Mum wasn’t in, but Helen was.
‘When will she be back?’
‘She’s only gone down to get her fags,’ said Helen. ‘I’ve stopped her smoking in here, did I tell you? She has to go outside.’
‘You’ll kill her,’ I said. It was only a joke, but you can’t really joke with Helen.
‘Oh, right. I’ll kill her, not the fags.’
‘Yeah. Ironic, eh?’
She made me a cup of coffee and we sat down at the kitchen table.
‘So what’s new? I could do with some gossip.’
I laughed. I couldn’t help it.
‘What?’
‘I don’t know. Gossip.’
‘What about it?’
‘People never really have any, do they? People always say, “Got any gossip?” but if they have to ask, it means there isn’t any. Because if there is any, they come out with it straight away.’
I didn’t know where I was going with this, or how much I wanted to say.
‘So what you’re saying is you’ve got nothing to tell me.’
‘Not really.’
And that was the moment I decided to tell her–just when I’d told her that I had nothing to tell her. It just seemed like too good an opportunity to miss. I get on OK with Helen, but she can be really prissy, and I suddenly saw that she’d find out anyway, sooner or later, and that I’d always regret not telling her myself, because I could choose the best moment. And the best moment was the moment she was least expecting it: I wanted the look on her face to be something I’d remember for ever, something I’d be describing to Dave, and maybe even to Mark, over and over again.
‘One funny thing, I suppose,’ I said. ‘Karen Glenister dropped this porn film through the door, and you’ll never guess who’s in it?’
She was already making this fantastic face, like she was being throttled by an invisible hand–she was going all pop-eyed and purple. I could have left it at that and she’d have needed to take deep breaths for the rest of the day.
‘Do you want to know?’ I said after a while, when she still hadn’t said anything.
‘Go on,’ she said.
‘Mark,’ I said. ‘Our Mark. Your nephew.’
‘What do you mean, “In a porn film”?’
‘What do you think I mean? What else could I mean, other than what I’ve just said? When people say that Hugh Grant’s in Love Actually, what do they mean?’
‘Love Actually isn’t a porn film, though, is it?’
‘What difference does that make?’
‘I dunno. When you say that a famous actor is in a film, you’re not saying very much, are you? I mean, there’s nothing that’s difficult to understand. But when you tell me that my nephew’s in a porn film…I thought for a moment there was something I’m not getting. That you were using some slang I’d never heard before.’
I wanted to laugh at her, but I couldn’t laugh at that, because I knew what she meant. It was sort of what I felt when I saw the cover of the video: that there was something about the photo that wasn’t in my language, or wasn’t aimed at my age group. I feel that way sometimes when Mark’s watching that comedy programme when some man dressed as a woman says ‘Yeah, but, no, but…’ and he just starts laughing.
Now I think about it, this whole thing with Mark is like an episode of Little Britain, because I don’t know whether it’s funny or not.
‘No,’ I said. ‘That’s what I’m saying. Mark’s in a porn film, like Hugh Grant was in Love Actually. It turns out he’s got an enormous penis, and, and…’
Helen was staring at me, trying hard to listen, trying hard to understand.
‘I suppose he didn’t know what to do with it,’ she said. ‘I suppose there isn’t much you can do with it, if you think about it.’
‘You could just leave it in your trousers,’ I said.
‘Well, yes. There’s that.’
‘You weren’t going to tell Mum, were you?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know why I came, really. Except the penis thing is supposed to be hereditary, and Dave hasn’t got it. I mean, he’s just got a normal one.’
‘Well, Mum hasn’t…Oh, my God! You mean Dad?’
‘Yes.’
‘But he didn’t…He couldn’t have had.’
‘Why not? I don’t know. Do you?’
‘No. God. Of course I don’t. No. God. You just going to come out and ask her?’
‘I don’t know. I’ll see what I feel like when she gets back.’
Mum came in, sat down, took the cellophane off her cigarettes, then with a sigh and a little mutter, she remembered that she had to go outside.
‘I’ll come out with you,’ I said.
‘You can have one here,’ said Helen.
‘Why?’
‘Lynn doesn’t come over that often. I don’t want to have to look at her through the window.’
But she was worried she was going to miss something, you could tell. She got a saucer off the draining board and put it down on the table, for the ash.
‘Did Dad ever smoke?’ I asked Mum. It was a start. Maybe he always liked a post-coital fag, and it would be a short step from talking about that to asking her whether…
‘No,’ she said.
‘Never?’
‘I don’t know about never. But he never smoked when he was with me. And he hated me smoking. Always on at me to give up. I wish I had. For him, I mean. He never asked for much, and I wouldn’t even give him that.’
She stubbed her cigarette out in disgust, half-smoked, as if she were giving up now, four years too late.
‘He only nagged because he was worried about you,’ I said. ‘As it happens, there was nothing to worry about. You’re still with us, and you’re still fagging away.’
But there was no joking her out of it–her eyes were glistening, and all we could do now was drag her back and away from that horrible, dark, deep pit that she fell into after Dad died. Who was I to push her back into it? I changed the subject, and we ended up talking about things that none of us could get upset about: why Mum won’t use the halal butcher, whether Big Brother is fake (Helen’s got a thing about that), and the family, including Mark. I told Mum he was ticking along, and Helen caught my eye, and I thought she was going to giggle. But there’s no joke in ‘ticking along’, is there? Where’s the pun in that?
Mark had a baby brother, for about two hours on the morning of June the fifth, 1984. We called him Nicky, and he was born with a heart defect, and he died in an incubator, without ever quite being alive. I’m over it now, of course I am; I was over it within a year or two. But I thought of the baby when I saw my mum struggling with the memory of my dad–not just because of the grief, but because I could see how lucky I was. I’m forty-nine years old, and those two deaths, Nicky and my dad, were the worst days of my life; nothing else has even come close. What else would there be? Dave had a car accident and broke his arm, Mark got pneumonia when he was little, but they were frightening for a moment or two, not devastating. And Mark’s film career didn’t even matter as much as either of the frightening things. I’ve been disappointed, loads and loads of times–who hasn’t?–but I wasn’t even entirely sure that Mark’s new career was disappointing. Like I said, it might even have been funny, and something that has the potential to be funny…Well, that’s a whole different category. If you think that something might be funny, looked at in the right way, then look at it in the right way.
On the bus going home, I thought about what had happened since I found out that Mark was in a porn video, and what I realized was, all of it was good. The conversation I had with Dave about Steve Laird was tricky, for a while, but then we ended up having great sex. I really enjoyed being cheeky to Karen Glenister, and on the bus going down to Mum’s I’d had that little blub, and even that was because of being able to swap some miserable memories for some happy ones. Throw in a nice cup of coffee with Mum and Helen (which would never have happened if I hadn’t decided, for reasons
best known to myself, to try and find out how big my father’s thing was) and I can honestly say that it’s an experience I could recommend to anyone. Can that be right?
Mark was making himself some lunch when I got back–he was frying up what looked like half a pound of bacon.
‘Blimey,’ I said. ‘Someone’s starving.’
He looked at me.
‘Yeah. I am. But not because I’ve been doing anything, if that’s what you mean.’
‘That’s not what I meant. Calm down. Not everything I say is going to be about that.’
‘Sorry.’
I watched him make a mess of turning the bacon over, and took the wooden spatula thing off him.
‘Do bad things happen to the girls in those films?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Are they, I dunno, all on drugs, or on the game or something?’
‘No. That one I was…The one you saw, Vicky, she’s a travel agent. She just got fed up with her breasts the way I got fed up with…me. There’s a few that want to do topless modelling, but that’s about it. Rachel’s boyfriend, he loves making films. He wants to be Steven Spielberg, and this is as close as he can get for the moment.’
‘He’s rubbish,’ I said. ‘They make Carry On look like Dances with Wolves or something.’
‘He’s terrible,’ said Mark. ‘I don’t want to stop, Mum.’
‘Oh. Why not?’
‘It doesn’t make any difference, you and Dad finding out. I wasn’t doing it because I could get away with it, you know.’
‘So how long do you want to do it for?’
‘I dunno. ’Til I’m on my feet, I suppose.’
‘Make me a promise.’
I didn’t know until I said it what I wanted from him, but when I came out with it, it sounded right.
‘Stop when something worse happens.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘You know. When, I don’t know…When your Gran dies. Or when your dad and I get divorced or something. Stop then.’
‘Why d’you say that?’
‘I don’t know. It just felt right.’
‘But shouldn’t it be the other way round? I mean…When something bad happens, you won’t notice this.’
‘No. But I’ll know it’s there, that’s the thing. I don’t want to know it’s there when I don’t feel the same as I do now.’
‘How do you feel now?’
‘I feel OK. That’s the thing.’
He shrugged. ‘All right, then. I promise. Unless you know for a fact you’re getting divorced in the next week or so.’
‘No, we’re all right for the time being.’
He reached out his hand and we shook. ‘Deal,’ he said, and we left it at that.
That night, the three of us went out to the Crown for a drink before our dinner. We used to do it quite a lot when Mark was in his late teens, and it was a novelty for us all, but then Mark found better things to do, and we stopped. It wasn’t like this huge thing, all deciding that we should spend quality time together in order to get to know each other better; it just happened. Dave said he fancied going out for a drink, and Mark and I were in the same sort of mood. But I was glad that somehow the film had moved us back in time, rather than forward–that we’d somehow ended up doing something we used to do. It needn’t have been that way.
Anyway, I had this strange moment. Admittedly I’d been drinking lager on an empty stomach, but when Dave was getting the drinks in, and Mark was playing on the fruit machine, it was as if I floated out of myself and saw the three of us, all in our different places, all apparently cheerful, and I thought, I’d have settled for this on just about any day of my life since Nicky died. I wouldn’t have settled for it before I got married, but you don’t know, then, do you? You don’t know how scared you’ll feel, how many compromises you’re prepared to make; you don’t know that just about anything which looks OK on the outside can be made to feel OK on the inside. You don’t know it has to work that way round.
Otherwise Pandemonium
Mom always sings this crappy old song when I’m in a bad mood. She does it to make me laugh, but I never do laugh, because I’m in a bad mood. (Sometimes I sort of smile later, when I’m in a better mood, and I think about her singing and dancing and making the dorky black-and-white movie face–eyes wide, all her teeth showing–she always makes when she sings the song. But I never tell her she makes me smile. It would only encourage her to sing more often.) This song is called ‘Ac-cent-chu-ate the Positive’, and I have to listen to it whenever she tells me we’re going to Dayton to see Grandma, or when she won’t give me the money for something I need, like CDs or even clothes, for Christ’s sake. Anyway, today I’m going to do what the song says. I’m going to accentuate the positive, and eliminate the negative. Otherwise, according to the song and to my mom, pandemonium is liable to walk upon the scene.
OK. Well, here is the accentuated positive: I got to have sex. That’s the upside of it. I know that’s probably a strange way of looking at things, considering the circumstances, but it’s definitely the major event of the week so far. It won’t be the major event of the year, I know that–Jesus, do I know that–but it’s still a headline news item: I just turned fifteen, and I’m no longer a virgin. How cool is that? The target I’d set for myself was sixteen, which means I’m a whole year ahead of schedule. Nearly two years, in fact, because I’ll still be sixteen in twenty-two months’ time. So let’s say this is the story of how I ended up getting laid–a story with a beginning, and a weird middle, and a happy ending. Otherwise I’d have to tell you a Stephen King-type story, with a beginning and a weird middle and a really fucking scary ending, and I don’t want to do that. It wouldn’t help me right now.
So. You probably think you need to know who I am, and what kind of car my brother drives, and all that Holden Caulfield kind of crap, but you really don’t, and not just because I haven’t got a brother, or even a cute little sister. It’s not one of those stories. Insights into my personality and all that stuff aren’t going to help you or me one bit, because this shit is real. I don’t want you to get to the end of this and start thinking about whether I’d have acted different if my parents had stayed together, or whether I’m a typical product of our times, or what I tell you about being fifteen, or any of those other questions we have to discuss when we read a story in school. It’s not the point. All you need to know is where I got the video recorder from, and maybe, I suppose, why I got it, so I’ll tell you.
I found it a couple blocks from my house, in this store that sells used electronic stuff. It cost fifty bucks, which seemed pretty good to me, although now it doesn’t seem like such a great bargain, but that’s another story. Or rather, it’s this story, but a different part of it. And I bought it because…OK, so maybe I will have to give you a little background, but I won’t make it into a big drama. I’ll just give you the facts. My mom and I moved from L.A. to Berkeley about three months ago. We moved because Mom finally walked out on my asshole of a father, who writes movies for a living–although as none of them ever got made, it would be more accurate to say that he writes scripts for a living. Mom is an art teacher, and she paints her own stuff, too, and she says there are millions of people in Berkeley with an artistic bend or whatever, so she thought we’d feel right at home here. (I like it that she says ‘we’. I haven’t got an artistic bone in my whole body, and she knows that, but for some reason she thinks I take after her. It was pretty much always me and her against him, so that became me and her against L.A., and because I was against L.A., that somehow made me able to paint. I don’t mind. Painting’s pretty cool, some of it.)
Berkeley’s nice, I guess, but I didn’t have any friends here, so Mom made me join this dumb jazz orchestra thing. I’d just started to take trumpet lessons in L.A., and I didn’t suck too bad; a couple months after we moved, she saw an ad in a local bookstore for something called the Little Berkeley Big Band, which is like for people under the age of sevente
en, and she signed me up. She had to sing the Ac-cent-chu-ate song a lot in the car the first evening I went to a rehearsal, because I’d be the first to admit that I wasn’t feeling very positive. But it was OK, not that I’d ever admit that to her. You can make a pretty fucking great noise when you’re part of a horn section. I can’t say I’m going to make any friends, though. The kind of people who want to play in the Little Berkeley Big Band…well, let’s just say that they’re not my kind of people. Apart from Martha, but I’ll tell you about her later. (And now you’ll probably have guessed some of the ending, but I don’t care, because you only know her name, and not how we ended up having sex. How we ended up having sex is the interesting part.) All you need to know about Martha: a) She’s hot; b) but hot in a not-slutty way. In other words, if you saw her, you would never guess in a million years that I’d persuade her to sleep with me. (Hopefully that has made you very curious–‘Man, how the fuck did he get to sleep with her?’–which means you’ll be more interested in the happy ending, rather than the weird middle, which means I don’t have to take the Stephen King route.)