Nick Hornby - A Long Way Down

And we had a history. There was a brief affair when we were co-presenting, but we were both married to other people, and so the affair ended, painfully and sadly. And then, finally, after much bad timing and many recriminations, we got together, but we’d missed the moment. I had become soiled goods. I was broken, finished, a wreck, scraping the bottom of my own barrel; she was still at the top of her game, beautiful and young and famous, broadcasting to millions every morning. I couldn’t believe that she wanted to be with me for any reason other than nostalgia and pity, and she couldn’t persuade me otherwise. A few years ago, Cindy joined one of those dreadful reading groups, where unhappy, repressed middle-class lesbians talk for five minutes about some novel they don’t understand, and then spend the rest of the evening moaning about how dreadful men are. Anyway, she read a book about this couple who were in love but couldn’t get together for donkey’s years and then finally managed it, aged about one hundred. She adored it and made me read it, and it took me about as long to get through as it took the characters to pair off. Well, our relationship felt like that, except the old biddies in the book had a better time than Penny and I were having. A few weeks before Christmas, in a fit of self-disgust and despair, I told her to bugger off, and so she went out that night with some guest on the show, a TV chef, and he gave her her first-ever line of coke, and they ended up in bed, and she came round to see me the next morning in floods of tears. That’s why I told Maureen she was a right bitch who would snort anything and fuck anybody. I can see now that this was a bit on the harsh side.

So that, give or take a few hundred heart-to-hearts and tantrums, a couple of dozen other split-ups, and the odd punch thrown—by her, I hasten to add—is how Penny came to be sitting on my sofa waiting up for me. She would have been waiting a long time if it hadn’t been for our impromptu roof party. I hadn’t even bothered writing her a note, an omission which only now is beginning to cause me any remorse. Why did we persist in the pathetic delusion that this relationship was in any way viable? I’m not sure. When I asked Penny what the big idea was, she said merely that she loved me, which struck me as an answer more likely to confuse and obscure than to illuminate. As for me… Well, I associated Penny, perhaps understandably, with a time before things had started to go awry: before Cindy, before fifteen-year-olds, before prison. I had managed to convince myself that if I could make things work with Penny, then I could make them work elsewhere—I could somehow haul myself back, as if one’s youth were a place you could visit whenever you felt like it. I bring you momentous news: it’s not. Who’d have thought?

My immediate problem was how to explain my connection with Maureen, JJ and Jess. She would find the truth hurtful and upsetting, and it was hard to think of a lie that would even get off the ground. What could we possibly be to one another? We didn’t look like colleagues, or poetry enthusiasts, or clubbers, or substance-abusers; the problem, it has to be said, was Maureen, on more or less every count, if failing to look like a substance-abuser could ever be described as a problem. And even if they were colleagues or substance-abusers, I would still find it hard to explain the apparent desperation of my desire to see them. I had told Penny and mine hosts that I was going to the toilet; why would I then shoot out the front door half an hour before midnight on New Year’s Eve, in order to attend the AGM of some nameless society?

So I decided simply to carry on as if there was nothing to explain.

“Sorry. Penny, this is JJ, Maureen, Jess, JJ, Maureen, Jess, this is Penny.”

Penny seemed unconvinced even by the introductions, as if I had started lying already.

“But you still haven’t told me who they are.”

“As in… ?”

“As in, how do you know them and where did you meet them?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Good.”

“Maureen I know from… Where did we meet, Maureen? First of all?”

Maureen stared at me.

“It’s a long time ago now, isn’t it? We’ll remember in a minute. And JJ used to be part of the old Channel 5 crowd, and Jess is his girlfriend.”

Jess put her arm around JJ, with a touch more satire than I might have wished.

“And where were they all tonight?”

“They’re not deaf, you know. Or idiots. They’re not… deaf idiots.”

“Where were you all tonight?”

“At… like… a party,” said JJ tentatively.

“Where?”

“In Shoreditch.”

“Whose?”

“Whose was it, Jess?”

Jess shrugged carelessly, as if it had been that sort of crazy night.

“And why did you want to go? At eleven-thirty? In the middle of a dinner party? Without me?”

“That I can’t explain.” And I attempted to look simultaneously helpless and apologetic. We had, I hoped, crossed the border into the land of psychological complexity and unpredictability, a country where ignorance and bafflement were permitted.

“You’re seeing someone else, aren’t you?”

Seeing someone else? How on earth could that explain any of this? Why would seeing someone else necessitate bringing home a middle-aged woman, a teenaged punk and an American with a leather jacket and a Rod Stewart haircut? What would the story have been? But then, after reflection, I realized that Penny had probably been here before, and therefore knew that infidelity can usually provide the answer to any domestic mystery. If I had walked in with Sheena Easton and Donald Rumsfeld, Penny would probably have scratched her head for a few seconds before saying exactly the same thing.

In other circumstances, on other evenings, it would have been the right conclusion, too; I used to be pretty resourceful when I was being unfaithful to Cindy, even if I do say so myself. I once drove a new BMW into a wall, simply because I needed to explain a four-hour delay in getting home from work. Cindy came out into the street to inspect the crumpled bonnet, looked at me, and said, “You’re seeing someone else, aren’t you?” I denied it, of course.

But then, anything—smashing up a new car, persuading Donald Rumsfeld to come to an Islington flat in the early hours of New Year’s Day—is easier than actually telling the truth. That look you get, the look which lets you see right through the eyes and down into the place where she keeps all the hurt and the rage and the loathing… Who wouldn’t go that extra yard to avoid it?

“Well?”

My delay in replying was a result of some pretty complicated mental arithmetic; I was trying to work out which of the two different sums gave me the smallest minus number. But, inevitably, the delay was interpreted as an admission of guilt.

“You fucking bastard.”

I was briefly tempted to point out that I was owed one, after the unfortunate incident with the line of coke and the TV chef, but that would only have served to delay her departure; more than anything I wanted to get drunk in my own home with my new friends. So I said nothing. Everyone else jumped when she slammed the door on the way out, but I knew it was coming.

I was sick on the carpet outside the bathroom. Well, I say “carpet”—I was actually sick where the carpet should have been, but he didn’t have one. Which was just as well, because it was much easier to clean up afterwards. I’ve seen lots of those programmes where they decorate your house for you, and I’ve never understood why they always make you throw your carpets away, even good ones which still have a nice thick pile. But now I’m wondering whether they first of all decide whether the people who live in the house are sicker-uppers or not. A lot of younger people have the bare floorboards, I’ve noticed, and of course they tend to be sick on the floor more than older people, what with all the beer they drink and so on. And the drugs they take, too, nowadays, I suppose. (Do drugs make you sick? I’d think so, wouldn’t you?) And some of the young families in Islington don’t seem to go in for the carpets much, either. But you see that might be because babies are always being sick all over the place as well. So maybe Martin is a sicker-upper. Or maybe he just has a lot of friends who are sicker-uppers. Like me. I was sick because I’m not used to drinking, and also because I hadn’t had a thing to eat for more than a day. I was too nervous on New Year’s Eve to eat anything, and there didn’t seem to be an awful lot of point anyway. I didn’t even have any of Matty’s mush. What’s food for? It’s fuel, isn’t it? It keeps you going. And I didn’t really want to be kept going. Jumping off Toppers’ House with a full stomach would have seemed wasteful, like selling a car with a full tank of petrol. So I was dizzy even before we started drinking the whisky, because of the white wine at the party, and after I’d had a couple the room started spinning round and round.