‘Are you in there, Marcus? I’m sorry. I’d forgotten about your mum. It’s OK. She’s not like Kurt.’

He paused for a moment, then unbolted the door and peered round it.

‘How do you know?’

‘Because you’re right. He’s not a real person.’

‘You’re only saying that to make me feel better.’

‘OK, he’s a real person. But he’s a different sort of real person.’

‘In what way?’

‘I don’t know. He just is. He’s like James Dean and Marilyn Monroe and Jimi Hendrix and all those people. You know that he’s going to die, and it’ll be OK.’

‘OK for who? Not for… what’s her name?’

‘Frances Bean?’

‘Yeah. Why is it OK for her? It’s not OK for her. It’s just OK for you.’

A boy from Ellie’s year came in to use the toilet. ‘Go away,’ said Ellie, as if she had said it a hundred times before, and as if the kid had no right to be wanting a pee in the first place. ‘We’re talking.’ He opened his mouth to argue, realized who he was about to argue with, and went out again. ‘Can I come in?’ Ellie said when he’d gone.

‘If there’s room.’

They squashed up next to each other on the hot pipes, and Ellie pulled the door towards her and bolted it.

‘You think I know things, but I don’t,’ said Ellie. ‘Not really. I don’t know anything about this stuff. I don’t know why he feels like he does, or why your mum feels like she does. And I don’t know what it feels like to be you. Pretty scary, I should think.’

‘Yeah.’ He started to cry, then. It wasn’t noisy crying—his eyes just filled with tears and they started to stream down his cheeks—but it was still embarrassing. He’d never thought he’d cry in front of Ellie.

She put her arm around him. ‘What I mean is, don’t listen to me. You know more than I do. You should be telling me things about it.’

‘I don’t know what to say about it.’

‘Let’s talk about something else, then.’

But they didn’t talk about anything for a while. They just sat on the pipes together, moving their bottoms when they got too hot, and waited until they felt like going back out into the world.

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.)