A Long Way Down Read online

  ‘Not very well,’ Jess said.

  ‘Oh, is that right? And this from the girl who can’t deal with being dumped.’

  We fell into a hostile silence.

  ‘Well,’ said Martin. ‘So. Here we all are, then.’

  ‘Now what?’ said Jess.

  ‘You’re going home, for a start,’ said Martin.

  ‘Like fuck I am. Why should I?’

  ‘Because we’re going to march you there.’

  ‘I’ll go home on one condition.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘You help me find Chas first.’

  ‘All of us?’

  ‘Yeah. Or I really will kill myself. And I’m too young to do that. You said.’

  ‘I’m not sure I was right about that, looking back,’ said Martin. ‘You’re wise beyond your years. I can see that, now.’

  ‘So it’s OK if I go over?’ She started to walk towards the edge of the roof.

  ‘Come back here,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t give a fuck, you know,’ she said. ‘I can jump, or we can look for Chas. Same thing, to me.’

  And that’s the whole thing, right there, because we believed her. Maybe other people on other nights wouldn’t have but the three of us, that night, we had no doubts. It wasn’t that we thought she was really suicidal, either; it was just that it felt like she might do whatever she wanted to do, at any given moment, and if she wanted to jump off a building to see what it felt like, then she’d try it. And once you’d worked that out, then it was just a question of how much you cared.

  ‘But you don’t need our help,’ I said. ‘We don’t know how to start looking for Chas. You’re the only one who can find him.’

  ‘Yeah, but I get weird on my own. Confused. That’s sort of how I ended up here.’

  ‘What do you think?’ said Martin to the rest of us.

  ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ said Maureen. ‘I’m not leaving the roof, and I won’t change my mind.’

  ‘Fine. We wouldn’t ask you to.’

  ‘Because they’ll come looking for me.’

  ‘Who will?’

  ‘The people in the respite home.’

  ‘So what?’ said Jess. ‘What are they going to do if they can’t find you?’

  ‘They’ll put Matty somewhere terrible.’

  ‘This is the Matty who’s a vegetable? Does he give a shit where he goes?’

  Maureen looked at Martin helplessly.

  ‘Is it the money?’ said Martin. ‘Is that why you have to be dead by the morning?’

  Jess snorted, but I could see why he had asked the question.

  ‘I only paid for one night,’ said Maureen.

  ‘Have you got the money for more than one night?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ The suggestion that she might not seemed to make her a little pissed. Pissed off. Whatever.

  ‘So phone them up and tell them he’ll be staying two.’

  Maureen looked at him helplessly again. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because,’ said Jess. ‘Anyway, there’s fuck all to do up here, is there?’

  Martin laughed, kind of.

  ‘Well, is there?’ said Jess.

  ‘Nothing I can think of,’ said Martin. ‘Apart from the obvious.’

  ‘Oh, that,’ said Jess. ‘Forget it. The moment’s gone. I can tell. So we’ve got to find something else to do.’

  ‘So even if you’re right, and the moment has passed,’ I said, ‘why do we have to do anything together? Why don’t we go home and watch TV?’

  ‘’Cos I get weird on my own. I told you.’

  ‘Why should we care? We didn’t know you half an hour ago. I don’t give much of a fuck about how weird you get on your own.’

  ‘So you don’t feel like a bond kind of thing because of what we’ve been through.’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘You will. I can see us still being friends when we’re all old.’

  There was a silence. This was clearly not a vision shared by all.

  MAUREEN

  I didn’t like it that they were making me sound tight. It wasn’t anything to do with money. I needed one night so I paid for one night. And then someone else would have to pay, but I wouldn’t be around to know.

  They didn’t understand, I could tell. I mean, they could understand that I was unhappy. But they couldn’t understand the logic of it. The way they looked at it was this: if I died, Matty would be put in a home somewhere. So why didn’t I just put him in a home and not die? What would the difference be? But that just goes to show that they didn’t understand me, or Matty, or Father Anthony, or anyone at the church. No one I know thinks that way.

  These people, though, Martin and JJ and Jess, they’re different from anyone I know. They’re more like the people on television, the people in EastEnders and the other programmes where people know what to say straightaway. I’m not saying they’re bad. I’m saying they’re different. They wouldn’t worry so much about Matty if he was their son. They don’t have the same sense of duty. They don’t have the church. They’d just say, ‘What’s the difference?’ and leave it at that, and maybe they’re right, but they’re not me, and I didn’t know how to tell them that.

  They’re not me, but I wish I was them. Maybe not them, exactly, because they’re not so happy either. But I wish I was one of those people, the people who know what to say, the people who can’t see the difference. Because it seems to me that you have more chance of being able to live a life you can stand if you’re like that.

  So I didn’t know what to say when Martin asked me if I really wanted to die. The obvious answer was, Yes, yes, of course I do, you fool, that’s why I’ve climbed all these stairs, that’s why I’ve been telling a boy – dear God, a man – who can’t hear me all about a New Year’s Eve party that I’d made up. But there’s another answer, too, isn’t there? And the other answer is, No, of course I don’t, you fool. Please stop me. Please help me. Please make me into the kind of person who wants to live, the kind of person who has a bit missing, maybe. The kind of person who would be able to say, I am entitled to something more than this. Not much more; just something that would have been enough, instead of not quite enough. Because that’s why I was up there – there wasn’t quite enough to stop me.

  ‘Well?’ said Martin. ‘Are you prepared to wait until tomorrow night?’

  ‘What will I tell the people in the home?’

  ‘Have you got the phone number?’

  ‘It’s too late to call them.’

  ‘There’ll be somebody on duty. Give me the number.’ He pulled one of those tiny little mobile telephones out of his pocket and turned it on. It started ringing, and he pressed a button and put the phone to his ear. He was listening to a message, I suppose.

  ‘Someone loves you,’ said Jess, but he ignored her.

  I had the address and phone number written down on my little note. I fished it out of my pocket, but I couldn’t read it in the dark.

  ‘Give it here,’ said Martin.

  Well, I was embarrassed. It was my little note, my letter, and I didn’t want anyone reading it while I was watching them, but I didn’t know how to say that, and before I knew it, Martin had reached over and snatched it from me.

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ he said when he saw it. I could feel myself blushing. ‘Is this your suicide note?’

  ‘Cool. Read it out,’ said Jess. ‘Mine are crap, but I bet hers is worse.’

  ‘Yours are crap?’ said JJ. ‘Meaning, there are like, what, hundreds of them?’

  ‘I’m always writing them,’ said Jess. She seemed quite cheerful about it. The two boys looked at her, but they didn’t say anything. You could see what they were thinking, though.

  ‘What?’ said Jess.

  ‘I imagine that most of us have just written the one,’ said Martin.

  ‘I keep changing my mind,’ Jess said. ‘Nothing wrong with that. It’s a big decision.’

  ‘One of the biggest,’ Martin said. ‘Certainly in the to
p ten.’ He was one of those people who sometimes seemed to be joking when he wasn’t, or not joking when he was.

  ‘Anyway. No I won’t be reading this one out.’ He was squinting at it to read the number, and then he tapped the number out. And a few seconds later it was all done. He apologized for ringing so late, and then told them something had come up and Matty would be staying for another day, and that was it. The way he said it, it was like he knew they weren’t going to be asking any more questions. If I’d phoned I would have come up with this great long explanation for why I was phoning at four in the morning, something I’d have had to have thought up months ago, and then they would have seen through me and I’d have confessed and ended up going to get Matty out a few hours earlier rather than a day later.

  ‘So,’ said JJ. ‘Maureen’s OK. That just leaves you, Martin. You wanna join in?’

  ‘Well, where is this Chas?’ Martin said.

  ‘I dunno,’ said Jess. ‘Some party somewhere. Is that what it depends on? Where he is?’

  ‘Yes. I’d rather f—ing kill myself than try and get a cab to go somewhere in South London at four in the morning,’ said Martin.

  ‘He doesn’t know anyone in South London,’ Jess said.

  ‘Good,’ said Martin. And when he said that, you could tell that, instead of killing ourselves, we were all going to come down from the roof and look for Jess’s boyfriend, or whatever he was. It wasn’t much of a plan, really. But it was the only plan we had, so all we could do was try and make it work.

  ‘Give me your mobile and I’ll make some calls,’ said Jess.

  So Martin gave her the phone, and she went to the other side of the roof where no one could hear her, and we waited to be told where we were going.

  MARTIN

  I know what you’re thinking, all you clever-clever people who read the Guardian and shop in Waterstone’s and would no more think of watching breakfast television than you would of buying your children cigarettes. You’re thinking, Oh, this guy wasn’t serious. He wanted a tabloid photographer to capture his quote unquote cry for help so that he could sign a ‘My Suicide Hell’ exclusive for the Sun. ‘SHARP TAKES THE SLEAZY WAY OUT’. And I can understand why you might be thinking that, my friends. I climb a stairwell, have a couple of nips of Scotch from a hip-flask while dangling my feet over the edge, and then when some dippy girl asks me to help find her ex-boyfriend at some party, I shrug and wander off with her. And how suicidal is that?

  First of all, I’ll have you know that I scored very highly on Aaron T. Beck’s Suicide Intent Scale. I’ll bet you didn’t even know there was such a scale, did you? Well, there is, and I reckon I got something like twenty-one out of thirty points, which I was pretty pleased with, as you can imagine. Yes, suicide had been contemplated for more than three hours prior to the attempt. Yes, I was certain of death even if I received medical attention: it’s fifteen storeys high, Toppers’ House, and they reckon that anything over ten will do it for you pretty well every time. Yes, there was active preparation for the attempt: ladder, wire-cutters and so on. He shoots, he scores. The only questions where I might not have received maximum points are the first two, which deal with what Aaron T. Beck calls isolation and timing. ‘No one near by in visual or vocal contact’ gets you top marks, as does ‘Intervention highly unlikely’. You might argue that as we chose the most popular suicide spot in North London on one of the most popular suicide nights of the year, intervention was almost inevitable; I would counter by saying that we were just being dim. Dim or grotesquely self-absorbed, take your pick.

  And yet, of course, if it hadn’t been for the teeming throng up there, I wouldn’t be around today, so maybe old Beck is bang on the money. We may not have been counting on anyone to rescue us, but once we started bumping into each other, there was certainly a collective desire – a desire born more than anything out of embarrassment – to shelve the whole idea, at least for the night. Not one of us descended those stairs having come to the conclusion that life was a beautiful and precious thing; if anything, we were slightly more miserable on the way down than on the way up, because the only solution we had found for our various predicaments was not available to us, at least for the moment. And there had been a sort of weird nervous excitement up on the roof; for a couple of hours we had been living in a sort of independent state, where street-level laws no longer applied. Even though our problems had driven us up there, it was as if they had somehow, like Daleks, been unable to climb the stairs. And now we had to go back down and face them again. But it didn’t feel like we had any choice. Even though we had nothing in common beyond that one thing, the one thing was enough to make us feel that there wasn’t anything else – not money, or class, or education, or age, or cultural interests – that was worth a damn; we’d formed a nation, suddenly, in that couple of hours, and for the time being we wanted only to be with our new compatriots. I had hardly exchanged a word with Maureen, and I didn’t even know her surname; but she understood more about me than my wife had done in the last five years of our marriage. Maureen knew that I was unhappy, because of where she’d met me, and that meant she knew the most important thing about me; Cindy always professed herself baffled by everything I did or said.

  It would have been neat if I’d fallen in love with Maureen, wouldn’t it? I can even see the newspaper headline: ‘SHARP TURNED!’ And then there’d be some story about how Old Sleaze-bag had seen the error of his ways and decided to settle down with nice homely older woman, rather than chase around after schoolgirls and C-list actresses with breast enlargements. Yeah, right. Dream on.

  JJ

  While Jess called everyone she knew to find out where this guy Chas was at, I was leaning on the wall, looking through the wire at the city, and trying to figure out what I’d listen to at that exact moment, if I owned an iPod or a Discman. The first thing that came to mind was Jonathan Richman’s ‘Abominable Snowman in the Market’, maybe because it was sweet and silly, and reminded me of a time in life when I could afford to be that way. And then I started humming the Cure’s ‘In Between Days’, which made a little more sense. It wasn’t today and it wasn’t tomorrow, and it wasn’t last year and it wasn’t next year, and anyway the whole roof thing was an in-between kind of a limbo, seeing as we hadn’t yet made up our minds where our immortal souls were headed.

  Jess spent ten minutes talking to sources close to Chas and came back with a best guess that he was at a party in Shoreditch. We walked down fifteen flights of stairs, through the thud of dub and the stink of piss, and then emerged back on to the street, where we stood shivering in the cold while waiting for a black cab to show. Nobody said much, besides Jess, who talked enough for all of us. She told us whose party it was, and who would probably be there.

  ‘It will be all Tessa and that lot.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Martin. ‘That lot.’

  ‘And Alfie and Tabitha and the posse who go down Ocean on Saturdays. And Acid-Head Pete and the rest of the whole graphic design crew.’

  Martin groaned; Maureen looked seasick.

  A young African guy driving a shitty old Ford pulled up alongside us. He wound down the passenger window and leaned over.

  ‘Where you wanna go?’

  ‘Shoreditch.’

  ‘Thirty pounds.’

  ‘Fuck off,’ said Jess.

  ‘Shut up,’ said Martin, and got in the front seat. ‘My treat,’ he said.

  The rest of us got in the back.

  ‘Happy New Year,’ said the driver.

  None of us said anything.

  ‘Party?’ said the driver.

  ‘Do you know Acid-Head Pete at all?’ Martin asked him. ‘Well, we’re hoping to run into him. Should be jolly.’

  ‘“Jolly”,’ Jess snorted. ‘Why are you such a tosser?’ If you were going to joke around with Jess, and use words ironically, then you’d have to give her plenty of advance warning.

  It was maybe four-thirty in the morning by now, but there were tons of people around
, in cars and cabs and on foot. Everyone seemed to be in a group. Sometimes people waved to us; Jess always waved back.

  ‘How about you?’ Jess said to the driver. ‘You working all night? Or are you gonna go and have a few somewhere?’

  ‘Work toute la nuit,’ said the driver. ‘All the night.’

  ‘Bad luck,’ said Jess.

  The driver laughed mirthlessly.

  ‘Yes. Bad luck.’

  ‘Does your missus mind?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Your missus. La femme. Does she care? About you working all night?’

  ‘No, she don’t care. Not now. Not in the place where is she.’

  Anyone with an emotional antenna could have felt the mood in the cab turn real dark. Anyone with any life experience could have figured out that this was a man with a story, and that this story, whatever it was, was unlikely to get us into the party mood. Anyone with any sense would have stopped right there.

  ‘Oh,’ said Jess. ‘Bad woman, eh?’

  I winced, and I’m sure the others did, too. Bigmouth strikes again.

  ‘Not bad. Dead.’ He said this flat, like he was just correcting her on a point of fact – as if in his line of work, ‘bad’ and ‘dead’ were two addresses that people got confused.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Yes. Bad men kill her. Kill her, kill her mother, kill her father.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Yes. In my country.’

  ‘Right.’

  And right there was the place Jess chose to stop: exactly at the point where her silence would show her up. So we drove on, thinking our thoughts. And I would bet a million bucks that our thoughts all contained, somewhere in their tangle and swirl, a version of the same questions: Why hadn’t we seen him up there? Or had he been up and come down, like us? Would he sneer, if we told him our troubles? How come he turned out to be so fucking… dogged?

  When we got to where we were going, Martin gave him a very large tip, and he was pleased and grateful, and called us his friends. We would have liked to be his friends, but he probably wouldn’t have cared for us much if he got to know us.