‘Anyway,’ Rachel went on. ‘The last guy I went out with… He wasn’t one hundred per cent good news, and he certainly couldn’t work out how Ali fitted in, and they ended up… not on good terms.’
‘He was a weirdo,’ said Ali.
‘Look, I’m sorry that everything’s become quite so… unsubtle,’ Rachel said. ‘I have no idea whether… I mean, I don’t know, I just got the impression that on New Year’s Eve…’ She made a face. ‘Oh, God, this is so embarrassing. And it’s all your fault, Ali. We shouldn’t have to talk about this now.’
‘It’s OK,’ said Marcus brightly. ‘He really fancies you. He told me.’
‘Are you going cross-eyed?’ Ellie said after school on Monday.
‘I might be,’ Marcus said, because it was easier than saying he was practising a trick he’d learnt from Will.
‘Maybe you need new glasses.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Can you get glasses that are stronger than that?’ Zoe asked. She wasn’t being nasty, he didn’t think, just curious.
The problem was that they were walking to the newsagent’s between school and home, and they weren’t talking about anything in particular. Will and Rachel had been sitting down, facing one another, and basically talking about how much they liked each other. Walking along the street meant that Marcus kept having to twist his neck to do the eye thing, and he could see that this would make him look a little peculiar, but the trouble was that he and Ellie never did any sitting down and facing each other. They hung out at the vending machine, and sometimes, like today, they met up after school and just mooched around for a while. So what was he supposed to do? How could you gaze into someone’s eyes if all you ever saw was their ears?
The newsagent’s was full of kids from school, and the guy who owned the place was shouting at some of them to go outside. He wasn’t like Mr Patel, who never shouted and never told kids to clear off.
‘I’m not going,’ said Ellie. ‘I’m a customer, not a kid.’ She carried on browsing over the sweet display, her hand poised to strike when she saw something she liked.
‘You, then,’ said the owner to Marcus. ‘Outside, please.’
‘Don’t listen to him, Marcus,’ said Ellie. ‘It’s a breach of human rights. Just because you’re young he’s calling you a thief. I might take him to court.’
‘It’s OK,’ said Marcus. ‘I don’t want anything.’
He stepped outside and read the postcards in the window. ‘YOUNG DISCIPLINARIAN – UNIFORMS AVAILABLE’… ‘PUMA STRIKER BOOTS, SIZE 5, STILL IN BOX’.
‘You’re a pervert, Marcus.’
It was Lee Hartley and a couple of his mates; Marcus hadn’t had much trouble from them so far this term, probably because he hung around with Ellie and Zoe.
‘What?’
‘I bet you don’t even know what those cards are all about, do you?’
Marcus couldn’t see how the first sentence and the second went together: if he was a pervert, then of course he would understand what the cards were all about, but he let it pass, as he let everything pass at times like this. One of Lee Hartley’s mates reached out, removed Marcus’s glasses and put them on.
‘Fucking hell,’ he said. ‘No wonder he doesn’t know what’s going on.’ He reeled around for a moment, his arms stretched out in front of him, making grunting noises meant to show that Marcus was in some way mentally deficient.
‘Can I have those back now, please? I can’t see much without them.’
‘Fuck off,’ said Lee Hartley’s mate.
Ellie and Zoe suddenly emerged from the shop.
‘You pathetic little shitbags,’ said Ellie. ‘Give him those back or you’ll get such a slap.’
Lee Hartley’s mate handed Marcus the glasses, but she hit him anyway, hard, somewhere between his nose and his eye.
‘Tricked you,’ she said, and Zoe laughed. ‘Now run along, all of you, before I get really cross.’
‘Slags,’ said Lee Hartley, but he said it quietly as he was walking away.
‘Now why does hitting someone make me a slag, I wonder?’ said Ellie. ‘Boys are peculiar creatures. Not you, though, Marcus. Well, you’re peculiar, but in a different way.’
But Marcus wasn’t really listening. He was too overcome by Ellie – by her style, and her beauty, and her ability to beat people up – to pay any attention to what she was saying.
twenty-eight
Twenty-four hours later Marcus was still buzzing, and Will was finding it difficult to adopt the right tone. It would be a mistake, he felt, for the boy to regard Ellie’s assault on Lee Somebody’s mate as evidence of an uncontrollable passion: surely it proved something like the opposite – that while he relied on teenage girls to defend him in the street, he was unlikely to be much of a catch for anybody. But then, maybe Will was being too traditional in his thinking. Maybe that’s how things worked now, and until a girl had smacked someone in the eye for you she wasn’t worth a second look. Either way, Marcus was even more smitten than he had been before, and Will feared for him.
‘You should have seen her,’ Marcus enthused.
‘I feel as though I did.’
‘Wham!’ said Marcus.
‘Yes. Wham. You said.’
‘She’s fantastic’
‘Yes, but…’ Will knew he would have to outline his theory that Marcus’s current status as victim did nothing for him sexually or romantically, even though it would be a rocky conversational road. ‘What do you think she thinks about having to get you out of trouble?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘It’s just… It’s not what normally happens.’
‘No. That’s why it’s so great.’
‘I’m not so sure. See, I think it’ll be hard for Ellie to think of you as a boyfriend if every time she buys a Mars Bar someone steals your glasses and she has to turn herself into Jean-Claud Van Damme.’
‘Who’s Jean-Claud Van Damme?’
‘Never mind. D’you see what I’m getting at?’
‘What am I supposed to do about it then? Take karate lessons or something?’
‘All I’m saying is, it might not turn out to be the sort of relationship you want it to be. In my experience romances don’t develop in this way. This looks more like pet and owner rather than boyfriend and girlfriend.’
‘That’s OK,’ said Marcus cheerfully.
‘You don’t mind being treated like a… like a gerbil?’
‘No. Course not. That’d do me. I just want to be with her.’ And he said it with such sincerity, and with such a complete absence of self-pity, that for the first time ever Will was tempted to hug him.
Will had no intention of adopting the Ellie/Marcus/gerbil model with Rachel, and though he could recognize the simplicity and decency of Marcus’s desire, his own was neither simple nor, frankly, decent, and it was with this knowledge he intended to proceed. At least Ellie knew who and what Marcus was, though, not that Marcus had any choice in the matter: that weird little speccy guy being tormented outside the newsagent’s, that was Marcus, and nobody was pretending any different. The guy who turned up for lunch with his twelve-year-old son, that wasn’t really Will, and somebody – namely Will himself – was certainly pretending different. One day, he thought, he might learn the lesson that lying about one’s very identity was a purely short-term strategy, useful only in relationships that had a limited life-span. You could tell a bus-conductor or a taxi driver all sorts of rubbish, provided the journey was brief, but if you intended to spend the rest of your life with somebody, then it was kind of inevitable that she would find out a few things sooner or later.
Will decided he would correct any erroneous impressions he might have given slowly and patiently, but halfway through their first time out alone together, he was reminded of the old April Fool’s Day joke about Britain changing over to driving on the right, and making the changeover gradually. Either you lied or you told the truth, it appeared, and that in-between state was pretty tricky
to achieve.
‘Oh,’ was all Rachel said at first, when he told her he wasn’t Marcus’s natural father. She was trying and failing to pick up a clump of seaweed with her chopsticks.
‘It’s not really seaweed, you know,’ said Will in a misguided attempt to make out that what he was telling her wasn’t any kind of big deal – not to him, anyway. ‘It’s lettuce or something. They shred it and fry it and put sugar and—’
‘So who is his natural father?’
‘Well,’ said Will. Why hadn’t it occurred to him that if he wasn’t Marcus’s father, then someone else would have to be? Why did these things never occur to him? ‘It’s a guy called Clive who lives in Cambridge.’
‘Right. And you get on OK with him?’
‘Yeah. We spent Christmas together, actually.’
‘So – sorry, I’m being a bit thick here – if you’re not Marcus’s natural father, and you don’t live with him, then, you know, how is he your son?’
‘Yes. Ha ha. I see what you mean. It must look very confusing from the outside.’
‘Tell me how it is on the inside.’
‘It’s just that sort of relationship. I’m old enough to be his father. He’s young enough to be my son. So—’
‘You’re old enough to be the father of just about anyone under twenty. Why this particular boy?’
‘I don’t know. Just one of those things. Would you like to move on to wine now, or do you want to stick with the Chinese beer? Anyway, tell me about your relationship with Ali. Is it as complicated as mine and Marcus’s?’
‘No. I slept with his father and nine months later I gave birth, and that’s about it. Pretty straightforward, but these things usually are.’
‘Yes. I envy you.’
‘I’m sorry to harp on about this, but I still haven’t got it all worked out. You’re Marcus’s stepfather, but you don’t live with him or his mother.’
‘I suppose you could look at it that way, yes.’
‘How else could you look at it?’
‘Ha. I see what you mean,’ he said thoughtfully, as if he had just that second worked out that there was only one way of looking at it.
‘Did you ever live with Marcus’s mother?’
‘Define “live with”.’
‘Did you ever have a spare pair of socks at her house? Or a toothbrush?’
Say that Fiona had given him a pair of socks for Christmas. And say that he had left them at her house, and hadn’t got around to picking them up yet. Then he could point out, with a clear conscience, that not only had he once kept a spare pair of socks at Fiona’s house, but they were still there! Unfortunately, however, she hadn’t given him socks, she had given him that stupid book. And he hadn’t even left the book there anyway. So the dream sock scenario was just that – a dream.
‘No.’
‘Just… no?’
‘Yes.’
He picked up the last little spring roll, dunked it in the chilli sauce, put it in his mouth, and behaved as though it were way too big, so he wouldn’t be able to speak for several minutes. Rachel would have to do the talking, and she would probably want to talk about something else eventually. He wanted her to tell him about the book she was currently illustrating, or her ambition to exhibit her work, or how much she had been looking forward to seeing him. Those were the kinds of conversations he had envisaged; he was fed up with talking about imaginary children, and even more fed up with talking about why he had imagined them in the first place.
But Rachel simply sat there and waited for him to finish his mouthful, and however much he chewed and grimaced and swallowed and choked he couldn’t make a mini spring roll last forever. So he told her the truth, as he knew he would, and she was appalled, as she had every right to be.
‘I never actually said he was my son. The words “I have a son called Marcus” never passed my lips. That’s what you chose to believe.’
‘Yeah, right. It’s me who’s the fantasist. I wanted to believe you had a son, so I let my imagination run riot.’
‘You know, that’s a very interesting theory. I read this thing in the paper once about this guy who’d taken all these middle-aged women for a ride, cleaned them out of their life savings because they were convinced he was rich. And, the thing was, he didn’t even have to do anything to prove it. They just believed him.’
‘So he told them he was rich. He lied. That’s different.’
‘Ah. Yes. I see what you mean. That’s sort of where the comparison breaks down, doesn’t it?’
‘Because you didn’t lie. I just made it up. I thought, Cute guy, if only he had a kid, a geeky son, pre-teenage if possible, and then you turned up at my house with Marcus, and bingo! I made this crazy link because of some deep psychological need in me.’
It wasn’t turning out as badly as Will feared it might. She was definitely seeing some kind of funny side, even though she clearly thought he was a weirdo.
‘You shouldn’t beat yourself up about it. Could have happened to anyone.’
‘Hey, don’t push your luck. If I want to be amused and tolerant, that’s my business. I’m not yet at a stage where you can make jokes too.’
‘Sorry.’
‘But where does Marcus come in? I mean, you obviously hadn’t hired him for the afternoon. There’s some kind of relationship there.’
She was right, of course, and he rescued a potentially disastrous evening by telling her everything there was to tell. Nearly everything, anyway: he didn’t tell her the reason he had come across Marcus in the first place was because he had joined SPAT. He didn’t tell her that because he thought it might sound bad coming on top of a similar revelation. He didn’t want her to think he had a problem.
Rachel invited him back for coffee after the meal, but Will knew that sex wasn’t in the air. Or rather, there was a little, the merest whiff, but it was emanating from him, so it didn’t count. He found Rachel so attractive that there would always be sex in the air when he was with her. All that seemed to be coming from her was a quiet amusement and a sort of baffled tolerance, and though he was grateful for these small mercies, they were very rarely, he would imagine, precursors to any kind of physical intimacy beyond a quick hair-ruffle.
Rachel made coffee in great big blue designer cups and they sat opposite each other, Rachel spread out on the sofa, Will bolt upright in an old armchair covered with some kind of Asian throw.
‘Why did you think Marcus would make you more interesting?’ she asked him after they had poured and stirred and blown and done everything else they could think of doing to a cup of coffee.
‘Was I more interesting?’
‘Yes, I suppose you were.’
‘Why?’
‘Because… You really want to know the truth?’
‘Yes.’
‘Because I thought you were a sort of blank – you didn’t do anything, you weren’t passionate about anything, you didn’t seem to have much to say – and then when you said you had a kid—’
‘I didn’t actually say—’
‘Yeah, whatever… I thought, I’ve got this guy all wrong.’
‘So there you are then. You’ve answered your own question.’
‘But I had got you wrong.’
‘How d’you work that out?’
‘Because there is something there. You didn’t make it all up about Marcus. You’re involved, and you care, and you understand him, and you worry about him… So you’re not the guy I thought you were before you brought him up.’
Will knew this was supposed to make him feel better about everything, but it didn’t. For a start, he’d only known Marcus for a few months, so Rachel had raised some interesting questions about the thirty-six years he had let slip through his fingers. And he didn’t want to be defined by Marcus. He wanted his own life, and his own identity; he wanted to be interesting in his own right. Where had he heard that complaint before? At SPAT, that’s where. He had somehow managed to turn himself into a single parent wi
thout even going to the trouble of fathering a child.
There was hardly any point in moaning though. It was too late for that; he had chosen to ignore his own advice, advice that had served him well for his entire adult life. The way Will saw it, the reason that some of the people at SPAT were in a state wasn’t because they had kids – their problems had started earlier than that, when they first fell for someone and made themselves vulnerable. Now Will had done the same and, as far as he was concerned, he deserved all he got. He’d be singing with his eyes closed soon, and there was nothing he could do about it.
twenty-nine
For three or four weeks – it couldn’t have been any longer than that, but later on, when Marcus looked back on that time, it seemed like months, or years – nothing happened. He saw Will, he saw Ellie (and Zoe) at school, Will bought him some new glasses and took him to have his hair cut, he discovered through Will a couple of singers he liked who weren’t Joni Mitchell or Bob Marley, singers that Ellie had heard of and didn’t hate. It felt as though he were changing, in his own body and in his head, and then his mum started the crying thing again.
Just like before, there didn’t seem to be any reason for it. and just like before, it began slowly, with the odd snuffle after dinner, which one night turned into a long, frightening burst of sobbing, a burst that Marcus could do nothing about, no matter how many questions he asked or hugs he gave her; and then, finally, there was the breakfast crying again, and he knew for sure that things were serious and they were in trouble.
But one thing had changed. Back in the first breakfast crying time, hundreds of years ago, he was on his own; now, there were loads of people. He had Will, he had Ellie, he had… Anyway, he had two people, two friends, and that was some kind of improvement on before. He could just go up to either of them and say, ‘My mum’s at it again,’ and they’d know what he meant, and they’d be able to say something that might make some kind of sense.
‘My mum’s at it again,’ he said to Will on the second breakfast crying day. (He hadn’t said anything on day one, just in case it turned out to be merely a temporary depression, but when she started up again the next morning he could see he’d just been stupidly hopeful.)