Nick Hornby: A Long Way Down

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.

“Any of you guys order a pizza?” he said.

I d never met an American before, I don’t think. I wasn’t at all sure he was one, either, until the others said something. You don’t expect Americans to be delivering pizzas, do you? Well, I don’t, but perhaps I’m just out of touch. I don’t order pizzas very often, but every time I have, they’ve been delivered by someone who doesn’t speak English. Americans don’t deliver things, do they? Or serve you in shops, or take your money on the bus. I suppose they must do in America, but they don’t here. Indians and West Indians, lots of Australians in the hospital where they see Matty, but no Americans. So we probably thought he was a bit mad at first. That was the only explanation for him. He looked a bit mad, with that hair. And he thought that we’d ordered pizzas while we were standing on the roof of Toppers’ House.

“How would we have ordered pizzas?” Jess asked him. We were still sitting on her, so her voice sounded funny.

“On a cell,” he said.

“What’s a cell?” Jess asked.

“OK, a mobile, whatever.”

Fair play to him, we could have done that.

“Are you American?” Jess asked him.

“Yeah.”

“What are you doing delivering pizzas?”

“What are you guys doing sitting on her head?”

“They’re sitting on my head because this isn’t afree country,” Jess said. “You can’t do what you want to.”

“What did you wanna do?”

She didn’t say anything.

“She was going to jump,” Martin said.

“So were you!”

He ignored her.

“You were all gonna jump?” the pizza man asked us.

We didn’t say anything.

“The f—?” he said.

“The f—?” said Jess. “The f— what?”

“It’s an American abbreviation,” said Martin. “ «The f—?» means «What the f—?» In America, they’re so busy that they don’t have time to say the «what».”

“Would you watch your language, please?” I said to them. “We weren’t all brought up in a pigsty.”

The pizza man just sat down on the roof and shook his head. I thought he was feeling sorry for us, but later he told us it wasn’t that at all.

“OK,” he said after a while. “Let her go.”

We didn’t move.

“Hey, you. You f— listening to me? Am I gonna have to come over and make you listen?” He stood up and walked towards us.

“I think she’s OK, now, Maureen,” Martin said, as if he was deciding to stand up of his own accord, and not because the American man might punch him. He stood up, and I stood up, and Jess stood up and brushed herself down and swore a lot. Then she stared at Martin.

“You’re that bloke,” she said. “The breakfast TV bloke. The one who slept with the fifteen-year-old. Martin Sharp. F—! Martin Sharp was sitting on my head. You old pervert.”

Well, of course I didn’t have a clue about any fifteen-year-old. I don’t look at that sort of newspaper, unless I’m in the hairdresser’s, or someone’s left one on the bus.

“You kidding me?” said the pizza man. “The guy who went to prison? I read about him.”

Martin made a groaning noise. “Does everyone in America know, too?” he said.

“Sure,” the pizza man said. “I read about it in the New York Times .”

“Oh, God,” said Martin, but you could tell he was pleased.

“I was just kidding,” said the pizza man. “You used to present a breakfast TV show in England. No one in the US has ever heard of you. Get real.”

“Give us some pizza, then,” said Jess. “What flavours have you got?”

“I don’t know,” said the pizza man.

“Let me have a look, then,” said Jess.

No, I mean… They’re not my pizzas, you know?”

Oh, don’t be such a pussy,” said Jess. (Really. That’s what she said. I don’t know why.) She leaned over, grabbed his bag and took out the pizza boxes. Then she opened the boxes and started poking the pizzas.

This one’s pepperoni. I don’t know what that is though. Vegetables.”

“Vegetarian,” said the pizza man.

“Whatever,” said Jess. “Who wants what?”

I asked for vegetarian. The pepperoni sounded like something that wouldn’t agree with me.

I told a couple people about that night, and the weird thing is that they get the suicide part, but they don’t get the pizza part. Most people get suicide, I guess; most people, even if it’s hidden deep down inside somewhere, can remember a time in their lives when they thought about whether they really wanted to wake up the next day. Wanting to die seems like it might be a part of being alive. So anyway, I tell people the story of that New Year’s Eve, and none of them are like, “Whaaaaat? You were gonna kill yourself?” It’s more, you know, “Oh, OK, your band was fucked up, you were at the end of the line with your music, which was all you wanted to do your whole life, PLUS you broke up with your girl, who was the only reason you were in this fuckin” country in the first place… Sure, I can see why you were up there.” But then like the very next second, they want to know what a guy like me was doing delivering fucking pizzas .

OK, you don’t know me, so you’ll have to take my word for it that I’m not stupid. I read the fuck out of every book I can get my hands on. I like Faulkner and Dickens and Vonnegut and Brendan Behan and Dylan Thomas. Earlier that week—Christmas Day, to be precise—I’d finished Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, which is a totally awesome novel. I was actually going to jump with a copy—not only because it would have been kinda cool, and would’ve added a little mystique to my death, but because it might have been a good way of getting more people to read it. But the way things worked out, I didn’t have any preparation time, and I left it at home. I have to say, though, that I wouldn’t recommend finishing it on Christmas Day, in like a cold-water bedsit, in a city where you don’t really know anybody. It probably didn’t help my general sense of well-being, if you know what I mean, because the ending is a real downer.