‘That’s right,’ said Martin.
‘But you must have thought something,’ Linda said. ‘Even if it was only, Bloody hell, I wonder if I could get him on to Rise and Shine with Penny and Martin.’ She chuckled encouragingly.
‘Well,’ said Martin. ‘I haven’t been presenting the show for a while now, remember. So it would have been a waste of time asking him.’
‘You’ve got your cable show, though.’
‘Yes.’
‘So maybe he would have gone on that.’ She chuckled encouragingly again.
‘We tend to book mainly showbiz stuff. Stand-up comedians, soap stars… The odd sportsman.’
‘So you’re saying you wouldn’t have had him on.’ Once she’d started this line of questioning, Linda seemed kind of reluctant to let it drop.
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know?’ she snorted. ‘I mean, it’s not David Letterman, your show, is it? It’s not like people are swarming all over you to get on it.’
‘We do all right.’
I couldn’t help feeling that she was missing the point of the story. An angel – possibly like an emissary from the Lord Himself, who knows? – had visited a tower-block in Archway to stop us all from killing ourselves, and she wanted to know why he hadn’t been booked on a talk show. I don’t know, man. You’d have thought that would be one of the questions nearer the end of the interview.
‘He’d have been the first person on that we’d ever heard of, anyway.’
‘You’d heard of him before, had you?’ said Martin. ‘This particular angel? The one who looked like Matt Damon?’
‘I’ve heard of angels,’ she said.
‘Well, I’m sure you’ve heard of actresses,’ said Martin. ‘We’ve had them on, too.’
‘Where are we going with this?’ I said. ‘You really wanna write a piece about why the Angel Matt wasn’t a guest on Martin’s show?’
‘Is that what you call him?’ she said. ‘The Angel Matt?’
‘Usually we just call him “The Angel”,’ said Jess. ‘But…’
‘Would you mind if Martin answered a couple of questions?’
‘You’ve asked him loads already,’ said Jess. ‘Maureen hasn’t said anything. JJ hasn’t said very much.’
‘Martin’s the one that most people will have heard of,’ said Linda. ‘Martin? Is that what you call him?’
‘Just “The Angel”,’ said Martin. He looked happier than this on the night he tried to kill himself.
‘Can I just check something?’ said Linda. ‘You did see him, Martin, didn’t you?’
Martin shifted in his seat. You could tell he was scouting around the inside of his head, just to make sure that there were no escape routes he’d overlooked.
‘Oh, yes,’ said Martin. ‘I saw him, all right. He was… He was awesome.’
And with that, he finally walked into the cage that Linda had opened for him. The public at large were now free to poke sticks at him and call him names, and he just had to sit there and take it, like an exhibit in a freak show.
But then, we were all freaks now. When friends and family and ex-lovers opened their newspapers the next morning, they could come to one of only two possible conclusions: 1) we’d all looped the loop, or 2) we were scam artists. OK, strictly speaking, there was a third conclusion – we were telling the truth. We saw an angel that looked like Matt Damon, who for reasons best known to himself told us to get down off the roof. But I got to say, I don’t know anyone who’d believe that. Maybe my great-aunt Ida, who lives in Alabama and handles snakes every Sunday morning in her church, but then, she’s nuts too.
And I don’t know, man, but to me it seemed a long way back from there. If you were gonna draw a map, you’d say that mortgages and relationships and jobs and all that stuff, all the things that constitute a regular life, were in like New Orleans, and by coming out with all this horseshit we’d just put ourselves somewhere north of Alaska. Who’s going to give a job to a guy who sees angels? And who’s going to give a job to a guy who says he sees angels because he might make a few bucks for himself? No, we were finished as serious people. We had sold our seriosity for twelve hundred and fifty of your English pounds, and as far as I could tell that money was going to have to last us for the rest of our lives, unless we saw God, or Elvis, or Princess Di. And next time we’d have to see them for real, and take photos.
Just over two years ago, REM’s manager came to see Big Yellow, and asked whether we were interested in his company representing us, and we said we were happy with what we had. REM! Twenty-six months ago! We were sitting around in this fancy office, and this guy, he was trying to persuade us, you know? And now I was sitting around with people like Maureen and Jess, taking part in a pathetic attempt to squeeze a few bucks out of someone who was desperate to give it to us, so long as we were prepared to totally embarrass ourselves. One thing the last couple of years has taught me is that there’s nothing you can’t fuck up if you try hard enough.
My only consolation was that I didn’t have any friends and family here; no one knew who I was, except for a few fans of the band, maybe, and I like to think that they weren’t the type to read Linda’s paper. And some of the guys at the pizza place might see a copy lying around somewhere, but they’d have smelled the cash, and the desperation, and they could have cared less about the humiliation.
So that just left Lizzie, and if she saw a picture of me looking insane, then so be it. You know why she dumped me? She dumped me because I wasn’t going to be a rock’n’roll star after all. Can you fucking believe that? No you can’t, because it’s beyond belief, and therefore unbelievable. ‘Shittiness, thy name is Woman.’ That was my thinking, at that point in time, you know, that it wouldn’t hurt her to see how she’d messed me up. In fact, if I could be temporarily invisible, then one of the first things I’d do, after robbing a bank and going into the women’s showers at the gym and all the usual stuff, is put the paper down in front of her and watch her read it.
See, I didn’t know anything about anything then. I thought I knew things, but I didn’t.
MAUREEN
I didn’t think I’d ever be able to go back to the church again after the interview with Linda. I’d been thinking about it a bit, the day before; I missed it terribly, and I wondered whether God would really mind if I just sat at the back and didn’t go to confession – sneaked out somehow before communion. But once I’d told Linda that I’d seen an angel, I knew that I’d have to keep away, that I wouldn’t be able to go back before I died. I didn’t know exactly what sin I’d committed, but I was sure that sins involving making up angels were mortal.
I still thought I was going to kill myself when the six weeks were up; what would have changed my mind? I was busier than I’d ever been, what with the press interviews and the meetings, and I suppose that took my mind off things. But all the running around just felt like last-minute activity, as if I had some things to get done before I went on holiday. That was who I was, then: a person who was going to kill herself soon, the moment I could get round to it.
I was going to say that I saw the first little glimmer of light that day, the day of the interview with Linda, but it wasn’t really like that. It was more as if I’d already chosen what I was going to watch on TV; and I was beginning to look forward to it, and then noticed that there was something else on that might be more interesting. I don’t know about you, but choice isn’t always what I want. You can end up flicking between one channel and another, and not watching either programme properly. I don’t know how people with the cable television cope.
What happened was that after the interview, I found myself talking to JJ. He was going back to his flat, and I was heading towards the bus stop, and we ended up walking along together. I’m not sure he wanted to, really, because we’ve hardly spoken since I slapped that man on New Year’s Eve, but it was one of those awkward situations where I was walking five paces behind him, so he stopped for me.
‘That was kind of hard, wasn’t it?’ he said, and I was surprised, because I thought I was the only one who’d found it difficult.
‘I hate lies,’ I said.
He looked at me and laughed, and then I remembered about his lie.
‘No offence,’ I said. ‘I lied too. I lied about the angel. And I lied to Matty, as well. About going to a party on New Year’s Eve. And to the people in the respite home.’
‘God’ll forgive you for those, I think.’ We walked along a little bit more, and then he said, for no reason that I could tell, ‘What would it take to change your mind?’
‘About what?’
‘About… you know. Wanting To End It All.’
I didn’t know what to say.
‘If you could make a deal with God, kind of thing. He’s sitting there, the Big Guy, across the table from you. And he’s saying, OK, Maureen, we like you, but we really want you to stay put, on Earth. What can we do to persuade you? What can we offer you?’
‘God’s asking me personally?’
‘Yeah.’
‘If He was asking me personally, He wouldn’t have to offer me anything.’
‘Really?’
‘If God in His infinite wisdom wanted me to stay on Earth, then how could I ask for anything?’
JJ laughed. ‘OK, then. Not God.’
‘Who, then?’
‘A sort of… I don’t know. A sort of cosmic, you know, President. Or Prime Minister. Tony Blair. Someone who can get things done. You don’t have to do what Tony Blair says without asking for something in return.’
‘Can he cure Matty?’
‘Nope. He can only arrange things.’
‘I’d like a holiday.’
‘God. You’re a cheap date. You’d choose to live out the rest of your natural life for a week in Florida?’
‘I’d like to go abroad. I’ve never been.’
‘You’ve never been abroad?’
He said it as though I should be ashamed, and for a moment I was.
‘When was the last time you had a holiday?’
‘Just before Matty was born.’
‘And he’s how old?’
‘He’s nineteen.’
‘OK. Well, as your manager, I’m going to be asking the Big Guy for a holiday a year. Maybe two.’
‘You can’t do that!’ I really felt scandalized. I can see now I was taking it all too seriously, but it felt real to me, and it seemed like a holiday a year was too much.
‘Trust me,’ said JJ. ‘I know the market. Cosmic Tony won’t blink an eye. Come on, what else?’
‘Oh, I couldn’t ask for anything else.’
‘Say he does give you two weeks’ holiday a year. Fifty weeks is a long time to wait for it, you know? And you’re not going to get another appointment with Cosmic Tony. You got one shot. Everything you want, you’ve got to ask for in one go.’
‘A job.’
‘You want a job?’
‘Yes. Of course.’
‘What kind of job?’
‘Anything. Working in a shop, maybe. Anything to get me out of the house.’
I used to work, before Matty was born. I had a job in an office stationer’s in Tufnell Park. I liked it; I liked all the different pens, and sizes of paper and envelopes. I liked my boss. I haven’t worked since.
‘OK. Come on, come on.’
‘Maybe a bit of a social life. The church has quizzes sometimes. Like pub quizzes, but not in the pub. I’d like to have a go at one of those.’
‘Yep, we can allow you a quiz.’
I tried to smile, because I knew JJ was joking a bit, but I was finding the conversation hard. I couldn’t really think of anything very much, and that annoyed me. And it made me feel afraid, in a strange sort of a way. It was like finding a door that you’d never seen before in your own house. Would you want to know what was behind it? Some people would, I’m sure, but I wouldn’t. I didn’t want to carry on talking about me.
‘What about you?’ I said to JJ. ‘What would you say to Cosmic Tony?’
‘Ha. I’m not sure, man.’ He calls everyone ‘man’, even if you’re not a man. You get used to it. ‘Maybe, I don’t know. Live the last fifteen years all over again or something. Finish high school. Forget about music. Become the kind of person who’s happy to settle for what he is, rather than what he wants to be, you know?’
‘But Cosmic Tony can’t arrange that.’
‘No. Exactly.’
‘So you’re worse off than me, really. Cosmic Tony can do things for me, but not for you.’
‘No, no, shit, I’m sorry, Maureen. I didn’t mean to imply that. You have a… You have a really hard life, and none of it’s your fault, and everything that’s happened to me is just ’cos of my own stupidity, and… There’s no comparison. Really. I’m sorry I ever mentioned it.’
But I wasn’t sorry. I liked thinking about Cosmic Tony much more than I liked thinking about God.
MARTIN
The headline in Linda’s paper – page one, accompanied by the picture of me flat on my face outside a nightclub – read ‘FOR HARPS – SEE SHARP’. The story did not, as Linda had promised it would, emphasize the beauty and mystery of our experience on the roof; rather, it chose to concentrate on another angle, namely, the sudden, gratifying and amusing lunacy of a former television personality. The journalist in me suspects that she got the story about right.
‘What does that mean?’ Jess asked me on the phone that morning.
‘It’s an old lager ad,’ I said. “ ‘HARP – STAYS SHARP”.’
‘What has lager got to do with anything?’
‘Nothing. But the name of the lager was Harp. And my name’s Sharp, you see.’
‘OK. Then what have harps got to do with anything?’
‘Angels are supposed to play them.’
‘Are they? Should we have said he was playing a harp? To make it more convincing?’
I told her that, in my opinion, the addition of a harp to the portrait of the Angel Matt Damon that we had painted was unlikely to have helped convince people of its authenticity.
‘And anyway, how come it’s all about you? We hardly get a fucking mention.’
I had many other phone calls that morning – from Theo, who said that there’s been a lot of interest in the story, and who thought I’d finally given him something he could work with, as long as I was comfortable talking to the public about what was obviously a private spiritual moment; from Penny, who wanted us to meet and talk; and from my daughters.
I hadn’t been allowed to speak to them for weeks, but Cindy’s maternal instinct had obviously told her that the day Daddy was in the papers talking about seeing messengers from God was a good day to reinstate contact.
‘Did you see an angel, Daddy?’
‘No.’
‘Mummy said you did.’
‘Well, I didn’t.’
‘Why did Mummy say you did?’
‘You’d better ask her.’
‘Mummy, why did you say Daddy saw an angel?’
I waited patiently while a brief conversation took place away from the receiver.
‘She says she didn’t say it. She says the newspaper says it.’
‘I told a fib, sweetie. To make some money.’
‘Oh.’
‘So I can buy you a nice birthday present.’
‘Oh. Why do you get money for saying you saw an angel?’
‘I’ll tell you another time.’
‘Oh.’
And then Cindy and I spoke, but not for very long. During our brief conversation I managed to refer to two different types of domesticated female animals.
I also received a phone call from my boss at FeetUp. He was calling to tell me that I was fired.
‘You’re joking.’
‘I wish I was, Sharpy. But you’ve left me with no alternative.’
‘By doing what, exactly?’
‘Have you seen the paper this morning?’
‘That’s a problem for you?’
‘You come across as a bit of a nutter, to be honest.’
‘What about the publicity for the channel?’
‘All negative, in my book.’
‘You think there’s such a thing as negative publicity for FeetUp?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘What with no one ever having heard of us. You.’
There was a long, long silence, during which you could hear the rusting cogs of poor Declan’s mind turning over.
‘Ah. I see. Very cunning. That hadn’t occurred to me.’
‘I’m not going to beg, Dec. But it would seem a little perverse to me. You hire me when no one else in the world would give me the time of day. And then you fire me when I’m hot. How many of your presenters are all over the papers today?’
‘No, no, fair point, fair point. I can see where you’re coming from. What you’re saying, if I read you correctly, is that there’s no such thing as bad publicity for a… a fledgling cable channel.’
‘Obviously I couldn’t have put it as elegantly as that. But yes, that’s the long and the short of it.’
‘OK. You’ve turned me round, Sharpy. Who’ve we got on this afternoon?’
‘This afternoon?’
‘Yeah. It’s Thursday.’
‘Ah.’
‘Had you forgotten?’
‘I sort of had, really, yeah.’
‘So we’ve got no one?’
‘I reckon I could get JJ, Maureen and Jess to come on.’
‘Who are they?’
‘The other three.’
‘The other three who?’
‘Have you read the story?’
‘I only read the one about you seeing the angel.’
‘They were up there with me.’
‘Up where?’
‘The whole angel thing, Declan, came about because I was going to kill myself. And then I bumped into three other people on the top of a tower-block who were thinking of doing the same thing. And then… Well, to cut a long story short, the angel told us to come down again.’
‘Fuck me.’
‘Exactly.’
‘And you reckon you can get the other three?’
‘Almost sure of it.’
‘Jesus Christ. How much will they cost, d’you reckon?’
‘Three hundred quid for the three of them, maybe? Plus expenses. One of them’s a… Well, she’s a single parent, and her kid will need looking after.’
‘Go on, then. Fuck it. Fuck the expense.’
‘Top man, Dec.’
‘I think it’s a good idea. I’m pleased with that. Old Declan’s still got it, eh?’
‘Too right. You’re a newshound. You’re the Newshound of the Baskervilles.’
‘What you’ve got to tell yourself,’ I told them, ‘is that no one will be watching.’
‘That’s one of your old pro tricks, right?’ said JJ knowingly.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Believe me. Literally no one will be watching. I have never met anyone who has ever seen my show.’
The world headquarters of FeetUp TV! – known, inevitably, to its staff as TitsUpTV! – is in a sort of shed in Hoxton. The shed contains a small reception area, two dressing rooms and a studio, where all four of our homegrown programmes are made. Every morning, a woman called Candy-Ann sells cosmetics; I split Thursday afternoon with a man called D J Goodnews, who speaks to the dead, usually on behalf of the receptionist, the window cleaner, the minicab driver booked to take him home, or anyone else who happens to be passing through: ‘Does the letter A mean anything to you, Asif?’ and so on. The other afternoons are taken up by tapes of old dog races from the US – once upon a time the intention was to offer viewers the chance to bet, but nothing ever came of it, and in my opinion, if you can’t bet, then dog racing, especially old dog racing, loses some of its appeal. During the evening, two women sit talking to each other, in and usually about their underwear, while viewers text them lewd messages, which they ignore. And that’s more or less it. Declan runs the station on behalf of a mysterious Asian businessman, and those of us who work for FeetUpTV! can only presume that somehow, in ways too obtuse and sophisticated for us to decipher, we are involved in the trafficking of class A drugs and child pornography. One theory is that the dogs in the races are sending out encoded messages to the traffickers: if, say, the dog in the outside lane wins, then that is a message to the Thai contact that he should send a couple of kilos of heroin and four thirteen-year-olds first thing in the morning. Something like that, anyway.
My guests on Sharp Words tend to be old friends who want to do something to help, or former celebrities in a boat not dissimilar to my own – holed under the waterline and sinking fast. Some weeks I get has-beens, and everyone gets wildly over-excited, but most weeks it’s had-beens. Candy-Ann, D J GoodNews and the two semi-clothed ladies have appeared on my show not just once, but several times, in order to give viewers a chance to get to know them a little better. (Sharp Words is two hours long, and though the advertising department, namely Karen on reception, does its best, we are rarely interrupted by messages from our sponsors. The theoretical viewer is highly unlikely to feel as though we have barely scratched the conversational surface.) Attracting people of the calibre of Maureen and Jess, then, constituted something of a coup: only rarely have my guests appeared on the show during the same decade that they have appeared in the newspapers.
I took pride in my interviewing. I mean, I still do, but at a time when I seemed to be able to do nothing else properly, I hung on to my competence in a studio as I would to a tree root on the side of a cliff. I have, in my time, interviewed drunken, maudlin actors at eight in the morning and drunken, aggressive footballers at eight in the evening. I have forced lying politicians to tell something like the truth, and I have had to cope with mothers whose grief has made them uncomfortably verbose, and not once have I let things become sloppy. My studio sofa was my classroom, and I didn’t tolerate any waywardness. Even in those desperate FeetUpTV! months spent talking to nobodies and never-weres, people with nothing to say and no ability to say it, it was comforting to think that there was some area of my life in which I was competent. So when Jess and JJ decided that my programme was a joke and acted accordingly, I suffered something of a sense of humour failure. I wish, of course, that I hadn’t; I wish that I could have found it in me to be a little less pompous, a little more relaxed. True, I was encouraging them to talk about an unforgettable experience that they hadn’t had, and which I knew they hadn’t had. And granted, that imaginary unforgettable experience was preposterous. And yet, despite these impediments, I had somehow expected a higher level of professionalism.
I don’t wish to overstate my case; it’s not bloody rocket science, doing a TV interview. You chat to your guests beforehand, agree on a rough conversational course, remind them of their hilarious anecdotes and, in this case, of the known facts about the fictions we were about to discuss, as provided by Jess in her original interview – namely, that the angel looked like Matt Damon, he floated above the roof, and he was wearing a baggy white suit. Don’t fuck about with those bits, I told them, or we’ll get into a mess. So what happens? Almost immediately? I ask JJ what the angel was wearing, and he tells me that the angel was wearing a promotional T-shirt for the Sandra Bullock film While You Were Sleeping – a film which, as luck would have it, Jess had seen on TV, and was thus able to synopsize at considerable length.
‘If we can just stick to the subject,’ I said. ‘Lots of people have seen While You Were Sleeping. Very few people have seen an angel.’
‘Fuck off. No one’s watching. You said.’
‘That was just one of my old pro’s tricks.’
‘We’ll be in trouble now, then. Because I just said “Fuck off”. You’ll get loads of complaints for that.’
‘I think that our viewers are sophisticated enough to know that extreme experiences sometimes produce extreme language.’
‘Good. Fuckofffuckofffuckoff.’ She made her apologetic wave at Maureen, and then into the camera, at the outraged people of Britain. ‘Anyway, watching rubbish Sandra Bullock films isn’t a very extreme experience.’
‘We were talking about the angel, not Sandra Bullock.’
‘What angel?’
And so on, and on, until Declan walked in with the cosmetics lady and ushered us off the air, into the street and, in my case, out of a job.
JESS
Someone should write a song or something called ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’. Something like, ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They make you feel fucking bad.’ Because they do. Especially your dad. That’s why he gets the rhyme. He wouldn’t like me saying this, but if it wasn’t for me and Jen, no one would ever have heard of him. He’s not like the boss of Education – that’s the Secretary of State. There are loads of ministers, and he’s only one of them, so he’s what they call a junior minister, which is a laugh and a half because he’s not very junior at all. So he’s sort of a loser politician, really. You wouldn’t mind if he was a loser because he shot his mouth off and said what he thought about Iraq or whatever, but he doesn’t; he says what he’s told to say, and it still doesn’t do him much good.
Most people have a rope that ties them to someone, and that rope can be short or it can be long. (Be long. Belong. Get it?) You don’t know how long, though. It’s not your choice. Maureen’s rope ties her to Matty and it’s about six inches long and it’s killing her. Martin’s rope ties him to his daughters, and, like a stupid dog, he thinks it isn’t there. He goes running off somewhere – into a nightclub after a girl, up a building, whatever – and then suddenly it brings him up short and chokes him and he acts surprised, and then he does the same thing again the next day. I think JJ is tied to this bloke Eddie he keeps talking about, the one he used to be in the band with.
And I’m learning that I’m tied to Jen, and not to my mum and dad – not to home, which is where the rope should be. Jen thought she was tied to them too, I’m sure of it. She felt safe, just because she was a kid with parents, so she kept walking and walking and walking until she walked off a cliff or into the desert or off to Texas with her mechanic. She thought she’d get jerked back by the rope, but there wasn’t one. She learned that the hard way. So I’m tied to Jen now, but Jen isn’t solid, like a house. She’s floating, blowing around, no one knows where she is; she’s sort of fucking useless, really, isn’t she?
Anyway, I don’t owe Mum and Dad anything. Mum understands that. She gave up expecting anything ages ago. She’s still a mess because of Jen, and she hates Dad, and she’s given up on me, so everything’s all above board there. But Dad really thinks that he’s entitled to something, which is a joke. For example: he kept showing me these articles that people were writing about him, saying he should resign because his daughter was in such a fucking state, as if it was any of my business. And I was like, So? Resign. Or don’t. Whatever. He needed to talk to a career adviser, not a daughter.
It wasn’t as if we were in the papers for long, anyway. We made one more chunk of money, from a new Channel 5 chat show. We were going to really try and do it straight that time, but the woman who interviewed us really got on my tits, so I told her we’d made it all up to earn a few bob, and she told us off, and all these stupid brain-dead old bags in the audience booed us. And that was it, no one wanted to speak to us any more. We were left to entertain ourselves. It wasn’t too hard. I had loads of ideas.
For example: it was my idea that we met for a coffee regularly – either at Maureen’s or somewhere in Islington, if we could find someone to sit with Matty. We didn’t mind spending bits of the money on babysitters or whatever you want to call them; we pretended we were up for it because we wanted Maureen to have a break, but really it was because we didn’t want to go round hers all the time. No offence, but Matty put like a real downer on everything.
Martin didn’t like my idea, of course. First he wanted to know what ‘regularly’ meant, because he didn’t want to commit himself. And I was like, Yeah, well, what with no kids and no wife and no girlfriend and no job, it must be hard to find the time, and he said it wasn’t a question of time actually it was a question of choice, so I had to remind him that he had agreed to be part of a gang. And he was like, So what, so I went, Well, what’s the point of agreeing? And he said, No point. Which he thought was funny, because it was more or less what I’d said on the roof on New Year’s Eve. And I was like, Well, you’re a lot older than me, and my young mind isn’t fully formed yet, and he went, You can say that again.
And then we couldn’t agree on where we’d meet. I wanted to go to Starbucks, because I like frappuccinos and all that, but JJ said he wasn’t into global franchises, and Martin had read in some posey magazine about a snooty little coffee bar in between Essex Road and Upper Street where they grow their own beans while you waited or something. So to keep him happy, we met up there.
Anyway, this place had just changed its name and its vibe. The snootiness hadn’t worked out, so it wasn’t snooty any more. It used to be called Tres Marias, which is the name of a dam in Brazil, but the guy who ran it thought the name confused people, because what did one Mary have to do with coffee, let alone three? And he didn’t even have one Mary. So now it was called Captain Coffee, and everyone knew what it sold, but it didn’t seem to make much difference. It was still empty.
We walked in, and the guy that ran it was wearing this old army uniform, and he saluted us, and said, Captain Coffee at your service. I thought he was funny, but Martin was like, Jesus Christ, and he tried to leave, but Captain Coffee wouldn’t let us, he was that desperate. He told us we could have our coffee for free on our first visit, and a cake, if we wanted. So we didn’t walk out, but the next problem was that the place was tiny. There were like three tables, and each table was six inches away from the counter, which meant that Captain Coffee was leaning on the counter listening to everything we said.
And because of who we were and what had happened to us, we wanted to talk about personal things, so it was embarrassing him standing there.
Martin was like, Let’s drink up and go, and he stood up. But Captain Coffee went, What’s the matter now? So I said, The thing is, we need to have a private conversation, and he said he understood completely, and he’d go outside until we’d finished. And I said, But really, everything we say is private, for reasons I can’t go into. And he said it didn’t matter, he’d still wait outside unless anyone else came. And that’s what he did, and that’s why we ended up going to Starbucks for our coffee meetings. It was hard to concentrate on how miserable we were, with this berk in an army uniform leaning against the window outside checking that we weren’t stealing his biscuits, or biscotties as he called them. People go on about places like Starbucks being unpersonal and all that, but what if that’s what you want? I’d be lost, if JJ and people like that got their way, and there was nothing unpersonal in the world. I like to know that there are big places without windows where no one gives a shit. You need confidence to go into small places with regular customers, small bookshops and small music shops and small restaurants and cafés. I’m happiest in the Virgin Megastore and Borders and Starbucks and Pizza Express, where no one gives a shit, and no one knows who you are. My mum and dad are always going on about how soulless those places are, and I’m like, Der. That’s the point.
The book group thing was JJ’s idea. He said people do it a lot in America, read books and talk about them; Martin reckoned it was becoming fashionable here, too, but I’d never heard of it, so it can’t be that fashionable, or I’d have read about it in Dazed and Confused. The point of it was to talk about Something Else, sort of thing, and not get into rows about who was a berk and who was a prat, which was how the afternoons in Starbucks usually ended up. And what we decided was, we were going to read books by people who’d killed themselves. They were, like, our people, and so we thought we ought to find out what was going on in their heads. Martin said he thought we might learn more from people who hadn’t killed themselves – we should be reading up on what was so great about staying alive, not what was so great about topping yourself. But it turned out there were like a billion writers who hadn’t killed themselves, and three or four who had, so we took the easy option, and went for the smaller pile. We voted on using funds from our media appearances to buy ourselves the books.
Anyway, it turned out not to be the easy option at all. Fucking hell! You should try and read the stuff by people who’ve killed themselves! We started with Virginia Woolf, and I only read like two pages of this book about a lighthouse, but I read enough to know why she killed herself: she killed herself because she couldn’t make herself understood. You only have to read one sentence to see that. I sort of identify with her a bit, because I suffer from that sometimes, but her mistake was to go public with it. I mean, it was lucky in a way, because she left a sort of souvenir behind so that people like us could learn from her difficulties and that, but it was bad luck for her. And she had some bad luck, too, if you think about it, because in the olden days anyone could get a book published because there wasn’t so much competition. So you could march into a publishers’ office and go, you know, I want this published, and they’d go, Oh, OK then. Whereas now they’d go, No, dear, go away, no one will understand you. Try pilates or salsa dancing instead.
JJ was the only one who thought it was brilliant, so I had a go at him, and he had a go back because I didn’t like it. He was all, Is it because your daddy reads books? Is that why you come on like such a dork? Which was an easy one to answer, because Daddy doesn’t read books, bad luck, and I told him so. And then I said, Is it because you didn’t go to school? Is that why you think all books are great even when they’re shit? Because some people are like that, aren’t they? You’re not allowed to say anything about books because they’re books, and books are, you know, God. Anyway, he didn’t like that much, which means I got him right where it hurts. He said that he could see that what was going to happen to our reading group was that I would wreck it, and how had he been so stupid as to expect anything else? And I was like, I’m not going to wreck anything. If a book’s shit, I’ll say so. And he went, Yeah, but you’re gonna say they’re all shit, aren’t you, because you’re so fucking contrary, sorry Maureen. And I said, Yeah, and you’re gonna say they’re all great, because you’re such a creep. And he said, They are all great, and he went through all these people we were supposed to be talking about in the club – Sylvia Plath, Primo Levi, Hemingway. So I said, Well what’s the point of doing the reading club if you know in advance they’re all great? What’s fun about that? And he said, It’s not Pop Idol, man. You don’t vote for the best one. They’re all good, and we accept that, and we talk about their ideas. And I was like, well if she’s anything to go by, I don’t accept they’re all great. In fact I now accept the opposite. And JJ got really worked up about that, and there was some unpleasantness then, and Martin stepped in and we decided not to do any more books for a while, in other words ever. That was when we decided to have a go at musical suicide instead. Maureen had never heard of Kurt Cobain, can you believe it?
I do think. I know no one believes it, but I do. It’s just that my way of thinking is different from everyone else’s. Before I think, I have to get angry and maybe a bit violent, which I can see is sort of annoying for everyone else, but tough shit. Anyway, that night, in bed, I thought about JJ, and what he’d said about how I hated books because Daddy read them. And it’s true what I said, that he doesn’t, not really, although because of his job he has to pretend that he does.
Jen was a reader, though. She loved her books, but they scared me. They scared me when she was around, and they scare me even more now. What was in them? What did they say to her, when she was unhappy and listening only to them and to no one else – not her friends, not her sister, no one? I got out of bed and went into her room, which has been left exactly as it was on the day she left. (People are always doing that in films, and you think, Yeah, right, like you don’t want a guest bedroom, or somewhere to put all your crap. But you try going in there and fucking everything up.) And there they all are: The Secret History, Catch-22, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye, No Logo, The Bell Jar (which is a coincidence, or maybe not, because that was one of the books JJ wanted us to read), Crime and Punishment, 1984, Good Places to Go When You Want To Disappear… That was just a joke, that last one.
I don’t think I was ever going to be a big reader, because she was the brainy one, not me, but I’m sure I would have been better at it if she hadn’t put me off by disappearing. It wasn’t the first time I’d been in her room, and it wouldn’t be the last, I knew, and the books all sit there and look at me, and what I hate most is knowing that one of them might help me to understand. I don’t mean that I’ll find some sentence she’s underlined that will give me a clue about where she is, although I looked, a while ago. I flicked through, just in case she’d put like an exclamation mark by the word ‘Wales’, or a ring around ‘Texas’. I just mean that if I read everything she loved, and everything that took her attention in those last few months, then I’d get some picture of where her head was at. I don’t even know whether these books are serious or sad or scary. And you’d think I’d want to find out, wouldn’t you, considering as how much I loved her and everything. But I don’t. I can’t. I can’t because I’m too lazy, too stupid, and I can’t even make the effort because something stops me. They just sit there looking at me, day after day, and one day I know I’ll put them all in a big pile and burn them.
So, no, I’m not a big reader.
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