Theyre Mattys, the posters, not mine. He doesnt know theyre his, of course, but they are; I chose them for him. I knew that the girl was called Buffy, because thats what it said on the poster, but I didnt really know who Buffy was; I just thought it would be nice for Matty to have an attractive young woman around the place, because hes that age now. And I knew that the black fella played for Arsenal, but I only caught his first name, Paddy. I took advice from John at the church, who goes along to Highbury every week, and he said everyone loved Paddy, so I asked him if hed bring me back a picture for my lad next time he went to a game. Hes a nice man, John, and he bought a great big picture of Paddy celebrating a goal, and he didnt even want paying for it, but things got a little awkward afterwards.

Sort of...

LINDA: An informal angel.

Hidden depths.

Im just giving you extra information, so you can get a better picture of the kind of person I am.) LINDA: And do you intend to spread that message? ME: Yeah. Course. Thats one of the reasons we want to do this interview. And if any of your readers are like world leaders or generals or terrorists or whatever, then they should know that God is not a happy bunny at the moment. Hes well pissed off with that side of things.

Who was it, then? Never mind.

LINDA: How high?

Which is something I personally believe.

The paper arranged for someone from the care home to sit for Matty, and we met Linda in the cafe where wed had breakfast on New Years morning. We had our photos taken - mostly group shots, but then they took one or two more outside, with us pointing at the sky and our jaws unhinged with wonder. They didnt end up using those, probably because one or two of us overdid it a little, and one of us wouldnt do it at all. And then, after the shoot, Linda asked us questions.

You know how kids do. Stuff everywhere.

Ah, to be young and idealistic and principled! I said. Anti-globalization, pro-cleaner, eh? Yeah, Im really going to be lectured by you two jerks. Plus theres the other thing. The Jen thing. They worry.

Now what? Just sounds funny, hearing a Yank say "flipping" instead of… you know what.

Maureen looked close to tears. Oh, for Gods sake, Jess, I said.

You could just see like the buildings on the other side of him. Oh, yeah - plus, he was hovering above the roof.

She was gone a while, and she came back grinning all over her stupid face, holding a couple of the posters.

So when the angel was hovering in front of you, Martin, what did you think? Think? Martin repeated.

Right. Sorry, Maureen. OK, "You are a pig" when youre not a pig.

LINDA: And did you know immediately he wasnt a human man?

He called me at home and went off on one for about ten minutes. But I knew he was going to be all right about it, because Dad answered the phone, and Martin never said anything to him. If hed said anything to Dad, then the story would have come apart. It needed the four of us to stick to our guns, and as long as we did that, we could say wed seen whatever we wanted to have seen. The thing is, it was too good an idea to waste, wasnt it? And they knew that, which is why I thought theyd come round to it in the end - which they did, sort of. And for me, it was our first big test as a group. They all had a straightforward choice to make: were they on my side or not? And to be honest, if theyd decided that they werent, I doubt whether Id have had anything more to do with them. It would have said a lot about them as people, none of it good.

Similes and metaphors.

Ive been thinking about this. How about if we saw something? said Jess.

In one hand she had the poster of the girl, and in the other the poster of the black fella, the footballer.

No ones stopping you, said Jess. But youve got to make it more interesting. Thats why we drift off and talk about biscuits.

Bit.

LINDA: You must have been frightened out of your wits.

ME: Hes not all that, Matt Damon. But, yeah.

Metaphor.

We do all right.

I was pleased with that. I got her up to five grand in the end. I had to promise that shed have a chance to speak to everybody, though.

LINDA: So. A handsome angel who looked like Matt Damon.

Yeah, well, it didnt happen yesterday, did it? We were sorry anyway, said JJ wearily. Conceding the moral high ground to Jess simply meant that she could piss all over everyone until she got thrown off again.

Martin winced, like the angels refusal to put his feet on the ground somehow made things more embarrassing for him.

ME: I dont know. Radiohead or someone like that.

Yeah. Exactly. Shakespeare invented them, didnt he? Thats why he was a genius.

ME: Yeah.

What if we dont want them to forget about us? said Jess.

ME: Oh, yeah. Course. He saw it… he saw it more than any of us.

I dont think he meant "flipping" like "flipping heck", said Martin. I think he meant flipping as in turning them over. Thats what they call it.

Well, said Martin. I havent been presenting the show for a while now, remember. So it would have been a waste of time asking him.

No.

This all began years ago, when I decided to decorate his bedroom.

LINDA: Yes, when. I mean, how close to… to jumping were you?

Not what youd expect, I said. And Linda went, What, no wings or haloes, Jess? And she laughed - like, What kind of九九藏书网 berk would say theyd seen an angel with wings and a halo? So I knew Id made the right decision.

Jess looked dubious. I dont know about that, she said. But you know about papers and that, Martin. We could make some money, couldnt we? Has it occurred to you that Ive had enough trouble with the papers? Oh, its always about you, isnt it? said Jess. What about if theres a few quid in it for us? But whats the story? said JJ. Theres no story. We went up, we came down, thats it. People must do that all the time.

And Im worried it will kill me.

We tend to book mainly showbiz stuff. Stand-up comedians, soap stars… The odd sportsman.

Oh, hes a big fan of… Just do as youre told and put them back, said Martin. Put them back or get out. How much of a bitch do you really want to be? One day, I thought, Ill learn to say that for myself.

Yeah. Exactly. Thats why theyd be interested in me. I could even play it up a bit, if you like.

LINDA: Wow. So you were standing on the ledge? All of you?

And you all saw it?

We do.

But you live with him? So? How can you stick it, man? JJ asked her.

So when this figure began hovering… Hovering? Is that right? Hovering, confirmed Jess. Like I said, he hovered too high at first, because of being out of practice, but then he found the right level.

Do you even know who these people are? she said.

(I was just making this stuff up as I went along. I mean, you know already I was making it up. But seeing as how Id called her without thinking any of it through, I thought I was doing really well. She seemed to like it, anyway.) LINDA: Amazing. ME: Yeah. It really was. LINDA: So what did he say?

Well, Im sure youve heard of actresses, said Martin. Weve had them on, too.

(That last bit, the Which I personally believe bit, wasnt part of the play.

What the hell is our message? Well. Thats sort of up to us, isnt it? How was one supposed to argue with a mind like this? The three of us never managed to find a way, so we contented ourselves with ridicule and sarcasm, and the afternoon ended with an unspoken agreement that as three-quarters of us hadnt really enjoyed our brief moment of media exposure, we would allow the current interest in our mental health to dwindle away to nothing. And then, a couple of hours after I got home, there was a phone call from Theo, asking me why I hadnt told him that Id seen an angel.

LINDA: So you all turned around… ME: Yeah. We all turned around, and he said… LINDA: Sorry. What was he wearing?

We didnt think much, did we? said Jess. We were too stunned.

They werent happy. Martin was the worst: he went up the fucking wall.

But say if we get on telly and get a chance to, you know, spread our message? We all stared at her.

Why the hell would we want them to remember? I asked her.

OK, all right. Look, theres nothing else for me. Im qualified for nothing. I didnt graduate from high school. I just had the band, and now its gone, and I didnt make a cent out of it, and Im looking at a life of flipping burgers.

So youre saying you wouldnt have had him on. Once shed started this line of questioning, Linda seemed kind of reluctant to let it drop.

Sorry. Sorry. I didnt know if we had the same swearing rules if it was only for discussion about grammar and that.

Whatever. Jeez. And a few weeks before Christmas my band finally split up for good. And soon after we split, I lost my girl. She was English.

Well, he - he - was an angel.

Id thought about this. The stupid thing to say would have been that he - Id decided he was a he, because of Gabriel - looked like a church angel, with wings and all that. That would give off the wrong signals, I thought.

Thats Mick Jagger, isnt it, the Rolling Stones? Maureen asked. They were quite good, werent they? They did well for themselves. Mick Jaggers not sitting here eating stale Custard Creams like JJ, is he? They were new right before Christmas, said Maureen. Maybe I didnt put the lid back on the biscuit tin properly.

Cant we talk about what were supposed to be talking about? Which is what, exactly? About what were going to do. About the papers and all that.

Any girl could be an angel. JJ again.

So maybe he would have gone on that. She chuckled encouragingly again.

Must be a strange thing to have to get used to.

Got used to it now.

We were sorry to hear about your sister, said Maureen.

ME: Yeah. Smart-casual, anyway.

(You couldnt say anything without her asking a question. I said Radiohead because they dont look like anything much. Theyre just blokes, arent they?) ME: I dont know. Or Blur. Or… Whos that guy? In that film? Hes not the one whos not married to Jennifer Lopez, hes the other one, and they won an Oscar, because he was good at maths even though he was only a cleaner… The blond one. Matt.

No, I get it, said Jess.

Any girl, anyway. Me, or even Maureen.

Thats just what happens to everyone, said Martin. Its called "getting older". I felt like that even before Id been to prison. Even before I slept with that girl. Its probably why I slept with her, come to think of it.

LINDA: So his feet were above your heads.

Thats pathetic. I see why you came out with all that crap about the disease now. Youd rather die than not be in a band that sounds like the Rolling Stones? Id be the opposite. Id rather die if I was. Do people still like them in A九-九-藏-书-网merica? No one does here.

You dont know? she snorted. I mean, its not David Letterman, your show, is it? Its not like people are swarming all over you to get on it.

I was starting to think we were losing focus on my issues.

ME: Yeah.

Most distant family members have never met him, and never asked to. All they know about him is just that hes not all there, or theres something not right with him. They dont want to know any more, so they never say, Oh, he can fish? Or, in the case of my Uncle Michael, Oh, he can swim underwater and then look at his watch while hes down there? Theyre just grateful to be told what to do. Matty took over the whole flat, in the end.

She was right. She got it.

What would be something to do? I dunno. I just… I get the feeling that were different. That people would like us, and be interested in us.

ME: Yeah, I suppose. A bit.

OK. Anyway. So which is the one where you say something is something, like "You are a prick" even if youre not actually a prick. As in a penis. Obviously.

Yes.

Oh, said Jess.

Jess snorted.

Thats it, I said. This disease that dries up all the blood in your veins.

I didnt see an angel, said Maureen. When did you see an angel? No one saw an angel, I explained. Jess is proposing that we invent a spiritual experience for financial gain.

Jess smiled sweetly, surprised by the unsought compliment. Thanks, Martin. So are you. And you - theyd want to know how you fucked up your life with the girl. And you, JJ, theyd want to know about pizzas and all that. And Maureen could tell everyone about how shit it is living with Matty. See, wed be like superheroes, the X-Men or whatever. Weve all got some secret superpower.

So she was all, What did this angel look like, Jess? She said Jess a lot, to show that we were friends.

JJ It didnt seem like it was going to be too difficult, at first. OK, none of us was thrilled that Jess had got us into this angel thing, but it didnt seem worth falling out over. Wed grit our teeth, say wed seen an angel, take the money and try and forget it ever happened. But then the next day youre sitting in front of a journalist, and youre all agreeing with a straight face that this fucking angel looked like Matt Damon, and loyalty seemed like the dumbest of all the virtues. It wasnt like you could just go through the motions, either, when youre supposed to have seen an angel. You cant just say, Yeah, blah, angel, whatever. Seeing an angel is clearly a big deal, so youve got to act like its a big deal, with excitement and open-mouthed awe, and its hard to do open-mouthed awe through gritted teeth. Maureen was maybe the one person who could have been convincing, because she believed in that stuff, kind of. But because she believed in it, she was the one who had the most trouble with the lies. Maureen, said Jess patiently and slowly, as if Maureen were simply being dumb, rather than fearing for her immortal soul, Its for five thousand pounds.

ME: No. No tie.

ME: High, man. When I first saw him, I was like, that guy is five metres tall. But when I looked down at his feet, they were a metre above the ground.

The Stones thing… Thats kind of not important. That was just like an illustration. I just meant… songs, guitars, energy.

LINDA: A designer suit?

Ah, yes. "Thing". Le mot juste, as ever.

Yeah? For some reason I suddenly lost patience.

LINDA: A band? Which band?

It doesnt matter whether I know who they are or not, I said. They belong to Matty.

I would have got away with it if Jess hadnt gone to the toilet. But you cant stop people going to the toilet, can you? I was green. It never occurred to me that shed be nosing around where she had no business.

I dont know.

Have you? I asked.

Hed have been the first person on that wed ever heard of, anyway.

Like what? What are we supposed to have seen? OK. How about if we saw an angel? An angel, said JJ flatly. Yeah.

Well, all right, superpower is the wrong word. But, you know. Some thing.

ME: (Becoming fucked off with her going on about metres, but trying not to show it) To begin with. But then he sort of worked out that hed overdone it, and he, you know. Came down a bit. I got the impression that he hadnt done any hovering for a while. He was a bit rusty.

Thats it.

ME: Yeah. He had that sort of air about him, like hed met God personally. It was wicked. LINDA: Thats all he said?

But you must have thought something, Linda said. Even if it was only, Bloody hell, I wonder if I could get him on to Rise and Shine with Penny and Martin. She chuckled encouragingly.

He was only seventy then, said Jess.

LINDA: How?

She shrugged.

Jess did all the talking to begin with, and then Linda got tired of her, and started to ask Martin questions directly.

LINDA: Im sure our readers will find that very thought-provoking.

He was eight, and he still slept in a nursery - clowns on the curtains, bunny rabbits on the frieze round the wall, all the things Id chosen when I was waiting for him and I didnt know what he was. And it was all peeling away, and it looked terrible, and I hadnt done anything about it because it made me think too much about what wasnt happening to him, all the ways he wasnt growing up. What was I going to replace the bunny rabbits with?

Where are we going with this? I said. You really wanna wr９９lｉb.ｎeｔite a piece about why the Angel Matt wasnt a guest on Martins show? Is that what you call him? she said. The Angel Matt? Usually we just call him "The Angel", said Jess. But… Would you mind if Martin answered a couple of questions? Youve somewhere other than here. In a pub, say. asked him loads already, said Jess. Maureen hasnt said anything. JJ hasnt said very much.

For some reason he decided my lad was a little lad, ten or twelve, and he promised to take him to a game. And sometimes on Sunday mornings, when Arsenal had lost on the Saturday, he asked how Matty was taking it, and sometimes when theyd won a big game hed say, Ill bet your lads happy, and so on. And then one Friday morning when I was wheeling Matty back from the shops, we bumped into him. And I could have said nothing, but sometimes you have to admit to yourself and to everyone else, This is Matty. This is my lad. So I did, and John never mentioned Arsenal again after that. I dont miss that on a Sunday morning. There are lots of good reasons to lose your faith.

LINDA: So he was nine feet tall.

LINDA: Of course. Will you be talking to any other newspapers?

I can put a tape on for him, and hope he was listening to it, but what am I going to fill an address book with? I havent even got one of my own.) The jazzy pens, the camera and the Walkman. Lots of watches. Theres a whole unlived teenage life in there.

No, course not. Hes a tosser.

I chose the posters the same as I chose all the other things that Jess had probably been rummaging through, the tapes and the books and the football boots and the computer games and the videos. The diaries and the trendy address books. (Address books! Dear God! Of all the things that spell it out.

She was called Linda, and she was really friendly. I thought she might think it was all a bit weird, but she was very interested and encouraging, really. If she had a fault as a journalist, Id say it was that she was too encouraging, if anything. Too believing and trusting. Youd expect a good journalist to be all, you know, How do I know youre telling the truth, but I could have told her anything and shed have written it down. She was slightly unprofessional, between you and me.

Its not really inventing, is it? said Jess. No? In what sense did we actually see an angel? What do you call it in poems? Im sorry? You know, in poems. And in English Literature. Sometimes you say something is like something and sometimes you say something is something. You know, my love is like a fuck-bloody rose or whatever.

Dont you think about it all the time? JJ asked her.

He was eight, so perhaps trains and rocket ships and maybe even footballers were the right sort of thing for him - but of course he didnt know what any of those things were, what they meant, what they did. But there again, he didnt know what the rabbits were either, or the clowns. So what was I supposed to do? Everything was pretending, wasnt it? The only thing I could do that wasnt make-believe was paint the walls white, get a plain pair of curtains. That would be a way of telling him and me and anyone else who came in that I knew he was a vegetable, a cabbage, and I wasnt trying to hide it. But then, where does it stop? Does that mean you can never buy him a T-shirt with a word on it, or a picture, because hell never read, and he cant make any sense of pictures? And who knows whether he even gets anything out of colours, or patterns? And it goes without saying that talking to him is ridiculous, and smiling at him, and kissing him on the head. Everything I do is pretending, so why not pretend properly?

Yeah? Course I do. Youre fucked. She waved an apologetic hand in Maureens direction, like a tennis player acknowledging a lucky net cord. You thought you were going to be someone, but now its obvious youre nobody. You havent got as much talent as you thought you had, and there was no plan B, and you got no skills and no education, and now youre looking at forty or fifty years of nothing. Less than nothing, probably. Thats pretty heavy. Thats worse than having the brain thing, because what you got now will take a lot longer to kill you. Youve got the choice of a slow painful death, or a quick merciful one.

ME: Yeah… LINDA: It was a wonder you didnt fall off.

LINDA: The angel looked like Matt Damon?

So whose are these then? she said.

Im sure that wont be necessary, I said quickly, on behalf of the three of us, and indeed on behalf of the entire population of Britain. Youre fine as you are.

Calmly. He had this like inner wisdom. You could tell he was a messenger from God. LINDA: Did he say that?

Thats it? said Jess.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, something turned us back. Something saved our lives. Why not an angel? Because there wasnt one.

Youd heard of him before, had you? said Martin. This particular angel? The one who looked like Matt Damon? Ive heard of angels, she said.

What is this nonsense? Can you hear yourself, Jess? What have I said now? We didnt see an angel, literally or metaphorically. And, incidentally, seeing something metaphorically, whatever that means, is not the same as seeing something. With your eyes. Which, as I understand it, is what youre proposing we say. Thats not embellishing. Thats talking bullshit, sorry, Maureen. To be honest, Id keep this to yourself. I w９９ｌｉb•ｎeｔouldnt tell anyone about the angel. Not even the national press.

ME: Just a sort of… Like a baggy suit, sort of thing. A baggy white suit. Quite fashionable, really. Looked like it had set him back a few quid.

Youve got your cable show, though.

ME: Two metres above the ground, then.

ME: Oh, really close, man. He came in at the last minute.

I admit I was a bit sneaky. First of all I asked JJ the name of the woman whod come round to see him that morning, and he told me her name and the paper she worked for, which was a bonus. He thought I was just making conversation, but I thought it might come in handy at some stage. And then when I got home, I called the paper. I said Id only speak to her, and when I told them my name they gave me her mobile number.

LINDA: So he was about twelve feet tall?

ME: Not in so many words. But you could work it out. LINDA: Because of the inner wisdom.

In the end, I went for trains on the curtains, and your man from Star Wars on the lampshade. And soon after that I started buying comics every now and again, just to see what a lad of his age might be reading and thinking about. And we watched the Saturday morning television together, so I learned a little bit about pop singers he might like, and sometimes about the TV programmes hed be watching. I said before that one of the worst things was never moving on, and pretending to move on doesnt change anything. But it helps. Without it, what is there left? And anyway, thinking about these things helped me to see Matty, in a strange sort of a way. I suppose it must be what they do when they think of a new character for EastEnders: they must say to themselves, well, what does this person like? What does he listen to, who are his friends, what football team does he support? Thats what I did - I made up a son. He supports Arsenal, he likes fishing, although he doesnt have a rod yet. He likes pop music, but not the sort of pop music where people sing half-naked and use a lot of swear words. Very occasionally, people ask what he wants for his birthday or Christmas, and I tell them, and they know better than to act surprised.

Cant afford to move out. Plus theyve got a cleaner and cable and broadband and all that.

ME: Oh, yeah.

OK, we didnt see one. But you could say that anything was an angel.

ME: Three metres. Whatever.

It was Martin she was after - he was the prize. If she could get Martin Sharp to say that an angel had kept him from killing himself - i.e., if she could get Martin Sharp to say, I AM A WACKO -OFFICIAL - she had a front-page story. Martin knew it, too, so his performance was heroic, or as close to heroism as you can come if youre a sleazy talk-show host who is never likely to do anything involving actual heroism. Martin telling Linda that hed seen an angel reminded me of that Sidney Carton guy in A Tale of Two Cities going to the guillotine so that his buddy could live: Martin wore the expression of a man about to have his head sliced off for the greater good. That Sidney guy, though, hed discovered his inner nobility, so he probably looked noble, but Martin just looked pissed off.

Yeah, said JJ. Right on. I have the superpower of delivering pizzas.

I couldnt help feeling that she was missing the point of the story. An angel - possibly like an emissary from the Lord Himself, who knows? - had visited a tower-block in Archway to stop us all from killing ourselves, and she wanted to know why he hadnt been booked on a talk show. I dont know, man. Youd have thought that would be one of the questions nearer the end of the interview.

(I always do this, when Im talking about what someone said. Im always, like, So I was like, and, She went, and all like that. But when a conversation goes on a bit, its a drag, isnt it? Like, went, like, went. So Im going to do it like a play from now on, OK? Im not so good on speech marks or whatever, but I can remember plays from reading them at school.) ME: Yeah. He was dressed modern. He looked like he could have been in a band or something.

ME: Yeah. Wed decided we were going to go over together. For company, sort of thing. So we were standing there saying our goodbyes to each other and that. And we were going to do One, Two, Three, Jump and we heard this voice behind us.

So why was Shakespeare a genius? What did he do? Another time.

And Maureen has the superpower of a disabled son.

And if we like actually sold the TV rights to Valentines Night… Maybe they could turn it into a Big Brother kinda thing. You could root for the person you wanted to go over, said JJ.

ME: Oh, yeah. Definitely.

ME: He said, you know, Dont jump. But he said it very peacefully.

Jess scowled, but was too besotted by her theme to hit me with the insult my knowledge of a foreign phrase demanded and deserved. And we could say that we still havent decided whether were going to actually top ourselves - theyd like that.

Hes about eighty, said Jess. He hasnt got any energy.

It was typical of Jess, I thought. She only has a filthy imagination, which is to say, no imagination at all.

LINDA: Tie?

ME: He was like, Your time hasnt come yet. Go back down and send people this message of comfort and joy. And tell them that war is stupid.

MARTIN Mattys posters werent mentioned again that day. We were all curious, of course, but Jess had ensured that JJ and I couldnｗww.９９lｉb.neｔt express this curiosity: Jess set things up so that you were either for her or against her, and in this matter, as in so many others, we were against her - which meant staying quiet on this issue. But because we resented being made to stay quiet, we became aggressive and noisy on any other issue we could bring to mind.

ME: When?

Exactly. We didnt literally see an angel. But we sort of did metaphorically.

We could make some dosh. And itd be something to do.

I saw them in , said Martin. The night England lost to Germany in the World Cup on penalties. A chap from Guinness took a whole crowd of us, and everyone spent most of the evening listening to the radio. Anyway, he had a lot of energy then.

Have you ever heard of the Angel Gabriel, for example? No.

Will you shut the fuck up? Sorry, Maureen. (From now on, just presume that every time I speak I say fuck, fucking or motherfucker and Sorry, Maureen, OK?) Im trying to tell you about my whole life.

Thats why I was here.

Thats terrible, said Maureen, if only because it was so clearly expected of her.

(I didnt quite know what that meant, but I could tell it was important to her that Martin was involved.) LINDA: So now what?

LINDA: Martin Sharp saw it?

I laughed as well, and I went, No, he looked all modern, and she was like, Really?

Do we have to do anything? I think so, said JJ.

ME: Well. Weve got to work out what were going to do.

I stood up and shouted at her. Put those back! Theyre not yours! Id never have thought it of you, she said. So lets work this out. Youre a dyke who has a bit of a thing for black guys with big thighs. Kinky.

Yeah. Because of angels. Girls.

You cant stand your dad, can you? I asked her.

LINDA: Why Radiohead?

ME: Oh, yeah. You couldnt miss him.

Ah, yes. The Jen thing. JJ and I were momentarily chastened. Looked at in a certain light, the previous conversation could be summarized as follows: a man recently imprisoned for having sex with a minor, and another who had fabricated a fatal disease because to do so saved him some time, trouble and face had ridiculed a grieving teenager for wanting to be at home with her grieving parents. I made a note to put aside some time later so that I could synopsize it differently.

Theyll forget about us soon, you know, I said. Its only because fuck all happens, sorry, Maureen, at the beginning of the year.

We sort of metaphorically saw an angel, repeated JJ. He had the flat disbelief thing off pat now.

There was a silence.

Youre mad.

ME: He was all… fuzzy. Like he wasnt tuned in properly. And you could see right through him. You couldnt see his liver or anything like that.

LINDA: And when did he appear, this angel?

Hard work never killed anyone, said Maureen. I dont mind hard work, you know? But when we were touring and recording… That was me, that was who I was, and, and I just feel empty and frustrated and, and… See, when you know youre good, you think that will be enough, thatll get you there, and when it doesnt… What are you supposed to do with it all? Where do you put it, huh? Theres nowhere for it to go, and, and it was… Man, it used to eat me up even when things were going OK, because even when things were going OK, I wasnt on stage or recording like every minute of the day, and sometimes it felt like I needed to be, otherwise Id explode, you know? So now, now theres nowhere for it to go. We used to have this song… I have no idea why I started up on this. We used to have this song, this little like Motowny thing called "I Got Your Back", which me and Eddie wrote together, really together, which we didnt usually do, and it was like, you know, a tribute to our friendship and how far back we went and blah blah. Anyhow, it was on our first album and it was like two minutes and thirty seconds long and no one really noticed it, I mean, people who actually bought the album didnt even notice it. But we started playing it live, and it kind of got longer, and Eddie worked out this sweet solo. It wasnt like a rock guitar solo; it was more like something maybe, I dont know, Curtis Mayfield or Ernie Isley might have played. And sometimes, when we played around Chicago and wed jam with friends on stage, wed have maybe a sax solo or a piano solo or maybe even like a pedal steel or something, and after like a year or two it got to be this like ten-, twelve-minute showstopper. And wed open with it or close with it or stick it in the middle somewhere if we were playing a long set, and to me it became the sound of pure fucking joy, sorry Maureen, you know? Pure joy. It felt like surfing, or, or whatever, a natural high. You could ride those chords like waves. I had that feeling maybe a hundred times a year, and not many people get it even once in their lives. And thats what I had to give up, man, the ability to create that routinely, whenever I felt like it, as part of my working day, and… You know, now that I think about it, I can see why I made up that bullshit, sorry Maureen, about dying of some fucking disease, sorry again. Because thats what it feels like. Im dying of some disease that dries up all the blood in your veins and all your sap and, and everything that makes you feel alive, and… Yeah, and? said Martin. You seem to have omitted the part about why you want to kill yourself.

Thats right, said Martin.