The Suicide Club

by Rhys Thomas

  A lot of people have asked me since whether or not I thought Freddy actually expected us to kill ourselves when he wrote the Charter and I can only answer the question honestly: I don’t know. I’ve thought about it loads but I just can’t come up with an answer. I don’t know what he was thinking.

  The following Monday was my final counselling session before Christmas with the dreadful Sylvia Bowler. Our last few sessions had descended into ridiculousness because I couldn’t take her seriously. We had a healthy dislike for each other. As far as I was concerned, the only good thing to have come from these sessions was that nobody in school had actually found out about them.

  However, when I went to see Sylvia on that day my mouth almost dropped to the floor. Instead of Sylvia, sat at the head of that big meeting table was a vision of sheer perfection. There was a woman, or maybe she was girl, of about twenty. I could try to describe her but I don’t want to sound clichéd by saying that she had olive skin and perfect features, so I won’t. But that was what she looked like. She was amazing. One thing was for certain: I would not want to beat this woman up like I sometimes wanted to do to Sylvia the fat old hag (I’m showing off – I would never hit a woman).

  ‘Hello,’ she said. She got up from her chair and went over to the unit at the side of the room where a coffee pot had been added. She poured herself a cup and I saw that her body was amazing as well, and I would not usually say something sexist like that so it must have been excellent.

  ‘Hi,’ I said. ‘Uh, where’s Sylvia?’

  ‘Sylvia’s gone.’ She didn’t say it mysteriously. Her voice was beautiful and I never use that word because it’s become so passé.

  ‘Gone where?’ I sat down.

  ‘Would you like some coffee?’

  ‘Yes please,’ I answered.

  ‘Sylvia told me your parents don’t like you drinking coffee.’

  ‘Yeah.’ I paused, looked at her. ‘I didn’t really like Sylvia. She was a know-all.’

  The new girl went back to her seat.

  ‘I guess there’s not much point talking in depth,’ she said. ‘You’ll be breaking up for the holidays soon so we can start properly next term, if that’s OK with you.’

  I was pleased that I was in my last session before Christmas but I was also looking forward to my next one in the new year if it meant that this woman would be my counsellor.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I asked.

  ‘Emma.’

  I liked the way she wasn’t too friendly with me. No doubt Sylvia had had a part in that. I used to ridicule her intelligence by researching a psychological trait the day before a session and then pretending to have that thing wrong with me, getting Sylvia to think that she knew what was going on in my head. But then I would explain to her my game. She hated it, I could tell.

  ‘My mother’s name is Emma,’ I beamed.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘No.’

  She laughed. I didn’t expect her to laugh because she was an adult and I was still, basically, a child, and adults and children don’t operate on the same level because of the idea of respect, you know? Telling jokes like that might have come across as precocious.

  ‘Can I ask you a question?’

  ‘Of course you can.’ She still wasn’t friendly.

  ‘Sylvia once gave me an orange ball and told me to “peel the orange”. What does that mean?’

  Emma smiled. Her whole face changed when she smiled. She was radiant.

  ‘Why don’t you look it up? I hear you’re into that.’

  Now it was my turn to smile.

  ‘Do you think I’m going to ask you about your qualifications?’ I was sort of seeing how far I could push her. I was flirting with her and must have looked like a complete idiot.

  ‘Maybe.’ I never did find out how many A levels she had, but I knew by the very fact that she refused to answer my question that she had done well and gone to a good university. ‘Now let me ask you a question,’ she said.

  I sat there and listened.

  ‘Do you feel that you’ve got anything out of your sessions with Sylvia?’

  I sighed.

  ‘No,’ I said honestly.

  ‘You don’t go in for us social workers then?’

  ‘Don’t say that word.’

  ‘Social workers?’

  ‘It’s so meaningless. You must know that.’

  She just smiled.

  ‘You know what, Rich? You might find this hard to believe but there are good people in the world who genuinely want to help. I have chosen this career to try and put kids back on the right track. Do you think there’s something wrong with that?’

  ‘I’m not disaffected,’ I said right out. ‘I know that there are good people in the world. My all-time hero is Bob Geldof. What he has done is mind-blowing. But for every good person, there’s a know-all like Sylvia. There’s a difference between the two. She’s not a good person. She’s a busybody.’

  ‘Tell me what you want to do with your life.’

  ‘I want to make cartoons,’ I said. I had never told an adult this in my life, not even my parents, mainly because I knew how far-fetched it sounded. Only a handful of my friends knew what I wanted to do. When people asked me, I would say that I wanted to be a vet. But here I was blurting it out.

  ‘Cartoons?’

  ‘Yeah. Kids’ cartoons. I want to write the scripts. I can’t really draw very well, but I can come up with ideas and stuff.’ I felt like I was unshackling chains from around my chest as I spoke. ‘And I mean cartoons for kids, not ironical things that can be enjoyed on “two levels”, I mean cartoons for kids.’ I paused. ‘I want to make a cartoon that parents and kids can enjoy together on one level, you know? I want it to be completely innocent.’

  She seemed impressed by what I had said because I could feel her warm to me.

  ‘Have you got any ideas?’

  ‘I have but I don’t like talking about them.’

  ‘You can tell me.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not embarrassed – I just haven’t fully formulated what’s in my head. If I told you about my ideas, they would sound terrible because they’re all over the place. When I write everything down in an order, I’ll be able to tell you.’

  ‘I look forward to that.’

  I paused and leaned forward on to the table. I had to tell her something important. And when I said it, I meant it.

  ‘Emma. I didn’t mean for any harm to come to the falcon.’ An image of Freddy flashed in my head, his face all aglow in candlelight. He was signing the Suicide Club Charter. Whoa! That felt . . . sinister.

  Emma was smiling at me.

  ‘I think I know that,’ she said.

  17

  I LEFT THE counselling room feeling a little better. At lunch, I sat with Freddy and Matthew. Freddy, I remember it well, was eating a plate of salad and fish. He was probably the only boy in the school who wasn’t gay and ate salad.

  ‘So,’ I said. ‘The Suicide Club.’

  Freddy pushed a lettuce leaf into his mouth, kept looking at the table, and nodded.

  We sat in silence as he ate. When he finished he picked up his glass of apple juice and took a swig.

  ‘Yup,’ he said.

  At the doors to the dinner hall I saw Clare waft in with some of her old friends. She had her fringe clipped up above her head with a clip that had a butterfly on it.

  ‘Jesus, why does she still hang around with those?’ said Matthew bitterly.

  Freddy and I stopped chewing.

  ‘Did those words just come out of your mouth?’ I said.

  ‘They’re so vacuous.’

  ‘Whoa, Matthew,’ I said. ‘Easy.’ I was shocked.

  ‘What? They are,’ he protested unapologetically.

  I agreed with him, I hated Clare’s friends, but it was still unexpected coming from Matthew.

  ‘Yeah, but . . . don’t be so bitter.’

  ‘I’m not being bitter,’ he laughed. ‘They’re a bun
ch of dicks.’

  ‘They’re OK,’ said Freddy, popping a piece of tomato into his mouth.

  ‘This coming from you,’ Matthew snorted. ‘The founding forefather of the Suicide Club. The hater of mediocrity.’

  ‘I don’t hate mediocrity,’ answered Freddy. ‘The masses might be deluded, but so what? They’ve still got to live. They’ve got to go to their jobs.’

  We all laughed cynically, which was unlike us. This whole conversation was unlike us. We were supposed to be nice kids, not these monsters sat at the lunch table. But there we were.

  By this time, Clare had her lunch on a tray and was paying for her meal. Her friends were chattering about something or other and cackling. You know how girls kind of like, scream when they laugh, well, that’s what they were doing.

  They all filed past us and everything went silent. I looked at Matthew and Freddy, who were quietly eating their meals. I shook my head. Clare and her friends chose a table three away from ours and sat down.

  Just then my mobile phone buzzed in my pocket. I took it out. It was a message from Clare: Come over to my house tonight. I have a present for you. I looked across at her. Her phone was on the table next to her plate. I half expected her to look over and smile but she didn’t. She was holding her drink in her left hand, her straw resting gently on her lower lip, as she listened to one of her friends say whatever it was she was saying. She knew that I was looking at her.

  When the school bell rang at the end of the day, I practically ran home. I needed to get ready to go over to Clare’s. She told me that her parents had finally lifted the ban on seeing me and so I was allowed back. I hadn’t even known I’d been banned in the first place. I decided that I’d go over at about seven. Not because it was too early to look keen, or too late to look as though I was deliberately being late because I was ‘cool’, but because that was the time I wanted to go over. I didn’t feel like playing games.

  I went online for a while and spoke to Matthew. He started slagging off one of our old friends. The way in which this stalwart of humanity was loosening made me feel bad. He was still a great guy, don’t get me wrong, but he was definitely on the turn. His parents were still moaning about him because they thought he went out too much. They had even told him that they were concerned and disappointed, the two words used by these stupid modern parents who don’t think it’s right to give their kids a quick slap. Not that you should smack a fifteen-year-old. In fact, I don’t even know what I’m talking about any more.

  At about six o’clock I had a visitor. It was Toby. My mum had told him to call up to me to tell me that dinner was ready, but Toby was far too much of a gentleman to shout across the house. Instead he took it upon himself to climb up the stairs, which took him about twice as long as most people because he was short with short legs. He then knocked on my door.

  ‘What?’ I called.

  Nothing. Knock, knock, knock.

  ‘What?!’

  Still nothing. I had to get off my bed to open the door. I then did my little joke where I look around and don’t notice him because of his height and went to close the door.

  ‘Don’t be such a silly,’ he said.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Toby. What the hell are you doing saying things like that? Do you know how stupid you sound?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ And he looked at me with his clear eyes.

  ‘What are you trying to do? Make my heart bleed? It’s made of stone, my friend.’

  I grabbed him under the arms and hoisted him into the air. He was giggling like a little girl as I spun him around on the landing outside my room.

  ‘Put me down,’ he laughed.

  So I did.

  ‘Listen, Tobe,’ I said. ‘You’re special. Do you realize that? Because you’ve got innocence.’ I paused. ‘How about this for a plan?’ I looked at him with his curly blond hair. ‘How about a trip into the city?’

  His face lit up. I could see happiness shooting out of his flesh like the stardust that came out of the Big Bang and made everything.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Sure. I’ll be breaking up for Christmas soon. We’ll go on the first day of the holidays. But only on one condition.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Two conditions, actually.’ I crouched down so that I was at his height. ‘One. You don’t wear a tie.’

  He agreed.

  ‘And two. You have to give me the picture you drew. The one with the people skating on the iced-over lake. Deal?’

  I knew how happy he was because my stomach was buzzing away like a power station. He ran to his room, came back, and thrust the drawing in my face. I took the picture, which was really excellent, and told him to tell Mum that I couldn’t eat dinner because I was going to visit Clare and that I’d grab something on my way.

  Clare is rich. Not rich like my family, I mean filthy rich. That’s probably why she’s so into Nirvana. Her house is this mansion with white pillars spilling into sky and those windows that come out of the roof.

  I knocked on the door and was shown into the hall by her disapproving father, who was something to do with heavy industry. I think he was like, an oil baron, something to do with the petrol trade, I think. Whatever he did, he earned enough money to cover his hall floor in disgusting marble. It was opulent and hideous. He was not a man of style. Nor was her mother, who chose to drive around in, can you believe it, a banana-yellow Porsche of all the dreadful things.

  Clare stood at the top of the spiralling staircase that I swear existed, and smiled at me. She looked great. She had on a pair of baggy jeans with a pink studded belt and a pink T-shirt that she had made herself. On the front she had sewn little black letters. You know those French Connection T-shirts that read:

  fcuk?

  Well, Clare had sewn:

  fuck

  She was a very clever girl. She was so lovely there in the surroundings of her parents’ mansion that she so abhorred. Her wrists were covered with Stars and Stripes sweatbands.

  ‘Come up to my room,’ she said. As she turned around I couldn’t help but notice her pink underwear climbing over the top of her belt.

  Let me describe her bedroom. It’s about forty feet from one end to the next and she’s got a sofa at the far end with a massive plasma TV and DVD player with surround sound. I first saw The Matrix on that TV. Her bed is a double bed and is pink. Most of her room is pink or purple. It’s like the bedroom of a teenage girl who could have it the exact way she wanted. Being a designer-type she had already decorated for Christmas. All of the overhead lights were switched off and the illumination was coming solely from hundreds of coloured fairy lights that she had strung up all around the walls.

  I went over to the sofa and slumped into it. Matthew popped into my head.

  ‘Do you worry about what’s happening to us?’ I said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean . . . this whole Suicide Club thing. I sometimes think it’s a bit too intense. I feel like it’s frying our minds.’

  She came and sat on the sofa next to me, but not too close.

  ‘Frying our minds?’

  ‘I just think we’re becoming cynical.’

  ‘Speak for yourself. I haven’t even got a clue what you’re talking about. So how am I cynical?’

  ‘When was the last time you went down to the homeless shelter?’ Clare used to visit the homeless people every couple of weeks, either helping out in the kitchen or repairing their clothes. She didn’t particularly enjoy it, but it was the right thing to do. One of the guys there had once tried it on with her, but she still carried on going.

  She flipped her hair in front of her eyes, grabbed a handful and inspected it.

  ‘I’m not allowed to go down there any more.’

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Since all that stuff with Bertie, my parents have stopped me going down there.’

  ‘Your parents have stopped you going down there?’

  She shrugged like she
didn’t care. But she did. I knew she did.

  A thought suddenly struck me. Clare’s parents had stopped homeless people having nice food and having the rips in their clothing sewn up in order to punish their daughter. But what about the homeless people? I was genuinely bewildered – surely her parents weren’t that stupid.

  ‘So now who’s cynical?’ she said.

  I think a bond came up for a second but it wasn’t full-blown. Not yet.

  ‘Anyway,’ she said. ‘I’ve got you a present.’ She jumped up from the sofa and danced over to the side of her bed. She picked up a wrapped package and brought it to me. It had a red bow tied around the centre.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s a new car,’ she referenced.

  It was clearly an item of clothing. I tore the paper away.

  ‘I made it myself,’ she said.

  I held it up to the light. It was a white T-shirt and, when I saw it, there was a catch in my throat. She was such a loving person. When she wasn’t being a bitch. Up the shoulders of the T-shirt she had sewn on epaulettes. Stitched into the cloth, alternating colours all the way up, were yellow and black stripes. It was exceptionally cool-looking. And sewn across the chest, in the exact same way that she had sewn fuck into her own T-shirt, she had sewn, again in alternating black and yellow:

  the bees knees.

  I didn’t know what to say. So I said nothing and looked at her.

  ‘It says “the bees knees”,’ she offered.

  I felt like we were young lovers untainted by experience. We were nervous and excited and like two pieces of substance on the quantum level – all crazy and vibrating. I wanted to tell her how much I loved her. But I couldn’t do it. I just wasn’t ready.

  ‘I love it,’ I said. ‘I really love it.’

  I stood up and pulled my sweater and T-shirt off so that I could try it on. It fitted perfectly. She knew my size and had made it slightly too small because that’s always the best way.