Identity, Pop Culture, and Fitting In Theme Analysis

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.

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.

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.

[...] 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.

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.

‘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.

‘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.

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.