by Nick Hornby
‘You know I haven’t had sex since that night we went out, don’t you?’
‘I didn’t know that, Chas, no. How would I know? Where would I have read that?’
‘I’ve been too scared. I can’t make that mistake again. I can’t have another woman shouting at me in the cinema. I don’t mind, you know, never having sex again. It’s better that way. I’m twenty-two. I mean, by the time you’re sixty, you don’t feel like it anyway, right? So we’re only talking forty years. Less. I can live with that. Women are fucking maniacs, man.’
‘You don’t want to think shit like that, man. You’ve just had some bad luck.’
I said this because I knew it was the right thing to say, not because my experience told me anything different. It wasn’t true that women were fucking maniacs, of course it wasn’t – just the ones that I had slept with and Chas had slept with.
‘Listen. If you came outside and had a little chat, what’s the worst that could happen?’
‘She’s tried to kill me twice and she got me arrested once. Plus, I’m banned from three pubs, two galleries and a cinema. Plus, I’ve had an official warning from…’
‘OK, OK. So you’re saying the worst that could happen is, you die a painful and violent death. And I say to you, my friend, that it’s better to die like a man than hide underneath grills like a mouse.’
Maureen had stood up and come to join us in our dark barbecue corner.
‘I’d try to kill you, if I were Jess,’ she said quietly – so quietly that it was hard to square the violence of the words with the timidity in the voice.
‘There you go. You’re in trouble wherever you look.’
‘Who the fuck’s this now?’
‘I’m Maureen,’ said Maureen. ‘Why should you get away with it?’
‘Get away with what? I didn’t do anything.’
‘I thought you said you had sex with her,’ Maureen said. ‘Or maybe you didn’t say that in so many words. But you said you hadn’t had sex since. So I’m thinking that you slept with her.’
‘Well, we had sex that once. But I didn’t know she was a fucking maniac then.’
‘So once you find out that the poor girl is confused and vulnerable, that’s when you run away.’
‘I had to run away. She was chasing me. With a knife, half the time.’
‘And why was she chasing you?’
‘What is this? Why is it your business?’
‘I don’t like to see people upset.’
‘What about me? I’m upset. My life is a shambles.’
Now, see, Chas couldn’t know, but that wasn’t such a good line of argument to use with any of our crowd, the Toppers’ House Four. We were, by definition, the Kings and Queens of Shambles. Chas had given up on sex, whereas we were trying to decide whether to give up on fucking life.
‘You have to talk to her,’ said Maureen.
‘Fuck off,’ said Chas. And then, womp! Maureen popped him as hard as she could.
I can’t tell you how many times I’d watched Eddie pop someone at a party or after a show. And he’d probably say the same thing about me, although in my memory I was the Man of Peace, with only the occasional lapse into violence, and he was the Man of War, with only the occasional moment of calm and clarity. And OK, Maureen was like this little old lady, but watching her take a swing really brought it all back home.
Here’s the thing about Maureen: she had a lot more guts than I had. She’d stuck around to find out what it would feel like, never to live the life she had planned for herself. I didn’t know what those plans were, but she had them, same as everybody, and when Matty came along, she’d waited around for twenty years to see what she’d be offered as a replacement, and she was offered nothing at all. There was a lot of feeling in that slap, and I could imagine hitting someone pretty hard when I was her age, too. That was one of the reasons I didn’t intend ever to be her age.
MAUREEN
Frank is Matty’s father. It’s funny to think that might not be immediately obvious to someone, because it’s so obvious to me. I only ever had intercourse with one man, and I only had intercourse with that one man once, and the one time in my entire life I had intercourse produced Matty. What are the chances, eh? One in a million? One in ten million? I don’t know. But of course even one in ten million means that there are a lot of women like me in the world. That’s not what you think of, when you think of one in ten million. You don’t think, That’s a lot of people.
What I’ve come to realize, over the years, is that we’re less protected from bad luck than you could possibly imagine. Because though it doesn’t seem fair, having intercourse only the once and ending up with a child who can’t walk or talk or even recognize me… Well, fairness doesn’t really have much to do with it, does it? You only have to have intercourse the once to produce a child, any child. There are no laws that say, You can only have a child like Matty if you’re married, or if you have lots of other children, or if you sleep with lots of different men. There are no laws like that, even though you and I might think there should be. And once you have a child like Matty, you can’t help but feel, That’s it! That’s all my bad luck, a whole lifetime’s worth, in one bundle. But I’m not sure luck works like that. Matty wouldn’t stop me from getting breast cancer, or from being mugged. You’d think he should, but he can’t. In a way, I’m glad I never had another child, a normal one. I’d have needed more guarantees from God than He could have provided.
And anyway, I’m Catholic, so I don’t believe in luck as much as I believe in punishment. We’re good at believing in punishment; we’re the best in the world. I sinned against the Church, and the price you pay for that is Matty. It might seem like a high price to pay, but then, these sins are supposed to mean something, aren’t they? So in one way it’s hardly surprising that this is what I got. For a long time I was even grateful, because it felt to me as though I were going to be able to redeem myself here on Earth, and there’d be no reckoning to be made afterwards. But now I’m not so sure. If the price you have to pay for a sin is so high that you end up wanting to kill yourself and committing an even worse sin, then Someone’s done his sums wrong. Someone’s overcharging.
I had never hit anyone before, not in the whole of my life, although I’d often wanted to. But that night was different. I was in limbo, somewhere between living and dying, and it felt as if it didn’t matter what I did until I went back to the top of Toppers’ House again. And that was the first time I realized that I was on a sort of holiday from myself. It made me want to slap him again, just because I could, but I didn’t. The once was enough: Chas fell over – more from the shock, I think, than from the force, because I’m not so strong – and then knelt on all fours covering his head with his hands.
‘I’m sorry,’ Chas said.
‘For what?’ JJ asked him.
‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘Whatever.’
‘I had a boyfriend like you once,’ I told him.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said again.
‘It hurts. It’s a horrible thing to do, to have intercourse with someone and then disappear.’
‘I can see that now.’
‘Can you?’
‘I think so.’
‘You can’t see anything from down there,’ said JJ. ‘Why don’t you get up?’
‘I don’t really want to be slapped again.’
‘Is it fair to say that you’re not the bravest man in the world?’ JJ asked him.
‘There are lots of different ways of showing courage,’ said Chas. ‘If what you’re saying is that I don’t set much store by physical bravery… then yes, that’s fair. It’s overrated, I think.’
‘Well, you know, Chas, I think that’s kinda brave of you, to show you’re so afraid of a small lady like Maureen. I respect your honesty, man. You won’t slap him again, will you, Maureen?’
I promised I wouldn’t, and Chas got to his feet. It was a strange feeling, watching a man do something because of me.
‘No. But I don’t really see the alternatives.’
‘Howsabout talking to Jess?’
‘Oh, no. I’d rather live out here all the time. Seriously. I’m already thinking of relocating, you know.’
‘What, to someone else’s back yard? Maybe somewhere with a bit of grass?’
‘No,’ Chas said. ‘To Manchester.’
‘Listen,’ JJ said. ‘I know she’s scary. That’s why you should talk to her now. With us around. We can, you know. Mediate. Wouldn’t you rather do that than move cities?’
‘But what is there to say?’
‘Maybe we could work something out. Together. Something that might get her off your back.’
‘Like what?’
‘I know for a fact she’d marry you if you asked her.’
‘Ah, no, you see that’s just…’
‘I was just kidding around, Chas. Lighten up, man.’
‘These aren’t, like, lightening-up times. These are dark times.’
‘Dark times indeed. What with Jess, and going to Manchester, and living under a grill and the Twin Towers and everything.’
‘Yeah.’
JJ shook his head.
‘OK. So what can you tell her that’s going to get you out of this f— mess?’
And JJ gave him some things to say, as if he were an actor and we were in a soap.
MARTIN
I’m not averse to having a go at DIY every now and again. I decorated the girls’ bedrooms myself, with stencils and everything. (And yes, there were TV cameras there, and the production company paid for every last drop of Day-Glo paint, but that doesn’t make it any less of an achievement.) Anyway, if you’re a fellow enthusiast then you’ll know that sometimes you come across holes that are too big for filler, especially in the bathroom. And when that happens, the sloppy way to do it is to bung the holes up with anything you can find – broken matches, bits of sponge, whatever is to hand. Well, that was Chas’s function that night: he was a bit of sponge that plugged a gap. The whole Jess and Chas thing was ludicrous, of course, a waste of time and energy, a banal little sideshow; but it absorbed us, got us down off the roof and even as I was listening to his preposterous speech I could see its value. I could also see that we were going to need a lot more bits of sponge over the coming weeks and months. Maybe that’s what we all need, whether we’re suicidal or not. Maybe life is just too big a gap to be plugged by filler, so we need anything we can get our hands on – sanders and planers, fifteen-year-olds, whatever – to fill it up.
‘Hi, Jess,’ said Chas when he was shoved out of the party and on to the street. He was trying to sound cheery and friendly and casual, as if he’d been hoping to bump into Jess at some point during the evening, but his general lack of volition undid him; cheeriness is hard to convey when you are too scared to make eye contact. He reminded me of a petty gangster caught thieving from the local godfather in a movie, out of his depth and desperately trying to suck up in order to save his skin.
‘Why wouldn’t you talk to me?’
‘Yeah. Right. I knew you’d want to know that. And I’ve been thinking about it. I’ve been thinking about it very hard, actually, because, you know, it’s… I’m not happy about it. It’s weak. It’s a weakness in me.’
‘Don’t overdo it, man,’ said JJ. There seemed no attempt on anyone’s part to pretend that this was going to bear any resemblance to a real conversation.
‘No. Right. So. First of all I should say sorry, and it won’t happen again. And second of all: I find you very attractive, and stimulating company, and…’
This time JJ just coughed ostentatiously.
‘… And, well. It’s not me, it’s you.’ He winced. ‘Sorry. Sorry. It’s not you, it’s me.’
At that point, just as he was trying to remember his lines, he caught my eye.
‘Hey. You look like that wanker off the telly. Martin Thing.’
‘It is him,’ said Jess.
‘How the fuck do you know him?’
‘It’s a long story,’ I said.
‘We were both just up on the roof of Toppers’ House. We was going to throw ourselves off,’ Jess said, thus making the long story considerably shorter, and, to be fair, leaving out very few of the salient points.
Chas swallowed this information almost visibly, like snakes swallow eggs: you could see the slow march to the brain. Chas, I’m sure, had many attractive aspects to his personality, but quickness of intelligence was not one of them. ‘Because of that girl you shagged? And your wife and kids throwing you out and everything?’ he asked finally.
‘Why don’t you ask Jess why she was going to jump? Isn’t that more relevant?’
‘Shut up,’ said Jess. ‘That’s private.’
‘Oh, and my stuff isn’t?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Not any more. Everyone knows about it.’
‘What’s Penny Chambers like? In real life?’
‘Is that what we came out here to talk about, Chas?’ JJ said quietly.
‘No. Right. Sorry. It’s just a bit distracting, having someone off the telly standing there.’
‘Do you want me to leave?’
‘No,’ said Jess quickly. ‘I want you here.’
‘I wouldn’t have thought you’d be his type,’ said Chas. ‘Too old. Plus, he’s a cunt.’ He chuckled, and then looked around for someone to share the chuckle with, but none of us – none of them, I should say, because even Chas didn’t expect me to laugh at my own age or cunthood – was even remotely amused.
‘Oh, right. It’s like that, is it?’
And suddenly, yes, it was exactly like that: we were more serious than him, in every way.
And even Jess saw it.
‘You’re the tosser,’ she said. ‘None of this is anything to do with you. Fuck off out of my sight.’ And then she kicked him – an old-fashioned, straight-legged toe into the meatiest part of the arse, as if the two of them were cartoon characters.
And that was the end of Chas.
JESS
When you’re sad – like, really sad, Toppers’ House sad – you only want to be with other people who are sad. I didn’t know this until that night, but I suddenly realized it just by looking at Chas’s face. There was nothing in it. It was just the face of a twenty-two-year-old boy who’d never done anything, apart from dropped a few Es, or thought anything, apart from where to get the next E from, or felt anything, apart from off his face. It was the eyes that gave him away: when he made that stupid joke about Martin and expected us to laugh, the eyes were completely lost in the joke, and there was nothing else left of them. They were just laughing eyes, not frightened eyes or troubled eyes – they were the eyes a baby has when you tickle it. I’d noticed with the others that when they made jokes, if they did (Maureen wasn’t a big comedian), you could still see why they’d been up on the roof even while they were laughing – there was something else in there, something that stopped them giving themselves over to the moment. And you can say that we shouldn’t have been up there, because wanting to kill yourself is a coward’s way out, and you can say that none of us had enough reason to want to do it. But you can’t say that we didn’t feel it, because we all did, and that was more important than anything. Chas would never know what that was like unless he crossed the line too.
Because that’s what the four of us had done – crossed a line. I don’t mean we’d done anything bad. I just mean that something had happened to us which separated us from lots of other people. We had nothing in common apart from where we’d ended up, on that square of concrete high up in the air, and that was the biggest thing you could possibly have in common with anyone. To say that Maureen and I had nothing in common because she wore raincoats and listened to brass bands or whatever was like saying, I don’t know, the only thing I’ve got in common with that girl is that we have the same parents. And I didn’t know any of that until Chas said th
at thing about Martin being a cunt.
The other thing I worked out was that Chas could have told me anything – that he loved me, he hated me, he’d been possessed by aliens and the Chas I knew was now on a different planet – and it wouldn’t have made any difference. I was still owed an explanation, I thought, but so what? What good was it going to do me? It wouldn’t have made me any happier. It was like scratching when you have chickenpox. You think it’s going to help, but the itch moves over, and then moves over again. My itch suddenly felt miles away, and I couldn’t have reached it with the longest arms in the world. Realizing that made me scared that I was going to be itchy for ever, and I didn’t want that. I knew all the things that Martin had done, but when Chas had gone I still wanted him to hug me. I wouldn’t even have cared if he’d tried anything on, but he didn’t. He sort of did the opposite; he held me all funny, as if I was covered in barbed wire.
I’m sorry, I went. I’m sorry that little shitbag called you names. And he said it wasn’t my fault, but I told him that of course it was, because if he hadn’t met me he wouldn’t have had to experience the trauma of being called a cunt on New Year’s Eve. And he said he got called a cunt a lot. (This is actually true. I’ve known him for a while now, and I’d say I’ve heard people, complete strangers, call him a cunt about fifteen times, a prick about ten times, a wanker maybe about the same, and an arsehole approximately half a dozen times. Also: tosser, berk, wally, git, shithead and pillock.) Nobody likes him, which is weird, because he’s famous. How can you be famous if nobody likes you?
Martin says it’s nothing to do with the fifteen-year-old thing; he reckons that if anything it got slightly better after that, because the people who called him a cunt were exactly the sort of people who didn’t see anything wrong with underage sex. So instead of shouting out names, they shouted out things like, Go on, my son, Get in there, Wallop, etcetera. In terms of personal abuse, although not in terms of his marriage or his relationship with his children, or his career, or his sanity, going to prison actually did him some good. But all sorts of people seem to be famous even though they have no fans. Tony Blair is a good example. And all the other people who present breakfast TV programmes and quiz shows. The reason they’re paid a lot of money, it seems to me, is because strangers yell terrible words at them in the street. Even a traffic warden doesn’t get called a cunt when he’s out shopping with his family. So the only real advantage to being Martin is the money, and also the invitations to film premieres and dodgy nightclubs. And that’s where you get yourself into trouble.
