‘Used to play for Nottingham Forest about twenty-five years ago. Didn’t look like Jesus. Didn’t bleach his hair. Never scored five goals. How was school today?’
‘OK.’
‘How was the afternoon?’
Marcus looked at him, trying to work out why he might have asked the question.
‘OK.’
‘What did you have?’
‘History, and then… ummm…’
Will had intended to store the skiving up, just as Marcus had stored the Ned thing up, but now he had him wriggling on the hook he couldn’t resist taking him off and making him swim round and round in the bucket.
‘It’s Wednesday today, isn’t it?’
‘Er… Yes.’
‘Don’t you have double walking up and down Upper Street on Wednesday afternoons?’
He could see Marcus beginning the slow descent towards panic.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I saw you this afternoon.’
‘What, in school?’
‘Well, I couldn’t have seen you in school, Marcus, could I? Because you weren’t there.’
‘This afternoon?’
‘Yes, this afternoon.’
‘Oh, right. I had to nip out and get something.’
‘You had to nip out? And they’re all right about nipping out, are they?’
‘Where did you see me?’
‘I drove past you on Upper Street. I have to say, it didn’t look as though you were nipping. It looked like you were skiving.’
‘It was Mrs Morrison’s fault.’
‘Her fault that you had to nip out? Or her fault that you had to skive?’
‘She told me to keep out of their way again.’
‘You’re losing me, Marcus. Who is Mrs Morrison?’
‘The head. You know they always say when I get in trouble that I should keep out of their way? She said that about the training shoe kids.’ His voice rose an octave, and he started to speak more quickly. ‘They followed me! How can I keep out of their way if they follow me?’
‘OK, OK, keep your hair on. Did you tell her that?’
‘Course I did. She just didn’t take any notice.’
‘Right. So you go home and tell your mum this. It’s no good telling me. And you’ve got to tell her that you bunked off as well.’
‘I’m not telling her that. She’s got enough problems without me.’
‘Marcus, you’re already a problem.’
‘Why can’t you go and see her? Mrs Morrison?’
‘You’re joking. Why should she take any notice of me?’
‘She would. She—’
‘Marcus, listen. I’m not your father, or your uncle, or your stepfather, or anybody at all. I’m nothing to do with you. No headmistress is going to take any notice of what I say, and nor should she, either. You’ve got to stop thinking I know the answer to anything, because I don’t.’
‘You know about things. You knew about the trainers.’
‘Yeah, and what a triumph they were. I mean, they were a source of endless happiness, weren’t they? You’d have been in school this afternoon if I hadn’t bought you the trainers.’
‘And you knew about Kirk O’Bane.’
‘Who?’
‘Kirk O’Bane.’
‘The footballer?’
‘Except I don’t think he can be a footballer. Ellie was making one of those jokes that you make.’
‘But his first name’s Kirk?’
‘I think so.’
‘Kurt Cobain, you jerk.’ ‘Who’s Kurt Cobain?’
‘The singer with Nirvana.’
‘I thought he must be a singer. Bleached hair? Looks a bit like Jesus?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘There you are, then,’ said Marcus triumphantly. ‘You knew about him, too.’
‘Everyone knows about him.’
‘I didn’t.’
‘No, you didn’t. But you’re different, Marcus.’
‘And my mum wouldn’t.’
‘No, she wouldn’t either.’
‘You see, you know things. You can help.’
It was then, for the first time, that Will saw the kind of help Marcus needed. Fiona had given him the idea that Marcus was after a father figure, someone to guide him gently towards male adulthood, but that wasn’t it at all: Marcus needed help to be a kid, not an adult. And, unhappily for Will, that was exactly the kind of assistance he was qualified to provide. He wasn’t able to tell Marcus how to grow up, or how to cope with a suicidal mother, or anything like that, but he could certainly tell him that Kurt Cobain didn’t play for Manchester United, and for a twelve-year-old boy attending a comprehensive school at the end of 1993, that was maybe the most important information of all.
twenty-one
Marcus went back to school the following morning. Nobody seemed to have noticed that he hadn’t been around the previous afternoon: his form teacher knew he’d had to go to see Mrs Morrison during afternoon registration, and Mr Sandford the history teacher never noticed him even when he was there. The other kids in the class might have worked out that he was bunking off, but as they never spoke to him anyway, how would he ever know?
He bumped into Ellie at breaktime at the vending machine. She was wearing her Kurt Cobain sweatshirt and standing with a friend from her class.
‘Kurt Cobain doesn’t play for Manchester United,’ he told her. The girl from her class burst into hysterical laughter.
‘Oh, no!’ said Ellie, mock-horrified. ‘Have they got rid of him?’
Marcus was confused for a moment – maybe Ellie really did think he was a footballer? But then he realized she was making one of those jokes he never got.
‘Ha, ha,’ he said, without laughing at all. That was what you were supposed to do, and he felt the thrill of having done something right for a change. ‘No, he plays… he sings for Nirvana.’
‘Thanks for telling me.’
‘That’s OK. A friend of mine has got one of their records. Nevermind.’
‘Everybody’s got that one. I’ll bet he hasn’t got the new one.’
‘He might have. He’s got lots of stuff.’
‘What year’s he in? I didn’t think anyone in this school liked Nirvana.’
‘He’s left school. He’s quite old. It’s grunge, isn’t it, Nirvana? I don’t know what I think of grunge.’ He didn’t, either. Will had played him some Nirvana the previous evening, and he’d never heard anything quite like it. At first he hadn’t been able to hear anything apart from noise and shouting, but there were some quiet bits, too, and in the end he had been able to make out a tune. He didn’t think he’d ever like it as much as he liked Joni or Bob or Mozart, but he could sort of see why someone like Ellie might like it.
The two girls looked at each other and laughed louder than they had done the first time.
‘And what do you think you might think of it?’ asked Ellie’s friend.
‘Well,’ said Marcus. ‘It’s a bit of a racket, but it’s got a good beat, and the picture on the cover is very interesting.’ It was a picture of a baby underwater, swimming after a dollar bill. Will had said something about the picture, but he couldn’t remember what it was. ‘I think the cover has a meaning. Something about society.’
The girls looked at him, looked at each other and laughed.
‘You’re very funny,’ said Ellie’s friend. ‘Who are you?’
‘Marcus.’
‘Marcus. Cool name.’
‘Do you think so?’ Marcus hadn’t thought about his name that much, but he’d never thought it was cool.
‘No,’ said Ellie’s friend, and they laughed again. ‘See you around, Marcus.’
‘See you.’
It was the longest conversation he’d had with anyone at school for weeks.
*
‘So we’ve scored,’ said Will when Marcus told him about Ellie and her friend. ‘I don’t fancy yours much, though.’
Sometimes he didn
’t understand one word Will said, and when that happened Marcus just ignored him completely.
‘They said I was funny.’
‘You are funny. You’re hilarious. But I don’t know if it’s much to build a whole relationship on.’
‘Can I invite Ellie round?’
‘I’m not sure she’d come, Marcus.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well… I’m not sure that… How old is she?’
‘I dunno. Fifteen?’
‘I’m not sure that fifteen-year-olds hang out with twelve-year-olds. I’ll bet you her boyfriend is twenty-five, drives a Harley Davidson and works as a roadie for some band. He’d beat you up. He’d squash you like a bug, man.’
Marcus hadn’t thought of that.
‘I don’t want to go out with her. I know she’d never go for someone like me. But we can come round here and listen to your Nirvana records, can’t we?’
‘She’s probably heard them already.’
Marcus was getting frustrated with Will. Why didn’t he want him to make friends?
‘OK, forget it, then.’
‘I’m sorry, Marcus. I’m glad you spoke to Ellie today, I really am. But a two-minute conversation with someone who’s taking the piss out of you… I can’t see that working out long-term, you know?’
Marcus wasn’t really listening. Ellie and her friend had said he was funny, and if he could be funny once, he could be funny again.
He saw them by the vending machine the next day. They were leaning against it and saying things about anyone who had the nerve to come up and put money in. Marcus watched them for a little while before he went up to them.
‘Hello, Ellie.’
‘Marcus! My man!’
Marcus didn’t want to think about what that might mean, so he didn’t take any notice.
‘Ellie, how old is your boyfriend?’
He’d only asked one question, and already he had made the girls laugh. He knew he could do it.
‘A hundred and two.’
‘Ha, ha.’ He’d done it right again.
‘Nine.’
‘Ha, ha.’
‘Why do you want to know? How do you even know I’ve got a boyfriend?’
‘My friend Will said he was probably about twenty-five and drove a Harley Davidson and he’d squash me like a bug.’
‘Aaaah, Marcus.’ Ellie grabbed him round the neck and ruffled his hair. ‘I wouldn’t let him.’
‘Good. Thank you. I have to admit I was a bit worried when he said that.’
More laughter. Ellie’s friend was staring at him as if he was the most interesting person she’d ever met.
‘How old is your girlfriend, anyway? She probably wants to kill me, doesn’t she?’ They were laughing all the time now. You couldn’t tell where one laugh ended and the next one began.
‘No, because I haven’t got one.’
‘I don’t believe that. A good-looking boy like you? We’ll have to fix you up.’
‘It’s OK, thanks. I don’t really want one at the moment. I don’t feel ready yet.’
‘Very sensible.’
Mrs Morrison suddenly appeared beside them.
‘In my office now, Ellie.’
‘I’m not changing the sweatshirt.’
‘We’ll talk about it in my office.’
‘There’s nothing to talk about.’
‘Do you want to argue in front of everyone?’
Ellie shrugged. ‘I don’t mind if you don’t.’
Ellie genuinely didn’t care, Marcus could see that. Loads of kids acted as if they weren’t scared, but dropped the act the moment a teacher said anything to them. Ellie could keep going forever, though, and there was nothing Mrs Morrison could do. There was a load of stuff she could do to him, though, and Ellie’s friend didn’t look like she wanted to pick a fight with Mrs Morrison either. Ellie had something that they didn’t have – or they had something Ellie didn’t have, he didn’t know which.
‘Zoe, Marcus, I want to talk to Ellie in private. And Marcus, you and I have some unfinished business to attend to, don’t we?’
‘Yes, Mrs Morrison.’ Ellie caught his eye and smiled, and for a moment he really felt as if the three of them were a trio. Or maybe a triangle, with Ellie at the top and him and Zoe at the bottom.
‘Off you go.’
And off they went.
Ellie and Zoe came looking for him at lunchtime. He was sitting at his desk eating his sandwiches, listening to Frankie Ball and Juliet Lawrence talk about some bloke in year nine, when they just turned up.
‘Here he is, look!’
‘Oooeee! Marcus!’
Just about every kid in the room stopped what they were doing and turned round. You could see what they were thinking: Ellie and Marcus???????? Even Nicky and Mark, who hadn’t spoken to him for weeks and liked to pretend that they had never known him, looked up from their Gameboy; Marcus hoped that one of them had lost a life. He felt great. If Kurt Cobain himself had walked through the form-room door looking for him, the mouths of his classmates couldn’t have opened any wider.
‘What are you lot staring at? Marcus is our friend, aren’t you, Marcus?’
‘Yes,’ said Marcus. Whatever his relationship with Ellie and Zoe was, ‘yes’ was definitely the right answer here.
‘Come on, then, let’s go. You don’t want to hang around here all lunchtime, do you? Come to our form room. It’s a waste of time hanging out with this lot. Boring fuckers.’
Marcus could see some of them start to blush but nobody said anything. They couldn’t, unless they were prepared to argue with Ellie, which clearly none of them were. What would be the point? Even Mrs Morrison couldn’t argue with Ellie, so what chance did Frankie Ball and the rest of them have?
‘OK,’ said Marcus. ‘Hang on a minute.’ He wanted them to wait simply because he wanted the moment to last longer: he didn’t know whether Ellie and Zoe would come looking for him ever again and, even if they did, he doubted whether they’d announce to the world, or the part of the world eating sandwiches in his classroom, that he was their friend and that everyone else was a boring fucker. That would be too much to ask. But now he’d asked them to hang on, he had no idea what they might be hanging on for.
‘Shall I… Do you want me to bring anything?’
‘Like what?’ said Zoe. ‘A bottle?’
‘No, but, like…’
‘Or condoms?’ said Ellie. ‘Is that what you mean? We can’t have sex in our room, Marcus, even though I’d like to, of course. There are too many people in there.’ Zoe was laughing so hard that Marcus thought she might be sick. Her eyes were closed and she was sort of choking.
‘No, I know, I…’ Maybe asking them to hang on had been a mistake. He was turning his moment of triumph into what seemed like a year of horrible awfulness.
‘Just bring your sweet self, Marcus. But get a move on, eh?’
He knew he was red in the face, and the condom bit had been bad. But he still got to walk from his desk to where Ellie and Zoe were standing while everyone else watched, and when he got there Ellie gave him a kiss. OK, she was making fun of him, but it didn’t matter, there weren’t many people in his class that Ellie would bother to spit on, let alone kiss. ‘There’s no such thing as bad publicity,’ his dad had said once, ages ago, when Marcus had asked him why some actor was letting Noel Edmonds pour stuff over his head, and now he could see what he meant. Ellie had kind of poured stuff over his head, but it was really, really worth it.
Ellie’s form room was upstairs and the walk made the good bit, the fucking-hell-Marcus-and-Ellie bit, last longer. One of the teachers even stopped him to ask if he was OK, as if anyone hanging around with Ellie must have been kidnapped or brainwashed.
‘We’re adopting him, sir,’ said Ellie.
‘I wasn’t asking you, Ellie. I was asking him.’
‘They’re adopting me, sir,’ said Marcus. He didn’t mean it as a joke – he just thought that saying what Ellie said wa
s sensible – but they all laughed anyway.
‘And you couldn’t hope for more responsible parents,’ said the teacher.
‘Ha, ha,’ said Marcus, although he wasn’t sure he should have done this time.
‘We’ll take that as a compliment,’ said Ellie. ‘Thank you. We’ll look after him. Have him home by midnight and all that.’
‘Make sure you do,’ said the teacher. ‘In one piece.’
Ellie made him wait outside her form room while she announced him. He could hear her shouting.
‘OK, listen everybody, I want you to meet Marcus. The only other Kurt Cobain fan in the whole fucking school. Come in, Marcus.’
He walked into the room. There weren’t many people in there, but those that were all laughed when they saw him.
‘I didn’t say I was a fan as such,’ he said. ‘I just think they have a good beat and their cover means something.’
Everyone laughed again. Ellie and Zoe stood beside him proudly, as if he had just done a magic trick that they had told everyone he could do even though nobody believed them. They were right; he did feel he’d been adopted.
twenty-two
Will had been trying not to think about Christmas, but as it got nearer he was beginning to go off the idea of watching a few hundred videos and smoking a few thousand joints. It didn’t seem very festive, somehow, and even though festivities invariably entailed The Song somewhere along the line, he didn’t want to ignore them completely. It struck him that how you spent Christmas was a message to the world about where you were at in life, some indication of how deep a hole you had managed to burrow for yourself, and therefore spending three days bombed out of your head on your own said things about you that you might not want saying.
So he would spend Christmas in the bosom of a family – not his family, because he didn’t have one, but a family. There was one family he wanted to avoid at all costs: no way did he want to spend Christmas eating nut fucking roast, not watching TV, and singing carols with his eyes closed. He had to be careful, though, because if he just let himself drift along he’d be carried right over the weir; he had to start swimming in the opposite direction fast.
Having decided with such unshakeable firmness that he would absolutely definitely not be celebrating 25 December with Fiona and Marcus, it came as something of a surprise to him to find himself accepting an invitation from Marcus the following afternoon to do exactly that.