Chummie is unperturbed (his niece often weeps, it’s a sight he’s seen nearly every day of their shared lives). ‘No, he was even conscious when they brought him in. I took him down to X-ray.’
‘Is he paralysed?’ Lace can hardly bear to ask.
‘No.’ Chummie slurps the last of the juice from the carton. ‘He just broke his toe.’
‘His toe?’ Is Chummie making one of his rare jokes? Lace mops her face with the scarf, the plastic needles scratching her cheeks. ‘But it was so high!’
‘He landed on a newspaper cart. Lucky for him or he’d be dead.’
Lace pulls the wool so tight around her finger that the tip goes white. ‘I suppose he wanted to be dead. Why else would you jump off a building?’
‘I guess so.’ Chummie’s eyes are glazing over. By now the sun is high behind the steel-grey clouds and it’s well past his bedtime.
‘Those cameras outside the hospital.’ Lace sits forward, willing him to stay awake. ‘The boy must have been famous.’
‘I guess so,’ repeats Chummie, yawning and swaying. ‘I’ve gotta go to bed. You around later?’
‘I’ve got a date,’ sighs Lace. ‘With a graphic designer.’
‘See you when I see you, then,’ says Chummie. ‘Night night.’
Sometimes these non-arrangements seem like freedom, but at other times it’s as if Lace is breathing in the thinnest, coldest air, the sort that hurts your lungs so much you feel like stopping breathing altogether. ‘Good night,’ she says into the empty mid-morning room. She piles cushions around her to protect her kidneys and liver and other vulnerable parts of the body, then she picks up all the stitches she’s dropped and starts to knit. On and on, blue magenta yellow green blue. The patterns build into a growing wall. As long as she keeps the rhythm, as long as the needles click and the wool is taut, no one will fall. No one will slip through the cracks, and the scarf will have no end, and everyone will be safe.
ON THE BENCH
THEY’D MET IN A shower of rain, which sounds clichéd, of course. Rain, thunderstorms, heat waves. Elevators, escalators, trains. Cafes, bookshops, supermarket queues; lost parcels, missing tickets, dropped gloves. You see? Every which way of boy-meets-girl has been done to death; originality rendered meaningless by duplication, as Warhol would say.
All the same, clichéd or not, Gibby and Lace had met in rain. A sudden downpour in a city park, a man beside the ice cream stand selling cheap umbrellas, and there the two of them were, side by side, bargaining over flimsy black nylon.
‘The sun came out,’ Gibby recalls, ‘before either of us had struck a deal. A tramp going through a bin nearby said, “Most people buy umbrellas before the rain” — which made us laugh. So we pooled our money. Half to the tramp, half went on ice cream.’
Although Gibby’s eyes shine when he tells this story, rest assured there’s no sentimental ending. No one ended up kissing someone else under rain-drenched blossom trees. To be honest, it shouldn’t even be classified as a boy-meets-girl story because, in spite of the rain and the ice cream, there’s never been any romance involved: just a slow-grown friendship based on mutual liking and a shared respect for early Hitchcock, mid-career Orson Welles, and the poetry of Pablo Neruda and Frank O’Hara.
Let’s meet Gibby four years later. Same park, same ice cream stand — perhaps even the same day of the week. He sees her from a long way away. She has a special way of walking. Most people lean slightly forwards, intent on where they’re going, but Lace is so upright it looks as if she’s leaning back on thin air. He’d noticed this the very first time they’d talked: she’d looked as if she was leaning on a railing, but it was just her way of slanting away from the world.
Here she comes, closer now. Gibby watches quietly from his bench. It’s a grey day, but Lace attracts every stray glint of sunlight falling through the clouds so by the time she reaches Gibby she’s shining. ‘I have two presents for you!’ She accepts a slightly melted ice cream from Gibby’s left hand.
Until now the park has been empty and Gibby has sat in solitary splendour with a single-scoop cone in each hand. Now that Lace has arrived, the world starts to gravitate towards them: toddlers, dogs, ducks, even discarded sandwich wrappers float towards them. Passers-by linger, pretending to tie their shoelaces. And a halo of blazing blue sky appears right above their bench.
‘Which present would you like first?’ There’s a slight flush on her pale cheeks. ‘The emotional one or the concrete one?’
‘Concrete? You’ve bought me a birdbath?’ Gibby deliberately misunderstands. ‘You shouldn’t have. It will put my mother’s garden gnomes to shame.’
Lace ignores him, flicks at the ice cream with her tongue. ‘It’s so cold today.’ She gives a shiver.
‘It’s not that cold.’ Gibby is puzzled. ‘Quite mild considering the time of year.’
‘Don’t you feel chilly around the edges?’
Just in time, he hears the hopeful tone in her voice. ‘Now that you mention it,’ he says quickly, ‘I do feel a bit cold, around the extremities.’
The sequins on Lace’s beret shine so brightly that the man on the next bench shields his eyes with his newspaper. ‘I thought you might!’
She gives Gibby the first gift — an incredibly long stripy work of art. It reaches around his neck seven or eight times and its fringed tail trails over his shoulder in a dashing way. ‘Whatever mood you’re in,’ glows Lace, ‘there’s sure to be one colour that matches your eyes.’
Wrapped in multiple hand-knitted layers, Gibby finds it difficult to bend his neck but he admires the scarf by squinting downwards. ‘As many colours as a hundred flavours of ice cream. I love it!’ The combination of a warm neck and a cool ice cream is comforting: almost enough to make him forget the way he’s started waking in the night, hearing the terrible cry, the whoosh, the thump, and the strange tearing sound as breath is ejected at speed from a human body.
Because he can’t tell Lace about the boy’s desperate request not to tell, nor does he wish to speak of the way the boy’s head fell sideways with saliva streaming from his mouth, nor that he found black woollen fibres ground into the newspapers from the force of the impact, he tells her of the ghoulish excitement around him once the ambulance had left. ‘The paper was calling in journalists to get the scoop, just like old movies. Don’t they realise the speed of the internet?’
Lace’s face is concentrated and serious. ‘It’s ironic, isn’t it. He fell on the news, and then he became it.’
For the first time in days Gibby finds he can sit up straight, rather than hunching around the knot in his stomach. ‘He was a writer. His first novel was a huge success. I thought I might send him a book, something to read in the hospital — anonymously, of course.’
Lace takes the end of his scarf and smoothes out the tassels. ‘You’re a hero. There must be hundreds of fans who are grateful to you and your newspaper cart.’
Gibby crunches into his cone. ‘I’d rather people didn’t know. I’ve called in sick all week to avoid the fuss.’
Lace tilts her head back. There’s something different about her; she seems more untouchable than ever. But when she speaks she sounds normally casual. ‘Now it’s time for the second present.’
The yellow ‘NO CYCLING’ sign beside the bench reflects off her throat with a buttery sheen. As Gibby looks at her, she’s golden all over, gleaming against the green-painted bench. Behind her are small black graffiti protestations against North Korea and Israel, scratches made by coins, and streaks of bird shit. But Lace — well, Lace is a flower. And, as with a buttercup, if you draw near, you can tell by the reflected glow the extent to which you appreciate her beauty.
He’s mesmerised, forces himself to speak. ‘What’s the second present?’
‘Something I read that will make you feel better,’ says Lace: a girl once more, no longer a flower.
‘Tell me.’ But just from sitting beside her, Gibby’s tension has eased. He has a new notebook in his s
atchel, some new ideas in his head. The day opens before him like a wide-mouthed shell.
‘There was once a girl,’ Lace’s voice is coated with vanilla, ‘who lived in New Zealand.’
‘Is this a fairytale?’ interrupts Gibby.
‘A little New Zealander,’ continues Lace, unperturbed, ‘whose parents named her Talula Does The Hula In Hawaii.’
‘Truly?’
‘She carted around that name for nine years until she went to court and divorced herself from her parents on the grounds of emotional distress. Does that make you feel better about your name, Gibby Lux?’
Gibby crunches silently on his stale orange cone. Actually, it doesn’t help at all. First, what imbeciles there are in the parenting arena! Do Talula’s parents also make excuses with their own version of Las Vegas and Casino Happy Hour? And secondly —
‘How on earth does a nine-year-old know how to go to court?’ he wonders.
‘How does anyone get to know anything? Kids talk to teachers, teachers talk to social workers, social workers talk to lawyers. You know how it goes.’
But this is the point. Gibby is twenty, and even now he can’t imagine getting himself to court and beginning a legal battle against people much older, who should be wiser. ‘No, I don’t know how it goes. There are so many things I don’t know! Have you ever noticed that I can’t walk through revolving doors like normal people? I’ve never learnt how to upload photos and send them by email. I can’t —’
Lace throws her cone in the rubbish bin and holds out her hand. ‘We should go to a bookshop, I think.’
Thus Gibby is interrupted in his list of all that’s wrong with him, which, as both he and Lace know, can grow disastrously fast to monstrous proportions. He looks at her soft gloved hand: small hole in the thumb, another at the tip of the third finger. ‘A bookshop. All right. I could pick out something for the writer boy. Maybe a dictionary. Wouldn’t that be a good get-well present?’
‘And then we can read Neruda in the aisle. Carefully, without breaking the spine.’
When Gibby gets up, the day stands back and the greening willows bow their heads. He’s no longer a loser or a hero. He’s Gibby Lux, with a nightmare situation recently behind him, a best friend beside him, and a free afternoon ahead. It’s okay to leave him now, walking close beside Lace, looking at the grass and the sky, looking like anybody else.
ONE GOOD ACCIDENT
IT ONLY TAKES ONE good accident for people to start butting into your life. As soon as Bright is home, the welt from the hospital bracelet still on his wrist, well-wishers throng to his door. The doorbell rings non-stop, as blaring and unwelcome as an alarm clock. ‘Not at home,’ he barks down the intercom. It’s not a lie. Strictly speaking, one is not at home when standing in a chilly communal stairwell. And Bright is a stickler for verbal truth.
An annoyingly large portion of the first day back is spent on the landing, in his pyjamas trousers and the Savile Row tweed jacket, still with a whiff of horsehair to it, bought at a church fair. There he stands, bottom half convalescent, top half normal (if you consider Horse-of-the-Year types normal), jamming his finger on the intercom button and sending the message out to the world: NO ONE IS IN RESIDENCE! His words clatter like marbles through the building and spray into the street, a scattergun approach to getting rid of visitors. SORRY NOT AT HOME! And sometimes, when his toe is hurting badly, SOD OFF!
When he becomes tired of standing, and his kidneys are aching from the updraft in the stairwell, he escapes upstairs to Eduardo’s. ‘They’re idiots to believe me!’ He thrusts his numb feet into the plush rug. ‘Of course I’m here. Who else would say I’m not at home when they’ve rung on my doorbell?’
‘There could be an automated message connected to the buzzer?’ Eduardo knows about such technical possibilities. His birdy wrist darts to the side of his keyboard and he scribbles something on a large yellow pad, keeping his eyes fixed on the screen.
There’s a better view from up here than from the dusty landing; Eduardo’s father pays for not only a carpet cleaner but also for a window cleaner. Bright inserts a finger between the venetian blinds and watches the latest batch of visitors dispersing. Some leave promptly, others are harder to dupe and are lurking behind the ‘No Parking’ sign, scanning the building for any flicker of Bright. Most appear disappointed, some look almost cheated. Bright pulls out a notebook from his tweedy pocket, lightly dusted with ancient chestnut horsehair, and jots this down:
Never underestimate the irresistible glamour of a near-fatal accident.
‘Vultures.’ He helps himself to a gin; without tonic it tastes almost medicinal. ‘Wanting a peck at a miraculously living carcass.’ The only visitor he could stand right now would be Miller, and Miller hasn’t been in touch since the incident on the train — scared off, perhaps, by the amount of blood and the general panic. It’s a pity; Miller of all people would appreciate the idea of an automated Bugger-Off bell.
Bright lies on the velvet sofa and watches his neighbour’s narrow back. Eduardo’s black hair shines with concentration. His tiny red-sneakered feet are twined around the legs of the antique chair. There’s a faint puffing sound, like a faraway steam engine — Eduardo is expelling the heady air of high-stake competition.
‘Game going well?’ asks Bright cordially, while knowing nothing about it.
‘Close to well, thank you.’ Eduardo is exquisitely polite, even when engrossed in international online poker. ‘Help yourself to gin.’
‘I already did,’ admits Bright, inhaling the dry silvery smell rising from the glass. He can still hear the distant doorbell, shrilling through the ankle-deep carpet and the gleaming parquet beneath it, and the girders and beams and insulation and plaster beneath that: all the many layers between Eduardo’s floor and his ceiling. ‘I drop down,’ he mutters, ‘and people drop in. I drop from the sky, and they drop by. Astonishing, the creative possibilities of a single verb, isn’t it?’
It’s unlikely that his friend understands what he’s is on about. Most of Eduardo’s youth has been spent running away from expensive Argentinean boarding schools; what with plotting his escapes, being hauled back and bawled out, he didn’t have much time to spend on grammar. But —
‘Sí, I know what you mean,’ he says with his customary agreeableness, while his nimble fingers tap away at his game.
Brrringg! Bright hobbles back to the window, peering out through the blind like a bandit holed up for an uncertain future. When viewed from above, all manner of things are exposed: thinning crowns, comb-overs, hair plugs. This particular visitor is wearing an unfortunate white denim cap with a ponytail pulled through the fastening. She glances up and Bright flattens himself against the wall, fugitive-style.
‘Another style-free stranger.’ It’s unkind, he knows, but he’s just felt that flicker of panic that can swell to an inferno, leading to god knows what. Breaking glass, broken noses, public mayhem, even ledges —
‘Perhaps she is representative of your readers.’ Eduardo gives a snort of laughter, which manages to be comradely rather than rude. He closes his screen. ‘I ’ave won another five grand. Let’s have ourselves a dinner out. It will be my cry.’
‘My shout.’ Bright longs to be out, but is scared to leave. He’s besieged in his own building, his ears ringing with the shrill peal, real or imagined, of his doorbell. ‘I think I’ll disconnect it,’ he says, swallowing gin to stop himself crying.
‘But first, dinner. You must eat to keep your strength up, no?’ Swivelling in his chair, Eduardo turns the full force of charm on Bright. His teeth shine, his skin has the sheen of good-quality olive oil; he looks radiant, and simultaneously solicitous.
The effect is utterly weakening, and Bright sinks down on the sofa. ‘I’ll cook you my special Chicken O’Connor —’ he dashes his sleeve over his eyes — ‘if you let me stay here for the evening.’
‘But of course!’ says Eduardo, refilling his glass with a practised slosh of gin. ‘My casa is your casa.’
It’s hard to believe that, before he was adopted by one of Argentina’s richest couples, he survived by diving for nails in a muddy river.
MOST OF BRIGHT’S WOULD-BE visitors come bearing gifts traditionally given to those who are ill. Flowers, magazines, grapes: suitable presents for those who have been in hospital after hurling themselves from a high-rise building. Bright’s father is different, arriving with nothing but a briefcase.
He steps in the door with the deliberateness of Armstrong alighting on the moon. ‘Hello, Brian,’ he says, taking what is, for him, a giant step indeed.
Uncertainly, Bright glances around but sees only the streaked window lit by the suggestion of a sunny day. ‘Are you talking to me?’
‘Now’s not the time for jokes, Brian.’ His father is formal in his white clerical collar and what looks like an exceedingly expensive jacket. ‘We nearly lost you.’ His Adam’s apple quivers briefly in his neatly shaven throat before he recovers his composure.
‘Ah, but you didn’t!’ Bright aims for a jovial tone. ‘Maybe I was handed a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Card because my father’s on speaking terms with the big guy upstairs?’
‘You know He doesn’t work like that.’ Reverend O’Connor frowns and looks around for somewhere to place his briefcase. ‘One must never assume that He operates on a personal-favour system.’ His capital H’s are so large they fill the room, extinguishing any hint of sunlight.
Bright shuffles around his father towards the half-open door. He’s just remembered how hard it is to breathe in spaces where both his father and God are present. ‘Water?’ he offers, although he doesn’t want either visitor to prolong their stay.
‘Tea, I think.’ As always, his father answers for the Almighty as well as himself. ‘But shall we take it upstairs?’
Suicide Club, The Page 5