A Long Way Down

JJ sees the newspaper in a store. He can’t believe that Jess’s father is an education minister: “But when I read the story, it wasn’t quite so funny” (117). Jess’s older sister, Jennifer, had disappeared years earlier after borrowing her mother’s car. The car had been found abandoned near a well-known suicide spot, but no body was found. The next day there is a new headline on another newspaper: “THERE WERE FOUR OF THEM” (117). He and Maureen are not identified, but there is a phone number and a promise of a reward for additional information. JJ finds the story gratifying in a way: “One of the things that had brought me down was my inability to leave my mark on the world through my music—which is another way of saying that I was suicidal because I wasn’t famous” (118). His buzzer rings, and a reporter’s voice comes through, asking if he is JJ from the article. He denies it, but she says that if he thinks of anything that would cheer her readers up, she is going to leave her card and number outside. JJ is tempted to run after her and tell her everything.

A couple of days after New Year’s, Maureen’s phone rings. It is a woman from the police department. She tells Maureen that her son was seen creating a dangerous disturbance in the Wood Green shopping center on New Year’s Eve. When Maureen protests that her son is too disabled to do such a thing, the woman changes her voice: it is Jess on the phone. She tells Maureen about the newspaper article. Jess tells her that the four of them are going to have an emergency meeting. When Maureen’s says she can’t go out with Matty, Jess says they will be coming to her at five that day. Maureen begins to tidy up and thinks: “I do think I’m only a little mad. If I were really mad, I wouldn’t have worried about tidying up. And if I were really, properly mad, I wouldn’t have minded what they found” (125). 

Martin’s agent, Theo, calls him after the first newspaper article and asks if Martin was really going to jump. Theo is an intern who was promoted to be Martin’s agent while Martin was in prison. While he is on the phone with Theo, Martin gets voice messages from Cindy and Penny. When he calls Cindy, she yells at him and calls him selfish. She asks what she is supposed to tell their daughters. Martin says that he will tell them himself if she’ll let him see them. Cindy hangs up.

When he calls Penny, she blames herself for his sadness. He tells her it’s not her fault and promises to call her later. He goes outside and pushes past a group of reporters who pester him with questions. Jess calls and tells him they are meeting at Maureen’s. First, he goes to visit Jess’s father, Chris Crichton. Chris scolds Martin in the living room and then Jess appears at the top of the stairs and begins arguing with her father. Martin tells Chris that he didn’t sleep with Jess, and Chris appears to believe him. He says that if Martin is going to continue seeing Jess in any way, he would appreciate it if Martin would act responsibly and be a good influence on her. Jess leaves. Chris gives Martin some money and asks him to try to prevent anything from happening to Jess.

Jess does not believe that her decision to kill herself had anything to do with Jen’s disappearance. She still believes Jen is alive. She tells the reader that Jen does not pop back up in the story and to stop thinking about it.

On the way to Maureen’s, Jess is nervous about meeting Matty. After she sees Matty, she feels better because he just sits there, but she feels worse for Maureen: “I’ll tell you, you wouldn’t have persuaded me down from that roof. No way” (142). She is surprised at how tidy Maureen’s house is. It looks like she just moved in, but there are spots on the walls as if pictures have just been taken down.

JJ is worried that the woman who buzzed his door will find out about his band and contact Eddie and Lizzie. Then she’ll find out that he isn’t dying. On the way to Maureen’s, he decides to tell them the truth. Martin and Jess immediately argue about how to begin the meeting. JJ interrupts them. He admits he lied to them about CCR. He tells them that his band split up before Christmas and his girlfriend left him. JJ worries that he is not good enough for anything but music and how a life working a normal job would kill him, so he decided to kill himself first. Martin listens and says, “That’s just what happens to everyone. It’s called getting older” (150). Jess is more sympathetic: “You’ve got the choice of a slow, painful death, or a quick, merciful one” (150).

Jess goes to the bathroom and comes back out holding posters that Maureen had taken down. One is of Buffy, from the show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The other is of a muscular black man, a soccer player named Paddy. Maureen had put the posters up for Matty, hoping he would like them. She remembers when Matty was 8 and still sleeping in the nursery that was still decorated the way it had been when he was a baby. She replaced the rabbits and puppies with Star Wars decorations and trains. Eventually, she decorated the whole house for Matty, hoping that he would see things he liked and feel better. She had nothing for herself. Martin tells Jess to put the posters back.

Martin and JJ ask Jess about her sister, Jen, and how she deals with it. Jess refuses to talk about it, saying only that she got used to it. They discuss how to handle the publicity and the newspapers, going forward. Jess thinks they should try to make money off the story and turn it into a TV show. She wants them to tell everyone that they saw an angel who convinced them not to jump. She says that they need to tell everyone their message. Martin asks, “What the hell is our message?” (159). Jess relays that it’s up to them to decide what their message is. After Martin gets home, Theo calls him. Theo asks why Martin hadn’t mentioned that they had seen an angel.

Martin is furious with Jess, but she thinks the angel was too good of an idea to waste. She had found the woman who buzzed JJ’s apartment. Her name was Linda. Linda interviews her and asks a lot of questions about the angel. Jess says that the angel looked “modern, like he could have been in a band” (162). She says the angel looked like Matt Damon, was wearing a baggy white designer suit, and was hovering several feet off the roof. Jess says the angel told them not to jump and to tell the world that he was unhappy with the state of things, particularly with war. Jess tells her that Martin saw the angel “[m]ore than anyone else” (165). Linda agrees to pay Jess $5,000 for the story, provided that she can get everyone else to talk to her. 

It surprises JJ how hard it is to face Linda when she interviews the four of them, but it’s apparent that she intends to focus on Martin. Every time she asks Martin about the angel, Linda changes the questions to subtly mock Martin for losing his prime-time TV show. She keeps asking Martin if he intends to have the angel on his new show, which is on basic cable and has a low viewership. Jess interrupts each time, answering for him, until Linda insists on Martin answering as to whether he saw the angel: “Oh yes, I saw him all right. He was awesome” (170).

JJ realizes that they “were done as serious people” (171). He worries that he will never get a job again, since everyone will think he is crazy. He wonders if Lizzie will see it and tells the reader that she left him because he was not becoming a rock star fast enough.

Maureen had been missing church, but after lying to Linda about the angel, she knows she’ll never be able to go back. She still believes she will kill herself after six weeks. After the interview, she goes for a walk with JJ and tells him that she hates lies. JJ asks her what it would take for her to consider living instead of suicide. She tell him that if she could make a deal with God, she would ask for a holiday, which she hasn’t had since before Matty was born. She also says she wants a job and a social life. 

The headline of Linda’s article is “FOR HARPS—SEE SHARP” (176). The article focuses on Martin going crazy, not on the beauty of their shared spiritual moment. That day, Martin gets calls from Theo, Penny, and his children. He tells his daughters that he didn’t see an angel and had lied to get money to buy them a present. His boss, Declan, from FeetUp!TV (the network where he now works) calls and fires him, saying that he comes off too crazy in the article. He talks Declan into keeping him if he brings the other three who saw the angel onto the show. Martin’s show is called Sharp Words and is usually filled with has-beens who are trying to repair their reputations. For reasons he doesn’t understand, JJ and Jess are combative on the air, changing what the angel was wearing, wondering if they had seen him at all, and using profanity. Declan kicks them out and fires Martin.

Jess reflects on the people she feels connected to: “Most people have a rope that ties them to someone, and that rope can be short or long. You don’t know how long, though, it’s not your choice” (184). Her rope is tied to Jen, not to her parents. She reveals that they tried to do one more TV show after Sharp Words, but when the host annoyed Jess, she told her that they had made the whole thing up just for money. There were no more requests for interviews. The four of them agree to keep meeting together at a Starbucks, feeling that they have no one else who understands them. They decide to form a book club, but they will only read books by authors who killed themselves. They start with Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and Jess hates the first two pages so much she believes that Woolf killed herself because she had no talent. JJ tells her that she is thinking about it wrong. Jess says to herself: “I do think. I know no one believes it, but I do. It’s just that my way of thinking is different from everyone else’s. Before I think I have to get angry and maybe a bit violent” (190). Jen had been an avid reader, and Jess wonders if that is what is making her resist the books.

JJ feels responsible for the reading program since he deems the others to have horrible tastes for, and attitudes towards, books. He thinks about how Eddie, his bandmate, had hated it when he read and felt like JJ was ignoring him: “That’s why I freaked out at Jess. I’d left one band full of aggressive illiterates, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to join another one” (193). At Maureen’s house, he plays a Nick Drake album for them. Drake was a singer and songwriter who killed himself, and JJ idolizes his talent. Jess sticks her finger down her throat and gags. JJ is about to erupt when Maureen says she likes it. “Don’t pretend to be more foolish than you are, Jess. Because you’re foolish enough as it is” (195). Jess stops and they finish the album in silence. Maureen adds: “This is how I feel every day, and people don’t want to know that” (196). JJ feels like he and Maureen are now best friends and tells her it’s time for her to plan a vacation. They agree to take Maureen on holiday, and five days later they are on a plane to Tenerife. 

Maureen cries when they make the plan and can’t remember the last time she cried because she was happy: “I was making little sobbing noises that embarrassed everyone, myself included” (199). On the plane, Maureen is surprised to realize that she misses Matty. On the first night at the hotel, they go to dinner and Maureen believes it is the nicest evening she has never had. 

Martin thinks the night is pleasant but unremarkable. He thinks about how humiliating it was to be in prison, but that the worst part was when he came out. He compares it to an amputee waking up after surgery and realizing that his legs are gone. The hardest part is what comes next: learning to live with the loss. He knew that when he left prison he had to learn to live with the loss of his career and family. After getting out, he took a holiday with Penny: “That holiday with Penny was the first time I fully apprehended the trouble I was in” (205). They had seen two people they knew in a bar, and the people had ignored him. Later they had told Penny that they were worried about Martin being around their 14-year-old daughter.

At breakfast the next morning, they agree to split up until dinner. Jess and JJ go swimming and then Jess leaves on her own to explore and try to find someone to buy drugs from. In a bar, she sees a girl who looks exactly like Jen to her. The girl tells her to stop staring at her. They argue and are thrown out of the bar. She finds a guy to buy drugs from, gets high on ecstasy, drinks all afternoon, and is eventually returned to the hotel by the cops after telling the police that Martin and Maureen are her parents: “My dad wonders why I choose to be like this, but the truth is, you have no choice, and that’s what makes you feel like killing yourself” (209). Martin checks out of the hotel and goes to stay somewhere else alone. 

JJ has a good day. For the first time in years, his libido motivates him to get out and look for someone to flirt with. He meets a girl at a bar who is reading Bel Canto by Ann Patchett, and JJ begins talking about it with her. Her name is Kathy and she has also seen his band live. They spend the afternoon together, and JJ misses the group dinner. Kathy stays overnight in JJ’s hotel room, and they have sex.

In the morning, he and Kathy have breakfast in the hotel lobby. Maureen and Jess come down and sit across from them. Kathy is confused about who they are. Jess tells Kathy that Maureen is JJ’s mother and that she is his sister, adding: “I wouldn’t bring a one-night stand to the family breakfast table” (213). She tells Kathy that she bets JJ told her all about his band, which is the only way he can ever get a girlfriend. Kathy excuses herself and leaves. JJ is mad, but he feels that Jess is right about one thing: he could never get a girl without music, and music is in his past, which makes his future look bleak all over again.

After breakfast, Maureen asks JJ to call Matty’s care home and then takes the phone from him. The orderly tells her about Matty’s day, which is the same as any other day for him at the home: “The point of me was exactly the same as the point of the people in the care home” (217). Maureen believes that when she dies, Matty will be fine, no worse off than he is now. This makes her potential suicide more confusing to her, and she can’t decide whether she thinks her life is a waste of time or not: “I didn’t know whether I wanted to kill myself more or less” (217).

Maureen spends the rest of the week by herself. The day before they go home, she goes into an old church and sees an elderly woman pushing a boy in a wheelchair. She thinks that you could go into any church and see the same thing: “It was one of the reasons churches were invented, probably” (219). 

Martin wonders why he has never been an introspective person. He feels that checking out of the hotel was a mistake because he had nothing to do but think about himself and his problems: “Jess irritated the hell out of me, and Maureen depressed me, but they occupied a part of me that should never be left untenanted and unfurnished” (219). Pettily, he also realizes that they make him feel superior and accomplished because he has done things that they never will. For two days he sits on his balcony and thinks until Jess finds him on the third day. He tells her that he is sick of her and wants her to go away. She asks him if he wants to have sex with her. When he says no, she reminds him that her dad told him to look out for her. He goes into his room and bolts the door. Jess stands outside in the hall and knocks for a long time before leaving. 

On the way to the airport from the hotel, JJ feels similarly to when his band broke up: “We’d taken things as far as we could, and there was nowhere for us to go” (225). When the band broke up, JJ was worried about what would happen to his bandmates, but they found a new band quickly, and he was soon up on the roof at Toppers’ House: “This time around I was determined not to fret about my fellow band members. They’d be OK” (226). Martin says they have nothing in common and should probably spend less time together. Jess says that her relationship with them is her most fulfilling relationship, but Martin says that’s a sign of sickness. They agree to meet up on Valentine’s Day, but probably not before.

They meet at eight in the evening on Valentine’s Day, on the roof at Toppers’ House. Martin says he read something that might interest them, but that they should talk about it somewhere else. Jess notices another man on the roof, out on the ledge. They each talk softly to him, telling him that they know what he is going through, but he moans and then jumps: “Those two noises, the moan and the thud, I’ve heard every single day since, and I don’t know which is scarier” (231).