by Nick Hornby
I’d never been to Toppers’ House before. I’d just been past it on the bus once or twice. I didn’t even know for sure that you could get on to the roof any more, but the door was open, and I just walked up the stairs until I couldn’t walk any further. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me that you couldn’t just jump off whenever you felt like it, but the moment I saw it I realized that they wouldn’t let you do that. They’d put this wire up, way up high, and there were curved railings with spikes on the top… well, that’s when I began to panic. I’m not tall, and I’m not very strong, and I’m not as young as I was. I couldn’t see how I was going to get over the top of it all, and it had to be that night, because of Matty being in the home and everything. And I started to go through all the other options, but none of them were any good. I didn’t want to do it in my own front room, where someone I knew would find me. I wanted to be found by a stranger. And I didn’t want to jump in front of a train, because I’d seen a programme on the television about the poor drivers and how suicides upset them. And I didn’t have a car, so I couldn’t drive off to a quiet spot and breathe in the exhaust fumes…
And then I saw Martin, right over the other side of the roof. I hid in the shadows and watched him. I could see he’d done things properly: he’d brought a little stepladder, and some wire-cutters, and he’d managed to climb over the top like that. And he was just sitting on the ledge, dangling his feet, looking down, taking nips out of a little hip flask, smoking, thinking, while I waited. And he smoked and he smoked and I waited and waited until in the end I couldn’t wait any more. I know it was his stepladder, but I needed it. It wasn’t going to be much use to him.
I never tried to push him. I’m not beefy enough to push a grown man off a ledge. And I wouldn’t have tried anyway. It wouldn’t have been right; it was up to him whether he jumped or not. I just went up to him and put my hand through the wire and tapped him on the shoulder. I only wanted to ask him if he was going to be long.
JESS
Before I got to the squat, I never had any intention of going on to the roof. Honestly. I’d forgotten about the whole Toppers’ House thing until I started speaking to this guy. I think he fancied me, which isn’t really saying much, seeing as I was about the only female under thirty who could still stand up. He gave me a fag, and he told me his name was Bong, and when I asked him why he was called Bong he said it was because he always smoked his weed out of a bong. And I went, Does that mean everyone else here is called Spliff? But he was just, like, No, that bloke over there is called Mental Mike. And that one over there is called Puddle. And that one over there is Nicky Turd. And so on, until he’d been through everyone in the room he knew.
But the ten minutes I spent talking to Bong made history. Well, not history like 55 BC or 1939. Not historical history, unless one of us goes on to invent a time machine or stops Britain from being invaded by Al-Qaida or something. But who knows what would have happened to us if Bong hadn’t fancied me? Because before he started chatting me up I was just about to go home, and Maureen and Martin would be dead now, probably, and… well, everything would have been different.
When Bong had finished going through his list, he looked at me and he went, You’re not thinking of going up on the roof, are you? And I thought, Not with you, stoner-brain. And he went, Because I can see the pain and desperation in your eyes. I was well pissed by that time, so looking back on it, I’m pretty sure that what he could see in my eyes were seven Bacardi Breezers and two cans of Special Brew. I just went, Oh, really? And he went, Yeah, see, I’ve been put on suicide watch, to look out for people who’ve only come here because they want to go upstairs. And I was like, What happens upstairs? And he laughed, and went, You’re joking, aren’t you? This is Toppers’ House, man. This is where people kill themselves. And I would never have thought of it if he hadn’t said that. Everything suddenly made sense. Because even though I’d been about to go home, I couldn’t imagine what I’d do when I got there, and I couldn’t imagine waking up in the morning. I wanted Chas, and he didn’t want me, and I suddenly realized that easily the best thing to do was make my life as short as I possibly could. I almost laughed, it was so neat: I wanted to make my life short, and I was at a party in Toppers’ House, and the coincidence was too much. It was like a message from God. OK, it was disappointing that all God had to say to me was, like, Jump off a roof, but I didn’t blame him. What else was he supposed to tell me?
I could feel the weight of everything then – the weight of loneliness, of everything that had gone wrong. I felt heroic, going up those last few flights to the top of the building, dragging that weight along with me. Jumping felt like the only way to get rid of it, the only way to make it work for me instead of against me; I felt so heavy that I knew I’d hit the street in no time. I’d beat the world record for falling off a tower-block.
MARTIN
If she hadn’t tried to kill me, I’d be dead, no question. But we’ve all got a preservation instinct, haven’t we? Even if we’re trying to kill ourselves when it kicks in. All I know is that I felt this thump on my back, and I turned round and grabbed the railings behind me, and I started yelling. I was drunk by then. I’d been taking nips out of the old hip-flask for a while, and I’d had a skinful before I came out, as well. (I know, I know, I shouldn’t have driven. But I wasn’t going to take the fucking stepladder on the bus.) So, yes, I probably did let rip with a bit of vocabulary. If I’d known it was Maureen, if I’d known what Maureen was like, then I would have toned it down a bit, probably, but I didn’t; I think I might even have used the c-word, for which I’ve apologized. But you’d have to admit it was a unique situation.
I stood up and turned round carefully, because I didn’t want to fall off until I chose to, and I started yelling at her, and she just stared.
‘I know you,’ she said.
‘How?’ I was being slow. People come up to me in restaurants and shops and theatres and garages and urinals all over Britain and say, ‘I know you,’ and they invariably mean precisely the opposite; they mean, ‘I don’t know you. But I’ve seen you on the telly.’ And they want an autograph, or a chat about what Penny Chambers is really like, in real life. But that night, I just wasn’t expecting it. It all seemed a bit beside the point, that side of life.
‘From the television.’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake. I was about to kill myself, but never mind, there’s always time for an autograph. Have you got a pen? Or a bit of paper? And before you ask, she’s a right bitch who will snort anything and fuck anybody. What are you doing up here anyway?’
‘I was… I was going to jump too. I wanted to borrow your ladder.’
That’s what everything comes down to: ladders. Well, not ladders literally; the Middle East peace process doesn’t come down to ladders, and nor do the money markets. But one thing I know from interviewing people on the show is that you can reduce the most enormous topics down to the tiniest parts, as if life were an Airfix model. I’ve heard a religious leader attribute his faith to a faulty catch on a garden shed (he got locked in for a night when he was a kid, and God guided him through the darkness); I’ve heard a hostage describe how he survived because one of his captors was fascinated by the London Zoo family discount card he kept in his wallet. You want to talk about big things, but it’s the catches on the garden sheds and the London Zoo cards that give you the footholds; without them you wouldn’t know where to start. Not if you’re hosting Rise and Shine with Penny and Martin you don’t, anyway. Maureen and I couldn’t talk about why we were so unhappy that we wanted our brains to spill out onto the concrete like a McDonald’s milk shake, so we talked about the ladder instead.
‘Be my guest.’
‘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.
After Jess and I had had our idiotic conversation about how
she’d killed lots of people, I shouted at Maureen to come and help me. She looked frightened, and then dawdled her way over to us.
‘Get a bloody move on.’
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Sit on her.’
Maureen sat on Jess’s arse, and I knelt on her arms.
‘Just let me go, you old bastard pervert. You’re getting a thrill out of this, aren’t you?’
Well, obviously that stung a bit, given recent events. I thought for a moment Jess might have known who I was, but even I’m not that paranoid. If you were rugby-tackled in the middle of the night just as you were about to hurl yourself off the top of a tower-block, you probably wouldn’t be thinking about breakfast television presenters. (This would come as a shock to breakfast television presenters, of course, most of whom firmly believe that people think about nothing else but breakfast, lunch and dinner.) I was mature enough to rise above Jess’s taunts, even though I felt like breaking her arms.
‘If we let go, are you going to behave?’
‘Yes.’
So Maureen stood up, and with wearying predictability Jess scrambled for the ladder, and I had to bring her crashing down again.
‘Now what?’ said Maureen, as if I were a veteran of countless similar situations, and would therefore know the ropes.
‘I don’t bloody know.’
Why it didn’t occur to any of us that a well-known suicide spot would be like Piccadilly Circus on New Year’s Eve I have no idea, but at that point in the proceedings I had accepted the reality of our situation: we were in the process of turning a solemn and private moment into a farce with a cast of thousands.
And at that precise moment of acceptance, we three became four. There was a polite cough, and when we turned round to look, we saw a tall, good-looking, long-haired man, maybe ten years younger than me, holding a crash helmet under one arm and one of those big insulated bags in the other.
