Chapter 15

I launched in. I just went, My name's Jess and I'm eighteen years old and, see, I'm here because I had some family problems that I don't need to go into. And then I split up with this guy. Chas. And he owes me an explanation. Because he didn't say anything. He just went. But if he gave me an explanation I'd feel better, I think, because he broke my heart. Except I can't find him. I was at the party downstairs looking for him, and he wasn't there. So I came up here.

And Martin goes, all sarcastic, You're going to kill yourself because Chas didn't turn up at a party? Jesus.

Well, I never said that, and I told him. So then he was like, OK, you're up here because you're owed an explanation, then. Is that it?

He was trying to make me sound stupid, and that wasn't fair, because we could all do that to each other. Like, for example, say, Oh, boo hoo hoo, they won't let me be on breakfast television any more. Oh, boo hoo hoo, my son's a vegetable and I don't talk to anyone and I have to clean up his… Well, OK, you couldn't make Maureen sound stupid. But it seemed to me that taking the piss wasn't on. You could have taken the piss out of all four of us; you can take the piss out of anyone who's unhappy, if you're cruel enough.

So I go, That wasn't what I said either. I said an explanation might stop me. I didn't say it was why I was up here in the first place, did I? See, we could handcuff you to those railings, and that would stop you. But you're not up here because no one's handcuffed you to railings, are you?

That shut him up. I was pleased with that.

JJ was nicer. He could see that I wanted to find Chas, so I was like, Duh, yeah, except I wished I hadn't done the Duh bit because he was being sympathetic and Duh is taking the piss, really, isn't it? But he ignored the Duh and he asked me where Chas was and I said I didn't know, some party or another, and he said, Well, why don't you go looking for him instead of fucking around up here and I said I'd run out of energy and hope and when I said that I knew it was true.

I don't know you. The only thing I know about you is, you're reading this. I don't know whether you're happy or not; I don't know whether you're young or not. I sort of hope you're young and sad. If you're old and happy, I can imagine that you'll maybe smile to yourself when you hear me going, He broke my heart. You'll remember someone who broke your heart, and you'll think to yourself, Oh, yes, I can remember how that feels. But you can't, you smug old git. Oh, you might remember feeling sort of pleasantly sad. You might remember listening to music and eating chocolates in your room, or walking along the Embankment on your own, wrapped up in a winter coat and feeling lonely and brave. But can you remember how with every mouthful of food it felt like you were biting into your own stomach? Can you remember the taste of red wine as it came back up and into the toilet bowl? Can you remember dreaming every night that you were still together, that he was talking to you gently and touching you, so that every morning when you woke up you had to go through it all over again? Can you remember carving his initials in your arm with a kitchen knife? Can you remember standing too close to the edge of an Underground platform? No? Well, fucking shut up then. Stick your smile up your saggy old arse.

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.'

Chapter 13

I think they picked me because I hadn't really said anything, and I hadn't rubbed anyone up the wrong way yet. And also, maybe, because I was more mysterious than the others. Martin everyone seemed to know about from the newspapers. And Jess, God love her… We'd only known her for half an hour, but you could tell that this was a girl who had problems. My own feeling about JJ, without knowing anything about him, was that he might have been a gay person, because he had long hair and spoke American. A lot of Americans are gay people, aren't they? I know they didn't invent gayness, because they say that was the Greeks. But they helped bring it back into fashion. Being gay was a bit like the Olympics: it disappeared in ancient times, and then they brought it back in the twentieth century. Anyway, I didn't know anything about gays, so I just presumed they were all unhappy and wanted to kill themselves. But me… You couldn't really tell anything about me from looking at me, so I think they were curious.

I didn't mind talking, because I knew I didn't need to say very much. None of these people would have wanted my life. I doubted whether they'd understand how I'd put up with it for as long as I had. It's always the toilet bit that upsets people. Whenever I've had to moan before - when I need another prescription for my anti-depressants, for example - I always mention the toilet bit, the cleaning up that needs doing most days. It's funny, because it's the bit I've got used to. I can't get used to the idea that my life is finished, pointless, too hard, completely without hope or colour; but the mopping up doesn't really worry me any more. That's always what gets the doctor reaching for his pen, though.

'Oh, yeah,' Jess said when I'd finished. 'That's a no-brainer. Don't change your mind. You'd only regret it.'

'Some people cope,' said Martin.

'Who?' said Jess.

'We had a woman on the show whose husband had been in a coma for twenty-five years.'

'And that was her reward, was it? Going on a breakfast TV show?'

'No. I'm just saying.'

'What are you just saying?'

'I'm just saying it can be done.'

You're not saying why, though, are you?'

'Maybe she loved him.'

They spoke quickly, Martin and Jess and JJ. Like people in a soap opera, bang bang bang. Like people who know what to say. I could never have spoken that quickly, not then, anyway; it made me realize that I'd hardly spoken at all for twenty-odd years. And the person I spoke to most couldn't speak back.

'What was there to love?' Jess was saying. 'He was a vegetable. Not even an awake vegetable. A vegetable in a coma.'

'He wouldn't be a vegetable if he wasn't in a coma, would he?' said Martin.

'I love my son,' I said. I didn't want them to think I didn't.

'Yes,' said Martin. 'Of course you do. We didn't mean to imply otherwise.'

'Do you want us to kill him for you?' said Jess. 'I'll go down there tonight if you want. Before I kill myself. I don't mind. No skin off my nose. And it's not like he's got much to live for, is it? If he could speak, he'd probably thank me for it, poor sod.'

My eyes filled with tears, and JJ noticed.

'What are you, a f— idiot?' he said to Jess. 'Look what you've done.'

'So-rry,' said Jess. 'Just an idea.'

But that wasn't why I was crying. I was crying because all I wanted in the world, the only thing that would make me want to live, was for Matty to die. And knowing why I was crying just made me cry more.

Chapter 12

A long time ago, when I was eight or nine, I saw this programme on telly about the history of the Beatles. Jen liked the Beatles, so she was the one who made me watch it, but I didn't mind. (I probably told her I did mind, though. I probably made a fuss and pissed her off.) Anyway, when Ringo joined, you sort of felt this little shiver, because that was it, then, that was the four of them, and they were ready to go off and be the most famous group in history. Well, that's how I felt when JJ turned up on the roof with his pizzas. I know you'll think, Oh, she's just saying that because it sounds good, but I'm not. I knew, honestly. It helped that he looked like a rock star, with his hair and his leather jacket and all that, but my feeling wasn't anything to do with music; I just mean that I could tell we needed JJ, and so when he appeared it felt right. He wasn't Ringo, though. He was more like Paul. Maureen was Ringo, except she wasn't very funny. I was George, except I wasn't shy, or spiritual. Martin was John, except he wasn't talented or cool. Thinking about it, maybe we were more like another group with four people in it.

Anyway, it just felt like something might happen, something interesting, and so I couldn't understand why we were just sitting there eating pizza slices. So I was like, Maybe we should talk, and Martin goes, What, share our pain? And then he made a face, like I'd said something stupid, so I called him a wanker, and then Maureen tutted and asked me whether I said things like that at home (which I do), so I called her a bag lady, and Martin called me a stupid, mean little girl, so I spat at him, which I shouldn't have done and which also by the way I don't do anywhere near as much nowadays, and so he made out like he was going to throttle me, and so JJ jumped in between us, which was just as well for Martin, because I don't think he would have hit me, whereas I most definitely would have hit and bitten and scratched him. And after that little fluffle of activity we sat there puffing and blowing and hating each other for a bit.

And then when we were all calming down, JJ said something like, I'm not sure what harm would be done by sharing our experiences, except he said it more American even than that. And Martin was like, Well, who's interested in your experiences? Your experiences are delivering pizzas. And JJ goes, Well, your experiences, then, not mine. But it was too late, and I could tell from what he'd said about sharing our experiences that he was up here for the same reasons we were. So I went, You came up here to jump, didn't you? And he didn't say anything, and Martin and Maureen looked at him. And Martin just goes, Were you going to jump with the pizzas? Because someone ordered those. Even though Martin was joking, it was like JJ's professional pride had been dented, because he told us that he was only here on a recce, and he was going downstairs to deliver before coming back up again. And I said, Well, we've eaten them now. And Martin goes, Gosh, you didn't seem like the jumping type, and JJ said, If you guys are the jumping type then I can't say I'm sorry. There was, as you can tell, a lot of, like, badness in the air.

So I tried again. Oh, go on, let's talk, I said. No need for pain-sharing. Just, you know, our names and why we're up here. Because it might be interesting. We might learn something. We might see a way out, kind of thing. And I have to admit I had a sort of plan. My plan was that they'd help me find Chas, and Chas and I would get back together, and I'd feel better.

But they made me wait, because they wanted Maureen to go first.

Chapter 11

I told a couple people about that night, and the weird thing is that they get the suicide part, but they don't get the pizza part. Most people get suicide, I guess; most people, even if it's hidden deep down inside somewhere, can remember a time in their lives when they thought about whether they really wanted to wake up the next day. Wanting to die seems like it might be a part of being alive. So anyway, I tell people the story of that New Year's Eve, and none of them are like, 'Whaaaaat? You were gonna kill yourself?' It's more, you know, 'Oh, OK, your band was fucked up, you were at the end of the line with your music, which was all you wanted to do your whole life, PLUS you broke up with your girl, who was the only reason you were in this fuckin' country in the first place… Sure, I can see why you were up there.' But then like the very next second, they want to know what a guy like me was doing delivering fucking pizzas.

OK, you don't know me, so you'll have to take my word for it that I'm not stupid. I read the fuck out of every book I can get my hands on. I like Faulkner and Dickens and Vonnegut and Brendan Behan and Dylan Thomas. Earlier that week - Christmas Day, to be precise - I'd finished Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, which is a totally awesome novel. I was actually going to jump with a copy - not only because it would have been kinda cool, and would've added a little mystique to my death, but because it might have been a good way of getting more people to read it. But the way things worked out, I didn't have any preparation time, and I left it at home. I have to say, though, that I wouldn't recommend finishing it on Christmas Day, in like a cold-water bedsit, in a city where you don't really know anybody. It probably didn't help my general sense of well-being, if you know what I mean, because the ending is a real downer.

Anyway, the point is, people jump to the conclusion that anyone driving around North London on a shitty little moped on New Year's Eve for the minimum wage is clearly a loser, and almost certainly one stagione short of the full Quattro. Well, OK, we are losers by definition, because delivering pizzas is a job for losers. But we're not all dumb assholes. In fact, even with the Faulkner and Dickens, I was probably the dumbest out of all the guys at work, or at least the worst educated. We got African doctors, Albanian lawyers, Iraqi chemists… I was the only one who didn't have a college degree. (I don't understand how there isn't more pizza-related violence in our society. Just imagine: you're like the top whatever in Zimbabwe, brain surgeon or whatever, and then you have to come to England because the fascist regime wants to nail your ass to a tree, and you end up being patronized at three in the morning by some stoned teenage motherfucker with the munchies… I mean, shouldn't you be legally entitled to break his fucking jaw?) Anyway. There's more than one way to be a loser. There's sure more than one way of losing.

So I could say that I was delivering pizzas because England sucks, and, more specifically, English girls suck, and I couldn't work legit because I'm not an English guy. Or an Italian guy, or a Spanish guy, or even like a fucking Finnish guy or whatever. So I was doing the only work I could find; Ivan, the Lithuanian proprietor of Casa Luigi on Holloway Road, didn't care that I was from Chicago, not Helsinki. And another way of explaining it is to say that shit happens, and there's no space too small, too dark and airless and fucking hopeless, for people to crawl into.

The trouble with my generation is that we all think we're fucking geniuses. Making something isn't good enough for us, and neither is selling something, or teaching something, or even just doing something; we have to be something. It's our inalienable right, as citizens of the twenty-first century. If Christina Aguilera or Britney or some American Idol jerk can be something, then why can't I? Where's mine, huh? OK, so my band, we put on the best live shows you could ever see in a bar, and we made two albums, which a lot of critics and not many real people liked. But having talent is never enough to make us happy, is it? I mean, it should be, because a talent is a gift, and you should thank God for it, but I didn't. It just pissed me off because I wasn't being paid for it, and it didn't get me on the cover of Rolling Stone.

Oscar Wilde once said that one's real life is often the life one does not lead. Well, fucking right on, Oscar. My real life was full of headlining shows at Wembley and Madison Square Garden and platinum records, and Grammies, and that wasn't the life I was leading, which is maybe why it felt like I could throw it away. The life I was leading didn't let me be, I don't know… be who I thought I was. It didn't even let me stand up properly. It felt like I'd been walking down a tunnel that was getting narrower and narrower, and darker and darker, and had started to ship water, and I was all hunched up, and there was a wall of rock in front of me and the only tools I had were my fingernails. And maybe everyone feels that way, but that's no reason to stick with it. Anyway, that New Year's Eve, I'd gotten sick of it, finally. My fingernails were all worn away, and the tips of my fingers were shredded up. I couldn't dig any more. With the band gone, the only room I had left for self-expression was in checking out of my unreal life: I was going to fly off that fucking roof like Superman. Except, of course, it didn't work out like that.

Some dead people, people who were too sensitive to live: Sylvia Plath, Van Gogh, Virginia Woolf, Jackson Pollock, Primo Levi, Kurt Cobain, of course. Some alive people: George W. Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Osama Bin Laden. Put a cross next to the people you might want to have a drink with, and then see whether they're on the dead side or the alive side. And, yeah, you could point out that I have stacked the deck, that there are a couple of people missing from my 'alive' list who might fuck up my argument, a few poets and musicians and so on. And you could also point out that Stalin and Hitler weren't so great, and they're no longer with us. But indulge me anyway: you know what I'm talking about. Sensitive people find it harder to stick around.

So it was real shocking to discover that Maureen, Jess and Martin Sharp were about to take the Vincent Van Gogh route out of this world. (And yeah, thank you, I know Vincent didn't jump off the top of a North London apartment building.) A middle-aged woman who looked like someone's cleaning lady, a shrieking adolescent lunatic and a talk-show host with an orange face… It didn't add up. Suicide wasn't invented for people like this. It was invented for people like Virginia Woolf and Nick Drake. And me. Suicide was supposed to be cool.

New Year's Eve was a night for sentimental losers. It was my own stupid fault. Of course there'd be a low-rent crowd up there. I should have picked a classier date - like March 28th, when Virginia Woolf took her walk into the river, or Nick Drake November 25th. If anybody had been on the roof on either of those nights, the chances are they would have been like-minded souls, rather than hopeless fuck-ups who had somehow persuaded themselves that the end of a calendar year is in any way significant. It was just that when I got the order to deliver the pizzas to the squat in Toppers' House, the opportunity seemed too good to turn down. My plan was to wander to the top, take a look around to get my bearings, go back down to deliver the pizzas and then Do It.

And suddenly there I was with three potential suicides munching the pizzas I was supposed to deliver and staring at me. They were apparently expecting some kind of Gettysburg address about why their damaged and pointless lives were worth living. It was ironic, really, seeing as I didn't give a fuck whether they jumped or not. I didn't know them from Adam, and none of them looked like they were going to add much to the sum total of human achievement.

'So,' I said. 'Great. Pizza. A small, good thing on a night like this.' Raymond Carver, as you probably know, but it was wasted on these guys.

'Now what?' said Jess.

'We eat our pizza.'

'Then?'

'Just give it half an hour, OK? Then we'll see where we're at.' I don't know where that came from. Why half an hour? And what was supposed to happen then?

'Everyone needs a little time out. Looks to me like things were getting undignified up here. Thirty minutes? Is that agreed?'

One by one they shrugged and then nodded, and we went back to chewing our pizzas in silence. This was the first time I had tried one of Ivan's. It was inedible, maybe even poisonous.

'I'm not fucking sitting here for half an hour looking at your fucking miserable faces,' said Jess.

'That's what you've just this minute agreed to do,' Martin reminded her.

'So what?'

'What's the point of agreeing to do something and then not doing it?'

'No point.' Jess was apparently untroubled by the concession.

'Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative,' I said. Wilde again. I couldn't resist.

Jess glared at me.

'He's being nice to you,' said Martin.

'There's no point in anything, though, is there?' Jess said. 'That's why we're up here.'

See, now this was a pretty interesting philosophical argument. Jess was saying that as long as we were on the rooftop, we were all anarchists. No agreements were binding, no rules applied. We could rape and murder each other and no one would pay any attention.

'To live outside the law you must be honest,' I said.

'What the fucking hell does that mean?' said Jess.

You know, I've never really known what the fuck it means, to tell you the truth. Bob Dylan said it, not me, and I'd always thought it sounded good. But this was the first situation I'd ever been in where I was able to put the idea to the test, and I could see that it didn't work. We were living outside the law, and we could lie through our teeth any time we wanted, and I wasn't sure why we shouldn't.

'Nothing,' I said.

'Shut up, then, Yankee boy.'

And I did. There were approximately twenty-eight minutes of our time out remaining.

Chapter 10

I d never met an American before, I don't think. I wasn't at all sure he was one, either, until the others said something. You don't expect Americans to be delivering pizzas, do you? Well, I don't, but perhaps I'm just out of touch. I don't order pizzas very often, but every time I have, they've been delivered by someone who doesn't speak English. Americans don't deliver things, do they? Or serve you in shops, or take your money on the bus. I suppose they must do in America, but they don't here. Indians and West Indians, lots of Australians in the hospital where they see Matty, but no Americans. So we probably thought he was a bit mad at first. That was the only explanation for him. He looked a bit mad, with that hair. And he thought that we'd ordered pizzas while we were standing on the roof of Toppers' House.

'How would we have ordered pizzas?' Jess asked him. We were still sitting on her, so her voice sounded funny.

'On a cell,' he said.

'What's a cell?' Jess asked.

'OK, a mobile, whatever.'

Fair play to him, we could have done that.

'Are you American?' Jess asked him.

'Yeah.'

'What are you doing delivering pizzas?'

'What are you guys doing sitting on her head?'

'They're sitting on my head because this isn't a free country,' Jess said. 'You can't do what you want to.'

'What did you wanna do?'

She didn't say anything.

'She was going to jump,' Martin said.

'So were you!'

He ignored her.

'You were all gonna jump?' the pizza man asked us.

We didn't say anything.

'The f—?' he said.

'The f—?' said Jess. 'The f— what?'

'It's an American abbreviation,' said Martin. ' "The f—?" means "What the f—?" In America, they're so busy that they don't have time to say the "what".'

'Would you watch your language, please?' I said to them. 'We weren't all brought up in a pigsty.'

The pizza man just sat down on the roof and shook his head. I thought he was feeling sorry for us, but later he told us it wasn't that at all.

'OK,' he said after a while. 'Let her go.'

We didn't move.

'Hey, you. You f— listening to me? Am I gonna have to come over and make you listen?' He stood up and walked towards us.

'I think she's OK, now, Maureen,' Martin said, as if he was deciding to stand up of his own accord, and not because the American man might punch him. He stood up, and I stood up, and Jess stood up and brushed herself down and swore a lot. Then she stared at Martin.

'You're that bloke,' she said. 'The breakfast TV bloke. The one who slept with the fifteen-year-old. Martin Sharp. F—! Martin Sharp was sitting on my head. You old pervert.'

Well, of course I didn't have a clue about any fifteen-year-old. I don't look at that sort of newspaper, unless I'm in the hairdresser's, or someone's left one on the bus.

'You kidding me?' said the pizza man. 'The guy who went to prison? I read about him.'

Martin made a groaning noise. 'Does everyone in America know, too?' he said.

'Sure,' the pizza man said. 'I read about it in the New York Times.'

'Oh, God,' said Martin, but you could tell he was pleased.

'I was just kidding,' said the pizza man. 'You used to present a breakfast TV show in England. No one in the US has ever heard of you. Get real.'

'Give us some pizza, then,' said Jess. 'What flavours have you got?'

'I don't know,' said the pizza man.

'Let me have a look, then,' said Jess.

No, I mean… They're not my pizzas, you know?'

Oh, don't be such a pussy,' said Jess. (Really. That's what she said. I don't know why.) She leaned over, grabbed his bag and took out the pizza boxes. Then she opened the boxes and started poking the pizzas.

This one's pepperoni. I don't know what that is though. Vegetables.'

'Vegetarian,' said the pizza man.

'Whatever,' said Jess. 'Who wants what?'

I asked for vegetarian. The pepperoni sounded like something that wouldn't agree with me.

Chapter 9

My first thought, after I'd brought Jess crashing to the ground, was that I didn't want Maureen sneaking off on her own. It was nothing to do with trying to save her life; it would simply have pissed me off if she'd taken advantage of my distraction and jumped. Oh, none of it makes much sense; two minutes before, I'd been practically ushering her over. But I didn't see why Jess should be my responsibility and not hers, and I didn't see why she should be the one to use the ladder when I'd carted it all the way up there. So my motives were essentially selfish; nothing new there, as Cindy would tell you.

After Jess and I had had our idiotic conversation about how she'd killed lots of people, I shouted at Maureen to come and help me. She looked frightened, and then dawdled her way over to us.

'Get a bloody move on.'

'What do you want me to do?'

'Sit on her.'

Maureen sat on Jess's arse, and I knelt on her arms.

'Just let me go, you old bastard pervert. You're getting a thrill out of this, aren't you?'

Well, obviously that stung a bit, given recent events. I thought for a moment Jess might have known who I was, but even I'm not that paranoid. If you were rugby-tackled in the middle of the night just as you were about to hurl yourself off the top of a tower-block, you probably wouldn't be thinking about breakfast television presenters.

(This would come as a shock to breakfast television presenters, of course, most of whom firmly believe that people think about nothing else but breakfast, lunch and dinner.) I was mature enough to rise above Jess's taunts, even though I felt like breaking her arms.

'If we let go, are you going to behave?'

'Yes.'

So Maureen stood up, and with wearying predictability Jess scrambled for the ladder, and I had to bring her crashing down again.

'Now what?' said Maureen, as if I were a veteran of countless similar situations, and would therefore know the ropes.

'I don't bloody know.'

Why it didn't occur to any of us that a well-known suicide spot would be like Piccadilly Circus on New Year's Eve. I have no idea, but at that point in the proceedings I had accepted the reality of our situation: we were in the process of turning a solemn and private moment into a farce with a cast of thousands.

And at that precise moment of acceptance, we three became four. There was a polite cough, and when we turned round to look, we saw a tall, good-looking, long-haired man, maybe ten years younger than me, holding a crash helmet under one arm and one of those big insulated bags in the other.

'Any of you guys order a pizza?' he said.