A Long Way Down, Page 20

  ‘Maureen?’

  ‘Yes, I don’t mind.’

  ‘It doesn’t look to me like anyone’s going to jump,’ I said. ‘Not tonight. Is that right? Jess?’

  She wasn’t listening.

  ‘Fuck me,’ she said. ‘Jesus Christ.’

  She was staring at the corner of the roof, the spot where Martin had snipped the wire on New Year’s Eve. There was a guy sitting there, exactly where Martin had sat, and he was watching us. He was maybe a few years older than me, and he looked real frightened.

  ‘Hey, man,’ I said quietly. ‘Hey. Just stay there.’

  I started to walk slowly over to him.

  ‘Please don’t come any closer,’ he said. He was panicky, near tears, dragging furiously on a smoke.

  ‘We’ve all been there,’ I said. ‘Come on back over and you can join our gang. This is our reunion.’ I tried another couple of steps. He didn’t say anything.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Jess. ‘Look at us. We’re OK. You think you’re never going to get through the evening, but you do.’

  ‘I don’t want to,’ said the guy.

  ‘Tell us what the problem is,’ I said. I walked a little closer. ‘I mean, we’re all fucking experts in the field. Maureen here…’

  But I never got any further. He flipped the cigarette over the edge, and then with a little moan he pushed himself off. And there was silence, and then there was the noise of his body hitting the concrete all those floors below. And those two noises, the moan and the thud, I’ve heard every single day since, and I still don’t know which is scarier.

  Part 3

  MARTIN

  The guy who jumped had two profound and apparently contradictory effects on us all. Firstly, he made us realize that we weren’t capable of killing ourselves. And secondly, this information made us suicidal again.

  That isn’t a paradox, if you know anything about the perversity of human nature. A long time ago, I worked with an alcoholic – someone who must remain nameless because you will almost certainly have heard of him. And he told me that the first time he failed on an attempt to quit the booze was the most terrifying day of his life. He’d always thought that he could stop drinking, if he ever got round to it, so he had a choice stashed away in a sock drawer somewhere at the back of his head. But when he found out that he had to drink, that the choice had never really been there… Well, he wanted to do away with himself, if I may temporarily confuse our issues.

  I didn’t properly understand what he meant until I saw that guy jump off the roof. Up until then, jumping had always been an option, a way out, money in the bank for a rainy day. And then suddenly the money was gone – or rather, it had never been ours in the first place. It belonged to the guy who jumped, and people like him, because dangling your legs over the precipice is nothing unless you’re prepared to go that extra two inches, and none of us had been. We could tell each other and ourselves something different – oh, I would have done it if she hadn’t been there or he hadn’t been there or if someone hadn’t sat on my head – but the fact of the matter was that we were all still around, and we’d all had ample opportunity not to be. Why had we come down that night? We’d come down because we thought we should go and look for some twit called Chas, who turned out not to be terribly germane to our story. I’m not sure we could have persuaded old matey, the jumper, to go and look for Chas. He had other things on his mind. I wonder how he would have scored on Aaron T. Beck’s Suicide Intent Scale? Pretty high, I should think, unless Aaron T. Beck has been barking up the wrong tree. No one could say the intent wasn’t there.

  We got off that roof sharpish once he’d gone over. We decided it was best not to hang around and explain our role, or lack of it, in the poor chap’s demise. We had a little Toppers’ previous, after all, and by owning up, we’d only be confusing the issue. If people knew we’d been up there, then the clarity of the story – unhappy man jumps off of building – would be diminished, and people would understand less of it, rather than more. We wouldn’t want that.

  So we charged down the stairs as fast as damaged lungs and varicosed legs would let us, and went our separate ways. We were too nervous to go for a drink in the immediate vicinity, and too nervous to travel in a taxi together, so we scattered the moment we reached the pavement. (What, I wondered on the way home, was the nearest pub to Toppers’ House like of an evening? Was it full of unhappy people on their way up, or half-confused, half-relieved people who’d just come down? Or an awkward mix of the two? Does the landlord recognize the uniqueness of his clientele? Does he exploit their mood for financial gain – by offering a Miserable Hour, for example? Does he ever try to get the Uppers – in this context the very unhappy people – to mix with the Downers? Or the Uppers to mix with each other? Has there ever been a relationship born there? Could the pub even have been responsible for a wedding, and thus maybe a child?)

  We met again the following afternoon in Starbucks, and everyone had the blues. A few days previously, in the immediate aftermath of the holiday, it had been perfectly clear that we no longer had much use for each other; now, it was hard to imagine who else would be suitable company. I looked around the café at the other customers: young mothers with prams, young men and women in suits with mobile phones and pieces of paper, foreign students… I tried to imagine talking to any of them, but it was impossible. They wouldn’t want to hear about people jumping off tower-blocks. No one would, apart from the people I was sitting with.

  ‘I was up all fucking night thinking about that guy,’ said JJ. ‘Man. What was going on there?’

  ‘He was probably just, you know. A drama queen. A male drama queen. A drama king,’ said Jess. ‘He looked the sort.’

  ‘That’s very shrewd, Jess,’ I said. ‘In the brief glimpse we got of him before he plunged to his death, he didn’t strike me as someone with serious problems. Nothing on your scale, anyway.’

  ‘It’ll be in the local paper,’ said Maureen. ‘They usually are. I used to read the reports. Especially when it was coming up to New Year’s Eve. I used to compare myself with them.’

  ‘And? How did you get on?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Maureen. ‘I did OK. Some of them I couldn’t understand.’

  ‘What sort of things?’

  ‘Money.’

  ‘I owe loads of people money,’ said Jess proudly.

  ‘Perhaps you should think of killing yourself,’ I said.

  ‘It’s not much,’ said Jess. ‘Only twenty quid here and twenty quid there.’

  ‘Even so. A debt’s a debt. And if you can’t pay… Maybe you should take the honourable way out.’

  ‘Hey. Guys,’ JJ said. ‘Let’s keep some focus, huh?’

  ‘On what? Isn’t that the problem? Nothing to focus on?’

  ‘Let’s focus on that guy.’

  ‘We don’t know anything about him.’

  ‘No, but, I don’t know. He seems kind of important to me. That was what we were gonna do.’

  ‘Were we?’

  ‘I was,’ said Jess.

  ‘But you didn’t.’

  ‘You sat on my head.’

  ‘But you haven’t done anything about it since.’

  ‘Well. We went to that party. And we went on holiday. And, you know. There’s been one thing after another.’

  ‘Terrible, isn’t it, how that happens? You’ll have to block out some time in your diary. Otherwise life will keep getting in the way.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘Guys, guys…’

  I had, once again, allowed myself to be drawn into an undignified spat with Jess. I decided to act in a more statesmanlike manner.

  ‘Like JJ, I have spent a long night cogitating,’ I said.

  ‘Tosser.’

  ‘And my conclusion is that we are not serious people. We were never serious. We got closer than some, but nowhere near as close as others. And that puts us in something of a bind.’

  ‘I agree. We’re fucked,’ said JJ. ‘Sorry, Maureen.’


  ‘I’m missing something,’ said Jess.

  ‘This is it,’ I said. ‘This is us.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘This.’ I gestured vaguely at our surroundings, the company we were keeping, the rain outside, all of which seemed to speak eloquently of our current condition. ‘This is it. There’s no way out. Not even the way out is the way out. Not for us.’

  ‘Fuck that,’ said Jess. ‘And I’m not sorry, Maureen.’

  ‘The other night, I was going to tell you about something I’d read in a magazine. About suicide. Do you remember? Anyway, this guy reckoned that the crisis period lasts ninety days.’

  ‘What guy?’ JJ asked.

  ‘This suicidologist guy.’

  ‘That’s a job?’

  ‘Everything’s a job.’

  ‘So what?’ said Jess.

  ‘So we’ve had forty-six of the ninety days.’

  ‘And what happens after the ninety days?’

  ‘Nothing happens,’ I said. ‘Just… things are different. Things change. The exact arrangement of stuff that made you think your life was unbearable… It’s got shifted around somehow. It’s like a sort of real-life version of astrology.’

  ‘Nothing’s going to change for you,’ said Jess. ‘You’re still going to be the geezer off the telly who slept with the fifteen-year-old and went to prison. No one will ever forget that.’

  ‘Yes. Well. I’m sure the ninety days thing won’t apply in my case,’ I said. ‘If that makes you happier.’

  ‘Won’t help Maureen, either,’ said Jess. ‘Or JJ. I might change, though. I do, quite a lot.’

  ‘My point, anyway, is that we extend our deadline again. Because… Well, I don’t know about you lot. But I realized this morning that I’m not, you know, ready to go solo just yet. It’s funny, because I don’t actually like any of you very much. But you seem to be, I don’t know… What I need. You know how sometimes you know you should be eating more cabbage? Or drinking more water? It’s like that.’

  There was a general shuffling of feet, which I interpreted as a declaration of reluctant solidarity.

  ‘Thanks, man,’ said JJ. ‘Very touching. When’s the ninety days up?’

  ‘March 31st.’

  ‘That’s a bit of a coincidence, isn’t it?’ said Jess. ‘Exactly three months.’

  ‘What’s your point?’

  ‘Well. It’s not scientific, is it?’

  ‘What, and eighty-eight days would be?’

  ‘More scientific, yeah.’

  ‘No, I get it,’ said JJ. ‘Three months sounds about right. Three months is like a season.’

  ‘Very much like,’ I agreed. ‘Given there are four seasons, and twelve months in a year.’

  ‘So we’re seeing the winter through together. That’s cool. Winter is when you get the blues,’ JJ said.

  ‘So it would appear,’ I said.

  ‘But we gotta do something,’ said JJ. ‘We can’t just sit around waiting for three months to be up.’

  ‘Typical American,’ said Jess. ‘What do you want to do? Bomb some poor little country somewhere?’

  ‘Sure. It would take my mind off things, some bombing.’

  ‘What should we do?’ I asked him.

  ‘I don’t know, man. I just know that if we spend six weeks pissing and moaning, then we’re not helping ourselves.’

  ‘Jess is right,’ I said. ‘Typical bloody American. “Helping ourselves.” Self-help. You can do anything if you put your mind to it, right? You could be President.’

  ‘What is it with you assholes? I’m not talking about becoming President. I’m talking about, like, finding a job waiting tables.’

  ‘Great,’ said Jess. ‘Let’s all not kill ourselves because someone gave us a fifty pence tip.’

  ‘No fucking chance of that in this fucking country,’ said JJ. ‘Sorry, Maureen.’

  ‘You could always just go back where you came from,’ said Jess. ‘That would change something. Also, your buildings are higher, aren’t they?’

  ‘So,’ I said. ‘Forty-four days to go.’

  There was something else in the article I read: an interview with a man who’d survived after jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. He said that two seconds after jumping, he realized that there was nothing in his life he couldn’t deal with, no problem he couldn’t solve – apart from the problem he’d just given himself by jumping off the bridge. I don’t know why I didn’t tell the others about that; you’d think it might be relevant information. I wanted to keep it to myself for the time being, though. It seemed like something that might be more appropriate later, when the story was over. If it ever was.

  MAUREEN

  It was in the local paper, the following week. I cut the story out, and kept it, and I read it every so often, just to try to understand the poor man better. I couldn’t keep him out of my head. He was called David Fawley, and he’d jumped because of problems with his wife and children. She’d met someone else, and moved away to be with him, and taken the kiddies with her. He only lived two streets away, which seemed very strange to me, a coincidence, until I realized that people in my local paper always lived locally, unless someone had visited to open a school or something. Glenda Jackson came to Matty’s school once, for example.

  Martin was right. When I saw David Fawley jump, it made me see that I hadn’t been ready on New Year’s Eve. I’d been ready to make the preparations, because it gave me something to do – New Year’s Eve was something to look forward to, in a strange sort of way. And when I’d met some people to talk to, then I was happy to talk, instead of jump. They’d have let me jump, I think, once I’d told them why I was up there. They wouldn’t have got in my way, or sat on my head. But even so, I’d gone down the stairs and on to the party. This poor David hadn’t wanted to talk to us, that was the thing I’d noticed. He’d come to jump, not to natter. I thought I’d gone to jump, but I ended up nattering anyway.

  If you thought about it, this David fella and me, we were opposites. He’d killed himself because his children were gone, and I’d thought about it because my son was still around. There must be a lot of that goes on. There must be people who kill themselves because their marriage is over, and others who kill themselves because they can’t see a way out of the one they’re in. I wondered whether you could do that with everyone, whether every unhappy situation had an unhappy opposite situation. I couldn’t see it with the people who had debts, though. No one ever killed himself because he had too much money. Those sheikhs with the oil don’t seem to commit suicide very often. Or if they do, no one ever talks about it. Anyway, perhaps there was something in this opposites idea. I had someone, and David had no one, and he’d jumped and I hadn’t. When it comes to committing suicide, nobody beats somebody, if you see what I mean. There’s no rope holding you back.

  I prayed for David’s soul, even though I knew it wouldn’t do him any good, because he had committed the sin of despair, and my prayers would fall on deaf ears. And then after Matty had gone to sleep, I left him alone for five minutes and walked down the road to see where David had lived. I don’t know why I did that, or what I hoped to see, but there was nothing there, of course. It was one of these streets full of big houses that have been turned into flats, so that’s what I found out, that he lived in a flat. And then it was time to turn around and go home.

  That evening, I watched a programme on the television about a Scottish detective who doesn’t get on with his ex-wife very well, so I thought about David some more, because I don’t suppose he got on very well with his ex-wife either. And I’m not sure this was the point of the programme, but there wasn’t much room in it for lots of arguments between the Scottish detective and his ex-wife, because most of the time he had to find out who’d killed this woman and left her body outside her ex-husband’s house to make it look as though he’d killed her. (This was a different ex-husband.) So in an hour-long programme, there were probably only ten minutes of him argu
ing with his ex-wife, and his children, and fifty minutes of him trying to find who’d put the woman’s body in the dustbin. Forty minutes, I suppose, if you took out the advertisements. I noticed because I was a bit more interested in the arguments than I was in the body, and the arguments didn’t seem to come around very often.

  And that seemed about right to me, ten minutes an hour. It was probably about right for the programme, because he was a detective, and it was more important for him and for the viewers that he spent the biggest chunk of his time on solving the murders. But I think even if you’re not in a TV programme, then ten minutes an hour is about right for your problems. This David Fawley was unemployed, so there was a fair old chance that he spent sixty minutes an hour thinking about his ex-wife, and his children, and when you do that, you’re bound to end up on the roof of Toppers’ House.

  I should know. I don’t have arguments, but there have been lots of times in my life when I couldn’t stop Matty becoming sixty minutes an hour. There was nothing else to think about. I’d had more on my mind recently, because of the others, and the things that have happened in their lives. But most of the time, on most days, it was just me and my son, and that meant trouble.

  Anyway, that evening there was a whole jumble of thoughts. I lay in bed half-asleep, thinking about David, and the Scottish detective, and coming down off the roof to find Chas and eventually I got these thoughts unknotted, and when I woke up in the morning I decided it would be a good idea to find out where Martin’s wife and children lived, and then go and talk to them all and see if there was any chance of getting the family back together. Because if that worked, then Martin wouldn’t get so eaten up about some things, and he’d have somebody rather than nobody, and I’d have something to do for forty or fifty minutes an hour, and it would help everybody.

  But I was a hopeless detective. I knew Martin’s wife’s name was Cindy, so I looked Cindy Sharp up in the phone book, and she wasn’t there, and I ran out of ideas after that. So I asked Jess, because I didn’t think JJ would approve of my plan, and she found all the information we needed in about five minutes, on a computer. But then she wanted to come with me to see Cindy, and I said she could. I know, I know. But you try telling her she can’t have something she wants.