About A Boy

twenty-four

Will fell in love on New Year's Eve, and the experience took him completely by surprise. She was called Rachel, she illustrated children's books, and she looked a little bit like Laura Nyro on the cover of Gonna Take A Miracle — nervy, glamorous, Bohemian, clever, lots of long, unruly dark hair.
Will had never wanted to fall in love. When it had happened to friends it had alwaysstruck
him as a peculiarly unpleasant-seeming experience, what with all the loss of sleep and weight, and the unhappiness when it was unreciprocated, and the suspect, dippy happiness when it was working out. These were people who could not control themselves, or protect
themselves, people who, if only temporarily, were no longer content to occupy their own
space, people who could no longer relyon a new jacket, a bag of grass and an afternoon rerun of The Rockford Files to make them complete.
Lots of people, of course, would be thrilled to take their seats next to their computergenerated ideal life-partner, but Will was a realist, and he could see immediately that there was only cause for panic. He was almost sure that Rachel was about to make him very miserable indeed, mostly becausehe couldn't see anything he might have which could
possibly interest her.
If there was a disadvantage to the life he had chosen for himself, a life without work and
care and difficulty and detail, a life without context and texture, then he had finally found it:
when he met an intelligent, cultured, ambitious, beautiful, witty and single woman at a New
Year's Eve party, he felt like a blanktwit, a cypher, someone who had done nothing with his whole life apart from watch Countdown and drive around listening to Nirvana records. That had to be a bad thing, he reckoned. If you were falling in love with someone beautiful and intelligent and all the rest of it, then feeling like a blank twit put you at something of a
disadvantage.
One of his problems, he reflected as he was trying todredge his memory for a single tiny
scrap of experience that this woman might regard as worth her momentary contemplation,
was that he was reasonably good-looking and reasonably articulate. It gave people the wrong impression. It gave him admission to a party from which he should be barred by ferocious bouncers with thick necks and tattoos. He may have been good-looking and articulate, but that wasjust a quirk of genetics, environment and education; at his core he was ugly and monosyllabic. Maybe he should undergo some sort of reverse plastic surgery — something that would rearrange his features so that they were less even, and push his eyes closer together or further apart. Or maybe he should put on an enormous amount of weight, sprout a few extra chins, grow so fat that he sweatedprofusely all the time. And, of course, he should start grunting like an ape.
Because the thing was that when this Rachel woman sat down next to him at dinner she
was interested, for the first five minutes, before she'd worked him out, and in that five
minutes he got a glimpse of what life could be like if he were in any way interesting. On
balance, he thought, he'd prefer not to have that glimpse.What good did it do him, after all?
He wasn't going to get to sleep with Rachel. He wasn't going to go to a restaurant with her, or see what her sitting room looked like, or get to understand how her father's affair with her mother's best friend had affected her views on having children. He hated the five-minute window of opportunity. In the end, he thought, he would be far happier if she turnedround to look at him, just about managed not to vomit, and turned her back on him for the rest of the evening.
He missed Ned. Ned had given him an extra something, a little il ne sait quoi, that would
have come in handy on an evening like this. He wasn't going to bring him back to life,
though, poor little sod. Let him rest in peace.
'How do you know Robert?' Rachel was asking him.
'Oh, just...