by Nick Hornby
‘Well, that’s a sign of maturity, I guess.’ The Ellie business was news to Will, and suddenly he could see this was where they had been heading right from the beginning. ‘You want Ellie to be your girlfriend?’
‘Yeah. Course.’
‘Not just your friend?’
‘Well.’ He inserted the pound coin into the slot and pressed the one-player button. ‘I was going to ask you about that. What would you say are the main differences?’
‘You’re funny, Marcus.’
‘I know. People keep telling me. I don’t care. I just want you to answer the question.’
‘OK. Do you want to touch her? That’s got to be the first thing.’
Marcus carried on blasting away at the monster on the screen, apparently oblivious to Will’s profundities.
‘Well?’
‘I don’t know. I’m thinking about it. Go on.’
‘That’s it.’
‘That’s it? There’s only one difference?’
‘Yeah. Marcus. You have heard of sex, haven’t you? It’s kind of a big deal.’
‘I know, I’m not stupid. But I can’t believe there’s nothing more to it. Oh, piss.’ Marcus had lost another life. ‘’Cos I’m not sure if I want to touch Ellie or not. But I still know that I want her to be my girlfriend.’
‘OK, so what things do you want to be different?’
‘I want to be with her more. I want to be with her all the time, instead of just when I bump into her. And I want to get rid of Zoe, even though I like Zoe, because I want Ellie to myself. And I want to tell her things first, before I tell anyone, even you or Mum. And I don’t want her to have another boyfriend. If I could have all those things, I wouldn’t mind if I touched her or not.’
Will shook his head, a gesture that Marcus missed because his eyes were still glued to the video screen. ‘I tell you, Marcus, you’ll learn. You won’t feel like that forever.’
But later that night, when he was home on his own and listening to the sort of music he needed to listen to when he felt like this, music that seemed to find the sore spot in him and press up hard against it, he remembered the deal Marcus was prepared to strike. And yes, he wanted to touch Rachel (the fantasies which involved enormous hotel beds definitely involved touching as well), but right now, he thought, if he had the choice, he’d settle for the less and the more that Marcus wanted.
The conversation in the video games arcade at least had the virtue of creating a mutuality between them: they had both confessed to something they wanted, and those somethings were, when all was said and done, not entirely dissimilar, even though the someones connected with the somethings evidently were. Will couldn’t get a very clear sense of Ellie from Marcus’s descriptions – he always ended up with the impression of an angry ball of black-lipsticked motion, an unimaginable cross between Siouxsie of the Banshees and the Roadrunner – but he could picture her well enough to see that Ellie and Rachel would not pass as twins. This mutuality, however, seemed more than enough to persuade Marcus that it would be disloyal of him, and some kind of curse on his own desire, not to act as Will’s son for an afternoon. So Will made the call, heart thumping, and wangled a Saturday lunch invitation for the pair of them. Marcus came round just after midday, in the hairy jumper Fiona had given him for Christmas and a disastrous pair of canary-yellow cords that might have looked cute on a four-year-old. Will was wearing his favourite Paul Smith shirt and a black leather jacket that he liked to think made him look a little like Matt Dillon in Drugstore Cowboy. What was going on here, Will reckoned, was that Marcus was showing a refreshingly rebellious disregard for his dad’s dandyism, so he tried to inculcate a feeling of pride, and to ignore the urge to take him out shopping.
‘What did you tell your mum?’ Will asked him in the car on the way over to Rachel’s place.
‘I told her you wanted me to meet your new girlfriend.’
‘And she was all right about that?’
‘No. She thinks you’re mad.’
‘I’m not surprised. Why would I take you to meet my new girlfriend?’
‘Why would you tell your new girlfriend I was your son? You can think up your own explanations next time, if mine are no good. Listen, I’ve got some questions. How much did I weigh at birth?’
‘I dunno. It was your birth.’
‘Yeah, but you should know, shouldn’t you? If you’re my dad, I mean.’
‘Surely at this stage in our relationship we’re a bit beyond birth weights, aren’t we? If you were twelve weeks old it might come up, but twelve years old…’
‘OK, so when’s my birthday?’
‘Marcus, she doesn’t suspect we’re not father and son. She’s not going to be trying to catch us out.’
‘But suppose it came up. Suppose I said, you know, Dad’s promised me a new Nintendo for my birthday, and she said to you, when’s his birthday?’
‘Why is she asking me? Why isn’t she asking you?’
‘Just suppose.’
‘OK, when’s your birthday?’
‘August the nineteenth.’
‘I’ll remember, I promise. August the nineteenth.’
‘And what’s my favourite food?’
‘Tell me,’ Will said wearily.
‘Pasta with the mushroom and tomato sauce my mum makes.’
‘Right.’
‘And where did I go the first time I went abroad?’
‘I don’t know. Grenoble.’
‘Doh,’ said Marcus scornfully. ‘Why would I want to go there? Barcelona.’
‘OK. Got it. Barcelona.’
‘And who’s my mum?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Who’s my mum?’
The question was so basic and yet so pertinent that for a moment Will was completely thrown.
‘Your mum’s your mum.’
‘So you were married to my mum and you’ve split up.’
‘Yeah. Whatever.’
‘And does that bother you? Or me?’
Suddenly the absurdity of the questions got to both of them. Marcus began to giggle, a peculiar high-pitched miaow that sounded nothing like himself or any other human but proved to be extraordinarily infectious. Will launched into his own version of a giggling fit.
‘It doesn’t bother me. Does it bother you?’ he said eventually.
But Marcus was unable to reply. He was still miaowing.
*
One sentence, the first sentence she said, was all it took to bring the whole thing, the elaborate past, present and future he had created for the two of them, crashing to the floor.
‘Hi. It’s Will and… Mark, is that right?’
‘Marcus,’ said Marcus, and nudged Will meaningfully.
‘Come in, both of you. Come and meet Ali.’
Will had remembered every single tiny detail that Rachel had offered him that first night. He knew the names of the books she had illustrated, although he wasn’t absolutely sure whether the first one was called The Way to the Woods or The Way Through the Woods- he would have to check – and her ex’s name, and where he lived, and what he did, and… It was unimaginable that he could have forgotten Ali’s name. That was one of his principal facts. That would be like forgetting when England had won the World Cup, or the name of Luke Skywalker’s real father – it just couldn’t be done, no matter how hard you tried. But she had forgotten Marcus’s name – Mark, Marcus, it was all the same to her – and it was thus perfectly clear that she hadn’t spent the last ten days in a sleepless fever of imagining and remembering and wondering. He felt crushed. He might as well give up now. These feelings were exactly what he had been so afraid of, and this was why he had been so sure that falling in love was rubbish, and, surprise surprise, it was rubbish, and… and it was too late.
Rachel lived just up the road from Camden Lock, in a tall, thin house full of books and old furniture and sepia photographs of dramatic, romantic Eastern European relatives, and for a moment Will was grateful that his flat and her
house would never get a chance to meet, current north London seismological conditions prevailing. Her house would be warm and welcoming, and his would be cocky and cool, and he’d be ashamed of it.
She shouted up the stairs: ‘Ali!’ Nothing. ‘ALI!’ Still nothing. She looked at Will and shrugged. ‘He’s got his headphones on. Shall we go up?’
‘He won’t mind?’ Will would have minded, when he was twelve years old, for reasons he didn’t necessarily want to remember.
Ali’s bedroom door was indistinguishable from all the other bedroom doors: no skull and crossbones, no ‘Keep Out’ signs, no hip-hop graffiti; once inside, however, there was no question but that the room belonged to a boy stuck between the equally wretched states of childhood and adolescence in early 1994. Everything was there – the Ryan Giggs poster and the Michael Jordan poster and the Pamela Anderson poster and the Super Mario stickers… A social historian of the future would probably be able to date the room to within a twenty-four-hour period. Will glanced at Marcus, who was looking bewildered. Standing Marcus in front of posters of Ryan Giggs and Michael Jordan was like taking an average twelve-year-old to look at the Tudors in the National Portrait Gallery. Ali himself was slumped in front of his computer, headphones still on, oblivious to his guests. His mother went over and tapped him on the shoulder, and he jumped.
‘Oh, hi. Sorry.’ Ali stood up, and Will immediately saw that this wasn’t going to work. Ali was cool – basketball boots, baggy skatepunk trousers, shaggy grunge hair, even an earring – and his face seemed to darken when he took in Marcus’s yellow cords and hairy jumper.
‘Marcus Ali, Ali Marcus,’ said Rachel. Marcus offered his hand, and Ali took it almost satirically. ‘Ali Will, Will Ali.’ Will raised his eyebrows in Ali’s direction. He thought Ali might appreciate the understatement.
‘Do you guys want to hang out up here for a while?’ Rachel asked them.
Marcus glanced at Will and Will nodded once, while Rachel’s back was turned towards him.
‘Yeah,’ Marcus shrugged, and for a moment Will loved him, really loved him.
‘OK,’ said Ali, with even less enthusiasm.
Rachel and Will went downstairs; ten minutes later – time enough for Will to have dreamed up a whole scenario whereby the four of them took a house in Spain for the summer – they heard a door slam. Rachel went to investigate and came flying back into the sitting room seconds afterwards.
‘I’m afraid Marcus has gone home,’ she said.
twenty-seven
Marcus had meant to try. He knew the lunch with Rachel was a big thing for Will, and he knew too that if he did well today, acted out his part, then Will might feel that he had to help him out with Ellie somehow. But this Ali kid never gave him a chance. Will and Rachel went downstairs, Ali stared at him for a few seconds and then started on him.
‘There’s no fucking way,’ was the first thing he said.
‘No?’ said Marcus, in an attempt to buy himself some time. He had obviously missed something already, although he wasn’t quite sure what.
‘I’ll tell you, if your dad goes out with my mum you’re fucking dead. Really. Dead.’
‘Oh, he’s all right,’ said Marcus.
Ali looked at him as though he were mad.
‘I don’t care if he’s all right. I don’t want him going out with my mum. So I don’t want to see him or you round here ever again, OK?’
‘Well,’ said Marcus. ‘I’m not sure it’s really up to me.’
‘It better be. Or you’re dead.’
‘Can I have a go on the computer? What games have you got?’ Marcus knew that a change of subject wouldn’t necessarily work. It worked sometimes, but maybe not when someone was threatening to kill you.
‘Are you listening to me?’
‘Yes, but… I’m not sure there’s very much I can do at the moment. We’ve come for lunch, and Will… that’s my dad, I call him Will, because, anyway… he’s talking to Rachel, that’s your mum—’
‘I fucking know it’s my mum.’
‘—downstairs, and to be honest he’s really pretty keen, and who knows? She might be keen on him, so—’
‘SHE’S NOT KEEN ON HIM!’ Ali suddenly shouted. ‘SHE’S ONLY KEEN ON ME!’
Marcus was beginning to realize that Ali was nuts, and he wasn’t sure what to do about it. He wondered whether this had ever happened before and, if it had, whether the kid who had been in his position was still here somewhere – either in pieces under the carpet, or tied up in a cupboard, where he was fed once a day on leftover bits of Ali’s supper. This kid probably weighed three stone and only talked his own language that nobody else could understand, not that anyone ever listened anyway, not even his mum and dad, who he would never see again.
Marcus considered his options carefully. The least attractive, he felt, and also the most unlikely, was to stay here and pass the time of day with Ali, chat about this and that, have a laugh and a couple of games on the computer; that simply wasn’t going to happen. He could go downstairs and join in with Will and Rachel, but Will had as good as told him to stay upstairs, and if he went downstairs he’d have to explain that Ali was a psycho who was on the point of cutting off his arms and legs, and that would be really embarrassing. No, Marcus’s choice would simply be to dash downstairs without anyone noticing, sneak out of the front door and get a bus home; after a very brief moment’s thought, that is exactly what he did.
He was standing at a bus stop near the Lock when Will found him. His sense of direction wasn’t brilliant and he was actually standing on the wrong side of the road, waiting for a bus that would have taken him to the West End, so it was probably just as well that Will drew up alongside him and told him to get into the car.
‘What are you playing at?’ Will asked him angrily.
‘Have I messed it up?’ And then, although he shouldn’t have said it, even though, or probably because, it was the first thing he thought of: ‘Will you still help me out with Ellie?’
‘What happened upstairs?’
‘He’s off his head. He said he’d kill me if you went out with her. And I believed him, too. Anyone would have. He’s really scary. Where are we going?’ It was raining now, and Camden was choked with traffic and market shoppers. Everywhere Marcus looked there were men and women with long wet straggly hair who looked like they probably played in Nirvana or one of the other bands Ellie liked.
‘Back to Rachel’s.’
‘I don’t want to go back there.’
‘Tough.’
‘She’ll think I’m stupid.’
‘She won’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because she thought something like this might happen. She said Ali could be difficult sometimes.’
That made Marcus laugh, ‘Ha!’, the kind of laugh you did when there was nothing much to laugh at. ‘Difficult? He was going to tie me up and lock me in a cupboard and only feed me once a day.’
‘Is that what he said?’
‘Not in so many words.’
‘Anyway, he’s crying his eyes out now.’
‘Really?’
‘Really. Blubbing like a three-year-old.’
This cheered Marcus up no end; he was perfectly happy to go back to Rachel’s, he decided.
As it turned out, running away from the house was the best thing Marcus could possibly have done. If he’d known it was all going to end so well, he wouldn’t have been so panicky when Will found him at the bus stop. He would have just winked at Will like a wise old owl, and said, ‘Wait and see’. When they got back, everything had changed: it was like everyone knew why they were there, instead of pretending that the whole lunch thing was a way of Ali and Marcus getting together to play computer games.
‘Ali has got something to say to you, Marcus,’ Rachel said, when they walked in.
‘Sorry, Marcus,’ Ali snivelled. ‘I didn’t mean to say those things.’
Marcus couldn’t see how you could threaten to kill someone by m
istake, but he didn’t want to make a thing of it; the sight of Ali snivelling away made him feel generous.
That’s OK, Ali,’ he said.
‘OK, shake hands, guys,’ said Rachel, and they did, although it was a rather peculiar and embarrassing handshake. They went up and down much too far three times, and Will and Rachel laughed, which annoyed Marcus. He knew how to shake hands. It was the other idiot who was doing all the up-and-down business.
‘Ali finds this very difficult.’
‘So does Marcus. Marcus feels just the same, don’t you?’
‘About what?’ He had drifted off temporarily. He was wondering whether there was any connection between Ali’s tears and his ability to hurt: did it follow that because he cried so easily he wasn’t hard? Or could it be that he was a psycho, and he would pull your head off with his bare hands, blubbing all the time? Maybe the crying had been a bit of a red herring, and Marcus was in even more danger than he had feared.
‘About… you know… this sort of thing.’
‘Yes,’ Marcus said. ‘I do. Exactly the same.’ He was sure he would find out soon enough what he felt exactly the same about.
‘Because you get into a pattern, and then each new person who comes along seems to represent some kind of a threat.’
‘Exactly. And the last guy I—’ Rachel broke off. ‘I’m sorry, I’m not comparing you to him. And I’m not saying that, you know, we’re—’ She broke off hopelessly.
Will smiled. ‘It’s OK,’ he said gently, and Rachel looked at him and smiled back. Suddenly Marcus could see why people like Rachel and Suzie – nice, attractive women who you thought wouldn’t give someone like that the time of day – might like Will. He had gone into this way of looking that he never used on Marcus: there was something in his eyes, a kind of softness that Marcus could see would really work. While he was listening to the conversation, he practised with his own eyes – you had to sort of narrow them, and then make them focus exactly on the other person’s face. Would Ellie like that? She’d probably thump him.