Chapter 7

If she hadn't tried to kill me, I'd be dead, no question. But we've all got a preservation instinct, haven't we? Even if we're trying to kill ourselves when it kicks in. All I know is that I felt this thump on my back, and I turned round and grabbed the railings behind me, and I started yelling. I was drunk by then. I'd been taking nips out of the old hip-flask for a while, and I'd had a skinful before I came out, as well. (I know, I know, I shouldn't have driven. But I wasn't going to take the fucking stepladder on the bus.) So, yes, I probably did let rip with a bit of vocabulary. If I'd known it was Maureen, if I'd known what Maureen was like, then I would have toned it down a bit, probably, but I didn't; I think I might even have used the c- word, for which I've apologized. But you'd have to admit it was a unique situation.

I stood up and turned round carefully, because I didn't want to fall off until I chose to, and I started yelling at her, and she just stared.

'I know you,' she said.

'How?' I was being slow. People come up to me in restaurants and shops and theatres and garages and urinals all over Britain and say, 'I know you,' and they invariably mean precisely the opposite; they mean, 'I don't know you. But I've seen you on the telly.' And they want an autograph, or a chat about what Penny Chambers is really like, in real life. But that night, I just wasn't expecting it. It all seemed a bit beside the point, that side of life. 'From the television.'

'Oh, for Christ's sake. I was about to kill myself, but never mind, there's always time for an autograph. Have you got a pen? Or a bit of paper? And before you ask, she's a right bitch who will snort anything and fuck anybody. What are you doing up here anyway?' I was… I was going to jump too. I wanted to borrow your ladder.'

That's what everything comes down to: ladders. Well, not ladders literally; the Middle East peace process doesn't come down to ladders, and nor do the money markets. But one thing I know from interviewing people on the show is that you can reduce the most enormous topics down to the tiniest parts, as if life were an Airfix model. I've heard a religious leader attribute his faith to a faulty catch on a garden shed (he got locked in for a night when he was a kid, and God guided him through the 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 were a 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 Eve.

'Why can't you shuffle round to the other side of the roof?'

'Why can't you? It's my ladder.'

'You're not much of a gentleman.'

'No, I'm fucking not. That's one of the reasons I'm up here, in fact. Don't you read the papers?'

'I look at the local one sometimes.'

'So what do you know about me?'

'You used to be on the TV.'

'That's it?'

'I think so.' She thought for a moment. 'Were you married to someone in Abba?'

'No.'

'Or another singer?'

'No.'

'Oh. And you like mushrooms, I know that.'

'Mushrooms?'

'You said. I remember. There was one of those chef fellas in the studio, and he gave you something to taste, and you said, "Mmmm, I love mushrooms. I could eat them all day." Was that you?'

'It might have been. But that's all you can dredge up?'

'Yes.'

'So why do you think I want to kill myself?'

'I've no idea.'

'You're pissing me around.'

'Would you mind watching your language? I find it offensive.'

'I'm sorry.'

But I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe I'd found someone who didn't know. Before I went to prison, I used to wake up in the morning and the tabloid scum were waiting outside the front door. I had crisis meetings with agents and managers and TV executives. It seemed impossible that there was anyone in Britain uninterested in what I had done, mostly because I lived in a world where it was the only thing that seemed to matter. Maybe Maureen lived on the roof, I thought. It would be easy to lose touch up there.

'What about your belt?' She nodded at my waist. As far as Maureen was concerned, these were her last few moments on earth. She didn't want to spend them talking about my passion for mushrooms (a passion which, I fear, may have been manufactured for the camera anyway). She wanted to get on with things.

'What about it?'

'Take your belt off and put it round the ladder. Buckle it your side of the railings.'

I saw what she meant, and saw that it would work, and for the next couple of minutes we worked in a companionable silence; she passed the ladder over the fence, and I took my belt off, passed it around both ladder and railings, pulled it tight, buckled it up, gave it a shake to check it would hold. I really didn't want to die falling backwards. I climbed back over, we unbuckled the belt, placed the ladder in its original position.

And I was just about to let Maureen jump in peace when this fucking lunatic came roaring at us.