had to have thought up months ago, and then they would have seen through me and I’d have confessed and ended up going to get Matty out a few hours earlier rather than a day later.
‘So,’ said JJ. ‘Maureen’s OK. That just leaves you, Martin. You wanna join in?’
‘Well, where is this Chas?’ Martin said.
‘I dunno,’ said Jess. ‘Some party somewhere. Is that what it depends on? Where he is?’
‘Yes. I’d rather f—ing kill myself than try and get a cab to go somewhere in South London at four in the morning,’ said Martin.
‘He doesn’t know anyone in South London,’ Jess said.
‘Good,’ said Martin. And when he said that, you could tell that, instead of killing ourselves, we were all going to come down from the roof and look for Jess’s boyfriend, or whatever he was. It wasn’t much of a plan, really. But it was the only plan we had, so all we could do was try and make it work.
‘Give me your mobile and I’ll make some calls,’ said Jess.
So Martin gave her the phone, and she went to the other side of the roof where no one could hear her, and we waited to be told where we were going.
MARTIN
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 rescueus, 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
‘So,’ said JJ. ‘Maureen’s OK. That just leaves you, Martin. You wanna join in?’
‘Well, where is this Chas?’ Martin said.
‘I dunno,’ said Jess. ‘Some party somewhere. Is that what it depends on? Where he is?’
‘Yes. I’d rather f—ing kill myself than try and get a cab to go somewhere in South London at four in the morning,’ said Martin.
‘He doesn’t know anyone in South London,’ Jess said.
‘Good,’ said Martin. And when he said that, you could tell that, instead of killing ourselves, we were all going to come down from the roof and look for Jess’s boyfriend, or whatever he was. It wasn’t much of a plan, really. But it was the only plan we had, so all we could do was try and make it work.
‘Give me your mobile and I’ll make some calls,’ said Jess.
So Martin gave her the phone, and she went to the other side of the roof where no one could hear her, and we waited to be told where we were going.
MARTIN
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 rescueus, 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
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