Nick Hornby - A Long Way Down

The list kind of ran out after that. But being alive seemed worth the price of a round of drinks. Being alive seemed worth celebrating. Unless, of course, it wasn’t what you wanted, in which case… Oh, fuck it. I wanted a drink anyway. If we couldn’t think of anything else, then me wanting a drink was worth celebrating. An ordinary human desire had emerged through the fog of depression and indecision.

“Maureen?”

“Yes, I don’t mind.”

“It doesn’t look to me like anyone’sgoing to jump,” I said. “Nottonight. Is that right? Jess?”

She wasn’t listening.

“Fuck me,” she said. “Jesus Christ.”

She was staring at the corner of the roof, the spot where Martin had snipped the wire on New Year’s Eve. There was a guy sitting there, exactly where Martin had sat, and he was watching us. He was maybe a few years older than me, and he looked real frightened.

“Hey, man,” I said quietly. “Hey. Just stay there.”

I started to walk slowly over to him.

“Please don’t come any closer,” he said. He was panicky, near tears, dragging furiously on a smoke.

“We’ve all been there,” I said. “Come on back over and you can join our gang. This is our reunion.” I tried another couple of steps. He didn’t say anything.

“Yeah,” said Jess. “Look at us. We’re OK. You think you’re never going to get through the evening, but you do.”

“I don’t want to,” said the guy.

“Tell us what the problem is,” I said. I walked a little closer. “I mean, we’re all fucking experts in the field. Maureen here…”

But I never got any further. He flipped the cigarette over the edge, and then with a little moan he pushed himself off. And there was silence, and then there was the noise of his body hitting the concrete all those floors below. And those two noises, the moan and the thud, I’ve heard every single day since, and I still don’t know which is scarier.

The guy who jumped had two profound and apparently contradictory effects on us all. Firstly, he made us realize that we weren’t capable of killing ourselves. And secondly, this information made us suicidal again.

That isn’t a paradox, if you know anything about the perversity of human nature. A long time ago, I worked with an alcoholic -someone who must remain nameless because you will almost certainly have heard of him. And he told me that the first time he failed on an attempt to quit the booze was the most terrifying day of his life. He’d always thought that he could stop drinking, if he ever got round to it, so he had a choice stashed away in a sock drawer somewhere at the back of his head. But when he found out that he had to drink, that the choice had never really been there… Well, he wanted to do away with himself, if I may temporarily confuse our issues.

I didn’t properly understand what he meant until I saw that guy jump off the roof. Up until then, jumping had always been an option, a way out, money in the bank for a rainy day. And then suddenly the money was gone—or rather, it had never been ours in the first place. It belonged to the guy who jumped, and people like him, because dangling your legs over the precipice is nothing unless you’re prepared to go that extra two inches, and none of us had been. We could tell each other and ourselves something different—oh, I would have done it if she hadn’t been there or he hadn’t been there or if someone hadn’t sat on my head—but the fact of the matter was that we were all still around, and we’d all had ample opportunity not to be. Why had we come down that night? We’d come down because we thought we should go and look for some twit called Chas, who turned out not to be terribly germane to our story. I’m not sure we could have persuaded old matey, the jumper, to go and look for Chas. He had other things on his mind. I wonder how he would have scored on Aaron T. Beck’s Suicide Intent Scale? Pretty high, I should think, unless Aaron T. Beck has been barking up the wrong tree. No one could say the intent wasn’t there.

We got off that roof sharpish once he’d gone over. We decided it was best not to hang around and explain our role, or lack of it, in the poor chap’s demise. We had a little Toppers’ previous, after all, and by owning up, we’d only be confusing the issue. If people knew we’d been up there, then the clarity of the story—unhappy man jumps off of building—would be diminished, and people would understand less of it, rather than more. We wouldn’t want that.

So we charged down the stairs as fast as damaged lungs and varicosed legs would let us, and went our separate ways. We were too nervous to go for a drink in the immediate vicinity, and too nervous to travel in a taxi together, so we scattered the moment we reached the pavement. (What, I wondered on the way home, was the nearest pub to Toppers’ House like of an evening? Was it full of unhappy people on their way up, or half-confused, half-relieved people who’d just come down? Or an awkward mix of the two? Does the landlord recognize the uniqueness of his clientele? Does he exploit their mood for financial gain—by offering a Miserable Hour, for example? Does he ever try to get the Uppers—in this context the very unhappy people—to mix with the Downers? Or the Uppers to mix with each other? Has there ever been a relationship born there? Could the pub even have been responsible for a wedding, and thus maybe a child?)

We met again the following afternoon in Starbucks, and everyone had the blues. A few days previously, in the immediate aftermath of the holiday, it had been perfectly clear that we no longer had much use for each other; now, it was hard to imagine who else would be suitable company. I looked around the cafe at the other customers: young mothers with prams, young men and women in suits with mobile phones and pieces of paper, foreign students… I tried to imagine talking to any of them, but it was impossible. They wouldn’t want to hear about people jumping off tower-blocks. No one would, apart from the people I was sitting with.

“I was up all fucking night thinking about that guy,” said JJ. “Man. What was going on there?”

“He was probably just, you know. A drama queen. A male drama queen. A drama king,” said Jess. “He looked the sort.”

“That’s very shrewd, Jess,” I said. “In the brief glimpse we got of him before he plunged to his death, he didn’t strike me as someone with serious problems. Nothing on your scale, anyway.”

“It’ll be in the local paper,” said Maureen. “They usually are. I used to read the reports. Especially when it was coming up to New Year’s Eve. I used to compare myself with them.”

“And? How did you get on?”

“Oh,” said Maureen. “I did OK. Some of them I couldn’t understand.”

“What sort of things?”

“Money.”

“I owe loads of people money,” said Jess proudly.

“Perhaps you should think of killing yourself,” I said.

“It’s not much,” said Jess. “Only twenty quid here and twentyquid there.”

“Even so. A debt’s a debt. And if you can’t pay… Maybe you should take the honourable way out.”

“Hey. Guys,” JJ said. “Let’s keep some focus, huh?”

“On what? Isn’t that the problem? Nothing to focus on?”

“Let’s focus on that guy.”

“We don’t know anything about him.”

“No, but, I don’t know. He seems kind of important to me. That was what we were gonna do.”

“Were we?”

“I was,” said Jess.

“But you didn’t.”

“You sat on my head.”

“But you haven’t done anything about it since.”