Chapter 18

I know what you're thinking, all you clever-clever people who read the Guardian and shop in Waterstone's and would no more think of watching breakfast television than you would of buying your children cigarettes. You're thinking, Oh, this guy wasn't serious. He wanted a tabloid photographer to capture his quote unquote cry for help so that he could sign a 'My Suicide Hell' exclusive for the Sun. 'SHARP TAKES THE SLEAZY WAY OUT'. And I can understand why you might be thinking that, my friends. I climb a stairwell, have a couple of nips of Scotch from a hip-flask while dangling my feet over the edge, and then when some dippy girl asks me to help find her ex-boyfriend at some party, I shrug and wander off with her. And how suicidal is that?

First of all, I'll have you know that I scored very highly on Aaron T. Beck's Suicide Intent Scale. I'll bet you didn't even know there was such a scale, did you? Well, there is, and I reckon I got something like twenty-one out of thirty points, which I was pretty pleased with, as you can imagine. Yes, suicide had been contemplated for more than three hours prior to the attempt. Yes, I was certain of death even if I received medical attention: it's fifteen storeys high, Toppers' House, and they reckon that anything over ten will do it for you pretty well every time. Yes, there was active preparation for the attempt: ladder, wire-cutters and so on. He shoots, he scores. The only questions where I might not have received maximum points are the first two, which deal with what Aaron T. Beck calls isolation and timing. 'No one near by in visual or vocal contact' gets you top marks, as does 'Intervention highly unlikely'. You might argue that as we chose the most popular suicide spot in North London on one of the most popular suicide nights of the year, intervention was almost inevitable; I would counter by saying that we were just being dim. Dim or grotesquely self-absorbed, take your pick.

And yet, of course, if it hadn't been for the teeming throng up there, I wouldn't be around today, so maybe old Beck is bang on the money. We may not have been counting on anyone to rescue us, but once we started bumping into each other, there was certainly a collective desire - a desire born more than anything out of embarrassment - to shelve the whole idea, at least for the night. Not one of us descended those stairs having come to the conclusion that life was a beautiful and precious thing; if anything, we were slightly more miserable on the way down than on the way up, because the only solution we had found for our various predicaments was not available to us, at least for the moment. And there had been a sort of weird nervous excitement up on the roof; for a couple of hours we had been living in a sort of independent state, where street-level laws no longer applied. Even though our problems had driven us up there, it was as if they had somehow, like Daleks, been unable to climb the stairs. And now we had to go back down and face them again. But it didn't feel like we had any choice. Even though we had nothing in common beyond that one thing, the one thing was enough to make us feel that there wasn't anything else - not money, or class, or education, or age, or cultural interests - that was worth a damn; we'd formed a nation, suddenly, in that couple of hours, and for the time being we wanted only to be with our new compatriots. I had hardly exchanged a word with Maureen, and I didn't even know her surname; but she understood more about me than my wife had done in the last five years of our marriage. Maureen knew that I was unhappy, because of where she'd met me, and that meant she knew the most important thing about me; Cindy always professed herself baffled by everything I did or said.

It would have been neat if I'd fallen in love with Maureen, wouldn't it? I can even see the newspaper headline: 'SHARP TURNED!' And then there'd be some story about how Old Sleazebag had seen the error of his ways and decided to settle down with nice homely older woman, rather than chase around after schoolgirls and C-list actresses with breast enlargements. Yeah, right. Dream on.