Two wasn’t enough, that was the trouble. He’d always thought that two was a good number, and that he’d hate to live in a family of three or four or five. But he could see the point of that now: if someone dropped off the edge, you weren’t left on your own. How could you make a family grow if there was no one around to, you know, help it along? He was going to have to find a way.
‘I’ll make the tea,’ he said brightly. At least now he had something to work on.
They decided to have a quiet, normal evening. They ordered a delivery curry, and Marcus went to the newsagent’s to get a video, but it took him ages: everything he looked at seemed to have something about death in it, and he didn’t want to watch anything about death. He didn’t want his mum to watch anything about death, come to that, although he wasn’t sure why. What did he think would happen if his mum saw Steven Seagal blast some guys in the head with a gun? That wasn’t the kind of death they were trying not to think about tonight. The kind of death they were trying not to think about was the quiet, sad, real kind, not the noisy, who-cares kind. (People thought that kids couldn’t tell the difference, but they could, of course.) In the end he got Groundhog Day, which he was pleased with, because it was new on video and it said it was funny on the back of the box.
They didn’t start watching it until the food arrived. Fiona served it up, and Marcus wound the tape on past the trailers and adverts so that they would be ready to go the moment they took their first bite of poppadum. The back of the box was right: it was a funny film. This guy was stuck in the same day, over and over again, although they didn’t really explain how that happened, which Marcus thought was weak – he liked to know how things worked. Maybe it was based on a true story, and there had been this guy who was stuck in the same day over and over again, and he didn’t know himself how it had happened. This alarmed Marcus. Supposing he woke up tomorrow and it was yesterday again, with the duck and the hospital and everything? Best not to think about it.
But then the film changed, and became all about suicide. This guy was so fed up with being stuck in the same day over and over for hundreds of years that he tried to kill himself. It was no good, though. Whatever he did, he still woke up the next morning (except it wasn’t the next morning. It was this morning, the morning he always woke up on).
Marcus was really angry. They hadn’t said anything about suicide on the video box, and yet this film had a bloke trying to kill himself about three thousand times. OK, he didn’t succeed, but that didn’t make it funny. His mum hadn’t succeeded either, and nobody felt like making a comedy film about it. Why wasn’t there any warning? There must be loads of people who wanted to watch a good comedy just after they’d tried to kill themselves. Supposing they all chose this one?
At first Marcus was quiet, so quiet that he almost stopped breathing. He didn’t want his mum to hear his breaths, in case she thought they were noisier than usual because he was upset. But then he couldn’t stand it any more, and he turned the film off with the remote.
‘What’s up?’
‘I just wanted to watch this.’ He gestured at the TV screen, where a man with a French accent and a chef’s hat was trying to teach one of the Gladiators how to cut open a fish and take its guts out. It didn’t look like the sort of programme Marcus usually watched, especially as he hated cooking. And fish. And he wasn’t very keen on Gladiators, either.
‘This? What do you want to watch this for?’
‘We’re doing cooking at school, and they said we had to watch this for homework.’
‘Au revoir,’ said the man in the chef’s hat. ‘See you,’ said the Gladiator. They waved and the programme ended.
‘So you’ll be in trouble tomorrow,’ said his mum. ‘Why didn’t you tell me you had to watch this tonight?’
‘I forgot.’
‘Anyway, we can watch the rest of the film now.’
‘Do you really want to?’
‘Yes. It’s funny. Don’t you think it’s funny?’
‘It’s not very realistic, is it?’
She laughed. ‘Oh, Marcus! You make me watch things where people jump from exploding helicopters on to the tops of trains, and you complain about realism.’
‘Yeah, but you can see them doing it. You can actually see them doing those things. You don’t know for sure he’s waking up on the same day over and over again, because they can just pretend that, can’t they?’
‘You do talk some rot.’
This was great. He was trying to save his mum from watching a man committing suicide for hours on end, and she was calling him an idiot.
‘Mum, you must know why I turned it off really?’
‘No.’
He couldn’t believe it. Surely she must be thinking about it all the time, like he was?
‘Because of what he was trying to do.’ She looked at him.
‘I’m sorry, Marcus, I’m still not with you.’
‘The… thing.’
‘Marcus, you’re an articulate boy. You can do better than this.’
She was driving him mad. ‘He’s spent the last five minutes trying to kill himself. Like you did. I didn’t want to watch it, and I didn’t want you to watch it.’
‘Ah.’ She reached for the remote control and turned the TV off. ‘I’m sorry. I was being pretty thick, wasn’t I?’
‘Yes.’
‘I just never made the connection at all. Incredible. God.’ She shook her head. ‘I’m going to have to get my act together.’
Marcus was starting to lose track of his mother. Right up until recently he had always thought she was… not perfect, because they had arguments, and she didn’t let him do things that he wanted to do, and so on, but he had never spent any time thinking she was stupid, or mad, or wrong. Even when they had arguments, he could see what she was on about: she was just saying the things that mothers were supposed to say. But at the moment, he wasn’t getting her at all. He hadn’t understood the crying, and now, when he had been expecting her to be twice as miserable as she had been before, she was completely normal. He was beginning to doubt himself. Wasn’t trying to kill yourself a really big deal? Didn’t you have long talks about it afterwards, and tears, and hugs? Apparently not. You just sat on the sofa and watched videos and acted as though nothing had happened.
‘Shall I put the film back on?’ he asked her. This was like a test. The old mum would know he didn’t mean that.
‘Do you mind?’ she said. ‘I’d like to see how it turns out.’
twelve
Filling days had never really been a problem for Will. He might not have been proud of his lifelong lack of achievement, but he was proud of his ability to stay afloat in the enormous ocean of time he had at his disposal; a less resourceful man, he felt, might have gone under and drowned.
The evenings were fine; he knew people. He didn’t know how he knew them, because he’d never had colleagues, and he never spoke to girlfriends when they became ex-girlfriends. But he had managed to pick people up along the way – guys who once worked in record shops that he frequented, guys he played football or squash with, guys from a pub quiz team he once belonged to, that kind of thing – and they sort of did the job. They wouldn’t be much use in the unlikely event of some kind of suicidal depression, or the even more unlikely event of a broken heart, but they were pretty good for a game of pool, or a drink and a curry.
No, the evenings were OK; it was the days that tested his patience and ingenuity, because all of these people were at work – unless they were on paternity leave, like John, father of Barney and Imogen, and Will didn’t want to see them anyway. His way of coping with the days was to think of activities as units of time, each unit consisting of about thirty minutes. Whole hours, he found, were more intimidating, and most things one could do in a day took half an hour. Reading the paper, having a bath, tidying the flat, watching Home and Away and Countdown, doing a quick crossword on the toilet, eating breakfast and lunch, going to the local shops… That was nine units of a
twenty-unit day (the evenings didn’t count) filled by just the basic necessities. In fact, he had reached a stage where he wondered how his friends could juggle life and a job. Life took up so much time, so how could one work and, say, take a bath on the same day? He suspected that one or two people he knew were making some pretty unsavoury short cuts.
Occasionally, when the mood took him, he applied for jobs advertised in the media pages of the Guardian. He liked the media pages, because he felt he was qualified to fill most of the vacancies on offer. How hard could it be to edit the building industry’s in-house journal, or run a small arts workshop, or write copy for holiday brochures? Not very hard at all, he imagined, so he doggedly wrote letters explaining to potential employers why he was the man they were looking for. He even enclosed a CV, although it only just ran on to a second page. Rather brilliantly, he thought, he had numbered these two pages ‘one’ and ‘three’, thus implying that page two, the page containing the details of his brilliant career, had got lost somewhere. The idea was that people would be so impressed by the letter, so dazzled by his extensive range of interests, that they would invite him in for an interview, where sheer force of personality would carry him through. Actually, he had never heard from anybody, although occasionally he received a standard rejection letter.
The truth was he didn’t mind. He applied for these jobs in the same spirit that he had volunteered to work in the soup kitchen, and in the same spirit that he had become the father of Ned: it was all a dreamy alternative reality that didn’t touch his real life, whatever that was, at all. He didn’t need a job. He was OK as he was. He read quite a lot; he saw films in the afternoon; he went jogging; he cooked nice meals for himself and his friends; he went to Rome and New York and Barcelona every now and again, when boredom became particularly acute… He couldn’t say that the need for change burned within him terribly fiercely.
In any case, this morning he was somewhat distracted by the curious events of the weekend. For some reason – possibly because he encountered real drama very rarely in the course of an average twenty-time-unit quick-crossword-on-the-toilet day – he kept being drawn back to thinking about Marcus and Fiona, and wondering how they were. He had also, in the absence of a Media Guardian advertisement that had really grabbed him, begun to entertain strange and probably unhealthy notions of entering their lives in some way. Maybe Fiona and Marcus needed him more than Suzie did. Maybe he could really… do something with those two. He could take an avuncular interest in them, give their lives a bit of shape and gaiety. He would bond with Marcus, take him somewhere every now and again – to Arsenal, possibly. And perhaps Fiona would like a nice dinner somewhere, or a night out at the theatre.
Mid-morning he phoned Suzie. Megan was having a nap, and she was just sitting down to a cup of coffee.
‘I was wondering how things are up the road,’ he said.
‘Not too bad, I think. She hasn’t gone back to work, but Marcus went to school today. How about you?’
‘Fine, thanks.’
‘You sound pretty cheerful. Did things get sorted out?’
If he sounded cheerful, then obviously they must have done. ‘Oh, yes. It’s all blown over now.’
‘And Ned’s OK?’
‘Yes, he’s fine. Aren’t you, Ned?’ Why had he done that? It was a completely unnecessary embellishment. Why couldn’t he just leave well alone?
‘Good.’
‘Listen, do you think there’s any way I could help with Marcus and Fiona? Take Marcus out or something?’
‘Would you like to?’
‘Of course. He seemed…’ What? What did Marcus seem, other than slightly batty and vaguely malevolent? ‘He seemed nice. We got on OK. Maybe I could, you know, build on the other day.’
‘Why don’t I ask Fiona?’
‘Thanks. And it’d be nice to see you and Megan again soon.’
‘I’m still dying to meet Ned.’
‘We’ll fix something up.’
So, there it was then: an enormous, happy, extended family. True, this happy family included an invisible two-year-old, a barmy twelve-year-old and his suicidal mother; but sod’s law dictated that this was just the sort of family you were bound to end up with when you didn’t like families in the first place.
Will bought a Time Out and read it from cover to cover in an attempt to find something that a twelve-year-old boy might want to do on a Saturday afternoon – or rather, something that might make it clear to Marcus that he was not dealing with your average, desperately unhip thirty-six-year-old here. He started with the children’s section, but soon realized that Marcus was not a brass-rubbing sort of a child, or a puppet theatre sort of a child, or even a child at all; at twelve, his childhood was over. Will tried to remember what he liked doing at that age, but could come up with nothing, although he could remember what he hated doing. What he hated doing were things that adults made him do, however well-intentioned those adults were. Maybe the coolest thing he could do for Marcus was let him run wild on Saturday – give him some money, take him to Soho and leave him there. He had to admit, though, that while this might score points on the coolometer, it didn’t do quite so well on the responsible in loco parentis scale: if Marcus were to embark on a career as a rent-boy and his mother never saw him again, Will would end up feeling responsible and possibly even regretful.
Films? Video arcades? Ice-skating? Museums? Art galleries? Brent Cross? McDonald’s? Jesus, how did anyone get through childhood without falling into a slumber lasting several years? If he were forced to relive his childhood, he would go to bed when Blue Peter had ceased to exert its allure and ask to be woken up when it was time to sign on. It was no wonder young people were turning to crime and drugs and prostitution. They were turning to crime and drugs and prostitution simply because they were on the menu now, an exciting, colourful and tasty new range of options that he had been denied. The real question was why his generation had been quite so apathetically, unenterprisingly law-abiding – especially given the lack of even the token sops to teens, the Australian soaps and the chicken dippers, that passed for youthful entertainment in contemporary society.
He was in the process of wondering whether the British Gas Wildlife Photographer of the Year Exhibition could possibly be any duller than it sounded, when the telephone rang.
‘Hi, Will, it’s Marcus.’
‘Hi. Funnily enough, I was just wondering—’
‘Suzie said you want to take me out for the day somewhere.’
‘Yeah, well, that’s just—’
‘I’ll come if my mum can come.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘I’ll come if you can take my mum too. And she hasn’t got any money, so either we’ll have to go somewhere cheap or you’ll have to treat us.’
‘Right. Hey, say what you mean, Marcus. Don’t beat around the bush.’
‘I don’t know how else to say it. We’re broke. You’re not. You pay.’
‘It’s OK. I was joking.’
‘Oh. I didn’t get it.’
‘No. Listen, I’m quite safe, you know. I thought it might be better just you and me.’
‘Why?’
‘Give your mum a break?’
‘Yeah, well.’
Suddenly, belatedly, he got it. Giving Marcus’s mum a break was what they had been doing last weekend; she had spent the leisure time tipping a bottle of pills down her throat and having her stomach pumped.
‘I’m sorry, Marcus. I was being dim.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Of course your mum can come. That would be great.’
‘We haven’t got a car either. You’ll have to bring yours.’
‘Fine.’
‘You can bring your little boy if you like.’
He laughed. ‘Thanks.’
‘That’s OK,’ Marcus said generously. ‘It’s only fair.’ Sarcasm, Will was beginning to see, was a language that Marcus found peculiarly baffling, which as far as Will was concerned meant it was
absolutely irresistible.
‘He’ll be with his mum again on Saturday.’
‘Fine. Come round about half-past twelve or something. You remember where we live? Flat 2, 31 Craysfield Road, Islington, London Nl 2SF.’
‘England, the world, the universe.’
‘Yeah,’ Marcus said blankly – simple confirmation for a simpleton.
‘Right. See you then.’
In the afternoon Will went out to buy a car seat in Mothercare. He had no intention of filling his whole flat with cots and potties and high chairs, but if he was going to start ferrying people around at weekends, he felt he should at least make some concession to Ned’s reality.
‘That’s sexist, you know,’ he said to the assistant smugly.
‘Sorry?’
‘Mothercare. What about the fathers?’
She smiled politely.
‘Fathercare,’ he added, just in case she was missing his point.
‘You’re the first person ever to say that.’
‘Really?’
‘No.’ She laughed. He felt like Marcus.
‘Anyway. How can I help you?’
‘I’m looking for a car seat.’
‘Yes.’ They were in the car-seat section. ‘What make are you looking for?’
‘Dunno. Anything. The cheapest.’ He laughed matily. ‘What do most people get?’
‘Well. Not the cheapest. They’re usually worried about safety.’
‘Ah. Yes.’ He stopped laughing. Safety was a serious business. ‘Not much point in saving a few quid if he ends up through the windscreen, is there?’
In the end – possibly to over-compensate for his previous callousness – he bought the most expensive car seat in the store, an enormous padded bright blue contraption that looked as though it might last Ned until he was a father himself.
‘He’ll love it,’ he said to the assistant as he handed over his credit card.
‘It looks nice now, but he’ll mess it up soon enough with his biscuits and crisps and what have you.’