A Long Way Down

Martin

The guy who jumped had two profound and apparently contradictory effects on us all. Firstly, he made us realize that we weren’t capable of killing ourselves. And secondly, this information made us suicidal again.

That isn’t a paradox, if you know anything about the perversity of human nature. A long time ago, I worked with an alcoholic -someone who must remain nameless because you will almost certainly have heard of him. And he told me that the first time he failed on an attempt to quit the booze was the most terrifying day of his life. He’d always thought that he could stop drinking, if he ever got round to it, so he had a choice stashed away in a sock drawer somewhere at the back of his head. But when he found out that he had to drink, that the choice had never really been there… Well, he wanted to do away with himself, if I may temporarily confuse our issues.

I didn’t properly understand what he meant until I saw that guy jump off the roof. Up until then, jumping had always been an option, a way out, money in the bank for a rainy day. And then suddenly the money was gone—or rather, it had never been ours in the first place. It belonged to the guy who jumped, and people like him, because dangling your legs over the precipice is nothing unless you’re prepared to go that extra two inches, and none of us had been. We could tell each other and ourselves something different—oh, I would have done it if she hadn’t been there or he hadn’t been there or if someone hadn’t sat on my head—but the fact of the matter was that we were all still around, and we’d all had ample opportunity not to be. Why had we come down that night? We’d come down because we thought we should go and look for some twit called Chas, who turned out not to be terribly germane to our story. I’m not sure we could have persuaded old matey, the jumper, to go and look for Chas. He had other things on his mind. I wonder how he would have scored on Aaron T. Beck’s Suicide Intent Scale? Pretty high, I should think, unless Aaron T. Beck has been barking up the wrong tree. No one could say the intent wasn’t there.

We got off that roof sharpish once he’d gone over. We decided it was best not to hang around and explain our role, or lack of it, in the poor chap’s demise. We had a little Toppers’ previous, after all, and by owning up, we’d only be confusing the issue. If people knew we’d been up there, then the clarity of the story—unhappy man jumps off of building—would be diminished, and people would understand less of it, rather than more. We wouldn’t want that.

So we charged down the stairs as fast as damaged lungs and varicosed legs would let us, and went our separate ways. We were too nervous to go for a drink in the immediate vicinity, and too nervous to travel in a taxi together, so we scattered the moment we reached the pavement. (What, I wondered on the way home, was the nearest pub to Toppers’ House like of an evening? Was it full of unhappy people on their way up, or half-confused, half-relieved people who’d just come down? Or an awkward mix of the two? Does the landlord recognize the uniqueness of his clientele? Does he exploit their mood for financial gain—by offering a Miserable Hour, for example? Does he ever try to get the Uppers—in this context the very unhappy people—to mix with the Downers? Or the Uppers to mix with each other? Has there ever been a relationship born there? Could the pub even have been responsible for a wedding, and thus maybe a child?)

We met again the following afternoon in Starbucks, and everyone had the blues. A few days previously, in the immediate aftermath of the holiday, it had been perfectly clear that we no longer had much use for each other; now, it was hard to imagine who else would be suitable company. I looked around the cafe at the other customers: young mothers with prams, young men and women in suits with mobile phones and pieces of paper, foreign students… I tried to imagine talking to any of them, but it was impossible. They wouldn’t want to hear about people jumping off tower-blocks. No one would, apart from the people I was sitting with.

“I was up all fucking night thinking about that guy,” said JJ. “Man. What was going on there?”

“He was probably just, you know. A drama queen. A male drama queen. A drama king,” said Jess. “He looked the sort.”

“That’s very shrewd, Jess,” I said. “In the brief glimpse we got of him before he plunged to his death, he didn’t strike me as someone with serious problems. Nothing on your scale, anyway.”

“It’ll be in the local paper,” said Maureen. “They usually are. I used to read the reports. Especially when it was coming up to New Year’s Eve. I used to compare myself with them.”

“And? How did you get on?”

“Oh,” said Maureen. “I did OK. Some of them I couldn’t understand.”

“What sort of things?”

“Money.”

“I owe loads of people money,” said Jess proudly.

“Perhaps you should think of killing yourself,” I said.

“It’s not much,” said Jess. “Only twenty quid here and twenty quid there.”

“Even so. A debt’s a debt. And if you can’t pay… Maybe you should take the honourable way out.”

“Hey. Guys,” JJ said. “Let’s keep some focus, huh?”

“On what? Isn’t that the problem? Nothing to focus on?”

“Let’s focus on that guy.”

“We don’t know anything about him.”

“No, but, I don’t know. He seems kind of important to me. That was what we were gonna do.”

“Were we?”

“I was,” said Jess.

“But you didn’t.”

“You sat on my head.”

“But you haven’t done anything about it since.”

“Well. We went to that party. And we went on holiday. And, you know. There’s been one thing after another.”

“Terrible, isn’t it, how that happens? You’ll have to block out some time in your diary. Otherwise life will keep getting in the way.”

“Shut up.”

“Guys, guys…”

I had, once again, allowed myself to be drawn into an undignified spat with Jess. I decided to act in a more statesmanlike manner.

“Like JJ, I have spent a long night cogitating,” I said.

“Tosser.”

“And my conclusion is that we are not serious people. We were never serious. We got closer than some, but nowhere near as close as others. And that puts us in something of a bind.”

“I agree. We’re fucked,” said JJ. “Sorry, Maureen.”

“I’m missing something,” said Jess.

“This is it,” I said. “This is us.”

“What is?”

“This.” I gestured vaguely at our surroundings, the company we were keeping, the rain outside, all of which seemed to speak eloquently of our current condition. “This is it. There’s no way out. Not even the way out is the way out. Not for us.”

“Fuck that,” said Jess. “And I’m not sorry, Maureen.”

“The other night, I was going to tell you about something I’d read in a magazine. About suicide. Do you remember? Anyway, this guy reckoned that the crisis period lasts ninety days.”

“What guy?” JJ asked.

“This suicidologist guy.”

“That’s a job?”

“Everything’s a job.”

“So what?” said Jess.

“So we’ve had forty-six of the ninety days.”

“And what happens after the ninety days?”

“Nothing happens ,” I said. “Just… things are different. Things change. The exact arrangement of stuff that made you think your life was unbearable… It’s got shifted around somehow. It’s like a sort of real-life version of astrology.”

“Nothing’s going to change for you,” said Jess. “You’re still going to be the geezer off the telly who slept with the fifteen-year-old and went to prison. No one will ever forget that.”

“Yes. Well. I’m sure the ninety days thing won’t apply in my case,” I said. “If that makes you happier.”

“Won’t help Maureen, either,” said Jess. “Or JJ. I might change, though. I do, quite a lot.”

“My point, anyway, is that we extend our deadline again. Because… Well, I don’t know about you lot. But I realized this morning that I’m not, you know, ready to go solo just yet. It’s funny, because I don’t actually like any of you very much. But you seem to be, I don’t know… What I need. You know how sometimes you know you should be eating more cabbage? Or drinking more water? It’s like that.”

There was a general shuffling of feet, which I interpreted as a declaration of reluctant solidarity.

“Thanks, man,” said JJ. “Very touching. When’s the ninety days up?”

“March 31st.”

“That’s a bit of a coincidence, isn’t it?” said Jess. “Exactly three months.”

“What’s your point?”

“Well. It’s not scientific, is it?”

“What, and eighty-eight days would be?”

“More scientific, yeah.”

“No, I get it,” said JJ. “Three months sounds about right. Three months is like a season.”

“Very much like,” I agreed. “Given there are four seasons, and twelve months in a year.”

“So we’re seeing the winter through together. That’s cool. Winter is when you get the blues,” JJ said.

“So it would appear,” I said.

“But we gotta do something,” said JJ. “We can’t just sit around waiting for three months to be up.”

“Typical American,” said Jess. “What do you want to do? Bomb some poor little country somewhere?”

“Sure. It would take my mind off things, some bombing.”

“What should we do?” I asked him.

“I don’t know, man. I just know that if we spend six weeks pissing and moaning, then we’re not helping ourselves.”

“Jess is right,” I said. “Typical bloody American. «Helping ourselves.» Self-help. You can do anything if you put your mind to it, right? You could be President.”

“What is it with you assholes? I’m not talking about becoming President. I’m talking about, like, finding a job waiting tables.”

“Great,” said Jess. “Let’s all not kill ourselves because someone gave us a fifty pence tip.”

“No fucking chance of that in this fucking country,” said JJ. “Sorry, Maureen.”

“You could always just go back where you came from,” said Jess. “That would change something. Also, your buildings are higher, aren’t they?”

“So,” I said. “Forty-four days to go.”

There was something else in the article I read: an interview with a man who’d survived after jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. He said that two seconds after jumping, he realized that there was nothing in his life he couldn’t deal with, no problem he couldn’t solve—apart from the problem he’d just given himself by jumping off the bridge. I don’t know why I didn’t tell the others about that; you’d think it might be relevant information. I wanted to keep it to myself for the time being, though. It seemed like something that might be more appropriate later, when the story was over. If it ever was.

Maureen

It was in the local paper, the following week. I cut the story out, and kept it, and I read it every so often, just to try to understand the poor man better. I couldn’t keep him out of my head. He was called David Fawley, and he’d jumped because of problems with his wife and children. She’d met someone else, and moved away to be with him, and taken the kiddies with her. He only lived two streets away, which seemed very strange to me, a coincidence, until I realized that people in my local paper always lived locally, unless someone had visited to open a school or something. Glenda Jackson came to Matty’s school once, for example.

Martin was right. When I saw David Fawley jump, it made me see that I hadn’t been ready on New Year’s Eve. I’d been ready to make the preparations, because it gave me something to do—New Year’s Eve was something to look forward to, in a strange sort of way. And when I’d met some people to talk to, then I was happy to talk, instead of jump. They’d have let me jump, I think, once I’d told them why I was up there. They wouldn’t have got in my way, or sat on my head. But even so, I’d gone down the stairs and on to the party. This poor David hadn’t wanted to talk to us, that was the thing I’d noticed. He’d come to jump, not to natter. I thought I’d gone to jump, but I ended up nattering anyway.

If you thought about it, this David fella and me, we were opposites. He’d killed himself because his children were gone, and I’d thought about it because my son was still around. There must be a lot of that goes on. There must be people who kill themselves because their marriage is over, and others who kill themselves because they can’t see a way out of the one they’re in. I wondered whether you could do that with everyone, whether every unhappy situation had an unhappy opposite situation. I couldn’t see it with the people who had debts, though. No one ever killed himself because he had too much money. Those sheikhs with the oil don’t seem to commit suicide very often. Or if they do, no one ever talks about it. Anyway, perhaps there was something in this opposites idea. I had someone, and David had no one, and he’d jumped and I hadn’t. When it comes to committing suicide, nobody beats somebody, if you see what I mean. There’s no rope holding you back.

I prayed for David’s soul, even though I knew it wouldn’t do him any good, because he had committed the sin of despair, and my prayers would fall on deaf ears. And then after Matty had gone to sleep, I left him alone for five minutes and walked down the road to see where David had lived. I don’t know why I did that, or what I hoped to see, but there was nothing there, of course. It was one of these streets full of big houses that have been turned into flats, so that’s what I found out, that he lived in a flat. And then it was time to turn around and go home.

That evening, I watched a programme on the television about a Scottish detective who doesn’t get on with his ex-wife very well, so I thought about David some more, because I don’t suppose he got on very well with his ex-wife either. And I’m not sure this was the point of the programme, but there wasn’t much room in it for lots of arguments between the Scottish detective and his ex-wife, because most of the time he had to find out who’d killed this woman and left her body outside her ex-husband’s house to make it look as though he’d killed her. (This was a different ex-husband.) So in an hour-long programme, there were probably only ten minutes of him arguing with his ex-wife, and his children, and fifty minutes of him trying to find who’d put the woman’s body in the dustbin. Forty minutes, I suppose, if you took out the advertisements. I noticed because I was a bit more interested in the arguments than I was in the body, and the arguments didn’t seem to come around very often.

And that seemed about right to me, ten minutes an hour. It was probably about right for the programme, because he was a detective, and it was more important for him and for the viewers that he spent the biggest chunk of his time on solving the murders. But I think even if you’re not in a TV programme, then ten minutes an hour is about right for your problems. This David Fawley was unemployed, so there was a fair old chance that he spent sixty minutes an hour thinking about his ex-wife, and his children, and when you do that, you’re bound to end up on the roof of Toppers’ House.

I should know. I don’t have arguments, but there have been lots of times in my life when I couldn’t stop Matty becoming sixty minutes an hour. There was nothing else to think about. I’d had more on my mind recently, because of the others, and the things that have happened in their lives. But most of the time, on most days, it was just me and my son, and that meant trouble.

Anyway, that evening there was a whole jumble of thoughts. I lay in bed half-asleep, thinking about David, and the Scottish detective, and coming down off the roof to find Chas and eventually I got these thoughts unknotted, and when I woke up in the morning I decided it would be a good idea to find out where Martin’s wife and children lived, and then go and talk to them all and see if there was any chance of getting the family back together. Because if that worked, then Martin wouldn’t get so eaten up about some things, and he’d have somebody rather than nobody, and I’d have something to do for forty or fifty minutes an hour, and it would help everybody.

But I was a hopeless detective. I knew Martin’s wife’s name was Cindy, so I looked Cindy Sharp up in the phone book, and she wasn’t there, and I ran out of ideas after that. So I asked Jess, because I didn’t think JJ would approve of my plan, and she found all the information we needed in about five minutes, on a computer. But then she wanted to come with me to see Cindy, and I said she could. I know, I know. But you try telling her she can’t have something she wants.

Jess

I got on Dad’s computer, and put “Cindy Sharp” into Google, and I found an interview she’d given to some woman’s magazine when Martin had gone to prison. “Cindy Sharp talks for the first time about her heartbreak” and all that. You could even click on a picture of her and her two girls. Cindy looked like Penny, except older and a bit fatter, because of having had kids and that. And what’s the betting that Penny looked like the fifteen-year-old, except that the fifteen-year-old was even slimmer than Penny, and had bigger tits or whatever? They’re tossers, aren’t they, men like Martin? They think women are like fucking laptops or whatever, like, My old one’s knackered and anyway, you can get ones that are slimmer and do more stuff now.

So I read the interview, and it said she lived in this village called Torley Heath, about forty miles outside London. And if she was trying to stop people like us from knocking on the door to tell her to get back with her husband, then she made a big mistake, because the interviewer described exactly where her house is in the village—opposite an old-fashioned corner shop, next door but one to the village school. She told us all this because she wanted us to know how idealistic or whatever Cindy’s life is. Apart from her ex-husband being in prison for sleeping with a fifteen-year-old.

We decided not to tell JJ. We were pretty sure he’d stop us for some bullshit reason or another. He’d say, “It’s none of your business,” or, “You’ll fuck up the last chance he’s got.” But we thought we had a strong argument, Maureen and I. Our argument was this. Maybe Cindy did hate Martin because he was a real playa who went anywhere with anyone. But now he was suicidal, and he probably wouldn’t go anywhere with anyone, or at least not for a while. So basically, if she wouldn’t take him back, she had to hate him enough to want him to die. And that’s a lot of hate. True, he hadn’t ever said he wanted to get back with her, but he needed to be in a secure domestic environment, in a place like Torley Heath. It was better to do nothing in a place where there was nothing to do than in London, where there was trouble—teenage girls and nightclubs and tower-blocks. That’s what we felt.

So we had a day out. Maureen made horrible like old-fashioned sandwiches with egg and stuff in them, which I couldn’t eat. And we got the tube to Paddington, then the train to Newbury, and then a bus to Torley Heath. I’d been worried that Maureen and I wouldn’t have much to say to each other, and we’d get really bored, and I’d end up doing something stupid, because of the boredom. But it really wasn’t like that, mostly because of me, and the effort I put in. I decided that I was going to be like an interviewer type-person, and I’d spend the journey finding out about Maureen’s life, no matter how boring or depressing it was. The only trouble was that it was actually too boring and depressing to listen to, so I sort of switched off when she was talking, and thought up the next question. A couple of times she looked at me funny, so I’m guessing that quite often she had just told me something and then I asked her about it again. Like once, I tuned back in to hear her go, something something something met Frank. So I went, When did you meet Frank, but I think what she’d just said was, That was when I met Frank. So I’d have to work on that, if I was ever to be an interviewer. But let’s face it, I wouldn’t be interviewing people who did nothing and had a disabled son, would I? So it would be easier to concentrate, because they’d be talking about their new films and other stuff you’d actually want to know about.

Anyway, the point was that we went through a whole journey to the middle of fucking nowhere without me asking her whether she had sex doggy style or anything like that. And what I realized then was that I’d come a long way since New Year’s Eve. I’d grown as a person. And that made me think that our story was sort of coming to an end, and it was going to be a happy ending. Because I’d grown as a person, and also we were in this period where we were sorting out each other’s problems. We weren’t just sitting around moping. That’s when stories end, isn’t it? When people show they’ve learned things, and problems get solved. I’ve seen loads of films like that. We’d sort out Martin today, and then turn our minds to JJ, and then me, and then Maureen. And we’d meet on the roof after ninety days, and smile, and hug, and know that we had moved on.

The bus stop was right outside the village shop that the article in the magazine had gone on about. So we got off the bus and stood outside the shop and looked across the road to see what we could see. What we saw was this little cottagey sort of place with a low wall, and you could look into the garden, and in the garden there were two little girls all wrapped up in hats and scarves and they were playing with a dog. So I went to Maureen, Do you know the names of Martin’s kids? And she was like, Yes, they’re called Polly and Maisie—which seemed about right, I thought. I could imagine Martin and Cindy having kids called Polly and Maisie, which are sort of old-fashioned posh names, so everyone could pretend that Mr Darcy or whatever lived next door. So I shouted, Oo-o, Polly! Maisie! And they looked at us and came towards us, and that was my detective work over.

We knocked on the door and Cindy answered, and she looked at me as if she half-recognized me, and I was like, I’m Jess. I’m one of the Toppers’ House Four, and I was, you know, linked to your husband or whatever in the newspapers. Which was a lie, by the way. (That was me telling her it was a lie, not me telling you. I really wish I knew where speech marks or whatever went. I can see the point of them now.)

And she said, Ex-husband, which was sort of an unfriendly and unhelpful start.

And I went, Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it?

And she went, Is it?

And I went, Yes, it is. Because he doesn’t have to be your ex-husband.

And she went, Oh, yes he does.

And we hadn’t even gone through the front door.

At that point Maureen goes, Do you think we could come in and talk to you? I’m Maureen. I’m also a friend of Martin’s. We’ve come down from London on the train.

And the bus, I said. I just wanted her to know we’d made an effort.

And Cindy said, I’m sorry, come in. Not I’m sorry, fuck off home, which is what I thought she was going to say. She was apologizing for her bad manners in making us stand out on the doorstep. So I was like, Oh, this is going to be easy. In ten minutes I’ll have bullied her into taking him back.

So we walk into the cottage, and it’s cosy in there, but not all like out of a magazine, which I thought it would be. The furniture didn’t really match, and it was old, and it smelled of the dog a bit. She showed us through to the sitting room and there was this geezer in there sitting by the fire. He was nice-looking, younger than her, and I thought, Oh-oh, he’s got his feet under the table. Because he was listening to a Walkman with his shoes off, and you don’t listen to a Walkman with your shoes off in someone’s house if you’re just visiting, do you?

Cindy went up to him and tapped him on the shoulder and said, We’ve got visitors, and he was like, Oh, I’m sorry. I was listening to Stephen Fry reading Harry Potter. The children love it, so I thought I should give it a whirl. Have you heard it? So I was like, Yeah, do I look nine years old to you? And he didn’t know what to say to that. He took the headphones off and pressed a button on the machine.

And Cindy said, It’s Paul’s dog that the girls are playing with. And I was like, Yeah, so? But I didn’t say that.

Cindy told him that we were friends of Martin’s, and he asked whether she wanted him to leave, and she said, No, of course not, whatever they’ve come to say I want you to hear. So I said, Well, we’ve come to tell Cindy she should get back with Martin, so you might not want to hear that. And he didn’t know what to say to that either.

Maureen looked at me, and then she goes, We’re worried about him. And Cindy said, Yes, well, I can’t say I’m surprised. And Maureen tells her about the bloke who topped himself, and how it was because of how his wife and kids had left him, and Cindy said, You know Martin left us? We didn’t leave him? And I was like, Yeah, that’s why we’ve come. Because if you’d left him, this whole trip would have been a waste of time. But, you know. We’ve come down here to tell you he’s changed his mind, sort of thing. And Maureen said, I think he knows that was a mistake. And Cindy goes, I had no doubt he’d realize it in the long term, and I also had no doubt that by the time he did it would be too late. And I went, It’s never too late to learn. And she went, It is for him. And I said I thought she owed him another chance, and she sort of smiled and said she disagreed and I said I disagreed with her disagreeing and she said we must agree to disagree. And I was like, So you want him to die, then?

And then she went a bit quiet, and I thought I’d got her. But then she goes, I thought about killing myself too, when things were really bad, a while ago. But I didn’t have the option, because of the girls. And it’s indicative of the way things are that he does have the option. He’s not part of a family. He hated being part of a family.

And that’s when I decided it was his business. If he had the freedom to fuck around, then he had the freedom to kill himself, too. Don’t you think?

And I went, Well I can see why you say that. Which was a mistake, because it didn’t help my argument.

Cindy said, Did he tell you I wouldn’t let him see the girls?

And Maureen said, Yes, he did mention that. And Cindy went, Well, that’s not true. I just won’t let him see them here. He could take them for weekends in London, but he won’t. Or he says he will, but then he makes excuses. He doesn’t want to be that sort of dad, you see. It’s too much effort. He wants to come home from work, read them a story some nights but not every night, and go to see them in the Christmas play. He doesn’t want all the other stuff. And then she was like, I don’t know why I’m telling you this. And I went, He’s a bit of a tosser, really, isn’t he? And she laughed. He’s made a lot of mistakes, she said. And he continues to make them.

And that Paul bloke goes, If he were a computer, you’d have to say that there’s a programming fault, so I was like, What’s it got to do with you? And Cindy said, Listen, I’ve been very patient with you up until now. Two strangers knock on my door and tell me to get back together with my ex-husband, a man who nearly destroyed me, and I invite them in and actually listen to them. But Paul is my partner, and part of my family, and a wonderful stepfather to the girls. And that’s what it’s got to do with him.

And then Paul stood up and said, I think I’ll take Harry Potter upstairs, and he nearly tripped over my feet, and Cindy dived over and was like, Careful, darling, and then I worked out he was blind. Blind! Fucking hell! That’s why he had a dog. That’s why she was trying to tell me he had a dog (because I was giving it all that stuff, like, Do I look nine years old oh God oh God). So we’d gone all the way down there to tell Cindy she had to leave a blind man and get back together with a man who shagged fifteen-year-olds and treated her like shit. It shouldn’t really have made any difference, though, should it? They’re always going on about how they want to be treated the same as everyone else. So I’ll leave the blind thing out of it. I’ll just say that we went all the way down there to tell Cindy she had to leave an OK bloke who was good to her and her kids, and get back with an arsehole. And that still didn’t sound great.

I’ll tell you what really got me, though. The only proof that Martin had ever had anything to do with Cindy was us turning up in her house. Us and his kids, anyway, but they would only be proof if you took them for a DNA test and that. Anyway, what I mean is, as far as Cindy was concerned, he might as well have never existed. They’d all moved on. Cindy had a whole new life now. On the way down, I’d been thinking about how I’d moved on, but all I’d done was gone one train ride and one bus journey without asking Maureen about sexual positions. After I’d seen Cindy, that didn’t seem like such a long journey. Cindy had got rid of Martin, moved and met someone else. Her past was in the past, but our past, I don’t know… Our past was still all over the place. We could see it every day when we woke up. It was like Cindy lived in a modern place like Tokyo and we lived in an old place like Rome or somewhere. Except it couldn’t be exactly like that, because Rome is probably a cool place to live, what with the clothes and the ice cream and the lush boys and that—just as cool as Tokyo. And where we lived wasn’t cool. So maybe it was more like, she lived in a modern penthouse, and we lived in some old shithole that should have been pulled down years ago. We lived in a place where there were holes in the walls, and anyone could stick their head through them if they wanted to, and make faces at us. And Maureen and I had been trying to persuade Cindy to move out of her cool penthouse and move into our dump with us. It wasn’t much of an offer, I could see that now.

As we were leaving, Cindy was like, I’d have more respect for him if he asked me himself. And I went, Ask you what? And she said, If I can help him, I will. But I don’t know what he wants help with.

And when she said that, I could see we’d done the afternoon all wrong, and there was a much better way.

JJ

The only trouble was, the American self-help guy didn’t have the first fucking idea of how to help himself. And to be honest with you, the more I thought about the ninety-day theory, the less I could see how it applied to me. As far as I could tell, I was fucked for a lot longer than ninety days. I was giving up being a musician for ever, man, and giving up music wasn’t going to be like giving up cigarettes. It was going to get worse and worse, harder and harder, every day I went without. My first day working at Burger King wouldn’t be so bad, because I’d tell myself, you know… Actually, I don’t know what the fuck I’d tell myself, but I’d think of something. But by the fifth day I’d be miserable, and by the thirtieth year … Man. Don’t try talking to me on my thirtieth anniversary of burger-flipping. I’ll be real grouchy that day. And I’ll be sixty-one years old.

And then, when this stuff had gone around and around in my head for a while, I’d kind of stand up, mentally speaking, and say, OK, fuck it, I’m going to kill myself. And then I’d remember the guy we saw do exactly that, and I’d sit down again feeling truly terrible, worse than when I’d stood up in the first place. Self-help was a crock of shit. I couldn’t help myself to a free drink.

The next time we met up, Jess told us all that she and Maureen had gone to see Cindy out in the countryside.

“My ex-wife was called Cindy,” said Martin. He was sipping a latte and reading the Telegraph , and not really listening to anything Jess had to say.

“Yeah, that’s a coincidence,” said Jess.

Martin continued to sip his coffee.

“Der,” said Jess.

Martin put the Telegraph down and looked at her.

“What?”

“It was your Cindy, you doughnut.”

Martin looked at her.

“You’ve never met my Cindy. Ex-my Cindy. My ex.”

“That’s what we’re saying to you. Maureen and I went down wherever it was to talk to her.”

“Torley Heath,” said Maureen.

“That’s where she lives!” said Martin, scandalized.

Jess sighed.

“You went to see Cindy?”

Jess picked up his Telegraph , and started leafing through it, kind of a spoof on his previous lack of interest. Martin snatched the paper away from her.

“What the hell did you do that for?”

“We thought it might help.”

“How?”

“We went down to ask her whether she’d take you back. But she wouldn’t. She’s shacked up with this blind geezer. She’s well sorted. Isn’t she, Maureen?”

Maureen had the good sense to stare at her own shoes.

Martin stared at Jess.

“Are you insane?” he said. “On whose authority did you do that?”

“On whose authority? On my authority. Free country.”

“And what would you have done if she’d burst into tears and said, you know, «I’d love him to come back»?”

“I would have helped you pack. And you’d have fucking well done what we’d told you.”

“But…” He made some spluttering noises, and then stopped. “Jesus Christ.”

“Anyway, there’s no chance of that. She thinks you’re a right bastard.”

“If you’d ever listened to anything I’d ever said about my ex-wife, you could have saved yourself a trip. You thought she’d take me back? You thought I’d go back?”

Jess shrugged. “It was worth a try.”

“You,” said Martin. “Maureen. There’s nothing on the floor. Look at me. You went with her?”

“It was her idea,” said Jess.

“So you’re an even bigger fool than she is.”

“We all need help,” said Maureen. “We don’t all know what we want. You’ve all helped me. I wanted to help you. And I thought that was the best way.”

“How would it work now when it didn’t work before?”

Maureen didn’t say anything, so I did.

“So which of us wouldn’t try to make something work now that didn’t work before? Now that we’ve seen what the alternative is. A big fat fucking nothing.”

“So what would you want back, JJ?” Jess asked.

“Everything, man. The band. Lizzie.”

“That’s stupid. The band was rubbish. Well,” she said quickly when she saw my face. “Not rubbish. But not… you know.”

I nodded. I knew.

“And Lizzie packed you in.”

I knew that, too. What I didn’t say, because it sounded too fucking lame, was that if it were possible to rewind, I’d rewind back to the last few weeks of the band, and the last few weeks of Lizzie, even though everything was fucked up. I was still playing music, I was still seeing her—there wasn’t anything to complain about, right? OK, everything was dying. But it wasn’t dead.

I don’t know why, but it was kind of liberating, saying what you really wanted, even if you couldn’t have it. When I’d invented that Cosmic Tony guy for Maureen, I’d put limits on his superpowers because I thought we might see what kind of practical assistance Maureen needed. And as it turned out, she needed a vacation, and we could help, so Cosmic Tony turned out to be a guy worth knowing. But if there’s no superpower limit, then you get to find out all kinds of other shit, like, I don’t know, the thing that’s wrong with you in the first place. We all spend so much time not saying what we want, because we know we can’t have it. And because it sounds ungracious, or ungrateful, or disloyal, or childish, or banal. Or because we’re so desperate to pretend that things are OK, really, that confessing to ourselves they’re not looks like a bad move. Go on, say what you want. Maybe not out loud, if it’s going to get you into trouble. “I wish I’d never married him.” “I wish she was still alive.” “I wish I’d never had kids with her.” “I wish I had a whole shitload of money.” “I wish all the Albanians would go back to fucking Albania.” Whatever it is, say it to yourself. The truth will set you free. Either that or it’ll get you a punch in the nose. Surviving in whatever life you’re living means lying, and lying corrodes the soul, so take a break from the lies just for one minute.

“I want my band back,” I said. “And my girl. I want my band back and my girl back.”

Jess looked at me. “You just said that.”

“I haven’t said it often enough. I want my band back and my girl back. I WANT MY BAND BACK AND MY GIRL BACK. What do you want, Martin?”

He stood up. “I want another cappuccino,” he said. “Anyone else?”

“Don’t be such a pussy. What do you want?”

“And what good will it do me if I tell you?”

“I don’t know. Say it, and well see what we see.”

He shrugged and sat down.

“You got three wishes,” I said.

“OK. I wish I’d been able to make my marriage work.”

“Yeah, well that was never going to happen,” said Jess. “Because you couldn’t keep your prick in your trousers. Sorry, Maureen.”

Martin ignored her.

“And of course I wish I’d never slept with that girl.”

“Yeah, well…” said Jess.

“Shut up,” I said.

“I don’t know,” said Martin. “Maybe I just wish that I wasn’t such an arsehole.”

“There, now. That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

I was joking, kind of, but no one laughed.

“Why don’t you just wish that you’d slept with the girl and got away with it?” said Jess. “That’s what I’d wish, if I were you. I think you’re still lying. You’re wishing for stuff that makes you look good.”

“That wish wouldn’t really solve the problem, though, would it? I’d still be an arsehole. I’d still get caught for something else.”

“Well, why not just wish that you never got caught for anything ever? Why not wish that you… What’s that one with the cake?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Something about eating a cake?”

“Having it and eating it?”

Jess looked kind of doubtful. “Are you sure that’s it? How can you eat a cake without having it in the first place?”

“The idea,” said Martin, “is that you get it both ways. You eat the cake, but it somehow remains untouched. So «have» here means «keep».”

“That’s mental.”

“Indeed.”

“How could you do that?”

“You can’t. Hence the expression.”

“And what’s the point of the fucking cake? If you’re not going to eat it?”

“We’re kind of getting off the subject here,” I said. “The point is to wish for something that would make us happier. And I can see why Martin wants to be, you know, a different person.”

“I wish Jen would come back,” said Jess.

“Yeah, well. I can see that. What else?”

“Nothing. That’s it.”

Martin snorted. “You don’t wish you were less of an arsehole?”

“If Jen came back, I wouldn’t be.”

“Or less mad?”

“I’m not mad. Just, you know. Confused.”

There was a thoughtful silence. You could tell that not everyone around the table was convinced.

“So you’re just gonna waste two wishes?” I said.

“No. I can use them up. Ummm… An everlasting supply of blow, maybe? And, I dunno… Oooh. I wouldn’t mind being able to play the piano, I suppose.”

Martin sighed. “Jesus Christ. That’s the only problem you’ve got? You can’t play the piano?”

“If I was less confused, I’d have the time to play the piano.”

We left it there.

“How “bout you, Maureen?”

“I told you before. When you said Cosmic Tony could only arrange things.”

“Tell everyone else.”

“I wish they could find a way to help Matty.”

“You can do better than that, can’t you?” said Jess.

We winced.

“How?”

“No, well, see, I was wondering what you’d say. “Cos you could have wished that he’d been born normal. And then you could have saved yourself all those years of clearing up shit.”

Maureen was quiet for a minute.

“Who would I be then?”

“Eh?”

“I don’t know who I’d be.”

“You’d still be Maureen, you stupid old trout.”

“That’s not what she means,” I said. “She means, like, we are what’s happened to us. So if you take away what’s happened to us, then, you know…”

“No, I don’t fucking know,” said Jess.

“If Jen hadn’t happened to you, and, and all the other things…”

“Like Chas and that?”

“Exactly. Events of that magnitude. Well, who would you be?”

“I’d be someone different.”

“Exactly.”

“That’d be fucking excellent.”

We stopped playing the wishing game then.

Martin

It was intended to be this enormous gesture, I think, a way of wrapping the whole thing up, as if the whole thing could or would ever be wrapped up. That’s the thing with the young these days, isn’t it? They watch too many happy endings. Everything has to be wrapped up, with a smile and a tear and a wave. Everyone has learned, found love, seen the error of their ways, discovered the joys of monogamy, or fatherhood, or filial duty, or life itself. In my day, people got shot at the end of films, after learning only that life is hollow, dismal, brutish and short.

It was about two or three weeks after the “I wish” conversation in Starbucks. Somehow Jess had managed to keep her trap shut—an impressive achievement for someone whose usual conversation technique is to describe everything as, or even before, it happens, using as many words as possible, like a radio sports commentator. Looking back on it, it is true that she had occasionally given the game away—or would have done, if any of us had known there was a game.

One afternoon, when Maureen said that she had to get back to see Matty, Jess stifled a giggle and observed enigmatically that she’d see him soon enough.

Maureen looked at her.

“I’ll be seeing him in twenty minutes if I’m lucky with the bus,” she said.

“Yeah, but after that,” said Jess.

“Soon enough but after that?” I said.

“Yeah.”

“I see him most minutes of every day,” said Maureen.

And we forgot all about it, just as we forgot all about so much that jess said.

Perhaps a week later, she started to show a hitherto concealed interest in Lizzie, JJ’s ex-girlfriend.

“Where does Lizzie live?” she asked JJ.

“King’s Cross. And before you say anything, no, she isn’t a hooker.”

“What is she, a hooker? Ha ha. Just messing around.”

“Yeah. Totally excellent joke.”

“So where is there to live in King’s Cross, then? If you’re not a hooker?”

JJ rolled his eyes. “I’m not telling you where she lives, Jess. You think I’m some kinda sucker?”

“I don’t want to talk to her. Stupid old slapper.”

“Why is she a slapper, precisely?” I asked her. “As far as we are aware, she has slept with only one man in her entire life.”

“What’s that word again? The prick one? Sorry, Maureen.”

” «Metaphorically»,” I said. When someone uses the phrase “the prick one”, and you know immediately that this is a synonym for the word “metaphorically”, you are entitled to wonder whether you know the speaker too well. You are even entitled to wonder whether you should know her at all.

“Exactly. She’s a metaphorical slapper. She dumped JJ and probably went out with someone else.”

“Yeah, I dunno,” said JJ. “I’m not sure that dumping me condemns a person to eternal celibacy.”

And thus we moved on, to a discussion about the appropriate punishment for our exes, whether death was too good for them and so on, and the Lizzie moment passed, like so many moments in those days, without us noticing. But it was in there, if we’d wanted to rootle around in the rubbish-strewn teenage bedroom of Jess’s mind.

On the big day itself, I had lunch with Theo—although of course while I was having lunch with Theo, I had no idea that it was going to be a big day. Having lunch with Theo was momentous enough. I hadn’t spoken to him face-to-face since I’d come out of prison.

He wanted to talk to me because he’d had, he said, a “substantial” offer from a reputable publisher for an autobiography.

“How much?”

“They’re not talking money yet.”

“May I ask, then, in what way it could be described as substantial?”

“Well. You know. It has substance.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s real, not imaginary.”

“And what does «real» mean, in real terms? Really?”

“You’re becoming very difficult, Martin. If you don’t mind me saying so. You’re not my easiest client at the best of times, what with one thing and another. And I’ve actually been working quite hard on this project.”

I was momentarily distracted by the realization that there was straw underneath my feet. We were eating in a restaurant called “Farm”, and everything we were eating came from a farm. Brilliant, eh? Meat! Potatoes! Green salad! What a concept! I suppose they needed the straw, without which their theme would have begun to look a little short on inspiration. I would like to report that the waitresses were all jolly and large and red-cheeked and wearing aprons, but of course they were surly, thin, pale and dressed in black.

“But what did you have to do, Theo? If, as you say, someone phoned up and offered for my autobiography, in some kind of indescribably substantial way?”

“Well. I phoned them up and suggested they might want it.”

“Right. And they seemed interested?”

“They phoned back.”

“With a substantial offer.”

Theo smiled condescendingly.

“You don’t really know much about the publishing world, do you?”

“Not really. Only what you’ve told me over this lunch. Which is that people have been phoning up with substantial offers. That’s why we’re here, apparently.”

“We mustn’t run before we can walk.”

Theo was beginning to annoy me.

“OK. Agreed. Just tell me the walking part.”

“No, you see… Even the walking part is running. It’s more, you know, tactical than that.”

“Asking you to tell me about walking is running?”

“Softly softly catchee monkey.”

“Jesus Christ, Theo.”

“And that sort of reaction isn’t softly softly, if I may say so. That’s noisy noisy. Tetchy tetchy, even.”

I never heard any more about the offer, and I have never been able to work out the point of the lunch.

Jess had called an extraordinary meeting for four o’clock, in the vast and invariably empty basement of the Starbucks in Upper Street, one of those rooms with a lot of sofas and tables that would feel exactly like your living room, if your living room had no windows, and you only ever drank out of paper cups that you never threw away.

“Why in the basement?” I asked her when she phoned me.

“Because I’ve got private things to talk about.”

“What sort of private things?”

“Sexual things.”

“Oh, God. The others are going to be there, aren’t they?”

“You think I’ve got private sexual things I only want to tell you?”

“I was hoping not.”

“Yeah, like I have fantasies about you all the time.”

“I’ll see you later, OK?”

I got a number 19 bus from the West End to Upper Street, because the money had finally run out. We’d got through the bits and pieces of money we’d picked up from chat-show appearances and junior ministers, and I had no job. So even though Jess once explained that cabs are the cheapest form of transport, because they will take you wherever you want to go for free, and it’s not until you get there that money is needed, I decided that inflicting my poverty on a cabbie was not such a good idea. In any case, the cabbie and I would almost certainly spend the journey talking about the unfairness of my incarceration, perfectly normal thing to want to do, her fault for going out looking like that and so on. I have preferred minicab drivers for some time now, because they are as ignorant of London’s inhabitants as they are of its geography. I got recognized twice on the bus, once by someone who wanted to read me a relevant and apparently redemptive passage in the Bible.

As I approached Starbucks, a youngish couple walked in just ahead of me, and immediately went downstairs. Initially I was pleased, of course, because it meant that Jess’s sexual revelations would have to be conducted sotto voce , if at all; but then as I was queuing for my chai tea latte, I realized that this meant no such thing, given Jess’s immunity to embarrassment; and my stomach started to do what it has done ever since I turned forty. It doesn’t churn , that’s for sure. Old stomachs don’t churn . It’s more as if one side of the stomach wall is a tongue, and the other side a battery. And at moments of tension the two sides touch, with disastrous consequences.

The first person I saw at the bottom of the stairs was Matty, in his wheelchair. He was flanked by two burly male nurses, who I presumed must have carried him down, one of whom was talking to Maureen. And as I was trying to work out what had brought Matty to Starbucks, two small blonde girls came belting towards me shouting “Daddy! Daddy!”, and even then I did not instantaneously realize that they were my daughters. I picked them up, held them, tried not to weep and looked around the room. Penny was there, smiling at me, and Cindy was at a table in the far corner, not smiling at me. JJ had his arms around the couple who’d walked in ahead of me, and Jess was standing with her father and a woman whom I presumed to be her mother—she was unmistakably the wife of a Labour junior minister. She was tall, expensively dressed and disfigured by a hideous smile that clearly bore no relation to anything she might be feeling, a real election night of a smile. Round her wrist there was one of those bits of red string that Madonna wears, so despite all appearances to the contrary, she was obviously a deeply spiritual woman. Given Jess’s flair for the melodramatic, I wouldn’t have been altogether surprised to see her sister, but I checked carefully, and she wasn’t there. Jess was wearing a skirt and a jacket, and for once you had to get up quite close to become scared by her eye make-up.

I put the girls down and led them over to their mother. I waved to Penny on the way, though, just so that she wouldn’t feel left out.

“Hello.” I leaned down to kiss Cindy on the cheek, and she moved smartly out of the way.

“What brings you here, then?” I said.

“The mad girl there seemed to think it might help in some way.”

“Oh. Did she explain how?”

Cindy snorted. I got the feeling that she was going to snort whatever I said, that snorting was going to be her preferred method of communication, so I knelt down to talk to the children.

Jess clapped her hands together and stepped into the centre of the room.

“I read about this on the internet,” she said. “It’s called an intervention. They do it all the time in America.”

“All the time,” JJ shouted. “It’s all we do.”

“See, if someone is fucked… messed up on drugs or drink or whatever, then the like friends and family, and whatever, all gather together and confront him and go, you know, Fucking pack it in. Sorry Maureen. Sorry Mum and Dad, sorry little girls. This one’s sort of different. In America, they have a skilled… Oh shit, I’ve forgotten the name. On the website I was on he was called Steve.”

She fumbled in the pocket of her jacket and pulled out a piece of paper.

“A facilitator. You’re supposed to have a skilled facilitator, and we haven’t got one. I didn’t know who to ask, really. I don’t know anyone with skills. Also, this intervention is sort of the other way round. Because we’re asking you to intervene. It’s us coming to you, rather than you coming to us. We’re saying to you, we need your help.”

The two nurses who’d come with Matty started to look a little uncomfortable at this point, and Jess noticed.

“Not you guys,” she said. “You don’t have to do anything. To tell you the truth, you’re only really here to bump up Maureen’s numbers, “cos, well, I mean, she hasn’t really got anybody, has she? And I thought you two and Matty would be better than nobody, see? It would have been a bit grim for you, Maureen, seeing all these reunions and standing there on your own.”

You had to hand it to Jess. Once she got a theme between her teeth, she was unwilling to let it go. Maureen attempted a grateful smile.

“Anyway. Just so’s you know who’s who. In the JJ corner we have his ex, Lizzie, and his mate Ed, who used to be in his crappy band with him. Ed’s flown over from America special. I’ve got my mum and dad, and it’s not often you’ll catch them in the same room together, ha ha. Martin’s got his ex-wife, his daughters, and his ex-girlfriend. Or maybe not ex, who knows? By the end of this he might have his wife back and his girlfriend back.”

Everyone laughed, looked at Cindy, and then stopped laughing when they realized that laughing would have consequences.

“And Maureen’s got her son Matty there, and the two guys from the care home. So here’s my idea. We spend some time talking to our people, have a little catch-up. And then we swap round, and go and talk to some other person’s people. So it’s a cross between the American thing and a school parents’ evening, ’cos the friends and family sort of sit in a corner, waiting for people to visit them.”

“Why?” I said. “What for?”

“I don’t know. Whatever. Just for a laugh. And we’ll learn things, won’t we? About each other? And about ourselves?”

There she went again, with her happy endings. It was true that I had learned things about the others, but I had learned absolutely nothing that wasn’t factual. So I could tell Ed the name of the band that he used to play in, and I could tell the Crichtons the name of their missing daughter; it seemed to me unlikely that they would find this in any way useful or even comforting, however.

And anyway, what does or can one ever learn, apart from times tables, and the name of the Spanish prime minister? I hope that I’ve learned not to sleep with fifteen-year-olds, but I learned that a long time ago—decades before I actually slept with a fifteen-year-old. The problem there was simply that she told me she was sixteen. So, have I learned not to sleep with sixteen-year-olds, or attractive young women? No. And yet just about everyone I’ve ever interviewed has told me that by doing something or other—recovering from cancer, climbing a mountain, playing the part of a serial killer in a movie—they have learned something about themselves. And I always nod and smile thoughtfully, when really I want to pin them down. “What did you learn from the cancer, actually? That you don’t like being sick? That you don’t want to die? That wigs make your scalp itch? Come on, be specific” I suspect it’s something they tell themselves in order to turn the experience into something that might appear valuable, rather than a complete and utter waste of time.

In the last few months, I have been to prison, lost every last molecule of self-respect, become estranged from my children and thought very seriously about killing myself. I mean, that little lot has got to be the psychological equivalent of cancer, right? And it’s certainly a bigger deal than acting in a bloody film. So how come I’ve learned absolutely bugger all? What was I supposed to learn? True, I have discovered that I was quite attached to my self-esteem, and regret its passing. Also, I’ve found out that prison and poverty aren’t really me . But, you know, I could have had a wild stab in the dark about both of those things beforehand. Call me literal-minded, but I suspect people might learn more about themselves if they didn’t get cancer. They’d have more time, and a lot more energy.

“So,” Jess went on. “Who’s going to go where?”

At that moment, several French teenage punks appeared in our midst, carrying coffee mugs. They headed for an empty table next to Matty’s wheelchair.

“Oi,” said Jess. “Where do you think you’re going? Upstairs, all of you.”

They stared at her.

“Come on, we haven’t got all day. Hup hup hup. Schnell. Plus vitement .” She shooed them towards the stairs, and away they went, uncomplainingly; Jess was just another incomprehensible and aggressive native of an incomprehensible and aggressive country. I sat down at my ex-wife’s table, and waved towards Penny again. It was a sort of all-purpose crowded-party gesture, some kind of cross between “I’m just getting a drink” and “I’ll give you a ring”, with maybe a little bit of “Can we have the bill, please?” thrown in. Penny nodded, as if she understood. And then, equally inappropriately, I rubbed my hands together, as if I were relishing the prospect of all the delicious and nutritious self-knowledge I was about to tuck into.

Maureen

I didn’t think there was going to be very much for me to say. I mean, there wasn’t really anything I could say to Matty. But I didn’t think I’d find anything to say to the two lads from the respite home, either. I asked them if they wanted a cup of tea, but they didn’t; and then I asked whether it had been hard getting Matty down the stairs, and they said it wasn’t, with the two of them there. And I said I couldn’t have got him down there if there were ten of me, and they laughed, and then we stood there looking at each other. And then the short one, the one who came from Australia and was shaped like the toy robot that Matty used to have, with a square head and a square body, asked what the little gathering was all about. It hadn’t occurred to me that they wouldn’t know.

“I’ve been trying to work it out, but I’m clueless.”

“Yes,” I said. “Well. It must be very confusing.”

“So come on, then. Put us out of our misery. Steve here reckons you’ve all got money troubles.”

“Some of us have. I haven’t.”

I’ve never had to worry about money, really. I get my carer’s allowance, and I live in my mother’s house, and she left me a little bit anyway. And if you never go anywhere or do anything, life is cheap.

“But you’ve got troubles,” said the square one.

“Yes, we’ve got troubles,” I said. “But they’re all different troubles.”

“Yeah, well I know he’s got troubles,” said the other one, Stephen. “The guy off of the TV.”

“Yes, he’s got troubles,” I said.

“So how do you know him? I can’t imagine you go to the same nightclubs.”

And I ended up telling them everything. I didn’t mean to. It just sort of came out. And once I’d started, it didn’t seem to matter much what I’d told them. And then, when I got to the end of the story, I realized I shouldn’t have said anything, even though they were nice about it, and said how sorry they were, and that kind of thing.

“You won’t tell them back at the centre, will you?” I said.

“Why would we tell them?”

“Because if they found out that I’d been planning to leave Matty with them for ever, they might refuse to take him again. They might think that whenever I called for you to take him, I was thinking of jumping off a roof somewhere.”

So we made a deal. They gave me the name of another centre in the area, a private one that they said was nicer than theirs, and I promised that if I was going to do away with myself, I’d call that one.

“It’s not that we don’t want to know,” said the square one, Sean. “And it’s not that we don’t want our centre to be stuck with Matty. It’s just that we don’t want to feel that every time you call us up, you’re in trouble.”

I don’t know why, but this made me feel happy. Two men I didn’t really know had told me not to call them if I was feeling suicidal, and I felt like hugging them. I didn’t want people feeling sorry for me, you see. I wanted them to help, even if helping meant saying that they wouldn’t help, if that doesn’t sound too Irish. And the funny thing was that this was what Jess was after when she arranged the get-together. And she didn’t expect me to get anywhere, and she’d only asked the two young fellas along because Matty couldn’t have got here without them, and in five minutes they’d made me feel better about something.

Stephen and Sean and I watched the others for a few moments, to see how they were getting on. JJ was doing the best, because he and his friends hadn’t really started fighting yet. Martin and his ex-wife were watching in silence as their daughters drew a picture, and Jess and her parents were shouting. Which might have been a good sign, if they were shouting about the right things, but every now and again you could hear Jess yelling the loudest about something or other, and it never seemed to be anything that would help. For example, “I never touched any stupid bloody earrings.” Everyone in the room heard that, and Martin and JJ and I looked at each other. None of us knew the situation with these earrings, so we didn’t want to judge, but it was hard to imagine that earrings were the root of Jess’s problem.

I felt sorry for Penny, who was still sitting on her own, so I asked her if she wanted to come to my corner.

“I’m sure you’ve got plenty to talk about over there,” she said.

“No,” I said. “We’re done, really.”

“Well, you’ve got the best-looking chap in the place,” she said. She was talking about Stephen, the tall nurse, and when I looked at him from the other side of the room, I could see what she meant. He was blond, with long, thick hair and bright blue eyes, and he had a smile that warmed the room. It was sad that I hadn’t noticed, but I don’t really think about things like that any more.

“So come on over and talk to him. He’d be pleased to meet you,” I said. I didn’t know for sure that he would be, but if you’ve got nothing to do but stand beside a boy in a wheelchair, then I’d have thought you’d be happy enough to meet a pretty woman who appears on the television. And I can’t take much credit for it, because I didn’t really do anything, apart from say what I said; but it was funny that so much happened because Penny walked across a coffee-bar to talk to Stephen.

Jess

Everyone seemed to be having an OK time except for me. I had a shit time. And that wasn’t fair, because I’d spent ages organizing that intervention parents’ evening thing. I’d gone on the internet and got hold of the email address of the bloke who used to manage JJ’s band. And he gave me Ed’s phone number, and I stayed up until like three in the morning so I could ring him when he got home from work. And when I told him how messed up JJ was, he said he’d come over, and then he phoned Lizzie and told her, and she was up for it too. And there was all sorts with Cindy and her kids, and it was like a fucking full-time job for a week, and what did I get out of it? Fuck all. Why did I think that talking to my fucking father and my fucking mother would be any fucking use at all? I talk to them every fucking day, and nothing ever changes. So what did I think would make a difference? Having Matty and Penny and all them around? Being in Starbucks? I suppose I’d hoped that they might listen, especially when I’d announced that we’d all got together because we needed their help; but when Mum brought up that thing about the earrings, I knew I might as well have dragged someone in off of the street and asked them to adopt me or whatever.

We’re never going to forget about the earrings. We’ll be talking about them on her deathbed. They’re almost like her way of swearing. When I’m angry with her, I say fuck a lot, and when she’s angry with me she says earrings a lot. They weren’t her earrings anyway; they were Jen’s, and like I told her, I never touched them. She has this thing that all through those horrible first few weeks, when all we did was sit by the phone and wait for the police to tell us they’d found her body, the earrings were on Jen’s bedside table. Mum reckons she went and sat on the bed every night, and that she has like this photographic memory of the things she saw every night, and she can still see the earrings now, next to an empty coffee cup and some paperback or other. And then, when we started to sort of drift back to work and school and a normal life, or as close to a normal life as we’ve ever had since, the earrings disappeared. So of course I must have taken them, because I’m always thieving. And I am, I admit it. But what I thieve mostly is money, off of them. Those earrings were Jen’s, not theirs, and anyway she bought them at Camden Market for like five quid.

I don’t know this for sure, and I’m not being all self-pitiful or whatever. But parents must have favourite kids, right? How could they not? How could like Mr and Mrs Minogue not prefer Kylie to the other one? Jen never thieved off of them; she read books all the time, did well at school, talked to Dad about shuffling and all those political things, never puked on the floor in front of the Treasure Minister or whatever. Take the puking, just for instance. It was a bad falafel, right? I’d bunked off of school, and we’d had maybe two spliffs and a couple of Breezers, so it wasn’t what you’d call a mental afternoon. I really hadn’t been giving it large. And then I ate this falafel just before I went home. Well, I could feel the falafel coming up again as I was turning the key in the front door, so I knew that was what had made me sick. And I had no chance of getting to the toilet, right? And Dad was in the kitchen with the Treasure bloke, and I tried to make the sink, and I didn’t. Falafel and Breezers everywhere. Would I have thrown up without the falafel? No. Did he believe it was anything to do with the falafel? No. Would they have believed Jen? Yes, just because she didn’t drink or smoke blow. I don’t know. This is what happens—falafels and earrings. Everyone knows how to talk, and no one knows what to say.

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

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

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

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

JJ

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I never pegged you for a quitter,” Ed said.

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

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

“Yup. That’s pretty much how it feels.”

“That wasn’t what I meant.”

“Anyone want a coffee?” said Lizzie.

I didn’t want her to go.

“I’ll come with you,” I said.

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

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

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

“Exactly.”

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

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

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

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

“Thanks, pal.”

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

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

Ed’s ears get red when he’s about to start throwing punches.

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

“Your ears are getting red,” I said.

“Fuck you.”

“You flew all this way to tell me that?”

“Fuck you.”

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

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

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

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

“No, no, I understand, man,” I said. “Thanks.”

“Shall I leave your coffees on the counter here?”

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

“Fuck you.”

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

Martin

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

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

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

“Thanks,” I said to Penny.

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

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

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

“Hi,” said Stephen. I glared at him.

“I suppose you think you’re pretty great,” I said.

“I’m sorry?” he said.

“Martin!” said Penny.

“You heard me,” I said. “Smug git.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Have you finished, mate?” Stephen asked.

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

Maureen

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

The people left behind stood around for a little while, the nurses and Jess’s parents and Martin’s friends and family, and then when we all began to realize that no one was coming back, not even JJ and his friends, no one was quite sure what to do.

“Is that it, do you think?” said Jess’s father. “I mean, I don’t want to… I don’t wish to appear unsympathetic. And I know Jess took a lot of trouble organizing this. But, well… There’s no one really left, is there? Would you like us to stay, Maureen? Is there anything we can usefully achieve as a unit? Because obviously, if there was… I mean, what do you think Jess was hoping for? Perhaps we can help her to achieve it in absentia ?”

I knew what Jess was hoping for. She was hoping that her mum and dad would come and make everything better, in the way mums and dads are supposed to. I used to have that dream, a long time ago, when I was first on my own with Matty, and I think it’s a dream that everyone has. Everyone whose life has gone badly wrong, anyway.

So I told Jess’s father that I thought Jess just wanted people to understand better, and that I was sorry if that wasn’t what had happened.

“It’s those bloody earrings,” he said, and so I asked about the earrings, and he told me the story.

“Were they special to her?” I said.

“To Jen? Or to Jess?”

“To Jen.”

“I don’t really know,” he said.

“They were her favourites,” said Mrs Crichton. She had a strange face. She smiled the whole time we were speaking, but it was as though she’d only discovered smiling that afternoon—she didn’t have the sort of face that looked as though it were very used to being cheerful. The lines she had were the sort you’d get from being angry about stolen earrings, and her mouth was very thin and tight.

“She came back for them,” I said. I don’t know why I said it, and I don’t know if it was true or not. But it felt like the right thing to say. It felt true in that way.

“Who did?” she said. Her face looked different now. It was having to do things it wasn’t used to doing, because she suddenly looked so desperate to hear what I had to say. I don’t think she was used to listening properly. I liked making her face do something new, and that was why I went on, partly. I felt like I was in charge of a lawnmower, cutting a path into places where the grass was overgrown.

“Jen. If she loved her earrings, then she probably came back for them. You know what girls of that age are like.”

“God,” said Mr Crichton. “I’d never thought of that.”

“Me neither. But… that makes so much sense. Because, do you remember, Chris? That’s when we lost a couple of other things, too. That was when that money went missing.”

I didn’t have the same feeling about the money. I could see that there might have been another explanation for that.

“And I said at the time that I thought there were a couple of books gone, do you remember? And we know Jess didn’t take those.”

And they both laughed, then, as if they liked Jess, and liked it that she’d rather jump off a tower-block than read a book.

I could see and feel why it would make a difference to them, this idea that Jen had come into the house for her earrings. It would mean that she had disappeared, gone to Texas or Scotland or Notting Hill Gate, rather than that she’d been killed, or she’d killed herself. It meant that they could think about where she was, imagine her life now. They could wonder about whether she’d had a baby that they’d never seen and might never see, or got a job that they’d never hear about. It meant that in their heads they could carry on being ordinary parents. It’s what I was doing, when I bought Matty his posters and his tapes—I was being an ordinary mother in my head, just for a moment.

You could wreck it all for them in a second, if you chose to, rip enormous great big holes in the story, because what did it add up to, really? Jen could have come back because she wanted to die wearing her earrings. She might not have come back at all. And she was still gone, whether she came back for five minutes or not. Oh, but I know what you need to keep yourself going. That probably sounds funny, considering why we were all there in that coffee bar in the first place. But the fact is that so far I have kept myself going, even if I had to climb the stairs to the roof of Toppers’ House to do it. Sometimes you just need to give things a tiny little jiggle. You just need to think that perhaps someone might have helped themselves to their own earrings, and your part of the world looks like somewhere you could live in for a while.

That was Mr and Mrs Crichton, though, not Jess. Jess didn’t know anything about the earring theory, and Jess was the one who needed her world to look different. She was the one who’d been up on the roof with me. Mr and Mrs Crichton had their jobs and their friends and all the rest of it, so you could say that they didn’t need any stories about earrings. You could say that stories about earrings were wasted on them.

You could say all that, but it wouldn’t be true. They needed the stories—you could see it in their faces. I only know one person in the world who doesn’t need stories to keep himself going, and that person is Matty. (And maybe even he does. I don’t know what goes on in there. Keep talking to him, they say, so I do, and who knows whether he uses something I say?) And there are other ways of dying, without killing yourself. You can let parts of yourself die. Jess’s mother had let her face die, and I watched it come to life again.

Jess

The first train that came along was southbound, and I got off at London Bridge and went for a walk. If you’d seen me leaning on the wall and looking down at the water, you’d have gone, Oh, she’s thinking, but I wasn’t. I mean, there were words in my head, but just because there are words in your head it doesn’t mean you’re thinking, just like if you’ve got a pocket full of pennies it doesn’t mean you’re rich. The words in my head were like, bollocks, bastard, bitch, shit, fuck, wanker, and they were spinning round in there pretty fast, too fast even for me to make a sentence out of them. And that’s not really thought, is it?

So I watched the water for a little while, and then I went to a stall by the bridge and bought some tobacco and papers and matches. Then I went back to where I’d been standing and sat down to roll myself a few smokes, for something to do, sort of thing. I don’t know why I don’t smoke more, to be honest. I forget, I think. If someone like me forgets to smoke, what chance has smoking got? Look at me. You’d bet any money that I smoked like fuck, and I don’t. New Year’s Resolution: smoke more. It’s got to be better for you than jumping off of tower-blocks.

Anyway, so there I was, sitting down with my back against the wall, rolling up roll-ups, when I saw this lecturer from college. He’s like an old bloke, one of those art-school people who’ve been knocking around since the sixties. He teaches typography and that, and I went to a couple of his classes until I got bored. I don’t mind him, Colin. He doesn’t have a grey pony-tail and he doesn’t wear a faded denim jacket. And he never wanted to be our friend, which must mean that he has his own friends. You couldn’t say that about some of them.

To tell this story truthfully, I should probably say that he saw me before I saw him, because when I looked up from my rolling, he was walking over to me. And to be really properly truthful, I should also say that some of the thinking I was doing, in other words the mental swearing, probably wasn’t entirely mental, if you see what I mean. It was meant to be mental, but some of it was coming out through my mouth, just because there was so much of it. It was sort of slopping out of me, as if the swearing was coming out of a tap and running into a bucket (my head), and I hadn’t bothered turning the tap off even when the bucket was full.

That’s what it looked like from my point of view. From his point of view, it looked like I was sitting on the pavement rolling up fags and swearing to myself, and that’s not such a good look, is it? He kind of came up to me, and then he crouched down so he was at my height, and then he started talking to me quietly. And he was like, Jess? Do you remember me?

I’d only seen him like two months before, so of course I remembered him. And I went, No, and laughed, which was supposed to be a joke, but which couldn’t have come across as a joke, because then he goes, still in this whispery voice, I’m Colin Wearing, and I used to teach you at art college. And I go, Yeah, yeah, and he goes, No, I am, and then I see that he thought my Yeah, yeah was like Yeah, right, but it wasn’t that sort of Yeah, yeah. All I was doing with the two Yeahs was trying to tell him that I’d only been joking before, but I only made it worse. I made it look like I thought he was pretending to be Colin Wearing, which would be an utterly insane thing to do. So the whole conversation is going right off course. It’s like a supermarket trolley with a wonky wheel, because all the time I’m thinking, this should be easy to push along, and everything I say just takes me in the wrong direction.

And he goes, Why are you here, sitting on the path? And I tell him that I’d had a row with my fucking mother about some earrings, and he was like, And now you can’t go home? And I said that I could if I wanted to. I could just get on the Northern Line back to Angel and then jump on a bus. But I didn’t want to. And he went, Well, I don’t think you should sit here. Is there anywhere you can go? And then I realized that he thought I had turned into like a nutter, so I stood up quickly, which made him jump, and I gave him a mouthful and walked away.

But then I did think, as opposed to swear mentally. And the first thing I thought was that it would be very easy for me to be a nutter. I’m not saying it would be a piece of piss, living that life—I don’t mean that. I just mean that I had a lot in common with some of the people you see sitting on pavements swearing and rolling cigarettes. Some of them seemed to hate people, and I hated just about everyone. They must have pissed off their friends and family, and I’d pretty much done that. And who knows whether Jen’s a nutter now? Maybe it runs in the genes, although with my dad being a junior Education minister, maybe it’s one of those things that skips a generation.

And I didn’t know where all this thinking was leading to, but I could see suddenly that I was in more trouble than I had thought. I know that sounds stupid, considering I’d thought about killing myself, but that was all just for a laugh, and if I’d jumped it would have been for a laugh, too. What if I had a future on this planet, though? What then? How many people could I piss off, and how many places could I run away from, before I found myself sitting by the river and swearing externally 4 real? Not many more, was the answer.

So the thing to do was to go back—to Starbucks, or home, to somewhere—anywhere that wasn’t forward. If you’re walking somewhere, and you come up against a brick wall, then you have to retrace your steps.

But then I sort of found a way of climbing over the wall. Or I found a little hole in the wall I could crawl through, or whatever. I met this geezer with a really nice dog, and I went and slept with him instead.

JJ

So I just stood there on the sidewalk and told Ed to take a swing at me if it would make him feel any better.

“I don’t want to hit you unless you hit me,” he said.

There was a guy selling that homeless magazine standing watching us.

“Hit him,” he said to me.

“You shut the fuck up,” said Ed.

“I was only trying to get things started,” said the homeless guy.

“You flew across the bloody Atlantic because JJ was in trouble,” Lizzie said to Ed. “And now look at you. One conversation and you want to punch him.”

“Things have to go the way they have to go,” said Ed.

“Is that like «A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do»? Because it sounds utterly meaningless to us, I’m afraid,” said Lizzie. She was leaning against the window of a thrift shop, making out like she was bored, but I knew she wasn’t. She was angry too, but she didn’t want to show it.

“He’s on my side,” said Ed. “So it doesn’t matter what it sounds like to you. He understands.”

“No I don’t,” I said. “Lizzie’s right. Why would you come all this way to punch me?”

“It’s a Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid thing, surely?” said Lizzie. “You want to sleep with each other, but you can’t, because you’re both so straight.”

This really tickled the homeless guy. He laughed like a hyena. “Did you ever read Pauline Kael on Butch Cassidy ! God, she hated it,” he said.

Neither Lizzie nor Ed would have had a fucking clue who Pauline Kael was, but I got two or three of her collections. I used to keep them by the toilet, because they’re great for dipping into when you’re on the can. Anyway, hers wasn’t a name I was necessarily expecting to hear from that particular guy at that particular moment. I looked at him.

“Oh, I know who Pauline Kael is,” he said. “I wasn’t born homeless, you know.”

“I really, really don’t want to sleep with him,” said Ed. “I really want to punch him. But he has to punch me first.”

“You see?” said Lizzie. “Homo-erotic, with a bit of sado-masochism thrown in. Just kiss him, and be done with it.”

“Kiss him,” the homeless guy said to Ed. “Kiss him or punch him. But let’s get something going, for God’s sake.”

Ed’s ears couldn’t have gotten any redder, so I was wondering whether they might just burst into flame and then turn black. At least then I could say that I’d seen something new.

“You trying to get me killed?” I said to her.

“Why don’t you just get back together?” said Lizzie. “At least you’ve got all that mike-sharing and those great big electric penis substitutes.”

“Oh, so that’s why you didn’t want him to be in a band,” said Ed. “You were jealous.”

“Who said I didn’t want him to be in a band?” Lizzie asked him.

“Yeah, you got that dead wrong, Ed,” I said. “She wasn’t that deep. She dumped me precisely because I wasn’t in a band. She wasn’t interested in being with me unless I became a rock star and made a shitload of money.”

“Is that what you think I meant?” said Lizzie.

I could suddenly see my life being put back together before my eyes. It had all been a terrible misunderstanding, which was now about to be cleared up, with much laughter and many tears. Lizzie never wanted to break up with me. Ed never wanted to break up with me. I’d come out on to the sidewalk to get my ass kicked, and instead, I was going to get everything I ever wanted.

“There isn’t going to be a fight, is there?” said the homeless guy sadly.

“Unless we all beat the shit out of you,” said Ed.

“Just let me hear the end of this,” said the homeless guy. “Don’t go back inside. I never get the fucking ending of a story, stuck out here.”

It was going to be a happy ending, I could feel it coming. And it was going to involve all four of us. The first show we played when we got back together, we could dedicate a song to Homeless Guy. Hey—he could maybe even be our road manager. Plus, he could make one of the toasts at the wedding. “Everyone should get back with everyone,” I said, and I meant it. This was my big closing speech. “Every band that has ever come apart, every couple . . There’s too much unhappiness in the world as it is, without people splitting up every ten seconds.”

Ed looked at me as if I had gone nuts.

“You’re not serious,” said Lizzie.

Maybe I’d misjudged the mood and the moment. The world wasn’t ready for my big closing speech.

“Naaah,” I said. “Well. You know. It’s just… an idea I had. A theory I was working on. I hadn’t ironed out all the kinks in it, yet.”

“Look at his face,” said Homeless Guy. “Oh, he’s serious, all right.”

“How does that work with bands that grew out of other bands?” said Ed. “Like, I don’t know. If Nirvana got back together. That would mean the Foo Fighters had to split up. Then they’d be unhappy.”

“Not all of “em,” I pointed out.

“And what about second marriages? There are loads of happy second marriages.”

“There’d have been no Clash. “Cos Joe Strummer would have had to stay in his first band.”

“And who was your first girlfriend?”

“Kathy Gorecki!” said Ed. “Ha!”

“You’d still be with her,” said Lizzie.

“Yeah, well” I shrugged. “She was nice. That wouldn’t have been a bad life.”

“But she never gave no thin” up!” said Ed. “You never even got a hand under a bra!”

I’m sure I’d have managed by now. We’d have been together fifteen years.”

“Oh, man,” said Ed, in the tone of voice that we usually used when Maureen had said something heartbreaking. “I can’t punch you.”

We walked down the road a little ways and went to a pub, and Ed bought me a Guinness, and Lizzie bought a pack of smokes from the machine and put it down on the table for us to share, and we just sat there, with Ed and Lizzie looking at me as if they were waiting for me to catch my breath.

“I didn’t realize you felt that bad,” Ed said after a while.

“The suicide thing—that wasn’t a clue?”

“Yeah. I knew you wanted to kill yourself. But I didn’t know you felt so bad that you wanted to patch things up with Lizzie and the band. That’s this whole different level of misery, way beyond suicide.”

Lizzie tried not to laugh, and the effort produced a weird snorting noise, and I took a long pull on my Guinness.

And suddenly, just for a moment, I felt good. It helped that I really love cold Guinness; it helped that I really love Ed and Lizzie. Or I used to love them, or kind of love them, or loved and hated them, or whatever. And maybe for the first time in the last few months, I acknowledged something properly, something I knew had been hiding right down in my guts, or at the back of my head—somewhere I could ignore it, anyway. And what I owned up to was this: I had wanted to kill myself not because I hated living, but because I loved it. And the truth of the matter is, I think, that a lot of people who think about killing themselves feel the same way—I think that’s how Maureen and Jess and Martin feel. They love life, but it’s all fucked up for them, and that’s why I met them, and that’s why we’re all still around. We were up on the roof because we couldn’t find a way back into life, and being shut out of it like that… It just fucking destroys you, man. So it’s like an act of despair, not an act of nihilism. It’s a mercy killing, not a murder. I don’t know why it suddenly got to me. Maybe because I was in a pub with people I loved, drinking a Guinness, and I know I said this before, but I fucking love Guinness, like I love pretty much all alcohol—love it as it should be loved, as one of the glories of God’s creation. And we’d had this stupid scene on the street, and even that was kind of cool, because sometimes it’s moments like that, real complicated moments, absorbing moments, that make you realize that even hard times have things in them that make you feel alive. And then there’s music, and girls, and drugs, and homeless people who’ve read Pauline Kael, and wah-wah pedals, and English potato chip flavours, and I haven’t even read Martin Chuzzlewit yet, and… There’s plenty out there.

And I don’t know what difference it made, this sudden flash.

It wasn’t like I wanted to, you know, grab life in a passionate embrace and vow never to let it go until it let go of me. In a way, it makes things worse, not better. Once you stop pretending that everything’s shitty and you can’t wait to get out of it, which is the story I’d been telling myself for a while, then it gets more painful, not less. Telling yourself life is shit is like an anesthetic, and when you stop taking the Advil, then you really can tell how much it hurts, and where, and it’s not like that kind of pain does anyone a whole lot of good.

And it was kind of appropriate that I was with my ex-lover and my ex-brother at the precise moment I realized, because it was the same kind of thing. I loved them, and would always love them. But there was no place where they could fit any more, so I had nowhere to put all the things I felt. I didn’t know what to do with them, and they didn’t know what to do with me, and isn’t that just like life?

“I never said anything about finishing with you because you weren’t going to be a rock star,” said Lizzie after a while. “You know that really, don’t you?”

I shook my head. I didn’t know, did I? You guys can back me up on that. Not once in this story have I ever owned up to any kind of misunderstanding, deliberate or otherwise. So far as I was concerned, she was dumping me because I was a musical loser.

“So what did you say, then? Try again. And I’ll listen real hard this time.”

“It’s not going to make any difference now, because we’ve all moved on, right?”

“Kind of.” I wasn’t going to admit to standing still, or going backwards.

“OK. What I said was, I couldn’t be with you if you weren’t a musician.”

“It wasn’t such a big deal to you at the time. You don’t even like music that much.”

“You’re not hearing me, JJ. You’re a musician. It’s not just what you did. It’s who you are. And I’m not saying you’re going to be a successful musician. I don’t even know if you’re a good one. It was just that I could see you’d be no use to anyone if you stopped. And look what happened. You break the band up, and five minutes later you’re standing on the top of a tower-block. You’re stuck with it. And without it you’re dead. Or you might as well be.”

“So… OK. Nothing to do with being unsuccessful.”

“God, what do you take me for?”

But I wasn’t talking about her; I was talking about me. I never looked at it that way before. I thought this whole thing had been about my failure, but that wasn’t it. And at that moment I felt like crying my fucking heart out, really. I felt like crying because I knew she was right, and sometimes the truth gets you like that. I felt like crying because I was going to make music again, and I’d missed it so much. And I felt like crying because I knew that making music was never going to make me successful, so Lizzie had just condemned me to another thirty-five years of poverty, rootlessness, despair, no health plan, cold-water motels and bad hamburgers. It’s just that I’d be eating the burgers, not flipping them.

Martin

I walked home, turned the phone off and spent the next forty-eight hours with the curtains drawn, drinking, sleeping and watching as many programmes about antiques as I could find. During those forty-eight hours, I would say that I was in grave danger of turning into Marie Prevost, the Hollywood actress who was discovered some time after her death in a state of disrepair, due to her corpse having been partially eaten by her dachshund. That I had no dachshund, or indeed any domestic pet, I can remember being a source of some consolation in those couple of days. I would certainly die alone, and my corpse would certainly be in a state of advanced decay by the time anyone found me, but I would be complete, apart from the bits that had dropped off through natural causes. So that was all right.

Here’s the thing. The cause of my problems is located in my head, if my head is where my personality is located. (Cindy and others would argue that both my personality and the source of my troubles were located below rather than above my waist, but hear me out.) I had been given many opportunities in life, and I had thrown each of them away, one by one, through a series of catastrophically bad decisions, each one of which seemed like a good idea to me—to me and my head—at the time. And yet the only tool I had at my disposal to correct the disastrous course my life seemed to be taking was the very same head that had caused me to fuck up in the first place. What chance did I have?

A couple of weeks after Jess’s Jerry Springer show, I read some notes I’d made during that two-day period. It wouldn’t be true to say that I’d been so drunk I’d forgotten I’d ever made them, and in any case they’d been lying around the flat in plain view. But it was a fortnight before I possessed enough courage to read them, and once I’d done so, I was almost compelled to draw the curtains and reach for the Glenmorangie once again.

The object of the exercise was to analyse, with the only head I have available to me, why I had behaved so absurdly that afternoon, and to list all possible responses to that behaviour. To give my head its due—to be fair to the lad, as sports pundits would say—it was at least capable of recognizing that the behaviour had been absurd. It just wasn’t capable of doing very much about it. Are all heads like this, or is it just mine?

Anyway, on the backs of several unopened envelopes, mostly bills, there was depressingly conclusive evidence of the circularity of human behaviour. “WHY HORRIBLE TO NURSE?” I had written. And then, underneath:

1) ARSEHOLE? HIM? ME?

2) HITTING ON PENNY?

3) GOOD-LOOKING AND YOUNG-PISSED ME OFF?

4) ANNOYED BY PEOPLE.

This last explanation, which may have meant something brilliantly precise when I hit on it, now seemed startlingly candid in its vagueness.

On another envelope, I had scrawled “COURSES OF ACTION”

(and please note, by the way, the switch from numbers to letters, a switch presumably meant to indicate the scientific nature of the work):

a) KILL MYSELF?

b) ASK Maureen NOT TO USE THAT NURSE ANY MORE

c) DON’T

And “C stopped there, either because I fell into a stupor at that point, or because “Don’t” was a concise way of expressing a profound solution to all my problems. Think about it: how much better things would be for me if I didn’t, wouldn’t and never had.

Neither envelope inspired much confidence in my powers of cogitation. I could see that they had both been written by the man who had recently wanted to tell a select group of people—a group that included his own young daughters—that all male nurses were effeminate and self-righteous: the word “ARSEHOLE” would surely provide a forensic psychologist with all the evidence required for that deduction. And similarly, the man who had spent some of New Year’s Eve trying to work out whether to jump from the roof of a tower-block was exactly the sort of man who might jot down “KILL MYSELF?” in a Things To Do list. If thinking inside the box were an Olympic sport, I would have won more gold medals than Carl Lewis.

Quite clearly, I needed two heads, two heads being better than one and all that. One would have to be the old one, just because the old one knows people’s names and phone numbers, and which breakfast cereal I prefer, and so on; the second one would be able to observe and interpret the behaviour of the first, in the manner of a television wildlife expert. Asking the head I have now to explain its own thinking is as pointless as dilling your own telephone number on your own telephone: either way, you get an engaged signal. Or your own answer message, if you have that kind of phone system.

It took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize that other people have heads, and that any one of these heads would do a better job of explaining what the purpose of my explosion might have been. This, I supposed, was why people persisted with the whole notion of friends. I seemed to have lost all mine around the time I went to prison, but I knew plenty of people who’d be prepared to tell me what they thought of me. In fact, it seemed that my propensity for letting people down and alienating them would actually serve me in good stead here. Friends and lovers might try to throw a kindly light on the episode, but because I had only ex-friends and ex-lovers, I was ideally placed. I only really knew people who would give it to me with both barrels.

I knew where to start, too. Indeed, so successful was my first phone call that I didn’t really need to speak to anyone else. My ex-wife was perfect—direct, articulate and clear-sighted—and I actually ended up feeling sorry for people living with someone who loved them, when not living with someone who loathed you was so obviously the way to go. When you have a Cindy in your life, there aren’t even any pleasantries to wade through: there are only unpleasantries, and unpleasantries are an essential part of the learning process.

“Where have you been?”

“At home. Drunk.”

“Have you listened to your messages?”

“No. Why?”

“Oh, I just left you a few thoughts about the other afternoon.”

“Ah, now, you see that’s exactly what I wanted to talk about. What do you think it was all about?”

“Well, you’re unbalanced, aren’t you? Unbalanced and poisonous. An unbalanced, poisonous tosser.”

This was a good start, I felt, but it lacked focus.

“Listen, I appreciate what you’re saying, and I don’t want to appear rude, but the unbalanced tosser part I find less interesting than the poisonous part. Could you talk more about that?”

“Maybe you should pay someone to do this,” said Cindy.

“You mean a therapist?”

She snorted. “A therapist? No, I was thinking more of one of those women who will pee all over you if you pay her enough. Isn’t that what you want?”

I thought about this. I didn’t want to dismiss anything out of hand.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “It’s never appealed before.”

“I was speaking metaphorically.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t really understand.”

“You clearly feel so awful about yourself that you don’t mind being abused. Isn’t that their problem?”

“Whose problem?”

“These men who need women to… Never mind.”

I was dimly beginning to perceive what she was driving at. It was true that being called names felt good. Or rather, it felt appropriate.

“You know why you turned on that poor guy, don’t you?”

“No! You see, that’s precisely why I called you.”

If Cindy had known how much damage she could have done by stopping right there, the temptation would have been too much for her. Luckily, though, Cindy was determined to go all the way.

“I mean, he was fifteen years younger than you, and much better-looking. But it wasn’t that. He’d done more with his life that afternoon than you’ve ever done with yours.”

Yes! Yes!

“You ponce around on television and screw schoolgirls, and he pushes disabled kids around in a wheelchair, probably for the minimum wage. It’s no wonder Penny wanted to chat him up. For her, it was the moral equivalent of going from Frankenstein’s monster to Brad Pitt.”

“Thank you. That’s great.”

“Don’t you dare put the phone down on me. I’ve only just started. I’ve got twelve years’ worth of this stuff.”

“Oh, I’ll be back for more, I promise. But that’s plenty to be going on with.”

You see? Ex-wives: really, everybody should have at least one.

Maureen

I feel a bit daft explaining what happened at the end of the intervention day, because it all sounds like too much of a coincidence. But I think it probably only sounds like a coincidence to me. I know I said before that I’m learning to feel the weight of things, which means learning what to say and what not to say in case you make people feel badly for you. So if I say that nothing happened in my life before I met the others, I don’t want to make it sound as though I’m grumbling. It was just how things were. If you spend all your time in a very quiet room and someone comes up behind you and says “Boo!”, you jump. If you spend all your time with short people, and you see a six-foot-tall policeman, he looks like a giant. And if nothing happens and then something happens, then the something seems to be peculiar, almost like an Act of God. The nothingness stretches the something, the happening, out of shape.

Here’s what happened. Stephen and Sean helped me get Matty home; we hailed a black cab, and the four of us just about squashed in, although the two nurses and I were pressed up against each other in the seat. And even that seemed like something. A few months ago, I’d have gone home and told Matty about that, if he hadn’t been there with me. But of course if he hadn’t been there with me, there’d have been nothing to tell. I wouldn’t have needed Stephen and Sean, and we wouldn’t have been there in a taxi. I’d have been on a bus, on my own, even supposing I’d gone anywhere. You see what I mean about something and nothing?

Once we were all settled, Stephen said to Sean, “Have you got anyone else yet?” And Sean said, “No, and I don’t think I’m going to be able to.” And Stephen said, “It’s just the three of us, then? We’ll get slaughtered.” And Sean just shrugged, and we all sat looking out of the window for a little while. I didn’t know what they’d been talking about.

And then Sean said, “Any good at quizzes, Maureen? Fancy joining our team? It doesn’t matter if you don’t know anything. We’re desperate.”

Now, that’s not the most amazing story you’ve ever heard, is it?

I listen to Jess and JJ and Martin, and that sort of thing happens to them all the time. They meet someone in a lift or a bar, and that someone says, “Would you like a drink?”, or even, “Would you like intercourse?” And perhaps they’d been thinking that they’d like intercourse, so it could seem to them that being offered intercourse, just when they’d been thinking they might like it, is the most amazing coincidence. But my impression is that this isn’t how they think, or how many people think. It’s just life. One person bumps into another person, and that person wants something, or knows someone else who wants something, and as a result, things happen. Or, to put it another way, if you don’t go out, and never meet anyone, then nothing happens. How could it? But for a moment, I could hardly talk. I’d wanted to take part in a quiz, and these people needed someone for their quiz team, and I felt a shiver go down my spine.

So instead of going home, we took Matty to the respite home. Sean and Stephen weren’t working, but they were friends with all the people who were, so they just told their friends that Matty was staying there for the evening, and no one turned a hair. We arranged to meet in the pub where they do their quizzing, and I went home to get changed.

I don’t know which part of the story to tell you about next. There’s another coincidence involved, so I don’t know whether to put it here, in the coincidences section, or later on, after I’ve told you about the quiz. Maybe if I separate the coincidences out, push them further apart, you might believe them more. On the other hand, I don’t care whether you believe them, because they’re true. And in any case, I still can’t decide whether they are coincidences or not, these things: perhaps getting something you want is never a coincidence. If you want a cheese sandwich and you get a cheese sandwich, that can’t be a coincidence, can it? And by the same token, if you want a job and you get a job, that can’t be a coincidence either. These things can only be coincidental if you think you have no power over your life at all. So I’ll tell you here: the other person on the team was an older man called Jack, who has a newsagent’s just off Archway, and he offered me a job.

It’s not much of a job—three mornings a week. And it doesn’t pay very well—Ј4.75 an hour. And he told me I’d be on probation at first. But he’s getting on a bit, and he wants to go back to bed at nine, after he’s opened the shop and sorted the papers and dealt with the early-morning rush. He offered me the job in the same way that Stephen and Sean had asked me whether I wanted to join the quiz team—as a joke, out of desperation. In between the TV round and the sport round, he asked me what I did, and I told him I didn’t do anything much apart from look after Matty, and then he said, “You don’t want a job, do you?” And a shiver went back up my spine.

We didn’t win the quiz. We came fourth out of eleven teams, but the boys were quite pleased with that. And I knew some things that they didn’t know. I knew that the name of Mary Tyler Moore’s boss was Lou Grant, for example. I knew that John Major’s son married Emma Noble, and I knew that Catherine Cookson had written about Tilly Trotter and Mary Ann Shaughnessy. So there were three points they wouldn’t have got, right there, which might be why they said I could come again. The fourth chap is unreliable, apparently, because he’s just got a girlfriend. I told them I was the most reliable person they could possibly hope to meet.

A couple of months ago, I read a library book about a girl who found herself falling in love with her long-lost brother. But of course it turned out he wasn’t her long-lost brother after all, and he’d only told her that because he liked the look of her. Also it turned out that he wasn’t poor. He was very rich. And on top of that, they found out that the bone marrow of his dog matched the bone marrow of her dog, who had leukemia, so his dog saved the life of her dog.

It wasn’t as good as I’m making it sound, to tell you the truth. It was a bit soppy. But the point I’m trying to make is that I’m worried I’m starting to sound like that book, what with the job, and the quiz team. And if I’m starting to sound like that to you, then I’d like to point out two things. Firstly I’d like to point out that getting care for Matty costs more than Ј4.75 an hour, so I’m not even as well off as I was, and a story that ends with you not as well off as you were isn’t really a fairy-story, is it? Secondly I’d like to point out that the fourth chap in the quiz team will turn up sometimes, so I won’t be in every week.

I was drinking gin and bitter lemons in the pub, and the others wouldn’t even let me buy a round; they said I was a ringer, and had to be paid for. Maybe it was the drink that left me feeling so positive, but at the end of the evening, I knew that when we met again on March 31st, I wouldn’t be wanting to throw myself off the roof, not for a while. And that feeling, the feeling that I could cope for now… I wanted to hang on to that for as long as possible. It’s going all right so far.

The morning after the quiz, I went back to the church. I hadn’t been to any church since we were on holiday, and I hadn’t been to mine for weeks and weeks, ever since I’d met the others on the roof. But I could go back now because I didn’t think I’d be committing the sin of despair for a while, so I could go back and ask for God’s forgiveness. He can only help you if you’ve stopped despairing, which if you think about it… Well, it’s not my business to think about it. It was a quiet Friday morning, and there was hardly anybody in. The old Italian woman who never misses a Mass was there, and there were a couple of African ladies I’d never seen before. There were no men, and there were no young people. I was nervous before I went to the confessional, but it was fine, really. I told the truth about how long it had been since my last confession, and I confessed to the sin of despair, and I was given fifteen Decades of the Rosary, which I thought seemed on the steep side, even for the sin of despair, but I won’t complain. Sometimes you can forget that God is infinite in His mercy. He wouldn’t have been infinite if I’d jumped, mind you, but I hadn’t.

And then Father Anthony said, “Can we help you with anything? Can we ease your burden in any way? Because you must remember that you’re part of a community here at the church, Maureen.”

And I said, “Thank you, Father, but I have friends who are helping.” I didn’t tell him what sort of community these friends belonged to, though. I didn’t tell him that they were all despairing sinners.

Do you remember Psalm 50? “Call upon Me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify Me.” I went to Toppers’ House because I had called and called and called, and there was no delivery, and my days of trouble seemed to have lasted too long, and showed no signs of ending. But He did hear me, in the end, and He sent me Martin and JJ and Jess, and then He sent me Stephen and Sean and the quiz, and then He sent me Jack and the newsagent’s. In other words, He proved to me that He was listening. How could I have carried on doubting Him, with all that evidence? So I’d better glorify Him, as best I can.

Jess

So this bloke with the dog didn’t have a name. I mean, he must have had one at some stage, but he told me he didn’t use it any more, because he didn’t agree with names. He reckoned they stopped you from being whoever you wanted to be, and once he’d explained it to me, I could sort of see what he meant. Say you’re Tony, or Joanna. Well, you were Tony or Joanna yesterday, and you’ll be Tony or Joanna tomorrow. So you’re fucked, really. People will always be able to say things like, Oh, that’s so typical of Joanna. But this geezer, he could be like a hundred different people all in one day. He told me to call him whatever came into my head, so at first he was Dog, because of the dog, and then he was Nodog, because we went for a drink in a pub and he left the dog outside. So he’d had two completely different personalities in the first hour we spent together, because Dog and Nodog are sort of opposite types, aren’t they? Bloke with dog is different from bloke with no dog. Bloke with dog has a different image from bloke in pub. And you can’t say, Oh, that’s so typical of Nodog to let his dog shit in someone’s garden. It wouldn’t make sense, would it? How can Nodog have a dog that shits in someone’s garden, or any dog at all, come to that? And his point is, we can all be Dogs and Nodogs in a single day. Dad, for example, could be Notdad when he’s at work, because when he’s at work he’s not Dad. I know this is all pretty deep, but if you think about it hard, it makes sense.

And in that same day he was Flower, because he picked me a flower when we were walking through the little park down near Southwark Bridge, and then Ashtray, because he tasted like one, and Flower is the opposite of Ashtray, too. You see how it works? Human beings are millions of things in one day, and his method understands that much better than like the Western way of thinking about it. I only called him one more name after that, and it was dirty, so that one will have to be a secret. When I say it was dirty, I mean it will sound dirty to you out of context sort of thing. It’s only really dirty if you don’t respect the male body, and that in my opinion would make you dirty, not us.

So this bloke… Actually, I can see one advantage to the Western way of thinking, which is that if someone has a name, you know what to call them, don’t you? It’s only one small advantage, and there are millions of big disadvantages, including the biggest one of all, which is that names are really fascist and don’t allow us to express ourselves as human beings, and turn us into one thing. But as I’m talking about him a lot here, I think I’ll call him just one name. Nodog will do, because it’s more unusual, and you’ll know who I’m talking about, and it’s better than Dog, because you might think I’m talking about a fucking dog, which I’m not.

So Nodog took me back to his place after we’d gone for a drink. I didn’t think he’d have a place, to be honest, what with the dog and everything. He looked like the sort of bloke who might be in between places, but I obviously met him at a good time. It wasn’t a normal sort of a place, though. He lived in a shop round the back of Rotherhithe station. It wasn’t a converted shop, either—it was just a shop, although it didn’t sell anything any more. It used to be like an old-fashioned corner shop thingy, so there were shelves, and counters, and there was a big shop window, which he kept covered with a sheet. Nodog’s dog had his own bedroom at the back, which must have been a stockroom once upon a time. Shops are actually quite comfortable, if you can put up with a bit of discomfort. You can put your clothes up on the shelves, put your telly up on the counter where the cash register would have gone, put your mattress on the floor, and you’re away. And shops have toilets, and water, although they don’t have baths or showers.

When we got there, we had sex straight off, to get it out of the way. I’d only had proper full-on sex with Chas before, and that wasn’t any good, but it was all right with Nodog. A lot more things worked, if you know what I mean, because with Chas, his bits didn’t really work and my bits didn’t really work, so it was all a bit of an effort. Anyway, this time around, Nodog’s bits worked fine, and so mine did too, and it was much easier to see why anyone would want to do it again. People go on about the first time being important, but it’s the second time that really matters. Or the second person, anyway.

Look at what a fool I was the first time, all cut up and sobbing and obsessed. See, if I’d been like that a second time, I’d have known I was going to have problems. But I really didn’t care if I saw Nodog again or not, so that’s got to be progress, right? That’s much more the way things should be, if you’re going to get on in life.

After we’d finished, he turned his little black-and-white TV on, and we lay on his mattress watching whatever, and then we started to talk, and I ended up telling him about Jen, and Toppers’ House, and the others. And he wasn’t surprised, or sympathetic, or anything like that. He just nodded, and then he goes, Oh, I’m always trying to top myself. And I was like, Well, you can’t be much good at it, and he went, That’s not the idea, though, is it? And I was like, Isn’t it? And he said that the idea was to like constantly offer yourself up to the gods of Life and Death, who were pagan gods, so they were nothing to do with church. And if the god of Life wanted you, then you lived, and if the god of Death wanted you, you didn’t. So he reckoned that on New Year’s Eve I’d been chosen by the god of Life, and that’s why I never jumped. And I was like, I never jumped because people sat on my head, and he explained that the god of Life was speaking through these people, and that made perfect sense to me. Because why else would they have bothered, unless they were like being guided by invisible forces? And then he told me that people who were brain-dead, like George Bush and Tony Blair, and the people who judged Pop Idol , never offered themselves up to the gods of Life and Death at all, and therefore could never prove that they had the right to live, and we shouldn’t obey their laws or recognize their decisions (like the Pop Idol judges). So we don’t have to bomb countries if they tell us to, and if they say that Fat Michelle or whoever has won Pop Idol , we don’t have to listen to them. We can just say, No she didn’t.

And everything he said was so true that it sort of made me regret the last few weeks, because even though JJ and Maureen and Martin had been nice to me, sort of, you wouldn’t really describe them as brainy, would you? It’s not like they had any answers, in the way Nodog had answers. But the other way of looking at it is that without the others, I’d never have met Nodog, because I wouldn’t have bothered with the intervention, and there’d have been nothing to walk out of.

And I suppose that’s the god of Life talking, too, if you think about it.

When I went home, Mum and Dad wanted to speak to me. And at first I was like, Whatever, but they were really keen, and Mum made me a cup of tea, and sat me down at the kitchen table, and then she said that she wanted to apologize to me about the earrings, and that she knew who’d pinched them. So I went, Who? And she goes, Jen. And I stared at her. And she was like, Yeah, really. Jen. So I said, So how does that work? And she went off on one about how Maureen had pointed out something that was actually blindingly obvious, if you thought about it. They were Jen’s favourite earrings, and if they’d gone and nothing else had, then that couldn’t be a coincidence. And at first I couldn’t see what difference it made, because Jen still wasn’t around. But when I saw what difference it made to her, how much calmer it made her, I didn’t care why. The main thing was, she wanted to be nicer to me.

And I was even more grateful to Nodog then. Because he had taught me this deep, clear way of thinking, the way that allowed me to see things as they really were. So even though Mum wasn’t seeing things the way they really were, and she didn’t know that for example the Pop Idol judges couldn’t prove they had the right to live, she was seeing something that could work for her, and stop her from being such a bitch.

And now because of Nodog’s teachings, I had like the wiseness to accept it, and not tell her it was stupid or pointless.

Martin

Who, you might want to ask, would call their child Pacino? Pacino’s parents, Harry and Marcia Cox, that’s who.

“May I ask how you got your name?” I asked Pacino when I first made his acquaintance.

He looked at me, baffled, although I should point out that just about any question baffled Pacino. He was large and buck-toothed, and he had a squint, so his lack of intelligence was particularly unfortunate. If anyone ever needed the compensation of charisma and good looks, it was Pacino.

“Howjer mean?”

“Where did your name come from?”

“Where did it come from?”

The idea that names came from anywhere was clearly a new one to him; I might as well have asked him where his toes came from.

“There’s a famous film actor called Pacino.”

He looked at me.

“Is there?”

“You hadn’t heard of him?”

“Nope.”

“So you don’t think you were named after him?”

“Dunno.”

“You never asked?”

“Nope. I don’t ask about no one’s name.”

“Right.”

Where chorname come from?”

“Martin?”

“Yeah.”

“Where did it come from?”

“Yeah.”

I gaped at him for a moment. I was at a loss. Apart from the obvious answer—that it had come from my parents, just as Pacino had come from his (although even this piece of information might have amazed him)—I could only have told him that mine was French in origin—just as his was Italian. As a consequence, I would have found it hard to articulate why his name was comical and mine was not.

“See? It’s a hard question. Don’t mean I’m thick, just because I can’t answer it.”

“No. Of course not.”

“Otherwise you’re thick, too.”

This was not a possibility that I felt I could rule out altogether. I was beginning to feel thick, for all sorts of reasons.

Pacino was a year-eight pupil at a comprehensive school in my neighbourhood, and I was supposed to be helping him with his reading. I had volunteered to do so after my conversation with Cindy, and after seeing a small advertisement in the local newspaper: Pacino was my first stop on the road towards self-respect. It’s a long road, I accept that, but I had somehow hoped that Pacino might have been positioned a little further along it. If we agree that self-respect is in, say, Sydney, and I’d begun the journey at Holloway Road tube station, then I’d imagined that Pacino would be my overnight stopover, the place where my plane could refuel. I was realistic enough to see that he wasn’t going to get me all the way there, but volunteering to sit down with a stupid and unattractive child for an hour represented several thousand air-miles, surely? During our first session, however, as we stumbled over even the simplest words, I realized that he was more like Caledonian Road than Singapore, and it would be another twenty-odd tube stops before I even got to bloody Heathrow.

We began with an appalling book he wanted to read about football, the large-print story of how a girl with one leg overcame her handicap and her team-mates’ sexism to become the captain of the school team. To be fair to Pacino, once he saw which way the wind was blowing, he was suitably contemptuous.

“She’s going to score the winning goal in a big match, innit?” he asked with some disgust.

“I fear that might be the case, yes.”

“But she’s only got one leg.”

“Indeed.”

“Plus she’s a girl.”

“She is, yes.”

“What school is this, then?”

“You may well ask.”

“I’m asking.”

“You want to know the name of the school?”

“Yeah. I want to go up there with my mates and laugh at them for having a girl with one leg in their team.”

“I’m not sure it’s a real school.”

“So it’s not even a true story?”

“No.”

“I’m not fucking bothering with this, then.”

“Good. Go and choose something else.”

He snuffled his way back to the library shelves, but could find nothing that might interest him.

“What are you interested in, actually?”

“Nuffink, really.”

“Nothing at all?”

“I quite like fruit. My mum says I’m a champion fruit-eater.”

“Right. That gives us something to work on.”

There were forty-five minutes of our hour remaining.

So what would you do? How does one begin to like oneself enough to want to live a little longer? And why didn’t my hour with Pacino do the trick? I blamed him, partly. He didn’t want to learn. And he wasn’t the sort of child I’d had in mind, either. I’d hoped for someone who was remarkably intelligent, but disadvantaged by home circumstance, someone who only needed an hour’s extra tuition a week to become some kind of working-class prodigy. I wanted my hour a week to make the difference between a future addicted to heroin and a future studying English at Oxford. That was the sort of kid I wanted, and instead they’d given me someone whose chief interest was in eating fruit. I mean, what did he need to read for? There’s an international symbol for the gents’ toilets, and he could always get his mother to tell him what was on television.

Perhaps that was the point, the sheer grinding uselessness of it. Perhaps if you knew you were doing something so obviously without value, you liked yourself more than someone who was indisputably helping people. Perhaps I’d end up feeling better than the blond nurse, and I could taunt him again, but this time I would have righteousness on my side. It’s a currency like any other, self-worth. You spend years saving up, and you can blow it all in an evening if you so choose. I’d done forty-odd years’ worth in the space of a few months, and now I had to save up again. I reckoned that Pacino was worth about ten pence a week, so it would be a while before I could afford another night on the town.

There you are. I can finish that sentence now: “Hard is teaching Pacino to read.” Or even, “Hard is trying to rebuild yourself, piece by piece, with no instruction book, and no clue as to where all the important bits are supposed to go.”

JJ

Lizzie and Ed bought me a guitar and a harp and a neck rack from one of those cool shops in Denmark Street; and when Ed and I were on the way to Heathrow, Ed told me he wanted to buy me a plane ticket home.

“I can’t go home yet, man.”

I was going along to say goodbye, but the tube journey was so fucking long that we ended up talking about something other than which crappy magazine he was going to buy from the bookstall.

“There’s nothing here for you. Go home, get a band together.”

“I got one here.”

“Where?”

“You know. The guys.”

“You think of them as a band? Those losers and fucking perverts we met in Starbucks?”

“I been in a band with losers and perverts before.”

“Weren’t ever no perverts in my band.”

“What about Dollar Bill?”

Dollar Bill was our first bass-player. He was older than the rest of us, and we’d had to unload him after an incident with the high school janitor’s son.

“At least Dollar Bill could fucking play. What can your buddies do?”

“It’s not that kind of band.”

“It’s no kind of band. So, what, this is for ever? You got to hang out with those guys until they die?”

“No, man. Just until everyone’s OK.”

“Until everyone’s OK? That girl is deranged. The guy can never hold his head up in public again. And the old woman has a kid who can hardly fucking breathe. So when are they gonna be OK? You’d be better off hoping they all get worse. Then they can jump off the fucking building, and you can come home. That’s the only happy ending for you.”

“What about you?”

“What the fuck’s any of this got to do with me?”

“What’s your happy ending going to be?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I want to know what kind of happy ending is available to the rest of the population. Tell me what the gap is. “Cos Martin and Maureen and Jess are all fucked, but you… You got a job hooking people up with cable TV. Where you going with that?”

“I’m going where I’m going.”

“Yeah. Tell me where that is.”

“Fuck you, man.”

“I’m just trying to make a point.”

“Yeah. I get it. I got as good a shot at a happy ending as your friends. Thanks. Do you mind if I wait until I get home before I shoot myself? Or you want me to do it here?”

“Hey, I didn’t mean that.”

But I did, I guess. When you get yourself in that place, the place I was in on New Year’s Eve, you think people who aren’t up on the roof are a million miles away, all the way across the ocean, but they’re not. There is no sea. Pretty much all of them are on dry land, in touching distance. I’m not trying to say that’s how close happiness is, if we could only see it, or some bullshit like that. I’m not telling you that suicidal people aren’t so far away from people who can get by; I’m telling you that people who get by aren’t so far away from being suicidal. Maybe I shouldn’t find that as comforting as I do.

We were coming up to the end of our ninety days, and I guess Martin’s suicidologist guy knew what he was talking about. Things had changed. They hadn’t changed very quickly, and they hadn’t changed very dramatically, and maybe we hadn’t even done much to make them change. And in my case anyway, they hadn’t even changed for the better. I could honestly say that my circumstances and prospects would be even less enviable on March 31st than they had been on New Year’s Eve.

“You really going through with this?” Ed asked me when we got to the airport.

“Through with what?”

“I don’t know. Life.”

“I don’t see why not.”

“Really? Shit, man. You must be the only one who doesn’t. I mean, we’d all understand if you jumped. Seriously. No one would think, you know, What a waste. He threw it all away. “Cos what are you throwing away? Nothing at all. There’s no waste involved.”

“Thanks, man.”

“You’re welcome. I just tell it like I see it.”

He was smiling and I was smiling, and we were just talking to each other the way we’ve always talked to each other about anything that’s gone wrong in our lives; it just sounded a little meaner than usual, I guess. Back in the day he’d be telling me that the girl who’d just broken my heart preferred him anyway, or I’d be telling him that the song he’d just spent months working on was a piece of shit, but the stakes were higher now. He was right, though, probably more right than he’d ever been. There would be no waste involved. The trick is to see that you’re still entitled to your three-score years and ten anyway.

Busking isn’t so bad. OK, it’s bad, but it’s not terrible. Well, OK, it’s terrible, but it’s not… I’ll come back and finish that sentence with something both life-affirming and true another time. First day out it felt fucking great, because I hadn’t held a guitar in so long, and second day out was pretty good, too, because the rustiness had gone a little, and I could feel stuff coming back, chords and songs and confidence. After that, I guess it felt like busking, and busking felt better than delivering pizzas.

And people do put money on the blanket. I got about ten pounds for playing “Losing My Religion” to a whole crowd of Spanish kids outside Madame Tussauds, and only a little less from a bunch of Swedes or whatever the next day (’William, It Was Really Nothing”, Tate Modern). If I could only kill this one guy, then busking would be the best job I could hope to find. Or at least, it would be the best job that involved playing guitar on a sidewalk, anyway. This guy calls himself Jerry Lee Pavement, and his thing is that he sets up right next to you, and plays exactly the same song as you, but like two bars later. So I start playing “Losing My Religion”, and he starts playing “Losing My Religion”, and I stop, because it sounds terrible, and then he stops, and then everyone laughs, because it’s so fucking funny ha ha ha, and so you move to a different spot, and he moves right along with you. And it doesn’t matter what song you play, which I have to admit is kind of impressive. I thought I’d throw him off with “Skyway” by the Replacements, which I worked simply to piss him off, and which maybe nineteen people in the world know, but he had it down. Oh, and everyone throws their coins at him, because he’s the genius, obviously, not me. I took a pop at him once, in Leicester Square, and everyone started booing me, because they all love him.

But I guess everyone has someone at work that they don’t get along with. And if you’re short on walking metaphors for the stupidity and futility of your working life—and I appreciate that not everyone is—then you have to admit that Jerry Lee Pavement is pretty hard to beat.

Maureen

We met in the pub opposite Toppers’ House for our Ninetieth Day party. The idea was to have a couple of drinks, go up on to the roof, have a little think about everything and then go off for a curry in the Indian Ocean on Holloway Road. I wasn’t sure about the curry part, but the others said they’d choose something that would agree with me.

I didn’t want to go up on the roof, though.

“Why not?” said Jess.

“Because people kill themselves up there,” I said.

“Der,” said Jess.

“Oh, so you enjoyed it on Valentine’s Day, did you?” Martin asked her.

“No, I didn’t enjoy it, exactly. But, you know.”

“No, I don’t know,” said Martin.

“It’s all part of life, isn’t it?”

“People always say that about unpleasant things. «Oh, this film shows someone getting his eyes pulled out with a corkscrew. But it’s all part of life.» I’ll tell you what else is all part of life: going for a crap. No one ever wants to see that, do they? No one ever puts that in a film. Let’s go and watch people taking a dump this evening.”

“Who’d let us?” said Jess. “People lock the door.”

“But you’d watch if they didn’t.”

“If they didn’t, it would be more a part of life, wouldn’t it? So, yes, I would.”

Martin groaned and rolled his eyes. You’d have thought he’d be much cleverer than Jess, but he never seemed to win an argument with her, and now she’d got him again.

“But the reason people lock the door is they want privacy,” said JJ. “And maybe they want privacy when they’re thinking of killing themselves.”

“So you’re saying we should just let them get on with it?” said Jess. “Because I don’t think that’s right. Maybe tonight we can stop someone.”

“And how does that fit in with your friend’s ideas? As far as I understand it, you’re now of the opinion that when it comes to suicide you should let the market decide,” said Martin.

We’d just been talking about a man without a name called Nodog, who told Jess that thinking about killing yourself was perfectly healthy, and everyone should do it.

“I never said anything about any of that’s—”

“I’m sorry. I was paraphrasing. I thought we weren’t allowed to interfere.”

“No, no. We can interfere. Interfering is part of the process, see? All you have to do is think about it, and after that, whatever. If we stop someone, the gods have spoken.”

“And if I were a god,” said Martin, “you’re exactly the sort of person I’d use as a mouthpiece.”

“Are you being dirty?”

“No. I’m being complimentary.”

Jess looked pleased.

“So shall we look for someone?” she said.

“How do you look for someone?” JJ asked her.

“There’s probably someone in here, for a start.”

We looked around the pub. It was just after seven, and there weren’t many people in yet. In the corner by the gents’, there were a couple of young fellas in suits looking at a mobile phone and laughing. At the table nearest the bar, there were three young women, looking at photographs and laughing. At the table next to us there was a young couple laughing about nothing, and sitting at the bar there was a middle-aged guy reading a newspaper.

“Too much laughing,” said Jess.

“Anyone who thinks text messages are funny isn’t going to kill himself,” said JJ. “There isn’t enough going on internally.”

“I’ve seen some funny text messages,” said Jess.

“Yeah, well,” said Martin. “I’m not sure that really disproves JJ’s point.”

“Shut up,” said Jess. “What about the bloke reading the paper? He’s on his own. He’s probably the best we can do.”

JJ and Martin looked at each other and laughed.

“The best we can do?” said Martin. “So what you’re saying is that we have to dissuade someone in this room from killing themselves whether they were thinking of it or not?”

“Yeah, well, the laughing cretins aren’t going to go up there, are they? He looks more, like, deep.”

“He’s reading the racing page of the f— Sun ,” said Martin. “In a moment his mate’s going to turn up, and they’ll have fifteen pints and a curry.”

“Snob.”

“Oh, and who’s the one who thinks you have to be deep to kill yourself?”

“We all do,” said JJ. “Don’t we?”

We had two drinks each. Martin drank large whiskies with water, JJ drank pints of Guinness, Jess drank Red Bull and vodka, and I drank white wine. I’d probably have been dizzy three months ago, but I seem to drink a lot now, so when we got up to walk across the road, I just felt warm and friendly. The clocks had gone forward on the previous Sunday, and even though it seemed dark when we were down on the street, up on the roof it felt as though there were some light left somewhere in the city. We leaned on the wall, right next to the place where Martin had cut through the wire, and looked south towards the river.

“So,” said Jess. “Anyone up for going over?”

No one said anything, because it wasn’t a serious question any more, so we just smiled.

“It’s gotta be a good thing, right? That we’re still around?” said JJ.

“Der,” said Jess.

“No,” said JJ. “It wasn’t a rhetorical question.”

Jess swore at him and asked him what that was supposed to mean.

“I mean, I really do want to know,” said JJ. “I really do want to know whether it’s… I don’t know.”

“Better that we’re here than that we’re not?” said Martin.

“Yeah. That. I guess.”

“It’s better for your kids,” said Jess.

“I suppose so,” said Martin. “Not that I ever see them.”

“It’s better for Matty,” said JJ, and I didn’t say anything, which reminded everyone else that it wasn’t really better for Matty at all.

“We’ve all got loved ones, anyway,” said Martin. “And our loved ones would rather we were alive than dead. On balance.”

“You reckon?” said Jess.

“Are you asking me whether I think your parents want you to live? Yes, Jess, your parents want you to live.”

Jess made a face, as though she didn’t believe him.

“How come we didn’t think of this before?” said JJ. “On New Year’s Eve? I never thought of my parents once.”

“Because things were worse then, I suppose,” said Martin. “Family’s like, I don’t know. Gravity. Stronger at some times than others.”

“Yup. That’s gravity for you. That’s why in the morning we can like float, and in the evening we can’t hardly lift our feet.”

“Tides, then. You don’t notice the pull when it’s… Well, anyway. You know what I mean.”

“If some guy came up here tonight, what would you tell him?” said JJ.

“I’d tell him about the ninety days,” said Jess. “ “Cos it’s true, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” said JJ. “It’s true that none of us feel like killing ourselves tonight. But like… If he asked us why, if he said to us, So tell me what great things have happened to you since you decided not to go over the edge… what would you tell him?”

I’d tell him about my job in the newsagent’s,” I said. “And the quiz.”

The others looked at their feet. Jess thought about saying something, but JJ caught her eye, and she changed her mind.

“Yeah, well, you, you’re doing OK,” said JJ after a little while. “But I’m f— busking, man. Sorry, Maureen.”

“And I’m failing to help the dimmest child in the world with his reading,” said Martin.

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” said Jess. “You’re failing at loads of different things. You’re failing with your kids, and your relationships…”

“Oh, yes, whereas you, Jess… You’re such a f— success. You’ve got it all.”

“Sorry, Maureen,” said JJ.

“Yes, excuse me, Maureen.”

“I didn’t know Nodog ninety days ago,” said Jess.

“Ah, yes,” said Martin. “Nodog. The one unqualified achievement any of us can boast of. Maureen’s quiz team excepted, of course.”

I didn’t remind him about the newsagent’s. I know it’s not much, but it might have seemed as though I was rubbing it in a bit.

“Let’s tell our suicidal friend about Nodog. «Oh, yes. Jess here has met a man who doesn’t believe in names, and thinks we should all kill ourselves all the time.» That’ll cheer him up.”

“That’s not what he thinks. You’re just taking the p—. What did you want to bring all this up for, JJ? We were going to have a good night out, and now everyone’s all f— depressed.”

“Yeah,” said JJ. “I’m sorry. I was just wondering, you know. Why we’re all still here.”

“Thanks,” said Martin. “Thanks for that.”

In the distance we could see the lights on that big wheel down by the river, the London Eye.

“We don’t have to decide right now, anyway, do we?” said JJ.

“Course we don’t,” said Martin.

“So how about we give it another six months? See how we’re doing?”

“Is that thing actually going round?” said Martin. “I can’t tell.” We stared at it for a long time, trying to work it out. Martin was right. It didn’t look as though it was moving, but it must have been.

I suppose.