by Nick Hornby
I knew where to start, too. Indeed, so successful was my first phone call that I didn’t really need to speak to anyone else. My ex-wife was perfect – direct, articulate and clear-sighted – and I actually ended up feeling sorry for people living with someone who loved them, when not living with someone who loathed you was so obviously the way to go. When you have a Cindy in your life, there aren’t even any pleasantries to wade through: there are only unpleasantries, and unpleasantries are an essential part of the learning process.
‘Where have you been?’
‘At home. Drunk.’
‘Have you listened to your messages?’
‘No. Why?’
‘Oh, I just left you a few thoughts about the other afternoon.’
‘Ah, now, you see that’s exactly what I wanted to talk about. What do you think it was all about?’
‘Well, you’re unbalanced, aren’t you? Unbalanced and poisonous. An unbalanced, poisonous tosser.’
This was a good start, I felt, but it lacked focus.
‘Listen, I appreciate what you’re saying, and I don’t want to appear rude, but the unbalanced tosser part I find less interesting than the poisonous part. Could you talk more about that?’
‘Maybe you should pay someone to do this,’ said Cindy.
‘You mean a therapist?’
She snorted. ‘A therapist? No, I was thinking more of one of those women who will pee all over you if you pay her enough. Isn’t that what you want?’
I thought about this. I didn’t want to dismiss anything out of hand.
‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘It’s never appealed before.’
‘I was speaking metaphorically.’
‘I’m sorry. I don’t really understand.’
‘You clearly feel so awful about yourself that you don’t mind being abused. Isn’t that their problem?’
‘Whose problem?’
‘These men who need women to… Never mind.’
I was dimly beginning to perceive what she was driving at. It was true that being called names felt good. Or rather, it felt appropriate.
‘You know why you turned on that poor guy, don’t you?’
‘No! You see, that’s precisely why I called you.’
If Cindy had known how much damage she could have done by stopping right there, the temptation would have been too much for her. Luckily, though, Cindy was determined to go all the way.
‘I mean, he was fifteen years younger than you, and much better-looking. But it wasn’t that. He’d done more with his life that afternoon than you’ve ever done with yours.’
Yes! Yes!
‘You ponce around on television and screw schoolgirls, and he pushes disabled kids around in a wheelchair, probably for the minimum wage. It’s no wonder Penny wanted to chat him up. For her, it was the moral equivalent of going from Frankenstein’s monster to Brad Pitt.’
‘Thank you. That’s great.’
‘Don’t you dare put the phone down on me. I’ve only just started. I’ve got twelve years’ worth of this stuff.’
‘Oh, I’ll be back for more, I promise. But that’s plenty to be going on with.’
You see? Ex-wives: really, everybody should have at least one.
MAUREEN
I feel a bit daft explaining what happened at the end of the intervention day, because it all sounds like too much of a coincidence. But I think it probably only sounds like a coincidence to me. I know I said before that I’m learning to feel the weight of things, which means learning what to say and what not to say in case you make people feel badly for you. So if I say that nothing happened in my life before I met the others, I don’t want to make it sound as though I’m grumbling. It was just how things were. If you spend all your time in a very quiet room and someone comes up behind you and says ‘Boo!’, you jump. If you spend all your time with short people, and you see a six-foot-tall policeman, he looks like a giant. And if nothing happens and then something happens, then the something seems to be peculiar, almost like an Act of God. The nothingness stretches the something, the happening, out of shape.
Here’s what happened. Stephen and Sean helped me get Matty home; we hailed a black cab, and the four of us just about squashed in, although the two nurses and I were pressed up against each other in the seat. And even that seemed like something. A few months ago, I’d have gone home and told Matty about that, if he hadn’t been there with me. But of course if he hadn’t been there with me, there’d have been nothing to tell. I wouldn’t have needed Stephen and Sean, and we wouldn’t have been there in a taxi. I’d have been on a bus, on my own, even supposing I’d gone anywhere. You see what I mean about something and nothing?
Once we were all settled, Stephen said to Sean, ‘Have you got anyone else yet?’ And Sean said, ‘No, and I don’t think I’m going to be able to.’ And Stephen said, ‘It’s just the three of us, then? We’ll get slaughtered.’ And Sean just shrugged, and we all sat looking out of the window for a little while. I didn’t know what they’d been talking about.
And then Sean said, ‘Any good at quizzes, Maureen? Fancy joining our team? It doesn’t matter if you don’t know anything. We’re desperate.’
Now, that’s not the most amazing story you’ve ever heard, is it? I listen to Jess and JJ and Martin, and that sort of thing happens to them all the time. They meet someone in a lift or a bar, and that someone says, ‘Would you like a drink?’, or even, ‘Would you like intercourse?’ And perhaps they’d been thinking that they’d like intercourse, so it could seem to them that being offered intercourse, just when they’d been thinking they might like it, is the most amazing coincidence. But my impression is that this isn’t how they think, or how many people think. It’s just life. One person bumps into another person, and that person wants something, or knows someone else who wants something, and as a result, things happen. Or, to put it another way, if you don’t go out, and never meet anyone, then nothing happens. How could it? But for a moment, I could hardly talk. I’d wanted to take part in a quiz, and these people needed someone for their quiz team, and I felt a shiver go down my spine.
So instead of going home, we took Matty to the respite home. Sean and Stephen weren’t working, but they were friends with all the people who were, so they just told their friends that Matty was staying there for the evening, and no one turned a hair. We arranged to meet in the pub where they do their quizzing, and I went home to get changed.
I don’t know which part of the story to tell you about next. There’s another coincidence involved, so I don’t know whether to put it here, in the coincidences section, or later on, after I’ve told you about the quiz. Maybe if I separate the coincidences out, push them further apart, you might believe them more. On the other hand, I don’t care whether you believe them, because they’re true. And in any case, I still can’t decide whether they are coincidences or not, these things: perhaps getting something you want is never a coincidence. If you want a cheese sandwich and you get a cheese sandwich, that can’t be a coincidence, can it? And by the same token, if you want a job and you get a job, that can’t be a coincidence either. These things can only be coincidental if you think you have no power over your life at all. So I’ll tell you here: the other person on the team was an older man called Jack, who has a newsagent’s just off Archway, and he offered me a job.
It’s not much of a job – three mornings a week. And it doesn’t pay very well – £4.75 an hour. And he told me I’d be on probation at first. But he’s getting on a bit, and he wants to go back to bed at nine, after he’s opened the shop and sorted the papers and dealt with the early-morning rush. He offered me the job in the same way that Stephen and Sean had asked me whether I wanted to join the quiz team – as a joke, out of desperation. In between the TV round and the sport round, he asked me what I did, and I told him I didn’t do anything much apart from look after Matty, and then he said, ‘You don’t want a job, do you?’ And a shiver went back up my spine.
We didn’t wi
n the quiz. We came fourth out of eleven teams, but the boys were quite pleased with that. And I knew some things that they didn’t know. I knew that the name of Mary Tyler Moore’s boss was Lou Grant, for example. I knew that John Major’s son married Emma Noble, and I knew that Catherine Cookson had written about Tilly Trotter and Mary Ann Shaughnessy. So there were three points they wouldn’t have got, right there, which might be why they said I could come again. The fourth chap is unreliable, apparently, because he’s just got a girlfriend. I told them I was the most reliable person they could possibly hope to meet.
A couple of months ago, I read a library book about a girl who found herself falling in love with her long-lost brother. But of course it turned out he wasn’t her long-lost brother after all, and he’d only told her that because he liked the look of her. Also it turned out that he wasn’t poor. He was very rich. And on top of that, they found out that the bone marrow of his dog matched the bone marrow of her dog, who had leukaemia, so his dog saved the life of her dog.
It wasn’t as good as I’m making it sound, to tell you the truth. It was a bit soppy. But the point I’m trying to make is that I’m worried I’m starting to sound like that book, what with the job, and the quiz team. And if I’m starting to sound like that to you, then I’d like to point out two things. Firstly I’d like to point out that getting care for Matty costs more than £4.75 an hour, so I’m not even as well off as I was, and a story that ends with you not as well off as you were isn’t really a fairy-story, is it? Secondly I’d like to point out that the fourth chap in the quiz team will turn up sometimes, so I won’t be in every week.
I was drinking gin and bitter lemons in the pub, and the others wouldn’t even let me buy a round; they said I was a ringer, and had to be paid for. Maybe it was the drink that left me feeling so positive, but at the end of the evening, I knew that when we met again on March 31st, I wouldn’t be wanting to throw myself off the roof, not for a while. And that feeling, the feeling that I could cope for now… I wanted to hang on to that for as long as possible. It’s going all right so far.
The morning after the quiz, I went back to the church. I hadn’t been to any church since we were on holiday, and I hadn’t been to mine for weeks and weeks, ever since I’d met the others on the roof. But I could go back now because I didn’t think I’d be committing the sin of despair for a while, so I could go back and ask for God’s forgiveness. He can only help you if you’ve stopped despairing, which if you think about it… Well, it’s not my business to think about it. It was a quiet Friday morning, and there was hardly anybody in. The old Italian woman who never misses a Mass was there, and there were a couple of African ladies I’d never seen before. There were no men, and there were no young people. I was nervous before I went to the confessional, but it was fine, really. I told the truth about how long it had been since my last confession, and I confessed to the sin of despair, and I was given fifteen Decades of the Rosary, which I thought seemed on the steep side, even for the sin of despair, but I won’t complain. Sometimes you can forget that God is infinite in His mercy. He wouldn’t have been infinite if I’d jumped, mind you, but I hadn’t.
And then Father Anthony said, ‘Can we help you with anything? Can we ease your burden in any way? Because you must remember that you’re part of a community here at the church, Maureen.’
And I said, ‘Thank you, Father, but I have friends who are helping.’ I didn’t tell him what sort of community these friends belonged to, though. I didn’t tell him that they were all despairing sinners.
Do you remember Psalm 50? ‘Call upon Me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify Me.’ I went to Toppers’ House because I had called and called and called, and there was no delivery, and my days of trouble seemed to have lasted too long, and showed no signs of ending. But He did hear me, in the end, and He sent me Martin and JJ and Jess, and then He sent me Stephen and Sean and the quiz, and then He sent me Jack and the newsagent’s. In other words, He proved to me that He was listening. How could I have carried on doubting Him, with all that evidence? So I’d better glorify Him, as best I can.
JESS
So this bloke with the dog didn’t have a name. I mean, he must have had one at some stage, but he told me he didn’t use it any more, because he didn’t agree with names. He reckoned they stopped you from being whoever you wanted to be, and once he’d explained it to me, I could sort of see what he meant. Say you’re Tony, or Joanna. Well, you were Tony or Joanna yesterday, and you’ll be Tony or Joanna tomorrow. So you’re fucked, really. People will always be able to say things like, Oh, that’s so typical of Joanna. But this geezer, he could be like a hundred different people all in one day. He told me to call him whatever came into my head, so at first he was Dog, because of the dog, and then he was Nodog, because we went for a drink in a pub and he left the dog outside. So he’d had two completely different personalities in the first hour we spent together, because Dog and Nodog are sort of opposite types, aren’t they? Bloke with dog is different from bloke with no dog. Bloke with dog has a different image from bloke in pub. And you can’t say, Oh, that’s so typical of Nodog to let his dog shit in someone’s garden. It wouldn’t make sense, would it? How can Nodog have a dog that shits in someone’s garden, or any dog at all, come to that? And his point is, we can all be Dogs and Nodogs in a single day. Dad, for example, could be Notdad when he’s at work, because when he’s at work he’s not Dad. I know this is all pretty deep, but if you think about it hard, it makes sense.
And in that same day he was Flower, because he picked me a flower when we were walking through the little park down near Southwark Bridge, and then Ashtray, because he tasted like one, and Flower is the opposite of Ashtray, too. You see how it works? Human beings are millions of things in one day, and his method understands that much better than like the Western way of thinking about it. I only called him one more name after that, and it was dirty, so that one will have to be a secret. When I say it was dirty, I mean it will sound dirty to you out of context sort of thing. It’s only really dirty if you don’t respect the male body, and that in my opinion would make you dirty, not us.
So this bloke… Actually, I can see one advantage to the Western way of thinking, which is that if someone has a name, you know what to call them, don’t you? It’s only one small advantage, and there are millions of big disadvantages, including the biggest one of all, which is that names are really fascist and don’t allow us to express ourselves as human beings, and turn us into one thing. But as I’m talking about him a lot here, I think I’ll call him just one name. Nodog will do, because it’s more unusual, and you’ll know who I’m talking about, and it’s better than Dog, because you might think I’m talking about a fucking dog, which I’m not.
So Nodog took me back to his place after we’d gone for a drink. I didn’t think he’d have a place, to be honest, what with the dog and everything. He looked like the sort of bloke who might be in between places, but I obviously met him at a good time. It wasn’t a normal sort of a place, though. He lived in a shop round the back of Rotherhithe station. It wasn’t a converted shop, either – it was just a shop, although it didn’t sell anything any more. It used to be like an old-fashioned corner shop thingy, so there were shelves, and counters, and there was a big shop window, which he kept covered with a sheet. Nodog’s dog had his own bedroom at the back, which must have been a stockroom once upon a time. Shops are actually quite comfortable, if you can put up with a bit of discomfort. You can put your clothes up on the shelves, put your telly up on the counter where the cash register would have gone, put your mattress on the floor, and you’re away. And shops have toilets, and water, although they don’t have baths or showers.
When we got there, we had sex straight off, to get it out of the way. I’d only had proper full-on sex with Chas before, and that wasn’t any good, but it was all right with Nodog. A lot more things worked, if you know what I mean, because with Chas, his bits didn’t really work and my bits
didn’t really work, so it was all a bit of an effort. Anyway, this time around, Nodog’s bits worked fine, and so mine did too, and it was much easier to see why anyone would want to do it again. People go on about the first time being important, but it’s the second time that really matters. Or the second person, anyway.
Look at what a fool I was the first time, all cut up and sobbing and obsessed. See, if I’d been like that a second time, I’d have known I was going to have problems. But I really didn’t care if I saw Nodog again or not, so that’s got to be progress, right? That’s much more the way things should be, if you’re going to get on in life.
After we’d finished, he turned his little black-and-white TV on, and we lay on his mattress watching whatever, and then we started to talk, and I ended up telling him about Jen, and Toppers’ House, and the others. And he wasn’t surprised, or sympathetic, or anything like that. He just nodded, and then he goes, Oh, I’m always trying to top myself. And I was like, Well, you can’t be much good at it, and he went, That’s not the idea, though, is it? And I was like, Isn’t it? And he said that the idea was to like constantly offer yourself up to the gods of Life and Death, who were pagan gods, so they were nothing to do with church. And if the god of Life wanted you, then you lived, and if the god of Death wanted you, you didn’t. So he reckoned that on New Year’s Eve I’d been chosen by the god of Life, and that’s why I never jumped. And I was like, I never jumped because people sat on my head, and he explained that the god of Life was speaking through these people, and that made perfect sense to me. Because why else would they have bothered, unless they were like being guided by invisible forces? And then he told me that people who were brain-dead, like George Bush and Tony Blair, and the people who judged Pop Idol, never offered themselves up to the gods of Life and Death at all, and therefore could never prove that they had the right to live, and we shouldn’t obey their laws or recognize their decisions (like the Pop Idol judges). So we don’t have to bomb countries if they tell us to, and if they say that Fat Michelle or whoever has won Pop Idol, we don’t have to listen to them. We can just say, No she didn’t.