A Long Way Down (24 page)

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?’

‘I dunno. It changes day by day.’

‘I’d like to meet up,’ said Maureen.

‘I suppose Valentine’s must be a pretty important day for you, Maureen,’ said Jess. She said it as if she were making conversation, but Maureen recognized the disguised nastiness and didn’t bother to respond. Just about everything Jess said could be bounced right back at her, but none of us had the energy any more. We looked out the window at the traffic in the rain, and at Angel I said goodbye and got off. As I watched the bus drive away, I could see Maureen offer the others, even Jess, her packet of Polo mints, and the gesture seemed kind of heartbreaking.

For the next week I did nothing, pretty much. I read a lot, and wandered around Islington to see if there was any sign of a bad job for me. One night I blew ten pounds on a ticket for a band called Fat Chance, who were playing in the Union Chapel. They started up around the same time as us, and now they had a decent deal, and there was a buzz about them, but they were lame, in my opinion. They stood there and played their songs, and people clapped, and there was an encore, and then we left, and I wouldn’t say any of us was richer for the experience.

I was recognized on the way out, by a guy who must have been in his forties.

‘All right, JJ?’ he said.

‘Do I know you?’

‘I saw you at the Hope and Anchor last year. I heard the band had split. You living here?’

‘Yeah, for now.’

‘What you doing? You gone solo?’

‘Yeah, that’s right.’

‘Cool.’

We met at eight in the evening on Valentine’s Day, and everyone was on time. Jess wanted to meet later, like at midnight or something, for full tragic effect, but no one else thought it was such a good idea, and Maureen didn’t want to travel home so late. I ran into her on the stairs on the way up, and told her I was glad to hear she was thinking about travelling home afterwards.

‘Where else would I go?’

‘No, I just meant… Last time you weren’t gonna go home, you know? Not, like, on the bus, anyway.’

‘On the bus?’

‘Last time, you were going to get off the roof the quick way.’ I walked my fingers through the air and then plunged them downwards, as if they were jumping off the roof. ‘But tonight, it sounds as though you’ll be taking the long way down.’

‘Oh. Yes. Well. I’ve come on a bit,’ she said. ‘In my head, I mean.’

‘That’s great.’

‘I’m still feeling the benefit of the holiday, I think.’

‘Right on.’

And then she didn’t want to talk any more, because it was a long way up, and she was short of breath.

Martin and Jess arrived a couple of minutes later, and we said hello, and then we all stood there.

‘What was the point of this, actually?’ said Martin.

‘We were going to meet up and see how we were all feeling and all that,’ said Jess.

‘Ah.’ We shuffled our feet. ‘And how are we all feeling?’

‘Maureen’s doing good,’ I said. ‘Aren’t you, Maureen?’

‘I am. I was saying to JJ, I think I’m still feeling the benefit of the holiday.’

‘Which holiday? The holiday we just had?’ He looked at her and then shook his head, with a mixture of amazement and admiration.

‘How about you, Mart?’ I said. ‘How you doing?’ But I could kind of tell what the answer to that question was going to be.

‘Oh, you know.
Comme ci comme ça
.’

‘Tosser,’ said Jess.

We shuffled our feet some more.

‘I read something I thought might interest you all,’ Martin said.

‘Yeah?’

‘I was wondering… Maybe it would be good to talk about it somewhere other than here. In a pub, say.’

‘Sounds good to me,’ I said. ‘I mean, maybe we should celebrate anyway, you know?’

‘Celebrate?’ said Martin, like I was nuts.

‘Yeah. I mean, we’re alive, and, and…’

The list kind of ran out after that. But being alive seemed worth the price of a round of drinks. Being alive seemed worth celebrating. Unless, of course, it wasn’t what you wanted, in which case… Oh, fuck it. I wanted a drink anyway. If we couldn’t think of anything else, then me wanting a drink was worth celebrating. An ordinary human desire had emerged through the fog of depression and indecision.

‘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.

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.