The Ledge
(Author's Note: This was one of my entries to the Big Finish "Short Trips" competition, which unfortunately didn't make it. Ah well. I think it's nice though, so I hope you all enjoy)
Bloody hell, it's cold up here. I shivered reflexively, and then made myself stop with some effort, because what was the point of trying to keep warm seconds before killing yourself?
The stark beige thereness of the council tower block loomed large below. All fourteen storeys of it. There was another one just like it directly opposite. I wondered if there'd be another poor soul balancing precariously on the ledge of that one, too. It was a Sunday morning, and...I checked my watch, for posterity's sake...9:35am. Cloudy overhead, occasional mizzle, great yawning pits of despair. They'd left that out of the weather forecast, but they may as well not have bothered.
Well, it was time for last words. No-one would be there to hear them except me and one fat and rather curious pigeon that had just landed four yards away and was regarding me, head askew, in what I felt was an unnecessarily judgemental way. I lobbed a small pebble at it and in the process of doing so almost fell off the bloody ledge.
I scrambled back on again before thinking – what the hell did I do that for? But I knew all the same; it's one thing to gracefully pirouette to one's doom and thereby stick two fingers up to the Almighty, but it's quite another to go kersplat on the pavement because you were trying to stove a pigeon's head in and missed.
Back to the last words. I cleared my throat. The pigeon looked on expectantly.
"Well God," I announced, "you've given me forty-one years of nothing but tedium. And then when you gave me Suze, I thought – hey, maybe this world doesn't stink after all. But silly me, I should have neglected the small print that said warning: cancer-ridden, may die at early age. So you win. Well done. Now get ready, cos you're about to see something pretty funny."
That's when the sound began. I can't describe it exactly, but the thing that it didn't sound like most (and this is important) was a police box materialising from nowhere. This was all the more surprising because that's exactly what happened. A big blue police box, just burping into existence in the middle of a council tower block roof. Shove that one up your arse, Einstein.
One of us flew over to investigate and, curiosity satisfied, promptly shat all over it. That's all the clues you're getting on that one. I decided to postpone my death for a few seconds on the general rule that I'd be kicking myself on the way down if I didn't.
The door opened. A strange fellow indeed emerged from within; a smile that was turning a Cheshire Cat somewhere green with envy, a scarf so long it probably had its own inclement weather, and an unruly mop of brown-ness on top of his head that seemed less like hair and more like fizzing sparks jumping off his skull. In any other circumstances, he'd have been the strangest thing I'd seen that morning, but as it was he ranked a distant third.
The police box ex nihilo had been top of the list of course, but hot on its heels was the sight of the man pulling a kayak from the police box. A bloody great big kayak, fully ten feet long. And he was pulling it horizontally.
Two things happened when he'd successfully dragged the kayak out onto the roof. First, he looked around and for the first time seemed to realise that council tower blocks were generally not renowned for their innate suitability as kayaking holiday destinations for a damned good reason. That megawatt smile dimmed for a moment, only to resurface as a somewhat more embarrassed version of its previous self.
The second thing that happened was that he saw me.
"Which way to the rapids?" he asked.
I admit that I took some time to ponder this question, which I feel was not unreasonable in the circumstances. Remarkably, I was feeling irritated by all this. I deliberately hadn't chosen some public place for my final swan dive because all that fuss and bother over killing yourself – the media circus, the policemen climbing out onto the ledge – call me old-fashioned, but I just wanted a bit of peace and quiet for my messy end. And now I had a man appearing from nowhere pulling a kayak from a police box. This rankled me.
"You'd be better off with America, somewhere like that," I suggested.
"This isn't America?"
"This is Blackburn."
"Ah well!" and his grin, incredibly, stretched another few inches across his face. "That's transdimensional time-travelling semi-sentient spaceships for you."
"So I've heard."
"Righto, must be off," he said, nodding to me. He began to shove the kayak back into the police box. The entrance to the box was just out of my line of sight from the ledge, crane as I might. He had some commendable strength this fellow – the kayak looked heavy but with only a few shoves he had it all (impossibly, of course) back in the box again. He grunted in satisfaction and stood up, his back cricking audibly as he did so. He winced. I could see in his posture that he was about to duck back into the box again. I couldn't believe it!
"Excuse me?" I said, a mite testily.
He had actually stepped inside. He stepped back out again and peered around the edge of the box from where I couldn't see. "Yes?" he said.
"I am about to kill myself, you know."
"Yes, I had noticed," he said cheerfully. "I imagine tower blocks are better for that than for kayaking."
"Well..." I spluttered "...yes, but I don't think you quite understand. I'm going to kill myself."
He cocked his head to one side quizzically, and in a few quick gravel-crunching strides was standing at the edge of the roof, on the other side of the safety ledge. He leaned over the waist-high ledge and peered down, shielding his eyes from the morning sun. This continued for a few seconds until he straightened up again and regarded me approvingly.
"Yes, that should do it," he nodded. "Best of luck with it."
And he was striding towards the police box again! I simply couldn't believe this man!
"Excuse me," I said, vaulting the ledge in my ire to get closer to this man, "I find it amazing that you can witness a man about to end his own life and not even attempt to try and talk him out of it. I think you should be ashamed of yourself, sir."
He U-turned to face me, and sighed. "Would it work?"
"Would what work?"
"Talking you out of it?"
"No it bloody well wouldn't!"
"Well, there you go then."
"Hold on a minute, it's not as simple as that! You couldn't have known that I was set on killing myself – I might have been easily talked down, for all you knew, and you're more concerned with shoving a kayak into a police box!" I spluttered indignantly, really on a roll now. "It's people like you who made me come up here in the first place!"
"You get a lot of inconsiderate kayaking space-travellers in Blackburn?"
"Will you stop going on about space travel," I sighed. "It's a police box. Grow up."
"It's a lot more than that," he said. "Come and look."
I cast a suspicious glance at him. "Are you trying to distract me from - ?"
"Me? I thought we'd established I'm a miserable excuse for a sentient being. Come on. It'll be something to tell your frien...well," he coughed delicately. "It'll be interesting, at any rate."
"One look?"
"One look. Then you can Wile E Coyote to your heart's content. Cross my hearts and hope you -"
" – not funny."
He looked suitably chastened, and scampered with surprising impishness back to the police box. I followed him warily, noting my good friend the pigeon was nowhere to be seen, and neither was its recent deposit upon the box's walls. I sniffed the air as a scent caught it. "Do you have chicken cooking in there?" I asked.
He didn't reply to me; instead, he lightly struck the box's wall with the back of his hand, for all the world looking as if he was admonishing it as a naughty boy. "Bad TARDIS," he said sternly.
He was gone a second later. I inhaled briefly and turned the corner to come face-to-face with the entrance to the box. It was surprisingly dark within. I paused, but the thought arrived in my head – what's the worst that could happen, on a day like today? – and I pushed through, not knowing whether to expect disintegration or fur coats and fauns...
I gaped for so long that I quite failed to notice the doors closing behind me, and only barely heard the rising and falling sound from earlier.
By the time I had pulled myself together, panic had seized me. I turned tail and ran, flinging open the doors and-
-his strength and reflexes saved my life. The ambulance screeched past where I had just stood, leaving the hospital car park at top speed, on its way to another emergency and never quite knowing how close it came to killing me. My body, nerveless, collapsed but he fairly shook me until some semblance of structure came back to my bones and I managed to stand. The tower block was gone.
"What's happening to me?" I managed.
"You brought us here," he told me, his voice barely above a whisper. "Do you have something to do here?"
And right then I knew. I knew what day it was.
I moved at a sort of zombie-sprint into the main building. The receptionist greeted me by name. I didn't notice. Two of the nurses tried to stop me and ask me what was wrong. I left them behind in my jinking run, my single-minded head-down arms-pumping stairs-vaulting sprint through the corridors of the hospital until it was the right ward, the right bed-
"Suze?"
She opened her eyes. "Thought you were...in America?" she rasped. It hurt her so just to speak, but she smiled through it, and I could feel my heart welling with awe for this woman.
I am, Suze. And I won't be back for another three days, thanks to 9/11. And by that time...
"I got here."
She smiled. "They're worried about me."
"I know."
"Are they right?"
I should have lied. Somehow, I couldn't. "You're going to die today," I said, just all at once like that, and by the end of the sentence I was kneeling by her, my world blurring and swimming as the tears flowed freely down my face and I kissed her, over and over and over.
She should have told me I was crazy, been angry with me. Somehow, she knew.
Her bedside phone rang. She answered it, and told the me on the other end of the line calling from America that she was fine and she would see me in a few days and that I shouldn't worry about her because she would be all right and to stop apologising, how was I to know this would happen, that she should take a turn for the worse now? It took her about five minutes to complete this simple, lie-filled conversation because of the pain she was in.
She replaced the phone in its cradle. "How did you do this?"
"Maybe I'm dreaming," I replied. "Maybe this is all a dream on the way down, before the lights go out. Maybe this is the last moment, stretched out as long as possible, my brain cutting loose before..."
Her hand shot out and grabbed my wrist with amazing strength. She yanked me toward her, and I was so amazed I stared down at her and at her fierce eyes blazing up at me as they'd done down the years and I knew this was real. Impossible, but real.
"Listen to me," she said, and even her voice seemed strong again in that moment, "you dare do anything to yourself after I'm gone and I swear, I will come back and I will..."
She trailed off, lost for an appropriate end to the threat under the circumstances. We held each other's gaze for a moment before a laugh escaped her lips, and mine a second later.
In the next four hours, she slipped away from me. I held her as she grew quiet. When she was gone, I kissed her once on the forehead and told her that I loved her and I always would.
The phone rang.
I picked it up.
"She's gone," I told myself. "Suze is gone."
I didn't believe me. Eventually, I convinced myself. I heard the despair in my voice, the shattering emptiness, the sucking void...and I told myself, I told myself that yes, that life is gigantically unfair and that people dying, angels like Suze, passing from us is the biggest tragedy of all. But I told myself that Suze loved me more than I could ever be loved by anyone, and that we had thirteen years of happiness before the cancer hit, and that as she left this world she was content to have loved me, to have been loved by me. And I told myself that in the end, that's all any of us can hope for.
I became aware that he was standing there, by the bedside. I saw tears in his eyes.
"Thank you," I said.
He nodded, once.
I faded to nothingness. There would be no ledge in my future.
He hung the phone up, and walked away.
THE END