The Suicide Club

by Rhys Thomas

  And it was my fault. Our fault. It was a fact, as undeniable as the spinning atoms. I knew it, Freddy knew it. I’m not being guilt-ridden for no reason – my knowledge was evidence-based. Because Freddy had taken that sheet of yellow paper from Craig’s corpse. He had taken the Suicide Club Charter, which was probably the last thing that Craig ever read. It was the last time his eyes absorbed the light reflecting off a piece of writing that was decoded in his brain – the last message. A message that told him to kill himself. And he did. Jesus. We had killed him. Craig may have been unstable, and he may have tried to kill himself in the past, but we had told him that it was OK, that it was to be encouraged. I had gone over to his house, befriended him, dragged him into this utter mess. Without us, he would probably still be alive.

  The bright-blue lights of an ambulance fractured my mind, here to take Craig away again, just as they had come for him at the very beginning of it all. Those lights had returned for him as if the dimensions had opened up to swallow his soul. Those blue lights. Now, whenever I see them flashing past me on the street, I wonder if they can carry substance in their beams, I wonder how many people’s essences are trapped in between the photons.

  The pub was practically empty now so I tried to regain my composure and went outside. As I passed through the doors into the night I didn’t even see them load Craig’s body on to the ambulance. All I saw were two white doors slam shut, sealing the world away from the tragedy.

  We watched the lights recede into the distance, blue echoes shimmering back off the buildings even when the ambulance was gone.

  As I tried to breathe, I felt a hand tap me on the shoulder. My sweet Clare. She wore a hoody and her neck disappeared into the rolls of fabric. In a fury of emotion, the incident in the school disco now utterly meaningless to me because I loved her, I suddenly grabbed her and she grabbed me and we hugged tight, tight, tight, like if we let go we’d fall off the world into outer space.

  She started crying into my shoulder, but I was going to support her. We had once been in a team, a secret team that comprised just me and her, and I think she was back there then, back in that time that seemed so long ago when things were not like this. Now everything was over because Craig was dead.

  A lot of cars arrived at the pub. Parents with concerned and saddened faces jumped down from their people carriers like they knew Craig. Girls were crying and I looked at them and do you know what I thought? Hypocrites. They didn’t know Craig, they didn’t care about Craig. When he had tried to kill himself, it was they who had made fun of him and laughed at him because he was crazy. They weren’t the ones who had actually donated chunks of their life to help him. I had. I had helped him, and even though he had killed himself (and even though we were responsible), we were still his friends and I know that what I just said sounds contradictory but I don’t care.

  As I held Clare close and realized how much I still loved her crazily, I went right back to square one – I was a member of the Suicide Club once again. As Clare entered me through osmosis I suddenly got shunted to the point where directly in front of me was the truth: the Suicide Club were right.

  The night before I had had sex for the very first time and it was with a girl I had only met that night. How could I have done that? That girl was now nothing but a memory and I knew even at the time that I would never fall in love with her. I had told Clare that I loved her but couldn’t be around her because it was unhealthy – that’s not what a romantic would do; we embrace only emotional storms because we crave the deepest feelings because that’s the only place where you can live. By sleeping with that girl I had skimmed the surface of the human spectrum because I ‘didn’t want to get hurt’. I was disgusted with myself.

  And then my father was coming towards me. Clare was taken away from me, still crying, and I was taken back to my house. It was the last place I wanted to go. I wanted to stay with my friends; they were all I had in the whole world. But they took me home.

  The place seemed even quieter than normal and the walls seemed grubbier. I hated being there, hated it with every piece of me. The books in the hallway had dust all over them and they insulated the heat and I hated it. I went straight up to my bedroom and locked the door. I wanted to be on my own because one of my best friends was dead and I would never see him again and I had been washed over by one of those instantaneous waves of understanding that I told you about. He was gone. Craig was gone. Gone.

  There was a knock at the door and I opened it straight away because I didn’t have any energy to fight any more. But it wasn’t my parents. Do you know who it was?

  It was Toby.

  ‘Mum and Dad told me what happened to your friend.’

  I went over to my CD player and put on my Damien Rice CD and let it play from track one before flopping down on my bed.

  ‘Are you all right, Rich?’ He was talking to me like I had never spat in his hair; all that was gone now because he wanted to tell me that everything would be OK.

  I fell back and rolled on to my side so that I wasn’t facing him.

  I heard Toby shuffle on my carpet.

  ‘I just feel so sorry for him,’ I said at last.

  I felt the angles of my mattress shift as Toby sat down.

  ‘It’ll be OK,’ he said comfortingly.

  ‘Do you think he’s OK?’ I asked.

  ‘I think he’s probably gone to heaven.’

  I breathed.

  ‘Me and my friends said that when we die we’ll all wait for each other in a secret chamber in heaven. And when weget there, we’ll do all the things we ever dreamed of before going to see our families.’

  Toby was silent for a second.

  ‘He’ll be waiting for you,’ he said at last.

  ‘I hope so, Tobe.’

  And that was it. Our conversation ended just like that. I don’t think I could have said any more even if I’d wanted. Not because I would have broken down in tears, but because I didn’t have any energy left in me. I just lay there in an L-shape on my bed, my legs stretched out over the edge and dangling in open air. Toby sat there for a while with me, up until the end of the song ‘Aimee’ in fact. And then he fell asleep. I got up and folded the bottom half of my duvet on top of him so that he would stay warm and then I curled up on the bottom of the bed like a snail’s shell and fell asleep with all of my clothes on, where I encountered no dreams, no breaks in my sleep, no discomfort, just deep, deep rest.

  28

  WHEN I AWOKE the next morning I felt like lying in bed for ever because I couldn’t find a reason to get up. I was empty inside. Craig’s death was starting to sink in deep and it was all but unbearable. I felt like my senses were flatter, like something had left me for ever. And there was this other thing as well; this weird boredom. My mother and father came into my bedroom at about eight o’clock. They too sat on my bed, next to a sleeping Toby, so that our whole little family was there. I was awake already, but I couldn’t move because it was too hard.

  ‘Son,’ my father said,’ do you want some toast?’

  Ten minutes later, all four of us were sat around the kitchen table eating warm toast slowly and in silence. I could only manage one mouthful. Outside was all grey and the little light that came into the kitchen was weak. I saw my mother and father glancing at each other and I knew why; it was because they were concerned about me. They loved me and I loved them. I truly appreciated them, but in truth I wanted to be left on my own. Toby reached for the marmalade in the centre of the table and clumsily spread some on to his toast in the way that little kids do. He had that tired look on his face like little kids have when they have to concentrate like crazy on the most mundane of tasks.

  I knew what was happening. My family were supporting me in silence. They were just there. With something as traumatic as what I had gone through they knew that it was best not to say anything so they didn’t. It was the sweetest moment. My mother, who was so tormented by my behaviour, had forgiven everything I had done because, in the end, s
he loved me.

  As I sat at the table and looked at the grain of the wood in front of me, I experienced something quite extraordinary. A dense feeling sat in my stomach, a feeling that had come from the sadness of Craig’s death. But directly on top of that was the help that my family were channelling into me. There were two incredibly strong, polar opposite emotions in a tight space. They fought with each other, adjusting themselves for position inside me. But rather than cancel each other out they did something different. The two emotions actually magnified each other so much that I thought my torso might split apart. Emotions exploded through my veins like fireworks with nowhere to go but down the fleshy corridors. It felt like the nodes at the tips of my nerve sensors were being filed down and lubricated with gasoline. I sort of couldn’t bear it any more and, even though I loved my family for being there, more than I’d ever realized, I had to get out.

  I stumbled out of the kitchen and collapsed on to the settee in the living room. The cool material soothed my skin, but not my insides. I didn’t know what to do with myself. Whatever I did wouldn’t change anything because what had happened last night was irreversible. That was the first time I truly understood what that meant.

  As you go through life you do good things and you do bad things. You can feel yourself moving along a timeline as you go, but you’re always safe because you can always undo things. If you have an argument, you can apologize. If you steal something you can give it back. But when somebody dies, you pass a marker to which you can never return. No amount of anything can bring someone back – death is for ever and that for ever is such a terrifying prospect that I can’t even think about it for long.

  The next morning I didn’t want to go to school but my parents made me. They said it was the best thing for me. As I walked down the dark, depressing corridors, alone and cold, I felt myself going and it was all I could do to stop myself from crying. There was a tangible difference in the air, but not as much as I would have expected. I thought that the whole place would be more respectful, but the younger kids carried on with their games of football whilst the older ones rushed to complete their homework on the school benches. To them, it was just like nothing had happened.

  In assembly the headmaster came on to the stage and started telling us about Craig and how if anybody wanted to talk to a counsellor then they should go to his secretary. That was the sickest thing of it all. This was the man who had lost control when Craig had broken down in his office. He had offered him no support; that task was left to us.

  I wished I had had Craig’s gun on me so that I could have put a bullet in his heart.

  I had only ever been in one of Craig’s classes, which was history, and when I went that day, his empty chair seemed to have its own gravity field that was sucking me in.

  It was in history that I spoke to Freddy.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ he whispered.

  I just shrugged because I was having trouble speaking.

  ‘What did you do yesterday?’ he said.

  ‘Nothing,’ I croaked.

  ‘I had my mother on the phone to me most of the day.’ I don’t know why he said that. ‘Telling me that her and my dad are proud of me,’ he whispered, and even laughed a little.

  I tried to understand how he could be so cool about all this. I thought that it might have been his way of dealing with things. Maybe he was just nuts.

  ‘Have you seen Clare today?’ he said.

  Clare was conspicuously absent from history. I shook my head and felt the blood drain from it.

  At lunchtime there were about four vans parked in the school yard. One of them had a BBC logo painted on to the side and people were milling around with TV cameras slung over their shoulders or mounted on tripods whilst suited presenters dragged microphones with long dark leads trailing into the backs of their vans. I watched with a detached mind.

  It was strange to see people at my school who would later appear on the TV, all because somebody I had been very close to had shot the side of his head off. I still couldn’t speak to anybody. Apart from one person.

  When I found her I grabbed the top of her arm. When she saw it was me, she seemed to have relief on her face.

  ‘Oh God,’ she said quickly and she grabbed me and hugged me, but there wasn’t the electricity that there had been on Saturday night after Craig had killed himself – this hug seemed forced somehow. ‘Have you spoken to Freddy today?’ she asked.

  ‘I saw him in history.’

  ‘Did he say anything to you?’

  ‘About what?’ I said.

  She smiled awkwardly, like she was hiding something.

  ‘About Craig.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘He’s just so . . . cold. Like he doesn’t care.’

  ‘It’s just his way of dealing with it.’

  ‘Ha,’ she spluttered. ‘Please.’ I noticed that there was a sheen of water across her eyes. She wasn’t looking at me, she was staring off to one side at some kids sat on the ground. The cold, dry wind howled across the yard and caught strands of her hair, blowing them into the air like electricity in one of those glass orbs. Her hands were in the pockets of her coat. The unbroken tears may have been because of the cold, I couldn’t tell, but she seemed upset. ‘It’s not his way of dealing with it,’ she spat. ‘He’s glad he did it.’

  ‘You mean Craig?’ I said, disgusted.

  ‘Of course. Craig signed the Charter, didn’t he?’

  My skeleton suddenly breathed in my flesh, tightening over my bones.

  ‘Don’t be so ridiculous.’

  ‘Well, did Freddy seem upset to you?’

  ‘Sure,’ I lied weakly.

  Her eyes went suddenly wide and her look told me that Freddy was coming. I stayed where I was and waited for him to arrive.

  ‘Hello,’ I heard his voice say behind me.

  Clare looked at me desperately. What did she want me to do?

  ‘I’ve got to go. I’ve got homework,’ she said, and walked off.

  ‘Jesus Christ, what the fuck is wrong with her?’ he said loudly so that she could hear. Clare didn’t even break stride, such was her magnificence.

  I was taken aback by the way he said it. He wasn’t usually so teenagerish. He kept looking at her, burning laser holes in her skull.

  ‘Look at those fucking ghouls.’ He pointed to the camera crews at the other end of the yard. I hated the way he was swearing. It was unlike him. It was creepy.

  The wind gnawed painfully at my ears. His heavy hair swayed. The clouds overhead let in hardly any light and flashes of red sprayed across the yard – the last leaves. I wanted to go home and see my mum, lie on my settee, run my hand through the living-room carpet. Hollow, I looked at Freddy.

  ‘So, he did it,’ he said.

  My chapped lips stayed closed.

  ‘I didn’t think he had it in him.’

  I finally mustered speech. When I spoke, my voice didn’t sound like my own. It sounded like it had been filtered through something viscous like amniotic fluid or something.

  ‘Are you glad?’ I said slowly.

  Freddy shrugged.

  ‘What else could he do? We all know he didn’t stand a chance.’

  I didn’t answer.

  ‘Richard, listen to me.’ He looked at me very, very deeply. ‘We are going to stick this out together, all of us. We have to see it through. We’re in it now.’

  I should have been chilled by what Freddy was saying, how he was so calm, but I wasn’t. So what did that make me? I remember actually finding it hard to believe that Freddy was being serious, acting like Craig’s death was all part of the big plan. I didn’t really know what to make of it. He wasn’t making me angry because his attitude was just so ludicrous. Maybe it really was his way of dealing with it. Who could tell?

  When I got home that night I watched the news for the first time in probably my whole life. Craig’s death was the third item on the national news, and the first story on the r
egional news. As I sat in my living room, my left leg kept shaking with restless excitement. Weird. I was a part of this story and my grief made way for a feeling of, what was it, happiness? For a second a thought flashed across my mind that I had to push to one side because it was so abhorrent: I was glad Craig was dead.

  But no matter how much I tried to ignore the thought, it kept digging away and digging away until I couldn’t keep it out any more and it got inside my head and ripped through it like a fire storm. My mind soared with possibilities. All my life I had wanted to be a part of something genuinely dramatic in which everybody else was interested, and now here I was, living it out. I had entered a suicide pact and the first member had gone through the barrier. Five left. I wondered if anyone else could do it. Matthew? I doubted it because he had always been so stable, despite his recent changes. His parents were strict, but not so strict that he would kill himself. I was pretty sure that Jenny wouldn’t kill herself, for the same reasons as Matt – she was too normal. The only scenario I could imagine was if they crept into a car together and carbon-monoxided themselves into oblivion. They would be found together; grey faces, blue lips, hands joined. I felt a shiver.