And then there was the sex. Sex with a single mother, Will decided after his first night with Angie, beat the sort of sex he was used to hands down. If you picked the right woman, someone who’d been messed around and eventually abandoned by the father of her children, and who hadn’t met anyone since (because the kids stopped you going out and anyway a lot of men didn’t like kids that didn’t belong to them, and they didn’t like the kind of mess that frequently coiled around these kids like a whirlwind)… if you picked one of these, then she loved you for it. All of a sudden you became better-looking, a better lover, a better person.
As far as he could see, it was an entirely happy arrangement. All those so-so couplings going on out in the world of the childless singles, to whom a night in a foreign bed was just another fuck… they didn’t know what they were missing. Sure, there were right-on people, men and women, who would be repelled and appalled by his logic, but that was fine by him. It reduced the competition.
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.
‘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 break-fast, 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 th
e 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 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, 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 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.