Nick Hornby - A Long Way Down

We were quiet for a little while after Penny had gone. We didn’t know whether we were supposed to be sad or not. Jess offered to chase after her and tell her that Martin hadn’t been with anyone else, but Martin asked her how she was going to explain what we were doing there, and Jess said she thought that the truth wasn’t so bad, and Martin said that he’d rather Penny thought badly of him than be told that he’d been thinking of killing himself.

“You’re mad,” said Jess. “She’d feel all sorry for you if she found out how we’d met. You’d probably get a sympathy shag.”

Martin laughed. “I don’t think that’s how it works, Jess,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Because if she found out how we met, it would really upset her. She’d think she was responsible in some way. It’s a terrible thing, finding out that your lover is so unhappy he wants to die. It’s a time for self-reflection.”

“Yeah. And?”

“And I’d have to spend hours holding her hand. I don’t feel like holding her hand.”

“You’d still end up with a sympathy shag. I didn’t say it would be easy.”

Sometimes it was hard to remember that Jess was unhappy too. The rest of us, we were still shell-shocked. I didn’t know how I’d ended up drinking whisky in the lounge of a well-known TV personality when I’d actually left the house to kill myself, and you could tell that JJ and Martin were confused about the evening too. But with Jess, it was like the whole how’s-your-father on the roof was like a minor accident, the sort of thing where you rub your head and sit down and have a cup of sweet tea, and then you get on with the rest of your day. When she was talking about sympathy intercourse and whatever other nonsense came into her head, you couldn’t see what could possibly have made her want to climb those stairs up to the roof—her eyes were twinkling, and she was full of energy, and you could tell that she was having fun. We weren’t having fun. We weren’t killing ourselves, but we weren’t having fun either. We’d come too close to jumping. And yet Jess had come the closest of all of us to going over. JJ had only just come out of the stairwell. Martin had sat with his feet dangling over the edge but hadn’t actually nerved himself to do it. I’d never even got as far as the other side of the fence. But if Martin hadn’t sat on Jess’s head, she’d have done it, I’m sure of that.

“Let’s play a game,” said Jess.

“F— off,” said Martin.

It was impossible to go on being shocked by the bad language. I didn’t want to get to the stage where I was swearing myself, so I was quite glad that the night was drawing to an end. But the getting used to it made me realize something. It made me realize that nothing had ever changed for me. In Martin’s flat, I could look back on myself—the me from only a few hours before—and think, “Ooh, I was different then. Fancy being upset by a little bit of bad language!” I’d got older even during the night. You get used to that, the feeling that you’re suddenly different, when you’re younger. You wake up in the morning and you can’t believe that you had a crush on this person, or used to like that sort of music, even if it was only a few weeks ago. But when I had Matty, everything stopped, and nothing ever moved on. It’s the one single thing that makes you die inside, and eventually wants to make you die on the outside too. People have children for all sorts of reasons, I know, but one of those reasons must be that children growing up make you feel that life has a sense of momentum—kids send you on a journey. Matty and I got stuck at the bus stop, though. He didn’t learn to walk or talk, let alone read or write: he stayed the same every single day, and life stayed the same every single day, and I stayed the same too. I know it’s not much, but hearing the word “f—” hundreds of times in an evening, well, even that was something different for me, something new. When I first met Martin on the roof, I physically flinched from the words he used, and now they just bounced off me, as if I had a helmet on. Well, they would, wouldn’t they? You’d be a proper eejit if you flinched three hundred times in an evening. It made me wonder what else would change if I lived like this for just a few more days. Already I’d slapped someone, and now there I was drinking whisky and Coca-Cola. You know when people on the TV say “You should get out more”? Now I saw what they meant.

“Miserable bastard,” said Jess.

“Well, yes,” said Martin. “Exactly. Der, as you would say.”

“What have I said now?”

“You accused me of being a miserable bastard. I was merely pointing out that, at this particular stage of my life, and indeed on this particular night, «miserable» is a very appropriate adjective. I am a very miserable bastard indeed, as I thought you would have worked out by now.”

“What, still?”

Martin laughed. “Yes. Still. Even after all the fun we’ve had tonight. What would you say has changed in the last few hours? Have I still been to prison? I believe I still have. Did I sleep with a fifteen-year-old? Regrettably, nothing much seems to have changed on that score. Is my career still in pieces, and am I still estranged from my children? Unhappily, yes and yes. Despite attending a party with your amusing friends in Shoreditch and being called a c—? What kind of malcontent must I be, eh?”

“I thought we’d cheered each other up.”

“Really? Is that really and truly what you thought?”

“Yeah.”

“I see. A trouble shared is a trouble halved, and because there are four of us, it’s actually been quartered? That sort of thing?”

“Well, you’ve all made me feel better.”

“Yes. Well,”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. I’m glad we’ve made you feel better. Your depression was clearly more… amenable than ours. Less intractable. You’re very lucky. Unfortunately, JJ is still going to die, Maureen still has a profoundly disabled son and my life is still a complete and utter f—ing shambles. To be honest with you, Jess, I don’t see how a couple of drinks and a game of Monopoly are going to help. Fancy a game of Monopoly, JJ? Will that help the old CCR? Or not, really?”

I was shocked, but JJ didn’t seem to mind. He just smiled, and said, “I guess not.”

“I wasn’t thinking of Monopoly,” said Jess. “Monopoly takes too long.”

And then Martin shouted something at her, but I didn’t hear what it was because I was starting to retch, so I put my handover my mouth and ran for the bathroom. But as I said, I didn’t make it.

“Jesus f—ing Christ,” Martin said when he saw the mess I’d made. I couldn’t get used to that sort of swearing, though, the sort that involves Him. I don’t think that will ever seem right.

I was beginning to regret the whole CCR scam, so I wasn’t sorry when Maureen puked her whisky and Coke all over Martin’s ash-blond wooden floor. I’d been experiencing an impulse to own up, and owning up would have got my year off to a pretty bad start. That’s on top of the bad start it had already got off to, what with thinking of jumping off a high building, and lying about having CCR in the first place. Anyway, I was glad that suddenly we all crowded round Maureen and patting her on the back and offering her glasses of water, because the owning-up moment passed.

The truth was that I didn’t feel like a dying man; I felt like a man who every now and again wanted to die, and there’s a difference. A man who wants to die feels angry and full of life and desperate and bored and exhausted, all at the same time; he wants to fight everyone, and he wants to curl up in a ball and hide in a cupboard somewhere. He wants to say sorry to everyone, and he wants everyone to know just how badly they’ve all let him down. I can’t believe that dying people feel that way, unless dying is worse than I’d thought. (And why shouldn’t it be? Every other fucking thing is worse than I thought, so why should dying be any different?)