He found Ellie underneath the departure board, which was where they had arranged to meet. She seemed normal. ‘Platform ten b,’ she said. ‘It’s in another part of the station, I think.’
Everyone was carrying an evening paper, so Kurt Cobain was everywhere. And because the photo in the paper was exactly the same picture that Ellie had on her sweatshirt, it took Marcus a while to get used to the idea that all these people were holding something that he had always thought of as a part of her. Every time he saw it he wanted to nudge her and point at it, but he said nothing. He didn’t know what to do.
‘Right. Follow me,’ Ellie shouted in a pretend-bossy voice that would have made Marcus giggle at any other time. Today, however, he could only manage a weak little smile; he was too worried to respond to her in the way he usually did, and he could only listen to what she was saying, not the way she was saying it. He didn’t want to follow her, because if she was out in front she was bound to notice the army of Kurt Cobains marching towards her.
‘Why should I follow you? Why don’t you follow me for a change?’
‘Ooh, Marcus. You’re so masterful,’ said Ellie. ‘I love that in a man.’
‘Where are we going?’
Ellie laughed. ‘Ten b. Over there.’
‘Right.’ He stood directly in front of her and began to walk very slowly towards the platform.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Leading you.’
She pushed him in the back. ‘Don’t be an idiot. Get a move on.’
He suddenly remembered something that he’d seen in one of the Open University programmes his mum used to have to watch for her course. He’d watched it with her because it was funny: there were all these people in a room, and half of them were wearing blindfolds, and the other half had to lead the blindfolded half around and not let them bump into each other. It was something to do with trust, his mum had said. If someone could guide you around safely when you were feeling vulnerable, then you learnt to trust them, and that was important. The best bit of the programme was when this woman walked an old man straight into a door and he smashed his head, and they started having a row.
‘Ellie, do you trust me?’
‘What are you on about?’
‘Do you trust me, yes or no?’
‘Yes. As far as I can throw you.’
‘Ha, ha.’
‘Of course I trust you.’
‘OK, then. Close your eyes and hang on to my jacket.’
‘Eh?’
‘Close your eyes and hang on to my jacket. You’re not allowed to peek.’
A young guy with long, straggly bleached hair looked at Ellie, at her sweatshirt and then her face. For a moment it looked as though he was going to say something to her, and Marcus began to panic; he stood in between her and the guy and grabbed her.
‘Come on.’
‘Marcus, have you gone mad?’
‘I’m going to guide you through all these people and I’m going to get you on the train, and then you’ll trust me forever.’
‘If I trust you forever, it won’t be because I spent five minutes wandering around King’s Cross station with my eyes closed.’
‘No. OK. But it’ll help.’
‘Oh, fucking hell. Come on, then.’
‘Ready?’
‘Ready.’
‘Eyes closed, no peeking?’
‘Marcus!’
They set off. To get to the Cambridge train you had to go out of the main part of the station and into another, smaller part tucked away at the side; most people were walking in their direction to get the train home from work, but there were enough people coming at them holding newspapers to make the game worthwhile.
‘Are you OK?’ he said over his shoulder.
‘Yes. You’ll tell me if we have to go upstairs or anything?’
‘Course.’
Marcus was almost enjoying it all now. They were going through a narrow passageway, and you had to concentrate, because you couldn’t just stop dead or sidestep, and you had to remember that you’d sort of doubled in size, so you had to think about what sort of spaces you could fit into. This must be what it was like if you started driving a coach when you were used to a Fiat Uno or something. The best thing about it was that he really did have to look after Ellie, and he liked the feeling that brought with it. He’d never looked after anything or anybody in his whole life – he’d never had a pet, because he wasn’t bothered about animals, even though he and his mum had agreed not to eat them (why hadn’t he just told her he wasn’t bothered about animals, instead of getting into an argument about factory farming and so on?) – and as he loved Ellie more than he would ever have loved a goldfish or a hamster, it felt real.
‘Are we nearly there?’
‘Yeah.’
‘The light’s different.’
‘We’re out of the big station and now we’re going into the little one. The train’s there waiting for us.’
‘I know why you’re doing this, Marcus,’ she suddenly said in a small, quiet voice that didn’t sound like her. He stopped, but she didn’t let go of him. ‘You think I haven’t seen the paper, but I have.’
He turned round to look at her, but she wouldn’t open her eyes.
‘Are you OK?’
‘Yeah. Well. Not really.’ She rummaged around in her bag and produced a bottle of vodka. ‘I’m going to get drunk.’
Suddenly Marcus could see a problem with his guided missile plan: the problem was that Ellie wasn’t actually a guided missile. You couldn’t guide her. That didn’t matter so much in school, because school was full of walls and rules and she could just bounce off them; but out in the world, where there were no walls and rules, she was scary. She could just blow up in his face any time.
thirty-two
There was absolutely nothing wrong with the idea – it wasn’t even particularly risky. On the contrary, it was just a mundane social arrangement, the sort that people make all the time, all over the place. If these people were ever to realize the possible consequences, Will reflected later, all the tears and embarrassment and panic that could ensue in the event of these arrangements going just slightly wrong, they would never arrange to meet for a drink again.
The plan was for Rachel, Will and Fiona to go to a pub in Islington while Marcus was up in Cambridge visiting his father. They would have a drink and a chat, then Will would absent himself and Rachel and Fiona would have a drink and a chat, as a result of which Fiona would cheer up, feel better about things and lose the urge to top herself. What could possibly go wrong?
Will arrived at the pub first, got himself a drink, sat down, lit a cigarette. Fiona arrived shortly afterwards; she was distracted and slightly manic. She asked for a large gin and ice, no mixer, and sipped at it nervously and quickly. Will started to feel a little uncomfortable.
‘Have you heard from the boy?’
‘Which boy?’
‘Marcus?’
‘Oh, him!’ She laughed. ‘I’d forgotten all about him. No. He’ll leave a message while I’m out, I should think. Who’s your friend?’
Will looked round, just to check that the seat beside him was as empty as he remembered it to be, and then back at Fiona. Maybe she was imagining people; maybe that’s why she got down and cried a lot. Maybe the people she imagined were horrible, or as depressed as she was.
‘Which friend?’
‘Rachel?’
‘Who’s my friend Rachel?’ Now he didn’t understand the question. If she knew his friend Rachel was Rachel, what exactly was the information she required?
‘Who is she? Where does she come from? How does she fit in? Why do you want me to meet her?’
‘Oh. I see. I just thought, you know.’
‘No.’
‘I just thought you might find her interesting.’
‘Will this happen every time you meet somebody? I have to see them for a drink, even though I don’t really know you, let alone them?’
?
??Oh, no. Not every time, anyway. I’ll weed out the rubbish.’
‘Thank you.’
And still no Rachel. She was now fifteen minutes late. After a peculiar and pointless conversation about John Major’s shirts (Fiona’s choice of conversational topic, not his), and several lengthy silences, Rachel was thirty minutes late.
‘She does exist?’
‘Oh, she definitely exists.’
‘Right.’
‘I’ll go and phone her.’ He went to the payphone, got the answerphone, waited for a human interruption that never came, and went back to his seat without leaving a message. The only excuse he would accept, he decided, would involve Ali and a large articulated vehicle… Unless she had never intended to come. He suddenly realized with terrible clarity that he’d been set up, that when Rachel had said that he would get the hang of it if she showed him how, this is what she had meant. He wanted to hate her, but he couldn’t: instead he felt a rising panic.
Another silence, and then Fiona started crying. Her eyes filled up and started to leak down her face and on to her pullover, and she just sat there quietly, like a kid oblivious to a runny nose. For a while Will thought he could just ignore it, and it would go away, but he knew deep down that ignoring her was simply not an option, not if he were worth anything at all.
‘What’s the matter?’ He tried to say it as if he knew it were a big question, but it came out all wrong: the gravity sounded, to him at least, like tetchiness, as if there were a ‘now’ missing from the end.
‘Nothing.’
‘That’s not true, is it?’ It still wouldn’t be too late. If Rachel arrived breathless and apologetic at this second, he could stand up, make the introductions, tell Rachel that Fiona was just about to explain the root cause of her misery, and then shove off. He looked towards the door hopefully and, as if by magic, it opened: two guys in Man United away shirts walked in.
‘It is true. Nothing’s the matter. No thing. I’m just like this.’
‘Existential despair, right?’
‘Yeah. Right.’
Again, he hadn’t got the tone of it. He’d used the phrase to prove that he knew it (he wondered whether Fiona thought he was dim), but quickly realized that if you knew it, these were precisely the circumstances in which you would give it an enormous body-swerve; it sounded flip and pseud and shallow. He wasn’t cut out for chats about existential despair. It just wasn’t him. And what was wrong with that? There was no shame in it, surely? Leather trousers weren’t him. (He’d tried some on once, just for a laugh, in a shop called Leather-Time in Covent Garden, and he’d looked like a… Anyway). The colour green wasn’t him. Antique furniture wasn’t him. And depressive hippy-liberal women weren’t him. Big deal. It didn’t make him a bad person.
‘I don’t know if there’s a lot of point in talking about this with you,’ she said.
‘No,’ he said, more cheerfully than was appropriate. ‘I know what you mean. Shall we finish this and go, then? I don’t think Rachel’s going to show up.’
Fiona smiled sadly and shook her head. ‘You could try persuading me that I’m wrong.’
‘Could I?’
‘I think I probably need to talk to somebody, and you’re the only one here.’
‘I’m the only one here that you know. But I’d be useless. You could throw that slice of lemon across the pub and hit somebody who was better than me. As long as you aimed away from that guy who’s singing on his own over there.’
She laughed. Maybe his lemon joke had done the trick. Maybe she’d look back on those few seconds as a turning point in her life. But then she shook her head, and said, ‘Oh, shit,’ and began to cry again, and he could see that he had overrated the power of the throwaway one-liner.
‘Do you want to go and get something to eat?’ he said wearily. He was going to have to look a long way down now.
They went to Pizza Express on Upper Street. He hadn’t been there since the last time he had had lunch with Jessica, the ex-girlfriend who was determined to make him as unhappy and sleepless and out of touch and burdened by parenthood as she had become. That was a long, long time ago, before SPAT and Marcus and Suzie and Fiona and Rachel and everything. He’d been an idiot then, but at least he’d been an idiot with an idea, some kind of belief system; now he was hundreds of years older, one or two IQ points wiser, and absolutely all over the place. He’d rather be an idiot again. He’d had his whole life set up so that nobody’s problem was his problem, and now everybody’s problem was his problem, and he had no solutions for any of them. So how, precisely, was he, or anybody else he was involved with, better off?
They looked at the menu in silence.
‘I’m not really hungry,’ said Fiona.
‘Please eat,’ said Will, too quickly and too desperately, and Fiona smiled.
‘You think a pizza will help?’ she said.
‘Yes. Veneziana. ‘Cos then you’ll stop Venice sinking into the sea and you’ll feel better.’
‘OK. If I can have extra mushrooms on it.’
‘Good call’
The waitress came to take their order; Will asked for a beer, a bottle of house red, and a Four Seasons with extra everything he could think of, including pine nuts. If he was lucky, he would be able to induce a heart attack, or find that he was suddenly fatally allergic to something.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Fiona.
‘What for?’
‘Being like this. And being like this with you.’
‘I’m used to women being like this with me. This is how I spend most evenings.’ Fiona smiled politely, but suddenly Will felt sick of himself. He wanted to find a way in to the conversation that they had to have, but there didn’t seem to be one, and there never would be while he was stuck with his brain and his vocabulary and his personality. He kept feeling as though he were on the verge of saying something proper and serious and useful; but then he ended up thinking, Oh, fuck it, say something stupid instead.
‘I’m the one who should apologize,’ he said. ‘I want to help, but I know I won’t be able to. I haven’t got the answers to anything.’
‘That’s what men think, isn’t it?’
‘What?’
‘That unless you’ve got some answer, unless you can say, “Oh, I know this bloke in Essex Road who can fix that for you”, then it’s not worth bothering.’
Will shifted in his seat and didn’t say anything. That was precisely what he thought; in fact, he had spent half the evening trying to think of the name of the bloke in Essex Road, metaphorically speaking.
‘That’s not what I want. I know there’s nothing you can do. I’m depressed. It’s an illness. It just started. Well, that’s not true, there were things happening that helped it along, but…’
And they were away. It was easier than he could possibly have anticipated: all he had to do was listen and nod and ask pertinent questions. He had done it before, loads of times, with Angie and Suzie and Rachel, but that was for a reason. There was no ulterior motive here. He didn’t want to sleep with Fiona, but he did want her to feel better, and he hadn’t realized that in order to make her feel better he had to act in exactly the same way as if he did want to sleep with her. He didn’t want to think about what that meant.
He learnt a lot of things about Fiona. He learnt that she hadn’t really wanted to be a mother, and that sometimes she hated Marcus with a passion that worried her; he learnt that she worried about her inability to hold down a relationship (Will restrained a desire to leap in at this point and tell her that an inability to hold down a relationship was indicative of an undervalued kind of moral courage, that only cool people screwed up); he learnt that her last birthday had scared her to bits, because she hadn’t been anywhere, done anything, all the usual malarkey. None of it amounted to anything enormous, but the sum of her depression was much greater than its parts, and now she had to live with something that tired her and made her see everything through a greeny-brown gauze. And he learnt that if someone wer
e to ask her where this thing lived (Will found it hard to imagine a more unlikely question, but that was just one of the many differences between them), she would say that it was in her throat, because it stopped her from eating, and made her feel as though she were constantly on the verge of tears – when she wasn’t actually crying.
And that was it, more or less. What Will had been most frightened of – apart from Fiona asking him about the point (a subject that never even came close to showing its face, probably because it was clear in his face and even in his life that he didn’t have a clue) – was that there was going to be a cause of all this misery, some dark secret, or some terrible lack, and he was one of the only people in the world who could deal with it, and he wouldn’t want to, even though he would have to anyway. But it wasn’t like that at all; there was nothing – if life, with its attendant disappointments and compromises and bitter little defeats, counted as nothing. Which it probably didn’t.
They got a taxi back to Fiona’s place. The cabbie was listening to GLR, and the disc jockey was talking about Kurt Cobain; it took Will a while to understand the strange, muted tone in the DJ’s voice.
‘What’s happened to him?’ Will asked the cabbie.
‘Who?’
‘Kurt Cobain.’
‘Is he the Nirvana geezer? He shot himself in the head. Boom.’
‘Dead?’
‘No. Just a headache. Yeah, course he’s dead.’
Will wasn’t surprised, particularly, and he was too old to be shocked. He hadn’t been shocked by the death of a pop star since Marvin Gaye died. He had been… how old? He thought back. The first of April 1984… Jesus, ten years ago, nearly to the day. So he had been twenty-six, and still of an age when things like that meant something: he probably sang Marvin Gaye songs with his eyes closed when he was twenty-six. Now he knew that pop stars committing suicide were all grist to the mill, and the only consequence of Kurt Cobain’s death as far as he was concerned was that Nevermind would sound a lot cooler. Ellie and Marcus weren’t old enough to understand that, though. They would think it all meant something, and that worried him.