Nick Hornby - A Long Way Down

So Dad got straight on the phone and talked to his office and told them what I’d told him, and then when he’d finished, he said he was going out and I wasn’t to answer the phone or go anywhere or do anything. So I watched TV for a few minutes, and then I looked out the window to see if I could see that bloke, and I could, and he wasn’t on his own any more.

And then Dad came back with a newspaper—he’d been out to get an early edition. He looked about ten years older than he had before he left. And he held up the paper for me to see, and the headline said, “Martin SHARP AND JUNIOR MINISTER’S DAUGHTER IN SUICIDE PACT”.

So the whole sex confession bit had been a complete and utter fucking waste of time.

That was the first time we knew anything about Jess’s background, and I have to say that my first reaction was that it was pretty fucking hilarious. I was in my local store, buying some smokes, and Jess and Martin were staring at me from the counter, and I read the headline and whooped. Which, seeing as the headline was about their supposed suicide pact, got me some strange looks. An Education minister! Holy shit! You’ve got to understand, this girl talked like she’d been brought up by a penniless, junkie welfare mother who was younger than her. And she acted like education was a form of prostitution, something that only the weird or the desperate would resort to.

But then when I read the story, it wasn’t quite so funny. I didn’t know anything about Jess’s older sister Jennifer. None of us did. She disappeared a few years ago, when Jess was fifteen and she was eighteen; she’d borrowed her mother’s car and they found it abandoned near a well-known suicide spot down on the coast. Jennifer had passed her test three days before, as if that had been the point of learning to drive. They never found a body. I don’t know what that would have done to Jess—nothing good, I guess. And her old man… Jesus. Parents who only beget suicidal daughters are likely to end up feeling pretty dark about the whole child-raising scene.

And then, the next day, it became a whole lot less funny. There was another headline, and it read THERE WERE FOUR OF THEM!”, and in the article underneath it there was a description of these two freaks that I eventually realized were supposed to be Maureen and me. And at the end of the article, there was an appeal for further information and a phone number. There was even like a cash reward. Maureen and I had prices on our heads, man!

The information had clearly come from that asshole Chas; you could hear the whine in his voice right through the weird British tabloid prose. You had to give the guy a little credit, though, I guess. To me, the evening had consisted of four miserable people, failing dismally to do something they had set out to do—something that is not, let’s be honest, real hard to achieve. But Chas had seen something else: he’d seen that it was a story, something he might make a few bucks off of. OK, he must have known about Jess’s dad, but, you know, props to the guy. He still needed to put it together.

I’ll tell you the honest truth here: I got off on the story a little. It was kind of gratifying, in an ironic way, reading about myself, and that makes sense if you think about it. See, one of the things that had brought me down was my inability to leave my mark on the world through my music—which is another way of saying that I was suicidal because I wasn’t famous. Maybe I’m being hard on myself, because I know there was a little more to it than that, but that was sure a part of it. Anyway, recognizing that I was all washed up had got me on to the front page of the newspaper, and maybe there’s a lesson there somewhere.

So I was sort of enjoying myself, sitting in my flat, drinking coffee and smoking, taking pleasure from knowing that I was sort of famous and completely anonymous, all at the same time. And then the fucking buzzer went, and I jumped out of my skin.

“Who is it?”

“Is that JJ?” A young woman’s voice.

“Who is it?”

“I wondered if I could have a few words with you? About the other night?”

“How did you get this address?”

“I understand you were one of the people with Jess Crichton and Martin Sharp on New Year’s Eve? When they tried to kill themselves?”

“You understand wrong, ma’am.” This was the first sentence from either of us that didn’t have a question mark at the end. The low note at the end of mine was a relief, like a sneeze.

“Which bit have I got wrong?”

“All of it. You pressed the wrong buzzer.”

“I don’t think I did.”

“How do you know?”

“Because you didn’t deny you were JJ. And you asked how I’d got this address.”

Good point. They were professional, these people.

“I didn’t say it was my address, though, did I?”

There was a pause, while we both allowed the complete stupidity of this observation to float around.

She didn’t say anything. I imagined her standing out there in the street, shaking her head sadly at my pathetic attempts. I vowed not to say another word until she went away.

“Listen,” she said. “Was there a reason you came down?”

“What kind of reason?”

“I don’t know. Something that might cheer our readers up. Maybe, I don’t know, you gave each other the will to go on.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“The four of you looked down over London and saw the beauty of the world. Anything like that? Anything that might inspire our readers?”

Was there anything inspirational in our quest to find Chas? If there was, I couldn’t see it.

“Did Martin Sharp say anything that gave you a reason to live, for example? People would want to know, if he did.”

I tried to think if Martin had offered us any words of comfort she could use. He’d called Jess a fucking idiot, but that was more of a spirit-lifting rather than life-saving moment. And he’d told us that a guest on his show had been married to someone who’d been in a coma for twenty-five years, but that hadn’t helped us out much, either.

“I can’t think of anything, no.”

“I’m going to leave a card with my numbers on it, OK? Ring me when you feel ready to talk about this.”

I nearly ran out after her—I was, as we say, missing her already. I liked being the temporary center of her world. Shit, I liked being the temporary center of my own, because there hadn’t been too much there recently, and there wasn’t much there after she’d gone, either.

So I went home, and I put the television on, and made a cup of tea, and I phoned the centre, and the two young fellas delivered Matty to the house, and I put him in front of the TV, and it all started again. It was hard to see how I’d last another six weeks. I know we had an agreement, but I never thought I’d see any of them again anyway. Oh, we exchanged telephone numbers and addresses and so forth. (Martin had to explain to me that if I didn’t have a computer, then I wouldn’t have an email address. I wasn’t sure whether I’d have one or not. I thought it might have come in one of those envelopes you throw away.) But I didn’t think we’d actually be using them. I’ll tell you God’s honest truth, even though it’ll make me sound as if I was feeling sorry for myself: I thought they might see each other, but they’d keep me out of it. I was too old for them, and too old-fashioned, with my shoes and all. I’d had an interesting time going to parties and seeing all the strange people there, but it hadn’t changed anything. I was still going back to pick Matty up, and I still had no life to live beyond the life I was already sick and tired of. You might be thinking, well, why isn’t she angry? But of course I am angry. I don’t know why I ever pretend I’m not. The church had something to do with it, I suppose. And maybe my age, because we were taught not to grumble, weren’t we? But some days—most days—I want to scream and shout and break things and kill people. Oh, there’s anger, right enough. You can’t be stuck with a life like this one and not get angry. Anyway. A couple of days later the phone rang, and this woman with a posh voice said, “Is that Maureen?”