by Nick Hornby
‘At what?’
Marcus was disappointed for a moment, but he hadn’t really given Will very much to go on. She could have been at anything, which was weird if you thought about it: no one could say his mum was predictable. She could have been moaning about Marcus coming round to Will’s flat again, or she could have been on about him taking up the piano, or she could have found a boyfriend that Marcus didn’t like very much (Marcus had told Will about some of the peculiar men she’d been out with since his parents had split)… It was nice, in a way, contemplating all the things he could have meant when he’d said she was at it again. He thought it made his mum seem interesting and complicated, which of course she was.
‘The crying.’
‘Oh.’ They were in Will’s kitchen, toasting crumpets under the grill; it was a Thursday afternoon routine they’d got into. ‘Are you worried about her?’
‘Course. She’s just the same now as she was before. Worse.’ That wasn’t true. Nothing could be worse than before, because before it had gone on for ages and it had all come to a head on the Dead Duck Day, but he wanted to make sure that Will knew it was serious.
‘So what are you going to do?’
It hadn’t occurred to Marcus that he would have to do anything – partly because he hadn’t done anything before (but then, before hadn’t worked out so brilliantly, so maybe he shouldn’t use before as any kind of example), and partly because he thought Will might take over. That’s what he wanted. That was the whole point of having friends, he thought. ‘What am I going to do? What are you going to do?’
‘What am I going to do?’ Will laughed, and then remembered that what they were talking about wasn’t supposed to be funny. ‘Marcus, I can’t do anything.’
‘You could talk to her.’
‘Why should she listen to me? Who am I? Nobody.’
‘You’re not nobody. You’re—’
‘Just because you come round here for a cup of tea after school doesn’t mean I can stop your mum from… doesn’t mean I can cheer your mum up. In fact, I know I can’t.’
‘I thought we were friends.’
‘Ow. Fuck. Sorry.’ In attempting to remove a crumpet, Will had burnt his fingers. ‘Is that what we are, d’you reckon? Friends?’ He seemed to find this funny too; at any rate, he was smiling.
‘Yeah. So what would you say we are?’
‘Well. Friends is fine.’
‘Why are you smiling?’
‘It’s a bit funny, isn’t it? You and me?’
‘I suppose so.’ Marcus thought about it for a little while longer. ‘Why?’
‘Because we’re such different heights.’
‘Oh. I see.’
‘Joke.’
‘Ha ha.’
Will let Marcus butter the crumpets because he loved doing it. It was much better than buttering toast, because with toast you had that thing where if the butter was too cold and hard all you could do was scrape off the brown that made toast what it was, and he hated that. With crumpets it was effortless: you just put a lump of butter on top, waited for a few seconds, then messed it about until it started to disappear into the holes. It was one of the few occasions in life where things seemed to go right every time.
‘D’you want anything on it?’
‘Yeah.’ He reached for the honey, put his knife in the jar and began twirling it about.
‘Listen,’ Will said. ‘That’s right. We’re friends. That’s why I can’t do anything about your mum.’
‘How d’you work that out?’
‘I said it was a joke that we’re different heights, but maybe it’s not. Maybe that’s how you should look at it. I’m your mate and I’m about a foot taller than you, and that’s it.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Marcus said. ‘I’m not getting you.’
‘I had a mate at school who was about a foot taller than me. He was enormous. He was six foot one when we were in the second year.’
‘We don’t have second years.’
‘Year whatever it is. Year eight.’
‘So what?’
‘I’d never have asked him to help if my mum was depressed. We used to talk about football and Mission Impossible and that was it. Say we were talking about whether, I don’t know, Peter Osgood should be playing for England, and then I said, “Oi, Phil, will you talk to my mum because she’s in tears all the time,” he’d have looked at me as if I were nuts. He was twelve. What’s he going to say to my mum? “Hello, Mrs Freeman, have you thought of tranquillizers?”’
‘I don’t know who Peter Osgood is. I don’t know about football’
‘Oh, Marcus, stop being so bloody obtuse. What I’m saying is, OK, I’m your friend. I’m not your uncle, I’m not your dad, I’m not your big brother. I can tell you who Kurt Cobain is and what trainers to get, and that’s it. Understood?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good.’
But on the way home Marcus remembered the end of the conversation, the way Will had said ‘Understood?’ in a way that was supposed to tell him that the conversation was over, and he wondered whether friends did that. He didn’t think they did. He knew teachers who said that, and parents who said that, but he didn’t know any friends who said that, no matter how tall they were.
Marcus wasn’t surprised about Will, not really. If he had been asked to say who his best friend was, he’d have gone for Ellie – not just because he loved her and wanted to go out with her, but because she was nice to him, and always had been, not counting the first time he’d met her, when she’d called him a squitty little shitty snotty bastard. She hadn’t been all that nice then. It wouldn’t be fair to say that Will hadn’t ever been nice to him, what with the trainers and the crumpets and the two video games and so on, but it would be fair to say that sometimes Will didn’t look thrilled to see him, especially if he called round four or five days in a row. Ellie, on the other hand, always threw her arms around him and made a fuss of him, and that, Marcus thought, had to mean something.
Today, however, she didn’t seem terribly pleased to see him. She looked down and distracted, and she didn’t say anything, let alone do anything, when he went to see her in her classroom at breaktime. Zoe was sitting next to her, looking at her and holding her hand.
‘What’s happened?’
‘Haven’t you heard?’ said Zoe.
Marcus hated it when people said that to him, because he never had.
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Kurt Cobain.’
‘What about him?’
‘He tried to kill himself. Took an overdose.’
‘Is he all right?’
‘We think so. They pumped his stomach.’
‘Good.’
‘Nothing’s good,’ said Ellie.
‘No,’ said Marcus. ‘But—’
‘He’ll do it, you know,’ said Ellie. ‘In the end. They always do. He wants to die. It wasn’t a cry for help. He hates this world.’
Marcus suddenly felt sick. The moment he’d walked out of Will’s flat the previous evening he’d been imagining this conversation with Ellie, and how she would cheer him up in a way that Will never could, and it wasn’t like that at all; instead, the room was beginning to turn round slowly, and all the colour was draining out of it.
‘How do you know? How do you know he wasn’t just messing about? I’ll bet you he never does anything like it again.’
‘You don’t know him,’ Ellie said.
‘Neither do you,’ Marcus shouted at her. ‘He’s not even a real person. He’s just a singer. He’s just someone on a sweatshirt. It’s not like he’s anyone’s mum.’
‘No, he’s someone’s dad, you little prat,’ said Ellie. ‘He’s Frances Bean’s dad. He’s got a beautiful little girl and he still wants to die. So, you know.’
Marcus did know, he thought. He turned around and ran out.
He decided to skip the next couple of lessons. If he went to the maths class, he would sit and dream and get picked on and lau
ghed at when he attempted to answer a question that had been asked an hour or a month before, or that hadn’t been asked at all; he wanted to be on his own to think properly, without irrelevant interruptions, so he went to the boys’ toilets near the gym and shut himself in the right-hand cubicle, because it had comforting hot pipes running along the wall which you could sort of squat down on. After a few minutes someone came in and started kicking on the door.
‘Are you in there, Marcus? I’m sorry. I’d forgotten about your mum. It’s OK. She’s not like Kurt.’
He paused for a moment, then unbolted the door and peered round it.
‘How do you know?’
‘Because you’re right. He’s not a real person.’
‘You’re only saying that to make me feel better.’
‘OK, he’s a real person. But he’s a different sort of real person.’
‘In what way?’
‘I don’t know. He just is. He’s like James Dean and Marilyn Monroe and Jimi Hendrix and all those people. You know that he’s going to die, and it’ll be OK.’
‘OK for who? Not for… what’s her name?’
‘Frances Bean?’
‘Yeah. Why is it OK for her? It’s not OK for her. It’s just OK for you.’
A boy from Ellie’s year came in to use the toilet. ‘Go away,’ said Ellie, as if she had said it a hundred times before, and as if the kid had no right to be wanting a pee in the first place. ‘We’re talking.’ He opened his mouth to argue, realized who he was about to argue with, and went out again. ‘Can I come in?’ Ellie said when he’d gone.
‘If there’s room.’
They squashed up next to each other on the hot pipes, and Ellie pulled the door towards her and bolted it.
‘You think I know things, but I don’t,’ said Ellie. ‘Not really. I don’t know anything about this stuff. I don’t know why he feels like he does, or why your mum feels like she does. And I don’t know what it feels like to be you. Pretty scary, I should think.’
‘Yeah.’ He started to cry, then. It wasn’t noisy crying – his eyes just filled with tears and they started to stream down his cheeks – but it was still embarrassing. He’d never thought he’d cry in front of Ellie.
She put her arm around him. ‘What I mean is, don’t listen to me. You know more than I do. You should be telling me things about it.’
‘I don’t know what to say about it.’
‘Let’s talk about something else, then.’
But they didn’t talk about anything for a while. They just sat on the pipes together, moving their bottoms when they got too hot, and waited until they felt like going back out into the world.
thirty
Will had vertigo, so he didn’t like looking down. But sometimes it couldn’t be helped. Sometimes someone said something, and he did look down, and he was left with an irresistible urge to jump. He could remember the last time it had happened: it was when he had split up with Jessica, and she had phoned him late at night and told him he was useless, worthless, that he would never be or do anything, that he had had the chance with her to – there was some peculiar, incomprehensible phrase she had used – sprinkle some salt on the ice, that was it, by having a relationship that meant something, and maybe a family. And while she was saying it he had started to get panicky, clammy, dizzy, because he knew that some people might think she was right, but he also knew that there was nothing in the world he could do about it.
He’d had just the same feeling when Marcus was asking him to do something about Fiona. Of course he should do something about Fiona; all that stuff about being the same but taller was bollocks, obviously. He was older than Marcus, he knew more… Every way you looked at it there was an argument that said, get involved, help the kid out, look after him.
He wanted to help him out, and he had done in some ways. But this depression thing, there was no way he wanted to get involved in that. He could write the whole conversation in his head, he could hear it like a radio play, and he didn’t like what he heard. There were two words in particular that made him want to cover his ears with his hands; they always had done, and they always would, as long as his life revolved around Countdown and Home and Away and new Marks and Spencer sandwich combinations, and he could see no way in which he could avoid them in any conversation with Fiona about her depression. Those two words were ‘the point’. As in, ‘What’s the point?’; ‘I don’t see the point’; ‘there’s just no point’ (a phrase which omits the ‘the’, but one that counts anyway, because the ‘the’ wasn’t the point of ‘the point’, really)… You couldn’t have a talk about life, and especially about the possibility of ending it, without bringing up the fucking point, and Will just couldn’t see one. Sometimes that was OK; sometimes you could be bombed out of your head on magic mushrooms at two in the morning, and some arsehole lying on the floor with his head jammed up against the speakers would want to talk about the point, and you could simply say, ‘There isn’t one, so shut up.’ But you couldn’t say that to someone who was so unhappy and lost that they wanted to empty a whole bottle of pills down themselves and go to sleep for as long as it took. Telling someone like Fiona that there was no point was more or less the same as killing her off, and though Will hadn’t always seen eye-to-eye with her, he could honestly say he had no desire to murder her.
People like Fiona really pissed him off. They ruined it for everyone. It wasn’t easy, floating on the surface of everything: it took skill and nerve, and when people told you that they were thinking of taking their own life, you could feel yourself being dragged under with them. Keeping your head above water was what it was all about, Will reckoned. That was what it was all about for everyone, but those who had reasons for living, jobs and relationships and pets, their heads were a long way from the surface anyway. They were wading in the shallow end, and only a bizarre accident, a freak wave from the wave machine, was going to sink them. But Will was struggling. He was way out of his depth, and he had cramp, probably because he’d gone in too soon after his lunch, and there were all sorts of ways he could see himself being dragged up to the surface by some smoothy life-guard with blond hair and a washboard stomach, long after his lungs had filled with chlorinated water. He needed someone buoyant to hang on to; he certainly didn’t need a dead weight like Fiona. He was very sorry, but that was the way things were. And that was the thing about Rachel: she was buoyant. She could keep him afloat. He went to see Rachel.
His relationship with Rachel was weird, or what Will considered weird, which was, he supposed, very different from what David Cronenberg or that guy who wrote The Wasp Factory considered weird. The weird thing was that they still hadn’t had sex, even though they’d been seeing each other for a few weeks. The subject just never came up. He was almost sure that she liked him, as in she seemed to enjoy seeing him and they never seemed to run out of things to talk about; he was more than sure that he liked her, as in he enjoyed seeing her, he wanted to be with her all the time for the rest of his life, and he couldn’t look at her without being conscious of his pupils dilating to an enormous and possibly comical size. It was fair to say that they liked each other in different ways.
(On top of which he had developed an almost irresistible urge to kiss her when she was saying something interesting, which he regarded as a healthy sign – he had never before wanted to kiss someone simply because she was stimulating – but which she was beginning to view with some distrust, even though she didn’t, as far as he knew, know what was going on. What happened was, she would be talking with humour and passion and a quirky, animated intelligence about Ali, or music, or her painting, and he would drift off into some kind of possibly sexual but certainly romantic reverie, and she would ask him whether he was listening, and he would feel embarrassed and protest too much in a way that suggested he hadn’t been paying attention because she was boring him stupid. It was something of a double paradox, really: you were enjoying someone’s conversation so much that a) you appeared to glaze over, and b)
you wanted to stop her talking by covering her mouth with yours. It was no good and something had to be done about it, but he had no idea what: he had never been in this situation before.)
He didn’t mind having a female friend; his realization during his drink with Fiona that he had never had any kind of relationship with someone he hadn’t wanted to sleep with still unsettled him. The problem was that he did want to sleep with Rachel, very much, and he didn’t know whether he could bear to sit there on her sofa with his eyes dilating wildly for the next ten or twenty years, or however long female friends lasted (how would he know?), listening to her being unintentionally sexy on the subject of drawing mice. He didn’t know whether his pupils could bear it, more to the point. Wouldn’t they start hurting after a while? He was almost sure it wouldn’t do them much good, all that expanding and contracting, but he would only mention the pupil-pain to Rachel as a last resort; there was a remote possibility that she might want to sleep with him to save his eyesight, but he’d prefer to find another, more conventionally romantic route to her bed. Or his bed. He wasn’t bothered about which bed they did it in. The point was that it just wasn’t happening.
And then it happened, that evening, for no reason that he could fathom at the time – although later, when he thought about it, he came up with one or two ideas that made sense but the implications of which he found somewhat disturbing. One moment they were talking, the next moment they were kissing, and the moment after that she was leading him upstairs with one hand and unbuttoning her denim shirt with the other. And the weird thing was that sex hadn’t been in the air, as far as he could tell; he’d simply come round to see a friend because he was feeling low. So here was the first of the disturbing implications: if he ended up having sex when he had been unable to detect sex in the air, he was obviously a pretty hopeless sex detective. If, in the immediate aftermath of an apparently sex-free conversation, a beautiful woman started to lead you to the bedroom while unbuttoning her shirt, you were clearly missing something somewhere.
