Because it might be interesting. We might learn something. We might see a way out, kind of thing. And I have to admit I had a sort of plan. My plan was that they'd help me find Chas, and Chas and I would get back together, and I'd feel better. But they made me wait, because they gucci handbags wanted Maureen to go first. Chapter 13 MAUREEN   I think they picked me because I hadn't really said anything, and I hadn't rubbed anyone up the wrong way yet. And also, maybe, because I was more mysterious than the others. Martin everyone seemed to know about from the newspapers. And Jess, God love her… We'd only known her for half an hour, but you could tell that this was a girl who had problems. My own feeling about JJ, without knowing anything about him, was that he might have been a gay person, because he had long hair and spoke American. A lot of Americans are gay people, aren't they? I know they didn't invent gayness, because they say that was the Greeks. But they helped bring it back into fashion. Being gay was a bit like the Olympics: it disappeared in ancient times, and then they brought it back in the twentieth century. Anyway, I didn't know anything about gays, so I just presumed they were all unhappy and wanted to kill themselves. But me… You couldn't really tell anything about me from looking at me, so I think they were curious. I didn't mind talking, because I knew I didn't need to say very much. None of these people would have wanted my life. I doubted whether they'd understand how I'd put up with it for as long as I had. It's always the toilet bit that upsets people. Whenever I've had to moan before - when I need another prescription for my anti-depressants, for example - I always mention the toilet bit, the cleaning up that needs doing most days. It's funny, because it's the bit I've got used to. I can't get used to the idea that my life is finished, pointless, too hard, completely without hope or colour; but the mopping up doesn't really worry me any more. That's always what gets the doctor reaching for his pen, though. 'Oh, yeah,' Jess said when I'd finished. 'That's a no-brainer. Don't change your mind. You'd only regret it.' 'Some people cope,' said Martin. 'Who?' said Jess. 'We had a woman on the show whose husband had been in a coma for twenty-five years.' 'And that was her reward, was it? Going on a breakfast TV show?' 'No. I'm just saying.' 'What are you just saying?' 'I'm just saying it can be done.' You're not saying why, though, are you?' 'Maybe she loved him.' They spoke quickly, Martin and Jess and JJ. Like people nike shox clearance in a soap opera, bang bang bang. Like people who know what to say. I could never have spoken that quickly, not then, anyway; it made me realize that I'd hardly spoken at all for twenty-odd years. And the person I spoke to most couldn't speak back. 'What was there to love?' Jess was saying. 'He was a vegetable. Not even an awake vegetable. A vegetable in a coma.' 'He wouldn't be a vegetable if he wasn't in a coma, would he?' said Martin. 'I love my son,' I said. I didn't want them to think I didn't. 'Yes,' said Martin. 'Of course you do. We didn't mean to imply otherwise.' 'Do you want us to kill him for you?' said Jess. 'I'll go down there tonight if you want. Before I kill myself. I don't mind. No skin off my nose. And it's not like he's got much to live for, is it? If he could speak, he'd probably thank me for it, poor sod.' My eyes filled with tears, and JJ noticed. 'What are you, a f— idiot?' he said to Jess. 'Look what you've done.' 'So-rry,' said Jess. 'Just an idea.' But that wasn't why I was crying. I was crying because all I wanted in the world, the only thing that would make me want to live, was for Matty to die. And knowing why I was crying just made me cry more. Chapter 14 MARTIN   Everyone bloody knew everything about me, so I didn't see theNike Shox Shoes point of this lark, and I told them that. 'Oh, come on, man,' said JJ, in his irritating American way. It doesn't take long, I find, to be irritated by Yanks. I know they're our friends and everything, and they respect success over there, unlike the ungrateful natives of this bloody chippy dump, but all that cool-daddio stuff gets on my wick. I mean, you should have seen him. You'd have thought he was on the roof to promote his latest movie. You certainly wouldn't think he'd been puttering around Archway delivering pizzas. 'We just want to hear your side of it,' said Jess. 'There isn't a "my side". I was a bloody idiot and I'm paying the price.' 'So you don't want to defend yourself? Because you're among friends here,' said JJ. 'She just spat at me,' I pointed out. 'What kind of a friend is that?' 'Oh, don't be such a baby,' said Jess. 'My friends are always spitting at me. I never take it personally.' 'Maybe you should. Perhaps that's how your friends intend it to be taken.' Jess snorted. 'If I took it personally, I wouldn't have any friends left.' We let that one hang in the air. 'So what do you want to know, that you don't know already?' There are two sides to every story,' said Jess. 'We only know the bad side.' 'I didn't know she was fifteen,' I said. 'She told me she was eighteen. She looked eighteen.' That was it. That was the good side of the story. 'So if she'd been, like, six months older you wouldn't be up here?' 'I don't suppose I would, no. Because I wouldn't haveGucci Shoes for Men broken the law. Wouldn't have gone to prison. Wouldn't have lost my job, my wife wouldn't have found out…' 'So you're saying it was just bad luck.' 'I'd say there was a certain degree of culpability involved.' This was, I need hardly tell you, an attempt at dry understatement; I didn't know then that Jess is at her happiest wallowing in the marshland of the bleeding obvious. 'Just because you've swallowed a fucking dictionary, it doesn't mean you've done nothing wrong,' said Jess. 'That's what "culpability"…' 'Because some married men wouldn't have shagged her no matter how old she was. And you've got kids and all, haven't you?' 'I have indeed.' 'So bad luck's got nothing to do with it.' Oh, for fuck's sake. Why d'you think I've been dangling my feet over the ledge, you moron? I screwed up. I'm not trying to make excuses for myself. I feel so wretched I want to die.' 'I should hope so.' 'Thanks. And thanks for introducing thisGucci Shoes for Women exercise, too. Very helpful. Very… curative.' Another polysyllabic word, another dirty look. I'm interested in something,' said JJ. 'Go on.' 'Why is it easier to like leap into the void than to face up to what you've done?' 'This is facing up to what I've done.' 'People are always fucking young girls and leaving their wives and kids. They don't all jump off of buildings, man.' 'No. But like Jess says, maybe they should.' 'Really? You think anyone who makes a mistake of this kind should die? Woah. That's some heavy shit,' said JJ. Did I really think that? Maybe I did. Or maybe I had done. As some of you might know, I'd written things in newspapers which said exactly that, more or less. This was before my fall from grace, naturally. I'd called for the Gucci Hats sale restoration of the death penalty, for example. I'd called for resignations and chemical castrations and prison sentences and public humiliations and penances of every kind. And maybe I had meant it when I'd said that men who couldn't keep their things in their trousers should be… Actually, I can't remember what I thought the appropriate punishment was now for philanderers and serial adulterers. I shall have to look up the column in question. But the point is that I was practising what I preached. I hadn't been able to keep my thing in my trousers, so now I had to jump. I was a slave to my own logic. That was the price you had to pay if you were a tabloid columnist who crossed the line you'd drawn. 'Not every mistake, no. But maybe this one.' 'Jesus,' said JJ. 'You're real tough on yourself.' 'It's not justGucci Backpack sale that, anyway. It's the public thing. The humiliation. The enjoyment of the humiliation. The TV show on cable that's watched by three people. Everything. I've… I've run out of room. I can't see any way forward or back.' There was a thoughtful silence, for about ten seconds. 'Right,' said Jess. 'My turn.' M91625 M91626 M91679 M93541-1 M93541 M93542