About a Boy

by Nick Hornby

  ‘Oh, right. Yeah, I see what you mean.’

  And yes, he saw what Will meant, and yes, Will was right. In those circumstances he would feel like a wally. But there was another way of looking at it: if his mum was coming round in four years’ time to cut his hair, then that would mean nothing terrible had happened in the meantime. The way he was feeling at the moment, he’d settle for looking like a bit of a wally once every couple of months.

  Marcus visited Will a lot that autumn, and by about the third or fourth time he felt that Will was getting used to him. They had a bit of an argument the second time – Will didn’t want to let him in again, and Marcus had to insist, but eventually they reached a stage where Marcus would ring the bell and Will would open the door without even bothering to check who it was; he’d just wander back in to the living room and expect Marcus to follow him. A couple of times he was out, but Marcus didn’t know whether he went out deliberately, and he didn’t want to know, either, so he didn’t ask him.

  They didn’t talk about much at first, but eventually, when the visits became routine, Will seemed to think they should have proper conversations. He wasn’t very good at them, though. The first time it happened they were talking about this fat bloke who kept winning on Countdown, when Will said, ‘How’s it going at home?’, for no reason at all that Marcus could see.

  ‘You mean my mum?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  It was so obvious that Will would rather talk about the fat bloke on Countdown than about what had happened before that for a moment Marcus felt a little stab of temper because he didn’t have the same kind of choice. If it was up to him he’d spend all his time thinking about the fat bloke on Countdown, but he couldn’t because there were too many other things to think about. He wasn’t annoyed for long, though. It wasn’t Will’s fault and at least he was trying, even though it was difficult for him.

  ‘She’s all right, thanks,’ Marcus said, in a way that suggested she was always all right.

  ‘No, you know—’

  ‘Yeah, I know. No, nothing like that.’

  ‘Does it still bother you?’

  He’d never talked about it since the night it happened, and even then he’d never said what he felt. What he felt, all the time, every single day, was a horrible fear. In fact, the main reason he came round to Will’s after school was that he was able to put off going back to the flat; he could no longer climb the stairs at home without looking at his feet and remembering the Dead Duck Day. By the time he got to the bit where he had to put his key in the lock, his heart was thumping in his chest and his arms and his legs, and when he saw his mum watching the news or cooking or preparing work on the dining table, it was all he could do not to cry, or be sick, or something.

  ‘A bit. When I think about it.’

  ‘How often do you think about it?’

  ‘I dunno.’ All the time, all the time, all the time. Could he say that to Will? He didn’t know. He couldn’t say it to his mum, he couldn’t say it to his dad, he couldn’t say it to Suzie; they’d all make too much of a fuss. His mum would get upset, Suzie would want to talk about it, his dad would want him to move back to Cambridge… he didn’t need that. So why tell anyone anything? What was the point? All he wanted was a promise from someone, anyone, that it wouldn’t happen again, ever, and no one could do that.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ said Will. ‘Sorry, I shouldn’t say that in front of you, should I?’

  ‘It’s OK. People say it at school all the time.’

  And that was it. That was all Will said. ‘Fucking hell.’ Marcus didn’t know why Will had sworn like that, but Marcus liked it; it made him feel better. It was serious, it wasn’t too much and it made him see that he wasn’t being pathetic to get so scared.

  ‘You might as well stay for Neighbours now,’ Will said. ‘Otherwise you’ll miss the beginning.’ Marcus never watched Neighbours, and didn’t know how Will had got the idea that he did, but he stayed anyway. He felt he should. They watched in silence, and when the theme music started up, Marcus said thank you politely and went home.

  sixteen

  Will found himself working Marcus’s visits into the fabric of his day. This wasn’t difficult to do, since the fabric of his day was tatty, and filled with any number of large and accommodating holes, but even so, he could have filled them with other, easier things, like more shopping, or more afternoon cinema visits; nobody could argue that Marcus was the equivalent of a crap Steve Martin film and a sackful of liquorice allsorts. It wasn’t that he behaved badly when he came round, because he didn’t, and it wasn’t that he was hard to talk to, because he wasn’t. Marcus was difficult simply because he frequently gave the impression that he was merely stopping off on this planet on his way to somewhere else, somewhere he might fit in better. Periods of blankness, when he seemed to disappear into his own head completely, were followed by periods when he seemed to be trying to compensate for these absences, and would ask question after question.

  Once or twice Will decided he couldn’t face it and went shopping or to the cinema; but most of the time he was in at four-fifteen, waiting for the buzzer – sometimes because he couldn’t be bothered to go out, sometimes because he felt he owed Marcus something. What and why he owed him he didn’t know, but he could see he was serving some purpose in the kid’s life at the moment, and as he served no purpose in anybody else’s he was hardly going to die of compassion fatigue. It was still a bit of a drag, though, having some kid inflict himself on you every afternoon. Will would be relieved when Marcus found a purpose to life somewhere else.

  On the third or fourth visit he asked Marcus about Fiona, and ended up wishing he hadn’t, because it was quite clear that the boy was messed up about it. Will couldn’t blame him, but couldn’t think of anything to say that would be of even the smallest consolation or value, so he ended up simply swearing sympathetically and, given Marcus’s age, inappropriately. Will wouldn’t make that mistake again. If Marcus wanted to talk about his suicidal mother, he could do it with Suzie, or a counsellor, or someone like that, someone capable of something more than an obscenity.

  The thing was, Will had spent his whole life avoiding real stuff. He was, after all, the son and heir of the man who wrote ‘Santa’s Super Sleigh’. Santa Claus, whose existence most adults had real cause to doubt, bought him everything he wore and ate and drank and sat on and lived in; it could reasonably be argued that reality was not in his genes. He liked watching real stuff on EastEnders and The Bill, and he liked listening to Joe Strummer and Curtis Mayfield and Kurt Cobain singing about real stuff, but he’d never had real stuff sitting on his sofa before. No wonder, then, that once he’d made it a cup of tea and offered it a biscuit he didn’t really know what to do with it.

  Sometimes they managed conversations about Marcus’s life that skirted round the twin disasters of school and home.

  ‘My dad’s stopped drinking coffee,’ Marcus suddenly said one evening after Will had complained of caffeine poisoning (an occupational hazard, he supposed, of those with no occupation).

  Will had never really thought about Marcus’s father. Marcus seemed so much a product of his mother that the idea of a father seemed almost incongruous.

  ‘What does he do, your dad?’

  ‘He works for Cambridge Social Services.’

  That figured, Will thought. All of these people came from another country, a country full of things that Will knew nothing about and had no use for, like music therapists and housing officers and health-food shops with noticeboards and aromatherapy oils and brightly coloured sweaters and difficult European novels and feelings. Marcus was the fruit of their loins.

  ‘What does he do for them?’

  ‘I dunno. He doesn’t get much money, though.’

  ‘Do you see him often?’

  ‘Quite often. Some weekends. Half-terms. He’s got a girlfriend called Lindsey. She’s nice.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Do you want me to say more about him?
’ Marcus asked helpfully. ‘I will if you want.’

  ‘Do you want to say more about him?’

  ‘Yeah. We don’t talk about him at home much.’

  ‘What do you want to say?’

  ‘I dunno. I could tell you what car he’s got, and whether he smokes.’

  ‘OK, does he smoke?’ Will was no longer thrown by Marcus’s somewhat eccentric conversational patterns.

  ‘No. Given up,’ Marcus said triumphantly, as if he had lured Will into a trap.

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘It was hard, though.’

  ‘I’ll bet. Do you miss your dad?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, you know. Do you… I don’t know… do you miss him? You understand what that means.’

  ‘I see him. How can I miss him?’

  ‘Do you wish you saw him more than you do?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh. That’s all right, then.’

  ‘Can I have another Coke?’

  Will didn’t understand at first why Marcus had introduced the subject of his father, but clearly there was a value in talking about something that didn’t remind Marcus of the awful messes that surrounded him. The triumph over nicotine addiction wasn’t Marcus’s triumph, exactly, but in a life that was at the moment decidedly triumph-free it was the closest he had come for a while.

  Will could see how sad this was, but he could also see that it wasn’t his problem. No problem was his problem. Very few people were in a position to say they had no problems, but then, that wasn’t his problem either. Will didn’t see this as a source of shame, but as a cause for wild and raucous celebration; to reach the age he had without encountering any serious difficulties seemed to him a record worth preserving, and though he didn’t mind giving Marcus the odd can of Coke, he wasn’t about to embroil himself in the sorry dog’s dinner that was Marcus’s life. Why would he want to do that?

  The following week Will’s date with Countdown was interrupted by a hail of what sounded like gravel against his sitting-room window, followed quickly by a continuous, urgent-sounding and annoying ring on the doorbell. Will knew it was trouble – you didn’t get gravel smashing into your windows and frantic doorbell-ringing without trouble, he imagined – and his first instinct was to turn the volume on the TV up and ignore it all. But in the end some sense of self-respect drove the cowardice away, and he propelled himself off the sofa towards the front door.

  Marcus was standing on the step being bombarded with some kind of confectionery, rock-shaped and rock-hard lumps that could easily do as much damage as rocks. Will knew this because he took several direct hits himself. He ushered Marcus in and managed to locate the bombardiers, two mean-looking french-cropped teenage boys.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Never mind who I am. Who the fuck are you?’ Will couldn’t remember the last time he felt like thumping someone, but he felt like thumping these two. ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘Ooo-er,’ said one of them obscurely. Will presumed it was intended to indicate their lack of fear, but their bravado was somewhat undercut by their immediate and rapid disappearance. This was a surprise and a relief. Will would never have run away from Will in a million years (or rather, in the admittedly unlikely event that Will should meet himself down a dark alley, both Wills would have run away at equal and very fast speeds in opposite directions). But he was an adult now, and though it was of course true that teenagers had lost all respect, bring back National Service and so on and so forth, only the very bad or very armed were likely to risk a confrontation with someone bigger and older than them. Will went back into the flat feeling bigger and older, and not altogether displeased with himself.

  Marcus had helped himself to a biscuit, and was sat on the sofa watching TV. He looked just as he normally looked, absorbed in the programme, the biscuit poised halfway to the mouth; there was no visible sign of distress at all. If this boy, the one on the sofa watching Countdown, had ever been bullied, it was ages ago, and he had long since forgotten all about it.

  ‘Who were they, then?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Who? Those kids who were just trying to embed sweets into your skull.’

  ‘Oh, them,’ said Marcus, his eyes still on the screen. ‘I don’t know their names. They’re in year nine.’

  ‘And you don’t know their names?’

  ‘No. They just started following me home after school. So I thought I’d better not go home, so they wouldn’t find out where I lived. I thought I’d come round here.’

  ‘Thanks a lot.’

  ‘They won’t chuck sweets at you. They were after me.’

  ‘And does this happen often?’

  ‘They’ve never chucked sweets before. They thought of that today. Just now.’

  ‘I’m not talking about the sweets. I’m talking about… older kids trying to kill you.’

  Marcus looked at him.

  ‘Yeah. I told you before.’

  ‘You didn’t make it sound so dramatic before.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You said a couple of kids gave you a hard time. You didn’t say that people you don’t even know follow you around and chuck things at you.’

  ‘They hadn’t done it then,’ said Marcus patiently. ‘They’ve only just invented it.’

  Will was beginning to lose his temper; if he’d had any sweets to hand he would have started flinging them at Marcus himself. ‘Marcus, for Christ’s sake, I’m not talking about the bloody sweets. Are you always this bloody literal-minded? I understand that they’ve never done that before. But they’ve been giving you a hard time for ages.’

  ‘Oh yeah. Not those two…’

  ‘No, OK, OK, not those two. But others like them.’

  ‘Yeah. Loads.’

  ‘Right. That’s all I’ve been trying to find out.’

  ‘You could have just asked.’

  Will walked into the kitchen and put the kettle on, if only to give himself something to do which wouldn’t result in a prison sentence, but he couldn’t let it drop.

  ‘So what are you going to do about it?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Are you going to let it go on like this for the next however many years?’

  ‘You’re like the teachers at school.’

  ‘What do they say?’

  ‘Oh, you know. “Keep out of their way.” I mean, I don’t try to get in their way.’

  ‘But it must make you unhappy.’

  ‘I s’pose so. I just don’t think about it. Like when I broke my wrist falling off that climbing-frame thing.’

  ‘You’ve lost me.’

  ‘I tried not to think about that. It happened and I wished it hadn’t, but it’s just life, isn’t it?’

  Sometimes Marcus sounded as though he were a hundred years old, and it broke Will’s heart.

  ‘It doesn’t have to be life, though, does it?’

  ‘I dunno. You tell me. I haven’t done anything. I just started at a new school and then I got all this. I don’t know why.’

  ‘What about your old school?’

  ‘It was different there. Not every kid was the same. There were clever ones and thick ones and trendy ones and weird ones. I didn’t feel different there. Here I feel different.’

  ‘They can’t be different sorts of kids here. Kids are kids.’

  ‘So where are all the weird ones, then?’

  ‘Maybe they start off weird, and then they get their act together. They’re still weird but you just can’t see them. The trouble is, these kids can see you. You make yourself obvious.’

  ‘So I’ve got to make myself invisible?’ Marcus snorted at the magnitude of the task. ‘How do I do that? Is one of the machines in your kitchen an invisible machine?’

  ‘You don’t have to make yourself invisible. You just have to go in disguise.’

  ‘What, with a moustache and stuff?’

  ‘Yeah
, right, with a moustache. Nobody would notice a twelve-year-old boy with a moustache, would they?’

  Marcus looked at him. ‘You’re joking. Everyone would notice. I’d be the only one in the whole school.’

  Will had forgotten about the sarcasm thing. ‘OK, no moustache, then. Bad idea. But how about if you wore the same clothes and haircut and glasses as everyone else? You can be as weird as you want on the inside. Just do something about the outside.’

  They started with his feet. Marcus wore the kind of shoes that Will didn’t think they made any more, plain black slip-ons whose only discernible ambition was to get their owner up and down school corridors without attracting the attention of the deputy head.

  ‘Do you like those shoes?’ Will asked him. They were walking up Holloway Road to look at trainers. Marcus peered down at his feet through the early-evening gloom and promptly collided with a large woman carrying several overstuffed Lo-Cost bags.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, do you like them?’

  ‘They’re my school shoes. I’m not supposed to like them.’

  ‘You can like everything you wear, if you can be bothered.’

  ‘Do you like everything you wear?’

  ‘I don’t wear anything I hate.’

  ‘What do you do with the stuff you hate, then?’

  ‘I don’t buy it, do I?’

  ‘Yeah, because you haven’t got a mum. Sorry to say it like that, but you haven’t.’

  ‘It’s OK. I’ve got used to the idea.’

  The trainer shop was huge and crowded, and the lighting made all the customers look ill; everyone had a green tinge, regardless of their original colour. Will caught sight of the pair of them in a mirror, and was shocked to see that they could easily pass for father and son; he had somehow imagined himself as Marcus’s elder brother, but the reflection threw age and youth into sharp relief – Will’s stubble and crow’s feet versus Marcus’s smooth cheeks and gleaming white teeth. And the hair… Will prided himself on having avoided even the tiniest of bald patches, but he still had less on top than Marcus, almost as if life had worn some of it away.