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‘No, I’m not.’ He was, but pizza was too cheap, he reckoned.
They went back to queuing in silence. Nobody was going to get married to anybody at this rate. It was
too wet and too horrible.
‘Tell me why you want to go to Planet Hollywood and I’ll see if I can think of anywhere like it,’ said
Will.
‘I don’t know. Because it’s famous. And it’s got the sort of food I like. Fries and things.’
‘So if I can think of somewhere famous that serves fries, we can go there?’
‘Yeah. But it’s got to be my sort of famous, not your sort of famous.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It’s got to be the sort of famous that kids know about. You can’t just tell me it’s famous, because if
I’ve never heard of it then it’s not.’
‘So if I said to you, how about Twenty-Eight, you wouldn’t want to go.’
‘No. Not famous. Never heard of it.’
‘But famous people go there.’
‘Like who?’
‘Actors and so on.’
‘Which actors?’
‘I should think they’ve all been there at some time or another. But they don’t tell you in advance. I’ll
be straight with you, Marcus. We could go there now and we might bump into Tom Cruise and Nicole
Kidman. Or we might see nobody at all. But they do good fries. The thing is, we’ll be standing here for
an hour, and then when we get in there’ll be nobody there worth seeing anyway.’
‘OK then.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Good man.’
No famous people ever went to this Twenty-Eight place. You could tell. It was nice, and the fries were
good, but it was just normal; it didn’t have anything on the walls, like Clint Eastwood’s jacket, or the
mask Michael Keaton wore in
Batman.
It didn’t even have any signed photos. The Indian restaurant near
their flat that delivered their takeaways wasn’t famous at all, but even that had a signed picture of
someone who used to play for Arsenal ages ago. He didn’t mind though. The main thing was that they
were sat down and dry, and Will and his mother could begin to talk.
They needed some help at first; nobody said anything until the waiter came to take their order.
‘Mushroom omelette and fries, please. And a Coke,’ said Marcus.
‘I’ll have the swordfish steak,’ said Will. ‘No vegetables, just a side salad.’
Fiona was having difficulty deciding.
‘Why don’t you have the swordfish steak?’ said Marcus.
‘Ummm…’
He tried to get his mother’s attention across the table without Will noticing. He nodded hard, once, and
then he coughed.
‘Are you all right, sweetie?’
He just felt it would help if his mum ordered the same food as Will. He didn’t know why. It wasn’t
like you could talk for ages about swordfish steak or anything, but maybe it would show them that they
had something in common, that sometimes they thought the same way about things. Even if they didn’t.
‘We’re vegetarian,’ said Marcus. ‘But we eat fish.’
‘So we’re not really vegetarian.’
‘We don’t eat fish very often though. Fish and chips sometimes. We never cook fish at home, do we?’
‘Not often, no.’
‘Never.’
‘Oh, don’t show me up.’
He didn’t know how saying she never cooked fish was showing her up—did men like women who
cooked fish? Why?—but that was the last thing he wanted to do.
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‘All right,’ he said. ‘Not never. Sometimes.’
‘Shall I come back in a couple of minutes?’ said the waiter. Marcus had forgotten he was still there.
‘Ummm…’
‘Have the swordfish,’ said Marcus.
‘I’ll have the penne pesto,’ said his mother. ‘With a mixed salad.’
Will ordered a beer, and his mum ordered a glass of white wine. Nobody said anything again.
Marcus didn’t have a girlfriend, nor had he ever come close to having one, unless you counted Holly
Garrett, which he didn’t. But he knew this: if a girl and a boy met, and they didn’t have a boyfriend or a
girlfriend, and they both looked all right, and they didn’t mind each other, then they might as well go out
together. What was the point in not? Will didn’t have a girlfriend, unless you counted Suzie, which he
didn’t, and his mum didn’t have a boyfriend, so… It would be good for all of them. The more he thought
about it, the more obvious it seemed.
It wasn’t that he needed someone to replace his dad. He’d talked about that with his mum ages ago.
They’d been watching a programme on TV about the family, and some silly fat Tory woman said that
everyone should have a mother and a father, and his mum got angry and later depressed. Then, before
the hospital thing, he’d thought the Tory woman was stupid, and he’d told his mum as much, but at the
time he hadn’t worked out that two was a dangerous number. Now he had worked that out, he wasn’t
sure it made much difference to what he thought about the fat Tory woman’s idea; he didn’t care
whether the family he wanted were all men, or all women, or all children. He simply wanted people.
‘Don’t just sit there,’ he said suddenly.
Will and his mother looked at him.
‘You heard me. Don’t just sit there. Talk to each other.’
‘I’m sure we will in a moment,’ said his mother.
‘Lunch will be over before you two’ve thought of anything to say,’ Marcus grumbled.
‘What do you want us to talk about?’ Will asked.
‘Anything. Politics. Films. Murders. I don’t care.’
‘I’m not sure that’s how conversation happens,’ said his mother.
‘Maybe you should have worked it out by now. You’re old enough.’
‘Marcus!’
Will was laughing, though.
‘He’s right. We have, I don’t know how old you are, Fiona, but we have at least sixty years of
conversational experience between us here, and maybe we ought to be able to get something going.’
‘OK then.’
‘So.’
‘After you.’
They both laughed, but neither of them said anything.
‘Will,’ said Marcus.
‘Yes, Marcus,’ said Will.
‘What do you think of John Major?’
‘Not much.’
‘What about you, Mum?’
‘You know what I think of him.’
‘Tell Will.’
‘Not much.’
This was useless.
‘Why?’
‘Oh, Marcus, leave us alone. You’re making it more difficult, not easier. You’re making us self-
conscious. We’ll start talking soon.’
‘When?’
‘Stop it.’
‘Have you ever been married, Will?’
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‘Marcus, I’m going to get cross with you in a minute.’
‘It’s OK, Fiona. No, I haven’t. Have you?’
‘No, course not. I’m not old enough.’
‘Oh.’
‘Now ask Mum.’
‘Fiona, have you ever been married?’
‘No.’
For a moment, Marcus was confused; when he was a real kid, a little kid, he used to think that you had
to be married to be a father or mother, in the same way that you had to have a driving licence to drive.
He knew now that this wasn’t true, and he knew too that his parents had never been married, but
somehow the ideas you grew up with were hard to shake off.
‘Did you want to get married, Mum?’
‘Not really. It didn’t seem important.’
‘So why do other people bother?’
‘Oh, all sorts of reasons. Security. Pressure from family. Misguided notions of romance.’
Will laughed at this. ‘Cynic,’ he said.
Marcus didn’t understand this, but that was good: his mum and Will now had something that he hadn’t
started.
‘Do you still see Marcus’s dad?’
‘Sometimes. Not very often. Marcus sees him quite a lot. How about you? Do you still see your ex?’
‘Ummm… Well, yes. All the time. She picked Ned up this morning.’ He said this in a funny way,
Marcus thought. Almost like he’d forgotten and then remembered.
‘And is that all right?’
‘Oh, it’s OK. We have our moments.’
‘How come you ended up looking after Ned? I mean, I’m sure you’re a brilliant dad and everything,
but that’s not usually how it works, is it?’
‘No. She was going through a
Kramer vs Kramer
kind of thing at the time. You know, a sort of I-
want-to-find-out-who-I-am malarkey.’
‘And did she find out who she was?’
‘Not really. I don’t know if anyone really does, do they?’
The food arrived, but the two adults hardly noticed; Marcus dug happily into his omelette and fries.
Would they move into Will’s place, he wondered, or buy somewhere new?
Fourteen
Will knew that Fiona was not his type. For a start, she didn’t look the way he wanted women to look—
in fact, he doubted whether looks were important to her at all. He couldn’t be doing with that. People,
women and men, had a duty to care, he felt, even if they didn’t have the requisite raw material—unless
they weren’t interested in the sexual side of life at all, in which case, fair enough. You could do what
you wanted then. Einstein, for example… Will didn’t know the first thing about Einstein’s private life,
but in his photos he looked like a guy with other things on his mind. But Fiona wasn’t Einstein. She
might have been as brainy as Einstein, for all he knew, but she was clearly interested in relationships,
judging from the conversation they had had over lunch, so why didn’t she make more of an effort? Why
didn’t she have a decent hair cut, instead of all that frizz, and why didn’t she wear clothes which looked
like they mattered to her? He didn’t get that at all.
And she was just too hippy. He could see now why Marcus was so weird. She believed in alternative
things, like aromatherapy and vegetarianism and the environment, stuff he didn’t give much of a shit
about, really. If they went out they’d fight terribly, he knew, and that would upset her, and the last thing
he wanted to do at the moment was upset her.
He had to say that the thing he found most attractive about her was that she had tried to kill herself.
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Now that was interesting—sexy, almost, in a morbid kind of way. But how can you contemplate dating
a woman who might top herself at any moment? Before, he thought that going out with a mother was a
heavy number; how much heavier would it be going out with a suicidal mother? But he didn’t want to
let it drop. He still had this sense that Fiona and Marcus could replace soup kitchens and
Media
Guardian
jobs, possibly forever. He wouldn’t have to do that much, after all—the occasional swordfish
steak, the odd visit to a crappy film that he might have gone to anyway. How hard could that be? It was
a damn sight easier than trying to force-feed vagrants. Good works! Helping people! That was the way
forward for him now. The way he saw it, he’d helped Angie by sleeping with her (although admittedly
there had been a little speck of self-interest there) and now he was going to find out whether it was
possible to help someone without sleeping with them. It had to be, surely? Other people had managed,
Mother Teresa and Florence Nightingale and so on, although he suspected that when he entered the
good-works fray his style would be somewhat different.
They had made no further arrangement after the lunch. They left the restaurant, wandered around
Covent Garden, caught the tube back to north London, and he was back home in time for
Sports Report.
But he knew they’d all started something that wasn’t finished.
Within a few days he’d changed his mind completely. He had no interest in good works. He had no
interest in Marcus and Fiona. He would, he felt sure, break out into a cold sweat of embarrassment every
time he thought of them. He would never see them again; he doubted, in fact, whether he would ever be
able to go to Holloway again, just in case he bumped into them. He knew he was overreacting, but not
by much. Singing! How could you have anything to do with someone who makes you sing! He knew
they were both a little flaky, but. . .
It began ordinarily enough, with an invitation to supper, and though he didn’t like what they had to
eat—something vegetarian with chickpeas and rice and tinned tomatoes—he quite enjoyed the
conversation. Fiona told him about her job as a music therapist, and Marcus told Fiona that Will earned
millions of pounds a minute because his dad had written a song. Will helped with the washing up, and
Fiona made them a cup of tea, and then she sat down at the piano and started to play.
She wasn’t bad. The piano playing was better than her voice, but her voice wasn’t awful, simply
adequate, if a little thin, and she could certainly carry a tune. No, it wasn’t the quality that embarrassed
him, it was the sincerity. He’d been with people who had picked up guitars and sat down at pianos
before (although not for a very long time), but they had always sent themselves up in some way: they
had chosen stupid songs to play, or sung them in a stupid way, or camped them up or done anything to
show they didn’t mean it.
Fiona meant it. She meant ‘Knocking On Heaven’s Door’, and then she meant ‘Fire And Rain’, and
then she meant ‘Both Sides Now’. There was nothing between her and the songs; she was inside them.
She even closed her eyes when she was singing.
‘Do you want to come over here so you can see the words?’ she asked him after ‘Both Sides Now’.
He’d been sitting at the dining table staring hard at Marcus, until Marcus started singing too, at which
point he turned his attention to the wall.
‘Ummm… What’s next?’
‘Any requests?’
He wanted her to play something that she couldn’t close her eyes to, ‘Roll Out The Barrel,’ say, or
‘Knees Up, Mother Brown’, but the mood had already been set.
‘Anything.’
She chose ‘Killing Me Softly With His Song’. There was nothing he could do but stand next to her and
let the odd half-syllable of lyric crawl choking out of his mouth. ‘Smile… While… Boy… Ling…’ He
knew, of course he knew, that the song couldn’t last forever, that the evening couldn’t last forever, that
he would soon be home tucked up in bed, that singing round the piano with a depressive hippy and her
weirdo son wouldn’t kill him. He knew all that, but he didn’t
feel
it. He couldn’t do anything with these
people after all, he could see that now. He’d been stupid to think there was anything here for him.
When he got home he put a Pet Shop Boys CD on, and watched
Prisoner: Cell Block H
with the sound
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down. He wanted to hear people who didn’t mean it, and he wanted to watch people he could laugh at.
He got drunk, too; he filled a glass with ice and poured himself scotch after scotch. And as the drink
began to take hold, he realized that people who meant it were much more likely to kill themselves than
people who didn’t: he couldn’t recall having even the faintest urge to take his own life, and he found it
hard to imagine that he ever would. When it came down to it, he just wasn’t that engaged. You had to be
engaged to be a vegetarian; you had to be engaged to sing ‘Both Sides Now’ with your eyes closed;
when it came down to it, you had to be engaged to be a mother. He wasn’t much bothered either way
about anything, and that, he knew, would guarantee him a long and depression-free life. He’d made a
big mistake thinking that good works were a way forward for him. They weren’t. They drove you mad.
Fiona did good works and they had driven her mad: she was vulnerable, messed-up, inadequate. Will
had a system going here that was going to whizz him effortlessly to the grave. He didn’t want to fuck it
up now.
Fiona called him once more, soon after the excruciating supper; she left a message on the machine,
and he didn’t answer it. Suzie called him too, and though he wanted to see her, he suspected she was
ringing on Fiona’s behalf, so he was vague and non-committal. It looked to him like he’d taken the
single mum thing as far as it would go, and he was preparing for a return to the life he had been living
before he met Angie. Maybe it was for the best.
He went record shopping, he went clothes shopping, he played a bit of tennis, he went to the pub, he
watched telly, he went to see films and bands with friends. Time units were filled effortlessly. He had
even gone back to reading books in the afternoon; he was halfway through a James Ellroy thriller one
Thursday, in that horrible dead dark time between
Countdown
and the news, when the doorbell went.
He was expecting to see someone selling J-cloths and brushes, so he found himself looking at nothing
when he opened the door, because his visitor was a good foot shorter than the average hawker.
‘I’ve come to see you,’ said Marcus.
‘Oh. Right. Come in.’ He said it warmly enough, as far as he could tell, but for some reason he felt a
rising tide of panic.
Marcus marched into the sitting room, sat down on the sofa and stared intently at everything.
‘You haven’t got a kid, have you?’
That was certainly one explanation for the panic.
‘Well,’ said Will, as if he were about to launch into a very long and involved story, the details of
which were currently eluding him.
Marcus got up and walked around the flat.
‘Where’s your loo? I’m dying for a pee.’
‘Just down the hall there.’
While Marcus was gone, Will tried to think of a story that would account for the complete absence of
anything Ned-related, but there was nothing. He could either tell Marcus that
of course
he had a child,
and that the lack of both child and child-related paraphernalia was simply… simply something he would
think of later; or he could dissolve into tears and own up to being a pathetic fantasist. He decided against
the latter version.
‘You’ve only got one bedroom,’ said Marcus when he got back.
‘Have you been nosing around?’
‘Yeah. You’ve got one bedroom, you’ve got no children’s toys in the bathroom, there are no toys in
here… You haven’t even got any photos of him.’
‘What business is it of yours?’
‘None. Apart from you’ve been lying to me and my mum and my mum’s friend.’
‘Who told you where I lived?’
‘I followed you home once.’
‘Where from?’
‘I saw you out wandering around and I followed you.’
This was plausible. He was often out wandering around and, in any case, he hadn’t told Suzie or Fiona
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