Nick Hornby - A Long Way Down

“OK. So the short version is, all I ever wanted to do was be in a rock’n’roll band.”

“Rock’n’roll? Like Bill Haley and the Comets?” said Martin.

“No, man. That’s not… Like, I don’t know. The Stones. Or…”

“They’re not rock’n’roll,” said Jess. “Are they? They’re rock.”

“OK, OK, all I wanted to do was be in a rock band. Like the Stones, or, or…”

“Crusty music,” said Jess. She wasn’t being rude. She was just clarifying my terms.

“Whatever. Jeez. And a few weeks before Christmas my band finally split up for good. And soon after we split, I lost my girl. She was English. That’s why I was here.”

There was a silence.

“That’s it?” said Jess.

“That’s it.”

“That’s pathetic. I see why you came out with all that crap about the disease now. You’d rather die than not be in a band that sounds like the Rolling Stones? I’d be the opposite. I’d rather die if I was. Do people still like them in America? No one does here.”

“That’s Mick Jagger, isn’t it, the Rolling Stones?” Maureen asked. “They were quite good, weren’t they? They did well for themselves.” “Mick Jagger’s not sitting here eating stale Custard Creams like JJ, is he?”

They were new right before Christmas,” said Maureen. “Maybe I didn’t put the lid back on the biscuit tin properly.”

I was starting to think we were losing focus on my issues.

“The Stones thing… That’s kind of not important. That was just like an illustration. I just meant… songs, guitars, energy.”

“He’s about eighty,” said Jess. “He hasn’t got any energy.”

“I saw them in “90,” said Martin. “The night England lost to Germany in the World Cup on penalties. A chap from Guinness took a whole crowd of us, and everyone spent most of the evening listening to the radio. Anyway, he had a lot of energy then.”

“He was only seventy then,” said Jess.

“Will you shut the fuck up? Sorry, Maureen.” (From now on, just presume that every time I speak I say “fuck”, “fucking” or “motherfucker” and “Sorry, Maureen”, OK?) “I’m trying to tell you about my whole life.”

“No one’s stopping you,” said Jess. “But you’ve got to make it more interesting. That’s why we drift off and talk about biscuits.”

“OK, all right. Look, there’s nothing else for me. I’m qualified for nothing. I didn’t graduate from high school. I just had the band, and now it’s gone, and I didn’t make a cent out of it, and I’m looking at a life of flipping burgers.”

Jess snorted.

“Now what?”

“Just sounds funny, hearing a Yank say «flipping» instead of… you know what.”

“I don’t think he meant «flipping» like «flipping heck»,” said Martin. “I think he meant flipping as in turning them over. That’s what they call it.”

“Oh,” said Jess.

“And I’m worried it will kill me.”

“Hard work never killed anyone,” said Maureen.

“I don’t mind hard work, you know? But when we were touring and recording… That was me, that was who I was, and, and I just feel empty and frustrated and, and… See, when you know you’re good, you think that will be enough, that’ll get you there, and when it doesn’t… What are you supposed to do with it all? Where do you put it, huh? There’s nowhere for it to go, and, and it was… Man, it used to eat me up even when things were going OK, because even when things were going OK, I wasn’t on stage or recording like every minute of the day, and sometimes it felt like I needed to be, otherwise I’d explode, you know? So now, now there’s nowhere for it to go. We used to have this song…” I have no idea why I started up on this. “We used to have this song, this little like Motowny thing called «I Got Your Back», which me and Eddie wrote together, really together, which we didn’t usually do, and it was like, you know, a tribute to our friendship and how far back we went and blah blah. Anyhow, it was on our first album and it was like two minutes and thirty seconds long and no one really noticed it, I mean, people who actually bought the album didn’t even notice it. But we started playing it live, and it kind of got longer, and Eddie worked out this sweet solo. It wasn’t like a rock guitar solo; it was more like something maybe, I don’t know, Curtis Mayfield or Ernie Isley might have played. And sometimes, when we played around Chicago and we’d jam with friends on stage, we’d have maybe a sax solo or a piano solo or maybe even like a pedal steel or something, and after like a year or two it got to be this like ten-, twelve-minute showstopper . And we’d open with it or close with it or stick it in the middle somewhere if we were playing a long set, and to me it became the sound of pure fucking joy, sorry Maureen, you know? Pure joy. It felt like surfing, or, or whatever, a natural high. You could ride those chords like waves. I had that feeling maybe a hundred times a year, and not many people get it even once in their lives. And that’s what I had to give up, man, the ability to create that routinely, whenever I felt like it, as part of my working day, and… You know, now that I think about it, I can see why I made up that bullshit, sorry Maureen, about dying of some fucking disease, sorry again. Because that’s what it feels like. I’m dying of some disease that dries up all the blood in your veins and all your sap and, and everything that makes you feel alive, and…”

“Yeah, and?” said Martin. “You seem to have omitted the part about why you want to kill yourself.”

“That’s it,” I said. “This disease that dries up all the blood in your veins.”

“That’s just what happens to everyone,” said Martin. “It’s called «getting older». I felt like that even before I’d been to prison. Even before I slept with that girl. It’s probably why I slept with her, come to think of it.”

“No, I get it,” said Jess.

“Yeah?”

“Course I do. You’re fucked.” She waved an apologetic hand in Maureen’s direction, like a tennis player acknowledging a lucky net cord. “You thought you were going to be someone, but now it’s obvious you’re nobody. You haven’t got as much talent as you thought you had, and there was no plan B, and you got no skills and no education, and now you’re looking at forty or fifty years of nothing. Less than nothing, probably. That’s pretty heavy. That’s worse than having the brain thing, because what you got now will take a lot longer to kill you. You’ve got the choice of a slow painful death, or a quick merciful one.”

She shrugged.

She was right. She got it.

I would have got away with it if Jess hadn’t gone to the toilet. But you can’t stop people going to the toilet, can you? I was green. It never occurred to me that she’d be nosing around where she had no business.

She was gone a while, and she came back grinning all over her stupid face, holding a couple of the posters.

In one hand she had the poster of the girl, and in the other the poster of the black fella, the footballer.

“So whose are these then?” she said.

I stood up and shouted at her. “Put those back! They’re not yours!”

“I’d never have thought it of you,” she said. “So let’s work this out. You’re a dyke who has a bit of a thing for black guys with big thighs. Kinky. Hidden depths.”

It was typical of Jess, I thought. She only has a filthy imagination, which is to say, no imagination at all.

“Do you even know who these people are?” she said.

They’re Matty’s, the posters, not mine. He doesn’t know they’re his, of course, but they are; I chose them for him. I knew that the girl was called Buffy, because that’s what it said on the poster, but I didn’t really know who Buffy was; I just thought it would be nice for Matty to have an attractive young woman around the place, because he’s that age now. And I knew that the black fella played for Arsenal, but I only caught his first name, Paddy. I took advice from John at the church, who goes along to Highbury every week, and he said everyone loved Paddy, so I asked him if he’d bring me back a picture for my lad next time he went to a game. He’s a nice man, John, and he bought a great big picture of Paddy celebrating a goal, and he didn’t even want paying for it, but things got a little awkward afterwards. For some reason he decided my lad was a little lad, ten or twelve, and he promised to take him to a game. And sometimes on Sunday mornings, when Arsenal had lost on the Saturday, he asked how Matty was taking it, and sometimes when they’d won a big game he’d say, I’ll bet your lad’s happy, and so on. And then one Friday morning when I was wheeling Matty back from the shops, we bumped into him. And I could have said nothing, but sometimes you have to admit to yourself and to everyone else, This is Matty. This is my lad . So I did, and John never mentioned Arsenal again after that. I don’t miss that on a Sunday morning. There are lots of good reasons to lose your faith.