by Rhys Thomas
I nodded. All of my efforts were going into not giving myself away. For Freddy’s sake.
‘You do realize that if you’re lying to me you’ve slurred the name of a dead kid.’
‘I’m not lying,’ I said. He sat there and gave me the eye. ‘You won’t tell anyone . . . will you?’
He did something with his eyebrows.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘You won’t say anything about Craig.’ I was acting my head off, pretending to be distraught, having betrayed Craig’s secret.
‘We’ll pick this up again,’ he said. He slammed his notebook shut. ‘I just want you to know that it’s not my job to be Mr Nice Guy. We have counsellors you can speak to for that. Two kids are dead – that’s what I care about.’ He got up from the table and leaned in over me. ‘If you think,’ he spat, ‘that we’re not going to take this seriously just because you’re kids, then you can think again.’ I could smell the mint and coffee on his breath. It was embarrassing. ‘If I find out that you have had anything to do with this . . .’
‘Hey,’ my dad said suddenly. He was grabbing the detective’s arm. The detective looked at my father’s hand and stood up straight. My father let go. ‘I think it’s time you left, Detective, but I have to tell you that the way in which you just behaved was completely inappropriate.’
They stared at each other.
‘It’s not my job to be . . .’
‘I don’t care about your job,’ my father snapped. ‘My son is clearly mixed up in something . . . awful . . . and you treat him like this?’ He was shaking. My actions were making him shake.
Detective Berryman, to his credit, said, ‘I’m sorry, Mr Harper.’ And then he looked at me. ‘And I’m sorry, Richard. But in my line of work I see some terrible things. I just don’t want this getting out of hand.’ He had redeemed himself slightly; I have to say that because it would be unfair of me not to.
‘Thank you, Detective,’ my father said quietly.
My mother was leaning against the kitchen counter, like she couldn’t stand of her own accord. I guess it was quite terrible, seeing the adults like this; so lost and confused, so helpless, their lives so out of control.
I sat in my chair; there was nothing I could do about it. The wheels were already in motion. Inside, bizarrely, I was laughing.
35
THE POLICE TOOK my laptop and went through all my stuff. I stood right up in the corner of my room, out of the way, and watched as Detective Berryman and two uniformed officers who had been outside in the car during my interview rifled through my drawers and looked under my bed for I don’t know what. They weren’t very good at looking because they found neither my Charter, the note from Craig, nor the film from Jenny’s camera. It was a farce.
Later that night my father called me downstairs for a chat.
‘I don’t know what you’re playing at,’ he said, ‘but your mother’s terrified that you’re going to kill yourself.’
It was really weird, the way he just came out and said it so straight. It kind of shocked me. I didn’t answer and we went into the conservatory. Next to the chair that my mother was sat in was a stack of books and something told me that I might have misjudged her. Maybe it was OK to like reading – it wasn’t as if she had lived her life inside a cocoon or anything – so maybe there was room for reading and life. She looked so small, sitting in her chair.
‘Rich, I’m sorry.’ She said it so suddenly it almost knocked me flat because she had never been so wounded and open in front of me. It took me by surprise.
It’s a bit of a cliché but you always see your parents as these infallible superbeings; even when they fly off the handle at something, they’re still better than you. When my mum said ‘I’m sorry’ to me, that’s when I saw that she wasn’t this superwoman at all. She was just a person – skin and bones. A piece of life’s magic slipped out of me when this painful truth hit me. I felt so sorry for me to have to suffer this sort of stuff so soon after another one of my friends had just died. The world can be so coldly scientific when it wants to be, you know?
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘But I can’t speak to you any more.’ I sat down in a chair. ‘You’ll have to talk to me through my assistant from now on.’
My parents looked at each other, half blankly, half horrifiedly.
‘Peter will deal with all of your enquiries.’ I looked at them, my monster completely in control now.
‘What are you talking about, Rich?’ my father said nicely, like he was scared to say anything bad to me. His hair was all scraggly.
‘Peter, my new imaginary friend. He’s sat right next to me,’ I said, waving at thin air to my right.
‘This isn’t funny, son,’ said Dad.
I held my hand up to silence him and eased my head to my right as if Peter was talking to me.
‘What’s that, Peter? They don’t think it’s funny? Think what’s not funny?’ I said, and looked at them.
What they saw was a son they had brought up from birth and who was now dancing perilously close to the edge of sanity. They must have been terrified.
‘What did I just say to you?’ my father suddenly shouted. ‘And now you come in here with this shit? What the hell has happened to you?’ he roared.
‘I said,’ I seethed through gritted teeth, ‘to talk to my assistant.’
That set my mother off crying and I shook my head at how pitiful it all was.
‘Why are you crying?’ I said jarringly.
She couldn’t answer because she was ashamed of herself. She suddenly got to her feet and bolted for the door. But it was too late. Chunks of vomit spewed out of her and smattered all over the carpet. My father tried to help by grabbing her round the waist and taking her out through the door that led to the back garden. These were my parents. She threw up again, this time into her potted rose bush. Because her son was treacherous.
I wanted to feel sorry for her because she was my mother and I was supposed to love her but, on the other hand, she was throwing up on a plant. I got to my feet and went over to the door, trying to think of something funny to say that would make everything OK. I didn’t want to apologize because I hadn’t done anything wrong.
So I went to the door and said, ‘Looks like you’ve completely embarrassed yourself, doesn’t it?’ And I said it with a bit too much nettle.
I remember thinking at the time that my behaviour was way too much, that I was being unbelievably cruel to my parents, yet I couldn’t stop. Maybe it was Jenny, maybe it was Craig, maybe it was because I was having a breakdown. Whatever it was, I just didn’t care any more. As far as I was concerned, the worse things got, the better.
Her reaction was crazy. She lumbered to her feet like she had arthritis and then quickly lashed out at me. There was sick all over her chin, tears coming out of her eyes and snot running out of her nose on to her lip. It was monstrous.
‘You’re evil!’ she screamed. I’d never seen her act like this before, not even when I went off the tracks. Even when she and my father used to have secret arguments before they split up. This was a whole new level.
My dad stopped her reaching me but her fingers still clawed at my face.
‘I don’t know where you came from! I don’t know what I’ve done!’ She leaned over so that she could get enough air out of her lungs and through her throat. Her mouth was wide open, like it might rip apart at the edges. Her neck was red, veins popping out purple and bruised. ‘What’s happened to you?’ The pitch and volume of her shrieking actually hurt my ears physically. Then she started crying in my father’s arms, sick going all over his sweater.
‘Jesus,’ I said.
‘I hope you do kill yourself. So I don’t have to look at you any more!!’
I stormed towards the door, barely able to hold in my tears when she said that. My mood had flipped 180 degrees just like that. I suddenly recalled being eight years old and going home at lunchtime from primary school. My mother had made me poached egg on toast and as I ate my lunch she sat an
d asked me what I had done in school, whilst holding Toby to her chest. The sun shone brightly through the window and on to her face. It had been such a close experience, just the three of us in our kitchen. I found it hard to think that our family could have come to this moment of insanity because of me.
I always thought that I could do anything and she’d always stay on my side but now it suddenly occurred to me that I might be wrong. Oh God, I was thinking, was I about to lose my mother as well?
‘Rich, wait,’ she cried. ‘I didn’t mean it.’
I stopped.
‘Promise me you won’t do it,’ she wailed. It was really horrendous, seeing my mother implode so utterly. ‘Promise me you won’t kill yourself,’ she cried.
I turned round and smiled evilly, oblivion scratching at my brain. ‘I promise nothing.’
I lay on my bed and looked at the ceiling, trying to decide if Jenny’s death just hadn’t had time to sink in, or if I really didn’t care that much. I was in one of those restless moods where you can’t concentrate on anything and nothing seems particularly important. More out of a sense of duty than anything else I tried to think of the times I had spent with Jenny. There had been Halloween night so long ago when we had played tag in the graveyard – that had been pretty great.
Then there was that one time when I had seen her in town and she had been taking pictures of all the people for Freddy using long shutter-speeds. That was also a happy memory of her, although I did feel a pang of jealousy that Freddy had that spiralled notebook of her photos to remind him of her whilst I had nothing.
Then there had been that one time when she had told me about her little town in America. It sounded like the neighbourhoods in films like ET, you know? American suburbia. As a girl she and her friends would cycle around the valleys there, which were full of vineyards. Once she had even seen a puma – how cool is that?!? I remembered that when she had told me about it her eyes kept going wide with excitement, then normal again, then wide again.
I tried to think of other memories. I remembered the times before I knew Jenny and she didn’t know me, before she started going out with Matt, when she first arrived from America. We were anonymous to one another and I remembered how she used to take long, deliberate steps to get to wherever it was she was going.
One final memory came to me. It was only a small thing, so I don’t know why it was in my head. One day I had been in the yard with Jenny during lunch on one of those sunny winter days. She asked me out of nowhere about Clare’s birthmark on the back of her neck. She had caught a glimpse of it whilst they had been changing for PE. She said that it made her feel really sorry for Clare because she would never be able to get her hair cut short. And I had told Jenny never to mention it to Clare because it would upset her.
I was suddenly exhausted. I was just drifting off to sleep when I got that image in my head again, the image I had weirdly got at Craig’s funeral – the image of me falling through the clouds at night. I was dive-bombing straight down like an arrow returning to earth. Once again I knew that when I passed through the last cloud I would see some sort of eternal truth – like the meaning of life or something.
As I thundered through them, the clouds swept away, clearing a path for me. Then, suddenly, there was that final layer again, just a veil between me and the answer. I headed for it at a billion miles an hour but I didn’t gain any distance. Pinpricks of light burned in the cloud once again but I couldn’t reach it. I desperately wanted to stay awake to see what was beyond that last cloud, but I was no longer conscious. I had passed a critical barrier and there was no turning back. I fell asleep.
36
THE NEXT DAY at school all hell broke loose. There were about twenty news vans and probably a hundred photographers. Smelly, greasy journalists dressed in black were milling around clutching Dictaphones and notepads, living the cynical dream.
News had spread that a terrible tragedy had struck this sleepy little town in the heart of Middle England – a schoolkid suicide pact was unravelling. I could see one news reporter, a woman, with a microphone in her hand. She was filming a report and had her head tilted to one side to emphasize just how tragic it all was.
I drifted past them all like I was just another kid. They had no idea that it was I who was at the centre of this horrendous maelstrom. As I glided past I felt sorry for how pathetic they all were.
But then I looked ahead of me, in the direction I was walking, and my heart leapt. Clare was walking towards me, looking like one of those amazingly feminine women you see in films from the seventies wearing berets. Her features were sallow, her eyes deep in her face.
‘Hey,’ I said.
She didn’t stop, she kept walking straight up to me and threw her arms around my neck. I rested my chin on her shoulder. The other kids were looking at us like we were freaks, either pulling evil faces or sniggering – they knew all about the Suicide Club now. It was all over the news. I felt a crushing desperation as I held on to that girl for dear life, not because everybody thought that I was a freak, but because they thought Clare was a freak. I didn’t want to be a freak, but if I was then it wasn’t the end of the world; people could think what they wanted about me. But for Clare . . . she wouldn’t be able to handle this.
‘I didn’t think you’d be in school,’ I whispered into her ear.
‘My dad made me come.’
I went to let go but she held me tighter.
‘Just hold on to me.’ I did as I was told. Just held on. ‘Remember the Eskimo Friends?’ she whispered.
‘Of course I do.’
And then she said,’ I’m so sorry for what I did at the disco.’
I don’t know if she wholly meant it – maybe she felt she had to say it again to keep me next to her, where she wasn’t alone. Whatever the reason I wasn’t going to desert her now because to do that would have been indescribably cruel, so I did the only thing I could do and kept hugging her. But there was no magic in it, not like there had been outside the pub on the night that Craig had killed himself. I still loved Clare and throughout all this it was still her that pervaded my thoughts even more than the suicides, but I knew that something was forever lost. Something that can’t be articulated had burned out and although I can’t say it in words, I know you know what I mean. Right?
So we stood there and hugged each other in front of the cynical eyes of the schoolkids and our embrace just cemented our position of eternal teenage outcasts. The kids swarmed past us and, if there had been an infrared camera over the yard, we’d have glowed up like nuclear fallout on the film with everything else remaining a sterile, cold grey.
There’s this line in the song ‘1979’ by the Smashing Pumpkins – Clare’s favourite song – that talks about this girl called Justine who used to hang around with the freaks and ghouls because she didn’t realize that that’s not what you’re supposed to do. That line always snagged on me because I always thought I could empathize with what it must have been like to be a freak, even though I never was. And now that it was happening, I realized that my original thoughts were correct. I felt isolated and alone and cut off from everybody but as well as that I knew, just as all freaks must, that it was only because everyone else didn’t understand. And because of that, I didn’t care what they thought.
By now the Suicide Club was fodder for the school hive mind and I could just imagine clandestine corners of the cloakrooms where all the girls, eyes popping out their heads, lids surgically sucked back into their eye-sockets, hands gesturing, decried how weird we were.
Instead of first lesson I was supposed to see my counsellor for an emergency session. So I trudged off to the meeting room, knowing that Emma was going to ask me about Jenny.
To my surprise, she wasn’t alone. With her were three other people. One was an old-looking, bald, pointy-headed guy with a rim of hair, tweed suit and smugness smeared all over his face, which was, to be frank, embarrassingly ugly. The second guy, who was also an ugly man, was wearing a leather jacke
t with a black roll-neck sweater underneath because he thought he was hip because he was only in his mid-thirties. The last person, who made me feel sick, was the horrendous Sylvia Bowler, my original counsellor.
As I sat down I said,’ You must be loving this . . . Sylvia.’
She just looked at me with fake-doleful eyes. I was in no doubt that she thought that she was being sincere; that’s how far gone she was, poor thing.
Seeing those people there hurt me, because I wouldn’t have thought that Emma would have put me through this humiliation.
‘Rich,’ she said. She looked genuinely sad. ‘This is Doctor Kramer from the university.’ She pointed to Pointy Head. Then she gestured to the fat slug. ‘You already know Sylvia.’ Finally she indicated the hip guy, who was introduced to me simply as, get this, Roy.
I sighed loudly with the sheer pointlessness of it all and put my outstretched arm on the table whilst bringing my other one across my chest, because these people would think that my doing this was a display of defensiveness because they thought they had all the answers.
‘You know why we’re all here, don’t you, Richard?’ said Pointy Head in a nasal voice that was almost as bad as his face.
I didn’t answer because I felt like Emma had betrayed me and I was too upset to speak. It was funny how, now that I was involved in a suicide pact, everybody was clambering over each other to get the inside scoop on the circus act. All these people wanted was to make themselves feel important. But Emma was supposed to be my counsellor and I couldn’t fathom why she was letting them into my world. She knew that I would hate being subjected to this crap. She should have been protecting me.
For the next five minutes, whilst the panel of experts told me why they were right and I was wrong, I did nothing but stare at Emma. She could barely look back.
And so it was that I listened to theories on group mentality, peer pressure, positive reinforcement, inferiority complexes, superiority complexes, all that stuff that’s just a part of the big human fuck-up that’s the glory of existence and should be encouraged, not ‘cured’. When I asked Dr Kramer how old he was when his hair fell out he told me that I was engaging in a process known as transference. God, I wish I could be as sure as him about what’s correct and what’s not so that I could live in a spacious house and have a nice car and sleep easily at night.