by Nick Hornby
I don’t know why, but it was kind of liberating, saying what you really wanted, even if you couldn’t have it. When I’d invented that Cosmic Tony guy for Maureen, I’d put limits on his superpowers because I thought we might see what kind of practical assistance Maureen needed. And as it turned out, she needed a vacation, and we could help, so Cosmic Tony turned out to be a guy worth knowing. But if there’s no superpower limit, then you get to find out all kinds of other shit, like, I don’t know, the thing that’s wrong with you in the first place. We all spend so much time not saying what we want, because we know we can’t have it. And because it sounds ungracious, or ungrateful, or disloyal, or childish, or banal. Or because we’re so desperate to pretend that things are OK, really, that confessing to ourselves they’re not looks like a bad move. Go on, say what you want. Maybe not out loud, if it’s going to get you into trouble. ‘I wish I’d never married him.’ ‘I wish she was still alive.’ ‘I wish I’d never had kids with her.’ ‘I wish I had a whole shitload of money.’ ‘I wish all the Albanians would go back to fucking Albania.’ Whatever it is, say it to yourself. The truth will set you free. Either that or it’ll get you a punch in the nose. Surviving in whatever life you’re living means lying, and lying corrodes the soul, so take a break from the lies just for one minute.
‘I want my band back,’ I said. ‘And my girl. I want my band back and my girl back.’
Jess looked at me. ‘You just said that.’
‘I haven’t said it often enough. I want my band back and my girl back. I WANT MY BAND BACK AND MY GIRL BACK. What do you want, Martin?’
He stood up. ‘I want another cappuccino,’ he said. ‘Anyone else?’
‘Don’t be such a pussy. What do you want?’
‘And what good will it do me if I tell you?’
‘I don’t know. Say it, and we’ll see what we see.’
He shrugged and sat down.
‘You got three wishes,’ I said.
‘OK. I wish I’d been able to make my marriage work.’
‘Yeah, well that was never going to happen,’ said Jess. ‘Because you couldn’t keep your prick in your trousers. Sorry, Maureen.’
Martin ignored her.
‘And of course I wish I’d never slept with that girl.’
‘Yeah, well…’ said Jess.
‘Shut up,’ I said.
‘I don’t know,’ said Martin. ‘Maybe I just wish that I wasn’t such an arsehole.’
‘There, now. That wasn’t so hard, was it?’
I was joking, kind of, but no one laughed.
‘Why don’t you just wish that you’d slept with the girl and got away with it?’ said Jess. ‘That’s what I’d wish, if I were you. I think you’re still lying. You’re wishing for stuff that makes you look good.’
‘That wish wouldn’t really solve the problem, though, would it? I’d still be an arsehole. I’d still get caught for something else.’
‘Well, why not just wish that you never got caught for anything ever? Why not wish that you… What’s that one with the cake?’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Something about eating a cake?’
‘Having it and eating it?’
Jess looked kind of doubtful. ‘Are you sure that’s it? How can you eat a cake without having it in the first place?’
‘The idea,’ said Martin, ‘is that you get it both ways. You eat the cake, but it somehow remains untouched. So “have” here means “keep”.’
‘That’s mental.’
‘Indeed.’
‘How could you do that?’
‘You can’t. Hence the expression.’
‘And what’s the point of the fucking cake? If you’re not going to eat it?’
‘We’re kind of getting off the subject here,’ I said. ‘The point is to wish for something that would make us happier. And I can see why Martin wants to be, you know, a different person.’
‘I wish Jen would come back,’ said Jess.
‘Yeah, well. I can see that. What else?’
‘Nothing. That’s it.’
Martin snorted. ‘You don’t wish you were less of an arsehole?’
‘If Jen came back, I wouldn’t be.’
‘Or less mad?’
‘I’m not mad. Just, you know. Confused.’
There was a thoughtful silence. You could tell that not everyone around the table was convinced.
‘So you’re just gonna waste two wishes?’ I said.
‘No. I can use them up. Ummm… An everlasting supply of blow, maybe? And, I dunno… Oooh. I wouldn’t mind being able to play the piano, I suppose.’
Martin sighed. ‘Jesus Christ. That’s the only problem you’ve got? You can’t play the piano?’
‘If I was less confused, I’d have the time to play the piano.’
We left it there.
‘How ’bout you, Maureen?’
‘I told you before. When you said Cosmic Tony could only arrange things.’
‘Tell everyone else.’
‘I wish they could find a way to help Matty.’
‘You can do better than that, can’t you?’ said Jess.
We winced.
‘How?’
‘No, well, see, I was wondering what you’d say. ’Cos you could have wished that he’d been born normal. And then you could have saved yourself all those years of clearing up shit.’
Maureen was quiet for a minute.
‘Who would I be then?’
‘Eh?’
‘I don’t know who I’d be.’
‘You’d still be Maureen, you stupid old trout.’
‘That’s not what she means,’ I said. ‘She means, like, we are what’s happened to us. So if you take away what’s happened to us, then, you know’
‘No, I don’t fucking know,’ said Jess.
‘If Jen hadn’t happened to you, and, and all the other things…’
‘Like Chas and that?’
‘Exactly. Events of that magnitude. Well, who would you be?’
‘I’d be someone different.’
‘Exactly.’
‘That’d be fucking excellent.’
We stopped playing the wishing game then.
MARTIN
It was intended to be this enormous gesture, I think, a way of wrapping the whole thing up, as if the whole thing could or would ever be wrapped up. That’s the thing with the young these days, isn’t it? They watch too many happy endings. Everything has to be wrapped up, with a smile and a tear and a wave. Everyone has learned, found love, seen the error of their ways, discovered the joys of monogamy, or fatherhood, or filial duty, or life itself. In my day, people got shot at the end of films, after learning only that life is hollow, dismal, brutish and short.
*
It was about two or three weeks after the ‘I wish’ conversation in Starbucks. Somehow Jess had managed to keep her trap shut – an impressive achievement for someone whose usual conversation technique is to describe everything as, or even before, it happens, using as many words as possible, like a radio sports commentator. Looking back on it, it is true that she had occasionally given the game away – or would have done, if any of us had known there was a game.
One afternoon, when Maureen said that she had to get back to see Matty, Jess stifled a giggle and observed enigmatically that she’d see him soon enough.
Maureen looked at her.
‘I’ll be seeing him in twenty minutes if I’m lucky with the bus,’ she said.
‘Yeah, but after that,’ said Jess.
‘Soon enough but after that?’ I said.
‘Yeah.’
‘I see him most minutes of every day,’ said Maureen.
And we forgot all about it, just as we forgot all about so much that Jess said.
Perhaps a week later, she started to show a hitherto concealed interest in Lizzie, JJ’s ex-girlfriend.
‘Where does Lizzie live?’ she asked JJ.
‘King’s Cross. And befo
re you say anything, no, she isn’t a hooker.’
‘What is she, a hooker? Ha ha. Just messing around.’
‘Yeah. Totally excellent joke.’
‘So where is there to live in King’s Cross, then? If you’re not a hooker?’
JJ rolled his eyes. ‘I’m not telling you where she lives, Jess. You think I’m some kinda sucker?’
‘I don’t want to talk to her. Stupid old slapper.’
‘Why is she a slapper, precisely?’ I asked her. ‘As far as we are aware, she has slept with only one man in her entire life.’
‘What’s that word again? The prick one? Sorry, Maureen.’
‘“Metaphorically”,’ I said. When someone uses the phrase ‘the prick one’, and you know immediately that this is a synonym for the word ‘metaphorically’, you are entitled to wonder whether you know the speaker too well. You are even entitled to wonder whether you should know her at all.
‘Exactly. She’s a metaphorical slapper. She dumped JJ and probably went out with someone else.’
‘Yeah, I dunno,’ said JJ. ‘I’m not sure that dumping me condemns a person to eternal celibacy.’
And thus we moved on, to a discussion about the appropriate punishment for our exes, whether death was too good for them and so on, and the Lizzie moment passed, like so many moments in those days, without us noticing. But it was in there, if we’d wanted to rootle around in the rubbish-strewn teenage bedroom of Jess’s mind.
On the big day itself, I had lunch with Theo – although of course while I was having lunch with Theo, I had no idea that it was going to be a big day. Having lunch with Theo was momentous enough. I hadn’t spoken to him face-to-face since I’d come out of prison.
He wanted to talk to me because he’d had, he said, a ‘substantial’ offer from a reputable publisher for an autobiography.
‘How much?’
‘They’re not talking money yet.’
‘May I ask, then, in what way it could be described as substantial?’
‘Well. You know. It has substance.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It’s real, not imaginary.’
‘And what does “real” mean, in real terms? Really?’
‘You’re becoming very difficult, Martin. If you don’t mind me saying so. You’re not my easiest client at the best of times, what with one thing and another. And I’ve actually been working quite hard on this project.’
I was momentarily distracted by the realization that there was straw underneath my feet. We were eating in a restaurant called ‘Farm’, and everything we were eating came from a farm. Brilliant, eh? Meat! Potatoes! Green salad! What a concept! I suppose they needed the straw, without which their theme would have begun to look a little short on inspiration. I would like to report that the waitresses were all jolly and large and red-cheeked and wearing aprons, but of course they were surly, thin, pale and dressed in black.
‘But what did you have to do, Theo? If, as you say, someone phoned up and offered for my autobiography, in some kind of indescribably substantial way?’
‘Well. I phoned them up and suggested they might want it.’
‘Right. And they seemed interested?’
‘They phoned back.’
‘With a substantial offer.’
Theo smiled condescendingly.
‘You don’t really know much about the publishing world, do you?’
‘Not really. Only what you’ve told me over this lunch. Which is that people have been phoning up with substantial offers. That’s why we’re here, apparently.’
‘We mustn’t run before we can walk.’
Theo was beginning to annoy me.
‘OK. Agreed. Just tell me the walking part.’
‘No, you see… Even the walking part is running. It’s more, you know, tactical than that.’
‘Asking you to tell me about walking is running?’
‘Softly softly catchee monkey.’
‘Jesus Christ, Theo.’
‘And that sort of reaction isn’t softly softly, if I may say so. That’s noisy noisy. Tetchy tetchy, even.’
I never heard any more about the offer, and I have never been able to work out the point of the lunch.
Jess had called an extraordinary meeting for four o’clock, in the vast and invariably empty basement of the Starbucks in Upper Street, one of those rooms with a lot of sofas and tables that would feel exactly like your living room, if your living room had no windows, and you only ever drank out of paper cups that you never threw away.
‘Why in the basement?’ I asked her when she phoned me.
‘Because I’ve got private things to talk about.’
‘What sort of private things?’
‘Sexual things.’
‘Oh, God. The others are going to be there, aren’t they?’
‘You think I’ve got private sexual things I only want to tell you?’
‘I was hoping not.’
‘Yeah, like I have fantasies about you all the time.’
‘I’ll see you later, OK?’
I got a number 19 bus from the West End to Upper Street, because the money had finally run out. We’d got through the bits and pieces of money we’d picked up from chat-show appearances and junior ministers, and I had no job. So even though Jess once explained that cabs are the cheapest form of transport, because they will take you wherever you want to go for free, and it’s not until you get there that money is needed, I decided that inflicting my poverty on a cabbie was not such a good idea. In any case, the cabbie and I would almost certainly spend the journey talking about the unfairness of my incarceration, perfectly normal thing to want to do, her fault for going out looking like that and so on. I have preferred minicab drivers for some time now, because they are as ignorant of London’s inhabitants as they are of its geography. I got recognized twice on the bus, once by someone who wanted to read me a relevant and apparently redemptive passage in the Bible.
As I approached Starbucks, a youngish couple walked in just ahead of me, and immediately went downstairs. Initially I was pleased, of course, because it meant that Jess’s sexual revelations would have to be conducted sotto voce, if at all; but then as I was queuing for my chai tea latte, I realized that this meant no such thing, given Jess’s immunity to embarrassment; and my stomach started to do what it has done ever since I turned forty. It doesn’t churn, that’s for sure. Old stomachs don’t churn. It’s more as if one side of the stomach wall is a tongue, and the other side a battery. And at moments of tension the two sides touch, with disastrous consequences.
The first person I saw at the bottom of the stairs was Matty, in his wheelchair. He was flanked by two burly male nurses, who I presumed must have carried him down, one of whom was talking to Maureen. And as I was trying to work out what had brought Matty to Starbucks, two small blonde girls came belting towards me shouting ‘Daddy! Daddy!’, and even then I did not instantaneously realize that they were my daughters. I picked them up, held them, tried not to weep and looked around the room. Penny was there, smiling at me, and Cindy was at a table in the far corner, not smiling at me. JJ had his arms around the couple who’d walked in ahead of me, and Jess was standing with her father and a woman whom I presumed to be her mother – she was unmistakably the wife of a Labour junior minister. She was tall, expensively dressed and disfigured by a hideous smile that clearly bore no relation to anything she might be feeling, a real election night of a smile. Round her wrist there was one of those bits of red string that Madonna wears, so despite all appearances to the contrary, she was obviously a deeply spiritual woman. Given Jess’s flair for the melodramatic, I wouldn’t have been altogether surprised to see her sister, but I checked carefully, and she wasn’t there. Jess was wearing a skirt and a jacket, and for once you had to get up quite close to become scared by her eye make-up.
I put the girls down and led them over to their mother. I waved to Penny on the way, though, just so that she wouldn’t feel left out.
/> ‘Hello.’ I leaned down to kiss Cindy on the cheek, and she moved smartly out of the way.
‘What brings you here, then?’ I said.
‘The mad girl there seemed to think it might help in some way.’
‘Oh. Did she explain how?’
Cindy snorted. I got the feeling that she was going to snort whatever I said, that snorting was going to be her preferred method of communication, so I knelt down to talk to the children.
Jess clapped her hands together and stepped into the centre of the room.
‘I read about this on the internet,’ she said. ‘It’s called an intervention. They do it all the time in America.’
‘All the time,’ JJ shouted. ‘It’s all we do.’
‘See, if someone is fucked… messed up on drugs or drink or whatever, then the like friends and family, and whatever, all gather together and confront him and go, you know, Fucking pack it in. Sorry Maureen. Sorry Mum and Dad, sorry little girls. This one’s sort of different. In America, they have a skilled… Oh shit, I’ve forgotten the name. On the website I was on he was called Steve.’
She fumbled in the pocket of her jacket and pulled out a piece of paper.
‘A facilitator. You’re supposed to have a skilled facilitator, and we haven’t got one. I didn’t know who to ask, really. I don’t know anyone with skills. Also, this intervention is sort of the other way round. Because we’re asking you to intervene. It’s us coming to you, rather than you coming to us. We’re saying to you, we need your help.’
The two nurses who’d come with Matty started to look a little uncomfortable at this point, and Jess noticed.
‘Not you guys,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to do anything. To tell you the truth, you’re only really here to bump up Maureen’s numbers, ’cos, well, I mean, she hasn’t really got anybody, has she? And I thought you two and Matty would be better than nobody, see? It would have been a bit grim for you, Maureen, seeing all these reunions and standing there on your own.’
You had to hand it to Jess. Once she got a theme between her teeth, she was unwilling to let it go. Maureen attempted a grateful smile.
‘Anyway. Just so’s you know who’s who. In the JJ corner we have his ex, Lizzie, and his mate Ed, who used to be in his crappy band with him. Ed’s flown over from America special. I’ve got my mum and dad, and it’s not often you’ll catch them in the same room together, ha ha. Martin’s got his ex-wife, his daughters, and his ex-girlfriend. Or maybe not ex, who knows? By the end of this he might have his wife back and his girlfriend back.’
