thirty

Will had vertigo, so he didn't like looking down. But sometimes it couldn't be helped. Sometimes someone said something, and he did look down, and he was left with an irresistible urge to jump. He could remember the last time it had happened: it was when he had split up with Jessica, and she had phoned him late at night and told him he was useless, worthless, that he would never be or do anything, that he had had the chance with her to — there was some peculiar, incomprehensible phrase she had used — sprinkle some salt on the ice, that was it, by having a relationship that meant something, and maybe a family. And while she was saying it he had started to get panicky, clammy, dizzy, because he knew that some people might think she was right, but he also knew that there was nothing in the world he could do about it.

    He'd had just the same feeling when Marcus was asking him to do something about Fiona. Of course he should do something about Fiona; all that stuff about being the same but taller was bollocks, obviously. He was older than Marcus, he knew more . . . Every way you looked at it there was an argument that said, get involved, help the kid out, look after him.

    He wanted to help him out, and he had done in some ways. But this depression thing, there was no way he wanted to get involved in that. He could write the whole conversation in his head, he could hear it like a radio play, and he didn't like what he heard. There were two words in particular that made him want to cover his ears with his hands; they always had done, and they always would, as long as his life revolved around Countdown and Home and Away and new Marks and Spencer sandwich combinations, and he could see no way in which he could avoid them in any conversation with Fiona about her depression. Those two words were 'the point'. As in, 'What's the point?'; 'I don't see the point'; 'there's just no point' (a phrase which omits the 'the', but one that counts anyway, because the 'the' wasn't the point of 'the point', really) . . . You couldn't have a talk about life, and especially about the possibility of ending it, without bringing up the fucking point, and Will just couldn't see one. Sometimes that was OK; sometimes you could be bombed out of your head on magic mushrooms at two in the morning, and some arsehole lying on the floor with his head jammed up against the speakers would want to talk about the point, and you could simply say, 'There isn't one, so shut up.' But you couldn't say that to someone who was so unhappy and lost that they wanted to empty a whole bottle of pills down themselves and go to sleep for as long as it took. Telling someone like Fiona that there was no point was more or less the same as killing her off, and though Will hadn't always seen eye-to-eye with her, he could honestly say he had no desire to murder her.

    People like Fiona really pissed him off. They ruined it for everyone. It wasn't easy, floating on the surface of everything: it took skill and nerve, and when people told you that they were thinking of taking their own life, you could feel yourself being dragged under with them. Keeping your head above water was what it was all about, Will reckoned. That was what it was all about for everyone, but those who had reasons for living, jobs and relationships and pets, their heads were a long way from the surface anyway. They were wading in the shallow end, and only a bizarre accident, a freak wave from the wave machine, was going to sink them. But Will was struggling. He was way out of his depth, and he had cramp, probably because he'd gone in too soon after his lunch, and there were all sorts of ways he could see himself being dragged up to the surface by some smoothy life-guard with blond hair and a washboard stomach, long after his lungs had filled with chlorinated water. He needed someone buoyant to hang on to; he certainly didn't need a dead weight like Fiona. He was very sorry, but that was the way things were. And that was the thing about Rachel: she was buoyant. She could keep him afloat. He went to see Rachel.

    His relationship with Rachel was weird, or what Will considered weird, which was, he supposed, very different from what David Cronenberg or that guy who wrote The Wasp Factory considered weird. The weird thing was that they still hadn't had sex, even though they'd been seeing each other for a few weeks. The subject just never came up. He was almost sure that she liked him, as in she seemed to enjoy seeing him and they never seemed to run out of things to talk about; he was more than sure that he liked her, as in he enjoyed seeing her, he wanted to be with her all the time for the rest of his life, and he couldn't look at her without being conscious of his pupils dilating to an enormous and possibly comical size. It was fair to say that they liked each other in different ways.

    (On top of which he had developed an almost irresistible urge to kiss her when she was saying something interesting, which he regarded as a healthy sign — he had never before wanted to kiss someone simply because she was stimulating — but which she was beginning to view with some distrust, even though she didn't, as far as he knew, know what was going on. What happened was, she would be talking with humour and passion and a quirky, animated intelligence about Ali, or music, or her painting, and he would drift off into some kind of possibly sexual but certainly romantic reverie, and she would ask him whether he was listening, and he would feel embarrassed and protest too much in a way that suggested he hadn't been paying attention because she was boring him stupid. It was something of a double paradox, really: you were enjoying someone's conversation so much that a) you appeared to glaze over, and b) you wanted to stop her talking by covering her mouth with yours. It was no good and something had to be done about it, but he had no idea what: he had never been in this situation before.)

    He didn't mind having a female friend; his realization during his drink with Fiona that he had never had any kind of relationship with someone he hadn't wanted to sleep with still unsettled him. The problem was that he did want to sleep with Rachel, very much, and he didn't know whether he could bear to sit there on her sofa with his eyes dilating wildly for the next ten or twenty years, or however long female friends lasted (how would he know?), listening to her being unintentionally sexy on the subject of drawing mice. He didn't know whether his pupils could bear it, more to the point. Wouldn't they start hurting after a while? He was almost sure it wouldn't do them much good, all that expanding and contracting, but he would only mention the pupil-pain to Rachel as a last resort; there was a remote possibility that she might want to sleep with him to save his eyesight, but he'd prefer to find another, more conventionally romantic route to her bed. Or his bed. He wasn't bothered about which bed they did it in. The point was that it just wasn't happening.

    And then it happened, that evening, for no reason that he could fathom at the time — although later, when he thought about it, he came up with one or two ideas that made sense but the implications of which he found somewhat disturbing. One moment they were talking, the next moment they were kissing, and the moment after that she was leading him upstairs with one hand and unbuttoning her denim shirt with the other. And the weird thing was that sex hadn't been in the air, as far as he could tell; he'd simply come round to see a friend because he was feeling low. So here was the first of the disturbing implications: if he ended up having sex when he had been unable to detect sex in the air, he was obviously a pretty hopeless sex detective. If, in the immediate aftermath of an apparently sex-free conversation, a beautiful woman started to lead you to the bedroom while unbuttoning her shirt, you were clearly missing something somewhere.

    It began with a stroke of luck that passed him by at the time: Ali was away for the night, sleeping over at a school-friend's house. If Rachel had told him at any other stage of their relationship that she was unencumbered by her psychotically Oedipal son, he would have taken it as a sign from Almighty God that he was about to get laid, but today it didn't even register. They went into the kitchen, she made them coffee and he found himself launching into the whole thing about Fiona and Marcus and the point even before the kettle had boiled.

    'What's the point?' Rachel echoed. 'Jesus.'

    'And don't say Ali. I haven't got an Ali.'

    'You've got a Marcus.'

    'It's hard to think of Marcus as the point of anything. I know that's a terrible thing to say, but it's true. You've met him.'

    'He's just a bit messed up. But he adores you.'

    It had never occurred to Will that Marcus actually had any real feelings towards him, especially feelings that were visible to a third party. He knew that Marcus liked hanging out at his place, and he knew that Marcus described him as a friend, but all this he had taken merely as evidence of the boy's eccentricity and loneliness. Rachel's observation that there were real feelings involved kind of changed things, just as they sometimes did when you found out that a woman you hadn't noticed was attracted to you, so that you ended up reassessing the situation and finding her much more interesting than you ever had done before.

    'You reckon?'

    'Of course he does.'

    'He's still not the point, though. If I were about to stick my head in the gas oven, and then you told me Marcus adored me, I wouldn't necessarily take it out again.'

    Rachel laughed.

    'What's so funny?'

    'I don't know. Just the idea that I'd be there in that situation. If you ended up sticking your head in a gas oven at the end of an evening, we'd have to come to the conclusion that the evening hadn't been a raging success.'

    'I . . .' Will stopped, and started, and then ploughed on anyway, with as much sincerity as he could muster, and with much more sincerity than the line could bear. 'I would never stick my head in a gas oven at the end of an evening with you.'

    He knew the moment he'd said it that it was a big mistake. He'd meant it, but that was precisely what provoked the hilarity: Rachel laughed and laughed until her eyes filled with tears. 'That,' she said in between great gulps of air, 'is . . . the . . . most . . . romantic . . . thing . . . anyone's ever said to me.'

    Will sat there helplessly, feeling like the most stupid man in the world, but when things calmed down again they seemed to be in a different place, somewhere where they were able to be warmer and less nervous with each other. Rachel made the coffee, found some stale custard creams and sat down with him at the kitchen table.

    'You don't need a point.'

    'Don't I? That's not what it feels like.'

    'No. See, I was thinking about you. About how you have to be fairly tough in your head to do what you do.'

    'What?' For a moment Will was completely bewildered. 'Tough in your head', 'Do what you do' . . . These were not phrases that anyone used about him too often. What the fuck was it he'd told Rachel he did? Work in a coalmine? Teach young offenders? But then he remembered he'd never actually told Rachel any lies, and his bewilderment took a different shape. 'What do I do?'

    'Nothing.'

    That's what Will thought he did. 'So how come I have to be tough to do that?'

    'Because . . . most of us think that the point is something to do with work, or kids, or family, or whatever. But you don't have any of that. There's nothing between you and despair, and you don't seem a very desperate person.'

    'Too stupid.'

    'You're not stupid. So why don't you ever put your head in the oven?'

    'I don't know. There's always a new Nirvana album to look forward to, or something happening in NYPD Blue to make you want to watch the next episode.'

    'Exactly.'

    'That's the point? NYPD Blue? Jesus.' It was worse than he thought.

    'No, no. The point is you keep going. You want to. So all the things that make you want to are the point. I don't know if you even realize it, but on the quiet you don't think life's too bad. You love things. Telly. Music. Food.' She looked at him. 'Women, probably. Which I guess means you like sex too.'

    'Yeah.' He said it sort of grumpily, as if she had caught him out somehow, and she smiled.

    'I don't mind. People who like sex are usually pretty good at it. Anyway. I'm the same. I mean, I love things, and they're mostly different things from you. Poetry. Paintings. My work. Men, and sex. My friends. Ali. I want to see what Ali gets up to tomorrow.' She started fiddling with the biscuit, breaking off the ends in an attempt to expose the cream, but the biscuit was too soft and it crumbled.

    'See, a few years ago, I was really, really down, and I did think about . . . you know, what you imagine Fiona's thinking about. And I really felt guilty about it, because of Ali, and I knew I shouldn't be that way but I was, and . . . Anyway, it was always, you know, not today. Maybe tomorrow, but not today. And after a few weeks of that I knew I was never going to do it, and the reason I was never going to do it was because I didn't want to miss out. I don't mean that life was great and I didn't want not to participate. I just mean there were always one or two things that seemed unfinished, things I wanted to follow through. Like you want to see the next episode of NYPD Blue. If I'd just finished stuff for a book, I wanted to see it come out. If I was seeing a guy, I wanted one more date. If Ali had a parents' evening coming up, I wanted to talk to his form teacher. Little things like that, but there was always something. And in the end I realized there would always be something, and that those somethings would be enough.' She looked up from the remnants of her biscuit and laughed, embarrassed. 'That's what I think, anyway.'

    'Fiona must have things like that.'

    'Yeah, well. I don't know. It doesn't sound like Fiona's getting the breaks. You need them too.'

    Was that really all there was to it? Probably not, Will thought, on balance. There were probably all sorts of things missing — stuff about how depression made you tired of everything, tired of everything no matter how much you loved it; and stuff about loneliness, and panic, and plain bewilderment. But Rachel's simple positivity was something to be going on with and, in any case, the conversation about the point created a point of its own, because there was this pause, and Rachel looked at him, and that was when they started kissing.

'Why don't I talk to her?' said Rachel. They were the first words spoken afterwards, although there had been a bit of talking during, and for a moment Will didn't understand what she meant at all: he was trying to trace it back to something that had taken place in the previous thirty minutes, a half-hour that had left him feeling a bit shaky and almost tearful, and had led him to question his previous conviction that sex was some sort of fantastic carnal alternative to drink, drugs and a great night out, but nothing much more than that.

    'You? She doesn't know you.'

    'I don't see why that would matter. Might even help. And maybe you'd get the hang of it, if I showed you how. It's not so bad.'

    'OK.' There was something in Rachel's voice that Will couldn't quite isolate, but he didn't want to think about Fiona just at that moment, so he didn't try very hard. He couldn't ever remember feeling so happy.