The Suicide Club (11 page)

‘Get a hold of him, Rich,' I heard Freddy call again.

The other bird, Burlington, had his head up against the
mesh and was squawking in panic. I was laughing like mad at the whole scenario. The flapping of Bertie's wings was creating a wind that washed through my face like a fresh ocean storm.

Freddy grabbed Bertie from behind and took him out of my hands. He calmed down immediately when Freddy held him. The wind from his wings was gone. We had captured the bird! I opened my mouth in silent glee, really chuffed with our little prank. Inside the cage, Burlington fell silent. I pictured the headmaster's face when our first joke death threat arrived on his desk. But then Freddy turned his body away from the others, who were watching from behind the fence about forty feet away. His body was also turning away from me and I just about caught the grimace that flashed across his face. But he didn't turn far enough away that I couldn't see what he did next. Which was to take the bird's neck in his hands and snap it in two.

WE WERE IN
an aeroplane and the doors had suddenly blown off. The pilot came on the PA screaming,' Everybody brace! We're going down!' All the air was being sucked out. I closed my eyes. Freddy had killed the bird.

Not flapping any more, Bertie was limp in his hands. Dead.

I took a step backwards and opened my mouth. Not because I was being dramatic, but because I didn't know what else to do. I couldn't believe what I had just seen. I was sort of totally horrified by what was happening. That poor bird.

But then Freddy realized that I had seen what he had done. His face went blank and his whole body became incredibly still. There was a deep, deep silence.

‘I think he's dead,' he whispered. ‘I think I killed him.'

‘Yeah,' I said timidly. I didn't want to give away that I knew he had done it deliberately. I was scared of what he might do to me.

‘You don't think I did it on purpose?' He looked like he was about to burst into tears.

‘What?' I said.

He was biting his lip now and the blood had drained from his face.

‘Hey.' Clare was calling us, sort of whispering, sort of shouting. ‘What's happening?'

‘Nothing,' I called. ‘It's fine.'

‘What are we going to do?' said Freddy. He looked really upset now, like he was about to flip out.

I didn't know what to do. We had just killed one of the school falcons. No,
Freddy
had just killed the falcon. But I had helped him. I had tried to grab the bird when it was getting away. If
I
hadn't got in the way it would have escaped and it would still be alive. I was equally responsible. I swallowed hard.

‘We'll put him back,' I said a little too coolly for my liking. My mind wasn't tumbling any more. I was calm and it was awful. I didn't want to react to such horror with such placidity.

‘Put him back?' He was whispering fast. ‘How can you be so cool about this? The poor fucker's dead.'

Yeah, I thought, you killed it.

‘Well, what do you suggest,
Frederick
?'

He nodded quickly.

‘OK, let's get it back in the cage.'

We turned away from the others so they couldn't see.

‘Hey, what's happening?' Clare scowled.

Turning my head to face them I saw Craig looking blankly at us. He didn't care what was going on. But, and there was no mistaking it, he was looking at the dead bird.

I am suddenly at the school gates, eleven years old, my first day at school. My new uniform feels heavy, my blazer a little too big for me. A beautiful day. Nerves tingling in my belly. A white flash.

I'm in the paddock, leather glove on my hand. Mr Thatcher, the man who looks after the falcons, his hand on my shoulder. The smell of grass. The sudden explosion of wings beating. A silhouette of a figure in flight against the sun. My arm suddenly heavy, I'm readjusting my weight to stop from falling over. Serenity. The falcon on my arm; still, proud. A white flash.

I stared at Bertie's corpse. Freddy placed it heavy-handedly back in the cage and closed the door. Burlington hopped
over to Bertie and prodded him with his beak but Bertie's body didn't move.

Freddy looked me in the eye.

‘I'm sorry,' he said.

My calmness was leaving me again and a different feeling impacted my chest hard. It was heavy and evil. It was guilt. I felt a little better because I was reacting in a more human way but it didn't help much.

‘Let's get away from here,' I said.

We weren't trying to be clever or dramatic or ironic any more. All that was stripped away and we were left exposed, our emotions naked.

We sprinted across the paddock and vaulted the fence.

‘Run,' Freddy said to the others.

I didn't even look at them; I was going home. My lungs were on fire as I ran, eating up the grass and the roads with my legs as they rolled beneath me, the light of a new day coming over the edge of the curved earth, catching up with me all the way, screaming at me that I was a bad person, evil. The guilt was consuming me like a worm in an apple but by the time I was halfway home it was taken over by yet another feeling: fear. Fear that, by the time I got to my front door, had ballooned into terror.

Terror of what would happen to me if I got caught, of course, but more than that, terror of the act in which I had been involved – terror at what I had done and who I was. Oh God, the monster was coming.

The vision of the murder replayed in my head. The way Freddy had done it was so cold. It was like he wasn't even human any more, just a fleshy machine going through the motions. He was looking straight at the bird as he wrung its neck, no expression on his face whatsoever. The expression you have when you do your shoelaces up? That's what Freddy looked like when he killed the bird. In fact, it was
even weirder than that, it was like another face's skin had been pulled taut over his own and you simply didn't know what was happening underneath it. That was the very first time I saw that nothing expression on his face and it stays with me even now.

How could he have done that? I had felt like I knew him, but I can't have. I was being torn up inside because I thought I had met someone who could show me the direction in which I had to go in my life. He had murdered a helpless animal. That's kind of what psychopaths do.

But then, after he had done it, it looked as if he was going to cry. The enormity of the situation, his blurred emotions, my blurred emotions were too much for me to comprehend. I had done some bad things in my life, my Bad Thing, but I would never have done something like that. Perhaps he wasn't so much like me after all. Perhaps I was wrong.

I got my keys from my pocket and ran inside my house. The grandfather clock in our hallway said it was just gone seven. I snuck up the stairs with as much stealth as I could manage and got to my bedroom. Shutting the door quietly I slid the lock across and lay on my bed, staring up at the ceiling just like Craig Bartlett-Taylor had been doing when I called for him. I think I started to know how he felt – what it was like to be trapped with no way out. My chest heaved up and down like a wave out at sea.

I didn't feel like throwing up and I didn't feel like crying – the two feelings I would have said somebody would have if I was writing a book about somebody who wasn't
real
. In truth, now that I was home and lying on my bed, locked away from the world, all I felt was tired. I crawled over my bed, reached my CD player, put on Damien Rice, and clambered under my sheets, still fully clothed, the bottoms of my jeans still cold and wet from the grass over which I had run so fast.

I ONCE WROTE
a story for my English teacher as part of an assignment. My story was about a French artist called Pascal. He was a landscape painter, and he was very good. But he was never good enough to be great. His trouble was that he could never get the colour of the sky quite right. He fretted over this for years, but no matter how much he mixed his paints he could never get the right blue. So he asked his muse for advice. She thought for a moment and declared that the perfect hue was in his eyes. Pascal had the most beautiful blue eyes, and his muse said that, whenever she looked into them, they reminded her of the sky. So Pascal set to work trying to get a blue that would mirror his eyes. But still he failed. His life fell apart and he went mad. His muse left him and he became a recluse. In the end, nobody saw him for weeks. They broke into his studio and found him dead next to his easel. Mounted on the stand was the most beautiful landscape that anybody had ever seen. The sky was perfect – Pascal had done it. The irony was that in his mad state Pascal had cut out his eyes and painted them into the canvas and so had never actually seen his life's masterpiece.

My teacher loved the story and said that he would enter it in the next inter-schools competition that came up.

My friends asked me how Pascal could see what he was painting if he didn't have any eyes, which left me in the
unenviable position of having to tell them that they just didn't understand.

A few weeks later a competition came up and my English teacher entered the story, just as he said he would. He said it was bound to win. But then my parents split up and I started going off the rails. I did something very bad, the worst thing I've ever done, got caught, and do you know what happened? They withdrew my entry. I'll never know what would have happened if I'd won that competition. The headmaster said that I was going down the Wrong Track and that I needed to be stopped. I believe that that competition could have done me real good in my recuperation, but they took it away from me. They wanted me saved and the only thing that could have saved me was that which they took away. A story about irony. That's sort of ironical, isn't it?

I woke up at eleven. At first I thought it had all been a dream, I really did. It actually took me a while to realize that it was all too true. Those few moments when I was unsure as to what had happened were wonderful. They were the segments of time in which my mind told me I was innocent. But I wasn't, was I? I went to my en suite and washed my face. My head was going crazy.

I almost jumped out of my skin when my phone started buzzing in my pocket. It was Clare. I didn't want to speak to anybody, but I also really wanted to speak to her, which does make sense to me.

‘Hi,' I said.

‘You killed Bertie,' she said matter-of-factly.

‘Clare, please,' I began. Oh my God, my voice was breaking. ‘Can you . . .' I moved the phone away from my mouth so she wouldn't know that I had almost started crying. I got myself together. ‘Can you come over?' I managed.

There was silence on the line; I think she knew how upset I was.

‘I'll be over as soon as I can. Are you OK?'

I hung up because I needed to lie down and do something very weak. I started crying. I had spent so long trying to be a good boy and lying to myself that I was anything but a nasty little shit who thinks he's better than other people. My fake world that I had built was about to come crashing down around me. My reality was slipping. Soon I would be that horrible person that I knew I really was. I wanted some way to kill that part of me, the bad part, but I just didn't know how to do it.

I knew that I would never tell anybody that it was Freddy who had killed Bertie. No matter how desperate you get, you never leave a man down in the field. If anyone asked, I would say that I didn't know what happened and that it was an accident.

Clare would take about twenty minutes to get across to my house and I needed to get myself together. I had had nowhere near enough sleep and my chest felt tight. My eyes were red and I felt like one of those lost souls in a sci-fi film, the ones that Freddy talked about. I got in the shower, hoping it would make me feel better, but it didn't.

I could hear people moving around downstairs – the dreaded parents. But closer, there was a shuffling noise. Toby was in his room. I went over to his door and went in. What he was doing was so ridiculous it didn't even bear thinking about. He was dusting his bookshelves with a feather duster. On a normal day I would have taken the duster off him, thrown it out the window and told him to stop being so gay. But today I sat down on his tiny chair next to his tiny desk.

‘Hi, Rich,' he said amiably.

‘Toby, I want you to do me a favour.'

He placed a book back on its shelf.

‘What?' he said.

‘I want you to hit me over the head with a cricket bat.'

‘What?'

I suddenly changed my mind – it wouldn't have made any difference anyway. ‘Don't worry.' My mouth was dry. ‘You carry on with your, er, cleaning.'

‘What are you doing in here?'

For some reason his words really hurt me and I almost started crying again. ‘I just want to be in here with you. Now carry on cleaning.' I actually shouted the last sentence.

Toby stared at me like he was scared.

I got up from my chair, that bad uncontrollable part of me coming out. I didn't want to be horrible to him so why couldn't I stop myself ?

‘Just fuck off,' I huffed and slammed the door behind me.

When I got outside the door, Clare was stood at the opposite end of the landing, at the top of the stairs. She looked a mess but it felt so good just to see her. I felt exposed because I was only wearing a T-shirt and a pair of shorts.

‘Did you just tell old Tobe to . . .
fuck off
?' she said like it was amusing. She used to laugh her head off at Toby because he acted like such an old man.

I didn't share the joke. I found myself shaking.

‘Hey,' she said, suddenly putting her hand on my arm. ‘Are you OK?'

My mouth was filling with moisture and I could feel my face burning. I was going to start crying again. And in front of Clare as well. I couldn't let it happen.