Chapter One
MARTIN.
Can I explain why I wanted to jump off the top of a tower block? Of course I can explain why I
wanted to jump off the top of a tower block. I’m not a bloody idiot. I can explain it because it wasn’t
inexplicable: it was a logical decision, the product of proper thought. It wasn’t even very serious
thought, either. I don’t mean it was whimsical – I just meant that it wasn’t terribly complicated, or
agonised. Put it this way: say you were, I don’t know, an assistant bank manager, in Guildford. And
you’d been thinking of emigrating, and then you were offered the job of managing a bank in
Sydney. Well, even though it’s a pretty straightforward decision, you’d still have to think for a bit,
wouldn’t you? You’d at least have to work out whether you could bear to move, whether you could
leave your friends and colleagues behind, whether you could uproot your wife and kids. You might
sit down with a bit of paper and draw up a list of pros and cons. You know:
CONS – Aged parents, friends, golf club.
PROS – more money, better quality of life (house with pool, barbecue etc), sea, sunshine, no left-wing
councils banning Baa-Baa Black Sheep, no EEC directives banning British sausages etc. It’s no
contest, is it? The golf club! Give me a break. Obviously your aged parents give you pause for
thought, but that’s all it is – a pause, and a brief one, too. You’d be on the phone to the travel
agents within ten minutes.
Well, that was me. There simply weren’t enough regrets, and lots and lots of reasons to jump. The
only things in my ‘cons’ list were the kids, but I couldn’t imagine Cindy letting me see them again
anyway. I haven’t got any aged parents, and I don’t play golf. Suicide was my Sydney. And I say
that with no offence to the good people of Sydney intended.
MAUREEN
I told him I was going to a New Year’s Eve party. I told him in October. I don’t know whether people
send out invitations to New Year’s Eve parties in October or not. Probably not. (How would I know?
I haven’t been to one since 1984. June and Brian across the road had one, just before they moved.
And even then I only nipped in for an hour or so, after he’d gone to sleep.) But I couldn’t wait any
longer. I’d been thinking about it since May or June, and I was itching to tell him. Stupid, really. He
doesn’t understand, I’m sure he doesn’t. They tell me to keep talking to him, but you can see that
nothing goes in. And what a thing to be itching about anyway! But it goes to show what I had to
look forward to, doesn’t it?
The moment I told him, I wanted to go straight to confession. Well, I’d lied, hadn’t I? I’d lied to my
own son. Oh, it was only a tiny, silly lie: I’d told him months in advance that I was going to a party,
a party I’d made up. I’d made it up properly, too. I told him whose party it was, and why I’d been
invited, and why I wanted to go, and who else would be there. (It was Bridgid’s party, Bridgid from
the Church. And I’d been invited because her sister was coming over from Cork, and her sister had
asked after me in a couple of letters. And I wanted to go because Bridgid’s sister had taken her
mother-in-law to Lourdes, and I wanted to find out all about it, with a view to taking Matty one
day.) But confession wasn’t possible, because I knew I would have to repeat the sin, the lie, over
and over as the year came to an end. Not only to Matty, but to the people at the nursing home,
and…. Well, there isn’t anyone else, really. Maybe someone at the Church, or someone in a shop.
It’s almost comical, when you think about it. If you spend day and night looking after a sick child,
there’s very little room for sin, and I hadn’t done anything worth confessing for donkey’s years. And
I went from that to sinning so terribly that I couldn’t even talk to the priest, because I was going to
go on sinning and sinning until the day I died, when I would commit the biggest sin of all. (And why
is it the biggest sin of all? All your life you’re told that you’ll be going to this marvellous place when
you pass on. And the one thing you can do to get you there a bit quicker is something that stops
you getting there at all. Oh, I can see that it’s a kind of queue-jumping. But if someone jumps the
queue at the Post Office, people tut. Or sometimes they say, ‘Excuse me, I was here first.’ They
don’t say, ‘You will be consumed by hellfire for all eternity.’ That would be a bit strong.) It didn’t
stop me from going to the Church, or from taking Mass. But I only kept going because people would
think there was something wrong if I stopped.
As we got closer and closer to the date, I kept passing on little tidbits of information that I told him
I’d picked up. Every Sunday I pretended as though I’d learned something new, because Sundays
were when I saw Bridgid. “Bridgid says there’ll be dancing.” “Bridgid’s worried that not everyone
likes wine and beer, so she’ll be providing spirits.” “Bridgid doesn’t know how many people will have
eaten already.” If Matty had been able to understand anything, he’d have decided that this Bridgid
woman was a lunatic, worrying like that about a little get-together. I blushed every time I saw her
at the Church. And of course I wanted to know what she actually was doing on New Year’s Eve, but
I never asked. If she was planning to have a party, she might’ve felt that she had to invite me.
I’m ashamed, thinking back. Not about the lies – I’m used to lying now. No, I’m ashamed of how
pathetic it all was. One Sunday I found myself telling Matty about where Bridgid was going to buy
the ham for the sandwiches. But it was on my mind, New Year’s Eve, of course it was, and it was a
way of talking about it, without actually saying anything. And I suppose I came to believe in the
party a little bit myself, in the way that you come to believe the story in a book. Every now and
again I imagined what I’d wear, how much I’d drink, what time I’d leave. Whether I’d come home in
a taxi. That sort of thing. In the end it was as if I’d actually been. Even in my imagination, though, I
couldn’t see myself talking to anyone at the party. I was always quite happy to leave it.
JESS
I was at a party downstairs in the squat. It was a shit party, full of all these ancient crusties sitting
on the floor drinking cider and smoking huge spliffs and listening to weirdo space-out reggae. At
midnight, one of them clapped sarcastically, and a couple of others laughed, and that was it – Happy
New Year to you too. You could have turned up to that party as the happiest person in
London, and you’d still have wanted up to jump off the roof by five past twelve. And I wasn’t the
happiest person in London anyway. Obviously.
I only went because someone at college told me Chas would be there, but he wasn’t. I tried his
mobile for the one zillionth time, but it wasn’t on. When we first split up, he called me a stalker, but
that’s like an emotive word, ‘stalker’, isn’t it? I don’t think you can call it stalking when it’s just
phone calls and letters and emails and knocking on the door. And I only turned up at his work twice.
Three times, if you count his Christmas party, which I don’t, because he said he was going to take
me to that anyway. Stalking is when you follow them to the shops and on holiday and all that, isn’t
it? Well, I never went near any shops. And anyway I didn’t think it was stalking when someone
owed you an explanation. Being owed an explanation is like being owed money, and not just a fiver,
either. Five or six hundred quid minimum, more like. If you were owed five or six hundred quid
minimum and the person who owed it to you was avoiding you, then you’re bound to knock on his
door late at night, when you know he’s going to be in. People get serious about that sort of money.
They call in debt collectors, and break people’s legs, but I never went that far. I showed some
restraint.
So even though I could see straight away that he wasn’t at this party, I stayed for a while. Where
else was I going to go? I was feeling sorry for myself. How can you be eighteen and not have
anywhere to go on New Year’s Eve, apart from some shit party in some shit squat where you don’t
know anybody? Well, I managed it. I seem to manage it every year. I make friends easily enough,
but then I piss them off, I know that much, even if I’m not sure why or how. And so people and
parties disappear.
I pissed Jen off, I’m sure of that. She disappeared, like everyone else.
MARTIN
I’d spent the previous couple of months looking up suicide inquests on the Internet, just out of
curiosity. And nearly every single time, the coroner says the same thing: “He took his own life while
the balance of his mind was disturbed.” And then you read the story about the poor bastard: his
wife was sleeping with his best friend, he’d lost his job, his daughter had been killed in a road
accident some months before…. Hello, Mr Coroner? Anyone at home? I’m sorry, but there’s no
disturbed mental balance here, my friend. I’d say he got it just right. Bad thing upon bad thing upon
bad thing until you can’t take any more, and then it’s off to the nearest multi-storey car park in the
family hatchback with a length of rubber tubing. Surely that’s fair enough? Surely the coroner’s
inquest should read, “He took his own life after sober and careful contemplation of the fucking
shambles it had become”?
Not once did I read a newspaper report, which convinced me that the deceased was off the old
trolley. You know: “The Manchester United forward, who was engaged to the current Miss Sweden,
had recently achieved a unique Double: he is the only man ever to have won the FA Cup and an
Oscar for Best Actor in the same year. The rights to his first novel had just been bought for an
undisclosed sum by Stephen Spielberg. He was found hanging from a beam in his stables by a
member of his staff.” Now, I’ve never seen a coroner’s report like that, but if there were cases in
which happy, successful, talented people took their own lives, one could safely come to the
conclusion that the old balance was indeed wonky. And I’m not saying that being engaged to Miss
Sweden, playing for Manchester United and winning Oscars inoculates you against depression – I’m
sure it doesn’t. I’m just saying that these things help. Look at the statistics. You’re more likely to
top yourself if you’ve just gone through a divorce. Or if you’re anorexic. Or if you’re unemployed. Or
if you’re a prostitute. Or if you’ve fought in a war, or if you’ve been raped, or if you’ve lost
somebody….. There are lots and lots of factors that push people over the edge; none of these
factors are likely to make you feel anything but fucking miserable.
Two years ago Martin Sharp would not have found himself sitting on a tiny concrete ledge in the
middle of the night, looking a hundred feet down at a concrete walkway and wondering whether
he’d hear the noise that his bones made when they shattered into tiny pieces. But two years ago
Martin Sharp was a different person. I still had my job. I still had a wife. I hadn’t slept with a
fifteen-year-old. I hadn’t been to prison. I hadn’t had to talk to my young daughters about a front-
page tabloid newspaper article, an article headlined with the word SLEAZEBAG! and illustrated with
a picture of me lying on the pavement outside a well-known London nightspot. (What would the
headline have been if I had gone over? “SLEAZY DOES IT!” perhaps. Or maybe “SHARP END!”)
There was, it is fair to say, less reason for ledge-sitting before all that happened. So don’t tell me
that the balance of my mind was disturbed, because it really didn’t feel that way. (What does it
mean, anyway, that stuff about “the balance of the mind”? Is it strictly scientific? Does the mind
really wobble up and down in the head like some sort of fish-scale, according to how loopy you
are?) Wanting to kill myself was an appropriate and reasonable response to a whole series of
unfortunate events that had rendered life unlivable. Oh, yes, I know the shrinks would say that they
could have helped, but that’s half the trouble with this bloody country, isn’t it? No one’s willing to
face their responsibilities. It’s always someone else’s fault. Boo-hoo-hoo. Well, I happen to be one
of those rare individuals who believe that what went on with Mummy and Daddy had nothing to do
with me screwing a fifteen-year-old. I happen to believe that I would have slept with her regardless
of whether I’d been breast-fed or not, and it was time to face up to what I’d done. And what I’d
done is, I’d pissed my life away. Literally. Well, OK, not literally literally. I hadn’t, you know, turned
my life into urine and stored it in my bladder and so on and so forth. But I felt as if I’d pissed my
life away in the same way that you can piss money away. I’d had a life, full of kids and wives and
jobs and all the usual stuff, and I’d somehow managed to mislay it. No, you see, that’s not right. I
knew where my life was, just as you know where money goes when you piss it away. I hadn’t
mislaid it at all. I’d spent it. I’d spent my kids and my job and my wife on teenage girls and
nightclubs: these things all come at a price, and I’d happily paid it, and suddenly my life wasn’t
there any more. What would I be leaving behind? On New Year’s Eve, it felt as though I’d be saying
goodbye to a dim form of consciousness and a semi-functioning digestive system – all the
indications of a life, certainly, but none of the content. I didn’t even feel sad, particularly. I just felt
very stupid, and very angry.
I’m not sitting here now because I suddenly saw sense. The reason I’m sitting here now is because
that night turned into as much of a mess as everything else. I couldn’t even jump off a fucking
tower block without fucking it up.
MAUREEN
On New Year’s Eve the nursing home sent their ambulance round for him. You had to pay extra for
that, but I didn’t mind. How could I? In the end, Matty was going to cost them a lot more than they
were costing me. I was only paying for a night, and they were going to pay for the rest of his life.
I thought about hiding some of Matty’s stuff, in case they thought it was odd, but no one had to
know it was his. I could have had loads of kids, as far as they knew, so I left it there. They came
around six, and these two young fellas wheeled him out. I couldn’t cry when he went, because then
the young fellas would know something was wrong; as far as they knew, I was coming to fetch him
at eleven the next morning. I just kissed him on the top of his head and told him to be good at the
home, and I held it all in until I’d seen them leave. Then I wept and wept, for about an hour. He’d
ruined my life, but he was still my son, and I was never going to see him again, and I couldn’t even
say goodbye properly. I watched the television for a while, and I did have one or two glasses of
sherry, because I knew it would be cold out.
I waited at the bus stop for ten minutes, but then I decided to walk. Knowing that you want to die
makes you less scared.
Continues…
Riverhead Books
ISBN: 1-573-22302-6
Excerpted from A Long Way Down
by Nick Hornby Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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