by John Marrs
Mary had more in common with them than I did. Most old people made me feel uncomfortable, as if their years of wisdom and experience gave them the capacity to see right through me. Mary, however, was an exception. I could have been a serial killer working my way around the room and euthanising every last one of them, and she’d still find some good to see in me.
We sat side by side on two plastic chairs at the front of the hall. I fixed my gaze on her as she used brightly coloured cue cards to remind her of the subjects she wanted to address. Her voice was confident, like she was comfortable among her own kind, whereas I just wanted to be back in the office waiting for the next call.
It was more than five months since I’d helped David and I was craving a new challenge. Steven was supposed to have fitted the bill, but his all-important third call still hadn’t come.
In an ideal world, I’ll only ever take on one candidate at a time. But sometimes, like buses, two can come along at once and juggling them is exhausting. Like Brendan and Helena, two of my early candidates. He was a middle-aged man with late-stage prostate cancer. It was a Monday evening when he suffocated himself with a plastic bag and a gas canister. The next morning, Helena took an overdose of painkillers. She was a twenty-something having an affair with a married dad-of-two who had reneged on his promise to leave his wife for her. After I helped her see that her death would teach him a lesson, I made sure to hammer the point home by placing an obituary in the local paper on his behalf, using his full name and making sure to describe her as his ‘beautiful girlfriend’.
As luck would have it, their funerals fell on the same day in neighbouring churches. I had walked from one to the other, and still got to the office in time for my afternoon shift.
‘Do you need a lot of training or can you start answering calls straight away?’ asked a woman in the front row. Her ankles were as thick as her calves. I wanted to tell her that there were many pointless bureaucratic hoops to jump through first, which taught you to go against your instinct and to listen rather than advise. But I didn’t.
‘Yes, there is a lot of training to be done to prepare you for what you might hear,’ I replied. ‘Some calls we get are quite hard, so we need to be ready for anything.’
After my first interview at End of the Line, I did my homework and read up on the answers expected in their psychometric and personality tests. I was asked my opinions on everything from abortions to what I’d tell a terminally ill friend who didn’t want to continue treatment. All were designed to see how open-minded, liberal and non-judgemental I was. The truth is that I am judgemental, but I went against my real self because giving advice isn’t listening. Only once did I slip up and say the words ‘commit suicide’. ‘Commit’ is a word we never use, as it makes suicide sound like it’s a crime, which it isn’t.
I passed, and then came the training – one day a week for the best part of two months. I was quick to get the measure of my mentor Mary. Her adult son had long flown the nest and the country, leaving her with a husband who’d rather spend time on the golf course than with her. I sensed she was aimless and empty and in another life, I’d have fast-tracked her as a candidate.
She filled her days between now and death by offering a friendly ear to others. Her body was slimmer than mine but she hid it away under frumpy clothing and abided by the World War II slogan ‘make do and mend’. I’d see her quietly green-eyeing the fashions I wore, and I’d make a point of telling her where I’d bought them and how much they cost.
Mary wore little make-up, ageing her further, and all the fillers in the world couldn’t have ironed out the wrinkles in her face. She didn’t even colour her short silver hair, as if she didn’t see the point of making an effort anymore. When she was considering a question or was lost in thought, she’d move her jaw from left to right like she was easing her loose dentures back into place. I’d rather be dead than become Mary.
Together, we embarked on an exploration of hypothetical depths of despair to see how much I knew about the types of problems callers were experiencing. It wasn’t in my nature to try to cheer someone up or tell them I knew how they felt, so that wasn’t a habit I needed to break.
Despite her maturity, Mary was easily hoodwinked; that’s the problem with those who only ever see the good in people. I found it easy to appear saddened as she recounted some of the horrors callers had told her. Secretly, I couldn’t wait until she let go of my reins and I could experience their suffering first-hand.
When the time arrived, I had to stifle my excitement. Not every call came from someone with suicidal thoughts, but when my first one arrived, I had to clench my fists to stop myself from clapping like a sea lion. For the first of my eight probationary shifts, Mary wore an earpiece to listen in on my conversations. Occasionally she’d pass me a suggested line of questioning on a Post-it note, and once the call was over she’d debrief me and offer constructive feedback. Well, she found it constructive. I found it time-consuming nonsense. Finally, with the wool well and truly pulled over her eyes, she unscrewed my stabilisers and I was off on my own.
There were many guidelines to follow, and even now I obey them, by and large. I don’t agree with them all but there’s no point in trying to break the rules just for the sake of it. Remain below the radar and no one will ever see you for what you are. And just to be on the safe side, I took three, maybe even four months before I began playing by my own rules.
I didn’t abandon the Internet message boards completely. I’d visit weekly and answer some questions, or continue talking to people I’d already started conversations with. But End of the Line gave me what the boards couldn’t.
‘What do you think about when you go home at night?’ asked a woman at the back of the Northants Women’s Circle meeting. ‘Do you ever worry how the people you’ve spoken to are getting on?’
I never forget a voice and I recognised hers. She’d called me before, up to her eyes in credit card debt. She certainly hadn’t spent all her money on her appearance.
‘Some of them stay with you longer than others,’ I replied, and thought of David. His and that of the woman I’d matched him with were the only funerals I hadn’t been to. I hadn’t even seen a photograph of them. Yet he still burned deeper inside me than anyone else.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I hated this house.
I glanced around the open-plan space that was full of barely used objects. A top-of-the-range fifty-two-inch television that was hardly ever turned on, an eight-seater dining room table and chairs that had yet to be eaten off, and two L-shaped sofas were rarely sat upon. Our £20,000 kitchen was adorned with branded, built-in appliances, Corian surfaces and Italian marble-tiled flooring. It was all less than a couple of years old, so beautiful, so box-fresh, but so hollow. The house had everything a family could need with the exception of love. In fact, try as I might, I couldn’t remember the last time that all five of us had been under the same roof, together at the same time. The more hours I whiled away there, the darker the walls became and the more I resented the house for changing everything.
The sound of a sneeze broke the silence. That cat had been asleep and curled into a tight ball on the windowsill before waking himself up. I’d assumed it was only dogs that gave their owners enthusiastic welcomes when they returned home. But Bieber always dashed through the house at the sound of Tony’s car crawling up the drive. As soon as the front door opened, he’d purr and rub his needy little head on Tony’s ankles, and would be rewarded with more attention than my husband gave me. Tonight, Bieber would have to join me in waiting. I took my place at the breakfast bar, staring at the oven. I had to think for a moment to remember what I was even cooking.
I sent all three of them a group WhatsApp message to find out where they were, but no one replied. They must have gone somewhere without a phone or Wi-Fi signal. I’d left the mail neatly arranged on the kitchen counter and I assumed Tony had sifted through it, as it was no longer how I’d left it, in size order.
; I turned on the radio to find my favoured 1980s music station. Whitney Houston was asking ‘How Will I Know’, the Eurythmics wanted to discover ‘Who’s That Girl?’ and Carly Simon inquired ‘Why’. They asked a lot of questions back then. All I wanted to know was where was my family?
When the six o’clock news began, I assumed Tony had already left the office and gone to the gym to knock the hell out of a punch bag. He was probably training for another of his white-collar boxing tournaments, where he and other like-minded office workers take each other on in the ring in organised, regulated matches. When things became strained between us, he’d spend more and more time there training. And while he’d told me in no uncertain terms not to attend his fights, I couldn’t help myself, and stood in the shadows at the back of the Freemasons’ Hall function room, increasingly aroused by each punch he threw and the damage inflicted on his opponent.
Alice was probably still at an after-school club and would be dropped off later by a friend’s mum, while Effie might be crying on her friends’ shoulders over Matt, who was likely blaming his public humiliation on her, for sending all and sundry his naked selfie. Or maybe Tony had taken the girls out for pizza without me. I wouldn’t put it past him.
I’d grown accustomed to watching my family interact while I lurked on the sidelines like a bit-part character in my own local theatre production. I didn’t blame the girls completely – Tony had taken it upon himself to organise birthday parties and trips out, and he spoiled them by making too much time to listen to every minute detail of their lives. That put immense pressure on me to keep up appearances and pretend to be interested in their stories, or else I’d look like an uninvolved mother. Only I wasn’t as convincing as my husband.
The distance between Tony and me had expanded from a crack to the size of a chasm shortly before my cancer diagnosis. I wasn’t even worthy of a peck on the cheek when he brushed past me on the stairs. I’d remind him how good he looked as he changed into his gym gear, then pretend not to be hurt when he didn’t reciprocate with a compliment of his own. I’d even feign liking the sleeve of tattoos gradually expanding up his left arm from wrist to shoulder, when quietly I hated them.
For a man approaching his late thirties, Tony was in enviable shape. When his friends had visited our former house for summer barbecues and he wore a sleeveless top and cargo shorts, I’d watched their wives ogling him. Their husbands had ‘dad bods’ and beer bellies, and it was all the women could do to keep themselves from panting when they saw Tony. Once upon a time, I’d felt sorry for them, but now I was envious because at least their out-of-shape partners were present. Tony wasn’t. He was far, far away.
I poured myself another glass from the bottle of Merlot from the online wine club he’d joined and never got around to cancelling, and asked myself if I’d been more in tune with Tony’s feelings, might I have been able to pinpoint the exact moment he’d looked at me and decided I was no longer the woman he’d married?
The last time I’d instigated intimacy between us, the girls were playing with Henry in the garden and I’d followed Tony upstairs. He’d moved into the spare room weeks before, but I’d told myself it was only because the stress of setting up his own IT support business was giving him sleepless nights. Then, somewhere along the line, he had decided to make the temporary measure permanent, and without discussion.
I crept up on him as he changed out of his work suit and, before he could protest, I slipped my hand down the front of his trousers and wrapped my other arm around his waist.
‘What are you doing?’ he’d asked. He sounded irritated.
‘I think you know what I’m doing,’ I replied, and moved my hand inside his briefs and played with his balls.
‘It was a rhetorical question,’ he replied. I could feel him stirring but he tried to resist. He squirmed until I removed my hand. But I wasn’t ready to give up, so I began unbuttoning my blouse. He used to find it sexy when I’d get naked while he was fully clothed. It would turn him on like nothing else.
‘Laura, stop it. I told you, I don’t have the time.’
‘You never have time,’ I sighed. ‘Not for me, anyway.’ Part of me hated myself for still desiring a physical relationship with someone who didn’t want one with me. But I longed to connect with him.
‘Maybe you should occupy more of your time with your children, and leave me the hell alone.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
He didn’t answer.
‘Do you think I’m spending too long at End of the Line? I can cut down my hours, if that’s what you want.’
‘I don’t care what you do.’
‘You used to. We can’t sort out whatever is happening between us if you don’t try.’
‘Some things are beyond sorting out.’
I felt sick. ‘I don’t understand why you’re being like this. We’ve been married for almost sixteen years. Every couple has bumps in the road . . .’
‘A bump? Is that what you’ve convinced yourself this is?’ He lowered his voice to make sure the children couldn’t hear him through the open window. Then he looked at me with a contempt I’d never seen in his eyes before.
‘I know about you, Laura,’ he growled. ‘I know what you are and what you’ve done. I know everything.’
My eyes locked on to his and my legs felt as if they were about to give way. He couldn’t have been referring to what I thought he was.
‘What . . . what are you talking about?’ I stammered.
‘You tried to hide your old social services file from me, but I found it and read the whole fucking thing,’ he snapped. ‘You have lied to me right from the very beginning of our relationship, and then every step of the way since. About what happened when you went into care in that house with Nate . . . the lot. I have no idea who I’m married to.’
I took a step back and felt the bile rising from my stomach, up my throat and into my mouth. I tried to pretend his words hadn’t just slashed me like broken glass.
‘You don’t have anything to say, do you?’ he continued.
He was right, I didn’t. I cursed myself; I knew it had been a huge mistake digging up the past. But once I had it written in black and white, I couldn’t dispose of it, no matter how hurtful and inaccurate it was. Instead, I’d hidden the file, so I could reread it and torture myself over and over again. Only Tony had clearly stumbled across it, too. It explained why he’d become so distant with me, why sometimes when I looked at him with love, he looked at me with loathing.
Suddenly I was brought back to the present by the sound of a car engine outside. I craned my neck, hoping to see Tony’s car. But it was the obese couple that lived next door. Tony was probably waiting until later, and for me to go to bed before he brought the girls home.
The oven timer chimed, so I slipped on my oven gloves and removed a large cooking pot. I pushed the lid to one side to remind myself it was a chicken casserole I’d made. I poured some into a bowl for me, and the rest I’d leave for the others to heat up if they were hungry. They’d probably ignore it though. The freezer was packed full of Tupperware meals I’d made for four, but that’d only been eaten by one.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
FIVE MONTHS, TWO WEEKS AFTER DAVID
‘If you can’t see yourself getting any better, what’s the best outcome you could hope for?’ I asked Steven.
Like all my questions, it was delivered in a caring, measured manner. But it was a loaded one. I focused on the second hand of the clock on the wall, measuring the time of his response. Twenty-four seconds elapsed before he spoke again.
‘That one morning I just don’t wake up.’
‘You don’t want to wake up,’ I reiterated. ‘I understand.’ And I did. The same thought had crossed my own mind over the years, more times than I cared to admit. Only, I possessed the strength to soldier on.
‘Aren’t you going to ask me what I have to live for?’ he said.
‘Would you like me to? Would you listen to me
if I came up with some reasons?’
‘No, probably not.’
‘Then I won’t patronise you. When you’ve thought long and hard about bringing your life to an end like you have, I don’t have the right to tell you you’re wrong, and that’s not what End of the Line is here for. I’m not going to try to pull you out of a hole; I’m in that hole with you. Have you considered how you might do it? In our first conversation, you mentioned ending your life by standing in front of a train.’
‘I’ve changed my mind.’
‘What are your thoughts now?’
‘Hanging.’
My eyes lit up. Almost sixty per cent of suicidal men end their lives by strangulation, but I’d yet to come across one. The prospect immediately excited me. My tally to date was eight overdoses on illegal or prescription drugs, three jumpers and four who’d bled to death.
I took a moment to compose myself. ‘Where would you do it?’
‘In my bedroom. I live in a house with a vaulted ceiling and wooden beams. I’ve tested them by doing pull-ups so I know they can take my weight. Honestly, it’s the perfect place.’ His voice was animated, like a child trying to impress a parent.
I was pleased to hear from Steven now he’d finally found me again, although he took a little longer than I’d expected. He seemed more serious than ever about wanting to die, as if he’d taken the time between calls to really consider how he might go about it.
The door to the office opened and Zoe entered. She gave me one of her lipstick-on-her-teeth smiles and a thumbs-up, then took a seat a couple of desks away from mine and unpacked her bag. It was a satchel I hadn’t seen before. If there was any doubt she was a lesbian, she’d just answered it. I moved the receiver closer to my mouth and chose my words carefully so she didn’t overhear me.
‘Why would you choose . . . those means . . . over any other process?’
‘Because I reckon it’s quick and it’s easy and not much can go wrong.’
