Nick Hornby - A Long Way Down

And then I saw me. She was my age, on her own, and she had a grown-up son in a wheelchair who didn’t know what day it was, and for a little while I stared at them, and the woman caught me staring and she obviously thought I was being rude. But it seemed so strange, such a coincidence, until I thought about it. And what I thought was, you could probably go into any church anywhere in the world and see a middle-aged woman, no husband in sight, pushing a young lad in a wheelchair. It was one of the reasons churches were invented, probably.

I have never been a particularly introspective man, and I say this unapologetically. One could argue that most of the trouble in the world is caused by introspection. I’m not thinking of things like war, famine, disease or violent crime—not that sort of trouble. I’m thinking more of things like annoying newspaper columns, tearful chat-show guests and so on. I can now see, however, that it’s hard to prevent introspection when one has nothing to do but sit around and think about oneself. You could try thinking about other people, I suppose, but the other people I tried to think about tended to be people I knew, and thinking about people I knew just brought me right back to where I didn’t want to be.

So in some ways it was a mistake, checking out of the hotel and going off on my own, because even though Jess irritated the hell out of me, and Maureen depressed me, they occupied a part of me that should never be left untenanted and unfurnished. It wasn’t just that, either: they also made me feel relatively accomplished. I’d done things, and because I’d done things, there was a possibility that I might do other things. They’d done nothing at all, and it was not difficult to imagine that they would continue to do nothing at all, and they made me look and feel like a world leader who runs a multinational company in the evenings and a scout troop at weekends.

I moved into a room that was more or less identical to the one I’d been staying in, except I treated myself to a sea view and a balcony. And I sat on the balcony for two solid days, staring at the sea view and being introspective. I can’t say that I was particularly inventive in my introspection; the conclusions I drew on the first day were that I’d made a pig’s ear of just about everything, and that I’d be better off dead, and if I died no one would miss me or feel bad about my death. And then I got drunk.

The second day was only very slightly more constructive; having reached the conclusion the previous evening that no one would miss me if I died, I realized belatedly that most of my woes were someone else’s fault: I was estranged from my children because of Cindy, and Cindy was also responsible for the end of my marriage. I made one mistake! OK, nine mistakes. Nine mistakes out of say a hundred opportunities! I got 91 per cent and I still failed the test! I was imprisoned a) due to entrapment, and b) because society’s attitudes to teenage sexuality are outmoded. I lost my job because of the hypocrisy and disloyalty of my bosses. So at the end of the second day, I wanted to kill other people, rather than kill myself, and that’s got to be healthier, surely?

Jess found me on the third day. I was sitting in a cafe reading a two-day-old Daily Express and drinking cafe con leche, and she sat down opposite me.

“Anything about us in there?” she said.

“I expect so,” I said. “But I’ve only read the sport and the horoscopes so far. Haven’t looked at the front page yet.”

“Fun-nee. Can I sit with you?”

“No.”

She sat down anyway.

“What’s all this about, then?”

“All what?”

“This… big sulk.”

“You think I’m sulking?”

“What would you call it, then?”

“I’m sick to death of you.”

“What have we done?”

“Not you plural. You singular. Toi , not vous .”

“Because of the other night?”

“Yes, because of the other night.”

“You just didn’t like me saying you were my dad, did you? You’re old enough to be.”

“I’m aware of that.”

“Yeah. So get over it. Take a chill pill.”

“I’m over it. I’ve taken one.”

“Looks like it.”

“Jess, I’m not sulking. You think I moved out of a hotel because you said I was your father?”

“I would.”

“Because you hate him? Or because you’d be ashamed of your daughter?”

“Both.”

This is what happens with Jess. When she thinks you’re withdrawing, she pretends to be thoughtful (and by thoughtful, I mean “self-loathing”, which to me is the only possible outcome of any prolonged thought on her part). I decided I wasn’t going to be taken in.

“I’m not going to be taken in. Get lost.”

“What have I done now? Fucking hell.”

“You’re pretending to be a remorseful human being.”

“What does «remorseful» mean?”

“It means you’re sorry.”

“For what?”

“Go away.”

“For what?”

“Jess, I want a holiday. Most of all, I want a holiday from you.”

“So you want me to get pissed up and take drugs.”

“Yes. I want that very much.”

“Yeah, right. And if I do I’ll get a bollocking.”

“Nope. No bollocking. Just go away.”

“I’m bored.”

“So go and find JJ or Maureen.”

“They’re boring.”

“And I’m not?”

“Which celebrities have you met? Have you met Eminem?”

“No.”

“You have, but you won’t tell me.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

I left some money on the table, got up and walked out. Jessfollowed me down the street. “What about a game of pool?”

“No.”

“Sex?”

“No.”

“You don’t fancy me?”

“No,”

“Some men do.”

“Have sex with them, then. Jess, I’m sorry to say it, but I thinkour relationship is over.”

“Not if I just follow you around all day it isn’t.”

“And you think that would work in the long term?”

“I don’t care about the long term. What about what my dad said about looking out for me? And I’d have thought you’d want to. I could replace the daughters you’ve lost. And that way you could find inner peace, see? There are loads of films like that.”

She offered this last observation matter-of-factly, as if it were somehow indicative of the truth of the scenario she’d imagined, rather than the opposite.

“What about the sex you were offering? How would that fit in with you replacing the daughters I’ve lost?”

“This would be a different, you know, thing. Route. A different way to go.”

We passed a ghastly looking bar called “New York City”.

“Thats where I got thrown out for fighting,” said Jess proudly. “They’ll kill me if I try to go in again.”

As if to illustrate the point, a grizzled-looking owner was standing in the doorway with a murderous look on his face.

“I need a pee. Don’t go anywhere.”

I walked into New York City, found a lavatory somewhere in the Lower East Side, put the TV pages of the Express over the seat, sat down and bolted the door. For the next hour or two I could hear her yelling at me through the wall, but eventually the yelling stopped; I presumed she’d gone, but I stayed in there anyway, just in case. It was eleven in the morning when I bolted the door, and three in the afternoon when I came out. I didn’t resent the time. It was that sort of holiday.

The last band Iwas in broke up after a show at the Hope and Anchor in Islington, just a few blocks from where my apartment is now. We knew we were breaking up before we went on stage, but we hadn’t talked about it. We’d played in Manchester the night before, to a very small crowd, and on the way down to London we’d all been a little snappy, but mostly just morose and quiet. It felt exactly the same as when you break up with a woman you love—the sick feeling in the stomach, the knowledge that nothing you can say will make any fucking difference—or, if it does, it won’t make any difference for any longer than like five minutes. It’s weirder with a band, because you kind of know that you won’t lose touch with the people the way you lose touch with a girlfriend. I could have sat in a bar with all three of them the next night without arguing, but the band would still have ceased to exist. It was more than the four of us; it was a house, and we were the people in it, and we’d sold it, so it wasn’t ours any more. I’m talking metaphorically here, obviously, because no one would have given us a fucking dime for it.