Chapter 14

Everyone bloody knew everything about me, so I didn't see the point of this lark, and I told them that.

'Oh, come on, man,' said JJ, in his irritating American way. It doesn't take long, I find, to be irritated by Yanks. I know they're our friends and everything, and they respect success over there, unlike the ungrateful natives of this bloody chippy dump, but all that cool-daddio stuff gets on my wick. I mean, you should have seen him. You'd have thought he was on the roof to promote his latest movie. You certainly wouldn't think he'd been puttering around Archway delivering pizzas.

'We just want to hear your side of it,' said Jess.

'There isn't a "my side". I was a bloody idiot and I'm paying the price.'

'So you don't want to defend yourself? Because you're among friends here,' said JJ.

'She just spat at me,' I pointed out. 'What kind of a friend is that?'

'Oh, don't be such a baby,' said Jess. 'My friends are always spitting at me. I never take it personally.'

'Maybe you should. Perhaps that's how your friends intend it to be taken.'

Jess snorted. 'If I took it personally, I wouldn't have any friends left.'

We let that one hang in the air.

'So what do you want to know, that you don't know already?'

There are two sides to every story,' said Jess. 'We only know the bad side.'

'I didn't know she was fifteen,' I said. 'She told me she was eighteen. She looked eighteen.' That was it. That was the good side of the story.

'So if she'd been, like, six months older you wouldn't be up here?'

'I don't suppose I would, no. Because I wouldn't have broken the law. Wouldn't have gone to prison. Wouldn't have lost my job, my wife wouldn't have found out…'

'So you're saying it was just bad luck.'

'I'd say there was a certain degree of culpability involved.' This was, I need hardly tell you, an attempt at dry understatement; I didn't know then that Jess is at her happiest wallowing in the marshland of the bleeding obvious.

'Just because you've swallowed a fucking dictionary, it doesn't mean you've done nothing wrong,' said Jess.

'That's what "culpability"…'

'Because some married men wouldn't have shagged her no matter how old she was. And you've got kids and all, haven't you?'

'I have indeed.'

'So bad luck's got nothing to do with it.'

Oh, for fuck's sake. Why d'you think I've been dangling my feet over the ledge, you moron? I screwed up. I'm not trying to make excuses for myself. I feel so wretched I want to die.'

'I should hope so.'

'Thanks. And thanks for introducing this exercise, too. Very helpful. Very… curative.'

Another polysyllabic word, another dirty look.

I'm interested in something,' said JJ.

'Go on.'

'Why is it easier to like leap into the void than to face up to what you've done?'

'This is facing up to what I've done.'

'People are always fucking young girls and leaving their wives and kids. They don't all jump off of buildings, man.'

'No. But like Jess says, maybe they should.'

'Really? You think anyone who makes a mistake of this kind should die? Woah. That's some heavy shit,' said JJ.

Did I really think that? Maybe I did. Or maybe I had done. As some of you might know, I'd written things in newspapers which said exactly that, more or less. This was before my fall from grace, naturally. I'd called for the restoration of the death penalty, for example. I'd called for resignations and chemical castrations and prison sentences and public humiliations and penances of every kind. And maybe I had meant it when I'd said that men who couldn't keep their things in their trousers should be… Actually, I can't remember what I thought the appropriate punishment was now for philanderers and serial adulterers. I shall have to look up the column in question. But the point is that I was practising what I preached. I hadn't been able to keep my thing in my trousers, so now I had to jump. I was a slave to my own logic. That was the price you had to pay if you were a tabloid columnist who crossed the line you'd drawn.

'Not every mistake, no. But maybe this one.'

'Jesus,' said JJ. 'You're real tough on yourself.'

'It's not just that, anyway. It's the public thing. The humiliation. The enjoyment of the humiliation. The TV show on cable that's watched by three people. Everything. I've… I've run out of room. I can't see any way forward or back.'

There was a thoughtful silence, for about ten seconds.

'Right,' said Jess. 'My turn.'