Authors: Ada Uzoije
Norman signed the contract with Cillian Construction Co
.
with a warmth in his chest he had not felt in a long time. It was a good one too, a good advance for his product purchases and a sturdy payment contract for his own income. Things were looking up for him and his business. He put the pen down on the kitchen table and carefully placed the papers back into the A4 envelope it came in and his eye caught Jean outside in front of the window, her shadow shifting in the late afternoon sun as she watered the plants she grew next to the exterior wall to make the kitchen window look more homey. Norman loved that about his wife. No matter the circumstances, she always tried to make things better – better looking and more pleasant.
It had been some time since they really spoke and he went to the window, making a silly face from the other side and she laughed without a flinch. Behind her smile she hid her pleasant surprise at his cheer, but she wasted no time in playing along, lifting the hose up to the window and splashing the strong current of water against the hard surface of the window. The sudden thundering noise started Norman and he jumped back from reflex, laughing at his unfounded fright.
She came into the kitchen, dusting her hands on her shirt and checking the fridge for a beer.
“You’re in a good mood,” she smiled at Norman as she took two beers from the shelf and popped them open. The sun illuminated her hair and she looked almost as young as the day they met. Norman explained that he had closed a good deal today to provide a well-known construction company with all the plumbing for its new restoration project. Jean yelped and jumped forward, embracing her husband tightly and they sat down at the table, just talking about this and that, nothing in particular, but it felt good to be truly present in each other’s company. From the upper floor came a noise of grunge guitars and a less than capable singer’s squeals and both Jean and Norman kept quiet for a second. They looked up and shook their heads as they drank.
“You know,” said Jean after drinking her beer down half a bottle in one go, “If I could make a wish, it’d be for Doug to find out what real music sounds like.”
“Amen,” said Norman, raising his bottle in a toast.
In the late afternoon sun, young Douglas sat reading on his bed, a homework project in English literature by the eccentric and sultry Ms. Grace. Oh, the countless hours during sleep-overs he, Mick and Thompson had spent discussing every inch of her was impossible to measure. Ms. Grace was the epitome of teenage desires and she knew it, but her charisma outweighed her good looks by miles and it was her personality, more than anything, that held the attention of her students, even if they did not notice. Many parents disproved of her enticing teaching techniques, others found her unwavering will to enlighten the new generation with the beauty of classic poetry and prose to be most welcome, no matter what her methods.
Of course Doug and his friends didn’t care what her intentions were or the outcome of her assignments as long as they could eyeball her voluptuous ass as she paraded through the rows of desks from front to back and back to front in English class. She had them wrapped around her finger, luring them into the depths of literature by means of charm of the highest order. This week she had them reading
The Flight of Icarus
and the meanings behind the metaphor.
It was not just her body that had the boys swooning. Ms. Grace had the face of a lewd angel, her eyes narrowing like a cat’s when she told a story particularly well and her lips, oh God, those lips.
Doug sank into another involuntary daydream about those lips, full and dark pink against the marble of her skin. And when she spoke they would look like ocean waves ebbing and flowing over her perfect teeth. He had this special daydream about her mouth, where she’d keep him after school to discuss a test or something and she’d sway that ass over to him, hitching up her red pencil skirt just a tad to accommodate her straddling of him. Her chin would be slightly elevated above his sight line, thus leaving his eyes with only her lips to look at. She would say stuff, but he wouldn’t hear what it was. It didn’t matter as she laced her elongated fingers behind the base of his neck and gently pulled him closer.
Then she’d part those full, perfect lips over his and he would feel her breath on his face. Her vanilla-scented breath. And Doug would throw his head back and let her play in his mouth with the tip of her tongue…
He realised he was daydreaming about kissing his teacher again, a most pleasurable way to use his imagination. And it was not the first time. But he knew it could never be. The angel was engaged to some bulked-up mountain called Vince, a wrestler who wore his jeans too tight and had zits on his arms from all the ‘roids he had to take to look good. He recalled once having met Vince face to face while trying to charm his teacher and what a most unpleasant surprise that was.
It was just after school. He had been dared by his friends to collect a sample of Ms. Grace’s lipstick and it had to be anywhere on his body. He decided to give her a polystyrene cup of coffee, wipe the lipstick from it and smudge a generous amount on his shirt. He marched into her class announcing, “It’s Best Teacher Coffee Day and you just won, ma’am!”
Ms. Grace gave him an inviting smile as he entered the classroom and he brought her the cup with some measure of ritual and then placed himself on the front desk, waiting for his crush to partake of his rather shrewdly intended beverage. It would be quite simple. Her lipstick was the glossy kind, not difficult to remove from the surface of those sweet lips and he nodded in a chivalrous manner when she thanked him for it.
“Why Doug,” she purred, “how sweet of you.”
He felt his heart jump and said, “Sweets for the sweet, Ms. Grace,” thinking himself quite the suave gentleman. But she was far too smart for the boys in her class. A woman this smouldering had her fair share of such attempts and she could, by now, see those coming a mile away. Suddenly she held up the cup as if to toast and from the corner behind the door of her classroom, hulked a menacing figure with lamb chop sideburns and a very hairy chest that could stop a truck in its tracks.
“This is Vince,” she declared, and Doug’s stomach churned at the sight of the sauntering muscle mass that reached for the cup of coffee. “Vince, this is Doug, one of my favourite students,” she teased and looked deeply into the bewildered boy’s eyes with no small measure of satisfaction and guile.
“Hey there,” the deep voice of the monster in the tight jeans rang in Doug’s ears.
The boy didn’t know what to do. All his sex appeal went down the toilet and he could hear his cunning plan shatter like broken glass.
“Umm, hey,” he stuttered and watched in horror as the bulked boyfriend swallowed down the entire cup of coffee, crushed the cup in his hand and threw it effortlessly into the small paper bin on the far side of the classroom like a pro shooter.
Of course he wouldn’t miss, the enamoured boy thought with scorn. The striking looking man leaned over and gave Ms. Grace a deep, delectable kiss that lasted far too long according to Doug. Then the tall Adonis walked over to the cowering teenager and with his thumb, wiped his woman’s lipstick from his mouth.
His other massive hand extended to Doug’s throat and the boy could already feel the deadly constriction, pinching his eyes shut, but Vince simply fisted Doug’s collar in his hand. He wiped the lipstick onto his own shirt and tugged lightly at the boy’s collar to bring him closer, within earshot.
“Don’t be crushing on my fiancée, pal,” his raspy voice whispered in Doug’s face, “this shade of lipstick doesn’t come in ‘Loser’.”
Doug scoffed. In his opinion, Vince belonged in some X-Men comic as a mutant gone wrong, or a zoo. What could she want with that rodent? What on earth did she see in him? Doug couldn’t imagine those lips kissing that freak.
But those lips told him to study his English assignments with a hint of discipline and a splurge of sexuality. This had Douglas taking time out from “Game of Thrones” to study English, an astounding feat on the part of the luscious Ms. Grace. The tale was not dull, at least.
As Icarus struggled to rise above the city below, he flew too close to the sun and his waxen wings began to melt, leaving him, eventually, flapping only his arms and finally he plummeted from the sky into the sea and drowned. Doug fully embraced the poem and the story, imagining what it would be like to soar above the expectations of all who knew him, but he also considered the sun of his perceived abilities perhaps blinding him to his weaknesses and he suddenly nurtured darker possibilities of his wings being clipped by the heat of his positive outlook, leaving him to fall.
“What the hell?” he suddenly said out loud to himself in the midst of the loud mess of punk rock that oozed out of his computer speakers. What surprised him most was how such misery, such unkind doubts, could suddenly cloud his normal state of mind without warning. He was not thinking of anything in particular. He was just reading the story, so how on earth could its negative subtexts infiltrate his subconscious and steer it, once more, towards the falling, the failure and the death of it? Even in context, it appeared as thought something subliminal would use the most trivial matters to remind him of people killing themselves. He knew at once that this was a brand of demon he would not easily be rid of, no matter how he wandered in sunlight and happiness.
He shut the thick book his hot teacher had given him the second week of the new semester and stared into space as the blaring riffs of the unknown bootleg CD pounded his ears. Doug baffled his parents. He could study to a fault and score the highest marks in class while studying in the chaos of heavy metal or punk rock at its loudest. This was the only reason why his folks allowed him to murder the beautiful sounds of birds and wind chimes outside with his unholy taste in music, on occasion. It was as if the cacophony locked out the world and its distractions and truly enabled him to focus. Ludicrous, but true. Now was such a moment. His mind filled with the similes of Icarus, he realised something profound – the thought of suicide in general, its causes, its victims and its hold was not going to stop.
“Well I may as well study it, then,” he said with conviction, agreeing to let the stalking mind demons have their day. If they were going to plague his thoughts, he may as well get to know them and he put down the book to log into the Internet.
Where else could he find unlimited knowledge on a subject? Certainly not in books. On the World Wide Web, he could not only study the phenomenon, but actually interact with others like him. Of course! Why had he not thought of this before?
And this is where it all started. Day after day, he would lock himself in his room after school and seek out like-minded individuals. He’d rush his homework, finish his assignments with as little possible time being devoted to them, as long as they were acceptable for a pass rate. His parents got along a bit better now that Doug refrained from constantly mentioning the stupid man who killed himself on the bridge and they had a stronger income with the project Norman had been involved in. The house had become a bit lighter in atmosphere and things had returned to normal.
When Thompson called to borrow his Call of Duty game, Douglas told him that he had lost it when he went to visit his grandparents. When Thompson had old Mick call Doug, he was “too busy studying for the exams” to get together. Days became weeks and his friends faded into the background of his busy online life. Just like with the nightmares, he didn’t tell anybody about his new occupation. His mother noticed that he was spending a lot of time on the computer and when she enquired what he was doing, she would get the typical teenage generic response, “Nothing, Mom!” Jean wondered if he was watching pornography, but didn’t like to pry, so she just left him to it, hoping whatever it was, he’d grow tired of it long enough to beat her at a chess game again. Whatever it was, she thought, it would be a passing phase.
He found sites that explored the psychology of suicide, sites that gave data on its prevalence in different areas, demographics and age groups. He was amazed to find out on one of the research sites that suicide was the second most common cause of death among American teenagers, the first being vehicle accidents. He found several sites that tried to acquaint parents with the signs of impending suicide in their children and the behavioural deviations that accompanied the illness.
One of the most interesting sites was one called Suicide Witness, a type of social media site where people who had seen suicide could share their feelings about the events and their takes on it, scrutinizing it from all angles they needed to make sense of it. He was surprised to discover that there were as many different experiences as there were people. Some people commented that it was actually a positive experience in that it really made them feel good that they were happily alive; others said that it made them appreciate life more. Others were seriously traumatized and remained obsessed with what had happened, sometimes for months on end, suffering from night terrors, insomnia and even cultivating eating disorders to cope. The more unstable ones wanted to share the gory details while others avoided that entirely, finding it utterly distasteful. A lot of what he read proved that a staggering amount of people were furious with the person who had committed suicide, especially if they were friends or relatives. There didn’t seem to be much of a common thread – except, of course, that everyone on the site wanted to talk; that’s why they flocked here.