He thought it might even kill.
There was no need to lie as he replied. “You look fine, Sarah. Just fine.”
He let her pull him back up
“Are you an angel, Sarah?”
A muffled laugh distracted him, and he peered into the shadows. Then Sarah laughed, and he flushed as the sound of her mirth was echoed by the other figures now becoming visible along the bridge.
“No, John. No angel.”
John saw an old man, shabbily dressed, a few steps away. There was a young couple, arms slung casually around each other in a way that spoke of long association. He wondered what could have been so bad that they'd felt a suicide pact was the only way out. Or the old man. At first glance he looked like a hundred other tramps, grubby and defeated. Then he turned to look at John, and a gleam of white caught his eye.
A priest’s collar.
“You mean this is it? You’re…”
She shushed him then. In his heart the answer lay like a stone, as he supposed it had since the beginning.
“We’re nothing, John. We abide, that’s all.”
“You can’t be nothing!” He couldn’t bring himself to believe that was all there was. “How can you be nothing? I see you, I hear you.” He reached out, pushed a stray lock of hair away from her face. “I can even touch you.”
She gripped his hand and held it to her cheek, just for a moment, as if cherishing the warmth. Then she sighed, and released her grip.
“This is it. This is all there is. Always. Sitting here, watching the world go by."
“You don’t go on?”
“On to where? Heaven?” She snorted with laughter. “If there is a Heaven, John, it’s not for the likes of us.”
“Don’t you know anything, boy? Suicide is a mortal sin.” The old man butted in, his voice surprisingly rich and sonorous given his general air of dilapidation. He leaned forward suddenly, and John flinched from the air of corruption that surrounded him up close. He hadn’t been an innocent in life, John thought. Not even close.
“But the good you must have done.”
“What, because I was a priest? Let’s just say the scales were a little wobbly at best. My death weighted the scales firmly against me.” He turned away, and John was relieved to have been dismissed.
“Never mind him.” Sarah’s voice dragged his attention back to her. “You should get out of here, John. You don’t belong. Go home.”
“To an empty flat? No job? No…no life?”
“So you lost your job! Big deal. You’re not the first and you won’t be the last!”
Stung by the scorn in her voice John blurted out the heart of it.
“It’s not just the job. It’s everything. My girlfriend’s pregnant.”
“And the prospect of impending fatherhood was more than you could cope with, was it?”
“It’s not like that. She doesn’t want me to be involved, says I’d make a lousy father.” John hung his head, bitterly. “Who knows, maybe she’s right.”
There was a silence after he finished. It sounded pathetic when he said it like that. People broke up every day; they moved on, they got on with their lives. Not many of them felt as if suicide was the only way out.
Their relationship, though, had been anything but mundane. Tempestuous would have been a better word for it. They had gone from one row to another, punctuated by passionate, though drunken, reconciliations. He’d been too busy getting drunk to notice that she wasn’t matching him drink for drink any more. He had just become more self-obsessed, increasingly maudlin. He'd lost his favourite drinking partner, and suddenly there was no sex at all, passionate or pedestrian.
Then she had told him.
He supposed the final straw had been when he suggested that the pregnancy need not be a problem. There had been a moment of stunned silence, then she’d said:
“Tell me you don’t mean you want me to have an abortion.”
“It’s not like we couldn’t have another one when we’re ready.”
“When we’re ready? What makes you think you’ll ever be ready?” She’d started flinging her things in a bag, crying. “I’ll tell you what, I’ll make it easy for you. I’ll take care of it myself.”
Then she left.
For a while he hadn’t believed that she was really gone. He’d sat there, watching the TV blankly, waiting for the sound of the key in the lock. There had, after all, been many other rows. She had walked out loads of times. So had he. They had never lasted long.
When the door finally did burst open it wasn’t Angie, but her brothers. They wasted no time in telling him exactly what they thought of him as they went through the flat packing everything they could find belonging to their sister. When they’d gone, there was no sign that anyone else had ever lived there with him. They had refused to say where she was, or even to pass on any messages. He got the feeling that the only reason they weren’t beating him to a bloody pulp was because of some promise extracted by Angie. He supposed he had to thank her for that much, at least.
The next few days had been a haze, when he had only left the flat long enough to reach the off-license on the corner. He had become more and more depressed, and ended up here, on the bridge; although he had no clear memory of how.
“John.”
“Mmm?”
“Go back to her.” Sarah’s voice broke gently into his misery.
“I can’t.”
“Give her time. Be the doting daddy when the baby comes. She’ll come round, in time.”
Now it was John’s turn to laugh. “Oh, Sarah, I don’t think that’s on the cards. It’s not exactly in her nature.”
“What isn’t?”
“Forgiveness.” He thought back, dredged through his memories. He remembered her at parties, wild and ecstatic. He remembered her hungriness in bed, her need to dominate. Those were the good times. But there were plenty of bad times, too. The times when she’d shrieked abuse for some imagined infidelity, while she smashed plates and threw anything within reach at him.
After those times, she would get depressed; sometimes even try to harm herself. One memory in particular stood out - the death of her grandmother. From the day she’d died to the day of the funeral, Angie never cried. When they got back from the crematorium she had locked herself in the bathroom. After a while, John had got nervous and forced the door open, only to find Angie lying semiconscious in a tub that looked like it was full of pure blood. Her wrists had gaped like open mouths.
He had raced her to the hospital, then sat and waited. Shortly afterwards, her family had descended like a plague, effectively shutting him out. As soon as they could, they had whisked her off to the safety of the family nest. She had been ensconced in her childhood room, complete with fluffy toys and pink wallpaper, something he had always found vaguely distasteful given that she was twenty-five. No one had even bothered to ask what he thought. What he felt.
He had tried not to mind. He had sat at home and waited, phoned dutifully, and she had come home in her own time, just as he had known she would.
Just as he knew this time she wouldn't. Not while there was a baby coming between them.
“Do you really want to end up here, John? Loitering around the scene of your death with all the other suicides, watching the world go by?”
“It might not be so bad. I like the company.”
“What’s this? Flirting with a corpse?” She watched him warily, quizzically, and he had to smile. The situation he found himself in was ludicrous. There was a growing conviction inside him that he had finally found where he belonged.
Sarah already seemed to understand him far better than Angie ever had. He looked up at her, seeking confirmation. She was still keeping her distance, but he thought he sensed her drawing closer. He needed to know.
“Is flirting with a corpse so bad?”
“I don’t know. It depends on your perspective, I suppose.”
They both smiled then, and John realised he felt at peace. Sometim
e during their little exchange he had come to his decision; and whether it was right or wrong, he would have to take the consequences.
“Will it hurt much?”
“Yes. It hurts like hell, I won’t lie to you.” She seemed to fade, as if unwilling to witness the final step. So he was alone once more.
He hauled himself up, carefully, on legs that were stiff and frozen. Even though he knew it was ridiculous, he didn’t want to slip.
He took a deep breath and peered over the edge at the traffic. There weren’t so many cars now. The night wind snatched greedily at his clothes. Looking at his watch, he saw that it was nearly midnight. All that time, and no one had missed him.
A bus rounded the corner and started up the hill towards him. If he could time his fall just right, it should do the job quickly and cleanly. He was dimly aware of Sarah’s voice, making one final effort. “What about Angie, John? What about your son?”
So it would be a boy. It made no difference now, anyway. They’d be better off without him, safe with her family.
The bus was quite close. The driver was going as fast as he decently could, obviously trying to make up lost time. Perfect. John raised his arms high above his head, took a deep breath, and let himself fall forward in a perfect swan dive.
The frozen air whipping past him seemed almost to be holding him aloft; his fall took forever. He was glad. It gave him the chance to savour the moment, experience the pleasure of flying. He could see a couple of people at the bus stop just below the bridge; the man’s arm came up, pointing, his mouth a perfect ‘O’ of surprise. The woman’s hands flew up in front of her face, shielding her sight. Looking back at the bus, he was in time to see the shock on the driver’s face as he realised what was about to happen. John smiled beatifically at him. Then he hit the ground.
The pain was immense. He felt it flaring in a million separate places as the wheels tore over him.
Then it went blessedly dark.
He wasn’t quite sure how long it was before awareness came back. It just seemed like one minute he was falling, and then he was back on the bridge
John could see the crowd gathering below. Ambulance lights were already flashing, and darkness had finally fallen, lending everything a weird, strobe-like quality. Police were cordoning off the area, shooing back the crowd and redirecting the traffic while the firemen hosed everything off.
In the middle of it all he could see himself staring blindly upwards, oblivious to the paramedic’s ministrations.
He felt sick, suddenly, and he forced his gaze away, focusing on the night sky instead.
“Not very pleasant, is it?”
So she was back. “No.” She sat a little way off, still in her summer dress. He realised belatedly that the cold made no difference to him now, either. It was going to take some getting used to.
“It makes you realise how savage the human race really is, doesn’t it?”
“What?”
“The people. The gawkers. They don’t make for very pleasant viewing.”
Reluctantly he followed her gaze, saddened at the anticipation he saw etched onto more than a few faces. To their credit, some of the onlookers looked sick, some were even offering up a prayer, he thought. But too many of them were getting some weird sort of pleasure out of his fate.
“I wonder why they do it?”
“Do what?”
“You know.” He gestured at the crowd below.
“Who knows? I’m sure some of them are genuinely sorry. They’re probably praying for your immortal soul right now. Either that, or thanking God that their lives aren’t quite that desperate.”
“And the others?”
“Some are just plain nosy. They’d get a kick out of anything they shouldn’t see or hear. I worry more about the ones that get a thrill out of it. Get off on the blood. It makes you think about what they do for kicks when there isn’t an accident or a suicide handy.”
“That’s obscene.”
“People are, John, by and large. It’s just a matter of degree. Didn’t you ever figure that one out?”
She looked away then, began to fade a little. She wasn’t quick enough, however, to stop John from seeing the tears beginning to crawl down her cheek.
“Let her be, John. She’ll get over it.”
The priest was back; a little more hunched now, a little more defeated. “It took her a long time to learn that lesson. Almost fifty years.”
“Fifty years?” He couldn’t believe it. “She looks so young.” Harsh laughter stopped him, and he realised how stupid that sounded.
“Of course she looks young! She was only seventeen when she died!”
“That’s enough!” Sarah was back, and she was furious. “It’s not your place to tell.” He nodded, grinned wearily at John, and faded away. She ignored him for a few moments, then sat beside him, her face averted. She couldn’t bring herself to look at him.
“I didn’t know what I was doing.”
John waited, sensing this was a one-time deal. She would never talk about it again. He could see how hard it was for her. It was written all over her face.
“My parents were pretty strict, liked to keep me on a tight rein, as my father put it. I wanted to be an actress, wanted it more than anything. My father said it was one step above being a prostitute.” She swallowed hard, desperately trying to keep control. “He also said that, useless as I was, it wouldn’t be long before I took that step down.” She stopped then, and John began to think she wasn’t going to tell any more. “It turns out he was right. “
“You’re not like that, Sarah.”
“How the hell do you know? We’ve only just met, John. You don’t know me.”
There was nothing he could say to that. She was right.
“I met a man. He was the drama teacher at my school. He said I had talent, that I could go far. Of course, it was exactly what I wanted to hear, wasn’t it? I looked up to him, trusted him. When he asked me to go for a drink with him, I thought I’d die. He treated me like a grown up! He treated me as if I mattered!”
“You slept with him.”
She couldn’t answer, just hung her head, tears streaming down her face.
Sighing, John continued. “Let me guess. He couldn’t, or wouldn’t, help you become an actress.” She shook her head, swallowing hard. “And your father found out?” A nod. “That doesn’t make you a prostitute, Sarah.”
“I know that.” She wiped her eyes, attempted a smile. “But that’s not the worst of it.” Silence again. John waited, patiently, and finally Sarah looked up once more. “What, you can’t guess?”
“Hey, it’s your story, Sarah.”
“You know. I can see it on your face. I got pregnant. And in the fifties that was just about the worst thing a single girl could do. I hid it for as long as I could, but he spotted it in the end. I was five months pregnant by then.”
“What did he do?”
“He did what any self-respecting father of the time would do. He threw me out of the house.”
“What, just like that?”
Sarah smiled, a tight, hard little smile that held no humour. “Of course just like that. He didn’t want the neighbours to think that he condoned such wanton behaviour. He threw my coat at me, grabbed my arm, and pushed me out of the house. I heard him lock the door behind me.”
“Where was your mother?”
“My mother was crying in her bedroom. My father sent her there, and she would never have contradicted him.” Now her face was hard, set in bleak lines that aged her in the worst way. “I had nowhere to go except to the father’s house. I thought he’d look after me.” She smiled cynically. “I was only seventeen. What did I know?”
“I take it he was less than enthusiastic.”
“Oh, it was worse than that. He was married. His wife answered the door, and I ran away. I came up here, and, well – you know the rest.”
They were silent then for a little while. There didn’t seem to be anything else to say.
She hadn’t just killed herself, had she? She had taken her child’s life as well.
Time passed. The days blurred into one another, spring slipped into summer, into autumn. To John, there seemed to be something missing. There was no sense of being punished, no suffering. There was, in fact, nothing at all.
Maybe that was the point.
He would spend hours, days sometimes, discussing the ills of the world, and where it had all gone wrong with the others. There didn’t seem to be any answer that they could see.
Then there came a day unlike all the others, a day that was so restless it seemed almost to hum. He sensed Sarah when she materialised beside him, and turned to her.
“Sarah, what day is it?”
“New Year’s Eve. You know, out with the old, in with the new.”
“Something’s coming, Sarah. Something big.”
“I know. I can feel it, too.” She sighed, and stretched languidly. “At least it will make a change.”
It was dusk when he heard the car screeching to a halt on the bridge. After a minute the door slammed, and footsteps stumbled towards him.
He heard a baby cry. A woman shushed it, half-crying, and his world came crashing down on him.
“Angie.” Sarah drew close. “What do I do, Sarah? How do I stop her?”
“She can see you if you want her to. Remember that.”
There was a muffled sob, and then she appeared over the top of the railings. The baby was in a sling, crying. Angie clung to the railings as she inched her way down towards the ledge. A couple of times she slipped, and just managed to save herself. Gradually she disentangled herself from the railings and sat on the ledge
Now, he thought. Now’s the time.
“Angie.” She started, swung around to see who had spoken. When she saw who it was he thought she would pass out.
“John? Is that really you?”
“It’s me, love. I’m here.” She was taking it surprisingly well, he thought. No hysterics, no screaming.
“You left me, John. You left me all alone.”
“You left me first, don’t forget that.”
Bury Them Deep Page 9