Nick Hornby - A Long Way Down

I wish I was deluding myself. Really. It would help. But we used to have these message boards up on our website, and I’d read them every now and again, and I could tell that people felt the same way we did; and I looked at other people’s boards, too, and they didn’t have the same kind of fans. I mean, everyone has fans who love what they do, otherwise they wouldn’t be fans, right? But I could tell from reading the other boards that our guys walked out of our shows feeling something special. We could feel it, and they could feel it. It’s just that there weren’t enough of them, I guess. Anyway.

Maureen felt faint after Jess cut loose on her, and who could blame her? Jesus. I would have needed to sit down too if Jess ever cut loose on me, and I’ve been around the block a few times. I took her outside on to a little roof terrace that looked like it never got the sun at any time of the day or year, but there was a picnic table and a grill out there anyway. Those little grills are everywhere in England, right? To me they’ve come to represent the triumph of hope over circumstance, seeing as all you can do is peer at them out the window through the pissing rain. There were a couple of people sitting at the picnic table, but when they saw that Maureen wasn’t feeling too good they got up and went back inside, and we sat down. I offered to get her a glass of water, but she didn’t want anything, so we just sat there for a while. And then we both heard like this hissing noise, coming from the shadows next to the grill in the far corner, and eventually we figured out that there was a guy back there. He was young, with long hair and a sorry-ass moustache, hunkered down in the dark, trying to attract our attention.

“Excuse me,” he whispered as loudly as he dared.

“You wanna talk to us, you come here.”

“I can’t come into the light.”

“What would happen to you if you did?”

“A nutter might try to kill me.”

“There’s only Maureen and me out here.”

“This nutter’s everywhere.”

“Like God,” I said.

I walked over to the other side of the terrace and crouched downnext to him.

“How can I help you?”

“You American?”

“Yes.”

“Oh. Howdy, pardner.” If I tell you that this amused him, you’ll know all you need to know about this guy. “Listen, can you check the party and see if the nutter’s gone?”

“What does he look like?”

“She. I know, I know, but she’s really scary. A mate saw her first and told me to hide out here until she’d gone. I went out with her once. Not like «once upon a time». Just once. But I stopped because she’s off her head, and…”

This was perfect.

“You’re Chas, aren’t you?”

“How did you know that?”

“I’m a friend of Jess’s.”

Oh, man, I wish you could have seen the look on his face. He scrambled to his feet and started looking for ways to escape over the back wall. At one point I thought he was going to try running up it, like a squirrel.

“Shit,” he said. “Fuck. I’m sorry. Shit. Will you help me climb over?”

“No. I want you to come and talk to her. She’s had, she’s had like a rough evening, and maybe a little chat would help calm her down.”

Chas laughed. It was the hollow, desperate laugh of a man who knew that, when it came to calming Jess down, several elephant tranquilizers would be much more useful than a little chat.

“You know I haven’t had sex since that night we went out, don’t you?”

“I didn’t know that, Chas, no. How would I know? Where would I have read that?”

“I’ve been too scared. I can’t make that mistake again. I can’t have another woman shouting at me in the cinema. I don’t mind, you know, never having sex again. It’s better that way. I’m twenty-two. I mean, by the time you’re sixty, you don’t feel like it anyway, right? So we’re only talking forty years. Less. I can live with that. Women are fucking maniacs, man.”

“You don’t want to think shit like that, man. You’ve just had some bad luck.”

I said this because I knew it was the right thing to say, not because my experience told me anything different. It wasn’t true that women were fucking maniacs, of course it wasn’t—just the ones that I had slept with and Chas had slept with.

“Listen. If you came outside and had a little chat, what’s the worst that could happen?”

“She’s tried to kill me twice and she got me arrested once. Plus, I’m banned from three pubs, two galleries and a cinema. Plus, I’ve had an official warning from…”

“OK, OK. So you’re saying the worst that could happen is, you die a painful and violent death. And I say to you, my friend, that it’s better to die like a man than hide underneath grills like a mouse.”

Maureen had stood up and come to join us in our dark barbecue corner.

“I’d try to kill you, if I were Jess,” she said quietly—so quietly that it was hard to square the violence of the words with the timidity in the voice.

“There you go. You’re in trouble wherever you look.”

“Who the fuck’s this now?”

“I’m Maureen,” said Maureen. “Why should you get away with it?”

“Get away with what? I didn’t do anything.”

“I thought you said you had sex with her,” Maureen said. “Or maybe you didn’t say that in so many words. But you said you hadn’t had sex since. So I’m thinking that you slept with her.”

“Well, we had sex that once. But I didn’t know she was a fucking maniac then.”

“So once you find out that the poor girl is confused and vulnerable, that’s when you run away.”

“I had to run away. She was chasing me. With a knife, half the time.”

“And why was she chasing you?”

“What is this? Why is it your business?”

“I don’t like to see people upset.”

“What about me? I’m upset. My life is a shambles.”

Now, see, Chas couldn’t know, but that wasn’t such a good line of argument to use with any of our crowd, the Toppers’ House Four. We were, by definition, the Kings and Queens of Shambles.

Chas had given up on sex, whereas we were trying to decide whether to give up on fucking life.

“You have to talk to her.” said Maureen.

“Fuck off,” said Chas. And then, womp! Maureen popped him as hard as she could.

I can’t tell you how many times I’d watched Eddie pop someone at a party or after a show. And he’d probably say the same thing about me, although in my memory I was the Man of Peace, with only the occasional lapse into violence, and he was the Man of War, with only the occasional moment of calm and clarity. And OK, Maureen was like this little old lady, but watching her take a swing really brought it all back home.

Here’s the thing about Maureen: she had a lot more guts than I had. She’d stuck around to find out what it would feel like, never to live the life she had planned for herself. I didn’t know what those plans were, but she had them, same as everybody, and when Matty came along, she’d waited around for twenty years to see what she’d be offered as a replacement, and she was offered nothing at all. There was a lot of feeling in that slap, and I could imagine hitting someone pretty hard when I was her age, too. That was one of the reasons I didn’t intend ever to be her age.

Frank is Matty’s father. It’s funny to think that might not be immediately obvious to someone, because it’s so obvious to me. I only ever had intercourse with one man, and I only had intercourse with that one man once, and the one time in my entire life I had intercourse produced Matty. What are the chances, eh? One in a million? One in ten million? I don’t know. But of course even one in ten million means that there are a lot of women like me in the world. That’s not what you think of, when you think of one in ten million. You don’t think, That’s a lot of people.