by Nick Hornby
After much heart-searching, GoodNews has been given three months to find somewhere to live. He says he appreciates that he has been a burden on us; we are, after all, a middle-class nuclear family, he knows that, and he should respect our, y’know, our nuclearness. We know we are being insulted, but we don’t care very much – or at least, I don’t. David agonizes about it every night just before we go to sleep, wonders aloud whether we want to be nuclear, whether we should become a denuclearized zone, but much of his conviction has gone.
The children seem pretty depressed, too. They were shaken by my outburst, and I have had to talk to them about my boyfriend, and they watch their parents with panic-filled eyes each time we eat, or go out together anywhere. We have only had one argument in the last few days, David and I – about a grillpan – and the kids needed counselling afterwards. I suspect that after a few months of dullness they will forget our woes, but right now I feel sorry for them, and I wish that we had not contrived to make them feel so insecure.
Me, I don’t think I’m depressed. That’s not the right word. I’m daunted. I no longer think about whether I want a divorce or not – the nice vicar took that option away from me. It is just beginning to register that those post-divorce fantasies I had before I was married were untenable, and that I am likely to remain married at least until the children are adults. So that’s . . . Fifteen years? By which time I will be in my mid-fifties, and one part of life – the Kris Kristofferson part – will be a long way behind me. But there is a sort of virtue in having no choices remaining, I think. It certainly clarifies the mind. And there is always the possibility that David and I will be able to say to each other one day ‘Do you remember when we nearly packed it in?’, and we will laugh at the sheer idiocy of these last few months. It is, I cannot help feeling, a remote possibility, but it is there nonetheless. I’m sure it’s right, that thing about leaving the knife in when you’ve been stabbed. Maybe I should check it out again. Just to be sure.
We are cooking my father’s birthday dinner, and my mother has called to say that he has given up red meat. David buys a free-range chicken, and it is nearly ready when Molly asks us what we are eating.
‘Hooray!’ she says, with more excitement than the menu really warrants.
‘I didn’t know you liked chicken that much.’
‘I don’t. But it means that Brian can come for dinner.’
‘It’s Grandpa’s birthday.’
‘Yes. But chicken. You promised.’
I had forgotten my promise. When I made it, it seemed like the best and easiest deal I could possibly strike; now it is preposterous, unreasonable, a deal with God made by an atheist at a time of crisis, forgotten when the crisis has passed.
‘Brian can’t come tonight.’
‘He has to. That’s why he’s not living with us, because he was allowed to come whenever we’re having chicken.’
‘Grandpa won’t like Brian.’
‘Why did you promise, if you were going to break it straightaway?’
Because I didn’t mean it. Because I did it to get myself out of a hole. Because we have done enough for Brian, even though we have done almost nothing, and even though he is a sad and pathetic man who will devour any crumb of comfort that is thrown at him, like a duck in winter.
‘I didn’t mean birthdays.’
‘Did you tell him that birthdays didn’t count?’
‘Molly’s right,’ says David. ‘We can’t just go around making promises to people like Brian and then breaking them when it is inconvenient.’
‘Brian is not coming to my father’s birthday dinner,’ I say. Of course he isn’t. It’s obvious, surely? It’s common sense.
‘You’re a liar, then,’ Molly says.
‘Fine.’
‘You don’t even care you’re a liar.’
‘No.’
‘OK. Well, I’ll be a liar, too, whenever I feel like it.’
I suddenly realize that David’s part in the chicken debacle might not be entirely innocent.
‘You bought that chicken deliberately,’ I say to him.
‘Deliberately? Well, it wasn’t an unconscious purchase, if that’s what you mean.’
‘You know that’s not what I mean.’
‘OK. I wasn’t entirely unaware of your promise to Brian and Molly when I put it in the trolley.’
‘So you were trying to catch me out?’
‘It didn’t occur to me that you would need catching out. It didn’t occur to me that your offer was anything but genuine.’
‘Liar.’
‘So what you’re saying is I should have realized that you didn’t really mean it? Even though you said you meant it with all your heart?’
‘Is this really what it’s all come down to, David? Playing games with chicken dinners?’
‘It rather looks like it. I don’t know what else is left. I couldn’t get you to do anything else. I’d rather hoped we’d drawn the last line in the sand.’
‘I just want my dad to have a nice birthday. Is that too much to ask?’
‘That’s been the question all the time. Or a version of it.’
We end up compromising. The night after my father’s birthday dinner, we cook another roast chicken, and we invite Brian round, and thus the spirit of the Brian treaty is upheld. Stuffing our faces with meat and three vegetables on consecutive nights may seem like a peculiar way to make the world a better place, but it seems to work for us.
OK, Vanessa Bell. She was a painter, so, you know, easier for her to live a beautiful life than it is for someone who has to deal with Mrs Cortenza and Barmy Brian and all the Holloway junkies. And she had children by more than one man, which might have made things a bit richer than they might otherwise have been. And the men she knocked around with were, it is only fair to say, more interesting and more talented than David and Stephen. They tended to be writers and painters and what have you, rather than people who wrote company brochures. And even though they didn’t have money, they were posh, whereas we’re not. It must be easier to live beautiful lives when you’re posh.
So, what I’m beginning to think – and I’m only halfway through the book, but I’m sure the second half will be more of the same – is that Vanessa Bell isn’t going to be too much help. OK, my brother may well end up filling his pockets with stones and jumping into the river, just as her sister did, but beyond that . . . Anyway, who lives a rich and beautiful life that I know? It’s no longer possible, surely, for anyone who works for a living, or lives in a city, or shops in a supermarket, or watches TV, or reads a newspaper, or drives a car, or eats frozen pizzas. A nice life, possibly, with a huge slice of luck and a little spare cash. And maybe even a good life, if . . . Well, let’s not go into all that. But rich and beautiful lives seem to be a discontinued line.
What helps is not Vanessa Bell, but reading about Vanessa Bell. I don’t want to be like Poppy the squashed cat any more. Ever since I moved back into the house after my stay at Janet’s, I have had the nagging feeling that I miss something, without quite being able to describe precisely what that something was. It’s not my former flatmates, or the chance of sleeping on my own in a bed (because, like I said, David and I fit, or have learned to fit, and sharing a duvet with him is frequently a comfort rather than a hardship), but something else, something that is clearly not important enough to me, in both senses: it should be more important to me than it is, because I miss it, and yet life is clearly not impossible without it, because I have been managing to survive despite its absence – in other words, it’s some spiritual equivalent of fruit, which I am bad about eating. And it is only when I have shut the bedroom door for the third or fourth time on my husband and children in order to find out precisely how Vanessa Bell’s life was better than my own that I work it out. It is the act of reading itself I miss, the opportunity to retreat further and further from the world until I have found some space, some air that isn’t stale, that hasn’t been breathed by my family a thousand times alrea
dy. Janet’s bedsit seemed enormous when I moved into it, enormous and quiet, but this book is so much bigger than that. And when I’ve finished it I will start another one, and that might be even bigger, and then another, and I will be able to keep extending my house until it becomes a mansion, full of rooms where they can’t find me. And it’s not just reading, either, but listening, hearing something other than my children’s TV programmes and my husband’s pious drone and the chatter chatter chatter in my head.
What happened to me? However did I get it into my head that I was too busy for all this stuff? Maybe I can’t live a rich and beautiful life, but there are rich and beautiful things for sale all around me, even on the Holloway Road, and they are not an extravagance because if I buy some of them then I think I might be able to get by, and if I don’t then I think I might go under. I need a Discman and some CDs and half-a-dozen novels urgently, total cost maybe three hundred pounds. Three hundred pounds for a mansion! Imagine asking a building society manager for three hundred pounds! He’d give you cash out of his own pocket. And I could shave even that pitiful amount down. I could go to the library, and I could borrow the CDs . . . but I need the Discman. I don’t want anyone else to hear what I am hearing, and I want to be able to block out every last trace of the world I inhabit, even if it is just for half-an-hour a day. And yes, yes: just think how many cataract operations or bags of rice could be bought for three hundred pounds. And just think how long it would take a twelve-year-old Asian girl to earn that in her sweatshop. Can I be a good person and spend that much money on overpriced consumer goods? I don’t know. But I do know this: I’d be no good without them.
For the last three days, it has been raining and raining and raining – it has been raining harder than anyone can remember. It’s the kind of rain you’re supposed to get after a nuclear attack: rivers have broken their banks all over the country, and people are wading down High Streets, sandbagging their houses, abandoning their cars, rowing across fields. The traffic all over London has slowed and slowed and then, finally, stopped, and the trains aren’t running, and the buses are overstuffed like a human sandwich, with bits of arms and legs hanging out of them. It’s dark all day, and there’s this relentless, terrible howling noise. If you believe in ghosts, the kinds of ghosts who have been condemned to haunt us because they died terrible, painful deaths or did terrible, painful things to their loved ones, then this is your time, because we would listen to you now. We would have no option but to listen to you, because the evidence is all around us.
The last time it rained like this was in 1947, according to the news, but back then it was just a fluke, a freak of nature; this time around, they say, we are drowning because we have abused our planet, kicked and starved it until it has changed its nature and turned nasty. It feels like the end of the world. And our homes, homes which cost some of us a quarter of a million pounds or more, do not offer the kind of sanctuary that enables us to ignore what is going on out there: they are all too old, and at night the lights flicker and the windows rattle. I’m sure that I am not the only one in this house who wonders where Monkey and his friends are tonight.
Just as we were eating, water started to pour into the kitchen under the French windows; the drain outside, placed incompetently in the dip between the garden and the house, cannot cope. David digs out an old pair of wellingtons and a cycling cape and goes outside to see if anything can be done.
‘It’s full of rubbish,’ he shouts. ‘And there’s water pouring down from the gutter outside Tom’s room.’
He clears as much muck from the drain as he can with his hands, and then we all go upstairs to see what can be done with the guttering.
‘Leaves,’ David says. He’s half out of the sash window, holding on to the frame – which, I can see now, is rotten, and should have been repaired years ago. ‘I could reach them with a stick or something.’
Molly runs off and comes back with a broom, and David kneels on the windowsill, and starts to take wild pokes at the gutter with the handle.
‘Stop, David,’ I tell him. ‘It’s not safe.’
‘It’s fine.’
He’s wearing jeans, and Tom and I grab hold of one back pocket each in an attempt to anchor him, while Molly in turn hangs on to us, purposelessly but sweetly. My family, I think, just that. And then, I can do this. I can live this life. I can, I can. It’s a spark I want to cherish, a splutter of life in the flat battery; but just at the wrong moment I catch a glimpse of the night sky behind David, and I can see that there’s nothing out there at all.
NippleJesus
They never told me what it was, and they never told me why they might need someone like me. I probably wouldn’t have taken the fucking job if they had, to tell you the truth. And if I’d been clever, I would have asked them on the first day, because looking back on it now, I had a few clues to be going on with: we were all sat around in this staff-room type place, being given all the do’s and don’t’s, and it never occurred to me that I was just about the only male under sixty they’d hired. There were a few middle-aged women, and a lot of old gits, semi-retired, ex-Army types, but there was only one bloke of around my age, and he was tiny – little African geezer, Geoffrey, who looked like he’d run a mile if anything went off. But sometimes I forget what I look like, if you know what I mean. I was sitting there listening to what this woman was saying about flash photography and how close people were allowed to get and all that, and I was more like a head than a body, sort of thing, because if you’re listening to what someone’s saying that’s what you are, isn’t it? A head. A brain, not a body. But the point of me – the point of me here, in this place, for this job – is that I’m six foot two and fifteen stone. It’s not just that, either, but I look . . . well, handy, I suppose. I look like I can take care of myself, what with the tattoos and the shaved head and all that. But sometimes I forget. I don’t forget when I’m eyeballing some little shitbag outside a club, some nineteen-year-old in a two-hundred-quid jacket who’s trying to impress his bird by giving me some mouth; but when I’m watching something on TV, like a documentary or something, or when I’m putting the kids to bed, or when I’m reading, I don’t think, you know, fucking hell I’m big. Anyway, listening to this woman, I forgot, so when she told me I’d be in the Southern Fried Chicken Wing looking after number 49,I never asked her ’Why me? Why do you need a big bloke in the Southern?’ I just trotted off, like a berk. I never thought for a moment that I was on some sort of special mission.
I took this job because I promised Lisa I’d give up the night work at the club. It wasn’t so much the hours – ten till three Monday to Thursday, ten till five Friday and Saturday, club closed on Sunday. OK, they fucked the weekends up, and I never saw the kids in the morning, but I could pick them up from school, give them their tea, and Lisa didn’t have to worry about childcare or anything. She works in a dentist’s near Harley Street, decent job, nice boss, good pay, normal hours, and with me being off all day, we could manage. I mean, it wasn’t ideal, ’cos I never really saw her – by the time the kids were down and we’d had something to eat, it was time for me to put the monkey-suit on and go out. But we both sort of knew it was just a phase, and I’d do something else eventually, although fuck knows what. Never really thought about that. She asks me sometimes what I’d do if I had the choice, and I always tell her I’d be Tiger Woods – millions of dollars a week, afternoons knocking a golf ball about in places like Spain and Florida, gorgeous blonde girlfriends (except I never mention that bit). And she says, no, seriously, and I say, I am being serious, and she says, no, you’ve got to be realistic. So I say, well what’s the point of this game, then? You’re asking me what I’d do if I had the choice, and I tell you, and then you tell me I haven’t got the fucking choice. So what am I supposed to say? And she says, but you’re too old to be a professional golfer – and she’s right, I’m thirty-eight now – and you smoke too much. (Like you can’t play fucking golf if you smoke.) Choose something else. And I say, O
K, then, I’ll be fucking Richard Branson. And she says, well you can’t just start by being Richard Branson. You have to do something first. And I say, OK, I’ll be a bouncer first. And she gives up.
I know she means well, and I know she’s trying to get me to think about my life, and about getting older and all that, but the truth is, I’m thirty-eight, I’ve got no trade and no qualifications, and I’m lucky to get a job headbutting cokeheads outside a club. She’s great. Lisa, and if you think about it, even her asking the question shows that she loves me and thinks the world of me, because she really does think I’ve got choices, and someone else is going to have as much faith in me as she does. She wants me to say, oh, I’d like to run a DIY shop, or I’d like to be an accountant, and the next day she’d come back with a load of leaflets, but I don’t want to run a DIY shop, and I don’t want to be an accountant. I know what my talent is: my talent is being big, and I’m making the most of it. If anyone asks her what I do, she says I’m a security consultant, but if I’m around when she says it, I laugh and say I’m a bouncer. I don’t know what she’d say now. Probably that I’m an art expert. You watch. Give her two weeks and she’ll be on at me to write to Antiques Roadshow. I don’t know what world she lives in sometimes. I think it’s something to do with the dentist’s. She meets all these people, and they’re loaded, and as thick as me, half of them, and she gets confused about what’s possible and what’s not.