this short story is called “mary poppins”

I was sure the entire time I waited in the elevator listening to the tinny shitty music. It was Calvin Harris inviting me to dance with him, but I did not want to. I wanted to kill myself. I hoped he would understand. And then when I got to the top floor and had to climb up the big reverberating scary stairs to the roof access door it seemed appropriately ominous. My footsteps echoed and I felt alone and I was sure.

I had a brief moment of doubt when I put my first foot off of the edge. Whoa! I said. I felt giddy and silly and weirdly happy. It was intoxicating being there in the wind, wondering if the tiny dotty little people on the ground could see me and if I was going to land on somebody attractive or not. I hoped so. Killing an attractive person by being a projectile seemed exactly the kind of thing that would appeal to me. In a way it was a shame I was too high up to tell. I wondered if I could get away with a shorter building. I realised I was procrastinating from my first definitive action in years. I had had enough of that. It was like a lifestyle choice, the way I pursued it.

I decided that walking off was silly and I needed to jump with both feet. But I felt stupid so I backed up to the roof access door first, so I could get a run up. I wondered if I was going to flail my limbs about as I fell. I’d feel foolish then.

I was doing it again.

“Fuck it!” I said, like I had taught myself to do when my nonsense was interrupting something that made sense. I sprinted and jumped.

Falling seemed to take a very long time. The ground was rushing up towards me like an angry, disappointed, hurt face. The wind was inflating my puffy grey jacket that I had never liked but been bought for Christmas. I wished I had worn something else. I would be dead in, well, soon, and strangers would think that I was just a man in an ugly jacket. They would probably use it to identify me. I didn’t like the idea of that.

It had been quite fun, toying with the idea, wondering about suicide, getting bored of collecting pills and instead trying to aim my body at the long haired blonde woman I dimly registered, but hitting the ground seemed

well I didn’t want to, anyway.

I had an idea. It wasn’t a very good idea. I felt silly for having it. I didn’t want to die with this idea as the last one in my head in case it leaked onto the ground when I made impact and some CSI type of character in the future realised it.

My father was a scientist. I know what he’d do with an idea. He’d test it. That’s what he did. He tested his relationships with people, too. Sometimes they broke. I didn’t know why, but I wanted him to be proud of me. Or maybe I wanted to play a sick joke on him. Either way, he’d feel something when the CSI guys told him my last thoughts.

I was either going to hit the ground, or I was going to learn to fly very quickly. Happy thoughts, like Mary Poppins said.

I had tried this before when I was a child, watching the film. I thought of the happiest things I could think of, of ice cream and of my teddy-koala-bear and of cuddling my mum. I shut my eyes really tight and wished and when I opened them I was still on the sofa. Maybe that’s where it started to go wrong. But I didn’t need to fly so much, then. Maybe Mary was testing my faith and now, I would be able to do it.

Anyway. Happy thoughts. Happy thoughts can make you fly! I do believe in fairies! I don’t have a better idea! I shut my eyes tightly and realised how much the wind had been hurting them. I thought about the girl I had dated twice before I met my ex-girlfriend. I thought about when we had kissed and how exciting that was and all the possibilities and how my head crackled and fizzed the entire way home. I thought about my niece drawing that picture of me in my flat with my telescope and my spider plants, with my big crayon eyebrows and a red biro smile. I thought about the time I helped the old woman who dropped her purse and how proud it made me and her big, toothless smile. I thought I should have thought about all this earlier.

I opened my eyes and I knew I was further down. The ground seemed huge and sad, like the lonely whale that swam in the Thames.

Supercalafragalisticexpealadocious. Even though the sound of it is something quite atrocious. Nothing. If anything I was falling faster. Maybe I needed an umbrella. I tried flapping my arms. I tried to think of the happiest I had ever been and it seemed very far away. I suppose most suicides can say that, really.

I decided not to give up. I shut my eyes tightly again and thought about my friend Brian. He had come back from Costa Rica or somewhere like that, somewhere that spoke Spanish and was poor. He had been doing missionary work. We met in a Starbucks after not seeing each other for two, maybe three years and drank coffee brewed by Ethiopians in probably not dissimilar conditions. I had felt warmth in my belly and warmth in my heart and inspiration as he told me about building a pump and a well for the villagers. He helped build a church as well, but I didn’t like the evangelist undertone, so I didn’t think about that. He described sunrise over the Atlantic, or the Pacific, whichever, the ocean. He was tanned and bright behind the eyes and he said I could come and help, and I had said no because I had just got an internship at a solicitor’s firm and that seemed important for some r

I heard a crack and I felt myself stop moving and for a moment I thought it had worked.