Coming of Age and Maturity Theme Analysis

People quite often thought Marcus was being funny when he wasn’t. He couldn’t understand it.

Now, though, it was easy. There was almost too much to do. You didn’t have to have a life of your own any more; you could just peek over the fence at other people’s lives, as lived in newspapers and EastEnders and films and exquisitely sad jazz or tough rap songs. The twenty-year-old Will would have been surprised and perhaps disappointed to learn that he would reach the age of thirty-six without finding a life for himself, but the thirty-six-year-old Will wasn’t particularly unhappy about it; there was less clutter this way.

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 there would have been none. Maybe children democratized single women.

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.

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.

‘You’ve got to stop this.’

‘I can’t.’

‘You’ve got to. If you can’t look after me properly then you’ll have to find someone who can.’

She rolled over onto her stomach and looked at him.

‘How can you say I don’t look after you?’

‘Because you don’t. All you do is make my meals and I could do that. The rest of the time you just cry. That’s . . . that’s no good. That’s no good to me.’

She cried even harder then, and he let her.

Everything about that two minutes was mysteriously memorable, even at the time, somehow; climbing the stairs, the cooking smells that got trapped in the hall, the way he noticed the pattern on the carpet for the first time ever.

I’ll watch out for you if I am able to. I think I will be. I think that when something happens to a mother, she’s allowed to do that, even if it’s her fault. I don’t want to stop writing this, but I can’t think of any reason to keep it going.

Love you,
Mum.

The truth was that he didn’t mind. He applied for these jobs in the same spirit that he had volunteered to work in the soup kitchen, and in the same way that he had become the father of Ned: it was all a dreamy alternative reality that didn’t touch his real life, whatever that was, at all. He didn’t need a job. He was OK as he was.

His mum was pretty. And Will seemed quite well off, they could go and live with Will and his kid, and then there’d be four of them, and four was twice as good as two. And maybe, if they wanted to, they could have a baby. His mum wasn’t too old. She was thirty-eight. You could have a baby when you were thirty-eight. So then there would be five of them, and it wouldn’t matter quite so much if one of them died.

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.

When he got home he put a Pet Shop Boys CD on, and watched Prisoner: Cell Block H with the sound 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.

‘How often do you think about it?’

‘I dunno.’ All the time, all the time, all the time. Could he say that to Will? He didn’t know. [...] All he wanted was a promise from someone, anyone, that it wouldn’t happen again, ever, and no one could do that.

‘Fucking hell,’ said Will. ‘Sorry, I shouldn’t say that in front of you, should I?’

‘It’s OK. People say it at school all the time.’

And that was it. That was all Will said. ‘Fucking hell.’ Marcus didn’t know why Will had sworn like that, but Marcus liked it; it made him feel better. It was serious, it wasn’t too much and it made him see that he wasn’t being pathetic to get so scared.

[...] it could reasonably be argued that reality was not in his genes. He liked watching real stuff on EastEnders and The Bill, and he liked listening to Joe Strummer and Kurt Cobain singing about real stuff, but he’d never had real stuff sitting on his sofa before. No wonder, then, that once he’d made it a cup of tea and offered it a biscuit he didn’t really know what to do with it.

The following day Marcus turned up at Will’s door, tearful, a pair of soggy black socks where his Adidas basketball boots should have been; they’d stolen them, of course.

‘Give me a good reason.’

He could give her a reason. It wouldn’t be the right reason, and he’d feel bad saying it, and he was pretty sure it would make her cry. But it was a good reason, a reason that would shut her up, and if that was how you had to win arguments, then he’d use it.

‘Because I need a father.’

It shut her up, and it made her cry. It did the job.

So Christmas was the season of anger and bitterness and regret and recrimination, of drinking binges, of a frantic and laughably inadequate industry (one Christmas day his father wrote an entire, and entirely useless, musical, in a doomed attempt to prove that his talent was durable). It was a season of presents by the chimney too, but even when he was nine Will would gladly have swapped his Spirographs and his Batmobiles for a little peace and goodwill.

He gave Marcus a vinyl copy of Nevermind, because they didn’t own a CD player, and a Kurt Cobain T-shirt, so he could keep in with Ellie; he gave Fiona a pretty groovy and pretty expensive plain glass vase, because she’d complained after the hospital business that she didn’t know what to do with the flowers. Marcus gave him a crossword-solver’s book to help him with Countdown, and Fiona gave him The Single Parent’s Handbook as a joke.

Even though what they were talking about was miserable, Marcus was enjoying the conversation. It seemed big, as though you could walk ‘round it and see different things, and that never happened when you talked to kids normally. [...] his mum must have conversations like this with Suzie, conversations which moved, conversations where each thing the other person said seemed to lead you on somewhere.

‘How do you know? How do you know he wasn’t just messing about? I’ll bet you he never does anything like it again.’

‘You don’t know him,’ Ellie said.

‘Neither do you,’ Marcus shouted at her. ‘He’s not even a real person. He’s just a singer. He’s just someone on a sweatshirt. It’s not like he’s anyone’s mum.’

‘No, but he’s someone’s dad, you little prat,’ said Ellie. ‘He’s Frances Bean’s dad. He’s got a beautiful little girl and he still wants to die. So, you know.’

Marcus did know, he thought. He turned around and ran out.

What Will had been most frightened of—apart from Fiona asking him about the point [...]—was that there was going to be a cause of all this misery, some dark secret, or some terrible lack, and he was one of the only people in the world who could deal with it, and he wouldn’t want to, even though he would have to anyway. But it wasn’t like that at all [...].

‘You don’t know anything.’

‘I know some things. I know about that. I’ll tell you, Ellie, you don’t feel anything like my mum, or Kurt Cobain. You shouldn’t say that you feel like killing yourself when you don’t. It’s not right.’

Ellie shook her head and laughed her low nobody-understands-me laugh, a noise that Marcus hadn’t heard since the day they met outside Mrs. Morrison’s office. She was right, he hadn’t understood her then; he understood her much better now.

Some of these people he hadn’t known until today; some of them he had only known for a little while, and even then he couldn’t say that he knew them well. But here they were anyway, one of them clutching a cardboard cut-out Kurt Cobain, one of them in a plaster cast, one of them crying, all of them bound to each other in ways that it would be almost impossible to explain to anyone who had just wandered in. Will couldn’t recall ever having been caught up in this sort of messy, sprawling, chaotic web before; it was almost as if he had been given a glimpse of what it was like to be human.

‘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.’

But all three of them had had to lose things in order to gain other things. Will had lost his shell and his cool and his distance, and he felt scared and vulnerable, but he got to be with Rachel; and Fiona had lost a big chunk of Marcus, and she got to stay away from the casualty ward; and Marcus had lost himself, and got to walk home from school with his shoes on.