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In the end, the thing that swung it for him in his affair with Angie was that he was not Someone Else.
That meant in this case he wasn’t Simon, her ex, who had problems with drink and work, and who, with
a cavalier disregard for cliché, turned out to be screwing his secretary. Will found it easy not to be
Simon; he had a positive flair for not being Simon, he was brilliant at it. It seemed unfair, in fact, that
something he found so effortless should bring him any kind of reward at all, but it did: he was loved for
not being Simon more than he had ever been loved simply for being himself.
Even the end, when it came, had an enormous amount to recommend it. Will found endings difficult:
he had never quite managed to grasp the bull by the horns, and as a consequence there had hitherto
always been some kind of messy overlap. But with Angie it was easy—indeed, it was so easy that he felt
there had to be some kind of catch.
They had been going out for six weeks, and there were certain things that he was beginning to find
unsatisfactory. Angie wasn’t very flexible, for a start, and the whole kid thing really got in the way
sometimes—the week before he had bought tickets for the new Mike Leigh film on the opening night,
but she didn’t make it to the cinema until thirty minutes after it had started because the babysitter hadn’t
turned up. That really pissed him off, although he felt he managed to disguise his annoyance pretty well,
and they had a reasonable evening out anyway. And she could never stay over at his place, so he always
had to go round there, and she didn’t have many CDs, and there was no VCR or satellite or cable, so on
a Saturday night they always ended up watching
Casualty
and a crap made-for-TV movie about some
kid with a disease. He was just beginning to wonder whether Angie was exactly what he was looking for
when she decided to finish it.
They were in an Indian restaurant on Holloway Road when she told him.
‘Will, I’m so sorry, but I’m not sure this is working out.’
He didn’t say anything. In the past, any conversation that began in this way usually meant that she had
found something out, or that he had done something mean, or stupid, or grotesquely insensitive, but he
really thought that he had kept a clean sheet in this relationship. His silence bought him time while he
scanned through the memory bank for any indiscretions he might have forgotten about, but there was
nothing. He would have been extremely disappointed if he had found something, an overlooked
infidelity, say, or a casual, unmemorable cruelty. As the whole point of this relationship was his
niceness, any blemish would have meant that his untrustworthiness was so deeply ingrained as to be
ungovernable.
‘It’s not you. You’ve been great. It’s me. Well, my situation, anyway.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with your situation. Not as far as I’m concerned.’ He was so relieved that he
felt like being generous.
‘There are things you don’t know. Things about Simon.’
‘Is he giving you a hard time? Because if he is…’ You’ll what? he wanted to ask himself
contemptuously. You’ll roll yourself a joint when you get home and forget them? You’ll go out with
someone a lot easier?
‘No, not really. Well, I suppose it would look like that from the outside. He’s not very happy about me
seeing somebody else. And I know how that sounds, but I know him, and he just hasn’t come to terms
with us splitting up. And I’m not sure I have either, more to the point. I’m not ready to launch into a
relationship with anybody new yet.’
‘You’ve been doing pretty well.’
‘The tragedy is that I’ve met someone just right for me at precisely the wrong time. I should have
started with a meaningless fling, not a… not with someone who…’
This, he couldn’t help feeling, was kind of ironic. If she but knew it, he was exactly right; if there was
a man better equipped for the meaningless fling, he wouldn’t like to meet him. I’ve been putting this on!
he wanted to tell her. I’m horrible! I’m much shallower than this, honest! But it was too late.
‘I did wonder whether I was rushing you. I’ve really cocked this up, haven’t I?’
‘No, Will, not at all. You’ve been brilliant. I’m so sorry that…’
She was starting to get a little tearful, and he loved her for it. He had never before watched a woman
cry without feeling responsible, and he was rather enjoying the experience.
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‘You don’t have to be sorry for anything. Really.’ Really, really, really.
‘Oh, I do.’
‘You don’t.’
When was the last time he had been in a position to bestow forgiveness? Certainly not since school,
and possibly not even then. Of all the evenings he had spent with Angie, he loved the last one the best.
This, for Will, was the clincher. He knew then that there would be other women like Angie—women
who would start off by thinking that they wanted a regular fuck, and end up deciding that a quiet life
was worth any number of noisy orgasms. As he felt something not dissimilar, although for very different
reasons, he knew he had a lot to offer. Great sex, a lot of ego massage, temporary parenthood without
tears and a guilt-free parting—what more could a man want? Single mothers—bright, attractive,
available women, thousands of them, all over London—were the best invention Will had ever heard of.
His career as a serial nice guy had begun.
Five
One Monday morning his mother started crying before breakfast, and it frightened him. Morning
crying was something new, and it was a bad, bad sign. It meant that it could now happen at any hour of
the day without warning; there was no safe time. Up until today the mornings had been OK; she seemed
to wake up with the hope that whatever was making her unhappy would somehow have vanished
overnight, in her sleep, the way colds and upset stomachs sometimes did. And she had sounded OK this
morning—not angry, not unhappy, not mad, just kind of normal and mum-like—when she shouted for
him to get a move on. But here she was, already at it, slumped over the kitchen table in her dressing-
gown, a half-eaten piece of toast on her plate, her face all puffed-up, snot pouring out of her nose.
Marcus never said anything when she cried. He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t understand why
she did it, and because he didn’t understand he couldn’t help, and because he couldn’t help, he just
ended up standing there and staring at her with his mouth open, and she’d just carry on as if nothing was
happening.
‘Do you want some tea?’
He had to guess at what she was saying, because she was so snuffled up.
‘Yeah. Please.’ He took a clean bowl from the draining board and went to the larder to choose his
cereal. That cheered him up. He’d forgotten that she’d let him put a variety pack in the supermarket
trolley on Saturday morning. He went through all the usual agonies of indecision: he knew he should get
through the boring stuff, the cornflakes and the one with fruit in it, first of all, because if he didn’t eat
them now he’d never eat them, and they’d just sit on the shelf until they got stale, and Mum would get
cross with him, and for the next few months he’d have to stick to an economy-sized packet of something
horrible. He understood all that, yet still he went for the Coco Pops, as he always did. His mother didn’t
notice—the first advantage of her terrible depression that he’d found so far. It wasn’t a big advantage,
though; on the whole he’d rather she was cheerful enough to send him back to the larder. He’d quite
happily give up Coco Pops if she’d give up crying all the time.
He ate his cereal, drank his tea, picked up his bag and gave his mother a kiss, just a normal one, not a
soppy, understanding one, and went out. Neither of them said a word. What else was he supposed to do?
On the way to school he tried to work out what was wrong with her. What could be wrong with her
that he wouldn’t know about? She was in work, so they weren’t poor, although they weren’t rich
either—she was a music therapist, which meant that she was a sort of teacher of handicapped children,
and she was always saying that the money was pitiful, pathetic, lousy, a crime. But they had enough for
the flat, and for food, and for holidays once a year, and even for computer games, once in a while. What
else made you cry, apart from money? Death? But he’d know if anybody important had died; she would
only cry that much about Grandma, Grandpa, his uncle Tom and Tom’s family, and they’d seen them all
the previous weekend, at his cousin Ella’s fourth birthday party. Something to do with men? He knew
she wanted a boyfriend; but he knew because she joked about it sometimes, and he couldn’t see that it
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was possible to go from joking about something now and again to crying about it all the time. Anyway,
she was the one who had got rid of Roger, and if she was desperate she would have kept it going. So
what else was there? He tried to remember what people cried about in
EastEnders
, apart from money,
death and boyfriends, but it wasn’t very helpful: prison sentences, unwanted pregnancies, Aids, stuff
that didn’t seem to apply to his mum.
He’d forgotten about it all by the time he was inside the school gates. It wasn’t like he’d
decided
to
forget about it. It was simply that an instinct for self-preservation took over. When you were having
trouble with Lee Hartley and his mates, it hardly mattered whether your mum was going round the bend
or not. But it was OK, this morning. He could see them all leaning against the wall of the gym, huddled
around some item of treasure, safe in the distance, so he reached the form room without any difficulty.
His friends Nicky and Mark were already there, playing Tetris on Mark’s Gameboy. He went over to
them.
‘All right?’
Nicky said hello, but Mark was too absorbed to notice him. He tried to position himself so he could
see how Mark was getting on, but Nicky was standing in the only place that offered a glimpse of the
Gameboy’s tiny screen, so he sat on a desk waiting for them to finish. They didn’t finish. Or rather, they
did, but then they just started again; they didn’t offer him a game or put it away because he had arrived.
Marcus felt he was being left out deliberately, and he didn’t know what he was supposed to have done
wrong.
‘Are you going to the computer room at lunchtime?’ That was how he knew Nicky and Mark—
through the computer club. It was a stupid question, because they always went. If they didn’t go, then
like him they would be tiptoeing timidly around the edges of lunchtime, trying not to get noticed by
anybody with a big mouth and a sharp haircut.
‘Dunno. Maybe. What do you reckon, Mark?’
‘Dunno. Probably.’
‘Right. See you there, then, maybe.’
He’d see them before then. He was seeing them now, for example—it wasn’t like he was going
anywhere. But it was something to say.
Breaktime was the same: Nicky and Mark on the Gameboy, Marcus hovering around on the outside.
OK, they weren’t real friends—not like the friends he’d had in Cambridge—but they got on OK,
usually, if only because they weren’t like the other kids in their class. Marcus had even been to Nicky’s
house once, after school one day. They knew they were nerdy and geeky and all the other things some of
the girls called them (all three of them wore specs, none of them was bothered about clothes, Mark had
ginger hair and freckles, and Nicky looked a good three years younger than everyone else in year seven),
but it didn’t worry them much. The important thing was that they had each other, that they weren’t
hugging the corridors trying desperately not to get noticed.
‘Oi! Fuzzy! Give us a song.’ A couple of year eights were standing in the doorway. Marcus didn’t
know them, so his fame was obviously spreading. He tried to look more purposeful: he craned his neck
to make it look as though he was concentrating on the Gameboy, but he still couldn’t see anything, and
anyway Mark and Nicky started to back away, leaving him on his own.
‘Hey, Ginger! Chris Evans! Speccy!’ Mark started to redden.
‘They’re all speccy.’
‘Yeah, I forgot. Oi, Ginger Speccy! Is that a love bite on your neck?’
They thought this was hilarious. They always made jokes about girls and sex; he didn’t know why.
Probably because they were sex-mad.
Mark gave up the struggle and turned the Gameboy off. This had been happening a lot recently, and
there wasn’t much you could do about it. You just had to stand there and take it until they got bored. It
was finding something to do in the meantime, some way to be and to look, that made it difficult. Marcus
had recently taken to making lists in his head; his mum had a game where you had cards with categories
on them, like, say, ‘Puddings’, and the other team had to guess what twelve examples were on the card,
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and then you swapped round and had to guess what twelve examples were on the other team’s card, like
‘Football teams’. He couldn’t play it here because he didn’t have the cards and there wasn’t another
team, but he played a variation of this: he thought of something that had lots of examples, like, say,
‘Fruit’, and tried to think of as many different fruits as he could before whoever it was who was giving
them a hard time went away again.
Chocolate bars. Mars, of course. Snickers. Bounty. Were there any more ice-cream ones? He couldn’t
remember. Topic. Picnic.
‘Hey, Marcus, who’s your favourite rapper? Tupac? Warren G?’ Marcus knew these names, but he
didn’t know what they meant, or any of their songs, and anyway he knew he wasn’t meant to give an
answer. If he gave an answer he’d be sunk.
His mind had gone blank, but then this was part of the point of the game. It would be easy to think of
the names of chocolate bars at home, but here, with these kids giving him a hard time, it was almost
impossible.
Milky Way.
‘Oi, Midget, do you know what a blow job is?’ Nicky was pretending to stare out of the window, but
Marcus could tell he wasn’t seeing anything at all.
Picnic. No, he’d already had that one.
‘Come on, this is boring.’
And they were gone. Only six. Pathetic.
The three of them didn’t say anything for a while. Then Nicky looked at Mark, and Mark looked at
Nicky, and finally Mark spoke.
‘Marcus, we don’t want you hanging around with us any more.’
He didn’t know how to react, so he said, ‘Oh,’ and then, ‘Why not?’
‘Because of them.’
‘They’re nothing to do with me.’
‘Yes they are. We never got in any trouble with anyone before we knew you, and now we get this
every day.’
Marcus could see that. He could imagine that if they had never met him, Nicky and Mark would have
had as much contact with Lee Hartley and the rest of them as koala bears have with piranha fish. But
now, because of him, the koala bears had fallen into the sea and the piranhas were taking an interest in
them. Nobody had hurt them, not yet, and Marcus knew all the stuff about sticks and stones and names.
But insults were hurled in just the same way as missiles, if you thought about it, and if other people
happened to be standing in the line of fire they got hit too. That’s what had happened with Nicky and
Mark: he had made them visible, he had turned them into targets, and if he was any kind of a friend at all
he’d take himself well away from them. It’s just that he had nowhere else to go.
Six
I’m a single father. I have a two-year-old boy. I’m a single father. I have a two-year-old boy. I’m a
single father. I have a two-year-old boy.
However many times Will told himself this, he could always
find some reason that prevented him from believing it; in his own head—not the place that counted the
most, but important nevertheless—he didn’t feel like a parent. He was too young, too old, too stupid, too
smart, too groovy, too impatient, too selfish, too careless, too careful (whatever the contraceptive
circumstances of the woman he was seeing, he always, always used a Durex, even in the days before
you had to), he didn’t know enough about kids, he went out too often, he drank too much, he took too
many drugs. When he looked in the mirror, he didn’t, couldn’t, see a dad, especially a single dad.
He was trying to see a single dad in the mirror because he had run out of single mums to sleep with; in
fact, Angie had so far proved to be both the beginning and the end of his supply. It was all very well
deciding that single mums were the future, that there were millions of sad, Julie Christie-like waifs just
dying for his call, but the frustrating truth was that he didn’t have any of their phone numbers. Where
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did they hang out?
It took him longer than it should have done to realize that, by definition, single mothers had children,
and children, famously, prevented one from hanging out anywhere. He had made a few gentle, half-
hearted enquiries of friends and acquaintances, but had so far failed to make any real headway; the
people he knew either didn’t know any single mothers, or were unwilling to effect the necessary
introductions due to Will’s legendarily poor romantic track record. But now he had found the ideal
solution to this unexpected dearth of prey. He had invented a two-year-old son called Ned and had
joined a single parents’ group.
Most people would not have bothered to go to these lengths to indulge a whim, but Will quite often
bothered to do things that most people wouldn’t bother to do, simply because he had the time to bother.
Doing nothing all day gave him endless opportunities to dream and scheme and pretend to be something
he wasn’t. He had, after a fit of remorse following a weekend of extreme self-indulgence, volunteered to
work in a soup kitchen, and even though he never actually reported for duty, the phone call had allowed
him to pretend, for a couple of days, that he was the kind of guy who might. And he had thought about
VSO and filled in the forms, and he had cut out an advert in the local paper about teaching slow learners
to read, and he had contacted estate agents about opening a restaurant and then a bookshop…
The point was that if you had a history of pretending, then joining a single parent group when you
were not a single parent was neither problematic nor particularly scary. If it didn’t work out, then he’d
just have to try something else. It was no big deal.
SPAT (Single Parents—Alone Together) met on the first Thursday of the month in a local adult
education centre, and tonight was Will’s first time. He was almost sure that tonight would be his last
time, too: he’d get something wrong, like the name of Postman Pat’s cat, or the colour of Noddy’s car
(or, more crucially, the name of his own child—for some reason he couldn’t stop thinking of him as
Ted, and he had only christened him Ned this morning), and he’d be exposed as a fraud and
frogmarched off the premises. If there was a chance of meeting someone like Angie, however, it had to
be worth a try.
The car park at the centre contained just one other vehicle, a beaten-up B-reg 2CV which had,
according to the stickers in its window, been to Chessington World of Adventure and Alton Towers;
Will’s car, a new GTi, hadn’t been anywhere like that at all. Why not? He couldn’t think of any reason
why not, apart from the glaringly obvious one, that he was a childless single man aged thirty-six and
therefore had never had the desire to drive miles and miles to plunge down a plastic fairy mountain on a
tea-tray.
The centre depressed him. He hadn’t set foot inside a place with classrooms and corridors and home-
made posters for nearly twenty years, and he had forgotten that British education smelt of disinfectant. It
hadn’t occurred to him that he wouldn’t be able to find the SPAT party. He thought he’d be led straight
to it by the happy buzz of people forgetting their troubles and getting roaring drunk, but there was no
happy buzz, just the distant, mournful clank of a bucket. Finally he spotted a piece of file paper pinned
to a classroom door with the word SPAT! scrawled on it in felt-tip pen. The exclamation mark put him
off. It was trying too hard.
There was only one woman in the room. She was taking bottles—of white wine, beer, mineral water
and supermarket-brand cola—out of a cardboard box and putting them on to a table in the centre of the
room. The rest of the tables had been pushed to the back; the chairs were stacked in rows behind them. It
was the most desolate party venue Will had ever seen.
‘Have I come to the right place?’ he asked the woman. She had pointy features and red cheeks; she
looked like Worzel Gummidge’s friend Aunt Sally.
‘SPAT? Come in. Are you Will? I’m Frances.’
He smiled and shook her hand. He had spoken to Frances on the phone earlier in the day.
‘I’m sorry there’s nobody else here yet. We quite often get off to a slow start. Babysitters.’
‘Of course.’ So he was wrong to be prompt. He had more or less given himself away already. And, of
course, he should never have said ‘of course’, which implied that she had clarified something he was
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