by Rhys Thomas
The police came round again to ask me some questions and my parents finally told me that I wasn’t allowed to go to Jenny’s funeral. They left it to the police to tell me that Clare’s parents were going to take out a restraining order on me. How fucking crazy is that? I was only a fifteen-year–old, for Christ’s sake. And I loved the way they thought it was my fault and not hers.
Because our group had been so utterly ripped asunder and I had no contact with anybody because the adults thought they knew best, I had no idea what was happening to Freddy. I was sure he was still up at the school because his parents were both working away and couldn’t get back. Some parents.
An army of media had descended on our town by now because, although Jenny’s death was a few days old, the whole nation had fallen in love with our tragedy and the news was still white hot. Though I didn’t really read the articles, the newspapers had streams of words telling everybody how we had killed ourselves with apparently no motive. Even though the Suicide Club Charter had been found on Jenny, people still refused to accept responsibility.
The actual suicide pact of the Suicide Club had collapsed and seemed like a distant memory now. The media were two days behind real time. Inside the Club, none of us knew where the story was now headed; we were in uncharted waters.
I didn’t care about any of the media stuff any more and so I let it all pass me by as if I was a tree at the side of a railway track. My parents tried to help me but they had grown cold towards each other and that made me even more cold.
Those tadpoles of electrical information holding the truth about Matt’s letter had still not attacked and Clare had not called back and everything was like the final stretches of cancer; drug-addled and flat.
‘Richard,’ called my father.
‘Yeah?’ I called back.
‘Can you come downstairs, please? Detective Berryman is here to see you.’
Jesus, why wouldn’t they leave me alone? Couldn’t they see that my whole world was in ruins? Why did they have to keep pushing me like this?
As I went to leave the room the phone started ringing. I had stopped answering the phone at that point but for some reason I answered it this time.
‘Rich?’
‘Freddy?’
Hearing his voice gave me the shivers. It suddenly dawned on me that he was my last remaining male friend. This boy who had come into my life and had left this trail of destruction in his wake. Maybe I should have hated him for what he had done, but I didn’t. I really didn’t.
‘I have to tell you something.’
He sounded very serious.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
A second passed.
‘I slept with Clare.’
Just then my father came in through my door.
‘Richard,’ he said. ‘Come on.’
I looked at him and bit my lip. It was the only thing I could do to stop myself crying.
On the other side of the line, Freddy was saying, ‘Rich?’ but I was gone. My head was scrambled so that it couldn’t actually function. I thought I was going to collapse. I held the phone in my hand and was just looking at my dad. I wanted him to understand what I was going through, but how could he? He had no idea what had just been said to me.
‘Rich, I’m so sorry,’ said Freddy.
‘Richard, we’re waiting for you,’ said my father.
Freddy was explaining to me what had happened. His words were going into my head, but they were indigestible at that point.
‘We did it on the night Craig killed himself. I’m so sorry. She took me back to her house and it just . . . happened. Rich, I have to tell you this, I can’t keep on lying to you. We didn’t tell you because we didn’t want to hurt you.’
I hated the way he was referring to them as ‘we’. They weren’t a ‘we’. We were a ‘we’. What did he want me to say? Did he want me to go nuts and start screaming, ‘Was she good?’ like a cliché? That’s what I wanted to do but I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. I wanted him to stop speaking because he had just taken Clare away from me for ever.
First Matt, now Freddy and Clare. I had to stand there, so small in comparison to the rest of the world, and experience my life unravel. Whilst my father was looking at me. He didn’t know that, while he waited at the door, he was watching his son dying. I couldn’t handle this, I wished I could be an innocent little boy again where my mum could save me from everything. I thought of Clare and why she would do this to me. Freddy had had sex with her and they weren’t even in love. So that was the end of it.
Because my father was standing in front of me I couldn’t say anything to Freddy. I couldn’t tell him that she had only fucked him because she didn’t respect him, that the reason I had never slept with her was because we loved each other, and she doesn’t sleep with people who she loves.
I hate the way I let people get to me like this. I can’t stand it because I want to be cool and aloof. I had almost made it to that point where I didn’t care about anything and now here I was feeling my face growing red and my eyes stinging. I dried them with the sleeves of my T-shirt and followed my father downstairs, hanging up the phone without saying a word.
Berryman gave me this fake-sympathetic smile that almost made me throw up.
‘Richard,’ he said with an affected softness. I wanted to ask him why he didn’t just throw himself off some balcony somewhere. He probably went on holiday to somewhere crass like the Costa del Sol every summer, so he could do it there. ‘We’ll do this here if you want.’
I sighed.
‘Whatever.’
We sat at the kitchen table, the adults drinking coffee, me drinking nothing. I couldn’t calm down. Terrible images of Freddy and Clare having disaffected sexual intercourse kept burning into my head, all fleshy and fish-cold.
‘I think this has gone far enough,’ said Berryman. He twitched his moustache and took out a notebook, breathing heavily through his nose like the air had to get past a tumour to get out. ‘Don’t you think?’ He smiled at me.
‘We’re not even halfway,’ I said calmly.
‘Two of your friends are dead, Richard. Look what you’re doing to your parents. Don’t you care about them?’
‘Of course I care about them, I love them,’ I answered. That even shocked me. The words had just come out involuntarily. I felt a sudden release of energy in the room, a shifting of feelings, a loosening. I opened my mouth a little and drew in some air and focused on a fleck in the kitchen table, unsure as to what had just happened. ‘But it’s not that simple, is it?’ I said.
‘It can be.’
‘You want simple? Who do you think is behind all this?’
He sat up straight.
‘Tell me.’
I was so angry I just had to tell on him. He deserved it after what he had done to me. I didn’t care about solidarity any more.
‘You know who’s behind it. Freddy wrote the Charter. You know that.’ And there it was. I had betrayed Freddy, I had betrayed the Suicide Club, I had betrayed me. It was over.
‘We’ve spoken to Freddy. Several times.’
Which was weird because Freddy had never said anything.
‘What did he say?’
‘He said that you wrote it. He told us yesterday.’
We sat there for a moment with slab-of-stone faces. Underneath I was like a hurricane. Would Freddy really have said that? I didn’t think so because he had taken the blame for Bertie’s murder. He had always been honest, he was incapable of not being honest. As he had just proved on the phone.
‘Really?’ I choked. The detective had tried this trick before but this time he was telling the truth. I just knew.
Detective Berryman nodded solemnly.
‘My son didn’t write that . . . thing,’ my mother seethed from the kettle.
Berryman and I stayed silent.
‘Rich?’ she said.
‘Freddy’s had a lot of problems,’ said Berryman.
I glanced at him. He
was addressing my mother. Freddy didn’t have problems.
‘His mother died in the summer. His father sent him to Atlantic High because he travels a lot with work. The poor lad blah, blah, blah, blah . . .’
I feel still, inside my head like this. In here nobody can hurt me because it’s my head and in here I am safe. No matter what, no matter where I go, no matter what they take from me, they can never get inside my head. Inside my head is where I keep everything that matters. Nobody can take my dreams away because they are inside my head. That is why I love it here, because they might take everything away from me that I hold dear in the outside world, but they will never take what’s inside my head. And so if I live in here, they can never get me, because in here I am safe. And so that is where I will hide, in here, inside my head, with my dreams.
I started to get a cracking sensation in my skull, like giant boulders being dislodged in an earthquake. I could feel bile fermenting in my gut as something apocalyptic came over the horizon. His mother was dead.
What that meant was mind-blowing. It was all fake. The whole Suicide Club mentality was nothing but a lie that had cost Craig and Jenny their lives. I didn’t bury the truth this time.
Freddy had never meant what he said at all. He wasn’t a dramatist like me and the others, he was a nihilist. He didn’t love life, he hated it. The whole point of the Suicide Club was that there was no motivation behind it, that was what he had said, that human behaviour is magical and can’t be explained. It was about being in love with life. We weren’t abused or mentally ill (apart from Craig), or social outcasts. All it was was a perfect idea, crystalline. But it wasn’t, was it? Freddy did have motivation. All along he had lied to us. We just didn’t know it.
All of the things that we had fought against, he was. We railed against pent-up aggression, teenage angst, buried fury and he was all of those things. He was a Trojan Horse. I put my head in my hands.
‘What did you just say about his mother?’
‘She died, Richard. Why do you think he did it?’ He looked at my mother. ‘There’s always a reason,’ he said, all snide and content.
No! There’s not always a reason – that’s what I wanted to believe. Reality is what we make of it, not what is thrust upon us. I couldn’t stomach the idea that Freddy had motivation because that wasn’t the way I wanted the world to work. I wanted it to be magical, inexplicable – not cause and effect, atoms and genes. I wanted grass and poems and cigarettes and sun, not offices and concrete and family saloons.
The walls of my universe weren’t crashing down, they were down. The colourful bricks that I had painted were in ruins at my feet revealing, for miles and miles, a cityscape of grey and smog, asthmatic visions of asbestos structures.
A huge tear dropped out of my eye and I felt it running down my cheek. In it were all of my hopes, all of my world, all of my energy, all of me. It was the end because the Suicide Club was not what I thought it was. Even the drama of hearing of Freddy’s mother’s death made me feel sick because it was like a twist at the end of a movie and I hate things like that because they’re so cheap, and here I am writing in a twist of my very own. But it’s not a twist, is it? It’s more like a conclusion.
I only cried that one tear. I lifted my head and looked at Detective Berryman, my heart split wide open, my soul lying on the floor in tatters.
‘What do you want me to tell you?’
43
THAT WAS IT. This might sound melodramatic, but I really could see no point in carrying on. Whichever way I looked was a dead end. I had had a cause, a belief that had driven the very centre of me. Having something like that is so powerful that if it ever leaves you you cannot recover. It’s like when little children want to be astronauts. I believe that the first day that child realizes that he’s not going to make it is the day he dies. That’s when he joins the masses on the road to the Middle.
Freddy had built this idea in my head and I had happily absorbed it entirely, we all had, and now it was in tatters. We had fallen to pieces. When Jenny killed herself she had done it alone, not with us; Matt had surrendered and turned coat; Freddy and Clare had betrayed me worst of all. If one person could have saved me, it would have been Clare. I could have lived out my life in ecstasy if we had bought a cottage in the country and started an apple farm and I wouldn’t have needed anyone but her. But that would never happen now.
As I sat at my desk that night, trying to make sense of what was happening and why it was happening, I kept coming back to the same conclusion: the Suicide Club had imploded because Freddy was a fraud. He had taken everything from me, taken my trust and my heart and squashed it up in his motivation. He had done all of this because his mother had died, and for no other reason. The strange thing was that at the time I was so furious that I didn’t feel sorry for him. I didn’t think, Jeez, his mother died. That is the normal reaction, and it wasn’t in me.
So which way was I headed now? I had no idea. I had nothing left. Every bridge was burned. I simply did not know what to do, or what was going to happen.
In front of me at my desk was a sheet of paper and without realizing it I had drawn this picture:
I think it’s a picture of me getting sucked into a vortex with Clare trying to pull me out but I’m not entirely sure.
I started feeling tired, too tired to think rationally. Staring at the picture I found myself imagining what it would be like to get sucked into an oblivion like that. I must have fallen asleep because it was suddenly real and there I am, holding on to her hands for my life. Whenever I look behind me I see a swirling mist, gases like argon, xenon, all that inert stuff. Clare is trying to pull me out but my body is being stretched like my bones are elastic. I scream crazily but the scream gets sucked backwards into the vortex so all Clare hears is nothing. I can feel the nothingness pulling at my legs, a vast presence that I can’t see.
And then, in a moment of pure release, I let go of Clare’s hands. Ahead of me, in the point of space where the vortex had opened to bridge the two dimensions, I see the swirling mist close up as the hole between universes is sewn together by an invisible needle and thread. I am lost.
I am falling through space and I look down into the direction I am falling. It’s familiar. I’m falling through the clouds again, heading towards the truth. I had been here when I was sitting on that pew at Craig’s funeral and again when lying in bed on the night that Jenny died. I can feel that this time I am going to make it through to whatever it is that lies beyond that last cloud. Through and through I go and then I see that final veil between me and the answer. The cloud tries to sink away from me but I’m catching. I get closer and closer, those pinpricks of light popping up all around me. The wind howls through my hair and tears at my face. I am arriving. Closer, closer, closer. The last cloud stretches away north, south, east, west as far as I can imagine. The atoms that make up my body start to come apart, electron orbits growing ever wider. It doesn’t hurt. I look at my body and I am almost transparent, like every alternate atom has slipped through a crack in the dimensions. I look down and suddenly lift my head up as I shoot through the final curtain.
All of my senses explode in a furious chain reaction and then, as fast as light, I crash through the other side of the cloud with a sonic boom and look down on the great secret, that elusive truth that always moves away when you’re just about to unfurl the ends of your fingers and touch it. It takes my breath away. Stretched out all the way to the edges of infinity before my eyes is nothing but inky, empty darkness.
44
I GASPED AWAKE, sweating and clammy. I was actually out of breath. Somehow in the night I had made it across to my bed, where I lay, my chest heaving up and down. I was in that place between sleep and waking where you don’t really know if a dream’s real or not, you know? I brushed my hair off my forehead, my palm coming away damp. Could that really be the answer? Nothing. No meaning. Was there really nothing to save any of us?
I kind of started having what’s called
in psychiatry a panic attack. How was I going to get through the rest of my life if there was no point to it? The enormity and blackness of this question, coupled with everything else, loomed over me like a night sky would loom if it were sentient. It was so huge I couldn’t handle it. I found myself hyperventilating, needing air, lungs not big enough. I thought I was dying. Searing waves of heat washed out of me like an earthquake at its epicentre. My chest suddenly tightened, wires being pulled taut about my ribs. I had never felt anything like this before. White stars started to materialize in front of me and I felt sick. My whole body went limp. I tried to call my mum but I couldn’t get any sound out. I was in a state of pure, undiluted dread; all sickle-cell and hyperglycaemic – no substance, all saccharin. Dusty air was in my throat and I couldn’t swallow it because it wouldn’t go down. I was in dread of there being no point in anything ever again.
I had to do something to stop this so I did the only thing I could think of which was to throw myself bodily off my bed and on to the floor, landing with a massive thunk.
I lay there for a second, cool and better. Down here the air wasn’t so bad. Then I cracked up at how ridiculous I must have looked falling out of my bed like a spastic. I laughed and laughed and laughed like it was the end of the world and it was then, in my fit of hysterics, that I came under attack.
Those little electrical bytes of information, the little blue tadpoles lying in wait, the ones that were holding the true meaning in Matt’s letter, the real reason why he had left me, had come to life. I could feel them swimming around the outside of my brain, their tales squirming slowly, mesmerizing. They came all at once, burrowing into my consciousness until they were inside my essence where their fragile bodies warped and folded outwards, their skin cracking open, exposing the monster that hid inside – desperate memories of an old friend.
Walking to school in the rain with hoods pulled over our heads; hanging around the park in the summer when the sky was like it was on fire; sitting on a wall eating Chinese food from cartons; nervously sat in a circle in a field with pretty girls; him laughing at me acting like an idiot, me laughing at him acting like an idiot.