by Nick Hornby
We were quiet for a little while after Penny had gone. We didn’t know whether we were supposed to be sad or not. Jess offered to chase after her and tell her that Martin hadn’t been with anyone else, but Martin asked her how she was going to explain what we were doing there, and Jess said she thought that the truth wasn’t so bad, and Martin said that he’d rather Penny thought badly of him than be told that he’d been thinking of killing himself.
‘You’re mad,’ said Jess. ‘She’d feel all sorry for you if she found out how we’d met. You’d probably get a sympathy shag.’
Martin laughed. ‘I don’t think that’s how it works, Jess,’ he said.
‘Why not?’
‘Because if she found out how we met, it would really upset her. She’d think she was responsible in some way. It’s a terrible thing, finding out that your lover is so unhappy he wants to die. It’s a time for self-reflection.’
‘Yeah. And?’
‘And I’d have to spend hours holding her hand. I don’t feel like holding her hand.’
‘You’d still end up with a sympathy shag. I didn’t say it would be easy.’
Sometimes it was hard to remember that Jess was unhappy too. The rest of us, we were still shell-shocked. I didn’t know how I’d ended up drinking whisky in the lounge of a well-known TV personality when I’d actually left the house to kill myself, and you could tell that JJ and Martin were confused about the evening too. But with Jess, it was like the whole how’s-your-father on the roof was like a minor accident, the sort of thing where you rub your head and sit down and have a cup of sweet tea, and then you get on with the rest of your day. When she was talking about sympathy intercourse and whatever other nonsense came into her head, you couldn’t see what could possibly have made her want to climb those stairs up to the roof – her eyes were twinkling, and she was full of energy, and you could tell that she was having fun. We weren’t having fun. We weren’t killing ourselves, but we weren’t having fun either. We’d come too close to jumping. And yet Jess had come the closest of all of us to going over. JJ had only just come out of the stairwell. Martin had sat with his feet dangling over the edge but hadn’t actually nerved himself to do it. I’d never even got as far as the other side of the fence. But if Martin hadn’t sat on Jess’s head, she’d have done it, I’m sure of that.
‘Let’s play a game,’ said Jess.
‘F— off,’ said Martin.
It was impossible to go on being shocked by the bad language. I didn’t want to get to the stage where I was swearing myself, so I was quite glad that the night was drawing to an end. But the getting used to it made me realize something. It made me realize that nothing had ever changed for me. In Martin’s flat, I could look back on myself – the me from only a few hours before – and think, ‘Ooh, I was different then. Fancy being upset by a little bit of bad language!’ I’d got older even during the night. You get used to that, the feeling that you’re suddenly different, when you’re younger. You wake up in the morning and you can’t believe that you had a crush on this person, or used to like that sort of music, even if it was only a few weeks ago. But when I had Matty, everything stopped, and nothing ever moved on. It’s the one single thing that makes you die inside, and eventually wants to make you die on the outside too. People have children for all sorts of reasons, I know, but one of those reasons must be that children growing up make you feel that life has a sense of momentum – kids send you on a journey. Matty and I got stuck at the bus stop, though. He didn’t learn to walk or talk, let alone read or write: he stayed the same every single day, and life stayed the same every single day, and I stayed the same too. I know it’s not much, but hearing the word ‘f —’ hundreds of times in an evening, well, even that was something different for me, something new. When I first met Martin on the roof, I physically flinched from the words he used, and now they just bounced off me, as if I had a helmet on. Well, they would, wouldn’t they? You’d be a proper eejit if you flinched three hundred times in an evening. It made me wonder what else would change if I lived like this for just a few more days. Already I’d slapped someone, and now there I was drinking whisky and Coca-Cola. You know when people on the TV say ‘You should get out more’? Now I saw what they meant.
‘Miserable bastard,’ said Jess.
‘Well, yes,’ said Martin. ‘Exactly. Der, as you would say.’
‘What have I said now?’
‘You accused me of being a miserable bastard. I was merely pointing out that, at this particular stage of my life, and indeed on this particular night, “miserable” is a very appropriate adjective. I am a very miserable bastard indeed, as I thought you would have worked out by now.’
‘What, still?’
Martin laughed. ‘Yes. Still. Even after all the fun we’ve had tonight. What would you say has changed in the last few hours? Have I still been to prison? I believe I still have. Did I sleep with a fifteen-year-old? Regrettably, nothing much seems to have changed on that score. Is my career still in pieces, and am I still estranged from my children? Unhappily, yes and yes. Despite attending a party with your amusing friends in Shoreditch and being called a c—? What kind of malcontent must I be, eh?’
‘I thought we’d cheered each other up.’
‘Really? Is that really and truly what you thought?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I see. A trouble shared is a trouble halved, and because there are four of us, it’s actually been quartered? That sort of thing?’
‘Well, you’ve all made me feel better.’
‘Yes. Well.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Nothing. I’m glad we’ve made you feel better. Your depression was clearly more… amenable than ours. Less intractable. You’re very lucky. Unfortunately, JJ is still going to die, Maureen still has a profoundly disabled son and my life is still a complete and utter f—ing shambles. To be honest with you, Jess, I don’t see how a couple of drinks and a game of Monopoly are going to help. Fancy a game of Monopoly, JJ? Will that help the old CCR? Or not, really?’
I was shocked, but JJ didn’t seem to mind. He just smiled, and said, ‘I guess not.’
‘I wasn’t thinking of Monopoly,’ said Jess. ‘Monopoly takes too long.’
And then Martin shouted something at her, but I didn’t hear what it was because I was starting to retch, so I put my hand over my mouth and ran for the bathroom. But as I said, I didn’t make it.
‘Jesus f—ing Christ,’ Martin said when he saw the mess I’d made. I couldn’t get used to that sort of swearing, though, the sort that involves Him. I don’t think that will ever seem right.
JJ
I was beginning to regret the whole CCR scam, so I wasn’t sorry when Maureen puked her whisky and Coke all over Martin’s ash-blond wooden floor. I’d been experiencing an impulse to own up, and owning up would have got my year off to a pretty bad start. That’s on top of the bad start it had already got off to, what with thinking of jumping off a high building, and lying about having CCR in the first place. Anyway, I was glad that suddenly we all crowded round Maureen and patting her on the back and offering her glasses of water, because the owning-up moment passed.
The truth was that I didn’t feel like a dying man; I felt like a man who every now and again wanted to die, and there’s a difference. A man who wants to die feels angry and full of life and desperate and bored and exhausted, all at the same time; he wants to fight everyone, and he wants to curl up in a ball and hide in a cupboard somewhere. He wants to say sorry to everyone, and he wants everyone to know just how badly they’ve all let him down. I can’t believe that dying people feel that way, unless dying is worse than I’d thought. (And why shouldn’t it be? Every other fucking thing is worse than I thought, so why should dying be any different?)
‘I’d like one of my Polo mints,’ she said. ‘I’ve got one in my handbag.’
‘Where’s your handbag?’
She didn’t say anything for a little while, and then s
he groaned softly.
‘If you’re going to be sick again, would you do me a favour and crawl the last couple of yards to the bog?’ Martin said.
‘It’s not that,’ said Maureen. ‘It’s my handbag. It’s on the roof. In the corner, right by the hole Martin made in the fence. It’s only got my keys and the Polos and a couple of pound coins in it.’
‘We can find you a mint, if that’s what you’re worried about.’
‘I’ve got some chewing gum,’ said Jess.
‘I’m not much of a one for chewing gum,’ said Maureen. ‘Anyway, I’ve got a bridge that’s a bit loose. And I didn’t bother getting it fixed because…’
She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t need to. I think we all had a few things we hadn’t got around to fixing, for obvious reasons.
‘So we’ll find you a mint,’ said Martin. ‘Or you can clean your teeth if you want. You can use Penny’s toothbrush.’
‘Thank you.’
She got to her feet and then sat down again on the floor.
‘What am I going to do? About the bag?’
It was a question for all of us, but Martin and I looked at Jess for the answer. Or rather, we knew the answer, but the answer would have to come in the form of another question, and we had both learned, over the course of the night, that Jess would be the one who was tactless enough to ask it.
‘The thing is,’ said Jess, right on cue, ‘do you need it?’
‘Oh,’ said Maureen, as the bag implications started to penetrate.
‘Do you see what I mean?’
‘Yes. Yes, I do.’
‘If you don’t know whether you’re gonna need it, just say so. ’Cos, you know. It’s a big question, and we wouldn’t want to rush you. But if you know for sure you won’t be needing it, then probably best say so now. That’d save us all a trip, see.’
‘I wouldn’t ask you to come with me.’
‘We’d want to,’ said Jess. ‘Wouldn’t we?’
‘And if you know you don’t want your keys, you can stay here for the day,’ said Martin.
‘Don’t worry about them.’
‘I see,’ Maureen said. ‘Right. I hadn’t really… I thought, I don’t know. I was going to put off thinking about it for a few hours.’
‘OK,’ Martin said. ‘Fair enough. So let’s go back.’
‘Do you mind?’
‘Not at all. It would be silly to kill yourself just because you didn’t have your handbag.’
When we got to Toppers’ House, I realized that I’d left Ivan’s moped there the night before. It wasn’t there any more, and I felt bad, because he’s not such a bad guy, Ivan, and it’s not like he’s some fucking Rolls-Royce-drivin’, cigar-smokin’ capitalist. He’s too poor. In fact, he drives one of his own mopeds around. Anyway, now I can never face him again, although one of the beauties of a minimum-wage, cash-in-hand job is that you can clean windshields at traffic lights and make pretty much the same money.
‘I left my car here, too,’ said Martin.
‘And that’s gone as well?’
‘The door was unlocked and the keys were in the ignition. It was supposed to be an act of charity. There won’t be any more of those.’
The bag was where Maureen had left it, though, right in the corner of the roof. It wasn’t until we got up there that we could see we’d made it through to dawn, just about. It was a proper dawn, too, with a sun and a blue sky. We walked around the roof to see what we could see, and the others gave me an American-in-London sightseeing tour: St Paul’s, the Ferris wheel down by the river, Jess’s house.
‘It’s not scary any more,’ said Martin.
‘You reckon?’ said Jess. ‘Have you looked over the edge? Fucking hell. It’s a fuck sight better in the dark, if you ask me.’
‘I didn’t mean the drop,’ said Martin. ‘I meant London. It looks all right.’
‘It looks beautiful,’ said Maureen. ‘I can’t remember the last time I could see so much.’
‘I didn’t mean that either. I meant… I don’t know. There were all those fireworks, and people walking around, and we were squeezed up here because there was nowhere else for us to go.’
‘Yeah. Unless you’d been invited to a dinner party,’ I said. ‘Like you had.’
‘I didn’t know anyone there. I’d been invited out of pity. I didn’t belong.’
‘And you feel included now?’
‘There’s nothing down there to feel excluded from. It’s just a big city again. Look. He’s on his own. And she’s on her own.’
‘She’s a fucking traffic warden,’ said Jess.
‘Yes, and she’s on her own, and today she’s got fewer friends than me even. But last night she was probably dancing on a table somewhere.’
‘With other traffic wardens, probably,’ said Jess.
‘And I wasn’t with other TV presenters.’
‘Or perverts,’ said Jess.
‘No. Agreed. I was on my own.’
‘Apart from the other people at the dinner party,’ I said. ‘But yeah. We hear where you’re coming from. That’s why New Year’s Eve is such a popular night for suicides.’
‘When’s the next one?’ Jess asked.
‘December 31st,’ said Martin.
‘Yeah, yeah. Ha, ha. The next popular night?’
‘That would be Valentine’s Day,’ said Martin.
‘What’s that? Six weeks?’ said Jess. ‘So let’s give it another six weeks, then. What about that? We’ll probably all feel terrible on Valentine’s Day.’
We all stared thoughtfully at the view. Six weeks seemed all right. Six weeks didn’t seem too long. Life could change in six weeks – unless you had a severely disabled child to care for. Or your career had gone up in fucking smoke. Or unless you were a national laughing stock.
‘D’you know how you’ll be feeling in six weeks?’ Maureen asked me.
Oh, yes – and unless you had a terminal disease. Life wouldn’t change much then, either. I shrugged. How the fuck did I know how I’d be feeling? This disease was brand new. No one was able to predict its course – not even me, and I invented it.
‘So are we going to meet again before the six weeks is up?’
‘I’m sorry, but… When did we become “we”?’ said Martin. ‘Why do we even have to meet in six weeks? Why can’t we just kill ourselves wherever and whenever we want?’
‘No one’s stopping you,’ said Jess.
‘Surely the whole purpose of this exercise is that someone is stopping me. We’re all stopping each other.’
‘Until the six weeks is up, yeah.’
‘So when you said, “No one’s stopping you,” then you meant the opposite.’
‘Listen,’ said Jess. ‘If you go home now and put your head in the gas oven, what am I going to do about it?’
‘Exactly. So the purpose of the exercise is?’
‘I’m asking, aren’t I? Because if we’re a gang, then we’ll all try and live by the rules. And there’s only one, anyway. Rule 1: We don’t kill ourselves for six weeks. And if we’re not a gang, then, you know. Whatever. So are we a gang, or not a gang?’
‘Not a gang,’ said Martin.
‘Why aren’t we?’
‘No offence, but…’ Martin clearly hoped these three words, and a wave of the hand in our general direction, would save him from having to explain himself. I wasn’t going to let him off the hook, though.
I hadn’t felt like I was in this gang either, until that moment. And now I belonged to the gang that Martin didn’t like much, and I felt real committed to it.
‘But what?’ I said.
‘Well. You’re not, you know. My Kind Of People.’ He said it like that, I swear. I heard the capitals as clearly as I heard the lower case.
‘Fuck you,’ I said. ‘Like I usually hang out with assholes like you.’
‘Well, there we are, then. We should all shake hands, thank one another for a most instructive evening and then go our separate
ways.’
‘And die,’ said Jess.
‘Possibly,’ said Martin.
‘And that’s what you want?’ I said.
‘Well, it’s not a long-held ambition, I grant you. But I’m not giving away any secrets when I say it’s come to look more attractive recently. I’m conflicted, as you people say. Anyway, why do you care?’ he said to Jess. ‘I’d got the impression that you didn’t care for anyone or anything. I thought that was your thing.’
Jess thought for a moment. ‘You know those films where people fight up the top of the Empire State Building or up a mountain or whatever? And there’s always that bit when the baddie slips off, and the hero tries to save him, but like the sleeve of his jacket tears off and he goes over and you hear him all the way down. Aaaaaaaagh. That’s what I want to do.’
‘You want to watch me plunge to my doom.’
‘I’d like to know that I’ve made the effort. I want to show people the torn sleeve.’
‘I didn’t know you were a fully trained Samaritan,’ said Martin.
‘I’m not. This is just my own personal philosophy.’
‘I’d find it easier if we saw each other on a regular basis,’ said Maureen quietly. ‘All of us. No one really knows how I feel about anything, apart from you three. And Matty. I tell Matty.’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ said Martin. He was using profanity because he knew then he was beaten: telling Maureen to go fuck herself required more moral courage than any of us possessed.