Nick Hornby - A Long Way Down

And it was kind of appropriate that I was with my ex-lover and my ex-brother at the precise moment I realized, because it was the same kind of thing. I loved them, and would always love them. But there was no place where they could fit any more, so I had nowhere to put all the things I felt. I didn’t know what to do with them, and they didn’t know what to do with me, and isn’t that just like life?

“I never said anything about finishing with you because you weren’t going to be a rock star,” said Lizzie after a while. “You know that really, don’t you?”

I shook my head. I didn’t know, did I? You guys can back me up on that. Not once in this story have I ever owned up to any kind of misunderstanding, deliberate or otherwise. So far as I was concerned, she was dumping me because I was a musical loser.

“So what did you say, then? Try again. And I’ll listen real hard this time.”

“It’s not going to make any difference now, because we’ve all moved on, right?”

“Kind of.” I wasn’t going to admit to standing still, or going backwards.

“OK. What I said was, I couldn’t be with you if you weren’t a musician.”

“It wasn’t such a big deal to you at the time. You don’t even like music that much.”

“You’re not hearing me, JJ. You’re a musician. It’s not just what you did. It’s who you are. And I’m not saying you’re going to be a successful musician. I don’t even know if you’re a good one. It was just that I could see you’d be no use to anyone if you stopped. And look what happened. You break the band up, and five minutes later you’re standing on the top of a tower-block. You’re stuck with it. And without it you’re dead. Or you might as well be.”

“So… OK. Nothing to do with being unsuccessful.”

“God, what do you take me for?”

But I wasn’t talking about her; I was talking about me. I never looked at it that way before. I thought this whole thing had been about my failure, but that wasn’t it. And at that moment I felt like crying my fucking heart out, really. I felt like crying because I knew she was right, and sometimes the truth gets you like that. I felt like crying because I was going to make music again, and I’d missed it so much. And I felt like crying because I knew that making music was never going to make me successful, so Lizzie had just condemned me to another thirty-five years of poverty, rootlessness, despair, no health plan, cold-water motels and bad hamburgers. It’s just that I’d be eating the burgers, not flipping them.

I walked home, turned the phone off and spent the next forty-eight hours with the curtains drawn, drinking, sleeping and watching as many programmes about antiques as I could find. During those forty-eight hours, I would say that I was in grave danger of turning into Marie Prevost, the Hollywood actress who was discovered some time after her death in a state of disrepair, due to her corpse having been partially eaten by her dachshund. That I had no dachshund, or indeed any domestic pet, I can remember being a source of some consolation in those couple of days. I would certainly die alone, and my corpse would certainly be in a state of advanced decay by the time anyone found me, but I would be complete, apart from the bits that had dropped off through natural causes. So that was all right.

Here’s the thing. The cause of my problems is located in my head, if my head is where my personality is located. (Cindy and others would argue that both my personality and the source of my troubles were located below rather than above my waist, but hear me out.) I had been given many opportunities in life, and I had thrown each of them away, one by one, through a series of catastrophically bad decisions, each one of which seemed like a good idea to me—to me and my head—at the time. And yet the only tool I had at my disposal to correct the disastrous course my life seemed to be taking was the very same head that had caused me to fuck up in the first place. What chance did I have?

A couple of weeks after Jess’s Jerry Springer show, I read some notes I’d made during that two-day period. It wouldn’t be true to say that I’d been so drunk I’d forgotten I’d ever made them, and in any case they’d been lying around the flat in plain view. But it was a fortnight before I possessed enough courage to read them, and once I’d done so, I was almost compelled to draw the curtains and reach for the Glenmorangie once again.

The object of the exercise was to analyse, with the only head I have available to me, why I had behaved so absurdly that afternoon, and to list all possible responses to that behaviour. To give my head its due—to be fair to the lad, as sports pundits would say—it was at least capable of recognizing that the behaviour had been absurd. It just wasn’t capable of doing very much about it. Are all heads like this, or is it just mine?

Anyway, on the backs of several unopened envelopes, mostly bills, there was depressingly conclusive evidence of the circularity of human behaviour. “WHY HORRIBLE TO NURSE?” I had written. And then, underneath:

1) ARSEHOLE? HIM? ME?

2) HITTING ON PENNY?

3) GOOD-LOOKING AND YOUNG-PISSED ME OFF?

4) ANNOYED BY PEOPLE.

This last explanation, which may have meant something brilliantly precise when I hit on it, now seemed startlingly candid in its vagueness.

On another envelope, I had scrawled “COURSES OF ACTION”

(and please note, by the way, the switch from numbers to letters, a switch presumably meant to indicate the scientific nature of the work):

a) KILL MYSELF?

b) ASK Maureen NOT TO USE THAT NURSE ANY MORE

c) DON’T

And “ C stopped there, either because I fell into a stupor at that point, or because “Don’t” was a concise way of expressing a profound solution to all my problems. Think about it: how much better things would be for me if I didn’t, wouldn’t and never had.

Neither envelope inspired much confidence in my powers of cogitation. I could see that they had both been written by the man who had recently wanted to tell a select group of people—a group that included his own young daughters—that all male nurses were effeminate and self-righteous: the word “ARSEHOLE” would surely provide a forensic psychologist with all the evidence required for that deduction. And similarly, the man who had spent some of New Year’s Eve trying to work out whether to jump from the roof of a tower-block was exactly the sort of man who might jot down “KILL MYSELF?” in a Things To Do list. If thinking inside the box were an Olympic sport, I would have won more gold medals than Carl Lewis.

Quite clearly, I needed two heads, two heads being better than one and all that. One would have to be the old one, just because the old one knows people’s names and phone numbers, and which breakfast cereal I prefer, and so on; the second one would be able to observe and interpret the behaviour of the first, in the manner of a television wildlife expert. Asking the head I have now to explain its own thinking is as pointless as dilling your own telephone number on your own telephone: either way, you get an engaged signal. Or your own answer message, if you have that kind of phone system.

It took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize that other people have heads, and that any one of these heads would do a better job of explaining what the purpose of my explosion might have been. This, I supposed, was why people persisted with the whole notion of friends. I seemed to have lost all mine around the time I went to prison, but I knew plenty of people who’d be prepared to tell me what they thought of me. In fact, it seemed that my propensity for letting people down and alienating them would actually serve me in good stead here. Friends and lovers might try to throw a kindly light on the episode, but because I had only ex-friends and ex-lovers, I was ideally placed. I only really knew people who would give it to me with both barrels.