by Nick Hornby
Maureen didn’t want to come in with us, but we led her through the door and up the stairs into a room that was the closest thing I’ve seen to a New York loft since I’ve been here. It would have cost a fortune in NYC, which means it would have cost a fortune plus another thirty per cent in London. It was still packed, even at four in the morning, and it was full of my least favorite people: fucking art students. I mean, Jess had already warned us, but it still came as a shock. All those woolly hats, and moustaches with parts of them missing, all those new tattoos and plastic shoes… I mean, I’m a liberal guy, and I didn’t want Bush to bomb Iraq, and I like a toke as much as the next guy, but these people still fill my heart with fear and loathing, mostly because I know they wouldn’t have liked my band. When we played a college town, and we walked out in front of a crowd like this, I knew we were going to have a hard time. They don’t like real music, these people. They don’t like the Ramones or the Temptations or the ’Mats; they like D J Bleepy and his stupid fucking bleeps. Or else they all pretend that they’re fucking gangstas, and listen to hip-hop about hos and guns.
So I was in a bad mood from the get-go. I was worried that I was going to get into a fight, and I’d even decided what that fight would be about: I’d be defending either Martin or Maureen from the sneers of some motherfucker with a goatee, or some woman with a moustache. But it never happened. The weird thing was that Martin in his suit and his fake tan, and Maureen in her raincoat and sensible shoes, they somehow blended right in. They looked so straight that they looked, you know, out there. Martin and his TV hair could have been in Kraftwerk, and Maureen could have been like a real weird version of Mo Tucker from the Velvet Underground. Me, I was wearing a pair of faded black pants, a leather jacket and an old Gitanes T-shirt, and I felt like a fucking freak.
There was only one incident that made me think I might have to break someone’s nose. Martin was standing there drinking wine straight out of a bottle, and these two guys started staring at him.
‘Martin Sharp! You know, off of breakfast telly!’
I winced. I have never really hung out with a celebrity, and it hadn’t occurred to me that walking into a party with Martin’s face is like walking into a party naked: even arts students tend to take notice. But this was more complicated than straightforward recognition.
‘Oh, yeah! Good call!’ his buddy said.
‘Oi, Sharpy!’
Martin smiled at them pleasantly.
‘People must say that to you all the time,’ one of them said.
‘What?’
‘You know. Oi, Sharpy and all that.’
‘Well, yes,’ said Martin. ‘They do.’
‘Bad luck, though. Of all the people on TV, you end up looking like that cunt.’
Martin gave them a cheerful, what-can-you-do shrug and turned back to me.
‘You OK?’
‘That’s life,’ he said, and looked at me. He’d somehow managed to give an old cliché new depth.
Maureen, meanwhile, was plainly petrified. She jumped every time anyone laughed, or swore, or broke something; she stared at the party-goers as if she were looking at Diane Arbus photos projected fifty feet wide on an Imax screen.
‘You want a drink?’
‘Where’s Jess?’
‘Looking for Chas.’
‘And then can we go?’
‘Sure.’
‘Good. I’m not enjoying myself here.’
‘Me neither.’
‘Where do you think we’ll go next?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘But we’ll all go together, do you think?’
‘I guess. That’s the deal, right? Until we find this guy.’
‘I hope we don’t find him,’ said Maureen. ‘Not for a while. I’d like a sherry, please, if you can find one.’
‘You know what? I’m not sure there’s going to be too much sherry around. These guys don’t look like sherry-drinkers to me.’
‘White wine? Would they have that?’
I found a couple paper cups, and a bottle with something left in it.
‘Cheers.’
‘Cheers.’
‘Every New Year’s the same, huh?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘You know. Warm white wine, a bad party full of jerks. And this year I’d promised myself things would be different.’
‘Where were you this time last year?’
‘I was at a party at home. With Lizzie, my ex.’
‘Nice?’
‘It was OK, yeah. You?’
‘I was at home. With Matty.’
‘Right. And did you think, a year ago…’
‘Yes,’ she said quickly. ‘Oh, yes.’
‘Right.’ And I didn’t really know how to follow up, so we sipped our drinks and watched the jerks.
MAUREEN
It can’t be hygienic, living in a place without rooms. Even people who live in bedsits usually have access to a proper bathroom, with doors and walls and a window. This place, the place where the party was being held, didn’t even have that. It was like a railway station toilet, except there wasn’t even a separate gents’. There was just a little wall separating the bath and toilet from the rest of it, so even though I needed to go, I couldn’t; anyone might have walked around the wall and seen what I was doing. And I don’t need to spell out how unhealthy it all was. Mother used to say that a bad smell is just a germ gas; well, whoever owned this flat must have had germs everywhere. Not that anyone could use the toilet anyway. When I went to find it, someone was kneeling on the floor and sniffing the lid. I have no idea why anyone would want to smell the lid of a toilet (while someone else watched! Can you imagine!). But I suppose people are perverted in all sorts of different ways. It was sort of what I expected when I walked into that party and heard the noise and saw what kind of people they were; if someone had asked me what I thought people like that would do in a toilet, I might have said that they’d sniff the lid.
When I came back, Jess was standing there in tears, and the rest of the party had cleared a little space around us. Some boy had told her that Chas had been and gone, and he’d gone with somebody he met at the party, some girl. Jess wanted us all to go round to this girl’s house, and JJ was trying to persuade her that it wasn’t a good idea.
‘It’s OK,’ Jess said. ‘I know her. There’s probably been some sort of misunderstanding. She probably just didn’t know about me and Chas.’
‘What if she did know?’ said JJ.
‘Well,’ said Jess. ‘In that case I couldn’t let it go, could I?’
‘What does that mean?’
‘I wouldn’t kill her. I’m not that mad. But I would have to hurt her. Maybe cut her a little.’
When Frank broke off our engagement I didn’t think I’d ever get over it. I felt almost as sorry for him as I did for myself, because I didn’t make it easy for him. We were in the Ambler Arms, except it’s not called that any more, over in the corner by the fruit machine, and the landlord came over to our table and asked Frank to take me home, because nobody wanted to put any money in the machine while I was there howling and bawling my eyes out, and they used to make a fair bit of money from the fruit machine on quiet nights.
I nearly did away with myself then – I certainly considered it. But I thought I could ride it out, I thought things might get better. Imagine the trouble I could have saved if I had done! I would have killed the both of us, me and Matty, but of course I didn’t know that then.
I didn’t take any notice of the silly things Jess said about cutting people. I came up with a lot of utter nonsense when Frank and I broke up; I told people that Frank had been forced to move away, that he was sick in the head, that he was a drunk and he’d hit me. None of it was true. Frank was a sweet man whose crime was that he didn’t love me quite enough, and because this wasn’t much of a crime I had to make up some bigger ones.
‘Were you engaged?’ I asked Jess, and then wished I hadn’t.
‘Engaged?’ Jess said. ‘Engaged? What is this? Pride and f—ing Prejudice? “Oooh, Mr Arsey Darcy. May I plight my truth?” “Oh yes, Miss Snooty Knobhead, I’d be charmed I’m sure.”’ She said this last part in a silly voice, but you could probably have guessed that.
‘People do still get engaged,’ Martin said. ‘It’s not a stupid question.’
‘Which people get engaged?’
‘I did,’ I said. But I said it too quietly, because I was scared of her, and so she made me say it again.
‘You did? Really? OK, but what living people get engaged? I’m not interested in people out of the Ark. I’m not interested in people with, with like shoes and raincoats and whatever.’ I wanted to ask what she thought we should wear instead of shoes, but I was learning my lesson.
‘Anyway, who the f— did you get engaged to?’
I didn’t want any of this. It didn’t seem fair that this is what happened when you tried to help.
‘Did you shag him? I’ll bet you did. How did he like it? Doggy style? So he didn’t have to look at you?’
And then Martin grabbed her and dragged her into the street.
JESS
When Martin pulled me outside, I did that thing where you decide to become a different person. It’s something I could do whenever I felt like it. Doesn’t everybody, when they feel themselves getting out of control? You know: you say to yourself, OK, I’m a booky person, so then you go and get some books from the library and carry them around for a while. Or, OK, I’m a druggy person, and smoke a lot of weed. Whatever. And it makes you feel different. If you borrow someone else’s clothes or their interests or their words, what they say, then it can give you a bit of a rest from yourself, I find.
It was time to feel different. I don’t know why I said that stuff to Maureen; I don’t know why I say half the things I say. I knew I’d overstepped the mark, but I couldn’t stop myself. I get angry, and when it starts it’s like being sick. I puke and puke over someone and I can’t stop until I’m empty. I’m glad Martin pulled me outside. I needed stopping. I need stopping a lot. So I told myself that from that point on I was going to be more a person out of the olden days kind of thing. I swore not to swear, ha ha, or to spit; I swore not to ask harmless old ladies who are clearly more or less virgins whether they shagged doggy style.
Martin went spare at me, told me I was a bitch, and an idiot, and asked me what Maureen had ever done to me. And I just said, Yes, sir, and, No, sir, and, Very sorry, sir, and I looked at the pavement, not at him, just to show him I really was sorry. And then I curtsied, which I thought was a nice touch. And he said, What the fuck’s this, now? What’s the yes sir no sir business? So I told him that I was going to stop being me, and that no one would ever see the old me again, and he didn’t know what to say to that. I didn’t want them to get sick of me. People do get sick of me, I’ve noticed. Chas got sick of me, for example. And I really need that not to happen any more, otherwise I’ll be left with nobody. With Chas, I think everything was just too much; I came on too strong too quickly, and he got scared. Like that thing in the Tate Modern? That was definitely a mistake. Because the vibe in there… OK, some of the stuff is all weird and intense and so on, but just because the stuff is all weird and intense, that shouldn’t have meant that I went all weird and intense. That was inappropriate behaviour, as Jen would have said. I should have waited until we’d got outside and finished looking at the pictures and installations before I went off on one.
I think Jen got sick of me, too.
Also, the business in the cinema, which looking back on it might have been the final straw. That was inappropriate behaviour, too. Or maybe the behaviour wasn’t inappropriate, because we had to have that conversation some time, but the place (the Holloway Odeon) wasn’t right, and nor was the time (halfway through the film) or the volume (loud). One of the points Chas made that night was that I wasn’t really mature enough to be a mother, and I can see now that by yelling my head off about having a baby halfway through Moulin Rouge I sort of proved it for him.
So anyway. Martin went mental at me for a while, and then he just seemed to shrink, as if he was a balloon and he’d been punctured. ‘What’s wrong, kind sir?’ I said, but he just shook his head, and I could understand enough from that. What I understood was that it was the middle of the night and he was standing outside a party full of people he didn’t know, shouting at someone else he didn’t know, a couple of hours after sitting on a roof thinking about killing himself. Oh yeah, and his wife and children hated him. In any other situation I would have said that he’d suddenly lost the will to live. I went over and put my hand on his shoulder, and he looked at me as if I were a person rather than an irritation and we almost had a Moment of some description – not a romantic Ross-and-Rachel-type moment (as if), but a Moment of Shared Understanding. But then we were interrupted, and the Moment passed.
JJ
I want to tell you about my old band – I guess because I’d started to think about these guys as my new one. There were four of us, and we were called Big Yellow. We started out being called Big Pink, as a tribute to the Band album, but then everyone thought we were a gay band, so we changed colors. Me and Eddie started the band in high school, and we wrote together, and we were like brothers, right up until the day that we weren’t like that any more. And Billy was the drummer, and Jesse was the bassist, and… shit, you could care less, right? All you need to know is this: we had something that no one else ever had. Maybe some people used to have it, before my time – the Stones, the Clash, the Who. But no one I’ve ever seen had it. I wish you’d come to one of our shows, because then you’d know that I’m not bullshitting you, but you’ll have to take my word for it: on our good nights we could suck people up and spit ’em out twenty miles away. I still like our albums, but it was the shows that people remember; some bands just go out and play their songs a little louder and faster, but we found a way of doing something else; we used to speed ’em up and slow ’em down, and we used to play covers of things we loved, and that we knew the people who came to hear us would love too, and our shows came to mean something to people, in a way that shows don’t any more. When Big Yellow played live, it was like some kind of Pentecostal service; instead of applause and whistles and hoots, there’d be tears and teeth-grinding and speaking in tongues. We saved souls. If you love rock’n’roll, all of it, from, I don’t know, Elvis right through James Brown and up to the White Stripes, then you’d have wanted to quit your job and come and live inside our amps until your ears fell off. Those shows were my reason for living, and I now know that this is not a figure of speech.
I wish I was deluding myself. Really. It would help. But we used to have these message boards up on our website, and I’d read them every now and again, and I could tell that people felt the same way we did; and I looked at other people’s boards, too, and they didn’t have the same kind of fans. I mean, everyone has fans who love what they do, otherwise they wouldn’t be fans, right? But I could tell from reading the other boards that our guys walked out of our shows feeling something special. We could feel it, and they could feel it. It’s just that there weren’t enough of them, I guess. Anyway.
Maureen felt faint after Jess cut loose on her, and who could blame her? Jesus. I would have needed to sit down too if Jess ever cut loose on me, and I’ve been around the block a few times. I took her outside on to a little roof terrace that looked like it never got the sun at any time of the day or year, but there was a picnic table and a grill out there anyway. Those little grills are everywhere in England, right? To me they’ve come to represent the triumph of hope over circumstance, seeing as all you can do is peer at them out the window through the pissing rain. There were a couple of people sitting at the picnic table, but when they saw that Maureen wasn’t feeling too good they got up and went back inside, and we sat down. I offered to get her a glass of water, but she didn’t want anything, so we just sat there for a while. And then we both heard like this hissing noise, co
ming from the shadows next to the grill in the far corner, and eventually we figured out that there was a guy back there. He was young, with long hair and a sorry-ass moustache, hunkered down in the dark, trying to attract our attention.
‘Excuse me,’ he whispered as loudly as he dared.
‘You wanna talk to us, you come here.’
‘I can’t come into the light.’
‘What would happen to you if you did?’
‘A nutter might try to kill me.’
‘There’s only Maureen and me out here.’
‘This nutter’s everywhere.’
‘Like God,’ I said.
I walked over to the other side of the terrace and crouched down next to him.
‘How can I help you?’
‘You American?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh. Howdy, pardner.’ If I tell you that this amused him, you’ll know all you need to know about this guy. ‘Listen, can you check the party and see if the nutter’s gone?’
‘What does he look like?’
‘She. I know, I know, but she’s really scary. A mate saw her first and told me to hide out here until she’d gone. I went out with her once. Not like “once upon a time”. Just once. But I stopped because she’s off her head, and…’
This was perfect.
‘You’re Chas, aren’t you?’
‘How did you know that?’
‘I’m a friend of Jess’s.’
Oh, man, I wish you could have seen the look on his face. He scrambled to his feet and started looking for ways to escape over the back wall. At one point I thought he was going to try running up it, like a squirrel.
‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Fuck. I’m sorry. Shit. Will you help me climb over?’
‘No. I want you to come and talk to her. She’s had, she’s had like a rough evening, and maybe a little chat would help calm her down.’
Chas laughed. It was the hollow, desperate laugh of a man who knew that, when it came to calming Jess down, several elephant tranquilizers would be much more useful than a little chat.