by Nick Hornby
‘It’s only six weeks,’ said Jess. ‘We’ll throw you off the top ourselves on Valentine’s, if it helps.’
Martin shook his head, but it was to indicate defeat rather than refusal.
‘We’ll all live to regret it,’ he said.
‘Good,’ said Jess. ‘So is everyone all right with that?’
I shrugged. It wasn’t like I had a better plan.
‘I’m not going on beyond six weeks,’ said Maureen.
‘No one will make you,’ said Martin.
‘As long as we know that from the start,’ said Maureen.
‘Noted,’ said Martin.
‘Excellent,’ said Jess. ‘So it’s a deal.’
We shook hands, Maureen picked up her handbag, and we all went out for breakfast. We couldn’t think of anything to say to each other, but we didn’t seem to mind much.
Part 2
JESS
It didn’t take long for the papers to find out. A couple of days, maybe. I was in my room, and Dad called me downstairs and asked me what I’d been up to on New Year’s Eve. And I went, Nothing much, and he went, Well, that isn’t what the newspapers seem to think. And I was like, Newspapers? And he said, Yeah, there’s apparently going to be a story about you and Martin Sharp. Do you know Martin Sharp? And I was, you know, Yeah, sort of, only met him that night at a party, don’t know him very well. And so Dad goes, What the hell kind of party is it where you meet someone like Martin Sharp? And I couldn’t think what kind of party that would be, so I didn’t say anything. And then Dad was like, And was there… Did anything… All tenterhooks or whatever, kind of thing, so I just dived in. Did I fuck him? No I did not! Thanks a bunch! Bloody hell! Martin Sharp! Eeeeuch! And so on and so on until he got the idea.
It was fucking Chas, of course, who phoned up the newspapers. He’d probably tried before, the little shit, but he never had much to go on then, when it was just me. The Jess Crichton/Martin Sharp combo, though… unresistable. How much do you think you get for something like that? A couple of hundred quid? More? To be honest, I’d have done it if I were him. He’s always skint. And I’m always skint. If he’d been anyone worth selling up the river, he’d be halfway out to sea by now.
Dad pulled back the curtain to sneak a look, and there was someone out there. I wanted to go out and have a go at him, but Dad wouldn’t let me; he said that they’d take a mad picture of me, and I’d look stupid and regret it. And he said it was undignified to do that, and in our position we had to rise above it all and ignore them. And I was like, In whose position? I’m not in a position. And he went, Well, you are, whether you like it or not you are in a position, and I go, You’re in a position not me, and he said, You’re in a position too, and we went on like that for a while. But of course going on about it never changes anything, and I know he’s right, really. If I wasn’t in a position then the papers wouldn’t be interested. In fact, the more I act as though I’m not in a position, then the more I’m in a position, if you see what I mean. If I just sat in my room and read, or got a steady boyfriend, there’d be no interest. But if I went to bed with Martin Sharp, or threw myself off a roof, then there would be the opposite of no interest. There’d be interest.
When I was in the papers a couple of years ago, just after the Jen thing, I think the feeling was I was Troubled rather than Bad. Anyway, shoplifting isn’t murder, is it? Everyone goes through a shoplifting phase, don’t they? By which I mean proper shoplifting, boosting Winona-style, bags and clothes and shit, not pens and sweets. It comes just after ponies and boy bands, and right before spliff and sex. But I could tell that it was different this time, and that was when I started to think things through. Yeah, yeah, I know. But better late than never, eh? What I thought was this: if it was going to be all over the papers, it was better for Mum and Dad to think that I’d slept with Martin than to know the real reason we were together. The real reason would kill them. Maybe literally. Which would make me the only family member left alive, possibly, and even I’m making up my mind which way to go. So if the papers had got hold of the wrong end of the stick, it wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Obviously it would be pretty humiliating at college, everyone thinking I’d fucked the sleaziest man in Britain, but it would be for the greater good, i.e. two alive parents.
The thing was, even though I’d started to think things through, I didn’t think them through properly. I could have saved myself a lot of trouble if I’d just given it another two minutes before I’d opened my mouth, but I didn’t. I just went, Da-ad. And he was like, Oh, no. And I just looked at him and he goes, You’d better tell me everything, and I said, Well, there isn’t much to tell really. I just went to this party and he was there and I had too much to drink and we went back to his place and that’s it. And he was like, That’s it, as in end of story? And I went, Well, no, that’s it as in dot dot dot you don’t need to know the details. So he went, Jesus Christ, and he sat down in a chair.
But here’s the thing: I didn’t need to say I’d slept with him, did I? I could have said we’d snogged, or he tried it on, or anything at all like that, but I wasn’t quick enough. I was like, Well if it’s a choice between suicide and sex, better go sex, but those didn’t have to be the choices. Sex was only a serving suggestion sort of thing, but you don’t have to do exactly what it says on the packet, do you? You can miss the garnish out, if you want, and that’s what I should have done. (‘Garnish’ – that’s a weird word, isn’t it? I don’t think I’ve ever used it before.) But I didn’t, did I? And the other thing I should have done but didn’t: before I told him anything, I should have got Dad to find out what the story in the newspaper was. I just thought, Tabloids, sex… I don’t know what I thought, to tell you the truth. Not much, as usual.
So Dad got straight on the phone and talked to his office and told them what I’d told him, and then when he’d finished, he said he was going out and I wasn’t to answer the phone or go anywhere or do anything. So I watched TV for a few minutes, and then I looked out the window to see if I could see that bloke, and I could, and he wasn’t on his own any more.
And then Dad came back with a newspaper – he’d been out to get an early edition. He looked about ten years older than he had before he left. And he held up the paper for me to see, and the headline said, ‘MARTIN SHARP AND JUNIOR MINISTER’S DAUGHTER IN SUICIDE PACT’.
So the whole sex confession bit had been a complete and utter fucking waste of time.
JJ
That was the first time we knew anything about Jess’s background, and I have to say that my first reaction was that it was pretty fucking hilarious. I was in my local store, buying some smokes, and Jess and Martin were staring at me from the counter, and I read the headline and whooped. Which, seeing as the headline was about their supposed suicide pact, got me some strange looks. An Education minister! Holy shit! You’ve got to understand, this girl talked like she’d been brought up by a penniless, junkie welfare mother who was younger than her. And she acted like education was a form of prostitution, something that only the weird or the desperate would resort to.
But then when I read the story, it wasn’t quite so funny. I didn’t know anything about Jess’s older sister Jennifer. None of us did. She disappeared a few years ago, when Jess was fifteen and she was eighteen; she’d borrowed her mother’s car and they found it abandoned near a well-known suicide spot down on the coast. Jennifer had passed her test three days before, as if that had been the point of learning to drive. They never found a body. I don’t know what that would have done to Jess – nothing good, I guess. And her old man… Jesus. Parents who only beget suicidal daughters are likely to end up feeling pretty dark about the whole child-raising scene.
And then, the next day, it became a whole lot less funny. There was another headline, and it read ‘THERE WERE FOUR OF THEM!’, and in the article underneath it there was a description of these two freaks that I eventually realized were supposed to be Maureen and me. And at the end of the article, there was an a
ppeal for further information and a phone number. There was even like a cash reward. Maureen and I had prices on our heads, man!
The information had clearly come from that asshole Chas; you could hear the whine in his voice right through the weird British tabloid prose. You had to give the guy a little credit, though, I guess. To me, the evening had consisted of four miserable people, failing dismally to do something they had set out to do – something that is not, let’s be honest, real hard to achieve. But Chas had seen something else: he’d seen that it was a story, something he might make a few bucks off of. OK, he must have known about Jess’s dad, but, you know, props to the guy. He still needed to put it together.
I’ll tell you the honest truth here: I got off on the story a little. It was kind of gratifying, in an ironic way, reading about myself, and that makes sense if you think about it. See, one of the things that had brought me down was my inability to leave my mark on the world through my music – which is another way of saying that I was suicidal because I wasn’t famous. Maybe I’m being hard on myself, because I know there was a little more to it than that, but that was sure a part of it. Anyway, recognizing that I was all washed up had got me on to the front page of the newspaper, and maybe there’s a lesson there somewhere.
So I was sort of enjoying myself, sitting in my flat, drinking coffee and smoking, taking pleasure from knowing that I was sort of famous and completely anonymous, all at the same time. And then the fucking buzzer went, and I jumped out of my skin.
‘Who is it?’
‘Is that JJ?’ A young woman’s voice.
‘Who is it?’
‘I wondered if I could have a few words with you? About the other night?’
‘How did you get this address?’
‘I understand you were one of the people with Jess Crichton and Martin Sharp on New Year’s Eve? When they tried to kill themselves?’
‘You understand wrong, ma’m.’ This was the first sentence from either of us that didn’t have a question mark at the end. The low note at the end of mine was a relief, like a sneeze.
‘Which bit have I got wrong?’
‘All of it. You pressed the wrong buzzer.’
‘I don’t think I did.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because you didn’t deny you were JJ. And you asked how I’d got this address.’
Good point. They were professional, these people.
‘I didn’t say it was my address, though, did I?’
There was a pause, while we both allowed the complete stupidity of this observation to float around.
She didn’t say anything. I imagined her standing out there in the street, shaking her head sadly at my pathetic attempts. I vowed not to say another word until she went away.
‘Listen,’ she said. ‘Was there a reason you came down?’
‘What kind of reason?’
‘I don’t know. Something that might cheer our readers up. Maybe, I don’t know, you gave each other the will to go on.’
‘I don’t know about that.’
‘The four of you looked down over London and saw the beauty of the world. Anything like that? Anything that might inspire our readers?’
Was there anything inspirational in our quest to find Chas? If there was, I couldn’t see it.
‘Did Martin Sharp say anything that gave you a reason to live, for example? People would want to know, if he did.’
I tried to think if Martin had offered us any words of comfort she could use. He’d called Jess a fucking idiot, but that was more of a spirit-lifting rather than life-saving moment. And he’d told us that a guest on his show had been married to someone who’d been in a coma for twenty-five years, but that hadn’t helped us out much, either.
‘I can’t think of anything, no.’
‘I’m going to leave a card with my numbers on it, OK? Ring me when you feel ready to talk about this.’
I nearly ran out after her – I was, as we say, missing her already. I liked being the temporary center of her world. Shit, I liked being the temporary center of my own, because there hadn’t been too much there recently, and there wasn’t much there after she’d gone, either.
MAUREEN
So I went home, and I put the television on, and made a cup of tea, and I phoned the centre, and the two young fellas delivered Matty to the house, and I put him in front of the TV, and it all started again. It was hard to see how I’d last another six weeks. I know we had an agreement, but I never thought I’d see any of them again anyway. Oh, we exchanged telephone numbers and addresses and so forth. (Martin had to explain to me that if I didn’t have a computer, then I wouldn’t have an email address. I wasn’t sure whether I’d have one or not. I thought it might have come in one of those envelopes you throw away.) But I didn’t think we’d actually be using them. I’ll tell you God’s honest truth, even though it’ll make me sound as if I was feeling sorry for myself: I thought they might see each other, but they’d keep me out of it. I was too old for them, and too old-fashioned, with my shoes and all. I’d had an interesting time going to parties and seeing all the strange people there, but it hadn’t changed anything. I was still going back to pick Matty up, and I still had no life to live beyond the life I was already sick and tired of. You might be thinking, well, why isn’t she angry? But of course I am angry. I don’t know why I ever pretend I’m not. The church had something to do with it, I suppose. And maybe my age, because we were taught not to grumble, weren’t we? But some days – most days – I want to scream and shout and break things and kill people. Oh, there’s anger, right enough. You can’t be stuck with a life like this one and not get angry. Anyway. A couple of days later the phone rang, and this woman with a posh voice said, ‘Is that Maureen?’
‘It is.’
‘This is the Metropolitan Police.’
‘Oh, hello,’ I said.
‘Hello. We’ve had reports that your son was causing trouble in the shopping centre on New Year’s Eve. Shoplifting and sniffing glue and mugging people and so on.’
‘I’m afraid it couldn’t have been my son,’ I said, like an eejit. ‘He has a disability.’
‘And you’re sure he’s not putting the disability on?’
I even thought about this for half a second. Well, you do, don’t you, when it’s the police? You want to make absolutely sure that you’re telling the absolute truth, just in case you get into trouble later on.
‘He’d be a very good actor if he was.’
‘And you’re sure he’s not a very good actor?’
‘Oh, positive. You see, he’s too disabled to act.’
‘But how about if that’s an act? Only, the er, the wossname fits his description. The suspect.’
‘What’s the description?’ I don’t know why I said that. To be helpful, I suppose.
‘We’ll come to that, madam. Can you account for his whereabouts on New Year’s Eve? Were you with him?’
I felt a chill run through me then. The date hadn’t registered at first. They’d got me. I didn’t know whether to lie or not. Supposing someone from the home had taken him out and used him as a cover, sort of thing? One of those young fellas, say? They looked nice enough, but you don’t know, do you? Supposing they had gone shoplifting, and hidden something under Matty’s blanket? Supposing they all went out drinking, and they took Matty with them, and they got into a fight, and they pushed the wheelchair hard towards someone they were fighting with? And the police saw him careering into someone, and they didn’t know that he couldn’t have pushed himself, so they thought he was joining in? And afterwards he was just playing dumb because he didn’t want to get into trouble? Well, you could hurt someone, crashing into them with a wheelchair. You could break someone’s leg. And supposing… Actually, even in the middle of my little panic I couldn’t really see how he’d manage the glue sniffing. But even so! These were all the things that went through my mind. It was all guilt, I suppose. I hadn’t been with him, and I should have been, and the re
ason I hadn’t been with him was because I wanted to leave him for ever.
‘I wasn’t with him, no. He was being looked after.’
‘Ah. I see.’
‘He was perfectly safe.’
‘I’m sure he was, madam. But we’re not talking about his safety, are we? We’re talking about the safety of people in the Wood Green shopping centre.’
Wood Green! He was all the way up in Wood Green!
‘No. Yes. Sorry.’
‘Are you really sorry? Are you really really really f— sorry?’
I couldn’t believe my ears. I knew the police used bad language, of course. But I thought it would come out more when they were under stress, with terrorists and such like, not on the phone to members of the public in the course of a routine inquiry. Unless, of course, she really was under stress. Could Matty, or whoever pushed him, have actually killed someone? A child, maybe?
‘Maureen.’
‘Yes, I’m still here.’
‘Maureen, I’m not really a policewoman. I’m Jess.’
‘Oh.’ I could feel myself blushing at my own stupidity.
‘You believed me, didn’t you, you silly old bag.’
‘Yes, I believed you.’
She could hear in my voice that she’d upset me, so she didn’t try to make any more of it.
‘Have you seen the papers?’
‘No. I don’t look at them.’
‘We’re in them.’
‘Who’s in them?’
‘We are. Well, Martin and I are in them by name. What a laugh, eh?’
‘What does it say?’
‘It says that me and Martin and two other mystery, you know, people had a suicide pact.’
‘That’s not true’.
‘Der. And it says I’m the Junior Minister for Education’s daughter.’
‘Why does it say that?’
‘Because I am.’
