A Long Way Down Read Free Page B

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 werea 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