Thirty-five

Marcus did end up going to stay with his dad and Lindsey. He felt sorry for them, in a funny sort of way: at the police station they had seemed really out of it, as if they weren’t able to cope. Marcus hadn’t thought about it before, but that evening you could really tell who lived in London and who didn’t, and the ones who didn’t just seemed more scared of everything. Clive and Lindsey had been scared of Ellie, for a start, but they’d been scared of Ellie’s mum, and the police, and they’d moaned a lot, and looked nervous… Maybe it wasn’t anything to do with London; maybe it was more to do with the kind of people he knew now, or maybe he’d just got a lot older in the last couple of months. But he couldn’t really see what his dad could offer him any more, which was why he felt sorry for him, which was why he agreed to go back to Cambridge with him.

Clive carried on moaning in the car. Why did Marcus want to get involved with someone like that? Why hadn’t he tried to stop her? Why had he been rude to Lindsey? What had she ever done to him? Marcus didn’t answer. He just let his father go on and on until eventually he seemed to run out of moans like you run out of petrol: they started to slow up and get quieter, and then they just disappeared altogether. The thing was, he couldn’t be that kind of dad any more. He’d missed his moment. It was like if God suddenly decided to be God again a zillion years after creating the world: He couldn’t suddenly come down from heaven and say, oh, you shouldn’t have put the Empire State Building there, and you shouldn’t have organized it so that African people get less money, and you shouldn’t have let them build nuclear weapons. Because you could say to Him, well, it’s a bit late now, isn’t it? Where were You when we were thinking about these things?

It wasn’t as though he thought his dad should have been around, but he couldn’t have it both ways. If he wanted to be up in Cambridge with Lindsey, smoking pot and falling off window-ledges, fine, but he couldn’t then start picking up on the little things—and Ellie was a little thing now really, even though when they’d been sitting on the kerb waiting for the police car to come, she’d seemed like the biggest thing ever. He’d have to find another job for himself. Will could do the little things, and his mum, but his dad was out of it.

They arrived back at his dad’s place around ten-thirty, which meant it had taken him six hours to get to Cambridge—not bad, really, seeing as he’d been arrested halfway there. (Arrested! He’d been arrested! Taken to a police station in a police car, at least. He’d already stopped thinking of the broken window as something that had come out of playing truant, and that would lead on to being a tramp and a drug addict. Now he was free he could see he had overreacted. Instead, he took the Royston incident as a measure of how far he’d come in the last few months. He’d never have been able to get arrested when he’d first arrived in London. He wouldn’t have known the right sort of people. )

Lindsey made them a cup of tea and they sat around the kitchen table for a while. Then Clive sort of nodded at Lindsey, and she said she was tired and she was going to bed, leaving the two of them alone.

‘Do you mind if I roll a joint? ’ his dad asked him.

‘No, ’ said Marcus. ‘You do what you want. I’m not smoking any, though. ’

‘Too right you’re not. Would you mind getting my tin down for me? It hurts me to stretch. ’

Marcus moved his chair over towards the shelves, climbed up on it and started fumbling around behind the cereal packets on the top shelf. It was funny how you could still know tiny little things about people, like where they kept their tin, even though you didn’t know what they were thinking from one week to the next.

He got down, handed the tin over and moved his chair back to the table. His dad started to roll himself a joint, mumbling into his cigarette papers as he did so.

‘I’ve had a big think since, you know. Since my accident. ’

‘Since you fell off the window-ledge? ’ Marcus loved saying that. It sounded so daft.

‘Yeah. Since my accident. ’

‘Mum said you’d been having a big think. ’

‘And? ’

‘And what? ’

‘I dunno. What do you think? ’

‘What do I think of you having a think? ’

‘Well. ’ His dad looked up from his Rizlas. ‘Yeah. I suppose. ’

‘It depends, really, doesn’t it? On what you’ve been thinking about. ’

‘OK. What I was thinking about was… It frightened me, my accident. ’

‘When you fell off the window-ledge? ’

‘Yeah. My accident. Why do you always have to say what it was? Anyway, it frightened me. ’

‘You didn’t fall very far. You only broke your collar bone. I know loads of people who’ve done that. ’

‘It doesn’t matter how far you fall if it makes you think, does it? ’

‘I suppose not. ’

‘Did you mean what you said in the police station? About me being a useless father? ’

‘Oh, I dunno. Not really. ’

‘Because I know I haven’t been great. ’

‘No. Not great. ’

‘And… you need a father, don’t you? I can see that now. I couldn’t see it before. ’

‘I don’t know what I need. ’

‘Well, you know you need a father. ’

‘Why? ’

‘Because everyone does. ’

Marcus thought about that. ‘Everyone does, you know, to get them going. And after that, I’m not sure. Why do you think I need one now? I’m doing OK without. ’

‘It doesn’t look like it. ’

‘What, because someone else broke a window? No, really, I am doing OK without. Maybe I’m doing better. I mean, it’s hard with Mum, but this year at school… I can’t explain it, but I feel safer than before, because I know more people. I was really scared because I didn’t think two was enough, and now there aren’t two any more. There are loads. And you’re better off that way. ’

‘Who are these loads? Ellie and Will and people like that? ’

‘Yeah, people like that. ’

‘They won’t be around forever. ’

‘Some of them will, some of them won’t. But, see, I didn’t know before that anyone else could do that job, and they can. You can find people. It’s like those acrobatic displays. ’

‘What acrobatic displays? ’

‘Those ones when you stand on top of loads of people in a pyramid. It doesn’t really matter who they are, does it, as long as they’re there and you don’t let them go away without finding someone else. ’

‘You really think that? It doesn’t matter who’s underneath you? ’

‘I do now, yeah. I didn’t, but now I do. Because you can’t stand on top of your mum and dad if they’re going to mess around and wander off and get depressed. ’

His dad had finished rolling the joint. He lit it and took a big lungful of smoke. ‘That’s what my big think was about. I shouldn’t have wandered off. ’

‘It doesn’t matter, Dad. Really. I know where you are if things get bad. ’

‘Gee, thanks. ’

‘Sorry. But… I’m OK. Really. I can find people. I’ll be all right. ’

And he would be, he knew it. He didn’t know whether Ellie would be, because she didn’t think about things that hard, even though she was clever and knew about politics and so on; and he didn’t know whether his mum would be, because she wasn’t very strong a lot of the time. But he was sure that he would be able to cope in ways that they couldn’t. He could cope at school, because he knew what to do, and he had worked out who you could trust and who you couldn’t, and he had worked that out down there, in London, where people came at each other from all sorts of odd angles. You could create little patterns of people that wouldn’t have been possible if his mum and dad hadn’t split up and the three of them had stayed in Cambridge. It didn’t work for everyone. It didn’t work for mad people and people who didn’t know anybody, or for people who were sick, or who drank too much. But it was going to work for him, he’d make sure of that, and because it was going to work for him he had decided that this was a much better way of doing things than the way that his dad wanted him to try.

They talked a little bit longer, about Lindsey and how she wanted a baby, and how his dad couldn’t decide, and whether Marcus would mind if they did have one; and Marcus said that he’d like it, that he liked babies. He didn’t really; but he knew the value of extra people around him, and Lindsey’s baby would grow up to be an extra person one day. And then he went to bed. His dad gave him a hug and got a bit teary, but he was stoned by then, so Marcus didn’t take any notice.

In the morning his dad and Lindsey gave him a lift to the station, and enough money for a taxi from King’s Cross to the flat. He sat on the train looking out of the window. He was sure he was right about the acrobatics display; but even if it was all rubbish he was still going to carry on believing it. If it helped get him through to the time when he was completely free to make the mistakes that they were all making, then what was the harm?