A Long Way Down (3 page)

‘Why can’t you shuffle round to the other side of the roof?’

‘Why can’t you? It’s my ladder.’

‘You’re not much of a gentleman.’

‘No, I’m fucking not. That’s one of the reasons I’m up here, in fact. Don’t you read the papers?’

‘I look at the local one sometimes.’

‘So what do you know about me?’

‘You used to be on the TV.’

‘That’s it?’

‘I think so.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Were you married to someone in Abba?’

‘No.’

‘Or another singer?’

‘No.’

‘Oh. And you like mushrooms, I know that.’

‘Mushrooms?’

‘You said. I remember. There was one of those chef fellas in the studio, and he gave you something to taste, and you said, “Mmmm, I love mushrooms. I could eat them all day.” Was that you?’

‘It might have been. But that’s all you can dredge up?’

‘Yes.’

‘So why do you think I want to kill myself?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘You’re pissing me around.’

‘Would you mind watching your language? I find it offensive.’

‘I’m sorry.’

But I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe I’d found someone who didn’t know. Before I went to prison, I used to wake up in the morning and the tabloid scum were waiting outside the front door. I had crisis meetings with agents and managers and TV executives. It seemed impossible that there was anyone in Britain uninterested in what I had done, mostly because I lived in a world where it was
the only thing that seemed to matter. Maybe Maureen lived on the roof, I thought. It would be easy to lose touch up there.

‘What about your belt?’ She nodded at my waist. As far as Maureen was concerned, these were her last few moments on earth. She didn’t want to spend them talking about my passion for mushrooms (a passion which, I fear, may have been manufactured for the camera anyway). She wanted to get on with things.

‘What about it?’

‘Take your belt off and put it round the ladder. Buckle it your side of the railings.’

I saw what she meant, and saw that it would work, and for the next couple of minutes we worked in a companionable silence; she passed the ladder over the fence, and I took my belt off, passed it around both ladder and railings, pulled it tight, buckled it up, gave it a shake to check it would hold. I really didn’t want to die falling backwards. I climbed back over, we unbuckled the belt, placed the ladder in its original position.

And I was just about to let Maureen jump in peace when this fucking lunatic came roaring at us.

I shouldn’t have made the noise. That was my mistake. I mean, that was my mistake if the idea was to kill myself. I could have just walked, quickly and quietly and calmly, to the place where Martin had cut through the wire, climbed the ladder and then jumped. But I didn’t. I yelled something like, ‘Out of the way, losers!’ and made this Red Indian war-whoop noise, as if it were all a game – which it was, at that point, to me, anyway – and Martin rugby-tackled me before I got halfway there. And then he sort of kneeled on me and ground my face into that sort of gritty fake-Tarmac stuff they put on the tops of buildings. Then I really did want to be dead.

I didn’t know it was Martin. I never saw anything, really, until he was rubbing my nose in the dirt, and then I just saw dirt. But I knew what the two of them were doing up there the moment I got
to the roof. You didn’t have to be like a genius to work that out. So when he was sitting on me I went, So how come you two are allowed to kill yourselves and I’m not? And he goes, You’re too young. We’ve fucked our lives up. You haven’t, yet. And I said, How do you know that? And he goes, No one’s fucked their lives up at your age. And I was like, What if I’ve murdered ten people? Including my parents and, I don’t know, my baby twins? And he went, Well have you? And I said, Yeah, I have. (Even though I hadn’t. I just wanted to see what he’d say.) And he went, Well, if you’re up here, you’ve got away with it, haven’t you? I’d get on a plane to Brazil if I were you. And I said, What if I want to pay for what I’ve done with my life? And he said, Shut up.

My first thought, after I’d brought Jess crashing to the ground, was that I didn’t want Maureen sneaking off on her own. It was nothing to do with trying to save her life; it would simply have pissed me off if she’d taken advantage of my distraction and jumped. Oh, none of it makes much sense; two minutes before, I’d been practically ushering her over. But I didn’t see why Jess should be my responsibility and not hers, and I didn’t see why she should be the one to use the ladder when I’d carted it all the way up there. So my motives were essentially selfish; nothing new there, as Cindy would tell you.

After Jess and I had had our idiotic conversation about how she’d killed lots of people, I shouted at Maureen to come and help me. She looked frightened, and then dawdled her way over to us.

‘Get a bloody move on.’

‘What do you want me to do?’

‘Sit on her.’

Maureen sat on Jess’s arse, and I knelt on her arms.

‘Just let me go, you old bastard pervert. You’re getting a thrill out of this, aren’t you?’

Well, obviously that stung a bit, given recent events. I thought for a moment Jess might have known who I was, but even I’m not that
paranoid. If you were rugby-tackled in the middle of the night just as you were about to hurl yourself off the top of a tower-block, you probably wouldn’t be thinking about breakfast television presenters. (This would come as a shock to breakfast television presenters, of course, most of whom firmly believe that people think about nothing else but breakfast, lunch and dinner.) I was mature enough to rise above Jess’s taunts, even though I felt like breaking her arms.

‘If we let go, are you going to behave?’

‘Yes.’

So Maureen stood up, and with wearying predictability Jess scrambled for the ladder, and I had to bring her crashing down again.

‘Now what?’ said Maureen, as if I were a veteran of countless similar situations, and would therefore know the ropes.

‘I don’t bloody know.’

Why it didn’t occur to any of us that a well-known suicide spot would be like Piccadilly Circus on New Year’s Eve I have no idea, but at that point in the proceedings I had accepted the reality of our situation: we were in the process of turning a solemn and private moment into a farce with a cast of thousands.

And at that precise moment of acceptance, we three became four. There was a polite cough, and when we turned round to look, we saw a tall, good-looking, long-haired man, maybe ten years younger than me, holding a crash helmet under one arm and one of those big insulated bags in the other.

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

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.

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.