Megan wriggled out of her mother’s lap and went over to the Christmas tree.
‘There might be a present for you under there, Megan,’ said Fiona.
‘Oooh, Megan, presents,’ said Suzie. Fiona went over to the tree, picked up one of the last two or three parcels and gave it to her. Megan stood there clutching it and looked around the room.
‘She’s wondering who to give it to,’ said Suzie. ‘She’s had as much fun giving them out as opening them today.’
‘How sweet,’ said Lindsey’s mum. Everyone watched and waited while Megan made her decision; it was almost as if the little girl had understood the snubbing business and wanted to make mischief, because she toddled over to Will and thrust the present at him.
Will didn’t move. ‘Well, take it from her then, you fool,’ said Suzie.
‘It’s not my bloody present,’ said Will. Good for you, Marcus thought. Do some snubbing of your own. The only trouble was that as things stood Will was snubbing Megan, not Suzie, and Marcus didn’t think you should snub anyone under the age of three. What was the point? Megan didn’t seem to mind, though, because she continued to hold the present out to him until he reached for it.
‘Now what?’ said Will crossly.
‘Open it with her,’ said Suzie. She was more patient this time; Will’s anger seemed to have calmed her down a little. If she wanted a row with Will, she clearly didn’t want it here, in front of all these people.
Will and Megan tore off the paper to reveal some sort of plastic toy that played tunes. Megan looked at it and waved it at Will.
‘What now?’ said Will.
‘Play with her,’ said Suzie. ‘God, spot the childless person here.’
‘Tell you what,’ said Will. ‘You play with her.’ He tossed Suzie the toy. ‘As I’m so bloody clueless.’
‘Maybe you could learn to be less clueless,’ said Suzie.
‘What for?’
‘I would have thought that in your line of work it might be handy to know how to play with kids.’
‘What’s your line of work?’ Lindsey asked politely, as if this were a normal conversation amongst a normal group of people.
‘He doesn’t do anything,’ Marcus said. ‘His dad wrote “Santa’s Super Sleigh” and he earns a million pounds a minute.’
‘He pretends he has a child so he can join single parent groups and chat up single mothers,’ said Suzie.
‘Yeah, but he doesn’t get paid for that,’ said Marcus.
Will stood up again, but this time he didn’t sit down.
‘Thanks for the lunch and everything,’ he said. ‘I’m off.’
‘Suzie has a right to express her anger, Will,’ said Fiona.
‘Yes, and she’s expressed it, and now I have a right to go home.’ He started to weave his way through the presents and glasses and people towards the door.
‘He’s my friend,’ Marcus said suddenly. ‘I invited him. I should be able to tell him when he goes home.’
‘I’m not sure that’s how the whole hospitality thing works,’ said Will.
‘But I don’t want him to go yet,’ said Marcus. ‘It’s not fair. How come Lindsey’s mum’s still here, and no one invited her, and the one person I invited is leaving because everyone’s being horrible to him?’
‘First of all,’ said Fiona, ‘I invited Lindsey’s mum, and it’s my house too. And we haven’t been horrible to Will. Suzie’s angry with Will, as she has every right to be, and she’s telling him so.’
Marcus felt as though he were in a play. He was standing up, and Will was standing up, and then Fiona stood up; but Lindsey and her mum and Clive were sat on the sofa watching, in a line, with their mouths open.
‘All he did was make up a kid for a couple of weeks. God. That’s nothing. So what? Who cares? Kids at school do worse than that every day.’
‘The point is, Marcus, that Will left school a long time ago. He should have grown out of making people up by now.’
‘Yeah, but he’s behaved better since, hasn’t he?’
‘Can I go yet?’ said Will, but nobody took any notice.
‘Why? What’s he done?’ asked Suzie.
‘He never wanted me round his flat every day. I just went. And he bought me those shoes, and at least he listens when I say I’m having a hard time at school. You just tell me to get used to it. And he knew who Kirk O’Bane was.’
‘Kurt Cobain,’ said Will.
‘And it’s not like you lot never do anything wrong ever, is it?’ said Marcus. ‘I mean…’ He had to be careful here. He knew he couldn’t say too much, or even anything at all, about the hospital stuff. ‘I mean, how come I got to know Will in the first place?’
‘Because you threw a bloody great baguette at a duck’s head and killed it, basically,’ said Will.
Marcus couldn’t believe Will was bringing that up now. It was supposed to be all about how everyone else did things wrong, not about how he had killed the duck. But then Suzie and Fiona started laughing, and Marcus could see that Will knew what he was doing.
‘Is that true, Marcus?’ said his father.
‘There was something wrong with it,’ said Marcus. ‘I think it was going to die anyway.’
Suzie and Fiona laughed even harder. The audience on the sofa looked appalled. Will sat down again.
twenty-four
Will fell in love on New Year’s Eve, and the experience took him completely by surprise. She was called Rachel, she illustrated children’s books, and she looked a little bit like Laura Nyro on the cover of Gonna Take A Miracle – nervy, glamorous, Bohemian, clever, lots of long, unruly dark hair.
Will had never wanted to fall in love. When it had happened to friends it had always struck him as a peculiarly unpleasant-seeming experience, what with all the loss of sleep and weight, and the unhappiness when it was unreciprocated, and the suspect, dippy happiness when it was working out. These were people who could not control themselves, or protect themselves, people who, if only temporarily, were no longer content to occupy their own space, people who could no longer rely on a new jacket, a bag of grass and an afternoon rerun of The Rockford Files to make them complete.
Lots of people, of course, would be thrilled to take their seats next to their computer-generated ideal life-partner, but Will was a realist, and he could see immediately that there was only cause for panic. He was almost sure that Rachel was about to make him very miserable indeed, mostly because he couldn’t see anything he might have which could possibly interest her.
If there was a disadvantage to the life he had chosen for himself, a life without work and care and difficulty and detail, a life without context and texture, then he had finally found it: when he met an intelligent, cultured, ambitious, beautiful, witty and single woman at a New Year’s Eve party, he felt like a blank twit, a cypher, someone who had done nothing with his whole life apart from watch Countdown and drive around listening to Nirvana records. That had to be a bad thing, he reckoned. If you were falling in love with someone beautiful and intelligent and all the rest of it, then feeling like a blank twit put you at something of a disadvantage.
One of his problems, he reflected as he was trying to dredge his memory for a single tiny scrap of experience that this woman might regard as worth her momentary contemplation, was that he was reasonably good-looking and reasonably articulate. It gave people the wrong impression. It gave him admission to a party from which he should be barred by ferocious bouncers with thick necks and tattoos. He may have been good-looking and articulate, but that was just a quirk of genetics, environment and education; at his core he was ugly and monosyllabic. Maybe he should undergo some sort of reverse plastic surgery – something that would rearrange his features so that they were less even, and push his eyes closer together or further apart. Or maybe he should put on an enormous amount of weight, sprout a few extra chins, grow so fat that he sweated profusely all the time. And, of course, he should start grunting like an ape.
Because th
e thing was that when this Rachel woman sat down next to him at dinner she was interested, for the first five minutes, before she’d worked him out, and in that five minutes he got a glimpse of what life could be like if he were in any way interesting. On balance, he thought, he’d prefer not to have that glimpse. What good did it do him, after all? He wasn’t going to get to sleep with Rachel. He wasn’t going to go to a restaurant with her, or see what her sitting room looked like, or get to understand how her father’s affair with her mother’s best friend had affected her views on having children. He hated the five-minute window of opportunity. In the end, he thought, he would be far happier if she turned round to look at him, just about managed not to vomit, and turned her back on him for the rest of the evening.
He missed Ned. Ned had given him an extra something, a little il ne sait quoi, that would have come in handy on an evening like this. He wasn’t going to bring him back to life, though, poor little sod. Let him rest in peace.
‘How do you know Robert?’ Rachel was asking him.
‘Oh, just…’ Robert produced television programmes. He hung out with actors and writers and directors. People who knew Robert were arty movers and shakers, and were almost obliged to be glamorous. Will wanted to say that he had written the music for Robert’s last film, or given him his big break, or that they met for lunch to talk about the godawful mess that was this government’s arts policy. He wanted to say that, but he couldn’t.
‘Just… I used to buy my dope off him years ago.’ That, unhappily, was the truth. Before Robert became a television producer, he was a dope dealer. Not a dope dealer with a baseball bat and a pit-bull, just someone who bought a bit extra to sell on to his mates, who at the time included Will, because Will was going out with a friend of Robert’s… Anyway, it didn’t matter why he was knocking around with Robert in the mid-eighties. The point was that he was the only person in the room who neither moved nor shook, and now Rachel knew it.
‘Oh, right,’ she said. ‘But you’ve kept in touch.’
Maybe he could make up some story about why he still saw Robert, a story that might cast him in a more flattering light, make him seem a little more complicated.
‘Yeah. Dunno why, really.’ No story, then, obviously. Oh well. The truth was that he didn’t know why they’d kept in touch. They got on reasonably well, but Robert had got on reasonably well with most of that crowd, and Will had never been entirely sure why he had been the one who survived the inevitable career-change cull. Maybe – and this sounded paranoid, but he was sure there was a grain of truth in here somewhere – he was enough of a deadbeat to demonstrate to the people here that Robert had pre-media roots, while at the same time he was presentable enough not to scare them all away.
He’d lost Rachel, for now at least. She was talking to the person sitting on her other side. What could he reel her back with? He must have had some talent or other which he could exaggerate and dramatize somehow. Cooking? He could cook a bit, but who couldn’t? Maybe he was writing a novel and had forgotten about it. What had he been good at when he was at school? Spelling. ‘Hey, Rachel, how many c’s in necessary?’ She probably knew anyway. It was hopeless. The most interesting thing about his life, he realized, was Marcus. That was something which set him apart. ‘Sorry to butt in, Rachel, but I have this weird relationship with a twelve-year-old boy. Is that any good to you?’ OK, the material needed some work, but it was there, definitely. It just needed shaping. He vowed to bring up Marcus at the first available opportunity.
Rachel had noticed he wasn’t talking to anyone, and wheeled round so that he could be included in a conversation about whether there was anything new under the sun, with particular reference to contemporary popular music. Rachel said that to her Nirvana sounded just like Led Zeppelin.
‘I know a twelve-year-old who’d kill you for saying that,’ said Will. It wasn’t true, of course. A couple of weeks ago, Marcus had thought that the lead singer of Nirvana played for Manchester United, so he was probably not yet at the stage where he wanted to annihilate people who accused the band of being derivative.
‘So do I, come to that,’ said Rachel. ‘Maybe they should meet. What’s yours called?’
He’s not mine, exactly, he thought. ‘Marcus,’ he said.
‘Mine’s Ali. Alistair.’
‘Right.’
‘And is Marcus into skateboards and rap and The Simpsons and so on?’
Will raised his eyes skywards and chuckled fondly, and the misapprehension was cast in concrete. It wasn’t his fault, this conversation. He hadn’t lied once in the entire minute and a half. OK, he had been speaking more figuratively than the expression usually implied when he had said that Marcus would kill her. And OK, the rolling eyes and the fond chuckle did suggest a certain amount of parental indulgence. But he hadn’t actually said that Marcus was his son. That was one hundred per cent her interpretation. Certainly over fifty per cent, anyway. But it definitely wasn’t the SPAT thing, when he’d lied through his teeth for the entire duration of the evening.
‘And is Marcus’s mother here tonight?’
‘Ummm…’ Will looked up and down the dinner table as if to remind himself one way or the other. ‘No.’ Not a lie! Not a lie! Marcus’s mother was not there!
‘You’re not spending New Year’s Eve with her?’ Rachel was narrowing her eyes and looking down her nose to indicate that she knew this was a leading question.
‘No. We, er, we don’t live together.’ He’d really got the hang of this truth-telling business now, he felt. If anything, he’d moved right away from lying and towards understatement, because not only was he not living with Fiona at the moment, but he had never lived with her, and never intended to live with her in the future.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s OK. How about Ali’s dad?’
‘Not at this table. Not in this city. Not in this country. He gives me his phone number when he moves.’
‘Right.’
Will had at least managed to introduce some friction into the conversation. Until he’d played the Marcus card he’d kept slipping off before he’d even started. Now he felt as though he were climbing a mountain, rather than a glacier. He imagined himself right at the bottom of the cliff-face, looking up and around for footholds.
‘Which country is he in, then?’
‘The States. California. I’d prefer Australia, but there you are. At least it’s the west coast.’
Will reckoned he’d now heard fifty-seven varieties of this conversation, but this gave him an advantage: he knew how it went, and go it did. He might not have done anything in the last decade and a half, but he could cluck sympathetically when a woman told him how badly her ex-husband had behaved. Clucking was something he had got really good at. But it worked, as clucking often did – no one, he decided, ever did themselves any harm by listening attentively to other people’s woes. Rachel’s story was, by SPAT standards, run-of-the-mill, and it turned out that she hated her ex because of who he was, rather than what he had done to her.
‘So why the fuck did you have a child with him?’ He was drunk. It was New Year’s Eve. He was feeling cheeky.
She laughed. ‘Good question. No answer. You change your mind about people. What’s Marcus’s mother’s name?’
‘Fiona.’ Which, of course, it was.
‘Did you change your mind about her?’
‘Not really.’
‘So what happened?’
‘I dunno.’ He shrugged, and somehow managed to give a rather convincing impression of a man who was still baffled, shell-shocked even. The words and the gesture were born of desperation; it was ironic, then, that they somehow managed to make a connection.
Rachel smiled, and picked up the knife she hadn’t used, and examined it. ‘In the end, “I dunno” is the only honest answer anyone can give, isn’t it? Because I dunno either, and I’d be kidding myself, and you, if I pretended any different.’
At midnight they sought each other out and
kissed, a kiss that was somewhere between cheek and lip, the embarrassed ambiguity hopefully significant. And at half-past midnight, just before Rachel left, they arranged to get their lads together to compare skateboards and baseball caps and the Christmas edition of The Simpsons.
twenty-five
Ellie was at Suzie’s New Year’s Eve party. For a moment, Marcus thought it was just someone who looked like Ellie, and wore the same Kurt Cobain sweatshirt as Ellie, but then the Ellie lookalike saw him and shouted ‘Marcus!’ and came over and hugged him and kissed him on the head, which kind of cleared up the confusion.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked her.
‘We always come here on New Year’s Eve,’ she said. ‘My mum’s really good friends with Suzie.’
‘I’ve never seen you here.’
‘You’ve never been here on New Year’s Eve, you twit.’
It was true. He’d been to Suzie’s flat loads of times, but he’d never come to the parties. This was the first year he’d been allowed to go. Why was it that even in the simplest, most straightforward conversations with Ellie he found something stupid to say?
‘Which one’s your mum?’
‘Don’t ask,’ said Ellie. ‘Not now.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because she’s dancing.’
Marcus looked over at the very small group dancing in the corner where the TV usually was. There were four people, three women and a man, and only one of them seemed to be having a good time: she was sort of punching the air with her fists and shaking her hair. Marcus guessed that this had to be Ellie’s mum – not because she looked like her (no adult looked like Ellie, because no adult would chop her hair up with kitchen scissors and wear black lipstick, and that was all you saw), but because Ellie was clearly embarrassed, and this was the only dancer who would embarrass anyone. The other dancers were embarrassed themselves, which meant that they weren’t actually embarrassing; they weren’t doing much more than tapping their feet, and the only way you could tell they were dancing at all was that they were facing each other but not looking at each other and not talking.