by Adam Cloake
He was going to be all right. As soon as Helen walked through the front door, the dog would start barking again. She would hear him, fling the cellar door open, and gasp at the sight before her. More than likely, Terry just needed a trip to the hospital. They would sort him out. He would be given a skin graft, and his leg and ass would be as good as new. They would pump some antibiotics into him to kill off whatever foul poisons the little vermin had left inside him.
Yes, he was going to be all right!
He could feel himself passing out, and welcomed the sensation. He would sleep, take a short respite from the horror of reality.
If he eventually woke up, that would be fine. If not, that might not be so bad, either.
He closed his eyes, and drifted off.
Helen strode angrily towards Marion Villa, the phone still clutched in her hand. She swore to herself; this was not the news she had wanted to hear.
Her anger, however, abated when she spotted the white Hiace van parked in front of the house. She couldn’t resist a partial smile as she approached the driver’s side window.
It rolled down, and Steve popped his head out, resting his bare arm on the doorframe.
“Hello, Missy,” he said.
“Hello, yourself,” she replied. This was the first time she had seen her ex in person since the warm afternoon, now more than a year ago, when he had given her the pup. She couldn’t help but notice some of the changes that were apparent in him. The firmness of his arms. The bronze tone of his skin.
He could see the way she was flicking her eyes about him. “I got a discount on some gym membership,” he said. “It was a present from Kevin and Sue.”
“And you’ve been using it?” she laughed. “I thought people just promised to go, then gave up straight away.”
“Not me. I love it. I feel great these days. And…” He paused for extra effect. “I’ve gone vegetarian as well.”
“Really?” she teased, remembering how resistant he had once been to the idea. “Why?” she continued. “Are you in love?”
“Nope,” he answered. “Still free. Still single.”
“Just like me,” she said.
This created a brief pause between them. They both looked away from each other.
Steve was the one who decided to break the silence. “Anyway,” he said, “Let’s get your things in the van. Is there much?” She had phoned him the previous day.
Helen’s lower lip curled in embarrassment as she said “I’m afraid there’s a bit of a hitch. I only just found out.”
“What is it?” he asked.
“My new landlord just called. He found a problem with the plumbing in the flat. They had to turn off the water to have a look at it.”
“Oh, I see!”
“He asked me if I could delay the move until tomorrow, or the day after.”
“Aw, that sucks!” he said. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“We could still take the stuff out of the house,” she suggested. “Maybe leave it in the van for a day or two.”
He sucked air in through his teeth. “Nah, I’m afraid we can’t, sorry” he told her. “I have to do a run to Athlone later on. Won’t be back till tomorrow evening. And I’m afraid I can’t leave your stuff in the garage either, coz Kevin’s Honda’s in there. I could meet you back here the day after tomorrow, if that’s all right.”
“Yeah, that should be fine,” she said. There was also no way she could suggest leaving the stuff anywhere around her sister’s place. She and her husband were not that kind of people. “Besides, I don’t fancy the idea of loading and unloading the van twice in three days.”
“There’s only one thing left to do, then,” he said.
“What’s that?” she asked, although she already had a fair idea.
“Pint?” he asked her, a playful note in his voice.
An image of Rusty darted through Helen’s mind. He was in the house right beside her. After a second, she pushed the image away. It’s just for an extra day, she though. Two at the most.
“You’re on,” she agreed. She gave a little “Woo hoo!” as she skipped around the front of the van, and over to the passenger door.
Within seconds, they were on their way into the city, away from Terry’s house.
Something brought him back out of the darkness, some change in the room’s atmosphere. It was something both familiar and foreign at the same time.
His eyes were closed, his mind dipping in and out of drowsiness, like fingers in warm, soapy water. He was hunting around in the spongy blackness of his mind for the origin of this strange new energy he could feel around him. Despite his resistance, his mind’s natural curiosity caused it to push him all the way back up, and into full consciousness.
The sensation of which he was most immediately aware was the dullness of the light coming through the cellar window. When he fell asleep, it had been late morning, creeping towards noon. Now, it seemed like the whole day was ending. A few seconds later, he realised from the angle of the light that it was not the fading embers of dusk that he was seeing.
It was dawn.
He had been lying here for almost a full day.
And Helen hadn’t come.
The screeching agony which had been wrenching at his body the day before was still there, but it had been tamped down into a throbbing numbness which subsumed him entirely. While he had slept, the paralysis had eaten further into his nerves.
He tried to roll over, but no part of his anatomy would budge.
He became aware again of the new sound in the room, very close to him. It was a whimpering sound, but not caused by pain or fear.
Terry opened his eyes, and looked at the dog.
Instantly, he understood what was happening.
Rusty was no longer focussed on the rat. It lay untouched, unwanted, where it had been thrown. The dog had stepped over it, and now stood closer to where Terry lay, surveying his master’s body from head to toe.
His heart sank as he recalled words once spoken by his fourth-class primary teacher, Miss Begley. She was answering a question posed by the son of a local farmer. She had told her class of nine- and ten-year-olds that, no matter how hungry a dog gets, it will never eat a rat, because it considers them to be poisonous. These words now echoed in Terry’s head like a faulty radio as he watched Rusty, his girlfriend’s loyal little terrier, sniff curiously at the gaping wound in Terry’s side, just as the rat had done earlier. The string of saliva dangling from the dog’s mouth was thicker than before. He looked briefly up at Terry, and their eyes locked for a few seconds. There was a guilty sadness in Rusty’s look.
Terry did a quick, frightened calculation in his head. He concluded that the dog hadn’t eaten for more than two days.
He understood what the tone in Rusty’s whine was.
It was an apology.
It was remorse for future sins.
Terry was forced to watch in horror as the dog proceeded to lick the open wound, the drool now flowing more freely, mixing with Terry’s own raw meat.
For the last time, Terry repeated his earlier action; he turned his face away.
Hungrier than he had ever been in his life, Rusty opened his mouth and, silently, almost respectfully, he began to eat.
Don’t Do This!
He sat on the stony ground of the alleyway, just three hundred unhappy yards from his old home.
Fingers of cold crawled their way up his thighs and back.
Or perhaps that feeling wasn’t the cold, but the uncaring spread of his own fear.
Or was there something else here with him – deeper than cold, stronger than fear?
Thankfully, he wouldn’t have to suffer any of these discomforts – real or imagined – for much longer.
For this was the night that he, Dean Roche, had chosen to end his own life.
In one hand, he held a bottle of mineral water; in the other, a small bag of coarse yellow powder.
Dean was about to implement his “permanent so
lution to a temporary problem”.
Of course, he had read these words many times, and in many places. He believed in the words. Their veracity was beyond question. The subject of suicide – Shakespeare had called it “self-slaughter” – was one which had followed him around throughout his life, although he had never before been so conscious of its prevalence. It elbowed its way into his pub conversations. It looked up at him from his newspaper, his laptop, his smartphone. Warnings about it were heralded on large billboards. He had even written a failed novel about it, and about the people he imagined would be prone to attempt it.
In each of these places, the message was always the same: “Don’t do this!”
And yet, he now felt that it was the permanence of the solution which attracted him most – the comfort of ignoring the quotidian escalation of all that harried him, and of allowing his essence to fall forever into nothingness. Isn’t that how the Demon of Suicide recruits, by throwing a veil over all future hope – even though the possibility of new hope may be mere moments away – and hiding it from honest view? Perhaps this Demon, by its nature, plays a long game. Perhaps it has always lived inside Dean, waiting for the right moment – his bleakest moment – to knock on the dark door of his consciousness. Or did that sound too much like Fate?
And this Demon had surely assembled a fine army to assist in its battle against Dean’s natural urge for self-salvation. The most promising soldiers to do such wicked work will always be the most surprising ones, the people we think we can trust.
His wife, Karen, was such a one. Dean had been abandoned by her and, via her proxy, by both of his children. He had also been discarded by Pavel, who had taken back from him the tedious work which he hated, but which – due to the decaying state of his finances – Dean now painfully missed. He had been choked at his creative birth by all those publishing houses, barely able to conceal their disdain for his work behind polite, diplomatic sentences.
It was thus easy for Dean to believe that he had truly been cast aside by life itself. Why not simply pursue the requisite finality? Why not just “give up the ghost”, “throw in the towel”, pour his life out into a pit of oblivion? Why not indeed?
Dean was thirty-eight years old, and an only child since his late teens. Subtract both parents – flung from their mangled mini-van, crumpled side-by-side in a dry ditch – from the family unit, and what are we left with?
“Well, that would be just me, right? All on my very own, right?”
For years, Karen and the kids had filled this void for him. The grey living of all those pre-marriage, pre-family, years had been trumped by the flashes of brightness they had brought into the home he had bought for them. For a time – and it was a good time – his new family had splashed his world with their delicious and delightful, bright and beautiful, orangey-lemony texture. Dean had embraced the sensation of being truly alive, truly wanted, truly loved. It was purely for them that he got out of bed early each morning, ignoring the laptop on the dresser, as it avidly guarded the litter of unfinished writing locked within. It was for them that he went out into each new day to perform the same old tasks.
But then the job at the warehouse had vanished. Pavel, his manager, and previously his good friend, had spoken about the pressures of the economy, the competition from overseas, the need for retrenchment – stuff like that. Pav had shaken his head ruefully as, with reluctance and regret, he had offered Dean his best wishes for the future, then had held his sympathetic smile while Dean turned and walked from his office for the last time.
The job had gone away, but the loan sharks hadn’t. They had stubbornly remained, patiently basking on the near edges of Dean’s life, along with his continuing urge to gamble and to snort, to snort and to gamble.
His family had vanished shortly after the job, his wife and children now happily, sunnily, farming away in New Zealand with tall, handsome Craig.
And the mortgage! They had all left him, during an economic slump, with his crippling mortgage. So, even the house had to go – the place where he had loved a woman, where he had helped to rear their children. In that steady home, Dean had cuddled these tiny people, had changed their dirty clothes, had cooked their little meals.
Sally likes spaghetti. Ronan likes sausage and chips.
They had both cheered the stories he so often read to them, especially the ones he had made up himself.
Now they were gone, and they had taken their little cheers with them.
They had all, in unison, left him to tumble down, then tumble further down, to land, at last, in this dank alley.
Dean had chosen, for his final chapter, this place of morbid darkness and foul dampness, because of its proximity to their old home in the centre of Killora. But, tonight, he had found himself unable to walk past that familiar blue door. He had added ten minutes to the journey, arriving circuitously where he now sat. For this night, it was important to him to be close to the house which he had shared with people he cherished, and who had once cherished him. He just couldn't bear to look at it again.
Why an alley? In the early stirrings of winter?
Dean had his reasons.
By his own specific choice, the act would be performed out of doors. He wanted his body to be found quickly, and this was unlikely if he died hidden away in the lonely bedsit to which circumstance had banished him. Who would ever call? Who would ever visit? How grotesque would his corpse be when its stench was strong enough to attract the attention of his neighbours?
He had elected the embrace of poison for his final companion, rather than a more violent, manlier, end. He had his reasons for this, as well – chief among them the gruelling nature of the alternatives.
He would not shoot himself on someone else’s property, not even that of his creepy, densely-eyebrowed landlord. He chose not to cause an inconvenience for – nor brook the irritation of – any innocent person who might have to sponge him up afterwards.
He refused to fling himself into any body of water. That would surely result in his complete disappearance. He would not allow himself to be washed away from all human sight, as his cadaver became bloated, providing food for the sea creatures which he himself disdained to eat. He wouldn’t satisfy them.
Dean wished to remain present after the fact, to be a visible corpse. When it was found, he wanted his body to be a stiff, accusatory digit pointing at the callousness of the world.
As for the means he had eventually chosen, he had received assurances about the painless workings of the yellow powder. The pharmacist – a dodgy friend of a dodgy gambling acquaintance – had spoken of a placid drift away from consciousness, from the world, from future harm. Dean had, of course, wondered how this man, who smelled of onions, could possibly have known this. He suspected it was mere spiel to close the sale.
Dean pushed this innocuous question aside, however. His need for an ending had pummelled all such questions, the answers to which now bore only a short-lived usefulness for him.
He released another sigh. He did that a lot these days. “Let's get this done!” he said aloud to the darkness, and to any heedless cats and rats lurking nearby.
He opened the small plastic bag, and peered at the powder inside. It looked like sherbet – the orangey-lemony type – and it smelled like ashes. Perhaps it was his own despair he was smelling.
The powder looked so innocent, being what it was – a corroder of guts, a consumer of life, the last meal he would ever ingest.
Resting his head on the brick wall behind him, Dean took one last look at the full moon, which seemed to be egging him on. Then he closed his eyes. The upcoming minutes would be measured out by his last few inhalations, his last few exhalations.
His mental preparation complete, Dean is ready to begin.
He removes the cap from the bottle of mineral water.
He pours the yellow powder into the bottle.
He replaces the cap, and gives the bottle a methodical shake. Too methodical! He’s delaying the Final Moment. Move
on!
He reopens the bottle.
Finally, he has arrived at the termination of his ritual.
He tilts his head back, opens his mouth, and pours the now-deadly water onto the curve of his tongue. All delaying tactics are now in the past. The Final Moment, held in the wings for long enough, has strutted onto the stage.
According to the pharmacist, he now has only five minutes remaining.
He waits.
These minutes feel quite distinct from all the others he has ever lived. They will be different, of course, from these same five minutes as they are experienced by everyone else in the world. Dean wonders how many new people will be born while his body winds down. How many people will die? And what proportion of them will die unhappy?
He now sits, expecting – as promised – nothing but a calming, gradual detachment. No person, and no event, may now intervene. There is no other presence here but the breeze that continues to whisper past him.
But the breeze is not alone.
Having previously possessed nothing but its own hollowness, it now carries something with it. Off to his left, at the entrance to the alley, Dean sees a brief flash of something small and white. Whatever it is, it is nudged along the stony ground towards him, like a nervous child being presented to a dour grandparent.
The white object pauses twenty feet away from him. From this distance, with the moon offering little help, he cannot see what it is, but he can tell that it’s accompanied by a strange odour. From the maw of the alley, from where the white object has come, Dean can smell something like rot, like decay.
Dismissing this as a mere interruption, he closes his eyes, and returns to his dying. Four minutes left! He allows his thoughts to drift, seeking out some memories, in the hope that, as a consolation gift, he will be offered only the good ones, the best ones.
At first, he sees himself at a mealtime with his kids. He sees Sally’s spaghetti, Ronan’s sausage and chips. The story he is telling them is about a skateboarding hedgehog. Their cheers – their whoops and howls – are more excited than ever.