The Suicide Club

by Rhys Thomas

  ‘Mum told me not to get my hopes up,’ he muttered sadly.

  I had never heard Toby say something like this before and it almost made me cry. His childishness was leaving him and he was beginning the hardening process that Freddy told us about. He was just a kid and here he was feeling upset because of something that I had done. Me.

  And what the hell was my mother doing anyway? How dare she say that to Toby. She didn’t know me. She was manipulating Toby for her own gain. She wanted Toby on her side just because I had thrown up and laughed at her last night. Bitch. I should have told Toby that I’d get ready and be down in a minute – that would have shown her. But I didn’t. Rather, I decided that if my mother wanted to play games then I’d play. I’d show her that, if she wanted to play with Toby’s feelings, then I’d hit her hard. I can’t really explain why I said what I said next, but it made sense to me at the time.

  ‘I’m not going into the city with you, Toby,’ I said.

  He stopped tugging at my leg. I looked at him. The stupid dinosaur on his sweater, I noticed, was actually doing a thumbs-up and winking as well as having that stupid grin on its face. Some dinosaur. I looked at Toby. My head hurt so much that I could barely keep my eyes open, but I couldn’t help but keep looking as I saw my little brother start to cry. He rushed out of the room, not quite having let go of his emotions, like he didn’t want me to see him burst into tears. He pulled the door shut behind him and I heard him scuttling around in his bedroom, no doubt looking for a fucking cravat to pull around his neck or something.

  I closed my eyes and almost died with the badness inside me. I felt like my history teacher Mrs Kenna – like I was having layers of tragedy poured down my neck and filling my body from the feet up. Toby was just the latest addition. My own mother was starting a war with me and we were throwing Toby’s emotions around like a rag doll – this was a boy who tried to look cool and ended up wearing a sweater with a smiley, happy dinosaur on the front.

  The room to my door opened and it was Toby again. This time he was fully crying. Seeing his emotions laid bare like that was a rare sight. Light reflected off his tears that had run messily all over his stupid cheeks and his lips were quivering.

  ‘I’m not going to listen to you any more,’ he said.

  With some reserve of energy that I didn’t know about I bolted upright. All my rage was in me now, like nuclear fuel, my monster full, and I jumped up off my bed. Everything had finally caught up with me.

  ‘Don’t you ever talk to me like that, you little fucking shit,’ I screamed at him.

  I grabbed his dinosaur sweater and lifted him bodily off the ground and threw him through the open door on to the landing. The force with which I threw him scared even me. His feet hit the floor but he was off balance and he fell backwards on to the carpet. My chest was heaving up and down and I found my whole body shaking uncontrollably as I loomed over him. I could have ripped his head off right there and then. I was having flashbacks to the night before, to all those kids laughing at me, to Clare ripping my aching heart out through my splintered ribs. And then further back . . . to the old man in the street. I saw the fear on his old face, fear of me, as I reached down to pick up the metal pipe . . .

  I took a malign step towards Toby and he shuffled back towards the top of the stairs, a look of terror on his face.

  I stopped myself right there. We looked at each other for a second. What the fuck was I doing? I didn’t start crying, like I should have done. I did something worse, something for which I can never be forgiven. More than anything I wanted to pick him up in my arms and tell him that I was sorry, that I was a prick, that my whole world had been torn apart by the atomic bonds that tie everything together. I wanted to tell him that I loved him more than anything in the world, even more than Clare, but I didn’t. I didn’t do any of that stuff. Instead of doing the right thing, purely because I couldn’t stand to do anything else, I leaned over him and spat into his hair before turning round, going back to my room, and locking my door.

  23

  IT WAS BECAUSE of our strong and lengthy history that Clare’s humiliation of me was so distressing. She had torn our friendship in half. So many years together and they obviously counted for nothing. Over the Christmas holidays, she rarely left my thoughts and it was the mental image of her laughing at me that made me feel like I had an anchor strapped around my lungs.

  Christmas was miserable. My mother had calmed down slightly because she didn’t want to spoil her own Christmas by being mean, so that was one good thing. But nobody called me and I didn’t call anybody either. Freddy had gone home for the holidays and I hadn’t spoken to him since before the school disco. I would have loved to have talked to him and messed around with him, but he was gone – disappeared.

  Jenny had gone back to America for Christmas. Back to the old US of A.

  I didn’t even speak to Matthew over the holidays, which was completely weird because it was the longest I hadn’t spoken to him in my whole life (apart from when one of us went on holiday). This may have had to do with me not having a phone because I had destroyed it. Over the weeks I expected him to call me on the house phone but he never did. I assumed he was missing Jenny and that he wanted to be on his own, or that he wouldn’t know what to say to me because what had happened had been so horrendous. I don’t know why I didn’t get in touch with anybody – probably because I was scared.

  So the whole holiday was spent in my house. It was awful. Toby ignored me the whole time and my father told me that he was terrified of me. Whenever I came into the lounge to watch TV and he was in there, he’d stay for about five minutes and then leave without saying anything.

  In the nights I’d be up in my room listening to music or watching a film and my dad would come and sit on my bed. I wouldn’t say anything to him and he’d eventually go away. I’d hear my mother prowling around upstairs, tidying things. At one point I felt incredibly sorry for her. I thought about what it must have been like to be her. She had a nutcase for a son. Despite all of this, I still acted frostily towards her because I blamed her for my outburst on Toby, which is completely pathetic.

  For Christmas, Father Christmas brought me a book on screenwriting. I had no idea why I had been given it because I had never once mentioned to my parents the fact that I wanted to write cartoons when I was older. The only reason they could have had for buying me the book was that they had been snooping around my drawers and come across my notebooks. Because I had been starved of company, I went completely mental and made my mother burst into tears. She started screaming that I had ruined Christmas but she should have thought about that before she started looking through my personal things. I was really starting to lose my grip on sanity at this point and doing and saying things because I knew they would make matters worse.

  On one cold, cloudy afternoon I was stood in my bedroom looking out the window at the silver birch tree in our garden. The latticed, spindly branches near the top were swaying in the wind. I sighed and went over to my desk, where I opened the bottom drawer. I took out the Suicide Club Charter that I had hidden underneath a pile of old Empire movie magazines. As I read over it I thought back to the night on the airbase, when we had been sat in the candlelight. I kept getting caught on the words, the world is run by the mediocre for the mediocre. A sudden thought that I was cut off from the world struck me. It didn’t make me feel emotional; I felt cold, like I had just learnt a fact in science class. I simply didn’t fit. A square through a circle. I was trapped. I recalled signing the Charter, sitting in that room. I remembered feeling good being hidden away whilst the rest of the world was going about its business in the mess hall. I remembered looking at Freddy, at his face. I remembered the headmaster’s office, us huddled around Craig. I remembered how linked I had felt to my friends. We had skimmed away from everyone else, been sent on a different trajectory, but where could it possibly lead? Freddy’s idea of life being an adventure couldn’t really come true. We’d soon get old, get jobs,
die. The whole idea of living a life of romance led to one place: a brick wall. You weren’t allowed to live like that. People would not allow it. They would hold you back.

  I returned to my window and looked down to the patio. I wondered what would happen if my skeleton fell limply on to it. It would only take a few seconds, perhaps less. The act of jumping would be instantaneous – that’s all it would take; a snap decision, over in an instant. I had no intention of actually doing it, of course, but it started me thinking. Is killing yourself a slow steady climb, a decision reached by degrees? Or just an opportunity meeting a circumstance – the right place at the right time? One moment of madness or clarity and it could all be over, surely. I looked long and hard at the patio, at the lines running at right angles to one another between the slabs. I suddenly wondered what Freddy was doing at that precise moment, hundreds of miles away. Then a very odd question popped into my head: would he be proud of me if I did it? I could feel myself setting on to tracks that would take me to a bad place and so I took a deep breath, a step back from the window, and said,’ Stop it,’ out loud.

  There was a knock at my door. It was unlocked. I quickly folded up the Suicide Club Charter and stuffed it back under the magazines in the bottom drawer of my desk.

  ‘Come in,’ I said.

  It was my father.

  ‘Hello, champ,’ he said. ‘Fancy going for a drive?’

  I got into the passenger seat alongside my father and we drove in silence out of town. I didn’t even want to speak because my throat was heavy and laden with antimatter. My life was a wreck and I could see no way out.

  We reached this forest on the edge of town that my father used to bring me to when I was a kid. He drove me up a dirt track and parked under a canopy of pines. He killed the engine and looked straight ahead. There was nobody about and it was quite serene.

  Just like my father, I stared straight ahead. I guess if you were secretly filming it and the camera was looking in through the windscreen, it would have been quite moving; father and son staring ahead, not speaking because the son had hurt the father so badly.

  We looked into that forest for about five minutes that, not surprisingly, felt like longer.

  Eventually he spoke.

  ‘Don’t you know what you’re doing to us?’

  I couldn’t look at him. I could see from the corner of my eye that he was staring at me.

  ‘We’re so worried about you, Rich.’

  ‘I know,’ I muttered. He was breaking through my walls. I wanted to tell him everything. All this time I still hadn’t spilled my heart out to anybody about Clare, and I felt like bursting.

  ‘Is there anything we can do?’ There was a pause. ‘You’re going to destroy yourself. You know we love you, don’t you?’

  ‘Don’t say that,’ I said.

  There was all this emotion in me but, because I knew myself so well, I knew that I wasn’t going to let it out.

  ‘We’d do anything for you, Rich. You’re such a talented boy.’

  I kept looking ahead.

  With genuine sincerity, but with not enough strength to turn my head, I said,’ I’m sorry.’

  ‘Come on, let’s go for a walk,’ he said.

  We got out of the car and traipsed off into the woods. It was very cold, but it was Christmas and I was in a pine forest so that suited me fine. For a while the fresh air started to cleanse my insides, and I think I started to recover. It’s funny how people say that, to get over something, you have to take a course of action yourself to get over it – like conquering your demons or something. But here I was, in the middle of the woods, and mother nature was healing me and I had nothing to do with it. It was pretty great, even though we didn’t say anything to one another.

  We found this brook running through the forest and we paused at the bank. We would have to get our feet wet if we wanted to get across. I thought to myself how amazing it was that I was here in this place doing something so joyous and nobody knew. We jumped into the water and the cold started attacking our feet immediately.

  My father gasped.

  ‘Jesus shits,’ he shouted.

  I looked at him and we started laughing. He had no idea how much good he was doing – parents can always turn it on when they need to.

  We waded across the three feet of water, which came up to our ankles, and clambered up the other side. It was muddy, but my dad made it up OK. I started the climb but the mud was more slippery than I had realized. I lost my footing and was about to fall back into the water. Instinctively I reached out and my hand grabbed on to the nearest thing that came to my touch. Which was the spindly outshoot of a bramble. My palm closed over the thorns and I gripped tight, not understanding what I was doing. As the thorns punctured through my skin and into my flesh, I screamed out. The sudden shock made me stop thinking about my footing and I lost control. Electronic signals made my hand involuntarily squeeze the branch tighter and, as I slid backwards, my palm and the inside of my fingers were drawn along a gauntlet of thorns jutting from the main stem of the bramble. Each one stabbed at me and tore along the fleshy parts of my hands.

  I released my grip and slid back into the water. I stumbled back but didn’t fall. I looked down at my hand in horror. Flaps of skin were loose like those little thin flags you see on castles; tiny triangles of torn skin. The blood was flowing like a river delta over my palm. The agony was unbearable. It was like the thorns had decapitated the nodes off the top of my pain nerve endings. My hand was throbbing and I was getting bile in my gut. Why me? I asked.

  I looked at my father. A real man would have borne the pain and carried on. A real man would have put the pain in a box in his head and locked it up. But I was having some sort of crisis inside.

  ‘Are you OK?’ said my father. ‘Let me see.’

  I held up my palm and the blood ran down my wrist into the sleeve of my sweater. I could have cried right there, but I wasn’t that pathetic.

  ‘I want to go home,’ I said.

  As we stumbled back through the forest, shattered and broken like a dream, I was overcome with an impending sense of dread.

  Clare’s game had broken my insides, being so horrible to Toby meant that I had passed a critical mass point that couldn’t be redeemed, my mother hated me, my father did not trust me, I had no friends and now, after all of that, I was suffering intense physical pain. This was the end.

  That night I read the book on screenwriting that my parents had bought for me. In it, it said that most screenplays are constructed in three acts and that at the end of a second act things get so bad that you can’t imagine anything working out OK. I felt like I was at the end of Act Two in my life. I couldn’t see how things could possibly get any worse. Everything had turned to dust.

  But there was one thing left for me. One bright star in dark space. Emma. My counsellor. She would understand. The day before school started again, I couldn’t get the thought of her out of my head. With everything gone I had nothing better to do than fall in love with her. Which I kind of did, I guess. You always need to find hope somewhere, right?

  That night I couldn’t sleep. I lay in bed sweating, my sheets getting caught up in my legs and my shorts riding up my thighs, making me restless. It was like I was in hell. As I finally drifted off to sleep and the real world faded to black, I could see four words in the blackness, as if they were on a page, and they made me feel better:

  END OF ACT TWO

  24

  MY FIRST SESSION with Emma was on my first day back at school after Christmas. The whole morning was spent trying to avoid people glaring at me and laughing at me. It was quite horrible but I didn’t really care that much because they were headed on the road to shitsville.

  I knocked on the door to the meeting room next to the headmaster’s office and suddenly my malaise lifted. Emma looked even better than I remembered. Today she had her hair tied back behind her head so I could see her ears that stuck out and made her look like an elf. One of the elegant elves
like in those Lord of the Rings films, not Christmas elves. She looked up with her hazel eyes and I almost died.

  ‘Hello, Richard,’ she said. She seemed too young to be talking in such an adult way. ‘How are you?’

  ‘I’m OK,’ I said, trying to act cool.

  I went to the table and sat in my chair and we looked at each other for a long time. I guess we were staring each other out and it felt like the right thing to do because we were both assessing one another; she was looking for certain reactions, I was just drinking in her beauty.

  But I broke first.

  ‘Did you have a nice Christmas?’ I said.

  ‘Great, thanks,’ she said quite coldly, which I liked because I’m drawn to that sort of stuff. ‘Did you have a nice Christmas?’

  ‘Not really,’ I said, holding my hand up and showing her my bandage.

  ‘I noticed that when you came in. What did you do?’

  ‘I cut it on broken glass,’ I said for no reason.

  ‘Did it require stitches?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘One.’

  ‘I didn’t know you could get just one stitch.’

  I just shrugged.

  ‘It got infected.’ This was true. My hand had basically turned green by New Year’s Day.