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.
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.