Don't Jump I'll Miss Celebrity Squares.

Don’t Jump – I’ll Miss Celebrity Squares

I was P.C. Mike Edwards of Cheshire Police, Runcorn. If your girlfriend ever asks you the old Les Dawson line to ‘kiss her where it smells’ then Runcorn really is the place to take Her. Runcorn is a particularly smelly place to live. Home of I.C.I. and a gold-hooped plague of pram-faced single mums. Most importantly for my epitaph, it is also home to the fabulous Runcorn suspension bridge. Bessie I call her, big boned, big lass, big old lump of iron ass. A feat of engineering performed in an age when half the globe was empire red, by a serious looking bloke in a stove pipe hat.
Much to the chagrin of myself, it is now a Mecca for those with suicidal tendencies racing through their muddled minds. Bessie is especially attractive to every depressed housewife, failed businessman and disgraced clergyman this side of the M53.
Bessie was built by hard men from Liverpool when we British exported our expertise around the world. A time when life was cheap and health and safety non existent. To the credit of those nutters in the big hats, Bessie doesn’t wobble when you walk across her, unlike that millennium effort in London. No Sir, solid is Bessie, solid as 80's funksters Ashford and Simpson.
I’ve had three call outs to her already this month making todays the fourth. It was April, spring had sprung, a season of supposedly new life, when a young mans thoughts turned to love and the girl next door with the jumper full of promise. April was usually quiet. I’d always get a run of leapers around Christmas time, you know when people got to see beyond the tinsel and reflect on how painful life really is. But I think that the Christmas day ritual of the bone achingly tedious Billy Smarts Circus had a lot to do with it. I hadn’t seen a busier April since they brought out the song from ‘Mash’ advising that suicide was painless. Attempted suicide isn’t painless, I can vouch for that. I’ve seen too many poor broken sods carried into ambulances screaming in agony for their mums.

I’d just dropped a Findus Cod in parsley sauce into a pan of boiling water when the call came. It was a shame, I like a nice bit of processed fish that has been moulded untidily into a oblongy sort of shape. Reminds me of happier times, when I didn’t have to pay for a woman to release my jollies. When I could put a smile on a woman’s face with my young libido. A time before the books in brown paper bags and the relentless search on the internet 'sluts' who were only a bus ride away.
So, as duty called, it was off with the gas and on with the coat. When I got there they had already closed the roads both sides of the bridge and a couple of hundred stranded drivers sat still, all with faces like smacked northern arses. Some were out of their cars and peered up to the top of the bridge in the vain hope of communicating some sort of ‘get down you fucker’ message. Some sat in sheep like tolerance and mused about divorce, deadlines and gorgeous Australian soap stars with big eyes.
I was met by Wingnut from Traffic. I swear you would be able to get Sky on those lugs of his if you plugged him in, the slight wind had given his ears a comedy tip of red, he looked like a car-boot gnome. He told me the jumper was a male, they nearly always were, if you ask me us men tend to bottle things up, women in my shite opinion weep too quickly.They tend to let it out straight away, that’s why you always see them coming out of toilets dabbing their eyes with hankies. Some don’t even bother going to the toilets. I had a young WPC with me who’d cry at the slightest of things. All it took was for a suspect to give some bullshit hard luck tale and she end up looking like Alice Cooper chopping onions.
So what we had was a bloke up top, the wind off the Mersey in his hair and a spectacular leap to death on his mind. Wingnut had got halfway up and the self preservation gene kicked in. Which wasn’t surprising, as a good gust behind those lugs and he’d have ended up in St Helens. Like Mary Poppins only with thicker wrists and sans umbrella. I was used to heights, they didn’t bother me. I’d been to the top of Bessie in all weathers. I preferred summer obviously, one afternoon in July I spent a glorious couple of hours with a failed businessman, spotting red Mondeos and laughing about Basil Brush. I was quite disappointed when he said he wanted to come down.

I climbed onto the steel walkway and proceeded to make my way the 300ft up to the top. As I got close to the jumper, the thick ginger hair and the round shoulders looked familiar. It couldn’t be. It was. ‘Ginner is that you?’ I asked siiting down next to him. Ginner was a mate all through school and for a couple of years after, until he left our gang to become a priest with The Salesians Of John Bosco.
Ginner looked at me. “Edwards?” He squinted.
“Christ on A Raliegh Chopper, Mary Magdelene in a Tiumph Herald, what’s a man of God like you doing in an ungodly place like this?”
He had obviously fulfilled his ambition to spend the rest of his life listening to other peoples sins and meating out confessional punishment as he was in the regulation black and his dog collar was stuffed untidily into his top pocket.
Ginner stood up in a ‘I’m going to jump now’ sort of way.
“Sit down you rum bugger.”
He took another step.
“Listen rusty nut sit down or I’ll give you a slap.”
I slipped into fourth form bully mode. It worked. Ginner sat down.
“Let me guess I said, you’ve been getting drunk and buying pictures of naked girlfriends on ebay, using the Sunday takings out of the wooden collection bowls
Ginner shook his head and spoke a solemn. “I wish.”
I’d tried this route first after his scam with the school tuck shop money in year two. Nothing was ever proven but I was privy to the existence of the Kwik Save bag full of copper he kept buried underneath the B and Q ‘pissing cherub fountain’ badly cast in concrete in his parents back garden.
“A little trouble with Choir boys?” I fished.
Ginner sneared at me. “What Do you take me for?”
I’d only suggested this because I vaguely remember he backed his Geography text book with a picture of Liberace and refused one day, at the bus stop to take his turn to spit in the face of the boy from St Martins private school who spoke like Danny La Rue.
“Woman trouble?” I offered, it was usually one of four things this being the third and only remaining possibility, as the fourth was being a failed businessman and assumed any business with God as the Managing Director couldn’t really fail.

Ginner nodded. Like the predictable plot in an episode of `cracker,it began to take shape. Priest falls for pretty member of congregation. Home-made scones long chats, light floaty summer dresses and flashes of olive inner thighs and ever so soft white knickers.
“Is she married?” I asked. Ginner shook his head.
“No, but I am.”
‘What,’ I thought and I never even got an invite to the reception.
“Married to God,” Ginner continued. I thought it was nuns that were married to God as the catholic church didn’t approve of homosexual marriages, but I decided not to contest this point as I was beginning to make progress.
“What’s her name?” Ginner stood up.
“Steady on.”
“ Don’t worry, I’m just getting you a photograph.” He passed me a picture of what looked like a summer camp. Two girls with that gawky thirteen year-old look – with big heads full of teeth, stood each side of a dowdy woman in something waterproof and green by Peter Storm, the outfit finished off by muddy leggings and hiking boots.
“Very nice,” I said, well what else could I say, ‘you’re three foot away from ending it all for a woman that looked like no fun whatsoever?’ My initial thoughts of summer dresses, smooth olive inner thighs with ever so soft white knickers, turned to polyester trousers, orange peel legs and pink ‘kidney warmers’.
“Give me a good reason then?” Ginner stood up. “Good enough not to jump right now.”
“I’ll miss Celebrity Squares.” I said automatically, it was the first thing that came into my head. Ginner sat down.
“What, you like it too?”
‘Yeeees’ I thought. I’d done it, the first rule when trying to get through
to a ‘jumper’ was to establish a common thread of interest and the eighties game show where minor ‘celebrities’ got a chance to be funny and revive their flagging
careers with a couple of witty remarks, seemed to have done the trick.
“Who do you think was the best?” I asked.
“Bernie Clifton, he replied without hesitation. I used to think he was no more than a second rate holiday camp entertainer, stuck forever with that bloody ostrich, but the answers to those questions were so funny, he was a real talent.”
I agreed, not because I thought the said Mr Clifton was the best, oh no, I felt that that honour should go to Ted Robbins, famous for being the fat unfunny brother of Kate Robbins, who was famous for being something to do with The Beatles, another one of Liverpool’s many McCartney cousins, who all called Paul ‘our kid’ and where shite at whatever they turned their greedy hands to.
We mused about it for a while then Ginner stood up. He took a deep breath.... “From Norwich... it’s the quiz of the week!” I stood up too and we both began to dance in a sort of twist like fashion. Like a pair of embarrassing wedding uncles. A twist but not a chubby checker and the fat boys twist, just a two pissed uncles trying to dance with a belly full of chicken legs and Cava.
After we’d forgotten the rest of the tune, we both sat back down.
“What’s he like to work for then, this God fella?”
Ginner smiled.
“Alright, no fear of the salary cheque ever bouncing and if you want a word with the top man there’s no need to make an appointment you just drop to your knees and open your mouth.”
“A bit like Monica Lewinsky eh ?” I joked.
Ginner looked at me like he did that day when we were in the fourth form together and I had carefully with a pen knife from Southport, bored a hole through the outside wall of the girls changing rooms, giving us a sneaky peep hole into heaven.
I turned to him that afternoon and invited his eye to partake “Look Ginner I grinned... Beaver!” it was that same look, the look of disappointment.
“You’ve always been the same haven’t you Edwards?” he said. “Always the same beast.”
“Steady on Ginner, I protested, I’m hardly a beast! We were thirteen remember, it wasn’t as if I was doing a Gary Glitter, it’s alright to look at little titties and arses if you’ve only got a little arse yourself.”
“Really?” his eyes rolled and looked dark and black.
“Beast” he repeated. He turned to me in a most unpriest like manner.
“Tell me about the books Edwards? Those disgusting, degrading books ,filth -ridden books filled to the frothy brim with vacant staring teenage girls. Lost daughters of good people, now full of drugs and unhappiness?”
I didn’t know which was worse the way Ginner seemed to be looking into my soul or the fact that he knew I had been sleeping on a tilt above a sticky pile of the very same teenage porn, sodden with my DNA and self loathing.
“Your life is shit Edwards.”
“Should a priest say shit?” I asked myself.
“I say it like it is Edwards, shit, like the shit bit of processed Cod you’ve left on the stove, that will now never get to partner with the garden peas and boiled Jersey Royals it deserves.
This was getting surreal as the thing was he spoke an uncomfortable truth, my life was shit, living alone in a house with no soul was shit, being a Policeman with everyone hating you apart from people over fifty was shit, wanking off to those ghoulish pictures of teenage girls in bitty Marks and Spencers knickers smiling heroin smiles was shit. My relationship with my family was shit. My colleagues, who had never invited me out for an after work drink thought I was a sad shit. Even my cat thought I was shit.
Ginners eyes where a solid black now, he held out a hoof, it seemed natural to take it.
“I’ve come for you Edwards, it’s time.”
The wind swung me around and as we fell, I saw Ginner smirking. The wind parted at the forehead his ginger wire wool hair that would make Vidal Sasoon weep into his pile of money, seven seconds from my death, the last question of my miserable life was not, is there a God, but ‘were they really horns?’

The End.