The Suicide Club (24 page)

I returned to my window and looked down to the patio. I wondered what would happen if my skeleton fell limply on to it. It would only take a few seconds, perhaps less. The act of jumping would be instantaneous – that's all it would take; a snap decision, over in an instant. I had no intention of actually doing it, of course, but it started me thinking. Is killing yourself a slow steady climb, a decision reached by degrees? Or just an opportunity meeting a circumstance – the right place at the right time? One moment of madness or clarity and it could all be over, surely. I looked long and hard at the patio, at the lines running at right angles to one another between the slabs. I suddenly wondered what
Freddy was doing at that precise moment, hundreds of miles away. Then a very odd question popped into my head: would he be proud of me if I did it? I could feel myself setting on to tracks that would take me to a bad place and so I took a deep breath, a step back from the window, and said,' Stop it,' out loud.

There was a knock at my door. It was unlocked. I quickly folded up the Suicide Club Charter and stuffed it back under the magazines in the bottom drawer of my desk.

‘Come in,' I said.

It was my father.

‘Hello, champ,' he said. ‘Fancy going for a drive?'

I got into the passenger seat alongside my father and we drove in silence out of town. I didn't even want to speak because my throat was heavy and laden with antimatter. My life was a wreck and I could see no way out.

We reached this forest on the edge of town that my father used to bring me to when I was a kid. He drove me up a dirt track and parked under a canopy of pines. He killed the engine and looked straight ahead. There was nobody about and it was quite serene.

Just like my father, I stared straight ahead. I guess if you were secretly filming it and the camera was looking in through the windscreen, it would have been quite moving; father and son staring ahead, not speaking because the son had hurt the father so badly.

We looked into that forest for about five minutes that, not surprisingly, felt like longer.

Eventually he spoke.

‘Don't you know what you're doing to us?'

I couldn't look at him. I could see from the corner of my eye that he was staring at me.

‘We're so worried about you, Rich.'

‘I know,' I muttered. He was breaking through my walls. I wanted to tell him everything. All this time I still hadn't spilled my heart out to anybody about Clare, and I felt like bursting.

‘Is there anything we can do?' There was a pause. ‘You're going to destroy yourself. You know we love you, don't you?'

‘Don't say that,' I said.

There was all this emotion in me but, because I knew myself so well, I knew that I wasn't going to let it out.

‘We'd do anything for you, Rich. You're such a talented boy.'

I kept looking ahead.

With genuine sincerity, but with not enough strength to turn my head, I said,' I'm sorry.'

‘Come on, let's go for a walk,' he said.

We got out of the car and traipsed off into the woods. It was very cold, but it was Christmas and I was in a pine forest so that suited me fine. For a while the fresh air started to cleanse my insides, and I think I started to recover. It's funny how people say that, to get over something, you have to take a course of action
yourself
to get over it – like conquering your demons or something. But here I was, in the middle of the woods, and mother nature was healing me and I had nothing to do with it. It was pretty great, even though we didn't say anything to one another.

We found this brook running through the forest and we paused at the bank. We would have to get our feet wet if we wanted to get across. I thought to myself how amazing it was that I was here in this place doing something so joyous and
nobody
knew. We jumped into the water and the cold started attacking our feet immediately.

My father gasped.

‘Jesus shits,' he shouted.

I looked at him and we started laughing. He had no idea
how much good he was doing – parents can always turn it on when they need to.

We waded across the three feet of water, which came up to our ankles, and clambered up the other side. It was muddy, but my dad made it up OK. I started the climb but the mud was more slippery than I had realized. I lost my footing and was about to fall back into the water. Instinctively I reached out and my hand grabbed on to the nearest thing that came to my touch. Which was the spindly outshoot of a bramble. My palm closed over the thorns and I gripped tight, not understanding what I was doing. As the thorns punctured through my skin and into my flesh, I screamed out. The sudden shock made me stop thinking about my footing and I lost control. Electronic signals made my hand involuntarily squeeze the branch tighter and, as I slid backwards, my palm and the inside of my fingers were drawn along a gauntlet of thorns jutting from the main stem of the bramble. Each one stabbed at me and tore along the fleshy parts of my hands.

I released my grip and slid back into the water. I stumbled back but didn't fall. I looked down at my hand in horror. Flaps of skin were loose like those little thin flags you see on castles; tiny triangles of torn skin. The blood was flowing like a river delta over my palm. The agony was unbearable. It was like the thorns had decapitated the nodes off the top of my pain nerve endings. My hand was throbbing and I was getting bile in my gut. Why me? I asked.

I looked at my father. A real man would have borne the pain and carried on. A real man would have put the pain in a box in his head and locked it up. But I was having some sort of crisis inside.

‘Are you OK?' said my father. ‘Let me see.'

I held up my palm and the blood ran down my wrist into the sleeve of my sweater. I could have cried right there, but I wasn't
that
pathetic.

‘I want to go home,' I said.

As we stumbled back through the forest, shattered and broken like a dream, I was overcome with an impending sense of dread.

Clare's game had broken my insides, being so horrible to Toby meant that I had passed a critical mass point that couldn't be redeemed, my mother hated me, my father did not trust me, I had no friends and now, after all of that, I was suffering intense physical pain. This was the end.

That night I read the book on screenwriting that my parents had bought for me. In it, it said that most screenplays are constructed in three acts and that at the end of a second act things get so bad that you can't imagine anything working out OK. I felt like I was at the end of Act Two in my life. I couldn't see how things could possibly get any worse. Everything had turned to dust.

But there was one thing left for me. One bright star in dark space. Emma. My counsellor. She would understand. The day before school started again, I couldn't get the thought of her out of my head. With everything gone I had nothing better to do than fall in love with her. Which I kind of did, I guess. You always need to find hope somewhere, right?

That night I couldn't sleep. I lay in bed sweating, my sheets getting caught up in my legs and my shorts riding up my thighs, making me restless. It was like I was in hell. As I finally drifted off to sleep and the real world faded to black, I could see four words in the blackness, as if they were on a page, and they made me feel better:

END OF ACT TWO

MY FIRST SESSION
with Emma was on my first day back at school after Christmas. The whole morning was spent trying to avoid people glaring at me and laughing at me. It was quite horrible but I didn't really care that much because they were headed on the road to shitsville.

I knocked on the door to the meeting room next to the headmaster's office and suddenly my malaise lifted. Emma looked even better than I remembered. Today she had her hair tied back behind her head so I could see her ears that stuck out and made her look like an elf. One of the elegant elves like in those
Lord of the Rings
films, not Christmas elves. She looked up with her hazel eyes and I almost died.

‘Hello, Richard,' she said. She seemed too young to be talking in such an adult way. ‘How are you?'

‘I'm OK,' I said, trying to act cool.

I went to the table and sat in my chair and we looked at each other for a long time. I guess we were staring each other out and it felt like the right thing to do because we were both assessing one another; she was looking for certain reactions, I was just drinking in her beauty.

But I broke first.

‘Did you have a nice Christmas?' I said.

‘Great, thanks,' she said quite coldly, which I liked because
I'm drawn to that sort of stuff. ‘Did you have a nice Christmas?'

‘Not really,' I said, holding my hand up and showing her my bandage.

‘I noticed that when you came in. What did you do?'

‘I cut it on broken glass,' I said for no reason.

‘Did it require stitches?'

‘Yes.'

‘How many?'

‘One.'

‘I didn't know you could get just one stitch.'

I just shrugged.

‘It got infected.' This was true. My hand had basically turned green by New Year's Day.

‘How was Christmas apart from what happened to your hand?'

‘Not very good.'

‘Why not?'

‘My parents told me Father Christmas doesn't exist.'

Emma didn't respond because I was being arrogant and ugly.

‘What's happened, Rich?'

Everything bad from my life flashed through my head but there was so much crap that I couldn't focus on anything. My neck was feeling heavy.

‘Some bad things,' I choked.

‘Do you want to tell me?'

As the conversation was moving forward, I felt myself opening up. My emotions were boiling up and bubbling over.

‘I'm glad you're my counsellor and not Sylvia.'

‘And why's that?'

‘Because I like you,' I said honestly. ‘And I didn't like
Sylvia.' I stopped for a moment. ‘You're young and I feel like I can talk to you.'

‘Do you think that our sessions will help you?'

I brought up my good hand and, with my second finger, scratched the top of my forehead, just below the hairline.

‘No,' I said.

‘Why not?'

I didn't feel like I could explain without offending her so I lied. And besides, if I told her about Freddy's theory of motivation and how it doesn't exist, she wouldn't understand.

‘My friends found out that I'm in counselling,' I started. ‘Do you know what happened to me?' I stared her right in the eye as I spoke. ‘In the school disco, I had about thirty people stood around me in a circle' – I knew how bad this must have sounded, it
was
bad – ‘
laughing
at me because I was crazy.'

I could see that she was shocked. If you think about it, if you imagine it had actually happened to
you
, think how you would feel.

All Emma could say was, ‘Children can be cruel sometimes.'

‘You have no idea.'

I looked at her and, right there and then, and without prior knowledge, I poured out my heart to the girl in front of me. As I spoke I was determined not to start crying but it was just so hard. I won't start getting all metaphoric about how it was like a waterfall pouring out of me, but let me just say that it felt great to finally speak about this stuff to somebody who might understand everything. Life is
so
hard sometimes that you have to share your bad stuff with someone or you'll collapse.

When I think about it now, I reckon I probably said all that stuff about Clare, about my humiliation, about Toby and
my mother, about hurting my hand, because, in some weird way, I thought Emma might feel sorry for me and fall in love with me. How crazy is that?

When I had finished my tears had gone back into their ducts and I felt
amazing
.

‘Richard, listen, let me say this to you as a person, not a counsellor.'

I sat there, deflated and exhausted.

‘I think that you are going to be fine. I know you've done a lot of bad things, but I also know that you've done a lot of good things as well. Shall I tell you what I think?'

‘Don't bother, you're just going to say that I'm a self-loather. But I'm not.'

‘Actually, Richard, you are. You've got two sides to you. One is the good side, the side that helps people and is kind and sensitive. The other side is the one that does the bad things, such as what you did following your parents' split, and the side that you say you can feel returning.'

‘OK.'

‘But you've also got this hinterland in between the two.'

I didn't expect her to say that.

‘That's the place where you have these deep-rooted emotions. It's the place where you think too deeply about everything, and where you beat yourself up over everything. What you said about you being a self-loather? That's interesting,' she said.

‘Why?'

‘Because most people don't think about that sort of stuff.' She sighed. ‘There's no doubting your intelligence, Richard, but intelligence and being a good person do not necessarily go hand in hand.'

‘I know that. I know I'm intelligent, but I still try to be a good person as well.' It felt strange to talk about this sort of stuff, because I kind of hated psychoanalysis.

‘The very fact that you think about self-loathing means that you have it in you.'

I rolled my eyes.

‘But don't worry, it's healthy to question yourself. You're lucky because, although you think deeply about things, you can still act in the real world. You still put yourself out there. Let me explain. When you were at the school disco, and you kissed that girl who you thought you loved, that was a brave thing to do. A genuine self-loather would never do something like that. They would never put their innermost emotions on the line like you did. For all you knew, that action could have led to you and her going out. You could have been happy. Self-loathers don't usually give themselves a shot at happiness, even if it's right there in front of them for the taking.'