A Long Way Down (4 page)

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.

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.

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.

I didn’t mind talking, because I knew I didn’t need to say very much. None of these people would have wanted my life. I doubted whether they’d understand how I’d put up with it for as long as I had. It’s always the toilet bit that upsets people. Whenever I’ve had to moan before – when I need another prescription for my anti-depressants, for example – I always mention the toilet bit, the cleaning up that needs doing most days. It’s funny, because it’s the bit I’ve got used to. I can’t get used to the idea that my life is finished, pointless, too hard, completely without hope or colour; but the mopping up doesn’t really worry me any more. That’s always what gets the doctor reaching for his pen, though.

‘Oh, yeah,’ Jess said when I’d finished. ‘That’s a no-brainer. Don’t change your mind. You’d only regret it.’

‘Some people cope,’ said Martin.

‘Who?’ said Jess.

‘We had a woman on the show whose husband had been in a coma for twenty-five years.’

‘And that was her reward, was it? Going on a breakfast TV show?’

‘No. I’m just saying.’

‘What are you just saying?’

‘I’m just saying it can be done.’

‘You’re not saying why, though, are you?’

‘Maybe she loved him.’

They spoke quickly, Martin and Jess and JJ. Like people in a soap opera, bang bang bang. Like people who know what to say. I could never have spoken that quickly, not then, anyway; it made me realize that I’d hardly spoken at all for twenty-odd years. And the person I spoke to most couldn’t speak back.

‘What was there to love?’ Jess was saying. ‘He was a vegetable. Not even an awake vegetable. A vegetable in a coma.’

‘He wouldn’t be a vegetable if he wasn’t in a coma, would he?’ said Martin.

‘I love my son,’ I said. I didn’t want them to think I didn’t.

‘Yes,’ said Martin. ‘Of course you do. We didn’t mean to imply otherwise.’

‘Do you want us to kill him for you?’ said Jess. ‘I’ll go down there tonight if you want. Before I kill myself. I don’t mind. No skin off my nose. And it’s not like he’s got much to live for, is it? If he could speak, he’d probably thank me for it, poor sod.’

My eyes filled with tears, and JJ noticed.

‘What are you, a f—idiot?’ he said to Jess. ‘Look what you’ve done.’

‘So-rry,’ said Jess. ‘Just an idea.’

But that wasn’t why I was crying. I was crying because all I wanted in the world, the only thing that would make me want to live, was for Matty to die. And knowing why I was crying just made me cry more.

Everyone bloody knew everything about me, so I didn’t see the point of this lark, and I told them that.

‘Oh, come on, man,’ said JJ, in his irritating American way. It doesn’t take long, I find, to be irritated by Yanks. I know they’re our friends and everything, and they respect success over there, unlike the ungrateful natives of this bloody chippy dump, but all that cool-daddio stuff gets on my wick. I mean, you should have seen him. You’d have thought he was on the roof to promote his latest movie. You certainly wouldn’t think he’d been puttering around Archway delivering pizzas.