10:08.
10:32.
10:56.
He must have dozed, because the noise jerked him awake. The people lined up along the edge of the drop were chanting, a slow liturgical dirge of nonsense words rich in consonants. They bent against the rail, their arms outstretched, swaying like sea anemones in a current, reaching towards the bridge. Martin turned, and saw that two shadowy figures were walking along the road to the midpoint of the bridge, where the two downcurving arcs of white-painted suspension chains met. One was a man, the other the girl in the white dress. She embraced her companion for a moment, and then he broke away and clambered over the rail and without hesitation or ceremony stepped out into thin air and plummeted into darkness.
Martin stood up, his heart beating lightly and quickly, his whole skin tingling, and thought that he saw a brief green flash in the river directly below the bridge, a moment of heat lightning. The girl was walking along the bridge towards the other side of the gorge; the people at the rail were beginning to drift away, each moving in a different direction.
One of them had a cloud of bushy hair, and walked with a distinct list.
Martin chased after him, stumbling in the dark, making far too much noise as he dodged from one clump of bushes to the next, at last daring to cut across his path and grab him by the shoulders and turn him around. Dr. John tried to twist away, like a freshly caught fish flopping in a trawlerman’s grasp. Martin held on and at last his friend quietened and stood still, his gaze fixed on something a thousand miles beyond Martin’s left shoulder.
“Let’s get out of this,” Martin said, and took hold of Dr. John’s right arm above the elbow and steered him through the streets of Clifton to Worcester Terrace. There was another brief struggle after Martin had opened the front door, but then Dr. John quietened again and allowed himself to be led up the four flights of stairs to Martin’s flat. He stood in a kind of dazed slouch, blinking slowly in the bright light of the kitchen while Martin made coffee, taking no notice of the mug that Martin tried to put it in his hand.
Martin leaned against the counter by the sink and sipped his own coffee and asked Dr. John where he’d been, what had happened to him, what the fuck had just happened on the bridge.
“Someone jumped. I saw it. He climbed over the rail and let go.”
Dr. John didn’t even blink. Martin had to step hard on the impulse to slap him silly.
“It’s something to do with the pill, isn’t it? The green pill, and the girl who gave it to you. Don’t try to deny it, I saw her with whoever it was that jumped.”
Dr. John stood still and silent, face slack, shoulders slumped. Or not entirely still—one hand was slowly and slyly creeping towards the breast pocket of his denim jacket. Martin knocked it away and reached inside the pocket and pulled out the green pill and held it in front of Dr. John’s face.
“What is this shit? What does it do to you?”
Dr. John’s eyes tracked the pill as Martin moved it to and fro; his hand limply pawed the air.
“Don’t be pathetic,” Martin said. He thrust the pill into the pocket of his jeans and steered Dr. John into the living room and put him to bed on the sofa. Then he went out to the phone box at the end of the road, dialled 999 and told the operator that he’d seen someone jump from the Clifton Suspension Bridge, and hung up when she asked for his name.
* * *
When Martin went into the living room the next morning, Dr. John was fast asleep, curled into the back of the sofa and drooling into the cushion he was using as a pillow. After Martin had shaken him awake and poured a cup of tea into him, he claimed not to remember anything about the last night, saying, “Man, I was definitely out of my head.”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
They were sitting at the kitchen table. Dr. John drank a mug of tea and devoured three slices of white bread smeared with butter and sprinkled with brown sugar while Martin told him about the boy in the bathtub, the people lined up at the railing above the Avon Gorge, and the girl who had escorted the man to the midpoint of the bridge, how she’d embraced him, how he’d stepped into thin air. Dr. John wore a funny little smile, as if he knew the secret that would make sense of everything, but when Martin had finished he shrugged and said, “People jump off the bridge all the time. They queue up to jump off. The police have to comb pieces of them out of the trees, scrape them off the road, dig them out of the mud...” He patted his pockets. “Got any fags?”
Martin found a packet his girlfriend had left behind.
“Silk Cut? They’re not real cigarettes,” Dr. John said, but tore off the filter off one and lit it and sat back and blew smoke at the ceiling.
Martin was tired of trying to crack Dr. John’s bullshit insouciance, but decided to give it one more try. He leaned across the table and said as forcefully as he could, “Someone jumped off the bridge. I saw it.”
“I believe you, man,” Dr. John said, still smiling that sly little smile.
“If you don’t remember anything at all, you really were out of your head. And I thought there wasn’t a pill or powder you couldn’t handle.”
“It isn’t that I don’t remember anything, man. I just don’t remember any of the shit you saw. That was just the pattern on the veil that hides the true reality of things. That hides what’s really going on.”
“So what was really going on?”
“It’s kind of hard to explain.”
“I want to understand.”
“Are you worried about me, man? I’m touched.”
“I saw someone throw himself off the suspension bridge. The girl who gave you that pill, the one in the white dress, was right there with him when he jumped. I think that guy got high on whatever it is she’s peddling, just like you did, and she persuaded him to jump. I think she killed him. That’s what I saw. How about you?”
Dr. John thought for a few moments. “What you have to understand is that the green shit doesn’t do anything but put you in the right frame of mind. It takes you to the beach, and after that it’s up to you. You have to wade out into the sea and give yourself up to it of your own free will. And if you can do that, the sea takes you right through the bottom of the world into this space that’s deeper and darker than anywhere you’ve ever been. The womb of the world, the place where rock and water and air and everything else came from.”
He developed a thousand-yard stare for a moment, then shook himself and smiled around the cigarette, showing his broken tooth.
“It’s very dark and quiet, but it isn’t lonely. It’s like the floor of the collective unconscious. Not in the Jungian sense, but something deeper than that. You can lose yourself in it forever. You dissolve. This is hard, trying to explain how it is to someone who doesn’t believe a word of it, but haven’t you ever had that feeling when everything inside you and everything outside you, everything in the whole wide world, lines up perfectly, just for a moment? I remember when I was a kid, this one day in summer. Hot as it is now, but everything lush and green. Cow parsley and nettles growing taller than me along the edges of the road on the way up to the common. Farmers turned cows and sheep out to graze there, and the grass was short and wiry, and warm beneath you when you lay down, and the sun was a warm red weight on your closed eyelids. You lay there and felt the whole world holding you to itself, and you heard a lark singing somewhere above you in the sunlight and the warm wind. You couldn’t see it, but it was singing its heart out above you, and everything dissolved into this one moment of pure happiness. You know what I’m saying? Well, if you take that feeling and make it a thousand times more intense and stretched that one moment out to infinity, it would be a little like where I went.”