by Nick Hornby
These were just some thoughts I had when Martin and I hugged. But they didn’t get us anywhere. Outside my head it was five o’clock in the morning and we were all unhappy and we didn’t have anywhere to go.
I was like, So now what? And I rubbed my hands together, as if we were all enjoying ourselves too much to let the night end – as if we’d been giving it large in Ocean, and we were all off for bagels and coffee in Bethnal Green, or back to someone’s flat for spliffs and a chill. So I went, Whose gaff? I’ll bet yours is tasty, Martin. I’ll bet you’ve got Jacuzzis and all sorts. That’ll do. And Martin said, No, we can’t go there. And, by the way, my Jacuzzi days are long gone. Which I think meant that he was broke, not that he was too fat to go in one or anything. Because he’s not fat, Martin. He’s too vain to be fat.
So I said, Well, never mind, as long as you’ve got a kettle and some Corn Flakes. And he went, I haven’t, so I was like, What have you got to hide? And he said, Nothing, but he said it in a funny way, an embarrassed, hiding sort of a way. And then I remembered something from before which I thought might be relevant and I said, Who was leaving messages for you on your mobile? And he went, Nobody. And I said, Is that Mr Nobody or maybe Miss Nobody? And he said, Just nobody. So I wanted to know why he didn’t want to invite us back, and he went, Because I don’t know you. And I said, Yeah, like you didn’t know that fifteen-year-old. And then he said, as if he was angry, OK. Yeah. Let’s go to mine. Why not?
And so we did.
JJ
I know I’d had that bonding moment with Maureen when she’d smacked Chas, but to tell you the truth I was working on the assumption that if we all made it through to breakfast time, then my new band would split up due to musical differences. Breakfast time would mean that we’d made it through to a new dawn, new hope, a new year, tra la la. And no offense meant, but I really didn’t want to be seen in daylight with these people, if you know what I mean – especially with… some of ’em. But breakfast and daylight were still a couple of hours away, so it felt to me like I had no real choice but to go with them back to Martin’s place. To do anything else would have been mean and unfriendly, and I still didn’t trust myself to spend too much time on my own.
Martin lived in a little villagey part of Islington, right around the corner from Tony Blair’s old house, and really not the kind of ’hood you’d choose if you’d fallen on hard times, as Martin was supposed to have done. He paid the cab fare, and we followed him up the front steps to his house. I could see three or four front-door bells, so I could tell it wasn’t all his, but I couldn’t have afforded to live there.
Before he put his key in the lock, he paused and turned around.
‘Listen,’ he said, and then he didn’t say anything, so we listened.
‘I don’t hear anything,’ said Jess.
‘No, I didn’t mean that sort of listen. I meant, Listen, I’m going to tell you something.’
‘Go on, then,’ said Jess. ‘Spit it out.’
‘It’s very late. So just… be respectful of the neighbours.’
‘That’s it?’
‘No.’ He took a deep breath. ‘There’ll probably be someone in there.’
‘In your flat?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who?’
‘I don’t know what you’d call her. My date. Whatever.’
‘You had a date for the evening?’ I tried to keep my voice in neutral, but, you know, Jesus… What kind of evening had she had? One moment you’re sitting in a club or whatever, the next he’s disappeared because he wants to jump off a building.
‘Yes. What of it?’
‘Nothing. Just…’ There was no need to say any more. We could leave the rest to the imagination.
‘Fucking hell,’ said Jess. ‘What kind of date ends up with you sitting on the fucking ledge of a tower-block?’
‘An unsuccessful one,’ said Martin.
‘I should think it was fucking unsuccessful,’ said Jess.
‘Yes,’ said Martin. ‘That’s why I described it as such.’
He opened the door to his flat and ushered us in ahead of him; so we saw the girl sitting on the sofa a moment before he did. She was maybe ten or fifteen years younger than him, and pretty, in a kind of bimbo TV weather-girl way; she was wearing an expensive-looking black dress, and she’d been crying a whole lot. She stared at us, and then at him.
‘Where have you been?’ She was trying to keep it light, but she couldn’t quite pull it off.
‘Just out. Met some…’ He gestured at us.
‘Met some who?’
‘You know. People.’
‘And that’s why you left in the middle of the evening?’
‘No. I didn’t know I was going to run into this crowd when I left.’
‘And which crowd are they?’ said the girl.
I wanted to hear Martin answer the question, because it might have been funny, but Jess interrupted.
‘You’re Penny Chambers,’ said Jess.
She didn’t say anything, probably because she knew that already. We stared at her.
‘Penny Chambers,’ said Maureen. She was gaping like a fucking fish.
Penny Chambers still didn’t say anything, for the same reasons as before.
‘Rise and Shine with Penny and Martin,’ said Maureen.
No response for a third time. I don’t know much about English television stars, but I got it. If Martin was Regis, then Penny was Kathy Lee. The English Regis had been nailing the English Kathy Lee, and then disappeared to kill himself. That was pretty fucking hilarious, you have to admit.
‘Are you two going out?’ Jess asked her.
‘You’d better ask him,’ said Penny. ‘He’s the one who vanished in the middle of a dinner party.’
‘Are you two going out?’ Jess asked him.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Martin.
‘Answer the question,’ said Penny. ‘I’m interested.’
‘This isn’t really the time to talk about it,’ said Martin.
‘So there’s clearly some doubt,’ Penny said. ‘Which is news to me.’
‘It’s complicated,’ said Martin. ‘You knew that.’
‘Nope.’
‘You knew I wasn’t happy.’
‘Yes, I knew you weren’t happy. But I didn’t know you were unhappy about me.’
‘I wasn’t… It’s not… Can we talk later? In private?’
He stopped, and gestured around the room again at the three staring faces. I think I can speak for everyone when I say that, as a rule, potential suicides tend to be pretty self-absorbed: those last few weeks, it’s pretty much all me me me. So we were gulping this shit down a) because it was not about us and b) because it was not a conversation likely to depress the hell out of us. It was, for the moment, just a fight between a boyfriend and a girlfriend, and it was taking us out of ourselves.
‘And when will we be in private?’
‘Soon. But probably not immediately.’
‘Right. And what do we talk about in the meantime? With your three friends here?’
No one knew what to say to that. Martin was the host, so it was up to him to find the common ground. And good luck to him.
‘I think you should call Tom and Christine,’ said Penny.
‘Yeah, I will. Tomorrow.’
‘They must think you’re so rude.’
‘Who are Tom and Christine? The people you were having dinner with?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did you tell them?’
‘He told them he was going to the toilet,’ said Penny.
Jess burst out laughing. Martin glanced at her, replayed in his head the lame excuse he’d used, and then smirked, very briefly, at his shoes. It was a weirdly familiar moment. You know when you’re being torn a new asshole by your dad for some crime you’ve committed, while a pal watches and tries not to laugh? And you try not to catch his eye, because then you’ll laugh too? Well, that’s what it was like. Anyway, Penny spotted
the little-boy smirk and flew across the room at the little boy in question. He grabbed her wrists to prevent her from hitting him.
‘How dare you find it funny.’
‘I’m sorry. Really. I know it’s not funny in any way.’ He tried to hug her, but she pushed herself away from him and sat down again.
‘We need a drink,’ said Martin. ‘Would you mind if they stayed for one?’
I’ll take a drink off just about anybody in any situation, but even I wasn’t sure whether to take this one. In the end, though, I was just too thirsty.
MARTIN
It was only when we got back to the flat that I had any recollection of describing Penny as a right bitch who would fuck anybody and snort anything. But when had I said that? I spent the next thirty minutes or so praying that it had been before Jess’s arrival, when Maureen and I were on our own; if Jess had heard, then I had no doubt that my opinion of Penny would be passed on.
And, needless to say, it was hardly a considered opinion anyway. Penny and I don’t live together, but we’d been seeing each other for a few months, more or less ever since I got out of prison, and as you can imagine she had to endure a fair amount of difficulty in that time. We didn’t want the press to know that we’d been seeing each other, so we never went out anywhere, and we wore hats and sunglasses more often than was strictly necessary. I had – still have, will always have – an ex-wife and children. I was only partially employed, on a dismal cable channel. And as I may have mentioned before, I wasn’t terribly cheerful.
And we had a history. There was a brief affair when we were co-presenting, but we were both married to other people, and so the affair ended, painfully and sadly. And then, finally, after much bad timing and many recriminations, we got together, but we’d missed the moment. I had become soiled goods. I was broken, finished, a wreck, scraping the bottom of my own barrel; she was still at the top of her game, beautiful and young and famous, broadcasting to millions every morning. I couldn’t believe that she wanted to be with me for any reason other than nostalgia and pity, and she couldn’t persuade me otherwise. A few years ago, Cindy joined one of those dreadful reading groups, where unhappy, repressed middle-class lesbians talk for five minutes about some novel they don’t understand, and then spend the rest of the evening moaning about how dreadful men are. Anyway, she read a book about this couple who were in love but couldn’t get together for donkey’s years and then finally managed it, aged about one hundred. She adored it and made me read it, and it took me about as long to get through as it took the characters to pair off. Well, our relationship felt like that, except the old biddies in the book had a better time than Penny and I were having. A few weeks before Christmas, in a fit of self-disgust and despair, I told her to bugger off, and so she went out that night with some guest on the show, a TV chef, and he gave her her first-ever line of coke, and they ended up in bed, and she came round to see me the next morning in floods of tears. That’s why I told Maureen she was a right bitch who would snort anything and fuck anybody. I can see now that this was a bit on the harsh side.
So that, give or take a few hundred heart-to-hearts and tantrums, a couple of dozen other split-ups, and the odd punch thrown – by her, I hasten to add – is how Penny came to be sitting on my sofa waiting up for me. She would have been waiting a long time if it hadn’t been for our impromptu roof party. I hadn’t even bothered writing her a note, an omission which only now is beginning to cause me any remorse. Why did we persist in the pathetic delusion that this relationship was in any way viable? I’m not sure. When I asked Penny what the big idea was, she said merely that she loved me, which struck me as an answer more likely to confuse and obscure than to illuminate. As for me… Well, I associated Penny, perhaps understandably, with a time before things had started to go awry: before Cindy, before fifteen-year-olds, before prison. I had managed to convince myself that if I could make things work with Penny, then I could make them work elsewhere – I could somehow haul myself back, as if one’s youth were a place you could visit whenever you felt like it. I bring you momentous news: it’s not. Who’d have thought?
My immediate problem was how to explain my connection with Maureen, JJ and Jess. She would find the truth hurtful and upsetting, and it was hard to think of a lie that would even get off the ground. What could we possibly be to one another? We didn’t look like colleagues, or poetry enthusiasts, or clubbers, or substance-abusers; the problem, it has to be said, was Maureen, on more or less every count, if failing to look like a substance-abuser could ever be described as a problem. And even if they were colleagues or substance-abusers, I would still find it hard to explain the apparent desperation of my desire to see them. I had told Penny and mine hosts that I was going to the toilet; why would I then shoot out the front door half an hour before midnight on New Year’s Eve, in order to attend the AGM of some nameless society?
So I decided simply to carry on as if there was nothing to explain.
‘Sorry. Penny, this is JJ, Maureen, Jess, JJ, Maureen, Jess, this is Penny.’
Penny seemed unconvinced even by the introductions, as if I had started lying already.
‘But you still haven’t told me who they are.’
‘As in…?’
‘As in, how do you know them and where did you meet them?’
‘It’s a long story.’
‘Good.’
‘Maureen I know from… Where did we meet, Maureen? First of all?’
Maureen stared at me.
‘It’s a long time ago now, isn’t it? We’ll remember in a minute. And JJ used to be part of the old Channel 5 crowd, and Jess is his girlfriend.’
Jess put her arm around JJ, with a touch more satire than I might have wished.
‘And where were they all tonight?’
‘They’re not deaf, you know. Or idiots. They’re not… deaf idiots.’
‘Where were you all tonight?’
‘At… like… a party,’ said JJ tentatively.
‘Where?’
‘In Shoreditch.’
‘Whose?’
‘Whose was it, Jess?’
Jess shrugged carelessly, as if it had been that sort of crazy night.
‘And why did you want to go? At eleven-thirty? In the middle of a dinner party? Without me?’
‘That I can’t explain.’ And I attempted to look simultaneously helpless and apologetic. We had, I hoped, crossed the border into the land of psychological complexity and unpredictability, a country where ignorance and bafflement were permitted.
‘You’re seeing someone else, aren’t you?’
Seeing someone else? How on earth could that explain any of this? Why would seeing someone else necessitate bringing home a middle-aged woman, a teenaged punk and an American with a leather jacket and a Rod Stewart haircut? What would the story have been? But then, after reflection, I realized that Penny had probably been here before, and therefore knew that infidelity can usually provide the answer to any domestic mystery. If I had walked in with Sheena Easton and Donald Rumsfeld, Penny would probably have scratched her head for a few seconds before saying exactly the same thing.
In other circumstances, on other evenings, it would have been the right conclusion, too; I used to be pretty resourceful when I was being unfaithful to Cindy, even if I do say so myself. I once drove a new BMW into a wall, simply because I needed to explain a four-hour delay in getting home from work. Cindy came out into the street to inspect the crumpled bonnet, looked at me, and said, ‘You’re seeing someone else, aren’t you?’ I denied it, of course. But then, anything – smashing up a new car, persuading Donald Rumsfeld to come to an Islington flat in the early hours of New Year’s Day – is easier than actually telling the truth. That look you get, the look which lets you see right through the eyes and down into the place where she keeps all the hurt and the rage and the loathing… Who wouldn’t go that extra yard to avoid it?
‘Well?’
My delay in replying was a result of some pretty compli
cated mental arithmetic; I was trying to work out which of the two different sums gave me the smallest minus number. But, inevitably, the delay was interpreted as an admission of guilt.
‘You fucking bastard.’
I was briefly tempted to point out that I was owed one, after the unfortunate incident with the line of coke and the TV chef, but that would only have served to delay her departure; more than anything I wanted to get drunk in my own home with my new friends. So I said nothing. Everyone else jumped when she slammed the door on the way out, but I knew it was coming.
MAUREEN
I was sick on the carpet outside the bathroom. Well, I say ‘carpet’ – I was actually sick where the carpet should have been, but he didn’t have one. Which was just as well, because it was much easier to clean up afterwards. I’ve seen lots of those programmes where they decorate your house for you, and I’ve never understood why they always make you throw your carpets away, even good ones which still have a nice thick pile. But now I’m wondering whether they first of all decide whether the people who live in the house are sicker-uppers or not. A lot of younger people have the bare floorboards, I’ve noticed, and of course they tend to be sick on the floor more than older people, what with all the beer they drink and so on. And the drugs they take, too, nowadays, I suppose. (Do drugs make you sick? I’d think so, wouldn’t you?) And some of the young families in Islington don’t seem to go in for the carpets much, either. But you see that might be because babies are always being sick all over the place as well. So maybe Martin is a sicker-upper. Or maybe he just has a lot of friends who are sicker-uppers. Like me. I was sick because I’m not used to drinking, and also because I hadn’t had a thing to eat for more than a day. I was too nervous on New Year’s Eve to eat anything, and there didn’t seem to be an awful lot of point anyway. I didn’t even have any of Matty’s mush. What’s food for? It’s fuel, isn’t it? It keeps you going. And I didn’t really want to be kept going. Jumping off Toppers’ House with a full stomach would have seemed wasteful, like selling a car with a full tank of petrol. So I was dizzy even before we started drinking the whisky, because of the white wine at the party, and after I’d had a couple the room started spinning round and round.
