The Suicide Club

by Rhys Thomas

  The three of them all chipped in dramatically but Emma didn’t say anything because, I realized, she knew that I wasn’t listening to these people and that she had hurt me badly by letting them talk to me. Unfortunately for my panel of experts they were so pompous and all-knowing that they could never get back to real life and real people, where all the living gets done, and for that I felt bad.

  After about fifteen minutes of their babble I thrust my head back and groaned, feeling my Adam’s apple stretch.

  Then I snapped my head back up just as quickly and said, ‘I’m sorry. Do you think I could talk to Emma on my own for a minute?’

  The experts looked at each other and nodded like they had any say whatsoever. I got to my feet, she got to hers, and we walked out of the room, me ten feet ahead. On my way out, I tried as hard as I could, but I couldn’t help crying. Not real crying, just stinging, watery eyes.

  Emma pulled the door shut and looked up at me. I had never realized it before because she had always been sat behind a desk, but I was slightly taller than she was.

  ‘Why have you let them do this?’ I said, trying to stop the tears breaking off my eyeballs.

  ‘They can help you, Rich.’

  I could tell that she was scared of me killing myself, and not because she would be losing a patient – but because I think she liked me. She didn’t want me to die. I knew that she had never been involved with a case as heavy as this, a case which had at its centre, you know, a runaway teenage suicide pact.

  The corridor was silent. Fuck it, I thought, I’ll never get a better chance than this. I leaned in quickly and stole a kiss off her mouth. It lasted for about a second before she pulled away.

  ‘No,’ she whispered.

  ‘I’m in love with you,’ I breathed.

  I took her by the hand and led her into the headmaster’s office, which was empty, and closed the door. My heart was fluttering like a baby bird was trapped in there. We turned and faced each other and started kissing. Wildly and uncontrollably. My hand was in her hair whilst one of hers started to unbutton my shirt and with her other hand she undid the button at the top of my trousers, her breathing hard and warm, and she started panting and if you haven’t realized by now that I’m lying then shame on you.

  Instead of that, after the first kiss Emma stepped back with consummate professionalism and told me that I had been wrong to invade her personal space and that nothing could ever happen between us because I was a fifteen-year-old boy. She also said that patients often feel this way towards their counsellors and I told her that nobody had ever felt this way towards Sylvia. My humiliation was so complete and embarrassing that I didn’t even let it register in my head because if I had I would have had to have left town or something. I was still upset at having been betrayed by her, but this embarrassment sort of diluted my anger and made me feel nothing. My tears got sucked back into their ducts and I was icy cool.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s go back inside.’ And she didn’t even hold my hand.

  She had won, that was the truth. I don’t like to think of human relationships as games because that’s just disgusting. But she had still won.

  I had had enough of counselling, I had had enough of school. It was all too much for me. I was trying to act cool about my dying friends, but I couldn’t handle this school any more. I couldn’t handle forever being the boy who was crazy, who had cruelly killed the peregrine falcon, driven two kids into killing themselves, the freak, the ostracized.

  I went back into the den of social workers and psychiatrists with only one purpose. To escape.

  I sat down in my seat and politely said,’ Thank you.’

  ‘Are you all right?’ said Sylvia.

  ‘I am going to kill myself and there’s nothing you can do about it.’

  Silence. I thought that one of the women would have gasped when I said it but neither of them did. I looked at Emma just to make sure that I wasn’t making a mistake, and then I knew that I wasn’t. I had only seen her as my equal in the past because she was so pretty. Underneath it all, I now saw, she was exactly the same as the others. She should have seen the drama and the romance that I had just offered her outside but all she saw was some theory she had read about in her textbook at university once. She didn’t get it.

  ‘You realize,’ said Pointy Head, ‘that if I think you are going to harm yourself we can put you in a psychiatric unit.’

  What felt like a snake slithered up my back. It scared me when he said that. Surely he couldn’t lock me up if I hadn’t done anything wrong. They couldn’t lock me up on the strength of this embarrassment’s opinion, could they?

  ‘But I don’t think that that is the case,’ he continued, light from outside shining off his scalp. ‘You have some problems that need ironing out but I think that what we are seeing from you is merely a’ – slow motion – ‘cry . . . for . . . help.’

  That was the trigger, all that was needed for me to realize that everything he had said was nothing but hot air, a fact which I had of course known all along. I got up from my chair and walked out. Roy followed but I was already out of the door and running. At the end of the staff corridor was the secretary’s office. I swung into it at full speed only to be greeted by the headmaster and his secretary, Mrs McKinsay. He was leaning over her desk and showing her something in a booklet. They both turned their heads to me. I crossed the room quick as a flash. All I wanted at that exact moment was to be expelled and free of this hellhole. So, with a perfectly clear mind, like a beach at dawn, I disguised myself in a whirlwind of chaos that ripped apart what my headmaster thought that I was capable of. I rushed over to the desk and lifted her monitor off it like it was a toy. I took four quick steps back and yanked all the leads clear. The base of her PC shuddered across the carpet and smashed into the leg of her desk as the monitor lead got torn out of the back, socket and all. I hoisted the thing over my head and threw it as hard as I could at the wall. But the school was so crap that it wasn’t even a flat-screened monitor so it was heavier than I thought and it only got about six feet across the room before heading downwards. It fell limply to the floor and faded from the world with a whimper instead of a bang, which is a phrase I once heard somebody use when describing how the world would most likely end.

  37

  I GOT MY wish. I was expelled from Atlantic High School that day. My father came to collect me. We drove away and not a single photographer noticed my leaving. The headmaster didn’t even allow me to say goodbye to any of my teachers or old friends. I was forced to wait in his office whilst he lectured me. He told me that, despite my angst towards what was happening in my life, my behaviour was not good enough for a school of this class. He told me that the way a person reacts in times of crisis is what defines a man.

  My apparent outburst of insanity in the secretary’s office only terrified my parents even more than before because they thought that I was genuinely crazy. After the incident that had happened between us the day before in the conservatory when my mother had thrown up, we found it difficult to talk about my expulsion. My mother, who had come home from work early, plain refused to see me at all, which I didn’t mind because I just wanted to go into the living room and watch the news channels’ coverage of my suicide adventure. My father just said something about sorting everything out later so I went into the living room and flicked on the TV.

  The news reports weren’t as extensive as I would have liked because I wanted 24-hour blanket coverage with news choppers all over the town, live satellite feeds to every corner of the globe, a frenzy of outraged parents roaring in the streets like it was the apocalypse.

  At around half three the BBC news channel had an expert in the studio talking about the nature of suicide pacts and how once one person does it the rest usually seem to follow. According to him, people who would ordinarily never kill themselves on their own often do it if they are part of a pact, kind of like a chain reaction. The news report was good because as he spoke they kept showin
g pictures of my school. There were a few kids I recognized milling around the yard and then the camera suddenly panned round and zoomed in right on . . . me and Clare. We were holding each other in our arms and I almost choked when I saw it. My heart skipped and a sudden surge of happiness coursed through me. I was on TV! And I looked cool, even if I do say so myself. But then the camera panned to another group and my heart sank once more.

  Since Jenny had died I hadn’t even spoken to Matt or Freddy so I had no idea what they were thinking at this point. I had been thrown out of school before first lesson had even finished.

  Inside I was in turmoil. I was happy because the school was on TV and I had even been given a brief cameo, and not just on the regional news; this story would get all over the world. But on the other hand it was me and my friends who were the stars of this story but our names weren’t getting mentioned. I know it must sound weird, and it wasn’t my strongest wish at that time, but a bit of recognition would have been nice.

  I know that if it was another school and I was just an observer, I would want to know how many kids were left in the pact so that I could count down the deaths. And I would want to know who the kids were and their backgrounds so that I could guess how likely it was that they were going to commit suicide. I know it’s what’s called gratuitous but it’s true. At least for me.

  As I sat in the living room I wondered what my parents were doing. They were being very quiet. I assumed that a big lecture was coming up about how I was throwing my life away, but you know what? It never came. Ever. After the way I had behaved in the conservatory, our relationship had broken and, though you could tape it up, it could never be fully repaired because what had happened was Not Natural and you never come back from something like that.

  So I sat in my room doing absolutely nothing. I could hear Toby shuffling around on the landing every now and again but I didn’t feel like talking to him because I knew I wouldn’t be able to handle it if I made him cry, which I almost certainly would, seeing as though everything I was touching lately was turning to shit.

  At ten o’clock I watched the news on TV (I only have terrestrial channels in my bedroom). Our story had been promoted to the first segment and we totally dominated the regional news, which made me feel a little better. The editors at the TV station must have had time to put together a better report by this time because in this one there were shots of Jenny’s house on the airbase and of her parents getting out of a car, her mother doubled over in agony, her dad in his uniform looking like the toughest guy in the world. The airbase was described by the reporter as having been ‘rocked’ by the events.

  I remembered how Jenny had told me that her parents were ‘opinionated’. Other than that all I knew was that they were from just outside San Francisco, from a town called San something. I suddenly realized just how little I actually knew about Jenny and her background. Right now, as I was in my bedroom, her parents must have felt like their world was over. Which it was of course because their daughter was dead after being smashed to bits by a car after jumping off a bridge. There was a gold rope of bond running between Jenny’s parents and Craig’s parents and they didn’t even know it. It probably never crossed their minds that just a mile of space away were another grieving couple being drowned in the same river.

  At least Jenny had done it dramatically. Thank God for that. Her death was probably better than Craig’s if you asked me to choose. Just. If you think about it, you could never have imagined Jenny killing herself in such an explosive manner. She was the most normal of us all. She was definitely capable of killing herself, everybody is, but to do it like that? I would never have said she could have done it in such a dramatic fashion. But then again, she was very artistic.

  The next morning I woke up with so much sun coming through the curtains that I thought that it had exploded. It was not normal for February. If it hadn’t been that sunny I would have probably stayed in bed all day but how could I miss out on a day like this? I had been expelled yesterday and so this was like that song, the first day of my life.

  The water in the shower fed me energy. Everything was going to be OK. My feeling wasn’t based on anything real; nothing had changed, I could just feel it. In reality, of course, so my counsellors tell me, I had gone crazy. By this point I was so far gone I had no idea that my view of the world had warped so badly. I hadn’t even noticed any discernible difference in me.

  I wanted to see my parents. Not to bury the hatchet and start anew, that was impossible; I just wanted to be around them. I got changed and pulled back my curtains. The sky was so blue it was like neon and there were absolutely no clouds. The world was alive. I was alive.

  I ran downstairs like one of those crazy winds that wash into France off Africa, ready to scream out how happy I was – only to find the house empty. I opened the front door. Mum’s car was gone. Surely they hadn’t all gone out without telling me, right? I looked at the floor and picked up the mail. My heart skipped when I saw my name written on a brown envelope. Don’t worry, it wasn’t another suicide note, it was one of those browny-yellowy padded envelopes that Play send out. My MCR album! There’s nothing quite like the feeling of seeing one of those brown envelopes on the doormat, is there? I tore the wrapping off frantically, excited that at last I was going to get my CD. The envelope slipped away and my heart sank. I almost started crying right there and then. I had to sit down at the kitchen table to get my breath back. In my hands was a classical music CD. They had sent the wrong CD. I had waited for so long and they had got my hopes raised and now here they were slapping me in the face. How could they do this? I was on the verge of giving up on everything, finding a rope and hanging myself from it, but a little voice said, Just give it one more chance, Rich.

  Hands shaking, I put the CD back into the ripped envelope and went over to the kitchen cabinet to fetch some sticky tape so that I could send it back.

  It was when I was stood at the kitchen counter, reaching up to the cupboard for the tape, looking out of the window into the back garden, that I saw Toby holding a two-litre plastic bottle with the top sawn off. I got a twang in me because I thought about me lying in bed whilst he had been going about his business in silence, just walking around the garden with a bottle in his hand. I sighed. I wished he had more friends because he was such a great little kid. I couldn’t even imagine why nobody wanted to hang around with him. If I had been a little kid I would have definitely hung around with someone like Toby.

  Anyway, it was while I was having this very thought that Toby started talking to someone. Whoever it was, they were out of sight. Curious, I craned my neck round and couldn’t believe what I saw. There was another little kid in the garden with him. A sudden sense of dread came out of nowhere and thudded into me. He had a friend. I watched Toby’s mouth move, even though I couldn’t hear what he was saying. Then I looked at the kid, and his mouth was moving in silence. They seemed to be having some sort of conversation. He didn’t need me any more. Over the coming months and years I was going to be phased out. I had a terrible WCS about it where I was crippled in bed and he never came to see me because he was too busy playing some awful game with his friends.

  Since he was born, Toby had been the weightiest constant in my life. No matter what happened, he was always there like a rock. Whenever it was raining on a Saturday afternoon it was never that bad because I always had Toby and he would do pretty much whatever I told him to because he idolized me. But that tide was turning. If he was going to turn into Mr Popularity then I would become the follower and he would become the idol. Now that he was all but gone, I felt it so hard that I almost collapsed.

  Anyway, this kid. He had thin black hair, was quite tall and had on a matching red tracksuit jacket and trousers. And you know those zips that you have at the bottom of tracksuit trousers that run down the side of your calf ? Well, he had zipped them all the way to the bottom so that above his bright white trainers was a hideous bulge of cloth. I’d say he was about nine. I instantly de
spised him.

  Under his arm he held a shoebox covered in black masking tape.

  I went into the conservatory and out through the French windows. I was more timid than usual because I was a little bit afraid. I knew that whatever was about to happen was going to be incredibly bad. I could just tell.

  The air was so cold that my warm breath condensed into clouds.

  ‘Hiya, Tobe,’ I said cheerily, even though it came out with no middle.

  ‘Morning,’ he answered coldly.

  ‘How come you’re not in school?’

  ‘School’s closed. The pipes got frozen. Mum said I had to call her mobile phone when you got out of bed. She’s just popped to the shops.’

  ‘I’ve just spoken to her,’ I lied. ‘She’s on her way back.’ I sort of couldn’t decide if I was upset or happy that my mum had to take time off work to look after her crazy son.

  I stood just in front of the door, on the patio. Toby was in the middle of the lawn.

  ‘Alan, pass me the box?’

  Alan walked like he had springs in his shoes, all bouncy. He handed Toby the box. Tobe took it and placed it carefully on the lawn. Then he took his bottle with the top cut off and placed it inside. From his pocket he produced a roll of masking tape and unravelled it around the bottle. Then he pulled the tape away from the bottle and used the rest of it to secure the bottle to the box, if you know what I mean. Next, he looked at Alan expectantly. Alan took some scissors from his pocket and snipped the tape.

  I watched on, incredulous.

  The bottle was now securely attached to the inside of the shoebox and the two boys stood up simultaneously and awkwardly to admire their handiwork.