The Suicide Diary

by Rees, Kirsten

  “It’s okay.” I laid my hand on his arm and looked at him. “You know you can talk to me about anything Conor, but if here’s not right we can meet another time." He nodded and turned back to his friends. For some reason people have always felt comfortable talking to me about anything. I suppose I’m a good listener and I’m hardly one to judge. And in more recent years - even though I only sparingly mention minor details of my past - I think it has more to do with people knowing somehow that I can understand something of what they are going through. Something inside told me Conor had been holding back and it only made me more determined to find out why.

  The following Saturday he sought me out before I had even laced up my skates.

  "Afterwards, would you come with me...to talk somewhere?" he asked.

  Although we spent our time on the ice and in cafes together we were always surrounded by our friends and I hesitated for a moment, until I saw the pleading in his eyes. "Yes." I replied.

  The next hour on the ice felt like forever and when we finished I expected Conor to ask me to go with him. Instead when he took my hand we followed the group to the usual spot for food and sugary juice which was the last thing I needed. He avoided eye contact and joined in the group's various, over-lapping conversations. His shoulders were hunched and I realised he might have been psyching himself up to tell me something. The rest of our group began to break up into smaller groups, some wanting more privacy, others heading home, so eventually only Conor and I were left at the table.

  We sat in uncomfortable silence for what felt like ages but I daren't speak.

  "I'm not really sure how to do this." He said.

  I remained quiet and just tried my best to look encouraging.

  "I don't have any older brothers or sisters and my Dad isn't really the kind of person you talk to about this kind of thing. My friends wouldn't understand; none of them really get it." He continued.

  He looked down at his hands before continuing. "I've kissed girls but I've never asked one out before. I know that must seem really lame when I'm sixteen, but my Mother, she was sick and everything else just...became kinda unimportant." he said.

  Conor reached across the table and tucked a stray hair behind my ear which only made me feel exposed as he stared at me. Then he broke the tension with a smile and changed the subject. We sat there across the table from each other, with my fingertips resting in his palm under the table and chatted about nothing for an hour or so. Suddenly he slid his fingers through mine, stood up and pulled me to my feet. “I have to be home soon.” He leaned in and kissed me on the lips and when he pulled away I remembered I had been holding my breath and inhaled quickly.

  He never actually said the words, but from that moment, he referred to me as his girlfriend. The weeks continued much as they had before, except after skating and our group lunch, we would wander around just the two of us.

  Nine weeks after he first said ‘Hi’ to me, I found myself walking up the driveway to Conor’s home for the first time and when he unlocked the front door and I felt the stillness in the house, I realised we were alone. He fetched some juice from the kitchen while I sat in his room. I don't really remember what it looked like - maybe we forget these things over time. I guess the colour of the walls or furnishings are unimportant, but I did notice the wall had none of the posters you would expect to find on the wall of a teenage boy. And yet I could see the markings where they had been - a few pieces of blue-tack and paper corners were left as if they had been torn down.

  He seemed reluctant to sit down so I made myself as comfortable as I could - I think it must have been one of those giant bean bags because it rustled and moved so much I was afraid to even fidget. He finally sat opposite me and I sipped juice while he reached over and pushed a CD into the player and music blasted into the room. He quickly turned the dial down and we laughed a little.

  "Is your Dad out?" I asked.

  "He goes to the cemetery every Saturday afternoon like clockwork. It's why I started going ice skating, I don't want to talk to a headstone. I want to remember my Mother as the person she was, not in a cemetery buried in the cold ground." he replied.

  I didn't respond, there was no way to answer that without repeating what he had probably heard a hundred times over from well-meaning people. So I blinked the pity from my eyes and looked at him, hoping he would take the silence as my willingness to listen when he was ready.

  He looked into the corner of the room, but it felt like he'd suddenly left the room and when he spoke it didn't really feel like he was talking to me. “It was cancer. I was thirteen when I first started to notice things weren't right. She was different, stopped giving me hassle about my homework, always making a huge fuss when we said goodbye, and acting like the three of us were having this great, fun, adventure together going away on weekends and holidays. It went on like that until I was fifteen, but whenever I mentioned that she was being strange, she would tell me I was being silly and that wasn’t a Mother allowed to tell her son she loved him.” He paused and I could see his jaw clenching.

  “Just after Christmas last year they sat me down and told me everything - that my Mother wasn't going to be around, she had a disease that was going to take her from us. The doctors had told her it’d come back and there was nothing they could do. They gave her three months to live but when she passed the six month mark, we thought maybe she was strong enough to fight it. And then one day she…just collapsed and she never came home from the hospital.” He was still staring into the corner of the room; he was choking out the words and I could only watch as I saw tears run down his right cheek. It was almost as if I wasn’t there and he was just speaking out in anger at someone – I wasn’t even sure if he was religious or not, but he had good reason to feel angry and want someone to blame.

  Conor knew the brief facts of my father's departure so I wondered if he felt I should understand just a little more than his friends could and maybe that was the reason he was drawn to me. It wasn't the same thing, but in a way I had gone through the loss of a parent just in a much less final way.

  Sometimes I don't think I’m wired the right way. I sat there speechless, watching his whole body shudder as he choked out tears. I knew it had to be so much worse for him to have a wonderful parent taken from you too soon, rather than one that didn’t quite cut it in the winning parents category walk out on you.

  Conor moved on to the floor and knelt before a chest of drawers. His cheeks were still wet but he didn’t seem to notice. He brought a box out from the bottom drawer and sat with it on the bed, so I moved to sit across from him with the box between us. I was scared to breathe too loudly in case it brought him out of this strange trance he seemed to be in. He sat glaring at this small box and I guessed he had sat like this before. After a few moments passed I slowly reached over and lifted the lid and placed it on the bed. His eye didn’t move from the box and I followed his gaze to look inside. It was beautiful and filled with small stacks of memories tied up with ribbon and each with a little card note. There were photos and mementos he could look back on over the years and what looked like a notebook. I opened it and there was handwritten note made out to Conor from his Mother. Half the notebook was filled with her words and the rest blank. He was suffering because she had gone, but he would never wonder if she had loved him. I thought of telling him it was obvious his Mother loved him very much but it sounded like another platitude.

  I couldn't empathise with what he was feeling, partly because I'd been unable to lament my father, a man I barely knew. I only had sparing memories of him and lived what was otherwise a fairly nice upbringing, alongside my brothers and our dog Mac.

  And so, I found myself ill-equipped how to help with such tragic loss. I held him as he talked and while I listened I looked around his room. I remembered something about there being five stages of grief but could only recall denial, anger and acceptance.

  On his desk I saw a photograph of Connor with a pretty, smiling woman I presumed was his
Mother but the frame was badly damaged and held together with Sellotape. He seemed a lot closer to anger than acceptance at this point.

  I tried not to move as we sat with my arms awkwardly around his shoulders while he told me how he'd lost his Mother just over a year ago. I felt awful for him but I'd never been the most emotional person and I wasn't sure how to ease his obvious pain. I didn't want him to be angry at his Mother for leaving - it wasn't right. He needed to break through this stage so he could grieve properly and accept there was nothing that could have been done. I'd never seen him like this and it scared me. And so I did the only thing I could think of and began kissing away his tears. His breath was hot and ragged against my cheek and then I was kissing him on the mouth and wrapping my arms even tighter around him. I had no idea what I was doing but it seemed right in that moment. I wanted to make him feel better and this was the only thing I had to give.

  When I pulled back he looked at me with an expression I couldn’t begin to interpret. We sat in silence just staring at each other and listening to our rapid breathing and hearts beating inside our chests. When he looked in my eyes he seemed to be asking if I was sure, but neither of us spoke the words. I wanted him to lose himself in the moment.

  Pulling my top over my head probably left me with a hairstyle resembling a scarecrow, which together with my less than desirable white cotton underwear set didn’t entirely cast me in the role of femme fatale. But it didn’t seem to hinder him as he pulled my body against his while kissing me fiercely on the mouth.

  I would have been able to put it in perspective – if I’d had any, however, I had none. I’d had minimal kissing experience at this point but I'd started this so I was going to see it through for his sake.

  It wasn’t like any of the brief sex scenes I had seen in films or comparable to anything I had read about in the girl’s magazines that my mother would have considered too old for me to be reading and I kept hidden in the top shelf of my bedroom wardrobe. We worked out the mechanics of what was supposed to happen and it was nice to be held and told I was beautiful but it wasn’t really about the sex. He needed something to block out the pain and this was as good a distraction I could provide. Little did I know that many years later I would find myself wanting the same.

  It would have been nice to say he was my first love, but if I'm honest I knew even then that I didn't feel that way about Conor. Likewise, I doubt he felt anything more than affection for the girl who gave him her virginity to cheer him up. Afterwards we lay on the bed in silence. It wasn’t uncomfortable, just peaceful. He held my hand and I listened to his breathing until he finally fell asleep. From the dark purple shadows that showed under his eyes he obviously needed it so I lay by his side holding his hand until I was sure he was too deeply unconscious to be woken by my movements.

  I wasn’t embarrassed or sneaking out but something told me that he would want to be alone when he woke up. I left a scribbled note on his bedside cabinet ‘Conor, I had to head home but you can call me when you want to. I think you should read your Mother’s words and I know it might seem like she never got to finish the notebook, maybe she was just leaving some room for you to write your own words.’ I hesitated on how to end it since it was hardly a proper letter deserving of a grand finish but it seemed a bit sad looking with just two sentences on a piece of scrap paper so I signed ‘Nina x’ and left as quietly as I could.

  To his credit Conor called me later that evening and although my Mother was out, Joshua took great delight in announcing that ‘a boy’ was on the phone for me.

  “Nina.” Conor sounded tired despite the sleep he’d had and his voice was husky as if he'd been crying so my guess about him needing to be alone when he woke was right.

  “Hey, I’m sorry I wasn’t there when you woke up.” I said.

  “You’ve nothing to apologise for, I’m the one that fell asleep. I just wanted to call and say…” he paused so I cut in.

  “I know.” I didn’t want him to thank me for what I’d done.

  “I was thinking maybe we could do something together. I mean other than ice skating, slush puppies and...and sex.” he replied.

  The last word hung there for a second before I finally answered. “Yeah sure, maybe a movie?” It was perfect since it involved sitting together in darkness watching a film so we couldn’t talk much and didn’t have to face each other.

  To this day, I’m still not sure what really made me want to sleep with Conor. I knew it wasn’t going to fix or stop his grief and I certainly didn’t see it as some great sacrifice or a means to keep him. To be honest how many of us can honestly claim our first time was for love? It's a romantic thought but there was no romance, it was unplanned and neither of us really knew what we were doing. So if it’s not for love or self-gratification, then what better reason to be with someone than to help distract them from their pain even just for a few hours.

  I knew no grief to compare to Conor’s since my mother had kept her pain well hidden on our account. My brother Joshua was too young to remember what it was like before our Father left and so didn’t know any different. I do, however, remember Matthew’s anger only too well, he once told me our Father’s only contribution to our family had been sperm donation. My Father hadn’t cheated on my Mother and he hadn’t treated us badly in the nine years I had known him at home nor had he left us in desperate poverty. He simply walked out one day, and from what little I know he’s not exactly living it up.

  The only other loss I'd suffered by that age was evident in the mini-graveyard in my mother’s garden, dedicated to the passing of all the goldfish I'd over fed. Whatever reason he had for being with me, I hoped it wasn’t because he thought I could help him through his grief because I had no idea what I was doing.

  The date to the cinema was strangely comfortable, but more like two friends going to see a movie rather a couple that had been intimate only a few days before. Nothing was said between us during the movie and afterwards we sat talking about the movie and school until my Mother came to pick us up. On the ride home after we'd dropped him off, she turned the music down and I knew what was coming.

  "Conor seems like a very nice boy." she commented.

  "Yes, all my friends are nice." I replied.

  "Conor is special." she said without it sounding like a question.

  "Yes, he is a special person but we're just friends." I thought I had given her the impression that he didn't see me as more than a friend, which meant I wouldn't have to deal with awkward questions.

  "Well, if one day he or anyone else becomes more than 'just a friend' then I hope you will talk to me about it. I was your age when I had my first boyfriend and I know how intense it can feel; sometimes it makes us want to make things too serious, too quickly.

  Nope, I was getting 'awkward' whether I liked it or not. "I know, but you don't have to worry about me." I said.

  "Just because you are the most sensible of my three children, doesn't mean I worry about you any less." she stated.

  I sighed audibly as if I was bored of the conversation. "Well worry about some other issue instead because Conor isn't going to be my first love okay." And it may have been an excuse to avoid more questions but I think even then I knew it was the truth.

  Conor and I drifted along for a few weeks or months, until our dates became less frequent and the phone calls dwindled to a halt. It was a couple of weeks before I even really noticed.

  Being with Conor hadn’t made me feel like I’d had something in common with the girls in my school year - I didn’t delight in sharing the latest gossip with them and neither did I sit in anguish and over-analyse his every word, like so many of the other girls seemed to do. It was private and personal but my reluctance to talk only seemed to spur them on.

  When they found out we had ‘ended’ I was engulfed in a circle of sympathy and shared teen angst of which I had no wish to be part of. I didn’t feel hurt or betrayed or any of the things they were telling me I should be feeling. I had been curi
ous perhaps; Conor and I had shared something together and then it was over.

  I should have known then that there was something wrong with me. Shouldn't I have been calling him every hour on the hour, begging him to love me? Where were the hysterical nights spent with girlfriends dissecting every conversation, reading between the lines of our last words to each other and trying to figure out where it had all gone wrong? From what little I had gathered from TV about the end of a relationship, I was pretty sure I should have been crying into a litre tub of double chocolate chip ice cream.

  But the only thing I felt was shame. Not over giving up my virginity to a boy I probably wasn't going to see again, more that I’d let him down. I’d known he was looking for something to drag him out of his despair and I wasn’t it. I could never be enough to pull him back from the pain of losing his mother, and I didn’t have the strength to help him.

  Strangely enough, the strongest memory I have from that time was the journey home after my first time. It was early evening but the sun was still shining on the grassy fields I saw out of the train window and there was a light breeze rustling through the trees. I can’t remember what I was thinking of specifically; perhaps I was wondering if I felt any different or maybe trying to think of anything other than what I’d just done.

  Whatever had me so distracted, it was enough that it was too late to notice my right shoe starting to slip from my foot. As I was hustled through the opening doors, it fell through the gap between the train and the platform. I half turned, staring down into the darkened space until someone nudged me aside. The tiled ground was too cold to put my bare foot onto so I did a sort of shuffled hop over to the little intercom box and pressed the buzzer and waited.

  It finally crackled and an older man’s voice spoke. “How can I help?” he asked.

  “Eh well you see, my shoe has fallen off and it’s on the tracks.” I stated.