The Suicide Club (18 page)

We opened our letters and, as we did so, Freddy spoke again.

‘I think we should all enter a pact,' he said.

I now held the sheet of paper gently between the second and third fingers of each hand. It hung in the air and glowed in the light. I could feel that golden bond-rope wrap itself around our souls and scream out of the ether between us; linking us, binding us, encasing us, imprisoning us to each other for ever.

‘I think we should stay together for eternity,' he said, his emotions starting to creep into his throat. ‘We can show our solidarity. The world can stop in space and we'll all get off. We can show everybody that we won't take it any more. We can stop them from holding us, and everyone like us, back.'

I started to unfold the paper and looked at Clare one more time. She looked at me and nodded, smiling. She looked so, so, so sweet I can't even handle thinking about it.

‘What I propose is the founding of a club,' Freddy said. ‘A club that the whole world will know about, but which it can never join.'

His words were so lucid they flowed over me like syrup. All of the others were now staring at their sheets of paper like they were in a trance. I took my friends in, one by one, a turn of the head for each of them. Their faces flickered in the candlelight, each in their own little world. My head spun a little with the vodka and nicotine. I forgot that I was holding the lit cigarette in my left hand and, as I looked at its sulphuric embers and at the smoke washing up, out, twirling, spinning, pirouetting into the sky with the cryptic symbolism that I would never
know
but would always
feel
, I looked upon the opening line of Freddy's paper:
The Official Charter of the Suicide Club
.

LET ME JUST
get something straight. When I signed the Charter, I had no intention whatsoever of killing myself. I don't think any of us did. Not even Craig with his history of mental illness. You see, we all knew that killing yourself has more than one victim – it rips entire families apart. We even had a good laugh about how bitter Freddy sounded in his writing. But in the candlelight, with vodka in our throats, we each took Freddy's pen and scribbled our signatures above our typed-out names on each other's sheets of cream paper.

A lot of people have asked me since whether or not I thought Freddy actually expected us to kill ourselves when he wrote the Charter and I can only answer the question honestly: I don't know. I've thought about it loads but I just can't come up with an answer. I don't know what he was thinking.

The following Monday was my final counselling session before Christmas with the dreadful Sylvia Bowler. Our last few sessions had descended into ridiculousness because I couldn't take her seriously. We had a healthy dislike for each other. As far as I was concerned, the only good thing to have come from these sessions was that nobody in school had actually found out about them.

However, when I went to see Sylvia on that day my mouth almost dropped to the floor. Instead of Sylvia, sat at the head of that big meeting table was a vision of sheer
perfection. There was a woman, or maybe she was girl, of about twenty. I could try to describe her but I don't want to sound clichéd by saying that she had olive skin and perfect features, so I won't. But that was what she looked like. She was amazing. One thing was for certain: I would not want to beat this woman up like I sometimes wanted to do to Sylvia the fat old hag (I'm showing off – I would
never
hit a woman).

‘Hello,' she said. She got up from her chair and went over to the unit at the side of the room where a coffee pot had been added. She poured herself a cup and I saw that her body was amazing as well, and I would not usually say something sexist like that so it must have been excellent.

‘Hi,' I said. ‘Uh, where's Sylvia?'

‘Sylvia's gone.' She didn't say it mysteriously. Her voice was beautiful and I
never
use that word because it's become so passé.

‘Gone where?' I sat down.

‘Would you like some coffee?'

‘Yes please,' I answered.

‘Sylvia told me your parents don't like you drinking coffee.'

‘Yeah.' I paused, looked at her. ‘I didn't really like Sylvia. She was a know-all.'

The new girl went back to her seat.

‘I guess there's not much point talking in depth,' she said. ‘You'll be breaking up for the holidays soon so we can start properly next term, if that's OK with you.'

I was pleased that I was in my last session before Christmas but I was also looking forward to my next one in the new year if it meant that this woman would be my counsellor.

‘What's your name?' I asked.

‘Emma.'

I liked the way she wasn't too friendly with me. No doubt
Sylvia had had a part in that. I used to ridicule her intelligence by researching a psychological trait the day before a session and then pretending to have that thing wrong with me, getting Sylvia to think that she knew what was going on in my head. But then I would explain to her my game. She hated it, I could tell.

‘My mother's name is Emma,' I beamed.

‘Really?'

‘No.'

She laughed. I didn't expect her to laugh because she was an adult and I was still, basically, a child, and adults and children don't operate on the same level because of the idea of respect, you know? Telling jokes like that might have come across as precocious.

‘Can I ask you a question?'

‘Of course you can.' She still wasn't friendly.

‘Sylvia once gave me an orange ball and told me to “peel the orange”. What does that mean?'

Emma smiled. Her whole face changed when she smiled. She was radiant.

‘Why don't you look it up? I hear you're into that.'

Now it was my turn to smile.

‘Do you think I'm going to ask you about your qualifications?' I was sort of seeing how far I could push her. I was flirting with her and must have looked like a complete idiot.

‘Maybe.' I never did find out how many A levels she had, but I knew by the very fact that she refused to answer my question that she had done well and gone to a good university. ‘Now let me ask you a question,' she said.

I sat there and listened.

‘Do you feel that you've got anything out of your sessions with Sylvia?'

I sighed.

‘No,' I said honestly.

‘You don't go in for us social workers then?'

‘Don't say that word.'

‘Social workers?'

‘It's so meaningless. You must know that.'

She just smiled.

‘You know what, Rich? You might find this hard to believe but there are good people in the world who genuinely want to help. I have chosen this career to try and put kids back on the right track. Do you think there's something wrong with that?'

‘I'm not disaffected,' I said right out. ‘I know that there are good people in the world. My all-time hero is Bob Geldof. What he has done is mind-blowing. But for every good person, there's a know-all like Sylvia. There's a difference between the two. She's not a good person. She's a busybody.'

‘Tell me what you want to do with your life.'

‘I want to make cartoons,' I said. I had never told an adult this in my life, not even my parents, mainly because I knew how far-fetched it sounded. Only a handful of my friends knew what I wanted to do. When people asked me, I would say that I wanted to be a vet. But here I was blurting it out.

‘Cartoons?'

‘Yeah. Kids' cartoons. I want to write the scripts. I can't really draw very well, but I can come up with ideas and stuff.' I felt like I was unshackling chains from around my chest as I spoke. ‘And I mean cartoons for kids, not ironical things that can be enjoyed on “two levels”, I mean cartoons
for
kids.' I paused. ‘I want to make a cartoon that parents and kids can enjoy together on
one
level, you know? I want it to be completely innocent.'

She seemed impressed by what I had said because I could feel her warm to me.

‘Have you got any ideas?'

‘I have but I don't like talking about them.'

‘You can tell me.'

‘No,' I said. ‘I'm not embarrassed – I just haven't fully formulated what's in my head. If I told you about my ideas, they would sound terrible because they're all over the place. When I write everything down in an order, I'll be able to tell you.'

‘I look forward to that.'

I paused and leaned forward on to the table. I had to tell her something important. And when I said it, I
meant
it.

‘Emma. I didn't mean for any harm to come to the falcon.' An image of Freddy flashed in my head, his face all aglow in candlelight. He was signing the Suicide Club Charter. Whoa! That felt . . . sinister.

Emma was smiling at me.

‘I think I know that,' she said.

I LEFT THE
counselling room feeling a little better. At lunch, I sat with Freddy and Matthew. Freddy, I remember it well, was eating a plate of salad and fish. He was probably the only boy in the school who wasn't gay and ate salad.

‘So,' I said. ‘The Suicide Club.'

Freddy pushed a lettuce leaf into his mouth, kept looking at the table, and nodded.

We sat in silence as he ate. When he finished he picked up his glass of apple juice and took a swig.

‘Yup,' he said.

At the doors to the dinner hall I saw Clare waft in with some of her old friends. She had her fringe clipped up above her head with a clip that had a butterfly on it.

‘Jesus, why does she still hang around with those?' said Matthew bitterly.

Freddy and I stopped chewing.

‘Did those words just come out of your mouth?' I said.

‘They're so vacuous.'

‘Whoa, Matthew,' I said. ‘Easy.' I was shocked.

‘What? They are,' he protested unapologetically.

I agreed with him, I hated Clare's friends, but it was still unexpected coming from Matthew.

‘Yeah, but . . . don't be so bitter.'

‘I'm not being bitter,' he laughed. ‘They're a bunch of dicks.'

‘They're OK,' said Freddy, popping a piece of tomato into his mouth.

‘This coming from you,' Matthew snorted. ‘The founding forefather of the Suicide Club. The hater of mediocrity.'

‘I don't hate mediocrity,' answered Freddy. ‘The masses might be deluded, but so what? They've still got to live. They've got to go to their jobs.'

We all laughed cynically, which was unlike us. This whole conversation was unlike us. We were supposed to be nice kids, not these monsters sat at the lunch table. But there we were.

By this time, Clare had her lunch on a tray and was paying for her meal. Her friends were chattering about something or other and cackling. You know how girls kind of like, scream when they laugh, well, that's what they were doing.

They all filed past us and everything went silent. I looked at Matthew and Freddy, who were quietly eating their meals. I shook my head. Clare and her friends chose a table three away from ours and sat down.

Just then my mobile phone buzzed in my pocket. I took it out. It was a message from Clare:
Come over to my house tonight. I have a present for you.
I looked across at her. Her phone was on the table next to her plate. I half expected her to look over and smile but she didn't. She was holding her drink in her left hand, her straw resting gently on her lower lip, as she listened to one of her friends say whatever it was she was saying. She knew that I was looking at her.

When the school bell rang at the end of the day, I practically ran home. I needed to get ready to go over to Clare's. She told me that her parents had finally lifted the ban on seeing me and so I was allowed back. I hadn't even known I'd been
banned in the first place. I decided that I'd go over at about seven. Not because it was too early to look keen, or too late to look as though I was deliberately being late because I was ‘cool', but because that was the time I wanted to go over. I didn't feel like playing games.

I went online for a while and spoke to Matthew. He started slagging off one of our old friends. The way in which this stalwart of humanity was loosening made me feel bad. He was still a great guy, don't get me wrong, but he was definitely on the turn. His parents were still moaning about him because they thought he went out too much. They had even told him that they were
concerned
and
disappointed
, the two words used by these stupid modern parents who don't think it's right to give their kids a quick slap. Not that you should smack a fifteen-year-old. In fact, I don't even know what I'm talking about any more.

At about six o'clock I had a visitor. It was Toby. My mum had told him to call up to me to tell me that dinner was ready, but Toby was far too much of a gentleman to shout across the house. Instead he took it upon himself to climb up the stairs, which took him about twice as long as most people because he was short with short legs. He then knocked on my door.