About a Boy

by Nick Hornby

  ‘She’s mad,’ Katrina said with a shrug as soon as she got into the car. ‘I don’t know how or why, but she is. Not mad mad, but, you know. Out of control. Do you mind if I smoke, if I open the window?’ She fiddled around in her bag, failed to find her lighter, and then forgot about smoking altogether. ‘It’s funny, because when Ellie was born I really hoped she’d turn out like this, feisty and rebellious and loud and bright. That’s why I called her Eleanor Toyah.’

  ‘Is that something classical?’ Fiona asked.

  ‘No, it’s pop,’ said Will. Fiona laughed, although Will couldn’t see why.

  ‘Toyah Wilcox.’

  ‘And now it’s happened, and she is feisty and rebellious and what have you, I’d give anything for her to be mousy and home every night. She’s killing me.’

  Will winced at Katrina’s turn of phrase, and glanced at Fiona alongside him, but she gave no indication of being aware that the expression had anything but a figurative meaning.

  ‘This is the last straw, though,’ Katrina said.

  ‘Ditto,’ said Fiona.

  ‘Until the next last straw, anyway.’

  They both laughed, but it was true, Will thought. There would always be one more last straw. Ellie was killing Katrina, and Marcus was killing Fiona, and they would go on killing them for years and years. They were the Undead. They couldn’t live, not properly, and they couldn’t die; all they could do was sit in a stranger’s car and laugh about it. And people like Jessica had the nerve to tell him that he was missing out? He didn’t think he’d ever understand what that was supposed to mean.

  They stopped to get petrol, cans of drink, crisps and chocolate bars, and when they got back into the car the atmosphere between them had changed: somewhere among the popping cans and the rustling crisp packets they seemed to have become a trio. It was almost as if they had forgotten why they were travelling in the first place; the journey had become the point of the trip. Will remembered from school coach trips that it was something to do with getting out and getting back in again, although he wasn’t sure exactly what. Perhaps you didn’t notice that you had created a feeling until you left it and went back to it, but there was a feeling now – a heady mix of despair, shared concern, suppressed hysteria, and straightforward team spirit – and Will could feel that he was inside it, rather than looking at it through a window. This couldn’t possibly be what he was missing out on, because he wasn’t missing out, but it still involved kids. You had to hand it to Marcus, he thought: the boy was awkward and weird and the rest of it, but he had this knack of creating bridges wherever he went, and very few adults could do that. Will would never have imagined that he would have been able to walk across to Fiona, but he could now; his relationship with Rachel had been entirely underpinned by Marcus. And here was a third person, someone he had never met before tonight, and they were swapping fingers of Kit-Kat and swigs of Diet Lilt as if they had already exchanged bodily fluids. It was kind of ironic that this strange and lonely child could somehow make all these connections, and yet remain so unconnected himself.

  ‘Why did that guy shoot himself?’ Fiona suddenly asked.

  ‘Kurt Cobain?’ said Will and Katrina together.

  ‘If that was his name.’

  ‘He was unhappy, I suppose,’ said Katrina.

  ‘Well, I gathered that much. What about?’

  ‘Oh, I can’t remember now. Ellie did tell me, but I switched off after a while. Drugs? A bad childhood? Pressure? That sort of thing, anyway.’

  ‘I’d never heard of him before Christmas,’ said Fiona, ‘but he was quite a big deal, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Did you see the news tonight? There were all these heartbroken young people hugging each other and crying. It was very sad to watch. None of them seemed to be trying to break shop windows, though. Only my daughter wanted to express her grief like that, apparently.’

  Will wondered whether Marcus had ever sat in his room listening to Nevermind in the same way that Will had sat in his room listening to the first Clash album. He couldn’t imagine that he had. Marcus couldn’t possibly have understood that kind of rage and pain, even though he probably had his own version of those feelings swilling around in there somewhere. And yet here he was, banged up in jail – well, sitting in a police station waiting room – because he had been accomplice to a crime that was somehow meant to avenge Kurt Cobain’s death. It was hard to imagine two less kindred spirits than Marcus and Kurt Cobain, and yet they had both managed to pull off the same trick: Marcus forced unlikely connections in cars and police stations and Kurt Cobain did the same thing on international television. It was proof that things weren’t as bad as they thought they were. Will wished he was able to show this proof to Marcus, and to anybody else who might be in need of it.

  They were nearly there now. Katrina was still chatting away, apparently completely reconciled to the idea that her daughter was in trouble again (the only route open to you, Will presumed, if you had the misfortune to have Ellie as a daughter), but Fiona had gone terribly quiet.

  ‘He’ll be OK, you know,’ he said to her.

  ‘I know he will,’ she said, but there was something in her voice that he didn’t like.

  Will was not surprised to find that the vibes in the police station were bad – like most habitual users of soft drugs he was no fan of the police – but he was surprised to find these vibes were coming not from the front desk, where they encountered only a slightly strained civility, but from the interview room, where there was a frosty silence and a lot of angry glares. Lindsey and Clive were glaring angrily at Marcus, who was glaring angrily at the wall. A furious teenage girl (who looked, Will was gratified to see, not unlike a cross between Siouxsie and Roadrunner, except with the haircut of someone who had recently been released into the community) was glaring angrily at anyone brave enough to catch her eye.

  ‘You took your time,’ said Ellie, when her mother walked in.

  ‘I took as long as it takes to make a phone call and drive here,’ said Katrina, ‘so don’t start.’

  ‘Your daughter,’ said Clive, with a pomposity that didn’t really suit a man wearing a University of Life sweatshirt and a plaster cast, ‘has been insulting and aggressive. And your son,’ he went on, nodding at Fiona, ‘has clearly been mixing with the wrong crowd.’

  ‘Your son,’ hooted Ellie, but Fiona was still grim and silent.

  ‘He told me to shut up,’ said Lindsey.

  ‘Diddums,’ said Ellie.

  The policewoman who had shown them in was beginning to let her enjoyment of their disharmony show in her face. ‘Are we allowed to go?’ Will asked her.

  ‘Not yet. We’re waiting for the shop owner to come down.’

  ‘Good,’ said Ellie. ‘I want to give him a piece of my mind.’

  ‘It’s a her, actually,’ said the policewoman.

  Ellie blushed. ‘Him or her, doesn’t matter. She’s sick.’

  ‘Why is she sick, Ellie?’ asked Katrina, in a tone which managed brilliantly to combine sarcasm and world-weariness, and which had clearly taken a very long time and a lot of practice to perfect.

  ‘Because she’s exploiting a tragic event for her own gain,’ said Ellie. ‘She has no idea what today means. She just thinks there’s a few quid in it.’

  ‘Why is she coming, anyway?’ Will asked the policewoman.

  ‘It’s something we’re trying here. You know, criminals face-to-face with victims of crime, so they get to see the consequences of their actions.’

  ‘Who’s the criminal and who’s the victim?’ asked Ellie meaningfully.

  ‘Oh, Ellie, do shut up,’ said her mother.

  A nervous-looking young woman in her late twenties was shown into the room. She was wearing a Kurt Cobain sweatshirt and lots of black eye make-up and if she wasn’t Ellie’s older sister, genetic scientists would want to know why not.

  ‘This is Ruth, who owns the shop. This is the young lady who broke your window,’ said the policewoman. Ell
ie looked at the shop owner, bewildered.

  ‘Did they tell you to do that?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look like me.’

  ‘Do I look like you?’

  Everyone in the room, including the police officers, laughed.

  ‘You put that picture in the window to exploit people,’ said Ellie, with noticeably less confidence than she had been exhibiting previously.

  ‘Which picture? The picture of Kurt? That’s always been there. I’m his biggest fan. His biggest fan in Hertfordshire, anyway.’

  ‘You didn’t just stick it in today to make some money?’

  ‘Make some money out of all the grieving Nirvana fans in Royston, you mean? That would only work if it was a picture of Julio Iglesias.’

  Ellie looked embarrassed.

  ‘Is that why you broke the window?’ Ruth asked. ‘Because you thought I was exploiting people?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Today has been the saddest day of my life. And then some little idiot comes up and breaks my window because she thinks I’m trying to rip people off. Just… grow up.’

  Will doubted very much whether Ellie was lost for words too often, but it was clear that if you wished to reduce her to a gaping, red-faced mess, all you had to do was find a twenty-something doppel gänger whose commitment to Kurt Cobain was even more devout than her own.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered.

  ‘Yeah, well,’ said Ruth. ‘Come here.’ And while the assembled and for the most part unsympathetic occupants of the police interview room watched, Ruth opened her arms, and Ellie stood up, walked over to her and hugged her.

  It seemed to have escaped Fiona’s notice that this embrace should have marked the end of the whole sorry cardboard-cutout affair, but then Will had been aware for some time that more or less everything had passed her by since they stopped for petrol. It soon became clear, however, that she had been steeling herself for action, rather than daydreaming, and for reasons best known to herself she had decided that the time for action was now. She stood up, walked around the table, put her arms around Marcus from behind and, with an embarrassingly emotional intensity, addressed the policewoman who had been looking after them.

  ‘I haven’t been a good mother to him,’ she declared. ‘I’ve let things slide, and I haven’t been noticing properly, and… I’m not surprised things have come to this.’

  ‘They haven’t come to anything, Mum,’ said Marcus. ‘How many more times? I haven’t done anything.’ Fiona ignored him; she didn’t seem even to have heard.

  ‘I know I don’t deserve a chance, but I’m asking for one now, and… I don’t know whether you’re a mother or not?’

  ‘Me?’ asked the policewoman. ‘Yeah. I’ve got a little boy. Jack.’

  ‘I’m appealing to you as a mother… If you give us another chance, you won’t regret it.’

  ‘We don’t need a chance, Mum. I haven’t done anything wrong. I only got off a train.’

  Still no reaction. Will had to hand it to her: once she had decided to fight for her child she was unstoppable, however wrong-headed the decision, and however inappropriate the weapons. What she was saying was barmy – she might even have been aware that it was barmy – but at least it was coming from a part of her that knew she had to do something for her son. It was a turning point, of sorts. You could imagine this woman saying all kinds of inappropriate things at peculiar times; but it was getting much harder to imagine finding her sprawled off a sofa covered in sick, and Will was beginning to learn that sometimes good news came in unpromising shapes and sizes.

  ‘We’re willing to cut a deal,’ said Fiona. Was Royston law the same as LA Law? Will wondered. It seemed unlikely, but one never knew. ‘Marcus will testify against Ellie, if you let him go. I’m sorry, Katrina, but it’s too late for her. Let Marcus start again with a clean sheet.’ She buried her face in the back of Marcus’s neck, but Marcus shook her off and moved away from her and towards Will. Katrina, who had spent much of Fiona’s speech trying not to laugh, went over to comfort her.

  ‘Shut up, Mum. You’re mad. Bloody hell, I can’t believe how crap my parents are,’ said Marcus with real feeling.

  Will looked at this strange little group, his gang for the day, and tried to make some sense of it. All these ripples and connections! He couldn’t get his head round them. He was not a man given to mystical moments, even under the influence of narcotics, but he was very worried that he was having one now, for some reason: maybe it was something to do with Marcus walking away from his mother and over to him? Whatever the explanation, it was making him feel very peculiar. Some of these people he hadn’t known until today; some of them he had only known for a little while, and even then he couldn’t say that he knew them well. But here they were anyway, one of them clutching a cardboard cut-out Kurt Cobain, one of them in a plaster cast, one of them crying, all of them bound to each other in ways that it would be almost impossible to explain to anyone who had just wandered in. Will couldn’t recall ever having been caught up in this sort of messy, sprawling, chaotic web before; it was almost as if he had been given a glimpse of what it was like to be human. It wasn’t too bad, really; he wouldn’t even mind being human on a full-time basis.

  They all went to the nearest burger bar for supper. Ruth and Ellie sat apart and ate chips and smoked and whispered; Marcus and his relatives carried on the sniping they had embarked on with such enthusiasm in the police station. Clive wanted Marcus to complete his journey to Cambridge, but Fiona felt he should return to London, while Marcus seemed too confused by his afternoon to feel anything very much.

  ‘Why was Ellie with you in the first place?’ Will asked him.

  ‘I can’t remember now,’ said Marcus. ‘She just wanted to come.’

  ‘Was she going to stay with us?’ asked Clive.

  ‘Dunno. S’pose so.’

  ‘Thanks for asking us first.’

  ‘Ellie’s not right for me,’ said Marcus firmly.

  ‘You’ve worked that out, have you?’ said Will.

  ‘I’m not sure who she is right for,’ said Katrina.

  ‘I think we’ll always be friends,’ Marcus continued. ‘But I don’t know. I think I ought to look for someone less—’

  ‘Less rude and mad? Less violent? Less bloody stupid? There are any number of lesses I can think of.’ This contribution was from Ellie’s mother.

  ‘Less different from me,’ said Marcus diplomatically.

  ‘Well, good luck,’ said Katrina. ‘There are a lot of us who’ve spent half our lives looking for someone less different from us, and we haven’t found them so far.’

  ‘Is it that hard?’ asked Marcus.

  ‘It’s the hardest thing in the world,’ said Fiona, with more feeling than Will wanted to contemplate.

  ‘Why do you think we’re all single?’ said Katrina.

  Was that really it? Will wondered. Was that what they were all doing, looking for someone less different? Was that what he was doing? Rachel was dynamic and thoughtful and focused and caring and different in more ways than he could count, but the whole point of Rachel, as far as Will was concerned, was that she wasn’t him. There was a flaw in Katrina’s logic, then. This thing about looking for someone less different… It only really worked, he realized, if you were convinced that being you wasn’t so bad in the first place.

  thirty-five

  Marcus did end up going to stay with his dad and Lindsey. He felt sorry for them, in a funny sort of way: at the police station they had seemed really out of it, as if they weren’t able to cope. Marcus hadn’t thought about it before, but that evening you could really tell who lived in London and who didn’t, and the ones who didn’t just seemed more scared of everything. Clive and Lindsey had been scared of Ellie, for a start, but they’d been scared of Ellie’s mum, and the police, and they’d moaned a lot, and looked nervous… Maybe it wasn’t anything to do with London; maybe it was more to do with the kind of people he knew now, or maybe he�
��d just got a lot older in the last couple of months. But he couldn’t really see what his dad could offer him any more, which was why he felt sorry for him, which was why he agreed to go back to Cambridge with him.

  Clive carried on moaning in the car. Why did Marcus want to get involved with someone like that? Why hadn’t he tried to stop her? Why had he been rude to Lindsey? What had she ever done to him? Marcus didn’t answer. He just let his father go on and on until eventually he seemed to run out of moans like you run out of petrol: they started to slow up and get quieter, and then they just disappeared altogether. The thing was, he couldn’t be that kind of dad any more. He’d missed his moment. It was like if God suddenly decided to be God again a zillion years after creating the world: He couldn’t suddenly come down from heaven and say, oh, you shouldn’t have put the Empire State Building there, and you shouldn’t have organized it so that African people get less money, and you shouldn’t have let them build nuclear weapons. Because you could say to Him, well, it’s a bit late now, isn’t it? Where were You when we were thinking about these things?

  It wasn’t as though he thought his dad should have been around, but he couldn’t have it both ways. If he wanted to be up in Cambridge with Lindsey, smoking pot and falling off window-ledges, fine, but he couldn’t then start picking up on the little things – and Ellie was a little thing now really, even though when they’d been sitting on the kerb waiting for the police car to come, she’d seemed like the biggest thing ever. He’d have to find another job for himself. Will could do the little things, and his mum, but his dad was out of it.

  They arrived back at his dad’s place around ten-thirty, which meant it had taken him six hours to get to Cambridge – not bad, really, seeing as he’d been arrested halfway there. (Arrested! He’d been arrested! Taken to a police station in a police car, at least. He’d already stopped thinking of the broken window as something that had come out of playing truant, and that would lead on to being a tramp and a drug addict. Now he was free he could see he had overreacted. Instead, he took the Royston incident as a measure of how far he’d come in the last few months. He’d never have been able to get arrested when he’d first arrived in London. He wouldn’t have known the right sort of people.)