by Nick Hornby
‘No, it looks like it,’ said Will. Marcus hated him even more. Who did this Will think he was?’
‘I’m not sure it was me.’ He was going to test out his theory. If Suzie didn’t believe him, there was no chance the police and judges would.
‘How do you mean?’
‘I think it must have been ill. I think it was going to die anyway.’ Nobody said anything; Will shook his head angrily. Marcus decided this line of defence was a waste of time, even though it was true.
They were staring so hard at the scene of the crime that they didn’t notice the park-keeper until he was standing right next to them. Marcus felt his insides turn to mush. This was it.
‘One of your ducks has died,’ said Will. He made it sound as if it were the saddest thing he’d ever seen. Marcus looked up at him; maybe he didn’t hate him after all.
‘I was told that you had something to do with it,’ said the park-keeper. ‘You know that’s a criminal offence, don’t you?’
‘You were told that I had something to do with it?’ said Will. ‘Me?’
‘Maybe not you, but your lad here.’
‘You’re suggesting that Marcus killed this duck? Marcus loves ducks, don’t you, Marcus?’
‘Yeah. They’re my favourite animal. Well, second favourite. After dolphins. They’re definitely my favourite bird, though.’ This was rubbish, because he hated all animals, but he thought it helped.
‘I was told he was throwing bloody great french loaves at it.’
‘He was, but I’ve stopped him now. Boys will be boys,’ said Will. Marcus hated him again. He might have known he’d grass him up.
‘So he killed it?’
‘Oh, God no. Sorry, I see what you mean. No, he was throwing bread at the body. I think he was trying to sink it, because Megan here was getting upset.’
The park-keeper looked at the sleeping form in the buggy.
‘She doesn’t look very upset now.’
‘No. She cried herself to sleep, poor love.’
There was a silence. Marcus could see that this was the crucial time; the attendant could either accuse them all of lying, and call the police or something, or forget all about it.
‘I’ll have to wade in and get it,’ he said. They were in the clear. Marcus wasn’t going to jail for a crime he probably – OK, possibly – didn’t commit.
‘I hope there’s not some sort of epidemic,’ said Will sympathetically, as they started to walk back towards the others.
It was then that Marcus saw – or thought he saw – his mum. She was standing in front of them, blocking the path, and she was smiling. He waved and turned around to tell Suzie that she’d turned up, but when he looked back his mum wasn’t there. He felt stupid and didn’t say anything about it to anyone, ever.
*
Marcus was never able to work out why Suzie had insisted on coming back to the flat with him. He’d been out with her before, and she’d just dropped him off outside, waited until he’d let himself in and then driven off. But that day she parked the car, lifted Megan out in her car seat, and came in with him. She was never able to explain why she had done it.
Will wasn’t invited, but he followed them in, and Marcus didn’t tell him not to. Everything about that two minutes was mysteriously memorable, even at the time, somehow: climbing the stairs, the cooking smells that got trapped in the hall, the way he noticed the pattern on the carpet for the first time ever. Afterwards he thought he could recall being nervous, too, but he must have made that up, because there wasn’t anything to be nervous about. Then he put the key in the door and opened it, and a new part of his life began, bang, without any warning at all.
His mum was half on and half off the sofa: her head was lolling towards the floor. She was white, and there was a pool of sick on the carpet, but there wasn’t much on her – either she’d had the sense to puke away from herself, or she’d just been lucky. In the hospital they told him it was a miracle she hadn’t choked on her own vomit and killed herself. The sick was grey and lumpy, and the room stank.
He couldn’t speak. He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t cry either. It was much too serious for that. So he just stood there. But Suzie dropped the car seat and ran over to her and started screaming at her and slapping her. Suzie must have seen the empty pill bottle as soon as she walked in, but Marcus didn’t spot it until later, when the ambulancemen came, so at first he was just confused; he couldn’t understand why Suzie was so mad at someone who was not very well.
Suzie yelled at Will to call for an ambulance and told Marcus to make some black coffee; his mum was moving now and making a terrible moaning noise that he had never heard before and never wanted to hear again. Suzie was crying, and then Megan started up too, so in seconds the room had gone from a terrifying silence and stillness to noisy, terrifying panic.
‘Fiona! How could you do this?’ Suzie screamed. ‘You’ve got a kid. How could you do this?’
It was only then it occurred to Marcus that all this reflected badly on him.
Marcus had seen some things, mostly on video at other people’s houses. He had seen a bloke put another bloke’s eye out with a kebab skewer in Hellhound 3. He had seen a man’s brains come out of his nostrils in Boilerhead – The Return. He had seen arms taken off with a single swing of a machete, he had seen babies with swords where their willies should be, he had seen eels coming out of a woman’s belly-button. None of it had ever stopped him sleeping or given him nightmares. OK, he hadn’t seen many things in real life, but up until now he hadn’t thought it mattered: shocks are shocks, wherever you find them. What got him about this was that there wasn’t even anything very shocking, just some puke and some shouting, and he could see his mum wasn’t dead or anything. But this was the scariest thing he’d ever seen, by a million miles, and he knew the moment he walked in that it was something he’d have to think about forever.
ten
When the ambulance came there was a long, complicated discussion about who would go to the hospital and how. Will was hoping he’d be packed off home, but it didn’t work out like that. The ambulancemen didn’t want to take Suzie and Marcus and the baby, so in the end he had to drive Megan and Marcus there in Suzie’s car, while she went with Marcus’s mother in the ambulance. He tried to stay tucked in behind them, but he lost them the moment they got out on to the main road. He would have liked nothing better than to pretend he had a flashing blue light on the top of the car, drive on the wrong side of the road and crash through as many red lights as he wanted, but he doubted whether either of the mothers ahead of him would thank him for it.
In the back seat Megan was still crying hard; Marcus was staring grimly through the windscreen.
‘See if you can do anything with her,’ said Will.
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know. Think of something.’
‘You think of something.’
Fair enough, Will thought. Asking a kid to do anything at all in these circumstances was probably unreasonable.
‘How do you feel?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘She’ll be OK.’
‘Yeah. I suppose so. But… that’s not the point, is it?’
Will knew it wasn’t the point, but he was surprised that Marcus had worked it out quite so quickly. For the first time it occurred to him that the boy was probably pretty bright.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Work it out for yourself.’
‘Are you worried she’ll try it again?’
‘Just shut up, all right?’
So he did, and they travelled to the hospital in as much silence as a screaming baby would allow.
When they arrived Fiona had already been carted off somewhere, and Suzie was sitting in the waiting room clutching a styrofoam cup. Marcus dumped the car seat and its apoplectic load down next to her.
‘So what’s happening?’ Will only just managed to restrain himself from rubbing his hands together. He was completely absorbed in all of this
– absorbed almost to the point of enjoyment.
‘I don’t know. They’re pumping her stomach or something. She was talking a little in the ambulance. She was asking after you, Marcus.’
‘That’s nice of her.’
‘This isn’t anything to do with you, Marcus. You know that, don’t you? I mean, you’re not the reason she… You’re not the reason she’s here.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I just do.’ She said it with warmth and humour, shaking her head and ruffling Marcus’s hair, but everything about the intonation and her gestures was wrong: they belonged to other, quieter, more domestic circumstances, and though they might have been appropriate for a twelve-year-old, they were not appropriate for the oldest twelve-year-old in the world, which Marcus had suddenly become. Marcus pushed her hand away.
‘Has anyone got any change? I want to get something from the machine.’
Will gave him a handful of silver, and he wandered off.
‘Fucking hell,’ said Will. ‘What are you supposed to tell a kid whose mum has just tried to top herself?’ He was merely curious, but luckily the question came out as if it were rhetorical, and therefore sympathetic. He didn’t want to sound like someone watching a really good disease-of-the-week film.
‘I don’t know,’ said Suzie. She had Megan on her lap, and she was trying to get her to chew on a breadstick. ‘But we’ll have to try and think of something.’
Will didn’t know if he was a part of the ‘we’ or not, but it didn’t matter one way or the other. However absorbing he was finding the evening’s entertainment, he certainly didn’t intend repeating it: this lot were just too weird.
The evening dragged on. Megan cried, then whined, then fell asleep; Marcus made repeated visits to the vending machine and came back with cans of Coke and Kit-Kats and bags of crisps. None of them talked much, although occasionally Marcus grumbled about the people waiting for treatment.
‘I hate this lot. They’re drunk, most of them. Look at them. They’ve all been fighting.’
It was true. More or less everyone in the waiting room was some kind of deadbeat – a vagrant, or a drunk, or a junkie, or just mad. The few people who were there through sheer bad luck (there was a woman who had been bitten by a dog and was waiting for a shot, and a mother with a little girl who looked as though she might have broken her ankle in a fall) looked anxious, pale, drained; tonight was really something out of the ordinary for them. But the rest had simply transferred the chaos of their daily life from one place to another. It made no difference to them if they were roaring at passers-by in the street or abusing nurses in a hospital casualty department – it was all just business.
‘My mum’s not like these people.’
‘No one said she was,’ said Suzie.
‘Supposing they think she is, though?’
‘They won’t.’
‘They might. She took drugs, didn’t she? She came in with sick all over her, didn’t she? How would they know the difference?’
‘Of course they’ll know the difference. And if they don’t, we’ll tell them.’
Marcus nodded, and Will could see that Suzie had said the right thing: who could believe that Fiona was any kind of derelict with friends like these? For once, Will thought, Marcus was asking the wrong question. The right question was: what the hell difference did it make? Because if the only things that separated Fiona from the rest of them were Suzie’s reassuring car keys and Will’s expensive casual clothes, then she was in trouble anyway. You had to live in your own bubble. You couldn’t force your way into someone else’s, because then it wouldn’t be a bubble any more. Will bought his clothes and his CDs and his cars and his Heal’s furniture and his drugs for himself, and himself alone; if Fiona couldn’t afford these things, and didn’t have an equivalent bubble of her own, then that was her lookout.
Right on cue, a woman came over to see them – not a doctor or a nurse, but somebody official.
‘Hello. Did you come in with Fiona Brewer?’
‘Yes. I’m her friend Suzie, and this is Will, and this is Fiona’s son Marcus.’
‘Right. We’re going to be keeping Fiona in overnight, and obviously we don’t want you to have to stay. Is there somewhere Marcus could go? Is there anyone else at home, Marcus?’
Marcus shook his head.
‘He’ll be staying with me tonight,’ said Suzie.
‘OK, but I’ll have to get his mother’s permission for that,’ said the woman.
‘Sure.’
‘That’s where I want to go,’ Marcus said to the woman’s retreating back. She turned round and smiled. ‘Not that anyone cares.’
‘Of course they do,’ said Suzie.
‘You reckon?’
The woman came back a couple of minutes later, smiling and nodding as if Fiona had given birth to a baby, rather than given permission for an overnight stay.
‘That’s fine. She says thank you.’
‘Great. Come on, then, Marcus. You can help me open the sofa bed.’
Suzie put Megan back into the car seat and they made their way out to the car park.
‘I’ll see you,’ said Will. ‘I’ll call you.’
‘I hope you get things sorted out with Ned and Paula.’
Again the momentary blankness: Ned and Paula, Ned and Paula… Ah, yes, his ex-wife and his son.
‘Oh, it’ll be fine. Thanks.’ He kissed Suzie on the cheek, punched Marcus on the arm, waved to Megan and went off to hail a cab. It had all been very interesting, but he wouldn’t want to do it every night.
eleven
It was there, on the kitchen table. He was just putting the flowers in the vase, like Suzie had told him to do, when he spotted it. Everyone had been in such a hurry and a mess last night that they hadn’t noticed. He picked it up and sat down.
Dear Marcus,
I think that whatever I say in this letter, you’ll end up hating me. Or maybe end up is a bit too final: perhaps when you’re older, you’ll feel something else other than hate. But there’s certainly going to he a long period of time when you’ll think I did a wrong, stupid, selfish, unkind thing. So I wanted to give myself a chance to explain, even if it doesn’t do any good.
Listen. A big part of me knows that I’m doing a wrong, stupid, selfish, unkind thing. Most of me, in fact. The trouble is that it’s not the part that controls me any more. That’s what’s so horrible about the sort of illness I’ve had for the last few months – it just doesn’t listen to anything or anybody else. It just wants to do its own thing. I hope you never get to find out what that’s like.
None of this is anything to do with you. I’ve loved being your mum, always, even though it’s been hard for me and I’ve found it difficult sometimes. And I don’t know why being your mum isn’t enough for me, but it isn’t. And it isn’t that I’m so unhappy I don’t want to live any more. That’s not what it feels like. It feels more like I’m tired and bored and the party’s gone on too long and I want to go home. I feel flat and there doesn’t seem to be anything to look forward to, so I’d rather call it a day. How can I feel like that when I’ve got you? I don’t know. I do know that if I kept it all going just for your sake, you wouldn’t thank me, and I reckon that once you’ve got over this things will be better for you than they were before. Really. You can go to your dad’s, or Suzie has always said she’ll look after you if anything happened to me.
I’ll watch out for you if I am able to. I think I will be. I think that when something happens to a mother, she’s allowed to do that, even if it’s her fault. I don’t want to stop writing this, but I can’t think of any reason to keep it going.
Love you,
Mum.
He was still sitting at the kitchen table when she came back from the hospital with Suzie and Megan. She could see straight away what he had found.
‘Shit, Marcus. I’d forgotten about it.’
‘You forgot? You forgot a suicide letter?’
‘Well, I didn�
�t think I’d ever have to remember it, did I?’ She laughed at that. She actually laughed. That was his mother. When she wasn’t crying over the breakfast cereal, she was laughing about killing herself.
‘Jesus,’ said Suzie. ‘Is that what it was? I shouldn’t have left him here before I went to get you. I thought it would be nice if he tidied the place up.’
‘Suzie, I don’t honestly think you’re to blame for anything.’
‘I should have thought.’
‘Maybe Marcus and I ought to have a little talk on our own.’
‘Of course.’
Suzie and his mum hugged, and Suzie came over to give him a kiss.
‘She’s fine,’ Suzie whispered, loud enough for his mum to hear. ‘Don’t worry about her.’
When Suzie had gone, Fiona put the kettle on and sat down at the table with him.
‘Are you angry with me?’
‘What do you think?’
‘Because of the letter?’
‘Because of the letter, because of what you did, everything.’
‘I can understand that. I don’t feel the same as I did on Saturday, if that’s any help.’
‘What, it’s all just gone away, all that?’
‘No, but… at the moment I feel better.’
‘At the moment’s no good to me. I can see that you’re better at the moment. You’ve just put the kettle on. But what happens when you’ve finished your tea? What happens when I go back to school? I can’t be here to watch you all the time.’
‘No, I know. But we’ve got to look after each other. It shouldn’t all be one way.’
Marcus nodded, but he was in a place where words didn’t matter. He had read her letter, and he was no longer very interested in what she said; it was what she did, and what she was going to do, that counted. She wasn’t going to do anything today. She’d drink her tea, and tonight they’d get a takeaway and watch TV, and they would feel as though it were the beginning of a different, better time. But that time would run out, and then there would be something else. He had always trusted his mother – or rather, he had never not trusted her. But for him, things would never be the same again.