Nick Hornby - A Long Way Down

LINDA: Why Radiohead?

(You couldn’t say anything without her asking a question. I said Radiohead because they don’t look like anything much. They’re just blokes, aren’t they?)

ME: I don’t know. Or Blur. Or… Who’s that guy? In that film? He’s not the one who’s not married to Jennifer Lopez, he’s the other one, and they won an Oscar, because he was good at maths even though he was only a cleaner… The blond one. Matt.

LINDA: The angel looked like Matt Damon?

ME: Yeah, I suppose. A bit.

LINDA: So. A handsome angel who looked like Matt Damon.

ME: He’s not all that, Matt Damon. But, yeah.

LINDA: And when did he appear, this angel?

ME: When?

LINDA: Yes, when. I mean, how close to… to jumping were you?

ME: Oh, really close, man. He came in at the last minute.

LINDA: Wow. So you were standing on the ledge? All of you?

ME: Yeah. We’d decided we were going to go over together. For company, sort of thing. So we were standing there saying our goodbyes to each other and that. And we were going to do One, Two, Three, Jump and we heard this voice behind us.

LINDA: You must have been frightened out of your wits.

ME: Yeah…

LINDA: It was a wonder you didn’t fall off.

ME: Yeah.

LINDA: So you all turned around…

ME: Yeah. We all turned around, and he said…

LINDA: Sorry. What was he wearing?

ME: Just a sort of… Like a baggy suit, sort of thing. A baggy white suit. Quite fashionable, really. Looked like it had set him back a few quid.

LINDA: A designer suit?

ME: Yeah.

LINDA: Tie?

ME: No. No tie.

LINDA: An informal angel.

ME: Yeah. Smart-casual, anyway.

LINDA: And did you know immediately he wasn’t a human man?

ME: Oh, yeah.

LINDA: How?

ME: He was all… fuzzy. Like he wasn’t tuned in properly. And you could see right through him. You couldn’t see his liver or anything like that. You could just see like the buildings on the other side of him. Oh, yeah—plus, he was hovering above the roof.

LINDA: How high?

ME: High, man. When I first saw him, I was like, that guy is five metres tall. But when I looked down at his feet, they were a metre above the ground.

LINDA: So he was about twelve feet tall?

ME: Two metres above the ground, then.

LINDA: So he was nine feet tall.

ME: Three metres. Whatever.

LINDA: So his feet were above your heads.

ME: (Becoming fucked off with her going on about metres, but trying not to show it) To begin with. But then he sort of worked out that he’d overdone it, and he, you know. Came down a bit. I got the impression that he hadn’t done any hovering for a while. He was a bit rusty.

(I was just making this stuff up as I went along. I mean, you know already I was making it up. But seeing as how I’d called her without thinking any of it through, I thought I was doing really well. She seemed to like it, anyway.)

LINDA: Amazing.

ME: Yeah. It really was.

LINDA: So what did he say?

ME: He said, you know, Don’t jump. But he said it very peacefully. Calmly. He had this like inner wisdom. You could tell he was a messenger from God.

LINDA: Did he say that?

ME: Not in so many words. But you could work it out.

LINDA: Because of the inner wisdom.

ME: Yeah. He had that sort of air about him, like he’d met God personally. It was wicked.

LINDA: That’s all he said?

ME: He was like, Your time hasn’t come yet. Go back down and send people this message of comfort and joy. And tell them that war is stupid. Which is something I personally believe.

(That last bit, the Which I personally believe bit, wasn’t part of the play. I’m just giving you extra information, so you can get a better picture of the kind of person I am.)

LINDA: And do you intend to spread that message?

ME: Yeah. Course. That’s one of the reasons we want to do this interview. And if any of your readers are like world leaders or generals or terrorists or whatever, then they should know that God is not a happy bunny at the moment. He’s well pissed off with that side of things.

LINDA: I’m sure our readers will find that very thought-provoking. And you all saw it?

ME: Oh, yeah. You couldn’t miss him.

LINDA: Martin Sharp saw it?

ME: Oh, yeah. Course. He saw it… he saw it more than any of us.

(I didn’t quite know what that meant, but I could tell it was important to her that Martin was involved.)

LINDA: So now what?

ME: Well. We’ve got to work out what we’re going to do.

LINDA: Of course. Will you be talking to any other newspapers?

ME: Oh, yeah. Definitely.

I was pleased with that. I got her up to five grand in the end. I had to promise that she’d have a chance to speak to everybody, though.

It didn’t seem like it was going to be too difficult, at first. OK, none of us was thrilled that Jess had got us into this angel thing, but it didn’t seem worth falling out over. We’d grit our teeth, say we’d seen an angel, take the money and try and forget it ever happened. But then the next day you’re sitting in front of a journalist, and you’re all agreeing with a straight face that this fucking angel looked like Matt Damon, and loyalty seemed like the dumbest of all the virtues. It wasn’t like you could just go through the motions, either, when you’re supposed to have seen an angel. You can’t just say, “Yeah, blah, angel, whatever.” Seeing an angel is clearly a big deal, so you’ve got to act like it’s a big deal, with excitement and open-mouthed awe, and it’s hard to do open-mouthed awe through gritted teeth. Maureen was maybe the one person who could have been convincing, because she believed in that stuff, kind of. But because she believed in it, she was the one who had the most trouble with the lies. “Maureen,” said Jess patiently and slowly, as if Maureen were simply being dumb, rather than fearing for her immortal soul, “It’s for five thousand pounds .”

The paper arranged for someone from the care home to sit for Matty, and we met Linda in the cafe where we’d had breakfast on New Year’s morning. We had our photos taken—mostly group shots, but then they took one or two more outside, with us pointing at the sky and our jaws unhinged with wonder. They didn’t end up using those, probably because one or two of us overdid it a little, and one of us wouldn’t do it at all. And then, after the shoot, Linda asked us questions.

It was Martin she was after—he was the prize. If she could get Martin Sharp to say that an angel had kept him from killing himself—i.e., if she could get Martin Sharp to say, “I AM A WACKO -OFFICIAL”—she had a front-page story. Martin knew it, too, so his performance was heroic, or as close to heroism as you can come if you’re a sleazy talk-show host who is never likely to do anything involving actual heroism. Martin telling Linda that he’d seen an angel reminded me of that Sidney Carton guy in A Tale of Two Cities going to the guillotine so that his buddy could live: Martin wore the expression of a man about to have his head sliced off for the greater good. That Sidney guy, though, he’d discovered his inner nobility, so he probably looked noble, but Martin just looked pissed off.

Jess did all the talking to begin with, and then Linda got tired of her, and started to ask Martin questions directly.

“So when this figure began hovering… Hovering? Is that right?”

“Hovering,” confirmed Jess. “Like I said, he hovered too high at first, because of being out of practice, but then he found the right level.”

Martin winced, like the angel’s refusal to put his feet on the ground somehow made things more embarrassing for him.