by Nick Hornby
Most people would not have bothered to go to these lengths to indulge a whim, but Will quite often bothered to do things that most people wouldn’t bother to do, simply because he had the time to bother. Doing nothing all day gave him endless opportunities to dream and scheme and pretend to be something he wasn’t. He had, after a fit of remorse following a weekend of extreme self-indulgence, volunteered to work in a soup kitchen, and even though he never actually reported for duty, the phone call had allowed him to pretend, for a couple of days, that he was the kind of guy who might. And he had thought about VSO and filled in the forms, and he had cut out an advert in the local paper about teaching slow learners to read, and he had contacted estate agents about opening a restaurant and then a bookshop…
The point was that if you had a history of pretending, then joining a single parent group when you were not a single parent was neither problematic nor particularly scary. If it didn’t work out, then he’d just have to try something else. It was no big deal.
SPAT (Single Parents – Alone Together) met on the first Thursday of the month in a local adult education centre, and tonight was Will’s first time. He was almost sure that tonight would be his last time, too: he’d get something wrong, like the name of Postman Pat’s cat, or the colour of Noddy’s car (or, more crucially, the name of his own child – for some reason he couldn’t stop thinking of him as Ted, and he had only christened him Ned this morning), and he’d be exposed as a fraud and frogmarched off the premises. If there was a chance of meeting someone like Angie, however, it had to be worth a try.
The car park at the centre contained just one other vehicle, a beaten-up B-reg 2CV which had, according to the stickers in its window, been to Chessington World of Adventure and Alton Towers; Will’s car, a new GTi, hadn’t been anywhere like that at all. Why not? He couldn’t think of any reason why not, apart from the glaringly obvious one, that he was a childless single man aged thirty-six and therefore had never had the desire to drive miles and miles to plunge down a plastic fairy mountain on a tea-tray.
The centre depressed him. He hadn’t set foot inside a place with classrooms and corridors and home-made posters for nearly twenty years, and he had forgotten that British education smelt of disinfectant. It hadn’t occurred to him that he wouldn’t be able to find the SPAT party. He thought he’d be led straight to it by the happy buzz of people forgetting their troubles and getting roaring drunk, but there was no happy buzz, just the distant, mournful clank of a bucket. Finally he spotted a piece of file paper pinned to a classroom door with the word SPAT! scrawled on it in felt-tip pen. The exclamation mark put him off. It was trying too hard.
There was only one woman in the room. She was taking bottles – of white wine, beer, mineral water and supermarket-brand cola – out of a cardboard box and putting them on to a table in the centre of the room. The rest of the tables had been pushed to the back; the chairs were stacked in rows behind them. It was the most desolate party venue Will had ever seen.
‘Have I come to the right place?’ he asked the woman. She had pointy features and red cheeks; she looked like Worzel Gummidge’s friend Aunt Sally.
’SPAT? Come in. Are you Will? I’m Frances.’
He smiled and shook her hand. He had spoken to Frances on the phone earlier in the day.
‘I’m sorry there’s nobody else here yet. We quite often get off to a slow start. Babysitters.’
‘Of course.’ So he was wrong to be prompt. He had more or less given himself away already. And, of course, he should never have said ‘of course’, which implied that she had clarified something he was finding puzzling. He should have rolled his eyes and said, ‘Tell me about it’, or, ‘Don’t talk to me about babysitters’, something weary and conspiratorial.
Maybe it wasn’t too late. He rolled his eyes. ‘Don’t talk to me about babysitters,’ he said. He laughed bitterly and shook his head, just for good measure. Frances ignored the eccentric conversational timing and took the cue.
‘Did you have trouble tonight, then?’
‘No. My mother’s looking after him.’ He was proud of the use of the pronoun. It implied familiarity. On the debit side, though, there had been an awful lot of head-shaking, eye-rolling and bitter laughter for a man with no apparent babysitting difficulties.
‘I’ve had trouble before, though,’ he added hastily. The conversation was less than two minutes old and already he was a nervous wreck.
‘Haven’t we all?’ said Frances.
Will laughed heartily. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I know I have.’
It was now perfectly clear, he felt, that he was either a liar or a lunatic, but before he could dig himself any deeper into a hole which was already shipping water other SPAT members – all of them women, all but one of them in their thirties – started to arrive. Frances introduced him to each of them: Sally and Moira, who looked tough, ignored him completely, helped themselves to a paper cupful of white wine and disappeared off to the further corner of the room (Moira, Will noted with interest, was wearing a Lorena Bobbitt T-shirt); Lizzie, who was small, sweet and scatty; Helen and Susannah, who obviously regarded SPAT as beneath their dignity, and made rude comments about the wine and the location; Saskia, who was ten years younger than anybody else in the room, and looked more like somebody’s daughter than somebody’s mother; and Suzie, who was tall, blond, pale, nervy-looking and beautiful. She would do, he thought, and stopped looking at anyone else who came in. Blond and beautiful were two of the qualities he was looking for; pale and nervy-looking were two of the qualities that gave him the right to do so.
‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I’m Will, I’m new, and I don’t know anybody.’
‘Hello, Will. I’m Suzie, I’m old, and I know everybody.’ He laughed. She laughed. He spent as much of the evening as courtesy allowed in her company.
His conversation with Frances had sharpened him up, so he did better on the Ned front. In any case Suzie wanted to talk, and in these circumstances he was extremely happy to listen. There was a lot to listen to. Suzie had been married to a man called Dan, who had started an affair when she was six months pregnant and had left her the day before she went into labour. Dan had only seen his daughter Megan once, accidentally, in the Body Shop in Islington. He hadn’t seemed to want to see her again. Suzie was now poor (she was trying to retrain as a nutritionist) and bitter, and Will could understand why.
Suzie looked around the room.
‘One of the reasons I like coming here is that you can be angry and no one thinks any the less of you,’ she said. ‘Just about everyone’s got something they’re angry about.’
‘Really?’ They didn’t look that angry to Will.
‘Let’s see who’s here… The woman in the denim shirt over there? Her husband went because he thought their little boy wasn’t his. Ummm… Helen… boring… he went off with someone from work… Moira… he came out… Susannah Curtis… I think he was running two families…’
There were endless ingenious variations on the same theme. Men who took one look at their new child and went, men who took one look at their new colleague and went, men who went for the hell of it. Immediately Will understood Moira’s sanctification of Lorena Bobbitt completely; by the time Suzie had finished her litany of treachery and deceit, he wanted to cut off his own penis with a kitchen knife.
‘Aren’t there any other men who come to SPAT?’ he asked Suzie.
‘Just one. Jeremy. He’s on holiday.’
‘So women do leave sometimes?’
‘Jeremy’s wife was killed in a car crash.’
‘Oh. Oh well.’
Will was becoming so depressed about his sex that he decided to redress the balance.
‘So. I’m on my own,’ he said, in what he hoped was a mysteriously wistful tone.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Suzie. ‘I haven’t asked you anything about yourself.’
‘Oh… It doesn’t matter.’
‘Did you get dumped then?’
‘Well, I s
uppose I did, yes.’ He gave her a sad, stoical smile.
‘And does your ex see Ned?’
‘Sometimes. She’s not really that bothered.’ He was beginning to feel better; it was good to be the bearer of bad news about women. True, this bad news was entirely fictitious, but there was, he thought, an emotional truth here somewhere, and he could see now that his role-playing had a previously unsuspected artistic element to it. He was acting, yes, but in the noblest, most profound sense of the word. He wasn’t a fraud. He was Robert De Niro.
’How does he cope with that?’
‘Oh… he’s a good little boy. Very brave.’
‘They have amazing resources, kids, don’t they?’
To his astonishment he found himself blinking back a tear, and Suzie put a reassuring hand on his arm. He was in here, no doubt about it.
seven
Some things carried on as normal. He went to his dad’s in Cambridge for the weekend and watched a load of telly. On the Sunday he and his dad and Lindsey, his dad’s girlfriend, went to Lindsey’s mum’s house in Norfolk, and they went for a walk on the beach and Lindsey’s mum gave him a fiver for no reason. He liked Lindsey’s mum. He liked Lindsey, too. Even his mum liked Lindsey, although she said nasty things about her every now and again. (He never stuck up for her. In fact, he stored up stupid things that Lindsey said or did and told his mum about them when he got home; it was easier that way.) Everyone was OK, really. It was just that there were so many of them now. But he got on with them all OK, and they didn’t think he was weird, or at least they didn’t seem to. He went back to school wondering whether he’d been making a fuss about nothing.
On the way home, though, it all started again, in the newsagent’s round the corner. They were nice in there, and they didn’t mind him looking at the computer magazines. He could stand browsing for ten minutes or so before they said anything, and even then they were gentle and jokey about it, not mean and anti-kid, like in so many of the shops. ‘Only three children allowed in at the same time.’ He hated all that. You were a thief just because of how old you were… He wouldn’t go in shops that had that sign in the window. He wouldn’t give them his money.
‘How’s your lovely mum, Marcus?’ the man behind the counter asked when he walked in. They liked his mother here, because she talked to them about the place where they came from; she had been there once, a long time ago, when she was a real hippy.
‘She’s OK.’ He wasn’t going to tell them anything.
He found the magazine he’d got halfway through last week, and forgot about everything else. The next thing he knew they were all in there, crowded in really close, and they were laughing at him again. He was sick of that sound. If no one laughed again in the whole world for the rest of his life, he wouldn’t care.
‘What you singing, Fuzzy?’
He’d done it again. He’d been thinking of one of his mum’s songs, a Joni Mitchell one about a taxi, but it had obviously slipped out again. They all started humming tunelessly, throwing in nonsense words every now and again, prodding him to get him to turn round. He ignored them, and tried to concentrate on what he was reading. He didn’t need to think of stuff like chocolate bars when he had a computer article to lose himself in. He started off just pretending, but within seconds he was properly lost, and he forgot all about them, and the next thing he knew they were on their way out of the shop.
‘Oi, Mohammed,’ one of them shouted. That wasn’t Mr Patel’s name. ‘You ought to check his pockets. He’s been thieving.’ And then they were gone. He checked his own pockets. They were full of chocolate bars and packets of chewing gum. He hadn’t even noticed. He felt sick. He started trying to explain, but Mr Patel interrupted him.
‘I was watching them, Marcus. It’s OK.’
He walked over to the counter and piled the stuff on top of the newspapers.
‘Are they at your school?’
Marcus nodded.
‘You’d better keep out of their way.’
Yeah, right. Bloody hell. Keep out of their way.
When he got home his mother was lying on the floor with a coat draped over her, watching children’s cartoons. She didn’t look up.
‘Didn’t you go to work today?’
‘This morning. I took the afternoon off sick.’
‘What kind of sick?’
No answer.
This wasn’t right. He was only a kid. He’d been thinking that more and more recently, as he got older and older. He didn’t know why. Maybe it was because, when he really was only a kid, he wasn’t capable of recognizing it – you had to be a certain age before you realized that you were actually quite young. Or maybe when he was little there was nothing to worry about – five or six years ago his mum never spent half the day shivering under a coat watching stupid cartoons, and even if she had he might not have thought it was anything out of the ordinary.
But something was going to have to give. He was having a shit time at school and a shit time at home, and as home and school was all there was to it, just about, that meant he was having a shit time all the time, apart from when he was asleep. Someone was going to have to do something about it, because he couldn’t do anything about it himself, and he couldn’t see who else there was, apart from the woman under the coat.
She was funny, his mum. She was all for talking. She was always on at him to talk and tell her things, but he was sure she didn’t really mean it. She was fine on the little things, but he knew that if he went for the big stuff then there’d be trouble, especially now, when she cried and cried about nothing. But at the moment he couldn’t see any way of avoiding it. He was only a kid, and she was his mum, and if he felt bad it was her job to stop him feeling bad, simple as that. Even if she didn’t want to, even if it meant that she’d end up feeling worse. Tough. Too bad. He was angry enough to talk to her now.
‘What are you watching this for? It’s rubbish. You’re always telling me.’
‘I thought you liked cartoons.’
‘I do. I just don’t like this one. It’s terrible.’
They both stared at the screen without speaking. This weird dog-type thing was trying to get at a boy who could turn himself into a kind of flying saucer.
‘What sort of sick?’ He asked the question roughly, the way a teacher would ask someone like Paul Cox whether he’d done his homework.
No answer again.
‘Mum, what sort of sick?’
‘Oh, Marcus, it’s not the sort of sick that—’
‘Don’t treat me like an idiot, Mum.’
She started crying again, long, low sobs that terrified him.
‘You’ve got to stop this.’
‘I can’t.’
‘You’ve got to. If you can’t look after me properly then you’ll have to find someone who can.’
She rolled over on to her stomach and looked at him.
‘How can you say I don’t look after you?’
‘Because you don’t. All you do is make my meals and I could do that. The rest of the time you just cry. That’s… that’s no good. That’s no good to me.’
She cried even harder then, and he let her. He went upstairs to his room and played NBA Basketball with the earphones on, even though he wasn’t supposed to on school nights. But when he came downstairs she was up and the duvet had been put away. She was spooning pasta and sauce on to plates, and she seemed OK. He knew she wasn’t OK – he may have been just a kid, but he was old enough to know that people didn’t stop being nuts (and that, he was beginning to realize, was what sort of sick it was) just because you told them to stop – but he didn’t care, as long as she was OK in front of him.
‘You’re going to a picnic on Saturday,’ she said out of the blue.
‘A picnic?’
‘Yes. In Regent’s Park.’
‘Who with?’
‘Suzie.’
‘Not that SPAT lot.’
‘Yes, that SPAT lot.’
‘I hate them.’ Fiona had
taken Marcus to a SPAT summer party in someone’s garden when they first moved to London, but she hadn’t been back since; Marcus had been to more meetings than she had, because Suzie had taken him on one of their outings.
‘Tant pis.’
What did she have to say things like that for? He knew it was French for ‘tough shit’, but why couldn’t she just say ‘tough shit’? No wonder he was a weirdo. If you had a mum who spoke French for no reason, you were more or less bound to end up singing out loud in newsagents’ without meaning to. He put loads and loads of cheese on his pasta and stirred it around.
‘Are you going?’
‘No.’
‘So why do I have to?’
‘Because I’m having a rest.’
‘I can keep out of your way.’
‘I’m doing what you said. I’m getting someone else to look after you. Suzie’s much more capable than I am.’
Suzie was her best friend; they’d known each other since school-days. She was nice; Marcus liked her a lot. But he still didn’t want to go on a picnic with her and all those horrible little kids from SPAT. He was ten years older than most of them, and every time he’d done anything with them before, he’d hated it. The last time, when they all went to the zoo, he’d come home and told his mum he wanted a vasectomy. That made her laugh a lot, but he’d meant it. He knew for a fact that he was never going to have children, so why not get it over and done with now?
‘I could do anything. I could sit in my room all day playing games. You wouldn’t even know I was in the house.’
‘I want you to get out. Do something normal. It’s too intense here.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean… Oh, I don’t know what I mean. I just know that we’re not doing each other any good.’
Hold on a moment. They didn’t do each other any good? For the first time since his mother had started crying, he wanted to cry too. He knew she wasn’t doing him any good, but he had no idea that it worked both ways. What had he done to her? He couldn’t think of a single thing. One day he’d ask her what she was on about, but not today, not now. He wasn’t sure he’d like the answer.
