by Nick Hornby
I didn’t mind talking, because I knew I didn’t need to say very much. None of these people would have wanted my life. I doubted whether they’d understand how I’d put up with it for as long as I had. It’s always the toilet bit that upsets people. Whenever I’ve had to moan before – when I need another prescription for my anti-depressants, for example – I always mention the toilet bit, the cleaning up that needs doing most days. It’s funny, because it’s the bit I’ve got used to. I can’t get used to the idea that my life is finished, pointless, too hard, completely without hope or colour; but the mopping up doesn’t really worry me any more. That’s always what gets the doctor reaching for his pen, though.
‘Oh, yeah,’ Jess said when I’d finished. ‘That’s a no-brainer. Don’t change your mind. You’d only regret it.’
‘Some people cope,’ said Martin.
‘Who?’ said Jess.
‘We had a woman on the show whose husband had been in a coma for twenty-five years.’
‘And that was her reward, was it? Going on a breakfast TV show?’
‘No. I’m just saying.’
‘What are you just saying?’
‘I’m just saying it can be done.’
‘You’re not saying why, though, are you?’
‘Maybe she loved him.’
They spoke quickly, Martin and Jess and JJ. Like people in a soap opera, bang bang bang. Like people who know what to say. I could never have spoken that quickly, not then, anyway; it made me realize that I’d hardly spoken at all for twenty-odd years. And the person I spoke to most couldn’t speak back.
‘What was there to love?’ Jess was saying. ‘He was a vegetable. Not even an awake vegetable. A vegetable in a coma.’
‘He wouldn’t be a vegetable if he wasn’t in a coma, would he?’ said Martin.
‘I love my son,’ I said. I didn’t want them to think I didn’t.
‘Yes,’ said Martin. ‘Of course you do. We didn’t mean to imply otherwise.’
‘Do you want us to kill him for you?’ said Jess. ‘I’ll go down there tonight if you want. Before I kill myself. I don’t mind. No skin off my nose. And it’s not like he’s got much to live for, is it? If he could speak, he’d probably thank me for it, poor sod.’
My eyes filled with tears, and JJ noticed.
‘What are you, a f—idiot?’ he said to Jess. ‘Look what you’ve done.’
‘So-rry,’ said Jess. ‘Just an idea.’
But that wasn’t why I was crying. I was crying because all I wanted in the world, the only thing that would make me want to live, was for Matty to die. And knowing why I was crying just made me cry more.
MARTIN
Everyone bloody knew everything about me, so I didn’t see the point of this lark, and I told them that.
‘Oh, come on, man,’ said JJ, in his irritating American way. It doesn’t take long, I find, to be irritated by Yanks. I know they’re our friends and everything, and they respect success over there, unlike the ungrateful natives of this bloody chippy dump, but all that cool-daddio stuff gets on my wick. I mean, you should have seen him. You’d have thought he was on the roof to promote his latest movie. You certainly wouldn’t think he’d been puttering around Archway delivering pizzas.
‘We just want to hear your side of it,’ said Jess.
‘There isn’t a “my side”. I was a bloody idiot and I’m paying the price.’
‘So you don’t want to defend yourself? Because you’re among friends here,’ said JJ.
‘She just spat at me,’ I pointed out. ‘What kind of a friend is that?’
‘Oh, don’t be such a baby,’ said Jess. ‘My friends are always spitting at me. I never take it personally.’
‘Maybe you should. Perhaps that’s how your friends intend it to be taken.’
Jess snorted. ‘If I took it personally, I wouldn’t have any friends left.’
We let that one hang in the air.
‘So what do you want to know, that you don’t know already?’
‘There are two sides to every story,’ said Jess. ‘We only know the bad side.’
‘I didn’t know she was fifteen,’ I said. ‘She told me she was eighteen. She looked eighteen.’ That was it. That was the good side of the story.
‘So if she’d been, like, six months older you wouldn’t be up here?’
‘I don’t suppose I would, no. Because I wouldn’t have broken the law. Wouldn’t have gone to prison. Wouldn’t have lost my job, my wife wouldn’t have found out…’
‘So you’re saying it was just bad luck.’
‘I’d say there was a certain degree of culpability involved.’ This was, I need hardly tell you, an attempt at dry understatement; I didn’t know then that Jess is at her happiest wallowing in the marshland of the bleeding obvious.
‘Just because you’ve swallowed a fucking dictionary, it doesn’t mean you’ve done nothing wrong,’ said Jess.
‘That’s what “culpability”…’
‘Because some married men wouldn’t have shagged her no matter how old she was. And you’ve got kids and all, haven’t you?’
‘I have indeed.’
‘So bad luck’s got nothing to do with it.’
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake. Why d’you think I’ve been dangling my feet over the ledge, you moron? I screwed up. I’m not trying to make excuses for myself. I feel so wretched I want to die.’
‘I should hope so.’
‘Thanks. And thanks for introducing this exercise, too. Very helpful. Very… curative.’
Another polysyllabic word, another dirty look.
‘I’m interested in something,’ said JJ.
‘Go on.’
‘Why is it easier to like leap into the void than to face up to what you’ve done?’
‘This is facing up to what I’ve done.’
‘People are always fucking young girls and leaving their wives and kids. They don’t all jump off of buildings, man.’
‘No. But like Jess says, maybe they should.’
‘Really? You think anyone who makes a mistake of this kind should die? Woah. That’s some heavy shit,’ said JJ.
Did I really think that? Maybe I did. Or maybe I had done. As some of you might know, I’d written things in newspapers which said exactly that, more or less. This was before my fall from grace, naturally. I’d called for the restoration of the death penalty, for example. I’d called for resignations and chemical castrations and prison sentences and public humiliations and penances of every kind. And maybe I had meant it when I’d said that men who couldn’t keep their things in their trousers should be… Actually, I can’t remember what I thought the appropriate punishment was now for philanderers and serial adulterers. I shall have to look up the column in question. But the point is that I was practising what I preached. I hadn’t been able to keep my thing in my trousers, so now I had to jump. I was a slave to my own logic. That was the price you had to pay if you were a tabloid columnist who crossed the line you’d drawn.
‘Not every mistake, no. But maybe this one.’
‘Jesus,’ said JJ. ‘You’re real tough on yourself.’
‘It’s not just that, anyway. It’s the public thing. The humiliation. The enjoyment of the humiliation. The TV show on cable that’s watched by three people. Everything. I’ve… I’ve run out of room. I can’t see any way forward or back.’
There was a thoughtful silence, for about ten seconds.
‘Right,’ said Jess. ‘My turn.’
JESS
I launched in. I just went, My name’s Jess and I’m eighteen years old and, see, I’m here because I had some family problems that I don’t need to go into. And then I split up with this guy. Chas. And he owes me an explanation. Because he didn’t say anything. He just went. But if he gave me an explanation I’d feel better, I think, because he broke my heart. Except I can’t find him. I was at the party downstairs looking for him, and he wasn’t there. So I came up here.
And Martin goes, al
l sarcastic, You’re going to kill yourself because Chas didn’t turn up at a party? Jesus.
Well, I never said that, and I told him. So then he was like, OK, you’re up here because you’re owed an explanation, then. Is that it?
He was trying to make me sound stupid, and that wasn’t fair, because we could all do that to each other. Like, for example, say, Oh, boo hoo hoo, they won’t let me be on breakfast television any more. Oh, boo hoo hoo, my son’s a vegetable and I don’t talk to anyone and I have to clean up his… Well, OK, you couldn’t make Maureen sound stupid. But it seemed to me that taking the piss wasn’t on. You could have taken the piss out of all four of us; you can take the piss out of anyone who’s unhappy, if you’re cruel enough.
So I go, That wasn’t what I said either. I said an explanation might stop me. I didn’t say it was why I was up here in the first place, did I? See, we could handcuff you to those railings, and that would stop you. But you’re not up here because no one’s handcuffed you to railings, are you?
That shut him up. I was pleased with that.
JJ was nicer. He could see that I wanted to find Chas, so I was like, Duh, yeah, except I wished I hadn’t done the Duh bit because he was being sympathetic and Duh is taking the piss, really, isn’t it? But he ignored the Duh and he asked me where Chas was and I said I didn’t know, some party or another, and he said, Well, why don’t you go looking for him instead of fucking around up here and I said I’d run out of energy and hope and when I said that I knew it was true.
I don’t know you. The only thing I know about you is, you’re reading this. I don’t know whether you’re happy or not; I don’t know whether you’re young or not. I sort of hope you’re young and sad. If you’re old and happy, I can imagine that you’ll maybe smile to yourself when you hear me going, He broke my heart. You’ll remember someone who broke your heart, and you’ll think to yourself, Oh, yes, I can remember how that feels. But you can’t, you smug old git. Oh, you might remember feeling sort of pleasantly sad. You might remember listening to music and eating chocolates in your room, or walking along the Embankment on your own, wrapped up in a winter coat and feeling lonely and brave. But can you remember how with every mouthful of food it felt like you were biting into your own stomach? Can you remember the taste of red wine as it came back up and into the toilet bowl? Can you remember dreaming every night that you were still together, that he was talking to you gently and touching you, so that every morning when you woke up you had to go through it all over again? Can you remember carving his initials in your arm with a kitchen knife? Can you remember standing too close to the edge of an Underground platform? No? Well, fucking shut up then. Stick your smile up your saggy old arse.
JJ
I was going to just like splurge, tell ’em everything they needed to know – Big Yellow, Lizzie, the works. There was no need to lie. I guess I felt a little queasy listening to the other guys, because their reasons for being up there seemed pretty solid. Jesus, everyone understood why Maureen’s life wasn’t worth living. And, sure, Martin had kind of dug his own grave, but even so, that level of humiliation and shame… If I’d been him, I doubt if I’d have stuck around as long as he had. And Jess was very unhappy and very nuts. So it wasn’t like people were being competitive, exactly, but there was a certain amount of, I don’t know what you’d call it… marking out territory? And maybe I felt a little insecure because Martin had pissed all over my patch. I was going to be the shame and humiliation guy, but my shame and humiliation was beginning to look a little pale. He’d been locked up for sleeping with a fifteen-year-old, and fucked over in the tabloids; I’d been dumped by a girl, and my band wasn’t going anywhere. Big fucking deal.
Still, I didn’t think of lying until I had the trouble with my name. Jess was so fucking aggressive, and I just lost my nerve.
‘So,’ I said. ‘OK. I’m JJ, and…’
‘Woss that stand for?’
People always want to know what my initials are for, and I never tell them. I hate my name. What happened was, my dad was one of those self-educated guys, and he had a real, like, reverence for the BBC, so he spent too much time listening to the World Service on his big old short-wave radio in the den, and he was real hung up on this dude who was always on the radio in the sixties, John Julius Norwich, who was like a lord or something, and writes millions of books about like churches and stuff. And that’s me. John fucking Julius. Did I become a lord, or a radio anchor, or even an Englishman? No. Did I drop out of school and form a band? Yep. Is John Julius a good name for a high-school dropout? Nope. JJ is OK, though. JJ’s cool enough.
‘That’s my business. Anyway, I’m JJ, and I’m here because…’
‘I’ll find out what your name is.’
‘How?’
‘I’ll come round your house and ransack it until I find something that tells me. Your passport or bank book or something. And if I can’t find anything then I’ll just steal something you love and I won’t give it back until you’ve coughed up.’
Jesus Christ. What gives with this girl?
‘You’d rather do that than call me by my initials?’
‘Yeah. Course. I hate not knowing things.’
‘I don’t know you very well,’ said Martin. ‘But if you’re really troubled by your own ignorance, I’d have thought there should be one or two things higher up the list than JJ’s name.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Do you know who the Chancellor of the Exchequer is? Or who wrote Moby-Dick?’
‘No,’ said Jess. ‘Course not.’ As if anyone who knew stuff like that was a dork. ‘But they’re not secrets, are they? I don’t like not knowing secrets. I could find that other stuff out any time I felt like it, and I don’t feel like it.’
‘If he doesn’t want to tell us, he doesn’t want to tell us. Do your friends call you JJ?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Then that’s good enough for us.’
‘S’not good enough for me,’ said Jess.
‘Just belt up and let him talk,’ said Martin.
But for me, the moment had gone. The moment of truth, anyway, ha ha. I could tell I wasn’t going to get a fair hearing; there were waves of hostility coming off Jess and Martin, and these waves were breaking everywhere.
I stared at them all for a minute.
‘So?’ said Jess. ‘You forgotten why you were going to kill yourself, or what?’
‘Of course I haven’t forgotten,’ I said.
‘Well, fucking spit it out then.’
‘I’m dying,’ I said.
See, I never thought I’d run into them again. I was pretty sure that sooner or later we’d shake hands, wish each other a happy whatever, and then either trudge back down the stairs or jump off the fucking roof, depending on mood, character, scale of problem etcetera. It really never occurred to me that this was going to come back and repeat on me like a pickle in a Big Mac.
‘Yeah, well you don’t look great,’ said Jess. ‘What you got? AIDS?’
AIDS fitted the bill. Everyone knew you could wander around with it for months; everyone knew it was incurable. And yet… I’d had a couple friends who died from it, and it’s not the kind of thing you joke about. AIDS I knew I should leave the fuck alone. But then – and this all ran through my head in the thirty seconds after Jess’s question – which fatal disease was more appropriate? Leukemia? The Ebola virus? None of them really says, ‘No, go on, man, be my guest. I’m only a joke killer disease. I’m not serious enough to offend anyone.’
‘I got like this brain thing. It’s called CCR.’ Which of course is Creedence Clearwater Revival, one of my all-time favorite bands, and a big inspiration to me. I didn’t think any of them looked like big Creedence fans. Jess was too young, I really didn’t need to worry about Maureen, and Martin was the kind of guy who’d only have smelled a rat if I’d told him I was dying of incurable ABBA.
‘It’s like Cranial Corno-something.’ I was pleased with the ‘c
ranial’ part. That sounded about right. The ‘corno-’ was weak, though, I admit.
‘Is there no cure for that?’ Maureen asked.
‘Oh, yeah,’ said Jess. ‘There’s a cure. You can take a pill. It’s just that he couldn’t be arsed. Der.’
‘They figure it’s from drug abuse. Drugs and alcohol. So it’s all my own fuckin’ fault.’
‘You must feel a bit of a berk, then,’ said Jess.
‘I do,’ I said. ‘If “berk” means asshole.’
‘Yeah. Anyway, you win.’
Which confirmed to me once and for all that a competitive edge had snuck in.
‘Really?’ I was pleased.
‘Oh, yeah. Dying? Fuck. That’s, you know… Like diamonds or spades or those… Trumps! You’ve got trumps, man.’
‘I’d say that having a fatal disease was only any good in this game,’ said Martin. ‘The who’s-the-most-miserable bastard game. Not much use anywhere else.’
‘How long have you got?’ Jess asked.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Roughly. Just like off the top of your head.’
‘Shut up, Jess,’ said Martin.
‘What have I said now? I wanted to know what we were dealing with.’
‘We’re not dealing with anything,’ I said. ‘I’m dealing with it.’
