Scene 2
It was early in the morning of a cold January day when Paul Bain was crossing through from one busy road towards another, admiring the contrast between this street and the one he had left and wishing he was at home in bed. The tree-lined street was quiet, containing ambassadorial-style residences and a discreetly expensive hotel with six floors and a façade of Edwardian splendour. He was wondering what it would be like to be a rich London tourist and stay in a place like that, reflecting that an overnight stay would cost him a month’s wages and this was not the career he had in mind for himself. Artist reduced to dogsbody. It was a day for feeling bitter. He had his camera ready for the morning’s unglamorous task, which was photographing road works in an evidence-gathering exercise for Westminster City Council. He hoped he did not look the part and he did not want to reach his destination, so he stopped and looked up for a spot of dreaming, and that was when he saw her.
The woman was sitting on the balustrade of the sixth-floor balcony of the hotel, framed by a couple of box trees behind her with her booted feet dangling in front, supporting herself on her hands. She was fully dressed with a flash of colour and looked small and odd, perched up there. A window opened in the room next to hers; someone stepped out on to their balcony and spoke to her. It all seemed very relaxed, if eccentric, as if it was a normal, early morning chat between chambermaids, all under control. The camera was in his hands. He trained it on her, the better to see. She had shiny hair, which caught the light as she shook her head. He thought he saw the suggestion of a reassuring smile through the lens, as if she had seen him or someone she knew and liked, and then she jumped.
She leapt. In one split second she was safe, if precarious, on the broad stone balustrade, a person teasing danger rather than in it, and then she pushed herself off with her hands, spread her arms wide and floated down like a bird shot from the skies. He recorded her agonisingly slow progress through the lens: he knew the meaning of time standing still as her disfigured shape fell and became a blur as it hit the road with a deafening sound. The noise was like a distant car crash causing vibrations through his feet and skull, a muted explosion sending the birds in the trees flying away in screaming protest. He simply stood there with his camera frozen to his hand until his knees began to tremble and the buildings around him seem to shake, shrug and become still. He had forgotten his own name.
Then he let the camera drop and looked back up to the balcony with his naked eye. The person who had been speaking to the woman had moved back from the edge and covered her face. The silence was unspeakable. He did not move; nothing moved. He stood there for some time, like a child waiting for someone to collect him. He had the perverse feeling that someone ought to ask him how he was, because he was cold on the shady side of the street and he felt weak and sick and lonely. In the midst of all of this, after an ambulance arrived and people fussed over the dead thing in the road and no one came near him, he found himself obscurely angry with her for subjecting him to this, and at the same time it occurred to him that all disasters created opportunities and if he wanted to be a member of the paparazzi, he should learn to think like one. With those colours, she looked as if she might have been a celebrity. It might have been a film stunt gone wrong. As soon as he had seen her, he had remembered a startlingly similar happening only a week before, when another woman had leapt from a building in the cold light of day. It made all this seem like an unreal sham, simply a harmless death rehearsal and a perfect photo opportunity.
So he sold her. Her, pictures of her. Ms Marianne Shearer hit the news with more force than she had ever done even in the most infamous of her trials as a champion of justice.
‘Celebrity’ and ‘well known in certain circles’ amounted to the same thing. It was a dull week too soon after New Year. Throwing oneself from a window was enough to secure temporary celebrity status, especially when the suicide was rich, well qualified, successful and without any apparent problems, thus providing more of a sensation than the last self-inflicted demise. Bain’s excellent-quality mementos were published the next day following an auction for the rights. There was intense interest and considerable outrage since the selected newspapers were the first to bear the bad tidings to most of her friends, family, colleagues, etc. They all learned of her ending by watching her in free fall, captured in newsprint on a morning when there was no other news. The insensitivity of sensationalised death on camera and the cold voyeurism of the opportunistic photographer gave the deceased an added dimension of tragedy. She floated to earth in a brown blur of glory, famous at last, as she might have wanted, or not. A woman at the top of her professional tree/a fearless practitioner of the law/protector of human rights/the innocent/owner of three-bedroomed Kensington apmt worth one mill, loved by friends and surviving brother. British citizen, born in NZ.
Strangers who never knew her at all shed tears. Poor, wretched woman, for whom money bought nothing but the price of a lofty hotel room hired for the express purpose of throwing herself out of it. A failed love affair? Seasonal blues? Whatever. Poor, lonely rich woman, a lesson to us all. Tributes from friends.
One person looked at the first edition of the Daily Mail, having been drawn to buy it like thousands of others purely by the front page photograph of a blurred silhouette plunging down the side of a building, with promises of more on page three. She looked closely and was also moved to tears until she found the details and name. Then she threw it across the room. Why didn’t she kill herself sooner, before she did so much damage? And then she cried herself angrily into sleep, because this wasn’t justice, it never was.
The photographer came to consider it the worst thing he had ever done, to be in that street, at that time and to sell what he had seen. It paid his debts and more, but she owned him after that. He could no longer hold his camera to his eye without his hand shaking; he could not believe what he saw on the screen and the images blurred along with the observations which haunted him, such as how careful she had been about the choice of a place to jump, so that she avoided the hotel portico where she might have fallen against the flagpole, or the room to the right, where she might have become entangled with the tree which reached the fourth floor, from whose bare branches the birds had flown with their anxious screams. He was trying to find something which indicated she had not meant it; that it was accident or homicide rather than self-destruct. He was also looking all the time for the third figure beyond the box-tree ornaments on the balcony and into the room beyond, searching for the shadow he wished he had seen, someone who would explain. There were no pictures of anything before the moment when she had jumped, nothing until she pushed herself away and that full skirt had slightly checked her fall, but there were the pictures he wished into his mind of the same figure, flying back.
A third person saw the photographs and simply laughed. Serve you right. You wouldn’t walk out of there with me. I knew I scared you rigid, I saw it in your face. I passed on the baton of conscience, all right? You fell with your hands outstretched and it looked as if you had no thumbs at all. You thought you were immune. Who’ll write the memoirs now?
He remembered how the last time he had seen her, she had fingered the mobile phone in her pocket as if checking. She recorded everything. He also remembered how it was with her, how nothing she did in public, not even the smallest gesture, was without a purpose.
She might have lost her grasp, but she still had his life, his soul. On record, on paper, she still possessed all that knowledge of him.