The Pause

by John Larkin

  When The Kraken went out shopping the next day, Lisa phoned and told me what had happened. It was pointless lying to her mum because the facts were all there. And what’s more, there were at least thirty witnesses and a much-respected youth minister to testify against her: that she had been ditching Christian Crusaders for dates with me. The caning she took was a significant one. She described each blow: how hard it was, where it fell, the look on her mother’s face … All the time she was telling me this, I just lay on my bed with my jaw practically down to my knees. Amazingly she managed to make me laugh when she told me how she hadn’t realised her mother was left-footed until she’d started stomping on the floor in her rage, and then how her father had to run for cover when The Kraken turned on him. Apparently it wasn’t sufficient enough for him to drop off their shameful, good-for-nothing, useless, disgrace of a daughter at Crusaders and pick her up afterwards. No. Part of his brief, which he hadn’t realised, was to make sure she went inside so she couldn’t be molested and corrupted by youthful, demonic, penis-possessing gweilos. Lisa’s father had fled outside before the swish of bamboo turned into a thwack. I was in stitches at how she described the way her father had torn off up the street and probably hadn’t stopped until he arrived at the pub.

  And when she told me this I fell even deeper in love with her. She’d deliberately brought up both her mother’s left-footedness and her father’s fleeing to the pub and probably embellished both in order to lighten the moment, to make me – to make me – feel better.

  My stomach lurched when she informed me that The Kraken was threatening to send her to live with her equally psychotic aunt in Hong Kong, but that I needn’t worry as rarely a week went by without The Kraken threatening to send Lisa to live with this equally psychotic aunt in Hong Kong. It would pass, Lisa assured me. It always did. We would just have to give it time. Not see each other for a while. She’d been through this before apparently when she’d been seeing that Justin kid in similar circumstances – I didn’t know him but I still hated him. And not only was Justin Chinese, he was a member – an actual member, not an existential/agnostic blow-in – of Crusaders. I would have thought he had ticked all the boxes and yet The Kraken still told him where the door was and what to do with himself once he was on the other side of it.

  Lisa’s immediate fate would involve her father or some other relative driving her to and from school and she would be Rapunzelled up in her room for the foreseeable future.

  But what we didn’t realise was that as we were chatting on the phone and trying to reassure each other that everything was going to be just fine, The Kraken was at the travel agent making final preparations. Preparations that had begun the previous evening with a phone call to Hong Kong as Lisa cried herself to sleep. But there had been nothing unusual about this. The Kraken regularly phoned Hong Kong. Just as Lisa regularly cried herself to sleep.

  I’m re-reading Sartre to try to make sense of the bleakness of the world, my place in it and the agony I’m feeling. Okay, if I’m going to be honest I’ll admit that I started reading Sartre so that chicks on the train would be impressed by my bookish intellect and not just my smouldering blond (Italian, Irish) emo looks. However, the more I read, the less I care what anyone thinks about me and if I ever find myself in a serious relationship then my girlfriend will also have to read Sartre or it just won’t work. Lisa read Sartre. The Bible and Sartre. She liked to keep her options open. Life everlasting or the bottomless chasm of nothingness. Either way, she was covered.

  But now, with my third coffee downed and my ruptured nerve endings bleeding permanent and poisoned insanity into me, not even Sartre can help. Apart from the bleakness of existence – I’m all over that. Not that I need a short, bespectacled, nihilistic Frenchman to point it out. The evidence is all around.

  I pack away my book and make a decision. It’s not a great decision but at least it will keep me moving, give me something to do rather than just dwell. I decide to go to the airport and look up the departure board for flights to Hong Kong. I won’t be catching any of them, of course. My part-time job at the supermarket is enough to keep me in movie, ice-skating and Tim-Tam-chiller money, with the occasional blowout such as tickets to see Bombay Bicycle Club. My budget certainly doesn’t stretch to international flights.

  After I’ve checked out the airport, I’ll try to find that beach that Dad used to take us to when we were kids and Mum was jetting off somewhere for work or just needed some space while she was finishing her master’s thesis. It’s the one near the old air traffic control tower. You can walk along the beach and watch the planes take off and climb up the rocks and practically onto the runway. Although he’d left years ago, I think there were times Dad yearned for Ireland and this was his way of connecting with it. He’s never been back. Not once. Perhaps he idealised the place through the movies of Neil Jordan, the novels of Roddy Doyle and the music of The Pogues. Occasionally he would visit Irish-themed bars and, over a pint or three of Guinness, gaze nostalgic ally at milk churns, rusty bicycles, hurley sticks and other kitschy symbols of the old land that are nailed to the walls of thousands of Irish pubs around the world except, curiously enough, the ones in Ireland.

  I check Google and find that it’s 4583 miles/7375.63 kilometres/3982.52 nautical miles to Hong Kong, which means it would probably be quicker and more efficient – not to mention cheaper – for me to swim there. However, given that I can only manage about two hundred metres before I have to come up for a rest and a Red Bull, that probably rules that out.

  I slouch across the footbridge and buy a ticket to the airport. It’s more than I expected. Much more, and I can only just cover it, mostly with coins. Had I known what was coming, I would have only bought a one-way ticket. As the guy behind the glass partition scoops my coins out of the stainless steel tray, he grunts at me like he’s evolved from warthogs, and even then only recently. I don’t bother with any of the obligatory pleasantries such as ‘please’ or ‘thank you’. When you fall through the cracks and your nerves rupture, social graces are the first thing to go. Apart from your mind.

  I take the escalator down to the city-bound platform but, step by step, the closer I get to Lisa, the further away I feel. The airport isn’t going to bring us closer. Nothing is. Instead, it’s going to accentuate the distance.

  My phone still refuses to ring.

  I can feel the wind from the approaching train as it makes its way through the tunnel, pushing out the warm air ahead of it. I can’t stand the pain anymore. I feel physically sick. I crouch down because the agony is such that I can no longer stand. I feel as though I’m about to vomit.

  I watch the train emerge from the tunnel. The train can take me away from all this. It can stop the pain. It can heal my ruptured nerves, silence my screaming mind. And it will be quick. It will be efficient. It will be final. Everyone will be better off without me. I’m practically a stranger to Dad and Kate anyway and without me being a weight around her neck, Mum will be able to get on with her career and might even make it to judge. And Lisa. My darling Lisa. Before I’d To Kill a Mockingbird-ed my way into her life, she was doing just fine. Well, she was doing okay. She would have made it into uni, come of age, started dating whether The Kraken liked it or not. She would have had her own life. But now, thanks to me, she’s probably stuffed in a shoebox bedroom in a foreign country. No wonder I haven’t heard from her. She’s obviously taken one look at her new life and begun to despise the pain – both physical and emotional – that I’ve brought down on her. She hates me. I’d hate me, too, if I were her. Hell, I hate myself for ruining her life. Lisa will definitely be better off without me. And my phone is a silent testimony to the fact. But I don’t want to live in a world without her. I don’t want to live in a world with me. I don’t want to live.

  The train is almost here now. I have to make it quick. I can’t hesitate. I stand up and run but for a moment I do hesitate. Just for a moment and it’s enough. Because it’s here I feel my life split in two
.

  But despite the hesitation I follow it through. I have to stop this pain.

  I thought it would be instantaneous. Boy was I wrong. Very wrong. I drop my backpack and jump. I have a moment’s peace as I’m flying through the air and then my path and the path of the train intersect and there was only ever going to be one winner. My face slams into the driver’s windscreen and I can feel my nose and my teeth being driven back through my skull and into my brain. My teeth and mouth are immediately destroyed and I feel so guilty because Mum and Dad paid a lot for my braces and I’ve only had them off for a couple of weeks. All that money; they work so hard. All that money wasted. What have I done? The look of horror on the driver’s face will stay with me forever as no doubt will the memory of my shattered face on his windscreen. He will wake up in a cold sweat every night for the rest of his life. Yet another life I’m destroying. But I didn’t think. I just wanted the pain to stop. What have I done? But the pain doesn’t stop. My knees practically liquefy on impact and while my ears remain functional I can hear screaming. My mouth no longer works and probably can no longer even be recognised as a mouth, as my jaw is being driven through my neck. So the screaming isn’t coming from me; it’s from a combination of the train’s brakes and the people on the platform. Little kids off for a day shopping or a day at the movies will also wake up screaming at night. I have become the bogeyman and I hate myself for it. What have I done? The train begins to slow and I slide down the front and fall beneath the wheels. My arms splay to the side so that both my hands are immediately severed. What have I done? I look at my hands as they fly away from me. What have I done? What have I done? I love my hands. Or rather, I loved my hands. I can still feel Lisa’s fingers interlocked in mine, the way an amputee can feel a phantom itch in an absent body part. But it’s not even over yet. What have I done? Something catches me beneath the train and I am tumbled along and mangled beneath it, my bones and tendons snapping, breaking, shattering and tearing with each revolution. By the time the train finally comes to a stop, I don’t so much need a body bag as a bucket. What have I done?

  As I lie there I can feel the last electrical surges transmitting through my dying mind. But there is only one thought. Only one word repeated over and over and over: Why?

  And then it’s over.

  Only it isn’t. There’s worse to come.

  Much worse.

  I don’t know where I am, but it’s not where I wanted to be, and I wanted to be nowhere, to not exist. Instead, I’m here, wherever or whenever here is. It’s not heaven. It’s not hell. It’s not even purgatory. It certainly isn’t nirvana. I could only call it non-space. An abyss of infinite nothingness. I’m not a thing, just an essence. A shadow of that which I once was and that which I might have been.

  I’m dead but instead of not existing, I’m wracked with guilt. Instead of destroying myself, I’ve destroyed the lives of the four people I love. I only realise now, as I watch the police and paramedics peering beneath the train and a couple of the newbies vomiting at what they find there. It’s now that I start to contemplate the damage I’ve left behind. My parents will have to identify the body. My body. How could I do this to them? Who’s going to tell Kate? Who’s going to tell her that her brother, her Uno buddy, is gone forever? Who’s going to break it to Lisa? Who’s going to tell her that the future we’d planned on our train ride to see Bombay Bicycle Club is over? Our future of motorcycling through Europe, of living together and teaching English in Hong Kong or Shanghai, of digging wells and teaching in Africa, will never happen?

  If I’d gone to Chris’s place rather than the station we would probably be having a laugh now, or else we might have taken the footy to the park and had a kick or played a game of chess. He’s good at taking people’s minds off their problems. He’s good at taking his own mind off his own problems. I should have gone to see him, I would have been okay for the moment. Instead, I’m currently splattered across one hundred square metres of train track, severely disrupting the mid-morning rail timetable and the rest of my family’s lives.

  It’s said that when you’re dying, your life passes before your eyes. What you never hear is that when you commit suicide, the life you lost passes before your eyes. And that is a whole other type of hell. It seems that before I can move on or fizzle out, I’m forced to narrate the road not travelled, the life unlived.

  The whole of time – past, present and future – is with me at once.

  So now I get to see, in vivid detail, the life that I gave up. And I deserve it.

  The train is almost here now. I have to make it quick. I can’t hesitate. I stand up and run, but for a moment I do hesitate. Just for a moment. And it’s enough. Because it’s here I feel my life split in two. Part of me carried it through, but the part of me that wanted to live, the part that knew that at some point the agony would stop, was stronger. Just. And although I have to stop the pain, this is not the way. So I pause.

  I slump to the ground and curl up in a ball. I feel that if I can make myself as small as possible, the pain won’t be as intense. It won’t find me. I’m wrong, of course, because my nerve endings are still rupturing, but at least now they’re not being splattered beneath the train’s wheels, though a strange sense of deja vu will not leave me.

  Various arms scoop me up and half-drag, half-carry me over to a bench. Someone wants to give me water; someone else wants to give me air. No one seems to know what’s wrong with me. They think I’ve had a seizure, that I’ve fainted, that I’ve OD’d, that I’m drunk. An ambulance has been called as have the police. A blanket appears from somewhere as if my problem is temperature related. A young woman in a business suit gently squeezes my shoulder while someone else strokes the back of my hand. A tradie in a bright orange shirt is kneeling down beside me as if asking for my hand in marriage. He might as well be because I can’t hear or understand a word he’s saying. He pats me gently on the head with a hand the size and texture of a baseball mitt. I look at the elderly lady who is stroking my hand. She smiles at me in that grandmotherly way that transcends generational, cultural and racial divides. Her tenderness, and that of the young businesswoman and tradie, tips me over the edge and I slump forward so that no one can see my tears. Crying over what I almost did. Crying over the agony that I must endure so as not to destroy the lives of those I love. Crying over the kindness of strangers. Crying because I don’t think I’m worth anything.

  The police arrive first – two young constables. One sits down next to me while the other talks to the witnesses. The one next to me asks me if I’ve been drinking or taken drugs. Slouched forward, I shake my head because I seem to have lost the power of speech. She asks me to look at her and although my eyes are bloodshot, they are not bloodshot in a way that concerns her.

  Another train enters the station and my fairy grandmother squeezes my hand tighter, her grip vice-like. She’s not letting go. Not until the train passes. She gets what no one else seems able to grasp.

  The paramedics arrive and with no crime seemingly committed, the police are happy to hand me over.

  The paramedics check my heart rate and my blood pressure and even give me some oxygen which, compared to the fetid air of the platform, is as sweet and crisp as strolling through a Tuscan meadow in spring. Not that I’ve ever strolled through a Tuscan meadow in spring, but still.

  The paramedics ask me a series of rehearsed questions but I don’t really hear them. I look about me but the tradie, the young businesswoman and the old lady have gone. Spirited away by a train.

  Despite my grunts that I am fine, the paramedics insist on putting me on the stretcher and keeping me covered with the blanket. The older of the two, Sandra, orders me about in a blustering matronly way. Despite her outward veneer of functionality, as they’re wheeling me towards the ambulance she never lets go of my hand.

  The looks I’m drawing as I’m wheeled across the concourse give me a brief taste of what fame must feel like. People staring at you in that not-staring-at-you ki
nd of way, whether you want them to or not.

  They roll me into the back of the ambulance and Sandra hauls herself in after me. Her partner, a young guy not much older than me, I’d say, seems happy to drive. He doesn’t put on the siren. He doesn’t need to. There’s no rush for this. All of us know that my problem, and its solution, is long term.

  ‘So why did you do it?’ asks Sandra after she’s given me another taste of oxygen.

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘Look, Declan. We spoke to the police, who spoke to the people on the platform. You bailed. Only you know how close you came to actually going through with it. Maybe you should think about your family. Can you imagine what this would have done to them?’

  ‘I didn’t do it.’ Or did I?

  ‘There’s something I tell kids like you. Reckon you should get it tattooed on your forehead backwards, so you can read it in the mirror each morning. Wanna hear it?’

  My ruptured nerve endings are screaming at me so I don’t say anything.

  ‘What you think is insurmountable today will probably be irrelevant in a month.’

  I look over at her. ‘Who said that?’ I manage to slur.

  ‘I did.’

  I try to smile at her but my face can’t quite manage to pull it off and it comes out more like a grimace.

  ‘Hang in there, kid. Someone loves you. And if they don’t now, someone will one day. You don’t want to miss that, do you?’

  Sandra sounds just like someone’s mum. She sounds just like my mum.

  ‘Okay,’ I say, but I don’t sound too convincing. Not even to myself.

  Sandra gently squeezes my hand all the way to the hospital. I have neither the strength nor the will to squeeze back.