The Suicide Club (17 page)

‘Do you hate me?' I said to Clare.

‘Rich, why do you say things like that? Why are you so sure you're evil?'

I frowned at her. ‘What?'

‘He pointed a gun at you. He's a twat.'

I smiled. ‘You're right,' I sighed.

‘We all know it. Jenny doesn't hate you either. We know Craig was wrong but, you know, we have to look after him.'

She was right. We did have to look after Craig. If we didn't then who would?

Clare left me and I finished my drink. My head started spinning. I looked into my empty cup, at the droplets of brown Coke running down the white inside. The drink was so strong. I placed the cup carefully down on a table near by and headed shakily outside for some fresh air.

The air was cool and refreshing, the clouds low and threatening rain. The wind was up and it felt like the whole atmosphere was writhing with life, like it was desperate to, I don't know,
do
something. Like it was restless. Just like me. It was probably because I was drunk, but I felt I had come to a point where something had to change. I either had to let myself go and embrace the person I really was, or decide once and for all that I was going to be a good person.

I was sitting on a crate, looking down at my Converse trainers, when the universe made the decision for me.

‘Richard?' said a voice.

There he was, standing before me, the wind blowing his hair wildly and romantically, a scarf tied tight around his neck.

‘Freddy? You're back?'

He looked sad, looked like how I felt.

‘I guess so. I got back this afternoon. How have things been since . . . you know?'

I wanted to tell him that everything was OK, but I didn't have the heart to lie to him.

‘Not so great. I mean, pretty much everyone's cut me off, apart from Matthew and Jenny and Clare.' I shrugged.

‘What about Craig? How's he?'

I didn't want to go into the whole gun thing.

‘He's OK. The usual.'

Freddy nodded and we looked at one another. For a long time.

‘Rich, about Bertie,' he said at last.

I thrust my hands into my pockets and looked at the floor.

‘I don't know why I did it. It wasn't an accident. I killed him deliberately.'

The wind blasted across the tarmacked ground, picking up some of the plastic cups, rattling them against the wall.

‘Why?'

‘Because . . . I don't know.' He was on the verge of tears. ‘All my life I've just—' He stopped himself.

There was a brief pause, during which we shared our whole worlds. I felt in him what he felt in me, this sense of . . . doom.

‘It's OK, Freddy.'

He had turned his head to one side, looking out across the sparse base towards a patch of grass on which sat an old Second World War fighter jet. A powerful floodlight under its fuselage lit up the plane brightly so it stood out in stark relief against the flat terrain, a circle of bright-green grass around its base.

‘It's not OK.'

‘Yes it is. It's in the past.'

He looked at me. ‘You don't understand.'

I adjusted myself on my crate to make room for him to sit down. We both sat there for a while in silence.

‘I do understand,' I said at last. ‘I've done some bad things
as well. After my parents split up I . . .' I composed myself. I had never told anybody this story before. Saying it out loud just reminded me of what sort of a person I was. When it was in my head I could lock it away. I felt Freddy's body warmth next to me. ‘We're not different,' I said. ‘We're the same.'

‘What did you do?'

An image of Mrs Kenna, my history teacher, suddenly flashed in my head. She was alone now that her husband and son had died so she was almost certainly asleep by now. Tucked up in her old bed with old sheets, sleeping her life away.

I pulled my knees up together and rested my forehead on them. I wanted to tell him. He was feeling sick because of what he had done in the exact same way that I had, all those months ago. I knew what he was going through. I knew the cramps in his stomach. I knew the searing flushes in his face. I knew the dark, terrible flashes in his brain that made his heart pound. It was just something bad that he had done. A moment of insanity. All he wanted was for someone to say that it was in the past and that one day his soul would be wiped clean. That was all he wanted, for another human to tell him it would be OK. That was all. So I told him all about the old man and the metal pipe.

‘
YOU KNOW THE
corridor at the far end of the mess hall?' he said.

‘Yeah.'

‘There's a room on the right. Can you get the others and meet me in there?'

‘What for?'

He shrugged and stood up from the crate. ‘I want it to be just us.'

This was the first time we had all been together since Freddy had jumped out of the headmaster's window. A lot had happened since then. The world had attacked us but we were still standing. Having Freddy back only served to tighten the rope we had slung around ourselves.

Seeing him again gave everything a sense of completion; everything was back to the way it should be. We had been knocked out of orbit but now we were back. He had lit four candles that were now stood in holders. Ordinarily I would have said that such a setting was overdramatic, even for us, but on that night it didn't feel so. There was a kind of increased gravity in the room; a weight. Shadows cut across our faces as we sat down in the chairs we had found.

There was a big window on the far wall and the first drops of rain were clicking against it. The wind rattled its frame.
Freddy had brought with him a bottle of Smirnoff Blue, which he shared with all of us, handing it around for us to swig from.

Sat in a circle, feeling slightly drunk, I noticed that Matthew and Jenny's little fingers were touching sweetly. Now, that image of young love burns like acid across the rivulets of my brain.

‘I'm so sorry about Bertie,' Freddy said. The sound of music coming from the mess hall could be heard only as a low, dense beat coming through the walls. ‘I didn't want to ruin everything. My first night here, the night we went to the lake, it was . . . you know. And now it's spoilt.'

‘Stop,' said Matthew.

Freddy looked up, his concentration knocked.

‘All I hear about is that stupid bird. We killed it. It was an accident. The end. It's over.'

‘Nothing's spoilt, Freddy,' Jenny said gently.

Freddy looked around the room, at each of us.

‘I want us to do something. Together. I've been thinking a lot about what happened at Halloween. And, you know, how the headmaster reacted. Actually' – he paused – ‘I've been thinking about stuff like this for longer than just a few weeks.' His voice was flat.

We listened intently.

‘You know how people get treated if they do something that people don't agree with? I don't mean the bird thing, I mean other things as well. Like whenever I do something good and other kids just put me down because they're jealous.' I guessed he was talking about his old school. Although I did know what he meant. Whenever I did something amazing like one of my stories for English, I was almost ashamed of it because of the way the kids looked at me. ‘I hate all that crap,' he said. He started gesturing towards the mess hall, to the party. ‘And I hate all that stuff too.'

I was shocked to hear Freddy say this. It was the first time he had been openly angry about something.

‘All those people in there patting each other on the back because none of them have amounted to anything and they're glad that they've all stuck together.' He stopped. ‘Have you ever noticed how there's something not quite right with the world – like it's not quite what it should be?'

I knew. I knew exactly.

‘I could never tell what it was. But I think I've worked it out. And you know what? It's people's attitudes towards people like us. The fact is, we're talented. But whenever we do something good, people always congratulate us and say how great we are but then they always have to wreck it by turning serious and saying something like, “But you must keep your feet on the ground.” Why?' His voice was still as calm as a lake. The words were powerful, but the delivery was soft. ‘Why should I keep my feet on the ground when I'm trying to get to the stars? All my life I've had it and I know it sounds bitter, but I believe it's because they're jealous. They don't want us to be all we can be because
we're
living
their
dreams. I hate it.'

I recoiled at his suggestion because it was such a cliché. But do you know something about clichés? They only get there because they're true. Right?

‘They're angry with us because we killed Bertie, Freddy,' I said calmly.

‘I know that. This has nothing to do with Bertie. If they're upset about him being dead, they should try going inside my brain for a while. I fucking killed him – I can hardly even eat any more.'

Clare had the bottle of vodka now. I watched her as she drank. As she moved her neck back the shadows and light shifted on her face and my heart palpitated. I looked back to Freddy. This night was quickly turning into one of the
weirdest of my life. First I had almost been shot, now this.

He took the vodka from Clare and brought it to his mouth. When he moved the bottle away, his lips glistened in the orange light.

‘The world is run
by
the mediocre
for
the mediocre.' He went into the inside pocket of his blazer and took out a packet of cigarettes. He threw one to each of us and lit his own. I don't really like smoking but it felt right to take one.

Matthew gave his back.

‘Thanks, but I don't feel like one,' he said. My respect for him soared and I felt jealous. Matthew was turning into a man. He had his girlfriend and he had a healthy lifestyle. He would be Great and leave me behind. I knew it but I was prepared to let him go because, deep down, I loved him. Not in a gay way, you understand.

‘Think about it,' said Freddy, his voice still not quickening at all. ‘None of the world's geniuses fit in, do they?'

‘But we're not geniuses,' I said, my head whirling from the vodka.

Freddy looked at me.

‘What I mean is we're in all the best classes of one of the best schools, and we're near the top of those classes. Even Matty.'

I smiled. Matthew gave an arrogant purse of the lips. It was true what Freddy was saying. We were the most intelligent kids in the school, though I don't really like to mention it.

‘And what are we? Everyone hates us. They probably always have, but they haven't shown it because we've always been nice to them.' He took a drag from his cigarette. I suddenly noticed how long his fingers were. ‘But now that we've killed the bird they think that they've been proved right about us. They think we're actually
evil
. Us. We're the good guys. We can't really get on with other people. We can talk to them, but not as equals. I know how terrible this
sounds, but it is a fact that we're
better
than the rest of them. We really are. Not because we're more intelligent, or funnier, or better-looking. That doesn't matter. It's because we're
nicer
than them. All they do is try to drag us down. We don't go around being horrible to people, getting our kicks at the expense of others. We love, absolutely love, life. They just exist, we live. And they don't like that. These people don't go to graveyards to play tag, you know?'

‘What are you saying, Freddy?' Matthew asked. He seemed to be caught in Freddy's words.

As, I hate to admit, was I. Ever since Bertie things had changed. I'm not sure if I
actually
believed what Freddy was saying or if I just
wanted
to believe. I felt that if I believed it meant that I was part of something special, that my life had some sort of meaning.

‘I'm saying that we don't stand a chance in life. The whole world is totally cynical and we still have the innocence of children because we're . . . incorruptible. The whole world is mediocre, and we're exceptional. We want to excel and make the world a better place. The rest, just because they can't, want to hold us back and rubbish our ideals as naive and childish. We could change the world, but
they
won't let us. They won't even listen to us. Every
normal
person resents us. We've got no chance. Whatever we try to do in life, we'll be held back by other people's mediocrity, cynicism, stupidity and envy.'

There was a resounding silence after these words. I don't think I had ever heard anyone speak like this before, so flowingly, like the exact kernel of what was in their brain was being perfectly articulated through words. Whenever I try to say what I mean, it always comes out with only half of the meaning because I can never express what I'm trying to say. But that wasn't the case for Freddy. He knew exactly how to say what he meant.

His words hit home hard. I did feel like others were holding me back, telling me that my ideas and opinions didn't matter, that I was no good. Like the time my short story about the artist who cut his eyes out was taken away from me by the headmaster. I was choked by what Freddy had said.

And more than that, he looked insanely cool in the candlelight. He delved back into his inside pocket and took from it six cream-coloured envelopes. They had been sealed with red wax and each one bore the name of one of us. They were handed around and, as I took mine, I noticed the texture and quality of it. It was sublime. A new wave of curiosity got up in me. I knew by this time, as did everybody else, that this moment of our lives was seminal. A line was being crossed. For me, I knew that these friends would last for ever. I didn't care about my other friends who had ditched me because this group of people, with candlelight on their faces, were
special
.