'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.ugg snow boots clearance
'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.ugg snow boots
'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 15
JESS
I launched in. I just went, My name's Jess andugg boots clearance
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 16
JJ
I was going to just like splurge, tell 'em everything they needed to know - Big Yellow, Lizzie, the works. There was no need to lie. I guess I felt a little queasy listening to the other guys, because their reasons for being up there seemed pretty solid. Jesus, everyone understood why Maureen's life wasn't worth living. And, sure, Martin had kind of dug his own grave, but even so, that level of humiliation and shame… If I'd been him, I doubt if I'd have stuck around as long as he had. And Jess was very unhappy and very nuts. So it wasn't like people were being competitive, exactly, but there was a certain amount of, I don't know what you'd call it…marking out territory? And maybe I felt a little insecure because Martin had pissed all over my patch. I was going to be the shame and humiliation guy, but my shame and humiliation was beginning to look a little pale. He'd been locked up for sleeping with a fifteen-year-old, and fucked over in the tabloids; I'd been dumped by a girl, and my band wasn't going anywhere. Big fucking deal.
Still, I didn't think of lying until I had the trouble with my name. Jess was so fucking aggressive, and I just lost my nerve.
'So,' I said. 'OK. I'm JJ, and…'
'Woss that stand for?'
People always want to know what my initials are for,www.uggsnowbootsclearance.com
and I never tell them. I hate my name. What happened was, my dad was one of those self-educated guys, and he had a real, like, reverence for the BBC, so he spent too much time listening to the World Service on his big old short-wave radio in the den, and he was real hung up on this dude who was always on the radio in the sixties, John Julius Norwich, who was like a lord or something, and writes millions of books about like churches and stuff. And that's me. John fucking Julius. Did I become a lord, or a radio anchor, or even an Englishman? No. Did I drop out of school and form a band? Yep. Is John Julius a good name for a high-school dropout? Nope. JJ is OK, though. JJ's cool enough.
'That's my business. Anyway, I'm JJ, and I'm here because…'
'I'll find out what your name is.'
'How?'
