Nick Hornby - A Long Way Down

I felt sorry for Penny, who was still sitting on her own, so I asked her if she wanted to come to my corner.

“I’m sure you’ve got plenty to talk about over there,” she said.

“No,” I said. “We’re done, really.”

“Well, you’ve got the best-looking chap in the place,” she said. She was talking about Stephen, the tall nurse, and when I looked at him from the other side of the room, I could see what she meant. He was blond, with long, thick hair and bright blue eyes, and he had a smile that warmed the room. It was sad that I hadn’t noticed, but I don’t really think about things like that any more.

“So come on over and talk to him. He’d be pleased to meet you,” I said. I didn’t know for sure that he would be, but if you’ve got nothing to do but stand beside a boy in a wheelchair, then I’d have thought you’d be happy enough to meet a pretty woman who appears on the television. And I can’t take much credit for it, because I didn’t really do anything, apart from say what I said; but it was funny that so much happened because Penny walked across a coffee-bar to talk to Stephen.

Everyone seemed to be having an OK time except for me. I had a shit time. And that wasn’t fair, because I’d spent ages organizing that intervention parents’ evening thing. I’d gone on the internet and got hold of the email address of the bloke who used to manage JJ’s band. And he gave me Ed’s phone number, and I stayed up until like three in the morning so I could ring him when he got home from work. And when I told him how messed up JJ was, he said he’d come over, and then he phoned Lizzie and told her, and she was up for it too. And there was all sorts with Cindy and her kids, and it was like a fucking full-time job for a week, and what did I get out of it? Fuck all. Why did I think that talking to my fucking father and my fucking mother would be any fucking use at all? I talk to them every fucking day, and nothing ever changes. So what did I think would make a difference? Having Matty and Penny and all them around? Being in Starbucks? I suppose I’d hoped that they might listen, especially when I’d announced that we’d all got together because we needed their help; but when Mum brought up that thing about the earrings, I knew I might as well have dragged someone in off of the street and asked them to adopt me or whatever.

We’re never going to forget about the earrings. We’ll be talking about them on her deathbed. They’re almost like her way of swearing. When I’m angry with her, I say fuck a lot, and when she’s angry with me she says earrings a lot. They weren’t her earrings anyway; they were Jen’s, and like I told her, I never touched them. She has this thing that all through those horrible first few weeks, when all we did was sit by the phone and wait for the police to tell us they’d found her body, the earrings were on Jen’s bedside table. Mum reckons she went and sat on the bed every night, and that she has like this photographic memory of the things she saw every night, and she can still see the earrings now, next to an empty coffee cup and some paperback or other. And then, when we started to sort of drift back to work and school and a normal life, or as close to a normal life as we’ve ever had since, the earrings disappeared. So of course I must have taken them, because I’m always thieving. And I am, I admit it. But what I thieve mostly is money, off of them. Those earrings were Jen’s, not theirs, and anyway she bought them at Camden Market for like five quid.

I don’t know this for sure, and I’m not being all self-pitiful or whatever. But parents must have favourite kids, right? How could they not? How could like Mr and Mrs Minogue not prefer Kylie to the other one? Jen never thieved off of them; she read books all the time, did well at school, talked to Dad about shuffling and all those political things, never puked on the floor in front of the Treasure Minister or whatever. Take the puking, just for instance. It was a bad falafel, right? I’d bunked off of school, and we’d had maybe two spliffs and a couple of Breezers, so it wasn’t what you’d call a mental afternoon. I really hadn’t been giving it large. And then I ate this falafel just before I went home. Well, I could feel the falafel coming up again as I was turning the key in the front door, so I knew that was what had made me sick. And I had no chance of getting to the toilet, right? And Dad was in the kitchen with the Treasure bloke, and I tried to make the sink, and I didn’t. Falafel and Breezers everywhere. Would I have thrown up without the falafel? No. Did he believe it was anything to do with the falafel? No. Would they have believed Jen? Yes, just because she didn’t drink or smoke blow. I don’t know. This is what happens—falafels and earrings. Everyone knows how to talk, and no one knows what to say.

After we’d gone over the earring thing again, my mum goes, What do you want? So I was like, Don’t you listen to anything, and she went, Which bit was I supposed to be listening to? And I was like, In my speech or whatever I said we needed your help, and she goes, Well, what does that mean? What are we supposed to do that we don’t do?

And I didn’t know. They feed me and clothe me and give me booze money and educate me and all that. When I talk they listen. I just thought that if I told them they had to help me, they’d help me. I never realized there was nothing I could say, and nothing they could say, and nothing they could do.

So that moment, when Mum asked me how they could help, it was sort of like the moment the guy jumped off the roof. I mean, it wasn’t as horrible or as scary and no one died and we were indoors et cetera. But you know how you keep things tucked up in the back of your head in a sort of rainy day box? For example, you think, one day, if I can’t handle it any more, then I’ll top myself. One day, if I’m really fucking up badly, then I’ll just give up and ask Mum and Dad to bail me out. Anyway, the mental rainy day box was empty now, and the joke was that there had never been anything in it all the time.

So, I did what I normally do in these situations. I told my mum to fuck off and I told my dad to fuck off and then I left, even though I was supposed to be talking to someone else’s friends and family afterwards. And then when I got up to the top of the stairs, I felt stupid, but it was too late to go back down again, so I just walked straight out the door and down Upper Street and into the Angel underground and I got on the first train that came. No one chased after me.

The minute I saw Ed and Lizzie down in that basement, I felt this uncontrollable little flicker of hope. Like, this is it! They’ve come to rescue me! The rest of the band are setting up for a gig tonight, and then afterwards Lizzie and I are going back to this cute apartment that she’s rented for the two of us! That’s what she’s been doing all this time! Apartment hunting and decorating! And… Who’s that old guy talking to Jess? Could he be a record-company executive? Has Ed fixed us up with a new deal? No, he hasn’t. The old guy is Jess’s dad, and later I found out that Lizzie had a new boyfriend, someone with a house in Hampstead and his own graphic design company.

I snapped out of it pretty quick. There was no excitement in their faces, or their voices, so I knew that they didn’t have any news for me, any grand announcement about my future. I could see love there, and concern, and it made me feel a little teary, to tell you the truth; I hugged them for a long time so that they couldn’t see me being a wuss. But they’d come to a Starbucks basement because they’d been told to come to a Starbucks basement, and neither of them had any idea why.