by Rhys Thomas
‘So you love it?’
I could see on her face that she was beaming inside and that made me feel so good, knowing that she was happy.
The rest of the evening we spent lying on her sofa watching TV. She had her head on my chest and I played with her hair, just like the old days. We talked sporadically about nothing in particular apart from the book 1984, which, coincidentally, we were both reading at that time. I can’t remember exactly what we said but I think we spoke about how the main guy and the main girl had the best relationship ever. It was just like our Eskimo Friends team that we had set up – nobody knew about it. There were a lot of great things about that night: the closeness of it, the sheer joy of being alive, the sense of intense easiness. But the best thing about it by a long, long way was the texture of her skin when we joined our hands and made steeples.
Many times I wanted to tell Clare how I had been feeling about her lately but every time I thought I was close I couldn’t quite find the courage. I was, in truth, a little scared. I liked her but I had no idea whether or not she felt the same about me. With all of the rules and tricks and games we had set up over the years I felt like I had just entered a minefield. What I considered a signal could just as easily be a joke. I was sure that she liked me but just how much was anybody’s guess. I had a WCS where I told her I loved her and she started laughing and saying,’ Oh my God, just wait until I tell my friends what you just said.’ I was going to have to tell her eventually but not having any idea whatsoever of what the reaction might be was not good. You see, it wasn’t like asking out somebody I hardly knew. Clare wasn’t just another girl. If I messed it up I could lose the special bond we had, and I didn’t want to do that. In fact, the thought of it, coupled with my WCS, started to freak me out a little bit.
‘OK, I have to go,’ I said at last.
She lifted her head off my chest.
‘What?’
‘Yeah, I’ve got homework.’
She shook her head as if she didn’t understand.
‘Homework?’ For some reason she was upset. ‘Are you serious?’
‘Um, yes.’
All of a sudden she jumped up off the sofa.
‘You are a fucking dick,’ she said.
It was like the scene in my bedroom all over again.
‘What? I have to go home,’ I said, drawing the words out like I was talking to a slow child. I hated the way I had to destroy perfect moments.
‘I made you a T-shirt.’ Her voice was warbly and I could see her chest going up and down.
I didn’t know what to say. I froze.
Clare looked at me very deeply indeed.
‘My friends were right about you.’
When she said that another WCS burned into my brain. A bad one.
‘Wh . . . what?’
She rolled her eyes.
‘God.’ She folded her arms and her eyes went up to the ceiling. ‘Just go.’
What had she meant? The idea of Clare talking about me behind my back didn’t bear thinking about. The WCS got bigger and bigger and bigger. ‘So I’ll see you tomorrow?’ I said.
She deliberately looked at the wall to her left, dramatically ignoring me.
I walked past her, said,’ Thanks for the T-shirt,’ and started to feel sick because of how much I had fucked everything up.
18
‘DO YOU KNOW what? If we did go ahead with the Suicide Club, I bet there’d be a special place for us in heaven where we could spend all our time together. I can just imagine it. You get to heaven and it’s all in the clouds and most people go through the main gates, but we’d find a way of skipping the queue because, just round the side of heaven, there’s this porthole of cloud that leads to a secret chamber where it would be just us. Heaven would be just on the other side, but before we went there we’d wait for each other.’
We were all sat around the war memorial when Freddy said that. This was what he did best: painted pictures. He’d build up these little worlds in his head that you could totally buy into. That was his talent.
I looked at all of my friends. Jenny, her nose red in the cold, had a faint smile on her lips and I noticed that she was wearing mittens on her hands. Matthew could have kissed her sweetly on the cheek and it would have been perfectly natural. Craig was sat on the bottom step next to Clare, looking blankly ahead as per usual, but we all knew he was listening to us. Freddy was sat on the highest step of the memorial, like he was the King. And I think that back then he probably was.
I started to get a mental image of bright clouds and angels and light, trying to imagine what Freddy had just been saying.
‘And what do we do while we wait?’ Clare said.
‘Whatever we want. Because on one of the walls is where our dreams come true. Whatever we can imagine, we can jump into the wall and our wildest dreams become real.’
‘Oh yeah,’ drawled Jenny. ‘Like what?’
‘What would you want to do?’ he said.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Have a picnic?’
‘Exactly,’ he chirped. ‘We’ll go and sit in sunny fields by a stream and eat apples from an apple tree.’
I noticed that he was looking at Craig and that jolted something in my gut. Was Freddy trying to persuade Craig to do something bad? I wondered. It was a complicated thought that I couldn’t really deal with right then.
‘What about you, Rich?’ said Freddy. ‘What would you do?’
I shrugged.
‘I’d become wrestling champion of the world.’
Everyone laughed and that made me feel great because it wasn’t that funny. I glanced at Clare but she was looking in the opposite direction. She wasn’t laughing.
‘Let’s make a pact,’ said Matthew of all people. He must have been struck by this idea of Freddy’s mystical heavenly chamber. ‘No matter how we go, or when we go, when we get to heaven, we’ll all go to this chamber and wait for everyone else. Whoever goes first, even if it takes fifty years for the last one to arrive, we wait in the chamber.’
Freddy held out his hand and offered it to Matthew, who placed his hand on top. Next to join the pact was Jenny with her mitten. Then there was Clare. Then it was my turn. I looked at Matthew, who was smiling at me innocently. I placed my hand on the pile of other hands. When Craig put his hand on to complete the pact, I noticed Freddy give himself a little grin, which was a bit chilling, to tell you the truth. In that moment I could just tell that his evil streak had come to the surface. But I also noticed something else – something brand new in Craig’s blank eyes. And it kind of chilled me even more. Right in the corner, only recognizable because the light was shining off it from the street lamp, was a tiny, round, glistening teardrop.
19
CHRISTMAS WAS JUST around the corner. The air was stingingly cold and the clouds were dense and silver. A few weeks had passed and you know what? Things were getting better. In school everything seemed to have settled down after the whole Bertie thing and, even though I still pretty much hung around with only those of us who had signed the Suicide Club Charter, life was not too bad.
It was a Saturday afternoon and I had gone into town to do some Christmas shopping. It was whilst I was out that, out of the blue, I saw Jenny.
‘Hey,’ I beamed enthusiastically. I loved it when I accidentally bumped into people I knew. Back in the old days, before all my old friends deserted me, this sort of thing happened all the time.
‘Hey you,’ she drawled.
I noticed that the sleeves of her hoody were rolled up and that she was wearing bright sweatbands with rainbow stripes. She was carrying her camera, attached to a tripod.
‘So you’re on a photography outing,’ I said.
She looked at her camera and lifted it.
‘I guess so.’
‘What are you taking photos of ?’
‘Freddy wants some pictures to take home with him in the summer so I said I’d do it.’
‘Really?’
‘Uh-huh,�
�� she said, and nodded quickly with wide-open eyes and a smile.
‘So what, you’re just taking pictures of people?’
‘Yup. And the buildings in the background. I’ve got a long shutter-speed so, you know, the buildings will be still and the people’ll come out all blurred and weird.’
‘I love blurred and weird.’
‘You are blurred and weird, Richie.’
It didn’t surprise me that she would do something like this. She was such a kind person. There was nothing contrived about her kindness – it was just an innocent, naive outlook that resulted in doing nice things for people.
I smiled.
‘So what’s a shutter-speed?’
‘Oh,’ she said, happy that I was taking an interest in her hobby. ‘Shutter-speeds are like, how long you have the shutter open on a camera?’
I nodded, not really understanding, to tell you the truth.
‘OK, when you take a photo you push the button on the top, yes?’
‘That’s the technical term? The “button on the top”?’
Smiling, she said, ‘Yes, Richie, that’s the technical term. So anyway, when you press the button, the shutter is opened. When that happens, light is flooded on to the film inside the camera, right? If you let too much light in, the film gets overexposed and is ruined so the camera has automatic settings so it can’t happen. But if you keep the shutter open for just a little bit longer, you let more light in and whatever’s in your frame will be taken over a longer period, you know, just a second longer or so.’
‘So, what, normal shutter-speed is a fraction of a second?’
‘Right. But what it means is that if you photograph something that’s moving while you have a long shutter-speed, the photo will come out with that movement.’
‘What?’
She laughed.
‘You know when you see those photos of roads at night and there’s bright-red lines running down the roads from the car tail lights? Well, those are taken with long shutter-speeds. Because the car is moving while the shutter is open, the light hitting the film is changing and the red lights are caught as one continuous line. Get it?’
‘Not really.’
She blew out air in exasperation and put her hands on her hips.
‘I’ll show you what I mean when I get my pictures back.’
‘I look forward to it.’
‘So what are you doing?’
I pushed my hands into my pockets.
‘Christmas shopping.’
Jenny was squinting to see me because the sky was so bright. I had never realized how short she was before. She only came up to my neck.
‘Have you done yours?’ I said.
Our eye-line was suddenly broken and she looked down.
I had inadvertently said something that had made everything awkward.
‘What? Tell me.’
‘It’s nothing, it’s stupid.’
‘Just tell me.’ I crouched a little so that I was just below the level of her eyes, up into which I looked kindly.
‘My family don’t buy each other presents.’
I laughed.
‘What? What’s wrong with that? So you don’t celebrate Christmas, who ca—’
‘No,’ she interrupted. ‘We do celebrate Christmas. It’s just that my parents have got this idea that it’s become too commercialized and has lost its meaning.’
I made a bemused face.
‘Why is that embarrassing for you?’
Jenny sighed, still looking at the floor, clearly uncomfortable.
‘I don’t know. They’re just . . .’
‘Weird?’ I offered.
She laughed.
‘I was going to say opinionated.’
Her dad was one of those military nerds, you know, like a normal nerd but more of a twat. A Strong Disciplinarian without really understanding anything about anything. Her mum didn’t work because her father believed in ‘stay-at-homemoms’. I’d seen him once before and he had a flat-top haircut. Seriously, he did. ‘Sometimes going to war is necessary for the greater good,’ I could imagine him saying from the head of his family dinner table as he helped himself to a spoonful of mashed potato. It was amazing that someone like Jenny had managed to come out of his household.
I didn’t really know what to do. Jenny was embarrassed by what she had just said and that was just stupid. Far be it from me to offer advice, but I did anyway.
‘Why don’t you just buy them something anyway? It’s nice getting presents. Get them an Easter egg.’
She laughed.
‘I’m not joking,’ I quipped. ‘Or get them one of those blue elephant gods with eight legs.’
Jenny tapped me playfully.
‘You’re an idiot.’
‘My grades would suggest otherwise,’ I retorted arrogantly.
This time she laughed really loudly and even kind of snorted.
‘Ugh,’ I said. ‘How disgusting.’
She was laughing madly now like the awkwardness of a moment ago had heightened her senses. She punched me in the right-hand side of my chest.
‘Why don’t you just ask Clare out?’ she said.
I gasped. What the hell kind of a direction had this conversation just taken? It was like we had been driving through a dense city, turned a sudden corner and now we were in a beautiful forest. Was it that obvious that I liked her? My God. I stared at Jenny and thought, Fuck it. Before now I had never told anyone how I really felt about Clare but now was a time for honesty. She had just shared something with me so I was going to reciprocate. ‘It’s difficult.’
‘What’s so difficult about it?’
I don’t normally like saying pathetic things, but I said this anyway.
‘Do you think she likes me?’
‘Honestly?’
‘Yeah.’
Jenny shrugged.
‘I don’t know. I have kind of asked her for you—’
‘You what?’ I said, shocked.
Jenny smiled.
‘You’re welcome. But she never gives me a direct answer. So, honestly I don’t know.’
‘We had an argument about a week ago. She hasn’t really spoken to me since.’
‘Really? She hasn’t said anything to me.’
This didn’t actually surprise me. Clare had her other group of friends and Jenny wasn’t a part of that. They had never really hung around together, apart from when it was with us. I looked at the sky and put my hands in my pockets.
‘I think she probably likes me,’ I said jokingly. ‘Who wouldn’t?’
Jenny laughed.
‘Richard Harper,’ she said. ‘You’ll be the end of me.’
20
ON THE NIGHT of Monday, 20 December I was looking for my iPod but couldn’t find it anywhere.
Toby was sat in the living room watching TV so I went to ask him about it.
‘You haven’t seen my—’
‘Ssssh.’ He held his hand up, keeping his eyes on the screen. On TV was a wildlife programme about those little desert-rat things called meerkats. They were all up on their hind legs looking out over the desert.
‘I was just going to ask if you were still available for a trip to the city on Thursday,’ I said. The end of term was just days away.
‘I’ll be there,’ he said flatly.
It knocked me out of kilter. I expected him to have done something excited when I said that, not kept watching his documentary.
I sighed and left the house. As soon as I got out into the night the cold hit me. My ears suddenly froze so I pulled up my hood and headed across town. I was going to try the war memorial to see if anybody was about.
When I got there Clare was with her friends, which I didn’t like at all. I thought about turning round and walking away but I was sure they had seen me and so I had no other option but to head into the vipers’ den. As I approached they started giggling but I just shook my head. Some of them were lounging on the steps like lions after a meal.
I had to go through the process of receiving a load of ‘Hiya, Riiiiich’ taunts from the girls, but there’s no point in getting annoyed with people like them. They had always been childish and talked to me in this way, even before the Bertie incident. These were the same girls that had led her to say,’ My friends were right about you.’
I looked up at Clare. She was sat on the top step. I noticed that she had pulled her sweater sleeves right down over her hands so that only the ends of her fingers were visible and between those I saw that she was holding a cigarette. That made her even more attractive. She skipped up and bounced easily down the steps before throwing her arms round me and kissing my cheek.
‘Hi,’ she cooed.
‘Hey,’ I said warily. Something was up. This was the first time she had spoken to me since the night in her house when we had argued, so why was she being so nice? ‘What are you doing?’
‘Just playing a game,’ she answered. The other girls laughed at that.
‘Listen,’ I said. ‘I have to speak to you. Will you come with me?’
‘Where?’
From where I was standing, it felt like I was looking at a perfect photograph; one of those weird photos where every level is in sharp, crisp focus. In the foreground was Clare, and then her friends and the war memorial made up the middle ground, whilst the Christmas lights and passing cars filled the background. It was like reality had got sharper. Exquisite. When she said, ‘Where?’ it was like it was in slow motion, but not really. It was more like something surreal, difficult to articulate. I guess it was like the neon from the lights were fusing with my reality and making it all fake, but good fake. Like artificial lights. Do you know what I mean?
‘I don’t know where,’ I said. ‘Can we get a coffee?’
There are a lot of ornate coffee shops in my town, with crusty old books on shelves, because there are a lot of pseudo-intelligent people living there who think it’s sophisticated to drink coffee. Which I guess it kind of is. But not if you go there thinking you’re sophisticated and then talk about shopping!
Clare thought about it for a second and nodded. In a way I was glad of this coincidence. I had to try and clear the air and Mr Fate had said there you go to me.