Nick Hornby - A Long Way Down

I knew where to start, too. Indeed, so successful was my first phone call that I didn’t really need to speak to anyone else. My ex-wife was perfect—direct, articulate and clear-sighted—and I actually ended up feeling sorry for people living with someone who loved them, when not living with someone who loathed you was so obviously the way to go. When you have a Cindy in your life, there aren’t even any pleasantries to wade through: there are only unpleasantries, and unpleasantries are an essential part of the learning process.

“Where have you been?”

“At home. Drunk.”

“Have you listened to your messages?”

“No. Why?”

“Oh, I just left you a few thoughts about the other afternoon.”

“Ah, now, you see that’s exactly what I wanted to talk about. What do you think it was all about?”

“Well, you’re unbalanced, aren’t you? Unbalanced and poisonous. An unbalanced, poisonous tosser.”

This was a good start, I felt, but it lacked focus.

“Listen, I appreciate what you’re saying, and I don’t want to appear rude, but the unbalanced tosser part I find less interesting than the poisonous part. Could you talk more about that?”

“Maybe you should pay someone to do this,” said Cindy.

“You mean a therapist?”

She snorted. “A therapist? No, I was thinking more of one of those women who will pee all over you if you pay her enough. Isn’t that what you want?”

I thought about this. I didn’t want to dismiss anything out of hand.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “It’s never appealed before.”

“I was speaking metaphorically.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t really understand.”

“You clearly feel so awful about yourself that you don’t mind being abused. Isn’t that their problem?”

“Whose problem?”

“These men who need women to… Never mind.”

I was dimly beginning to perceive what she was driving at. It was true that being called names felt good. Or rather, it felt appropriate.

“You know why you turned on that poor guy, don’t you?”

“No! You see, that’s precisely why I called you.”

If Cindy had known how much damage she could have done by stopping right there, the temptation would have been too much for her. Luckily, though, Cindy was determined to go all the way.

“I mean, he was fifteen years younger than you, and much better-looking. But it wasn’t that. He’d done more with his life that afternoon than you’ve ever done with yours.”

Yes! Yes!

“You ponce around on television and screw schoolgirls, and he pushes disabled kids around in a wheelchair, probably for the minimum wage. It’s no wonder Penny wanted to chat him up. For her, it was the moral equivalent of going from Frankenstein’s monster to Brad Pitt.”

“Thank you. That’s great.”

“Don’t you dare put the phone down on me. I’ve only just started. I’ve got twelve years’ worth of this stuff.”

“Oh, I’ll be back for more, I promise. But that’s plenty to be going on with.”

You see? Ex-wives: really, everybody should have at least one.

I feel a bit daft explaining what happened at the end of the intervention day, because it all sounds like too much of a coincidence. But I think it probably only sounds like a coincidence to me. I know I said before that I’m learning to feel the weight of things, which means learning what to say and what not to say in case you make people feel badly for you. So if I say that nothing happened in my life before I met the others, I don’t want to make it sound as though I’m grumbling. It was just how things were. If you spend all your time in a very quiet room and someone comes up behind you and says “Boo!”, you jump. If you spend all your time with short people, and you see a six-foot-tall policeman, he looks like a giant. And if nothing happens and then something happens, then the something seems to be peculiar, almost like an Act of God. The nothingness stretches the something, the happening, out of shape.

Here’s what happened. Stephen and Sean helped me get Matty home; we hailed a black cab, and the four of us just about squashed in, although the two nurses and I were pressed up against each other in the seat. And even that seemed like something. A few months ago, I’d have gone home and told Matty about that, if he hadn’t been there with me. But of course if he hadn’t been there with me, there’d have been nothing to tell. I wouldn’t have needed Stephen and Sean, and we wouldn’t have been there in a taxi. I’d have been on a bus, on my own, even supposing I’d gone anywhere. You see what I mean about something and nothing?

Once we were all settled, Stephen said to Sean, “Have you got anyone else yet?” And Sean said, “No, and I don’t think I’m going to be able to.” And Stephen said, “It’s just the three of us, then? We’ll get slaughtered.” And Sean just shrugged, and we all sat looking out of the window for a little while. I didn’t know what they’d been talking about.

And then Sean said, “Any good at quizzes, Maureen? Fancy joining our team? It doesn’t matter if you don’t know anything. We’re desperate.”

Now, that’s not the most amazing story you’ve ever heard, is it?

I listen to Jess and JJ and Martin, and that sort of thing happens to them all the time. They meet someone in a lift or a bar, and that someone says, “Would you like a drink?”, or even, “Would you like intercourse?” And perhaps they’d been thinking that they’d like intercourse, so it could seem to them that being offered intercourse, just when they’d been thinking they might like it, is the most amazing coincidence. But my impression is that this isn’t how they think, or how many people think. It’s just life. One person bumps into another person, and that person wants something, or knows someone else who wants something, and as a result, things happen. Or, to put it another way, if you don’t go out, and never meet anyone, then nothing happens. How could it? But for a moment, I could hardly talk. I’d wanted to take part in a quiz, and these people needed someone for their quiz team, and I felt a shiver go down my spine.

So instead of going home, we took Matty to the respite home. Sean and Stephen weren’t working, but they were friends with all the people who were, so they just told their friends that Matty was staying there for the evening, and no one turned a hair. We arranged to meet in the pub where they do their quizzing, and I went home to get changed.

I don’t know which part of the story to tell you about next. There’s another coincidence involved, so I don’t know whether to put it here, in the coincidences section, or later on, after I’ve told you about the quiz. Maybe if I separate the coincidences out, push them further apart, you might believe them more. On the other hand, I don’t care whether you believe them, because they’re true. And in any case, I still can’t decide whether they are coincidences or not, these things: perhaps getting something you want is never a coincidence. If you want a cheese sandwich and you get a cheese sandwich, that can’t be a coincidence, can it? And by the same token, if you want a job and you get a job, that can’t be a coincidence either. These things can only be coincidental if you think you have no power over your life at all. So I’ll tell you here: the other person on the team was an older man called Jack, who has a newsagent’s just off Archway, and he offered me a job.

It’s not much of a job—three mornings a week. And it doesn’t pay very well—Ј4.75 an hour. And he told me I’d be on probation at first. But he’s getting on a bit, and he wants to go back to bed at nine, after he’s opened the shop and sorted the papers and dealt with the early-morning rush. He offered me the job in the same way that Stephen and Sean had asked me whether I wanted to join the quiz team—as a joke, out of desperation. In between the TV round and the sport round, he asked me what I did, and I told him I didn’t do anything much apart from look after Matty, and then he said, “You don’t want a job, do you?” And a shiver went back up my spine.