by Nick Hornby
It was true that on our last tour, we stayed in a motel like that in South Carolina. But I remember the show, which smoked; Ed remembers the showers, which didn’t.
‘Anyway, I knew Springsteen. Or at least, I saw him live on the E Street reunion tour. And, Senator JJ, you’re no Springsteen.’
‘Thanks, pal.’
‘Shit, JJ. What do you want me to say? OK, you are Springsteen. You’re one of the most successful performers in music business history. You were on the cover of Time and Newsweek in the same week. You fill stadiums night after fucking night. There. You feel better now? Jeez. Grow up, man.’
‘Oh, what, and you’re all grown up because your old man took pity on you and gave you a job hooking people up with illegal cable TV?’
Ed’s ears get red when he’s about to start throwing punches. This information is probably of no use to anyone in the world apart from me, because, for obvious reasons, he doesn’t tend to form real deep attachments to people he’s punched, so they never learn the ear thing – they don’t seem to stick around long enough. I’m probably the only one who knows when to duck.
‘Your ears are getting red,’ I said.
‘Fuck you.’
‘You flew all this way to tell me that?’
‘Fuck you.’
‘Stop it, the pair of you,’ said Lizzie. I couldn’t say for sure, but I seem to remember that last time the three of us were together, she said the same thing.
The guy making our coffee was watching us carefully. I knew him, to say hello to, and he was OK; he was a student, and we’d talked about music a couple times. He liked the White Stripes a lot, and I’d been trying to get him to listen to Muddy Waters and the Wolf. We were freaking him out a little.
‘Listen,’ I said to Ed. ‘I come here a lot. You wanna kick my ass, then let’s go outside.’
‘Thanks,’ said the White Stripes guy. ‘I mean, you know. You’d be welcome if there wasn’t anyone else here, because you’re a regular, and we like to look after our regulars. But…’ He gestured at the line behind us.
‘No, no, I understand, man,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’
‘Shall I leave your coffees on the counter here?’
‘Sure. It won’t take long. He usually calms down after he’s landed a good one.’
‘Fuck you.’
So we all went out on to the street. It was cold and dark and wet, but Ed’s ears were like two little torches in the gloom.
MARTIN
I hadn’t seen or spoken to Penny since the morning our brush with the angel had been in the papers. I had thought fondly of her, but I hadn’t really missed her, either sexually or socially. My libido was on leave of absence (and one had to be prepared for the possibility that it might opt for early retirement and never return to its place of work); my social life consisted of JJ, Maureen and Jess, which might suggest that it was as sickly as my sex drive, not least because they seemed to suffice for the time being. And yet when I saw Penny flirt with one of Matty’s nurses, I felt uncontrollably angry.
This isn’t a paradox, if you know anything about the perversity of human nature. (I believe I have used that line before, and as a consequence it is probably beginning to seem a little less authoritative and psychologically astute. Next time, I shall just own up to the perversity and the inconsistency, and leave human nature out of it.) Jealousy is likely to seize a man at any time, and in any case the blond nurse was tall, and young, and tanned, and blond. There is every chance that he would have made me uncontrollably angry if he had been standing on his own in the basement of Starbucks, or indeed anywhere in London.
I was, in retrospect, almost certainly looking for an excuse to leave the bosom of my family. As suspected, I had learned very little about myself in the previous few minutes. Neither my ex-wife’s scorn nor my daughters’ crayons had been as instructive as Jess might have wished.
‘Thanks,’ I said to Penny.
‘Oh, that’s OK. I wasn’t doing anything, and Jess seemed to think it might help.’
‘No,’ I said, immediately at something of a moral disadvantage. ‘Not thanks for that. Thanks for standing here flirting in front of me. Thanks for nothing, in other words.’
‘This is Stephen,’ Penny said. ‘He’s looking after Matty, and he didn’t have anyone to talk to, so I came over to say hello.’
‘Hi,’ said Stephen. I glared at him.
‘I suppose you think you’re pretty great,’ I said.
‘I’m sorry?’ he said.
‘Martin!’ said Penny.
‘You heard me,’ I said. ‘Smug git.’
I had the feeling that over in the corner, where the girls were colouring their picture, there was another Martin – a kinder, gentler Martin – watching in appalled fascination, and I wondered briefly whether it was possible to rejoin him.
‘Go away, before you make an idiot of yourself,’ said Penny. It says a lot for Penny’s generosity of spirit that she still saw idiocy coming towards me from off in the distance, and that I still had a chance of getting out of the way; less partial observers would have argued that idiocy had already squashed me flat. It didn’t matter, though, because I wasn’t moving.
‘It’s easy, being a male nurse, isn’t it?’
‘Not very,’ said Stephen. He had made the elementary mistake of answering my question as if it had been delivered straight, without bile. ‘I mean, it’s rewarding, sure, but… Long hours, poor pay, night shifts. Some of the patients are difficult.’ He shrugged.
‘Some of the patients are difficult,’ I said, in a stupid whiny voice. ‘Poor pay. Night shifts. Diddums.’
‘Sean,’ Stephen said to his partner. ‘I’m going to wait upstairs. This guy’s throwing the rattle out of the pram.’
‘You just wait and listen to what I have to say. I did you the courtesy of listening to you banging on about what a national hero you are. Now you listen to me.’
I don’t think he minded staying where he was for a couple of minutes. This kind of sensationally bad behaviour elicited a great deal of fascination, I could see that, and I hope I don’t seem immodest when I say that my celebrity, or what remained of it, was crucial to the success of the spectacle: usually, television personalities only behave badly in nightclubs, when surrounded by other television personalities, so my decision to cut loose when sober to a male nurse, in a Starbucks basement, was bold – possibly even groundbreaking. And it wasn’t as if Stephen could really take it personally, just as he couldn’t have taken it personally if I’d decided to crap on his shoes. The outward manifestations of an inner combustion are never very directed.
‘I hate people like you,’ I said. ‘You wheel a disabled kid around for a bit and you want a medal. And how hard is it, really?’
At this point, I regret to say, I took the handles of Matty’s wheelchair and pushed him up and down. And it suddenly seemed like an excellent idea to put my hand on my hip while I was doing it, in order to suggest that pushing disabled people around in their wheelchairs was an effeminate activity.
‘Look at Daddy, Mummy,’ one of my daughters (and I’m sorry to say that I don’t know which one) yelled with delight. ‘He’s funny, isn’t he?’
‘There,’ I said to Penny. ‘How’s that? Do I look more attractive to you again now?’
Penny was staring at me as if I were indeed crapping on Stephen’s shoe, a look that answered the question.
‘Hey, everybody,’ I yelled, although I had already attracted all the attention I could possibly wish for. ‘Aren’t I great? Aren’t I great? You think this is hard, Blondie? I’ll tell you what’s hard, Sunny Jim. Hard is…’
But here I dried up. As it turned out, there were no examples of difficulty in my professional life readily to hand. And the difficulties I had experienced recently all stemmed from sleeping with an underage girl, which meant that they weren’t much good for eliciting sympathy.
‘Hard is when…’ I just needed something with which to finish the sentence. Any
thing would do, even something I hadn’t experienced directly. Childbirth? Tournament-level chess? But nothing came.
‘Have you finished, mate?’ Stephen asked.
I nodded, trying somehow to convey in the gesture that I was too angry and disgusted to continue. And then I took the only option apparently available to me, and followed Jess and JJ out of the door.
MAUREEN
Jess was always walking out of everywhere, so I didn’t mind her going too much. But when JJ walked out, and then Martin… Well, I started to feel a bit annoyed, to tell you the honest truth. It seemed rude, when everyone had gone to all that trouble to turn up. And Martin was so peculiar, pushing Matty up and down and asking everyone if he looked attractive. Why would anyone think he looked attractive? He didn’t look attractive at all. He looked mad. To be fair to JJ, he’d taken his guests with him when he went – he hadn’t left them behind in the coffee bar, the way Jess and Martin had done. But later on I found out that he’d taken them all outside to have a fight with them, so it was difficult to decide whether he was being rude or not. On the one hand, he was with them, but on the other hand, he was with them because he wanted to beat them up. I think that’s probably still rude, but not as rude as the others.
The people left behind stood around for a little while, the nurses and Jess’s parents and Martin’s friends and family, and then when we all began to realize that no one was coming back, not even JJ and his friends, no one was quite sure what to do.
‘Is that it, do you think?’ said Jess’s father. ‘I mean, I don’t want to… I don’t wish to appear unsympathetic. And I know Jess took a lot of trouble organizing this. But, well… There’s no one really left, is there? Would you like us to stay, Maureen? Is there anything we can usefully achieve as a unit? Because obviously, if there was… I mean, what do you think Jess was hoping for? Perhaps we can help her to achieve it in absentia?’
I knew what Jess was hoping for. She was hoping that her mum and dad would come and make everything better, in the way mums and dads are supposed to. I used to have that dream, a long time ago, when I was first on my own with Matty, and I think it’s a dream that everyone has. Everyone whose life has gone badly wrong, anyway.
So I told Jess’s father that I thought Jess just wanted people to understand better, and that I was sorry if that wasn’t what had happened.
‘It’s those bloody earrings,’ he said, and so I asked about the earrings, and he told me the story.
‘Were they special to her?’ I said.
‘To Jen? Or to Jess?’
‘To Jen.’
‘I don’t really know,’ he said.
‘They were her favourites,’ said Mrs Crichton. She had a strange face. She smiled the whole time we were speaking, but it was as though she’d only discovered smiling that afternoon – she didn’t have the sort of face that looked as though it were very used to being cheerful. The lines she had were the sort you’d get from being angry about stolen earrings, and her mouth was very thin and tight.
‘She came back for them,’ I said. I don’t know why I said it, and I don’t know if it was true or not. But it felt like the right thing to say. It felt true in that way.
‘Who did?’ she said. Her face looked different now. It was having to do things it wasn’t used to doing, because she suddenly looked so desperate to hear what I had to say. I don’t think she was used to listening properly. I liked making her face do something new, and that was why I went on, partly. I felt like I was in charge of a lawnmower, cutting a path into places where the grass was overgrown.
‘Jen. If she loved her earrings, then she probably came back for them. You know what girls of that age are like.’
‘God,’ said Mr Crichton. ‘I’d never thought of that.’
‘Me neither. But… that makes so much sense. Because, do you remember, Chris? That’s when we lost a couple of other things, too. That was when that money went missing.’
I didn’t have the same feeling about the money. I could see that there might have been another explanation for that.
‘And I said at the time that I thought there were a couple of books gone, do you remember? And we know Jess didn’t take those.’
And they both laughed, then, as if they liked Jess, and liked it that she’d rather jump off a tower-block than read a book.
I could see and feel why it would make a difference to them, this idea that Jen had come into the house for her earrings. It would mean that she had disappeared, gone to Texas or Scotland or Notting Hill Gate, rather than that she’d been killed, or she’d killed herself. It meant that they could think about where she was, imagine her life now. They could wonder about whether she’d had a baby that they’d never seen and might never see, or got a job that they’d never hear about. It meant that in their heads they could carry on being ordinary parents. It’s what I was doing, when I bought Matty his posters and his tapes – I was being an ordinary mother in my head, just for a moment.
You could wreck it all for them in a second, if you chose to, rip enormous great big holes in the story, because what did it add up to, really? Jen could have come back because she wanted to die wearing her earrings. She might not have come back at all. And she was still gone, whether she came back for five minutes or not. Oh, but I know what you need to keep yourself going. That probably sounds funny, considering why we were all there in that coffee bar in the first place. But the fact is that so far I have kept myself going, even if I had to climb the stairs to the roof of Toppers’ House to do it. Sometimes you just need to give things a tiny little jiggle. You just need to think that perhaps someone might have helped themselves to their own earrings, and your part of the world looks like somewhere you could live in for a while.
That was Mr and Mrs Crichton, though, not Jess. Jess didn’t know anything about the earring theory, and Jess was the one who needed her world to look different. She was the one who’d been up on the roof with me. Mr and Mrs Crichton had their jobs and their friends and all the rest of it, so you could say that they didn’t need any stories about earrings. You could say that stories about earrings were wasted on them.
You could say all that, but it wouldn’t be true. They needed the stories – you could see it in their faces. I only know one person in the world who doesn’t need stories to keep himself going, and that person is Matty. (And maybe even he does. I don’t know what goes on in there. Keep talking to him, they say, so I do, and who knows whether he uses something I say?) And there are other ways of dying, without killing yourself. You can let parts of yourself die. Jess’s mother had let her face die, and I watched it come to life again.
JESS
The first train that came along was southbound, and I got off at London Bridge and went for a walk. If you’d seen me leaning on the wall and looking down at the water, you’d have gone, Oh, she’s thinking, but I wasn’t. I mean, there were words in my head, but just because there are words in your head it doesn’t mean you’re thinking, just like if you’ve got a pocket full of pennies it doesn’t mean you’re rich. The words in my head were like, bollocks, bastard, bitch, shit, fuck, wanker, and they were spinning round in there pretty fast, too fast even for me to make a sentence out of them. And that’s not really thought, is it?
So I watched the water for a little while, and then I went to a stall by the bridge and bought some tobacco and papers and matches. Then I went back to where I’d been standing and sat down to roll myself a few smokes, for something to do, sort of thing. I don’t know why I don’t smoke more, to be honest. I forget, I think. If someone like me forgets to smoke, what chance has smoking got? Look at me. You’d bet any money that I smoked like fuck, and I don’t. New Year’s Resolution: smoke more. It’s got to be better for you than jumping off of tower-blocks.
Anyway, so there I was, sitting down with my back against the wall, rolling up roll-ups, when I saw this lecturer from college. He’s like an old bloke, one of those art-school people who’ve been knocking around since the sixt
ies. He teaches typography and that, and I went to a couple of his classes until I got bored. I don’t mind him, Colin. He doesn’t have a grey pony-tail and he doesn’t wear a faded denim jacket. And he never wanted to be our friend, which must mean that he has his own friends. You couldn’t say that about some of them.
To tell this story truthfully, I should probably say that he saw me before I saw him, because when I looked up from my rolling, he was walking over to me. And to be really properly truthful, I should also say that some of the thinking I was doing, in other words the mental swearing, probably wasn’t entirely mental, if you see what I mean. It was meant to be mental, but some of it was coming out through my mouth, just because there was so much of it. It was sort of slopping out of me, as if the swearing was coming out of a tap and running into a bucket (= my head), and I hadn’t bothered turning the tap off even when the bucket was full.
That’s what it looked like from my point of view. From his point of view, it looked like I was sitting on the pavement rolling up fags and swearing to myself, and that’s not such a good look, is it? He kind of came up to me, and then he crouched down so he was at my height, and then he started talking to me quietly. And he was like, Jess? Do you remember me?
I’d only seen him like two months before, so of course I remembered him. And I went, No, and laughed, which was supposed to be a joke, but which couldn’t have come across as a joke, because then he goes, still in this whispery voice, I’m Colin Wearing, and I used to teach you at art college. And I go, Yeah, yeah, and he goes, No, I am, and then I see that he thought my Yeah, yeah was like Yeah, right, but it wasn’t that sort of Yeah, yeah. All I was doing with the two Yeahs was trying to tell him that I’d only been joking before, but I only made it worse. I made it look like I thought he was pretending to be Colin Wearing, which would be an utterly insane thing to do. So the whole conversation is going right off course. It’s like a supermarket trolley with a wonky wheel, because all the time I’m thinking, this should be easy to push along, and everything I say just takes me in the wrong direction.
