Nick Hornby - A Long Way Down

“Well. We went to that party. And we went on holiday. And, you know. There’s been one thing after another.”

“Terrible, isn’t it, how that happens? You’ll have to block out some time in your diary. Otherwise life will keep getting in the way.”

“Shut up.”

“Guys, guys…”

I had, once again, allowed myself to be drawn into an undignified spat with Jess. I decided to act in a more statesmanlike manner.

“Like JJ, I have spent a long night cogitating,” I said.

“Tosser.”

“And my conclusion is that we are not serious people. We were never serious. We got closer than some, but nowhere near as close as others. And that puts us in something of a bind.”

“I agree. We’re fucked,” said JJ. “Sorry, Maureen.”

“I’m missing something,” said Jess.

“This is it,” I said. “This is us.”

“What is?”

“This.” I gestured vaguely at our surroundings, the company we were keeping, the rain outside, all of which seemed to speak eloquently of our current condition. “This is it. There’s no way out. Not even the way out is the way out. Not for us.”

“Fuck that,” said Jess. “And I’m not sorry, Maureen.”

“The other night, I was going to tell you about something I’d read in a magazine. About suicide. Do you remember? Anyway, this guy reckoned that the crisis period lasts ninety days.”

“What guy?” JJ asked.

“This suicidologist guy.”

“That’s a job?”

“Everything’s a job.”

“So what?” said Jess.

“So we’ve had forty-six of the ninety days.”

“And what happens after the ninety days?”

“Nothing happens ,” I said. “Just… things are different. Things change. The exact arrangement of stuff that made you think your life was unbearable… It’s got shifted around somehow. It’s like a sort of real-life version of astrology.”

“Nothing’s going to change for you,” said Jess. “You’re still going to be the geezer off the telly who slept with the fifteen-year-old and went to prison. No one will ever forget that.”

“Yes. Well. I’m sure the ninety days thing won’t apply in my case,” I said. “If that makes you happier.”

“Won’t help Maureen, either,” said Jess. “Or JJ. I might change, though. I do, quite a lot.”

“My point, anyway, is that we extend our deadline again. Because… Well, I don’t know about you lot. But I realized this morning that I’m not, you know, ready to go solo just yet. It’s funny, because I don’t actually like any of you very much. But you seem to be, I don’t know… What I need. You know how sometimes you know you should be eating more cabbage? Or drinking more water? It’s like that.”

There was a general shuffling of feet, which I interpreted as a declaration of reluctant solidarity.

“Thanks, man,” said JJ. “Very touching. When’s the ninety days up?”

“March 31st.”

“That’s a bit of a coincidence, isn’t it?” said Jess. “Exactly three months.”

“What’s your point?”

“Well. It’s not scientific, is it?”

“What, and eighty-eight days would be?”

“More scientific, yeah.”

“No, I get it,” said JJ. “Three months sounds about right. Three months is like a season.”

“Very much like,” I agreed. “Given there are four seasons, and twelve months in a year.”

“So we’re seeing the winter through together. That’s cool. Winter is when you get the blues,” JJ said.

“So it would appear,” I said.

“But we gotta do something,” said JJ. “We can’t just sit around waiting for three months to be up.”

“Typical American,” said Jess. “What do you want to do? Bomb some poor little country somewhere?”

“Sure. It would take my mind off things, some bombing.”

“What should we do?” I asked him.

“I don’t know, man. I just know that if we spend six weeks pissing and moaning, then we’re not helping ourselves.”

“Jess is right,” I said. “Typical bloody American. «Helping ourselves.» Self-help. You can do anything if you put your mind to it, right? You could be President.”

“What is it with you assholes? I’m not talking about becoming President. I’m talking about, like, finding a job waiting tables.”

“Great,” said Jess. “Let’s all not kill ourselves because someone gave us a fifty pence tip.”

“No fucking chance of that in this fucking country,” said JJ. “Sorry, Maureen.”

“You could always just go back where you came from,” said Jess. “That would change something. Also, your buildings are higher, aren’t they?”

“So,” I said. “Forty-four days to go.”

There was something else in the article I read: an interview with a man who’d survived after jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. He said that two seconds after jumping, he realized that there was nothing in his life he couldn’t deal with, no problem he couldn’t solve—apart from the problem he’d just given himself by jumping off the bridge. I don’t know why I didn’t tell the others about that; you’d think it might be relevant information. I wanted to keep it to myself for the time being, though. It seemed like something that might be more appropriate later, when the story was over. If it ever was.

It was in the local paper, the following week. I cut the story out, and kept it, and I read it every so often, just to try to understand the poor man better. I couldn’t keep him out of my head. He was called David Fawley, and he’d jumped because of problems with his wife and children. She’d met someone else, and moved away to be with him, and taken the kiddies with her. He only lived two streets away, which seemed very strange to me, a coincidence, until I realized that people in my local paper always lived locally, unless someone had visited to open a school or something. Glenda Jackson came to Matty’s school once, for example.

Martin was right. When I saw David Fawley jump, it made me see that I hadn’t been ready on New Year’s Eve. I’d been ready to make the preparations, because it gave me something to do—New Year’s Eve was something to look forward to, in a strange sort of way. And when I’d met some people to talk to, then I was happy to talk, instead of jump. They’d have let me jump, I think, once I’d told them why I was up there. They wouldn’t have got in my way, or sat on my head. But even so, I’d gone down the stairs and on to the party. This poor David hadn’t wanted to talk to us, that was the thing I’d noticed. He’d come to jump, not to natter. I thought I’d gone to jump, but I ended up nattering anyway.

If you thought about it, this David fella and me, we were opposites. He’d killed himself because his children were gone, and I’d thought about it because my son was still around. There must be a lot of that goes on. There must be people who kill themselves because their marriage is over, and others who kill themselves because they can’t see a way out of the one they’re in. I wondered whether you could do that with everyone, whether every unhappy situation had an unhappy opposite situation. I couldn’t see it with the people who had debts, though. No one ever killed himself because he had too much money. Those sheikhs with the oil don’t seem to commit suicide very often. Or if they do, no one ever talks about it. Anyway, perhaps there was something in this opposites idea. I had someone, and David had no one, and he’d jumped and I hadn’t. When it comes to committing suicide, nobody beats somebody, if you see what I mean. There’s no rope holding you back.

I prayed for David’s soul, even though I knew it wouldn’t do him any good, because he had committed the sin of despair, and my prayers would fall on deaf ears. And then after Matty had gone to sleep, I left him alone for five minutes and walked down the road to see where David had lived. I don’t know why I did that, or what I hoped to see, but there was nothing there, of course. It was one of these streets full of big houses that have been turned into flats, so that’s what I found out, that he lived in a flat. And then it was time to turn around and go home.