Nick Hornby - A Long Way Down

We knocked on the door and Cindy answered, and she looked at me as if she half-recognized me, and I was like, I’m Jess. I’m one of the Toppers’ House Four, and I was, you know, linked to your husband or whatever in the newspapers. Which was a lie, by the way. (That was me telling her it was a lie, not me telling you. I really wish I knew where speech marks or whatever went. I can see the point of them now.)

And she said, Ex-husband, which was sort of an unfriendly and unhelpful start.

And I went, Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it?

And she went, Is it?

And I went, Yes, it is. Because he doesn’t have to be yourex-husband.

And she went, Oh, yes he does.

And we hadn’t even gone through the front door.

At that point Maureen goes, Do you think we could come in and talk to you? I’m Maureen. I’m also a friend of Martin’s. We’ve come down from London on the train.

And the bus, I said. I just wanted her to know we’d made an effort.

And Cindy said, I’m sorry, come in. Not I’m sorry, fuck off home, which is what I thought she was going to say. She was apologizing for her bad manners in making us stand out on the doorstep. So I was like, Oh, this is going to be easy. In ten minutes I’ll have bullied her into taking him back.

So we walk into the cottage, and it’s cosy in there, but not all like out of a magazine, which I thought it would be. The furniture didn’t really match, and it was old, and it smelled of the dog a bit. She showed us through to the sitting room and there was this geezer in there sitting by the fire. He was nice-looking, younger than her, and I thought, Oh-oh, he’s got his feet under the table. Because he was listening to a Walkman with his shoes off, and you don’t listen to a Walkman with your shoes off in someone’s house if you’re just visiting, do you?

Cindy went up to him and tapped him on the shoulder and said, We’ve got visitors, and he was like, Oh, I’m sorry. I was listening to Stephen Fry reading Harry Potter. The children love it, so I thought I should give it a whirl. Have you heard it? So I was like, Yeah, do I look nine years old to you? And he didn’t know what to say to that. He took the headphones off and pressed a button on the machine.

And Cindy said, It’s Paul’s dog that the girls are playing with. And I was like, Yeah, so? But I didn’t say that.

Cindy told him that we were friends of Martin’s, and he asked whether she wanted him to leave, and she said, No, of course not, whatever they’ve come to say I want you to hear. So I said, Well, we’ve come to tell Cindy she should get back with Martin, so you might not want to hear that. And he didn’t know what to say to that either.

Maureen looked at me, and then she goes, We’re worried about him. And Cindy said, Yes, well, I can’t say I’m surprised. And Maureen tells her about the bloke who topped himself, and how it was because of how his wife and kids had left him, and Cindy said, You know Martin left us? We didn’t leave him? And I was like, Yeah, that’s why we’ve come. Because if you’d left him, this whole trip would have been a waste of time. But, you know. We’ve come down here to tell you he’s changed his mind, sort of thing. And Maureen said, I think he knows that was a mistake. And Cindy goes, I had no doubt he’d realize it in the long term, and I also had no doubt that by the time he did it would be too late. And I went, It’s never too late to learn. And she went, It is for him. And I said I thought she owed him another chance, and she sort of smiled and said she disagreed and I said I disagreed with her disagreeing and she said we must agree to disagree. And I was like, So you want him to die, then?

And then she went a bit quiet, and I thought I’d got her. But then she goes, I thought about killing myself too, when things were really bad, a while ago. But I didn’t have the option, because of the girls. And it’s indicative of the way things are that he does have the option. He’s not part of a family. He hated being part of a family.

And that’s when I decided it was his business. If he had the freedom to fuck around, then he had the freedom to kill himself, too. Don’t you think?

And I went, Well I can see why you say that. Which was a mistake, because it didn’t help my argument.

Cindy said, Did he tell you I wouldn’t let him see the girls?

And Maureen said, Yes, he did mention that. And Cindy went, Well, that’s not true. I just won’t let him see them here. He could take them for weekends in London, but he won’t. Or he says he will, but then he makes excuses. He doesn’t want to be that sort of dad, you see. It’s too much effort. He wants to come home from work, read them a story some nights but not every night, and go to see them in the Christmas play. He doesn’t want all the other stuff. And then she was like, I don’t know why I’m telling you this. And I went, He’s a bit of a tosser, really, isn’t he? And she laughed. He’s made a lot of mistakes, she said. And he continues to make them.

And that Paul bloke goes, If he were a computer, you’d have to say that there’s a programming fault, so I was like, What’s it got to do with you? And Cindy said, Listen, I’ve been very patient with you up until now. Two strangers knock on my door and tell me to get back together with my ex-husband, a man who nearly destroyed me, and I invite them in and actually listen to them. But Paul is my partner, and part of my family, and a wonderful stepfather to the girls. And that’s what it’s got to do with him.

And then Paul stood up and said, I think I’ll take Harry Potter upstairs, and he nearly tripped over my feet, and Cindy dived over and was like, Careful, darling, and then I worked out he was blind. Blind! Fucking hell! That’s why he had a dog. That’s why she was trying to tell me he had a dog (because I was giving it all that stuff, like, Do I look nine years old oh God oh God). So we’d gone all the way down there to tell Cindy she had to leave a blind man and get back together with a man who shagged fifteen-year-olds and treated her like shit. It shouldn’t really have made any difference, though, should it? They’re always going on about how they want to be treated the same as everyone else. So I’ll leave the blind thing out of it. I’ll just say that we went all the way down there to tell Cindy she had to leave an OK bloke who was good to her and her kids, and get back with an arsehole. And that still didn’t sound great.

I’ll tell you what really got me, though. The only proof that Martin had ever had anything to do with Cindy was us turning up in her house. Us and his kids, anyway, but they would only be proof if you took them for a DNA test and that. Anyway, what I mean is, as far as Cindy was concerned, he might as well have never existed. They’d all moved on. Cindy had a whole new life now. On the way down, I’d been thinking about how I’d moved on, but all I’d done was gone one train ride and one bus journey without asking Maureen about sexual positions. After I’d seen Cindy, that didn’t seem like such a long journey. Cindy had got rid of Martin, moved and met someone else. Her past was in the past, but our past, I don’t know… Our past was still all over the place. We could see it every day when we woke up. It was like Cindy lived in a modern place like Tokyo and we lived in an old place like Rome or somewhere. Except it couldn’t be exactly like that, because Rome is probably a cool place to live, what with the clothes and the ice cream and the lush boys and that—just as cool as Tokyo. And where we lived wasn’t cool. So maybe it was more like, she lived in a modern penthouse, and we lived in some old shithole that should have been pulled down years ago. We lived in a place where there were holes in the walls, and anyone could stick their head through them if they wanted to, and make faces at us. And Maureen and I had been trying to persuade Cindy to move out of her cool penthouse and move into our dump with us. It wasn’t much of an offer, I could see that now.