It’s Not The Height But The Drop Which Is Terrible

Four months after leaving the psychiatric ward I found myself 300 feet up on the top of a Belgian cooling tower holding an empty bottle of anti-depressants.

If you’ve never found yourself on the ledge of a cooling tower, it’s about the width of a human body, doesn’t sway as much as a single stack chimney and yields the most beguiling view of its beautiful parabolic flanks. The slopes slide away effortlessly to the cooling pools from which it draws its name.

A lot of factors had brought me to this point. Mostly poor choices, bad influences, weak will.

Mostly, however, if was the Hull-Zeebrugge ferry.

A few months earlier, I’d finally been deemed no longer a danger to myself or others. I was deemed as normal as every dysfunctional person wandering the streets. Packed off with a prescription for Temazepam for sleep and Dothiepin anti-depressants, I was sent home with my completed forms for sickness benefit to hand in at the dole office.

I should have been delighted.

I was anything but. My life had hit the bumpers. One day rolled into the next, bleak as its forebear, and as dark as the winter months in the Teesdale hills. In an age before social media, letters dropped in from uni friends who had travelled the world, helped out in kibbutzes or started careers.FOMO was real. Occasionally, some even asked ‘What I was up to these days?’ I was in no fit state to write back.

The letters asking how I was eventually dried up.

The dull nothingness of depression was truly starting to kick in. Sleep was as elusive as ever with my parents taking turns to ferry me around in the back seat of the car, its motion the only thing that could generate the semblance of sleep. Perhaps it was a throwback to childhood, long trips back and forth to Ireland, asleep.

Anxiety was a new feature in my life now, too. I was unsure of anything and everything. Using the microwave, catching the bus, all were near impossible. I’d start many things, unable to finish. Anything I attempted was glued up in self-doubt, and shame.

The community nurse booked me in to a support group called Toc H. Originally founded after the First World War for soldiers with shell shock, the group met every week in the nearby market town of Barnard Castle where middle-aged folk, mostly men, talked about being depressed.

It was depressing. I went only once more.

For the first time in my life I had no plan. No targets. No vision of how things should be. It was bleak.

It was my father who broke the spell. His solution to most things was work. And if work didn’t work, you obviously weren’t working hard enough.

Too poor? Work.

Unfit? Work.

No confidence? Work.

Severe depression and anxiety with a risk of self-harm? Go to another country with strangers and work as a steeplejack in a deadly environment at height.

It’s not what my psychiatrist was likely to prescribe but few things focus the mind more clearly that your imminent death.

And so instead of Toc H, I was in Mol, Belgium, with two lads from Middlesbrough and an Irish foreman. We were to water wash the inside of the town’s power station’s cooling towers, grind out the bad concrete and seal it up.

Steeplejacks don’t really give too much of a fuck about mental health. The job involves not falling to your death seven days a week for three weeks and then going home for a week off. In between not falling to your death, you drink.

For younger readers, British pubs weren’t always open all day with late night extensions and shit DJs? They shut. But in 1990, Belgian pubs didn’t. This was a revelation to steeplejacks. Usually, the bar staff and the last orders bell made sure they were back in their digs for the next day’s shift. Didn’t happen in Belgium.

When we began drinking, we only knew it was time to leave when the local bar began serving soup. This meant is was about 6am. This was handy, because that was also the time we were due on site.

The work was physically exhausting. I did most of the ‘dogging’ and unlike Stan Collymore’s lay-by excursions, was all the most menial of physical tasks. For one week I did nothing all day but carry lead weights from the ground stores up a flight of stairs on the outside of the cooling towers to an internal gantry. I had forearms that made Popeye question the efficacy of spinach.

Too unfit? Work? Check.

I was mercilessly ribbed by the steeplejacks. I was sent to the stores for ‘a long stand’ — I got one, an hour later; I was sent for striped paint — what colour?; I was sent for a rubber hammer — we don’t want to make any sparks. They shat in my tea when I was up the top of the cooling tower, they stole pictures of my girlfriend and masturbated to them, they cheated at cribbage which we played relentlessly in the hut and stole my wages.

I’d been around steeplejacks my entire life so this level of bullying was them just being coy, as far as I was concerned. I was son of the boss after all. What you have to understand about men who work in dangerous conditions is a) humour is bleak and black and b) site bullying like this is just probing for weakness. The logic is straightforward: if you can’t take a few ribs, how can we trust you to keep your shit together when it goes wrong at height — which it does, and has for me on other jobs.

I felt I belonged for the first time in a long while.

No confidence? Work? Check.

We always got paid on Thursday and for a bunch of abuse-hurling drunks, this was a day of extraordinary discipline. The foreman would hand out our wages in tiny brown envelopes fat with cash, and tax-free at that. Firstly, we would all hand over our dig money without question, then the majority of the cash was given back to the foreman to be sent back home to wives, girlfriends or mothers. All that was left was money for betting, drinking and for site grub — usually ham and cheese sarnies or chips and mayo, this being Belgium.

Too poor? Work? Check.

One day one of the lads caught me taking my meds.

‘What the fuck are those, Gaz?’

‘Oh, they’re for my depression.’

‘What? You’re fucking mental? No wonder you’re working here.’ Davy called out to Jason, the other ‘jack. ‘Ow, Jason, Gazza’s a nutter.’

‘So what’s new?’ Was the reply. Pure Boro.

And that was that. We were running late and I popped the bottle in my overalls.

That same day we had to shift the wires for the cradles that we had built and dangled inside the inside of the cooling towers. The foreman had me up the top and he’d left his scaffold spanner near one of the cable pads. I had to go and get it in case it fell. It could kill someone if it fell.

I climbed out of the cradle and padded out onto the lip of the cooling tower’s edge. It was fairly windy and a gust caught me unawares as I had been shielded from below. I fell to my knees immediately, trembling. I had nearly gone over the edge.

‘Stop fucking about and get the spanner, ye eejit.’

‘It’s not here, you daft twat,’ I said. ‘You must be getting old, Ali.’

‘No, not here. Over there,’ he said pointing to the other side of the cooling tower — the opposite cradle saddle.

Standing up and walking may sound daft when you’re 300 ft up with no harness but it is actually easier than shuffling on your knees. I gingerly stood up keeping my hands gripping the edge until the last possible moment.

‘Fer fuck’s sake, man. Gerron with it,’ grumbled Ali.

And so I walked around the top, looking at the spanner getting closer and closer and avoiding looking down and the inviting slide. After initial paralysis, the adrenalin was pumping through my body making my feet itchy and light-feeling. It was as easy as walking down the High Street, I felt exhiliration, almost immortal.

I picked up the scaffold spanner with its special swivel head and dropped it in my overalls pocket. I heard a crack. I took it back out and turned the pocket inside out to see what it was and a stream of pills dribbled out. The wind took most of them but some bounced down the smooth concrete shell, racing towards the pools below. I watched them tumble one by one until I could see them no more.

I read the label: not to be taken with alcohol.

Ali shouted over: ‘What’s wrong with ya, ya daft dink?’ In keeping with tradition, they never repeated the same invective twice.

‘Nothing, Ali.’ I shouted back.

‘Nothing at all.’