Chapter 1
MARTIN
 
Can I explain why I wanted to jump off the top of a tower-block? Of course I can explain why I wanted to jump off the top of a tower-block. I'm not a bloody idiot. I can explain it because it wasn't inexplicable: it was a logical decision, the product of proper thought. It wasn't even a very serious thought, either. I don't mean it was whimsical - I just meant that it wasn't terribly complicated, or agonized. Put it this way: say you were, I don't know, an assistant bank manager, in Guildford. And you'd been thinking of emigrating, and then you were offered the job of managing a bank in Sydney. Well, even though it's a pretty straightforward decision, you'd still have to think for a bit, wouldn't you? You'd at least have to work out whether you could bear to move, whether you could leave your friends and colleagues behind, whether you could uproot your wife and kids. You might sit down with a bit of paper and draw up a list of pros and cons. You know:
CONS - aged parents, friends, golf club.
PROS - more money, better quality of life (house with pool, barbecue, etc.), sea, sunshine, no left-wing councils banning 'Baa-Baa Black Sheep', no EEC directives banning British sausages, etc.
It's no contest, is it? The golf club! Give me a break. Obviously your aged parents give you pause for thought, but that's all it is - a pause, and a brief one, too. You'd be on the phone to the travel agents within ten minutes.
Well, that was me. There simply weren't enough regrets, and lots and lots of reasons to jump. The only things in my 'cons' list were the kids, but I couldn't imagine Cindy letting me see them again anyway. I haven't got any aged parents, and I don't play golf. Suicide was my Sydney. And I say that with no offence to the good people of Sydney intended.
Chapter 2
MAUREEN
 
I told him I was going to a New Year's Eve party. I told him in October. I don't know whether people send out invitations to New Year's Eve parties in October or not. Probably not. (How would I know? I haven't been to one since 1984. June and Brian across the road had one, just before they moved. And even then I only nipped in for an hour or so, after he'd gone to sleep.) But I couldn't wait any longer. I'd been thinking about it since May or June, and I was itching to tell him. Stupid, really. He doesn't understand, I'm sure he doesn't. They tell me to keep talking to him, but you can see that nothing goes in. And what a thing to be itching about anyway! It just goes to show what I had to look forward to, doesn't it?
The moment I told him, I wanted to go straight to confession. Well, I'd lied, hadn't I? I'd lied to my own son. Oh, it was only a tiny, silly lie: I'd told him months in advance that I was going to a party, a party I'd made up. I'd made it up properly, too. I told him whose party it was, and why I'd been invited, and why I wanted to go, and who else would be there. (It was Bridgid's party, Bridgid from the church. And I'd been invited because her sister was coming over from Cork, and her sister had asked after me in a couple of letters. And I wanted to go because Bridgid's sister had taken her mother-in-law to Lourdes, and I wanted to find out all about it, with a view to taking Matty one day.) But confession wasn't possible, because I knew I would have to repeat the sin, the lie, over and over as the year came to an end. Not only to Matty, but to the people at the nursing home, and… Well, there isn't anyone else, really. Maybe someone at the church, or someone in a shop. It's almost comical, when you think about it. If you spend day and night looking after a sick child, there's very little room for sin, and I hadn't done anything worth confessing for donkey's years. And I went from that, to sinning so terribly that I couldn't even talk to the priest, because I was going to go on sinning and sinning until the day I died, when I would commit the biggest sin of all. (And why is it the biggest sin of all? All your life you're told that you'll be going to this marvellous place when you pass on. And the one thing you can do to get you there a bit quicker is something that stops you getting there at all. Oh, I can see that it's a kind of queue-jumping. But if someone jumps the queue at the Post Office, people tut. Or sometimes they say, 'Excuse me, I was here first.' They don't say, 'You will be consumed by hellfire for all eternity.' That would be a bit strong.) It didn't stop me from going to the church. But I only kept going because people would think there was something wrong if I stopped.
As we got closer and closer to the date, I kept passing on little tidbits of information that I told him I'd picked up. Every Sunday I pretended as though I'd learned something new, because Sundays were when I saw Bridgid. 'Bridgid says there'll be dancing.' 'Bridgid's worried that not everyone likes wine and beer, so she'll be providing spirits.' 'Bridgid doesn't know how many people will have eaten already.' If Matty had been able to understand anything, he'd have decided that this Bridgid woman was a lunatic, worrying like that about a little get-together. I blushed every time I saw her at the church. And of course I wanted to know what she actually was doing on New Year's Eve, but I never asked. If she was planning to have a party, she might've felt that she had to invite me.
I'm ashamed, thinking back. Not about the lies - I'm used to lying now. No, I'm ashamed of how pathetic it all was. One Sunday I found myself telling Matty about where Bridgid was going to buy the ham for the sandwiches. But it was on my mind, New Year's Eve, of course it was, and it was a way of talking about it, without actually saying anything. And I suppose I came to believe in the party a little bit myself, in the way that you come to believe the story in a book. Every now and again I imagined what I'd wear, how much I'd drink, what time I'd leave. Whether I'd come home in a taxi. That sort of thing. In the end it was as if I'd actually been. Even in my imagination, though, I couldn't see myself talking to anyone at the party. I was always quite happy to leave it.
Chapter 3
JESS
 
I was at a party downstairs in the squat. It was a shit party, full of all these ancient crusties sitting on the floor drinking cider and smoking huge spliffs and listening to weirdo space-out reggae. At midnight, one of them clapped sarcastically, and a couple of others laughed, and that was it - Happy New Year to you too. You could have turned up to that party as the happiest person in London, and you'd still have wanted up to jump off the roof by five past twelve. And I wasn't the happiest person in London anyway. Obviously.
I only went because someone at college told me Chas would be there, but he wasn't. I tried his mobile for the one zillionth time, but it wasn't on. When we first split up, he called me a stalker, but that's like an emotive word, 'stalker', isn't it? I don't think you can call it stalking when it's just phone calls and letters and emails and knocking on the door. And I only turned up at his work twice. Three times, if you count his Christmas party, which I don't, because he said he was going to take me to that anyway. Stalking is when you follow them to the shops and on holiday and all that, isn't it? Well, I never went near any shops. And anyway, I didn't think it was stalking when someone owed you an explanation. Being owed an explanation is like being owed money, and not just a fiver, either. Five or six hundred quid minimum, more like. If you were owed five or six hundred quid minimum and the person who owed it to you was avoiding you, then you're bound to knock on his door late at night, when you know he's going to be in. People get serious about that sort of money. They call in debt collectors, and break people's legs, but I never went that far. I showed some restraint.
So even though I could see straight away that he wasn't at this party, I stayed for a while. Where else was I going to go? I was feeling sorry for myself. How can you be eighteen and not have anywhere to go on New Year's Eve, apart from some shit party in some shit squat where you don't know anybody? Well, I managed it. I seem to manage it every year. I make friends easily enough, but then I piss them off, I know that much, even if I'm not sure why or how. And so people and parties disappear.
I pissed Jen off, I'm sure of that. She disappeared, like everyone else.
Chapter 4
I'd spent the previous couple of months looking up suicide inquests on the Internet, just out of curiosity. And nearly every single time, the coroner says the same thing: 'He took his own life while the balance of his mind was disturbed.' And then you read the story about the poor bastard: his wife was sleeping with his best friend, he'd lost his job, his daughter had been killed in a road accident some months before… Hello, Mr Coroner? Anyone at home? I'm sorry, but there's no disturbed mental balance here, my friend. I'd say he got it just right. Bad thing upon bad thing upon bad thing until you can't take any more, and then it's off to the nearest multi-storey car park in the family hatchback with a length of rubber tubing. Surely that's fair enough? Surely the coroner's inquest should read, 'He took his own life after sober and careful contemplation of the fucking shambles it had become'?
Not once did I read a newspaper report which convinced me that the deceased was off the old trolley. You know: 'The Manchester United forward, who was engaged to the current Miss Sweden, had recently achieved a unique Double: he is the only man ever to have won the FA Cup and an Oscar for Best Actor in the same year. The rights to his first novel had just been bought for an undisclosed sum by Steven Spielberg. He was found hanging from a beam in his stables by a member of his staff.' Now, I've never seen a coroner's report like that, but if there were cases in which happy, successful, talented people took their own lives, one could safely come to the conclusion that the old balance was indeed wonky. And I'm not saying that being engaged to Miss Sweden, playing for Manchester United and winning Oscars inoculates you against depression - I'm sure it doesn't. I'm just saying that these things help. Look at the statistics. You're more likely to top yourself if you've just gone through a divorce. Or if you're anorexic. Or if you're unemployed. Or if you're a prostitute. Or if you've fought in a war, or if you've been raped, or if you've lost somebody… There are lots and lots of factors that push people over the edge; none of these factors are likely to make you feel anything but fucking miserable.
Two years ago Martin Sharp would not have found himself sitting on a tiny concrete ledge in the middle of the night, looking a hundred feet down at a concrete walkway and wondering whether he'd hear the noise that his bones made when they shattered into tiny pieces. But two years ago Martin Sharp was a different person. I still had my job. I still had a wife. I hadn't slept with a fifteen-year-old. I hadn't been to prison. I hadn't had to talk to my young daughters about a front-page tabloid newspaper article, an article headlined with the word 'SLEAZEBAG!' and illustrated with a picture of me lying on the pavement outside a well-known London nightspot. (What would the headline have been if I had gone over? 'SLEAZY DOES IT!' perhaps. Or maybe 'SHARP END!') There was, it is fair to say, less reason for ledge-sitting before all that happened. So don't tell me that the balance of my mind was disturbed, because it really didn't feel that way. (What does it mean, anyway, that stuff about 'the balance of the mind'? Is it strictly scientific? Does the mind really wobble up and down in the head like some sort of fish-scale, according to how loopy you are?) Wanting to kill myself was an appropriate and reasonable response to a whole series of unfortunate events that had rendered life unlivable. Oh, yes, I know the shrinks would say that they could have helped, but that's half the trouble with this bloody country, isn't it? No one's willing to face their responsibilities. It's always someone else's fault. Boo-hoo-hoo. Well, I happen to be one of those rare individuals who believe that what went on with Mummy and Daddy had nothing to do with me screwing a fifteen-year-old. I happen to believe that I would have slept with her regardless of whether I'd been breast-fed or not, and it was time to face up to what I'd done.
And what I'd done is, I'd pissed my life away. Literally. Well, OK, not literally literally. I hadn't, you know, turned my life into urine and stored it in my bladder and so on and so forth. But I felt as if I'd pissed my life away in the same way that you can piss money away. I'd had a life, full of kids and wives and jobs and all the usual stuff, and I'd somehow managed to mislay it. No, you see, that's not right. I knew where my life was, just as you know where money goes when you piss it away. I hadn't mislaid it at all. I'd spent it. I'd spent my kids and my job and my wife on teenage girls and nightclubs: these things all come at a price, and I'd happily paid it, and suddenly my life wasn't there any more. What would I be leaving behind? On New Year's Eve, it felt as though I'd be saying goodbye to a dim form of consciousness and a semi-functioning digestive system - all the indications of a life, certainly, but none of the content. I didn't even feel sad, particularly. I just felt very stupid, and very angry.
I'm not sitting here now because I suddenly saw sense. The reason I'm sitting here now is because that night turned into as much of a mess as everything else. I couldn't even jump off a fucking tower-block without fucking it up.
Chapter 5
MAUREEN
 
On New Year's Eve the nursing home sent their ambulance round for him. You had to pay extra for that, but I didn't mind. How could I? In the end, Matty was going to cost them a lot more than they were costing me. I was only paying for a night, and they were going to pay for the rest of his life.
I thought about hiding some of Matty's stuff, in case they thought it was odd, but no one had to know it was his. I could have had loads of kids, as far as they knew, so I left it there. They came around six, and these two young fellas wheeled him out. I couldn't cry when he went, because then the young fellas would know something was wrong; as far as they knew, I was coming to fetch him at eleven the next morning. I just kissed him on the top of his head and told him to be good at the home, and I held it all in until I'd seen them leave. Then I wept and wept, for about an hour. He'd ruined my life, but he was still my son, and I was never going to see him again, and I couldn't even say goodbye properly. I watched the television for a while, and I did have one or two glasses of sherry, because I knew it would be cold out.
I waited at the bus stop for ten minutes, but then I decided to walk. Knowing that you want to die makes you less scared. I wouldn't have dreamed of walking all that way late at night, especially when the streets are full of drunks, but what did it matter now? Although then, of course, I found myself worrying about being attacked but not murdered - left for dead without actually dying. Because then I'd be taken to hospital, and they'd find out who I was, and they'd find out about Matty, and all those months of planning would have been a complete waste of time, and I'd come out of hospital owing the home thousands of pounds, and where was I going to find that? But no one attacked me. A couple of people wished me a Happy New Year, but that was about all. There isn't so much to be afraid of out there. I can remember thinking it was a funny time to find that out, on the last night of my life; I'd spent the rest of it being afraid of everything.
I'd never been to Toppers' House before. I'd just been past it on the bus once or twice. I didn't even know for sure that you could get on to the roof any more, but the door was open, and I just walked up the stairs until I couldn't walk any further. I don't know why it didn't occur to me that you couldn't just jump off whenever you felt like it, but the moment I saw it I realized that they wouldn't let you do that. They'd put this wire up, way up high, and there were curved railings with spikes on the top… well, that's when I began to panic. I'm not tall, and I'm not very strong, and I'm not as young as I was. I couldn't see how I was going to get over the top of it all, and it had to be that night, because of Matty being in the home and everything. And I started to go through all the other options, but none of them were any good. I didn't want to do it in my own front room, where someone I knew would find me. I wanted to be found by a stranger. And I didn't want to jump in front of a train, because I'd seen a programme on the television about the poor drivers and how suicides upset them. And I didn't have a car, so I couldn't drive off to a quiet spot and breathe in the exhaust fumes…
And then I saw Martin, right over the other side of the roof. I hid in the shadows and watched him. I could see he'd done things properly: he'd brought a little stepladder, and some wire-cutters, and he'd managed to climb over the top like that. And he was just sitting on the ledge, dangling his feet, looking down, taking nips out of a little hip flask, smoking, thinking, while I waited. And he smoked and he smoked and I waited and waited until in the end I couldn't wait any more. I know it was his stepladder, but I needed it. It wasn't going to be much use to him.
I never tried to push him. I'm not beefy enough to push a grown man off a ledge. And I wouldn't have tried anyway. It wouldn't have been right; it was up to him whether he jumped or not. I just went up to him and put my hand through the wire and tapped him on the shoulder. I only wanted to ask him if he was going to be long.
Chapter 6
JESS
 
Before I got to the squat, I never had any intention of going on to the roof. Honestly. I'd forgotten about the whole Toppers' House thing until I started speaking to this guy. I think he fancied me, which isn't really saying much, seeing as I was about the only female under thirty who could still stand up. He gave me a fag, and he told me his name was Bong, and when I asked him why he was called Bong he said it was because he always smoked his weed out of a bong. And I went, Does that mean everyone else here is called Spliff ? But he was just, like, No, that bloke over there is called Mental Mike. And that one over there is called Puddle. And that one over there is Nicky Turd. And so on, until he'd been through everyone in the room he knew.
But the ten minutes I spent talking to Bong made history. Well, not history like 55 bc or 1939. Not historical history, unless one of us goes on to invent a time machine or stops Britain from being invaded by Al-Qaida or something. But who knows what would have happened to us if Bong hadn't fancied me? Because before he started chatting me up I was just about to go home, and Maureen and Martin would be dead now, probably, and… well, everything would have been different.
When Bong had finished going through his list, he looked at me and he went, You're not thinking of going up on the roof, are you? And I thought, Not with you, stoner-brain. And he went, Because I can see the pain and desperation in your eyes. I was well pissed by that time, so looking back on it, I'm pretty sure that what he could see in my eyes were seven Bacardi Breezers and two cans of Special Brew. I just went, Oh, really? And he went, Yeah, see, I've been put on suicide watch, to look out for people who've only come here because they want to go upstairs. And I was like, What happens upstairs? And he laughed, and went, You're joking, aren't you? This is Toppers' House, man. This is where people kill themselves. And I would never have thought of it if he hadn't said that. Everything suddenly made sense. Because even though I'd been about to go home, I couldn't imagine what I'd do when I got there, and I couldn't imagine waking up in the morning. I wanted Chas, and he didn't want me, and I suddenly realized that easily the best thing to do was make my life as short as I possibly could. I almost laughed, it was so neat: I wanted to make my life short, and I was at a party in Toppers' House, and the coincidence was too much. It was like a message from God. OK, it was disappointing that all God had to say to me was, like, Jump off a roof, but I didn't blame him. What else was he supposed to tell me?
I could feel the weight of everything then - the weight of loneliness, of everything that had gone wrong. I felt heroic, going up those last few flights to the top of the building, dragging that weight along with me. Jumping felt like the only way to get rid of it, the only way to make it work for me instead of against me; I felt so heavy that I knew I'd hit the street in no time. I'd beat the world record for falling off a tower-block.
Chapter 7
MARTIN
 
If she hadn't tried to kill me, I'd be dead, no question. But we've all got a preservation instinct, haven't we? Even if we're trying to kill ourselves when it kicks in. All I know is that I felt this thump on my back, and I turned round and grabbed the railings behind me, and I started yelling. I was drunk by then. I'd been taking nips out of the old hip-flask for a while, and I'd had a skinful before I came out, as well. (I know, I know, I shouldn't have driven. But I wasn't going to take the fucking stepladder on the bus.) So, yes, I probably did let rip with a bit of vocabulary. If I'd known it was Maureen, if I'd known what Maureen was like, then I would have toned it down a bit, probably, but I didn't; I think I might even have used the c- word, for which I've apologized. But you'd have to admit it was a unique situation.
I stood up and turned round carefully, because I didn't want to fall off until I chose to, and I started yelling at her, and she just stared.
'I know you,' she said.
'How?' I was being slow. People come up to me in restaurants and shops and theatres and garages and urinals all over Britain and say, 'I know you,' and they invariably mean precisely the opposite; they mean, 'I don't know you. But I've seen you on the telly.' And they want an autograph, or a chat about what Penny Chambers is really like, in real life. But that night, I just wasn't expecting it. It all seemed a bit beside the point, that side of life. 'From the television.'
'Oh, for Christ's sake. I was about to kill myself, but never mind, there's always time for an autograph. Have you got a pen? Or a bit of paper? And before you ask, she's a right bitch who will snort anything and fuck anybody. What are you doing up here anyway?' I was… I was going to jump too. I wanted to borrow your ladder.'
That's what everything comes down to: ladders. Well, not ladders literally; the Middle East peace process doesn't come down to ladders, and nor do the money markets. But one thing I know from interviewing people on the show is that you can reduce the most enormous topics down to the tiniest parts, as if life were an Airfix model. I've heard a religious leader attribute his faith to a faulty catch on a garden shed (he got locked in for a night when he was a kid, and God guided him through the darkness); I've heard a hostage describe how he survived because one of his captors was fascinated by the London Zoo family discount card he kept in his wallet. You want to talk about big things, but it's the catches on the garden sheds and the London Zoo cards that give you the footholds; without them you wouldn't know where to start. Not if you're hosting Rise and Shine with Penny and Martin you don't, anyway. Maureen and I couldn't talk about why we were so unhappy that we wanted our brains to spill out onto the concrete like a McDonald's milk shake, so we talked about the ladder instead. 'Be my guest.'
'I'll wait until… Well, I'll wait.'
'So you're just going to stand there and watch?'
'No. Of course not. You'll be wanting to do it on your own, I'd imagine.'
'You'd imagine right.'
'I'll go over there.' She gestured to the other side of the roof.
'I'll give you a shout on the way down.' I laughed, but she didn't.
'Come on. That wasn't a bad gag. In the circumstances.'
'I suppose I'm not in the mood, Mr Sharp.'
I don't think she was trying to be funny, but what she said made me laugh even more. Maureen went to the other side of the roof, and sat down with her back against the far wall. I turned around and lowered myself back on to the ledge. But I couldn't concentrate. The moment had gone. You're probably thinking, How much concentration does a man need to throw himself off the top of a high building? Well, you'd be surprised. Before Maureen arrived I'd been in the zone; I was in a place where it would have been easy to push myself off. I was entirely focused on all the reasons I was up there in the first place; I understood with a horrible clarity the impossibility of attempting to resume life down on the ground.
But the conversation with her had distracted me, pulled me back out into the world, into the cold and the wind and the noise of the thumping bass seven floors below. I couldn't get the mood back; it was as if one of the kids had woken up just as Cindy and I were starting to make love. I hadn't changed my mind, and I still knew that I'd have to do it some time. It's just that I knew I wasn't going to be able to do it in the next five minutes.
I shouted at Maureen.
'Oi! Do you want to swap places? See how you get on?' And I laughed again. I was, I felt, on a comedy roll, drunk enough - and, I suppose, deranged enough - to feel that just about anything I said would be hilarious.
Maureen came out of the shadows and approached the breach in the wire fence cautiously.
'I want to be on my own, too,' she said.
'You will be. You've got twenty minutes. Then I want my spot back.'
'How are you going to get back over this side?' I hadn't thought of that. The stepladder really only worked one way: there wasn't enough room on my side of the railings to open it out.
'You'll have to hold it.' 'What do you mean?'
'You hand it over the top to me. I'll put it flush against the railings. You hold it steady from that side.'
'I'd never be able to keep it in place. You're too heavy.'
And she was too light. She was small, but she carried no weight at all; I wondered whether she wanted to kill herself because she didn't want to die a long and painful death from some disease or other.
So you'll have to put up with me being here.'
I wasn't sure that I wanted to climb over to the other side anyway. The railings marked out a boundary now: you could get to the stairs from the roof, and the street from the stairs, and from the street you could get to Cindy, and the kids, and Danielle, and her dad, and everything else that had blown me up here as if I were a crisp packet in a gale. The ledge felt safe. There was no humiliation and shame there - beyond the humiliation and shame you'd expect to feel if you were sitting on a ledge, on your own, on New Year's Eve.
'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.
Chapter 8
JESS
 
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.
Chapter 9
MARTIN
 
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.
Chapter 10
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.
Chapter 11
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.
Chapter 12
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.
Chapter 13
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.
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.
Chapter 14
MARTIN
 
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.
'We just want to hear your side of it,' said Jess.
'There isn't a "my side". I was a bloody idiot and I'm paying the price.'
'So you don't want to defend yourself? Because you're among friends here,' said JJ.
'She just spat at me,' I pointed out. 'What kind of a friend is that?'
'Oh, don't be such a baby,' said Jess. 'My friends are always spitting at me. I never take it personally.'
'Maybe you should. Perhaps that's how your friends intend it to be taken.'
Jess snorted. 'If I took it personally, I wouldn't have any friends left.'
We let that one hang in the air.
'So what do you want to know, that you don't know already?'
There are two sides to every story,' said Jess. 'We only know the bad side.'
'I didn't know she was fifteen,' I said. 'She told me she was eighteen. She looked eighteen.' That was it. That was the good side of the story.
'So if she'd been, like, six months older you wouldn't be up here?'
'I don't suppose I would, no. Because I wouldn't have broken the law. Wouldn't have gone to prison. Wouldn't have lost my job, my wife wouldn't have found out…'
'So you're saying it was just bad luck.'
'I'd say there was a certain degree of culpability involved.' This was, I need hardly tell you, an attempt at dry understatement; I didn't know then that Jess is at her happiest wallowing in the marshland of the bleeding obvious.
'Just because you've swallowed a fucking dictionary, it doesn't mean you've done nothing wrong,' said Jess.
'That's what "culpability"…'
'Because some married men wouldn't have shagged her no matter how old she was. And you've got kids and all, haven't you?'
'I have indeed.'
'So bad luck's got nothing to do with it.'
Oh, for fuck's sake. Why d'you think I've been dangling my feet over the ledge, you moron? I screwed up. I'm not trying to make excuses for myself. I feel so wretched I want to die.'
'I should hope so.'
'Thanks. And thanks for introducing this exercise, too. Very helpful. Very… curative.'
Another polysyllabic word, another dirty look.
I'm interested in something,' said JJ.
'Go on.'
'Why is it easier to like leap into the void than to face up to what you've done?'
'This is facing up to what I've done.'
'People are always fucking young girls and leaving their wives and kids. They don't all jump off of buildings, man.'
'No. But like Jess says, maybe they should.'
'Really? You think anyone who makes a mistake of this kind should die? Woah. That's some heavy shit,' said JJ.
Did I really think that? Maybe I did. Or maybe I had done. As some of you might know, I'd written things in newspapers which said exactly that, more or less. This was before my fall from grace, naturally. I'd called for the restoration of the death penalty, for example. I'd called for resignations and chemical castrations and prison sentences and public humiliations and penances of every kind. And maybe I had meant it when I'd said that men who couldn't keep their things in their trousers should be… Actually, I can't remember what I thought the appropriate punishment was now for philanderers and serial adulterers. I shall have to look up the column in question. But the point is that I was practising what I preached. I hadn't been able to keep my thing in my trousers, so now I had to jump. I was a slave to my own logic. That was the price you had to pay if you were a tabloid columnist who crossed the line you'd drawn.
'Not every mistake, no. But maybe this one.'
'Jesus,' said JJ. 'You're real tough on yourself.'
'It's not just that, anyway. It's the public thing. The humiliation. The enjoyment of the humiliation. The TV show on cable that's watched by three people. Everything. I've… I've run out of room. I can't see any way forward or back.'
There was a thoughtful silence, for about ten seconds.
'Right,' said Jess. 'My turn.'
Chapter 15
JESS
 
I launched in. I just went, My name's Jess and I'm eighteen years old and, see, I'm here because I had some family problems that I don't need to go into. And then I split up with this guy. Chas. And he owes me an explanation. Because he didn't say anything. He just went. But if he gave me an explanation I'd feel better, I think, because he broke my heart. Except I can't find him. I was at the party downstairs looking for him, and he wasn't there. So I came up here.
And Martin goes, all sarcastic, You're going to kill yourself because Chas didn't turn up at a party? Jesus.
Well, I never said that, and I told him. So then he was like, OK, you're up here because you're owed an explanation, then. Is that it?
He was trying to make me sound stupid, and that wasn't fair, because we could all do that to each other. Like, for example, say, Oh, boo hoo hoo, they won't let me be on breakfast television any more. Oh, boo hoo hoo, my son's a vegetable and I don't talk to anyone and I have to clean up his… Well, OK, you couldn't make Maureen sound stupid. But it seemed to me that taking the piss wasn't on. You could have taken the piss out of all four of us; you can take the piss out of anyone who's unhappy, if you're cruel enough.
So I go, That wasn't what I said either. I said an explanation might stop me. I didn't say it was why I was up here in the first place, did I? See, we could handcuff you to those railings, and that would stop you. But you're not up here because no one's handcuffed you to railings, are you?
That shut him up. I was pleased with that.
JJ was nicer. He could see that I wanted to find Chas, so I was like, Duh, yeah, except I wished I hadn't done the Duh bit because he was being sympathetic and Duh is taking the piss, really, isn't it? But he ignored the Duh and he asked me where Chas was and I said I didn't know, some party or another, and he said, Well, why don't you go looking for him instead of fucking around up here and I said I'd run out of energy and hope and when I said that I knew it was true.
I don't know you. The only thing I know about you is, you're reading this. I don't know whether you're happy or not; I don't know whether you're young or not. I sort of hope you're young and sad. If you're old and happy, I can imagine that you'll maybe smile to yourself when you hear me going, He broke my heart. You'll remember someone who broke your heart, and you'll think to yourself, Oh, yes, I can remember how that feels. But you can't, you smug old git. Oh, you might remember feeling sort of pleasantly sad. You might remember listening to music and eating chocolates in your room, or walking along the Embankment on your own, wrapped up in a winter coat and feeling lonely and brave. But can you remember how with every mouthful of food it felt like you were biting into your own stomach? Can you remember the taste of red wine as it came back up and into the toilet bowl? Can you remember dreaming every night that you were still together, that he was talking to you gently and touching you, so that every morning when you woke up you had to go through it all over again? Can you remember carving his initials in your arm with a kitchen knife? Can you remember standing too close to the edge of an Underground platform? No? Well, fucking shut up then. Stick your smile up your saggy old arse.
Chapter 16
 JJ
 
I was going to just like splurge, tell 'em everything they needed to know - Big Yellow, Lizzie, the works. There was no need to lie. I guess I felt a little queasy listening to the other guys, because their reasons for being up there seemed pretty solid. Jesus, everyone understood why Maureen's life wasn't worth living. And, sure, Martin had kind of dug his own grave, but even so, that level of humiliation and shame… If I'd been him, I doubt if I'd have stuck around as long as he had. And Jess was very unhappy and very nuts. So it wasn't like people were being competitive, exactly, but there was a certain amount of, I don't know what you'd call it…marking out territory? And maybe I felt a little insecure because Martin had pissed all over my patch. I was going to be the shame and humiliation guy, but my shame and humiliation was beginning to look a little pale. He'd been locked up for sleeping with a fifteen-year-old, and fucked over in the tabloids; I'd been dumped by a girl, and my band wasn't going anywhere. Big fucking deal.
Still, I didn't think of lying until I had the trouble with my name. Jess was so fucking aggressive, and I just lost my nerve.
'So,' I said. 'OK. I'm JJ, and…'
'Woss that stand for?'
People always want to know what my initials are for, and I never tell them. I hate my name. What happened was, my dad was one of those self-educated guys, and he had a real, like, reverence for the BBC, so he spent too much time listening to the World Service on his big old short-wave radio in the den, and he was real hung up on this dude who was always on the radio in the sixties, John Julius Norwich, who was like a lord or something, and writes millions of books about like churches and stuff. And that's me. John fucking Julius. Did I become a lord, or a radio anchor, or even an Englishman? No. Did I drop out of school and form a band? Yep. Is John Julius a good name for a high-school dropout? Nope. JJ is OK, though. JJ's cool enough.
'That's my business. Anyway, I'm JJ, and I'm here because…'
'I'll find out what your name is.'
'How?'
'I'll come round your house and ransack it until I find something that tells me. Your passport or bank book or something. And if I can't find anything then I'll just steal something you love and I won't give it back until you've coughed up.'
Jesus Christ. What gives with this girl?
'You'd rather do that than call me by my initials?'
'Yeah. Course. I hate not knowing things.'
'I don't know you very well,' said Martin. 'But if you're really troubled by your own ignorance, I'd have thought there should be one or two things higher up the list than JJ's name.'
'What's that supposed to mean?'
'Do you know who the Chancellor of the Exchequer is? Or who wrote Moby-Dick?'
'No,' said Jess. 'Course not.' As if anyone who knew stuff like that was a dork. 'But they're not secrets, are they? I don't like not knowing secrets. I could find that other stuff out any time I felt like it, and I don't feel like it.'
'If he doesn't want to tell us, he doesn't want to tell us. Do your friends call you JJ?'
'Yeah.'
'Then that's good enough for us.'
'S'not good enough for me,' said Jess.
'Just belt up and let him talk,' said Martin.
But for me, the moment had gone. The moment of truth, anyway, ha ha. I could tell I wasn't going to get a fair hearing; there were waves of hostility coming off Jess and Martin, and these waves were breaking everywhere.
I stared at them all for a minute.
'So?' said Jess. 'You forgotten why you were going to kill yourself, or what?'
'Of course I haven't forgotten,' I said.
'Well, fucking spit it out then.'
'I'm dying,' I said.
See, I never thought I'd run into them again. I was pretty sure that sooner or later we'd shake hands, wish each other a happy whatever, and then either trudge back down the stairs or jump off the fucking roof, depending on mood, character, scale of problem etcetera. It really never occurred to me that this was going to come back and repeat on me like a pickle in a Big Mac.
'Yeah, well you don't look great,' said Jess. 'What you got? AIDS?'
AIDS fitted the bill. Everyone knew you could wander around with it for months; everyone knew it was incurable. And yet… I'd had a couple friends who died from it, and it's not the kind of thing you joke about. AIDS I knew I should leave the fuck alone. But then - and this all ran through my head in the thirty seconds after Jess's question - which fatal disease was more appropriate?
Leukemia? The Ebola virus? None of them really says, 'No, go on, man, be my guest. I'm only a joke killer disease. I'm not serious enough to offend anyone.'
'I got like this brain thing. It's called CCR.' Which of course is Creedence Clearwater Revival, one of my all-time favorite bands, and a big inspiration to me. I didn't think any of them looked like big Creedence fans. Jess was too young, I really didn't need to worry about Maureen, and Martin was the kind of guy who'd only have smelled a rat if I'd told him I was dying of incurable ABBA.
'It's like Cranial Corno-something.' I was pleased with the 'cranial' part. That sounded about right. The 'corno-' was weak, though, I admit.
'Is there no cure for that?' Maureen asked.
'Oh, yeah,' said Jess. 'There's a cure. You can take a pill. It's just that he couldn't be arsed. Der.'
'They figure it's from drug abuse. Drugs and alcohol. So it's all my own fuckin' fault.'
'You must feel a bit of a berk, then,' said Jess.
'I do,' I said. 'If "berk" means asshole.'
'Yeah. Anyway, you win.'
Which confirmed to me once and for all that a competitive edge had snuck in.
'Really?' I was pleased.
'Oh, yeah. Dying? Fuck. That's, you know… Like diamonds or spades or those… Trumps! You've got trumps, man.'
'I'd say that having a fatal disease was only any good in this game,' said Martin. 'The who's-the-most-miserable bastard game. Not much use anywhere else.'
'How long have you got?' Jess asked.
'I don't know.'
'Roughly. Just like off the top of your head.'
'Shut up, Jess,' said Martin.
'What have I said now? I wanted to know what we were dealing with.'
We're not dealing with anything,' I said. 'I'm dealing with it.'
'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.
Chapter 17
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 top 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.
Chapter 18
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 Sleazebag 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.
Chapter 19
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.
Maureen didn't want to come in with us, but we led her through the door and up the stairs into a room that was the closest thing I've seen to a New York loft since I've been here. It would have cost a fortune in NYC, which means it would have cost a fortune plus another thirty per cent in London. It was still packed, even at four in the morning, and it was full of my least favorite people: fucking art students. I mean, Jess had already warned us, but it still came as a shock. All those woolly hats, and moustaches with parts of them missing, all those new tattoos and plastic shoes… I mean, I'm a liberal guy, and I didn't want Bush to bomb Iraq, and I like a toke as much as the next guy, but these people still fill my heart with fear and loathing, mostly because I know they wouldn't have liked my band. When we played a college town, and we walked out in front of a crowd like this, I knew we were going to have a hard time. They don't like real music, these people. They don't like the Ramones or the Temptations or the 'Mats; they like D J Bleepy and his stupid fucking bleeps. Or else they all pretend that they're fucking gangstas, and listen to hip-hop about hos and guns.
So I was in a bad mood from the get-go. I was worried that I was going to get into a fight, and I'd even decided what that fight would be about: I'd be defending either Martin or Maureen from the sneers of some motherfucker with a goatee, or some woman with a moustache. But it never happened. The weird thing was that Martin in his suit and his fake tan, and Maureen in her raincoat and sensible shoes, they somehow blended right in. They looked so straight that they looked, you know, out there. Martin and his TV hair could have been in Kraftwerk, and Maureen could have been like a real weird version of Mo Tucker from the Velvet Underground. Me, I was wearing a pair of faded black pants, a leather jacket and an old Gitanes T-shirt, and I felt like a fucking freak.
There was only one incident that made me think I might have to break someone's nose. Martin was standing there drinking wine straight out of a bottle, and these two guys started staring at him.
'Martin Sharp! You know, off of breakfast telly!'
I winced. I have never really hung out with a celebrity, and it hadn't occurred to me that walking into a party with Martin's face is like walking into a party naked: even arts students tend to take notice. But this was more complicated than straightforward recognition.
'Oh, yeah! Good call!' his buddy said.
'Oi, Sharpy!'
Martin smiled at them pleasantly.
'People must say that to you all the time,' one of them said.
'What?'
'You know. Oi, Sharpy and all that.'
'Well, yes,' said Martin. 'They do.'
'Bad luck, though. Of all the people on TV, you end up looking like that cunt.'
Martin gave them a cheerful, what-can-you-do shrug and turned back to me.
'You OK?'
'That's life,' he said, and looked at me. He'd somehow managed to give an old cliche new depth.
Maureen, meanwhile, was plainly petrified. She jumped every time anyone laughed, or swore, or broke something; she stared at the party-goers as if she were looking at Diane Arbus photos projected fifty feet wide on an Imax screen.
'You want a drink?'
'Where's Jess?'
'Looking for Chas.'
'And then can we go?'
'Sure.'
'Good. I'm not enjoying myself here.'
'Me neither.'
'Where do you think we'll go next?'
'I don't know.'
'But we'll all go together, do you think?'
'I guess. That's the deal, right? Until we find this guy.'
'I hope we don't find him,' said Maureen. 'Not for a while. I'd like a sherry, please, if you can find one.'
'You know what? I'm not sure there's going to be too much sherry around. These guys don't look like sherry-drinkers to me.'
'White wine? Would they have that?'
I found a couple paper cups, and a bottle with something left in it.
'Cheers.'
'Cheers.'
'Every New Year's the same, huh?'
'How do you mean?'
'You know. Warm white wine, a bad party full of jerks. And this year I'd promised myself things would be different.'
'Where were you this time last year?'
'I was at a party at home. With Lizzie, my ex.'
'Nice?'
'It was OK, yeah. You?'
'I was at home. With Matty.'
'Right. And did you think, a year ago...'
'Yes,' she said quickly. 'Oh, yes.'
'Right.' And I didn't really know how to follow up, so we sipped our drinks and watched the jerks.
Chapter 20
MAUREEN
 
It can't be hygienic, living in a place without rooms. Even people who live in bedsits usually have access to a proper bathroom, with doors and walls and a window. This place, the place where the party was being held, didn't even have that. It was like a railway station toilet, except there wasn't even a separate gents'. There was just a little wall separating the bath and toilet from the rest of it, so even though I needed to go, I couldn't; anyone might have walked around the wall and seen what I was doing. And I don't need to spell out how unhealthy it all was. Mother used to say that a bad smell is just a germ gas; well, whoever owned this flat must have had germs everywhere. Not that anyone could use the toilet anyway. When I went to find it, someone was kneeling on the floor and sniffing the lid. I have no idea why anyone would want to smell the lid of a toilet (while someone else watched! Can you imagine!). But I suppose people are perverted in all sorts of different ways. It was sort of what I expected when I walked into that party and heard the noise and saw what kind of people they were; if someone had asked me what I thought people like that would do in a toilet, I might have said that they'd sniff the lid.
When I came back, Jess was standing there in tears, and the rest of the party had cleared a little space around us. Some boy had told her that Chas had been and gone, and he'd gone with somebody he met at the party, some girl. Jess wanted us all to go round to this girl's house, and JJ was trying to persuade her that it wasn't a good idea.
'It's OK,' Jess said. 'I know her. There's probably been some sort of misunderstanding. She probably just didn't know about me and Chas.'
'What if she did know?' said JJ.
'Well,' said Jess. 'In that case I couldn't let it go, could I?'
'What does that mean?'
'I wouldn't kill her. I'm not that mad. But I would have to hurt her. Maybe cut her a little.'
When Frank broke off our engagement I didn't think I'd ever get over it. I felt almost as sorry for him as I did for myself, because I didn't make it easy for him. We were in the Ambler Arms, except it's not called that any more, over in the corner by the fruit machine, and the landlord came over to our table and asked Frank to take me home, because nobody wanted to put any money in the machine while I was there howling and bawling my eyes out, and they used to make a fair bit of money from the fruit machine on quiet nights.
I nearly did away with myself then - I certainly considered it. But I thought I could ride it out, I thought things might get better. Imagine the trouble I could have saved if I had done! I would have killed the both of us, me and Matty, but of course I didn't know that then.
I didn't take any notice of the silly things Jess said about cutting people. I came up with a lot of utter nonsense when Frank and I broke up; I told people that Frank had been forced to move away, that he was sick in the head, that he was a drunk and he'd hit me. None of it was true. Frank was a sweet man whose crime was that he didn't love me quite enough, and because this wasn't much of a crime I had to make up some bigger ones.
'Were you engaged?' I asked Jess, and then wished I hadn't.
'Engaged?' Jess said. 'Engaged? What is this? Pride and f—ing Prejudice? "Oooh, Mr Arsey Darcy. May I plight my truth?" "Oh yes, Miss Snooty Knobhead, I'd be charmed I'm sure." ' She said this last part in a silly voice, but you could probably have guessed that.
'People do still get engaged,' Martin said. 'It's not a stupid question.'
'Which people get engaged?'
'I did,' I said. But I said it too quietly, because I was scared of her, and so she made me say it again.
'You did? Really? OK, but what living people get engaged? I'm not interested in people out of the Ark. I'm not interested in people with, with like shoes and raincoats and whatever.' I wanted to ask what she thought we should wear instead of shoes, but I was learning my lesson.
'Anyway, who the f— did you get engaged to?'
I didn't want any of this. It didn't seem fair that this is what happened when you tried to help.
'Did you shag him? I'll bet you did. How did he like it? Doggy style? So he didn't have to look at you?'
And then Martin grabbed her and dragged her into the street.
Chapter 21
JESS
 
When Martin pulled me outside, I did that thing where you decide to become a different person. It's something I could do whenever I felt like it. Doesn't everybody, when they feel themselves getting out of control? You know: you say to yourself, OK, I'm a booky person, so then you go and get some books from the library and carry them around for a while. Or, OK, I'm a druggy person, and smoke a lot of weed. Whatever. And it makes you feel different. If you borrow someone else's clothes or their interests or their words, what they say, then it can give you a bit of a rest from yourself, I find.
It was time to feel different. I don't know why I said that stuff to Maureen; I don't know why I say half the things I say. I knew I'd overstepped the mark, but I couldn't stop myself. I get angry, and when it starts it's like being sick. I puke and puke over someone and I can't stop until I'm empty. I'm glad Martin pulled me outside. I needed stopping. I need stopping a lot. So I told myself that from that point on I was going to be more a person out of the olden days kind of thing. I swore not to swear, ha ha, or to spit; I swore not to ask harmless old ladies who are clearly more or less virgins whether they shagged doggy style.
Martin went spare at me, told me I was a bitch, and an idiot, and asked me what Maureen had ever done to me. And I just said, Yes, sir, and, No, sir, and, Very sorry, sir, and I looked at the pavement, not at him, just to show him I really was sorry. And then I curtsied, which I thought was a nice touch. And he said, What the fuck's this, now? What's the yes sir no sir business? So I told him that I was going to stop being me, and that no one would ever see the old me again, and he didn't know what to say to that. I didn't want them to get sick of me. People do get sick of me, I've noticed. Chas got sick of me, for example. And I really need that not to happen any more, otherwise I'll be left with nobody. With Chas, I think everything was just too much; I came on too strong too quickly, and he got scared. Like that thing in the Tate Modern? That was definitely a mistake. Because the vibe in there… OK, some of the stuff is all weird and intense and so on, but just because the stuff is all weird and intense, that shouldn't have meant that I went all weird and intense. That was inappropriate behaviour, as Jen would have said. I should have waited until we'd got outside and finished looking at the pictures and installations before I went off on one. I think Jen got sick of me, too.
Also, the business in the cinema, which looking back on it might have been the final straw. That was inappropriate behaviour, too. Or maybe the behaviour wasn't inappropriate, because we had to have that conversation some time, but the place (the Holloway Odeon) wasn't right, and nor was the time (halfway through the film) or the volume (loud). One of the points Chas made that night was that I wasn't really mature enough to be a mother, and I can see now that by yelling my head off about having a baby halfway through Moulin Rouge I sort of proved it for him.
So anyway. Martin went mental at me for a while, and then he just seemed to shrink, as if he was a balloon and he'd been punctured. 'What's wrong, kind sir?' I said, but he just shook his head, and I could understand enough from that. What I understood was that it was the middle of the night and he was standing outside a party full of people he didn't know, shouting at someone else he didn't know, a couple of hours after sitting on a roof thinking about killing himself. Oh yeah, and his wife and children hated him. In any other situation I would have said that he'd suddenly lost the will to live. I went over and put my hand on his shoulder, and he looked at me as if I were a person rather than an irritation and we almost had a Moment of some description - not a romantic Ross-and-Rachel-type moment (as if), but a Moment of Shared Understanding. But then we were interrupted, and the Moment passed.
Chapter 22
MAUREEN
 
Frank is Matty's father. It's funny to think that might not be immediately obvious to someone, because it's so obvious to me. I only ever had intercourse with one man, and I only had intercourse with that one man once, and the one time in my entire life I had intercourse produced Matty. What are the chances, eh? One in a million? One in ten million? I don't know. But of course even one in ten million means that there are a lot of women like me in the world. That's not what you think of, when you think of one in ten million. You don't think, That's a lot of people.
What I've come to realize, over the years, is that we're less protected from bad luck than you could possibly imagine. Because though it doesn't seem fair, having intercourse only the once and ending up with a child who can't walk or talk or even recognize me… Well, fairness doesn't really have much to do with it, does it? You only have to have intercourse the once to produce a child, any child. There are no laws that say, You can only have a child like Matty if you're married, or if you have lots of other children, or if you sleep with lots of different men. There are no laws like that, even though you and I might think there should be. And once you have a child like Matty, you can't help but feel, That's it! That's all my bad luck, a whole lifetime's worth, in one bundle. But I'm not sure luck works like that. Matty wouldn't stop me from getting breast cancer, or from being mugged. You'd think he should, but he can't. In a way, I'm glad I never had another child, a normal one. I'd have needed more guarantees from God than He could have provided.
And anyway, I'm Catholic, so I don't believe in luck as much as I believe in punishment. We're good at believing in punishment; we're the best in the world. I sinned against the Church, and the price you pay for that is Matty. It might seem like a high price to pay, but then, these sins are supposed to mean something, aren't they? So in one way it's hardly surprising that this is what I got. For a long time I was even grateful, because it felt to me as though I were going to be able to redeem myself here on Earth, and there'd be no reckoning to be made afterwards. But now I'm not so sure. If the price you have to pay for a sin is so high that you end up wanting to kill yourself and committing an even worse sin, then Someone's done his sums wrong. Someone's overcharging.
I had never hit anyone before, not in the whole of my life, although I'd often wanted to. But that night was different. I was in limbo, somewhere between living and dying, and it felt as if it didn't matter what I did until I went back to the top of Toppers' House again. And that was the first time I realized that I was on a sort of holiday from myself. It made me want to slap him again, just because I could, but I didn't. The once was enough: Chas fell over - more from the shock, I think, than from the force, because I'm not so strong - and then knelt on all fours covering his head with his hands.
I'm sorry,' Chas said.
'For what?' JJ asked him.
'I'm not sure,' he said. 'Whatever.'
'I had a boyfriend like you once,' I told him.
'I'm sorry,' he said again.
'It hurts. It's a horrible thing to do, to have intercourse with someone and then disappear.'
'I can see that now.'
'Can you?'
'I think so.'
'You can't see anything from down there,' said JJ. 'Why don't you get up?'
'I don't really want to be slapped again.'
'Is it fair to say that you're not the bravest man in the world?' JJ asked him.
'There are lots of different ways of showing courage,' said Chas. 'If what you're saying is that I don't set much store by physical bravery… then yes, that's fair. It's overrated, I think.'
'Well, you know, Chas, I think that's kinda brave of you, to show you're so afraid of a small lady like Maureen. I respect your honesty, man. You won't slap him again, will you, Maureen?'
I promised I wouldn't, and Chas got to his feet. It was a strange feeling, watching a man do something because of me.
'Not much of a life, hiding underneath people's grills, is it?' said JJ.
'No. But I don't really see the alternatives.'
'Howsabout talking to Jess?'
'Oh, no. I'd rather live out here all the time. Seriously. I'm already thinking of relocating, you know,'
'What, to someone else's back yard? Maybe somewhere with a bit of grass?'
'No,' Chas said. 'To Manchester.'
'Listen,' JJ said. 'I know she's scary. That's why you should talk to her now. With us around. We can, you know. Mediate. Wouldn't you rather do that than move cities?'
'But what is there to say?'
'Maybe we could work something out. Together. Something that might get her off your back.'
'Like what?'
'I know for a fact she'd marry you if you asked her.'
'Ah, no, you see that's just…'
'I was just kidding around, Chas. Lighten up, man.'
'These aren't, like, lightening-up times. These are dark times.'
'Dark times indeed. What with Jess, and going to Manchester, and living under a grill and the Twin Towers and everything.'
'Yeah.'
JJ shook his head.
'OK. So what can you tell her that's going to get you out of this f— mess?'
And JJ gave him some things to say, as if he were an actor and we were in a soap.
Chapter 23
MARTIN
 
I'm not averse to having a go at DIY every now and again. I decorated the girls' bedrooms myself, with stencils and everything. (And yes, there were TV cameras there, and the production company paid for every last drop of Day-Glo paint, but that doesn't make it any less of an achievement.) Anyway, if you're a fellow enthusiast then you'll know that sometimes you come across holes that are too big for filler, especially in the bathroom. And when that happens, the sloppy way to do it is to bung the holes up with anything you can find - broken matches, bits of sponge, whatever is to hand. Well, that was Chas's function that night: he was a bit of sponge that plugged a gap. The whole Jess and Chas thing was ludicrous, of course, a waste of time and energy, a banal little sideshow; but it absorbed us, got us down off the roof and even as I was listening to his preposterous speech I could see its value. I could also see that we were going to need a lot more bits of sponge over the coming weeks and months. Maybe that's what we all need, whether we're suicidal or not. Maybe life is just too big a gap to be plugged by filler, so we need anything we can get our hands on - sanders and planers, fifteen-year-olds, whatever -to fill it up.
'Hi, Jess,' said Chas when he was shoved out of the party and on to the street. He was trying to sound cheery and friendly and casual, as if he'd been hoping to bump into Jess at some point during the evening, but his general lack of volition undid him; cheeriness is hard to convey when you are too scared to make eye contact. He reminded me of a petty gangster caught thieving from the local godfather in a movie, out of his depth and desperately trying to suck up in order to save his skin.
'Why wouldn't you talk to me?'
'Yeah. Right. I knew you'd want to know that. And I've been thinking about it. I've been thinking about it very hard, actually, because, you know, it's… I'm not happy about it. It's weak. It's a weakness in me.'
'Don't overdo it, man,' said JJ. There seemed no attempt on anyone's part to pretend that this was going to bear any resemblance to a real conversation.
'No. Right. So. First of all I should say sorry, and it won't happen again. And second of all: I find you very attractive, and stimulating company, and…'
This time JJ just coughed ostentatiously.
'… And, well. It's not me, it's you.' He winced. 'Sorry. Sorry. It's not you, it's me.'
At that point, just as he was trying to remember his lines, he caught my eye.
'Hey. You look like that wanker off the telly. Martin Thing.'
'It is him,' said Jess.
'How the fuck do you know him?'
'It's a long story,' I said.
'We were both just up on the roof of Toppers' House. We was going to throw ourselves off,' Jess said, thus making the long story considerably shorter, and, to be fair, leaving out very few of the salient points.
Chas swallowed this information almost visibly, like snakes swallow eggs: you could see the slow march to the brain. Chas, I'm sure, had many attractive aspects to his personality, but quickness of intelligence was not one of them. 'Because of that girl you shagged? And your wife and kids throwing you out and everything?' he asked finally.
'Why don't you ask Jess why she was going to jump? Isn't that more relevant?'
'Shut up,' said Jess. 'That's private.'
'Oh, and my stuff isn't?'
'No,' she said. 'Not any more. Everyone knows about it.'
'What's Penny Chambers like? In real life?'
'Is that what we came out here to talk about, Chas?' JJ said quietly.
'No. Right. Sorry. It's just a bit distracting, having someone off the telly standing there.'
'Do you want me to leave?'
'No,' said Jess quickly. 'I want you here.'
'I wouldn't have thought you'd be his type,' said Chas. 'Too old. Plus, he's a cunt.' He chuckled, and then looked around for someone to share the chuckle with, but none of us - none of them, I should say, because even Chas didn't expect me to laugh at my own age or cunthood - was even remotely amused.
'Oh, right. It's like that, is it?'
And suddenly, yes, it was exactly like that: we were more serious than him, in every way.
And even Jess saw it.
'You're the tosser,' she said. 'None of this is anything to do with you. Fuck off out of my sight.' And then she kicked him - an old-fashioned, straight-legged toe into the meatiest part of the arse, as if the two of them were cartoon characters.
And that was the end of Chas.
Chapter 24
JESS
 
When you're sad - like, really sad, Toppers' House sad - you only want to be with other people who are sad. I didn't know this until that night, but I suddenly realized it just by looking at Chas's face.
There was nothing in it. It was just the face of a twenty-two-year-old boy who'd never done anything, apart from dropped a few Es, or thought anything, apart from where to get the next E from, or felt anything, apart from off his face. It was the eyes that gave him away: when he made that stupid joke about Martin and expected us to laugh, the eyes were completely lost in the joke, and there was nothing else left of them. They were just laughing eyes, not frightened eyes or troubled eyes - they were the eyes a baby has when you tickle it. I'd noticed with the others that when they made jokes, if they did (Maureen wasn't a big comedian), you could still see why they'd been up on the roof even while they were laughing - there was something else in there, something that stopped them giving themselves over to the moment. And you can say that we shouldn't have been up there, because wanting to kill yourself is a coward's way out, and you can say that none of us had enough reason to want to do it. But you can't say that we didn't feel it, because we all did, and that was more important than anything. Chas would never know what that was like unless he crossed the line too.
Because that's what the four of us had done - crossed a line. I don't mean we'd done anything bad. I just mean that something had happened to us which separated us from lots of other people. We had nothing in common apart from where we'd ended up, on that square of concrete high up in the air, and that was the biggest thing you could possibly have in common with anyone. To say that Maureen and I had nothing in common because she wore raincoats and listened to brass bands or whatever was like saying, I don't know, the only thing I've got in common with that girl is that we have the same parents. And I didn't know any of that until Chas said that thing about Martin being a cunt.
The other thing I worked out was that Chas could have told me anything - that he loved me, he hated me, he'd been possessed by aliens and the Chas I knew was now on a different planet - and it wouldn't have made any difference. I was still owed an explanation, I thought, but so what? What good was it going to do me? It wouldn't have made me any happier. It was like scratching when you have chickenpox. You think it's going to help, but the itch moves over, and then moves over again. My itch suddenly felt miles away, and I couldn't have reached it with the longest arms in the world. Realizing that made me scared that I was going to be itchy for ever, and I didn't want that. I knew all the things that Martin had done, but when Chas had gone I still wanted him to hug me. I wouldn't even have cared if he'd tried anything on, but he didn't. He sort of did the opposite; he held me all funny, as if I was covered in barbed wire.
I'm sorry, I went. I'm sorry that little shitbag called you names. And he said it wasn't my fault, but I told him that of course it was, because if he hadn't met me he wouldn't have had to experience the trauma of being called a cunt on New Year's Eve. And he said he got called a cunt a lot. (This is actually true. I've known him for a while now, and I'd say I've heard people, complete strangers, call him a cunt about fifteen times, a prick about ten times, a wanker maybe about the same, and an arsehole approximately half a dozen times. Also: tosser, berk, wally, git, shithead and pillock.) Nobody likes him, which is weird, because he's famous. How can you be famous if nobody likes you?
Martin says it's nothing to do with the fifteen-year-old thing; he reckons that if anything it got slightly better after that, because the people who called him a cunt were exactly the sort of people who didn't see anything wrong with underage sex. So instead of shouting out names, they shouted out things like, Go on, my son, Get in there, Wallop, etcetera. In terms of personal abuse, although not in terms of his marriage or his relationship with his children, or his career, or his sanity, going to prison actually did him some good. But all sorts of people seem to be famous even though they have no fans. Tony Blair is a good example. And all the other people who present breakfast TV programmes and quiz shows. The reason they're paid a lot of money, it seems to me, is because strangers yell terrible words at them in the street. Even a traffic warden doesn't get called a cunt when he's out shopping with his family. So the only real advantage to being Martin is the money, and also the invitations to film premieres and dodgy nightclubs. And that's where you get yourself into trouble.
These were just some thoughts I had when Martin and I hugged. But they didn't get us anywhere. Outside my head it was five o'clock in the morning and we were all unhappy and we didn't have anywhere to go.
I was like, So now what? And I rubbed my hands together, as if we were all enjoying ourselves too much to let the night end - as if we'd been giving it large in Ocean, and we were all off for bagels and coffee in Bethnal Green, or back to someone's flat for spliffs and a chill. So I went, Whose gaff? I'll bet yours is tasty, Martin. I'll bet you've got Jacuzzis and all sorts. That'll do. And Martin said, No, we can't go there. And, by the way, my Jacuzzi days are long gone. Which I think meant that he was broke, not that he was too fat to go in one or anything. Because he's not fat, Martin. He's too vain to be fat.
So I said, Well, never mind, as long as you've got a kettle and some Corn Flakes. And he went, I haven't, so I was like, What have you got to hide? And he said, Nothing, but he said it in a funny way, an embarrassed, hiding sort of a way. And then I remembered something from before which I thought might be relevant and I said, Who was leaving messages for you on your mobile? And he went, Nobody. And I said, Is that Mr Nobody or maybe Miss Nobody? And he said, Just nobody. So I wanted to know why he didn't want to invite us back, and he went, Because I don't know you. And I said, Yeah, like you didn't know that fifteen-year-old. And then he said, as if he was angry, OK. Yeah. Let's go to mine. Why not?
And so we did.
Chapter 25
JJ
 
I know I'd had that bonding moment with Maureen when she'd smacked Chas, but to tell you the truth I was working on the assumption that if we all made it through to breakfast time, then my new band would split up due to musical differences. Breakfast time would mean that we'd made it through to a new dawn, new hope, a new year, tra la la. And no offense meant, but I really didn't want to be seen in daylight with these people, if you know what I mean - especially with… some of 'em. But breakfast and daylight were still a couple of hours away, so it felt to me like I had no real choice but to go with them back to Martin's place. To do anything else would have been mean and unfriendly, and I still didn't trust myself to spend too much time on my own.
Martin lived in a little villagey part of Islington, right around the corner from Tony Blair's old house, and really not the kind of 'hood you'd choose if you'd fallen on hard times, as Martin was supposed to have done. He paid the cab fare, and we followed him up the front steps to his house. I could see three or four front-door bells, so I could tell it wasn't all his, but I couldn't have afforded to live there.
Before he put his key in the lock, he paused and turned around.
'Listen,' he said, and then he didn't say anything, so we listened.
'I don't hear anything,' said Jess.
'No, I didn't mean that sort of listen. I meant, Listen, I'm going to tell you something.'
'Go on, then,' said Jess. 'Spit it out.'
'It's very late. So just… be respectful of the neighbours.'
'That's it?'
'No.' He took a deep breath. 'There'll probably be someone in there.'
'In your flat?'
'Yes.'
'Who?'
'I don't know what you'd call her. My date. Whatever.'
'You had a date for the evening?' I tried to keep my voice in neutral, but, you know, Jesus… What kind of evening had she had? One moment you're sitting in a club or whatever, the next he's disappeared because he wants to jump off a building.
'Yes. What of it?'
'Nothing. Just…' There was no need to say any more. We could leave the rest to the imagination.
'Fucking hell,' said Jess. 'What kind of date ends up with you sitting on the fucking ledge of a tower-block?'
'An unsuccessful one,' said Martin.
'I should think it was fucking unsuccessful,' said Jess.
'Yes,' said Martin. 'That's why I described it as such.'
He opened the door to his flat and ushered us in ahead of him; so we saw the girl sitting on the sofa a moment before he did. She was maybe ten or fifteen years younger than him, and pretty, in a kind of bimbo TV weather-girl way; she was wearing an expensive-looking black dress, and she'd been crying a whole lot. She stared at us, and then at him.
'Where have you been?' She was trying to keep it light, but she couldn't quite pull it off.
'Just out. Met some…' He gestured at us.
'Met some who?'
'You know. People.'
'And that's why you left in the middle of the evening?'
'No. I didn't know I was going to run into this crowd when I left.'
'And which crowd are they?' said the girl.
I wanted to hear Martin answer the question, because it might have been funny, but Jess interrupted.
'You're Penny Chambers,' said Jess.
She didn't say anything, probably because she knew that already. We stared at her.
'Penny Chambers,' said Maureen. She was gaping like a fucking fish.
Penny Chambers still didn't say anything, for the same reasons as before.
'Rise and Shine with Penny and Martin,' said Maureen.
No response for a third time. I don't know much about English television stars, but I got it. If Martin was Regis, then Penny was Kathy Lee. The English Regis had been nailing the English Kathy Lee, and then disappeared to kill himself. That was pretty fucking hilarious, you have to admit.
'Are you two going out?' Jess asked her.
'You'd better ask him,' said Penny. 'He's the one who vanished in the middle of a dinner party.'
'Are you two going out?' Jess asked him.
'I'm sorry,' said Martin.
'Answer the question,' said Penny. 'I'm interested.'
'This isn't really the time to talk about it,' said Martin.
'So there's clearly some doubt,' Penny said. 'Which is news to me.'
'It's complicated,' said Martin. 'You knew that.'
'Nope.'
'You knew I wasn't happy.'
'Yes, I knew you weren't happy. But I didn't know you were unhappy about me.'
'I wasn't… It's not… Can we talk later? In private?'
He stopped, and gestured around the room again at the three staring faces. I think I can speak for everyone when I say that, as a rule, potential suicides tend to be pretty self-absorbed: those last few weeks, it's pretty much all me me me. So we were gulping this shit down a) because it was not about us and b) because it was not a conversation likely to depress the hell out of us. It was, for the moment, just a fight between a boyfriend and a girlfriend, and it was taking us out of ourselves.
'And when will we be in private?'
'Soon. But probably not immediately.'
'Right. And what do we talk about in the meantime? With your three friends here?'
No one knew what to say to that. Martin was the host, so it was up to him to find the common ground. And good luck to him.
'I think you should call Tom and Christine,' said Penny.
'Yeah, I will. Tomorrow.'
'They must think you're so rude.'
'Who are Tom and Christine? The people you were having dinner with?'
'Yes.'
'What did you tell them?'
'He told them he was going to the toilet,' said Penny.
Jess burst out laughing. Martin glanced at her, replayed in his head the lame excuse he'd used, and then smirked, very briefly, at his shoes. It was a weirdly familiar moment. You know when you're being torn a new asshole by your dad for some crime you've committed, while a pal watches and tries not to laugh? And you try not to catch his eye, because then you'll laugh too? Well, that's what it was like. Anyway, Penny spotted the little-boy smirk and flew across the room at the little boy in question. He grabbed her wrists to prevent her from hitting him.
'How dare you find it funny.'
'I'm sorry. Really. I know it's not funny in any way.' He tried to hug her, but she pushed herself away from him and sat down again.
'We need a drink,' said Martin. 'Would you mind if they stayed for one?'
I'll take a drink off just about anybody in any situation, but even I wasn't sure whether to take this one. In the end, though, I was just too thirsty.
Chapter 26
MARTIN
 
It was only when we got back to the flat that I had any recollection of describing Penny as a right bitch who would fuck anybody and snort anything. But when had I said that? I spent the next thirty minutes or so praying that it had been before Jess's arrival, when Maureen and I were on our own; if Jess had heard, then I had no doubt that my opinion of Penny would be passed on.
And, needless to say, it was hardly a considered opinion anyway. Penny and I don't live together, but we'd been seeing each other for a few months, more or less ever since I got out of prison, and as you can imagine she had to endure a fair amount of difficulty in that time. We didn't want the press to know that we'd been seeing each other, so we never went out anywhere, and we wore hats and sunglasses more often than was strictly necessary. I had - still have, will always have - an ex-wife and children. I was only partially employed, on a dismal cable channel. And as I may have mentioned before, I wasn't terribly cheerful.
And we had a history. There was a brief affair when we were co-presenting, but we were both married to other people, and so the affair ended, painfully and sadly. And then, finally, after much bad timing and many recriminations, we got together, but we'd missed the moment. I had become soiled goods. I was broken, finished, a wreck, scraping the bottom of my own barrel; she was still at the top of her game, beautiful and young and famous, broadcasting to millions every morning. I couldn't believe that she wanted to be with me for any reason other than nostalgia and pity, and she couldn't persuade me otherwise. A few years ago, Cindy joined one of those dreadful reading groups, where unhappy, repressed middle-class lesbians talk for five minutes about some novel they don't understand, and then spend the rest of the evening moaning about how dreadful men are. Anyway, she read a book about this couple who were in love but couldn't get together for donkey's years and then finally managed it, aged about one hundred. She adored it and made me read it, and it took me about as long to get through as it took the characters to pair off. Well, our relationship felt like that, except the old biddies in the book had a better time than Penny and I were having. A few weeks before Christmas, in a fit of self-disgust and despair, I told her to bugger off, and so she went out that night with some guest on the show, a TV chef, and he gave her her first-ever line of coke, and they ended up in bed, and she came round to see me the next morning in floods of tears. That's why I told Maureen she was a right bitch who would snort anything and fuck anybody. I can see now that this was a bit on the harsh side.
So that, give or take a few hundred heart-to-hearts and tantrums, a couple of dozen other split-ups, and the odd punch thrown - by her, I hasten to add - is how Penny came to be sitting on my sofa waiting up for me. She would have been waiting a long time if it hadn't been for our impromptu roof party. I hadn't even bothered writing her a note, an omission which only now is beginning to cause me any remorse. Why did we persist in the pathetic delusion that this relationship was in any way viable? I'm not sure. When I asked Penny what the big idea was, she said merely that she loved me, which struck me as an answer more likely to confuse and obscure than to illuminate. As for me… Well, I associated Penny, perhaps understandably, with a time before things had started to go awry: before Cindy, before fifteen-year-olds, before prison. I had managed to convince myself that if I could make things work with Penny, then I could make them work elsewhere - I could somehow haul myself back, as if one's youth were a place you could visit whenever you felt like it. I bring you momentous news: it's not. Who'd have thought?
My immediate problem was how to explain my connection with Maureen, JJ and Jess. She would find the truth hurtful and upsetting, and it was hard to think of a lie that would even get off the ground. What could we possibly be to one another? We didn't look like colleagues, or poetry enthusiasts, or clubbers, or substance-abusers; the problem, it has to be said, was Maureen, on more or less every count, if failing to look like a substance-abuser could ever be described as a problem. And even if they were colleagues or substance-abusers, I would still find it hard to explain the apparent desperation of my desire to see them. I had told Penny and mine hosts that I was going to the toilet; why would I then shoot out the front door half an hour before midnight on New Year's Eve, in order to attend the AGM of some nameless society?
So I decided simply to carry on as if there was nothing to explain.
'Sorry. Penny, this is JJ, Maureen, Jess, JJ, Maureen, Jess, this is Penny.'
Penny seemed unconvinced even by the introductions, as if I had started lying already.
'But you still haven't told me who they are.'
'As in… ?'
'As in, how do you know them and where did you meet them?'
'It's a long story.'
'Good.'
'Maureen I know from… Where did we meet, Maureen? First of all?'
Maureen stared at me.
'It's a long time ago now, isn't it? We'll remember in a minute. And JJ used to be part of the old Channel 5 crowd, and Jess is his girlfriend.'
Jess put her arm around JJ, with a touch more satire than I might have wished.
'And where were they all tonight?'
'They're not deaf, you know. Or idiots. They're not… deaf idiots.'
'Where were you all tonight?'
'At… like… a party,' said JJ tentatively.
'Where?'
'In Shoreditch.'
'Whose?'
'Whose was it, Jess?'
Jess shrugged carelessly, as if it had been that sort of crazy night.
'And why did you want to go? At eleven-thirty? In the middle of a dinner party? Without me?'
'That I can't explain.' And I attempted to look simultaneously helpless and apologetic. We had, I hoped, crossed the border into the land of psychological complexity and unpredictability, a country where ignorance and bafflement were permitted.
'You're seeing someone else, aren't you?'
Seeing someone else? How on earth could that explain any of this? Why would seeing someone else necessitate bringing home a middle-aged woman, a teenaged punk and an American with a leather jacket and a Rod Stewart haircut? What would the story have been? But then, after reflection, I realized that Penny had probably been here before, and therefore knew that infidelity can usually provide the answer to any domestic mystery. If I had walked in with Sheena Easton and Donald Rumsfeld, Penny would probably have scratched her head for a few seconds before saying exactly the same thing.
In other circumstances, on other evenings, it would have been the right conclusion, too; I used to be pretty resourceful when I was being unfaithful to Cindy, even if I do say so myself. I once drove a new BMW into a wall, simply because I needed to explain a four-hour delay in getting home from work. Cindy came out into the street to inspect the crumpled bonnet, looked at me, and said, 'You're seeing someone else, aren't you?' I denied it, of course.
But then, anything - smashing up a new car, persuading Donald Rumsfeld to come to an Islington flat in the early hours of New Year's Day - is easier than actually telling the truth. That look you get, the look which lets you see right through the eyes and down into the place where she keeps all the hurt and the rage and the loathing… Who wouldn't go that extra yard to avoid it?
'Well?'
My delay in replying was a result of some pretty complicated mental arithmetic; I was trying to work out which of the two different sums gave me the smallest minus number. But, inevitably, the delay was interpreted as an admission of guilt.
'You fucking bastard.'
I was briefly tempted to point out that I was owed one, after the unfortunate incident with the line of coke and the TV chef, but that would only have served to delay her departure; more than anything I wanted to get drunk in my own home with my new friends. So I said nothing. Everyone else jumped when she slammed the door on the way out, but I knew it was coming.
Chapter 27
MAUREEN
 
I was sick on the carpet outside the bathroom. Well, I say 'carpet' - I was actually sick where the carpet should have been, but he didn't have one. Which was just as well, because it was much easier to clean up afterwards. I've seen lots of those programmes where they decorate your house for you, and I've never understood why they always make you throw your carpets away, even good ones which still have a nice thick pile. But now I'm wondering whether they first of all decide whether the people who live in the house are sicker-uppers or not. A lot of younger people have the bare floorboards, I've noticed, and of course they tend to be sick on the floor more than older people, what with all the beer they drink and so on. And the drugs they take, too, nowadays, I suppose. (Do drugs make you sick? I'd think so, wouldn't you?) And some of the young families in Islington don't seem to go in for the carpets much, either. But you see that might be because babies are always being sick all over the place as well. So maybe Martin is a sicker-upper. Or maybe he just has a lot of friends who are sicker-uppers. Like me. I was sick because I'm not used to drinking, and also because I hadn't had a thing to eat for more than a day. I was too nervous on New Year's Eve to eat anything, and there didn't seem to be an awful lot of point anyway. I didn't even have any of Matty's mush. What's food for? It's fuel, isn't it? It keeps you going. And I didn't really want to be kept going. Jumping off Toppers' House with a full stomach would have seemed wasteful, like selling a car with a full tank of petrol. So I was dizzy even before we started drinking the whisky, because of the white wine at the party, and after I'd had a couple the room started spinning round and round.
We were quiet for a little while after Penny had gone. We didn't know whether we were supposed to be sad or not. Jess offered to chase after her and tell her that Martin hadn't been with anyone else, but Martin asked her how she was going to explain what we were doing there, and Jess said she thought that the truth wasn't so bad, and Martin said that he'd rather Penny thought badly of him than be told that he'd been thinking of killing himself.
'You're mad,' said Jess. 'She'd feel all sorry for you if she found out how we'd met. You'd probably get a sympathy shag.'
Martin laughed. 'I don't think that's how it works, Jess,' he said.
'Why not?'
'Because if she found out how we met, it would really upset her. She'd think she was responsible in some way. It's a terrible thing, finding out that your lover is so unhappy he wants to die. It's a time for self-reflection.'
'Yeah. And?'
'And I'd have to spend hours holding her hand. I don't feel like holding her hand.'
'You'd still end up with a sympathy shag. I didn't say it would be easy.'
Sometimes it was hard to remember that Jess was unhappy too. The rest of us, we were still shell-shocked. I didn't know how I'd ended up drinking whisky in the lounge of a well-known TV personality when I'd actually left the house to kill myself, and you could tell that JJ and Martin were confused about the evening too. But with Jess, it was like the whole how's-your-father on the roof was like a minor accident, the sort of thing where you rub your head and sit down and have a cup of sweet tea, and then you get on with the rest of your day. When she was talking about sympathy intercourse and whatever other nonsense came into her head, you couldn't see what could possibly have made her want to climb those stairs up to the roof - her eyes were twinkling, and she was full of energy, and you could tell that she was having fun. We weren't having fun. We weren't killing ourselves, but we weren't having fun either. We'd come too close to jumping. And yet Jess had come the closest of all of us to going over. JJ had only just come out of the stairwell. Martin had sat with his feet dangling over the edge but hadn't actually nerved himself to do it. I'd never even got as far as the other side of the fence. But if Martin hadn't sat on Jess's head, she'd have done it, I'm sure of that.
'Let's play a game,' said Jess.
'F— off,' said Martin.
It was impossible to go on being shocked by the bad language. I didn't want to get to the stage where I was swearing myself, so I was quite glad that the night was drawing to an end. But the getting used to it made me realize something. It made me realize that nothing had ever changed for me. In Martin's flat, I could look back on myself - the me from only a few hours before - and think, 'Ooh, I was different then. Fancy being upset by a little bit of bad language!' I'd got older even during the night. You get used to that, the feeling that you're suddenly different, when you're younger. You wake up in the morning and you can't believe that you had a crush on this person, or used to like that sort of music, even if it was only a few weeks ago. But when I had Matty, everything stopped, and nothing ever moved on. It's the one single thing that makes you die inside, and eventually wants to make you die on the outside too. People have children for all sorts of reasons, I know, but one of those reasons must be that children growing up make you feel that life has a sense of momentum - kids send you on a journey. Matty and I got stuck at the bus stop, though. He didn't learn to walk or talk, let alone read or write: he stayed the same every single day, and life stayed the same every single day, and I stayed the same too. I know it's not much, but hearing the word 'f—' hundreds of times in an evening, well, even that was something different for me, something new. When I first met Martin on the roof, I physically flinched from the words he used, and now they just bounced off me, as if I had a helmet on. Well, they would, wouldn't they? You'd be a proper eejit if you flinched three hundred times in an evening. It made me wonder what else would change if I lived like this for just a few more days. Already I'd slapped someone, and now there I was drinking whisky and Coca-Cola. You know when people on the TV say 'You should get out more'? Now I saw what they meant.
'Miserable bastard,' said Jess.
'Well, yes,' said Martin. 'Exactly. Der, as you would say.'
'What have I said now?'
'You accused me of being a miserable bastard. I was merely pointing out that, at this particular stage of my life, and indeed on this particular night, "miserable" is a very appropriate adjective. I am a very miserable bastard indeed, as I thought you would have worked out by now.'
'What, still?'
Martin laughed. 'Yes. Still. Even after all the fun we've had tonight. What would you say has changed in the last few hours? Have I still been to prison? I believe I still have. Did I sleep with a fifteen-year-old? Regrettably, nothing much seems to have changed on that score. Is my career still in pieces, and am I still estranged from my children? Unhappily, yes and yes. Despite attending a party with your amusing friends in Shoreditch and being called a c—? What kind of malcontent must I be, eh?'
'I thought we'd cheered each other up.'
'Really? Is that really and truly what you thought?'
'Yeah.'
'I see. A trouble shared is a trouble halved, and because there are four of us, it's actually been quartered? That sort of thing?'
'Well, you've all made me feel better.'
'Yes. Well,'
'What's that supposed to mean?'
'Nothing. I'm glad we've made you feel better. Your depression was clearly more… amenable than ours. Less intractable. You're very lucky. Unfortunately, JJ is still going to die, Maureen still has a profoundly disabled son and my life is still a complete and utter f—ing shambles. To be honest with you, Jess, I don't see how a couple of drinks and a game of Monopoly are going to help. Fancy a game of Monopoly, JJ? Will that help the old CCR? Or not, really?'
I was shocked, but JJ didn't seem to mind. He just smiled, and said, 'I guess not.'
'I wasn't thinking of Monopoly,' said Jess. 'Monopoly takes too long.'
And then Martin shouted something at her, but I didn't hear what it was because I was starting to retch, so I put my handover my mouth and ran for the bathroom. But as I said, I didn't make it.
'Jesus f—ing Christ,' Martin said when he saw the mess I'd made. I couldn't get used to that sort of swearing, though, the sort that involves Him. I don't think that will ever seem right.
Chapter 28
JJ
 
I was beginning to regret the whole CCR scam, so I wasn't sorry when Maureen puked her whisky and Coke all over Martin's ash-blond wooden floor. I'd been experiencing an impulse to own up, and owning up would have got my year off to a pretty bad start. That's on top of the bad start it had already got off to, what with thinking of jumping off a high building, and lying about having CCR in the first place. Anyway, I was glad that suddenly we all crowded round Maureen and patting her on the back and offering her glasses of water, because the owning-up moment passed.
The truth was that I didn't feel like a dying man; I felt like a man who every now and again wanted to die, and there's a difference. A man who wants to die feels angry and full of life and desperate and bored and exhausted, all at the same time; he wants to fight everyone, and he wants to curl up in a ball and hide in a cupboard somewhere. He wants to say sorry to everyone, and he wants everyone to know just how badly they've all let him down. I can't believe that dying people feel that way, unless dying is worse than I'd thought. (And why shouldn't it be? Every other fucking thing is worse than I thought, so why should dying be any different?)
'I'd like one of my Polo mints,' she said. 'I've got one in my handbag.'
'Where's your handbag?'
She didn't say anything for a little while, and then she groaned softly.
'If you're going to be sick again, would you do me a favour and crawl the last couple of yards to the bog?' Martin said.
'It's not that,' said Maureen. 'It's my handbag. It's on the roof. In the corner, right by the hole Martin made in the fence. It's only got my keys and the Polos and a couple of pound coins in it.'
'We can find you a mint, if that's what you're worried about.'
'I've got some chewing gum,' said Jess.
'I'm not much of a one for chewing gum,' said Maureen. 'Anyway, I've got a bridge that's a bit loose. And I didn't bother getting it fixed because...'
She didn't finish the sentence. She didn't need to. I think we all had a few things we hadn't got around to fixing, for obvious reasons.
'So we'll find you a mint,' said Martin. 'Or you can clean your teeth if you want. You can use Penny's toothbrush.'
'Thank you.'
She got to her feet and then sat down again on the floor.
'What am I going to do? About the bag?'
It was a question for all of us, but Martin and I looked at Jess for the answer. Or rather, we knew the answer, but the answer would have to come in the form of another question, and we had both learned, over the course of the night, that Jess would be the one who was tactless enough to ask it.
'The thing is,' said Jess, right on cue, 'do you need it?'
'Oh,' said Maureen, as the bag implications started to penetrate.
'Do you see what I mean?'
'Yes. Yes, I do.'
'If you don't know whether you're gonna need it, just say so. 'Cos, you know. It's a big question, and we wouldn't want to rush you. But if you know for sure you won't be needing it, then probably best say so now. That'd save us all a trip, see.'
'I wouldn't ask you to come with me.'
'We'd want to,' said Jess. 'Wouldn't we?'
'And if you know you don't want your keys, you can stay here for the day,' said Martin.
'Don't worry about them.'
'I see,' Maureen said. 'Right. I hadn't really… I thought, I don't know. I was going to put off thinking about it for a few hours.'
'OK,' Martin said. 'Fair enough. So let's go back.'
'Do you mind?'
'Not at all. It would be silly to kill yourself just because you didn't have your handbag.'
When we got to Toppers' House, I realized that I'd left Ivan's moped there the night before. It wasn't there any more, and I felt bad, because he's not such a bad guy, Ivan, and it's not like he's some fucking Rolls-Royce-drivin', cigar-smokin' capitalist. He's too poor. In fact, he drives one of his own mopeds around. Anyway, now I can never face him again, although one of the beauties of a minimum-wage, cash-in-hand job is that you can clean windshields at traffic lights and make pretty much the same money.
'I left my car here, too,' said Martin.
'And that's gone as well?'
'The door was unlocked and the keys were in the ignition. It was supposed to be an act of charity. There won't be any more of those.'
The bag was where Maureen had left it, though, right in the corner of the roof. It wasn't until we got up there that we could see we'd made it through to dawn, just about. It was a proper dawn, too, with a sun and a blue sky. We walked around the roof to see what we could see, and the others gave me an American-in-London sightseeing tour: St Paul's, the Ferris wheel down by the river, Jess's house.
'It's not scary any more,' said Martin.
'You reckon?' said Jess. 'Have you looked over the edge? Fucking hell. It's a fuck sight better in the dark, if you ask me.'
'I didn't mean the drop,' said Martin. 'I meant London. It looks all right.'
'It looks beautiful,' said Maureen. 'I can't remember the last time I could see so much.'
'I didn't mean that either. I meant… I don't know. There were all those fireworks, and people walking around, and we were squeezed up here because there was nowhere else for us to go.'
'Yeah. Unless you'd been invited to a dinner party,' I said. 'Like you had.'
'I didn't know anyone there. I'd been invited out of pity. I didn't belong.'
'And you feel included now?'
'There's nothing down there to feel excluded from. It's just a big city again. Look. He's on his own. And she's on her own.'
'She's a fucking traffic warden,' said Jess.
'Yes, and she's on her own, and today she's got fewer friends than me even. But last night she was probably dancing on a table somewhere.'
'With other traffic wardens, probably,' said Jess.
'And I wasn't with other TV presenters.'
'Or perverts,' said Jess.
'No. Agreed. I was on my own.'
'Apart from the other people at the dinner party,' I said. 'But yeah. We hear where you're coming from. That's why New Year's Eve is such a popular night for suicides.'
'When's the next one?' Jess asked.
'December 31st,' said Martin.
'Yeah, yeah. Ha, ha. The next popular night?'
'That would be Valentine's Day,' said Martin.
'What's that? Six weeks?' said Jess. 'So let's give it another six weeks, then. What about that? We'll probably all feel terrible on Valentine's Day.'
We all stared thoughtfully at the view. Six weeks seemed all right. Six weeks didn't seem too long. Life could change in six weeks - unless you had a severely disabled child to care for. Or your career had gone up in fucking smoke. Or unless you were a national laughing stock.
'D'you know how you'll be feeling in six weeks?' Maureen asked me.
Oh, yes - and unless you had a terminal disease. Life wouldn't change much then, either. I shrugged. How the fuck did I know how I'd be feeling? This disease was brand new. No one was able to predict its course - not even me, and I invented it.
'So are we going to meet again before the six weeks is up?'
'I'm sorry, but… When did we become "we"?' said Martin. 'Why do we even have to meet in six weeks? Why can't we just kill ourselves wherever and whenever we want?'
'No one's stopping you,' said Jess.
'Surely the whole purpose of this exercise is that someone is stopping me. We're all stopping each other.'
'Until the six weeks is up, yeah.'
'So when you said, "No one's stopping you," then you meant the opposite.'
'Listen,' said Jess. 'If you go home now and put your head in the gas oven, what am I going to do about it?'
'Exactly. So the purpose of the exercise is?'
'I'm asking, aren't I? Because if we're a gang, then we'll all try and live by the rules. And there's only one, anyway. Rule 1: We don't kill ourselves for six weeks. And if we're not a gang, then, you know. Whatever. So are we a gang, or not a gang?'
'Not a gang,' said Martin.
'Why aren't we?'
'No offence, but…' Martin clearly hoped these three words, and a wave of the hand in our general direction, would save him from having to explain himself. I wasn't going to let him off the hook, though.
I hadn't felt like I was in this gang either, until that moment. And now I belonged to the gang that Martin didn't like much, and I felt real committed to it.
'But what?' I said.
'Well. You're not, you know. My Kind Of People.' He said it like that, I swear. I heard the capitals as clearly as I heard the lower case.
'Fuck you,' I said. 'Like I usually hang out with assholes like you.'
'Well, there we are, then. We should all shake hands, thank one another for a most instructive evening and then go our separate ways.'
'And die,' said Jess.
'Possibly,' said Martin.
'And that's what you want?' I said.
'Well, it's not a long-held ambition, I grant you. But I'm not giving away any secrets when I say it's come to look more attractive recently. I'm conflicted, as you people say. Anyway, why do you care?' he said to Jess. 'I'd got the impression that you didn't care for anyone or anything. I thought that was your thing.'
Jess thought for a moment. 'You know those films where people fight up the top of the Empire State Building or up a mountain or whatever? And there's always that bit when the baddie slips off, and the hero tries to save him, but like the sleeve of his jacket tears off and he goes over and you hear him all the way down. Aaaaaaaagh. That's what I want to do.'
'You want to watch me plunge to my doom.'
'I'd like to know that I've made the effort. I want to show people the torn sleeve.'
'I didn't know you were a fully trained Samaritan,' said Martin.
'I'm not. This is just my own personal philosophy.'
'I'd find it easier if we saw each other on a regular basis,' said Maureen quietly. 'All of us. No one really knows how I feel about anything, apart from you three. And Matty. I tell Matty.'
'Oh, for Christ's sake,' said Martin. He was using profanity because he knew then he was beaten: telling Maureen to go fuck herself required more moral courage than any of us possessed.
'It's only six weeks,' said Jess. 'We'll throw you off the top ourselves on Valentine's, if it helps.'
Martin shook his head, but it was to indicate defeat rather than refusal.
'We'll all live to regret it,' he said.
'Good,' said Jess. 'So is everyone all right with that?'
I shrugged. It wasn't like I had a better plan.
'I'm not going on beyond six weeks,' said Maureen.
'No one will make you,' said Martin.
'As long as we know that from the start,' said Maureen.
'Noted,' said Martin.
'Excellent,' said Jess. 'So it's a deal.'
We shook hands, Maureen picked up her handbag, and we all went out for breakfast. We couldn't think of anything to say to each other, but we didn't seem to mind much.
Chapter 29
JESS
 
It didn't take long for the papers to find out. A couple of days, maybe. I was in my room, and Dad called me downstairs and asked me what I'd been up to on New Year's Eve. And I went, Nothing much, and he went, Well, that isn't what the newspapers seem to think. And I was like, Newspapers? And he said, Yeah, there's apparently going to be a story about you and Martin Sharp. Do you know Martin Sharp? And I was, you know, Yeah, sort of, only met him that night at a party, don't know him very well. And so Dad goes, What the hell kind of party is it where you meet someone like Martin Sharp? And I couldn't think what kind of party that would be, so I didn't say anything. And then Dad was like, And was there… Did anything… All tenterhooks or whatever, kind of thing, so I just dived in. Did I fuck him? No I did not! Thanks a bunch! Bloody hell! Martin Sharp! Eeeeuch! And so on and so on until he got the idea.
It was fucking Chas, of course, who phoned up the newspapers. He'd probably tried before, the little shit, but he never had much to go on then, when it was just me. The Jess Crichton/Martin Sharp combo, though… unresistable. How much do you think you get for something like that? A couple of hundred quid? More? To be honest, I'd have done it if I were him. He's always skint. And I'm always skint. If he'd been anyone worth selling up the river, he'd be halfway out to sea by now.
Dad pulled back the curtain to sneak a look, and there was someone out there. I wanted to go out and have a go at him, but Dad wouldn't let me; he said that they'd take a mad picture of me, and I'd look stupid and regret it. And he said it was undignified to do that, and in our position we had to rise above it all and ignore them. And I was like, In whose position? I'm not in a position. And he went, Well, you are, whether you like it or not you are in a position, and I go, You're in a position not me, and he said, You're in a position too, and we went on like that for a while. But of course going on about it never changes anything, and I know he's right, really. If I wasn't in a position then the papers wouldn't be interested. In fact, the more I act as though I'm not in a position, then the more I'm in a position, if you see what I mean. If I just sat in my room and read, or got a steady boyfriend, there'd be no interest. But if I went to bed with Martin Sharp, or threw myself off a roof, then there would be the opposite of no interest. There'd be interest.
When I was in the papers a couple of years ago, just after the Jen thing, I think the feeling was I was Troubled rather than Bad. Anyway, shoplifting isn't murder, is it? Everyone goes through a shoplifting phase, don't they? By which I mean proper shoplifting, boosting Winona-style, bags and clothes and shit, not pens and sweets. It comes just after ponies and boy bands, and right before spliff and sex. But I could tell that it was different this time, and that was when I started to think things through. Yeah, yeah, I know. But better late than never, eh? What I thought was this: if it was going to be all over the papers, it was better for Mum and Dad to think that I'd slept with Martin than to know the real reason we were together. The real reason would kill them. Maybe literally. Which would make me the only family member left alive, possibly, and even I'm making up my mind which way to go. So if the papers had got hold of the wrong end of the stick, it wouldn't be such a bad thing. Obviously it would be pretty humiliating at college, everyone thinking I'd fucked the sleaziest man in Britain, but it would be for the greater good, i.e. two alive parents.
The thing was, even though I'd started to think things through, I didn't think them through properly. I could have saved myself a lot of trouble if I'd just given it another two minutes before I'd opened my mouth, but I didn't. I just went, Da-ad. And he was like, Oh, no. And I just looked at him and he goes, You'd better tell me everything, and I said, Well, there isn't much to tell really. I just went to this party and he was there and I had too much to drink and we went back to his place and that's it. And he was like, That's it, as in end of story? And I went, Well, no, that's it as in dot dot dot you don't need to know the details. So he went, Jesus Christ, and he sat down in a chair.
But here's the thing: I didn't need to say I'd slept with him, did I? I could have said we'd snogged, or he tried it on, or anything at all like that, but I wasn't quick enough. I was like, Well if it's a choice between suicide and sex, better go sex, but those didn't have to be the choices. Sex was only a serving suggestion sort of thing, but you don't have to do exactly what it says on the packet, do you? You can miss the garnish out, if you want, and that's what I should have done. ('Garnish' - that's a weird word, isn't it? I don't think I've ever used it before.) But I didn't, did I? And the other thing I should have done but didn't: before I told him anything, I should have got Dad to find out what the story in the newspaper was. I just thought, Tabloids, sex… I don't know what I thought, to tell you the truth. Not much, as usual.
So Dad got straight on the phone and talked to his office and told them what I'd told him, and then when he'd finished, he said he was going out and I wasn't to answer the phone or go anywhere or do anything. So I watched TV for a few minutes, and then I looked out the window to see if I could see that bloke, and I could, and he wasn't on his own any more.
And then Dad came back with a newspaper - he'd been out to get an early edition. He looked about ten years older than he had before he left. And he held up the paper for me to see, and the headline said, 'MARTIN SHARP AND JUNIOR MINISTER'S DAUGHTER IN SUICIDE PACT'.
So the whole sex confession bit had been a complete and utter fucking waste of time.
Chapter 30
JJ
 
That was the first time we knew anything about Jess's background, and I have to say that my first reaction was that it was pretty fucking hilarious. I was in my local store, buying some smokes, and Jess and Martin were staring at me from the counter, and I read the headline and whooped. Which, seeing as the headline was about their supposed suicide pact, got me some strange looks. An Education minister! Holy shit! You've got to understand, this girl talked like she'd been brought up by a penniless, junkie welfare mother who was younger than her. And she acted like education was a form of prostitution, something that only the weird or the desperate would resort to.
But then when I read the story, it wasn't quite so funny. I didn't know anything about Jess's older sister Jennifer. None of us did. She disappeared a few years ago, when Jess was fifteen and she was eighteen; she'd borrowed her mother's car and they found it abandoned near a well-known suicide spot down on the coast. Jennifer had passed her test three days before, as if that had been the point of learning to drive. They never found a body. I don't know what that would have done to Jess - nothing good, I guess. And her old man… Jesus. Parents who only beget suicidal daughters are likely to end up feeling pretty dark about the whole child-raising scene.
And then, the next day, it became a whole lot less funny. There was another headline, and it read THERE WERE FOUR OF THEM!', and in the article underneath it there was a description of these two freaks that I eventually realized were supposed to be Maureen and me. And at the end of the article, there was an appeal for further information and a phone number. There was even like a cash reward. Maureen and I had prices on our heads, man!
The information had clearly come from that asshole Chas; you could hear the whine in his voice right through the weird British tabloid prose. You had to give the guy a little credit, though, I guess. To me, the evening had consisted of four miserable people, failing dismally to do something they had set out to do - something that is not, let's be honest, real hard to achieve. But Chas had seen something else: he'd seen that it was a story, something he might make a few bucks off of. OK, he must have known about Jess's dad, but, you know, props to the guy. He still needed to put it together.
I'll tell you the honest truth here: I got off on the story a little. It was kind of gratifying, in an ironic way, reading about myself, and that makes sense if you think about it. See, one of the things that had brought me down was my inability to leave my mark on the world through my music - which is another way of saying that I was suicidal because I wasn't famous. Maybe I'm being hard on myself, because I know there was a little more to it than that, but that was sure a part of it. Anyway, recognizing that I was all washed up had got me on to the front page of the newspaper, and maybe there's a lesson there somewhere.
So I was sort of enjoying myself, sitting in my flat, drinking coffee and smoking, taking pleasure from knowing that I was sort of famous and completely anonymous, all at the same time. And then the fucking buzzer went, and I jumped out of my skin.
'Who is it?'
'Is that JJ?' A young woman's voice.
'Who is it?'
'I wondered if I could have a few words with you? About the other night?'
'How did you get this address?'
'I understand you were one of the people with Jess Crichton and Martin Sharp on New Year's Eve? When they tried to kill themselves?'
'You understand wrong, ma'am.' This was the first sentence from either of us that didn't have a question mark at the end. The low note at the end of mine was a relief, like a sneeze.
'Which bit have I got wrong?'
'All of it. You pressed the wrong buzzer.'
'I don't think I did.'
'How do you know?'
'Because you didn't deny you were JJ. And you asked how I'd got this address.'
Good point. They were professional, these people.
'I didn't say it was my address, though, did I?'
There was a pause, while we both allowed the complete stupidity of this observation to float around.
She didn't say anything. I imagined her standing out there in the street, shaking her head sadly at my pathetic attempts. I vowed not to say another word until she went away.
'Listen,' she said. 'Was there a reason you came down?'
'What kind of reason?'
'I don't know. Something that might cheer our readers up. Maybe, I don't know, you gave each other the will to go on.'
'I don't know about that.'
'The four of you looked down over London and saw the beauty of the world. Anything like that? Anything that might inspire our readers?'
Was there anything inspirational in our quest to find Chas? If there was, I couldn't see it.
'Did Martin Sharp say anything that gave you a reason to live, for example? People would want to know, if he did.'
I tried to think if Martin had offered us any words of comfort she could use. He'd called Jess a fucking idiot, but that was more of a spirit-lifting rather than life-saving moment. And he'd told us that a guest on his show had been married to someone who'd been in a coma for twenty-five years, but that hadn't helped us out much, either.
'I can't think of anything, no.'
'I'm going to leave a card with my numbers on it, OK? Ring me when you feel ready to talk about this.'
I nearly ran out after her - I was, as we say, missing her already. I liked being the temporary center of her world. Shit, I liked being the temporary center of my own, because there hadn't been too much there recently, and there wasn't much there after she'd gone, either.
Chapter 31
MAUREEN
 
So I went home, and I put the television on, and made a cup of tea, and I phoned the centre, and the two young fellas delivered Matty to the house, and I put him in front of the TV, and it all started again. It was hard to see how I'd last another six weeks. I know we had an agreement, but I never thought I'd see any of them again anyway. Oh, we exchanged telephone numbers and addresses and so forth. (Martin had to explain to me that if I didn't have a computer, then I wouldn't have an email address. I wasn't sure whether I'd have one or not. I thought it might have come in one of those envelopes you throw away.) But I didn't think we'd actually be using them. I'll tell you God's honest truth, even though it'll make me sound as if I was feeling sorry for myself: I thought they might see each other, but they'd keep me out of it. I was too old for them, and too old-fashioned, with my shoes and all. I'd had an interesting time going to parties and seeing all the strange people there, but it hadn't changed anything. I was still going back to pick Matty up, and I still had no life to live beyond the life I was already sick and tired of. You might be thinking, well, why isn't she angry? But of course I am angry. I don't know why I ever pretend I'm not. The church had something to do with it, I suppose. And maybe my age, because we were taught not to grumble, weren't we? But some days - most days - I want to scream and shout and break things and kill people. Oh, there's anger, right enough. You can't be stuck with a life like this one and not get angry. Anyway. A couple of days later the phone rang, and this woman with a posh voice said, 'Is that Maureen?'
'It is.'
'This is the Metropolitan Police.'
'Oh, hello,' I said.
'Hello. We've had reports that your son was causing trouble in the shopping centre on New Year's Eve. Shoplifting and sniffing glue and mugging people and so on.'
'I'm afraid it couldn't have been my son,' I said, like an eejit. 'He has a disability.'
'And you're sure he's not putting the disability on?'
I even thought about this for half a second. Well, you do, don't you, when it's the police? You want to make absolutely sure that you're telling the absolute truth, just in case you get into trouble later on.
'He'd be a very good actor if he was.'
'And you're sure he's not a very good actor?'
'Oh, positive. You see, he's too disabled to act.'
'But how about if that's an act? Only, the er, the wossname fits his description. The suspect.'
'What's the description?' I don't know why I said that. To be helpful, I suppose.
'We'll come to that, madam. Can you account for his whereabouts on New Year's Eve? Were you with him?'
I felt a chill run through me then. The date hadn't registered at first. They'd got me. I didn't know whether to lie or not. Supposing someone from the home had taken him out and used him as a cover, sort of thing? One of those young fellas, say? They looked nice enough, but you don't know, do you? Supposing they had gone shoplifting, and hidden something under Matty's blanket? Supposing they all went out drinking, and they took Matty with them, and they got into a fight, and they pushed the wheelchair hard towards someone they were fighting with? And the police saw him careering into someone, and they didn't know that he couldn't have pushed himself, so they thought he was joining in? And afterwards he was just playing dumb because he didn't want to get into trouble? Well, you could hurt someone, crashing into them with a wheelchair. You could break someone's leg. And supposing… Actually, even in the middle of my little panic I couldn't really see how he'd manage the glue sniffing. But even so! These were all the things that went through my mind. It was all guilt, I suppose. I hadn't been with him, and I should have been, and the reason I hadn't been with him was because I wanted to leave him for ever.
'I wasn't with him, no. He was being looked after.'
'Ah. I see.'
'He was perfectly safe.'
'I'm sure he was, madam. But we're not talking about his safety, are we? We're talking about the safety of people in the Wood Green shopping centre.'
Wood Green! He was all the way up in Wood Green!
'No. Yes. Sorry.'
'Are you really sorry? Are you really really really f— sorry?'
I couldn't believe my ears. I knew the police used bad language, of course. But I thought it would come out more when they were under stress, with terrorists and such like, not on the phone to members of the public in the course of a routine inquiry. Unless, of course, she really was under stress. Could Matty, or whoever pushed him, have actually killed someone? A child, maybe?
'Maureen.'
'Yes, I'm still here.'
'Maureen, I'm not really a policewoman. I'm Jess.'
'Oh.' I could feel myself blushing at my own stupidity.
'You believed me, didn't you, you silly old bag.'
'Yes, I believed you.'
She could hear in my voice that she'd upset me, so she didn't try to make any more of it.
'Have you seen the papers?'
'No. I don't look at them.'
'We're in them.'
'Who's in them?'
'We are. Well, Martin and I are in them by name. What a laugh, eh?'
'What does it say?'
'It says that me and Martin and two other mystery, you know, people had a suicide pact.'
'That's not true'.
'Der. And it says I'm the Junior Minister for Education's daughter.'
'Why does it say that?'
'Because I am.'
'Oh.'
'I'm just telling you so you know what's in the papers. Are you surprised?'
'Well, you do swear a lot, for a politician's daughter.'
'And a woman reporter came round to JJ's flat and asked him whether we came down for an inspirational reason.'
'What does that mean?'
'We don't know. Anyway. We're going to have a crisis meeting.'
'Who is?'
The four of us. Big reunion. Maybe in the place where we had breakfast.'
'I can't go anywhere.'
'Why not?'
'Because of Matty. That's one of the reasons I was up on the roof. Because I can never go anywhere.'
'We could come to you.'
I began to flush again. I didn't want them here.
'No, no. I'll think of something. When are you thinking of meeting up?'
'Later on today.'
'Oh, I won't be able to sort anything out for today.'
'So we'll come to you.'
'Please don't. I haven't tidied up.'
'So tidy up.'
'I've never had anyone from the television in my house. Or a politician's daughter.'
'I won't put on any airs or graces. We'll see you at five.'
And that gave me three hours to sort everything out, put everything away. It does drive you a little bit mad, a life like mine, I think. You have to be a little mad to want to jump off the top of a building. You have to be a little mad to come down again. You have to be more than a little mad to put up with Matty, and the staying in all the time, and the loneliness. But I do think I'm only a little mad. If I were really mad, I wouldn't have worried about the tidying up. And if I were really, properly mad, I wouldn't have minded what they found.