The ship is white. He doesn’t know whether it was always like that or it has been painted but it makes him think of his mother and their home and selling their house and how you have to neutralise in order to appeal to a larger market and make it easier to sell. But he still can’t remember the last thing he said to her.

Probably goodbye.

He hopes it was I love you.

He hopes she believed him.

Passing a red phone box, he recalls how his father asked him to send back a photo standing next to one. Get a picture with one of those double-decker buses, too, he asked enthusiastically. Of course, this witness obliged and emailed digital copies across the Atlantic. But he can’t recollect his father’s response. Or the message he sent with them.

He has forgotten his gratitude.

The world has dulled.

This is his grey mile.

He walks by another ship turned into a restaurant turned into a themed Mexican bar turned into a nightclub turned into an insult. The life preserver has been taken from its housing on the wall outside.

From this point on he cannot be saved.

63

235 – NOBODY

One-hundred and eleven steps back from the spot that he will leap from he is blinded by the brightness that edges itself above the tower of the Tate Modern, and it almost snaps him out of the frame of mind to jump and die.

But it doesn’t.

He has no choice.

Before he walks up the hill to the mark where his vision is impaired by sunlight rising high above the gallery, a City of London policeman walks past him, swinging a white motorcycle helmet at his side dejectedly, his steps devoid of bounce, his heart omitting passion, his mind elsewhere.

Nothing he can do.

Oh well.

Thanks for not trying.

One minute behind the ignorant, uncaring policeman, this Nobody is stood outside the City of London School watching the gaggle of children emerging from the double doors in their white T-shirts and shorts, embarking on a riverside run in the direction from which he just came. They smile at one another and jostle for position, energised before their daily prescribed session of physical activity.

Unaffected.

Unaware of the things that this nobody witness has seen.

Uncomplicated.

Prior to wrenching his vertebrae and crushing his oesophagus, before the apathetic helmet-swinger. Behind the carefree, uncorrupted school kids, he was counting lampposts. Nine of them. Each offering an opportunity to turn back. To save two lives.

At lamppost nine he is yet to encounter the policeman who could stop him, search him, find a rather long length of rope in his backpack with a noose at either end, locate the suicide note in the zipped pocket.

Make it seem like his job actually means something.