“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.
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.
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.