The Suicide Club (35 page)

There was a pause as Detective Berryman folded his arms. ‘You think you're big because you say something like that? Do you know the sort of people who act like this towards me? Like they don't care? Criminals.' He breathed loudly through his nose and stared at me. ‘Criminals are always the smart-arses.'

I could feel him glaring at me, trying to intimidate me, and so I put on my doe eyes, which are excellent, and looked at him as if he had beaten me. I sighed sadly.

‘I'm telling you this only because I want to do the right thing.'

‘Just tell me.'

I breathed out.

‘It was Craig. After he tried to kill himself we all tried to help him.'

His eyes gave nothing away. I couldn't tell if he believed me. I said it because I didn't want to get Freddy in trouble. This thing had caused enough misery for enough people already. I didn't want to add more to the list. The way I saw it, I had to protect my friends. They were all I had left in the whole world now.

‘We spent loads of time with him, trying to cheer him up and stuff like that. He seemed to be getting better as well. And then he turned up with that thing.' I stopped.

‘And?'

I shrugged.

‘We signed it. We were only messing around. You know, trying to be nice to him.'

He shifted and the kitchen chair creaked.

‘So Craig wrote it?'

I nodded. All of my efforts were going into not giving myself away. For Freddy's sake.

‘You do realize that if you're lying to me you've slurred the name of a dead kid.'

‘I'm not lying,' I said. He sat there and gave me the eye. ‘You won't tell anyone . . . will you?'

He did something with his eyebrows.

‘I'm sorry?'

‘You won't say anything about Craig.' I was acting my head off, pretending to be distraught, having betrayed Craig's secret.

‘We'll pick this up again,' he said. He slammed his notebook shut. ‘I just want you to know that it's not my job to be Mr Nice Guy. We have counsellors you can speak to for that. Two kids are dead – that's what I care about.' He got up from the table and leaned in over me. ‘If you think,' he spat, ‘that we're not going to take this seriously just because you're kids, then you can think again.' I could smell the mint and coffee on his breath. It was embarrassing. ‘If I find out that you have had anything to do with this . . .'

‘Hey,' my dad said suddenly. He was grabbing the detective's arm. The detective looked at my father's hand and stood up straight. My father let go. ‘I think it's time you left, Detective, but I have to tell you that the way in which you just behaved was completely inappropriate.'

They stared at each other.

‘It's not my job to be . . .'

‘I don't care about your job,' my father snapped. ‘My son is clearly mixed up in something . . . awful . . . and you treat him like this?' He was shaking. My actions were making him shake.

Detective Berryman, to his credit, said, ‘I'm sorry, Mr Harper.' And then he looked at me. ‘And I'm sorry, Richard.
But in my line of work I see some terrible things. I just don't want this getting out of hand.' He had redeemed himself slightly; I have to say that because it would be unfair of me not to.

‘Thank you, Detective,' my father said quietly.

My mother was leaning against the kitchen counter, like she couldn't stand of her own accord. I guess it was quite terrible, seeing the adults like this; so lost and confused, so helpless, their lives so out of control.

I sat in my chair; there was nothing I could do about it. The wheels were already in motion. Inside, bizarrely, I was laughing.

THE POLICE TOOK
my laptop and went through all my stuff. I stood right up in the corner of my room, out of the way, and watched as Detective Berryman and two uniformed officers who had been outside in the car during my interview rifled through my drawers and looked under my bed for I don't know what. They weren't very good at looking because they found neither my Charter, the note from Craig, nor the film from Jenny's camera. It was a farce.

Later that night my father called me downstairs for a chat.

‘I don't know what you're playing at,' he said, ‘but your mother's terrified that you're going to kill yourself.'

It was really weird, the way he just came out and said it so straight. It kind of shocked me. I didn't answer and we went into the conservatory. Next to the chair that my mother was sat in was a stack of books and something told me that I might have misjudged her. Maybe it was OK to like reading – it wasn't as if she had lived her life inside a cocoon or anything – so maybe there was room for reading
and
life. She looked so small, sitting in her chair.

‘Rich, I'm sorry.' She said it so suddenly it almost knocked me flat because she had never been so wounded and open in front of me. It took me by surprise.

It's a bit of a cliché but you always see your parents as these
infallible superbeings; even when they fly off the handle at something, they're still
better
than you. When my mum said ‘I'm sorry' to me, that's when I saw that she wasn't this superwoman at all. She was just a person – skin and bones. A piece of life's magic slipped out of me when this painful truth hit me. I felt so sorry for me to have to suffer this sort of stuff so soon after another one of my friends had just died. The world can be so coldly scientific when it wants to be, you know?

‘I'm sorry,' I said. ‘But I can't speak to you any more.' I sat down in a chair. ‘You'll have to talk to me through my assistant from now on.'

My parents looked at each other, half blankly, half horrifiedly.

‘Peter will deal with all of your enquiries.' I looked at them, my monster completely in control now.

‘What are you talking about, Rich?' my father said nicely, like he was scared to say anything bad to me. His hair was all scraggly.

‘Peter, my new imaginary friend. He's sat right next to me,' I said, waving at thin air to my right.

‘This isn't funny, son,' said Dad.

I held my hand up to silence him and eased my head to my right as if Peter was talking to me.

‘What's that, Peter? They don't think it's funny? Think what's not funny?' I said, and looked at them.

What they saw was a son they had brought up from birth and who was now dancing perilously close to the edge of sanity. They must have been terrified.

‘What did I just say to you?' my father suddenly shouted. ‘And now you come in here with this shit? What the hell has happened to you?' he roared.

‘I said,' I seethed through gritted teeth, ‘to talk to my assistant.'

That set my mother off crying and I shook my head at how pitiful it all was.

‘Why are you crying?' I said jarringly.

She couldn't answer because she was ashamed of herself. She suddenly got to her feet and bolted for the door. But it was too late. Chunks of vomit spewed out of her and smattered all over the carpet. My father tried to help by grabbing her round the waist and taking her out through the door that led to the back garden. These were my
parents
. She threw up again, this time into her potted rose bush. Because her son was treacherous.

I wanted to feel sorry for her because she was my mother and I was supposed to love her but, on the other hand, she was throwing up on a plant. I got to my feet and went over to the door, trying to think of something funny to say that would make everything OK. I didn't want to apologize because I hadn't done anything wrong.

So I went to the door and said, ‘Looks like you've completely embarrassed yourself, doesn't it?' And I said it with a bit too much nettle.

I remember thinking at the time that my behaviour was way too much, that I was being unbelievably cruel to my parents, yet I couldn't stop. Maybe it was Jenny, maybe it was Craig, maybe it was because I was having a breakdown. Whatever it was, I just didn't care any more. As far as I was concerned, the worse things got, the better.

Her reaction was crazy. She lumbered to her feet like she had arthritis and then quickly lashed out at me. There was sick all over her chin, tears coming out of her eyes and snot running out of her nose on to her lip. It was monstrous.

‘You're evil!' she screamed. I'd never seen her act like this before, not even when I went off the tracks. Even when she and my father used to have secret arguments before they split up. This was a whole new level.

My dad stopped her reaching me but her fingers still clawed at my face.

‘I don't know where you came from! I don't know what I've done!' She leaned over so that she could get enough air out of her lungs and through her throat. Her mouth was wide open, like it might rip apart at the edges. Her neck was red, veins popping out purple and bruised. ‘What's happened to you?' The pitch and volume of her shrieking actually hurt my ears physically. Then she started crying in my father's arms, sick going all over his sweater.

‘Jesus,' I said.

‘I hope you do kill yourself. So I don't have to
look at you any more!!'

I stormed towards the door, barely able to hold in my tears when she said that. My mood had flipped 180 degrees just like that. I suddenly recalled being eight years old and going home at lunchtime from primary school. My mother had made me poached egg on toast and as I ate my lunch she sat and asked me what I had done in school, whilst holding Toby to her chest. The sun shone brightly through the window and on to her face. It had been such a close experience, just the three of us in our kitchen. I found it hard to think that our family could have come to this moment of insanity because of me.

I always thought that I could do anything and she'd always stay on my side but now it suddenly occurred to me that I might be wrong. Oh God, I was thinking, was I about to lose my mother as well?

‘Rich, wait,' she cried. ‘I didn't mean it.'

I stopped.

‘Promise me you won't do it,' she wailed. It was really horrendous, seeing my mother implode so utterly. ‘Promise me you won't kill yourself,' she cried.

I turned round and smiled evilly, oblivion scratching at my brain. ‘I promise nothing.'

I lay on my bed and looked at the ceiling, trying to decide if Jenny's death just hadn't had time to sink in, or if I really didn't care that much. I was in one of those restless moods where you can't concentrate on anything and nothing seems particularly important. More out of a sense of duty than anything else I tried to think of the times I had spent with Jenny. There had been Halloween night so long ago when we had played tag in the graveyard – that had been pretty great.

Then there was that one time when I had seen her in town and she had been taking pictures of all the people for Freddy using long shutter-speeds. That was also a happy memory of her, although I did feel a pang of jealousy that Freddy had that spiralled notebook of her photos to remind him of her whilst I had nothing.

Then there had been that one time when she had told me about her little town in America. It sounded like the neighbourhoods in films like
ET
, you know? American suburbia. As a girl she and her friends would cycle around the valleys there, which were full of vineyards. Once she had even seen a puma – how cool is that?!? I remembered that when she had told me about it her eyes kept going wide with excitement, then normal again, then wide again.

I tried to think of other memories. I remembered the times before I knew Jenny and she didn't know me, before she started going out with Matt, when she first arrived from America. We were anonymous to one another and I remembered how she used to take long, deliberate steps to get to wherever it was she was going.

One final memory came to me. It was only a small thing, so I don't know why it was in my head. One day I had been in the yard with Jenny during lunch on one of those sunny winter days. She asked me out of nowhere about Clare's birthmark on the back of her neck. She had caught a glimpse
of it whilst they had been changing for PE. She said that it made her feel really sorry for Clare because she would never be able to get her hair cut short. And I had told Jenny never to mention it to Clare because it would upset her.

I was suddenly exhausted. I was just drifting off to sleep when I got that image in my head again, the image I had weirdly got at Craig's funeral – the image of me falling through the clouds at night. I was dive-bombing straight down like an arrow returning to earth. Once again I knew that when I passed through the last cloud I would see some sort of eternal truth – like the meaning of life or something.

As I thundered through them, the clouds swept away, clearing a path for me. Then, suddenly, there was that final layer again, just a veil between me and the answer. I headed for it at a billion miles an hour but I didn't gain any distance. Pinpricks of light burned in the cloud once again but I couldn't reach it. I desperately wanted to stay awake to see what was beyond that last cloud, but I was no longer conscious. I had passed a critical barrier and there was no turning back. I fell asleep.

THE NEXT DAY
at school all hell broke loose. There were about twenty news vans and probably a hundred photographers. Smelly, greasy journalists dressed in black were milling around clutching Dictaphones and notepads, living the cynical dream.

News had spread that a terrible tragedy had struck this sleepy little town in the heart of Middle England – a schoolkid suicide pact was unravelling. I could see one news reporter, a woman, with a microphone in her hand. She was filming a report and had her head tilted to one side to emphasize just how tragic it all was.

I drifted past them all like I was
just another kid
. They had no idea that it was I who was at the centre of this horrendous maelstrom. As I glided past I felt sorry for how pathetic they all were.