Nick Hornby - A Long Way Down

That evening, I watched a programme on the television about a Scottish detective who doesn’t get on with his ex-wife very well, so I thought about David some more, because I don’t suppose he got on very well with his ex-wife either. And I’m not sure this was the point of the programme, but there wasn’t much room in it for lots of arguments between the Scottish detective and his ex-wife, because most of the time he had to find out who’d killed this woman and left her body outside her ex-husband’s house to make it look as though he’d killed her. (This was a different ex-husband.) So in an hour-long programme, there were probably only ten minutes of him arguing with his ex-wife, and his children, and fifty minutes of him trying to find who’d put the woman’s body in the dustbin. Forty minutes, I suppose, if you took out the advertisements. I noticed because I was a bit more interested in the arguments than I was in the body, and the arguments didn’t seem to come around very often.

And that seemed about right to me, ten minutes an hour. It was probably about right for the programme, because he was a detective, and it was more important for him and for the viewers that he spent the biggest chunk of his time on solving the murders. But I think even if you’re not in a TV programme, then ten minutes an hour is about right for your problems. This David Fawley was unemployed, so there was a fair old chance that he spent sixty minutes an hour thinking about his ex-wife, and his children, and when you do that, you’re bound to end up on the roof of Toppers’ House.

I should know. I don’t have arguments, but there have been lots of times in my life when I couldn’t stop Matty becoming sixty minutes an hour. There was nothing else to think about. I’d had more on my mind recently, because of the others, and the things that have happened in their lives. But most of the time, on most days, it was just me and my son, and that meant trouble.

Anyway, that evening there was a whole jumble of thoughts. I lay in bed half-asleep, thinking about David, and the Scottish detective, and coming down off the roof to find Chas and eventually I got these thoughts unknotted, and when I woke up in the morning I decided it would be a good idea to find out where Martin’s wife and children lived, and then go and talk to them all and see if there was any chance of getting the family back together. Because if that worked, then Martin wouldn’t get so eaten up about some things, and he’d have somebody rather than nobody, and I’d have something to do for forty or fifty minutes an hour, and it would help everybody.

But I was a hopeless detective. I knew Martin’s wife’s name was Cindy, so I looked Cindy Sharp up in the phone book, and she wasn’t there, and I ran out of ideas after that. So I asked Jess, because I didn’t think JJ would approve of my plan, and she found all the information we needed in about five minutes, on a computer. But then she wanted to come with me to see Cindy, and I said she could. I know, I know. But you try telling her she can’t have something she wants.

I got on Dad’s computer, and put “Cindy Sharp” into Google, and I found an interview she’d given to some woman’s magazine when Martin had gone to prison. “Cindy Sharp talks for the first time about her heartbreak” and all that. You could even click on a picture of her and her two girls. Cindy looked like Penny, except older and a bit fatter, because of having had kids and that. And what’s the betting that Penny looked like the fifteen-year-old, except that the fifteen-year-old was even slimmer than Penny, and had bigger tits or whatever? They’re tossers, aren’t they, men like Martin? They think women are like fucking laptops or whatever, like, My old one’s knackered and anyway, you can get ones that are slimmer and do more stuff now.

So I read the interview, and it said she lived in this village called Torley Heath, about forty miles outside London. And if she was trying to stop people like us from knocking on the door to tell her to get back with her husband, then she made a big mistake, because the interviewer described exactly where her house is in the village—opposite an old-fashioned corner shop, next door but one to the village school. She told us all this because she wanted us to know how idealistic or whatever Cindy’s life is. Apart from her ex-husband being in prison for sleeping with a fifteen-year-old.

We decided not to tell JJ. We were pretty sure he’d stop us for some bullshit reason or another. He’d say, “It’s none of your business,” or, “You’ll fuck up the last chance he’s got.” But we thought we had a strong argument, Maureen and I. Our argument was this. Maybe Cindy did hate Martin because he was a real playa who went anywhere with anyone. But now he was suicidal, and he probably wouldn’t go anywhere with anyone, or at least not for a while. So basically, if she wouldn’t take him back, she had to hate him enough to want him to die. And that’s a lot of hate. True, he hadn’t ever said he wanted to get back with her, but he needed to be in a secure domestic environment, in a place like Torley Heath. It was better to do nothing in a place where there was nothing to do than in London, where there was trouble—teenage girls and nightclubs and tower-blocks. That’s what we felt.

So we had a day out. Maureen made horrible like old-fashioned sandwiches with egg and stuff in them, which I couldn’t eat. And we got the tube to Paddington, then the train to Newbury, and then a bus to Torley Heath. I’d been worried that Maureen and I wouldn’t have much to say to each other, and we’d get really bored, and I’d end up doing something stupid, because of the boredom. But it really wasn’t like that, mostly because of me, and the effort I put in. I decided that I was going to be like an interviewer type-person, and I’d spend the journey finding out about Maureen’s life, no matter how boring or depressing it was. The only trouble was that it was actually too boring and depressing to listen to, so I sort of switched off when she was talking, and thought up the next question. A couple of times she looked at me funny, so I’m guessing that quite often she had just told me something and then I asked her about it again. Like once, I tuned back in to hear her go, something something something met Frank. So I went, When did you meet Frank, but I think what she’d just said was, That was when I met Frank. So I’d have to work on that, if I was ever to be an interviewer. But let’s face it, I wouldn’t be interviewing people who did nothing and had a disabled son, would I? So it would be easier to concentrate, because they’d be talking about their new films and other stuff you’d actually want to know about.

Anyway, the point was that we went through a whole journey to the middle of fucking nowhere without me asking her whether she had sex doggy style or anything like that. And what I realized then was that I’d come a long way since New Year’s Eve. I’d grown as a person. And that made me think that our story was sort of coming to an end, and it was going to be a happy ending. Because I’d grown as a person, and also we were in this period where we were sorting out each other’s problems. We weren’t just sitting around moping. That’s when stories end, isn’t it? When people show they’ve learned things, and problems get solved. I’ve seen loads of films like that. We’d sort out Martin today, and then turn our minds to JJ, and then me, and then Maureen. And we’d meet on the roof after ninety days, and smile, and hug, and know that we had moved on.

The bus stop was right outside the village shop that the article in the magazine had gone on about. So we got off the bus and stood outside the shop and looked across the road to see what we could see. What we saw was this little cottagey sort of place with a low wall, and you could look into the garden, and in the garden there were two little girls all wrapped up in hats and scarves and they were playing with a dog. So I went to Maureen, Do you know the names of Martin’s kids? And she was like, Yes, they’re called Polly and Maisie—which seemed about right, I thought. I could imagine Martin and Cindy having kids called Polly and Maisie, which are sort of old-fashioned posh names, so everyone could pretend that Mr Darcy or whatever lived next door. So I shouted, Oo-o, Polly! Maisie! And they looked at us and came towards us, and that was my detective work over.