LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter One

       20 February

      It seemed unlikely that there would be enough of his body intact to reuse after the fall, but in one final act of optimism, Stephen Berry left his organ donor card pinned beneath his mobile, keys and wallet at the side of the road. The impact of the fall, even onto water, would be devastating. He would suffer crushing injuries, probable brain damage, and if the force of his body hitting the water didn’t kill him, the temperature would take care of it in a matter of seconds.

      He’d done his research. After tumbling from the Queensferry Crossing into the River Forth, the breath would be knocked from his body, the sudden chill would make him gasp and he’d take in lungfuls of water before he had time to resurface. Death, if not instantaneous, would certainly be fast. Nothing to be scared of, he told himself. Fear was only anticipatory. In the moment, his brain would serve him a huge dose of mental opiate. Should he survive the drop, he’d have no memory of it.

      The most dramatic of graves, millions of tons of water rushed beneath him, daring him to join it. He only had a matter of a few minutes to get it done and the truth was that he should have begun climbing already. Having purchased special gloves and boots to allow him to scale the inverted anti-suicide fencing, there was no excuse for his ambivalence.

      When he’d called the taxi to his home address, he’d been ready to get on with it. The poor cabbie had already done an eight-hour shift and was on his way home. Stephen had hated pointing the carving knife towards his own jugular and threatening to cut, thereby forcing the driver to pull the car over on the bridge – a strictly no-pedestrians zone – but had been unable to think of a less abusive plan. At least he hadn’t threatened the driver with it. He’d said sorry a dozen times before the driver had brought the vehicle to a halt, not that an apology would make up for the trauma of seeing a blade flashing in the rear-view mirror.

      He climbed the easy vertical railings, then got a grip on the sharp layers of metal intended to ensure no one made it from one side to the other. It hurt a little, but he was in good shape. Better physically than mentally, that much was obvious. An hour a day at the gym meant he was well toned. A jog twice a week kept his cardio levels high. To look at him, you’d have no idea about the bipolar disorder he was suffering. It would all come out during the investigation into his death. His long flirtation with drugs designed to even out his moods. Periods when he’d gone off his medication against the advice of one doctor after another. Attempts at counselling that only made him feel weaker and more pathetic than his illness already did. Relationships that couldn’t withstand the bluster of his stormy nature. Jobs that hadn’t lasted as long as they should have when some days he simply couldn’t face the concept of shifting from his bed.

      The coroner would assume he was in the middle of one of his downward episodes. There would be some regret that there was no more effective treatment available, or that he hadn’t felt able to reach out to a friend and ask for help. A small-type headline buried deep within a local newspaper would repeat that tired old truth that there wasn’t enough care in the community. While he’d decided against leaving a note to explain his death, he wished briefly that he could have dealt with that ridiculous fallacy. No amount of care could have prevented him from getting to where he was today. He’d felt his premature death tugging at him, like a chain around his waist, since he was fifteen years old. He’d spent the next sixteen years fighting it, but today he’d become the postscript in his own story.

      The girlfriend from whom he’d tried so carefully to hide his disorder had finally figured out that he was a worthless piece of shit who’d drag her down for the rest of her life if she stayed with him. There had been a lengthy session of me-not-you bullshit, which he could have done without, followed by an excruciatingly long packing period. It wasn’t like in the films, where one of you simply monologued for a while then slammed a door and was mystically gone forever.

      He and Rosa had been living together for a year and it was amazing how complex the structure of intertwined lives could get in twelve short months. Pots and pans, pictures, ornaments, books, extension cables, for fuck’s sake. They’d argued over who’d bought the extension cable by their bed. Not – ridiculously – over who’d spent the money on it, but out of fairness, trying to remember the event because she didn’t suddenly want to realise she’d taken something she had no right to. Bitch. Even at the fucking end she couldn’t set him free by being selfish and unjust. She was a good person. How annoying was that? She was such a good person that the fault, as ever, lay with him. His moods, his needs, his fractured, ruptured psyche.

      A passing car issued a long beep and someone shouted from a window. The wind swallowed the words, which pleased him. There were times when the rest of the human race just had to butt out and the sixty seconds prior to committing suicide was one of them. He took another upwards step, jolting with the sudden clarity of the memory of buying the extension cable for Rosa when he’d bought her a new hairdryer. It had been obvious the cable would never reach the dressing table and around the back, so he’d added it to the Christmas list as a functional extra.

      ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ he muttered. It was still plugged into the wall. A stupid remnant of a good stretch when he’d been able to be thoughtful, living outside the trappings of his own mind for four months without interruption. Bliss. For a second he considered phoning Rosa to remind her of the extension cord’s history. She could reclaim it when the flat was emptied out. Only then he’d have to explain where he was, and what he was doing, and she might talk him out of it. Rosa would be the only person who could. Too late, he thought. It was just an extension cable, after all. His snake of a brain had just chosen the moment to try to turn it into a lifeline instead.

      Other cars beeped their horns as he took the final step up and over the railing. He stood, wobbling in the fierce breeze. Vehicles halted, forming an unofficial barrier. Doors slammed. Stephen turned around slowly. An arc of people had formed several metres away from him. He wasn’t sure if the distance was because they thought he might grab one of them and take them with him, or for fear that approaching closer might make him jump all the sooner.

      In the end, one man pushed between two onlookers, hands in his pockets, casual as you like, and wandered over to stand below his position on the fencing.

      ‘Are you okay for me to stand here and talk to you?’ he asked.

      ‘Not much point,’ Stephen muttered. ‘You should probably back up a bit.’

      ‘Why?’ the man asked.

      ‘I’m going to jump and I don’t want you to feel responsible. No one else needs to be involved.’

      ‘That’s really thoughtful of you …’ The man left the sentence hanging. ‘That’s the part where you fill in with your name,’

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