A Long Way Down Read online

  ‘Any of you guys order a pizza?’ he said.

  MAUREEN

  I’d never met an American before, I don’t think. I wasn’t at all sure he was one, either, until the others said something. You don’t expect Americans to be delivering pizzas, do you? Well, I don’t, but perhaps I’m just out of touch. I don’t order pizzas very often, but every time I have, they’ve been delivered by someone who doesn’t speak English. Americans don’t deliver things, do they? Or serve you in shops, or take your money on the bus. I suppose they must do in America, but they don’t here. Indians and West Indians, lots of Australians in the hospital where they see Matty, but no Americans. So we probably thought he was a bit mad at first. That was the only explanation for him. He looked a bit mad, with that hair. And he thought that we’d ordered pizzas while we were standing on the roof of Toppers’ House.

  ‘How would we have ordered pizzas?’ Jess asked him. We were still sitting on her, so her voice sounded funny.

  ‘On a cell,’ he said.

  ‘What’s a cell?’ Jess asked.

  ‘OK, a mobile, whatever.’

  Fair play to him, we could have done that.

  ‘Are you American?’ Jess asked him.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What are you doing delivering pizzas?’

  ‘What are you guys doing sitting on her head?’

  ‘They’re sitting on my head because this isn’t a free country,’ Jess said. ‘You can’t do what you want to.’

  ‘What did you wanna do?’

  She didn’t say anything.

  ‘She was going to jump,’ Martin said.

  ‘So were you!’

  He ignored her.

  ‘You were all gonna jump?’ the pizza man asked us.

  We didn’t say anything.

  ‘The f—?’ he said.

  ‘The f—?’ said Jess. ‘The f— what?’

  ‘It’s an American abbreviation,’ said Martin. ‘“The f—?” means “What the f—?” In America, they’re so busy that they don’t have time to say the “what”.’

  ‘Would you watch your language, please?’ I said to them. ‘We weren’t all brought up in a pigsty.’

  The pizza man just sat down on the roof and shook his head. I thought he was feeling sorry for us, but later he told us it wasn’t that at all.

  ‘OK,’ he said after a while. ‘Let her go.’

  We didn’t move.

  ‘Hey, you. You f— listening to me? Am I gonna have to come over and make you listen?’ He stood up and walked towards us.

  ‘I think she’s OK, now, Maureen,’ Martin said, as if he was deciding to stand up of his own accord, and not because the American man might punch him. He stood up, and I stood up, and Jess stood up and brushed herself down and swore a lot. Then she stared at Martin.

  ‘You’re that bloke,’ she said. ‘The breakfast TV bloke. The one who slept with the fifteen-year-old. Martin Sharp. F—! Martin Sharp was sitting on my head. You old pervert.’

  Well, of course I didn’t have a clue about any fifteen-year-old. I don’t look at that sort of newspaper, unless I’m in the hairdresser’s, or someone’s left one on the bus.

  ‘You kidding me?’ said the pizza man. ‘The guy who went to prison? I read about him.’

  Martin made a groaning noise. ‘Does everyone in America know, too?’ he said.

  ‘Sure,’ the pizza man said. ‘I read about it in the New York Times.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ said Martin, but you could tell he was pleased.

  ‘I was just kidding,’ said the pizza man. ‘You used to present a breakfast TV show in England. No one in the US has ever heard of you. Get real.’

  ‘Give us some pizza, then,’ said Jess. ‘What flavours have you got?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said the pizza man.

  ‘Let me have a look, then,’ said Jess.

  ‘No, I mean… They’re not my pizzas, you know?’

  ‘Oh, don’t be such a pussy,’ said Jess. (Really. That’s what she said. I don’t know why.) She leaned over, grabbed his bag and took out the pizza boxes. Then she opened the boxes and started poking the pizzas.

  ‘This one’s pepperoni. I don’t know what that is though. Vegetables.’

  ‘Vegetarian,’ said the pizza man.

  ‘Whatever,’ said Jess. ‘Who wants what?’

  I asked for vegetarian. The pepperoni sounded like something that wouldn’t agree with me.

  JJ

  I told a couple people about that night, and the weird thing is that they get the suicide part, but they don’t get the pizza part. Most people get suicide, I guess; most people, even if it’s hidden deep down inside somewhere, can remember a time in their lives when they thought about whether they really wanted to wake up the next day. Wanting to die seems like it might be a part of being alive. So anyway, I tell people the story of that New Year’s Eve, and none of them are like, ‘Whaaaaat? You were gonna kill yourself?’ It’s more, you know, ‘Oh, OK, your band was fucked up, you were at the end of the line with your music, which was all you wanted to do your whole life, PLUS you broke up with your girl, who was the only reason you were in this fuckin’ country in the first place… Sure, I can see why you were up there.’ But then like the very next second, they want to know what a guy like me was doing delivering fucking pizzas.

  OK, you don’t know me, so you’ll have to take my word for it that I’m not stupid. I read the fuck out of every book I can get my hands on. I like Faulkner and Dickens and Vonnegut and Brendan Behan and Dylan Thomas. Earlier that week – Christmas Day, to be precise – I’d finished Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, which is a totally awesome novel. I was actually going to jump with a copy – not only because it would have been kinda cool, and would’ve added a little mystique to my death, but because it might have been a good way of getting more people to read it. But the way things worked out, I didn’t have any preparation time, and I left it at home. I have to say, though, that I wouldn’t recommend finishing it on Christmas Day, in like a cold-water bedsit, in a city where you don’t really know anybody. It probably didn’t help my general sense of well-being, if you know what I mean, because the ending is a real downer.

  Anyway, the point is, people jump to the conclusion that anyone driving around North London on a shitty little moped on New Year’s Eve for the minimum wage is clearly a loser, and almost certainly one stagione short of the full Quattro. Well, OK, we are losers by definition, because delivering pizzas is a job for losers. But we’re not all dumb assholes. In fact, even with the Faulkner and Dickens, I was probably the dumbest out of all the guys at work, or at least the worst educated. We got African doctors, Albanian lawyers, Iraqi chemists… I was the only one who didn’t have a college degree. (I don’t understand how there isn’t more pizza-related violence in our society. Just imagine: you’re like the top whatever in Zimbabwe, brain surgeon or whatever, and then you have to come to England because the fascist regime wants to nail your ass to a tree, and you end up being patronized at three in the morning by some stoned teenage motherfucker with the munchies… I mean, shouldn’t you be legally entitled to break his fucking jaw?) Anyway. There’s more than one way to be a loser. There’s sure more than one way of losing.

  So I could say that I was delivering pizzas because England sucks, and, more specifically, English girls suck, and I couldn’t work legit because I’m not an English guy. Or an Italian guy, or a Spanish guy, or even like a fucking Finnish guy or whatever. So I was doing the only work I could find; Ivan, the Lithuanian proprietor of Casa Luigi on Holloway Road, didn’t care that I was from Chicago, not Helsinki. And another way of explaining it is to say that shit happens, and there’s no space too small, too dark and airless and fucking hopeless, for people to crawl into.

  The trouble with my generation is that we all think we’re fucking geniuses. Making something isn’t good enough for us, and neither is selling something, or teaching something, or even just doing something; we have to be something
. It’s our inalienable right, as citizens of the twenty-first century. If Christina Aguilera or Britney or some American Idol jerk can be something, then why can’t I? Where’s mine, huh? OK, so my band, we put on the best live shows you could ever see in a bar, and we made two albums, which a lot of critics and not many real people liked. But having talent is never enough to make us happy, is it? I mean, it should be, because a talent is a gift, and you should thank God for it, but I didn’t. It just pissed me off because I wasn’t being paid for it, and it didn’t get me on the cover of Rolling Stone.

  Oscar Wilde once said that one’s real life is often the life one does not lead. Well, fucking right on, Oscar. My real life was full of headlining shows at Wembley and Madison Square Garden and platinum records, and Grammies, and that wasn’t the life I was leading, which is maybe why it felt like I could throw it away. The life I was leading didn’t let me be, I don’t know… be who I thought I was. It didn’t even let me stand up properly. It felt like I’d been walking down a tunnel that was getting narrower and narrower, and darker and darker, and had started to ship water, and I was all hunched up, and there was a wall of rock in front of me and the only tools I had were my fingernails. And maybe everyone feels that way, but that’s no reason to stick with it. Anyway, that New Year’s Eve, I’d gotten sick of it, finally. My fingernails were all worn away, and the tips of my fingers were shredded up. I couldn’t dig any more. With the band gone, the only room I had left for self-expression was in checking out of my unreal life: I was going to fly off that fucking roof like Superman. Except, of course, it didn’t work out like that.

  Some dead people, people who were too sensitive to live: Sylvia Plath, Van Gogh, Virginia Woolf, Jackson Pollock, Primo Levi, Kurt Cobain, of course. Some alive people: George W. Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Osama Bin Laden. Put a cross next to the people you might want to have a drink with, and then see whether they’re on the dead side or the alive side. And, yeah, you could point out that I have stacked the deck, that there are a couple of people missing from my ‘alive’ list who might fuck up my argument, a few poets and musicians and so on. And you could also point out that Stalin and Hitler weren’t so great, and they’re no longer with us. But indulge me anyway: you know what I’m talking about. Sensitive people find it harder to stick around.

  So it was real shocking to discover that Maureen, Jess and Martin Sharp were about to take the Vincent Van Gogh route out of this world. (And yeah, thank you, I know Vincent didn’t jump off the top of a North London apartment building.) A middle-aged woman who looked like someone’s cleaning lady, a shrieking adolescent lunatic and a talk-show host with an orange face… It didn’t add up. Suicide wasn’t invented for people like this. It was invented for people like Virginia Woolf and Nick Drake. And me. Suicide was supposed to be cool.

  New Year’s Eve was a night for sentimental losers. It was my own stupid fault. Of course there’d be a low-rent crowd up there. I should have picked a classier date – like March 28th, when Virginia Woolf took her walk into the river, or Nick Drake November 25th. If anybody had been on the roof on either of those nights, the chances are they would have been like-minded souls, rather than hopeless fuck-ups who had somehow persuaded themselves that the end of a calendar year is in any way significant. It was just that when I got the order to deliver the pizzas to the squat in Toppers’ House, the opportunity seemed too good to turn down. My plan was to wander to the top, take a look around to get my bearings, go back down to deliver the pizzas and then Do It.

  And suddenly there I was with three potential suicides munching the pizzas I was supposed to deliver and staring at me. They were apparently expecting some kind of Gettysburg address about why their damaged and pointless lives were worth living. It was ironic, really, seeing as I didn’t give a fuck whether they jumped or not. I didn’t know them from Adam, and none of them looked like they were going to add much to the sum total of human achievement.

  ‘So,’ I said. ‘Great. Pizza. A small, good thing on a night like this.’ Raymond Carver, as you probably know, but it was wasted on these guys.

  ‘Now what?’ said Jess.

  ‘We eat our pizza.’

  ‘Then?’

  ‘Just give it half an hour, OK? Then we’ll see where we’re at.’ I don’t know where that came from. Why half an hour? And what was supposed to happen then?

  ‘Everyone needs a little time out. Looks to me like things were getting undignified up here. Thirty minutes? Is that agreed?’

  One by one they shrugged and then nodded, and we went back to chewing our pizzas in silence. This was the first time I had tried one of Ivan’s. It was inedible, maybe even poisonous.

  ‘I’m not fucking sitting here for half an hour looking at your fucking miserable faces,’ said Jess.

  ‘That’s what you’ve just this minute agreed to do,’ Martin reminded her.

  ‘So what?’

  ‘What’s the point of agreeing to do something and then not doing it?’

  ‘No point.’ Jess was apparently untroubled by the concession.

  ‘Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative,’ I said. Wilde again. I couldn’t resist.

  Jess glared at me.

  ‘He’s being nice to you,’ said Martin.

  ‘There’s no point in anything, though, is there?’ Jess said. ‘That’s why we’re up here.’

  See, now this was a pretty interesting philosophical argument. Jess was saying that as long as we were on the rooftop, we were all anarchists. No agreements were binding, no rules applied. We could rape and murder each other and no one would pay any attention.

  ‘To live outside the law you must be honest,’ I said.

  ‘What the fucking hell does that mean?’ said Jess.

  You know, I’ve never really known what the fuck it means, to tell you the truth. Bob Dylan said it, not me, and I’d always thought it sounded good. But this was the first situation I’d ever been in where I was able to put the idea to the test, and I could see that it didn’t work. We were living outside the law, and we could lie through our teeth any time we wanted, and I wasn’t sure why we shouldn’t.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said.

  ‘Shut up, then, Yankee boy.’

  And I did. There were approximately twenty-eight minutes of our time out remaining.

  JESS

  A long time ago, when I was eight or nine, I saw this programme on telly about the history of the Beatles. Jen liked the Beatles, so she was the one who made me watch it, but I didn’t mind. (I probably told her I did mind, though. I probably made a fuss and pissed her off.) Anyway, when Ringo joined, you sort of felt this little shiver, because that was it, then, that was the four of them, and they were ready to go off and be the most famous group in history. Well, that’s how I felt when JJ turned up on the roof with his pizzas. I know you’ll think, Oh, she’s just saying that because it sounds good, but I’m not. I knew, honestly. It helped that he looked like a rock star, with his hair and his leather jacket and all that, but my feeling wasn’t anything to do with music; I just mean that I could tell we needed JJ, and so when he appeared it felt right. He wasn’t Ringo, though. He was more like Paul. Maureen was Ringo, except she wasn’t very funny. I was George, except I wasn’t shy, or spiritual. Martin was John, except he wasn’t talented or cool. Thinking about it, maybe we were more like another group with four people in it.

  Anyway, it just felt like something might happen, something interesting, and so I couldn’t understand why we were just sitting there eating pizza slices. So I was like, Maybe we should talk, and Martin goes, What, share our pain? And then he made a face, like I’d said something stupid, so I called him a wanker, and then Maureen tutted and asked me whether I said things like that at home (which I do), so I called her a bag lady, and Martin called me a stupid, mean little girl, so I spat at him, which I shouldn’t have done and which also by the way I don’t do anywhere near as much nowadays, and so he made out like he was going to throttle me, and so JJ jumped
in between us, which was just as well for Martin, because I don’t think he would have hit me, whereas I most definitely would have hit and bitten and scratched him. And after that little fluffle of activity we sat there puffing and blowing and hating each other for a bit.

  And then when we were all calming down, JJ said something like, I’m not sure what harm would be done by sharing our experiences, except he said it more American even than that. And Martin was like, Well, who’s interested in your experiences? Your experiences are delivering pizzas. And JJ goes, Well, your experiences, then, not mine. But it was too late, and I could tell from what he’d said about sharing our experiences that he was up here for the same reasons we were. So I went, You came up here to jump, didn’t you? And he didn’t say anything, and Martin and Maureen looked at him. And Martin just goes, Were you going to jump with the pizzas? Because someone ordered those. Even though Martin was joking, it was like JJ’s professional pride had been dented, because he told us that he was only here on a recce, and he was going downstairs to deliver before coming back up again. And I said, Well, we’ve eaten them now. And Martin goes, Gosh, you didn’t seem like the jumping type, and JJ said, If you guys are the jumping type then I can’t say I’m sorry. There was, as you can tell, a lot of, like, badness in the air.

  So I tried again. Oh, go on, let’s talk, I said. No need for pain-sharing. Just, you know, our names and why we’re up here. 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 wanted Maureen to go first.

  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.