Authors: Nick Hornby
‘But you didn’t.’
‘You sat on my head.’
‘But you haven’t done anything about it since.’
‘Well. We went to that party. And we went on holiday. And, you know. There’s been one thing after another.’
‘Terrible, isn’t it, how that happens? You’ll have to block out some time in your diary. Otherwise life will keep getting in the way.’
‘Shut up.’
‘Guys, guys…’
I had, once again, allowed myself to be drawn into an undignified spat with Jess. I decided to act in a more statesmanlike manner.
‘Like JJ, I have spent a long night cogitating,’ I said.
‘Tosser.’
‘And my conclusion is that we are not serious people. We were never serious. We got closer than some, but nowhere near as close as others. And that puts us in something of a bind.’
‘I agree. We’re fucked,’ said JJ. ‘Sorry, Maureen.’
‘I’m missing something,’ said Jess.
‘This is it,’ I said. ‘This is us.’
‘What is?’
‘This.’ I gestured vaguely at our surroundings, the company we were keeping, the rain outside, all of which seemed to speak eloquently of our current condition. ‘This is it. There’s no way out. Not even the way out is the way out. Not for us.’
‘Fuck that,’ said Jess. ‘And I’m not sorry, Maureen.’
‘The other night, I was going to tell you about something I’d read in a magazine. About suicide. Do you remember? Anyway, this guy reckoned that the crisis period lasts ninety days.’
‘What guy?’ JJ asked.
‘This suicidologist guy.’
‘That’s a job?’
‘Everything’s a job.’
‘So what?’ said Jess.
‘So we’ve had forty-six of the ninety days.’
‘And what happens after the ninety days?’
‘Nothing
happens
,’ I said. ‘Just… things are different. Things change. The exact arrangement of stuff that made you think your
life was unbearable… It’s got shifted around somehow. It’s like a sort of real-life version of astrology.’
‘Nothing’s going to change for you,’ said Jess. ‘You’re still going to be the geezer off the telly who slept with the fifteen-year-old and went to prison. No one will ever forget that.’
‘Yes. Well. I’m sure the ninety days thing won’t apply in my case,’ I said. ‘If that makes you happier.’
‘Won’t help Maureen, either,’ said Jess. ‘Or JJ. I might change, though. I do, quite a lot.’
‘My point, anyway, is that we extend our deadline again. Because… Well, I don’t know about you lot. But I realized this morning that I’m not, you know, ready to go solo just yet. It’s funny, because I don’t actually like any of you very much. But you seem to be, I don’t know… What I need. You know how sometimes you know you should be eating more cabbage? Or drinking more water? It’s like that.’
There was a general shuffling of feet, which I interpreted as a declaration of reluctant solidarity.
‘Thanks, man,’ said JJ. ‘Very touching. When’s the ninety days up?’
‘March 31st.’
‘That’s a bit of a coincidence, isn’t it?’ said Jess. ‘Exactly three months.’
‘What’s your point?’
‘Well. It’s not scientific, is it?’
‘What, and eighty-eight days would be?’
‘More scientific, yeah.’
‘No, I get it,’ said JJ. ‘Three months sounds about right. Three months is like a season.’
‘Very much like,’ I agreed. ‘Given there are four seasons, and twelve months in a year.’
‘So we’re seeing the winter through together. That’s cool. Winter is when you get the blues,’ JJ said.
‘So it would appear,’ I said.
‘But we gotta
do
something,’ said JJ. ‘We can’t just sit around waiting for three months to be up.’
‘Typical American,’ said Jess. ‘What do you want to do? Bomb some poor little country somewhere?’
‘Sure. It would take my mind off things, some bombing.’
‘What should we do?’ I asked him.
‘I don’t know, man. I just know that if we spend six weeks pissing and moaning, then we’re not helping ourselves.’
‘Jess is right,’ I said. ‘Typical bloody American. “Helping ourselves.” Self-help. You can do anything if you put your mind to it, right? You could be President.’
‘What is it with you assholes? I’m not talking about becoming President. I’m talking about, like, finding a job waiting tables.’
‘Great,’ said Jess. ‘Let’s all not kill ourselves because someone gave us a fifty pence tip.’
‘No fucking chance of that in this fucking country,’ said JJ. ‘Sorry, Maureen.’
‘You could always just go back where you came from,’ said Jess. ‘That would change something. Also, your buildings are higher, aren’t they?’
‘So,’ I said. ‘Forty-four days to go.’
There was something else in the article I read: an interview with a man who’d survived after jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. He said that two seconds after jumping, he realized that there was nothing in his life he couldn’t deal with, no problem he couldn’t solve – apart from the problem he’d just given himself by jumping off the bridge. I don’t know why I didn’t tell the others about that; you’d think it might be relevant information. I wanted to keep it to myself for the time being, though. It seemed like something that might be more appropriate later, when the story was over. If it ever was.
It was in the local paper, the following week. I cut the story out, and kept it, and I read it every so often, just to try to understand the poor man better. I couldn’t keep him out of my head. He was called David Fawley, and he’d jumped because of problems with
his wife and children. She’d met someone else, and moved away to be with him, and taken the kiddies with her. He only lived two streets away, which seemed very strange to me, a coincidence, until I realized that people in my local paper always lived locally, unless someone had visited to open a school or something. Glenda Jackson came to Matty’s school once, for example.
Martin was right. When I saw David Fawley jump, it made me see that I hadn’t been ready on New Year’s Eve. I’d been ready to make the preparations, because it gave me something to do – New Year’s Eve was something to look forward to, in a strange sort of way. And when I’d met some people to talk to, then I was happy to talk, instead of jump. They’d have let me jump, I think, once I’d told them why I was up there. They wouldn’t have got in my way, or sat on my head. But even so, I’d gone down the stairs and on to the party. This poor David hadn’t wanted to talk to us, that was the thing I’d noticed. He’d come to jump, not to natter. I thought I’d gone to jump, but I ended up nattering anyway.
If you thought about it, this David fella and me, we were opposites. He’d killed himself because his children were gone, and I’d thought about it because my son was still around. There must be a lot of that goes on. There must be people who kill themselves because their marriage is over, and others who kill themselves because they can’t see a way out of the one they’re in. I wondered whether you could do that with everyone, whether every unhappy situation had an unhappy opposite situation. I couldn’t see it with the people who had debts, though. No one ever killed himself because he had too much money. Those sheikhs with the oil don’t seem to commit suicide very often. Or if they do, no one ever talks about it. Anyway, perhaps there was something in this opposites idea. I had someone, and David had no one, and he’d jumped and I hadn’t. When it comes to committing suicide, nobody beats somebody, if you see what I mean. There’s no rope holding you back.
I prayed for David’s soul, even though I knew it wouldn’t do him any good, because he had committed the sin of despair, and my prayers would fall on deaf ears. And then after Matty had gone
to sleep, I left him alone for five minutes and walked down the road to see where David had lived. I don’t know why I did that, or what I hoped to see, but there was nothing there, of course. It was one of these streets full of big houses that have been turned into flats, so that’s what I found out, that he lived in a flat. And then it was time to turn around and go home.
That evening, I watched a programme on the television about a Scottish detective who doesn’t get on with his ex-wife very well, so I thought about David some more, because I don’t suppose he got on very well with his ex-wife either. And I’m not sure this was the point of the programme, but there wasn’t much room in it for lots of arguments between the Scottish detective and his ex-wife, because most of the time he had to find out who’d killed this woman and left her body outside her ex-husband’s house to make it look as though he’d killed her. (This was a different ex-husband.) So in an hour-long programme, there were probably only ten minutes of him arguing with his ex-wife, and his children, and fifty minutes of him trying to find who’d put the woman’s body in the dustbin. Forty minutes, I suppose, if you took out the advertisements. I noticed because I was a bit more interested in the arguments than I was in the body, and the arguments didn’t seem to come around very often.
And that seemed about right to me, ten minutes an hour. It was probably about right for the programme, because he was a detective, and it was more important for him and for the viewers that he spent the biggest chunk of his time on solving the murders. But I think even if you’re not in a TV programme, then ten minutes an hour is about right for your problems. This David Fawley was unemployed, so there was a fair old chance that he spent sixty minutes an hour thinking about his ex-wife, and his children, and when you do that, you’re bound to end up on the roof of Toppers’ House.
I should know. I don’t have arguments, but there have been lots of times in my life when I couldn’t stop Matty becoming sixty minutes an hour. There was nothing else to think about. I’d had more on my mind recently, because of the others, and
the things that have happened in their lives. But most of the time, on most days, it was just me and my son, and that meant trouble.
Anyway, that evening there was a whole jumble of thoughts. I lay in bed half-asleep, thinking about David, and the Scottish detective, and coming down off the roof to find Chas and eventually I got these thoughts unknotted, and when I woke up in the morning I decided it would be a good idea to find out where Martin’s wife and children lived, and then go and talk to them all and see if there was any chance of getting the family back together. Because if that worked, then Martin wouldn’t get so eaten up about some things, and he’d have somebody rather than nobody, and I’d have something to do for forty or fifty minutes an hour, and it would help everybody.
But I was a hopeless detective. I knew Martin’s wife’s name was Cindy, so I looked Cindy Sharp up in the phone book, and she wasn’t there, and I ran out of ideas after that. So I asked Jess, because I didn’t think JJ would approve of my plan, and she found all the information we needed in about five minutes, on a computer. But then she wanted to come with me to see Cindy, and I said she could. I know, I know. But you try telling her she can’t have something she wants.
I got on Dad’s computer, and put ‘Cindy Sharp’ into Google, and I found an interview she’d given to some woman’s magazine when Martin had gone to prison. ‘Cindy Sharp talks for the first time about her heartbreak’ and all that. You could even click on a picture of her and her two girls. Cindy looked like Penny, except older and a bit fatter, because of having had kids and that. And what’s the betting that Penny looked like the fifteen-year-old, except that the fifteen-year-old was even slimmer than Penny, and had bigger tits or whatever? They’re tossers, aren’t they, men like Martin? They think women are like fucking laptops or whatever, like, My old one’s knackered and anyway, you can get ones that are slimmer and do more stuff now.
So I read the interview, and it said she lived in this village called Torley Heath, about forty miles outside London. And if she was trying to stop people like us from knocking on the door to tell her to get back with her husband, then she made a big mistake, because the interviewer described exactly where her house is in the village – opposite an old-fashioned corner shop, next door but one to the village school. She told us all this because she wanted us to know how idealistic or whatever Cindy’s life is. Apart from her ex-husband being in prison for sleeping with a fifteen-year-old.
We decided not to tell JJ. We were pretty sure he’d stop us for some bullshit reason or another. He’d say, ‘It’s none of your business,’ or, ‘You’ll fuck up the last chance he’s got.’ But we thought we had a strong argument, Maureen and I. Our argument was this. Maybe Cindy did hate Martin because he was a real playa who went anywhere with anyone. But now he was suicidal, and he probably wouldn’t go anywhere with anyone, or at least not for a while. So basically, if she wouldn’t take him back, she had to hate him enough to want him to die. And that’s a lot of hate. True, he hadn’t ever said he wanted to get back with her, but he needed to be in a secure domestic environment, in a place like Torley Heath. It was better to do nothing in a place where there was nothing to do than in London, where there was trouble – teenage girls and nightclubs and tower-blocks. That’s what we felt.
So we had a day out. Maureen made horrible like old-fashioned sandwiches with egg and stuff in them, which I couldn’t eat. And we got the tube to Paddington, then the train to Newbury, and then a bus to Torley Heath. I’d been worried that Maureen and I wouldn’t have much to say to each other, and we’d get really bored, and I’d end up doing something stupid, because of the boredom. But it really wasn’t like that, mostly because of me, and the effort I put in. I decided that I was going to be like an interviewer type-person, and I’d spend the journey finding out about Maureen’s life, no matter how boring or depressing it was. The only trouble was that it was actually too boring and depressing to listen to, so I sort of switched off when she was talking, and thought up the next question. A couple of times she looked at me funny, so I’m guessing
that quite often she had just told me something and then I asked her about it again. Like once, I tuned back in to hear her go, something something something met Frank. So I went, When did you meet Frank, but I think what she’d just said was, That was when I met Frank. So I’d have to work on that, if I was ever to be an interviewer. But let’s face it, I wouldn’t be interviewing people who did nothing and had a disabled son, would I? So it would be easier to concentrate, because they’d be talking about their new films and other stuff you’d actually want to know about.