About a Boy

  ‘Isn’t he the singer Marcus liked?’ Fiona asked him.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Oh, dear.’

  Suddenly Will was fearful. He had never had any kind of intuition or empathy or connection in his life before, but he had it now. Typical, he thought, that it should be Marcus, rather than Rachel or someone who looked like Uma Thurman, who brought it on. ‘I’m not being funny, but can I come in with you to listen to Marcus’s answerphone message? I just want to hear that he’s OK.’

  But he wasn’t, really. He was calling from a police station in a place called Royston, and he sounded little and frightened and lonely.

  thirty-three

  They didn’t talk on the train at first; every now and again Ellie would give a small sob, or threaten to press the emergency stop button, or threaten to do things to the people who looked at her when she swore or swigged from her bottle of vodka. Marcus felt exhausted. It was now perfectly clear to him that, even though he thought Ellie was great, and even though he was always pleased to see her at school, and even though she was funny and pretty and clever, he didn’t want her to be his girlfriend. She just wasn’t the right sort of person for him. He really needed to be with someone quieter, someone who liked reading and computer games, and Ellie needed to be with someone who liked drinking vodka and swearing in front of people and threatening to stop trains.

  His mum had explained to him once (perhaps when she was going out with Roger, who wasn’t like her at all) that sometimes people needed opposites, and Marcus could see how that might work: if you thought about it, right at this moment Ellie needed someone who was going to stop her from pressing the button more than she needed someone who loved pressing buttons, because if she was with someone who loved pressing buttons, they would have pressed it by now and they’d be on their way to prison. The trouble with this theory, though, was that actually it wasn’t an awful lot of fun being the opposite of Ellie. It had been fun sometimes – at school, where Ellie’s… Ellieness could be contained. But out in the world it was no fun at all. It was frightening and embarrassing.

  ‘Why does it matter so much?’ he asked her quietly. ‘I mean, I know you like his records and everything, and I know it’s sad because of Frances Bean, but—’

  ‘I loved him.’

  ‘You didn’t know him.’

  ‘Of course I knew him. I listened to him sing every single day. I wear him every single day. The things he sings about, that’s him. I know him better than I know you. He understood me.’

  ‘He understood you?’ How did that work? How did someone you had never met understand you?

  ‘He knew what I felt, and he sang about it.’

  Marcus tried to remember some of the words to the songs on the Nirvana record that Will had given him for Christmas. He had only ever been able to hear little bits: ‘I feel stupid and contagious.’ ‘A mosquito.’ ‘I don’t have a gun.’ None of it meant anything to him.

  ‘So what were you feeling?’

  ‘Angry.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Nothing. Just… life.’

  ‘What about life?’

  ‘It’s shit.’

  Marcus thought about that. He thought about whether life was shit, and whether Ellie’s life in particular was shit, and then he realized that Ellie spent her whole time wanting life to be shit, and then making life shit by making things difficult for herself. School was shit because she wore her sweatshirt every day, which she wasn’t allowed to do, and because she shouted at teachers and got into fights, which upset people. But what if she didn’t wear her sweatshirt and stopped shouting at people? How shit would life be then? Not very, he thought. Life was really shit for him, what with his mum and the other kids at school and all that, and he’d give anything to be Ellie; but Ellie seemed determined to turn herself into him, and why would anyone want to do that?

  Somehow it reminded him of Will and his pictures of dead drug-takers; maybe Ellie was like Will. If either of them had real trouble in their lives, they wouldn’t want or need to invent it for themselves, or put pictures of it on the walls.

  ‘Is that really true, Ellie? Do you really think life is shit?’

  ‘Course.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because… because the world is sexist and racist and full of injustice.’

  Marcus knew this was true – his mum and dad had told him so often enough – but he wasn’t convinced that this was what made Ellie angry.

  ‘And is that what Kurt Cobain thought?’

  ‘I don’t know. Probably.’

  ‘So you’re not sure that he felt the same way as you.’

  ‘He sounded as though he did.’

  ‘Do you feel like shooting yourself?’

  ‘Of course. Sometimes, anyway.’

  Marcus looked at her. ‘That’s not true, Ellie.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because I know how my mum feels. And you don’t feel like that. You’d like to think you do, but you don’t. You have too good a time.’

  ‘I have a shit time.’

  ‘No. I have a shit time. Apart from the time I spend with you. And my mum has a shit time. But you… I don’t think so.’

  ‘You don’t know anything.’

  ‘I know some things. I know about that. I’ll tell you, Ellie, you don’t feel anything like my mum, or Kurt Cobain. You shouldn’t say that you feel like killing yourself when you don’t. It’s not right.’

  Ellie shook her head and laughed her low nobody-understands-me laugh, a noise that Marcus hadn’t heard since the day they met outside Mrs Morrison’s office. She was right, he hadn’t understood her then; he understood her much better now.

  They sat in silence for a couple of stops. Marcus looked out of the window and tried to work out how to explain Ellie to his dad. He hardly noticed when the train pulled in at Royston station, and he wasn’t even completely alert when Ellie suddenly stood up and jumped off the train. He hesitated for a moment, then, with a horrible sick feeling, he jumped off after her.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I don’t want to go to Cambridge. I don’t know your dad.’

  ‘You didn’t know him before, and you wanted to come then.’

  ‘That was before. Everything’s different now.’

  He followed her; he wasn’t going to let her out of his sight. They walked out of the station, up a side road and then on to the High Street. They walked past a chemist and a greengrocer’s and a Tesco, and then they came to a record shop which had a big cardboard cut-out of Kurt Cobain in the window.

  ‘Look at that,’ said Ellie. ‘Bastards. They’re trying to make money out of him already.’

  She took off one of her boots, and threw it at the glass as hard as she could. She cracked it first time, and Marcus found himself thinking about how shop windows in Royston were much weedier than shop windows in London before he realized what was going on.

  ‘Shit, Ellie!’

  She picked up the boot and used it as a hammer, carefully smashing a hole big enough to lean through without hurting herself, and rescued Kurt Cobain from his record-shop prison.

  ‘There. He’s out.’ She sat down on the kerb outside the shop, holding Kurt to her as if he were a ventriloquist’s dummy, and smiling this weird little smile to herself; meanwhile Marcus panicked. He charged up the road, intending to run all the way back to London or on to Cambridge, whichever direction he was heading. After a few yards, however, his legs went all shaky, and he stopped, took a few deep breaths, and went back to sit with her.

  ‘What did you do that for?’

  ‘I dunno. It just didn’t seem right, him being in there on his own.’

  ‘Oh, Ellie.’ Once again, Marcus was left with the feeling that Ellie didn’t have to do what she had just done, and that she had brought the trouble she was in upon herself. He was tired of it. It wasn’t real, and there was enough real trouble in the world without having to invent things.

  The
street had been quiet when Ellie broke the window, but the noise of breaking glass had woken Royston up, and a couple of people closing up their shops had run down to see what was going on.

  ‘Right, you two. Stay there,’ said a guy with long hair and a suntan. Marcus reckoned he had to be a hairdresser or someone who worked in a boutique. He wouldn’t have been able to work something like that out a while ago, but if you hung around with Will long enough you picked stuff up.

  ‘We’re not going anywhere, are we, Marcus?’ said Ellie sweetly.

  When they were sitting in the police car Marcus remembered the day he had walked out of school, and the future he had predicted for himself that afternoon. He’d been right, in a way. His whole life had changed, just as he thought it would, and he was almost certain now that he would become a tramp or a drug addict. He was already a criminal. And it was all his mum’s fault! If his mum hadn’t complained to Mrs Morrison about the shoes, then he would never have got cross with Mrs Morrison for suggesting that he should keep out of the way of the kids who were giving him a hard time. And then he wouldn’t have walked out, and… and he would never have met Ellie that morning. Ellie had something to answer for here. It was Ellie, after all, who had just chucked a boot at a plate-glass window. The point was that once you had become a truant, you started hanging out with people like Ellie, and getting into trouble, and being arrested and taken to Royston police station. Now there was nothing he could do about it.

  The policemen were nice, really. Ellie had explained to them that she wasn’t a hooligan or on drugs; she was simply making a protest, which was her right as a citizen, about the commercial exploitation of Kurt Cobain’s death. The policemen thought this was funny, which Marcus took as a good sign, although it made Ellie very angry indeed: she told them they were patronizing, and they looked at each other and laughed a bit more.

  When they got to the station, they were shown into a little room, and a policewoman came in and started talking to them. She asked them their ages and addresses, and what they were doing in Royston. Marcus tried to explain about his dad and the window-ledge and the big think and Kurt Cobain and the vodka, but he could see that it was all a bit of a muddle, and that the policewoman couldn’t understand what his dad’s accident had to do with Ellie and the shop window, so he gave up.

  ‘He didn’t do anything,’ Ellie suddenly said. She didn’t say it in a nice way, either; she said it as if he should have done something but didn’t. ‘I got off the train and he followed me. I broke the window. Let him go.’

  ‘Let him go where?’ the policewoman asked her. It was a very good question, Marcus thought, and he was glad that she’d asked it. He didn’t especially want to be let go in Royston. ‘We’ve got to phone one of his parents. We’ve got to phone yours too.’

  Ellie glared at her and the policewoman glared back. There didn’t seem much else to say. They knew the crime and the identity of the criminal; the said criminal had been apprehended and was in the police station, so they sat and waited in silence.

  His dad and Lindsey were the first to turn up. Lindsey had had to drive, because of the broken collar bone, and she hated driving, so they were both in a bit of a state: Lindsey was tired and nervy, and his dad was grumpy and in pain. He didn’t look like a man who’d had a big think, and he certainly didn’t look like a man who until very recently had been desperate to see his only son.

  The policewoman left them alone. Clive slumped on a bench that ran along one side of the room, and Lindsey sat down next to him, looking at him with concern.

  ‘That was just what I needed. Thank you, Marcus.’

  Marcus looked at his dad unhappily.

  ‘He didn’t do anything,’ said Ellie impatiently. ‘He was trying to help me.’

  ‘And who exactly are you?’

  ‘Who exactly?’ Ellie was taking the piss out of his dad. Marcus didn’t think that was a particularly good idea, but he was tired of wrestling with Ellie. ‘Who exactly? I’m Eleanor Toyah McCrae, aged fifteen years seven months. I live at twenty-three…’

  ‘What are you doing messing around with Marcus?’

  ‘I’m not messing around with him. He’s my friend.’ This was news to Marcus. He hadn’t felt Ellie was his friend since they got on the train. ‘He asked me to come with him to Cambridge, because he wasn’t looking forward to a heart-to-heart with a father he feels doesn’t understand him and who has abandoned him at a time when he needed him most. Great, aren’t they, men? You’ve got a mother who wants to top herself and they’re not interested. But they fall off a fucking window-sill and suddenly you’re summoned for a talk about the meaning of life.’

  Marcus slumped on the table and put his head in his hands. He was suddenly very, very tired; he didn’t want to be with any of these people. Life was hard enough without Ellie shooting her mouth off.

  ‘Whose mum wants to top herself?’ Clive asked.

  ‘Ellie’s,’ said Marcus firmly.

  Clive looked at Ellie with interest.

  ‘Sorry to hear that,’ he said, without sounding either sorry or even particularly interested.

  ‘That’s OK,’ said Ellie. She took the hint and said nothing for a while.

  ‘I suppose you blame me for all this,’ said his father. ‘I suppose you think that if I’d stayed with your mother you wouldn’t have gone off the rails. And you’re probably right.’ He sighed, and Lindsey took his hand and stroked it sympathetically.

  Marcus sat bolt upright. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I’ve messed you up.’

  ‘All I did was get off a train,’ said Marcus. His tiredness had vanished now. It had been replaced by the kind of anger which he didn’t feel very often, an anger that gave him the strength to argue with anyone of any age. He wished you could buy this stuff in bottles, so he could keep it in his desk at school and sip from it throughout the day. ‘What’s going off the rails about getting off a train? Ellie’s off the rails. She’s nuts. She just broke a window with her boot because it had a photo of a pop star in it. But I haven’t done anything. And I don’t care if you left home or not. It doesn’t make any difference to me. I’d have got off the train if you were still with Mum because I wanted to try and look after my friend.’ That wasn’t quite right, actually, because if his mum and dad were still together, he wouldn’t have been on the train in the first place, unless he’d been going to Cambridge with Ellie for some other reason that he couldn’t imagine. ‘I suppose you are a useless father, and that doesn’t help a kid very much, but you’d have been a useless father wherever you were living, so I don’t see what difference it makes.’

  Ellie laughed. ‘Yay, Marcus! Cool speech!’

  ‘Thank you. I rather enjoyed making it.’

  ‘You poor kid,’ said Lindsey.

  ‘And you can shut up,’ said Marcus. Ellie laughed even harder. It was the anger juice talking – poor Lindsey had never done anything wrong, particularly – but it still felt good.

  ‘Can we go now?’ Ellie asked.

  ‘We have to wait for your mother,’ said Clive. ‘She’s coming with Fiona. Will’s driving them up.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Marcus.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ said Ellie, and Marcus groaned. The four of them sat there staring at each other, waiting for the next scene in what was beginning to feel like a never-ending play.

  thirty-four

  Life was, after all, like air. Will could have no doubt about that any more. There seemed to be no way of keeping it out, or at a distance, and all he could do for the moment was live it and breathe it. How people managed to draw it down into their lungs without choking was a mystery to him: it was full of bits. This was air you could almost chew.

  He rang Rachel from Fiona’s flat while Fiona was in the bathroom, and this time she answered the phone.

  ‘You were never going to come, were you?’

  ‘Well—’

  ‘Were you?’

  ‘No. I thought… I thought it
might do you some good. Did I do a terrible thing?’

  ‘I guess not. I guess it did me some good.’

  ‘So there you are.’

  ‘But as a general rule—’

  ‘As a general rule, I’ll turn up when I say I’m going to.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  He told Rachel about Marcus and Ellie, and promised to keep her informed. The moment he’d put the phone down Ellie’s mother Katrina called and spoke to Fiona, and then Fiona spoke to Clive, and then she called Katrina back to offer her a lift to Royston with them, and then Will went home to get his car, and they drove off to look for Ellie’s house.

  While Fiona was collecting Ellie’s mum, Will sat in the car listening to Nirvana and thinking about the Dead Duck Day. Something about now was reminding him of then; there was that same sense of unpredictability and absorption and chaos. The main difference was that today wasn’t as… well, as enjoyable. It wasn’t that Fiona’s attempted suicide had been a riot of fun and laughter; it was just that he neither knew nor cared about any of them then, and it had been possible for him to observe, with a terrible but neutral fascination, the kind of mess that people can make if they are wilful or unlucky or both. But the neutrality had gone now, and he was more worried about poor Marcus sitting with some deranged teenager in a small-town police station, an experience that Marcus would probably have forgotten all about by the weekend, than about the same boy’s mother attempting to take her own life, the memory of which he was almost certain to carry with him to his grave. It seemed that whether you felt something, or whether you felt nothing, it didn’t matter: your responses were off either way.

  Ellie’s mum was an attractive woman in her early forties, youthful-looking enough to get away with the tatty, faded blue jeans and leather biker jacket she was wearing. She had a shock of curly hennaed hair and nice crinkles around her eyes and mouth, and she seemed to have given up on her daughter a long time ago.