Skip to main content



A Long Way Down


Can I explain why I wanted to jump off the top of a tower block? Of
block. I'm not a bloody idiot. I can explain it because it wasn't
inexplicable: it was a logical decision, the product of proper
thought. It wasn't even very serious thought, either. I don't mean
it was whimsical - I just meant that it wasn't terribly
complicated, or agonised. 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, even though it's a pretty
straightforward decision, 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, whether you could leave your friends and colleagues
behind, whether you could uproot your wife and kids. You might sit
down with a bit of paper and draw up a list of pros and cons. You

CONS - Aged 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? The golf club! Give me a break. Obviously your
aged parents give you pause for thought, but that's all it is - a
pause, and a brief one, too. 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. And I say that with no offence to the good
people of Sydney intended.


I told him I was going to a New Year's Eve party. I told him in
October. I don't know whether people send out invitations to New
Year's Eve parties in October or not. Probably not. (How would I
know? I haven't been to one since 1984. June and Brian across the
road had one, just before they moved. And even then I only nipped
in for an hour or so, after he'd gone to sleep.) But I couldn't
wait any longer. I'd been thinking about it since May or June, and
I was itching to tell him. Stupid, really. He doesn't understand,
I'm sure he doesn't. They tell me to keep talking to him, but you
can see that nothing goes in. And what a thing to be itching about
anyway! But it goes to show what I had to look forward to, doesn't

The moment I told him, I wanted to go straight to confession. Well,
I'd lied, hadn't I? 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. I'd made it up properly, too. I told
him whose party it was, and why I'd been invited, and why I wanted
to go, and who else would be there. (It was Bridgid's party,
Bridgid from the Church. And I'd been invited because her sister
was coming over from Cork, and her sister had asked after me in a
couple of letters. And I wanted to go because Bridgid's sister had
taken her mother-in-law to Lourdes, and I wanted to find out all
about it, with a view to taking Matty one day.) But confession
wasn't possible, because I knew I would have to repeat the sin, the
lie, over and over as the year came to an end. Not only to Matty,
but to the people at the nursing home, and....Well, there isn't
anyone else, really. Maybe someone at the Church, or someone in a
shop. It's almost comical, when you think about it. 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 terribly that I couldn't
even talk to the priest, because I was going to go on sinning and
sinning until the day I died, when I would commit the biggest sin
of all. (And why is it the biggest sin of all? All your life you're
told that you'll be going to this marvellous place when you pass
Post Office, people tut. Or sometimes they say, 'Excuse me, I was
here first.' They don't say, 'You will be consumed by hellfire for
all eternity.' That would be a bit strong.) It didn't stop me from
going to the Church, or from taking Mass. But I only kept going
because people would think there was something wrong if I

As we got closer and closer to the date, I kept passing on little
tidbits of information that I told him I'd picked up. Every Sunday
I pretended as though I'd learned something new, because Sundays
were when I saw Bridgid. "Bridgid says there'll be dancing."
"Bridgid's worried that not everyone likes wine and beer, so she'll
be providing spirits." "Bridgid doesn't know how many people will
have eaten already." If Matty had been able to understand anything,
he'd have decided that this Bridgid woman was a lunatic, worrying
like that about a little get-together. I blushed every time I saw
her at the Church. And of course I wanted to know what she actually
was doing on New Year's Eve, but I never asked. If she was planning
to have a party, she might've felt that she had to invite me.

I'm ashamed, thinking back. Not about the lies - I'm used to lying
now. No, I'm ashamed of how pathetic it all was. One Sunday I found
myself telling Matty about where Bridgid was going to buy the ham
for the sandwiches. But it was on my mind, New Year's Eve, of
course it was, and it was a way of talking about it, without
actually saying anything. And I suppose I came to believe in the
party a little bit myself, in the way that you come to believe the
story in a book. Every now and again I imagined what I'd wear, how
much I'd drink, what time I'd leave. Whether I'd come home in a
taxi. That sort of thing. In the end it was as if I'd actually
been. Even in my imagination, though, I couldn't see myself talking
to anyone at the party. I was always quite happy to leave it.


I was at a party downstairs in the squat. It was a shit party, full
of all these ancient crusties sitting on the floor drinking cider
others laughed, 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 by five

I only went because 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
that's like an emotive word, 'stalker', isn't it? 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. Three times, if you count his Christmas party, which I
don't, because he said he was going to take me to that anyway.
Stalking is when you follow them to the shops and on holiday and
all that, isn't it? Well, I never went near any shops. And anyway I
didn't think it was stalking when someone owed you an explanation.
Being owed an explanation is like being owed money, and not just a
fiver, either. Five or six hundred quid minimum, more like. If you
were owed five or six hundred quid minimum and the person who owed
it to you was avoiding you, then you're bound to knock on his door
late at night, when you know he's going to be in. People get
serious about that sort of money. They call in debt collectors, and
break people's legs, but I never went that far. I showed some

So 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 know that much, even if 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


I'd spent the previous couple of months looking up suicide inquests
about the poor bastard: his wife was sleeping with his best friend,
some months before.... Hello, Mr Coroner? Anyone at home? I'm
say he got it just right. Bad thing upon bad thing upon bad thing
until you can't take any more, and then it's off to the nearest
multi-storey car park in the family hatchback with a length of
rubber tubing. Surely that's fair enough? Surely the coroner's
inquest should read, "He took his own life after sober and careful
contemplation of the fucking shambles it had become"?

Not once did I read a newspaper report, which convinced me that the
deceased was off the old trolley. You know: "The Manchester United
forward, who was engaged to the current Miss Sweden, had recently
achieved a unique Double: he is the only man ever to have won the
FA Cup and an Oscar for Best Actor in the same year. The rights to
his first novel had just been bought for an undisclosed sum by
Stephen Spielberg. He was found hanging from a beam in his stables
by a member of his staff." Now, I've never seen a coroner's report
like that, but if there were cases in which happy, successful,
talented people took their own lives, one could safely come to the
conclusion that the old balance was indeed wonky. And I'm not
saying that being engaged to Miss Sweden, playing for Manchester
United and winning Oscars inoculates you against depression - I'm
sure it doesn't. I'm just saying that these things help. Look at
the statistics. You're more likely to top yourself if you've just
gone through a divorce. Or if you're anorexic. Or if you're
unemployed. Or if you're a prostitute. Or if you've fought in a
war, or if you've been raped, or if you've lost somebody..... There
are lots and lots of factors that push people over the edge; none
of these factors are likely to make you feel anything but fucking

Two years ago Martin Sharp would not have found himself sitting on
a tiny concrete ledge in the middle of the night, looking a hundred
feet down at a concrete walkway and wondering whether he'd hear the
noise that his bones made when they shattered into tiny pieces. But
two years ago Martin Sharp was a different person. 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. I hadn't had to talk to my young daughters
about a front-page tabloid newspaper article, an article headlined
with the word SLEAZEBAG! and illustrated with a picture of me lying
on the pavement outside a well-known London nightspot. (What would
the headline have been if I had gone over? "SLEAZY DOES IT!"
perhaps. Or maybe "SHARP END!") There was, it is fair to say, less
reason for ledge-sitting before all that happened. So don't tell me
that the balance of my mind was disturbed, because it really didn't
feel that way. (What does it mean, anyway, that stuff about "the
balance of the mind"? Is it strictly scientific? Does the mind
really wobble up and down in the head like some sort of fish-scale,
according to how loopy you are?) Wanting to kill myself was an
appropriate and reasonable response to a whole series of
unfortunate events that had rendered life unlivable. Oh, yes, I
know the shrinks would say that they could have helped, but that's
half the trouble with this bloody country, isn't it? No one's
willing to face their responsibilities. It's always someone else's
fault. Boo-hoo-hoo. Well, I happen to be one of those rare
individuals who believe that what went on with Mummy and Daddy had
nothing to do with me screwing a fifteen-year-old. I happen to
believe that I would have slept with her regardless of whether I'd
been breast-fed or not, and it was time to face up to what I'd
done. And what I'd done is, I'd pissed my life away. Literally.
But I felt as if I'd pissed my life away in the same way that you
can piss money away. I'd had a life, full of kids and wives and
jobs and all the usual stuff, and I'd somehow managed to mislay it.
No, you see, that's not right. I knew where my life was, just as
you know where money goes when you piss it away. I hadn't mislaid
it at all. I'd spent it. I'd spent my kids and my job and my wife
on teenage girls and nightclubs: these things all come at a price,
and I'd happily paid it, and suddenly my life wasn't there any
more. What would I be leaving behind? On New Year's Eve, it felt as
though I'd be saying goodbye to a dim form of consciousness and a
semi-functioning digestive system - all the indications of a life,
certainly, but none of the content. I didn't even feel sad,
particularly. I just felt very stupid, and very angry.

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.


On New Year's Eve the nursing home sent their ambulance round for
him. You had to pay extra for that, but I didn't mind. How could I?
In the end, Matty was going to cost them a lot more than they were
costing me. I was only paying for a night, and they were going to
pay for the rest of his life.

I thought about hiding some of Matty's stuff, in case they thought
it was odd, but no one had to know it was his. I could have had
loads of kids, as far as they knew, so I left it there. They came
around six, and these two young fellas wheeled him out. I couldn't
cry when he went, because then the young fellas would know
something was wrong; as far as they knew, I was coming to fetch him
at eleven the next morning. I just kissed him on the top of his
head and told him to be good at the home, and I held it all in
until I'd seen them leave. Then I wept and wept, for about an hour.
He'd ruined my life, but he was still my son, and I was never going
to see him again, and I couldn't even say goodbye properly. I
watched the television for a while, and I did have one or two
glasses of sherry, because I knew it would be cold out.

I waited at the bus stop for ten minutes, but then I decided to
walk. Knowing that you want to die makes you less scared. I
wouldn't have dreamed of walking all that way late at night,
especially when the streets are full of drunks, but what did it
matter now? Although then, of course, I found myself worrying about
being attacked but not murdered - left for dead without actually
being dying. Because then I'd be taken to hospital, and they'd find
out who I was, and they'd find out about Matty, and all those
months of planning would have been a complete waste of time, and
I'd come out of hospital owing the home thousands of pounds, and
where was I going to find that? But no one attacked me. A couple of
people wished me a Happy New Year, but that was about all. There
isn't so much to be afraid of, out there. I can remember thinking
it was a funny time to find that out, on the last night of my life;
I'd spent the rest of it being afraid of everything.

I'd never been to Topper's House before. I'd just been past it on
the bus once or twice. I didn't even know for sure that you could
get onto the roof any more, but the door was open, and I just
walked up the stairs until I couldn't walk any further. I don't
know why it didn't occur to me that you couldn't just jump off
whenever you felt like it, but the moment I saw it I realised that
they wouldn't let you do that. They'd put this wire up, way up
high, and there were curved railings with spikes on the top...well,
that's when I began to panic. I'm not tall, and I'm not very
strong, and I'm not as young as I was. I couldn't see how I was
going to get over the top of it all, and it had to be that night,
because of Matty being in the home and everything. And I started to
go through all the other options, but none of them were any good. I
didn't want to do it in my own front room, where someone I knew
would find me. I wanted to be found by a stranger. And I didn't
want to jump in front of a train, because I'd seen a programme on
the television about the poor drivers and how suicides upset them.
And I didn't have a car, so I couldn't drive off to a quiet spot
and breathe in the exhaust fumes….

to ask him if he was going to be long.


the roof. Honestly. I'd forgotten about the whole Toppers House
everyone in the room he knew.

goes on to invent a time machine or stops Britain from being
been different.

was he supposed to tell me?

I could feel the weight of everything then - the weight of
loneliness, of everything that had gone wrong. I felt heroic, going
up those last few flights to the top of the building, dragging that
weight along with me. Jumping felt like the only way to get rid of
it, the only way to make it work for me instead of against me; I
felt so heavy that I knew I'd hit the street in no time. I'd beat
the world record for falling off a tower block.

Excerpted from A LONG WAY DOWN © Copyright 2005 by Nick
Hornby. Reprinted with permission by Riverhead Books, an imprint of
Penguin Group (USA). All rights reserved.

A Long Way Down
by by Nick Hornby

  • Genres: Fiction
  • hardcover: 352 pages
  • Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover
  • ISBN-10: 1573223026
  • ISBN-13: 9781573223027