About A Boy Flashcards
Will
Life was, afterall, like air…and all he could do for the moment was live it
and breathe it.
How cool was Will Freeman? This cool.
He was, according to the questionnaire, sub zero.
His career as a serial nice guy had begun.
I’m not your dad, I’m not your big brother, I can tell you who Kurt Cobain is and what trainers to get and that’s it. Understand?
…being men’s magazine cool was a close as he had ever come to an achievement
Children served as a symbolic blemish, like a birthmark or obesity, which gave him a chance where previously there would have been none.
You had to live in your own bubble.
Will only just managed to restrain himself from rubbing his hands together. He was completely absorbed in all of this - absorbed almost to the point of enjoyment.
He had imagined entering their world, but he hadn’t foreseen that they might be able to penetrate his. He was one of life’s visitors; he didn’t want to be visited.
But there was more than a whiff of the Freeman household in Fiona’s flat: you got the same sense of hopelessness and defeat and
bewilderment and straightforward lunacy.
Marcus needed help to be a kid, not an adult. And, unhappily for Will, that was exactly the kind of assistance he was qualified to provide.
He had somehow managed to turn himself into a single parent without even going to the trouble of fathering a child.
Nobody’s problem was his problem, and now everybody’s problem was his problem, and he had no solutions for any of them.
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FIONA
“Are you being funny?”
“…started crying before breakfast, and it frightened him”
“At first Marcus was quiet, so quiet that he almost stopped breathing. He didn’t want his mum to hear his breaths because then she would’ve thought he was more upset than usual”
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ELLIE
“…the sulky scruffy girl from year 10 who hacked off her own hair an wore black lipstick”
“Marcus, my man!”
“She put her arm around him”
“It’s okay. She’s not like Kurt… He is not a real person”
“Auntie Ellie”
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MARCUS
“He’ll be imprisoned for a crime he never committed”- Marcus on dead duck day
“How come he’d managed to pick a duck that was so pathetic?”- Same as above
“He just wasn’t right for schools. Not secondary schools, anyway”- Marcus on being bullied
“But this was the scariest thing he’d ever seen, by a million miles, and he knew the moment he walked in that it was something he’d have to think about forever”- Marcus on his Mum’s suicide
“He didn’t want to put up with thing as they were, but the other choice meant that he’d have to be his own mother, and how could you be your own mother when you were only twelve?”- Marcus on his mum’s depression.
“He was having a ** time at school and a ** time at home, and as home and school was all there was to it, just about, that meant he was having a ** time all the time, apart from when he was asleep”- Marcus on his life
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