In the bed, the once-spirited teenager now looks like a stroke victim. Her head is tightly bandaged.
The nurse raises her eyebrows in an ‘Excuse me for living’ expression and slips the leaflet on the pine-effect bedside locker.
The consultant neurologist Mr Anthony Dean appears, followed by a gaggle of student doctors, some carrying clipboards. The females are dressed as if they’re about to go down a catwalk. The surgeon has traded the surgical robes for a white coat, and a stethoscope hangs from his neck.
Nancy barely acknowledges him; she’s too busy whispering reassurances in Lucy’s ear.
Mr Dean speaks to his students: ‘Patient presented with cerebral oedema following a car crash.’
He moves to the foot of the bed and pulls back the sheet, revealing a set of glitzy toenails, completely incongruous against the starched white.
Mr Dean runs a plexor along the sole of one of Lucy’s feet. He pauses then does the same to the other foot. The students watch closely.
Neither foot moves.
Nigel brushes away a tear.
‘The condition’s commonly known as “Talk and die” syndrome because of the speed with which concussion can suddenly cause death,’ Mr Dean drones. ‘Intercranial pressure punctured dura as a result of the impact.’
He stops because Nancy is interrupting: ‘No, no, no. A subdural bleed developed between the brain and dura, causing hypertension.’
Mr Dean gives a knowing look to the students. ‘Mum’s a doctor. MRI shows activity but the patient is unresponsive, uncommunicative, has complete paralysis.’
‘Wrong again,’ Nancy pipes up.
She turns to her daughter in the bed and squeezes her hand. ‘Show them my darling. Blink once, if that tickled,’ she says, full of love.
Everyone stares as Lucy’s disarmingly long lashes blink. The nurse gasps.
‘This is Locked-in syndrome,’ Nancy states categorically. ‘I’m taking her home. She’s better off with us.’
Mr Dean is flustered. ‘You can’t,’ he blusters. ‘We will need to do tests … monitor her progress. A diagnosis like that takes months.’
Nancy locks eyes with her husband. ‘Try and stop us.’
19
Sexton walks with the headmistress from her office to the musty gym hall downstairs, already packed with concerned parents about to be briefed by a psychologist attached to the Department of Education.
‘One of the dads has just arrived,’ Bronwyn whispers, twisting away from the door and mouthing exaggeratedly for Sexton’s benefit, ‘Amy Reddan’s father.’
She turns back and Sexton follows her gaze to the broad, pale-faced man who looks like a lost soul, in an Aran-knit cardigan and a denim shirt buttoned up incorrectly. He appears completely and utterly distracted, as if he’s not connected to the present at all.
Sexton puts a hand on Bronwyn’s before she can sweep off ‘to see how he’s doing’.
‘I could do with an introduction,’ he says.
She drags air through her teeth as if she can’t face it, but then gives a resolute nod. They cross the room together, but Sexton hangs back as she invades the man’s body space, watching as she takes his hands and goes through the motions – the pitter-patter of condolences mingled with comforting chin-up talk. Then she sweeps an arm towards Sexton.
‘Rob, I want you to meet Detective Inspector Gavin Sexton, from Store Street. He’s compiling a report on the girls, and the pressures they were under. If you feel up to it, he would like to … Well, he can probably explain it better himself.’
Sexton puts out his hand. ‘I’m very sorry for your troubles.’
‘Thank you,’ Rob replies.
Parents arriving into the room put hands on his back and shoulders as they pass, touch his arm, offering him a sad face, which disappears the second they have moved on, relieved to have escaped anything more in-depth.
‘Can we talk about Amy and the issues she had before she died?’ Sexton asks.
‘Of course … if there’s anything I can do to help … You know about the bullying, I presume.’
Sexton gives a nod.
‘You want to know the ironic thing,’ Rob says. ‘As terrible as it was, it was no worse than what Melissa went through afterwards. Amy was such a sensitive girl. She took it to heart.’
‘I’d like to find out if Amy was taking any drugs – prescription or otherwise?’ Sexton says.
‘Not that I ever knew,’ Rob says. The psychologist comes over and asks him if he’s ready.
‘Can we talk after?’ Sexton asks Rob.
Rob puts his hand in his pocket and hands over his card. ‘I can’t today but ring me any time. Today would have been Amy’s fifteenth birthday, you see. That’s the only reason I’m here. I said I’d contribute to the talk. Afterwards, we’re going to release fifteen lanterns in Amy’s memory.’ He points to the card in Sexton’s hand. ‘Call me, I’d like to help. I’ve also done a lot of research since Amy died that you might find useful.’
He checks his watch and says he has to get started. Sexton thanks him and tells him he will ring soon. Bronwyn gives Rob a hug, or tries to, but his arms stay stiff at his side and his back straight as a pole, despite the tears that have welled up in his eyes. It’s as if what’s happened has drained him of every last resource. Sexton remembers how gutting it felt when his father died. He can’t imagine what it must be like to bury a teenage child. Finding out Maura was pregnant when she’d died nearly killed him as it was. He scans the room for a free seat and finds one right at the back of the hall.
The crowd consists of an even split of mothers and fathers – some clutching each others’ hands, many gripping tissues. They lean in to each other, exchanging worried whispers, and when they spot Rob, brace themselves before heading over to give him long hugs, waiting for the lecture to get underway.
At the top of the room an attractive brunette in her thirties, wearing a just-below-knee navy skirt and matching tailored jacket, points a remote control at a projector and runs through the order of beaming pictures on a large screen behind her, before turning them off to lead Rob up to the podium.
Sexton stretches out his legs and makes himself comfortable as the shrink raises her voice to introduce ‘a very special guest speaker’. There is a thunderous round of applause, and Rob looks uncomfortable as he puts a hand up to make them stop. After clearing his throat, he begins. ‘Amy was three years old when we watched Toy Story on DVD. There’s a part in the movie when Woody causes Buzz to fall out of the bedroom window and all the toys think he’s trying to murder him because Buzz has just become Andy’s favourite toy. When this happened, Amy became upset and cried that Woody hadn’t meant it, when even Woody himself didn’t seem too sure. That was Amy. All her life she had a built in sense of right and wrong, even as a little girl.’
Rob adjusts himself, and Sexton watches him swallowing hard. ‘There has been a lot of anger since my daughter died. A lot of people rushed judgements, and it’s human nature to want to have someone to blame. I certainly did. But it needs to stop now. Enough children have been lost. My daughter would have hated that anyone else felt compelled to take her own life too. Even when things were very tough for Amy, she was willing to give Melissa the benefit of the doubt. If I’m honest, I wanted to go and talk to Melissa, to go and give her a piece of my mind, but Amy said we didn’t know what was going on in Melissa’s life.’ He takes a breath. ‘That’s the way Amy was all her short life. Her heart was too big. Anyone who heard her sing knows she felt things more deeply than most people. Even those people carrying clipboards who stop you in the street looking for your bank-account details for charity, people I’d go out of my way to avoid, well, Amy never let me pass one without agreeing to donate something. “It’s only ten euro, Dad,” she’d say.’
There is a quiet murmur of laughter in the room.
Rob sighs, and his eyes stay lowered. ‘I kept all her things – the little band they put on her wrist when she was a baby i
n the hospital with her name and date of birth, the umbilical-cord clip that snipped her from her mom and made her dependent on the universe. Every shoe she ever wore, I have, even ones with holes in the toes, because every step she took in them mattered. Maybe I always knew she was too good for this earth, and sensed that I was always going to lose her. Her giant heart saved the life of another girl, all her organs were donated; she didn’t have one drop of bitterness or guile in her body. Please let the lesson of Amy’s life be compassion.
‘My heart is broken, but every time another kid follows Amy’s way they diminish her a little more. Please tell the kids not to let the bullies have the last word, but also that bullying back is never the answer. Thank you very much.’
Rob swipes an eye and finds a chair in the crowd as they applaud him again. The shrink turns her projector on and ignores a collective groan that emanates in response to the first detail she delivers – that some twenty-five people between the ages of fifteen and twenty-eight killed themselves in Bridgend within two years of January 2007.
‘I want to say from the outset, I’m here not to scare but to inform,’ the psychologist states.
All the suicides occurred within a ten-mile radius of the town, and all but one were by hanging, she goes on.
The shrink clicks her control stick and the face of a Goth-eyed teenage girl with dyed black hair replaces a damp-looking town that could have been anywhere in Ireland.
‘Suicide epidemics are rare, but not unprecedented,’ she continues. ‘And the gender breakdown is interesting. Whereas, here, we have an exact 50:50 ratio, in Bridgend it was a largely male phenomenon at first. Within a month of the first female and fifteenth in the Bridgend cluster, Natasha Randall, hanging herself in her bedroom, four more hangings followed, three of whom were girls.’
Females tend to overdose or slash their wrists, she says, because often they are more interested in self harm, and issuing a cry for help than dying, and these cases are referred to as parasuicides.
‘There has been speculation that the victims might have belonged to an Internet suicide cult.’ She indicates a map of the Welsh town on the screen which has interpreted the clusters as darkened shades of red. ‘This was because of the speed with which Bebo pages eulogizing the dead went up on the Web. Sometimes the people leaving messages were themselves found hanging weeks later.
‘But true Internet suicide cults – in which strangers meet online and agree to die together – are most common in Japan, a country with the worst suicide rate in the world, perhaps because of the cultural association of suicide being honourable, from the Samurai military nobility of pre-industrial Japan to the kamikaze pilots of the Second World War. To put it in context, in 2003, more than 34,000 people died by suicide in Japan.
‘Of these, only around thirty-four died in Internet-linked group suicides, but that figure has been rising steadily ever since. So many young Japanese people have now killed themselves by inhaling fumes from household cleaning agents, or burning charcoal in cars and taking sleeping tablets, that it’s no longer even considered newsworthy. Every night across Japan, hundreds of people meet online, looking for strangers to die with.
‘The Internet messages are all variations of this, typically: “I want to die … anyone die with me? Let’s die together.”’
A sudden bang makes her stop and Sexton sees Rob bolt from the room. His chair has overturned in his haste to get away. One of the mums runs after him.
The speaker waits for a second then clicks the screen, and a snapshot of a chatroom exchange appears. ‘This one is called the Suicide Club,’ she resumes slowly. ‘And this message says, “I’ve got a car and a charcoal briquette and medicine, everything. I’m a 22-year-old man and I want to die with six other people.”
‘There are thousands more equally sincere messages about despair and wanting to die. A guidebook on the best places to do it and describing the pros and cons of various methods has sold over a million copies.’
She pauses. Sexton notes how quiet the room is.
The lecture continues: ‘There seems to be a reassurance for people in the idea of dying together. The reason why these pacts between strangers should hold any appeal is as mysterious as the cases of the Bridgend deaths, where victims tended to know each other, and so, in some cases, the domino effect of multiple deaths might be attributable to unresolved grief.
‘In Bridgend, some experts have put the cause down to Gilbert Grape syndrome – where bored, impulsive teenagers with nothing to do in a backwater town consider infamy an achievement. Suicide became something cool to do.’
There is a collective intake of breath.
‘But the Japanese believe,’ the shrink goes on, ‘that the problem is the Internet has created a new generation of “hikikomori” – recluses who never leave their room and use computers to socialize, to communicate and as their only source of entertainment. They believe online suicide pacts are ultimately kids trying to find friendship.
‘We must not underestimate the role of the Internet in Bridgend either.’ She stretches a pointer to the screen as a graph appears showing the number of Bridgend victims with Facebook accounts. It looked like almost all of them.
‘The teenage years are turbulent for every generation, but since the advent of the Internet we have seen the demise of face-to-face discussions, leading to a greater sense of alienation and inability to communicate feelings anywhere other than on the Internet.
‘Internet clubs are not confined to Japan. In Oregon, a suicidal man posted a message on Valentine’s Day with the tagline: “Suicide party – you want to join it?”
‘Ultimately, though, it’s too easy to blame the Internet, cults, pacts, video games. At the end of the day, today’s youth are more sexually active, and more likely to experiment with drugs at an earlier age than ever before. This, combined with the impulsiveness that comes with such a hormonal stage of life, has turned out to be a deadly cocktail, as we know to our own cost in this country.’
She reaches for a glass of water and sips slowly.
‘I think it would be helpful to try to understand what’s going through the heads of the suicide survivors, and I’d like to read what one near-suicide victim said after her head accidentally slipped through a noose she had made from her belt and she was found by her mother.’
The psychologist puts on a pair of glasses, reaches for some cue cards and, angling them into the light of the projector, reads:
‘“It’s something that developed in my mind. I started to think death is not the bad thing I was taught to think, I got this feeling I wanted to be with the others, that they understood me more than the people around me. I felt miserable being here and thinking there’s got to be a better place. I don’t believe in heaven, God, or none of that.
‘“I was thinking about suicide since I was thirteen and I knew some of the others were hanging themselves. When I was twelve, my family fell apart and my mother took up with this man and I didn’t get along with him. I’ve had a lot of people betray me and I find it hard to trust people, friends as well. I did try to kill myself when I was fourteen. I took an overdose of painkillers. I suffer from severe headaches and carried them in my schoolbag, but I got scared of what I done. We were at school and I told the nurse and she got me to the hospital in time.
‘“A lot of people said it’s selfish what these people done. But to me the only selfish people are the ones that drove them to it. It’s been a month since I tried to do it. I can’t really remember much about it, but I was feeling unhappy with life, sitting alone in my room. My mother was in the house. At the time I was mad at her. My head kept telling me to do it because everything was going to be OK. So finally I tied a couple of belts and jumped off the stairs, but my head slipped through the noose. It only held me for a split second. My mother came. I fell to the floor really shaking, and got up, sitting and crying. I still haven’t recovered, to be honest.”’
The psychologist pauses after putting down her notes, reco
gnizing the sense of horror in the room. Everyone assembled is the parent of a teenager, Sexton presumes. It isn’t hard to imagine what might be going through their minds.
‘There is a psychodynamic explanation of suicide, that it’s 180-degree murder. The victim really wants to kill somebody else, possibly an abuser, but instead they eliminate the abuse by killing the self. You kill the abusee instead of the abuser to send – excuse my French – a “Fuck you.”’
There is a murmur of discomfort in the room. Sexton uses the opportunity to take his phone from his pocket and read a text. It’s from Jo: ‘I need a favour. Would you call over and have a word with Rory about how hard it was when Maura took her own life? Tonight. It’s important.’ Sexton puts the phone back in his pocket.
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ comes a voice from the crowd. ‘It’s our fault, now is that it?’
‘Not at all,’ the shrink answers. ‘It might be more helpful if I just go straight to some more examples, to help us see the world through the eyes of depressed teenagers.’ She clicks through slides showing the brain and a lab.
She stops when the stunning doe-eyed girl with the white face, heavy black eyeliner and jet-black hair from the start of the presentation reappears, staring blankly back. ‘Angeline is another Bridgend victim. She was eighteen when she died. She had tried to take her own life twice before she succeeded. Angeline’s Facebook profile said, “I don’t like myself, but hey, who does?”
‘Angie was a Goth, and some of you here might well have been Goths too in your teenage years.’
There are grunts of recognition from the crowd. ‘The Goth subculture started in the eighties but it never disappeared through the nineties and noughties. It’s that phase teenagers go through – dressing in black because of a sudden sense of the morbidity of life. Goths are influenced by the horror and romance of nineteenth-century literature. And today’s teens, who devoured the Twilight series about vampires, and the Hunger Games about teenagers battling to the death, are not such a big leap away.’
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