by Rhys Thomas
‘Can I be honest with you?’ I asked.
She didn’t need to answer.
‘I don’t know what’s happening to me. When Craig . . . you know . . . I was devastated. I kept thinking about how he’d never do anything ever again, you know?’
She squeezed my hand as if to say that she didn’t have the strength to speak.
‘But with Jenny, I don’t know, it’s like I’m empty. I can’t even feel sad. Just numb. I don’t know why. I think I might be going nuts.’
I felt her head rest on my arm and my left shoulder slumped a little because she was leaning on me gently, a tiny redistribution of weight between us that meant the world.
‘Let’s go down there,’ she said, her head snapping up quickly, reinvigorated. She let go of my hand and darted across the gravel path to a trail that led into some baby pines. I had never seen this trail before, which was weird because I’d been up and down that bike track hundreds of times.
‘What about the others?’ I protested, wary.
‘We’ll catch up with them later.’ She disappeared into the trees and I had to follow her.
The track led off down the hillside. I had never been on this part of the mountain before. The little pines were so delicate, like gossamer spread over a mist, an unnatural greeny-blue. I could hear Clare ahead of me and whenever I went around a corner there was a flurry of pines floating to the ground where she had just brushed past. I quickened my pace a little, looking down so that I didn’t fall, and finally caught up with her.
She was standing over a secret, hidden pool of creamy white water that nobody had ever seen before. That’s how I saw it anyway. Secret and our own, like our feelings.
‘Whoa,’ I breathed, then, ‘WHOA!’ Suddenly the most disgusting stink stuffed itself up my nose. ‘What the hell is that smell? Ergh!’ It was like rotten eggs.
Clare smiled again, for the second time. Before today I hadn’t seen her smile for an age and had totally forgotten how it made me feel.
‘I know what this is,’ she said, staring dramatically into its depths. ‘This is the Egg Well.’
I made the few steps it took to get across the small clearing and joined her at the water’s edge. On the far side, about ten feet away, a little stream gurgled in from a more ancient part of the forest, the underside of which was pitch black and primordial. The stream itself was only about two metres long before it disappeared underground into a carpet of mossy bracken.
‘It’s a spring from inside the mountain. That rotten-eggs smell is chemicals from the rocks dissolving.’
‘It’s disgusting,’ I said crassly.
Her arm hooked under mine.
‘It’s magical,’ she said. ‘My dad used to bring me here. My God, I totally forgot about this place. The water has healing properties.’
I turned my head so that I was looking at her. Her hair had split in two around her ear. Her cheeks were red from the cold and exertion of the bike ride. I wondered if she was nervous like I was.
‘I used to lie in bed and imagine it was full moon and all the forest animals would bring out the sick animals and let them drink from the spring.’
All the world was bending over us, warping up and over to see the two of us by the side of the spring, talking nonsense.
‘How do you know it has healing properties?’ I whispered.
‘Clive told me.’ That’s what she sometimes called her father.
Then she was looking at me and the whole planet was ablaze with the polyphonic colours that we used to drown in before everything went black. We were back from the dead and kids again.
‘Shall we drink from it?’ she said, excited like a little girl.
‘From that?’ I said, eyebrows up, disdainful finger pointing.
‘We’ll be immortal.’
‘I already am.’
She punched my arm.
‘Come on.’ She crouched on the shore, her pink shoes sinking half a centimetre into the soft silt. Turning back at me and looking up, she said,’ Shall we do it?’
‘I’m not drinking that. It smells like someone’s shat themselves.’
She stood up and tutted, came close to me, eyeball to eyeball, mockingly threatening that if I didn’t drink from the spring she’d do something bad to me. And then the threat faded, the meaning of her gaze changed, and everything was shifting. I thought back to our kiss at the Christmas party when she had sucked out my insides and I found myself wanting it again. As if I was submerged in water, my ears throbbed. How had it come to this?
‘You feel free to take a taste,’ I said.
‘Not if you won’t.’
‘No,’ I said. I suddenly jumped behind her and grabbed her round the waist. I lifted her up and dangled her over the water. She was strangely heavy, given how small she was. Extra gravity or something. ‘I insist.’
‘Agh,’ she screamed playfully like girls do. ‘Put me down.’
I did and we looked at each other like in a movie. Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to say that I put my hand on the side of her face, swept her hair to one side, made a tentative, nervous inward move, waited for her to respond, and then our lips met. But I can’t say that because it would sound too perfect. And, more than that, it wouldn’t be true. That’s not what happened.
Instead, my eyes broke for the milky water and I said, ‘I didn’t even know this place existed.’
Clare nodded, maybe with a disappointed look on her face, I couldn’t tell. Whatever, the moment was over.
‘I think there’s a quarry around here somewhere.’
And that was that. Without acknowledgement that it had ever happened, we changed the subject as if we were saving face or something bad like that. Like adults do.
‘It’s around here somewhere,’ she said.
I saw a line of even newer pines near the far edge of the pool.
‘What’s that?’
We scrambled around the water, over the jagged rocks.
‘It looks like they’ve planted over an old path,’ she said Sherlock Holmesishly.
At the base of the trees were remnants of gravel mixed in with mud.
‘Come on.’ She went into the trees.
Even though it hadn’t rained for over a week, the pine needles were wet and I could feel my hoody and jeans grow heavy as we plunged deeper. We moved quickly, like it was urgent, she in front of me. Our disturbance released the scent of pine all over us and I found my vision coming into sharp focus; the colours deeper and vivid, the world fresh, new, clean.
A tranquillity descended on me, like gravity had edged forward ever so secretly, like that feeling you get when the weight of a duvet sits on you in the night. I was happy. I had honestly forgotten what it felt like. Genuine happiness. I felt something spark up inside me: hope. I looked at the girl in front of me, thinking that nothing could spoil this sensation: Clare’s back, her hair, her hood . . . the hood being pulled down her back, needles snapping at her, our heads dancing clear of branches, her hair glistening like silk, slipping to one side.
But suddenly a darkness came over me and my smile faded into my cheeks. A welling of tears crushed my throat and I thought I was going crazy to flip-reverse like this. But I couldn’t help it because I was witnessing the world’s end. I was looking at my Clare, the girl who was so amazing it made me numb, and I could see the death of all of us, including you, because we’re all in this together. Her bare neck. Naked. Just there. She didn’t even know about it being exposed. Or at least she did nothing to hide it, which was how she usually reacted when the wind got up and blew her hair away. But whatever, there it was – sour, malignant, devastating: her birthmark. It seethed out at me like it was alive – black, brown, indigo, bruised, spreading, burning, scarring, hurting, breaking, forcing her into loneliness for ever. It meant that she could never get through this, I just knew it deep, deep down where the bottom of my soul sloshes in the bile of my gut, I just knew it. Jesus Christ, stick another coin in my soul.
39
WE CAME OUT from the trees and there in front of me was the most surreal landscape I had ever seen.
‘God,’ I gasped, non-ironically.
Apart from a rim of green pines hemming us in, the whole world was shiny and grey. Clare was right. We were standing on the site of an old slate quarry. There was something cold and sad about the place that told me that nobody had been here in years.
The quarry was like a perfect circle, not a semicircle, so I have no idea how they got the slate out. There was no sign of a road anywhere where the trucks used to come and go. It was like somebody had come along with one of those circular pieces of metal that you use to cut rounds out of pastry, a massive one, and taken out a chunk of the land. It was totally weird. I suspected that it was an alien landing site because the hundred-foot circular chasm would have been the perfect place to hide a craft. Probably the strangest thing about it though was that, when you peered over the edge, at the bottom, sixty feet down, was a green, green lake like molten emeralds.
‘How crazy is this place?’ she said and she stepped out towards the edge of the cliff.
Instinctively I grabbed her arm.
‘Don’t go so close.’ I pointed to a beat-up old sign that said, Danger! Loose rock.
She took another step out, my arm lifting in the air. I took a step forward with her, my heart racing, an eerie detachment in my head. I didn’t want her to jump.
From the cliff the green lake seemed to have a milky texture, all full of chemicals from the rocks like the Egg Well had been.
The walls of the quarry were sheer, lines scored into its sides running straight down into the water. If you fell in there, you wouldn’t get out.
‘It’s so beautiful,’ she whispered.
I couldn’t argue; the shiny grey walls and the dense green water were like part of another planet. It was mesmerizing. I pictured the headlines: Teenage Lovers Drown in Secluded Lake.
‘I have to tell you something, Rich,’ she said, facing away from me.
I took a deep breath and, for the most terrible moment of my life, fixed my eye on her back, and thought about pushing her forward. It would be so easy, so poetic. I saw frogmen harnessing our sodden corpses to a bright-yellow helicopter and lifting us into the sky. I could do it right now. It would take just one moment of insanity, nothing else.
‘What?’ I said, my focus centred entirely on the small of her back. Was I really going to do this? If I was, then it would not be because I was evil, but because I was swept away by a moment. I didn’t know if I was seriously considering it, or if I was fantasizing.
‘What is it?’ I heard my voice say again. My heart was still now, the lines between good and evil a fuzzy blur, not even existent, in fact.
And then . . .
If you asked me what happened next, I would have to say that I don’t know. I like to think, have to think, that I decided not to push her, but the truth is I genuinely don’t know. When Freddy placed his fingers in his mouth and let go of that whistle from the other side of the quarry I can’t say that the whistle stopped me, or if it was me, myself. It still tears me apart, which I guess it should.
But there they were, Matt and Freddy, on the opposite side to us, their hoodies so colourful against the grey and green world.
‘What did you want to say to me?’ I asked half-heartedly, trying to put what had just happened out of my mind.
She was looking across to Freddy and Matt and waving, not smiling. ‘Nothing,’ she answered. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
I cursed myself. Maybe she had been about to tell me that she loved me and I had been too busy to listen because I was thinking about doing something so bad that just thinking about doing it meant that I could never be redeemed. But deep down I don’t think that that was what she was going to say.
Clare and I, and Matt and Freddy started to make our way round to meet each other, the slate slipping away under our feet, some of it tumbling over the edge and splashing quietly into the lake below. We met halfway and all the way there I thought about who the bad guy really was. A sinking, lead feeling told me that it was not Freddy at all.
‘Where have you been?’ he said, looking at her, looking at me, almost as if he was jealous.
‘Nowhere,’ I said as calmly as I could. It was almost like a stand-off. I was glad it was me who was stood next to Clare and not Freddy.
‘We’ve started a fire over there,’ he said, in such a hurt way that I actually felt sorry for him. ‘Then we heard you two through here.’
Matt picked up on the tension that had risen between us out of nothing.
‘Come on,’ he started,’ let’s get over there before it spreads.’
Matt and Freddy’s fire was pretty good. They’d cleared all the dead leaves away and made a circle out of stones, inside of which was a pile of logs and scraps of an old newspaper that they had found.
The forest was silent, the trees bent over us like a roof.
We helped each other drag some large logs over from a pile of timber so that we could sit and stare into the fire, each of us lost in our own thoughts. I don’t want to go into mine because I was WCSing Clare’s murder by me; thinking about what I could have done, wondering why I had thought about doing something so evil.
‘I can’t believe she did it.’
We all looked at Matt. Our attentions, wherever they had been, were now on him. In his hand, Matt was holding a long, thin stick which he used to prod some wood inside the fire.
Past the flames, I saw Freddy staring at Matt. ‘She did it because she had no choice.’
My whole body shuddered. It seemed like such a cold thing to say. I knew he was trying to manipulate Matt. I hoped to God that Matt would stand up and storm off, tell Freddy that he was an idiot. At least that would show me that he was still strong and that he wouldn’t kill himself. But Matt didn’t react. He kept staring into the fire.
‘You should have seen her body.’
A crackle of cold shuddered up my skeleton. I suddenly remembered seeing Matt climbing down the motorway embankment after Jenny had thrown herself off the bridge.
‘It was like, not even her. It was just mush.’ His words were slow and quiet and horrifying. ‘She didn’t even have a face.’
‘Matt, don’t,’ Clare said quickly. ‘Please stop.’
He glanced at her and breathed out through his nose.
‘Sorry.’
The hairs on my arms were standing on end. The image of Jenny, her face ripped off, was branding itself into my brain. I could feel bile in my stomach. It was too hard to take. Two tears fell out of my eyes, and I’m glad that the others didn’t notice. I turned away and wiped them clear.
‘Would you miss me if I was gone?’ he said.
Clare gasped.
‘Matt . . .’ she spluttered.
He just kept staring into the fire.
I had to say something, I had to stop this.
‘Matt, I know this is all fucked up but you can’t talk like—’ I stopped in my tracks.
Matt was looking at me and his stare was so terrible that I could not continue speaking. His eyes were looking at me like I was something alien, like I wasn’t his best friend. I remembered the time on the airbase when Craig had threatened to shoot me and I had gone mental on him. Matt had looked at me in the same way then, like I was an animal. But this was more extreme, more concentrated. This was awful.
‘Matt?’ A shadow moved behind his eyes. ‘Matt, Jenny wouldn’t want you to do anything—’
‘What do you know about Jenny?’ he snapped. ‘You didn’t even notice—’
My heart turned to ice, my ribs liquid nitrogen.
‘You think that because you’re in this club that you’re invincible, that we’re better than everyone else. But it’s not the same for the rest of us. You think’ – he was pointing at me – ‘that we’re in the right. But the rest of us—’ He stopped. ‘Forget it.’
I felt like crying. We were better than
everyone else, I knew this was true. I didn’t like Matt saying that we weren’t because it wasn’t true. Everyone else was horrible. We were nice. We understood. I knew unfalteringly, as we sat around that fire in the woods, light dappling our faces, that I loved my friends. Even the dead ones who were waiting for us in our heavenly chamber that nobody else could enter. I loved that I was in this group of wonderful people and I didn’t like the way that Matt seemed to be faltering. The Suicide Club wasn’t about killing ourselves, it was about being nice people protected from the cold world by each other. I desperately didn’t want him to kill himself. If he did, it wouldn’t be anything to do with the Suicide Club. No, if he killed himself it would be because he couldn’t stand life any more, not because he loved life. If any of us were going to do it, I thought that Clare would have been next, but now, as I watched shadows warp across his face, I knew that it would be him. Everything had been taken away from Matt – his friends, his school, his Jenny, his soul.
Across the fire we stared at one another and I think he felt sorry for me, like I had gone crazy and was in the wrong. But that’s OK because I felt the same about him. I guess it was just his way of dealing with Jenny’s suicide. We all had our own ways of dealing with it – Matt was angry, Clare was sad, I was numb. Only Freddy seemed to be happy about it. Or indifferent at least.
I caught Freddy’s eyes moving back and forth between me and Matt and I never wanted to punch him in the face more than then. My heart was starting to beat faster and I was losing my grip.
Clare looked at me.
‘Stop being such a fucking idiot and you’ – she looked at Matt – ‘you stop being such an idiot as well. You’re supposed to be best friends.’
My lips were wet because the moisture from all of my emotions was getting the better of me again.
Then none of us spoke.
I felt bad because I didn’t want Matt to hate me.
Jenny was dead and he was somehow blaming me. But we were best friends and that was all there was to it.
That’s why, after five minutes, and finally ending the standoff, he said,’ I can’t believe that neither of us are going back to school.’