It began with a stroke of luck that passed him by at the time: Ali was away for the night, sleeping over at a school-friend’s house. If Rachel had told him at any other stage of their relationship that she was unencumbered by her psychotically Oedipal son, he would have taken it as a sign from Almighty God that he was about to get laid, but today it didn’t even register. They went into the kitchen, she made them coffee and he found himself launching into the whole thing about Fiona and Marcus and the point even before the kettle had boiled.
‘What’s the point?’ Rachel echoed. ‘Jesus.’
‘And don’t say Ali. I haven’t got an Ali.’
‘You’ve got a Marcus.’
‘It’s hard to think of Marcus as the point of anything. I know that’s a terrible thing to say, but it’s true. You’ve met him.’
‘He’s just a bit messed up. But he adores you.’
It had never occurred to Will that Marcus actually had any real feelings towards him, especially feelings that were visible to a third party. He knew that Marcus liked hanging out at his place, and he knew that Marcus described him as a friend, but all this he had taken merely as evidence of the boy’s eccentricity and loneliness. Rachel’s observation that there were real feelings involved kind of changed things, just as they sometimes did when you found out that a woman you hadn’t noticed was attracted to you, so that you ended up reassessing the situation and finding her much more interesting than you ever had done before.
‘You reckon?’
‘Of course he does.’
‘He’s still not the point, though. If I were about to stick my head in the gas oven, and then you told me Marcus adored me, I wouldn’t necessarily take it out again.’
Rachel laughed.
‘What’s so funny?’
‘I don’t know. Just the idea that I’d be there in that situation. If you ended up sticking your head in a gas oven at the end of an evening, we’d have to come to the conclusion that the evening hadn’t been a raging success.’
‘I…’ Will stopped, and started, and then ploughed on anyway, with as much sincerity as he could muster, and with much more sincerity than the line could bear. ‘I would never stick my head in a gas oven at the end of an evening with you.’
He knew the moment he’d said it that it was a big mistake. He’d meant it, but that was precisely what provoked the hilarity: Rachel laughed and laughed until her eyes filled with tears. ‘That,’ she said in between great gulps of air, ‘is… the… most… romantic… thing… anyone’s ever said to me.’
Will sat there helplessly, feeling like the most stupid man in the world, but when things calmed down again they seemed to be in a different place, somewhere where they were able to be warmer and less nervous with each other. Rachel made the coffee, found some stale custard creams and sat down with him at the kitchen table.
‘You don’t need a point.’
‘Don’t I? That’s not what it feels like.’
‘No. See, I was thinking about you. About how you have to be fairly tough in your head to do what you do.’
‘What?’ For a moment Will was completely bewildered. ‘Tough in your head’, ‘Do what you do’… These were not phrases that anyone used about him too often. What the fuck was it he’d told Rachel he did? Work in a coalmine? Teach young offenders? But then he remembered he’d never actually told Rachel any lies, and his bewilderment took a different shape. ‘What do I do?’ ‘Nothing.’
That’s what Will thought he did. ‘So how come I have to be tough to do that?’
‘Because… most of us think that the point is something to do with work, or kids, or family, or whatever. But you don’t have any of that. There’s nothing between you and despair, and you don’t seem a very desperate person.’
‘Too stupid.’
‘You’re not stupid. So why don’t you ever put your head in the oven?’
‘I don’t know. There’s always a new Nirvana album to look forward to, or something happening in NYPD Blue to make you want to watch the next episode.’
‘Exactly.’
‘That’s the point? NYPD Blue? Jesus.’ It was worse than he thought.
‘No, no. The point is you keep going. You want to. So all the things that make you want to are the point. I don’t know if you even realize it, but on the quiet you don’t think life’s too bad. You love things. Telly. Music. Food.’ She looked at him. ‘Women, probably. Which I guess means you like sex too.’
‘Yeah.’ He said it sort of grumpily, as if she had caught him out somehow, and she smiled.
‘I don’t mind. People who like sex are usually pretty good at it. Anyway. I’m the same. I mean, I love things, and they’re mostly different things from you. Poetry. Paintings. My work. Men, and sex. My friends. Ali. I want to see what Ali gets up to tomorrow.’ She started fiddling with the biscuit, breaking off the ends in an attempt to expose the cream, but the biscuit was too soft and it crumbled.
‘See, a few years ago, I was really, really down, and I did think about… you know, what you imagine Fiona’s thinking about. And I really felt guilty about it, because of Ali, and I knew I shouldn’t be that way but I was, and… Anyway, it was always, you know, not today. Maybe tomorrow, but not today. And after a few weeks of that I knew I was never going to do it, and the reason I was never going to do it was because I didn’t want to miss out. I don’t mean that life was great and I didn’t want not to participate. I just mean there were always one or two things that seemed unfinished, things I wanted to follow through. Like you want to see the next episode of NYPD Blue. If I’d just finished stuff for a book, I wanted to see it come out. If I was seeing a guy, I wanted one more date. If Ali had a parents’ evening coming up, I wanted to talk to his form teacher. Little things like that, but there was always something. And in the end I realized there would always be something, and that those somethings would be enough.’ She looked up from the remnants of her biscuit and laughed, embarrassed. ‘That’s what I think, anyway.’
‘Fiona must have things like that.’
‘Yeah, well. I don’t know. It doesn’t sound like Fiona’s getting the breaks. You need them too.’
Was that really all there was to it? Probably not, Will thought, on balance. There were probably all sorts of things missing – stuff about how depression made you tired of everything, tired of everything no matter how much you loved it; and stuff about loneliness, and panic, and plain bewilderment. But Rachel’s simple positivity was something to be going on with and, in any case, the conversation about the point created a point of its own, because there was this pause, and Rachel looked at him, and that was when they started kissing.
*
‘Why don’t I talk to her?’ said Rachel. They were the first words spoken afterwards, although there had been a bit of talking during, and for a moment Will didn’t understand what she meant at all: he was trying to trace it back to something that had taken place in the previous thirty minutes, a half-hour that had left him feeling a bit shaky and almost tearful, and had led him to question his previous conviction that sex was some sort of fantastic carnal alternative to drink, drugs and a great night out, but nothing much more than that.
‘You? She doesn’t know you.’
‘I don’t see why that would matter. Might even help. And maybe you’d get the hang of it, if I showed you how. It’s not so bad.’
‘OK.’ There was something in Rachel’s voice that Will couldn’t quite isolate, but he didn’t want to think about Fiona just at that moment, so he didn’t try very hard. He couldn’t ever remember feeling so happy.
thirty-one
Marcus was finding it hard to get used to the idea that winter was over. Pretty much everything Marcus had experienced in London had taken place in the dark and the wet (there must have been a few light evenings right at the beginning of the school year, but so much had happened since that he no longer had any recollection of them), and now he was able to walk home from Will’s place in the late afternoon
sunshine. It was hard not to feel that everything was OK the first week after the clocks had gone forward; it was ridiculously easy to believe that his mum would get better, that he’d suddenly age three years and suddenly get cool so that Ellie would like him, that he’d score the winning goal for the school football team and become the most popular person in school.
But that was stupid, in the same way that star signs were stupid, in his opinion. The clocks had gone forward for everybody, not just him, and there was no way that every depressed mother was going to cheer up, there was no way that every kid in Britain was going to score the winning goal for the school football team – especially every kid in Britain who hated football and didn’t know which end of a ball to kick – and there was certainly no way that every single twelve-year-old was going to become fifteen overnight. The chances of it happening to even one of them were pretty slim, and even if it did, it wouldn’t be Marcus, knowing his luck. It would be some other twelve-year-old at some other school who wasn’t in love with someone three years older than him, and who therefore wouldn’t even care very much. The injustice of the scene that Marcus had just pictured made him angry, and he marked his return home by slamming the door in a temper.
‘Have you been round to Will’s?’ his mum asked. She looked OK. Maybe one of the clocks-forward wishes had come true.
‘Yeah. I wanted to…’ He still felt he should come up with reasons for why he went round, and he still couldn’t think of anything to say.
‘I don’t care. Your dad’s hurt himself. You’ve got to go up and see him. He fell off a window-ledge.’
‘I’m not going while you’re like this.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like crying all the time.’
‘I’m OK. Well, I’m not OK, but I’m not going to do anything. Promise.’
‘Is he really bad?’
‘He’s broken his collar bone. And he’s a bit concussed.’
He fell off a window-ledge. No wonder his mum had cheered up.
‘What was he doing on a window-ledge?’
‘Some sort of DIY thing. Painting, or grouting, or one of those Scrabble words. For the first time ever. That’ll teach him a lesson.’
‘And why do I have to go up?’
‘He was asking for you. I think he’s a bit doolally at the moment.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Oh, Marcus, I’m sorry, that isn’t why he’s been asking for you. I just meant… I think he’s feeling a bit pathetic. Lindsey said he was quite lucky it wasn’t worse, so maybe he’s having this big think about his life.’
‘He can piss off.’
‘Marcus!’
But Marcus didn’t want an argument about where and why he had learnt to swear; he wanted to sit in his room and sulk, and that’s exactly what he did.
He’s having this big think about his life… That had made Marcus so angry, when his mum had told him, and now he was trying to work out why. He was quite good at working things out when he wanted to: he had an old bean bag in his room, and he sat on it and stared at the wall where he had stuck up some interesting stories out of the newspaper, ‘man falls five thousand feet and lives’; ‘dinosaurs may have been wiped out by meteor.’ Those were the sorts of things that made you have a big think about your life, not falling off a window-ledge while you were pretending to be a proper dad. Why had he never had a big think before, when he wasn’t falling off a window-ledge? Over the last year or so it seemed like everyone had been having big thinks, apart from his father. His mum, for example, never did anything else other than have big thinks, which was probably why everyone had to worry about her all the time. And why did he only want to see his son when he’d broken his collar bone? Marcus couldn’t remember ever having come home before and his mum telling him to get on the train to Cambridge because his dad was desperate. All those hundreds and hundreds of days when his collar bone was all right, Marcus had heard nothing.
He went downstairs to see his mother.
‘I’m not going,’ he said to her. ‘He makes me sick.’
It wasn’t until the next day, when he was talking to Ellie about the window-ledge, that he began to change his mind about going to see his dad. They were in an empty classroom during the morning break, although it hadn’t been empty at first: when Marcus had told her he wanted a chat, she’d taken his hand, led him inside, and scared off the half-dozen kids messing about in there, kids she didn’t know but who seemed perfectly prepared to believe that Ellie would follow through with the terrible threats she was making. (Why did that happen? he wondered. She wasn’t much taller than him, so how did she get away with this stuff? Maybe if he started to wear that sort of eye make-up and cut his own hair he’d be able to make people scared of him, too, but there would still be something missing.)
‘You should go and see him. Tell him what you think of him. I would. Jerk. I’ll come with you, if you like. Give him what for.’ She laughed, and though Marcus heard her he had already drifted off by then. He was thinking about how nice it would be to have a whole hour on a train with Ellie, just the two of them; and then he was thinking how great it would be if he let Ellie loose on his dad. Ellie was like a guided missile in school, and sometimes it felt as though she were his personal guided missile. Whenever he was with her he could point her at targets and she destroyed them, and he loved her for it. She had beaten up Lee Hartley’s mate, and she stopped people laughing at him quite so much… And if it worked so well in school, why wouldn’t it work away from school? There was no reason he could think of. He was going to point Ellie at his dad and see what happened.
‘Will you come with me really, Ellie?’
‘Yeah, of course. If you want me to. It’d be a laugh.’ Marcus knew she would say yes, if he asked her. Ellie would say yes to just about anything, apart from a dance at a party. ‘Anyway, you don’t want to go up there on your own, do you?’
He always did things on his own, so he had never bothered even thinking about whether there was a choice. That was the trouble with Ellie: he was frightened that when and if he didn’t see her any more, he’d still be aware that there were choices, but it wouldn’t do him any good because he wouldn’t be able to get at them, and his whole life would be ruined.
‘Not really. Would Zoe come?’
‘No. She wouldn’t know what to say to him, and I will. Just us.’
‘OK then. Brilliant.’ Marcus didn’t want to think about what Ellie might have to say. He’d worry about that later.
‘Have you got any money? ‘Cos I haven’t got the train fare.’
‘I can get it.’ He didn’t spend very much; he reckoned he had at least twenty pounds saved up, and his mum would give him what he needed for the trip anyway.
‘So shall we go next week, then?’ It was nearly Easter, and they were on holiday next week, so they could stay overnight if they wanted. And Marcus would have to ring Ellie at home to make arrangements – it would be like a proper date.
‘Yeah. Cool. We’ll have a great time.’
Marcus wondered for a moment whether his idea of a great time would be the same as Ellie’s idea of a great time, and then he decided not to worry about that until later.
Fiona wanted to come to King’s Cross with Marcus, but he managed to talk her out of it.
‘It’d be too sad,’ he told her.
‘You’re only going for a night.’
‘But I’ll miss you.’
‘You’ll still be missing me if we say goodbye at the underground station. In fact, you’ll have to miss me for longer.’
‘It’ll seem more normal to say goodbye at the underground, though.’
He knew he was overdoing it, and he knew what he was saying didn’t make much sense anyway, but he wasn’t going to risk a meeting between Ellie and his mum at the station. She’d stop him from going if she knew he was taking Ellie along to Cambridge to blow up his dad.
The two of them walked from the flat to Holloway Road station, and said goodbye
in the tube entrance.
‘You’ll be OK,’ she said to him.
‘Yeah.’
‘And it’ll be over before you know it.’
‘It’s only for a night,’ he said. By the time they reached the underground he’d forgotten he’d told her how much he would miss her. ‘It’s only for a night, but it seems like forever.’ He was hoping his mum wouldn’t remember this when he came back. If she did, he probably wouldn’t be allowed down to the shops on his own.
‘I shouldn’t be making you go. You’ve had such a rough time lately.’
‘I’ll be fine. Really.’
Because he was going to miss her so much, she gave him an enormous hug that went on forever, while everyone walking past watched.
The tube wasn’t crowded. It was mid-afternoon – his dad had worked out the train times so that Lindsey could pick him up from Cambridge on her way home from work – and there was only one other person in his carriage, an old guy reading the evening paper. He was looking at the back page, so Marcus could see some of the stuff on the front; the first thing he noticed was the photo. It seemed so familiar that for a moment he thought it was a picture of someone he knew, a member of the family, and maybe they had it at home, in a frame on the piano, or pinned on to the cork board in the kitchen. But there was no family friend or relative who had bleached hair and half a beard and looked like a sort of modern Jesus…
He knew who it was now. He saw the same picture every single day of the week on Ellie’s chest. He felt hot all over; he didn’t even need to read the old guy’s paper, but he did anyway. ‘ROCK STAR COBAIN DEAD’, was the headline, and underneath, in smaller writing ‘Nirvana singer, 27, shoots himself. Marcus thought and felt a lot of things all at once: he wondered whether Ellie had seen the paper yet, and if she hadn’t then how she’d be when she found out; and he wondered if his mum was OK, even though he knew there was no connection between his mum and Kurt Cobain because his mum was a real person and Kurt Cobain wasn’t; and then he felt confused, because the newspaper headline had turned Kurt Cobain into a real person somehow; and then he just felt very sad – sad for Ellie, sad for Kurt Cobain’s wife and little girl, sad for his mum, sad for himself. And then he was at King’s Cross and he had to get off the train.