A Long Way Down (15 page)

Before I go on, I’ll answer the questions that everyone always asks, just so’s you don’t sit there wondering and not concentrating on what I’m saying. No, I don’t know where she is. Yes, I think she’s alive. Why I think she’s alive: because that whole thing with the car in the car park looked phony to me. What does it feel like,
having a missing sister? I can tell you. You know how if you lose something valuable, a wallet or a piece of jewellery, you can’t concentrate on anything else? Well, it feels like that all the time, every day.

There’s something else people ask: Where do you think she is? Which is different from: Do I know where she is? At first I didn’t understand that the two questions were different. And then when I did understand, I thought that the Where do you think she is? question was stupid. Like, well if I knew that I’d go and look for her. But now I understand it as being a more poetic question. ’Cos, really, it’s a way of asking what she was like. Do I think she’s in Africa, helping people? Or do I think she’s on one long permanent rave, or writing poems on a Scottish island, or travelling through the bush in Australia? So here’s what I think. I think she has a baby, maybe in America, and she’s in a little town somewhere sunny, Texas, say, or California, and she’s living with a man who works hard with his hands and looks after her and loves her. So that’s what I tell people, except of course I don’t know whether I’m telling them about Jen or about me.

Oh, and one more thing – especially if you’re reading this in the future, when everyone’s forgotten about us and how things turned out for us: don’t sit around hoping for her to pop up later on, to rescue me. She doesn’t come back, OK? And we don’t find out she’s dead, either. Nothing happens, so forget about it. Well, don’t forget about her, because she’s important. But forget about that sort of ending. It’s not that sort of story.

Maureen lives halfway between Toppers’ House and Kentish Town, in one of those little poky streets full of old ladies and teachers. I don’t know for sure they’re teachers, but there are an awful lot of bikes around – bikes and recycling bins. It’s shit, recycling, isn’t it? I said to Martin, and he was like, If you say so. He sounded a bit tired. And I asked him if he wanted to know why it was shit, but he didn’t. Just like he hadn’t wanted to know why France was shit, either. He wasn’t in a chatty mood, I suppose.

It was just me and Martin in the car because JJ didn’t want a lift
with us, even though we nearly went past his flat. JJ probably would have helped smooth the conversation along a bit, I think. I wanted to talk because I was nervous, and that probably made me say stupid things. Or maybe stupid is the wrong word, because it’s not stupid to say France is shit. It’s just a bit abrupt or whatever. JJ could have put a sort of ramp up to my sentences to help people skateboard down from them.

I was nervous because I knew that we were going to meet Matty, and I’m sort of not good with disabled people. It’s nothing personal, and I don’t think I’m disablist, because I know they’ve got rights to an education and bus passes and that; it’s just that they turn my stomach a bit. It’s all that having to pretend they’re just like you and me when they’re not, really, are they? I’m not talking ‘disabled’ like people who have only got one leg, say. They’re all right. I’m talking about the ones who aren’t right up top, and shout, and make funny faces. How can you say they’re like you and me? OK, I shout and make funny faces, but I know when I’m doing it. Most of the time I do, anyway. With them there’s no predicting, is there? They’re all over the place.

To be fair to him, though, Matty’s pretty quiet. He’s sort of
so
disabled that it’s OK, if you know what I mean. He just sits there. From my point of view, that’s probably better, although I can see that from his, it’s probably not much good. Except who knows whether he’s got a point of view? And if he hasn’t got one, then it’s got to be mine that counts, hasn’t it? He’s quite tall, and he’s in a wheelchair, and he’s got cushions and what have you stuffed up behind his neck to stop his head lolling about. He doesn’t look at you or anything, so you don’t get too freaked out. You forget he’s there after a while, so I coped better than I thought I would. Fucking hell, though. Poor old Maureen. I’ll tell you, you wouldn’t have persuaded me down from that roof. No way.

JJ was already there when we arrived, so when we walked in it was like a family reunion, except no one looked like each other, and no one pretended to be pleased to see each other. Maureen made us a cup of tea, and Martin and JJ asked her some polite questions about Matty. I just looked around a bit, because I didn’t
want to listen. She really had tidied up, like she said she was going to. There was almost nothing in the place, apart from the telly and things to sit on. It was like she’d just moved in. In fact, I got the impression that she’d moved things out and taken things down, because you could just make out marks on the wall. But then Martin was going, What do you think, Jess?, so I had to stop looking around and start joining in. We had plans to make.

I didn’t want to go to Maureen’s place with Martin and Jess because I needed time to think. I’d done a couple interviews with music journalists in the past, but they were fans of the band, sweet guys who went away totally psyched if you gave them a demo CD and let them buy you a drink. But these people, people like the knock-on-the-door inspirational lady… Man, I didn’t know anything about them. All I knew was that they’d somehow found out my address in twenty-four hours, and if they could do that, then what couldn’t they do? It was like they had the names and addresses of every single person living in Britain, just in case one day any of them did anything that might be interesting.

Anyway, she made me totally paranoid. If she wanted to, she could find out about the band in five minutes. And then she’d get a hold of Eddie, and Lizzie, and then she’d find out that I wasn’t dying of anything – or if I was, I’d kept the news to myself. Plus, she’d find out that the disease I wasn’t dying of was non-existent.

In other words, I was freaked out enough to think I was in trouble. I took a bus up to Maureen’s, and on the way I decided I was going to come clean, tell them all about everything, and if they didn’t like it, fuck ’em. But I didn’t want them reading about it in the papers.

It took us a while to get used to the sound of poor Matty’s breathing, which was loud and sounded as if it took a lot of effort. We were all thinking the same thing, I guess: we were all wondering whether we could have coped, if we were Maureen; we were all
trying to figure out whether anything could have persuaded us to come back down off that roof.

‘Jess,’ said Martin. ‘You wanted us to meet. Why don’t you call us to order?’

‘OK,’ she said, and she cleared her throat. ‘We are gathered here today…’

Martin laughed.

‘Fucking hell,’ she said. ‘I’ve only done half a sentence. What’s funny about that?’

Martin shook his head.

‘No, come on. If I’m so fucking funny, I want to know why.’

‘It’s perhaps because it’s something more usually said in church.’

There was a long pause.

‘Yeah. I knew that. That was the vibe I was after.’

‘Why?’ Martin asked.

‘Maureen, you go to church, don’t you?’ Jess said.

‘I used to,’ said Maureen.

‘Yeah, see. I was trying to make Maureen feel comfortable.’

‘Very thoughtful of you.’

‘Why do you have to fuck up everything I do?’

‘Gosh,’ said Martin. ‘I can almost smell the incense.’

‘Right, you can start it off then, you fucking…’

‘That’s enough,’ said Maureen. ‘In my house. In front of my son.’

Martin and I looked at each other, screwed up our faces, held our breaths, crossed our fingers, but it was no use. Jess was going to point out the obvious anyway.

‘In front of your son? But he’s…’

‘I haven’t got CCR,’ I said. It was the only thing I could think of. I mean, obviously it needed saying, but I had intended to give myself a little more preparation time.

There was a silence. I was waiting for them to dump on me.

‘Oh, JJ!’ Jess said. ‘That’s fantastic!’

It took me a minute to realize that in the weird world of Jess, they had not only found a cure for CCR during the Christmas holidays, but delivered it to my front door in the Angel some time between New Year’s Eve and January 2nd.

‘I’m not sure that’s quite what JJ is saying,’ said Martin.

‘No,’ I said. ‘The thing is, I never had it.’

‘No! Bastards.’

‘Who?’

‘The fuck-bloody doctors.’ At Maureen’s house, ‘fuck-bloody’ became Jess’s curse of choice. ‘You should sue them. Supposing you’d jumped? And they’d got it wrong?’

Mother
fucker
. Did it really have to be this hard?

‘I’m not sure he’s quite saying that, either,’ said Martin.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll try and be as clear as possible: there ain’t no such thing as CCR, and even if there was, I’m not dying of it. I made it up, ’cos… I don’t know. Partly ’cos I wanted your sympathy, and partly because I didn’t think you’d understand what was really wrong with me. I’m sorry.’

‘You tosser,’ said Jess.

‘That’s awful,’ said Maureen.

‘You arsehole,’ said Jess.

Martin smiled. Telling people you have an incurable disease when you don’t is probably right up there with seducing a fifteen-year-old, so he was enjoying my embarrassment. Plus, he was maybe even entitled to a little moral superiority, because he’d done the decent thing when he got humiliated: he’d walked to the top of Toppers’ House and dangled his feet over the edge. OK, he didn’t go over, but, you know, he’d shown he was taking things seriously. Me, I’d thought about offing myself first and then disgraced myself afterwards. I’d become an even bigger asshole since New Year’s Eve, which was kind of depressing.

‘So why did you say it?’ Jess asked.

‘Yes,’ said Martin. ‘What were you attempting to simplify?’

‘It just… I don’t know. Everything seemed so straightforward with you guys. Martin and the, you know. And Maureen and…’ I nodded over to Matty.

‘Wasn’t straightforward with me,’ said Jess. ‘I was crapping on about Chas and explanations.’

‘Yeah, but… No offense, but you were nutso. Didn’t really matter what you said.’

‘So what
was
wrong with you?’ Maureen asked.

‘I don’t know. Depression, I suppose you’d call it.’

‘Oh, we understand depression,’said Martin. ‘We’re all depressed.’

‘Yeah, I know. But mine seemed too… too fucking vague. Sorry, Maureen.’

How do people, like, not curse? How is it possible? There are all these gaps in speech where you just have to put a ‘fuck’. I’ll tell you who the most admirable people in the world are: newscasters. If that was me, I’d be like, ‘And the motherfuckers flew the fucking plane right into the Twin Towers.’ How could you not, if you’re a human being? Maybe they’re not so admirable. Maybe they’re robot zombies.

‘Try us out,’ said Martin. ‘We’re understanding people.’

‘OK. So the short version is, all I ever wanted to do was be in a rock’n’roll band.’

‘Rock’n’roll? Like Bill Haley and the Comets?’ said Martin.

‘No, man. That’s not… Like, I don’t know. The Stones. Or…’

‘They’re not rock’n’roll,’ said Jess. ‘Are they? They’re rock.’

‘OK, OK, all I wanted to do was be in a rock band. Like the Stones, or, or…’

‘Crusty music,’ said Jess. She wasn’t being rude. She was just clarifying my terms.

‘Whatever. Jeez. And a few weeks before Christmas my band finally split up for good. And soon after we split, I lost my girl. She was English. That’s why I was here.’

There was a silence.

‘That’s it?’ said Jess.

‘That’s it.’

‘That’s pathetic. I see why you came out with all that crap about the disease now. You’d rather die than not be in a band that sounds like the Rolling Stones? I’d be the opposite. I’d rather die if I was. Do people still like them in America? No one does here.’

‘That’s Mick Jagger, isn’t it, the Rolling Stones?’ Maureen asked. ‘They were quite good, weren’t they? They did well for themselves.’

‘Mick Jagger’s not sitting here eating stale Custard Creams like JJ, is he?’

‘They were new right before Christmas,’ said Maureen. ‘Maybe I didn’t put the lid back on the biscuit tin properly.’

I was starting to think we were losing focus on my issues.

‘The Stones thing… That’s kind of not important. That was just like an illustration. I just meant… songs, guitars, energy.’

‘He’s about eighty,’ said Jess. ‘He hasn’t got any energy.’

‘I saw them in ’90,’ said Martin. ‘The night England lost to Germany in the World Cup on penalties. A chap from Guinness took a whole crowd of us, and everyone spent most of the evening listening to the radio. Anyway, he had a lot of energy then.’

‘He was only seventy then,’ said Jess.

‘Will you shut the fuck up? Sorry, Maureen.’ (From now on, just presume that every time I speak I say ‘fuck’, ‘fucking’ or ‘motherfucker’ and ‘Sorry, Maureen’, OK?) ‘I’m trying to tell you about my whole life.’

‘No one’s stopping you,’ said Jess. ‘But you’ve got to make it more interesting. That’s why we drift off and talk about biscuits.’

‘OK, all right. Look, there’s nothing else for me. I’m qualified for nothing. I didn’t graduate from high school. I just had the band, and now it’s gone, and I didn’t make a cent out of it, and I’m looking at a life of flipping burgers.’

Jess snorted.

‘Now what?’

‘Just sounds funny, hearing a Yank say “flipping” instead of… you know what.’

‘I don’t think he meant “flipping” like “flipping heck”,’ said Martin. ‘I think he meant flipping as in turning them over. That’s what they call it.’

‘Oh,’ said Jess.

‘And I’m worried it will kill me.’

‘Hard work never killed anyone,’ said Maureen.

‘I don’t mind hard work, you know? But when we were touring and recording… That was me, that was who I was, and, and I just feel empty and frustrated and, and… See, when you know you’re good, you think that will be enough, that’ll get you there, and when it doesn’t… What are you supposed to do with it all? Where do
you put it, huh? There’s nowhere for it to go, and, and it was… Man, it used to eat me up even when things were going OK, because even when things were going OK, I wasn’t on stage or recording like every minute of the day, and sometimes it felt like I needed to be, otherwise I’d explode, you know? So now, now there’s nowhere for it to go. We used to have this song…’ I have no idea why I started up on this. ‘We used to have this song, this little like Motowny thing called “I Got Your Back”, which me and Eddie wrote together,
really
together, which we didn’t usually do, and it was like, you know, a tribute to our friendship and how far back we went and blah blah. Anyhow, it was on our first album and it was like two minutes and thirty seconds long and no one really noticed it, I mean, people who actually bought the album didn’t even notice it. But we started playing it live, and it kind of got longer, and Eddie worked out this sweet solo. It wasn’t like a rock guitar solo; it was more like something maybe, I don’t know, Curtis Mayfield or Ernie Isley might have played. And sometimes, when we played around Chicago and we’d jam with friends on stage, we’d have maybe a sax solo or a piano solo or maybe even like a pedal steel or something, and after like a year or two it got to be this like ten-, twelve-minute
showstopper
. And we’d open with it or close with it or stick it in the middle somewhere if we were playing a long set, and to me it became the sound of pure fucking joy, sorry Maureen, you know? Pure joy. It felt like surfing, or, or whatever, a natural high. You could ride those chords like waves. I had that feeling maybe a hundred times a year, and not many people get it even once in their lives. And that’s what I had to give up, man, the ability to create that routinely, whenever I felt like it, as part of my working day, and… You know, now that I think about it, I can see why I made up that bullshit, sorry Maureen, about dying of some fucking disease, sorry again. Because that’s what it feels like. I’m dying of some disease that dries up all the blood in your veins and all your sap and, and everything that makes you feel alive, and…’