A Long Way Down

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  JJ

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘If everyone else shows, Kathy and I will move,’ I said.

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

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

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

  ‘What had she done?’ asked Kathy.

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

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

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

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

  ‘I’m Kathy,’ said Kathy.

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

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

  ‘What sort of friend?’

  ‘We just met yesterday.’

  ‘And you’re having breakfast together?’

  ‘Shut up, Jess.’

  ‘What have I said?’

  ‘It’s what you’re going to say.’

  ‘What am I going to say?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘Have you met our mum and dad yet, Kathy?’

  Kathy’s eyes flickered nervously over to Maureen.

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

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

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

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

  Kathy nodded, and looked at me.

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

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

  Maureen and her croissants sat down at the table.

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

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

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

  ‘Anna will be wondering what’s happened to me.’

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

  ‘See you later,’ said Jess cheerily.

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

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

  MAUREEN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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