A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby Page B

street-level laws no longer applied. Even though our problems had driven us up there, it was as if they had somehow, like Daleks, been unable to climb the stairs. And now we had to go back down and face them again. But it didn’t feel like we had any choice. Even though we had nothing in common beyond that one thing, the one thing was enough to make us feel that there wasn’t anything else – not money, or class, or education, or age, or cultural interests – that was worth a damn; we’d formed a nation, suddenly, in that couple of hours, and for the time being we wanted only to be with our new compatriots. I had hardly exchanged a word with Maureen, and I didn’t even know her surname; but she understood more about me than my wife had done in the last five years of our marriage. Maureen knew that I was unhappy, because of where she’d met me, and that meant she knew the most important thing about me; Cindy always professed herself baffled by everything I did or said.
    It would have been neat if I’d fallen in love with Maureen, wouldn’t it? I can even see the newspaper headline: ‘SHARP TURNED!’ And then there’d be some story about how Old Sleaze-bag had seen the error of his ways and decided to settle down with nice homely older woman, rather than chase around after schoolgirls and C-list actresses with breast enlargements. Yeah, right. Dream on.
JJ
    While Jess called everyone she knew to find out where this guy Chas was at, I was leaning on the wall, looking through the wire at the city, and trying to figure out what I’d listen to at that exact moment, if I owned an iPod or a Discman. The first thing that came to mind was Jonathan Richman’s ‘Abominable Snowman in the Market’, maybe because it was sweet and silly, and reminded me of a time in life when I could afford to be that way. And then I started humming the Cure’s ‘In Between Days’, which made a little more sense. It wasn’t today and it wasn’t tomorrow, and it wasn’t last year and it wasn’t next year, and anyway the whole roof thing was an in-between kind of a limbo, seeing as we hadn’t yet made up our minds where our immortal souls were headed.
    Jess spent ten minutes talking to sources close to Chas and came back with a best guess that he was at a party in Shoreditch. We walked down fifteen flights of stairs, through the thud of dub and the stink of piss, and then emerged back on to the street, where we stood shivering in the cold while waiting for a black cab to show. Nobody said much, besides Jess, who talked enough for all of us. She told us whose party it was, and who would probably be there.
    ‘It will be all Tessa and that lot.’
    ‘Ah,’ said Martin. ‘That lot.’
    ‘And Alfie and Tabitha and the posse who go down Ocean on Saturdays. And Acid-Head Pete and the rest of the whole graphic design crew.’
    Martin groaned; Maureen looked seasick.
    A young African guy driving a shitty old Ford pulled up alongside us. He wound down the passenger window and leaned over.
    ‘Where you wanna go?’
    ‘Shoreditch.’
    ‘Thirty pounds.’
    ‘Fuck off,’ said Jess.
    ‘Shut up,’ said Martin, and got in the front seat. ‘My treat,’ he said.
    The rest of us got in the back.
    ‘Happy New Year,’ said the driver.
    None of us said anything.
    ‘Party?’ said the driver.
    ‘Do you know Acid-Head Pete at all?’ Martin asked him. ‘Well, we’re hoping to run into him. Should be jolly.’
    ‘“Jolly”,’ Jess snorted. ‘Why are you such a tosser?’ If you were going to joke around with Jess, and use words ironically, then you’d have to give her plenty of advance warning.
    It was maybe four-thirty in the morning by now, but there were tons of people around, in cars and cabs and on foot. Everyone seemed to be in a group. Sometimes people waved to us; Jess always waved back.
    ‘How about you?’ Jess said to the driver. ‘You working all night? Or are you gonna go and have a few somewhere?’
    ‘Work
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