Nick Hornby - A Long Way Down

“What’s up, man?” said Ed. “I heard you weren’t doing so good.”

“Yeah, well,” I said. “Something will turn up.” I wanted to say something about that Micawber dude in Dickens, but I didn’t want Ed to get on my case even before we’d talked.

“Nothing’s gonna turn up here,” he said. “You gotta come home.”

I didn’t want to have to go into the whole ninety-day thing, so I changed the subject.

“Look at you,” I said. He was wearing like a suede jacket, which looked like it had cost a lot of money, and a pair of white corduroys, and though his hair was still long, it looked kind of healthy and glossy. He looked like one of those assholes that date the girls in Sex and the City .

“I never really wanted to look like I used to look. I looked like that because I was broke. And we never stayed anywhere with a decent shower.”

Lizzie smiled politely. It was hard, with the two of them there—like your first and your second wives coming to see you in the hospital.

“I never pegged you for a quitter,” Ed said.

“Hey, be careful what you say. This is the Quitters’ Club HQ.”

“Yeah. But from what I hear, the rest of them had good reasons. What have you got? You got nothing, man.”

“Yup. That’s pretty much how it feels.”

“That wasn’t what I meant.”

“Anyone want a coffee?” said Lizzie.

I didn’t want her to go.

“I’ll come with you,” I said.

“We’ll all go,” said Ed. So we all went, and Lizzie and I kept not talking, and Ed kept talking, and it felt like the last couple years of my life, condensed into a line for a latte.

“For people like us, rock’n’roll is like college,” said Ed after we’d ordered. “We’re working-class guys. We don’t get to fuck around like frat boys unless we join a band. We get a few years then the band starts to suck, and the road starts to suck, and having no money really starts to suck. So you get a job. That’s life, man.”

“So, the point when everything starts to suck… That’s like our college degree. Our graduation.”

“Exactly.”

“So when’s it all going to start sucking for Dylan? Or Springsteen?”

“Probably when they’re staying in a motel that doesn’t allow them to use hot water until six p.m.”

It was true that on our last tour, we stayed in a motel like that in South Carolina. But I remember the show, which smoked; Ed remembers the showers, which didn’t.

“Anyway, I knew Springsteen. Or at least, I saw him live on the E Street reunion tour. And, Senator JJ, you’re no Springsteen.”

“Thanks, pal.”

“Shit, JJ. What do you want me to say? OK, you are Springsteen. You’re one of the most successful performers in music business history. You were on the cover of Time and Newsweek in the same week. You fill stadiums night after fucking night. There. You feel better now? Jeez. Grow up, man.”

“Oh, what, and you’re all grown up because your old man took pity on you and gave you a job hooking people up with illegal cable TV?”

Ed’s ears get red when he’s about to start throwing punches.

This information is probably of no use to anyone in the world apart from me, because, for obvious reasons, he doesn’t tend to form real deep attachments to people he’s punched, so they never learn the ear thing—they don’t seem to stick around long enough. I’m probably the only one who knows when to duck.

“Your ears are getting red,” I said.

“Fuck you.”

“You flew all this way to tell me that?”

“Fuck you.”

“Stop it, the pair of you,” said Lizzie. I couldn’t say for sure, but I seem to remember that last time the three of us were together, she said the same thing.

The guy making our coffee was watching us carefully. I knew him, to say hello to, and he was OK; he was a student, and we’d talked about music a couple times. He liked the White Stripes a lot, and I’d been trying to get him to listen to Muddy Waters and the Wolf. We were freaking him out a little.

“Listen,” I said to Ed. “I come here a lot. You wanna kick my ass, then let’s go outside.”

“Thanks,” said the White Stripes guy. “I mean, you know. You’d be welcome if there wasn’t anyone else here, because you’re a regular, and we like to look after our regulars. But…” He gestured at the line behind us.

“No, no, I understand, man,” I said. “Thanks.”

“Shall I leave your coffees on the counter here?”

“Sure. It won’t take long. He usually calms down after he’s landed a good one.”

“Fuck you.”

So we all went out on to the street. It was cold and dark and wet, but Ed’s ears were like two little torches in the gloom.

I hadn’t seen or spoken to Penny since the morning our brush with the angel had been in the papers. I had thought fondly of her, but I hadn’t really missed her, either sexually or socially. My libido was on leave of absence (and one had to be prepared for the possibility that it might opt for early retirement and never return to its place of work); my social life consisted of JJ, Maureen and Jess, which might suggest that it was as sickly as my sex drive, not least because they seemed to suffice for the time being. And yet when I saw Penny flirt with one of Matty’s nurses, I felt uncontrollably angry.

This isn’t a paradox, if you know anything about the perversity of human nature. (I believe I have used that line before, and as a consequence it is probably beginning to seem a little less authoritative and psychologically astute. Next time, I shall just own up to the perversity and the inconsistency, and leave human nature out of it.) Jealousy is likely to seize a man at any time, and in any case the blond nurse was tall, and young, and tanned, and blond. There is every chance that he would have made me uncontrollably angry if he had been standing on his own in the basement of Starbucks, or indeed anywhere in London.

I was, in retrospect, almost certainly looking for an excuse to leave the bosom of my family. As suspected, I had learned very little about myself in the previous few minutes. Neither my ex-wife’s scorn nor my daughters’ crayons had been as instructive as Jess might have wished.

“Thanks,” I said to Penny.

“Oh, that’s OK. I wasn’t doing anything, and Jess seemed to think it might help.”

“No,” I said, immediately at something of a moral disadvantage. “Not thanks for that. Thanks for standing here flirting in front of me. Thanks for nothing, in other words.”

“This is Stephen,” Penny said. “He’s looking after Matty, and he didn’t have anyone to talk to, so I came over to say hello.”

“Hi,” said Stephen. I glared at him.

“I suppose you think you’re pretty great,” I said.

“I’m sorry?” he said.

“Martin!” said Penny.

“You heard me,” I said. “Smug git.”

I had the feeling that over in the corner, where the girls were colouring their picture, there was another Martin—a kinder, gentler Martin—watching in appalled fascination, and I wondered briefly whether it was possible to rejoin him.

“Go away, before you make an idiot of yourself,” said Penny. It says a lot for Penny’s generosity of spirit that she still saw idiocy coming towards me from off in the distance, and that I still had a chance of getting out of the way; less partial observers would have argued that idiocy had already squashed me flat. It didn’t matter, though, because I wasn’t moving.

“It’s easy, being a male nurse, isn’t it?”

“Not very,” said Stephen. He had made the elementary mistake of answering my question as if it had been delivered straight, without bile. “I mean, it’s rewarding, sure, but… Long hours, poor pay, night shifts. Some of the patients are difficult.” He shrugged.