The Suicide Club (44 page)

The path was drier than before because there hadn't been any rain and I guess it was quite serene with the sun shining down, me wending my way through the foliage. Once I got past the Egg Well, the forest got denser and darker. I started
stumbling over the roots, having to close my eyes where branches threatened to rip them out. And then, just as it had before, it ended and I was in the alien grey-and-green world of the quarry. The sun was blinding and I had to squint to see.

I looked around but there was no sign of Freddy or Clare. Maybe I had been wrong and they were on their way to California or something. Or maybe she was in the side of the road with stab wounds in her.

I skirted the edge of the chasm, occasionally peering over the edge into the green waters in case there were floating corpses in there. The lake was empty, at least on the surface.

When I got about halfway round I heard a disturbance up ahead and my heart instinctively started pumping blood faster and harder.

Freddy and Clare came out of the darkness hand in hand, from the same place that Matt and Freddy had come the last time we were up here. An instant relief smashed into me. They were still alive. But when I saw them holding hands the terrible realization that she would never love me like she loved Freddy hit me. It would have knocked me down but this is real life and things like that don't happen. Instead I got that feeling of desperation where you know that, no matter how much you want something, you're never going to get it. Just seeing them come out of the woods together, that sense of easiness between them, told me everything. She might have loved me in a sweet, teenage way, but it was Freddy she
yearned
for. He was the one who would get her lust and you can't beat that, no matter how Nice a Person you are.

They saw me immediately but didn't wave. They just headed over. I took a deep breath because it was clear that this was going to be the final confrontation. After this, there would be no going back. I found myself tensing my muscles,
pumping myself up, getting ready in case a fight broke out. Freddy looked taller and leaner, more athletic, more animal. But he looked tired as well. Both of them did.

The air was unreal somehow, the atmosphere cloaked in something weird.

‘Everybody's looking for you,' I said.

Clare's eyes were red and she was a million billion miles away from the full-of-life force of nature she had been a few months ago.

I stepped towards her.

‘Clare.'

Her lips were shaking and I almost burst into tears because I could never be with her even though I wanted it more than anything.

I looked at Freddy. His hair looked different somehow, not as full. His skin was dry and a few spots had broken out around his mouth.

‘Why can't it go back to the way it was, you know?' he said. He didn't say it sadly, he said it loudly. He had reached a point beyond sadness. He was in the final stretches of wherever his journey was taking him. I suddenly saw him in a new light. Now that I knew about his mother I was looking at a whole new person. So many questions had been answered now that the enigmatic last piece of the puzzle had been filled in. Freddy was like a magic-eye picture: suddenly I got him.

All three of us stood there in silence, a triangle.

‘What are you doing up here?' I said.

Freddy glanced at Clare. ‘We're up here for a reason.'

‘There's always a reason,' I muttered to myself. I looked at Clare but she couldn't look at me. ‘You're not going to do anything stupid, are you?'

‘I'm not,' he answered. ‘We are.' It was like the devil was in him when he said it.

I suddenly realized how cold the weather was, despite the sun. I was scared. We were miles from anywhere. Freddy's face was that expressionless mask.

‘Clare?' I pleaded, hoping that she would say something to him.

‘I'm sorry, Rich,' she said, taking a step towards Freddy and putting her arm around him. It almost crippled me to see that. It was an echo of that night in the graveyard playing tag, when she should have freed me but instead receded into the shadows.

‘I don't want to live any more.'

I couldn't handle much more of this. The words were so clinical and to the point.

‘Don't say that.'

‘Why?' she said, trying not to cry. ‘I mean it. Nobody likes me any more.'

‘I do,' I blurted. ‘I love you, Clare. I just . . . love you.' My face was pleading. ‘Please don't.'

‘Don't tell her what to do,' Freddy said.

It suddenly struck me that I had no idea how this was going to end. The most surreal thought entered my brain: was I living the last few minutes of my life? It seemed like a stalemate. Freddy had beaten Clare but how was he going to get her to kill herself and stay alive himself ? Maybe he
was
going to kill himself after all. To be honest I didn't care. All I wanted was to save Clare.

‘Please, Clare, just get away from him.'

‘There's nothing left, Rich. Don't you get it?' she whispered.

‘Of course there is,' I lied, thinking frantically. ‘We'll run away,' I said. ‘We'll go to London or Edinburgh and get jobs. We'll rent a bedsit and watch TV in the nights on our sofa. And nobody will know where we are, we'll just sink into the city.' Emotions coursed through every sinew, soaring like
meteor storms. I actually believed what I was saying. It all came out of nowhere. ‘We'll save our money and open a clothes stall in Camden Market and you can make all the clothes and all the cool people will come to buy your T-shirts and
only
cool people will know about it. Normal people will see your logo and wonder where they can buy them but they'll never know.'

‘Shut up, Rich. We don't want to go on,' Freddy said, almost pathetically.

‘Don't listen to him, Clare, he's not what you think. He's only doing this because his mother died and he's fucked up.'

The scene was at breaking point, chaos roaring at us from its secret dimension.

‘What?' he said. ‘My mother's not dead.' But he stumbled over the words. I was winning.

‘Your mother is dead. That detective told me.'

‘What? How can you listen to that greasy bastard?'

‘Because he was telling the truth,' I said with unblinking certainty. ‘You're a fraud. You don't love life at all, you're just a fuck-up,' I said harshly. ‘And you told him that I wrote the Charter.'

‘Well, I had to say something,' he smiled. ‘I didn't want to get into trouble.'

Clare removed her arm from around his waist.

‘Is that true?'

He looked at her, stunned.

‘No,' he choked and I saw his face change imperceptibly. Something indefinable had slipped out of him.

‘Your mother's dead?' She looked at him intensely. I saw her expression change to one of complete sorrow for Freddy.

He could barely look at her.

‘Don't look at me like that,' he said forcefully.

Clare reached her hand out to him.

‘Freddy—'

‘Just fuck off!' he said, and took a step away from her instinctively so that she couldn't touch him. ‘I'm not a fucking freak.'

Clare took two steps towards me and turned so that now we were stood against the trees and his back was to the quarry.

I felt guilty for what I had said to Freddy because he was my friend and I had just wrenched his guts out, but I had to save Clare. This was the first time I had seen him since he told me he had slept with Clare and I thought I was going to feel hatred for him, but I didn't. Seeing him in the flesh like this, and knowing that he had lost his mother, brought me the pity that I had lacked. Everything was so much clearer now. He was my friend, and he was in trouble.

Clare looked at Freddy.

‘Let's just go home,' she said, still trying not to cry.

‘What? No!' he shouted. A flock of birds shot out of the trees in shock. ‘We can't go home. Don't you see? My home is a fucking school. That's not a home. Please,' he said. ‘Please come with me.' There was no sign of a tear in his eyes but I knew that he was going through hell. ‘I can't go on like this. Please. We had a
deal
. Doesn't that mean anything to you? Rich,' he said, looking at me with his big lost eyes, ‘doesn't the Suicide Club mean anything? Were their deaths just a game?'

He looked so much smaller than normal. I thought about how he must have been a few months ago, when his mother died. I wondered what he was like before. He was just lost, that's all. He was a little boy without a mother. He thought he had protected himself from the grief of it all by making friends with us but now we were turning our backs on him.

‘We're going home,' I said as kindly as I could.

Freddy looked at his feet for ages and then brought his head up, his face full of an exhausted rage. He reached
around his back and pulled out from his belt a huge hunting knife. He wasn't like an evil psychopath, he was still a normal human being, just one that had crossed over to chaos. Whatever he was about to do, it would be out of love, not insanity. His own brain was torturing him to the limits. He was going through the exact same thing that Craig had gone through in the headmaster's office after Bertie had died, what Clare had gone through outside the church at his funeral, what I had gone through last night when I had slashed my wrist. Jenny must have gone through it as well at some point. The only one who hadn't done it was Matt, and he had gone anyway.

Freddy was going through what it's like when you are out of control, when everything hurts so bad that you're nothing. When you just want to ball up your fists, squeeze your eyes tight shut and scream until your vocal cords snap because you can't do anything else. That was Freddy.

‘Whoa,' I breathed when I saw the knife, and took an instinctive step backwards. I grabbed Clare's arm and pulled her towards me. Behind us were thick trees and bushes that we couldn't get through and we wouldn't be able to get past him left or right. If we tried to push past him, he would easily be able to slash at us. And if I pushed him too hard he'd fall back into the quarry and I wasn't prepared to do that.

‘Don't you realize that we
have
to do this?' he pleaded. ‘All three of us.'

My heart was racing, getting ready.

‘But I don't want to die, Freddy,' I croaked. ‘I want to carry on.' I couldn't truly believe that this was actually happening.

‘You're not my friends at all,' he suddenly screamed, his brain about to pop. His voice echoed off the inside of the quarry walls, ringing around like we were inside a church bell. ‘You just used me like everyone else.' He took a step towards us and we took a tiny step back, the sharp needles of
the trees pricking into our backs, not letting us into the forest. I looked at Freddy. Freddy looked at me. There it was. A tear. Two tears. One for each eye. He sucked in air through his teeth and his lips quivered because he was ended.

The world breathed in. This was it.

‘Fuck it,' he whispered. He brought the knife up and, with the most force that I have ever seen come out of a human being, he ripped his throat out with the blade. As the knife came away a streak of blood spat out to the left and caught the sun. A lens flare burned into my eye.

Unable to move I watched Freddy drop the knife. He was trying to hold his neck together to say something. It came out as a gargling sound, guttural and horrifying. I knew what he was trying to say. He was trying to say, ‘Push me.' He looked at me like I had been the only true friend he had ever had and tried to say it again.

I shook my head quickly, panicked, scared.

‘I can't,' I coughed out of my dry throat.

When I said that, his face turned to that expressionless mask one last time. A lost, hurt desperation crossed his eyes. I had let him down. I suddenly got the impression that he was scared. He was dying. I wanted to push him but I couldn't. I was too selfish to do for my friend that one last thing.

After all we had been through, Freddy killing himself had finally shown me that he was not a fraud after all and that our ideals ran through him just as strongly as they ran through me. All of his ideas had come from a truth within. He had meant everything he said. The world would never get him. He refused to surrender his life to the Middle and so he surrendered it to the ether instead because that was the only other option.

But even though I now realized this, I still couldn't push him into the quarry, and those eyes he gave me will never
leave my memory because they held in them every emotion you can ever experience in life. Not pushing him to let him know that I loved him is my biggest regret. Freddy took two steps back, looked into the chasm like he had a choice, and that was it. When he went over the edge, it was with sadness in his heart, not joy. And that was my fault. Because I didn't push him. Because I had betrayed him.

AND THAT'S PRETTY
much the end of the story. Just as I hoped it would be, Freddy's body was found by frogmen and lifted clear by a bright-yellow helicopter. It was even televised, although you couldn't see his bloated flesh. I'm sorry, I shouldn't say things like that because it's crass and I'm just trying to shock. And that's bad.

Following what happened at the quarry I was taken to what I suppose was a mental hospital even though they called it a Recovery Clinic. They gave me lots of tests, forced me to eat full meals and took me to see lots of people who tried to cure me of my illness. I even had a long chat with somebody who worked at the hospital who had a degree in philosophy. I told him about my falling through the clouds towards the meaning of life and finding only blackness and he told me that it wasn't such a bad thing. The blackness, he said, didn't represent nihilism, it just meant that the answer was so mind-bogglingly vast that it was impossible to visualize and that's why all I had seen was black. And I suppose that makes sense.