Nick Hornby - A Long Way Down

“But what did you have to do, Theo? If, as you say, someone phoned up and offered for my autobiography, in some kind of indescribably substantial way?”

“Well. I phoned them up and suggested they might want it.”

“Right. And they seemed interested?”

“They phoned back.”

“With a substantial offer.”

Theo smiled condescendingly.

“You don’t really know much about the publishing world, do you?”

“Not really. Only what you’ve told me over this lunch. Which is that people have been phoning up with substantial offers. That’s why we’re here, apparently.”

“We mustn’t run before we can walk.”

Theo was beginning to annoy me.

“OK. Agreed. Just tell me the walking part.”

“No, you see… Even the walking part is running. It’smore, youknow, tactical than that.”

“Asking you to tell me about walking is running?”

“Softly softly catchee monkey.”

“Jesus Christ, Theo.”

“And that sort of reaction isn’t softly softly, if I may say so. That’s noisy noisy. Tetchy tetchy, even.”

I never heard any more about the offer, and I have never been able to work out the point of the lunch.

Jess had called an extraordinary meeting for four o’clock, in the vast and invariably empty basement of the Starbucks in Upper Street, one of those rooms with a lot of sofas and tables that would feel exactly like your living room, if your living room had no windows, and you only ever drank out of paper cups that you never threw away.

“Why in the basement?” I asked her when she phoned me.

“Because I’ve got private things to talk about.”

“What sort of private things?”

“Sexual things.”

“Oh, God. The others are going to be there, aren’t they?”

“You think I’ve got private sexual things I only want to tell you?”

“I was hoping not.”

“Yeah, like I have fantasies about you all the time.”

“I’ll see you later, OK?”

I got a number 19 bus from the West End to Upper Street, because the money had finally run out. We’d got through the bits and pieces of money we’d picked up from chat-show appearances and junior ministers, and I had no job. So even though Jess once explained that cabs are the cheapest form of transport, because they will take you wherever you want to go for free, and it’s not until you get there that money is needed, I decided that inflicting my poverty on a cabbie was not such a good idea. In any case, the cabbie and I would almost certainly spend the journey talking about the unfairness of my incarceration, perfectly normal thing to want to do, her fault for going out looking like that and so on. I have preferred minicab drivers for some time now, because they are as ignorant of London’s inhabitants as they are of its geography. I got recognized twice on the bus, once by someone who wanted to read me a relevant and apparently redemptive passage in the Bible.

As I approached Starbucks, a youngish couple walked in just ahead of me, and immediately went downstairs. Initially I was pleased, of course, because it meant that Jess’s sexual revelations would have to be conducted sotto voce , if at all; but then as I was queuing for my chai tea latte, I realized that this meant no such thing, given Jess’s immunity to embarrassment; and my stomach started to do what it has done ever since I turned forty. It doesn’t churn , that’s for sure. Old stomachs don’t churn . It’s more as if one side of the stomach wall is a tongue, and the other side a battery. And at moments of tension the two sides touch, with disastrous consequences.

The first person I saw at the bottom of the stairs was Matty, in his wheelchair. He was flanked by two burly male nurses, who I presumed must have carried him down, one of whom was talking to Maureen. And as I was trying to work out what had brought Matty to Starbucks, two small blonde girls came belting towards me shouting “Daddy! Daddy!”, and even then I did not instantaneously realize that they were my daughters. I picked them up, held them, tried not to weep and looked around the room. Penny was there, smiling at me, and Cindy was at a table in the far corner, not smiling at me. JJ had his arms around the couple who’d walked in ahead of me, and Jess was standing with her father and a woman whom I presumed to be her mother—she was unmistakably the wife of a Labour junior minister. She was tall, expensively dressed and disfigured by a hideous smile that clearly bore no relation to anything she might be feeling, a real election night of a smile. Round her wrist there was one of those bits of red string that Madonna wears, so despite all appearances to the contrary, she was obviously a deeply spiritual woman. Given Jess’s flair for the melodramatic, I wouldn’t have been altogether surprised to see her sister, but I checked carefully, and she wasn’t there. Jess was wearing a skirt and a jacket, and for once you had to get up quite close to become scared by her eye make-up.

I put the girls down and led them over to their mother. I waved to Penny on the way, though, just so that she wouldn’t feel left out.

“Hello.” I leaned down to kiss Cindy on the cheek, and she moved smartly out of the way.

“What brings you here, then?” I said.

“The mad girl there seemed to think it might help in some way.”

“Oh. Did she explain how?”

Cindy snorted. I got the feeling that she was going to snort whatever I said, that snorting was going to be her preferred method of communication, so I knelt down to talk to the children.

Jess clapped her hands together and stepped into the centre of the room.

“I read about this on the internet,” she said. “It’s called an intervention. They do it all the time in America.”

“All the time,” JJ shouted. “It’s all we do.”

“See, if someone is fucked… messed up on drugs or drink or whatever, then the like friends and family, and whatever, all gather together and confront him and go, you know, Fucking pack it in. Sorry Maureen. Sorry Mum and Dad, sorry little girls. This one’s sort of different. In America, they have a skilled… Oh shit, I’ve forgotten the name. On the website I was on he was called Steve.”

She fumbled in the pocket of her jacket and pulled out a piece of paper.

“A facilitator. You’re supposed to have a skilled facilitator, and we haven’t got one. I didn’t know who to ask, really. I don’t know anyone with skills. Also, this intervention is sort of the other way round. Because we’re asking you to intervene. It’s us coming to you, rather than you coming to us. We’re saying to you, we need your help.”

The two nurses who’d come with Matty started to look a little uncomfortable at this point, and Jess noticed.

“Not you guys,” she said. “You don’t have to do anything. To tell you the truth, you’re only really here to bump up Maureen’s numbers, “cos, well, I mean, she hasn’t really got anybody, has she? And I thought you two and Matty would be better than nobody, see? It would have been a bit grim for you, Maureen, seeing all these reunions and standing there on your own.”

You had to hand it to Jess. Once she got a theme between her teeth, she was unwilling to let it go. Maureen attempted a grateful smile.

“Anyway. Just so’s you know who’s who. In the JJ corner we have his ex, Lizzie, and his mate Ed, who used to be in his crappy band with him. Ed’s flown over from America special. I’ve got my mum and dad, and it’s not often you’ll catch them in the same room together, ha ha. Martin’s got his ex-wife, his daughters, and his ex-girlfriend. Or maybe not ex, who knows? By the end of this he might have his wife back and his girlfriend back.”