Not a Star and Otherwise Pandemonium (3 page)

‘I dunno. I never thought he had it in him.’

‘That’s not it. You never thought of it because it couldn’t kill him. If it could have killed him, I would’ve thought about it, because I’ve thought about everything else.’

‘What about AIDS?’

I got up, put my dressing gown on and hammered on Mark’s door.

‘What?’

‘What about AIDS?’

‘Go to bed.’

‘No. Not until you’ve talked to me.’

‘I’m not going into any details. But I’m not daft.’

‘You’d better give me a few more details than that. That’s not good enough.’

‘Thanks a bunch. There is absolutely nothing whatsoever to worry about.’

‘I just want to say one more thing,’ said Dave when I’d gone back to bed.

‘Go on.’

‘One more thing about Mark’s, you know. His talent.’

‘If you must.’

‘If it’s hereditary…It must have been your dad.’

My dad…Jesus.

I hope this never happens to you, but when you get your dad’s thing and your son’s thing dangled in your face, all on the same day…Well, you can imagine. It’s not the sort of day you never want to end.

I went to sleep all right, though, because for some reason that I can’t and don’t really want to explain, Dave and I ended up having sex that night, and it wasn’t the sort of sex we usually have. It was more his idea than mine, but, you know. I joined in.

My mum lives with my sister Helen in Walthamstow, a couple of miles away. It’s just one of those things that happened: Helen got divorced soon after Dad died, and she’s never had kids, and it just seemed like a happy solution for everyone–especially, if I’m honest, for me and Dave. Helen moans about it a bit to me, tries to make me feel guilty and so on, but the arrangement suits her, really. It’s not like Mum’s a geriatric. She’s only sixty-eight, and she’s pretty fit, and she goes out a lot–she goes out more than Helen, in fact. Helen says that Mum stops her from meeting anybody, but the only way that would work is if Mum’s actually copping off with the men that Helen is interested in.

I went round to see them on the Saturday morning. I bumped into Karen Glenister on the way to the bus stop; she just happened to be putting her recycling out the very moment I walked past her front door, and if you believe that you’ll believe anything.

‘So,’ she said.

‘Hello, Karen.’ I gave her a big smile.

‘Did you watch it?’

‘Oh, I’ve seen it all before,’ I said. ‘Did Carl enjoy it?’

She looked at me. ‘He wasn’t looking at Mark, you know.’

‘Oh, course not. I’m sure he’ll get a girlfriend soon enough.’

‘And does he get it off his dad?’

‘Have you ever wondered why I’m always so cheerful?’ I said. And then I just kept walking.

I hadn’t made up my mind whether I was going to try and talk to Mum. We’ve never had that kind of conversation before, and once you get to a certain age, you’re tempted to think that you’ve got away with it, aren’t you? But it just seemed important. When Dad died, I went through that business of regretting that I hadn’t spent enough time talking to him; I loved him, but I seemed to spend a lot of time resenting him, and trying to avoid him, and getting pissed off with him. And now I was trying to work out whether this business was something I should know. Was it a part of him? And if so, was it a good part or a bad part?

Dad was really sick for the last couple of years of his life, and sick is how I remembered him best. But when I found out about this other thing, I started to think about him in a different way. I don’t mean I started to think about him in, you know, a weird way. It’s just that knowing what I knew meant that I thought about him being healthy and young, or younger, anyway. It just seemed to follow. Because finding out something like that…You can’t help but wonder about a period in his life when he would have been using it, if you know what I mean, and he couldn’t have been using it much at the end, poor sod. And it really helped me to think about him in these other ways. I started to remember other things: the way he dressed when Helen and I were kids, for example–in trousers like Mark’s, even though he must have been young in the sixties and seventies, when people were wearing tighter trousers. And on the bus that morning, I suddenly had a flash of the way he looked at my mum sometimes, and the way she looked at him. I’ll tell you the truth: I suddenly got all weepy, on the top of the bus. I was sad, but it wasn’t just sadness. There was something else in there, too–it was that happy/sad, sweet-and-sour feeling you can get when you look at baby photos of your grown-up kids. I don’t know. When you get older, it feels like happy memories and sad memories come to pretty much the same thing. It’s all just emotion, in the end, and any of it can make you weep. Anyway, when I’d dabbed at my eyes a bit, I almost started to laugh. Because who’d have thought that what began with Karen Glenister dropping a porn film through the letter-box would end up with that sort of stuff going through your head?

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.’