though this telephone conversation was going to be his life’s work; that once every few hours he would put the receiver down to eat and sleep and go to the toilet, and the rest of the time Fiona would be telling him one thing and then its opposite over and over again. ‘Just put the phone down! Hang up on me! I really won’t be offended!’
‘I think we need to talk about this properly, don’t you?’
‘What? What do we need to talk about properly?’
‘This whole thing.’
‘There isn’t a whole thing. There isn’t even a half thing!’
‘Are you free for a drink tomorrow night? Maybe it would be better to talk face to face. We’re not getting anywhere here.’
There was no point in fighting her. There wasn’t even any point in not fighting her. They made arrangements to meet for a drink, and it was a mark of Will’s frustration and confusion that he was able to look on the agreement of a time and a place as a resounding triumph.
Will had never been alone with Fiona; up until now Marcus had always been there, telling them when to talk, and what to talk about – apart from the trainers day, when he was kind of telling them what to talk about, even though he wasn’t saying anything. But when Will had got the drinks in – they went to a quiet pub off the Liverpool Road where they knew they would get a seat and be able to talk without competing against a juke-box, or a grunge band, or an alternative comedian – and sat down opposite Fiona, and ascertained, once again, without even meaning to, that he did not find her in the least attractive, he realized something else: he had been drinking in pubs for nearly twenty years and not once had he been to a pub with a woman in whom he had no sexual interest whatsoever. He thought again. Could that be right? OK, he’d carried on seeing Jessica, the ex, who always insisted he was missing out, after they had split up. But there had been sexual interest once upon a time, and he knew that if Jessica were ever to announce that she was looking for a discreet extra-marital affair, he would certainly apply for the job, put his name forward for consideration.
No, this was certainly a first for him, and he had no idea whether different rules applied in these situations. Obviously it would be neither appropriate nor sensible to take her by the hand and look into her eyes, or move the subject gently on to sex so that he could introduce a more flirtatious note into the proceedings. If he had no desire to sleep with Fiona, then of course there was no necessity to pretend that every single thing she said was interesting. But a strange thing happened: he was interested, mostly. Not in a well-I-never-knew-that kind of way, because even though Fiona probably knew a lot of things that Will didn’t, he was almost sure that all of them would be very dull… It was just that he was absorbed in the conversation. He listened to what she said, he thought about it, he answered. He couldn’t remember the last time that had happened, so why was it happening now? Was it just sod’s law – you don’t fancy someone, so they’re bound to be endlessly fascinating – or was something happening here that he should think about?
She was different today. She didn’t want to tell him what a useless human being he was, and she didn’t want to accuse him of molesting her son; it was almost as if she had decided that this was a relationship she was stuck with. Will didn’t like the implications of that.
‘I’m sorry about yesterday,’ she said.
‘That’s OK.’
Will lit a cigarette, and Fiona made a face and wafted the smoke away. Will hated people who did that in places where they had no right to do so. He wasn’t going to apologize for smoking in a pub; in fact, what he was going to do was single-handedly create a fug so thick that they would be unable to see each other.
‘I was very upset when I called. When Marcus said he felt he needed some male input, I felt as though I’d been slapped round the face.’
‘I can imagine.’
He didn’t have a clue what she was talking about. Why would anyone take the blindest bit of notice of anything Marcus said?
‘You know, it’s the first thing you think of when you split up with the father of your son, that he’s going to need a man around and so on. And then good feminist common sense takes over. But ever since Marcus has been old enough to understand we’ve talked about it, and every time he’s assured me that it doesn’t matter. And then yesterday it came right out of the blue… He’s always known how worried I am about that.’
Will didn’t want to get involved in any of this. He didn’t care whether Marcus needed a man in his life or not. Why should he? It wasn’t his business, even though he seemed to be the man in question. He hadn’t asked to be and, anyway, he was pretty sure that if Marcus did need a man, it wasn’t his sort. But listening to Fiona now, he realized that in some respects at least he understood Marcus better than she did – possibly, he conceded reluctantly, because he was a man and Fiona wasn’t, and possibly because Marcus was, in his own junior and eccentric way, a devious man. Will understood devious men.
‘Well there you are then,’ he said flatly.
‘Where am I?’
‘That’s why he said it. Because he knew it would do the job.’
‘What job?’
‘Whatever job he wanted it to do at the time. I expect he’s been saving it. That was his nuclear option. What were you arguing about?’
‘I’d just reiterated my opposition to his relationship with you.’
‘Oh.’ That was very bad news. If Marcus was willing to go nuclear on his account, then he was in even deeper than he’d feared.
‘Are you saying what I think you’re saying? That he was attacking me in my most vulnerable spot just so he could win an argument?’
‘Yeah. Course he was.’
‘Marcus isn’t capable of that.’
Will snorted. ‘Whatever.’
‘Do you really think so?’
‘He’s not daft.’
‘It’s not his intelligence I’m worried about. It’s his… emotional honesty.’
Will snorted again. He had intended to keep his thoughts to himself throughout this conversation, but they kept escaping through his nose. What planet did this woman live on? She was so unworldly that she seemed to him to be an unlikely suicidal depressive, even though she sang with her eyes closed: surely anyone who floated that hi
gh above everything was protected in some way? But of course that was part of the problem. They were sitting here because a twelve-year-old’s craftiness had brought her crashing down to earth, and if Marcus could do it, any boyfriend or boss or landlord – any adult who didn’t love her – could do it. There was no protection in that. Why did these people want to make things so hard for themselves? It was easy, life, easy-peasy, a matter of simple arithmetic: loving people, and allowing yourself to be loved, was only worth the risk if the odds were in your favour, but they quite clearly weren’t. There were about seventy-nine squillion people in the world, and if you were very lucky, you would end up being loved by fifteen or twenty of them. So how smart did you have to be to work out that it just wasn’t worth the risk? OK, Fiona had made the mistake of having a child, but it wasn’t the end of the world. In her position, Will wouldn’t let the little sod drag him under.
Fiona was looking at him. ‘Why does everything I say make you do that?’
‘What?’
‘Make that snorting noise?’
‘I’m sorry. It’s just that… I don’t know anything about, you know, stages of development and what kids should do when and all that. But I do know that it’s around now you shouldn’t trust anything a human male says about what he feels.’
Fiona looked bleakly at her Guinness.
‘And when does that stop, in your expert opinion?’ The last two words had a rusty serrated edge on them, but Will ignored it.
‘When he’s around seventy or eighty, and then he can use the truth at highly inappropriate moments to shock people.’
‘I’ll be dead then.’
‘Yup.’
She went to the bar to get him a drink, and then sat back down heavily in her seat. ‘But why you?’
‘I just told you. He doesn’t really need a male influence. He just said it to get his own way.’
‘I know, I know. I understand that. But why does he want to see you so much he’d do that to me?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Do you really not know?’