Failure is more than an option

Martin McNeil had failed at pretty much everything he had tried and right now he was busy failing at suicide. From the ground it had seemed a relatively simple endeavour: go to the top floor of the car park, walk to the edge, jump, the end. Now he stood uneasily beside the edge, swaying slightly with the springtime breeze and the unsteady legs of a man quavering over his destiny. As the waves of vertigo tickled at his knees, he contemplated the stupidity of a man with a fear of heights choosing this particularly height-centric means of despatching oneself. It was never going to have worked was it?

Dickhead.

He braved a glance down the side of the building to the concrete path below. Seven floors of parking, two floors of offices, one of retail and a rapid terminal deceleration followed by his body slowly returning to ambient temperature. He watched a couple walking hand-in-hand below him. They looked happy. They looked like they’d succeeded. They looked like … a pair of complete bastards.

His stomach contents took a brief trip halfway up to his throat before he choked them back down with a determined grunt. Was it the vertigo or the happy couple that made him almost spray his half-digested lunch over the pedestrians below? A little of A, a little of B.

He took a step back, away from the edge. No, this was never going to work. He’d just have to accept that he was going to fail at ending his own life just as he’d failed at having a life in the first place. After all, this wasn’t his first attempt at bringing it all to an early conclusion. At least this time he hadn’t had the embarrassment of being helped up from the tracks after trying to throw himself in front of a train just as it crossed a set of points and raced passed him on the adjacent track. Martin shuddered at the memory.

There was just one thing for it. One thing that would satisfactorily finish off another day of failing to finish himself off. An outrageous, disgraceful, “my God my liver is screaming”, possibly life-endangering amount of beer. Drunkenness was the only time when Martin was happy. At least, he was happy for a while. Pints one and two were just for warming up, relaxing the muscles, blurring the edges of the day’s hardships. Pints three to five were the happy pints. Life was no longer a struggle. All was good with the world. Loud 90s Britpop was played, sung along with in a voice once described by his primary teacher as “like listening to an angel, being strangled with barbed wire”.

By pint six he was usually losing his grip on what passed for sanity in his world. Out would come the Spice Girls CDs, early noughties trance and whatever the hell they called this crap they play on the radio these days – not like the good old days of the last millennium.

Pint seven was the maudlin malt. Euphoria rapidly melted away into dysphoria. Now the music triggered memories of woe: rejections, failure, loneliness. The only way to push past this point was to down pint number eight, or nine or ten and let his brain slowly float away on a river of fermented hops and into the land of intoxicated unconsciousness.

Yes, Martin had a plan for the rest of the evening. A trip to the offy, load up the car with a case of lager and head home to get hammered.

The car.

Ah, he thought. He’d driven here with the expectation of it being a one way trip – or at least one way under automotive locomotion and one way under the force of gravity. As such he hadn’t given much thought to getting out through the barrier again and had screwed up the ticket from the entry machine and carelessly chucked it back towards where it had popped out from.

He peered at the parking tariff notice, berating himself for not having brought his reading glasses – again there hadn’t seemed much point. “Lost tickets : £25” he made out.

“Twenty-five quid! Bugger that!” he blurted out loud before catching himself and looking around to make sure there wasn’t anyone around to hear his outburst. The incident with the easily-offended young mother and her three brats still made his innards gyrate with embarrassment.

“Now then”, he muttered to himself. “There must be a logical way to get out of this car park without spending two and a half tenners”.

Logic was Martin’s one redeeming quality. He was nothing if he wasn’t logical. He might be foolish, clumsy, inept, pointless, unbelievably shit at everything else but logic was his gift. It was his instrument, his repertoire, his back catalogue, his difficult second album, his largely misunderstood flirtation with experimental jazz and his triumphant homecoming gig.

And so it was that ten minutes later Martin found himself walking up to the car park’s entry barrier attempting to impersonate a Vauxhall Corsa.