‘We were wondering,’ said John, ‘whether you’d like to be Imogen’s godfather?’ The two of them sat there with an expectant smile on their faces, as if he were about to leap to his feet, burst into tears and wrestle them to the carpet in a euphoric embrace. Will laughed nervously.
‘Godfather? Church and things? Birthday presents? Adoption if you’re killed in an air crash?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You’re kidding.’
‘We’ve always thought you have hidden depths,’ said John.
‘Ah, but you see I haven’t. I really am this shallow.’
They were still smiling. They weren’t getting it.
‘Listen. I’m touched that you asked. But I can’t think of anything worse. Seriously. It’s just not my sort of thing.’
He didn’t stay much longer.
A couple of weeks later Will met Angie and became a temporary stepfather for the first time. Maybe if he had swallowed his pride and his hatred of children and the family and domesticity and monogamy and early nights, he could have saved himself an awful lot of trouble.
three
During the night after his first day Marcus woke up every half-hour or so. He could tell from the luminous hands of his dinosaur clock: 10.41, 11.19, 11.55, 12.35, 12.55, 1.31… He couldn’t believe he was going to have to go back there the next morning, and the morning after that, and the morning after that, and… well, then it would be the weekend, but more or less every morning for the rest of his life, just about. Every time he woke up his first thought was that there must be some kind of way past, or round, or even through, this horrible feeling; whenever he had been upset about anything before, there had usually turned out to be some kind of answer – one that mostly involved telling his mum what was bothering him. But there wasn’t anything she could do this time. She wasn’t going to move him to another school, and even if she did it wouldn’t make a whole lot of difference. He’d still be who he was, and that, it seemed to him, was the basic problem.
He just wasn’t right for schools. Not secondary schools, anyway. That was it. And how could you explain that to anyone? It was OK not to be right for some things (he already knew he wasn’t right for parties, because he was too shy, or for baggy trousers, because his legs were too short), but not being right for school was a big problem. Everyone went to school. There was no way round it. Some kids, he knew, got taught by their parents at home, but his mum couldn’t do that because she went out to work. Unless he paid her to teach him – but she’d told him not long ago that she got three hundred and fifty pounds a week from her job. Three hundred and fifty pounds a week! Where was he going to get that kind of money from? Not from a paper round, he knew that much. The only other kind of person he could think of who didn’t go to school was the Macaulay Culkin kind. They’d had something about him on Saturday-morning TV once, and they said he got taught in a caravan sort of thing by a private tutor. That would be OK, he supposed. Better than OK, because Macaulay Culkin probably got three hundred and fifty pounds a week, maybe even more, which meant that if he were Macaulay Culkin he could pay his mum to teach him. But if being Macaulay Culkin meant being good at drama, then forget it: he was crap at drama, because he hated standing up in front of people. Which was why he hated school. Which was why he wanted to be Macaulay Culkin. Which was why he was never going to be Macaulay Culkin in a thousand years, let alone in the next few days. He was going to have to go to school tomorrow.
All that night he thought like boomerangs fly: an idea would shoot way off into the distance, all the way to a caravan in Hollywood and, for a moment, when he had got as far away from school and reality as it was possible to go, he was reasonably happy; then it would begin the return journey, thump him on the head, and leave him in exactly the place he had started from. And all the time it got nearer and nearer to the morning.
He was quiet at breakfast. ‘You’ll get used to it,’ his mum said as he was eating his cereal, probably because he was looking miserable. He just nodded, and smiled at her; it was an OK thing to say. There had been times when he knew, somewhere in him, that he would get used to it, whatever it was, because he had learnt that some hard things became softer after a very little while. The day after his dad left, his mum had taken him to Glastonbury with her friend Corinne and they’d had a brilliant time in a tent. But this was only going to get worse. That first terrible, horrible, frightening day was going to be as good as it got.
He got to school early, went to the form room, sat down at his desk. He was safe enough there. The kids who had given him a hard time yesterday were probably not the sort to arrive at school first thing; they’d be off somewhere smoking and taking drugs and raping people, he thought darkly. There were a couple of girls in the room, but they ignored him, unless the snort of laughter he heard while he was getting his reading book out had anything to do with him.
What was there to laugh at? Not much, really, unless you were the kind of person who was on permanent lookout for something to laugh at. Unfortunately, that was exactly the kind of person most kids were, in his experience. They patrolled up and down school corridors like sharks, except that what they were on the lookout for wasn’t flesh but the wrong trousers, or the wrong haircut, or the wrong shoes, any or all of which sent them wild with excitement. As he was usually wearing the wrong shoes or the wrong trousers, and his haircut was wrong all the time, every day of the week, he didn’t have to do very much to send them all demented.
Marcus knew he was weird, and he knew that part of the reason he was weird was because his mum was weird. She just didn’t get this, any of it. She was always telling him that only shallow people made judgements on the basis of clothes or hair; she didn’t want him to watch rubbish television, or listen to rubbish music, or play rubbish computer games (she thought they were all rubbish), which meant that if he wanted to do anything that any of the other kids spent their time doing he had to argue with her for hours. He usually lost, and she was so good at arguing that he felt good about losing. She could explain why listening to Joni Mitchell and Bob Marley (who happened to be her two favourite singers) was much better for him than listening to Snoop Doggy Dogg, and why it was more important to read books than to play on the Gameboy his dad had given him. But he couldn’t pass any of this on to the kids at school. If he tried to tell Lee Hartley – the biggest and loudest and nastiest of the kids he’d met yesterday – that he didn’t approve of Snoop Doggy Dogg because Snoop Doggy Dogg had a bad attitude to women, Lee Hartley would thump him, or call him something that he didn’t want to be called. It wasn’t so bad in Cambridge, because there were loads of kids who weren’t right for school, and loads of mums who had made them that way, but in London it was different. The kids were harder and meaner and less understanding, and it seemed to him that if his mum had made him change schools just because she had found a better job, then she should at least have the decency to stop all that let’s-talk-about-this stuff.
He was quite happy at home, listening to Joni Mitchell and reading books, but it didn’t do him any good at school. It was funny, because most people would probably think the opposite – that reading books at home was bound to help, but it didn’t: it made him different, and because he was different he felt uncomfortable, and because he felt uncomfortable he could feel himself floating away from everyone and everything, kids and teachers and lessons.
It wasn’t all his mum’s fault. Sometimes he was weird just because of who he was, rather than what she did. Like the singing… When was he going to learn about the singing? He always had a tune in his head, but every now and again, when he was nervous, the tune just sort of slipped out. For some reason he couldn’t spot the difference between inside and outside, because there didn’t seem to be a difference. It was like when you went swimming in a heated pool on a warm day, and you could get out of the water without noticing that you were getting out, because the temperatures were the same; that seemed to be what happened with the singing. Anyway, a song had slip
ped out yesterday during English, while the teacher was reading; if you wanted to make people laugh at you, really, really laugh, then the best way, he had discovered, better even than to have a bad haircut, was to sing out loud when everybody else in the room was quiet and bored.
This morning he was OK until the first period after break. He was quiet during registration, he avoided people in the corridors, and then it was double maths, which he enjoyed, and which he was good at, although they were doing stuff that he’d already done before. At breaktime he went to tell Mr Brooks, one of the other maths teachers, that he wanted to join his computer club. He was pleased he did that, because his instinct was to stay in the form room and read, but he toughed it out; he even had to cross the playground.
But then in English things went bad again. They were using one of those books that had a bit of everything in them; the bit they were looking at was taken from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He knew the story, because he’d seen the film with his mum, and so he could see really clearly, so clearly that he wanted to run from the room, what was going to happen.
When it happened it was even worse than he thought it was going to be. Ms Maguire got one of the girls who she knew was a good reader to read out the passage, and then she tried to get a discussion going.
‘Now, one of the things this book is about is… How do we know who’s mad and who isn’t? Because, you know, in a way we’re all a bit mad, and if someone decides that we’re a bit mad, how do we… how do we show them we’re sane?’
Silence. A couple of the kids sighed and rolled their eyes at each other. One thing Marcus had noticed was that when you came into a school late you could tell straight away how well the teachers got on with a class. Ms Maguire was young and nervous and she was struggling, he reckoned. This class could go either way.
‘OK, let’s put it another way. How can we tell if people are mad?’
Here it comes, he thought. Here it comes. This is it.
‘If they sing for no reason in class, miss.’
Laughter. But then it all got worse than he’d expected. Everyone turned round and looked at him; he looked at Ms Maguire, but she had this big forced grin on and she wouldn’t catch his eye.
‘OK, that’s one way of telling, yes. You’d think that someone who does that would be a little potty. But leaving Marcus out of it for a moment…’
More laughter. He knew what she was doing and why, and he hated her.
four
Will first saw Angie – or, as it turned out, he didn’t see her – in Championship Vinyl, a little record shop off the Holloway Road. He was browsing, filling up the time, vaguely trying to hunt down an old R & B anthology he used to own when he was younger, one of those he had loved and lost; he heard her tell the surly and depressive assistant that she was looking for a Pinky and Perky record for her niece. He was trawling through the racks while she was being served, so he never caught a glimpse of her face, but he saw a lot of honey-blond hair, and he heard the kind of vaguely husky voice that he and everyone else thought of as sexy, so he listened while she explained that her niece didn’t even know who Pinky and Perky were. ‘Don’t you think that’s terrible? Fancy being five and not knowing who Pinky and Perky are! What are they teaching these kids!’
She was trying to be jolly, but Will had learnt to his cost that jollity was frowned upon in Championship Vinyl. She was, as he knew she would be, met with a withering look of contempt and a mumble which indicated that she was wasting the assistant’s valuable time.
Two days later, he found himself sitting next to the same woman in a café on Upper Street. He recognized her voice (they both ordered a cappuccino and croissant), the blond hair and her denim jacket. They both got up to get one of the cafe’s newspapers – she took the Guardian, so he was left with the Mail- and he smiled, but she clearly didn’t remember him, and he would have left it at that if she hadn’t been so pretty.
‘I like Pinky and Perky,’ he said in what he hoped was a gentle, friendly and humorously patronizing tone, but he could see immediately that he had made a terrible mistake, that this was not the same woman, that she didn’t have the faintest idea what he was talking about. He wanted to tear out his tongue and grind it into the wooden floor with his foot.
She looked at him, smiled nervously and glanced across at the waiter, probably calculating how long it would take for the waiter to hurl himself across the room and wrestle Will to the floor. Will both understood and sympathized. If a complete stranger were to sit down next to you in a coffee shop and tell you quietly that he liked Pinky and Perky as an opening conversational gambit, you could only presume that you were about to be decapitated and hidden under the floorboards.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I thought you were someone else.’ He blushed, and the blush seemed to relax her: his embarrassment was some kind of indication of sanity, at least. They returned to their newspapers, but the woman kept breaking into a smile and looking across at him.
‘I know this sounds nosy,’ she said eventually, ‘but I’ve got to ask you. Who did you think I was? I’ve been trying to come up with some kind of story, and I can’t.’
So he explained, and she laughed again, and then finally he was given a chance to start over and converse normally. They talked about not working in the morning (he didn’t own up to not working in the afternoon either), and the record shop, and Pinky and Perky, of course, and several other children’s television characters. He had never before attempted to start a relationship cold in this way, but by the time they had finished their second cappuccino he had a phone number and a date for dinner.
When they met again she told him about her kids straight away; he wanted to throw his napkin on the floor, push the table over and run.
‘So?’ he said. It was, of course, the right thing to say.
‘I just thought you ought to know. It makes a difference to some people.’
‘In what way?’
‘Guys, I mean.’
‘Well, yes, I worked that out.’
‘I’m sorry, I’m not making this very easy, am I?’
‘You’re doing fine.’
‘It’s just that… if this is a date date, and it feels like one to me, then I thought I ought to tell you.’
‘Thank you. But really, it’s no problem. I would have been disappointed if you didn’t have children.’
She laughed. ‘Disappointed? Why?’
This was a good question. Why? Obviously he had said it because he thought it sounded smooth and winning, but he couldn’t tell her that.
‘Because I’ve never been out with someone who was a mum before, and I’ve always wanted to. I think I’d be good at it.’
‘Good at what?’
Right. Good at what? What was he good at? This was the million-dollar question, the one he had never been able to answer about anything. Maybe he would be good at children, even though he hated them and everyone responsible for bringing them into the world. Maybe he had written John and Christine and baby Imogen off too hastily. Maybe this was it! Uncle Will!
‘I don’t know. Good at kids’ things. Messing about things.’
He must be, surely. Everyone was, weren’t they? Maybe he should have been working with kids all this time. Maybe this was a turning point in his life!
It had to be said that Angie’s beauty was not irrelevant to his decision to reassess his affinity with children. The long blond hair, he now knew, was accompanied by a calm, open face, big blue eyes and extraordinarily sexy crows’ feet – she was beautiful in a very winning, wholesome, Julie Christie-type way. And that was the point. When had he ever been out with a woman who looked like Julie Christie? People who looked like Julie Christie didn’t go out with people like him. They went out with other film stars, or peers of the realm, or Formula One drivers. What was happening here? He decided that children were what was happening here; that children served as a symbolic blemish, like a birthmark or obesity, which gave him a chance where previously the
re would have been none. Maybe children democratized beautiful single women.
‘I’ll tell you,’ Angie was saying, although he had missed much of the cogitation that had brought her to this point, ‘when you’re a single mother, you’re far more likely to end up thinking in feminist clichés. You know, all men are bastards, a woman without a man is like a… a… something without a something that doesn’t have any relation to the first something; all that stuff.’
‘I’m sure,’ said Will, sympathetically. He was getting excited now. If single mothers really thought that all men were bastards, then he could clean up. He could go out with women who looked like Julie Christie forever. He nodded and frowned and pursed his lips while Angie ranted, and while he plotted his new, life-changing strategy.
For the next few weeks he was Will the Good Guy, Will the Redeemer, and he loved it. It was effortless, too. He never managed to strike up much of a rapport with Maisy, Angie’s mysteriously sombre five-year-old, who seemed to regard him as frivolous to his core. But Joe, the three-year-old, took to him almost at once, mostly because during their first meeting Will held him upside-down by his ankles. That was it. That was all it took. He wished that relationships with proper human beings were that easy.
They went to McDonald’s. They went to the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum. They went on a boat down the river. On the very few occasions when he had thought about the possibility of children (always when he was drunk, always in the first throes of a new relationship), he had convinced himself that fatherhood would be a sort of sentimental photo-opportunity, and fatherhood Angie-style was exactly like that: he could walk hand-in-hand with a beautiful woman, children gambolling happily in front of him, and everyone could see him doing it, and when he had done it for an afternoon he could go home again if he wanted to.