A Long Way Down

Jess

It didn’t take long for the papers to find out. A couple of days, maybe. I was in my room, and Dad called me downstairs and asked me what I’d been up to on New Year’s Eve. And I went, Nothing much, and he went, Well, that isn’t what the newspapers seem to think. And I was like, Newspapers? And he said, Yeah, there’s apparently going to be a story about you and Martin Sharp. Do you know Martin Sharp? And I was, you know, Yeah, sort of, only met him that night at a party, don’t know him very well. And so Dad goes, What the hell kind of party is it where you meet someone like Martin Sharp? And I couldn’t think what kind of party that would be, so I didn’t say anything. And then Dad was like, And was there… Did anything… All tenterhooks or whatever, kind of thing, so I just dived in. Did I fuck him? No I did not! Thanks a bunch! Bloody hell! Martin Sharp! Eeeeuch! And so on and so on until he got the idea.

It was fucking Chas, of course, who phoned up the newspapers. He’d probably tried before, the little shit, but he never had much to go on then, when it was just me. The Jess Crichton/Martin Sharp combo, though… unresistable. How much do you think you get for something like that? A couple of hundred quid? More? To be honest, I’d have done it if I were him. He’s always skint. And I’m always skint. If he’d been anyone worth selling up the river, he’d be halfway out to sea by now.

Dad pulled back the curtain to sneak a look, and there was someone out there. I wanted to go out and have a go at him, but Dad wouldn’t let me; he said that they’d take a mad picture of me, and I’d look stupid and regret it. And he said it was undignified to do that, and in our position we had to rise above it all and ignore them. And I was like, In whose position? I’m not in a position. And he went, Well, you are, whether you like it or not you are in a position, and I go, You’re in a position not me, and he said, You’re in a position too, and we went on like that for a while. But of course going on about it never changes anything, and I know he’s right, really. If I wasn’t in a position then the papers wouldn’t be interested. In fact, the more I act as though I’m not in a position, then the more I’m in a position, if you see what I mean. If I just sat in my room and read, or got a steady boyfriend, there’d be no interest. But if I went to bed with Martin Sharp, or threw myself off a roof, then there would be the opposite of no interest. There’d be interest.

When I was in the papers a couple of years ago, just after the Jen thing, I think the feeling was I was Troubled rather than Bad. Anyway, shoplifting isn’t murder, is it? Everyone goes through a shoplifting phase, don’t they? By which I mean proper shoplifting, boosting Winona-style, bags and clothes and shit, not pens and sweets. It comes just after ponies and boy bands, and right before spliff and sex. But I could tell that it was different this time, and that was when I started to think things through. Yeah, yeah, I know. But better late than never, eh? What I thought was this: if it was going to be all over the papers, it was better for Mum and Dad to think that I’d slept with Martin than to know the real reason we were together. The real reason would kill them. Maybe literally. Which would make me the only family member left alive, possibly, and even I’m making up my mind which way to go. So if the papers had got hold of the wrong end of the stick, it wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Obviously it would be pretty humiliating at college, everyone thinking I’d fucked the sleaziest man in Britain, but it would be for the greater good, i.e. two alive parents.

The thing was, even though I’d started to think things through, I didn’t think them through properly. I could have saved myself a lot of trouble if I’d just given it another two minutes before I’d opened my mouth, but I didn’t. I just went, Da-ad. And he was like, Oh, no. And I just looked at him and he goes, You’d better tell me everything, and I said, Well, there isn’t much to tell really. I just went to this party and he was there and I had too much to drink and we went back to his place and that’s it. And he was like, That’s it, as in end of story? And I went, Well, no, that’s it as in dot dot dot you don’t need to know the details. So he went, Jesus Christ, and he sat down in a chair.

But here’s the thing: I didn’t need to say I’d slept with him, did I? I could have said we’d snogged, or he tried it on, or anything at all like that, but I wasn’t quick enough. I was like, Well if it’s a choice between suicide and sex, better go sex, but those didn’t have to be the choices. Sex was only a serving suggestion sort of thing, but you don’t have to do exactly what it says on the packet, do you? You can miss the garnish out, if you want, and that’s what I should have done. (’Garnish”—that’s a weird word, isn’t it? I don’t think I’ve ever used it before.) But I didn’t, did I? And the other thing I should have done but didn’t: before I told him anything, I should have got Dad to find out what the story in the newspaper was. I just thought, Tabloids, sex… I don’t know what I thought, to tell you the truth. Not much, as usual.

So Dad got straight on the phone and talked to his office and told them what I’d told him, and then when he’d finished, he said he was going out and I wasn’t to answer the phone or go anywhere or do anything. So I watched TV for a few minutes, and then I looked out the window to see if I could see that bloke, and I could, and he wasn’t on his own any more.

And then Dad came back with a newspaper—he’d been out to get an early edition. He looked about ten years older than he had before he left. And he held up the paper for me to see, and the headline said, “Martin SHARP AND JUNIOR MINISTER’S DAUGHTER IN SUICIDE PACT”.

So the whole sex confession bit had been a complete and utter fucking waste of time.

JJ

That was the first time we knew anything about Jess’s background, and I have to say that my first reaction was that it was pretty fucking hilarious. I was in my local store, buying some smokes, and Jess and Martin were staring at me from the counter, and I read the headline and whooped. Which, seeing as the headline was about their supposed suicide pact, got me some strange looks. An Education minister! Holy shit! You’ve got to understand, this girl talked like she’d been brought up by a penniless, junkie welfare mother who was younger than her. And she acted like education was a form of prostitution, something that only the weird or the desperate would resort to.

But then when I read the story, it wasn’t quite so funny. I didn’t know anything about Jess’s older sister Jennifer. None of us did. She disappeared a few years ago, when Jess was fifteen and she was eighteen; she’d borrowed her mother’s car and they found it abandoned near a well-known suicide spot down on the coast. Jennifer had passed her test three days before, as if that had been the point of learning to drive. They never found a body. I don’t know what that would have done to Jess—nothing good, I guess. And her old man… Jesus. Parents who only beget suicidal daughters are likely to end up feeling pretty dark about the whole child-raising scene.

And then, the next day, it became a whole lot less funny. There was another headline, and it read THERE WERE FOUR OF THEM!”, and in the article underneath it there was a description of these two freaks that I eventually realized were supposed to be Maureen and me. And at the end of the article, there was an appeal for further information and a phone number. There was even like a cash reward. Maureen and I had prices on our heads, man!

The information had clearly come from that asshole Chas; you could hear the whine in his voice right through the weird British tabloid prose. You had to give the guy a little credit, though, I guess. To me, the evening had consisted of four miserable people, failing dismally to do something they had set out to do—something that is not, let’s be honest, real hard to achieve. But Chas had seen something else: he’d seen that it was a story, something he might make a few bucks off of. OK, he must have known about Jess’s dad, but, you know, props to the guy. He still needed to put it together.

I’ll tell you the honest truth here: I got off on the story a little. It was kind of gratifying, in an ironic way, reading about myself, and that makes sense if you think about it. See, one of the things that had brought me down was my inability to leave my mark on the world through my music—which is another way of saying that I was suicidal because I wasn’t famous. Maybe I’m being hard on myself, because I know there was a little more to it than that, but that was sure a part of it. Anyway, recognizing that I was all washed up had got me on to the front page of the newspaper, and maybe there’s a lesson there somewhere.

So I was sort of enjoying myself, sitting in my flat, drinking coffee and smoking, taking pleasure from knowing that I was sort of famous and completely anonymous, all at the same time. And then the fucking buzzer went, and I jumped out of my skin.

“Who is it?”

“Is that JJ?” A young woman’s voice.

“Who is it?”

“I wondered if I could have a few words with you? About the other night?”

“How did you get this address?”

“I understand you were one of the people with Jess Crichton and Martin Sharp on New Year’s Eve? When they tried to kill themselves?”

“You understand wrong, ma’am.” This was the first sentence from either of us that didn’t have a question mark at the end. The low note at the end of mine was a relief, like a sneeze.

“Which bit have I got wrong?”

“All of it. You pressed the wrong buzzer.”

“I don’t think I did.”

“How do you know?”

“Because you didn’t deny you were JJ. And you asked how I’d got this address.”

Good point. They were professional, these people.

“I didn’t say it was my address, though, did I?”

There was a pause, while we both allowed the complete stupidity of this observation to float around.

She didn’t say anything. I imagined her standing out there in the street, shaking her head sadly at my pathetic attempts. I vowed not to say another word until she went away.

“Listen,” she said. “Was there a reason you came down?”

“What kind of reason?”

“I don’t know. Something that might cheer our readers up. Maybe, I don’t know, you gave each other the will to go on.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“The four of you looked down over London and saw the beauty of the world. Anything like that? Anything that might inspire our readers?”

Was there anything inspirational in our quest to find Chas? If there was, I couldn’t see it.

“Did Martin Sharp say anything that gave you a reason to live, for example? People would want to know, if he did.”

I tried to think if Martin had offered us any words of comfort she could use. He’d called Jess a fucking idiot, but that was more of a spirit-lifting rather than life-saving moment. And he’d told us that a guest on his show had been married to someone who’d been in a coma for twenty-five years, but that hadn’t helped us out much, either.

“I can’t think of anything, no.”

“I’m going to leave a card with my numbers on it, OK? Ring me when you feel ready to talk about this.”

I nearly ran out after her—I was, as we say, missing her already. I liked being the temporary center of her world. Shit, I liked being the temporary center of my own, because there hadn’t been too much there recently, and there wasn’t much there after she’d gone, either.

Maureen

So I went home, and I put the television on, and made a cup of tea, and I phoned the centre, and the two young fellas delivered Matty to the house, and I put him in front of the TV, and it all started again. It was hard to see how I’d last another six weeks. I know we had an agreement, but I never thought I’d see any of them again anyway. Oh, we exchanged telephone numbers and addresses and so forth. (Martin had to explain to me that if I didn’t have a computer, then I wouldn’t have an email address. I wasn’t sure whether I’d have one or not. I thought it might have come in one of those envelopes you throw away.) But I didn’t think we’d actually be using them. I’ll tell you God’s honest truth, even though it’ll make me sound as if I was feeling sorry for myself: I thought they might see each other, but they’d keep me out of it. I was too old for them, and too old-fashioned, with my shoes and all. I’d had an interesting time going to parties and seeing all the strange people there, but it hadn’t changed anything. I was still going back to pick Matty up, and I still had no life to live beyond the life I was already sick and tired of. You might be thinking, well, why isn’t she angry? But of course I am angry. I don’t know why I ever pretend I’m not. The church had something to do with it, I suppose. And maybe my age, because we were taught not to grumble, weren’t we? But some days—most days—I want to scream and shout and break things and kill people. Oh, there’s anger, right enough. You can’t be stuck with a life like this one and not get angry. Anyway. A couple of days later the phone rang, and this woman with a posh voice said, “Is that Maureen?”

“It is.”

“This is the Metropolitan Police.”

“Oh, hello,” I said.

“Hello. We’ve had reports that your son was causing trouble in the shopping centre on New Year’s Eve. Shoplifting and sniffing glue and mugging people and so on.”

“I’m afraid it couldn’t have been my son,” I said, like an eejit. “He has a disability.”

“And you’re sure he’s not putting the disability on?”

I even thought about this for half a second. Well, you do, don’t you, when it’s the police? You want to make absolutely sure that you’re telling the absolute truth, just in case you get into trouble later on.

“He’d be a very good actor if he was.”

“And you’re sure he’s not a very good actor?”

“Oh, positive. You see, he’s too disabled to act.”

“But how about if that’s an act? Only, the er, the wossname fits his description. The suspect.”

“What’s the description?” I don’t know why I said that. To be helpful, I suppose.

“We’ll come to that, madam. Can you account for his whereabouts on New Year’s Eve? Were you with him?”

I felt a chill run through me then. The date hadn’t registered at first. They’d got me. I didn’t know whether to lie or not. Supposing someone from the home had taken him out and used him as a cover, sort of thing? One of those young fellas, say? They looked nice enough, but you don’t know, do you? Supposing they had gone shoplifting, and hidden something under Matty’s blanket? Supposing they all went out drinking, and they took Matty with them, and they got into a fight, and they pushed the wheelchair hard towards someone they were fighting with? And the police saw him careering into someone, and they didn’t know that he couldn’t have pushed himself, so they thought he was joining in? And afterwards he was just playing dumb because he didn’t want to get into trouble? Well, you could hurt someone, crashing into them with a wheelchair. You could break someone’s leg. And supposing… Actually, even in the middle of my little panic I couldn’t really see how he’d manage the glue sniffing. But even so! These were all the things that went through my mind. It was all guilt, I suppose. I hadn’t been with him, and I should have been, and the reason I hadn’t been with him was because I wanted to leave him for ever.

“I wasn’t with him, no. He was being looked after.”

“Ah. I see.”

“He was perfectly safe.”

“I’m sure he was, madam. But we’re not talking about his safety, are we? We’re talking about the safety of people in the Wood Green shopping centre.”

Wood Green! He was all the way up in Wood Green!

“No. Yes. Sorry.”

“Are you really sorry? Are you really really really f— sorry?”

I couldn’t believe my ears. I knew the police used bad language, of course. But I thought it would come out more when they were under stress, with terrorists and such like, not on the phone to members of the public in the course of a routine inquiry. Unless, of course, she really was under stress. Could Matty, or whoever pushed him, have actually killed someone? A child, maybe?

“Maureen.”

“Yes, I’m still here.”

“Maureen, I’m not really a policewoman. I’m Jess.”

“Oh.” I could feel myself blushing at my own stupidity.

“You believed me, didn’t you, you silly old bag.”

“Yes, I believed you.”

She could hear in my voice that she’d upset me, so she didn’t try to make any more of it.

“Have you seen the papers?”

“No. I don’t look at them.”

“We’re in them.”

“Who’s in them?”

“We are. Well, Martin and I are in them by name. What a laugh, eh?”

“What does it say?”

“It says that me and Martin and two other mystery, you know, people had a suicide pact.”

“That’s not true”.

“Der. And it says I’m the Junior Minister for Education’s daughter.”

“Why does it say that?”

“Because I am.”

“Oh.”

“I’m just telling you so you know what’s in the papers. Are you surprised?”

“Well, you do swear a lot, for a politician’s daughter.”

“And a woman reporter came round to JJ’s flat and asked him whether we came down for an inspirational reason.”

“What does that mean?”

“We don’t know. Anyway. We’re going to have a crisis meeting.”

“Who is?”

The four of us. Big reunion. Maybe in the place where we had breakfast.”

“I can’t go anywhere.”

“Why not?”

“Because of Matty. That’s one of the reasons I was up on the roof. Because I can never go anywhere.”

“We could come to you.”

I began to flush again. I didn’t want them here.

“No, no. I’ll think of something. When are you thinking of meeting up?”

“Later on today.”

“Oh, I won’t be able to sort anything out for today.”

“So we’ll come to you.”

“Please don’t. I haven’t tidied up.”

“So tidy up.”

“I’ve never had anyone from the television in my house. Or a politician’s daughter.”

“I won’t put on any airs or graces. We’ll see you at five.”

And that gave me three hours to sort everything out, put everything away. It does drive you a little bit mad, a life like mine, I think. You have to be a little mad to want to jump off the top of a building. You have to be a little mad to come down again. You have to be more than a little mad to put up with Matty, and the staying in all the time, and the loneliness. But I do think I’m only a little mad. If I were really mad, I wouldn’t have worried about the tidying up. And if I were really, properly mad, I wouldn’t have minded what they found.

Martin

I suppose it crossed my mind that my visit to Toppers’ House might be of interest to our friends in the tabloid press. I was on the front page of the paper for falling down drunk in the street, for Christ’s sake, and some would argue that attempting to fall off a high building is even more interesting than that. When Jess told Chas where we’d met, I did wonder whether he’d have the wit to sell the knowledge on, but as Chas seemed to me a particularly witless individual, I dismissed the fear as paranoia. If I’d known that Jess was newsworthy in her own right, then I could have prepared myself.

My agent called first thing, and read the story out to me—I only bother with the Telegraph at home now.

“Is any of this true?” he said.

“Between you and me?”

“If you want.”

“I was going to jump from the top of a tower-block.”

“Gosh.”

My agent is young, posh and green. I came out of prison to find that there had been a quote unquote reorganization at the agency, and Theo, who used to make the coffee for my previous agent, is now all that stands between me and professional oblivion. It was Theo who found me my current job at FeetUpTV!, the world’s worst cable channel. He has a degree in Comparative Religion, and he’s a published poet. I suspect that he plays his football for Allboys United, if you get my drift, although that’s neither here nor there. He’s at the chocolate teapot end of the competency scale.

“I met her up there. Her and a couple of others. We came back down again. And here I am, in the land of the living.”

“Why were you going to jump off the top of a tower-block?”

“It was purely whimsical.”

“I’m sure you must have had a reason.”

“I did. I was joking. Read my file. Acquaint yourself with recent events.”

“We thought we’d turned a corner.” It’s always very touching, his insistence on the first person plural. I’ve heard them all: “Since we came out of prison…”, “Since we had that spot of bother with the teenage girl…» If there was one cause for regret after a successful suicide attempt, it would be that I’d never get to hear Theo say, “Since we killed ourselves…” Or, “Since our funeral…”

“We thought wrong.”

There was a ruminative silence.

“Well. Gosh. Now what?”

“You’re the agent. I’d have thought this gave you no end of creative opportunities.”

“I’ll have a little think and call you back. By the way, Jess’s father has been trying to get hold of you. He called here, and I said we didn’t give out personal numbers. Did I do the right thing?”

“You did the right thing. But give him my mobile number anyway. I suppose there’s no avoiding him.”

“Do you want to call him? He left his number.”

“Go on, then.”

While I was on the phone to Theo, both my ex-wife and my ex-girlfriend left messages. I had thought of neither of them when Theo was reading out that story; now I felt sick. I was beginning to realize an important truth about suicide: failure is as hurtful as success, and is likely to provoke even more anger, because there’s no grief with which to water it down. I was, I could hear from the tone of the messages, in very deep shit.

I called Cindy first.

“You fucking selfish idiot,” she said.

“You don’t know anything, apart from what you read in the paper.”

“You seem to be the only person in the world that the papers get bang to rights. If they say you’ve slept with a fifteen-year-old, you have. If they say you’ve fallen over drunk in the street, you have. They don’t need to invent stuff for you.”

This was actually quite an acute observation. She was right: not once have I been the victim of misrepresentation or distortion. If you think about it, that was one of the most humiliating aspects of the last few years. The papers have been full of shit about me, and every word of the shit was true.

“So I’m presuming,” she went on, “that they’ve got it right again. You were up the top of a tower-block with the intention of hurling yourself off. And instead you came back down again with a girl.”

“That’s about the long and the short of it.”

“And what about your daughters?”

“Do they know?”

“Not yet. But someone at school will tell them. They always do. What do you want me to say to them?”

“Maybe I should talk to them.”

Cindy barked once. The bark was, I suspected, intended to be a satirical laugh.

“Tell them what you want,” I said. “Tell them Daddy was sad, but then he cheered up again.”

“Brilliant. If we had a pair of two-year-olds, that would be perfect.”

“I don’t know, Cindy. I mean, if I can’t see them, then it’s not really my problem, is it? It’s something you’ve got to deal with.”

“You bastard.”

And that was the end of the first phone call. Pointing out that her refusal to let me participate in my daughters’ upbringing left me out in the cold struck me as a restatement of the bleeding obvious, but never mind. It got her off the phone.

I don’t know what I owe my daughters any more. I gave up smoking, years ago, because I knew then that I owed them that much. But when you make the sort of mess I’ve made, smoking seems like the least of your worries—which is why I started again. Now there’s a journey: from giving up smoking—giving up smoking because you want to protect your kids from loss for as long as possible—to arguing with their mother about the best way to tell them of your attempted suicide. They never said anything about that conversation in antenatal classes. It’s the distance that does it, of course. I got further and further away, and the girls got smaller and smaller until they were just tiny dots, and I could no longer see them, literally or metaphorically. You can’t make out their faces, can you, when they’re just tiny dots, so you don’t need to worry about whether they’re happy or sad. It’s why we can kill ants. And so after a while, suicide becomes imaginable, in a way that wouldn’t be possible if they looked into your eyes every day.

Penny was still crying when I called her.

“At least that makes more sense,” she said after a while.

“What?”

“You leaving the party to go up there. And then coming back with those people. I couldn’t work out what they had to do with anything.”

“All you knew was that somehow they’d helped me to have sex with someone else.”

“Exactly.” She gave a little rueful snort. She’s OK, Penny. She’s not a bitch at all. She’s sweet-natured, self-deprecating, loving… She’d make someone a lovely partner. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m the one who’s failed, aren’t I?”

“I think my failures preceded yours. Which, by the way, don’t amount to anything. I mean, anything at all. I mean, there weren’t any failures. You’ve been fantastic to me.”

“How do you feel today?”

I hadn’t asked myself that question. I’d woken up with a hangover and the phone ringing, and since then, life seemed to have a momentum. I hadn’t thought about killing myself once all morning.

“OK. I won’t be going up there again just yet, if that’s what you mean.”

“Will you talk to me before you do?”

“About all that?”

“Yes. About all that.”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t seem like something talking can fix.”

“Oh, I know I can’t fix it. I just don’t want to have to read about it in the papers.”

“You can do better than this, Penny. Better than me.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Ah. So you don’t disagree with the premise.”

“I’ve got enough self-respect to think that there might be a man somewhere who’d rather spend New Year’s Eve with me than leap to his death, yes.”

“So why don’t you try and find him?”

“Would you care one way or the other?”

“Well. Caring about stuff like that… It’s sort of not where I’m at, is it?”

“Wow. That’s honest.”

“Is it? I would have thought it was merely self-evident.”

“So what do you want me to do?”

“I’m not sure there’s much you can do.”

“Will you call me later?”

“Yes, of course.”

I could promise that much, anyway.

Everyone—everyone apart from Chris Crichton, obviously—knows where I live. They all have my home phone number, my mobile number, my email address. When I came out of prison, I gave all my coordinates to anyone who showed any interest at all: I needed work, and I needed a profile. I never heard back from any of the bastards, of course, but now here they all were, gathered outside my front door. When I say “all”, I mean three or four rather squalid-looking hacks, mostly the young ones, those puffy-faced boys and girls who used to report on school fetes for a local paper and now can’t believe their luck. I pushed through the middle of them, even though I could have walked around them quite comfortably—four people shivering on a pavement and sipping coffee from Styrofoam cups doesn’t constitute a media scrum. We all enjoyed the pushing, though. It made me feel important, and it made them feel as though they were at the centre of a story. I smiled a lot, said “Good morning” to no one in particular, and batted one of them out of the way with a briefcase.

“Is it true you tried to kill yourself?” asked one particularly unattractive woman in a beige mac.

I gestured at myself, in order to draw their attention to my superb physical condition.

“Well, if I did, I clearly made quite a mess of it,” I said.

“Do you know Jess Crichton?”

“Who?”

“Jess Crichton, the Wossit Minister’s daughter. Education.”

“I’ve been a friend of the family for many years. We all spent New Year’s Eve together. Perhaps that’s how this rather silly misunderstanding arose. It wasn’t a suicide pact. It was a drinks party. Two entirely different things.”

I was beginning to enjoy myself a little. I was almost sorry when I reached the Peugeot I was renting, at enormous expense, to replace the BMW I had given away. And it wasn’t as if I knew where I was going anyway. But within minutes, the rest of my day was mapped out: Chris Crichton called on my mobile to invite me over for a chat; and then, shortly afterwards, from the same telephone number, Jess called to inform me that we were all going to visit Maureen. I didn’t mind. I had nothing else to do.

Before I knocked on Jess’s door, I sat in the car for a couple of minutes and examined my conscience. The last confrontation I’d had with an angry father came shortly after my ill-advised and, as it turned out, illegal sexual encounter with Danielle (5’ 9’, 36DD, fifteen years and 250 days old, and, let me tell you, those 115 days make quite a difference). The venue for this previous confrontation was my flat, the old, big flat in Gibson Square—not, needless to say, because Danielle’s father responded to a warm invitation, but because he was outside waiting for me as I tried to sneak home one night. It wasn’t a particularly fruitful meeting, not least because I tried to raise the issue of parental responsibility with him, and he tried to hit me. I still think I had a point. What was a fifteen-year-old doing snorting cocaine in the gents’ toilets of Melons nightclub at 1 a.m. on a Tuesday morning? But there is a possibility that, if I hadn’t been so forceful in the expression of my view, he wouldn’t have marched round the corner to the police station and made a complaint about my relationship with his daughter.

This time, I thought I’d try to avoid that particular line of argument. I could see that the subject of parental responsibility was an altogether touchy one in the Crichton household, what with one teenage girl missing, possibly dead, and the other suicidal, possibly nuts. And anyway, my conscience was entirely clear. The only physical contact I had had with Jess was when I sat on her head, and that was for entirely non-sexual reasons. In fact, they were not only non-sexual, but selfless. Heroic, even.

Chris Crichton, unfortunately, was not prepared to greet me as a hero. I wasn’t offered a handshake or a cup of coffee; I was ushered into his living room and given a dressing-down, as if I were some hapless parliamentary researcher. I had shown a lack of judgement, apparently—I should have found out Jess’s surname and phone number and called him. And I had somehow shown “a lack of taste”—Mr Crichton seemed under the impression that his daughter’s appearance in the tabloids was something to do with me, simply because I’m the kind of person who appears in the cheaper newspapers. When I tried to point out the various flaws in his logic, he claimed that I was likely to do very well out of it all. I’d just stood up to go when Jess appeared.

“I told you to stay upstairs.”

“Yeah, I know. It’s just that I stopped being seven a while ago. Has anyone ever told you you’re an idiot?”

He was terrified of her; you could see that straight away. He had just enough self-respect to hide the fear behind a dry world-weariness.

“I’m a politician. No one ever tells me anything but.”

“What’s it got to do with you where I spend New Year’s Eve?”

“You seem to have spent it together.”

“Yeah, by accident, you stupid old bastard.”

“This is how she talks to me,” he said, looking at me mournfully, as if my long relationship with the two of them would somehow allow me to intercede on his behalf.

“I’ll bet you’re regretting the decision not to go private, aren’t you?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Very admirable and all, sending her to the local comprehensive. But, you know. You get what you pay for. And you even got a bit less than that.”

“Jess’s school does a very good job under very difficult circumstances,” said Crichton. “Fifty-one per cent of Jess’s year got grade C or above at GCSE, up eleven per cent on the year before.”

“Excellent. That must be a great consolation to you.” We both looked at Jess, who gave us the finger.

“The point is, you were in loco parentis,” said the proud father. I had forgotten that Jess felt about long words the way that racists feel about black people: she hated them, and wanted to send them back where they came from. She threw him a filthy look.

“Firstly, she’s eighteen. And secondly, I sat on her head in order to stop her from jumping. Which might not have been parental, but it was at least practical. I’m sorry I didn’t write you a full report at the end of the evening.”

“Did you sleep with her?”

“Why is that your business, Dad?”

I wasn’t having that. I wasn’t going to get involved in an argument about Jess’s rights to a private sex life.

“Absolutely not.”

“Oi,” said Jess. “You don’t have to say it like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like you’re relieved or something. You should be so lucky.”

“I value our friendship too much to complicate it.”

“Ha ha.”

“Are you going to maintain a relationship with Jess?”

“Define your terms.”

“I think you should define yours first.”

“Listen, pal. I came here because I knew how worried you must be. But if you’re going to talk to me like that, I’ll fuck off home.” The word-racist brightened a little: the Anglo-Saxon was striking back against the Roman invader.

“I’m sorry. But you know the family history now. It doesn’t make things easy for me.”

“Ha! Like it makes things easy for me,” said Jess.

“It’s hard for all of us.” Crichton had clearly decided to make an effort.

“Yeah, I can see that.”

“So what can we do? Please? If you’ve got any ideas…”

“The thing is,” I said, “I’ve got problems of my own.”

“Der,” said Jess. “We were wondering why you were up there.”

“I appreciate that, Martin.” He had clearly been media-trained to use first names wherever possible, like the rest of Blair’s robots, to show that he was my mate. “I have a hunch about you. I can see you’ve made some, some wrong turns in your life…”

Jess snorted.

“But I don’t think you’re a bad man.”

“Thank you.”

“We’re in a gang,” said Jess. “Aren’t we, Martin?”

“We are, Jess,” I said, with what I hoped her father would recognize as a weary lack of enthusiasm. “We’re friends for ever.”

“What sort of gang?” said Crichton.

“We’re going to watch out for each other. Aren’t we, Martin?”

“We are, Jess.” If my words became any wearier, they would no longer have the energy to crawl up my throat and out of my mouth. I could imagine them slithering back down to where they’d come from.

“So you will be in loco parentis after all?”

“I’m not sure it’s that sort of gang,” I said. “ «The Loco Parentis gang"… Doesn’t sound very tough, does it? What are we going to do? Beat up the Paterfamiliases?”

“You fucking shut up and you fucking shut up,” Jess said, to Crichton and me respectively.

“My point is,” said Crichton, “that you’re going to be around.”

“He’s promised,” Jess said.

“And I’m supposed to feel reassured by that.”

“You can feel what you like,” I said. “But I’m not reassuring anyone about anything.”

“You have children of your own, I understand?”

“Sort of,” said Jess.

“I don’t need to spell out how worried I’ve been about Jess, and what a difference it would make to know that there was a sensible adult looking out for her.”

Jess sniggered unhelpfully.

“I know you wouldn’t be… You’re not exactly… Some of the tabloids would…”

“He’s worried about you sleeping with fifteen-year-olds,” said Jess.

“I’m not being interviewed for this job,” I said. “I don’t want it, and if you choose to give it to me, that’s your lookout.”

“All I want you to say is that if you see Jess getting herself into serious trouble, then you’ll either try to prevent it, or you’ll tell me about it.”

“He’d love to,” said Jess. “But he’s flat broke.”

“Why is money relevant?”

“Because say he had to keep an eye on me and I’d gone into some club or something, and they wouldn’t let him in because he’s skint… Well”

“Well what?”

“I could go in there and OD on smack. I’d be dead, just because you were too mean to stump up.”

I suddenly saw Jess’s point: a weekly wage of Ј250 from Britain’s lowest-rated cable TV station not only focuses the mind but stimulates empathy and imagination. Jess slumped lifeless in a toilet, all for the sake of twenty quid… It was too ghastly to contemplate, if you contemplated in the right spirit.

“How much do you want?” Crichton let out a sigh, as if everything—the conversation we were having, New Year’s Eve, my prison sentence—had been carefully plotted to lead to this moment.

“I don’t want anything,” I said.

“Yes, you do,” said Jess. “Yes he does.”

“How much does it cost to get into a club, these days?” Crichton asked.

“You can get through a hundred quid, easy,” said Jess.

A hundred quid? We were humiliating ourselves for the price of a decent dinner for two?

“I don’t doubt you can «get through» a hundred quid without trying. But he wouldn’t need to «get through» anything, would he? He’d only need the price of admission, if you’d overdosed on drugs. I’m presuming that he wouldn’t be stopping at the bar, if you were hovering between life and death in the toilet.”

“So what you’re saying is, my life isn’t worth a hundred quid to you. That’s nice, after what happened to Jen. I wouldn’t have thought you had enough daughters to spare.”

“Jess, that’s not fair.”

The front door slammed somewhere between the “not” and the “fair”, and Crichton and I were left staring at each other.

“I handled that badly,” he said, “didn’t I?”

I shrugged. “She was extorting money with menaces. Either you give her as much as she wants every time she asks for it, or she storms out. And I can see that might be a little… you know. Disconcerting. Given the family history.”

“I’ll give her as much as she wants, every time she asks for it,” he said. “Please go and find her.”

I left the house two hundred and fifty pounds richer; Jess was waiting for me at the end of the drive.

“I’ll bet you got double what we were asking for,” she said. “Always works, when you mention Jen.”

Jess

You won’t believe this—I don’t think I do now—but in my head, what happened to Jen had fuck all to do with New Year’s Eve. I could tell, from talking to the others and reading the papers, that no one else saw it that way, though. They were like, Ooooh, I get it: your sister disappeared, so you want to jump off a building. But it isn’t like that. I’m sure it must have been an ingredient, sort of thing, but it wasn’t the whole recipe. Say I’m a spaghetti Bolognese, well I reckon Jen is the tomatoes. Maybe the onions. Or even just the garlic. But she’s not the meat or the pasta.

Everyone reacts to something like that in different ways, don’t they? Some people would start support groups and all that; I know they would, because Mum and Dad are always trying to introduce me to some fucking group or another, mostly because the group was set up by someone who ended up getting a CSE or whatever off of the Queen. And some people would sit down, turn the TV on and watch for the next twenty years. Me, I just started messing around. Or rather, messing around became more like a full-time job, whereas previously it had been a hobby: some messing around had already been done before Jen went. I’ll be honest about that.

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.

JJ

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?”

Motherfucker. 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…”

“Yeah, and?” said Martin. “You seem to have omitted the part about why you want to kill yourself.”

“That’s it,” I said. “This disease that dries up all the blood in your veins.”

“That’s just what happens to everyone,” said Martin. “It’s called «getting older». I felt like that even before I’d been to prison. Even before I slept with that girl. It’s probably why I slept with her, come to think of it.”

“No, I get it,” said Jess.

“Yeah?”

“Course I do. You’re fucked.” She waved an apologetic hand in Maureen’s direction, like a tennis player acknowledging a lucky net cord. “You thought you were going to be someone, but now it’s obvious you’re nobody. You haven’t got as much talent as you thought you had, and there was no plan B, and you got no skills and no education, and now you’re looking at forty or fifty years of nothing. Less than nothing, probably. That’s pretty heavy. That’s worse than having the brain thing, because what you got now will take a lot longer to kill you. You’ve got the choice of a slow painful death, or a quick merciful one.”

She shrugged.

She was right. She got it.

Maureen

I would have got away with it if Jess hadn’t gone to the toilet. But you can’t stop people going to the toilet, can you? I was green. It never occurred to me that she’d be nosing around where she had no business.

She was gone a while, and she came back grinning all over her stupid face, holding a couple of the posters.

In one hand she had the poster of the girl, and in the other the poster of the black fella, the footballer.

“So whose are these then?” she said.

I stood up and shouted at her. “Put those back! They’re not yours!”

“I’d never have thought it of you,” she said. “So let’s work this out. You’re a dyke who has a bit of a thing for black guys with big thighs. Kinky. Hidden depths.”

It was typical of Jess, I thought. She only has a filthy imagination, which is to say, no imagination at all.

“Do you even know who these people are?” she said.

They’re Matty’s, the posters, not mine. He doesn’t know they’re his, of course, but they are; I chose them for him. I knew that the girl was called Buffy, because that’s what it said on the poster, but I didn’t really know who Buffy was; I just thought it would be nice for Matty to have an attractive young woman around the place, because he’s that age now. And I knew that the black fella played for Arsenal, but I only caught his first name, Paddy. I took advice from John at the church, who goes along to Highbury every week, and he said everyone loved Paddy, so I asked him if he’d bring me back a picture for my lad next time he went to a game. He’s a nice man, John, and he bought a great big picture of Paddy celebrating a goal, and he didn’t even want paying for it, but things got a little awkward afterwards. For some reason he decided my lad was a little lad, ten or twelve, and he promised to take him to a game. And sometimes on Sunday mornings, when Arsenal had lost on the Saturday, he asked how Matty was taking it, and sometimes when they’d won a big game he’d say, I’ll bet your lad’s happy, and so on. And then one Friday morning when I was wheeling Matty back from the shops, we bumped into him. And I could have said nothing, but sometimes you have to admit to yourself and to everyone else, This is Matty. This is my lad . So I did, and John never mentioned Arsenal again after that. I don’t miss that on a Sunday morning. There are lots of good reasons to lose your faith.

I chose the posters the same as I chose all the other things that Jess had probably been rummaging through, the tapes and the books and the football boots and the computer games and the videos. The diaries and the trendy address books. (Address books! Dear God! Of all the things that spell it out. I can put a tape on for him, and hope he was listening to it, but what am I going to fill an address book with? I haven’t even got one of my own.) The jazzy pens, the camera and the Walkman. Lots of watches. There’s a whole unlived teenage life in there.

This all began years ago, when I decided to decorate his bedroom.

He was eight, and he still slept in a nursery—clowns on the curtains, bunny rabbits on the frieze round the wall, all the things I’d chosen when I was waiting for him and I didn’t know what he was. And it was all peeling away, and it looked terrible, and I hadn’t done anything about it because it made me think too much about what wasn’t happening to him, all the ways he wasn’t growing up. What was I going to replace the bunny rabbits with? He was eight, so perhaps trains and rocket ships and maybe even footballers were the right sort of thing for him—but of course he didn’t know what any of those things were, what they meant, what they did. But there again, he didn’t know what the rabbits were either, or the clowns. So what was I supposed to do? Everything was pretending, wasn’t it? The only thing I could do that wasn’t make-believe was paint the walls white, get a plain pair of curtains. That would be a way of telling him and me and anyone else who came in that I knew he was a vegetable, a cabbage, and I wasn’t trying to hide it. But then, where does it stop? Does that mean you can never buy him a T-shirt with a word on it, or a picture, because he’ll never read, and he can’t make any sense of pictures? And who knows whether he even gets anything out of colours, or patterns? And it goes without saying that talking to him is ridiculous, and smiling at him, and kissing him on the head. Everything I do is pretending, so why not pretend properly?

In the end, I went for trains on the curtains, and your man from Star Wars on the lampshade. And soon after that I started buying comics every now and again, just to see what a lad of his age might be reading and thinking about. And we watched the Saturday morning television together, so I learned a little bit about pop singers he might like, and sometimes about the TV programmes he’d be watching. I said before that one of the worst things was never moving on, and pretending to move on doesn’t change anything. But it helps. Without it, what is there left? And anyway, thinking about these things helped me to see Matty, in a strange sort of a way. I suppose it must be what they do when they think of a new character for EastEnders : they must say to themselves, well, what does this person like? What does he listen to, who are his friends, what football team does he support? That’s what I did—I made up a son. He supports Arsenal, he likes fishing, although he doesn’t have a rod yet. He likes pop music, but not the sort of pop music where people sing half-naked and use a lot of swear words. Very occasionally, people ask what he wants for his birthday or Christmas, and I tell them, and they know better than to act surprised. Most distant family members have never met him, and never asked to. All they know about him is just that he’s not all there, or there’s something not right with him. They don’t want to know any more, so they never say, Oh, he can fish? Or, in the case of my Uncle Michael, Oh, he can swim underwater and then look at his watch while he’s down there? They’re just grateful to be told what to do. Matty took over the whole flat, in the end. You know how kids do. Stuff everywhere.

“It doesn’t matter whether I know who they are or not,” I said. “They belong to Matty.”

“Oh, he’s a big fan of…”

“Just do as you’re told and put them back,” said Martin. “Put them back or get out. How much of a bitch do you really want to be?”

One day, I thought, I’ll learn to say that for myself.

Martin

Matty’s posters weren’t mentioned again that day. We were all curious, of course, but Jess had ensured that JJ and I couldn’t express this curiosity: Jess set things up so that you were either for her or against her, and in this matter, as in so many others, we were against her—which meant staying quiet on this issue. But because we resented being made to stay quiet, we became aggressive and noisy on any other issue we could bring to mind.

“You can’t stand your dad, can you?” I asked her.

“No, course not. He’s a tosser.”

“But you live with him?”

“So?”

“How can you stick it, man?” JJ asked her.

“Can’t afford to move out. Plus they’ve got a cleaner and cable and broadband and all that.”

“Ah, to be young and idealistic and principled!” I said. “Anti-globalization, pro-cleaner, eh?”

“Yeah, I’m really going to be lectured by you two jerks. Plus there’s the other thing. The Jen thing. They worry.”

Ah, yes. The Jen thing. JJ and I were momentarily chastened. Looked at in a certain light, the previous conversation could be summarized as follows: a man recently imprisoned for having sex with a minor, and another who had fabricated a fatal disease because to do so saved him some time, trouble and face had ridiculed a grieving teenager for wanting to be at home with her grieving parents. I made a note to put aside some time later so that I could synopsize it differently.

“We were sorry to hear about your sister,” said Maureen.

“Yeah, well, it didn’t happen yesterday, did it?”

“We were sorry anyway,” said JJ wearily. Conceding the moral high ground to Jess simply meant that she could piss all over everyone until she got thrown off again.

“Got used to it now.”

“Have you?” I asked.

“Sort of…”

“Must be a strange thing to have to get used to.”

“Bit.”

“Don’t you think about it all the time?” JJ asked her.

“Can’t we talk about what we’re supposed to be talking about?”

“Which is what, exactly?”

“About what we’re going to do. About the papers and all that.”

“Do we have to do anything?”

“I think so,” said JJ.

“They’ll forget about us soon, you know,” I said. “It’s only because fuck all happens, sorry, Maureen, at the beginning of the year.”

“What if we don’t want them to forget about us?” said Jess.

“Why the hell would we want them to remember?” I asked her.

“We could make some dosh. And it’d be something to do.”

“What would be something to do?”

“I dunno. I just… I get the feeling that we’re different. That people would like us, and be interested in us.”

“You’re mad.”

“Yeah. Exactly. That’s why they’d be interested in me. I could even play it up a bit, if you like.”

“I’m sure that won’t be necessary,” I said quickly, on behalf of the three of us, and indeed on behalf of the entire population of Britain. “You’re fine as you are.”

Jess smiled sweetly, surprised by the unsought compliment. “Thanks, Martin. So are you. And you—they’d want to know how you fucked up your life with the girl. And you, JJ, they’d want to know about pizzas and all that. And Maureen could tell everyone about how shit it is living with Matty. See, we’d be like superheroes, the X-Men or whatever. We’ve all got some secret superpower.”

“Yeah,” said JJ. “Right on. I have the superpower of delivering pizzas. And Maureen has the superpower of a disabled son.”

“Well, all right, superpower is the wrong word. But, you know. Some thing .”

“Ah, yes. «Thing». Le mot juste , as ever.”

Jess scowled, but was too besotted by her theme to hit me with the insult my knowledge of a foreign phrase demanded and deserved. “And we could say that we still haven’t decided whether we’re going to actually top ourselves—they’d like that.”

“And if we like actually sold the TV rights to Valentine’s Night… Maybe they could turn it into a Big Brother kinda thing. You could root for the person you wanted to go over,” said JJ.

Jess looked dubious. “I don’t know about that,” she said. “But you know about papers and that, Martin. We could make some money, couldn’t we?”

“Has it occurred to you that I’ve had enough trouble with the papers?”

“Oh, it’s always about you, isn’t it?” said Jess. “What about if there’s a few quid in it for us?”

“But what’s the story?” said JJ. “There’s no story. We went up, we came down, that’s it. People must do that all the time.”

“I’ve been thinking about this. How about if we saw something?” said Jess.

“Like what? What are we supposed to have seen?”

“OK. How about if we saw an angel?”

“An angel,” said JJ flatly.

“Yeah.”

“I didn’t see an angel,” said Maureen. “When did you see an angel?”

“No one saw an angel,” I explained. “Jess is proposing that we invent a spiritual experience for financial gain.”

“That’s terrible,” said Maureen, if only because it was so clearly expected of her.

“It’s not really inventing , is it?” said Jess.

“No? In what sense did we actually see an angel?”

“What do you call it in poems?”

“I’m sorry?”

“You know, in poems. And in English Literature. Sometimes you say something is like something and sometimes you say something is something. You know, my love is like a fuck-bloody rose or whatever.”

“Similes and metaphors.”

“Yeah. Exactly. Shakespeare invented them, didn’t he? That’s why he was a genius.”

“No.”

“Who was it, then?”

“Never mind.”

“So why was Shakespeare a genius? What did he do?”

“Another time.”

“OK. Anyway. So which is the one where you say something is something, like «You are a prick» even if you’re not actually a prick. As in a penis. Obviously.”

Maureen looked close to tears.

“Oh, for God’s sake, Jess,” I said.

“Sorry. Sorry. I didn’t know if we had the same swearing rules if it was only for discussion about grammar and that.”

“We do.”

“Right. Sorry, Maureen. OK, «You are a pig» when you’re not a pig.”

“Metaphor.”

“Exactly. We didn’t literally see an angel. But we sort of did metaphorically.”

“We sort of metaphorically saw an angel,” repeated JJ. He had the flat disbelief thing off pat now.

“Yeah. Yeah. I mean, something turned us back. Something saved our lives. Why not an angel?”

“Because there wasn’t one.”

“OK, we didn’t see one. But you could say that anything was an angel. Any girl, anyway. Me, or even Maureen.”

“Any girl could be an angel.” JJ again.

“Yeah. Because of angels. Girls.”

“Have you ever heard of the Angel Gabriel, for example?”

“No.”

“Well, he—he—was an angel.”

“Yeah?”

For some reason I suddenly lost patience.

“What is this nonsense? Can you hear yourself, Jess?”

“What have I said now?”

“We didn’t see an angel, literally or metaphorically. And, incidentally, seeing something metaphorically, whatever that means, is not the same as seeing something. With your eyes. Which, as I understand it, is what you’re proposing we say. That’s not embellishing. That’s talking bullshit, sorry, Maureen. To be honest, I’d keep this to yourself. I wouldn’t tell anyone about the angel. Not even the national press.”

“But say if we get on telly and get a chance to, you know, spread our message?”

We all stared at her.

“What the hell is our message?”

“Well. That’s sort of up to us, isn’t it?”

How was one supposed to argue with a mind like this? The three of us never managed to find a way, so we contented ourselves with ridicule and sarcasm, and the afternoon ended with an unspoken agreement that as three-quarters of us hadn’t really enjoyed our brief moment of media exposure, we would allow the current interest in our mental health to dwindle away to nothing. And then, a couple of hours after I got home, there was a phone call from Theo, asking me why I hadn’t told him that I’d seen an angel.

Jess

They weren’t happy. Martin was the worst: he went up the fucking wall. He called me at home and went off on one for about ten minutes. But I knew he was going to be all right about it, because Dad answered the phone, and Martin never said anything to him. If he’d said anything to Dad, then the story would have come apart. It needed the four of us to stick to our guns, and as long as we did that, we could say we’d seen whatever we wanted to have seen. The thing is, it was too good an idea to waste, wasn’t it? And they knew that, which is why I thought they’d come round to it in the end—which they did, sort of. And for me, it was our first big test as a group. They all had a straightforward choice to make: were they on my side or not? And to be honest, if they’d decided that they weren’t, I doubt whether I’d have had anything more to do with them. It would have said a lot about them as people, none of it good.

I admit I was a bit sneaky. First of all I asked JJ the name of the woman who’d come round to see him that morning, and he told me her name and the paper she worked for, which was a bonus. He thought I was just making conversation, but I thought it might come in handy at some stage. And then when I got home, I called the paper. I said I’d only speak to her, and when I told them my name they gave me her mobile number.

She was called Linda, and she was really friendly. I thought she might think it was all a bit weird, but she was very interested and encouraging, really. If she had a fault as a journalist, I’d say it was that she was too encouraging, if anything. Too believing and trusting. You’d expect a good journalist to be all, you know, How do I know you’re telling the truth, but I could have told her anything and she’d have written it down. She was slightly unprofessional, between you and me.

So she was all, What did this angel look like, Jess? She said Jess a lot, to show that we were friends.

I’d thought about this. The stupid thing to say would have been that he—I’d decided he was a he, because of Gabriel—looked like a church angel, with wings and all that. That would give off the wrong signals, I thought.

Not what you’d expect, I said. And Linda went, What, no wings or haloes, Jess? And she laughed—like, What kind of berk would say they’d seen an angel with wings and a halo? So I knew I’d made the right decision. I laughed as well, and I went, No, he looked all modern, and she was like, Really?

(I always do this, when I’m talking about what someone said. I’m always, like, So I was like, and, She went, and all like that. But when a conversation goes on a bit, it’s a drag, isn’t it? Like, went, like, went. So I’m going to do it like a play from now on, OK? I’m not so good on speech marks or whatever, but I can remember plays from reading them at school.)

ME: Yeah. He was dressed modern. He looked like he could have been in a band or something.

LINDA: A band? Which band?

ME: I don’t know. Radiohead or someone like that.

LINDA: Why Radiohead?

(You couldn’t say anything without her asking a question. I said Radiohead because they don’t look like anything much. They’re just blokes, aren’t they?)

ME: I don’t know. Or Blur. Or… Who’s that guy? In that film? He’s not the one who’s not married to Jennifer Lopez, he’s the other one, and they won an Oscar, because he was good at maths even though he was only a cleaner… The blond one. Matt.

LINDA: The angel looked like Matt Damon?

ME: Yeah, I suppose. A bit.

LINDA: So. A handsome angel who looked like Matt Damon.

ME: He’s not all that, Matt Damon. But, yeah.

LINDA: And when did he appear, this angel?

ME: When?

LINDA: Yes, when. I mean, how close to… to jumping were you?

ME: Oh, really close, man. He came in at the last minute.

LINDA: Wow. So you were standing on the ledge? All of you?

ME: Yeah. We’d decided we were going to go over together. For company, sort of thing. So we were standing there saying our goodbyes to each other and that. And we were going to do One, Two, Three, Jump and we heard this voice behind us.

LINDA: You must have been frightened out of your wits.

ME: Yeah…

LINDA: It was a wonder you didn’t fall off.

ME: Yeah.

LINDA: So you all turned around…

ME: Yeah. We all turned around, and he said…

LINDA: Sorry. What was he wearing?

ME: Just a sort of… Like a baggy suit, sort of thing. A baggy white suit. Quite fashionable, really. Looked like it had set him back a few quid.

LINDA: A designer suit?

ME: Yeah.

LINDA: Tie?

ME: No. No tie.

LINDA: An informal angel.

ME: Yeah. Smart-casual, anyway.

LINDA: And did you know immediately he wasn’t a human man?

ME: Oh, yeah.

LINDA: How?

ME: He was all… fuzzy. Like he wasn’t tuned in properly. And you could see right through him. You couldn’t see his liver or anything like that. You could just see like the buildings on the other side of him. Oh, yeah—plus, he was hovering above the roof.

LINDA: How high?

ME: High, man. When I first saw him, I was like, that guy is five metres tall. But when I looked down at his feet, they were a metre above the ground.

LINDA: So he was about twelve feet tall?

ME: Two metres above the ground, then.

LINDA: So he was nine feet tall.

ME: Three metres. Whatever.

LINDA: So his feet were above your heads.

ME: (Becoming fucked off with her going on about metres, but trying not to show it) To begin with. But then he sort of worked out that he’d overdone it, and he, you know. Came down a bit. I got the impression that he hadn’t done any hovering for a while. He was a bit rusty.

(I was just making this stuff up as I went along. I mean, you know already I was making it up. But seeing as how I’d called her without thinking any of it through, I thought I was doing really well. She seemed to like it, anyway.)

LINDA: Amazing.

ME: Yeah. It really was.

LINDA: So what did he say?

ME: He said, you know, Don’t jump. But he said it very peacefully. Calmly. He had this like inner wisdom. You could tell he was a messenger from God.

LINDA: Did he say that?

ME: Not in so many words. But you could work it out.

LINDA: Because of the inner wisdom.

ME: Yeah. He had that sort of air about him, like he’d met God personally. It was wicked.

LINDA: That’s all he said?

ME: He was like, Your time hasn’t come yet. Go back down and send people this message of comfort and joy. And tell them that war is stupid. Which is something I personally believe.

(That last bit, the Which I personally believe bit, wasn’t part of the play. I’m just giving you extra information, so you can get a better picture of the kind of person I am.)

LINDA: And do you intend to spread that message?

ME: Yeah. Course. That’s one of the reasons we want to do this interview. And if any of your readers are like world leaders or generals or terrorists or whatever, then they should know that God is not a happy bunny at the moment. He’s well pissed off with that side of things.

LINDA: I’m sure our readers will find that very thought-provoking. And you all saw it?

ME: Oh, yeah. You couldn’t miss him.

LINDA: Martin Sharp saw it?

ME: Oh, yeah. Course. He saw it… he saw it more than any of us.

(I didn’t quite know what that meant, but I could tell it was important to her that Martin was involved.)

LINDA: So now what?

ME: Well. We’ve got to work out what we’re going to do.

LINDA: Of course. Will you be talking to any other newspapers?

ME: Oh, yeah. Definitely.

I was pleased with that. I got her up to five grand in the end. I had to promise that she’d have a chance to speak to everybody, though.

JJ

It didn’t seem like it was going to be too difficult, at first. OK, none of us was thrilled that Jess had got us into this angel thing, but it didn’t seem worth falling out over. We’d grit our teeth, say we’d seen an angel, take the money and try and forget it ever happened. But then the next day you’re sitting in front of a journalist, and you’re all agreeing with a straight face that this fucking angel looked like Matt Damon, and loyalty seemed like the dumbest of all the virtues. It wasn’t like you could just go through the motions, either, when you’re supposed to have seen an angel. You can’t just say, “Yeah, blah, angel, whatever.” Seeing an angel is clearly a big deal, so you’ve got to act like it’s a big deal, with excitement and open-mouthed awe, and it’s hard to do open-mouthed awe through gritted teeth. Maureen was maybe the one person who could have been convincing, because she believed in that stuff, kind of. But because she believed in it, she was the one who had the most trouble with the lies. “Maureen,” said Jess patiently and slowly, as if Maureen were simply being dumb, rather than fearing for her immortal soul, “It’s for five thousand pounds .”

The paper arranged for someone from the care home to sit for Matty, and we met Linda in the cafe where we’d had breakfast on New Year’s morning. We had our photos taken—mostly group shots, but then they took one or two more outside, with us pointing at the sky and our jaws unhinged with wonder. They didn’t end up using those, probably because one or two of us overdid it a little, and one of us wouldn’t do it at all. And then, after the shoot, Linda asked us questions.

It was Martin she was after—he was the prize. If she could get Martin Sharp to say that an angel had kept him from killing himself—i.e., if she could get Martin Sharp to say, “I AM A WACKO -OFFICIAL”—she had a front-page story. Martin knew it, too, so his performance was heroic, or as close to heroism as you can come if you’re a sleazy talk-show host who is never likely to do anything involving actual heroism. Martin telling Linda that he’d seen an angel reminded me of that Sidney Carton guy in A Tale of Two Cities going to the guillotine so that his buddy could live: Martin wore the expression of a man about to have his head sliced off for the greater good. That Sidney guy, though, he’d discovered his inner nobility, so he probably looked noble, but Martin just looked pissed off.

Jess did all the talking to begin with, and then Linda got tired of her, and started to ask Martin questions directly.

“So when this figure began hovering… Hovering? Is that right?”

“Hovering,” confirmed Jess. “Like I said, he hovered too high at first, because of being out of practice, but then he found the right level.”

Martin winced, like the angel’s refusal to put his feet on the ground somehow made things more embarrassing for him.

“So when the angel was hovering in front of you, Martin, what did you think?”

“Think?” Martin repeated.

“We didn’t think much, did we?” said Jess. “We were too stunned.”

“That’s right,” said Martin.

“But you must have thought something,” Linda said. “Even if it was only, Bloody hell, I wonder if I could get him on to Rise and Shine with Penny and Martin .” She chuckled encouragingly.

“Well,” said Martin. “I haven’t been presenting the show for a while now, remember. So it would have been a waste of time asking him.”

“You’ve got your cable show, though.”

“Yes.”

“So maybe he would have gone on that.” She chuckled encouragingly again.

“We tend to book mainly showbiz stuff. Stand-up comedians, soap stars… The odd sportsman.”

“So you’re saying you wouldn’t have had him on.” Once she’d started this line of questioning, Linda seemed kind of reluctant to let it drop.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” she snorted. “I mean, it’s not David Letterman, your show, is it? It’s not like people are swarming all over you to get on it.”

“We do all right.”

I couldn’t help feeling that she was missing the point of the story. An angel—possibly like an emissary from the Lord Himself, who knows?—had visited a tower-block in Archway to stop us all from killing ourselves, and she wanted to know why he hadn’t been booked on a talk show. I don’t know, man. You’d have thought that would be one of the questions nearer the end of the interview.

“He’d have been the first person on that we’d ever heard of, anyway.”

“You’d heard of him before, had you?” said Martin. “This particular angel? The one who looked like Matt Damon?”

“I’ve heard of angels ,” she said.

“Well, I’m sure you’ve heard of actresses ,” said Martin. “We’ve had them on, too.”

“Where are we going with this?” I said. “You really wanna write a piece about why the Angel Matt wasn’t a guest on Martin’s show?”

“Is that what you call him?” she said. “The Angel Matt?”

“Usually we just call him «The Angel»,” said Jess. “But…”

“Would you mind if Martin answered a couple of questions?”

“You’ve asked him loads already,” said Jess. “Maureen hasn’t said anything. JJ hasn’t said very much.”

“Martin’s the one that most people will have heard of,” said Linda. “Martin? Is that what you call him?”

“Just «The Angel»,” said Martin. He looked happier than this on the night he tried to kill himself.

“Can I just check something?” said Linda. “You did see him, Martin, didn’t you?”

Martin shifted in his seat. You could tell he was scouting around the inside of his head, just to make sure that there were no escape routes he’d overlooked.

“Oh, yes,” said Martin. “I saw him, all right. He was… He was awesome.”

And with that, he finally walked into the cage that Linda had opened for him. The public at large were now free to poke sticks at him and call him names, and he just had to sit there and take it, like an exhibit in a freak show.

But then, we were all freaks now. When friends and family and ex-lovers opened their newspapers the next morning, they could come to one of only two possible conclusions: 1) we’d all looped the loop, or 2) we were scam artists. OK, strictly speaking, there was a third conclusion—we were telling the truth. We saw an angel that looked like Matt Damon, who for reasons best known to himself told us to get down off the roof. But I got to say, I don’t know anyone who’d believe that. Maybe my great-aunt Ida, who lives in Alabama and handles snakes every Sunday morning in her church, but then, she’s nuts too.

And I don’t know, man, but to me it seemed a long way back from there. If you were gonna draw a map, you’d say that mortgages and relationships and jobs and all that stuff, all the things that constitute a regular life, were in like New Orleans, and by coming out with all this horseshit we’d just put ourselves somewhere north of Alaska. Who’s going to give a job to a guy who sees angels? And who’s going to give a job to a guy who says he sees angels because he might make a few bucks for himself? No, we were finished as serious people. We had sold our seriosity for twelve hundred and fifty of your English pounds, and as far as I could tell that money was going to have to last us for the rest of our lives, unless we saw God, or Elvis, or Princess Di. And next time we’d have to see them for real, and take photos.

Just over two years ago, REM’s manager came to see Big Yellow, and asked whether we were interested in his company representing us, and we said we were happy with what we had. REM! Twenty-six months ago! We were sitting around in this fancy office, and this guy, he was trying to persuade us , you know? And now I was sitting around with people like Maureen and Jess, taking part in a pathetic attempt to squeeze a few bucks out of someone who was desperate to give it to us, so long as we were prepared to totally embarrass ourselves. One thing the last couple of years has taught me is that there’s nothing you can’t fuck up if you try hard enough.

My only consolation was that I didn’t have any friends and family here; no one knew who I was, except for a few fans of the band, maybe, and I like to think that they weren’t the type to read Linda’s paper. And some of the guys at the pizza place might see a copy lying around somewhere, but they’d have smelled the cash, and the desperation, and they could have cared less about the humiliation.

So that just left Lizzie, and if she saw a picture of me looking insane, then so be it. You know why she dumped me? She dumped me because I wasn’t going to be a rock’n’roll star after all. Can you fucking believe that? No you can’t, because it’s beyond belief, and therefore unbelievable. “Shittiness, thy name is Woman.” That was my thinking, at that point in time, you know, that it wouldn’t hurt her to see how she’d messed me up. In fact, if I could be temporarily invisible, then one of the first things I’d do, after robbing a bank and going into the women’s showers at the gym and all the usual stuff, is put the paper down in front of her and watch her read it.

See, I didn’t know anything about anything then. I thought I knew things, but I didn’t.

Maureen

I didn’t think I’d ever be able to go back to the church again after the interview with Linda. I’d been thinking about it a bit, the day before; I missed it terribly, and I wondered whether God would really mind if I just sat at the back and didn’t go to confession—sneaked out somehow before communion. But once I’d told Linda that I’d seen an angel, I knew that I’d have to keep away, that I wouldn’t be able to go back before I died. I didn’t know exactly what sin I’d committed, but I was sure that sins involving making up angels were mortal.

I still thought I was going to kill myself when the six weeks were up; what would have changed my mind? I was busier than I’d ever been, what with the press interviews and the meetings, and I suppose that took my mind off things. But all the running around just felt like last-minute activity, as if I had some things to get done before I went on holiday. That was who I was, then: a person who was going to kill herself soon, the moment I could get round to it.

I was going to say that I saw the first little glimmer of light that day, the day of the interview with Linda, but it wasn’t really like that. It was more as if I’d already chosen what I was going to watch on TV; and I was beginning to look forward to it, and then noticed that there was something else on that might be more interesting. I don’t know about you, but choice isn’t always what I want. You can end up flicking between one channel and another, and not watching either programme properly. I don’t know how people with the cable television cope.

What happened was that after the interview, I found myself talking to JJ. He was going back to his flat, and I was heading towards the bus stop, and we ended up walking along together. I’m not sure he wanted to, really, because we’ve hardly spoken since I slapped that man on New Year’s Eve, but it was one of those awkward situations where I was walking five paces behind him, so he stopped for me.

“That was kind of hard, wasn’t it?” he said, and I was surprised, because I thought I was the only one who’d found it difficult.

“I hate lies,” I said.

He looked at me and laughed, and then I remembered about his lie.

“No offence,” I said. “I lied too. I lied about the angel. And I lied to Matty, as well. About going to a party on New Year’s Eve. And to the people in the respite home.”

“God’ll forgive you for those, I think.” We walked along a little bit more, and then he said, for no reason that I could tell, “What would it take to change your mind?”

“About what?”

“About… you know. Wanting To End It All.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“If you could make a deal with God, kind of thing. He’s sitting there, the Big Guy, across the table from you. And he’s saying, OK, Maureen, we like you, but we really want you to stay put, on Earth. What can we do to persuade you? What can we offer you?”

“God’s asking me personally?”

“Yeah.”

“If He was asking me personally, He wouldn’t have to offer me anything.”

“Really?”

“If God in His infinite wisdom wanted me to stay on Earth, then how could I ask for anything?”

JJ laughed. “OK, then. Not God.”

“Who, then?”

“A sort of… I don’t know. A sort of cosmic, you know, President. Or Prime Minister. Tony Blair. Someone who can get things done. You don’t have to do what Tony Blair says without asking for something in return.”

“Can he cure Matty?”

“Nope. He can only arrange things.”

“I’d like a holiday.”

“God. You’re a cheap date. You’d choose to live out the rest of your natural life for a week in Florida?”

“I’d like to go abroad. I’ve never been.”

“You’ve never been abroad?”

He said it as though I should be ashamed, and for a moment I was.

“When was the last time you had a holiday?”

“Just before Matty was born.”

“And he’s how old?”

“He’s nineteen.”

“OK. Well, as your manager, I’m going to be asking the Big Guy for a holiday a year. Maybe two.”

“You can’t do that!” I really felt scandalized. I can see now I was taking it all too seriously, but it felt real to me, and it seemed like a holiday a year was too much.

“Trust me,” said JJ. “I know the market. Cosmic Tony won’t blink an eye. Come on, what else?”

“Oh, I couldn’t ask for anything else.”

“Say he does give you two weeks’ holiday a year. Fifty weeks is a long time to wait for it, you know? And you’re not going to get another appointment with Cosmic Tony. You got one shot. Everything you want, you’ve got to ask for in one go.”

“A job.”

“You want a job?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“What kind of job?”

“Anything. Working in a shop, maybe. Anything to get me out of the house.”

I used to work, before Matty was born. I had a job in an office stationer’s in Tufnell Park. I liked it; I liked all the different pens, and sizes of paper and envelopes. I liked my boss. I haven’t worked since.

“OK. Come on, come on.”

“Maybe a bit of a social life. The church has quizzes sometimes. Like pub quizzes, but not in the pub. I’d like to have a go at one of those.”

“Yep, we can allow you a quiz.”

I tried to smile, because I knew JJ was joking a bit, but I was finding the conversation hard. I couldn’t really think of anything very much, and that annoyed me. And it made me feel afraid, in a strange sort of a way. It was like finding a door that you’d never seen before in your own house. Would you want to know what was behind it? Some people would, I’m sure, but I wouldn’t. I didn’t want to carry on talking about me.

“What about you?” I said to JJ. “What would you say to Cosmic Tony?”

“Ha. I’m not sure, man.” He calls everyone “man”, even if you’re not a man. You get used to it. “Maybe, I don’t know. Live the last fifteen years all over again or something. Finish high school. Forget about music. Become the kind of person who’s happy to settle for what he is, rather than what he wants to be, you know?”

“But Cosmic Tony can’t arrange that.”

“No. Exactly.”

“So you’re worse off than me, really. Cosmic Tony can do things for me, but not for you.”

“No, no, shit, I’m sorry, Maureen. I didn’t mean to imply that. You have a… You have a really hard life, and none of it’s your fault, and everything that’s happened to me is just “cos of my own stupidity, and… There’s no comparison. Really. I’m sorry I ever mentioned it.”

But I wasn’t sorry. I liked thinking about Cosmic Tony much more than I liked thinking about God.

Martin

The headline in Linda’s paper—page one, accompanied by the picture of me flat on my face outside a nightclub—read “FOR HARPS—SEE SHARP”. The story did not, as Linda had promised it would, emphasize the beauty and mystery of our experience on the roof; rather, it chose to concentrate on another angle, namely, the sudden, gratifying and amusing lunacy of a former television personality. The journalist in me suspects that she got the story about right.

“What does that mean?” Jess asked me on the phone that morning.

“It’s an old lager ad,” I said. “ «HARP—STAYS SHARP».”

“What has lager got to do with anything?”

“Nothing. But the name of the lager was Harp. And my name’s Sharp, you see.”

“OK. Then what have harps got to do with anything?”

“Angels are supposed to play them.”

“Are they? Should we have said he was playing a harp? To make it more convincing?”

I told her that, in my opinion, the addition of a harp to the portrait of the Angel Matt Damon that we had painted was unlikely to have helped convince people of its authenticity.

“And anyway, how come it’s all about you? We hardly get a fucking mention.”

I had many other phone calls that morning—from Theo, who said that there’s been a lot of interest in the story, and who thought I’d finally given him something he could work with, as long as I was comfortable talking to the public about what was obviously a private spiritual moment; from Penny, who wanted us to meet and talk; and from my daughters.

I hadn’t been allowed to speak to them for weeks, but Cindy’s maternal instinct had obviously told her that the day Daddy was in the papers talking about seeing messengers from God was a good day to reinstate contact.

“Did you see an angel, Daddy?”

“No.”

“Mummy said you did.”

“Well, I didn’t.”

“Why did Mummy say you did?”

“You’d better ask her.”

“Mummy, why did you say Daddy saw an angel?”

I waited patiently while a brief conversation took place away from the receiver.

“She says she didn’t say it. She says the newspaper says it.”

“I told a fib, sweetie. To make some money.”

“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 FeetUpTV!—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.

Jess

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.

And because of who we were and what had happened to us, we wanted to talk about personal things, so it was embarrassing him standing there.

Martin was like, Let’s drink up and go, and he stood up. But Captain Coffee went, What’s the matter now? So I said, The thing is, we need to have a private conversation, and he said he understood completely, and he’d go outside until we’d finished. And I said, But really, everything we say is private, for reasons I can’t go into. And he said it didn’t matter, he’d still wait outside unless anyone else came. And that’s what he did, and that’s why we ended up going to Starbucks for our coffee meetings. It was hard to concentrate on how miserable we were, with this berk in an army uniform leaning against the window outside checking that we weren’t stealing his biscuits, or biscotties as he called them. People go on about places like Starbucks being unpersonal and all that, but what if that’s what you want? I’d be lost, if JJ and people like that got their way, and there was nothing unpersonal in the world. I like to know that there are big places without windows where no one gives a shit. You need confidence to go into small places with regular customers, small bookshops and small music shops and small restaurants and cafes. I’m happiest in the Virgin Megastore and Borders and Starbucks and Pizza Express, where no one gives a shit, and no one knows who you are. My mum and dad are always going on about how soulless those places are, and I’m like, Der. That’s the point.

The book group thing was JJ’s idea. He said people do it a lot in America, read books and talk about them; Martin reckoned it was becoming fashionable here, too, but I’d never heard of it, so it can’t be that fashionable, or I’d have read about it in Dazed and Confused . The point of it was to talk about Something Else, sort of thing, and not get into rows about who was a berk and who was a prat, which was how the afternoons in Starbucks usually ended up. And what we decided was, we were going to read books by people who’d killed themselves. They were, like, our people, and so we thought we ought to find out what was going on in their heads. Martin said he thought we might learn more from people who hadn’t killed themselves—we should be reading up on what was so great about staying alive, not what was so great about topping yourself. But it turned out there were like a billion writers who hadn’t killed themselves, and three or four who had, so we took the easy option, and went for the smaller pile. We voted on using funds from our media appearances to buy ourselves the books.

Anyway, it turned out not to be the easy option at all. Fucking hell! You should try and read the stuff by people who’ve killed themselves! We started with Virginia Woolf, and I only read like two pages of this book about a lighthouse, but I read enough to know why she killed herself: she killed herself because she couldn’t make herself understood. You only have to read one sentence to see that. I sort of identify with her a bit, because I suffer from that sometimes, but her mistake was to go public with it. I mean, it was lucky in a way, because she left a sort of souvenir behind so that people like us could learn from her difficulties and that, but it was bad luck for her. And she had some bad luck, too, if you think about it, because in the olden days anyone could get a book published because there wasn’t so much competition. So you could march into a publishers’ office and go, you know, I want this published, and they’d go, Oh, OK then. Whereas now they’d go, No, dear, go away, no one will understand you. Try pilates or salsa dancing instead.

JJ was the only one who thought it was brilliant, so I had a go at him, and he had a go back because I didn’t like it. He was all, Is it because your daddy reads books? Is that why you come on like such a dork? Which was an easy one to answer, because Daddy doesn’t read books, bad luck, and I told him so. And then I said, Is it because you didn’t go to school? Is that why you think all books are great even when they’re shit? Because some people are like that, aren’t they? You’re not allowed to say anything about books because they’re books, and books are, you know, God. Anyway, he didn’t like that much, which means I got him right where it hurts. He said that he could see that what was going to happen to our reading group was that I would wreck it, and how had he been so stupid as to expect anything else? And I was like, I’m not going to wreck anything. If a book’s shit, I’ll say so. And he went, Yeah, but you’re gonna say they’re all shit, aren’t you, because you’re so fucking contrary, sorry Maureen. And I said, Yeah, and you’re gonna say they’re all great, because you’re such a creep. And he said, They are all great, and he went through all these people we were supposed to be talking about in the club—Sylvia Plath, Primo Levi, Hemingway. So I said, Well what’s the point of doing the reading club if you know in advance they’re all great? What’s fun about that? And he said, It’s not Pop Idol , man. You don’t vote for the best one. They’re all good, and we accept that, and we talk about their ideas. And I was like, well if she’s anything to go by, I don’t accept they’re all great. In fact I now accept the opposite. And JJ got really worked up about that, and there was some unpleasantness then, and Martin stepped in and we decided not to do any more books for a while, in other words ever. That was when we decided to have a go at musical suicide instead. Maureen had never heard of Kurt Cobain, can you believe it?

I do think. I know no one believes it, but I do. It’s just that my way of thinking is different from everyone else’s. Before I think, I have to get angry and maybe a bit violent, which I can see is sort of annoying for everyone else, but tough shit. Anyway, that night, in bed, I thought about JJ, and what he’d said about how I hated books because Daddy read them. And it’s true what I said, that he doesn’t, not really, although because of his job he has to pretend that he does.

Jen was a reader, though. She loved her books, but they scared me. They scared me when she was around, and they scare me even more now. What was in them? What did they say to her, when she was unhappy and listening only to them and to no one else—not her friends, not her sister, no one? I got out of bed and went into her room, which has been left exactly as it was on the day she left. (People are always doing that in films, and you think, Yeah, right, like you don’t want a guest bedroom, or somewhere to put all your crap. But you try going in there and fucking everything up.) And there they all are: The Secret History, Catch-22, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye, No Logo, The Bell Jar (which is a coincidence, or maybe not, because that was one of the books JJ wanted us to read), Crime and Punishment, 1984, Good Places to Go When You Want To Disappear … That was just a joke, that last one.

I don’t think I was ever going to be a big reader, because she was the brainy one, not me, but I’m sure I would have been better at it if she hadn’t put me off by disappearing. It wasn’t the first time I’d been in her room, and it wouldn’t be the last, I knew, and the books all sit there and look at me, and what I hate most is knowing that one of them might help me to understand. I don’t mean that I’ll find some sentence she’s underlined that will give me a clue about where she is, although I looked, a while ago. I flicked through, just in case she’d put like an exclamation mark by the word “Wales”, or a ring around “Texas”. I just mean that if I read everything she loved, and everything that took her attention in those last few months, then I’d get some picture of where her head was at. I don’t even know whether these books are serious or sad or scary. And you’d think I’d want to find out, wouldn’t you, considering as how much I loved her and everything. But I don’t. I can’t. I can’t because I’m too lazy, too stupid, and I can’t even make the effort because something stops me. They just sit there looking at me, day after day, and one day I know I’ll put them all in a big pile and burn them.

So, no, I’m not a big reader.

JJ

Our cultural program was all on my shoulders, because none of the others knew anything about anything. Maureen got books out of the library every couple weeks, but she didn’t read stuff we could talk about, if you know what I’m saying, unless we wanted to talk about whether the nurse should marry the bad rich guy or the good poor guy. And Martin wasn’t a big fan of Literature. He said he read a lot of books in prison, but mostly biographies of people who had overcome great adversities, like Nelson Mandela and those guys. My guess is Nelson Mandela wouldn’t have thought of Martin Sharp as a soul brother. When you looked at their lives closely, you’d see that they’d wound up in jail for different reasons. And, believe me, you don’t want to know what Jess thought of books. You’d find it offensive.

She was right about me, though, kind of. How could she not be? I’ve spent my entire life with people who don’t read—my folks, my sister, most of the band, especially the rhythm section—and it makes you really defensive, after a while. How many times can you be called a fag before you snap? Not that I mind being called a fag blah blah blah, and some of my best friends blah blah, but to me, being a fag is about whether you like guys, not whether you like Don DeLillo—who is a guy, admittedly, but it’s his books I like, not his ass. Why does reading freak people out so much? Sure, I could be pretty anti-social when we were on the road, but if I was playing a Gameboy hour after hour, no one would be on my case. In my social circle, blowing up fucking space monsters is socially acceptable in a way that American Pastoral isn’t.

Eddie was the worst. It was like we were married, and picking up a book was my way of telling him that I had a headache every night. And like a marriage, the longer we were together, the worse it got; but now that I think about it, the longer we were together, the worse everything got. We knew we weren’t going to make it, as a band and maybe even as friends, and so we were both panicking. And me reading just made Eddie panic more, because I think he had some bullshit idea that reading was going to help me find some sort of new career. Yeah, like that’s what happens in life. “Hey, you like Updike? You must be a cool guy. Here’s a $100,000 job in our advertising agency.” We spent all those years talking about the stuff we had in common, and the last few months noticing all the ways we were different, and it broke both of our hearts.

And all that is a long-ass way of explaining why I freaked out at Jess. I’d left one band full of aggressive illiterates, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to join another one. When you’re unhappy, I guess everything in the world—reading, eating, sleeping—has something buried somewhere inside it that just makes you unhappier.

And for some reason, I thought music was going to be easier, which, considering I’m a musician, wasn’t real smart. I only have a lot invested in books, but I got my whole life invested in music. I thought I couldn’t go wrong with Nick Drake, especially in a room full of people who’ve got the blues. If you haven’t heard him… Man, it’s like he boiled down all the melancholy in the world, all the bruises and all the fucked-up dreams you’ve let go, and poured the essence into a little tiny bottle and corked it up. And when he starts to play and sing, he takes the cork out, and you can smell it. You’re pinned into your seat, as if it’s a wall of noise, but it’s not—it’s still, and quiet, and you don’t want to breathe in case you frighten it away. And we were listening to him over at Maureen’s, because we couldn’t play our own music at Starbucks, and at Maureen’s you’ve got the sound of Matty breathing, which was like this whole extra freaky instrument. So I was sitting there thinking, man, this is going to change these people’s lives for ever .

At the end of the first song, Jess started putting her fingers down her throat and making faces.

“But he’s such a drip ,” she said. “He’s like, I dunno, a poet or something.” This was meant to be an insult: I was spending my days with someone who thought that poets were creatures you might find living in your lower intestine.

“I don’t mind it,” said Martin. “I wouldn’t walk out, if he was playing in a wine bar.”

“I would,” said Jess.

I wondered whether it would be possible to punch both of them out simultaneously, but rejected the idea on the grounds that it would all be over too quickly, and there wouldn’t be enough pain involved. I’d want to keep on pummeling them after they were down, which would mean doing them one at a time. It’s music rage, which is like road rage, only more righteous. When you get road rage, a tiny part of you knows you’re being a jerk, but when you get music rage, you’re carrying out the will of God, and God wants these people dead.

And then this weird thing happened, if you can call a deep response to Five Leaves Left weird.

“Have you not got ears?” Maureen said suddenly. “Can’t you hear how unhappy he is, and how beautiful his songs are?”

We looked at her, and then Jess looked at me.

“Ha ha,” said Jess. “You like something Maureen likes.” She sang this last part, like a little kid, nah-nah, nah-nah-nah.

“Don’t pretend to be more foolish than you are, Jess,” said Maureen. “Because you’re foolish enough as it is.” She was steamed. She had the music rage too. “Just listen to him for a moment, and stop blathering.”

And Jess could see that she meant it, and she shut up, and we listened to the whole rest of the album in silence, and if you looked at Maureen closely you could see her eyes were glistening a little.

“When did he die?”

“Nineteen seventy-four. He was twenty-six.”

“Twenty-six.” She was quiet for a moment, thoughtful, and I was really hoping that she was feeling sorry for him and his family. The alternative was that she was envying him for having spared himself all those unnecessary extra years. You want people to respond, but sometimes they can overdo it, you know?

“People don’t want to hear it, do they?” she said.

No one said anything, because we weren’t sure where she was at.

“This is how I feel, every day, and people don’t want to know that. They want to know that I’m feeling what Tom Jones makes you feel. Or that Australian girl who used to be in Neighbours . But I feel like this, and they won’t play what I feel on the radio, because people that are sad don’t fit in.”

We’d never heard Maureen talk like this, didn’t even know she could, and even Jess didn’t want to stop her.

“It’s funny, because people think it’s Matty that stops me fitting in. But Matty’s not so bad. Hard work, but… It’s the way Matty makes me feel that stops me fitting in. You get the weight of everything wrong. You have to guess all the time whether things are heavy or light, especially the things inside you, and you get it wrong, and it puts people off. I’m tired of it.”

And so suddenly Maureen was like my girl, because she got it, and because she felt the music rage too, and I wanted to say the right thing to her. “You need a holiday.”

I said it because I wanted to be sympathetic, but then I remembered Cosmic Tony, and I realized that now Cosmic Tony had the money.

“Hey. What about that? Why not?” I said. “Let’s all take Maureen on holiday somewhere.” Martin burst out laughing.

“Yeah, right,” said Jess. “What are we? Volunteers for like an old folks’ home or something?”

“Maureen’s not old,” I said. “How old are you, Maureen?”

“I’m fifty-one,” she said.

“OK, not an old folks’ home. A boring folks’ home.”

“And what makes you the most fascinating person on the planet?” Martin said.

“I don’t look like that, for a start. Anyways, I thought you were on my side?”

And almost unnoticed, amid all the laughter and the general scorn, Maureen had started to cry.

“I’m sorry, Maureen,” said Martin. “I wasn’t being ungallant. I just couldn’t imagine the four of us sitting around a swimming pool on our sun loungers.”

“No, no,” said Maureen. “I took no offense. Not much, anyway. And I know nobody wants to go on holiday with me, and that’s fine. I just got a bit weepy because JJ suggested it. It’s been a long… Nobody’s… I haven’t… It was just nice of him, that’s all.”

“Oh, fucking hell,” said Martin quietly. Now, “Oh, fucking hell” can mean a lot of different things, as you know, but there was no ambiguity here; we all understood. What Martin meant by “Oh, fucking hell” in this context, if I can explain an obscenity with an obscenity, is that he was fucked. Because what kind of asshole was going to say to Maureen, you know, “Yeah, well, it’s the thought that counts. Hope that’s enough for you.”

And like five days later we were on a plane to Tenerife.

Maureen

It was their decision, not mine. I didn’t feel that I had the right to decide, not really, even though a quarter of the money did belong to me. I was the one who’d suggested the holiday in the first place, to JJ, when we were talking about Cosmic Tony, so I didn’t think it was right that I should join in when they took a vote on it. I think what I did is, I abstained.

It wasn’t as if there was a big argument, though. Everyone was all for it. The only debate was about whether to go now or in the summer, because of the weather, but there was a general feeling that, what with one thing and another, it was better to go now, before Valentine’s Day. For a moment they thought we could afford the Caribbean, Barbados or somewhere, until Martin pointed out that the money we had would have to cover Matty’s time in the care centre as well.

“Let’s go without Maureen, then,” said Jess, and I was hurt, for a moment, until it turned out she was joking.

I can’t remember the last time I wept because I was happy. I’m not saying that because I want people to feel sorry for me; it’s just that it was a strange feeling. When JJ said he had an idea, and then explained what it was, I didn’t even allow myself to think for a moment that it would ever come to anything.

It was funny, but up to that point, we hadn’t really ever been nice to each other. You’d think that would have been a part of the story, considering how we’d met. You’d think this would be the story of four people who met because they were unhappy, and wanted to help each other. But it hadn’t been up until then, not at all, nothing like, unless you count me and Martin sitting on Jess’s head. And even that was being cruel to be kind, rather than kind plain and simple. Up until then it had been the story of four people who met because they were unhappy and then swore at each other. Three of them swore, anyway.

I was making little sobbing noises that embarrassed everyone, myself included.

“F— hell,” said Jess. “It’s only a week in the poxy Canary Isles. I’ve been there. It’s just beaches and clubs and that.”

I wanted to tell Jess that I hadn’t even seen an English beach since Matty left school; they used to take them to Brighton every year, and I went with them once or twice. I didn’t say anything, though. I may not know the weight of many things, but I could feel the weight of that one, so I kept it to myself. You know that things aren’t going well for you when you can’t even tell people the simplest fact about your life, just because they’ll presume you’re asking them to feel sorry for you. I suppose it’s why you feel so far away from everyone, in the end; anything you can think of to tell them just ends up making them feel terrible.

I want to describe every moment of the journey, because it seemed so exciting, but that would probably be a mistake, too. If you’re like everybody else then you’ll already know what an airport looks like, what it sounds and smells like, and if I tell you about it, then it would be just another way of saying that I haven’t seen the sea for ten years. I’d got a one-year passport from the post office, and even that caused too much excitement, because I saw one or two people from the church in the queue, and they know I’m not a big traveler. One of the people I saw was Bridgid, the woman who didn’t invite me to the New Year’s Eve party I didn’t go to; one day, I thought, I’ll tell her how she helped me to take my first trip abroad. I’d really have to know how much things weighed before I tried that, though.

You probably know that you sit in a row of three. They let me sit in the window seat, because they’d all been on planes before. Martin sat in the middle and JJ sat next to him on the aisle for the first few minutes. After a little while, Jess had to swap places with JJ, because she had an argument with the woman sitting next to her about the wee bag of nuts they give you, and there was some shouting and carrying on. Another thing you probably know is that there’s a terrible noise when you take off, and sometimes the plane shakes in the air. Well of course I didn’t know any of those things, and my stomach turned to water, and Martin had to hold my hand and talk to me.

And you probably also know that when you look out of an aeroplane window and see the world shrink like that, you can’t help but think about the whole of your life, from the beginning until where you are now, and everyone you’ve ever known. And you’ll know that thinking about those things makes you feel grateful to God for providing them, and angry with Him for not helping you to understand them better, and so you end up in a terrible muddle and needing to talk to a priest. I decided I wouldn’t sit in the window seat on the way back. I don’t know how these jet-set people who have to fly once or twice a year cope, I really don’t.

Not having Matty with me was like missing a leg. It felt that strange. But I also enjoyed the lightness of it, so it probably wasn’t at all like missing a leg, because I don’t suppose people who’ve had a leg taken off do enjoy the lightness of it very much. And I was going to say that it was much easier to move around without Matty, but it’s much harder to move around with only one leg, isn’t it? So maybe it would be more truthful to say that being on the plane without Matty was like being without a third leg, because a third leg would feel heavy, I expect, and it would get in the way, and you would be relieved if it was taken off. I missed him most when the plane was doing its shaking; I thought I was going to die, and I hadn’t said goodbye to him. I panicked, then.

We didn’t fall out on the first night. Everyone was happy then, even Jess. The hotel was nice, and clean, and we all had our own toilets and bathrooms, which I hadn’t been expecting. And when I opened the shutters, the light poured into the room like a torrent of water through a burst dam, and it nearly knocked me over. My knees buckled for a moment, and I had to lean against the wall. The sea was there too, but it wasn’t fierce and strong, like the light; it just sat quiet and blue, and made tiny little murmuring noises.

Some people can see this whenever they want to, I thought, but then I had to stop thinking that because it would have got in the way of the things I wanted to think about. It was a time to be feeling grateful, not to be coveting my neighbour’s wife, or his sea views.

We ate in a seafront restaurant not far from the hotel. I had a nice piece of fish, and the men ate squid and lobster, and Jess had a hamburger, and I drank two or three glasses of wine. I won’t tell you when I’d last eaten out in a restaurant, or had wine with a meal, because I’m learning not to do that. I didn’t even try to tell the others, because I could feel the weight for myself, and knew it was more than they would want to carry. Anyway, they knew by this time that it was donkey’s years since I’d done anything at all, apart from the things I do every day of my life. They took it for granted.

I would like to say this, though, and I don’t care how it sounds: it was the nicest meal I’ve ever had in my life, and perhaps the nicest evening I’ve ever had in my life. Is that so terrible, to be so positive about something?

Martin

The first evening wasn’t too bad, I suppose. I was recognized once or twice, and ended up wearing JJ’s baseball cap pulled down over my eyes, which depressed me. I am not a baseball-cap sort of a chap, and I abhor people who wear any sort of headgear during dinner. We ate so-so seafood in a tourist trap on the seafront, and the only reason I didn’t complain about just about everything was because of the look on Maureen’s face: she was transported by her microwaved plaice and her warm white wine, and it seemed churlish to spoil it.

Maureen had never been anywhere, and I’d had a holiday just a few months before. Penny and I went away for a few days after I’d come out of prison, to Majorca. We stayed in a private villa outside Deya, and I thought it was going to be the best few days of my life, because the worst three months were over. But of course it wasn’t like that at all; to describe prison as the worst three months of one’s life is like describing a horrible car crash as the worst ten seconds. It sounds logical, and neat; it sounds truthful. But it’s not, because the worst time is afterwards, when you wake up in hospital and learn that your wife is dead, or you’ve had your legs amputated, and that therefore the worst has just begun. I appreciate that this is a gloomy way of talking about a mini-break on a perfectly pleasant Mediterranean island, but it was on Majorca that I realized that the worst was nowhere near over, and might never be over. Prison was humiliating and terrifying, mind-numbing, savagely destructive of the soul in a way that the expression “soul-destroying” can no longer convey. Do you know what “quizzies” are? Neither did I, until my first night. “Quizzies” are when drugged-up psychos hurl questions at each other across the blocks, all of them centred around what the participants would like to see done to unpopular and /or celebrated newcomers. I was the subject of a quizzie on my first night; I won’t bother to list even the more imaginative suggestions, but suffice to say that I didn’t sleep very well that night, and that for the first time in my life I had intensely violent fantasies of revenge. I focused everything on the day of my release, and though that day brought with it an overwhelming relief, it didn’t last very long.

Criminals serve their time, but with all due respect to my friends in B Wing, I was not a criminal, not really; I was a television presenter who had made a mistake, and paradoxically, this meant that I would never serve my time. It was a class issue, and I’m sorry, but there’s no point in pretending it wasn’t. You see, the other inmates would eventually return to their lives of thieving and drug-dealing and possibly even roofing or whatever the hell it was they did before their careers were interrupted; prison would prove to be no impediment, either socially or professionally. Indeed, they may even find their prospects and social standing enhanced.

But you don’t return to the middle class when you’ve been banged up. It’s over, and you’re out. You don’t go and see the Head of Daytime TV and tell her you’re ready to reclaim your seat behind the Rise and Shine desk. You don’t knock on your friends’ doors and tell them that you’re once again available for dinner parties. You needn’t even bother telling your ex-wife you want to see your kids again. I doubt whether Mrs Big Joe would have attempted to deny him access to his children, and I doubt whether many of his mates in the pub would have stood in the corner muttering their disapproval. I’ll bet they bought him a drink and got him laid, in fact. I have thought long and hard about this, and have turned into something of a radical on the subject of penal reform: I have come to the conclusion that no one who earns more than, say, seventy-five thousand pounds a year should ever be sent to jail, because the punishment will always be more severe than the crime. You should just have to see a therapist, or give some money to charity, or something.

That holiday with Penny was the first time I fully apprehended the trouble I was in, and the trouble I would always be in. The villa at the end of the road was owned by people we both knew, a couple who ran their own production company and had, in happier times, offered us both work. We ran into them one night in a local bar, and they pretended they didn’t know us. Later, the woman took Penny aside in the supermarket and explained that they were worried about their teenage daughter, a particularly unprepossessing fourteen-year-old who, to be perfectly frank, is unlikely to lose her virginity for a good many years to come, and certainly not to me. It was all nonsense, of course, and she was no more worried about my proximity to her daughter than she was about my proximity to her purse. It was her way of telling me, as so many others have done since, that I’ve been cast out of the Garden of Islington, doomed to roam the offices of crap cable companies for evermore.

So the dinner that first night in Tenerife just made me gloomy. These weren’t my people. They were just people who would talk to me because I was in their boat, but it was a bad boat to be in—an unseaworthy, shabby little boat, and I could suddenly see that it was going to break up and sink. It was a boat made for pootling around the lake in Regent’s Park, and we were attempting to sail to fucking Tenerife in it. You’d have to be an idiot to think it was going to stay afloat for much longer.

Jess

I don’t think everything the next day was my fault. I take some of the blame, but when things go wrong, you just make them worse if you overreact, don’t you? And I think some people overreacted. Because my dad is New Labour and all that, he’s always going on about tolerance for people of different cultures, and I think what happened was that some people, in other words Martin, were not tolerant of my culture, which is more of a drinking and drug-taking and shagging sort of a culture than his culture. I like to think that I’m respectful of his. I don’t tell him that he should get pissed up and fucked up on drugs and pick up more girls. So he should be more respectful of mine. He wouldn’t tell me to eat pork if I was Jewish, so why should he tell me not to do the other stuff?

There were only seven years between the first and last Beatles albums. That’s nothing, seven years, when you think of how their hairstyles changed and their music changed. Some bands now go seven years without hardly bothering to do anything. Anyway, at the end of their seven years, they’d probably got sick of the sight of each other, and you can see that they wanted different things. John wanted to be in a bag or whatever, and Paul wanted to be on his farm or whatever, and it’s hard to see how you can keep a relationship going when you’re so different, and one of you is in a bag. OK, we hadn’t even been going for seven weeks, but we were different in the first place, whereas John and Paul liked the same music and went to the same schools and so on. We didn’t have any of that to go on. We weren’t all even from the same country. So in a way, it’s no wonder that our seven years got condensed into about three weeks.

What happened was, we had breakfast together, and we agreed that we’d go our separate ways until the evening, when we were all going to meet up in the hotel bar, have a cocktail and find somewhere to eat. And then JJ and I went for a swim in the hotel pool while Maureen sat and watched us, and then I decided to go out on my own.

We were staying on the north of the island, in this place called Puerto de la Cruz, which was OK. When I came before we were in the south, which is really mental, but probably too mental for Maureen, and as it was supposed to be her holiday, I didn’t mind too much. I did want to buy some blow, though, and it was harder to find up here than it would have been down there, and that’s how come I ended up getting myself into the trouble that Martin was in my opinion disrespectful of.

I went into a couple of bars looking for the kinds of people who might sell spliff, and in the second bar I saw a girl who looked exactly like Jen. I’m not exaggerating; when she looked at me and didn’t recognize me, I thought she was messing about, until I noticed that her eyes weren’t quite big enough, and her hair was bleached; Jen would never have bleached her hair, however much she wanted to disguise herself. Anyway, this girl didn’t like me staring at her, so I had to have a few words, and she was English and unfortunately understood those words, so she gave me a mouthful back, and I sort of took it on from there. And after we’d been at it for a while, we were both asked to leave. I’ll be truthful and say that I’d already had a couple of Bacardi Breezers, even though it was still quite early, and I think they made me aggressive, although she didn’t take up my offer of a fight. And then the usual stuff happened: Notjen’s brother, this bar, this guy, money, dope and a couple of Es, wasn’t going to do any of it until later, ended up doing most of it straightaway, some people from a place called Nantwich, this guy, freaked, left to freak on my own. Puke, sleep on the beach, woken up, freaked, driven back to the hotel in a police car. I don’t think I’d ever met anyone from Nantwich before, and this all happened during the day, but other than that it was a pretty typical night out. I told the police that Maureen and Martin were my parents, and Martin wasn’t happy. I don’t think there was any need for him to check out of our hotel, though. It would have all blown over.

I felt terrible the next morning, mostly because I’d gone to bed without anything to eat, although I’m sure the Es and the Breezers and the blow didn’t help. I felt low, too. I had that terrible feeling you get when you realize that you’re stuck with who you are, and there’s nothing you can do about it. I mean, you can make characters up, like I did when I became like a Jane Austeny person on New Year’s Eve, and that gives you some time off. But it’s impossible to keep it going for long, and then you’re back to being sick outside some dodgy club and offering to fight people. My dad wonders why I choose to be like this, but the truth is, you have no choice, and that’s what makes you feel like killing yourself. When I try to think of a life that doesn’t involve being sick outside a dodgy club, I can’t manage it; I picture nothing at all. This is I; this is my voice, this is my body, this is my life. Jess Crichton, this is your life, and here are some people from Nantwich to talk about you.

I once asked Dad what he’d do if he wasn’t working in politics, and he said he’d be working in politics, and what he meant, I think, is that wherever he was in the world, whatever job he was doing, he’d still find a way back, in the way that cats are supposed to be able to find a way back when they move house. He’d be on the local council, or he’d give out pamphlets, or something. Anything that was a part of that world, he’d do. He was a little sad when he said it; he told me it was, in the end, a failure of imagination.

And that’s me: I suffer from a failure of imagination. I could do what I wanted, every day of my life, and what I want to do, apparently, is to get walloped out of my head and pick fights. Telling me I can do anything I want is like pulling the plug out of the bath and then telling the water it can go anywhere it wants. Try it, and see what happens.

JJ

I had a good day, that first day. In the morning I read The Sportswriter by the pool, and that’s one fucking cool book. And then I ordered a sandwich, and then… Well, the truth of the matter is, I thought it was about time to jump-start my libido, which had been on life-support and demonstrating no outward signs of life for like four or five months. You ever read that book some dude wrote with like his eyelid? He had to flicker it every time whoever was helping him got to the right letter of the alphabet. True story. Anyway, my fucking libido couldn’t even have written that book. But sitting by the pool in my shorts, with the sun warming parts of me that had been frozen for a long time, in all the ways there are to be frozen, there were dim but unmistakable signs of life.

It wasn’t like I went out with the express purpose of doing anything about it. I just thought I’d go for a walk and look around, maybe get back in touch with that side of life. I went back to the room to get dressed first, though. I’m not a bare-chested kind of guy. I’m like a hundred and thirty pounds, skinny as fuck, white as a ghost, and you can’t walk around next to guys with a tan and six-pack when you look like that. Even if you found a chick who dug the skinny ghost look, she wouldn’t remember she dug it in this context, right? If you were into Dolly Parton and they played a blast of her album during a hip-hop show, she just wouldn’t sound good. In fact, you wouldn’t even be able to fucking hear her. So putting on my faded black jeans and my old Drive-By Truckers T-shirt was my way of being heard by the right people.

And get this: not only did I get heard, if I may use a euphemism, but I got heard by someone who’d seen the band and liked us. I mean, what are the chances? OK, she couldn’t remember us real clearly, and I kind of had to tell her she’d liked us, but, you know. Still. What happened was, I found this cool salt-water pool in the town, designed by some local artist, and I stopped for a beer and a sandwich right across from there. And this English chick was sitting by herself on the next table, and she was reading this book called Bel Canto , so I told her I’d read it too, and we started to talk about it, and I scooted over to her table. And then we started talking about music, because Bel Canto is kind of about music—opera, anyway, which some people think is music—and she said she was more into rock’n’roll than opera, so I was like, which bands? And she listed a whole bunch, and one of them, this band called the Clockers, we’d done a tour with a few years back. And she’d seen them on that tour, in Manchester, where she lives, and she thought she might have gotten there early enough to see the opener, and I said, Well, that was us. And she said, Oh, right, I remember, you were cool. I know, I know, but I was at a period in my life where I took what I could get.

We ended up spending the afternoon together, and then I blew off the family dinner and we spent the evening together, and then, finally, we spent the night together at my hotel, because she had a room-mate at hers. And that was the first time I’d gotten any since the last night with Lizzie, which was more like necrophilia anyway.

Kathy and I had breakfast together in the dining room the next morning, and not only because the hotel didn’t have enough stars for room service: I was kind of looking forward to bumping into the others. For some reason I thought I’d get some props—OK, maybe not from Maureen, but from Martin, certainly, because he’s got an eye for a pretty girl. I even somehow got it into my head that Jess would be kind of impressed. I could see the three of them on the other side of the room, and two of them whispering dirty jokes, and I’d feel cool again.

Maureen was first down. I waved to her as she came in, to be friendly, but the wave was somehow misinterpreted as an invitation, and she came and sat down at our table. She looked at Kathy suspiciously.

“Is someone not coming down for breakfast?” She wasn’t being rude. She was just confused.

“No, see…” But then I didn’t know what to say.

“I’m Kathy,” said Kathy, who was also confused. “I’m a friend of JJ’s.”

“The trouble is, there isn’t really room for five on the table,” said Maureen.

“If everyone else shows, Kathy and I will move,” I said.

“Who’s «everyone else»?” Kathy asked, I guess reasonably.

“Martin and Jess,” said Maureen. “But Jess got brought home in a police car last night. So she might be having a lie-in.”

“Oh,” I said. I mean, I wanted to know why Jess had been brought home in a police car and everything. But I didn’t want to know right then.

“What had she done?” asked Kathy.

“What hadn’t she done?” said Maureen. The waitress came over and poured us some coffee, and Maureen went to the buffet table for her croissants.

Kathy looked at me. She had some questions, I could tell.

“Maureen is…” But then I couldn’t think of a way to finish the sentence. I didn’t have to find a way, either, because then Jess walked in and sat down.

“Fuck me,” she said. That was by way of an introduction. “I feel so shit. Normally I’d think a good puke might make me feel better. But I puked my whole insides up last night. There’s nothing left.”

“I’m Kathy,” said Kathy.

“Hello,” said Jess. “I’m in such a state I didn’t even realize I don’t know you.”

“I’m a friend of JJ’s,” said Kathy, and Jess’s eyes lit up ominously.

“What sort of friend?”

“We just met yesterday.”

“And you’re having breakfast together?”

“Shut up, Jess.”

“What have I said?”

“It’s what you’re going to say.”

“What am I going to say?”

“I have no idea.”

“Have you met our mum and dad yet, Kathy?”

Kathy’s eyes flickered nervously over to Maureen.

“You’re braver than me, JJ,” said Jess. “I wouldn’t bring a one-night stand down to the family breakfast table. That’s fucking modern, man.”

“That’s your mother?” said Kathy. She was trying to be real casual, but I could tell she was freaking a little.

“Of course it’s not my mother. We’re not even the same nationality. Jess is being…”

“Did he tell you he was a musician?” said Jess. “I’ll bet he did. He always does. That’s the only way he can ever get a girlfriend. We keep telling him not to try that one, because people always find out in the end. And then they’re disappointed. I’ll bet he said he was a singer, right?”

Kathy nodded, and looked at me.

“That’s a laugh. Sing for her, JJ. You should hear him. Fucking hell.”

“Kathy saw my band,” I said. But as soon as I’d said it, I remembered that I’d told Kathy she’d seen the band, which isn’t quite the same thing; Kathy turned to look at me, and I could tell she was remembering the same thing. Oh, man.

Maureen and her croissants sat down at the table.

“What are we going to do if Martin comes down? There’s no room.”

“Oh, no,” said Jess. “Aaaaagh. Help. We’ll just panic, I’s’pose.”

“Maybe I should make a move,” said Kathy. She stood up and gulped some coffee down.

“Anna will be wondering what’s happened to me.”

“We could move to another table,” I said, but I knew it was over, destroyed by a malevolent force beyond my control.

“See you later,” said Jess cheerily.

And that was the last time I saw Kathy. If I were her, I’d still be reconstructing the dialogue in my head, writing it down and getting friends to act it out, looking for any kind of clue that would help me make sense of that breakfast.

You never know with Jess whether she’s being sharp or lucky. When you shoot your mouth off as fast and as frequently as she does, you’re bound to hit something sometime. But for whatever reason, she was right: Kathy wouldn’t have happened without music. She was supposed to be a little pick-me-up, my first since the band broke up—my first ever as a non-practicing musician, because I was already in a band when I lost my virginity, and I’ve been in a band ever since. So after she left, I started to worry about how this was ever going to work, and like whether I’d be in some fucking old folks’ home in forty years telling some little old lady with no teeth that REM’s manager had wanted to represent my band. When was I ever going to be a person—someone with maybe a job, and a personality that people could respond to? It’s no fucking use, giving something up if there’s nothing to take its place. Say I’d just kept talking about the books we were both reading, and we’d never mentioned music… Would we still have gone to bed? I couldn’t see it. It seemed to me that without my old life, I had no life at all. My morale-booster ended up making me feel totally fucking crushed and desperate.

Maureen

We didn’t really think anything of Martin missing his breakfast, even though breakfast was included. I was getting used to the idea that once or twice a day, something would happen that I wouldn’t understand. I didn’t understand what Jess had been up to the night before, and I didn’t understand why there was a strange woman—a girl, really—sitting at our breakfast table. And now I didn’t understand where Martin had gone. But not understanding didn’t seem to matter very much. Sometimes, when you watch a cops and robbers film on the television, you don’t understand the beginning, but you know you’re not meant to. You watch anyway, though, because in the end someone will explain some of the things to you if you pay close attention. I was trying to think of life with Jess and JJ and Martin as a cops and robbers film; if I didn’t get everything, I told myself not to panic. I’d wait until someone gave me a clue. And anyway, I was beginning to see that it didn’t really matter even if you understood almost nothing. I hadn’t really understood why we had to say we’d seen an angel, or how that got us on to the television. But that was all forgotten about now, apparently, so why make a fuss? I must admit, I was worried about where everyone was going to sit at breakfast, but that wasn’t because I was confused. I just didn’t want Martin to think us rude.

After breakfast I tried to telephone the care home, but I couldn’t manage on my own. In the end I had to ask JJ to do it for me, and he explained that there were lots of extra numbers to dial, and some you had to leave out, and I don’t know what else. I wasn’t being cheeky, using the telephone, because the others told me I could call once a day whatever the expense; otherwise, they said, I wouldn’t relax properly.

And the telephone call… Well, it changed everything. Just those two or three minutes. More happened to me in my head during the telephone call than during all that time up on the roof. And it wasn’t as if there was any bad news, or any news at all. Matty was fine. How could he not be? He needed care, and he was getting care, and there wasn’t much else they could tell me, was there? I tried to make the conversation last longer, and, fair play to him, the nurse tried to help me make it last longer, God love him. But neither of us could think of anything to say. Matty doesn’t do anything in the course of a day, and he hadn’t done anything on that particular day. He’d been out in his wheelchair, and we talked about that, but mostly we were talking about the weather, and the garden.

And I thanked him and put the phone down and thought for a moment, and tried not to feel sorry for myself. Love and concern and the rest of it, the things that only a mother can provide… For the first time in his life I could finally see that those things were no use to him anyway. The point of me was exactly the same as the point of the people in the care home. I was probably still better at it than they were, because of the practice I’d had. But I could have taught them all they’d need to know in a couple of weeks.

What that meant was that when I died, Matty would be fine. And what that meant was the thing I’d been most afraid of, ever since he was born, wasn’t frightening in the least. And I didn’t know whether I wanted to kill myself more or less, knowing that. I didn’t know whether my whole life had been a waste of time or not.

I went downstairs, and I saw Jess in the lobby.

“Martin’s checked out of the hotel,” she said.

And I smiled at her politely, but I didn’t stop, and I kept walking. I didn’t care that Martin had checked out of the hotel. If I hadn’t made the telephone call I would have cared, because he was in charge of our money. But if he’d gone off with the money, it wouldn’t matter much, would it? I’d stay there, or not, and I’d eat, or not, and I’d drink, or not, and go home, or not, and what I did or didn’t do wouldn’t matter to anyone at all. And I walked for most of the day. Do people get sad on holiday sometimes? I can imagine they do, having all that time to think.

For the rest of the week, I tried to keep out of everybody’s way. Martin was gone anyway, and JJ didn’t seem to mind. Jess didn’t like it much, and once or twice she tried to make me eat with her, or sit on the beach with her. But I just smiled and said, No thank you. I didn’t say, But you’re always so rude to me! Why do you want to talk to me now?

I borrowed a book from the little bookcase in reception, a silly one with a bright pink cover called Paws for Beth about a single girl whose cat turns into a handsome young fella. And the young fella wants to marry her, but she’s not sure because he’s a cat, so she takes a while to decide. And sometimes I read that, and sometimes I slept. I’ve always been fine on my own.

And the day before we flew home I went to Mass, for the first time in a month or so. There was a lovely old church in the town—much nicer than ours at home, which is modern and square. (I’ve often wondered whether God would even have found ours, but I suppose He must have done by now.) It was easier than I thought it would be to walk in and sit down, but that’s mostly because I didn’t know anybody there. But after that everything seemed a little harder, because the people seemed so foreign, and I didn’t know where we were very often because of the language.

I got used to it, though. It was like walking into a dark room—and it was dark in there, much darker than ours. After a little while, I started to be able to see things, and what I could see were people from home. Not the actual people, of course, but the Tenerife versions. There was a woman like Bridgid, who knew everyone and kept looking down the pews and smiling and nodding. And there was a fella who was a little unsteady on his feet, even at that time of day, and that was Pat.

And then I saw me. She was my age, on her own, and she had a grown-up son in a wheelchair who didn’t know what day it was, and for a little while I stared at them, and the woman caught me staring and she obviously thought I was being rude. But it seemed so strange, such a coincidence, until I thought about it. And what I thought was, you could probably go into any church anywhere in the world and see a middle-aged woman, no husband in sight, pushing a young lad in a wheelchair. It was one of the reasons churches were invented, probably.

Martin

I have never been a particularly introspective man, and I say this unapologetically. One could argue that most of the trouble in the world is caused by introspection. I’m not thinking of things like war, famine, disease or violent crime—not that sort of trouble. I’m thinking more of things like annoying newspaper columns, tearful chat-show guests and so on. I can now see, however, that it’s hard to prevent introspection when one has nothing to do but sit around and think about oneself. You could try thinking about other people, I suppose, but the other people I tried to think about tended to be people I knew, and thinking about people I knew just brought me right back to where I didn’t want to be.

So in some ways it was a mistake, checking out of the hotel and going off on my own, because even though Jess irritated the hell out of me, and Maureen depressed me, they occupied a part of me that should never be left untenanted and unfurnished. It wasn’t just that, either: they also made me feel relatively accomplished. I’d done things, and because I’d done things, there was a possibility that I might do other things. They’d done nothing at all, and it was not difficult to imagine that they would continue to do nothing at all, and they made me look and feel like a world leader who runs a multinational company in the evenings and a scout troop at weekends.

I moved into a room that was more or less identical to the one I’d been staying in, except I treated myself to a sea view and a balcony. And I sat on the balcony for two solid days, staring at the sea view and being introspective. I can’t say that I was particularly inventive in my introspection; the conclusions I drew on the first day were that I’d made a pig’s ear of just about everything, and that I’d be better off dead, and if I died no one would miss me or feel bad about my death. And then I got drunk.

The second day was only very slightly more constructive; having reached the conclusion the previous evening that no one would miss me if I died, I realized belatedly that most of my woes were someone else’s fault: I was estranged from my children because of Cindy, and Cindy was also responsible for the end of my marriage. I made one mistake! OK, nine mistakes. Nine mistakes out of say a hundred opportunities! I got 91 per cent and I still failed the test! I was imprisoned a) due to entrapment, and b) because society’s attitudes to teenage sexuality are outmoded. I lost my job because of the hypocrisy and disloyalty of my bosses. So at the end of the second day, I wanted to kill other people, rather than kill myself, and that’s got to be healthier, surely?

Jess found me on the third day. I was sitting in a cafe reading a two-day-old Daily Express and drinking cafe con leche, and she sat down opposite me.

“Anything about us in there?” she said.

“I expect so,” I said. “But I’ve only read the sport and the horoscopes so far. Haven’t looked at the front page yet.”

“Fun-nee. Can I sit with you?”

“No.”

She sat down anyway.

“What’s all this about, then?”

“All what?”

“This… big sulk.”

“You think I’m sulking?”

“What would you call it, then?”

“I’m sick to death of you.”

“What have we done?”

“Not you plural. You singular. Toi, notvous .”

“Because of the other night?”

“Yes, because of the other night.”

“You just didn’t like me saying you were my dad, did you? You’re old enough to be.”

“I’m aware of that.”

“Yeah. So get over it. Take a chill pill.”

“I’m over it. I’ve taken one.”

“Looks like it.”

“Jess, I’m not sulking. You think I moved out of a hotel because you said I was your father?”

“I would.”

“Because you hate him? Or because you’d be ashamed of your daughter?”

“Both.”

This is what happens with Jess. When she thinks you’re withdrawing, she pretends to be thoughtful (and by thoughtful, I mean “self-loathing”, which to me is the only possible outcome of any prolonged thought on her part). I decided I wasn’t going to be taken in.

“I’m not going to be taken in. Get lost.”

“What have I done now? Fucking hell.”

“You’re pretending to be a remorseful human being.”

“What does «remorseful» mean?”

“It means you’re sorry.”

“For what?”

“Go away.”

“For what?”

“Jess, I want a holiday. Most of all, I want a holiday from you.”

“So you want me to get pissed up and take drugs.”

“Yes. I want that very much.”

“Yeah, right. And if I do I’ll get a bollocking.”

“Nope. No bollocking. Just go away.”

“I’m bored.”

“So go and find JJ or Maureen.”

“They’re boring.”

“And I’m not?”

“Which celebrities have you met? Have you met Eminem?”

“No.”

“You have, but you won’t tell me.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

I left some money on the table, got up and walked out. Jess followed me down the street. “What about a game of pool?”

“No.”

“Sex?”

“No.”

“You don’t fancy me?”

“No,”

“Some men do.”

“Have sex with them, then. Jess, I’m sorry to say it, but I think our relationship is over.”

“Not if I just follow you around all day it isn’t.”

“And you think that would work in the long term?”

“I don’t care about the long term. What about what my dad said about looking out for me? And I’d have thought you’d want to. I could replace the daughters you’ve lost. And that way you could find inner peace, see? There are loads of films like that.”

She offered this last observation matter-of-factly, as if it were somehow indicative of the truth of the scenario she’d imagined, rather than the opposite.

“What about the sex you were offering? How would that fit in with you replacing the daughters I’ve lost?”

“This would be a different, you know, thing. Route. A different way to go.”

We passed a ghastly looking bar called “New York City”.

“Thats where I got thrown out for fighting,” said Jess proudly. “They’ll kill me if I try to go in again.”

As if to illustrate the point, a grizzled-looking owner was standing in the doorway with a murderous look on his face.

“I need a pee. Don’t go anywhere.”

I walked into New York City, found a lavatory somewhere in the Lower East Side, put the TV pages of the Express over the seat, sat down and bolted the door. For the next hour or two I could hear her yelling at me through the wall, but eventually the yelling stopped; I presumed she’d gone, but I stayed in there anyway, just in case. It was eleven in the morning when I bolted the door, and three in the afternoon when I came out. I didn’t resent the time. It was that sort of holiday.

JJ

The last band I was in broke up after a show at the Hope and Anchor in Islington, just a few blocks from where my apartment is now. We knew we were breaking up before we went on stage, but we hadn’t talked about it. We’d played in Manchester the night before, to a very small crowd, and on the way down to London we’d all been a little snappy, but mostly just morose and quiet. It felt exactly the same as when you break up with a woman you love—the sick feeling in the stomach, the knowledge that nothing you can say will make any fucking difference—or, if it does, it won’t make any difference for any longer than like five minutes. It’s weirder with a band, because you kind of know that you won’t lose touch with the people the way you lose touch with a girlfriend. I could have sat in a bar with all three of them the next night without arguing, but the band would still have ceased to exist. It was more than the four of us; it was a house, and we were the people in it, and we’d sold it, so it wasn’t ours any more. I’m talking metaphorically here, obviously, because no one would have given us a fucking dime for it.

Anyway, after the show at the Hope and Anchor—and the show had an unhappy intensity to it, like a desperate break-up fuck—we walked into this shitty little dressing room, and sat down in a line, and then Eddie said, “That feels like it.” And he did this thing that was so unlike him, so not just like Eddie: he reached out either side, and took my hand and Jesse’s hand, and squeezed. And Jesse took Billy’s hand, just so that we’d all be joined for one last time, and Billy said, “Fuck you, queer boy,” and stood up real quick, which kind of tells you all you need to know about drummers.

I had only known my holiday companions for a few weeks, but there was the same kind of sick feeling on the way from the hotel to the airport. There was a break-up coming, you could smell it, and no one was saying anything. And it was for the same reason, which was that we’d taken things as far as we could, and there was nowhere for us to go. That’s why everyone breaks up, I guess, bands, friends, marriages, whatever. Parties, weddings, anything.

It’s funny, but when the band split, one of the reasons I felt sick was because I was worried about the other guys. What the fuck were they going to do, you know? None of us were over-qualified. Billy wasn’t real big on reading and writing, if you hear what I’m saying, and Eddie was too, like, pugilistic to hold down a job for long, and Jesse liked his spliff… The one person I had no real concerns about was me. I was going to be OK. I was smart, and stable, and I had a girlfriend, even though I knew I’d miss making music every fucking day of my life, I could still be something and someone without it. So what happens? A few weeks later, Billy and Jesse get a gig with a band back home whose rhythm section had walked out on them, Eddie goes to work for his dad, and I’m delivering pizzas and nearly jumping off a fucking roof.

So this time around, I was determined not to fret about my fellow band members. They’d be OK, I told myself. It didn’t look that way, maybe, but they’d survived so far, just about, and it wasn’t my problem anyway.

In the taxi to the airport we talked some about what we’d done, and what we’d read, and the first thing we were going to do when we got home, and shit like that, and on the plane we all dozed, because it was an early flight. And then we got the tube from Heathrow to King’s Cross, and took a bus from there. It was on the bus that we started to recognize that maybe we wouldn’t be hanging out so much.

“Why not?” said Jess.

“Because we have nothing in common,” said Martin. “The holiday proved that.”

“I thought it went OK.”

Martin snorted. “We didn’t speak to each other.”

“You were hiding in a toilet most of the time,” said Jess.

“And why was that, do you think? Because we’re soul mates? Or because ours is not one of my most fulfilling relationships?”

“Yeah, and what is your most fulfilling relationship?”

“What’s yours?”

Jess thought for a moment, and then shrugged.

“With you lot,” she said.

There was a silence that was long enough for us to see the truth of Jess’s observation as it applied to her. And luckily for us, Martin spoke up just as we were starting to see how it might possibly apply to us too.

“Yes. Well. It shouldn’t be, shouldn’t it?”

“Are you giving me the push?”

“If you want to put it like that. Jess, we got through the holiday. and now it’s time to go our separate ways.”

“What about Valentine’s Day?”

“We can meet on Valentine’s Day, if you want. We said we’d do that.”

“Up on the roof?”

“Do you still think you might throw yourself off ?”

“I dunno. It changes day by day.”

“I’d like to meet up,” said Maureen.

“I suppose Valentine’s must be a pretty important day for you, Maureen,” said Jess. She said it as if she were making conversation, but Maureen recognized the disguised nastiness and didn’t bother to respond. Just about everything Jess said could be bounced right back at her, but none of us had the energy any more. We looked out the window at the traffic in the rain, and at Angel I said goodbye and got off. As I watched the bus drive away, I could see Maureen offer the others, even Jess, her packet of Polo mints, and the gesture seemed kind of heartbreaking.

For the next week I did nothing, pretty much. I read a lot, and wandered around Islington to see if there was any sign of a bad job for me. One night I blew ten pounds on a ticket for a band called Fat Chance, who were playing in the Union Chapel. They started up around the same time as us, and now they had a decent deal, and there was a buzz about them, but they were lame, in my opinion. They stood there and played their songs, and people clapped, and there was an encore, and then we left, and I wouldn’t say any of us was richer for the experience.

I was recognized on the way out, by a guy who must have been in his forties.

“All right, JJ?” he said.

“Do I know you?”

“I saw you at the Hope and Anchor last year. I heard the band had split. you living here?”

“Yeah, for now.”

“What you doing? You gone solo?”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“Cool”

We met at eight in the evening on Valentine’s Day, and everyone was on time. Jess wanted to meet later, like at midnight or something, for full tragic effect, but no one else thought it was such a good idea, and Maureen didn’t want to travel home so late. I ran into her on the stairs on the way up, and told her I was glad to hear she was thinking about travelling home afterwards.

“Where else would I go?”

“No, I just meant… Last time you weren’t gonna go home, you know? Not, like, on the bus, anyway.”

“On the bus?”

“Last time, you were going to get off the roof the quick way.” I walked my fingers through the air and then plunged them downwards, as if they were jumping off the roof. “But tonight, it sounds as though you’ll be taking the long way down.”

“Oh. Yes. Well. I’ve come on a bit,” she said. “In my head, I mean.”

“That’s great.”

“I’m still feeling the benefit of the holiday, I think.”

“Right on.”

And then she didn’t want to talk any more, because it was a long way up, and she was short of breath.

Martin and Jess arrived a couple of minutes later, and we said hello, and then we all stood there.

“What was the point of this, actually?” said Martin.

“We were going to meet up and see how we were all feeling and all that,” said Jess.

“Ah.” We shuffled our feet. “And how are we all feeling?”

“Maureen’s doing good,” I said. “Aren’t you, Maureen?”

“I am. I was saying to JJ, I think I’m still feeling the benefit of the holiday.”

“Which holiday? The holiday we just had?” He looked at her and then shook his head, with a mixture of amazement and admiration.

“How about you, Mart?” I said. “How you doing?” But I could kind of tell what the answer to that question was going to be.

“Oh, you know. Comme ci comme ca,”

“Tosser,” said Jess.

We shuffled our feet some more.

“I read something I thought might interest you all,” Martin said.

“Yeah?”

“I was wondering… Maybe it would be good to talk about it somewhere other than here. In a pub, say.”

“Sounds good to me,” I said. “I mean, maybe we should celebrate anyway, you know?”

“Celebrate?” said Martin, like I was nuts.

“Yeah. I mean, we’re alive, and, and…”

The list kind of ran out after that. But being alive seemed worth the price of a round of drinks. Being alive seemed worth celebrating. Unless, of course, it wasn’t what you wanted, in which case… Oh, fuck it. I wanted a drink anyway. If we couldn’t think of anything else, then me wanting a drink was worth celebrating. An ordinary human desire had emerged through the fog of depression and indecision.

“Maureen?”

“Yes, I don’t mind.”

“It doesn’t look to me like anyone’s going to jump,” I said. “Not tonight. Is that right? Jess?”

She wasn’t listening.

“Fuck me,” she said. “Jesus Christ.”

She was staring at the corner of the roof, the spot where Martin had snipped the wire on New Year’s Eve. There was a guy sitting there, exactly where Martin had sat, and he was watching us. He was maybe a few years older than me, and he looked real frightened.

“Hey, man,” I said quietly. “Hey. Just stay there.”

I started to walk slowly over to him.

“Please don’t come any closer,” he said. He was panicky, near tears, dragging furiously on a smoke.

“We’ve all been there,” I said. “Come on back over and you can join our gang. This is our reunion.” I tried another couple of steps. He didn’t say anything.

“Yeah,” said Jess. “Look at us. We’re OK. You think you’re never going to get through the evening, but you do.”

“I don’t want to,” said the guy.

“Tell us what the problem is,” I said. I walked a little closer. “I mean, we’re all fucking experts in the field. Maureen here…”

But I never got any further. He flipped the cigarette over the edge, and then with a little moan he pushed himself off. And there was silence, and then there was the noise of his body hitting the concrete all those floors below. And those two noises, the moan and the thud, I’ve heard every single day since, and I still don’t know which is scarier.