by Louise Beech
‘Katrina,’ he said into my hair.
‘I don’t know,’ I whispered. ‘It’s so soon after…’
‘I understand. I was with you when you remembered. I’d do anything to make it easier. Maybe it’s best I let you be. I can’t do the kissing and then not kissing.’ He pulled away, unable to look me in the eye. ‘I’ve no right to expect anything from you. I’ve no right to complain about you kissing me and pushing me away. But I’m afraid I might get hurt again. Selfish, I know.’
I wanted to say that we were both scared, but I didn’t interrupt.
‘I can’t help but imagine a relationship with you. I know we’ve never even gone out or anything, but some of our shifts have sort of felt like a date. Like when we’ve talked about nothing and everything. When we’ve analysed theories and talked about TV shows. Small talk. Firstand second-date talk, I suppose. I love kissing you and I loved when you had your epiphany at the flat on Sunday, saying how afraid you are but that you do like me.’ He paused and fiddled with the drawer handle; I knew he wasn’t done, so I still didn’t interrupt. I let him have his Wednesday-afternoon epiphany as I’d had my Sunday one.
‘I’m afraid too,’ he said. ‘I’m not saying that to pressure you or compete. I think about what it was like when my wife left and I didn’t get out of bed for a week and I didn’t wash or eat, and my sister said I was pathetic, that life should go on. It was the same when my father died. I couldn’t function. I felt abandoned. I don’t cope well with that. So, I feel foolish that I might let a woman I’ve slept with once and never even taken out for dinner do that again.’
I couldn’t think of a single word to say; he had used them all.
‘Did you write that before you were born?’ I asked, referring to Jangly Jane’s theory. Then I worried I’d been too flippant after his emotional admission. I tried to correct myself. ‘Because it was really honest.’
‘You were honest on Sunday,’ he said.
‘I wonder about a future too – a relationship. But do we have to write it now? Can’t we just see? I’m not going anywhere. I’ll just be at the flat unless my house gets finished early.’
A phone rang. It was Jane’s turn. It stopped after three rings.
‘Christopher…’ I had no idea what I was going to say, and then, before I could even work it out, Jane opened the door with an intrusive crash of jewellery.
‘That guy with the funny voice wants you,’ she said to me, glaring. ‘You two should just get a room or something.’
‘Fuck you, Jane,’ I said.
‘You can’t talk to me like that.’ She leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, bangles squashed together like a car pile-up. ‘And you can’t keep a caller waiting.’
‘I should get that,’ I said to Christopher, and he said, ‘I know.’
The phone receiver waited for me, black and needy. I picked it up and switched gears. I was Katrina.
‘Hello Sid, how are you?’ I said.
‘Hello Katrina.’ His voice was clumsier than I remembered and yet somehow more understandable; his tongue sounded heavy but his tone was light. ‘I worried you’d have the day off.’
‘I’m here.’
I picked up the pen. This one worked. Today I would write Sid’s life in blue with my right hand, my white, non-itchy hand. I watched Jane come back into the lounge area, eyeing me through blue lashes like millions of tiny pen tips. Christopher didn’t follow.
Someone had tacked a plastic baby Jesus by his foot to the prompt board; he dangled perilously above the ‘How do you feel?’ question. I wrote the date at the top of a fresh page; it smudged, staining the end of my thumb.
‘Sid isn’t my name,’ he said.
I’d always known this. I couldn’t blame him for giving a false name. I considered asking what his real name was but didn’t – not because it was the wrong question for a crisis line but because it didn’t matter. Our name is not who we are. I recalled that he’d once said names often evaded him, that he would call people ‘thingy’.
‘Katrina isn’t my name, either,’ I admitted.
This went against all I’d been taught in training, but I liked that we had in common our pen names. I looked out into the lounge area: Christopher had returned and had resumed reading his book. He looked up and then at me, his eyes kind of sad and his mouth curled slightly.
Of course he was sad.
‘I want to be honest today,’ said Sid, slowly.
I wrote ‘honest’.
‘Why do you feel like being honest today?’ I asked.
Finally, I understood how significant the right question was. Perhaps in the past I’d been too aggressive, too impatient, when trying to tap into my own memory. Only when I was ready to open the door in my dream had the handle turned of its own accord, quietly, effortlessly, permitting me to see the whole room. The wrong questions led me to a locked door, to a false room, so now I fully understood their importance on the phones. Some answers need more than a gentle tone or non-judgmental silence. They require the right words, maybe the right person.
‘I got my test results back,’ he said.
I recorded the sentence in blue and read it twice. But I didn’t want to ask the inevitable question.
‘I have lung cancer, Katrina,’ he said.
Some answers we never want.
I thought of Aunty Mary. ‘They can do stuff for cancer,’ I said. ‘I know people who get better. They can remove it. They can cure you. You can be home after—’
‘Not from lung cancer. Not this far along. The doctor said I’d be lucky if I have a month. Showed me a scan-picture thing. God, what a mess. He said I’ve probably had it a while, that I should have gone sooner about my cough. But I hate doctors and hospitals. I’m weak anyway. What a mess, eh? A stroke, the floods, and now this. But none of it matters.’
‘Of course it matters,’ I said, tears pricking my eyelashes.
‘No, it doesn’t. You mustn’t feel sad for me, really you mustn’t. Getting the results helped me. I’m no spring chicken and I’m lonely. I have no one. Who’ll miss me?’ He paused. ‘So I’ve made a decision.’
‘Well, that’s good,’ I enthused.
‘Maybe.’
‘Tell me about your decision,’ I said, gently.
Christopher left the lounge again and the door slammed on its fire safety hinges. The steam-trains calendar above Norman’s desk fell down. Jane looked up, at the door and then me. In the other booth, the phone rang and she went to it, her expression stony. The star on top of her cubicle paused between flashes.
‘I know I can tell you, Katrina. I know you good souls on these lines deal with this all the time.’ I counted his words; the pause in between each was half a second, his syllables flat.
‘You can tell me anything,’ I said.
‘I have decided that I’m going to die today,’ he said.
‘I don’t understand.’ The pen was warm in my hand, the paper waiting for words.
‘I will die today. This afternoon. Here, now.’
‘You can’t,’ I said.
‘Katrina, it’s too late. I took them all.’
‘Took all what?’
‘Paracetamol, sleeping pills, ibuprofen, some pills from a bottle with no label. Everything I have.’
The slow voice, the clear voice, the heaviness, the lightness, the difference – I knew now. I shook my head and looked out into the lounge, but it was empty. I thought of Christopher’s father, of Christopher saying he’d felt abandoned when he killed himself. I had been angry for a time after my dad went. It was how I felt now. Abandoned and angry. But I had no right. Sid was not my father. He was not my anyone.
‘No.’ I put my hand over my mouth. ‘No, you can’t.’
‘Katrina, this isn’t how I want you to be. Aren’t you supposed to respect our choices? I’m going to die, I want to. I don’t want to be here anymore. And I need you to talk to me until I go. You’ve been here for me these few weeks and you have to finish th
is with me.’
‘I can’t.’
Tears fell onto the pad and wet the word ‘honest’. I looked out into the lounge area; Christopher was back but no longer reading. He held his head in his hands. Though I tried I couldn’t catch his eye. In the next cubicle Jane asked the caller whether they wanted to explore the reasons further.
‘You must,’ mumbled Sid. ‘If you don’t I’ll have to die alone in this armchair with only a view of an empty courtyard and the back of the supermarket.’
My father had died in his chair. His heart gave out in the chair by the study window, as mine was threatening to now in this fake leather thing.
‘Let me ring an ambulance,’ I suggested. ‘Let me talk to you until they come. You might have another month – two or three, even. Isn’t it worth having that?’
‘I’m not going to die in some hospital bed, coughing, and shitting my innards out, nurses full of pity and the doctors indifferent. This is my choice. You have to accept it.’
He sounded calm and ready. Who was I to question him? Didn’t he deserve acceptance? Didn’t he deserve to choose his death, to have another human witness it, to die in his own way? My training and my head said the answer to all these question was ‘yes’. But my heart couldn’t get on board so easily.
‘Tell me your address,’ I persisted. ‘I won’t call an ambulance; I’ll just have it, in case.’
‘There is something.’ His voice was a deathly whisper.
‘Something?’
‘Something I need to tell you.’
‘Tell me your address,’ I whispered.
‘There’s something I’ve carried for all these years,’ he said. ‘Something I can’t carry anymore.’ He coughed for a while. ‘It eats away at me. I’ve bottled it up, but I have to share it with someone before I go. Do you know how old I am? Sixty-eight. And I look eighty. Let me tell you…’
If I listened to his confession, I was agreeing to his death. The flashing star reflected bloody in Jane’s sleek, red hair. Again, Christopher was not in the room. I was not in it either.
‘You have to hear me, Katrina,’ whispered Sid. ‘Yesterday, last Tuesday, last month is vague, but this memory never leaves me. I take it to sleep and wake up with it. I swallow it with my morning coffee and my late-night brandy. You have to hear me.’
‘Share it with me.’
A lump of familiarity stuck in my throat like indigestible food.
‘I think you’ll judge me,’ he said, his voice slow and heavy now.
‘You know I’m not here to judge,’ I said.
‘I know you’re not supposed to, but you will. I do. I’ve done a terrible thing. What you won’t understand is that though I regret the hurt I caused, I also don’t. I can’t. Because I loved her. But my love hurt her.’
‘We all make mistakes,’ I said softly. ‘We hurt people we love all the time.’
‘I think if I tell you, Katrina, you’ll hang up and leave me to die here without ever sharing it with anyone.’ Sid’s pain hung on the tapering of the last word. ‘But I have to take that chance.’
I said I wouldn’t hang up.
I thought about the hundreds of calls I’d taken, the nine active suicides I’d been witness to and how this might be my tenth. I thought about going against all I was supposed to do and trying to obtain his address so I could get Christopher to call an ambulance. I thought about how I’d been abused by my own uncle, how I was still here in this leatherette chair, still able to go on despite it, perhaps even because of it, and I was angry that Sid would not do the same. There was nothing he could tell me that I would judge. But I didn’t want him to die, because then I would have failed as a crisis-line volunteer. Failed the one person I’d become attached to. My first caller here. And yet I had to accept how he had written his end.
‘Are you still there?’ Sid sounded as though he might fall asleep.
I nodded, said, ‘Yes, I’m here,’ and knew I might have little time.
Pills could take minutes or hours to dissolve; it depended on type and quantity, on resistance and mixture, what they had been swallowed with, how empty or full the stomach was, or how large or small the victim. I glanced at the Flood Crisis banner and the stickman with no head. Whoever had drawn that must have just finished a call with someone they were attached to and lost.
‘Don’t write it down,’ he slurred. ‘I know you probably write notes but I don’t want anyone but you to know.’
I lay down the pen. Baby Jesus fell off the wall and onto my pad with a loud clump. Picking him up, I studied his cracked face. I dropped him in the wire basket under the desk.
‘I’m not writing,’ I said. ‘Just give me your home address so I can send someone. Someone here will call an ambulance while you tell me. You have options; you don’t have to do it this way. Tell me what you want to say, but don’t die.’
‘Don’t ask me that, Katrina. I’m tired now … very tired. Let me tell you … I must…’
‘But I don’t want you to die!’ I cried.
Jane had ended her call and poked her head in my booth. ‘You can’t tell a caller that,’ she hissed. ‘If they’ve chosen to die, you have to accept it.’
I covered the mouthpiece. ‘Go fuck yourself, Jane,’ I said.
‘You can’t talk to a co-volunteer that way. You’re not in a fit state to take this call. Give me the phone, now.’ She reached for it, purple nails glinting.
‘If you touch me, I’ll bite you,’ I hissed.
It was a threat I’d often used as a child. I remembered it well and now I knew why. If a person invaded my space, or tried to pull me from where I’d hidden, I’d threaten to bite them.
‘Katrina, I have to tell you this,’ murmured Sid.
‘I’m calling Norman,’ snapped Jane, marching back into the lounge.
‘It was a long time ago,’ sighed Sid. ‘It was snowing. White flakes. Lots of them.’
I looked at the darkening sky outside; it threatened to snow but for now it remained contained.
‘It was snowing when I left her. I’ve never loved anyone since I loved her. My precious girl.’
I realised he was going to tell me about his daughter, the one he’d once mentioned. This dying man, a father, who surely should be with that daughter, sharing his final moments with her, not with a faceless crisis-line volunteer.
‘Where is she?’ I asked him. ‘Can we call her?’
‘No, she won’t want me.’ The gap between the words grew longer than the words themselves.
Christopher appeared at the booth, his expression everything I needed to see in a face. He crouched at my feet. ‘Are you OK?’ he whispered. ‘Jane said it’s an active suicide.’
‘It’s Sid.’ I held Sid in one hand and reached out to Christopher’s face with the other. I placed the handset against my body and whispered back: ‘He took paracetamol and sleeping pills and shit knows what else. I don’t want him to die. I know I’m wrong to.’
‘You’re not wrong,’ said Christopher.
I put the handset to my ear again. Sid was coughing. I told him I was still here; I was waiting.
‘But here,’ insisted Christopher, ‘we have to let them make their own choices.’
‘What if this was your father all that time ago?’ I said, covering the handset again. ‘Wouldn’t you want me to try and stop him?’
‘It’s not my father, Katrina.’
‘He’s someone’s father,’ I said, and listened to Sid once more.
His coughing had subsided. ‘My daughter won’t want me near her,’ he mumbled in my ear, words light as snow.
‘Tell me why not, Sid,’ I urged him.
Christopher remained at my feet.
‘I did a terrible thing – did I tell you that? I’m tired. I can hardly remember now. Maybe I don’t want to go. Maybe I just want to sleep. I’m scared … of going to … hell … going to hell … I’m a coward … I just want to go to sleep for a long time and wake up and I’m young again … and I
’m with her … and I won’t hurt her … I’ll just love her.’
‘Give me your address, Sid,’ I begged.
Christopher watched me but said nothing.
‘I don’t know … can … you … forgive me?’ Sid was floundering now; I could hear him flapping at the water.
‘We’re not here to forgive.’ I repeated the crisis-line mantra.
‘Forgive me,’ he begged. ‘I need … someone … to know … that I just loved her … and I’m sorry…’
‘Give me your address.’
‘Forgive me.’
‘Your address.’
‘Forgive…’
I shook my head. Held my head. Tried to keep my head. ‘I forgive you, Sid.’
He gave me his address, and I wrote it on the pad, the only record of his confession. ‘Ring them,’ I told Christopher. ‘He gave it to us so we can.’
He took the address and looked at it. I knew he was thinking of his own father.
I watched him pick up the other phone and heard him speak to the emergency services. Jane marched up to him and demanded what was going on and he showed her the address.
‘She coerced him,’ she spat. ‘Norman’s on his way.’
‘I’m sleepy,’ said Sid.
‘Stay with me,’ I said. ‘Someone will come. Tell me your memory. I won’t judge you.’
‘She was just a child…’
‘Your daughter?’ My heart counted the seconds. I imagined they went faster than real seconds, faster than a wailing ambulance.
‘Not really … not really…’
‘But you loved her.’
‘My little…’
‘Your little what, Sid?’
The star flashed again. It lit the adjacent booth and the top of Christopher’s head like an intermittent halo. He sat on the chair with the phone in there off its hook to show that he was only with me, not the world.
‘That’s not my name.’ Sid’s breathing rattled.