Nick Hornby - A Long Way Down

I chose the posters the same as I chose all the other things that Jess had probably been rummaging through, the tapes and the books and the football boots and the computer games and the videos. The diaries and the trendy address books. (Address books! Dear God! Of all the things that spell it out. I can put a tape on for him, and hope he was listening to it, but what am I going to fill an address book with? I haven’t even got one of my own.) The jazzy pens, the camera and the Walkman. Lots of watches. There’s a whole unlived teenage life in there.

This all began years ago, when I decided to decorate his bedroom.

He was eight, and he still slept in a nursery—clowns on the curtains, bunny rabbits on the frieze round the wall, all the things I’d chosen when I was waiting for him and I didn’t know what he was. And it was all peeling away, and it looked terrible, and I hadn’t done anything about it because it made me think too much about what wasn’t happening to him, all the ways he wasn’t growing up. What was I going to replace the bunny rabbits with? He was eight, so perhaps trains and rocket ships and maybe even footballers were the right sort of thing for him—but of course he didn’t know what any of those things were, what they meant, what they did. But there again, he didn’t know what the rabbits were either, or the clowns. So what was I supposed to do? Everything was pretending, wasn’t it? The only thing I could do that wasn’t make-believe was paint the walls white, get a plain pair of curtains. That would be a way of telling him and me and anyone else who came in that I knew he was a vegetable, a cabbage, and I wasn’t trying to hide it. But then, where does it stop? Does that mean you can never buy him a T-shirt with a word on it, or a picture, because he’ll never read, and he can’t make any sense of pictures? And who knows whether he even gets anything out of colours, or patterns? And it goes without saying that talking to him is ridiculous, and smiling at him, and kissing him on the head. Everything I do is pretending, so why not pretend properly?

In the end, I went for trains on the curtains, and your man from Star Wars on the lampshade. And soon after that I started buying comics every now and again, just to see what a lad of his age might be reading and thinking about. And we watched the Saturday morning television together, so I learned a little bit about pop singers he might like, and sometimes about the TV programmes he’d be watching. I said before that one of the worst things was never moving on, and pretending to move on doesn’t change anything. But it helps. Without it, what is there left? And anyway, thinking about these things helped me to see Matty, in a strange sort of a way. I suppose it must be what they do when they think of a new character for EastEnders : they must say to themselves, well, what does this person like? What does he listen to, who are his friends, what football team does he support? That’s what I did—I made up a son. He supports Arsenal, he likes fishing, although he doesn’t have a rod yet. He likes pop music, but not the sort of pop music where people sing half-naked and use a lot of swear words. Very occasionally, people ask what he wants for his birthday or Christmas, and I tell them, and they know better than to act surprised. Most distant family members have never met him, and never asked to. All they know about him is just that he’s not all there, or there’s something not right with him. They don’t want to know any more, so they never say, Oh, he can fish? Or, in the case of my Uncle Michael, Oh, he can swim underwater and then look at his watch while he’s down there? They’re just grateful to be told what to do. Matty took over the whole flat, in the end. You know how kids do. Stuff everywhere.

“It doesn’t matter whether I know who they are or not,” I said. “They belong to Matty.”

“Oh, he’s a big fan of…”

“Just do as you’re told and put them back,” said Martin. “Put them back or get out. How much of a bitch do you really want to be?”

One day, I thought, I’ll learn to say that for myself.

Matty’s posters weren’t mentioned again that day. We were all curious, of course, but Jess had ensured that JJ and I couldn’t express this curiosity: Jess set things up so that you were either for her or against her, and in this matter, as in so many others, we were against her—which meant staying quiet on this issue. But because we resented being made to stay quiet, we became aggressive and noisy on any other issue we could bring to mind.

“You can’t stand your dad, can you?” I asked her.

“No, course not. He’s a tosser.”

“But you live with him?”

“So?”

“How can you stick it, man?” JJ asked her.

“Can’t afford to move out. Plus they’ve got a cleaner and cable and broadband and all that.”

“Ah, to be young and idealistic and principled!” I said. “Anti-globalization, pro-cleaner, eh?”

“Yeah, I’m really going to be lectured by you two jerks. Plus there’s the other thing. The Jen thing. They worry.”

Ah, yes. The Jen thing. JJ and I were momentarily chastened. Looked at in a certain light, the previous conversation could be summarized as follows: a man recently imprisoned for having sex with a minor, and another who had fabricated a fatal disease because to do so saved him some time, trouble and face had ridiculed a grieving teenager for wanting to be at home with her grieving parents. I made a note to put aside some time later so that I could synopsize it differently.

“We were sorry to hear about your sister,” said Maureen.

“Yeah, well, it didn’t happen yesterday, did it?”

“We were sorry anyway,” said JJ wearily. Conceding the moral high ground to Jess simply meant that she could piss all over everyone until she got thrown off again.

“Got used to it now.”

“Have you?” I asked.

“Sort of…”

“Must be a strange thing to have to get used to.”

“Bit.”

“Don’t you think about it all the time?” JJ asked her.

“Can’t we talk about what we’re supposed to be talking about?”

“Which is what, exactly?”

“About what we’re going to do. About the papers and all that.”

“Do we have to do anything?”

“I think so,” said JJ.

“They’ll forget about us soon, you know,” I said. “It’s only because fuck all happens, sorry, Maureen, at the beginning of the year.”

“What if we don’t want them to forget about us?” said Jess.

“Why the hell would we want them to remember?” I asked her.

“We could make some dosh. And it’d be something to do.”

“ What would be something to do?”

“I dunno. I just… I get the feeling that we’re different. That people would like us, and be interested in us.”

“You’re mad.”

“Yeah. Exactly. That’s why they’d be interested in me. I could even play it up a bit, if you like.”

“I’m sure that won’t be necessary,” I said quickly, on behalf of the three of us, and indeed on behalf of the entire population of Britain. “You’re fine as you are.”

Jess smiled sweetly, surprised by the unsought compliment. “Thanks, Martin. So are you. And you—they’d want to know how you fucked up your life with the girl. And you, JJ, they’d want to know about pizzas and all that. And Maureen could tell everyone about how shit it is living with Matty. See, we’d be like superheroes, the X-Men or whatever. We’ve all got some secret superpower.”

“Yeah,” said JJ. “Right on. I have the superpower of delivering pizzas. And Maureen has the superpower of a disabled son.”

“Well, all right, superpower is the wrong word. But, you know. Some thing .”