And I was even more grateful to Nodog then. Because he had taught me this deep, clear way of thinking, the way that allowed me to see things as they really were. So even though Mum wasn’t seeing things the way they really were, and she didn’t know that for example the Pop Idol judges couldn’t prove they had the right to live, she was seeing something that could work for her, and stop her from being such a bitch.
And now because of Nodog’s teachings, I had like the wiseness to accept it, and not tell her it was stupid or pointless.
Martin
Who, you might want to ask, would call their child Pacino? Pacino’s parents, Harry and Marcia Cox, that’s who.
“May I ask how you got your name?” I asked Pacino when I first made his acquaintance.
He looked at me, baffled, although I should point out that just about any question baffled Pacino. He was large and buck-toothed, and he had a squint, so his lack of intelligence was particularly unfortunate. If anyone ever needed the compensation of charisma and good looks, it was Pacino.
“Howjer mean?”
“Where did your name come from?”
“Where did it come from?”
The idea that names came from anywhere was clearly a new one to him; I might as well have asked him where his toes came from.
“There’s a famous film actor called Pacino.”
He looked at me.
“Is there?”
“You hadn’t heard of him?”
“Nope.”
“So you don’t think you were named after him?”
“Dunno.”
“You never asked?”
“Nope. I don’t ask about no one’s name.”
“Right.”
Where chorname come from?”
“Martin?”
“Yeah.”
“Where did it come from?”
“Yeah.”
I gaped at him for a moment. I was at a loss. Apart from the obvious answer—that it had come from my parents, just as Pacino had come from his (although even this piece of information might have amazed him)—I could only have told him that mine was French in origin—just as his was Italian. As a consequence, I would have found it hard to articulate why his name was comical and mine was not.
“See? It’s a hard question. Don’t mean I’m thick, just because I can’t answer it.”
“No. Of course not.”
“Otherwise you’re thick, too.”
This was not a possibility that I felt I could rule out altogether. I was beginning to feel thick, for all sorts of reasons.
Pacino was a year-eight pupil at a comprehensive school in my neighbourhood, and I was supposed to be helping him with his reading. I had volunteered to do so after my conversation with Cindy, and after seeing a small advertisement in the local newspaper: Pacino was my first stop on the road towards self-respect. It’s a long road, I accept that, but I had somehow hoped that Pacino might have been positioned a little further along it. If we agree that self-respect is in, say, Sydney, and I’d begun the journey at Holloway Road tube station, then I’d imagined that Pacino would be my overnight stopover, the place where my plane could refuel. I was realistic enough to see that he wasn’t going to get me all the way there, but volunteering to sit down with a stupid and unattractive child for an hour represented several thousand air-miles, surely? During our first session, however, as we stumbled over even the simplest words, I realized that he was more like Caledonian Road than Singapore, and it would be another twenty-odd tube stops before I even got to bloody Heathrow.
We began with an appalling book he wanted to read about football, the large-print story of how a girl with one leg overcame her handicap and her team-mates’ sexism to become the captain of the school team. To be fair to Pacino, once he saw which way the wind was blowing, he was suitably contemptuous.
“She’s going to score the winning goal in a big match, innit?” he asked with some disgust.
“I fear that might be the case, yes.”
“But she’s only got one leg.”
“Indeed.”
“Plus she’s a girl.”
“She is, yes.”
“What school is this, then?”
“You may well ask.”
“I’m asking.”
“You want to know the name of the school?”
“Yeah. I want to go up there with my mates and laugh at them for having a girl with one leg in their team.”
“I’m not sure it’s a real school.”
“So it’s not even a true story?”
“No.”
“I’m not fucking bothering with this, then.”
“Good. Go and choose something else.”
He snuffled his way back to the library shelves, but could find nothing that might interest him.
“What are you interested in, actually?”
“Nuffink, really.”
“Nothing at all?”
“I quite like fruit. My mum says I’m a champion fruit-eater.”
“Right. That gives us something to work on.”
There were forty-five minutes of our hour remaining.
So what would you do? How does one begin to like oneself enough to want to live a little longer? And why didn’t my hour with Pacino do the trick? I blamed him, partly. He didn’t want to learn. And he wasn’t the sort of child I’d had in mind, either. I’d hoped for someone who was remarkably intelligent, but disadvantaged by home circumstance, someone who only needed an hour’s extra tuition a week to become some kind of working-class prodigy. I wanted my hour a week to make the difference between a future addicted to heroin and a future studying English at Oxford. That was the sort of kid I wanted, and instead they’d given me someone whose chief interest was in eating fruit. I mean, what did he need to read for? There’s an international symbol for the gents’ toilets, and he could always get his mother to tell him what was on television.
Perhaps that was the point, the sheer grinding uselessness of it. Perhaps if you knew you were doing something so obviously without value, you liked yourself more than someone who was indisputably helping people. Perhaps I’d end up feeling better than the blond nurse, and I could taunt him again, but this time I would have righteousness on my side. It’s a currency like any other, self-worth. You spend years saving up, and you can blow it all in an evening if you so choose. I’d done forty-odd years’ worth in the space of a few months, and now I had to save up again. I reckoned that Pacino was worth about ten pence a week, so it would be a while before I could afford another night on the town.
There you are. I can finish that sentence now: “Hard is teaching Pacino to read.” Or even, “Hard is trying to rebuild yourself, piece by piece, with no instruction book, and no clue as to where all the important bits are supposed to go.”
JJ
Lizzie and Ed bought me a guitar and a harp and a neck rack from one of those cool shops in Denmark Street; and when Ed and I were on the way to Heathrow, Ed told me he wanted to buy me a plane ticket home.
“I can’t go home yet, man.”
I was going along to say goodbye, but the tube journey was so fucking long that we ended up talking about something other than which crappy magazine he was going to buy from the bookstall.
“There’s nothing here for you. Go home, get a band together.”