A Long Way Down (8 page)

I think Jen got sick of me, too.

Also, the business in the cinema, which looking back on it might have been the final straw. That was inappropriate behaviour, too. Or maybe the behaviour wasn’t inappropriate, because we had to have that conversation some time, but the place (the Holloway Odeon) wasn’t right, and nor was the time (halfway through the film) or the volume (loud). One of the points Chas made that night was that I wasn’t really mature enough to be a mother, and I can see now that by yelling my head off about having a baby halfway through
Moulin Rouge
I sort of proved it for him.

So anyway. Martin went mental at me for a while, and then he just seemed to shrink, as if he was a balloon and he’d been punctured. ‘What’s wrong, kind sir?’ I said, but he just shook his head, and I could understand enough from that. What I understood was that it was the middle of the night and he was standing outside a party full of people he didn’t know, shouting at someone else he didn’t know, a couple of hours after sitting on a roof thinking about killing himself. Oh yeah, and his wife and children hated him. In any other situation I would have said that he’d suddenly lost the will to live. I went over and put my hand on his shoulder, and he looked at me as if I were a person rather than an irritation and we almost had a Moment of some description – not a romantic Ross-and-Rachel-type moment (as if), but a Moment of Shared Understanding. But then we were interrupted, and the Moment passed.

I want to tell you about my old band – I guess because I’d started to think about these guys as my new one. There were four of us, and we were called Big Yellow. We started out being called Big Pink, as a tribute to the Band album, but then everyone thought we were a gay band, so we changed colors. Me and Eddie started the band in high school, and we wrote together, and we were like brothers, right up until the day that we weren’t like that any more. And Billy was the drummer, and Jesse was the bassist, and… shit, you could care less, right? All you need to know is this: we had something that no one else ever had. Maybe some people used to have it, before my time – the Stones, the Clash, the Who. But no one I’ve ever seen had it. I wish you’d come to one of our shows, because then you’d know that I’m not bullshitting you, but you’ll have to take my word for it: on our good nights we could suck people up and spit ’em out twenty miles away. I still like our albums, but it was the shows that people remember; some bands just go out and play their songs a little louder and faster, but we found a way of doing something else; we used to speed ’em up and slow ’em down, and we used to play covers of things we loved, and that we knew the people who came to hear us would love too, and our shows came to
mean
something to people, in a way that shows don’t any more. When Big Yellow played live, it was like some kind of Pentecostal service; instead of applause and whistles and hoots, there’d be tears and teeth-grinding and speaking in tongues. We saved souls. If you love rock’n’roll, all of it, from, I don’t know, Elvis right through James Brown and up to the White Stripes, then you’d have wanted to quit your job and come and live inside our amps until your ears fell off. Those shows were my reason for living, and I now know that this is not a figure of speech.

I wish I was deluding myself. Really. It would help. But we used to have these message boards up on our website, and I’d read them every now and again, and I could tell that people felt the same way we did; and I looked at other people’s boards, too, and they didn’t
have the same kind of fans. I mean, everyone has fans who love what they do, otherwise they wouldn’t be fans, right? But I could tell from reading the other boards that our guys walked out of our shows feeling something special. We could feel it, and they could feel it. It’s just that there weren’t enough of them, I guess. Anyway.

Maureen felt faint after Jess cut loose on her, and who could blame her? Jesus. I would have needed to sit down too if Jess ever cut loose on me, and I’ve been around the block a few times. I took her outside on to a little roof terrace that looked like it never got the sun at any time of the day or year, but there was a picnic table and a grill out there anyway. Those little grills are everywhere in England, right? To me they’ve come to represent the triumph of hope over circumstance, seeing as all you can do is peer at them out the window through the pissing rain. There were a couple of people sitting at the picnic table, but when they saw that Maureen wasn’t feeling too good they got up and went back inside, and we sat down. I offered to get her a glass of water, but she didn’t want anything, so we just sat there for a while. And then we both heard like this hissing noise, coming from the shadows next to the grill in the far corner, and eventually we figured out that there was a guy back there. He was young, with long hair and a sorry-ass moustache, hunkered down in the dark, trying to attract our attention.

‘Excuse me,’ he whispered as loudly as he dared.

‘You wanna talk to us, you come here.’

‘I can’t come into the light.’

‘What would happen to you if you did?’

‘A nutter might try to kill me.’

‘There’s only Maureen and me out here.’

‘This nutter’s everywhere.’

‘Like God,’ I said.

I walked over to the other side of the terrace and crouched down next to him.

‘How can I help you?’

‘You American?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh. Howdy, pardner.’ If I tell you that this amused him, you’ll know all you need to know about this guy. ‘Listen, can you check the party and see if the nutter’s gone?’

‘What does he look like?’

‘She. I know, I know, but she’s really scary. A mate saw her first and told me to hide out here until she’d gone. I went out with her once. Not like “once upon a time”. Just once. But I stopped because she’s off her head, and…’

This was perfect.

‘You’re Chas, aren’t you?’

‘How did you know that?’

‘I’m a friend of Jess’s.’

Oh, man, I wish you could have seen the look on his face. He scrambled to his feet and started looking for ways to escape over the back wall. At one point I thought he was going to try running up it, like a squirrel.

‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Fuck. I’m sorry. Shit. Will you help me climb over?’

‘No. I want you to come and talk to her. She’s had, she’s had like a rough evening, and maybe a little chat would help calm her down.’

Chas laughed. It was the hollow, desperate laugh of a man who knew that, when it came to calming Jess down, several elephant tranquilizers would be much more useful than a little chat.

‘You know I haven’t had sex since that night we went out, don’t you?’

‘I didn’t know that, Chas, no. How would I know? Where would I have read that?’

‘I’ve been too scared. I can’t make that mistake again. I can’t have another woman shouting at me in the cinema. I don’t mind, you know, never having sex again. It’s better that way. I’m twenty-two. I mean, by the time you’re sixty, you don’t feel like it anyway, right? So we’re only talking forty years. Less. I can live with that. Women are fucking maniacs, man.’

‘You don’t want to think shit like that, man. You’ve just had some bad luck.’

I said this because I knew it was the right thing to say, not
because my experience told me anything different. It wasn’t true that women were fucking maniacs, of course it wasn’t – just the ones that I had slept with and Chas had slept with.

‘Listen. If you came outside and had a little chat, what’s the worst that could happen?’

‘She’s tried to kill me twice and she got me arrested once. Plus, I’m banned from three pubs, two galleries and a cinema. Plus, I’ve had an official warning from…’

‘OK, OK. So you’re saying the worst that could happen is, you die a painful and violent death. And I say to you, my friend, that it’s better to die like a man than hide underneath grills like a mouse.’

Maureen had stood up and come to join us in our dark barbecue corner.

‘I’d try to kill you, if I were Jess,’ she said quietly – so quietly that it was hard to square the violence of the words with the timidity in the voice.

‘There you go. You’re in trouble wherever you look.’

‘Who the fuck’s this now?’

‘I’m Maureen,’ said Maureen. ‘Why should you get away with it?’

‘Get away with what? I didn’t do anything.’

‘I thought you said you had sex with her,’ Maureen said. ‘Or maybe you didn’t say that in so many words. But you said you hadn’t had sex since. So I’m thinking that you slept with her.’

‘Well, we had sex that once. But I didn’t know she was a fucking maniac then.’

‘So once you find out that the poor girl is confused and vulnerable, that’s when you run away.’

‘I had to run away. She was chasing me. With a knife, half the time.’

‘And why was she chasing you?’

‘What is this? Why is it your business?’

‘I don’t like to see people upset.’

‘What about me? I’m upset. My life is a shambles.’

Now, see, Chas couldn’t know, but that wasn’t such a good line of argument to use with any of our crowd, the Toppers’ House Four. We were, by definition, the Kings and Queens of Shambles.
Chas had given up on sex, whereas we were trying to decide whether to give up on fucking life.

‘You have to talk to her,’ said Maureen.

‘Fuck off,’ said Chas. And then, womp! Maureen popped him as hard as she could.

I can’t tell you how many times I’d watched Eddie pop someone at a party or after a show. And he’d probably say the same thing about me, although in my memory I was the Man of Peace, with only the occasional lapse into violence, and he was the Man of War, with only the occasional moment of calm and clarity. And OK, Maureen was like this little old lady, but watching her take a swing really brought it all back home.

Here’s the thing about Maureen: she had a lot more guts than I had. She’d stuck around to find out what it would feel like, never to live the life she had planned for herself. I didn’t know what those plans were, but she had them, same as everybody, and when Matty came along, she’d waited around for twenty years to see what she’d be offered as a replacement, and she was offered nothing at all. There was a lot of feeling in that slap, and I could imagine hitting someone pretty hard when I was her age, too. That was one of the reasons I didn’t intend ever to be her age.

Frank is Matty’s father. It’s funny to think that might not be immediately obvious to someone, because it’s so obvious to me. I only ever had intercourse with one man, and I only had intercourse with that one man once, and the one time in my entire life I had intercourse produced Matty. What are the chances, eh? One in a million? One in ten million? I don’t know. But of course even one in ten million means that there are a lot of women like me in the world. That’s not what you think of, when you think of one in ten million. You don’t think, That’s a lot of people.

What I’ve come to realize, over the years, is that we’re less protected from bad luck than you could possibly imagine. Because though it
doesn’t seem fair, having intercourse only the once and ending up with a child who can’t walk or talk or even recognize me… Well, fairness doesn’t really have much to do with it, does it? You only have to have intercourse the once to produce a child, any child. There are no laws that say, You can only have a child like Matty if you’re married, or if you have lots of other children, or if you sleep with lots of different men. There are no laws like that, even though you and I might think there should be. And once you have a child like Matty, you can’t help but feel, That’s it! That’s all my bad luck, a whole lifetime’s worth, in one bundle. But I’m not sure luck works like that. Matty wouldn’t stop me from getting breast cancer, or from being mugged. You’d think he should, but he can’t. In a way, I’m glad I never had another child, a normal one. I’d have needed more guarantees from God than He could have provided.

And anyway, I’m Catholic, so I don’t believe in luck as much as I believe in punishment. We’re good at believing in punishment; we’re the best in the world. I sinned against the Church, and the price you pay for that is Matty. It might seem like a high price to pay, but then, these sins are supposed to mean something, aren’t they? So in one way it’s hardly surprising that this is what I got. For a long time I was even grateful, because it felt to me as though I were going to be able to redeem myself here on Earth, and there’d be no reckoning to be made afterwards. But now I’m not so sure. If the price you have to pay for a sin is so high that you end up wanting to kill yourself and committing an even worse sin, then Someone’s done his sums wrong. Someone’s overcharging.

I had never hit anyone before, not in the whole of my life, although I’d often wanted to. But that night was different. I was in limbo, somewhere between living and dying, and it felt as if it didn’t matter what I did until I went back to the top of Toppers’ House again. And that was the first time I realized that I was on a sort of holiday from myself. It made me want to slap him again, just because I could, but I didn’t. The once was enough: Chas fell over – more from the shock, I think, than from the force, because I’m not so strong – and then knelt on all fours covering his head with his hands.

‘I’m sorry,’ Chas said.

‘For what?’ JJ asked him.

‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘Whatever.’

‘I had a boyfriend like you once,’ I told him.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said again.

‘It hurts. It’s a horrible thing to do, to have intercourse with someone and then disappear.’

‘I can see that now.’

‘Can you?’

‘I think so.’

‘You can’t see anything from down there,’ said JJ. ‘Why don’t you get up?’

‘I don’t really want to be slapped again.’

‘Is it fair to say that you’re not the bravest man in the world?’ JJ asked him.

‘There are lots of different ways of showing courage,’ said Chas. ‘If what you’re saying is that I don’t set much store by physical bravery… then yes, that’s fair. It’s overrated, I think.’

‘Well, you know, Chas, I think that’s kinda brave of you, to show you’re so afraid of a small lady like Maureen. I respect your honesty, man. You won’t slap him again, will you, Maureen?’