Free Not a Star and Otherwise Pandemonium by Nick Hornby

Not a Star
    I found out that my son was the star of a porn film when Karen Glenister from two doors down dropped an envelope through our letter-box. Inside the envelope was a video and a little note which said:
    Dear Lynn,
    I’m not in the habit of dropping smutty films through people’s letter-boxes! But I thought you and Dave might be interested in this one! It’s not mine, I should add! Carl was at a mate’s house on Friday night after they’d been out drinking, and his mate put this tape on, you know what they’re like! And Carl recognized Someone You Might Know. He couldn’t stop laughing. I had no idea! Does he get this from his Dad?!? You’ve kept it quiet if he does!!!!
    Love
Karen
    It had to be her, didn’t it? It had to be Karen bloody Glenister. She’s a nurse at the hospital, so she knows everyone and everything. And whatever she finds out, she passes on to whoever happens to be standing around, whether it’s their business or not, and whether they’re interested or not. She knew Dave had had the snip about ten minutes before I did, and half the town knew about it five minutes later. Everything has to go through her. She’s the Clapham Junction of gossip. So it would be her son that saw Mark’s film; it couldn’t not have been. It’s the law around here.
     
    I was the only one in when I picked the envelope up off of the doormat. Dave wasn’t back from work, and Mark plays five-a-side after college on Wednesdays. I opened the envelope at the kitchen table, read the note, and then looked at the video, which was called…Listen, if I’m going to tell this story, I’ll have to use some words that might offend you. But if I don’t say them, you won’t get any sense of the shock I felt. So. The film was called Meet the Fuckers , and there was a picture of Mark on the cover. He was standing behind a woman with enormous boobs, and he had his hands over them so that you couldn’t see her nipples.
    My knees started to shake. I couldn’t stand up, and I could hardly breathe. I hadn’t seen the film then, so I still had the luxury of imagining that my son didn’t really do very much, apart from stand behind topless women and cover their nipples with his hands. I think there might even have been a brief moment when I told myself Mark was just being a gentleman–that there was this poor girl, caught with no blouse, thankful that Mark was there to hide her shame…You know what it’s like when you’ve got kids. You’ll only believe the worst of them when you’ve got no other choice.
    I found it impossible to get my head around. Mark! I thought. My Mark! Mark, who used to sit at the kitchen table trying to do his English homework, and finding it so difficult that he chewed his way right through his biro, night after night! At first, I didn’t know why that particular memory made the video seem so hard to believe. There must have been millions of people who took their clothes off for a living, and every single one of them probably found their English homework a bit of a struggle. Or is that just me being prejudiced? Could you come top in English and then go on to star in a film called Meet the Fuckers? It’s hard to imagine, isn’t it?.
    But then I worked out why the biro-chewing didn’t seem to fit with the career in porn. Mark is…Well, he’s never been the star of anything. He’s been trying to get a leisure and tourism qualification so as he can get a job in a sports centre somewhere, but he’s finding the studying hard. We’re worried it might be too much for him, that he’s set his sights too high. Anyway, when I saw him on the cover of that video, I realized that we’d got used to the idea of thinking of him as, I don’t know. Not special . I mean, he’s special because he’s our son. But it seemed to me that the two words I’d said to him most over the last few years were ‘Never mind’. School reports, exam results, job applications, football trials, girlfriends: ‘Never