Read Online A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby - Free Book Online

nuit
,’ said the driver. ‘All the night.’
    ‘Bad luck,’ said Jess.
    The driver laughed mirthlessly.
    ‘Yes. Bad luck.’
    ‘Does your missus mind?’
    ‘Sorry?’
    ‘Your missus.
La femme
. Does she care? About you working all night?’
    ‘No, she don’t care. Not now. Not in the place where is she.’
    Anyone with an emotional antenna could have felt the mood in the cab turn real dark. Anyone with any life experience could have figured out that this was a man with a story, and that this story, whatever it was, was unlikely to get us into the party mood. Anyone with any sense would have stopped right there.
    ‘Oh,’ said Jess. ‘Bad woman, eh?’
    I winced, and I’m sure the others did, too. Bigmouth strikes again.
    ‘Not bad. Dead.’ He said this flat, like he was just correcting her on a point of fact – as if in his line of work, ‘bad’ and ‘dead’ were two addresses that people got confused.
    ‘Oh.’
    ‘Yes. Bad men kill her. Kill her, kill her mother, kill her father.’
    ‘Oh.’
    ‘Yes. In my country.’
    ‘Right.’
    And right there was the place Jess chose to stop: exactly at the point where her silence would show her up. So we drove on, thinking our thoughts. And I would bet a million bucks that our thoughts all contained, somewhere in their tangle and swirl, a version of the same questions: Why hadn’t we seen him up there? Or had he been up and come down, like us? Would he sneer, if we told him our troubles? How come he turned out to be so fucking…
dogged
?
    When we got to where we were going, Martin gave him a very large tip, and he was pleased and grateful, and called us his friends. We would have liked to be his friends, but he probably wouldn’t have cared for us much if he got to know us.
    Maureen didn’t want to come in with us, but we led her through the door and up the stairs into a room that was the closest thing I’ve seen to a New York loft since I’ve been here. It would have cost a fortune in NYC, which means it would have cost a fortune plus another thirty per cent in London. It was still packed, even at four in the morning, and it was full of my least favorite people: fucking art students. I mean, Jess had already warned us, but it still came as a shock. All those woolly hats, and moustaches with parts of them missing, all those new tattoos and plastic shoes… I mean, I’m a liberal guy, and I didn’t want Bush to bomb Iraq, and I like a toke as much as the next guy, but these people still fill my heart with fear and loathing, mostly because I know they wouldn’t have liked my band. When we played a college town, and we walked out in front of a crowd like this, I knew we were going to have a hard time. They don’t like real music, these people. They don’t like the Ramones or the Temptations or the ’Mats; they like D J Bleepy and his stupid fucking bleeps. Or else they all pretend that they’re fucking gangstas, and listen to hip-hop about hos and guns.
    So I was in a bad mood from the get-go. I was worried that I was going to get into a fight, and I’d even decided what that fight wouldbe about: I’d be defending either Martin or Maureen from the sneers of some motherfucker with a goatee, or some woman with a moustache. But it never happened. The weird thing was that Martin in his suit and his fake tan, and Maureen in her raincoat and sensible shoes, they somehow blended right in. They looked so straight that they looked, you know,
out there
. Martin and his TV hair could have been in Kraftwerk, and Maureen could have been like a real weird version of Mo Tucker from the Velvet Underground. Me, I was wearing a pair of faded black pants, a leather jacket and an old Gitanes T-shirt, and I felt like a fucking freak.
    There was only one incident that made me think I might have to break someone’s nose. Martin was standing there drinking wine straight out of a bottle, and these two guys started staring at him.
    ‘Martin Sharp! You know, off of