“I’m not going to be taken in. Get lost.”
“What have I done now? Fucking hell.”
“You’re pretending to be a remorseful human being.”
“What does «remorseful» mean?”
“It means you’re sorry.”
“For what?”
“Go away.”
“For what?”
“Jess, I want a holiday. Most of all, I want a holiday from you.”
“So you want me to get pissed up and take drugs.”
“Yes. I want that very much.”
“Yeah, right. And if I do I’ll get a bollocking.”
“Nope. No bollocking. Just go away.”
“I’m bored.”
“So go and find JJ or Maureen.”
“They’re boring.”
“And I’m not?”
“Which celebrities have you met? Have you met Eminem?”
“No.”
“You have, but you won’t tell me.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”
I left some money on the table, got up and walked out. Jess followed me down the street. “What about a game of pool?”
“No.”
“Sex?”
“No.”
“You don’t fancy me?”
“No,”
“Some men do.”
“Have sex with them, then. Jess, I’m sorry to say it, but I think our relationship is over.”
“Not if I just follow you around all day it isn’t.”
“And you think that would work in the long term?”
“I don’t care about the long term. What about what my dad said about looking out for me? And I’d have thought you’d want to. I could replace the daughters you’ve lost. And that way you could find inner peace, see? There are loads of films like that.”
She offered this last observation matter-of-factly, as if it were somehow indicative of the truth of the scenario she’d imagined, rather than the opposite.
“What about the sex you were offering? How would that fit in with you replacing the daughters I’ve lost?”
“This would be a different, you know, thing. Route. A different way to go.”
We passed a ghastly looking bar called “New York City”.
“Thats where I got thrown out for fighting,” said Jess proudly. “They’ll kill me if I try to go in again.”
As if to illustrate the point, a grizzled-looking owner was standing in the doorway with a murderous look on his face.
“I need a pee. Don’t go anywhere.”
I walked into New York City, found a lavatory somewhere in the Lower East Side, put the TV pages of the Express over the seat, sat down and bolted the door. For the next hour or two I could hear her yelling at me through the wall, but eventually the yelling stopped; I presumed she’d gone, but I stayed in there anyway, just in case. It was eleven in the morning when I bolted the door, and three in the afternoon when I came out. I didn’t resent the time. It was that sort of holiday.
JJ
The last band I was in broke up after a show at the Hope and Anchor in Islington, just a few blocks from where my apartment is now. We knew we were breaking up before we went on stage, but we hadn’t talked about it. We’d played in Manchester the night before, to a very small crowd, and on the way down to London we’d all been a little snappy, but mostly just morose and quiet. It felt exactly the same as when you break up with a woman you love—the sick feeling in the stomach, the knowledge that nothing you can say will make any fucking difference—or, if it does, it won’t make any difference for any longer than like five minutes. It’s weirder with a band, because you kind of know that you won’t lose touch with the people the way you lose touch with a girlfriend. I could have sat in a bar with all three of them the next night without arguing, but the band would still have ceased to exist. It was more than the four of us; it was a house, and we were the people in it, and we’d sold it, so it wasn’t ours any more. I’m talking metaphorically here, obviously, because no one would have given us a fucking dime for it.
Anyway, after the show at the Hope and Anchor—and the show had an unhappy intensity to it, like a desperate break-up fuck—we walked into this shitty little dressing room, and sat down in a line, and then Eddie said, “That feels like it.” And he did this thing that was so unlike him, so not just like Eddie: he reached out either side, and took my hand and Jesse’s hand, and squeezed. And Jesse took Billy’s hand, just so that we’d all be joined for one last time, and Billy said, “Fuck you, queer boy,” and stood up real quick, which kind of tells you all you need to know about drummers.
I had only known my holiday companions for a few weeks, but there was the same kind of sick feeling on the way from the hotel to the airport. There was a break-up coming, you could smell it, and no one was saying anything. And it was for the same reason, which was that we’d taken things as far as we could, and there was nowhere for us to go. That’s why everyone breaks up, I guess, bands, friends, marriages, whatever. Parties, weddings, anything.
It’s funny, but when the band split, one of the reasons I felt sick was because I was worried about the other guys. What the fuck were they going to do, you know? None of us were over-qualified. Billy wasn’t real big on reading and writing, if you hear what I’m saying, and Eddie was too, like, pugilistic to hold down a job for long, and Jesse liked his spliff… The one person I had no real concerns about was me. I was going to be OK. I was smart, and stable, and I had a girlfriend, even though I knew I’d miss making music every fucking day of my life, I could still be something and someone without it. So what happens? A few weeks later, Billy and Jesse get a gig with a band back home whose rhythm section had walked out on them, Eddie goes to work for his dad, and I’m delivering pizzas and nearly jumping off a fucking roof.
So this time around, I was determined not to fret about my fellow band members. They’d be OK, I told myself. It didn’t look that way, maybe, but they’d survived so far, just about, and it wasn’t my problem anyway.
In the taxi to the airport we talked some about what we’d done, and what we’d read, and the first thing we were going to do when we got home, and shit like that, and on the plane we all dozed, because it was an early flight. And then we got the tube from Heathrow to King’s Cross, and took a bus from there. It was on the bus that we started to recognize that maybe we wouldn’t be hanging out so much.
“Why not?” said Jess.
“Because we have nothing in common,” said Martin. “The holiday proved that.”
“I thought it went OK.”
Martin snorted. “We didn’t speak to each other.”
“You were hiding in a toilet most of the time,” said Jess.
“And why was that, do you think? Because we’re soul mates? Or because ours is not one of my most fulfilling relationships?”
“Yeah, and what is your most fulfilling relationship?”
“What’s yours?”
Jess thought for a moment, and then shrugged.
“With you lot,” she said.
There was a silence that was long enough for us to see the truth of Jess’s observation as it applied to her. And luckily for us, Martin spoke up just as we were starting to see how it might possibly apply to us too.
“Yes. Well. It shouldn’t be, shouldn’t it?”
“Are you giving me the push?”
“If you want to put it like that. Jess, we got through the holiday. and now it’s time to go our separate ways.”
“What about Valentine’s Day?”
“We can meet on Valentine’s Day, if you want. We said we’d do that.”
“Up on the roof?”
“Do you still think you might throw yourself off ?”