A Long Way Down (19 page)

‘Oh.’

‘So I can buy you a nice birthday present.’

‘Oh. Why do you get money for saying you saw an angel?’

‘I’ll tell you another time.’

‘Oh.’

And then Cindy and I spoke, but not for very long. During our brief conversation I managed to refer to two different types of domesticated female animals.

I also received a phone call from my boss at FeetUp. He was calling to tell me that I was fired.

‘You’re joking.’

‘I wish I was, Sharpy. But you’ve left me with no alternative.’

‘By doing what, exactly?’

‘Have you seen the paper this morning?’

‘That’s a problem for you?’

‘You come across as a bit of a nutter, to be honest.’

‘What about the publicity for the channel?’

‘All negative, in my book.’

‘You think there’s such a thing as negative publicity for FeetUp?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘What with no one ever having heard of us. You.’

There was a long, long silence, during which you could hear the rusting cogs of poor Declan’s mind turning over.

‘Ah. I see. Very cunning. That hadn’t occurred to me.’

‘I’m not going to beg, Dec. But it would seem a little perverse to me. You hire me when no one else in the world would give me the time of day. And then you fire me when I’m hot. How many of your presenters are all over the papers today?’

‘No, no, fair point, fair point. I can see where you’re coming from. What you’re saying, if I read you correctly, is that there’s no such thing as bad publicity for a… a
fledgling
cable channel.’

‘Obviously I couldn’t have put it as elegantly as that. But yes, that’s the long and the short of it.’

‘OK. You’ve turned me round, Sharpy. Who’ve we got on this afternoon?’

‘This afternoon?’

‘Yeah. It’s Thursday.’

‘Ah.’

‘Had you forgotten?’

‘I sort of had, really, yeah.’

‘So we’ve got no one?’

‘I reckon I could get JJ, Maureen and Jess to come on.’

‘Who are they?’

‘The other three.’

‘The other three who?’

‘Have you read the story?’

‘I only read the one about you seeing the angel.’

‘They were up there with me.’

‘Up where?’

‘The whole angel thing, Declan, came about because I was going to kill myself. And then I bumped into three other people on the top of a tower-block who were thinking of doing the same thing. And then… Well, to cut a long story short, the angel told us to come down again.’

‘Fuck me.’

‘Exactly.’

‘And you reckon you can get the other three?’

‘Almost sure of it.’

‘Jesus Christ. How much will they cost, d’you reckon?’

‘Three hundred quid for the three of them, maybe? Plus expenses. One of them’s a… Well, she’s a single parent, and her kid will need looking after.’

‘Go on, then. Fuck it. Fuck the expense.’

‘Top man, Dec.’

‘I think it’s a good idea. I’m pleased with that. Old Declan’s still got it, eh?’

‘Too right. You’re a newshound. You’re the Newshound of the Baskervilles.’

‘What you’ve got to tell yourself,’ I told them, ‘is that no one will be watching.’

‘That’s one of your old pro tricks, right?’ said JJ knowingly.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Believe me. Literally no one will be watching. I have never met anyone who has ever seen my show.’

The world headquarters of FeetUp TV! – known, inevitably, to its staff as TitsUpTV! – is in a sort of shed in Hoxton. The shed contains a small reception area, two dressing rooms and a studio, where all four of our homegrown programmes are made. Every morning, a woman called Candy-Ann sells cosmetics; I split Thursday afternoon with a man called D J Goodnews, who speaks to the
dead, usually on behalf of the receptionist, the window cleaner, the minicab driver booked to take him home, or anyone else who happens to be passing through: ‘Does the letter A mean anything to you, Asif?’ and so on. The other afternoons are taken up by tapes of old dog races from the US – once upon a time the intention was to offer viewers the chance to bet, but nothing ever came of it, and in my opinion, if you can’t bet, then dog racing, especially old dog racing, loses some of its appeal. During the evening, two women sit talking to each other, in and usually about their underwear, while viewers text them lewd messages, which they ignore. And that’s more or less it. Declan runs the station on behalf of a mysterious Asian businessman, and those of us who work for FeetUpTV! can only presume that somehow, in ways too obtuse and sophisticated for us to decipher, we are involved in the trafficking of class A drugs and child pornography. One theory is that the dogs in the races are sending out encoded messages to the traffickers: if, say, the dog in the outside lane wins, then that is a message to the Thai contact that he should send a couple of kilos of heroin and four thirteen-year-olds first thing in the morning. Something like that, anyway.

My guests on
Sharp Words
tend to be old friends who want to do something to help, or former celebrities in a boat not dissimilar to my own – holed under the waterline and sinking fast. Some weeks I get has-beens, and everyone gets wildly over-excited, but most weeks it’s had-beens. Candy-Ann, D J GoodNews and the two semi-clothed ladies have appeared on my show not just once, but several times, in order to give viewers a chance to get to know them a little better. (
Sharp Words
is two hours long, and though the advertising department, namely Karen on reception, does its best, we are rarely interrupted by messages from our sponsors. The theoretical viewer is highly unlikely to feel as though we have barely scratched the conversational surface.) Attracting people of the calibre of Maureen and Jess, then, constituted something of a coup: only rarely have my guests appeared on the show during the same decade that they have appeared in the newspapers.

I took pride in my interviewing. I mean, I still do, but at a time
when I seemed to be able to do nothing else properly, I hung on to my competence in a studio as I would to a tree root on the side of a cliff. I have, in my time, interviewed drunken, maudlin actors at eight in the morning and drunken, aggressive footballers at eight in the evening. I have forced lying politicians to tell something like the truth, and I have had to cope with mothers whose grief has made them uncomfortably verbose, and not once have I let things become sloppy. My studio sofa was my classroom, and I didn’t tolerate any waywardness. Even in those desperate FeetUpTV! months spent talking to nobodies and never-weres, people with nothing to say and no ability to say it, it was comforting to think that there was some area of my life in which I was competent. So when Jess and JJ decided that my programme was a joke and acted accordingly, I suffered something of a sense of humour failure. I wish, of course, that I hadn’t; I wish that I could have found it in me to be a little less pompous, a little more relaxed. True, I was encouraging them to talk about an unforgettable experience that they hadn’t had, and which I knew they hadn’t had. And granted, that imaginary unforgettable experience was preposterous. And yet, despite these impediments, I had somehow expected a higher level of professionalism.

I don’t wish to overstate my case; it’s not bloody rocket science, doing a TV interview. You chat to your guests beforehand, agree on a rough conversational course, remind them of their hilarious anecdotes and, in this case, of the known facts about the fictions we were about to discuss, as provided by Jess in her original interview – namely, that the angel looked like Matt Damon, he floated above the roof, and he was wearing a baggy white suit. Don’t fuck about with those bits, I told them, or we’ll get into a mess. So what happens? Almost immediately? I ask JJ what the angel was wearing, and he tells me that the angel was wearing a promotional T-shirt for the Sandra Bullock film
While You Were Sleeping
– a film which, as luck would have it, Jess had seen on TV, and was thus able to synopsize at considerable length.

‘If we can just stick to the subject,’ I said. ‘Lots of people have seen
While You Were Sleeping
. Very few people have seen an angel.’

‘Fuck off. No one’s watching. You said.’

‘That was just one of my old pro’s tricks.’

‘We’ll be in trouble now, then. Because I just said “Fuck off”. You’ll get loads of complaints for that.’

‘I think that our viewers are sophisticated enough to know that extreme experiences sometimes produce extreme language.’

‘Good. Fuckofffuckofffuckoff.’ She made her apologetic wave at Maureen, and then into the camera, at the outraged people of Britain. ‘Anyway, watching rubbish Sandra Bullock films isn’t a very extreme experience.’

‘We were talking about the angel, not Sandra Bullock.’

‘What angel?’

And so on, and on, until Declan walked in with the cosmetics lady and ushered us off the air, into the street and, in my case, out of a job.

Someone should write a song or something called ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’. Something like, ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They make you feel fucking bad.’ Because they do. Especially your dad. That’s why he gets the rhyme. He wouldn’t like me saying this, but if it wasn’t for me and Jen, no one would ever have heard of him. He’s not like the boss of Education – that’s the Secretary of State. There are loads of ministers, and he’s only one of them, so he’s what they call a junior minister, which is a laugh and a half because he’s not very junior at all. So he’s sort of a loser politician, really. You wouldn’t mind if he was a loser because he shot his mouth off and said what he thought about Iraq or whatever, but he doesn’t; he says what he’s told to say, and it still doesn’t do him much good.

Most people have a rope that ties them to someone, and that rope can be short or it can be long. (Be long. Belong. Get it?) You don’t know how long, though. It’s not your choice. Maureen’s rope ties her to Matty and it’s about six inches long and it’s killing her. Martin’s rope ties him to his daughters, and, like a stupid dog, he
thinks it isn’t there. He goes running off somewhere – into a nightclub after a girl, up a building, whatever – and then suddenly it brings him up short and chokes him and he acts surprised, and then he does the same thing again the next day. I think JJ is tied to this bloke Eddie he keeps talking about, the one he used to be in the band with.

And I’m learning that I’m tied to Jen, and not to my mum and dad – not to home, which is where the rope should be. Jen thought she was tied to them too, I’m sure of it. She felt safe, just because she was a kid with parents, so she kept walking and walking and walking until she walked off a cliff or into the desert or off to Texas with her mechanic. She thought she’d get jerked back by the rope, but there wasn’t one. She learned that the hard way. So I’m tied to Jen now, but Jen isn’t solid, like a house. She’s floating, blowing around, no one knows where she is; she’s sort of fucking useless, really, isn’t she?

Anyway, I don’t owe Mum and Dad anything. Mum understands that. She gave up expecting anything ages ago. She’s still a mess because of Jen, and she hates Dad, and she’s given up on me, so everything’s all above board there. But Dad really thinks that he’s entitled to something, which is a joke. For example: he kept showing me these articles that people were writing about him, saying he should resign because his daughter was in such a fucking state, as if it was any of my business. And I was like, So? Resign. Or don’t. Whatever. He needed to talk to a career adviser, not a daughter.

It wasn’t as if we were in the papers for long, anyway. We made one more chunk of money, from a new Channel 5 chat show. We were going to really try and do it straight that time, but the woman who interviewed us really got on my tits, so I told her we’d made it all up to earn a few bob, and she told us off, and all these stupid brain-dead old bags in the audience booed us. And that was it, no one wanted to speak to us any more. We were left to entertain ourselves. It wasn’t too hard. I had loads of ideas.

For example: it was my idea that we met for a coffee regularly – either at Maureen’s or somewhere in Islington, if we could find someone to sit with Matty. We didn’t mind spending bits of the
money on babysitters or whatever you want to call them; we pretended we were up for it because we wanted Maureen to have a break, but really it was because we didn’t want to go round hers all the time. No offence, but Matty put like a real downer on everything.

Martin didn’t like my idea, of course. First he wanted to know what ‘regularly’ meant, because he didn’t want to commit himself. And I was like, Yeah, well, what with no kids and no wife and no girlfriend and no job, it must be hard to find the time, and he said it wasn’t a question of time actually it was a question of choice, so I had to remind him that he had agreed to be part of a gang. And he was like, So what, so I went, Well, what’s the point of agreeing? And he said, No point. Which he thought was funny, because it was more or less what I’d said on the roof on New Year’s Eve. And I was like, Well, you’re a lot older than me, and my young mind isn’t fully formed yet, and he went, You can say that again.

And then we couldn’t agree on where we’d meet. I wanted to go to Starbucks, because I like frappuccinos and all that, but JJ said he wasn’t into global franchises, and Martin had read in some posey magazine about a snooty little coffee bar in between Essex Road and Upper Street where they grow their own beans while you waited or something. So to keep him happy, we met up there.

Anyway, this place had just changed its name and its vibe. The snootiness hadn’t worked out, so it wasn’t snooty any more. It used to be called Tres Marias, which is the name of a dam in Brazil, but the guy who ran it thought the name confused people, because what did one Mary have to do with coffee, let alone three? And he didn’t even have one Mary. So now it was called Captain Coffee, and everyone knew what it sold, but it didn’t seem to make much difference. It was still empty.

We walked in, and the guy that ran it was wearing this old army uniform, and he saluted us, and said, Captain Coffee at your service. I thought he was funny, but Martin was like, Jesus Christ, and he tried to leave, but Captain Coffee wouldn’t let us, he was that desperate. He told us we could have our coffee for free on our first visit, and a cake, if we wanted. So we didn’t walk out, but the next
problem was that the place was tiny. There were like three tables, and each table was six inches away from the counter, which meant that Captain Coffee was leaning on the counter listening to everything we said.