Excerpt of A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby
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MARTIN.
Can I explain why I wanted to jump off the top of a tower block? Of
course I can explain why I wanted to jump off the top of a tower
block. I'm not a bloody idiot. I can explain it because it wasn't
inexplicable: it was a logical decision, the product of proper
thought. It wasn't even very serious thought, either. I don't mean it
was whimsical - I just meant that it wasn't terribly complicated, or
agonised. Put it this way: say you were, I don't know, an assistant
bank manager, in Guildford. And you'd been thinking of emigrating, and
then you were offered the job of managing a bank in Sydney. Well, even
though it's a pretty straightforward decision, you'd still have to
think for a bit, wouldn't you? You'd at least have to work out whether
you could bear to move, whether you could leave your friends and
colleagues behind, whether you could uproot your wife and kids. You
might sit down with a bit of paper and draw up a list of pros and
cons. You know:
CONS - Aged parents, friends, golf club.
PROS - more money, better quality of life (house with pool,
barbecue etc), sea, sunshine, no left-wing councils banning Baa-Baa
Black Sheep, no EEC directives banning British sausages etc. It's no
contest, is it? The golf club! Give me a break. Obviously your aged
parents give you pause for thought, but that's all it is - a pause,
and a brief one, too. You'd be on the phone to the travel agents
within ten minutes.
Well, that was me. There simply weren't enough regrets, and lots
and lots of reasons to jump. The only things in my 'cons' list were
the kids, but I couldn't imagine Cindy letting me see them again
anyway. I haven't got any aged parents, and I don't play golf. Suicide
was my Sydney. And I say that with no offence to the good people of
Sydney intended.
MAUREEN
I told him I was going to a New Year's Eve party. I told him in
October. I don't know whether people send out invitations to New
Year's Eve parties in October or not. Probably not. (How would I know?
I haven't been to one since 1984. June and Brian across the road had
one, just before they moved. And even then I only nipped in for an
hour or so, after he'd gone to sleep.) But I couldn't wait any longer.
I'd been thinking about it since May or June, and I was itching to
tell him. Stupid, really. He doesn't understand, I'm sure he doesn't.
They tell me to keep talking to him, but you can see that nothing goes
in. And what a thing to be itching about anyway! But it goes to show
what I had to look forward to, doesn't it?
The moment I told him, I wanted to go straight to confession. Well,
I'd lied, hadn't I? I'd lied to my own son. Oh, it was only a tiny,
silly lie: I'd told him months in advance that I was going to a party,
a party I'd made up. I'd made it up properly, too. I told him whose
party it was, and why I'd been invited, and why I wanted to go, and
who else would be there. (It was Bridgid's party, Bridgid from the
Church. And I'd been invited because her sister was coming over from
Cork, and her sister had asked after me in a couple of letters. And I
wanted to go because Bridgid's sister had taken her mother-in-law to
Lourdes, and I wanted to find out all about it, with a view to taking
Matty one day.) But confession wasn't possible, because I knew I would
have to repeat the sin, the lie, over and over as the year came to an
end. Not only to Matty, but to the people at the nursing home,
and....Well, there isn't anyone else, really. Maybe someone at the
Church, or someone in a shop. It's almost comical, when you think
about it. If you spend day and night looking after a sick child,
there's very little room for sin, and I hadn't done anything worth
confessing for donkey's years. And I went from that to sinning so
terribly that I couldn't even talk to the priest, because I was going
to go on sinning and sinning until the day I died, when I would commit
the biggest sin of all. (And why is it the biggest sin of all? All
your life you're told that you'll be going to this marvellous place
when you pass on. And the one thing you can do to get you there a bit
quicker is something that stops you getting there at all. Oh, I can
see that it's a kind of queue-jumping. But if someone jumps the queue
at the Post Office, people tut. Or sometimes they say, 'Excuse me, I
was here first.' They don't say, 'You will be consumed by hellfire for
all eternity.' That would be a bit strong.) It didn't stop me from
going to the Church, or from taking Mass. But I only kept going
because people would think there was something wrong if I stopped.
Copyright Nick Hornby 2005. All rights reserved. Reproduced by the permission of Putnam Publishing. No part of this book maybe reproduced without written permission from the publisher.
