The Suicide Club (28 page)

There was that brewing, undefined craziness in his eyes. I thought he could lash out at me any second like a tentacle thrashing out of a sea monster.

‘I didn't say anything,' I said, searching for some inner strength.

‘You said you don't want to hang around with us any more.'

A new song came on the jukebox now. I didn't know it. It was alien. I was detached from the rest of the pub. All there was now was me and the Suicide Club and the wooden floor on which we stood.

‘I didn't say—' I didn't know why I was being so pathetic.

‘You said it,' said Freddy. ‘I just want to know why.' He took a step in, even closer.

I glanced at Clare, who I expected to have a smug grin on her face. But she didn't. She was almost crying. I knew her well enough to know that.

I looked Freddy in the eye.

‘I didn't say that, Freddy. I said that I didn't want to hang around with
you
any more.' And I pointed at his face so that he knew exactly what I was saying.

The surroundings suddenly re-emerged out of the ether and I was back. I took a step away from Freddy and looked at Clare. She broke the eye-line and looked at her shoes. I almost died when she did that, but instead I turned around and walked off into the crowd.

‘Hey,' I heard from behind me. Freddy's voice sounded angry. I stopped and swung back, expecting him to hit me. ‘You're not what I thought you were,' he shouted across the ten yards between us.

The jukebox died out and instantaneously there was a squeal of feedback from the PA speakers. I winced as the noise drilled into my skull.

Then I heard Johnny's voice.

‘Good evening,' he shouted into his mike.

I looked at the stage. The whole band were up there, lights singing out from behind them like heaven, cutting five heroic silhouettes out of space. The crowd cheered.

They were ready to go.

‘We're Atticus.'

And then the guitars raged into the room like the SAS storming a building. The drums were crisper, the bass louder, the guitar seething with divine angst.

I turned back to Freddy.

‘I thought you
meant
it, Rich.' I caught a strange look on his face as it flashed across his features. Sorrow. I shook my head, confused. Was I witnessing vulnerability? For a second I saw the Freddy who I had fallen in love with, the little lost schoolboy sent away by his parents.

I went to say something but my words caught. I didn't know what I wanted to say to him.

Suddenly, there was a commotion near the stage and feedback ripped out into the room again like a snaking electrical wire spewing blue energy in incandescent sparks. My head snapped around quickly. Something was happening. I didn't get a forewarning of doom, I just knew that something was happening. There was a sudden unity of screams from the crowd at the front of the stage. The drums were still banging and the one guitar was still thrashing. I craned my neck. Craig Bartlett-Taylor was on the stage. The spotlights showed everybody how puffed up his face was, his eye purple and black. Tears scored his cheeks like acid. Something metal glinted in his hand as he raised it to his head.

I had stopped breathing. There was another scream, a frantic, chaotic, atomic mass of distributed shock. Johnny moved in for Craig but he stepped to one side and looked out into the crowd. Whispers of smoke were in the air and time moved so fast that there was nothing that anybody
could do. Craig moved something underneath his thumb. A third scream crashed from the front of the stage to the back of the room like a tsunami and then, right in front of everybody, and in an act that sent into oblivion all of his pain and anger and sadness and indifference, Craig Bartlett-Taylor pulled the trigger and blew his brains out.

HIS BODY WENT
instantly and sickeningly limp. His face kind of crumpled on the side that he shot himself in and the bullet ripped out of the other side and took with it an explosion of blood and skull. I watched it all in vivid reality, unblinking. Absolutely nothing went through my head when it happened. For the first second, I just watched his body topple sideways.

I found myself pushing through the crowd, heading for the stage. Freddy was right behind me. Everybody else was too shocked to do anything. I got to the front, where lots of girls were crying. Johnny had turned away and was crouching on the stage, seemingly unable to comprehend what had just happened. I turned my head to the left-hand side of the stage where Craig's body was lying. I jumped up on to the low platform and tried to pick him up.

I can't say that the thought that he might still be alive went through my head because it didn't. I knew he was dead because his body had gone from being
something
to being
nothing
, like his essence had left him and the thing on the stage was just a slab of meat.

Smoke was coming out of a crisp hole in his head where the bullet had gone in. I thought there would have been a lot more blood but there wasn't because the bullet was so hot it had sealed up the wound with searing heat. The other side
of his head was a complete mess; a white mushy material that I guessed was his brain was poking out through the brilliant red of his blood.

Why I tried to hold him in my arms I have no idea. He was certainly dead. Freddy stood between me and Craig and the crowd so that nobody could look at his corpse. The way he was staring at him was crazy. He was just completely expressionless. I'd like to say that he gave himself away by letting an evil grin creep out from his mouth up his cheeks, but that didn't happen. He looked like he had looked when he'd killed Bertie: cold. But not cold in that he didn't care. More like he'd been hit over the head with an anvil that severed all the connections in his brain and made him a picture of confusion. I felt sorry for him. But then his face changed. Like it was suddenly full of dread. He was looking at something on Craig. On his knees, he leaned in and took something from Craig's pocket. I recognized what he had taken immediately. It was a folded sheet of yellow paper. Freddy looked at me and slipped the paper into his pocket. I felt like somebody had drawn a sharp blade across my chest with tremendous force, slashing my clothes, opening my flesh and scoring into the surface of my ribs. A yellow sheet of paper.

My mouth went dry and it was then that the doormen arrived on the stage. One of them told me and Freddy to move aside (he said it really kindly,' Watch out, lads') whilst the other one lifted Craig in his arms like a sleeping child, as light as a feather. That's when I suddenly lost feeling in my legs and stumbled backwards. Behind me was the drum kit from the band and I sat on the bass drum, my head in my hands.

In my head I heard the noise and screams die down. People were filing out of the pub, following the doormen, trying to get a look at the show. The show that
I
had orchestrated. I was feeling sick. I now knew that Craig's
death was because of me. Not just me, but because of me, Freddy, Jenny, Matthew, Clare, all of us. We had broken him in two like he was a twig. Christ, I thought, his poor fucking parents. I WCSed it and it was the worst one I had ever had because
it was going to come true
. At some time in the next hour, Craig's parents were going to be told that their son had killed himself; that he had put a gun to the side of his head and pulled the trigger. They no longer had a son because he was
dead
. He was fucking dead. I don't know how you use words to describe that feeling you get when someone dies. It can only ever last for a few seconds because it's so huge and complicated that if you think about it for longer than that your head will explode. It's that feeling that you just
get
– that sudden knowledge that death is final and irreversible and you'll never talk to that dead person again. And Craig's parents would get that feeling in waves over the coming months and years, probably for ever because he had done something Not Natural. Oh my God, how the hell were they going to go to bed tomorrow night? They'd have to climb those old stairs with horrible carpet knowing that they wouldn't be saying goodnight to their son because he was crazy and had killed himself. Oh my God, how do you even start to comprehend their grief ? I wished that they would have a car crash and die so that they wouldn't have to go through it. I really did. They were too old and good for all this. I just could not imagine it because it was so very, very sad.

And it was my fault. Our fault. It was a fact, as undeniable as the spinning atoms. I knew it, Freddy knew it. I'm not being guilt-ridden for no reason – my knowledge was evidence-based. Because Freddy had taken that sheet of yellow paper from Craig's corpse. He had taken the Suicide Club Charter, which was probably the last thing that Craig ever read. It was the last time his eyes absorbed the light
reflecting off a piece of writing that was decoded in his brain – the last message. A message that told him to kill himself. And he did. Jesus. We had killed him. Craig may have been unstable, and he may have tried to kill himself in the past, but we had told him that it was OK, that it was to be encouraged. I had gone over to his house, befriended him, dragged him into this utter mess. Without us, he would probably still be alive.

The bright-blue lights of an ambulance fractured my mind, here to take Craig away again, just as they had come for him at the very beginning of it all. Those lights had returned for him as if the dimensions had opened up to swallow his soul. Those blue lights. Now, whenever I see them flashing past me on the street, I wonder if they can carry substance in their beams, I wonder how many people's essences are trapped in between the photons.

The pub was practically empty now so I tried to regain my composure and went outside. As I passed through the doors into the night I didn't even see them load Craig's body on to the ambulance. All I saw were two white doors slam shut, sealing the world away from the tragedy.

We watched the lights recede into the distance, blue echoes shimmering back off the buildings even when the ambulance was gone.

As I tried to breathe, I felt a hand tap me on the shoulder. My sweet Clare. She wore a hoody and her neck disappeared into the rolls of fabric. In a fury of emotion, the incident in the school disco now utterly
meaningless
to me because I loved her, I suddenly grabbed her and she grabbed me and we hugged tight, tight, tight, like if we let go we'd fall off the world into outer space.

She started crying into my shoulder, but I was going to support her. We had once been in a team, a secret team that comprised just me and her, and I think she was back there
then, back in that time that seemed so long ago when things were
not like this
. Now everything was over because Craig was dead.

A lot of cars arrived at the pub. Parents with concerned and saddened faces jumped down from their people carriers like they knew Craig. Girls were crying and I looked at them and do you know what I thought? Hypocrites. They didn't
know
Craig, they didn't care about Craig. When he had tried to kill himself, it was they who had made fun of him and laughed at him because he was crazy. They weren't the ones who had actually donated chunks of their life to help him. I had. I had helped him, and even though he had killed himself (and even though we were responsible), we were still his friends and I know that what I just said sounds contradictory but I don't care.

As I held Clare close and realized how much I still loved her crazily, I went right back to square one – I was a member of the Suicide Club once again. As Clare entered me through osmosis I suddenly got shunted to the point where directly in front of me was the truth: the Suicide Club were right.

The night before I had had sex for the very first time and it was with a girl I had only met that night. How could I have done that? That girl was now nothing but a memory and I knew even at the time that I would never fall in love with her. I had told Clare that I loved her but couldn't be around her because it was unhealthy – that's not what a romantic would do; we embrace only emotional storms because we crave the deepest feelings because that's the only place where you can
live
. By sleeping with that girl I had skimmed the surface of the human spectrum because I ‘didn't want to get hurt'. I was disgusted with myself.

And then my father was coming towards me. Clare was taken away from me, still crying, and I was taken back to my house. It was the last place I wanted to go. I wanted to stay
with my friends; they were all I had in the whole world. But they took me home.

The place seemed even quieter than normal and the walls seemed grubbier. I hated being there, hated it with every piece of me. The books in the hallway had dust all over them and they insulated the heat and I hated it. I went straight up to my bedroom and locked the door. I wanted to be on my own because one of my best friends was dead and I would never see him again and I had been washed over by one of those instantaneous waves of understanding that I told you about. He was gone. Craig was gone. Gone.

There was a knock at the door and I opened it straight away because I didn't have any energy to fight any more. But it wasn't my parents. Do you know who it was?

It was Toby.

‘Mum and Dad told me what happened to your friend.'

I went over to my CD player and put on my Damien Rice CD and let it play from track one before flopping down on my bed.

‘Are you all right, Rich?' He was talking to me like I had never spat in his hair; all that was gone now because he wanted to tell me that everything would be OK.

I fell back and rolled on to my side so that I wasn't facing him.

I heard Toby shuffle on my carpet.

‘I just feel so sorry for him,' I said at last.

I felt the angles of my mattress shift as Toby sat down.

‘It'll be OK,' he said comfortingly.

‘Do you think he's OK?' I asked.