The policemen were nice, really. Ellie had explained to them that she wasn’t a hooligan or on drugs; she was simply making a protest, which was her right as a citizen, about the commercial exploitation of Kurt Cobain’s death. The policemen thought this was funny, which Marcus took as a good sign, although it made Ellie very angry indeed: she told them they were patronizing, and they looked at each other and laughed a bit more.

When they got to the station, they were shown into a little room, and a policewoman came in and started talking to them. She asked them their ages and addresses, and what they were doing in Royston. Marcus tried to explain about his dad and the window-ledge and the big think and Kurt Cobain and the vodka, but he could see that it was all a bit of a muddle, and that the policewoman couldn’t understand what his dad’s accident had to do with Ellie and the shop window, so he gave up.

‘He didn’t do anything,’ Ellie suddenly said. She didn’t say it in a nice way, either; she said it as if he should have done something but didn’t. ‘I got off the train and he followed me. I broke the window. Let him go.’

‘Let him go where?’ the policewoman asked her. It was a very good question, Marcus thought, and he was glad that she’d asked it. He didn’t especially want to be let go in Royston. ‘We’ve got to phone one of his parents. We’ve got to phone yours too.’

Ellie glared at her and the policewoman glared back. There didn’t seem much else to say. They knew the crime and the identity of the criminal; the said criminal had been apprehended and was in the police station, so they sat and waited in silence.

His dad and Lindsey were the first to turn up. Lindsey had had to drive, because of the broken collar bone, and she hated driving, so they were both in a bit of a state: Lindsey was tired and nervy, and his dad was grumpy and in pain. He didn’t look like a man who’d had a big think, and he certainly didn’t look like a man who until very recently had been desperate to see his only son.

The policewoman left them alone. Clive slumped on a bench that ran along one side of the room, and Lindsey sat down next to him, looking at him with concern.

‘That was just what I needed. Thank you, Marcus.’

Marcus looked at his dad unhappily.

‘He didn’t do anything,’ said Ellie impatiently. ‘He was trying to help me.’

‘And who exactly are you?’

‘Who exactly?’ Ellie was taking the piss out of his dad. Marcus didn’t think that was a particularly good idea, but he was tired of wrestling with Ellie. ‘Who exactly? I’m Eleanor Toyah McCrae, aged fifteen years seven months. I live at twenty-three…’

‘What are you doing messing around with Marcus?’

‘I’m not messing around with him. He’s my friend.’ This was news to Marcus. He hadn’t felt Ellie was his friend since they got on the train. ‘He asked me to come with him to Cambridge, because he wasn’t looking forward to a heart-to-heart with a father he feels doesn’t understand him and who has abandoned him at a time when he needed him most. Great, aren’t they, men? You’ve got a mother who wants to top herself and they’re not interested. But they fall off a fucking window-sill and suddenly you’re summoned for a talk about the meaning of life.’

Marcus slumped on the table and put his head in his hands. He was suddenly very, very tired; he didn’t want to be with any of these people. Life was hard enough without Ellie shooting her mouth off.

‘Whose mum wants to top herself?’ Clive asked.

‘Ellie’s,’ said Marcus firmly.

Clive looked at Ellie with interest.

‘Sorry to hear that,’ he said, without sounding either sorry or even particularly interested.

‘That’s OK,’ said Ellie. She took the hint and said nothing for a while.

‘I suppose you blame me for all this,’ said his father. ‘I suppose you think that if I’d stayed with your mother you wouldn’t have gone off the rails. And you’re probably right.’ He sighed, and Lindsey took his hand and stroked it sympathetically.

Marcus sat bolt upright. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘I’ve messed you up.’

‘All I did was get off a train,’ said Marcus. His tiredness had vanished now. It had been replaced by the kind of anger which he didn’t feel very often, an anger that gave him the strength to argue with anyone of any age. He wished you could buy this stuff in bottles, so he could keep it in his desk at school and sip from it throughout the day. ‘What’s going off the rails about getting off a train? Ellie’s off the rails. She’s nuts. She just broke a window with her boot because it had a photo of a pop star in it. But I haven’t done anything. And I don’t care if you left home or not. It doesn’t make any difference to me. I’d have got off the train if you were still with Mum because I wanted to try and look after my friend.’ That wasn’t quite right, actually, because if his mum and dad were still together, he wouldn’t have been on the train in the first place, unless he’d been going to Cambridge with Ellie for some other reason that he couldn’t imagine. ‘I suppose you are a useless father, and that doesn’t help a kid very much, but you’d have been a useless father wherever you were living, so I don’t see what difference it makes.’

Ellie laughed. ‘Yay, Marcus! Cool speech!’

‘Thank you. I rather enjoyed making it.’

‘You poor kid,’ said Lindsey.

‘And you can shut up,’ said Marcus. Ellie laughed even harder. It was the anger juice talking—poor Lindsey had never done anything wrong, particularly—but it still felt good.

‘Can we go now?’ Ellie asked.

‘We have to wait for your mother,’ said Clive. ‘She’s coming with Fiona. Will’s driving them up.’

‘Oh, no,’ said Marcus.

‘Fucking hell,’ said Ellie, and Marcus groaned. The four of them sat there staring at each other, waiting for the next scene in what was beginning to feel like a never-ending play.

Thirty-four

Life was, after all, like air. Will could have no doubt about that any more. There seemed to be no way of keeping it out, or at a distance, and all he could do for the moment was live it and breathe it. How people managed to draw it down into their lungs without choking was a mystery to him: it was full of bits. This was air you could almost chew.

He rang Rachel from Fiona’s flat while Fiona was in the bathroom, and this time she answered the phone.

‘You were never going to come, were you?’

‘Well—’

‘Were you?’

‘No. I thought… I thought it might do you some good. Did I do a terrible thing?’

‘I guess not. I guess it did me some good.’

‘So there you are.’

‘But as a general rule—’

‘As a general rule, I’ll turn up when I say I’m going to.’

‘Thank you.’

He told Rachel about Marcus and Ellie, and promised to keep her informed. The moment he’d put the phone down Ellie’s mother Katrina called and spoke to Fiona, and then Fiona spoke to Clive, and then she called Katrina back to offer her a lift to Royston with them, and then Will went home to get his car, and they drove off to look for Ellie’s house.

While Fiona was collecting Ellie’s mum, Will sat in the car listening to Nirvana and thinking about the Dead Duck Day. Something about now was reminding him of then; there was that same sense of unpredictability and absorption and chaos. The main difference was that today wasn’t as… well, as enjoyable. It wasn’t that Fiona’s attempted suicide had been a riot of fun and laughter; it was just that he neither knew nor cared about any of them then, and it had been possible for him to observe, with a terrible but neutral fascination, the kind of mess that people can make if they are wilful or unlucky or both. But the neutrality had gone now, and he was more worried about poor Marcus sitting with some deranged teenager in a small-town police station, an experience that Marcus would probably have forgotten all about by the weekend, than about the same boy’s mother attempting to take her own life, the memory of which he was almost certain to carry with him to his grave. It seemed that whether you felt something, or whether you felt nothing, it didn’t matter: your responses were off either way.