Authors: Nick Hornby
‘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 the 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.’
‘Thank you.’
‘We’re in a gang,’ said Jess. ‘Aren’t we, Martin?’
‘We are, Jess,’ I said, with what I hoped her father would recognize as a weary lack of enthusiasm. ‘We’re friends for ever.’
‘What sort of gang?’ said Crichton.
‘We’re going to watch out for each other. Aren’t we, Martin?’
‘We are, Jess.’ If my words became any wearier, they would no longer have the energy to crawl up my throat and out of my mouth. I could imagine them slithering back down to where they’d come from.
‘So you will be in loco parentis after all?’
‘I’m not sure it’s that sort of gang,’ I said. “ ‘The Loco Parentis gang”… Doesn’t sound very tough, does it? What are we going to do? Beat up the Paterfamiliases?’
‘You fucking shut up and you fucking shut up,’ Jess said, to Crichton and me respectively.
‘My point is,’ said Crichton, ‘that you’re going to be around.’
‘He’s promised,’ Jess said.
‘And I’m supposed to feel reassured by that.’
‘You can feel what you like,’ I said. ‘But I’m not reassuring anyone about anything.’
‘You have children of your own, I understand?’
‘Sort of,’ said Jess.
‘I don’t need to spell out how worried I’ve been about Jess, and what a difference it would make to know that there was a sensible adult looking out for her.’
Jess sniggered unhelpfully.
‘I know you wouldn’t be… You’re not exactly… Some of the tabloids would…’
‘He’s worried about you sleeping with fifteen-year-olds,’ said Jess.
‘I’m not being interviewed for this job,’ I said. ‘I don’t want it, and if you choose to give it to me, that’s your lookout.’
‘All I want you to say is that if you see Jess getting herself into serious trouble, then you’ll either try to prevent it, or you’ll tell me about it.’
‘He’d love to,’ said Jess. ‘But he’s flat broke.’
‘Why is money relevant?’
‘Because say he had to keep an eye on me and I’d gone into some club or something, and they wouldn’t let him in because he’s skint… Well.’
‘Well what?’
‘I could go in there and OD on smack. I’d be dead, just because you were too mean to stump up.’
I suddenly saw Jess’s point: a weekly wage of £250 from Britain’s lowest-rated cable TV station not only focuses the mind but stimulates empathy and imagination. Jess slumped lifeless in a toilet, all for the sake of twenty quid… It was too ghastly to contemplate, if you contemplated in the right spirit.
‘How much do you want?’ Crichton let out a sigh, as if everything – the conversation we were having, New Year’s Eve, my prison sentence – had been carefully plotted to lead to this moment.
‘I don’t want anything,’ I said.
‘Yes, you do,’ said Jess. ‘Yes he does.’
‘How much does it cost to get into a club, these days?’ Crichton asked.
‘You can get through a hundred quid, easy,’ said Jess.
A hundred quid? We were humiliating ourselves for the price of a decent dinner for two?
‘I don’t doubt you can “get through” a hundred quid without trying. But he wouldn’t need to “get through” anything, would he? He’d only need the price of admission, if you’d overdosed on drugs. I’m presuming that he wouldn’t be stopping at the bar, if you were hovering between life and death in the toilet.’
‘So what you’re saying is, my life isn’t worth a hundred quid to you. That’s nice, after what happened to Jen. I wouldn’t have thought you had enough daughters to spare.’
‘Jess, that’s not fair.’
The front door slammed somewhere between the ‘not’ and the ‘fair’, and Crichton and I were left staring at each other.
‘I handled that badly,’ he said, ‘didn’t I?’
I shrugged. ‘She was extorting money with menaces. Either you
give her as much as she wants every time she asks for it, or she storms out. And I can see that might be a little… you know. Disconcerting. Given the family history.’
‘I’ll give her as much as she wants, every time she asks for it,’ he said. ‘Please go and find her.’
I left the house two hundred and fifty pounds richer; Jess was waiting for me at the end of the drive.
‘I’ll bet you got double what we were asking for,’ she said. ‘Always works, when you mention Jen.’
You won’t believe this – I don’t think I do now – but in my head, what happened to Jen had fuck all to do with New Year’s Eve. I could tell, from talking to the others and reading the papers, that no one else saw it that way, though. They were like, Ooooh, I get it: your sister disappeared, so you want to jump off a building. But it isn’t like that. I’m sure it must have been an ingredient, sort of thing, but it wasn’t the whole recipe. Say I’m a spaghetti Bolognese, well I reckon Jen is the tomatoes. Maybe the onions. Or even just the garlic. But she’s not the meat or the pasta.
Everyone reacts to something like that in different ways, don’t they? Some people would start support groups and all that; I know they would, because Mum and Dad are always trying to introduce me to some fucking group or another, mostly because the group was set up by someone who ended up getting a CSE or whatever off of the Queen. And some people would sit down, turn the TV on and watch for the next twenty years. Me, I just started messing around. Or rather, messing around became more like a full-time job, whereas previously it had been a hobby: some messing around had already been done before Jen went. I’ll be honest about that.