“So,” said JJ. “Maureen’s OK. That just leaves you, Martin. You wanna join in?”
“Well, where is this Chas?” Martin said.
“I dunno,” said Jess. “Some party somewhere. Is that what it depends on? Where he is?”
“Yes. I’d rather f—ing kill myself than try and get a cab to go somewhere in South London at four in the morning,” said Martin.
“He doesn’t know anyone in South London,” Jess said.
“Good,” said Martin. And when he said that, you could tell that, instead of killing ourselves, we were all going to come down from the roof and look for Jess’s boyfriend, or whatever he was. It wasn’t much of a plan, really. But it was the only plan we had, so all we could do was try and make it work.
“Give me your mobile and I’ll make some calls,” said Jess.
So Martin gave her the phone, and she went to the other side of the roof where no one could hear her, and we waited to be told where we were going.
Martin
I know what you’re thinking, all you clever-clever people who read the Guardian and shop in Waterstone’s and would no more think of watching breakfast television than you would of buying your children cigarettes. You’re thinking, Oh, this guy wasn’t serious. He wanted a tabloid photographer to capture his quote unquote cry for help so that he could sign a “My Suicide Hell” exclusive for the Sun . “SHARP TAKES THE SLEAZY WAY OUT”. And I can understand why you might be thinking that, my friends. I climb a stairwell, have a couple of nips of Scotch from a hip-flask while dangling my feet over the edge, and then when some dippy girl asks me to help find her ex-boyfriend at some party, I shrug and wander off with her. And how suicidal is that?
First of all, I’ll have you know that I scored very highly on Aaron T. Beck’s Suicide Intent Scale. I’ll bet you didn’t even know there was such a scale, did you? Well, there is, and I reckon I got something like twenty-one out of thirty points, which I was pretty pleased with, as you can imagine. Yes, suicide had been contemplated for more than three hours prior to the attempt. Yes, I was certain of death even if I received medical attention: it’s fifteen storeys high, Toppers’ House, and they reckon that anything over ten will do it for you pretty well every time. Yes, there was active preparation for the attempt: ladder, wire-cutters and so on. He shoots, he scores. The only questions where I might not have received maximum points are the first two, which deal with what Aaron T. Beck calls isolation and timing. “No one near by in visual or vocal contact” gets you top marks, as does “Intervention highly unlikely”. You might argue that as we chose the most popular suicide spot in North London on one of the most popular suicide nights of the year, intervention was almost inevitable; I would counter by saying that we were just being dim. Dim or grotesquely self-absorbed, take your pick.
And yet, of course, if it hadn’t been for the teeming throng up there, I wouldn’t be around today, so maybe old Beck is bang on the money. We may not have been counting on anyone to rescue us, but once we started bumping into each other, there was certainly a collective desire—a desire born more than anything out of embarrassment—to shelve the whole idea, at least for the night. Not one of us descended those stairs having come to the conclusion that life was a beautiful and precious thing; if anything, we were slightly more miserable on the way down than on the way up, because the only solution we had found for our various predicaments was not available to us, at least for the moment. And there had been a sort of weird nervous excitement up on the roof; for a couple of hours we had been living in a sort of independent state, where street-level laws no longer applied. Even though our problems had driven us up there, it was as if they had somehow, like Daleks, been unable to climb the stairs. And now we had to go back down and face them again. But it didn’t feel like we had any choice. Even though we had nothing in common beyond that one thing, the one thing was enough to make us feel that there wasn’t anything else—not money, or class, or education, or age, or cultural interests—that was worth a damn; we’d formed a nation, suddenly, in that couple of hours, and for the time being we wanted only to be with our new compatriots. I had hardly exchanged a word with Maureen, and I didn’t even know her surname; but she understood more about me than my wife had done in the last five years of our marriage. Maureen knew that I was unhappy, because of where she’d met me, and that meant she knew the most important thing about me; Cindy always professed herself baffled by everything I did or said.
It would have been neat if I’d fallen in love with Maureen, wouldn’t it? I can even see the newspaper headline: “SHARP TURNED!” And then there’d be some story about how Old 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.
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?”