The Suicide Club (36 page)

But then I looked ahead of me, in the direction I was walking, and my heart leapt. Clare was walking towards me, looking like one of those amazingly feminine women you see in films from the seventies wearing berets. Her features were sallow, her eyes deep in her face.

‘Hey,' I said.

She didn't stop, she kept walking straight up to me and threw her arms around my neck. I rested my chin on her shoulder. The other kids were looking at us like we were
freaks, either pulling evil faces or sniggering – they knew all about the Suicide Club now. It was all over the news. I felt a crushing desperation as I held on to that girl for dear life, not because everybody thought that
I
was a freak, but because they thought Clare was a freak. I didn't want to be a freak, but if I was then it wasn't the end of the world; people could think what they wanted about me. But for Clare . . . she wouldn't be able to handle this.

‘I didn't think you'd be in school,' I whispered into her ear.

‘My dad made me come.'

I went to let go but she held me tighter.

‘Just hold on to me.' I did as I was told. Just held on. ‘Remember the Eskimo Friends?' she whispered.

‘Of course I do.'

And then she said,' I'm so sorry for what I did at the disco.'

I don't know if she wholly meant it – maybe she felt she had to say it again to keep me next to her, where she wasn't alone. Whatever the reason I wasn't going to desert her now because to do that would have been indescribably cruel, so I did the only thing I could do and kept hugging her. But there was no magic in it, not like there had been outside the pub on the night that Craig had killed himself. I still loved Clare and throughout all this it was still her that pervaded my thoughts even more than the suicides, but I knew that something was forever lost. Something that can't be articulated had burned out and although I can't say it in words, I know you know what I mean. Right?

So we stood there and hugged each other in front of the cynical eyes of the schoolkids and our embrace just cemented our position of eternal teenage outcasts. The kids swarmed past us and, if there had been an infrared camera over the yard, we'd have glowed up like nuclear fallout on the film with everything else remaining a sterile, cold grey.

There's this line in the song ‘1979' by the Smashing Pumpkins – Clare's favourite song – that talks about this girl called Justine who used to hang around with the freaks and ghouls because she didn't realize that that's not what you're supposed to do. That line always snagged on me because I always thought I could empathize with what it must have been like to be a freak, even though I never was. And now that it was happening, I realized that my original thoughts were correct. I felt isolated and alone and cut off from everybody but as well as that I knew, just as all freaks must, that it was only because everyone else didn't
understand
. And because of that, I didn't care what they thought.

By now the Suicide Club was fodder for the school hive mind and I could just imagine clandestine corners of the cloakrooms where all the girls, eyes popping out their heads, lids surgically sucked back into their eye-sockets, hands gesturing, decried how weird we were.

Instead of first lesson I was supposed to see my counsellor for an emergency session. So I trudged off to the meeting room, knowing that Emma was going to ask me about Jenny.

To my surprise, she wasn't alone. With her were three other people. One was an old-looking, bald, pointy-headed guy with a rim of hair, tweed suit and smugness smeared all over his face, which was, to be frank, embarrassingly ugly. The second guy, who was also an ugly man, was wearing a leather jacket with a black roll-neck sweater underneath because he thought he was hip because he was only in his mid-thirties. The last person, who made me feel sick, was the horrendous Sylvia Bowler, my original counsellor.

As I sat down I said,' You must be loving this . . . Sylvia.'

She just looked at me with fake-doleful eyes. I was in no doubt that she
thought
that she was being sincere; that's how far gone she was, poor thing.

Seeing those people there hurt me, because I wouldn't have thought that Emma would have put me through this humiliation.

‘Rich,' she said. She looked genuinely sad. ‘This is Doctor Kramer from the university.' She pointed to Pointy Head. Then she gestured to the fat slug. ‘You already know Sylvia.' Finally she indicated the hip guy, who was introduced to me simply as, get this, Roy.

I sighed loudly with the sheer pointlessness of it all and put my outstretched arm on the table whilst bringing my other one across my chest, because these people would think that my doing this was a display of defensiveness because they thought they had all the answers.

‘You know why we're all here, don't you, Richard?' said Pointy Head in a nasal voice that was almost as bad as his face.

I didn't answer because I felt like Emma had betrayed me and I was too upset to speak. It was funny how, now that I was involved in a suicide pact, everybody was clambering over each other to get the inside scoop on the circus act. All these people wanted was to make themselves feel important. But Emma was supposed to be my counsellor and I couldn't fathom why she was letting them into my world. She knew that I would hate being subjected to this crap. She should have been protecting me.

For the next five minutes, whilst the panel of experts told me why they were right and I was wrong, I did nothing but stare at Emma. She could barely look back.

And so it was that I listened to theories on group mentality, peer pressure, positive reinforcement, inferiority complexes, superiority complexes, all that stuff that's just a part of the big human fuck-up that's the glory of existence and should be encouraged, not ‘cured'. When I asked Dr Kramer how old he was when his hair fell out he told me
that I was engaging in a process known as transference. God, I wish I could be as sure as him about what's correct and what's not so that I could live in a spacious house and have a nice car and sleep easily at night.

The three of them all chipped in dramatically but Emma didn't say anything because, I realized, she knew that I wasn't listening to these people and that she had hurt me badly by letting them talk to me. Unfortunately for my panel of experts they were so pompous and all-knowing that they could never get back to real life and real people, where all the living gets done, and for that I felt bad.

After about fifteen minutes of their babble I thrust my head back and groaned, feeling my Adam's apple stretch.

Then I snapped my head back up just as quickly and said, ‘I'm sorry. Do you think I could talk to Emma on my own for a minute?'

The experts looked at each other and nodded like they had any say whatsoever. I got to my feet, she got to hers, and we walked out of the room, me ten feet ahead. On my way out, I tried as hard as I could, but I couldn't help crying. Not real crying, just stinging, watery eyes.

Emma pulled the door shut and looked up at me. I had never realized it before because she had always been sat behind a desk, but I was slightly taller than she was.

‘Why have you let them do this?' I said, trying to stop the tears breaking off my eyeballs.

‘They can help you, Rich.'

I could tell that she was scared of me killing myself, and not because she would be losing a patient – but because I think she liked me. She didn't want me to die. I knew that she had never been involved with a case as heavy as this, a case which had at its centre, you know, a runaway teenage suicide pact.

The corridor was silent. Fuck it, I thought, I'll never get a
better chance than this. I leaned in quickly and stole a kiss off her mouth. It lasted for about a second before she pulled away.

‘No,' she whispered.

‘I'm in love with you,' I breathed.

I took her by the hand and led her into the headmaster's office, which was empty, and closed the door. My heart was fluttering like a baby bird was trapped in there. We turned and faced each other and started kissing. Wildly and uncontrollably. My hand was in her hair whilst one of hers started to unbutton my shirt and with her other hand she undid the button at the top of my trousers, her breathing hard and warm, and she started panting and if you haven't realized by now that I'm lying then shame on you.

Instead of that, after the first kiss Emma stepped back with consummate professionalism and told me that I had been wrong to invade her personal space and that nothing could ever happen between us because I was a fifteen-year-old boy. She also said that patients often feel this way towards their counsellors and I told her that nobody had ever felt this way towards Sylvia. My humiliation was so complete and embarrassing that I didn't even let it register in my head because if I had I would have had to have left town or something. I was still upset at having been betrayed by her, but this embarrassment sort of diluted my anger and made me feel
nothing
. My tears got sucked back into their ducts and I was icy cool.

‘Come on,' she said. ‘Let's go back inside.' And she didn't even hold my hand.

She had won, that was the truth. I don't like to think of human relationships as games because that's just disgusting. But she had still won.

I had had enough of counselling, I had had enough of school. It was all too much for me. I was trying to act cool
about my dying friends, but I couldn't handle this school any more. I couldn't handle forever being the boy who was crazy, who had cruelly killed the peregrine falcon, driven two kids into killing themselves, the freak, the ostracized.

I went back into the den of social workers and psychiatrists with only one purpose. To escape.

I sat down in my seat and politely said,' Thank you.'

‘Are you all right?' said Sylvia.

‘I
am
going to kill myself and there's nothing you can do about it.'

Silence. I thought that one of the women would have gasped when I said it but neither of them did. I looked at Emma just to make sure that I wasn't making a mistake, and then I knew that I wasn't. I had only seen her as my equal in the past because she was so pretty. Underneath it all, I now saw, she was exactly the same as the others. She should have seen the drama and the romance that I had just offered her outside but all she saw was some theory she had read about in her textbook at university once. She didn't
get
it.

‘You realize,' said Pointy Head, ‘that if I think you are going to harm yourself we can put you in a psychiatric unit.'

What felt like a snake slithered up my back. It scared me when he said that. Surely he couldn't lock me up if I hadn't done anything wrong. They couldn't lock me up on the strength of this embarrassment's opinion, could they?

‘But I don't think that that is the case,' he continued, light from outside shining off his scalp. ‘You have some problems that need ironing out but I think that what we are seeing from you is merely a' – slow motion – ‘cry . . . for . . . help.'

That was the trigger, all that was needed for me to realize that everything he had said was nothing but hot air, a fact which I had of course known all along. I got up from my chair and walked out. Roy followed but I was already out of the door and running. At the end of the staff corridor was
the secretary's office. I swung into it at full speed only to be greeted by the headmaster and his secretary, Mrs McKinsay. He was leaning over her desk and showing her something in a booklet. They both turned their heads to me. I crossed the room quick as a flash. All I wanted at that exact moment was to be expelled and free of this hellhole. So, with a perfectly clear mind, like a beach at dawn, I disguised myself in a whirlwind of chaos that ripped apart what my headmaster thought that I was capable of. I rushed over to the desk and lifted her monitor off it like it was a toy. I took four quick steps back and yanked all the leads clear. The base of her PC shuddered across the carpet and smashed into the leg of her desk as the monitor lead got torn out of the back, socket and all. I hoisted the thing over my head and threw it as hard as I could at the wall. But the school was so crap that it wasn't even a flat-screened monitor so it was heavier than I thought and it only got about six feet across the room before heading downwards. It fell limply to the floor and faded from the world with a whimper instead of a bang, which is a phrase I once heard somebody use when describing how the world would most likely end.

I GOT MY
wish. I was expelled from Atlantic High School that day. My father came to collect me. We drove away and not a single photographer noticed my leaving. The headmaster didn't even allow me to say goodbye to any of my teachers or old friends. I was forced to wait in his office whilst he lectured me. He told me that, despite my angst towards what was happening in my life, my behaviour was not good enough for a school of this class. He told me that the way a person reacts in times of crisis is what defines a man.

My apparent outburst of insanity in the secretary's office only terrified my parents even more than before because they thought that I was genuinely crazy. After the incident that had happened between us the day before in the conservatory when my mother had thrown up, we found it difficult to talk about my expulsion. My mother, who had come home from work early, plain refused to see me at all, which I didn't mind because I just wanted to go into the living room and watch the news channels' coverage of my suicide adventure. My father just said something about sorting everything out later so I went into the living room and flicked on the TV.

The news reports weren't as extensive as I would have liked because I wanted 24-hour blanket coverage with news
choppers all over the town, live satellite feeds to every corner of the globe, a frenzy of outraged parents roaring in the streets like it was the apocalypse.