Authors: Nick Hornby
I promised I wouldn’t, and Chas got to his feet. It was a strange feeling, watching a man do something because of me.
‘Not much of a life, hiding underneath people’s grills, is it?’ said JJ.
‘No. But I don’t really see the alternatives.’
‘Howsabout talking to Jess?’
‘Oh, no. I’d rather live out here all the time. Seriously. I’m already thinking of relocating, you know.’
‘What, to someone else’s back yard? Maybe somewhere with a bit of grass?’
‘No,’ Chas said. ‘To Manchester.’
‘Listen,’ JJ said. ‘I know she’s scary. That’s why you should talk to her now. With us around. We can, you know. Mediate. Wouldn’t you rather do that than move cities?’
‘But what is there to say?’
‘Maybe we could work something out. Together. Something that might get her off your back.’
‘Like what?’
‘I know for a fact she’d marry you if you asked her.’
‘Ah, no, you see that’s just…’
‘I was just kidding around, Chas. Lighten up, man.’
‘These aren’t, like, lightening-up times. These are dark times.’
‘Dark times indeed. What with Jess, and going to Manchester, and living under a grill and the Twin Towers and everything.’
‘Yeah.’
JJ shook his head.
‘OK. So what can you tell her that’s going to get you out of this f— mess?’
And JJ gave him some things to say, as if he were an actor and we were in a soap.
I’m not averse to having a go at DIY every now and again. I decorated the girls’ bedrooms myself, with stencils and everything. (And yes, there were TV cameras there, and the production company paid for every last drop of Day-Glo paint, but that doesn’t make it any less of an achievement.) Anyway, if you’re a fellow enthusiast then you’ll know that sometimes you come across holes that are too big for filler, especially in the bathroom. And when that happens, the sloppy way to do it is to bung the holes up with anything you can find – broken matches, bits of sponge, whatever is to hand. Well, that was Chas’s function that night: he was a bit of sponge that plugged a gap. The whole Jess and Chas thing was ludicrous, of course, a waste of time and energy, a banal little sideshow; but it absorbed us, got us down off the roof and even as I was listening to his preposterous speech I could see its value. I could also see that we were going to need a lot more bits of sponge over the coming weeks and months. Maybe that’s what we all need, whether we’re suicidal or not. Maybe life is just too big a gap to be plugged by filler, so we need anything we can get
our hands on – sanders and planers, fifteen-year-olds, whatever – to fill it up.
‘Hi, Jess,’ said Chas when he was shoved out of the party and on to the street. He was trying to sound cheery and friendly and casual, as if he’d been hoping to bump into Jess at some point during the evening, but his general lack of volition undid him; cheeriness is hard to convey when you are too scared to make eye contact. He reminded me of a petty gangster caught thieving from the local godfather in a movie, out of his depth and desperately trying to suck up in order to save his skin.
‘Why wouldn’t you talk to me?’
‘Yeah. Right. I knew you’d want to know that. And I’ve been thinking about it. I’ve been thinking about it very hard, actually, because, you know, it’s… I’m not happy about it. It’s weak. It’s a weakness in me.’
‘Don’t overdo it, man,’ said JJ. There seemed no attempt on anyone’s part to pretend that this was going to bear any resemblance to a real conversation.
‘No. Right. So. First of all I should say sorry, and it won’t happen again. And second of all: I find you very attractive, and stimulating company, and…’
This time JJ just coughed ostentatiously.
‘… And, well. It’s not me, it’s you.’ He winced. ‘Sorry. Sorry. It’s not you, it’s me.’
At that point, just as he was trying to remember his lines, he caught my eye.
‘Hey. You look like that wanker off the telly. Martin Thing.’
‘It is him,’ said Jess.
‘How the fuck do you know him?’
‘It’s a long story,’ I said.
‘We were both just up on the roof of Toppers’ House. We was going to throw ourselves off,’ Jess said, thus making the long story considerably shorter, and, to be fair, leaving out very few of the salient points.
Chas swallowed this information almost visibly, like snakes swallow eggs: you could see the slow march to the brain. Chas,
I’m sure, had many attractive aspects to his personality, but quickness of intelligence was not one of them. ‘Because of that girl you shagged? And your wife and kids throwing you out and everything?’ he asked finally.
‘Why don’t you ask Jess why she was going to jump? Isn’t that more relevant?’
‘Shut up,’ said Jess. ‘That’s private.’
‘Oh, and my stuff isn’t?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Not any more. Everyone knows about it.’
‘What’s Penny Chambers like? In real life?’
‘Is that what we came out here to talk about, Chas?’ JJ said quietly.
‘No. Right. Sorry. It’s just a bit distracting, having someone off the telly standing there.’
‘Do you want me to leave?’
‘No,’ said Jess quickly. ‘I want you here.’
‘I wouldn’t have thought you’d be his type,’ said Chas. ‘Too old. Plus, he’s a cunt.’ He chuckled, and then looked around for someone to share the chuckle with, but none of us – none of them, I should say, because even Chas didn’t expect me to laugh at my own age or cunthood – was even remotely amused.
‘Oh, right. It’s like that, is it?’
And suddenly, yes, it was exactly like that: we were more serious than him, in every way.
And even Jess saw it.
‘You’re the tosser,’ she said. ‘None of this is anything to do with you. Fuck off out of my sight.’ And then she kicked him – an old-fashioned, straight-legged toe into the meatiest part of the arse, as if the two of them were cartoon characters.
And that was the end of Chas.
When you’re sad – like, really sad, Toppers’ House sad – you only want to be with other people who are sad. I didn’t know this until that night, but I suddenly realized it just by looking at Chas’s face.
There was nothing in it. It was just the face of a twenty-two-year-old boy who’d never done anything, apart from dropped a few Es, or thought anything, apart from where to get the next E from, or felt anything, apart from off his face. It was the eyes that gave him away: when he made that stupid joke about Martin and expected us to laugh, the eyes were completely lost in the joke, and there was nothing else left of them. They were just laughing eyes, not frightened eyes or troubled eyes – they were the eyes a baby has when you tickle it. I’d noticed with the others that when they made jokes, if they did (Maureen wasn’t a big comedian), you could still see why they’d been up on the roof even while they were laughing – there was something else in there, something that stopped them giving themselves over to the moment. And you can say that we shouldn’t have been up there, because wanting to kill yourself is a coward’s way out, and you can say that none of us had enough reason to want to do it. But you can’t say that we didn’t feel it, because we all did, and that was more important than anything. Chas would never know what that was like unless he crossed the line too.
Because that’s what the four of us had done – crossed a line. I don’t mean we’d done anything bad. I just mean that something had happened to us which separated us from lots of other people. We had nothing in common apart from where we’d ended up, on that square of concrete high up in the air, and that was the biggest thing you could possibly have in common with anyone. To say that Maureen and I had nothing in common because she wore raincoats and listened to brass bands or whatever was like saying, I don’t know, the only thing I’ve got in common with that girl is that we have the same parents. And I didn’t know any of that until Chas said that thing about Martin being a cunt.
The other thing I worked out was that Chas could have told me anything – that he loved me, he hated me, he’d been possessed by aliens and the Chas I knew was now on a different planet – and it wouldn’t have made any difference. I was still owed an explanation, I thought, but so what? What good was it going to do me? It wouldn’t have made me any happier. It was like scratching when you have chickenpox. You think it’s going to help, but the itch
moves over, and then moves over again. My itch suddenly felt miles away, and I couldn’t have reached it with the longest arms in the world. Realizing that made me scared that I was going to be itchy for ever, and I didn’t want that. I knew all the things that Martin had done, but when Chas had gone I still wanted him to hug me. I wouldn’t even have cared if he’d tried anything on, but he didn’t. He sort of did the opposite; he held me all funny, as if I was covered in barbed wire.
I’m sorry, I went. I’m sorry that little shitbag called you names. And he said it wasn’t my fault, but I told him that of course it was, because if he hadn’t met me he wouldn’t have had to experience the trauma of being called a cunt on New Year’s Eve. And he said he got called a cunt a lot. (This is actually true. I’ve known him for a while now, and I’d say I’ve heard people, complete strangers, call him a cunt about fifteen times, a prick about ten times, a wanker maybe about the same, and an arsehole approximately half a dozen times. Also: tosser, berk, wally, git, shithead and pillock.) Nobody likes him, which is weird, because he’s famous. How can you be famous if nobody likes you?
Martin says it’s nothing to do with the fifteen-year-old thing; he reckons that if anything it got slightly better after that, because the people who called him a cunt were exactly the sort of people who didn’t see anything wrong with underage sex. So instead of shouting out names, they shouted out things like, Go on, my son, Get in there, Wallop, etcetera. In terms of personal abuse, although not in terms of his marriage or his relationship with his children, or his career, or his sanity, going to prison actually did him some good. But all sorts of people seem to be famous even though they have no fans. Tony Blair is a good example. And all the other people who present breakfast TV programmes and quiz shows. The reason they’re paid a lot of money, it seems to me, is because strangers yell terrible words at them in the street. Even a traffic warden doesn’t get called a cunt when he’s out shopping with his family. So the only real advantage to being Martin is the money, and also the invitations to film premieres and dodgy nightclubs. And that’s where you get yourself into trouble.
These were just some thoughts I had when Martin and I hugged. But they didn’t get us anywhere. Outside my head it was five o’clock in the morning and we were all unhappy and we didn’t have anywhere to go.
I was like, So now what? And I rubbed my hands together, as if we were all enjoying ourselves too much to let the night end – as if we’d been giving it large in Ocean, and we were all off for bagels and coffee in Bethnal Green, or back to someone’s flat for spliffs and a chill. So I went, Whose gaff? I’ll bet yours is tasty, Martin. I’ll bet you’ve got Jacuzzis and all sorts. That’ll do. And Martin said, No, we can’t go there. And, by the way, my Jacuzzi days are long gone. Which I think meant that he was broke, not that he was too fat to go in one or anything. Because he’s not fat, Martin. He’s too vain to be fat.
So I said, Well, never mind, as long as you’ve got a kettle and some Corn Flakes. And he went, I haven’t, so I was like, What have you got to hide? And he said, Nothing, but he said it in a funny way, an embarrassed, hiding sort of a way. And then I remembered something from before which I thought might be relevant and I said, Who was leaving messages for you on your mobile? And he went, Nobody. And I said, Is that Mr Nobody or maybe Miss Nobody? And he said, Just nobody. So I wanted to know why he didn’t want to invite us back, and he went, Because I don’t know you. And I said, Yeah, like you didn’t know that fifteen-year-old. And then he said, as if he was angry, OK. Yeah. Let’s go to mine. Why not?
And so we did.
I know I’d had that bonding moment with Maureen when she’d smacked Chas, but to tell you the truth I was working on the assumption that if we all made it through to breakfast time, then my new band would split up due to musical differences. Breakfast time would mean that we’d made it through to a new dawn, new hope, a new year, tra la la. And no offense meant, but I really didn’t
want to be seen in daylight with these people, if you know what I mean – especially with… some of ’em. But breakfast and daylight were still a couple of hours away, so it felt to me like I had no real choice but to go with them back to Martin’s place. To do anything else would have been mean and unfriendly, and I still didn’t trust myself to spend too much time on my own.
Martin lived in a little villagey part of Islington, right around the corner from Tony Blair’s old house, and really not the kind of ’hood you’d choose if you’d fallen on hard times, as Martin was supposed to have done. He paid the cab fare, and we followed him up the front steps to his house. I could see three or four front-door bells, so I could tell it wasn’t all his, but I couldn’t have afforded to live there.
Before he put his key in the lock, he paused and turned around.
‘Listen,’ he said, and then he didn’t say anything, so we listened.
‘I don’t hear anything,’ said Jess.
‘No, I didn’t mean that sort of listen. I meant, Listen, I’m going to tell you something.’
‘Go on, then,’ said Jess. ‘Spit it out.’
‘It’s very late. So just… be respectful of the neighbours.’
‘That’s it?’
‘No.’ He took a deep breath. ‘There’ll probably be someone in there.’
‘In your flat?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who?’
‘I don’t know what you’d call her. My date. Whatever.’
‘You had a date for the evening?’ I tried to keep my voice in neutral, but, you know, Jesus… What kind of evening had she had? One moment you’re sitting in a club or whatever, the next he’s disappeared because he wants to jump off a building.
‘Yes. What of it?’
‘Nothing. Just…’ There was no need to say any more. We could leave the rest to the imagination.