A Long Way Down

Maureen finds an article about the man who jumped—David Fawley. He jumped because of problems with his wife and children. She had left him for someone else and took the children. To Maureen, David seems like her opposite: “He’d killed himself because his children were gone, and I’d thought about it because my son was still around” (243). That night, she wonders if she should visit Martin’s wife and children and see if she can talk to them in a way that might get the family back together. Jess helps her locate the address. 

They don’t tell JJ about their plan because Jess thinks he’ll disapprove and stop them. They take a bus to Torley Heath, where Cindy lives, 40 miles away. On the bus, Jess feels optimistic. She believes the 90 days will pass, and they will all move on. They knock on Cindy’s door. She lets them in, but there is a man named Paul in the living room, listening to an audiobook. Jess says that they are there to get her back together with Martin. Cindy says Martin left them and that it’s too late. She also says she considered suicide herself but couldn’t because of their daughters: “He hated being part of a family. And that’s when I decided it was his business. If he had the freedom to fuck around, then he had the freedom to kill himself too” (251). Jess can’t disagree.

Cindy explains it’s not true that Martin can’t see the girls—she just won’t let him see them in her home. She adds how he never comes to get them or sends for them so that they can stay with him in the city. She also says Paul is a wonderful partner, is part of her family, and is wonderful to her daughters. When Paul stands up to say good-bye, Jess realizes he is blind.

Jess is impressed and saddened that Cindy has actually moved on. She has a new life. It makes Jess realize that she herself has not actually moved on, no matter how good she feels sometimes: “Maureen and I had been trying to persuade Cindy to move out of her cool penthouse and move into our dump with us” (254). As they leave, Cindy tells Jess that she would respect Martin more if he asked for himself. This gives Jess an idea. 

At their next meetup, Jess tells Martin that they visited Cindy. Martin is angry, but Jess says that it’s a free country and he can’t stop them. JJ says they were right to try something because they had shown themselves that the alternative—suicide—wasn’t actually available to them: “We all spend so much time not saying what we want, because we know we can’t have it” (258). He says that he wants his band and his girl back. Then he demands that Martin tell him what he wants. Martin refuses. JJ says Martin gets three wishes, and he has to tell them what they are.

Martin says that he wishes he had been able to make his marriage work, he wishes he had never slept with the 15-year-old, and he wishes that he wasn’t “such an arsehole” (259).

Jess says she wishes Jen would come back, that she wants an everlasting supply of drugs, and that she could play the piano.

Maureen says she wishes that there were a way to help Matty, but she can’t think of anything else.

Two weeks later, Martin says that he is impressed that Jess was able to keep quiet about her plan, although he had started to suspect there was one. He had noticed Jess showing genuine interest in Matty, and in Lizzie, JJ’s ex.

Martin has lunch with Theo. Theo tells him that a publisher is interested in an autobiography of Martin and that the deal is “substantial” (264). When Martin presses for details, Theo is vague and won’t say more.

Jess has scheduled a meeting for the four of them in the basement of a Starbucks because she has “private things to talk about” (266). When he arrives, there is a line of people going down the stairs to the basement. At the bottom of the stairs Martin sees Matty in his wheelchair, accompanied by two orderlies. While he is looking at Matty, his daughters appear and hug him. He sees Penny in the corner of the room and Cindy sitting at a table. JJ is there, hugging two people Martin does not recognize. They turn out to be Lizzie and Eddie. Jess is there with her parents. She moves to the middle of the room and claps her hands: “I read about this on the Internet. It’s called an intervention” (268). She says that it is a chance for everyone in the room to confront the four of them. Then she tells them all to mix it up and start talking to everyone else in the room.

Maureen talks to the two orderlies, Stephen and Sean. She tells them everything. They are attentive and supportive. She sees that Penny is sitting alone and goes over to talk to him. When Penny mentions how attractive Stephen is, Maureen insists that she go and talk to him. Then Maureen hints that a lot happened because of Penny meeting Stephen. 

Jess is annoyed that she is the only one not having a good time. She hates it. She doesn’t know why she thought talking to her parents would help, and she feels certain that Jen was their favorite. After Jen died, there were some earrings on her nightstand. One evening they were gone, and Jess doesn’t know where they went. Her mother has always accused her of taking and selling them, and she brings it up again now, which is the source of their argument.

She asks Jess what she wants, and how they can help. Jess realizes that she is sincere and can’t think of anything to ask for, which terrifies her. She swears at her parents and leaves, getting on the first train she finds outside.

JJ briefly tells himself that the band, as well as he and Lizzie, are getting back together. It’s soon obvious they are there out of concern, not to make plans for a future with him. Eddie asks him why he wanted to kill himself and says that JJ didn’t have reasons like the others did. JJ changes the subject, and they get a coffee. Eddie brings it up again in line and tells JJ that he has to grow up. JJ retorts that he shouldn’t feel superior just because his dad gave him a job installing cable. They go outside, and JJ wonders if they’re going to fight. 

Martin is angry when he sees Penny flirting with Stephen, even though he hasn’t thought of her in a while. He walks over and brusquely thanks Penny for flirting in front of him. He glares at Stephen and asks him if he thinks he’s “pretty great” (284). Martin says being a nurse isn’t hard, adding: “I hate people like you. You wheel a disabled kid around for a bit and you want a medal. And how hard is it, really?” (285). He grabs Matty’s wheelchair and starts to push it around, putting one hand on his hip in an effeminate gesture. Everyone is watching him. He realizes how horribly he is behaving and goes outside.

Maureen just watches them all not knowing what to do. Jess’s mother tells her the story about the earrings and says they were Jen’s favorites. Maureen says that Jen must have come back for them. Jess’s parents stop to think about it. Her father adds how there were also some books messing, and he knows Jess hadn’t taken them. Maureen can tell that she has done a good thing: now they have the possibility of thinking Jen is alive.

Jess takes the train to London Bridge and gets out. She stares at the water and smokes. She sees a college lecturer named Colin that she knows; she took a couple of his art classes. He is walking towards her with a concerned look on his face. He asks her why she’s sitting there on the ground looking at the water. She pretends not to know who he is, and then swears at him and leaves when he keeps talking to her: “I could see suddenly that I was in more trouble than I had thought. What if I had a future on this planet? What then? How many people could I piss off, and how many places could I run from?” (294). She considers going back to Starbucks but changes her mind: “I met this geezer with a really nice dog and I went and slept with him instead” (294).

Outside, JJ tells Eddie to hit him if it will make him feel better. Lizzie asks Eddie why he would fly across the Atlantic just to punch JJ. Lizzie tells them that they should just kiss and get it over with, angry enough to provoke them. JJ tells them that he just wants everyone to get back together: him and Lizzie, and the three of them in a band again. They go to a pub where Eddie says he had no idea JJ felt bad enough to be suicidal.

JJ has a thought that he can’t ignore: “I had wanted to kill myself, not because I hated living, but because I loved it. And the truth of the matter is, I think, that a lot of people who think about killing themselves feel the same way” (299). He, Maureen, Jess, and Martin loved living but couldn’t find a way back into their own lives. Lizzie tells him that she didn’t dump him because he wasn’t a rock star. She had dumped him because he had split the band up. She knew he would be miserable without music, and she didn’t want to be with someone who was miserable. JJ feels like crying because he knows in that moment he will make music again.

Martin goes home and does nothing but drink and watch TV for two days. He doesn’t even remember eating: “I have been given many opportunities in life, and I had thrown each of them away, one by one, through a series of catastrophically bad decisions, each one of which seemed like a good idea to me—to me and my head—at the time” (302). He thinks that it is unfair that the only tool he has with which he can examine his life is the head that makes the bad decisions. A few days later, he finds the notes he made during the two-day bender. It is an examination of why he thinks he might have acted so badly at the intervention. Under his questions about his motivations, he has written:“COURSE OF ACTION […] (a) Kill myself (b) Ask Maureen to use another nurse (c) Don’t” (303).

He thinks that C is the answer because at any time in his life, if he had just said “don’t” to himself, his life would be better. He realizes that because he has no friends—at least, he believes this—the only people he knows are people who will tell him the truth, no matter how brutal it is. He calls Cindy to ask why she thinks he got into the altercation with Stephen. Cindy tells him it’s because he is unbalanced, but also that he resents Stephen because he is younger, more handsome, makes less money, and has done more with his life than Martin has. He thanks her and says that’s exactly what he needed to hear. 

Maureen rides with Stephen and Sean to take Matty back to the home. On the way, they tell her that they are short one member for their quiz team and ask her if she will go to the pub with them to fill in so that they have enough people. They drop Matty off at the home, and she goes with them. Maureen believes this is a coincidence, that they had invited her just when she wanted to badly not to go home alone. When other coincidences begin to happen, she wonders if it is something more mysterious. There is another member on their quiz team, a man named Jack. Jack offers her a job running one of his newspaper stands for $4.75 an hour. By the time she goes home, she knows that she will not jump off the roof when the 90 days ends.

The morning after the quiz, she goes and sits in a church. She feels that she can now be forgiven of her sins because despair no longer grips her, and she is willing to help herself. 

Jess calls the man she slept with “Nodog” because he said names were a way of categorizing people and that the names you call them should reflect how they seem in the moment. Jess calls him Nodog because when they’re in a bar, he leaves his dog outside. After they have sex at his place, she tells him about Toppers’ House. Nodog says that she lived because she had been chosen by the God of Life, who had sent the other three to stop her. He says that he is always thinking of ways to try to kill himself, but the God of Death can’t seem to find him. Everything he says seems true to Jess, particularly when he says that the key to peace is seeing things as they are and not pretending they are better or worse than they really are.

When she goes home, she talks with her parents. Her mother tells her about Maureen and her observation about Jen’s earrings. Jess can see how much more peaceful the thought that Jen took the earrings makes her, and she tries to practice Nodog’s advice and just to see the moment for what it is, with no embellishments or speculation.

After his conversation with Cindy, Martin volunteers to tutor reading at a local school. He begins working with an 8-year-old named Pacino. Martin views his service as a step on the long road back to self-respect, but the work quickly frustrates him. During their first session, Pacino is tired of reading after fifteen minutes, so they sit there and think for the remaining forty-five minutes:

It’s a currency like any other, self-worth. You spend years saving up, and you can blow it all in an evening if you so choose. I’d done forty-odd years’ worth in the space of a few months, and now I had to save up again. I reckoned that Pacino was worth about ten pence a week (322).

He thinks that Pacino will be good for him precisely because the task feels so unrewarding and useless, and yet he is committed to doing it away. 

Eddie and Lizzie buy JJ a guitar and a harp rack and then ask him to come back to America with them. JJ says he can’t because he thinks he already has a band here, and he’s thinking of Maureen, Martin, and Jess. Eddie is incredulous and tells him that they’re just going to make him want to kill himself again. JJ asks Eddie why he thinks that he, with his cable installation job, has a better chance at a happy ending than his friends, to which JJ thinks: “People who get by aren’t so far away from being suicidal. Maybe I shouldn’t find that as comforting as I do” (324).

The 90 days is almost over, and JJ knows that he can, and will, keep going. He says good-bye to Eddie at the airport, and they part as friends. JJ begins “busking” (325)—playing his guitar and singing on the street for money. He doesn’t enjoy it at first, but he makes decent money. Soon, however, people start to enjoy seeing him arrive, and it is enough to keep him making music. 

On day 90, the four of them meet at a pub across from Toppers’ House. Their plan was to eat and then go up to the roof and see how they felt, but they find that they don’t want to go up onto the roof. Jess tells them all about Nodog and decides that they should find someone in the pub who looks like they might kill themselves and try to stop it. They look at various people in the pub and decide that everyone looks too happy to be bothered by them. They each have two drinks and then go up to the roof.

JJ asks if they think it’s a good thing that they are all still alive. They agree that it’s better for Martin’s kids, for Matty, and for Jess’s parents. But JJ is frustrated that all he is doing is busking. Jess asks what he would tell a man if he came up to jump right now, and JJ says he would tell him about the 90 days. Maureen says she would tell him about the quiz and her job as a newsagent. Jess says she would tell him about Nodog.

JJ proposes that they give it another six months and see how they all feel. He notices a large Ferris wheel in the distance and asks if it’s actually moving. They all stare at it and decide that it must be moving, but none of them can really tell for sure.