About a Boy

by Nick Hornby

Will hadn’t thought about his biscuits and crisps and what have you, so on the way home he stopped off for some chocolate chip cookies and a couple of bags of cheese and onion, squashed everything up, and sprinkled the crumbs generously over his new purchase.

  thirteen

  Contrary to what he told Will, Marcus wasn’t really bothered about leaving his mum on her own. He knew that if she did try anything again it wouldn’t be for a while, because right now she was still in this weird, calm mood. But telling Will that he wanted his mum to come with them was a way of getting her and Will together, and after that, he reckoned, it should be easy. His mum was pretty, and Will seemed quite well off, they could go and live with Will and his kid, and then there’d be four of them, and four was twice as good as two. And maybe, if they wanted to, they could have a baby. His mum wasn’t too old. She was thirty-eight. You could have a baby when you were thirty-eight. So then there would be five of them, and it wouldn’t matter quite so much if one of them died. Well, it would matter, of course it would matter, but at least it wouldn’t leave somebody, him or his mum or Will or his little boy, completely on their own. Marcus didn’t even know whether he liked Will or not, but that didn’t come into it any more; he could see he wasn’t bad, or a drunk, or violent, so he would have to do.

  It wasn’t as if he didn’t know anything about Will, because he did: Marcus had checked him out. On his way back from school one afternoon he had seen Will out shopping, and he had followed him home like a private detective. He hadn’t really found out much about him, apart from where he lived and what shops he went in. But he seemed to be on his own – no girlfriend, no wife, no little boy, even. Unless the little boy was with his girlfriend at home. But if he had a girlfriend, why was he trying to chat up Suzie?

  ‘What time is this guy coming?’ his mum asked. They were tidying the house and listening to Exodus by Bob Marley.

  ‘In about ten minutes. You’re going to get changed, aren’t you?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you look a wreck, and he’s going to take us to Planet Hollywood for lunch.’ Will didn’t know that last bit yet, because Marcus hadn’t told him, but he wouldn’t mind.

  She looked at him. ‘Why does it bother you what I wear?’

  ‘Planet Hollywood.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘You don’t want to look like an old bag there. In case one of them sees you.’

  ‘In case one of who sees me?’

  ‘Bruce Willis or one of them.’

  ‘Marcus, they won’t be there, you know.’

  ‘They’re there all the time. Unless they’re working. And even then they try to make films in London so they can go for lunch.’

  Fiona laughed and laughed. ‘Who told you that?’

  A kid at his old school called Sam Lovell had told him that. Now Marcus thought about it, Sam had told him some other things that turned out not to be true: that Michael Jackson and Janet Jackson were the same person, and that Mr Harrison the French teacher had been in the Beatles.

  ‘It’s just well known.’

  ‘Do you still want to go there if you’re not going to see any stars?’

  He didn’t really, but he wasn’t going to let her know that.

  ‘Yeah. Course.’

  His mum shrugged and went off to get changed.

  *

  Will came into the flat before they went out. He introduced himself, which Marcus thought was pretty stupid as everyone knew who everyone else was anyway.

  ‘Hi. I’m Will,’ he said. ‘We’ve… Well, I…’ But he obviously couldn’t think of a polite way of saying that he’d seen her conked out on the sofa by a pool of her own sick the week before, so he stopped and just smiled.

  ‘I’m Fiona.’ His mum looked good, Marcus thought. She was wearing her best leggings and a baggy, hairy jumper, and she was wearing make-up for the first time since the hospital, and a pair of nice dangly earrings someone had sent her from Zimbabwe. ‘Thanks for all you did last weekend. I really appreciate it.’

  ‘Pleasure. I hope you’re feeling… I hope you’ve—’

  ‘My stomach’s fine. I suppose I must still be a bit barmy, though. That sort of thing doesn’t clear up so quickly, does it?’

  Will looked shocked, but she just laughed. Marcus hated it when she made jokes to people who didn’t know her very well.

  ‘Have you decided where you want to go, then, young Marcus?’

  ‘Planet Hollywood.’

  ‘Oh, God. Really?’

  ‘Yeah. Supposed to be brilliant.’

  ‘Is it? We obviously don’t read the same restaurant reviews.’

  ‘It wasn’t a restaurant reviewer. It was Sam Lovell from my old school.’

  ‘Oh, well, in that case… Shall we go?’

  Will opened the door and waved at Fiona to go through. Marcus wasn’t sure what to look for, but he had a feeling that this was going to work.

  They didn’t take the car, because Will said Planet Hollywood was in Leicester Square and they wouldn’t be able to park, so they caught the bus. On the way to the bus stop Will showed them his car.

  ‘This is mine. The one with the car seat in the back. Look at it. What a mess.’

  ‘Gosh,’ said Fiona.

  ‘Right,’ said Marcus.

  They couldn’t think of much else to say about it, so they walked on.

  There were loads of people outside Planet Hollywood waiting to get in, and it was raining. They were the only people that spoke English in the whole queue.

  ‘Are you sure this is where you want to go, Marcus?’ his mum asked him.

  ‘Yeah. Where else is there, anyway?’ If someone came up with an even half-decent suggestion, he’d take it. He didn’t want to stand around with a load of French and Italian people. It wasn’t right.

  ‘There’s a Pizza Express round the corner,’ said Will.

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘You’re always on about wanting to go out for a pizza,’ said his mum.

  ‘No, I’m not.’ He was, but pizza was too cheap, he reckoned.

  They went back to queuing in silence. Nobody was going to get married to anybody at this rate. It was too wet and too horrible.

  ‘Tell me why you want to go to Planet Hollywood and I’ll see if I can think of anywhere like it,’ said Will.

  ‘I don’t know. Because it’s famous. And it’s got the sort of food I like. Fries and things.’

  ‘So if I can think of somewhere famous that serves fries, we can go there?’

  ‘Yeah. But it’s got to be my sort of famous, not your sort of famous.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It’s got to be the sort of famous that kids know about. You can’t just tell me it’s famous, because if I’ve never heard of it then it’s not.’

  ‘So if I said to you, how about Twenty-Eight, you wouldn’t want to go.’

  ‘No. Not famous. Never heard of it.’

  ‘But famous people go there.’

  ‘Like who?’

  ‘Actors and so on.’

  ‘Which actors?’

  ‘I should think they’ve all been there at some time or another. But they don’t tell you in advance. I’ll be straight with you, Marcus. We could go there now and we might bump into Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Or we might see nobody at all. But they do good fries. The thing is, we’ll be standing here for an hour, and then when we get in there’ll be nobody there worth seeing anyway.’

  ‘OK then.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Good man.’

  No famous people ever went to this Twenty-Eight place. You could tell. It was nice, and the fries were good, but it was just normal; it didn’t have anything on the walls, like Clint Eastwood’s jacket, or the mask Michael Keaton wore in Batman. It didn’t even have any signed photos. The Indian restaurant near their flat that delivered their takeaways wasn’t famous at all, but even that had a signed picture of someone who use
d to play for Arsenal ages ago. He didn’t mind though. The main thing was that they were sat down and dry, and Will and his mother could begin to talk.

  They needed some help at first; nobody said anything until the waiter came to take their order.

  ‘Mushroom omelette and fries, please. And a Coke,’ said Marcus.

  ‘I’ll have the swordfish steak,’ said Will. ‘No vegetables, just a side salad.’

  Fiona was having difficulty deciding.

  ‘Why don’t you have the swordfish steak?’ said Marcus.

  ‘Ummm…’

  He tried to get his mother’s attention across the table without Will noticing. He nodded hard, once, and then he coughed.

  ‘Are you all right, sweetie?’

  He just felt it would help if his mum ordered the same food as Will. He didn’t know why. It wasn’t like you could talk for ages about swordfish steak or anything, but maybe it would show them that they had something in common, that sometimes they thought the same way about things. Even if they didn’t.

  ‘We’re vegetarian,’ said Marcus. ‘But we eat fish.’

  ‘So we’re not really vegetarian.’

  ‘We don’t eat fish very often though. Fish and chips sometimes. We never cook fish at home, do we?’

  ‘Not often, no.’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Oh, don’t show me up.’

  He didn’t know how saying she never cooked fish was showing her up – did men like women who cooked fish? Why? – but that was the last thing he wanted to do.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Not never. Sometimes.’

  ‘Shall I come back in a couple of minutes?’ said the waiter. Marcus had forgotten he was still there.

  ‘Ummm…’

  ‘Have the swordfish,’ said Marcus.

  ‘I’ll have the penne pesto,’ said his mother. ‘With a mixed salad.’

  Will ordered a beer, and his mum ordered a glass of white wine. Nobody said anything again.

  Marcus didn’t have a girlfriend, nor had he ever come close to having one, unless you counted Holly Garrett, which he didn’t. But he knew this: if a girl and a boy met, and they didn’t have a boyfriend or a girlfriend, and they both looked all right, and they didn’t mind each other, then they might as well go out together. What was the point in not? Will didn’t have a girlfriend, unless you counted Suzie, which he didn’t, and his mum didn’t have a boyfriend, so… It would be good for all of them. The more he thought about it, the more obvious it seemed.

  It wasn’t that he needed someone to replace his dad. He’d talked about that with his mum ages ago. They’d been watching a programme on TV about the family, and some silly fat Tory woman said that everyone should have a mother and a father, and his mum got angry and later depressed. Then, before the hospital thing, he’d thought the Tory woman was stupid, and he’d told his mum as much, but at the time he hadn’t worked out that two was a dangerous number. Now he had worked that out, he wasn’t sure it made much difference to what he thought about the fat Tory woman’s idea; he didn’t care whether the family he wanted were all men, or all women, or all children. He simply wanted people.

  ‘Don’t just sit there,’ he said suddenly.

  Will and his mother looked at him.

  ‘You heard me. Don’t just sit there. Talk to each other.’

  ‘I’m sure we will in a moment,’ said his mother.

  ‘Lunch will be over before you two’ve thought of anything to say,’ Marcus grumbled.

  ‘What do you want us to talk about?’ Will asked.

  ‘Anything. Politics. Films. Murders. I don’t care.’

  ‘I’m not sure that’s how conversation happens,’ said his mother.

  ‘Maybe you should have worked it out by now. You’re old enough.’

  ‘Marcus!’

  Will was laughing, though.

  ‘He’s right. We have, I don’t know how old you are, Fiona, but we have at least sixty years of conversational experience between us here, and maybe we ought to be able to get something going.’

  ‘OK then.’

  ‘So.’

  ‘After you.’

  They both laughed, but neither of them said anything.

  ‘Will,’ said Marcus.

  ‘Yes, Marcus,’ said Will.

  ‘What do you think of John Major?’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘What about you, Mum?’

  ‘You know what I think of him.’

  ‘Tell Will.’

  ‘Not much.’

  This was useless.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Oh, Marcus, leave us alone. You’re making it more difficult, not easier. You’re making us self-conscious. We’ll start talking soon.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Stop it.’

  ‘Have you ever been married, Will?’

  ‘Marcus, I’m going to get cross with you in a minute.’

  ‘It’s OK, Fiona. No, I haven’t. Have you?’

  ‘No, course not. I’m not old enough.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Now ask Mum.’

  ‘Fiona, have you ever been married?’

  ‘No.’

  For a moment, Marcus was confused; when he was a real kid, a little kid, he used to think that you had to be married to be a father or mother, in the same way that you had to have a driving licence to drive. He knew now that this wasn’t true, and he knew too that his parents had never been married, but somehow the ideas you grew up with were hard to shake off.

  ‘Did you want to get married, Mum?’

  ‘Not really. It didn’t seem important.’

  ‘So why do other people bother?’

  ‘Oh, all sorts of reasons. Security. Pressure from family. Misguided notions of romance.’

  Will laughed at this. ‘Cynic,’ he said.

  Marcus didn’t understand this, but that was good: his mum and Will now had something that he hadn’t started.

  ‘Do you still see Marcus’s dad?’

  ‘Sometimes. Not very often. Marcus sees him quite a lot. How about you? Do you still see your ex?’

  ‘Ummm… Well, yes. All the time. She picked Ned up this morning.’ He said this in a funny way, Marcus thought. Almost like he’d forgotten and then remembered.

  ‘And is that all right?’

  ‘Oh, it’s OK. We have our moments.’

  ‘How come you ended up looking after Ned? I mean, I’m sure you’re a brilliant dad and everything, but that’s not usually how it works, is it?’

  ‘No. She was going through a Kramer vs Kramer kind of thing at the time. You know, a sort of I-want-to-find-out-who-I-am malarkey.’

  ‘And did she find out who she was?’

  ‘Not really. I don’t know if anyone really does, do they?’

  The food arrived, but the two adults hardly noticed; Marcus dug happily into his omelette and fries. Would they move into Will’s place, he wondered, or buy somewhere new?

  fourteen

  Will knew that Fiona was not his type. For a start, she didn’t look the way he wanted women to look – in fact, he doubted whether looks were important to her at all. He couldn’t be doing with that. People, women and men, had a duty to care, he felt, even if they didn’t have the requisite raw material – unless they weren’t interested in the sexual side of life at all, in which case, fair enough. You could do what you wanted then. Einstein, for example… Will didn’t know the first thing about Einstein’s private life, but in his photos he looked like a guy with other things on his mind. But Fiona wasn’t Einstein. She might have been as brainy as Einstein, for all he knew, but she was clearly interested in relationships, judging from the conversation they had had over lunch, so why didn’t she make more of an effort? Why didn’t she have a decent hair cut, instead of all that frizz, and why didn’t she wear clothes which looked like they mattered to her? He didn’t get that at all.

  And she was just too hippy. He could see now why Marcus was so weird. She believed in alternati
ve things, like aromatherapy and vegetarianism and the environment, stuff he didn’t give much of a shit about, really. If they went out they’d fight terribly, he knew, and that would upset her, and the last thing he wanted to do at the moment was upset her.

  He had to say that the thing he found most attractive about her was that she had tried to kill herself. Now that was interesting – sexy, almost, in a morbid kind of way. But how can you contemplate dating a woman who might top herself at any moment? Before, he thought that going out with a mother was a heavy number; how much heavier would it be going out with a suicidal mother? But he didn’t want to let it drop. He still had this sense that Fiona and Marcus could replace soup kitchens and Media Guardian jobs, possibly forever. He wouldn’t have to do that much, after all – the occasional swordfish steak, the odd visit to a crappy film that he might have gone to anyway. How hard could that be? It was a damn sight easier than trying to force-feed vagrants. Good works! Helping people! That was the way forward for him now. The way he saw it, he’d helped Angie by sleeping with her (although admittedly there had been a little speck of self-interest there) and now he was going to find out whether it was possible to help someone without sleeping with them. It had to be, surely? Other people had managed, Mother Teresa and Florence Nightingale and so on, although he suspected that when he entered the good-works fray his style would be somewhat different.

  They had made no further arrangement after the lunch. They left the restaurant, wandered around Covent Garden, caught the tube back to north London, and he was back home in time for Sports Report. But he knew they’d all started something that wasn’t finished.

  Within a few days he’d changed his mind completely. He had no interest in good works. He had no interest in Marcus and Fiona. He would, he felt sure, break out into a cold sweat of embarrassment every time he thought of them. He would never see them again; he doubted, in fact, whether he would ever be able to go to Holloway again, just in case he bumped into them. He knew he was overreacting, but not by much. Singing! How could you have anything to do with someone who makes you sing! He knew they were both a little flaky, but…

  It began ordinarily enough, with an invitation to supper, and though he didn’t like what they had to eat – something vegetarian with chickpeas and rice and tinned tomatoes – he quite enjoyed the conversation. Fiona told him about her job as a music therapist, and Marcus told Fiona that Will earned millions of pounds a minute because his dad had written a song. Will helped with the washing up, and Fiona made them a cup of tea, and then she sat down at the piano and started to play.