漫漫长路 1-Track01

MARTIN

Can I explain why I wanted to jump off the top of a tower-block? Of course I can. I'mnot a bloody 1 idiot. it was a logical decision.Put it this way: say you were, I don't know, an assistant bank manager, in Guildford. And you'd been thinking of emigrating, and then you were offered the job of managing a bank in Sydney. Well, you'd still have to think for a bit, wouldn't you? You'd at least have to work out whether you could bear to move, leave your friends and colleagues behind, uproot 2 your wife and kids. You might draw up a list of pros 3 and cons 4. You know:

CONS - aged 5 parents, friends, golf club.

PROS - more money, better quality of life (house with pool, barbecue,

etc.), sea, sunshine, no left-wing councils banning 'Baa-Baa Black Sheep',

no EEC directives banning British sausages, etc.

It's no contest, is it? You'd be on the phone to the travel agents within ten

minutes.

Well, that was me. There simply weren't enough regrets, and lots and lots of reasons to jump. The only things in my 'cons' list were the kids, but I couldn't imagine Cindy letting me see them again anyway. I haven't got any aged parents, and I don't play golf. Suicide was my Sydney.

MAUREEN

I told him I was going to a New Year's Eve party. Stupid, really. He doesn't understand. They tell me to keep talking to him, but you can see that nothing

goes in. The moment I told him, I wanted to go straight to confession 6. I'd lied to my own son. Oh, it was only a tiny, silly lie: I'd told him months in advance that I was going to a party, a party I'd made up. But confession wasn't possible, because I knew I would have to repeat the sin, the lie, over and over again, to Matty, to my brother, to the people at the nursing home, It's almost comical, If you spend day and night looking after a sick child, there's very little room for sin, and I hadn't done anything worth confessing for donkey's years. And I went from that, to sinning so badly that I couldn't even talk to the priest until the day I died, when I would commit the biggest sin of all.

It didn't stop me from going to the church. But I only kept going because people would think there was something wrong if I stopped.

JESS

I was at a party downstairs in the squat 7. It was a shit party, full of crusties sitting on the floor drinking cider and smoking spliffs and listening to weirdo space-out reggae. At midnight, one of them clapped sarcastically 8, and that was it -Happy New Year to you too. You could have turned up to that party as the happiest person in London, and you'd still have wanted up to jump off the roof.someone at college told me Chas would be there, but he wasn't. I tried his mobile for the one zillionth time, but it wasn't on.

When we first split up, he called me a stalker, but I don't think you can call it stalking when it's just phone calls and letters and emails and knocking on the door. And I only

turned up at his work twice. Stalking is when you follow them to the shops and on holiday and all that, isn't it? Anyway, I didn't think it was stalking when someone owed you an explanation.

Even though I could see straight away that he wasn't at this party, I stayed for a while. Where else was I going to go? I was feeling sorry for myself. How can you be eighteen and not have anywhere to go on New Year's Eve, apart from some shit party in some shit squat where you don't know anybody? Well, I managed it. I seem to manage it every year. I make friends easily enough, but then I piss them off, I'm not sure why or how. And so people and parties disappear. I pissed Jen off, I'm sure of that. She disappeared, like everyone else.

MARTIN

Two years ago Martin Sharp would not have found himself sitting on a tiny concrete ledge 9 in the middle of the night, looking a hundred feet down and wondering whether he'd hear the noise that his bones made when they shattered into tiny pieces. But two years ago I still had my job. I still had a wife. I hadn't slept with a fifteen-year-old. I hadn't been to prison. Wanting to kill myself was an appropriate and reasonable response to a whole series of unfortunate events that had rendered life unlivable. I'm not sitting here now because I suddenly saw sense. The reason I'm sitting here now is because that night turned into as much of a mess as everything else. I couldn't even jump off a fucking tower-block without fucking it up.