NICK HORNBY
NOT A STAR
and OTHERWISE PANDEMONIUM
stories
RIVERHEAD BOOKS
A MEMBER OF PENGUIN GROUP (USA) INC.
NEW YORK
2009
ALSO BY NICK HORNBY
FICTION
HIGH FIDELITY
ABOUT A BOY
HOW TO BE GOOD
A LONG WAY DOWN
SLAM
JULIET, NAKED
NONFICTION
FEVER PITCH
SONGBOOK
THE POLYSYLLABIC SPREE
HOUSEKEEPING VS. THE DIRT
SHAKESPEARE WROTE FOR MONEY
ANTHOLOGY
SPEAKING WITH THE ANGEL
RIVERHEAD BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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ISBN: 1-101-15412-8
Copyright 2006 by Nick Hornby
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NOT A STAR
and OTHERWISE PANDEMONIUM
Contents
Not a Star
Otherwise Pandemonium
About the Author
Not a Star
I found out that my son was the star of a porn film when Karen Glenister from two doors down dropped an envelope through our letter-box. Inside the envelope was a video and a little note which said:
Dear Lynn,
I’m not in the habit of dropping smutty films through people’s letter-boxes! But I thought you and Dave might be interested in this one! It’s not mine, I should add! Carl was at a mate’s house on Friday night after they’d been out drinking, and his mate put this tape on, you know what they’re like! And Carl recognized Someone You Might Know. He couldn’t stop laughing. I had no idea! Does he get this from his Dad?!? You’ve kept it quiet if he does!!!!
Love
Karen
It had to be her, didn’t it? It had to be Karen bloody Glenister. She’s a nurse at the hospital, so she knows everyone and everything. And whatever she finds out, she passes on to whoever happens to be standing around, whether it’s their business or not, and whether they’re interested or not. She knew Dave had had the snip about ten minutes before I did, and half the town knew about it five minutes later. Everything has to go through her. She’s the Clapham Junction of gossip. So it would be her son that saw Mark’s film; it couldn’t not have been. It’s the law around here.
I was the only one in when I picked the envelope up off of the doormat. Dave wasn’t back from work, and Mark plays five-a-side after college on Wednesdays. I opened the envelope at the kitchen table, read the note, and then looked at the video, which was called…Listen, if I’m going to tell this story, I’ll have to use some words that might offend you. But if I don’t say them, you won’t get any sense of the shock I felt. So. The film was called Meet the Fuckers, and there was a picture of Mark on the cover. He was standing behind a woman with enormous boobs, and he had his hands over them so that you couldn’t see her nipples.
My knees started to shake. I couldn’t stand up, and I could hardly breathe. I hadn’t seen the film then, so I still had the luxury of imagining that my son didn’t really do very much, apart from stand behind topless women and cover their nipples with his hands. I think there might even have been a brief moment when I told myself Mark was just being a gentleman–that there was this poor girl, caught with no blouse, thankful that Mark was there to hide her shame…You know what it’s like when you’ve got kids. You’ll only believe the worst of them when you’ve got no other choice.
I found it impossible to get my head around. Mark! I thought. My Mark! Mark, who used to sit at the kitchen table trying to do his English homework, and finding it so difficult that he chewed his way right through his biro, night after night! At first, I didn’t know why that particular memory made the video seem so hard to believe. There must have been millions of people who took their clothes off for a living, and every single one of them probably found their English homework a bit of a struggle. Or is that just me being prejudiced? Could you come top in English and then go on to star in a film called Meet the Fuckers? It’s hard to imagine, isn’t it?.
But then I worked out why the biro-chewing didn’t seem to fit with the career in porn. Mark is…Well, he’s never been the star of anything. He’s been trying to get a leisure and tourism qualification so as he can get a job in a sports centre somewhere, but he’s finding the studying hard. We’re worried it might be too much for him, that he’s set his sights too high. Anyway, when I saw him on the cover of that video, I realized that we’d got used to the idea of thinking of him as, I don’t know. Not special. I mean, he’s special because he’s our son. But it seemed to me that the two words I’d said to him most over the last few years were ‘Never mind’. School reports, exam results, job applications, football trials, girlfriends: ‘Never mind’, ‘Never mind’, ‘Never mind’. I haven’t really seen any porn films–only what was on the TV when we were on holiday in Spain, when we found that German cable channel. But if someone had told me that Mark had appeared in one and asked me to guess what sort of part he played, I’d have said he was the husband who discovered his wife in bed with the window-cleaner or something like that. I’d never have guessed that he’d be on the cover. Sad, isn’t it, the way you sort of give up on your kids?
So it was like I had to get used to this whole new life–a life in which Mark had something that marked him out, made him different to everyone else. I had no idea what that something was, though. That was the next big shock.
I know this sounds funny, but I probably hadn’t thought about Mark’s penis since the day he was born. I mean, I didn’t even think about it very much then, but that was the last time it actually sort of meant something to me. Because on the day he was born, his penis was who he was, if you know what I mean. The midwife held him up and said, ‘It’s a little boy,’ and I looked, and it was. So Mark was Mark, and not Olivia, which was who he would have been if he didn’t have one. And after that…Well, I washed him and everything, until he was old enough to do it himself, and then that was it. Our relationship was over. Even when he started seeing girls, and Dave and I were wondering wheth
er he was sleeping with them, I never thought about that actual part of him. I told Dave to talk to him about contraception and the rest of it, and when I thought about his sex life…Well, I tried not to. Once, when he was seventeen or so, I walked into his bedroom on a Thursday afternoon, and he was in there with Lisa, his girlfriend at the time. They weren’t naked or anything, but they weren’t doing their homework either, and his hands were all over her. I just walked out again, and I got Dave to talk to him later, about what would happen if he got someone pregnant, what it would cost him. (I left Dave to work that bit out, because–never mind, never mind–I couldn’t.) But I never said anything. I wished I hadn’t seen what I saw, though. It was as if I’d walked in on my mum and dad doing something. I suppose someone’s written a book about sex and the family, because it’s obviously an important and difficult subject. But the trouble is, you wouldn’t want to read it, would you?
I had to think about all of it–Mark’s penis and sex and the family, everything–when I put the video on. I didn’t watch it all. I couldn’t. (And it wasn’t just because Mark was in it, or because it was filthy. It was also rubbish, cheap and vulgar and depressing, like a naked version of an old 70s sitcom. The girl with the big breasts, for example, was supposed to be French, so of course she said ‘Ooh la la!’ It was about all she did say.) But I saw enough to understand why Mark was on the cover. It was the biggest one I’ve ever seen. OK, I haven’t seen many, but you see them around more than you used to, don’t you? You see them in films, and some of the girls at work have posters and postcards up, and Dave isn’t the only man I’ve ever slept with. And I can honestly say that the ones I’ve seen were all pretty much the same size, give or take. Mark’s, though…It looked like it didn’t belong to him. It looked like it was a special effect. In fact, the only reason I knew for sure it was real was because no one in their right minds would put Mark in a film if it wasn’t for his thing. He can’t act to save his life, and you could hardly hear what he says because he mumbles so badly, and it’s not even as if he looks like Tom Cruise. He’s nice-looking, I think, but no one would go to the trouble of making an enormous penis for him. Mark was special, after all. We’d never have to say ‘Never mind’ about that.
You’re probably thinking to yourself, ‘Hold on. She really had no idea? Is she blind or stupid?’ And as the film was going on, and I watched these girls rolling their eyes in disbelief (that wasn’t all they did, but there was a lot of eye-rolling, and I was grateful for it), I tried to work out whether I’d missed any clues the last few years.
And the first thing I remembered is that he didn’t like taking communal showers–there had been a thing about it at school, and in the end we’d had to write a note to his games teacher. Neither of us ever sat him down to ask him what the problem was; he’d just told us that he didn’t like them, felt funny about them. Dave was even worried that he might be queer, but we’d already found a couple of girly magazines under his bed, so that theory didn’t make much sense. And then I started to think about his thing with trousers. He’s always preferred baggy ones–he hasn’t ever worn jeans or anything like that, and we’ve always teased him a bit because he’s ended up looking so straight. He’s got more suits than any normal twenty-three-year-old–he buys them in the Oxfam shop and places like that–and he’s got endless pairs of what my mum would have called ‘slacks’, trousers with creases in them made out of flannel or whatever. He always said that other kids were all scruffy and dirty, and that no one knew how to dress properly any more, but now I could see that he’d invented his look to get himself out of a tight spot, as it were. His clothes never seemed to fit with the rest of his personality, or the music he liked, or the friends he knocked around with, so we could never really understand it, but that was because we didn’t have all the information we needed. Oh, plus: he stopped me buying his pants. He was clever about it, because he said I didn’t understand about things like that, pants and socks and vests, but, looking back, I can see it was the pants part of it all that he was worried about. He didn’t like slips much, and he didn’t like boxers; he’d only wear something he calls boxer briefs, which are sort of like trunks, but with a pouch to put it in. They look a bit show-offy, the sort of thing a male stripper might wear, and Dave went back to thinking he was gay for a little while. But Mark had moved away from girly mags and on to real girls by this time, and it seemed to me that Mark was going to an awful lot of trouble just to prove he was straight if he wasn’t. We didn’t waste a lot of time puzzling it all out. He just had his quirks, that was all. Who doesn’t?
I turned the video off and sat there for a moment. Dave was due back any minute, and Mark after he’d had a drink with his five-a-side team, and I didn’t know what I was going to say to either of them. Maybe I didn’t have to say anything. Maybe I could just march up to bloody Karen bloody Glenister’s house, give her the film back and tell her that if she ever breathed a word to anybody about Mark’s wotsit, I’d bash her over the head with it. But in my heart of hearts I knew it was too late.
Dave came in to find me sitting on the sofa staring at a blank TV screen.
‘You all right?’ he said.
‘I’ve just had a bit of a shock,’ I told him.
‘What’s up?’ He sat down with me and took my hand and looked at me. He was frightened, and just for a moment I could see that finding out your son had a huge penis wasn’t the same as finding out you had cancer, so I tried to smile.
‘Oh, it’s nothing. Really. It’s just…’ I reached down to my feet and picked up the video case and gave it to him. He laughed.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Who gave you that?’
‘Karen Glenister.’
‘I can see why. That’s funny.’
‘What’s funny?’
‘He looks just like him, doesn’t he? Have you shown him?’
‘Not yet. He’s at football. Dave…’ I took a deep breath. ‘It is Mark.’
He looked at me, and then he looked at the video, and then he looked at me again.
‘How d’you mean?’
I put my hands up, as if to say, I don’t know an easier way of explaining it.
‘Mark?’
‘Yeah.’
‘In this film?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Doing what?’
I put my hands up again, although this time I meant, Well, what do people normally do in porn films?
‘Why?’
‘You’d have to ask him.’
‘But, I mean…Why would they choose Mark? He’s not…He can’t…’
‘Dave,’ I said. ‘Our son has the biggest…thing I’ve ever seen.’
We had a talk then, about the pants and the showers and the rest of it, and it was like one of those conversations you see on ER or something like that. You know, How did we miss the signs? How could we be so blind? Except in ER they’re usually talking about prostitution or heroin addiction, which is a much more important thing, and the signs they’re talking about aren’t anywhere near as obvious. They have more of an excuse for their blindness.
‘He’s been hiding it,’ said Dave, and that was the first time I actually laughed. ‘He has, though, hasn’t he? For years and years. Bloody hell.’
‘What did you want him to do?’
‘I don’t know. He could have talked to us.’
‘Could he? He couldn’t have talked to me.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’m his mother. He isn’t going to tell me stuff like that. I wouldn’t have let him, to be honest.’
‘So it was my job?’
‘It was nobody’s job. What could you have done? Ask him every few months how it’s coming along? It was up to him, Dave, and he didn’t want to, you know. Share the load.’
The trouble is, you can’t help it. Everything you say sounds dirty, without you wanting it to, so you end up cracking jokes about your own son’s private parts. It seemed unhealthy but unavoidable, like breathing bad air whe
n you live beside a motorway.
‘You going to watch the film?’ I asked Dave.
‘No. No way. I can’t watch that.’ The way he said it, with the emphasis on the ‘I’, irritated me, as if he was superior in some way.
‘Yeah, well it wasn’t as if I wanted to.’
‘You did, though, didn’t you? Even after you’d seen his picture on the cover. You knew what you’d see.’
‘I really didn’t.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said after a while. ‘It’s just, you know…It just seemed like such a normal day. I didn’t think I’d come home to find my whole life had changed.’
I didn’t say anything. But I could have pointed out that most life-changing days happen without you expecting them. I’ve spent what seems like half my life expecting the worst, and it never happens. But on the day it does, it’ll knock me flat on my back anyway.
Mark came in about eleven. We’re usually upstairs getting ready for bed by then, but we’d waited up, for obvious reasons, and he was surprised to see us there, sat on the sofa watching TV.
‘Is there something good on?’
Dave didn’t even turn round to look at him.
‘No. Not really,’ I said. ‘We just started watching this film, and now we want to see how it finishes.’
‘I’m going to make myself a sandwich.’
‘OK, son.’
He always comes in from the pub and makes himself a sandwich on football nights, which is why Dave had left the video on the kitchen table. That way, he’d know we’d cottoned on to him without us having to say anything. We didn’t really have a plan after that. I suppose we thought there’d be an argument, and then eventually a chat; but the next thing we heard was the front door slamming.
‘Shit,’ said Dave. ‘Now what?’
‘Where’s he gone, d’you think?’