Nick Hornby - A Long Way Down

“No I don’t,” I said. “Lizzie’s right. Why would you come all this way to punch me?”

“It’s a Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid thing, surely?” said Lizzie. “You want to sleep with each other, but you can’t, because you’re both so straight.”

This really tickled the homeless guy. He laughed like a hyena. “Did you ever read Pauline Kael on Butch Cassidy ! God, she hated it,” he said.

Neither Lizzie nor Ed would have had a fucking clue who Pauline Kael was, but I got two or three of her collections. I used to keep them by the toilet, because they’re great for dipping into when you’re on the can. Anyway, hers wasn’t a name I was necessarily expecting to hear from that particular guy at that particular moment. I looked at him.

“Oh, I know who Pauline Kael is,” he said. “I wasn’t born homeless, you know.”

“I really, really don’t want to sleep with him,” said Ed. “I really want to punch him. But he has to punch me first.”

“You see?” said Lizzie. “Homo-erotic, with a bit of sado-masochism thrown in. Just kiss him, and be done with it.”

“Kiss him,” the homeless guy said to Ed. “Kiss him or punch him. But let’s get something going, for God’s sake.”

Ed’s ears couldn’t have gotten any redder, so I was wondering whether they might just burst into flame and then turn black. At least then I could say that I’d seen something new.

“You trying to get me killed?” I said to her.

“Why don’t you just get back together?” said Lizzie. “At least you’ve got all that mike-sharing and those great big electric penis substitutes.”

“Oh, so that’s why you didn’t want him to be in a band,” said Ed. “You were jealous.”

“Who said I didn’t want him to be in a band?” Lizzie asked him.

“Yeah, you got that dead wrong, Ed,” I said. “She wasn’t that deep. She dumped me precisely because I wasn’t in a band. She wasn’t interested in being with me unless I became a rock star and made a shitload of money.”

“Is that what you think I meant?” said Lizzie.

I could suddenly see my life being put back together before my eyes. It had all been a terrible misunderstanding, which was now about to be cleared up, with much laughter and many tears. Lizzie never wanted to break up with me. Ed never wanted to break up with me. I’d come out on to the sidewalk to get my ass kicked, and instead, I was going to get everything I ever wanted.

“There isn’t going to be a fight, is there?” said the homeless guy sadly.

“Unless we all beat the shit out of you,” said Ed.

“Just let me hear the end of this,” said the homeless guy. “Don’t go back inside. I never get the fucking ending of a story, stuck out here.”

It was going to be a happy ending, I could feel it coming. And it was going to involve all four of us. The first show we played when we got back together, we could dedicate a song to Homeless Guy. Hey—he could maybe even be our road manager. Plus, he could make one of the toasts at the wedding. “Everyone should get back with everyone,” I said, and I meant it. This was my big closing speech. “Every band that has ever come apart, every couple . . There’s too much unhappiness in the world as it is, without people splitting up every ten seconds.”

Ed looked at me as if I had gone nuts.

“You’re not serious,” said Lizzie.

Maybe I’d misjudged the mood and the moment. The world wasn’t ready for my big closing speech.

“Naaah,” I said. “Well. You know. It’s just… an idea I had. A theory I was working on. I hadn’t ironed out all the kinks in it, yet.”

“Look at his face,” said Homeless Guy. “Oh, he’s serious, all right.”

“How does that work with bands that grew out of other bands?” said Ed. “Like, I don’t know. If Nirvana got back together. That would mean the Foo Fighters had to split up. Then they’d be unhappy.”

“Not all of “em,” I pointed out.

“And what about second marriages? There are loads of happy second marriages.”

“There’d have been no Clash. “Cos Joe Strummer would have had to stay in his first band.”

“And who was your first girlfriend?”

“Kathy Gorecki!” said Ed. “Ha!”

“You’d still be with her,” said Lizzie.

“Yeah, well” I shrugged. “She was nice. That wouldn’t have been a bad life.”

“But she never gave no thin” up!” said Ed. “You never even got a hand under a bra!”

I’m sure I’d have managed by now. We’d have been together fifteen years.”

“Oh, man,” said Ed, in the tone of voice that we usually used when Maureen had said something heartbreaking. “I can’t punch you.”

We walked down the road a little ways and went to a pub, and Ed bought me a Guinness, and Lizzie bought a pack of smokes from the machine and put it down on the table for us to share, and we just sat there, with Ed and Lizzie looking at me as if they were waiting for me to catch my breath.

“I didn’t realize you felt that bad,” Ed said after a while.

“The suicide thing—that wasn’t a clue?”

“Yeah. I knew you wanted to kill yourself. But I didn’t know you felt so bad that you wanted to patch things up with Lizzie and the band. That’s this whole different level of misery, way beyond suicide.”

Lizzie tried not to laugh, and the effort produced a weird snorting noise, and I took a long pull on my Guinness.

And suddenly, just for a moment, I felt good. It helped that I really love cold Guinness; it helped that I really love Ed and Lizzie. Or I used to love them, or kind of love them, or loved and hated them, or whatever. And maybe for the first time in the last few months, I acknowledged something properly, something I knew had been hiding right down in my guts, or at the back of my head—somewhere I could ignore it, anyway. And what I owned up to was this: I had wanted to kill myself not because I hated living, but because I loved it. And the truth of the matter is, I think, that a lot of people who think about killing themselves feel the same way—I think that’s how Maureen and Jess and Martin feel. They love life, but it’s all fucked up for them, and that’s why I met them, and that’s why we’re all still around. We were up on the roof because we couldn’t find a way back into life, and being shut out of it like that… It just fucking destroys you, man. So it’s like an act of despair, not an act of nihilism. It’s a mercy killing, not a murder. I don’t know why it suddenly got to me. Maybe because I was in a pub with people I loved, drinking a Guinness, and I know I said this before, but I fucking love Guinness, like I love pretty much all alcohol—love it as it should be loved, as one of the glories of God’s creation. And we’d had this stupid scene on the street, and even that was kind of cool, because sometimes it’s moments like that, real complicated moments, absorbing moments, that make you realize that even hard times have things in them that make you feel alive. And then there’s music, and girls, and drugs, and homeless people who’ve read Pauline Kael, and wah-wah pedals, and English potato chip flavours, and I haven’t even read Martin Chuzzlewit yet, and… There’s plenty out there.

And I don’t know what difference it made, this sudden flash.

It wasn’t like I wanted to, you know, grab life in a passionate embrace and vow never to let it go until it let go of me. In a way, it makes things worse, not better. Once you stop pretending that everything’s shitty and you can’t wait to get out of it, which is the story I’d been telling myself for a while, then it gets more painful, not less. Telling yourself life is shit is like an anesthetic, and when you stop taking the Advil, then you really can tell how much it hurts, and where, and it’s not like that kind of pain does anyone a whole lot of good.