Страница 60 из 62
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 wi
“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 go
“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.