Not a Star and Otherwise Pandemonium Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.’
    ‘Oh. Why not?’
    ‘It doesn’t make any difference, you and Dad finding out. I wasn’t doing it