by Nick Hornby
‘Mick Jagger’s not sitting here eating stale Custard Creams like JJ, is he?’
‘They were new right before Christmas,’ said Maureen. ‘Maybe I didn’t put the lid back on the biscuit tin properly.’
I was starting to think we were losing focus on my issues.
‘The Stones thing… That’s kind of not important. That was just like an illustration. I just meant… songs, guitars, energy.’
‘He’s about eighty,’ said Jess. ‘He hasn’t got any energy.’
‘I saw them in ’90,’ said Martin. ‘The night England lost to Germany in the World Cup on penalties. A chap from Guinness took a whole crowd of us, and everyone spent most of the evening listening to the radio. Anyway, he had a lot of energy then.’
‘He was only seventy then,’ said Jess.
‘Will you shut the fuck up? Sorry, Maureen.’ (From now on, just presume that every time I speak I say ‘fuck’, ‘fucking’ or ‘motherfucker’ and ‘Sorry, Maureen’, OK?) ‘I’m trying to tell you about my whole life.’
‘No one’s stopping you,’ said Jess. ‘But you’ve got to make it more interesting. That’s why we drift off and talk about biscuits.’
‘OK, all right. Look, there’s nothing else for me. I’m qualified for nothing. I didn’t graduate from high school. I just had the band, and now it’s gone, and I didn’t make a cent out of it, and I’m looking at a life of flipping burgers.’
Jess snorted.
‘Now what?’
‘Just sounds funny, hearing a Yank say “flipping” instead of… you know what.’
‘I don’t think he meant “flipping” like “flipping heck”,’ said Martin. ‘I think he meant flipping as in turning them over. That’s what they call it.’
‘Oh,’ said Jess.
‘And I’m worried it will kill me.’
‘Hard work never killed anyone,’ said Maureen.
‘I don’t mind hard work, you know? But when we were touring and recording… That was me, that was who I was, and, and I just feel empty and frustrated and, and… See, when you know you’re good, you think that will be enough, that’ll get you there, and when it doesn’t… What are you supposed to do with it all? Where do you put it, huh? There’s nowhere for it to go, and, and it was… Man, it used to eat me up even when things were going OK, because even when things were going OK, I wasn’t on stage or recording like every minute of the day, and sometimes it felt like I needed to be, otherwise I’d explode, you know? So now, now there’s nowhere for it to go. We used to have this song…’ I have no idea why I started up on this. ‘We used to have this song, this little like Motowny thing called “I Got Your Back”, which me and Eddie wrote together, really together, which we didn’t usually do, and it was like, you know, a tribute to our friendship and how far back we went and blah blah. Anyhow, it was on our first album and it was like two minutes and thirty seconds long and no one really noticed it, I mean, people who actually bought the album didn’t even notice it. But we started playing it live, and it kind of got longer, and Eddie worked out this sweet solo. It wasn’t like a rock guitar solo; it was more like something maybe, I don’t know, Curtis Mayfield or Ernie Isley might have played. And sometimes, when we played around Chicago and we’d jam with friends on stage, we’d have maybe a sax solo or a piano solo or maybe even like a pedal steel or something, and after like a year or two it got to be this like ten-, twelve-minute showstopper. And we’d open with it or close with it or stick it in the middle somewhere if we were playing a long set, and to me it became the sound of pure fucking joy, sorry Maureen, you know? Pure joy. It felt like surfing, or, or whatever, a natural high. You could ride those chords like waves. I had that feeling maybe a hundred times a year, and not many people get it even once in their lives. And that’s what I had to give up, man, the ability to create that routinely, whenever I felt like it, as part of my working day, and… You know, now that I think about it, I can see why I made up that bullshit, sorry Maureen, about dying of some fucking disease, sorry again. Because that’s what it feels like. I’m dying of some disease that dries up all the blood in your veins and all your sap and, and everything that makes you feel alive, and…’
‘Yeah, and?’ said Martin. ‘You seem to have omitted the part about why you want to kill yourself.’
‘That’s it,’ I said. ‘This disease that dries up all the blood in your veins.’
‘That’s just what happens to everyone,’ said Martin. ‘It’s called “getting older”. I felt like that even before I’d been to prison. Even before I slept with that girl. It’s probably why I slept with her, come to think of it.’
‘No, I get it,’ said Jess.
‘Yeah?’
‘Course I do. You’re fucked.’ She waved an apologetic hand in Maureen’s direction, like a tennis player acknowledging a lucky net cord. ‘You thought you were going to be someone, but now it’s obvious you’re nobody. You haven’t got as much talent as you thought you had, and there was no plan B, and you got no skills and no education, and now you’re looking at forty or fifty years of nothing. Less than nothing, probably. That’s pretty heavy. That’s worse than having the brain thing, because what you got now will take a lot longer to kill you. You’ve got the choice of a slow painful death, or a quick merciful one.’
She shrugged.
She was right. She got it.
MAUREEN
I would have got away with it if Jess hadn’t gone to the toilet. But you can’t stop people going to the toilet, can you? I was green. It never occurred to me that she’d be nosing around where she had no business.
She was gone a while, and she came back grinning all over her stupid face, holding a couple of the posters.
In one hand she had the poster of the girl, and in the other the poster of the black fella, the footballer.
‘So whose are these then?’ she said.
I stood up and shouted at her. ‘Put those back! They’re not yours!’
‘I’d never have thought it of you,’ she said. ‘So let’s work this out. You’re a dyke who has a bit of a thing for black guys with big thighs. Kinky. Hidden depths.’
It was typical of Jess, I thought. She only has a filthy imagination, which is to say, no imagination at all.
‘Do you even know who these people are?’ she said.
They’re Matty’s, the posters, not mine. He doesn’t know they’re his, of course, but they are; I chose them for him. I knew that the girl was called Buffy, because that’s what it said on the poster, but I didn’t really know who Buffy was; I just thought it would be nice for Matty to have an attractive young woman around the place, because he’s that age now. And I knew that the black fella played for Arsenal, but I only caught his first name, Paddy. I took advice from John at the church, who goes along to Highbury every week, and he said everyone loved Paddy, so I asked him if he’d bring me back a picture for my lad next time he went to a game. He’s a nice man, John, and he bought a great big picture of Paddy celebrating a goal, and he didn’t even want paying for it, but things got a little awkward afterwards. For some reason he decided my lad was a little lad, ten or twelve, and he promised to take him to a game. And sometimes on Sunday mornings, when Arsenal had lost on the Saturday, he asked how Matty was taking it, and sometimes when they’d won a big game he’d say, I’ll bet your lad’s happy, and so on. And then one Friday morning when I was wheeling Matty back from the shops, we bumped into him. And I could have said nothing, but sometimes you have to admit to yourself and to everyone else, This is Matty. This is my lad. So I did, and John never mentioned Arsenal again after that. I don’t miss that on a Sunday morning. There are lots of good reasons to lose your faith.
I chose the posters the same as I chose all the other things that Jess had probably been rummaging through, the tapes and the books and the football boots and the computer games and the videos. The diaries and the trendy address books. (Address books! Dear God! Of all the things that spell it out. I can put a tape on for him,
and hope he was listening to it, but what am I going to fill an address book with? I haven’t even got one of my own.) The jazzy pens, the camera and the Walkman. Lots of watches. There’s a whole unlived teenage life in there.
This all began years ago, when I decided to decorate his bedroom. He was eight, and he still slept in a nursery – clowns on the curtains, bunny rabbits on the frieze round the wall, all the things I’d chosen when I was waiting for him and I didn’t know what he was. And it was all peeling away, and it looked terrible, and I hadn’t done anything about it because it made me think too much about what wasn’t happening to him, all the ways he wasn’t growing up. What was I going to replace the bunny rabbits with? He was eight, so perhaps trains and rocket ships and maybe even footballers were the right sort of thing for him – but of course he didn’t know what any of those things were, what they meant, what they did. But there again, he didn’t know what the rabbits were either, or the clowns. So what was I supposed to do? Everything was pretending, wasn’t it? The only thing I could do that wasn’t make-believe was paint the walls white, get a plain pair of curtains. That would be a way of telling him and me and anyone else who came in that I knew he was a vegetable, a cabbage, and I wasn’t trying to hide it. But then, where does it stop? Does that mean you can never buy him a T-shirt with a word on it, or a picture, because he’ll never read, and he can’t make any sense of pictures? And who knows whether he even gets anything out of colours, or patterns? And it goes without saying that talking to him is ridiculous, and smiling at him, and kissing him on the head. Everything I do is pretending, so why not pretend properly?
In the end, I went for trains on the curtains, and your man from Star Wars on the lampshade. And soon after that I started buying comics every now and again, just to see what a lad of his age might be reading and thinking about. And we watched the Saturday morning television together, so I learned a little bit about pop singers he might like, and sometimes about the TV programmes he’d be watching. I said before that one of the worst things was never moving on, and pretending to move on doesn’t change anything. But it helps. Without it, what is there left? And anyway, thinking about these things helped me to see Matty, in a strange sort of a way. I suppose it must be what they do when they think of a new character for EastEnders: they must say to themselves, well, what does this person like? What does he listen to, who are his friends, what football team does he support? That’s what I did – I made up a son. He supports Arsenal, he likes fishing, although he doesn’t have a rod yet. He likes pop music, but not the sort of pop music where people sing half-naked and use a lot of swear words. Very occasionally, people ask what he wants for his birthday or Christmas, and I tell them, and they know better than to act surprised. Most distant family members have never met him, and never asked to. All they know about him is just that he’s not all there, or there’s something not right with him. They don’t want to know any more, so they never say, Oh, he can fish? Or, in the case of my Uncle Michael, Oh, he can swim underwater and then look at his watch while he’s down there? They’re just grateful to be told what to do. Matty took over the whole flat, in the end. You know how kids do. Stuff everywhere.
‘It doesn’t matter whether I know who they are or not,’ I said. ‘They belong to Matty.’
‘Oh, he’s a big fan of…’
‘Just do as you’re told and put them back,’ said Martin. ‘Put them back or get out. How much of a bitch do you really want to be?’
One day, I thought, I’ll learn to say that for myself.
MARTIN
Matty’s posters weren’t mentioned again that day. We were all curious, of course, but Jess had ensured that JJ and I couldn’t express this curiosity: Jess set things up so that you were either for her or against her, and in this matter, as in so many others, we were against her – which meant staying quiet on this issue. But because we resented being made to stay quiet, we became aggressive and noisy on any other issue we could bring to mind.
‘You can’t stand your dad, can you?’ I asked her.
‘No, course not. He’s a tosser.’
‘But you live with him?’
‘So?’
‘How can you stick it, man?’ JJ asked her.
‘Can’t afford to move out. Plus they’ve got a cleaner and cable and broadband and all that.’
‘Ah, to be young and idealistic and principled!’ I said. ‘Anti-globalization, pro-cleaner, eh?’
‘Yeah, I’m really going to be lectured by you two jerks. Plus there’s the other thing. The Jen thing. They worry.’
Ah, yes. The Jen thing. JJ and I were momentarily chastened. Looked at in a certain light, the previous conversation could be summarized as follows: a man recently imprisoned for having sex with a minor, and another who had fabricated a fatal disease because to do so saved him some time, trouble and face, had ridiculed a grieving teenager for wanting to be at home with her grieving parents. I made a note to put aside some time later so that I could synopsize it differently.
‘We were sorry to hear about your sister,’ said Maureen.
‘Yeah, well, it didn’t happen yesterday, did it?’
‘We were sorry anyway,’ said JJ wearily. Conceding the moral high ground to Jess simply meant that she could piss all over everyone until she got thrown off again.
‘Got used to it now.’
‘Have you?’ I asked.
‘Sort of.’
‘Must be a strange thing to have to get used to.’
‘Bit.’
‘Don’t you think about it all the time?’ JJ asked her.
‘Can’t we talk about what we’re supposed to be talking about?’
‘Which is what, exactly?’
‘About what we’re going to do. About the papers and all that.’
‘Do we have to do anything?’
‘I think so,’ said JJ.
‘They’ll forget about us soon, you know,’ I said. ‘It’s only because fuck all happens, sorry, Maureen, at the beginning of the year.’
‘What if we don’t want them to forget about us?’ said Jess.
‘Why the hell would we want them to remember?’ I asked her.
‘We could make some dosh. And it’d be something to do.’
‘What would be something to do?’
‘I dunno. I just… I get the feeling that we’re different. That people would like us, and be interested in us.’
‘You’re mad.’
‘Yeah. Exactly. That’s why they’d be interested in me. I could even play it up a bit, if you like.’
‘I’m sure that won’t be necessary,’ I said quickly, on behalf of the three of us, and indeed on behalf of the entire population of Britain. ‘You’re fine as you are.’
Jess smiled sweetly, surprised by the unsought compliment. ‘Thanks, Martin. So are you. And you – they’d want to know how you fucked up your life with the girl. And you, JJ, they’d want to know about pizzas and all that. And Maureen could tell everyone about how shit it is living with Matty. See, we’d be like superheroes, the X-Men or whatever. We’ve all got some secret superpower.’
‘Yeah,’ said JJ. ‘Right on. I have the superpower of delivering pizzas. And Maureen has the superpower of a disabled son.’
‘Well, all right, superpower is the wrong word. But, you know. Some thing.’
‘Ah, yes. “Thing”. Le mot juste, as ever.’
Jess scowled, but was too besotted by her theme to hit me with the insult my knowledge of a foreign phrase demanded and deserved. ‘And we could say that we still haven’t decided whether we’re going to actually top ourselves – they’d like that.’
‘And if we like actually sold the TV rights to Valentine’s Night… Maybe they could turn it into a Big Brother kinda thing. You could root for the person you wanted to go over,’ said JJ.
Jess looked dubious. ‘I don’t know about that,’ she said. ‘But you know about papers and that, Martin. We could make some money, couldn’t we?’
&nbs
p; ‘Has it occurred to you that I’ve had enough trouble with the papers?’
‘Oh, it’s always about you, isn’t it?’ said Jess. ‘What about if there’s a few quid in it for us?’
‘But what’s the story?’ said JJ. ‘There’s no story. We went up, we came down, that’s it. People must do that all the time.’
‘I’ve been thinking about this. How about if we saw something?’ said Jess.
‘Like what? What are we supposed to have seen?’
‘OK. How about if we saw an angel?’
‘An angel,’ said JJ flatly.
‘Yeah.’
‘I didn’t see an angel,’ said Maureen. ‘When did you see an angel?’
‘No one saw an angel,’ I explained. ‘Jess is proposing that we invent a spiritual experience for financial gain.’
‘That’s terrible,’ said Maureen, if only because it was so clearly expected of her.
‘It’s not really inventing, is it?’ said Jess.
‘No? In what sense did we actually see an angel?’
‘What do you call it in poems?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘You know, in poems. And in English Literature. Sometimes you say something is like something and sometimes you say something is something. You know, my love is like a fuck-bloody rose or whatever.’
‘Similes and metaphors.’
‘Yeah. Exactly. Shakespeare invented them, didn’t he? That’s why he was a genius.’
‘No.’
‘Who was it, then?’
‘Never mind.’
‘So why was Shakespeare a genius? What did he do?’
‘Another time.’
‘OK. Anyway. So which is the one where you say something is something, like “You are a prick” even if you’re not actually a prick. As in a penis. Obviously.’
Maureen looked close to tears.
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Jess,’ I said.
‘Sorry. Sorry. I didn’t know if we had the same swearing rules if it was only for discussion about grammar and that.’
