A Long Way Down (30 page)

The people left behind stood around for a little while, the nurses and Jess’s parents and Martin’s friends and family, and then when we all began to realize that no one was coming back, not even JJ and his friends, no one was quite sure what to do.

‘Is that it, do you think?’ said Jess’s father. ‘I mean, I don’t want to… I don’t wish to appear unsympathetic. And I know Jess took a lot of trouble organizing this. But, well… There’s no one really left, is there? Would you like us to stay, Maureen? Is there anything we can usefully achieve as a unit? Because obviously, if there was… I mean, what do you think Jess was hoping for? Perhaps we can help her to achieve it
in absentia
?’

I knew what Jess was hoping for. She was hoping that her mum and dad would come and make everything better, in the way mums and dads are supposed to. I used to have that dream, a long time ago, when I was first on my own with Matty, and I think it’s a dream that everyone has. Everyone whose life has gone badly wrong, anyway.

So I told Jess’s father that I thought Jess just wanted people to understand better, and that I was sorry if that wasn’t what had happened.

‘It’s those bloody earrings,’ he said, and so I asked about the earrings, and he told me the story.

‘Were they special to her?’ I said.

‘To Jen? Or to Jess?’

‘To Jen.’

‘I don’t really know,’ he said.

‘They were her favourites,’ said Mrs Crichton. She had a strange face. She smiled the whole time we were speaking, but it was as though she’d only discovered smiling that afternoon – she didn’t have the sort of face that looked as though it were very used to being cheerful. The lines she had were the sort you’d get from being angry about stolen earrings, and her mouth was very thin and tight.

‘She came back for them,’ I said. I don’t know why I said it, and I don’t know if it was true or not. But it felt like the right thing to say. It felt true in that way.

‘Who did?’ she said. Her face looked different now. It was having to do things it wasn’t used to doing, because she suddenly looked so desperate to hear what I had to say. I don’t think she was used to listening properly. I liked making her face do something new, and that was why I went on, partly. I felt like I was in charge of a lawnmower, cutting a path into places where the grass was overgrown.

‘Jen. If she loved her earrings, then she probably came back for them. You know what girls of that age are like.’

‘God,’ said Mr Crichton. ‘I’d never thought of that.’

‘Me neither. But… that makes so much sense. Because, do you remember, Chris? That’s when we lost a couple of other things, too. That was when that money went missing.’

I didn’t have the same feeling about the money. I could see that there might have been another explanation for that.

‘And I said at the time that I thought there were a couple of books gone, do you remember? And we know Jess didn’t take those.’

And they both laughed, then, as if they liked Jess, and liked it that she’d rather jump off a tower-block than read a book.

I could see and feel why it would make a difference to them, this idea that Jen had come into the house for her earrings. It would mean that she had disappeared, gone to Texas or Scotland or Notting Hill Gate, rather than that she’d been killed, or she’d killed herself. It meant that they could think about where she was, imagine
her life now. They could wonder about whether she’d had a baby that they’d never seen and might never see, or got a job that they’d never hear about. It meant that in their heads they could carry on being ordinary parents. It’s what I was doing, when I bought Matty his posters and his tapes – I was being an ordinary mother in my head, just for a moment.

You could wreck it all for them in a second, if you chose to, rip enormous great big holes in the story, because what did it add up to, really? Jen could have come back because she wanted to die wearing her earrings. She might not have come back at all. And she was still gone, whether she came back for five minutes or not. Oh, but I know what you need to keep yourself going. That probably sounds funny, considering why we were all there in that coffee bar in the first place. But the fact is that so far I have kept myself going, even if I had to climb the stairs to the roof of Toppers’ House to do it. Sometimes you just need to give things a tiny little jiggle. You just need to think that perhaps someone might have helped themselves to their own earrings, and your part of the world looks like somewhere you could live in for a while.

That was Mr and Mrs Crichton, though, not Jess. Jess didn’t know anything about the earring theory, and Jess was the one who needed her world to look different. She was the one who’d been up on the roof with me. Mr and Mrs Crichton had their jobs and their friends and all the rest of it, so you could say that they didn’t need any stories about earrings. You could say that stories about earrings were wasted on them.

You could say all that, but it wouldn’t be true. They needed the stories – you could see it in their faces. I only know one person in the world who doesn’t need stories to keep himself going, and that person is Matty. (And maybe even he does. I don’t know what goes on in there. Keep talking to him, they say, so I do, and who knows whether he uses something I say?) And there are other ways of dying, without killing yourself. You can let parts of yourself die. Jess’s mother had let her face die, and I watched it come to life again.

The first train that came along was southbound, and I got off at London Bridge and went for a walk. If you’d seen me leaning on the wall and looking down at the water, you’d have gone, Oh, she’s thinking, but I wasn’t. I mean, there were words in my head, but just because there are words in your head it doesn’t mean you’re thinking, just like if you’ve got a pocket full of pennies it doesn’t mean you’re rich. The words in my head were like, bollocks, bastard, bitch, shit, fuck, wanker, and they were spinning round in there pretty fast, too fast even for me to make a sentence out of them. And that’s not really thought, is it?

So I watched the water for a little while, and then I went to a stall by the bridge and bought some tobacco and papers and matches. Then I went back to where I’d been standing and sat down to roll myself a few smokes, for something to do, sort of thing. I don’t know why I don’t smoke more, to be honest. I forget, I think. If someone like me forgets to smoke, what chance has smoking got? Look at me. You’d bet any money that I smoked like fuck, and I don’t. New Year’s Resolution: smoke more. It’s got to be better for you than jumping off of tower-blocks.

Anyway, so there I was, sitting down with my back against the wall, rolling up roll-ups, when I saw this lecturer from college. He’s like an old bloke, one of those art-school people who’ve been knocking around since the sixties. He teaches typography and that, and I went to a couple of his classes until I got bored. I don’t mind him, Colin. He doesn’t have a grey pony-tail and he doesn’t wear a faded denim jacket. And he never wanted to be our friend, which must mean that he has his own friends. You couldn’t say that about some of them.

To tell this story truthfully, I should probably say that he saw me before I saw him, because when I looked up from my rolling, he was walking over to me. And to be really properly truthful, I should also say that some of the thinking I was doing, in other words the mental swearing, probably wasn’t entirely mental, if you
see what I mean. It was meant to be mental, but some of it was coming out through my mouth, just because there was so much of it. It was sort of slopping out of me, as if the swearing was coming out of a tap and running into a bucket (= my head), and I hadn’t bothered turning the tap off even when the bucket was full.

That’s what it looked like from my point of view. From his point of view, it looked like I was sitting on the pavement rolling up fags and swearing to myself, and that’s not such a good look, is it? He kind of came up to me, and then he crouched down so he was at my height, and then he started talking to me quietly. And he was like, Jess? Do you remember me?

I’d only seen him like two months before, so of course I remembered him. And I went, No, and laughed, which was supposed to be a joke, but which couldn’t have come across as a joke, because then he goes, still in this whispery voice, I’m Colin Wearing, and I used to teach you at art college. And I go, Yeah, yeah, and he goes, No, I am, and then I see that he thought my Yeah, yeah was like Yeah, right, but it wasn’t that sort of Yeah, yeah. All I was doing with the two Yeahs was trying to tell him that I’d only been joking before, but I only made it worse. I made it look like I thought he was pretending to be Colin Wearing, which would be an utterly insane thing to do. So the whole conversation is going right off course. It’s like a supermarket trolley with a wonky wheel, because all the time I’m thinking, this should be easy to push along, and everything I say just takes me in the wrong direction.

And he goes, Why are you here, sitting on the path? And I tell him that I’d had a row with my fucking mother about some earrings, and he was like, And now you can’t go home? And I said that I could if I wanted to. I could just get on the Northern Line back to Angel and then jump on a bus. But I didn’t want to. And he went, Well, I don’t think you should sit here. Is there anywhere you can go? And then I realized that he thought I had turned into like a nutter, so I stood up quickly, which made him jump, and I gave him a mouthful and walked away.

But then I did think, as opposed to swear mentally. And the first thing I thought was that it would be very easy for me to be a nutter. I’m not saying it would be a piece of piss, living that life – I don’t mean that. I just mean that I had a lot in common with some of the people you see sitting on pavements swearing and rolling cigarettes. Some of them seemed to hate people, and I hated just about everyone. They must have pissed off their friends and family, and I’d pretty much done that. And who knows whether Jen’s a nutter now? Maybe it runs in the genes, although with my dad being a junior Education minister, maybe it’s one of those things that skips a generation.

And I didn’t know where all this thinking was leading to, but I could see suddenly that I was in more trouble than I had thought. I know that sounds stupid, considering I’d thought about killing myself, but that was all just for a laugh, and if I’d jumped it would have been for a laugh, too. What if I had a future on this planet, though? What then? How many people could I piss off, and how many places could I run away from, before I found myself sitting by the river and swearing externally 4 real? Not many more, was the answer.

So the thing to do was to go back – to Starbucks, or home, to somewhere – anywhere that wasn’t forward. If you’re walking somewhere, and you come up against a brick wall, then you have to retrace your steps.

But then I sort of found a way of climbing over the wall. Or I found a little hole in the wall I could crawl through, or whatever. I met this geezer with a really nice dog, and I went and slept with him instead.

So I just stood there on the sidewalk and told Ed to take a swing at me if it would make him feel any better.

‘I don’t want to hit you unless you hit me,’ he said.

There was a guy selling that homeless magazine standing watching us.

‘Hit him,’ he said to me.

‘You shut the fuck up,’ said Ed.

‘I was only trying to get things started,’ said the homeless guy.

‘You flew across the bloody Atlantic because JJ was in trouble,’ Lizzie said to Ed. ‘And now look at you. One conversation and you want to punch him.’

‘Things have to go the way they have to go,’ said Ed.

‘Is that like “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do”? Because it sounds utterly meaningless to us, I’m afraid,’ said Lizzie. She was leaning against the window of a thrift shop, making out like she was bored, but I knew she wasn’t. She was angry too, but she didn’t want to show it.

‘He’s on my side,’ said Ed. ‘So it doesn’t matter what it sounds like to you. He understands.’

‘No I don’t,’ I said. ‘Lizzie’s right. Why would you come all this way to punch me?’

‘It’s a Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid thing, surely?’ said Lizzie. ‘You want to sleep with each other, but you can’t, because you’re both so straight.’

This really tickled the homeless guy. He laughed like a hyena. ‘Did you ever read Pauline Kael on
Butch Cassidy
? God, she hated it,’ he said.

Neither Lizzie nor Ed would have had a fucking clue who Pauline Kael was, but I got two or three of her collections. I used to keep them by the toilet, because they’re great for dipping into when you’re on the can. Anyway, hers wasn’t a name I was necessarily expecting to hear from that particular guy at that particular moment. I looked at him.

‘Oh, I know who Pauline Kael is,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t born homeless, you know.’

‘I really, really don’t want to sleep with him,’ said Ed. ‘I really want to punch him. But he has to punch me first.’

‘You see?’ said Lizzie. ‘Homo-erotic, with a bit of sado-masochism thrown in. Just kiss him, and be done with it.’

‘Kiss him,’ the homeless guy said to Ed. ‘Kiss him or punch him. But let’s get something going, for God’s sake.’

Ed’s ears couldn’t have gotten any redder, so I was wondering whether they might just burst into flame and then turn black. At least then I could say that I’d seen something new.

‘You trying to get me killed?’ I said to her.

‘Why don’t you just get back together?’ said Lizzie. ‘At least you’ve got all that mike-sharing and those great big electric penis substitutes.’

‘Oh, so that’s why you didn’t want him to be in a band,’ said Ed. ‘You were jealous.’

‘Who said I didn’t want him to be in a band?’ Lizzie asked him.

‘Yeah, you got that dead wrong, Ed,’ I said. ‘She wasn’t that deep. She dumped me precisely because I wasn’t in a band. She wasn’t interested in being with me unless I became a rock star and made a shitload of money.’

‘Is that what you think I meant?’ said Lizzie.

I could suddenly see my life being put back together before my eyes. It had all been a terrible misunderstanding, which was now about to be cleared up, with much laughter and many tears. Lizzie never wanted to break up with me. Ed never wanted to break up with me. I’d come out on to the sidewalk to get my ass kicked, and instead, I was going to get everything I ever wanted.