by Nick Hornby
I don’t think even I had quite realized, up until this point, just what a limp grasp on reality David now has.
‘We don’t bloody want him,’ says Ed. ‘Little shit.’
GoodNews is staggered. ‘You don’t want him? Because of this? Come on, guys. We knew it was going to be a hard road. I didn’t think you two would fall at the first hurdle.’
‘You told us you’d vetted everybody,’ says Wendy.
‘We did,’ David says. ‘We got recommendations from a local hostel. But, you know. It must have been very tempting for him. There’s money lying around, and jewellery, and electronic goods, and . . .’
‘So it’s our fault?’ says Ed. ‘Is that what you’re telling us?’
‘Not your fault, exactly. But maybe we’re not quite seeing the . . . the extent of the cultural gap here.’
Ed and Wendy look at each other and walk out.
‘I’m very disappointed in them,’ says David, almost to himself. ‘I thought they were made of tougher stuff than that.’
I clean Robbie up and suggest to him that it might be politic to disappear. He’s not entirely happy with the suggestion – like David and GoodNews, he seems to believe that I am indulging in some unhelpful stereotyping, and that he hasn’t been given a chance. We have quite a lively debate about it all, as you can imagine, because my own feeling, a feeling that Robbie doesn’t share, is that he has been given a chance, and he hasn’t responded entirely positively to it.
He disagrees. ‘That camera thing was cheap Korean crap,’ he says. ‘And like GoodNews says, it was only twenty quid.’
This, I try to point out, is beside the point – indeed, it is a non sequitur – but I don’t make very much headway. After a much briefer conversation with Monkey he decides that Webster Road isn’t for him after all. We never see him again.
News of the misfortune spreads up and down the street, and we receive several visits during the course of the day. All the other four hosts want to talk to David and GoodNews, of course, but Ed and Wendy’s immediate neighbours – including Mike, whose ideological opposition to the project has predictably hardened overnight – are also unhappy. Mike pays us a visit.
‘This isn’t anything to do with you,’ says David.
‘What, when I’ve got a bloody tea-leaf living next door?’
‘You don’t know who you’ve got living next door,’ says David. ‘You’re judging someone before you’ve got to know them.’
‘You’re jumping,’ says GoodNews, pleased with his new verb. ‘And we’re not jumpers here.’
‘What, so I’ve got to wait until half my fucking stuff has gone before I’m allowed to complain?’
‘Why don’t we call a street meeting?’ says David.
‘What good will that do?’
‘I want to gauge the temperature. See how other people feel.’
‘I don’t give a fuck how other people feel.’
‘That’s not what living in a community is about, Mike.’
‘I don’t live in a fucking community. I live in my house. With my things. And I want to keep them.’
‘OK. So maybe you should be given the opportunity to express that. Meet the kids and tell them you don’t want them in your house.’
‘Tell them! Tell them! If they have to be told not to break in, they shouldn’t be here in the first place.’
‘And where should they be?’
‘In a hostel, back on the street, who cares?’
‘I do, obviously. That’s why I’m doing this.’
‘Yeah, well, I don’t.’
‘What do you care about, Mike?’ This is GoodNews’s first contribution to the debate, but it is the most incendiary so far: Mike is now dangerously close to thumping somebody. I have conflicting loyalties. I don’t like Mike very much, but on the other hand both David and GoodNews clearly need thumping, and it is difficult to see who else is going to do it.
‘Listen,’ says David. He has come back from the brink; I can hear the desire to pacify in his voice. ‘I understand why you’re worried. But I promise you you’ve got nothing to worry about. Please meet the other kids and listen to what they’ve got to say. And if anything else like this happens, well, I’ve got it all wrong and I’ll have to think again. OK?’
It’s enough, just; Mike calms down, and agrees to come round later on, although I suspect that David has some way to go before he manages to convert him to the cause. Meanwhile we prepare – some of us with heavier hearts than others – yet more cheese straws, for yet another community gathering in our house.
Rather sweetly, the kids all come with their hosts, rather than with each other, as if to demonstrate their new allegiances. They have to be nudged through the door, like much younger children attending a birthday party, and when they are in they stand there staring at the floor while the adults introduce them gently and, well, yes, proudly.
‘This is Sas,’ says Richard, the gay actor from The Bill. Sas is a chronically shy eighteen-year-old from Birmingham who arrived in London two years ago after being sexually assaulted by her stepfather. She wants to be a nurse; she has recently been working as a prostitute. Some parts of her – her body language, the braids in her hair – make her look nine; her eyes make her look forty-five.
No one, not even Mike, could want anything else bad to happen to her.
Martina brings a girl called Tiz. Tiz is spotty and fat, and she and Martina, I notice, are holding hands when they come in. Ros and Max bring their own daughter Holly and her new best friend, Annie, who is older than the others, twenty-two or so, and is wearing what are clearly Ros’s clothes – a long dress with a flowered print and a pair of sparkly sandals. Robert and Jude’s Craig is wearing a suit, another cast-off, and his hair is wet from the shower and he looks like a sweet, scared little boy. That’s what strikes you most about all of them: when they arrived they all looked as though they had seen too much, too young, and it’s as if the comforts of Webster Road, the baths and the showers, have washed all that unimaginable filthy experience from their bodies and their faces. Now they all look as they should – and shouldn’t, if the world were a different place. They look like terrified young people who are a long way from family and home and a life that any of us would want to live.
Mike doesn’t stand a chance – he isn’t even allowed to speak. Max points out that they have been burgled three times in the last two years, and it doesn’t really matter if thieves are living next door to you or a couple of streets away. Martina tells Mike that she has lived alone for fifteen years, and enjoys Tiz’s company so much that she would be devastated if she disappeared now. ‘I would haf to go and find another Tiz,’ she says.
Sas speaks last. She’s not a good speaker – she’s shy, and she looks at her shoes, and she stops and starts, and no one can really hear her anyway. But what is clear is that she is desperate for this chance – desperate to stay with Simon and Richard, desperate to go to college so that she can pass some exams, desperate not to return to how things were for her before. She wanted to kill Robbie, she said, because she knew what it meant, and what people would think of the rest of them, and she said if anything else got stolen while they were in the street she would personally pay the victims back out of her own pocket, even if it took her the rest of her life. When she has finished Richard comes up and hugs her, while everyone else claps. Mike goes home, looking as if he might burgle his own house and disappear.
Richard comes up to me afterwards to thank me for the evening – as if I have done anything apart from complain about yet more intrusion.
‘I know Sas thinks we’ve done a lot for her,’ he says. ‘But I can’t describe what she’s done for us. I mean, look at me. A bad actor who’s thrilled to bits if I survive more than one week in a hospital bed in Casualty. I’ve done nothing with my life. And now I’m on this permanent high. If Sas ever qualifies as a nurse I’ll die a happy man. And I’d cry for a month. You must be very proud of David.’
‘I am a
doctor, you know,’ I say. ‘I’ve saved the odd life myself.’ Richard stares at me until I run off and lock myself in the toilet.
This is not their story; it is mine, and David’s. So I want to bring their story to an end, and tell you what has happened to them all. Craig and Monkey disappeared, after a few days in Monkey’s case, and a few weeks in Craig’s. Monkey took some money when he went, but it was money that David and I had put to one side to be stolen: when we began to suspect that Monkey was unhappy, and uncomfortable, and itching to move on to something else, I showed him the kitchen jar where we keep our emergency money, and then we put five twenty pound notes in it. We knew it would go, and it did. Craig was talking about going to find his mother, apparently, and we hope that’s where he has gone. The girls are still here, in the street, and it is as if they never had a previous life at all. So. David wanted to rescue ten kids. He had to settle for six. Three of those six were beyond his reach. If the other three stay, and get jobs, and find homes of their own, and partners, maybe, then . . . Oh, you can do the maths yourself. I don’t mean the three-out-of-ten maths, of course. I mean the rest of it. Because I don’t know the value of anything any more.
11
The only scenes I can stand in any of the Star Wars films are the quiet scenes in the second one, The Empire Strikes Back. Or rather, it used to be the second one, before the fourth one became the first one, thus making the second one the fifth one. A couple of years ago Tom used to watch his Star Wars videos over and over again, in sequence, and at first I preferred The Empire Strikes Back simply because it offered some respite from all the roaring and banging and whizzing. But later I came to appreciate its . . . I don’t know what you’d call it. Message? Moral? Do Star Wars films have messages? Anyway, something in it began to chime somewhere in me, and I wanted to be Luke Skywalker, off somewhere on my own, learning to be a Jedi. I wanted a break from the war. I wanted someone wise to teach me how to do the things I needed to know to survive the rest of my life. And I know it’s pathetic that it should have been a children’s science-fiction film telling me this – it should have been George Eliot, or Wordsworth, or Virginia Woolf. But then, that’s precisely the point, isn’t it? There is no time or energy for Virginia Woolf, which means that I am forced to look for meaning and comfort in my son’s Star Wars videos. I have to be Luke Skywalker because I don’t know who else to be.
When Monkey and his pals moved into the street, I became acutely aware of the need to think; it seemed as though life were unsustainable without thought, in fact. I couldn’t work out who was right and who was wrong, my house was full of people I didn’t know . . . I was going mad, really. So I had to do this, didn’t I? And of course it’s selfish and indulgent and bad, but it seemed at the time as though I couldn’t work out how to be good without being bad. Anyone would understand. God, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Miriam Stoppard, anyone. Wouldn’t they? And it doesn’t mean I love my children less, and it doesn’t even mean I love my husband less (I don’t think, although that’s one of the things I need to think about) . . .
I’ve moved out. Sort of, anyway. Except that nobody knows. Well, David and GoodNews know, and a colleague called Janet, for reasons that will become clear, but Molly and Tom don’t, not yet. I now live, or at least sleep, in a bedsit just around the corner, and I put the kids to bed at night, and I set the alarm for six-fifteen in the morning, get dressed, and walk straight out of the flat, no tea, no muesli, nightdress and dressing gown in a carrier bag, so that I am back in the familial house at six-thirty. The children usually need to be woken an hour later, but I’m there on the off-chance that either of them should get up earlier. (They rarely wake in the night now, and when they do, David has always been the one to deal with them, simply because I am the one with the proper job.) I then change back into my nightdress and dressing gown in order to remove any last doubts the children might have – although they would have to be very suspicious indeed to suspect that the mother who puts them to bed at night and is there at breakfast the next morning has moved out – and spend my extra hour reading the paper that I have brought with me. In theory, I get an hour’s less sleep, but this is no hardship, because in practice it feels like I have slept for an hour longer, such is the revivifying effect of being on my own for the night.
I’m not paying for the room; it belongs to Janet Walder, the third person who knows about my new domestic arrangements. Janet works at the surgery and has gone back to New Zealand for a month to see her new niece. If it hadn’t been for Janet’s new niece, in fact, I would never have taken the decision to move out. Like those thieves who would never have dreamed of stealing a wallet if they hadn’t seen it sticking out of somebody’s pocket, the opportunity was all: she just happened to mention that she was leaving her room empty, and within seconds I had made my mind up. It was as if I were powerless to resist the temptation; my senses were overcome. I could hear the emptiness, and taste the silence, and smell the solitude, and I wanted it more than I have ever wanted anything before. (And what does that say about me? What kind of sensualist craves nothingness?) And then I invented my post-bedtime, pre-breakfast plan, on the spot, in seconds, because necessity is the mother of invention. And then I went home and told David what I was doing, and then I did it.
‘Why?’ David asked – not unreasonably, I suppose.
Because of everything, I told him. Because of GoodNews, and because of Monkey, and because I’m frightened of what you might do next. And because I’m disappearing, I wanted to tell him. Every day I wake up and there’s a little bit less of me. But I couldn’t say that, because I didn’t know whether I was entitled to, and nor would I ever know, unless I got my Jedi training.
‘I dunno, really,’ I said. ‘I just want some time out.’
‘Time out of what?’
Time out of our marriage, I should have said. Because that, really, is what it comes down to. That’s all there is left, when you take away working hours and family suppers and family breakfasts: the time I get on my own is the time I would have spent being a wife, rather than being a mother or a doctor. (And God, how frightening, that those are the only options available. The only times when I am not performing one of those three roles is when I am in the bathroom.) But of course I didn’t say that either; I just waved a hand airily at what I hoped he would see was a decaying, wartorn planet that didn’t have enough oxygen to support complex life forms.
‘Please don’t go,’ he said, but I couldn’t hear any conviction or desperation in his voice. Maybe I wasn’t trying hard enough.
‘Why don’t you want me to go?’ I asked him. ‘What difference will it make to you?’
And there was a long, thoughtful, fatal pause before he said anything, a pause that allowed me first to ignore and then to forget what it was he eventually cobbled together.
Janet’s bedsit is at the top of a large terraced house on Taymor Road, which runs parallel to Webster Road. The terrace is weird, because it’s actually very beautiful, but was allowed to decay. Now the houses are being recovered, one by one, and I’m in the middle of a row of the last three tatty houses left.
There are three flats underneath me, and I now know and like the inhabitants of all of them. Gretchen, who works in PR and has promised me all sorts of free samples, lives in the garden flat, the biggest of the four; and above her is Marie, who teaches philosophy at the University of North London and goes home to Glasgow at weekends, and above Marie is Dick, a quiet, very nervous guy who works in a local record shop.
It’s fun here. We make decisions together, decisions about how to live our lives, and where responsibilities lie, and what would be for the greatest possible good. Last week, for example, Gretchen hosted a house meeting, and we voted to get a bigger letter box: Marie orders a lot of books from Amazon and the postman can’t put them through the door, so he has taken to leaving them out on the front step, where they get wet. Do you hear that, David? Letter box sizes! Those are the things we can change! (Probably – al
though we haven’t yet got a quote, and we’re not sure who instals letter boxes, or how to find out.) It was an entirely satisfactory discussion, short, logical, harmonious and just: Marie will pay two thirds of the installation costs, and I will pay nothing. And we drank wine, and listened to Air, who are French, and play mostly instrumentals that sound as if they are best heard in lifts. Air are my new favourite group, although Dick is a bit snooty about them, in his quiet, nervous way. He says there’s much better ambient French pop than this, and he could do us a tape if we wanted.
But to me Air sound modern and childless and single, compared to, say, Dylan, who sounds old and married and burdened – who sounds like home. If Air are Conran, then Dylan is the greengrocers. Mushrooms, lettuce and tomato, home to cook bolognese and prepare a salad, and how does it feeeeeel? To be on your oowwwn? Except I never am whenever Bob is singing. This, I can’t help feeling, is what communal living should be about: cool music and white wine and letter boxes and a closed door when you need it. Next time we’re going to talk about whether we need a table in the hall for post, and I’m looking forward to it. (My feeling is that we do, although I’m prepared to listen to those who disagree.)
Everyone is single here, and I like that, too. None of them want to be single, I suspect; even the other night there were lots of very forced, very self-deprecating and very well-rehearsed jokes about their romantic status, and I would surmise that if the subject came up during a house meeting about letter boxes – Gretchen wondered whether the size of the slot was responsible for the poor show on Valentine’s Day, and we all laughed dutifully and mock-sorrowfully – it would come up in a discussion about anything at all. And though I’m sorry for them, if they are sorry for themselves, it suits my purposes that none of them should be in relationships, because it adds to that in-between, Empire-Strikes-Back atmosphere; it feels as though I have just started a fresh sheet on someone else’s drawing pad. Mine got used up, every corner filled in, and I didn’t like what I had done.
