A Long Way Down (13 page)

‘I can’t think of anything, no.’

‘I’m going to leave a card with my numbers on it, OK? Ring me when you feel ready to talk about this.’

I nearly ran out after her – I was, as we say, missing her already. I liked being the temporary center of her world. Shit, I liked being the temporary center of my own, because there hadn’t been too much there recently, and there wasn’t much there after she’d gone, either.

So I went home, and I put the television on, and made a cup of tea, and I phoned the centre, and the two young fellas delivered Matty to the house, and I put him in front of the TV, and it all started again. It was hard to see how I’d last another six weeks. I know we
had an agreement, but I never thought I’d see any of them again anyway. Oh, we exchanged telephone numbers and addresses and so forth. (Martin had to explain to me that if I didn’t have a computer, then I wouldn’t have an email address. I wasn’t sure whether I’d have one or not. I thought it might have come in one of those envelopes you throw away.) But I didn’t think we’d actually be using them. I’ll tell you God’s honest truth, even though it’ll make me sound as if I was feeling sorry for myself: I thought they might see each other, but they’d keep me out of it. I was too old for them, and too old-fashioned, with my shoes and all. I’d had an interesting time going to parties and seeing all the strange people there, but it hadn’t changed anything. I was still going back to pick Matty up, and I still had no life to live beyond the life I was already sick and tired of. You might be thinking, well, why isn’t she angry? But of course I am angry. I don’t know why I ever pretend I’m not. The church had something to do with it, I suppose. And maybe my age, because we were taught not to grumble, weren’t we? But some days – most days – I want to scream and shout and break things and kill people. Oh, there’s anger, right enough. You can’t be stuck with a life like this one and not get angry. Anyway. A couple of days later the phone rang, and this woman with a posh voice said, ‘Is that Maureen?’

‘It is.’

‘This is the Metropolitan Police.’

‘Oh, hello,’ I said.

‘Hello. We’ve had reports that your son was causing trouble in the shopping centre on New Year’s Eve. Shoplifting and sniffing glue and mugging people and so on.’

‘I’m afraid it couldn’t have been my son,’ I said, like an eejit. ‘He has a disability.’

‘And you’re sure he’s not putting the disability on?’

I even thought about this for half a second. Well, you do, don’t you, when it’s the police? You want to make absolutely sure that you’re telling the absolute truth, just in case you get into trouble later on.

‘He’d be a very good actor if he was.’

‘And you’re sure he’s not a very good actor?’

‘Oh, positive. You see, he’s too disabled to act.’

‘But how about if
that’s
an act? Only, the er, the wossname fits his description. The suspect.’

‘What’s the description?’ I don’t know why I said that. To be helpful, I suppose.

‘We’ll come to that, madam. Can you account for his whereabouts on New Year’s Eve? Were you with him?’

I felt a chill run through me then. The date hadn’t registered at first. They’d got me. I didn’t know whether to lie or not. Supposing someone from the home had taken him out and used him as a cover, sort of thing? One of those young fellas, say? They looked nice enough, but you don’t know, do you? Supposing they had gone shoplifting, and hidden something under Matty’s blanket? Supposing they all went out drinking, and they took Matty with them, and they got into a fight, and they pushed the wheelchair hard towards someone they were fighting with? And the police saw him careering into someone, and they didn’t know that he couldn’t have pushed himself, so they thought he was joining in? And afterwards he was just playing dumb because he didn’t want to get into trouble? Well, you could hurt someone, crashing into them with a wheelchair. You could break someone’s leg. And supposing… Actually, even in the middle of my little panic I couldn’t really see how he’d manage the glue sniffing. But even so! These were all the things that went through my mind. It was all guilt, I suppose. I hadn’t been with him, and I should have been, and the reason I hadn’t been with him was because I wanted to leave him for ever.

‘I wasn’t with him, no. He was being looked after.’

‘Ah. I see.’

‘He was perfectly safe.’

‘I’m sure he was, madam. But we’re not talking about
his
safety, are we? We’re talking about the safety of people in the Wood Green shopping centre.’

Wood Green! He was all the way up in Wood Green!

‘No. Yes. Sorry.’

‘Are you really sorry? Are you really really really f— sorry?’

I couldn’t believe my ears. I knew the police used bad language, of course. But I thought it would come out more when they were under stress, with terrorists and such like, not on the phone to members of the public in the course of a routine inquiry. Unless, of course, she really was under stress. Could Matty, or whoever pushed him, have actually killed someone? A child, maybe?

‘Maureen.’

‘Yes, I’m still here.’

‘Maureen, I’m not really a policewoman. I’m Jess.’

‘Oh.’ I could feel myself blushing at my own stupidity.

‘You believed me, didn’t you, you silly old bag.’

‘Yes, I believed you.’

She could hear in my voice that she’d upset me, so she didn’t try to make any more of it.

‘Have you seen the papers?’

‘No. I don’t look at them.’

‘We’re in them.’

‘Who’s in them?’

‘We are. Well, Martin and I are in them by name. What a laugh, eh?’

‘What does it say?’

‘It says that me and Martin and two other mystery, you know, people had a suicide pact.’

‘That’s not true’.

‘Der. And it says I’m the Junior Minister for Education’s daughter.’

‘Why does it say that?’

‘Because I am.’

‘Oh.’

‘I’m just telling you so you know what’s in the papers. Are you surprised?’

‘Well, you do swear a lot, for a politician’s daughter.’

‘And a woman reporter came round to JJ’s flat and asked him whether we came down for an inspirational reason.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘We don’t know. Anyway. We’re going to have a crisis meeting.’

‘Who is?’

‘The four of us. Big reunion. Maybe in the place where we had breakfast.’

‘I can’t go anywhere.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because of Matty. That’s one of the reasons I was up on the roof. Because I can never go anywhere.’

‘We could come to you.’

I began to flush again. I didn’t want them here.

‘No, no. I’ll think of something. When are you thinking of meeting up?’

‘Later on today.’

‘Oh, I won’t be able to sort anything out for today.’

‘So we’ll come to you.’

‘Please don’t. I haven’t tidied up.’

‘So tidy up.’

‘I’ve never had anyone from the television in my house. Or a politician’s daughter.’

‘I won’t put on any airs or graces. We’ll see you at five.’

And that gave me three hours to sort everything out, put everything away. It does drive you a little bit mad, a life like mine, I think. You have to be a little mad to want to jump off the top of a building. You have to be a little mad to come down again. You have to be more than a little mad to put up with Matty, and the staying in all the time, and the loneliness. But I do think I’m only a little mad. If I were really mad, I wouldn’t have worried about the tidying up. And if I were really, properly mad, I wouldn’t have minded what they found.

I suppose it crossed my mind that my visit to Toppers’ House might be of interest to our friends in the tabloid press. I was on the front page of the paper for falling down drunk in the street, for Christ’s sake, and some would argue that attempting to fall off a high building is even more interesting than that. When Jess told Chas
where we’d met, I did wonder whether he’d have the wit to sell the knowledge on, but as Chas seemed to me a particularly witless individual, I dismissed the fear as paranoia. If I’d known that Jess was newsworthy in her own right, then I could have prepared myself.

My agent called first thing, and read the story out to me – I only bother with the
Telegraph
at home now.

‘Is any of this true?’ he said.

‘Between you and me?’

‘If you want.’

‘I was going to jump from the top of a tower-block.’

‘Gosh.’

My agent is young, posh and green. I came out of prison to find that there had been a quote unquote reorganization at the agency, and Theo, who used to make the coffee for my previous agent, is now all that stands between me and professional oblivion. It was Theo who found me my current job at Feet Up TV!, the world’s worst cable channel. He has a degree in Comparative Religion, and he’s a published poet. I suspect that he plays his football for Allboys United, if you get my drift, although that’s neither here nor there. He’s at the chocolate teapot end of the competency scale.

‘I met her up there. Her and a couple of others. We came back down again. And here I am, in the land of the living.’

‘Why were you going to jump off the top of a tower-block?’

‘It was purely whimsical.’

‘I’m sure you must have had a reason.’

‘I did. I was joking. Read my file. Acquaint yourself with recent events.’

‘We thought we’d turned a corner.’ It’s always very touching, his insistence on the first person plural. I’ve heard them all: ‘Since we came out of prison…’, ‘Since we had that spot of bother with the teenage girl…’ If there was one cause for regret after a successful suicide attempt, it would be that I’d never get to hear Theo say, ‘Since we killed ourselves…’ Or, ‘Since our funeral…’

‘We thought wrong.’

There was a ruminative silence.

‘Well. Gosh. Now what?’

‘You’re the agent. I’d have thought this gave you no end of creative opportunities.’

‘I’ll have a little think and call you back. By the way, Jess’s father has been trying to get hold of you. He called here, and I said we didn’t give out personal numbers. Did I do the right thing?’

‘You did the right thing. But give him my mobile number anyway. I suppose there’s no avoiding him.’

‘Do you want to call him? He left his number.’

‘Go on, then.’

While I was on the phone to Theo, both my ex-wife and my ex-girlfriend left messages. I had thought of neither of them when Theo was reading out that story; now I felt sick. I was beginning to realize an important truth about suicide: failure is as hurtful as success, and is likely to provoke even more anger, because there’s no grief with which to water it down. I was, I could hear from the tone of the messages, in very deep shit.

I called Cindy first.

‘You fucking selfish idiot,’ she said.

‘You don’t know anything, apart from what you read in the paper.’

‘You seem to be the only person in the world that the papers get bang to rights. If they say you’ve slept with a fifteen-year-old, you have. If they say you’ve fallen over drunk in the street, you have. They don’t need to invent stuff for you.’

This was actually quite an acute observation. She was right: not once have I been the victim of misrepresentation or distortion. If you think about it, that was one of the most humiliating aspects of the last few years. The papers have been full of shit about me, and every word of the shit was true.

‘So I’m presuming,’ she went on, ‘that they’ve got it right again. You were up the top of a tower-block with the intention of hurling yourself off. And instead you came back down again with a girl.’

‘That’s about the long and the short of it.’

‘And what about your daughters?’

‘Do they know?’

‘Not yet. But someone at school will tell them. They always do. What do you want me to say to them?’

‘Maybe I should talk to them.’

Cindy barked once. The bark was, I suspected, intended to be a satirical laugh.

‘Tell them what you want,’ I said. ‘Tell them Daddy was sad, but then he cheered up again.’

‘Brilliant. If we had a pair of two-year-olds, that would be perfect.’

‘I don’t know, Cindy. I mean, if I can’t see them, then it’s not really my problem, is it? It’s something you’ve got to deal with.’

‘You bastard.’

And that was the end of the first phone call. Pointing out that her refusal to let me participate in my daughters’ upbringing left me out in the cold struck me as a restatement of the bleeding obvious, but never mind. It got her off the phone.

I don’t know what I owe my daughters any more. I gave up smoking, years ago, because I knew then that I owed them that much. But when you make the sort of mess I’ve made, smoking seems like the least of your worries – which is why I started again. Now
there’s
a journey: from giving up smoking – giving up smoking because you want to protect your kids from loss for as long as possible – to arguing with their mother about the best way to tell them of your attempted suicide. They never said anything about that conversation in antenatal classes. It’s the distance that does it, of course. I got further and further away, and the girls got smaller and smaller until they were just tiny dots, and I could no longer see them, literally or metaphorically. You can’t make out their faces, can you, when they’re just tiny dots, so you don’t need to worry about whether they’re happy or sad. It’s why we can kill ants. And so after a while, suicide becomes imaginable, in a way that wouldn’t be possible if they looked into your eyes every day.

Penny was still crying when I called her.

‘At least that makes more sense,’ she said after a while.

‘What?’

‘You leaving the party to go up there. And then coming back
with those people. I couldn’t work out what they had to do with anything.’

‘All you knew was that somehow they’d helped me to have sex with someone else.’

‘Exactly.’ She gave a little rueful snort. She’s OK, Penny. She’s not a bitch at all. She’s sweet-natured, self-deprecating, loving… She’d make someone a lovely partner.