Nick Hornby - A Long Way Down

“So when the angel was hovering in front of you, Martin, what did you think?”

“Think?” Martin repeated.

“We didn’t think much, did we?” said Jess. “We were too stunned.”

“That’s right,” said Martin.

“But you must have thought something,” Linda said. “Even if it was only, Bloody hell, I wonder if I could get him on to Rise and Shine with Penny and Martin .” She chuckled encouragingly.

“Well,” said Martin. “I haven’t been presenting the show for a while now, remember. So it would have been a waste of time asking him.”

“You’ve got your cable show, though.”

“Yes.”

“So maybe he would have gone on that.” She chuckled encouragingly again.

“We tend to book mainly showbiz stuff. Stand-up comedians, soap stars… The odd sportsman.”

“So you’re saying you wouldn’t have had him on.” Once she’d started this line of questioning, Linda seemed kind of reluctant to let it drop.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” she snorted. “I mean, it’s not David Letterman, your show, is it? It’s not like people are swarming all over you to get on it.”

“We do all right.”

I couldn’t help feeling that she was missing the point of the story. An angel—possibly like an emissary from the Lord Himself, who knows?—had visited a tower-block in Archway to stop us all from killing ourselves, and she wanted to know why he hadn’t been booked on a talk show. I don’t know, man. You’d have thought that would be one of the questions nearer the end of the interview.

“He’d have been the first person on that we’d ever heard of, anyway.”

“You’d heard of him before, had you?” said Martin. “This particular angel? The one who looked like Matt Damon?”

“I’ve heard of angels ,” she said.

“Well, I’m sure you’ve heard of actresses ,” said Martin. “We’ve had them on, too.”

“Where are we going with this?” I said. “You really wanna write a piece about why the Angel Matt wasn’t a guest on Martin’s show?”

“Is that what you call him?” she said. “The Angel Matt?”

“Usually we just call him «The Angel»,” said Jess. “But…”

“Would you mind if Martin answered a couple of questions?”

“You’ve asked him loads already,” said Jess. “Maureen hasn’t said anything. JJ hasn’t said very much.”

“Martin’s the one that most people will have heard of,” said Linda. “Martin? Is that what you call him?”

“Just «The Angel»,” said Martin. He looked happier than this on the night he tried to kill himself.

“Can I just check something?” said Linda. “You did see him, Martin, didn’t you?”

Martin shifted in his seat. You could tell he was scouting around the inside of his head, just to make sure that there were no escape routes he’d overlooked.

“Oh, yes,” said Martin. “I saw him, all right. He was… He was awesome.”

And with that, he finally walked into the cage that Linda had opened for him. The public at large were now free to poke sticks at him and call him names, and he just had to sit there and take it, like an exhibit in a freak show.

But then, we were all freaks now. When friends and family and ex-lovers opened their newspapers the next morning, they could come to one of only two possible conclusions: 1) we’d all looped the loop, or 2) we were scam artists. OK, strictly speaking, there was a third conclusion—we were telling the truth. We saw an angel that looked like Matt Damon, who for reasons best known to himself told us to get down off the roof. But I got to say, I don’t know anyone who’d believe that. Maybe my great-aunt Ida, who lives in Alabama and handles snakes every Sunday morning in her church, but then, she’s nuts too.

And I don’t know, man, but to me it seemed a long way back from there. If you were gonna draw a map, you’d say that mortgages and relationships and jobs and all that stuff, all the things that constitute a regular life, were in like New Orleans, and by coming out with all this horseshit we’d just put ourselves somewhere north of Alaska. Who’s going to give a job to a guy who sees angels? And who’s going to give a job to a guy who says he sees angels because he might make a few bucks for himself? No, we were finished as serious people. We had sold our seriosity for twelve hundred and fifty of your English pounds, and as far as I could tell that money was going to have to last us for the rest of our lives, unless we saw God, or Elvis, or Princess Di. And next time we’d have to see them for real, and take photos.

Just over two years ago, REM’s manager came to see Big Yellow, and asked whether we were interested in his company representing us, and we said we were happy with what we had. REM! Twenty-six months ago! We were sitting around in this fancy office, and this guy, he was trying to persuade us , you know? And now I was sitting around with people like Maureen and Jess, taking part in a pathetic attempt to squeeze a few bucks out of someone who was desperate to give it to us, so long as we were prepared to totally embarrass ourselves. One thing the last couple of years has taught me is that there’s nothing you can’t fuck up if you try hard enough.

My only consolation was that I didn’t have any friends and family here; no one knew who I was, except for a few fans of the band, maybe, and I like to think that they weren’t the type to read Linda’s paper. And some of the guys at the pizza place might see a copy lying around somewhere, but they’d have smelled the cash, and the desperation, and they could have cared less about the humiliation.

So that just left Lizzie, and if she saw a picture of me looking insane, then so be it. You know why she dumped me? She dumped me because I wasn’t going to be a rock’n’roll star after all. Can you fucking believe that? No you can’t, because it’s beyond belief, and therefore unbelievable. “Shittiness, thy name is Woman.” That was my thinking, at that point in time, you know, that it wouldn’t hurt her to see how she’d messed me up. In fact, if I could be temporarily invisible, then one of the first things I’d do, after robbing a bank and going into the women’s showers at the gym and all the usual stuff, is put the paper down in front of her and watch her read it.

See, I didn’t know anything about anything then. I thought I knew things, but I didn’t.

I didn’t think I’d ever be able to go back to the church again after the interview with Linda. I’d been thinking about it a bit, the day before; I missed it terribly, and I wondered whether God would really mind if I just sat at the back and didn’t go to confession—sneaked out somehow before communion. But once I’d told Linda that I’d seen an angel, I knew that I’d have to keep away, that I wouldn’t be able to go back before I died. I didn’t know exactly what sin I’d committed, but I was sure that sins involving making up angels were mortal.

I still thought I was going to kill myself when the six weeks were up; what would have changed my mind? I was busier than I’d ever been, what with the press interviews and the meetings, and I suppose that took my mind off things. But all the running around just felt like last-minute activity, as if I had some things to get done before I went on holiday. That was who I was, then: a person who was going to kill herself soon, the moment I could get round to it.

I was going to say that I saw the first little glimmer of light that day, the day of the interview with Linda, but it wasn’t really like that. It was more as if I’d already chosen what I was going to watch on TV; and I was beginning to look forward to it, and then noticed that there was something else on that might be more interesting. I don’t know about you, but choice isn’t always what I want. You can end up flicking between one channel and another, and not watching either programme properly. I don’t know how people with the cable television cope.