by Nick Hornby
‘Oh.’
‘I’m just telling you so you know what’s in the papers. Are you surprised?’
‘Well, you do swear a lot, for a politician’s daughter.’
‘And a woman reporter came round to JJ’s flat and asked him whether we came down for an inspirational reason.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘We don’t know. Anyway. We’re going to have a crisis meeting.’
‘Who is?’
‘The four of us. Big reunion. Maybe in the place where we had breakfast.’
‘I can’t go anywhere.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because of Matty. That’s one of the reasons I was up on the roof. Because I can never go anywhere.’
‘We could come to you.’
I began to flush again. I didn’t want them here.
‘No, no. I’ll think of something. When are you thinking of meeting up?’
‘Later on today.’
‘Oh, I won’t be able to sort anything out for today.’
‘So we’ll come to you.’
‘Please don’t. I haven’t tidied up.’
‘So tidy up.’
‘I’ve never had anyone from the television in my house. Or a politician’s daughter.’
‘I won’t put on any airs or graces. We’ll see you at five.’
And that gave me three hours to sort everything out, put everything away. It does drive you a little bit mad, a life like mine, I think. You have to be a little mad to want to jump off the top of a building. You have to be a little mad to come down again. You have to be more than a little mad to put up with Matty, and the staying in all the time, and the loneliness. But I do think I’m only a little mad. If I were really mad, I wouldn’t have worried about the tidying up. And if I were really, properly mad, I wouldn’t have minded what they found.
MARTIN
I suppose it crossed my mind that my visit to Toppers’ House might be of interest to our friends in the tabloid press. I was on the front page of the paper for falling down drunk in the street, for Christ’s sake, and some would argue that attempting to fall off a high building is even more interesting than that. When Jess told Chas where we’d met, I did wonder whether he’d have the wit to sell the knowledge on, but as Chas seemed to me a particularly witless individual, I dismissed the fear as paranoia. If I’d known that Jess was newsworthy in her own right, then I could have prepared myself.
My agent called first thing, and read the story out to me – I only bother with the Telegraph at home now.
‘Is any of this true?’ he said.
‘Between you and me?’
‘If you want.’
‘I was going to jump from the top of a tower-block.’
‘Gosh.’
My agent is young, posh and green. I came out of prison to find that there had been a quote unquote reorganization at the agency, and Theo, who used to make the coffee for my previous agent, is now all that stands between me and professional oblivion. It was Theo who found me my current job at Feet Up TV!, the world’s worst cable channel. He has a degree in Comparative Religion, and he’s a published poet. I suspect that he plays his football for Allboys United, if you get my drift, although that’s neither here nor there. He’s at the chocolate teapot end of the competency scale.
‘I met her up there. Her and a couple of others. We came back down again. And here I am, in the land of the living.’
‘Why were you going to jump off the top of a tower-block?’
‘It was purely whimsical.’
‘I’m sure you must have had a reason.’
‘I did. I was joking. Read my file. Acquaint yourself with recent events.’
‘We thought we’d turned a corner.’ It’s always very touching, his insistence on the first person plural. I’ve heard them all: ‘Since we came out of prison…’, ‘Since we had that spot of bother with the teenage girl…’ If there was one cause for regret after a successful suicide attempt, it would be that I’d never get to hear Theo say, ‘Since we killed ourselves…’ Or, ‘Since our funeral…’
‘We thought wrong.’
There was a ruminative silence.
‘Well. Gosh. Now what?’
‘You’re the agent. I’d have thought this gave you no end of creative opportunities.’
‘I’ll have a little think and call you back. By the way, Jess’s father has been trying to get hold of you. He called here, and I said we didn’t give out personal numbers. Did I do the right thing?’
‘You did the right thing. But give him my mobile number anyway. I suppose there’s no avoiding him.’
‘Do you want to call him? He left his number.’
‘Go on, then.’
While I was on the phone to Theo, both my ex-wife and my ex-girlfriend left messages. I had thought of neither of them when Theo was reading out that story; now I felt sick. I was beginning to realize an important truth about suicide: failure is as hurtful as success, and is likely to provoke even more anger, because there’s no grief with which to water it down. I was, I could hear from the tone of the messages, in very deep shit.
I called Cindy first.
‘You fucking selfish idiot,’ she said.
‘You don’t know anything, apart from what you read in the paper.’
‘You seem to be the only person in the world that the papers get bang to rights. If they say you’ve slept with a fifteen-year-old, you have. If they say you’ve fallen over drunk in the street, you have. They don’t need to invent stuff for you.’
This was actually quite an acute observation. She was right: not once have I been the victim of misrepresentation or distortion. If you think about it, that was one of the most humiliating aspects of the last few years. The papers have been full of shit about me, and every word of the shit was true.
‘So I’m presuming,’ she went on, ‘that they’ve got it right again. You were up the top of a tower-block with the intention of hurling yourself off. And instead you came back down again with a girl.’
‘That’s about the long and the short of it.’
‘And what about your daughters?’
‘Do they know?’
‘Not yet. But someone at school will tell them. They always do. What do you want me to say to them?’
‘Maybe I should talk to them.’
Cindy barked once. The bark was, I suspected, intended to be a satirical laugh.
‘Tell them what you want,’ I said. ‘Tell them Daddy was sad, but then he cheered up again.’
‘Brilliant. If we had a pair of two-year-olds, that would be perfect.’
‘I don’t know, Cindy. I mean, if I can’t see them, then it’s not really my problem, is it? It’s something you’ve got to deal with.’
‘You bastard.’
And that was the end of the first phone call. Pointing out that her refusal to let me participate in my daughters’ upbringing left me out in the cold struck me as a restatement of the bleeding obvious, but never mind. It got her off the phone.
I don’t know what I owe my daughters any more. I gave up smoking, years ago, because I knew then that I owed them that much. But when you make the sort of mess I’ve made, smoking seems like the least of your worries – which is why I started again. Now there’s a journey: from giving up smoking – giving up smoking because you want to protect your kids from loss for as long as possible – to arguing with their mother about the best way to tell them of your attempted suicide. They never said anything about that conversation in antenatal classes. It’s the distance that does it, of course. I got further and further away, and the girls got smaller and smaller until they were just tiny dots, and I could no longer see them, literally or metaphorically. You can’t make out their faces, can you, when they’re just tiny dots, so you don’t need to worry about whether they’re happy or sad. It’s why we can kill ants. And so after a while, suicide becomes imaginable, in a way that wouldn’t be possible if they looked into your eyes every day.
Penny was still crying when I called her.
‘At least that makes more sense,’ she said after a while.
‘What?’
‘You leaving the party to go up there. And then coming back with those people. I couldn’t work out what they had to do with anything.’
‘All you knew was that somehow they’d helped me to have sex with someone else.’
‘Exactly.’ She gave a little rueful snort. She’s OK, Penny. She’s not a bitch at all. She’s sweet-natured, self-deprecating, loving… She’d make someone a lovely partner.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I’m the one who’s failed, aren’t I?’
‘I think my failures preceded yours. Which, by the way, don’t amount to anything. I mean, anything at all. I mean, there weren’t any failures. You’ve been fantastic to me.’
‘How do you feel today?’
I hadn’t asked myself that question. I’d woken up with a hangover and the phone ringing, and since then, life seemed to have a momentum. I hadn’t thought about killing myself once all morning.
‘OK. I won’t be going up there again just yet, if that’s what you mean.’
‘Will you talk to me before you do?’
‘About all that?’
‘Yes. About all that.’
‘I don’t know. It doesn’t seem like something talking can fix.’
‘Oh, I know I can’t fix it. I just don’t want to have to read about it in the papers.’
‘You can do better than this, Penny. Better than me.’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘Ah. So you don’t disagree with the premise.’
‘I’ve got enough self-respect to think that there might be a man somewhere who’d rather spend New Year’s Eve with me than leap to his death, yes.’
‘So why don’t you try and find him?’
‘Would you care one way or the other?’
‘Well. Caring about stuff like that… It’s sort of not where I’m at, is it?’
‘Wow. That’s honest.’
‘Is it? I would have thought it was merely self-evident.’
‘So what do you want me to do?’
‘I’m not sure there’s much you can do.’
‘Will you call me later?’
‘Yes, of course.’
I could promise that much, anyway.
Everyone – everyone apart from Chris Crichton, obviously – knows where I live. They all have my home phone number, my mobile number, my email address. When I came out of prison, I gave all my co-ordinates to anyone who showed any interest at all: I needed work, and I needed a profile. I never heard back from any of the bastards, of course, but now here they all were, gathered outside my front door. When I say ‘all’, I mean three or four rather squalid-looking hacks, mostly the young ones, those puffy-faced boys and girls who used to report on school fêtes for a local paper and now can’t believe their luck. I pushed through the middle of them, even though I could have walked around them quite comfortably – four people shivering on a pavement and sipping coffee from Styrofoam cups doesn’t constitute a media scrum. We all enjoyed the pushing, though. It made me feel important, and it made them feel as though they were at the centre of a story. I smiled a lot, said ‘Good morning’ to no one in particular, and batted one of them out of the way with a briefcase.
‘Is it true you tried to kill yourself?’ asked one particularly unattractive woman in a beige mac.
I gestured at myself, in order to draw their attention to my superb physical condition.
‘Well, if I did, I clearly made quite a mess of it,’ I said.
‘Do you know Jess Crichton?’
‘Who?’
‘Jess Crichton, the Wossit Minister’s daughter. Education.’
‘I’ve been a friend of the family for many years. We all spent New Year’s Eve together. Perhaps that’s how this rather silly misunderstanding arose. It wasn’t a suicide pact. It was a drinks party. Two entirely different things.’
I was beginning to enjoy myself a little. I was almost sorry when I reached the Peugeot I was renting, at enormous expense, to replace the BMW I had given away. And it wasn’t as if I knew where I was going anyway. But within minutes, the rest of my day was mapped out: Chris Crichton called on my mobile to invite me over for a chat; and then, shortly afterwards, from the same telephone number, Jess called to inform me that we were all going to visit Maureen. I didn’t mind. I had nothing else to do.
Before I knocked on Jess’s door, I sat in the car for a couple of minutes and examined my conscience. The last confrontation I’d had with an angry father came shortly after my ill-advised and, as it turned out, illegal sexual encounter with Danielle (5′ 9″, 36DD, fifteen years and 250 days old, and, let me tell you, those 115 days make quite a difference). The venue for this previous confrontation was my flat, the old, big flat in Gibson Square – not, needless to say, because Danielle’s father responded to a warm invitation, but because he was outside waiting for me as I tried to sneak home one night. It wasn’t a particularly fruitful meeting, not least because I tried to raise the issue of parental responsibility with him, and he tried to hit me. I still think I had a point. What was a fifteen-year-old doing snorting cocaine in the gents’ toilets of Melons nightclub at 1 a.m. on a Tuesday morning? But there is a possibility that, if I hadn’t been so forceful in the expression of my view, he wouldn’t have marched round the corner to the police station and made a complaint about my relationship with his daughter.
This time, I thought I’d try to avoid that particular line of argument. I could see that the subject of parental responsibility was an altogether touchy one in the Crichton household, what with one teenage girl missing, possibly dead, and the other suicidal, possibly nuts. And anyway, my conscience was entirely clear. The only physical contact I had had with Jess was when I sat on her head, and that was for entirely non-sexual reasons. In fact, they were not only non-sexual, but selfless. Heroic, even.
Chris Crichton, unfortunately, was not prepared to greet me as a hero. I wasn’t offered a handshake or a cup of coffee; I was ushered into his living room and given a dressing-down, as if I were some hapless parliamentary researcher. I had shown a lack of judgement, apparently – I should have found out Jess’s surname and phone number and called him. And I had somehow shown ‘a lack of taste’ – Mr Crichton seemed under the impression that his daughter’s appearance in the tabloids was something to do with me, simply because I’m the kind of person who appears in the cheaper newspapers. When I tried to point out the various flaws in his logic, he claimed that I was likely to do very well out of it all. I’d just stood up to go when Jess appeared.
‘I told you to stay upstairs.’
‘Yeah, I know. It’s just that I stopped being seven a while ago. Has anyone ever told you you’re an idiot?’
He was terrified of her; you could see that straight away. He had just enough self-respect to hide the fear behind a dry world-weariness.
‘I’m a politician. No one ever tells me anything but.’
‘What’s it got to do with you where I spend New Year’s Eve?’
‘You seem to have spent it together.’
‘Yeah, by accident, you stupid old bastard.’
‘This is how she talks to me,’ he said, looking at me mournfully, as if my long relationship with the two of them would somehow allow me to intercede on his behalf.
‘I’ll bet you’re regretting the decision not to go private, aren’t you?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Very admirable and all, sending her to the local comprehensive. But, you know. You get what you pay for. And you even got a bit less than that.’
‘Jess’s school does a very good job under very difficult circumstances,’ said Crichton. ‘Fifty-one per cent of Jess’s year got grade “C” or above at GCSE, up eleven per cent on the year before.’
‘Excellent. That must be a great consolation to you.’ We both looked at Jess, who gave us th
e finger.
‘The point is, you were in loco parentis,’ said the proud father. I had forgotten that Jess felt about long words the way that racists feel about black people: she hated them, and wanted to send them back where they came from. She threw him a filthy look.
‘Firstly, she’s eighteen. And secondly, I sat on her head in order to stop her from jumping. Which might not have been parental, but it was at least practical. I’m sorry I didn’t write you a full report at the end of the evening.’
‘Did you sleep with her?’
‘Why is that your business, Dad?’
I wasn’t having that. I wasn’t going to get involved in an argument about Jess’s rights to a private sex life.
‘Absolutely not.’
‘Oi,’ said Jess. ‘You don’t have to say it like that.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like you’re relieved or something. You should be so lucky.’
‘I value our friendship too much to complicate it.’
‘Ha ha.’
‘Are you going to maintain a relationship with Jess?’
‘Define your terms.’
‘I think you should define yours first.’
‘Listen, pal. I came here because I knew how worried you must be. But if you’re going to talk to me like that, I’ll fuck off home.’ The word-racist brightened a little: the Anglo-Saxon was striking back against the Roman invader.
‘I’m sorry. But you know the family history now. It doesn’t make things easy for me.’
‘Ha! Like it makes things easy for me,’ said Jess.
‘It’s hard for all of us.’ Crichton had clearly decided to make an effort.
‘Yeah, I can see that.’
‘So what can we do? Please? If you’ve got any ideas…’
‘The thing is,’ I said, ‘I’ve got problems of my own.’
‘Der,’ said Jess. ‘We were wondering why you were up there.’
‘I appreciate that, Martin.’ He had clearly been media-trained to use first names wherever possible, like the rest of Blair’s robots, to show that he was my mate. ‘I have a hunch about you. I can see you’ve made some, some wrong turns in your life…’
Jess snorted.
‘But I don’t think you’re a bad man.’