Too Good for this World (2 page)

‘No,’ he said.
‘Do you?’

‘Other people
think we are.’

Jonny laughed.
‘Other people can say what they want. I know my own mind. Don’t
you?’

Imogen smiled.
‘I guess,’ she said, ‘but not the way you know yours.’

‘Why do people
think we’re too young?’

Imogen waggled
her toes in the cool breeze. It was getting a bit chilly to still
be outside in shorts. She began to wish she hadn’t brought this
up.

‘I don’t
know,’ she said, ‘but… people say you should have fun while you’re
young, don’t they? That you should… you know… have lots of
different experiences…’

‘You mean fuck
lots of different people?’ Jonny asked.

Imogen’s
cheeks turned pink. ‘I’m not saying I want to-’

‘People are
obsessed with things being new,’ Jonny said, ‘if you only care
about being with someone new all the time you’re never going to be
happy, because new things don’t stay new. I’m not interested in
having sex with anyone else now I’ve found you.’

Imogen nodded.
She felt awful for starting this conversation. She felt she’d let
Jonny down, and it wasn’t that she was even genuinely worried,
people’s attitudes just confused her, that was all.

Jonny gave her
a one-armed hug. He didn’t seem to be angry. ‘Surely you don’t
think we’ve already done everything together that we’re going to
do?’ he said, giving her a squeeze, ‘believe me, we’ve barely even
started yet.’

Imogen
snuggled against his shoulder. She wasn’t sure if he was talking
exclusively about sex now or about their lives in general, but it
didn’t really matter. Either way, she knew he was right, and she
couldn’t wait for the rest of their lives to begin.

Imogen slammed
her bedroom door, but her mum followed her upstairs anyway and even
though Imogen told her to go away she came inside.

‘Gennie,’ she
said gently, ‘I’m sorry if I upset you.’

Imogen sat
down on her bed, and her mum sat beside her.

‘The longer
you leave things, the harder it will get,’ her mum said.

‘I don’t
care.’

Her mum gave
her a reproachful look. ‘I know Jonny’s death is still very raw to
you,’ she said matter-of-factly, ‘but there’s only so long you can
hide away.’

Imogen drew
her knees up to her chest and rested her chin on them. She wanted
to be left alone. That’s all she ever wanted. ‘You knew Jonny,’ she
said, ‘you knew what he was like. How could I ever find somebody
else like him? How could you even suggest that I try?’

‘Why don’t I
show you the website I found?’ her mum asked, ‘you don’t need to do
anything today, just have a look. I’m sure it would be good for
you. I was thinking just before the woman came into the shop and
told me about how she met her husband that I wish I could be sent a
sign of how I could help you-’

‘I let Jonny
down,’ Imogen said, ignoring her mum. ‘He turned to that game
because he couldn’t get what he needed from me. I was… I was a
terrible wife.’

He tried to
talk to her about the game one Sunday lunchtime in mid June. Some
friends had invited them over for dinner, but Jonny had been
playing Affrayed in the morning and he was agitated before they
left.

‘Gennie,’ he
said urgently, while she was trying to decide what to wear, ‘I have
to talk to you.’

She carried on
looking through the wardrobe. ‘Go on, then,’ she said.

‘It’s about
Affrayed.’

She slammed
the wardrobe door closed. ‘I don’t want to hear it.’

‘You have to
listen,’ he said, ‘and you have to believe me. It’s not just a
game. I’m sorry I spend so long on it, but you should play it too.
It… it’s important.’

Imogen turned
to him. ‘It’s a game,’ she said. ‘Maybe it’s fun, maybe it’s
interesting. It is
not
important. Not more important than
your real life.’

‘Gennie,’ he
said, ‘you know I wouldn’t be saying this if I didn’t believe it. I
know I sound like I’ve lost my mind, but you’ve seen me play
without touching the keys-’

‘I haven’t,’
she said. It was true that sometimes she’d turned and seen him with
his hands in his lap, but as soon as she looked at him- when she
really
looked at him to try to ascertain whether his claims
were true- he’d snap out of the game and come back to reality
again. She had never actually witnessed him controlling Affrayed
with his mind as he claimed.

‘Please,’ he
said, ‘Gennie…’ he sounded so desperate, and when she replied a
little sob crept into her voice. ‘Jonny, I don’t understand,’ she
said, ‘it’s a game. You have to let it go-’

‘But it links
me to the other players,’ he said, ‘I know things about them.
Things I couldn’t possibly know. And there’s something else as
well, it links me to something else, to this… being. I can sense
it-’ her face must have shown what she thought because his
desperation increased. ‘I’m not crazy,’ he said, ‘when I’m in
Affrayed it links us together and I feel… I feel part of something.
I’ve always said there has to be a better way of living and I think
Affrayed-’

‘It’s a game,’
Imogen said, ‘a game where gangs of people roam around killing each
other for resources. I’ve heard about it. They talk about it on the
news. How can you say it’s a better way of living? I’ve heard the
sorts of things people can do to each other in that game and it
sounds… it sounds disgusting to me. The people who made it should
be ashamed.’

‘Gennie, no,’
he said, ‘it’s not like that. I don’t mean the violence is good, I
mean the… the unity, the togetherness…’

Imogen turned
away from him and rubbed tears from her eyes with the back of her
hand.

The next
morning when she was about to leave for work, Imogen almost tripped
over a newspaper that had been placed outside her bedroom door. For
a moment Imogen thought her mum had been going through the lonely
hearts columns and she felt angry. She’d argued with her mum most
of the previous evening, coming up with every reason under the sun
why she couldn’t possibly contemplate starting a relationship with
anyone else while her mum countered with all the reasons why she
could and should. Imogen was tempted to throw the newspaper away
without looking at it, when she noticed that what had been ringed
in red biro was not anything to do with dating. It was a job
advert- one of the local schools was looking for a new English
teacher.

Imogen sagged
against the wall in the landing and stared at the advert. It made
her feel all sorts of conflicted emotions- fear, sadness,
excitement, hope. She worked now in the same café where she had had
a Saturday job as a teenager, just like she now lived at home with
her mum as she had done as a teenager, as though becoming a widow
at twenty-eight had made her regress back to childhood. She threw
the newspaper into her bedroom and closed the door. She’d look at
it later. Or maybe she wouldn’t.

‘We should go
for it,’ Jonny said, ‘we should do it now. There’s no reason to
wait any longer.’ He was talking about a book he’d just read. A
book about some guy who’d gone off to live in the woods, and was
apparently having a great time.

‘We’ve got
jobs,’ Imogen said. She was cooking spaghetti Bolognese in the
little kitchen in their flat, while Jonny was “helping”, slicing
vegetables distractedly while he talked with his eyes intense and
wild, his hands moving rapidly. ‘Everything I’ve read,’ he said,
‘it makes sense. People aren’t designed to live in the world the
way it is. We’re designed to survive- to cope with immediate
dangers and needs. You’re always saying you’re stressed out. It’s
because the world makes you like that- all these every day worries
dragging you down. We have to pare everything back… pare everything
back so that all that matters is staying alive and getting from one
day to the next, and our feelings can be raw and true and
immediate-’

‘Jonny, I
don’t know if I could live in the wild,’ Imogen said. She was
tired, and hungry, and she just wanted to eat. ‘I don’t know how to
live like that, not really. I know we’ve sort of tried it for short
periods, on holidays and things, but that’s not the same as doing
it all the time. And there isn’t really wilderness in England. Not
like you’re talking about. Do you mean for us to move to a
different country, away from all our family and friends?’ She
thought for a while and something else occurred to her. ‘What about
when we have children-’ she started.

‘It’ll be
better for children.’

‘But… what
about schools?’

‘You’re a
teacher,’ Jonny said, ‘you could teach them.’

Imogen shook
her head. ‘I’m an English teacher,’ she said, ‘what if our children
wanted to go to university to do a different subject? I can’t teach
them to a level where they’d be accepted on their course,
especially not if they want to do maths or science or something.
And children need social skills as well. They can’t learn all that
from us, they need to learn it from being with other children and
being involved with the world.’

Jonny sliced
celery with frenzied abandon. ‘On the news the other day they were
talking about what percentage of teenagers had thought about
committing suicide, and it was… it was… well, I can’t remember the
numbers. But it was too high, Imogen! It was far too high. Children
are under way too much pressure nowadays. The world isn’t right for
children. In fact… I’d rather… I’d rather not have them at all than
bring them into a fucked up world like this.’

Imogen stopped
cooking and hugged him. ‘Jonny,’ she said, ‘don’t get upset. If we
decide to go and live somewhere else we don’t want it to be because
we’re running away. We want it to be because we believe we’ll be
happy.’

The day in the
café passed in a haze. When Imogen stumbled outside after her shift
was over she struggled to remember what had happened while she had
been there. She took out her phone, and to her surprise it was open
on the website of the school where the teaching job was being
advertised. She made her way over to a bench and sat staring at the
screen. It didn’t make any sense. She hadn’t looked up the school
on her phone, and why would anyone else have done? As quickly as
she asked that question she realised the answer. It must have been
her mum.

Back at home
Imogen turned on her laptop. She thought she might have a closer
look at the school and the job, but before she could type in a
search the school’s website opened on the screen in front of her.
Her skin prickled. She looked around her, behind her. She was alone
in the house. Her mum was still at work and wouldn’t be home for
another hour or so yet. Imogen looked at the page- which was
boasting the school’s facilities, with a picture of a shiny new
block that had recently been built to house several
state-of-the-art classrooms. Her skin prickled again. How had it
opened before she’d even told it to? She was about to close the
website again when a message flashed up on the screen, so briefly
she wasn’t sure if she’d really seen it. A black screen with white
words across it, a short sentence, all in capitals.
YOU WERE A
GREAT TEACHER.

Jonny had
always admired her being a teacher. One evening after he’d had a
tough day at work he came home and said to her, ‘maybe I should do
what you do.’

‘Really?’ she
asked. He’d never mentioned it before.

‘Yeah,’ he
said, ‘you’re an inspiration. What you do in one day is better than
anything I’ve done my entire life.’

Imogen
laughed. ‘Jonny, you can’t be serious!’ she said, ‘you help to run
campaigns for a homeless charity. I just get kids to read things
they don’t want to read and then make them write about it.’

He put his
arms around her. ‘You shouldn’t do yourself down,’ he said,
‘working with kids is really important. More important than what
I’m doing.’

‘What do you
mean? How could what you do not be important?’

He frowned,
and she could sense he was agitated that she wasn’t understanding
his meaning more quickly. ‘What I do doesn’t change anything,’ he
said, ‘never as much as I want. And I’m just working in one tiny
area of all the problems there are in the world, I mean… there’s
just so much
shit
that goes on. Every day, just so much
shit.
’

By the end of
the sentence his voice was raised and Imogen felt a little scared.
‘Jonny,’ she said, ‘it’s alright.’ She tried to touch him but he
moved out of the way. ‘It’s not alright,’ he said, ‘I feel like… I
feel like there is just this tidal wave of crap going on all the
time, everywhere, and it’s like everyone is inside this glass house
and I can see them and hear them and I’m banging on the window
trying to get them to listen to me before they’re swallowed up by
it, but they won’t. They just won’t.’

Imogen could
hardly sleep that night for remembering the message she thought
she’d seen.
You were a great teacher.
It had the ring of
Jonny about it. She knew she couldn’t really have seen it. She was
still shaken by the argument she’d had with her mum the day before
about the dating website, and then the job opportunity had come up
and thrown her even more. That was all it was. With everything that
had been going on she could hardly blame herself for imagining
things.

She finally
began to drift off around two a.m. As her thoughts became less and
less lucid, she thought she could hear a voice; a quiet, gentle
voice that lulled her into sleep. It was saying,
Istillloveyougenniestillloveyougenniestillloveyougennie.

Affrayed had
been made, originally made, in any case, by a company called DAWN
Industries. Imogen knew this because she’d read and heard all about
it after the suicide pact that was responsible for Jonny’s death.
Apparently the game had been “hijacked”, and its creators, Nick
Winterbourne and Dan Avery had been “victims” in the whole thing
too. What nobody seemed to know was how or why the game had been
taken over, and just as mysterious, why every copy of it had now
disappeared as though it had never existed at all. On the first
anniversary of Jonny’s suicide, she emailed DAWN Industries, her
mood dark and dangerous.