A Long Way Down (29 page)

After we’d gone over the earring thing again, my mum goes, What do you want? So I was like, Don’t you listen to anything, and she went, Which bit was I supposed to be listening to? And I was like, In my speech or whatever I said we needed your help, and she goes, Well, what does that mean? What are we supposed to do that we don’t do?

And I didn’t know. They feed me and clothe me and give me booze money and educate me and all that. When I talk they listen. I just thought that if I told them they had to help me, they’d help me. I never realized there was nothing I could say, and nothing they could say, and nothing they could do.

So that moment, when Mum asked me how they could help, it was sort of like the moment the guy jumped off the roof. I mean, it wasn’t as horrible or as scary and no one died and we were indoors et cetera. But you know how you keep things tucked up in the back of your head in a sort of rainy day box? For example, you think, one day, if I can’t handle it any more, then I’ll top myself. One day, if I’m really fucking up badly, then I’ll just give up and ask Mum and Dad to bail me out. Anyway, the mental rainy day box was empty now, and the joke was that there had never been anything in it all the time.

So, I did what I normally do in these situations. I told my mum to fuck off and I told my dad to fuck off and then I left, even though I was supposed to be talking to someone else’s friends and family afterwards. And then when I got up to the top of the stairs, I felt stupid, but it was too late to go back down again, so I just walked straight out the door and down Upper Street and into the Angel underground and I got on the first train that came. No one chased after me.

The minute I saw Ed and Lizzie down in that basement, I felt this uncontrollable little flicker of hope. Like, this is it! They’ve come to rescue me! The rest of the band are setting up for a gig tonight, and then afterwards Lizzie and I are going back to this cute apartment
that she’s rented for the two of us! That’s what she’s been doing all this time! Apartment hunting and decorating! And… Who’s that old guy talking to Jess? Could he be a record-company executive? Has Ed fixed us up with a new deal? No, he hasn’t. The old guy is Jess’s dad, and later I found out that Lizzie had a new boyfriend, someone with a house in Hampstead and his own graphic design company.

I snapped out of it pretty quick. There was no excitement in their faces, or their voices, so I knew that they didn’t have any news for me, any grand announcement about my future. I could see love there, and concern, and it made me feel a little teary, to tell you the truth; I hugged them for a long time so that they couldn’t see me being a wuss. But they’d come to a Starbucks basement because they’d been told to come to a Starbucks basement, and neither of them had any idea why.

‘What’s up, man?’ said Ed. ‘I heard you weren’t doing so good.’

‘Yeah, well,’ I said. ‘Something will turn up.’ I wanted to say something about that Micawber dude in Dickens, but I didn’t want Ed to get on my case even before we’d talked.

‘Nothing’s gonna turn up here,’ he said. ‘You gotta come home.’

I didn’t want to have to go into the whole ninety-day thing, so I changed the subject.

‘Look at you,’ I said. He was wearing like a suede jacket, which looked like it had cost a lot of money, and a pair of white corduroys, and though his hair was still long, it looked kind of healthy and glossy. He looked like one of those assholes that date the girls in
Sex and the City
.

‘I never really wanted to look like I used to look. I looked like that because I was broke. And we never stayed anywhere with a decent shower.’

Lizzie smiled politely. It was hard, with the two of them there – like your first and your second wives coming to see you in the hospital.

‘I never pegged you for a quitter,’ Ed said.

‘Hey, be careful what you say. This is the Quitters’ Club HQ.’

‘Yeah. But from what I hear, the rest of them had good reasons. What have you got? You got nothing, man.’

‘Yup. That’s pretty much how it feels.’

‘That wasn’t what I meant.’

‘Anyone want a coffee?’ said Lizzie.

I didn’t want her to go.

‘I’ll come with you,’ I said.

‘We’ll all go,’ said Ed. So we all went, and Lizzie and I kept not talking, and Ed kept talking, and it felt like the last couple years of my life, condensed into a line for a latte.

‘For people like us, rock’n’roll is like college,’ said Ed after we’d ordered. ‘We’re working-class guys. We don’t get to fuck around like frat boys unless we join a band. We get a few years then the band starts to suck, and the road starts to suck, and having no money really starts to suck. So you get a job. That’s life, man.’

‘So, the point when everything starts to suck… That’s like our college degree. Our graduation.’

‘Exactly.’

‘So when’s it all going to start sucking for Dylan? Or Springsteen?’

‘Probably when they’re staying in a motel that doesn’t allow them to use hot water until six p.m.’

It was true that on our last tour, we stayed in a motel like that in South Carolina. But I remember the show, which smoked; Ed remembers the showers, which didn’t.

‘Anyway, I knew Springsteen. Or at least, I saw him live on the E Street reunion tour. And, Senator JJ, you’re no Springsteen.’

‘Thanks, pal.’

‘Shit, JJ. What do you want me to say? OK, you are Springsteen. You’re one of the most successful performers in music business history. You were on the cover of
Time
and
Newsweek
in the same week. You fill stadiums night after fucking night. There. You feel better now? Jeez. Grow up, man.’

‘Oh, what, and you’re all grown up because your old man took pity on you and gave you a job hooking people up with illegal cable TV?’

Ed’s ears get red when he’s about to start throwing punches.
This information is probably of no use to anyone in the world apart from me, because, for obvious reasons, he doesn’t tend to form real deep attachments to people he’s punched, so they never learn the ear thing – they don’t seem to stick around long enough. I’m probably the only one who knows when to duck.

‘Your ears are getting red,’ I said.

‘Fuck you.’

‘You flew all this way to tell me that?’

‘Fuck you.’

‘Stop it, the pair of you,’ said Lizzie. I couldn’t say for sure, but I seem to remember that last time the three of us were together, she said the same thing.

The guy making our coffee was watching us carefully. I knew him, to say hello to, and he was OK; he was a student, and we’d talked about music a couple times. He liked the White Stripes a lot, and I’d been trying to get him to listen to Muddy Waters and the Wolf. We were freaking him out a little.

‘Listen,’ I said to Ed. ‘I come here a lot. You wanna kick my ass, then let’s go outside.’

‘Thanks,’ said the White Stripes guy. ‘I mean, you know. You’d be welcome if there wasn’t anyone else here, because you’re a regular, and we like to look after our regulars. But…’ He gestured at the line behind us.

‘No, no, I understand, man,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’

‘Shall I leave your coffees on the counter here?’

‘Sure. It won’t take long. He usually calms down after he’s landed a good one.’

‘Fuck you.’

So we all went out on to the street. It was cold and dark and wet, but Ed’s ears were like two little torches in the gloom.

I hadn’t seen or spoken to Penny since the morning our brush with the angel had been in the papers. I had thought fondly of her, but I hadn’t really missed her, either sexually or socially. My libido was
on leave of absence (and one had to be prepared for the possibility that it might opt for early retirement and never return to its place of work); my social life consisted of JJ, Maureen and Jess, which might suggest that it was as sickly as my sex drive, not least because they seemed to suffice for the time being. And yet when I saw Penny flirt with one of Matty’s nurses, I felt uncontrollably angry.

This isn’t a paradox, if you know anything about the perversity of human nature. (I believe I have used that line before, and as a consequence it is probably beginning to seem a little less authoritative and psychologically astute. Next time, I shall just own up to the perversity and the inconsistency, and leave human nature out of it.) Jealousy is likely to seize a man at any time, and in any case the blond nurse was tall, and young, and tanned, and blond. There is every chance that he would have made me uncontrollably angry if he had been standing on his own in the basement of Starbucks, or indeed anywhere in London.

I was, in retrospect, almost certainly looking for an excuse to leave the bosom of my family. As suspected, I had learned very little about myself in the previous few minutes. Neither my ex-wife’s scorn nor my daughters’ crayons had been as instructive as Jess might have wished.

‘Thanks,’ I said to Penny.

‘Oh, that’s OK. I wasn’t doing anything, and Jess seemed to think it might help.’

‘No,’ I said, immediately at something of a moral disadvantage. ‘Not thanks for that. Thanks for standing here flirting in front of me. Thanks for nothing, in other words.’

‘This is Stephen,’ Penny said. ‘He’s looking after Matty, and he didn’t have anyone to talk to, so I came over to say hello.’

‘Hi,’ said Stephen. I glared at him.

‘I suppose you think you’re pretty great,’ I said.

‘I’m sorry?’ he said.

‘Martin!’ said Penny.

‘You heard me,’ I said. ‘Smug git.’

I had the feeling that over in the corner, where the girls were colouring their picture, there was another Martin – a kinder, gentler
Martin – watching in appalled fascination, and I wondered briefly whether it was possible to rejoin him.

‘Go away, before you make an idiot of yourself,’ said Penny. It says a lot for Penny’s generosity of spirit that she still saw idiocy coming towards me from off in the distance, and that I still had a chance of getting out of the way; less partial observers would have argued that idiocy had already squashed me flat. It didn’t matter, though, because I wasn’t moving.

‘It’s easy, being a male nurse, isn’t it?’

‘Not very,’ said Stephen. He had made the elementary mistake of answering my question as if it had been delivered straight, without bile. ‘I mean, it’s rewarding, sure, but… Long hours, poor pay, night shifts. Some of the patients are difficult.’ He shrugged.

‘Some of the patients are difficult,’ I said, in a stupid whiny voice. ‘Poor pay. Night shifts. Diddums.’

‘Sean,’ Stephen said to his partner. ‘I’m going to wait upstairs. This guy’s throwing the rattle out of the pram.’

‘You just wait and listen to what I have to say. I did you the courtesy of listening to you banging on about what a national hero you are. Now you listen to me.’

I don’t think he minded staying where he was for a couple of minutes. This kind of sensationally bad behaviour elicited a great deal of fascination, I could see that, and I hope I don’t seem immodest when I say that my celebrity, or what remained of it, was crucial to the success of the spectacle: usually, television personalities only behave badly in nightclubs, when surrounded by other television personalities, so my decision to cut loose when sober to a male nurse, in a Starbucks basement, was bold – possibly even groundbreaking. And it wasn’t as if Stephen could really take it personally, just as he couldn’t have taken it personally if I’d decided to crap on his shoes. The outward manifestations of an inner combustion are never very directed.

‘I hate people like you,’ I said. ‘You wheel a disabled kid around for a bit and you want a medal. And how hard is it, really?’

At this point, I regret to say, I took the handles of Matty’s wheelchair and pushed him up and down. And it suddenly seemed
like an excellent idea to put my hand on my hip while I was doing it, in order to suggest that pushing disabled people around in their wheelchairs was an effeminate activity.

‘Look at Daddy, Mummy,’ one of my daughters (and I’m sorry to say that I don’t know which one) yelled with delight. ‘He’s funny, isn’t he?’

‘There,’ I said to Penny. ‘How’s that? Do I look more attractive to you again now?’

Penny was staring at me as if I were indeed crapping on Stephen’s shoe, a look that answered the question.

‘Hey, everybody,’ I yelled, although I had already attracted all the attention I could possibly wish for. ‘Aren’t I great? Aren’t I great? You think this is hard, Blondie? I’ll tell you what’s hard, Sunny Jim. Hard is…’

But here I dried up. As it turned out, there were no examples of difficulty in my professional life readily to hand. And the difficulties I had experienced recently all stemmed from sleeping with an underage girl, which meant that they weren’t much good for eliciting sympathy.

‘Hard is when…’ I just needed something with which to finish the sentence. Anything would do, even something I hadn’t experienced directly. Childbirth? Tournament-level chess? But nothing came.

‘Have you finished, mate?’ Stephen asked.

I nodded, trying somehow to convey in the gesture that I was too angry and disgusted to continue. And then I took the only option apparently available to me, and followed Jess and JJ out of the door.

Jess was always walking out of everywhere, so I didn’t mind her going too much. But when JJ walked out, and then Martin… Well, I started to feel a bit annoyed, to tell you the honest truth. It seemed rude, when everyone had gone to all that trouble to turn up. And Martin was so peculiar, pushing Matty up and down and
asking everyone if he looked attractive. Why would anyone think he looked attractive? He didn’t look attractive at all. He looked mad. To be fair to JJ, he’d taken his guests with him when he went – he hadn’t left them behind in the coffee bar, the way Jess and Martin had done. But later on I found out that he’d taken them all outside to have a fight with them, so it was difficult to decide whether he was being rude or not. On the one hand, he was with them, but on the other hand, he was with them because he wanted to beat them up. I think that’s probably still rude, but not as rude as the others.