by John Marrs
‘I’m trying to imagine what you’re like in the real world.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘I was just building up a mental picture of you. I imagine you looking a bit like an older Jennifer Lawrence. No offence.’
‘None taken,’ I chuckled and felt my cheeks blush. ‘Even the “older” part is flattering. But alas, I’m not in her league.’
‘Do you have kids?’
‘Yes. Do you?’
‘No.’
‘Is being a father something you have ever considered?’
‘I didn’t have a dad, so I wouldn’t know how to be one. I’d just fuck it up.’
‘Nature and instinct have ways of leading us into parenthood.’ I read that once in a magazine lying on a table in a therapist’s waiting room. I didn’t believe it, but I copied it into the back of my notebook in case it came in useful.
‘There was someone once, I guess, who I considered having a family with,’ Steven said.
‘Would you like to tell me about her?’
‘She was sweet and kind and I thought that she really loved me, but suddenly she disappeared from my life.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
I was happy to hear it, actually. Because the more open and vulnerable Steven made himself to me, the more I believed he was genuine. I’d tried catching him out by asking him to repeat stories he’d told me before and listening carefully for contradictions. But each time, they remained almost word for word identical.
It didn’t mean he wasn’t being dishonest, though. If somebody like me can portray an image of a person I’m not, there’s nothing to prevent anyone else doing the same thing. And frustratingly, I didn’t know enough about him to check up on him. Could I trust him like I’d trusted David?
With every conversation, Steven reminded me more and more of the friend I’d lost. However, this time I wasn’t going to allow myself to become so emotionally involved. The mistake I’d made with David was that I’d allowed him to get to me. I’d hoped that when he stepped over the cliff top and the tide swept his body away, that would be the end of our relationship and I could move on. But even now I heard his voice in the wind as it swayed the branches of the trees; it was inside the music I played to cover the silence and now it came through the telephone line in Steven’s voice. Perhaps Steven had been destined to find me and make me his offer. Maybe by being present as he hanged himself, I could actually free myself of David.
I glanced at Mary, across the room. Her eyes were still puffy as she slipped on her well-worn coat and picked up her bag, ready to return to an empty nest with a husband who hadn’t seen her properly in years. For the briefest of moments, I could see myself becoming like her, surrounded by people but so desperately alone, too set in her ways to take a risk. It scared me to death.
She couldn’t cope with hearing a person die, but I could. I also knew I could deal with watching it happen, too. So I made a decision and hoped I wouldn’t live to regret it.
‘I’ll do it.’
‘I’m sorry?’ replied Steven.
I whispered into the receiver, ‘If you are serious about wanting to end your life, then I will be with you in person when you do it.’
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
SIX MONTHS AFTER DAVID
‘Why don’t you tell me what brought you to where you are today?’ I asked Steven over the phone.
I gingerly took a sip from my steaming mug of peppermint tea and sank my hips down into the chair, making notes in the book I kept hidden in my bag. I listened quietly as Steven filled in the blanks of his story.
He hadn’t been a victim of physical or sexual abuse, he was addiction-free and he wasn’t in debt – the most common reasons for suicidal thoughts. Instead he was, like a quarter of the British population at some time, suffering from depression. It had begun in his teenage years with occasional depressive chapters. Gradually those episodes became a series until they took control of his life, affecting his studies, ruining his exam results and leading to a career of unfulfilling jobs. When he found me, he’d been struggling for two years with psychotic depression that had led to hallucinations and paranoia.
To give Steven credit, he hadn’t just given in and accepted his fate; he’d battled against his own brain with therapies and an alphabet’s worth of drugs. Some had brought him temporary relief but made his world a blurred, false reality. And none of the professionals he consulted could help him see how the next twenty-eight years of his life would be any better than the first. He was taking up space in this world and offering nothing in return.
‘What do you get out of our arrangement?’ asked Steven suddenly. ‘You’re going to all this trouble to help me, and in return all you’re asking is for me to tell you about myself. Is there nothing else I can do for you?’
I was touched by his thoughtfulness. Nobody, not even David, had asked me that.
‘No, there’s nothing,’ I replied. ‘Your faith is all I need.’
‘Can I ask if you’ve done this for anyone else?’ he asked.
‘Yes, there have been others.’
‘Can you tell me more about them?’
‘Would you like the next person I choose to know about you?’
‘No, not really.’
‘Then you have to respect their privacy.’ I hesitated before continuing. ‘I help different people in different ways. This life is difficult to negotiate alone. Some people fall by the wayside and need help in finding their way back onto the right road. Others want to stay off the road completely, and that’s where I come in.’
‘You called me David before. Was he someone like me?’
My skin prickled as if it had been brushed by stinging nettles. ‘Yes, I did help David. You remind me of him a little, which is why I might have said his name in error.’
I took a cursory glance around the room at the rest of the team. Two of them were gossiping by a boiling kettle in the kitchen, one was on a call, and Janine was in her office staring hard at her computer. The glass in a picture frame behind her reflected the image of a moving roulette wheel on her screen. Her expression told me it wasn’t moving in her favour.
‘Now, let’s get back to what we were talking about earlier,’ I continued, and detailed where the noose should sit on his neck. ‘If you don’t do it correctly, your instinct isn’t going to be to just remain there until you pass out, you’re going to claw at that rope and try to stop yourself from being strangled. You’ll be in a huge amount of pain and it’ll take five minutes to lose consciousness and a further twenty to die.’
Hearing him scribbling notes satisfied me. I was quietly making a to-do list of my own, reminding myself to search his house after his death to ensure he’d left no evidence linking us. No stray notes screwed up and tossed into a bin, and my name not written on a pad anywhere. I’d also need to take the contract-free pay-as-you-go mobile I’d asked him to buy to call me once I’d agreed to help him. And I didn’t need the police sniffing around his actual phone and finding End of the Line’s number on there again like they had with Chantelle.
‘Can I ask you for something before . . . it happens?’ he asked.
‘Of course.’
‘I feel almost embarrassed saying this, but could you . . . hug . . . me? We don’t need to talk or anything and it’s not some kind of sexual thing, it’s just that I can’t remember the last time I felt anyone’s arms around me.’
My mouth opened and then wavered ever so slightly. ‘Yes,’ I replied, trying to gain control of any sign of emotion. But I knew exactly how he felt.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
SEVEN MONTHS AFTER DAVID
I woke from a dream with a sudden jolt, confused but aware I’d just yelled the word ‘no!’.
I sat bolt upright in my darkened bedroom and turned to Tony for reassurance, momentarily forgetting he no longer slept in our bed. I used some breathing techniques cribbed from my yoga classes and thought about Henry’s beautiful smile until I felt calm again.
Since I’d agreed to be present for Steven’s death, it was nigh-on impossible for me to enjoy more than a couple of hours of sleep at a time without waking up and thinking of him. I attempted to tire myself out in the early evenings by signing up for Zumba and body-pump gym classes, but all they did were make my endorphins skyrocket, leaving me wide awake into the early hours.
I began to think about the five rules I gave my candidates and what amendments I’d created specifically for Steven. After all, this was the first time I’d ever been invited to the scene to supervise a person taking their own life. While I trusted him as much as I could trust anyone in his position, I’d need to protect my safety and ensure I knew where I was going and in good time. I told him that at no point must anyone join us. Also, everything in his house would need to be exactly where he said it was. If I had the slightest inkling something was out of sorts, I would leave.
The alarm clock read 4.27 a.m. I couldn’t shift my anxiety and needed comfort from my husband. So I padded quietly along the landing, passing the girls’ ajar bedroom doors where it was too dark for me to see inside. The curtains in Tony’s room remained open, however, and an orange streetlight cast a tangerine glow against the wallpaper. It was as I moved to slip silently between his sheets that I realised his bed was how I’d left it that morning, unused and with four decorative cushions propped upright by the pillows. He had not returned home.
I moved both hands in front of my mouth as if in prayer. Where was Tony? And more importantly, who was he with?
Entering the kitchen, I poured myself a glass of water from the dispenser in the fridge, and tried to repress my unease. I unplugged my phone from the charger and checked to see if he’d texted me or left a voicemail after I’d gone to bed. But there was nothing.
I looked at the suicide message boards on my tablet, because reading people’s misery and answering questions often helped to relax me. But not this morning.
Eventually I gave up, defeated, and headed upstairs to change my clothing before leaving the house.
The wind hit my face like a sharp slap before circling my head and blowing my ponytail in all manner of directions. I’d learned from last time how cold it could get up here even in August, so I’d brought a pair of patterned gloves and a matching scarf with me. I stood firm behind the safety railings, two hundred feet above the car park below.
The Hartley Hotel had been a blot on Northampton town centre’s landscape for as long as I could remember; a grotesque twenty-five-storey building that was only possible to ignore if you walked with your eyes closed. I made my way unnoticed through the mahogany-clad lobby towards the clunky lifts and up to the top floor. There was a musty stairwell to climb, illuminated by a green emergency exit sign, before I reached the door to the roof.
It was my fifth candidate, Eleanor, who’d told me about it. She’d lifted her feet from the asphalt where I was standing now, clambered over the railings and dropped to the ground below. Now I’d occasionally use the location to check if I was still needed in this world. I’d lean forward against the rusty railings, and if the metal bars were to bend and snap, it’d be fate deciding my time was up, not me. If I remained where I was, it meant God still had a plan for me to rid the world of the terminally unhappy.
There were some occasions, especially after Henry was taken away from me, when it wouldn’t have taken much for me to have leaned a little too far until gravity won out. Eleanor had allowed me to hear her final gasp of breath before she died on impact. The only thing to prevent me from doing the same was my anchor, and the knowledge there’d be nobody to hear my final exhalation. What a waste that would be.
Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve thought the most beautiful sound in the world is a person’s last breath. It’s a singularly unique noise that marks the transition from this life into the next. To have spent time working with a candidate, encouraging and reinforcing their decision to die and then to be rewarded with their final breath is intoxicating. It’s something that can never be replicated. The first time I heard it, it came from my mother’s lips.
The inherited cancer gene that came close to killing me years later took her life when she was just thirty-two and I was eleven. For days, it had been just her and my dad alone in their bedroom, with twice-daily visits from Macmillan nurses.
Dad wanted to keep the inevitable away from me and my younger sisters, Sara and Karen, for as long as possible. So we’d been uprooted and landed on the Ronson family’s welcome mat further up the road. But every so often I’d sneak back home to visit Mum, even though she was asleep much of the time. On her final day, I hid in the living room of the bungalow and waited until Dad was in the bathroom before I crawled under their bed. That way I could be close to Mum without having to look at her skeletal frame and sunken face.
Her body barely made a dip in the mattress above me, but I traced where her outline might be with my fingers. Her breath was becoming heavy and laboured, then suddenly she gave out a thick gasp like she was being suffocated before there was silence. I heard Dad flush the toilet just as Mum exhaled one last time. It was a long, drawn-out and delicate breath that I imagined being as soft as cotton wool. I felt it inside me, like something lighting up my spine and making each of my nerve endings tingle. I thought that if I could push my lips out as far as I could and breathe in, I might capture that last breath and hold it inside me forever.
But our shared moment was all too brief, because when my father returned and discovered she was dead, he fell to his knees and sobbed with guilt for allowing her to die alone. I didn’t admit I was there and remained motionless until he left to call for help.
Without his soulmate by his side, Dad didn’t know how to function as a father or a human being. Even his body seemed to shrink under the pressure of grief. It wasn’t enough for him to see her image live on in his three daughters. And over the following year, as his depression escalated, I took on Mum’s role around the house, washing dishes and clothes, cleaning bathrooms and reading the girls their bedtime stories.
By day, Dad rarely washed, changed his clothes or left the house. At night, I’d lie in my bed listening to him aimlessly pace or watch the television way into the early hours until he finally fell asleep.
Sometimes, when the bungalow was quiet and I was alone, I’d close my eyes and remember the sound of Mum’s last breath, and it brought us closer than two people could ever be. How I longed to hear something like it again.
Gradually, a divide opened up between my younger sisters and me, because while I attended school during the day, they got to spend time at home with their remaining parent. And then for a while, it was as if they were accomplishing what I couldn’t by lifting him out of his dark place with their imaginary tea parties and garden picnics.
‘What are you doing, Daddy?’ I asked him one Saturday afternoon. He was in the kitchen, crushing something on a breadboard with the back of a spoon.
‘Would you like to help me?’ He smiled warmly and passed me a rolling pin. I’ll never forget that smile, because it radiated from his eyes, too. It was the first time I’d seen it since Mum died. ‘I need you to turn these tablets into a powder, put them in that jug and then stir it really well.’
He gave me a handful of pills. I was too buoyed up by his need for me to ask the purpose of what we were doing. When I finished, he popped more tablets from another blister pack, like the one he kept by the side of his bed to help him sleep, and we turned them into powder, too.
Quietly, we worked together, me with the rolling pin and him with a spoon, neither of us saying a word but me sensing everything in our world was about to change for the better. I was being rewarded for my patience; my dad was coming back to me. When we ran out of tablets, we brushed the small powdery mound into a jug. He added a pint and a half of semi-skimmed milk, heaped in tablespoons of sugar and squirted some strawberry-flavoured milkshake syrup inside.
‘Girls, come and get your milk,’ he shouted, and Karen and Sara sk
ipped in from the garden to join us, squishing their bottoms on the same wooden seat at the kitchen table. He poured out three glasses and I pushed my empty glass towards him.
‘You’re a big girl now,’ he told me. ‘Why don’t you get some cola instead?’
‘This tastes funny,’ complained Sara, but Dad ignored her and grinned at me. I liked being in on the joke even if I didn’t understand the punchline.
‘Can we go and play in the garden now?’ Karen asked, draining her glass.
‘Why don’t we all go and lie down for a nap?’ he replied.
‘But I’m not sleepy,’ Sara replied.
‘Well, let’s play a game. We’ll all keep our eyes closed for half an hour and if we don’t fall asleep then we can go to the park for ice creams instead.’
My two excited siblings skipped towards Dad’s room and jumped on the mattress as he and I followed. But as I was about to enter, he stretched his arm across the door.
‘It’s just us today, sweetheart.’ He leaned forward and kissed me on the forehead. ‘You’re stronger than us. Once you find your anchor, never let go of it. No matter what.’
Before I could ask what he meant, he gently closed the door and turned the lock. I didn’t know what was going to happen in that room, but I had a strong sense that I needed to hear it. So I remained with my ear pressed to the door, straining to decipher their muffled chat. Eventually I slumped to the floor with my back to it, waiting for the thirty-minute deadline to pass. I hated closed doors, because closed doors meant secrets and I didn’t like being kept out of secrets.
Gradually their conversation petered out into silence as they drifted into sleep. I guessed that we wouldn’t be going to the park and crossed my arms in an exaggerated sulk. I was ready to walk away when I felt my body tingle. A few moments later and it happened again. Then a longer time passed before I felt it once more. It was the same warm feeling I’d had on hearing Mum’s last breath.
