Suicide Club, The

by Quigley, Sarah

  ‘Upstairs?’ Bright glances towards the flyspecked ceiling. ‘I’m not sure that Eduardo’s home.’

  ‘Eduardo? Who’s that, your… your roommate?’ Dismay flickers on the Reverend’s face at the possibility that his son may be gay as well as suicidal.

  ‘No.’ If he weren’t so short of breath, Bright would laugh. ‘I live alone.’

  His father looks relieved and grips his alligator-skin briefcase with its shiny gold clasp even more firmly. ‘I must admit I was pleasantly surprised to find you living at such a respectable address. Well, lead the way to your flat.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Bright is confused. ‘We’re already in it.’

  His father almost drops the briefcase. ‘We’re in it? You live — here?’

  ‘Let me put that somewhere for you!’ Bright snatches the briefcase. ‘Jesus! This weighs a ton!’ Only now does he realise one of the drawbacks of his home: an absence of horizontal surfaces. The bed? The stovetop? There’s not much floor space, what with his father, himself, and the neat stack of books, each thirty volumes high, marking out a narrow path from the door to the window. ‘Jesus!’ he repeats, staggering under the alligator-weight.

  Already, just a few minutes into the visit, his father is looking distressed. A tide of red is seeping up from his snowy collar. ‘Mind your language, Brian!’

  How does it happen that Bright always blasphemes almost as soon as he sets eyes on the Reverend? It’s as if he has a uniquely religious version of Tourette’s. ‘Damnation! I guess storage space wasn’t a top priority when I picked this flat.’

  ‘This flat?’ echoes the Reverend. It’s been a while since they last met, but the way he looks at his son is completely familiar. As if I’m mad, thinks Bright, putting down the briefcase with a thump.

  ‘This is not a flat, Brian,’ states his father. ‘This is a storeroom.’

  ‘You’re right, it used to be a storeroom. Now it’s my home.’ His anxious, acquiescent tone makes him burn with shame.

  ‘Your home?’ As always under emotional duress, the Reverend is becoming theatrical, repeating phrases but changing the inflection. Normally he would start pacing the room like someone in an Oscar Wilde play, but in his current surroundings he can take no more than two and a half strides before meeting a wall. He swivels on the spot like a soldier and faces his son, the disappointing non-home-maker, the cupboard-dweller in an otherwise respectable building. ‘There isn’t enough room to swing a cat here. Look around you!’

  Obediently, Bright does. He’s dismayed but not surprised (his father always has this effect) to find his home has shrunk to the size of one of the Reverend’s several bathrooms. ‘It is fairly small,’ he admits.

  ‘Where do you work?’ His father wipes his sweating face with a monogrammed linen handkerchief. ‘Where do you sleep?’

  Ah, this is easier. Bright’s lungs peel apart at the prospect of indisputable answers. ‘I sleep here.’ He pats the multi-coloured blanket crocheted by Eduardo during tension-ridden pauses in poker games. The blanket is half-covered in piles of carefully selected newspaper clippings and fifty red notebooks laid out in a row.

  ‘That’s a day bed,’ hisses his father.

  ‘A day bed during the day,’ nods Bright. ‘And when I’m tired, it becomes a night bed.’

  ‘It’s too short for you.’ As the Reverend trains his gaze on it, Eduardo’s blanket begins to look misshapen and garish. ‘You’re over six foot tall and that bed is no more than four.’

  ‘I sleep with my knees crooked up. It’s perfectly comfortable.’ Lacking a square of monogrammed linen, Bright wipes his forehead with his sleeve. ‘Think of horses! Horses sleep standing up. It depends on what you’re used to.’

  ‘You are my son. You are not a horse,’ says the Reverend heavily. ‘And where does my son work?’

  Now Bright is beginning to feel tired, much more tired than when he discharged himself from the hospital. Perhaps it’s the delayed effect of gravity? Of falling so far, so fast? ‘Well, I sit here.’ He pulls a low wooden crate from under the bed. ‘I sit here,’ he repeats, sinking onto the coconut crate, ‘within easy reach of my notebooks and research material. And I put my computer on my knees.’

  ‘I see. Your knees double as a desk, your bed functions as your library. And your computer — where, exactly, is your computer?’ His father looks up, as if hoping to see a workstation stocked with hi-tech equipment hanging above him. Instead, he sees the voluptuous curves and rosy nipples of a naked beauty, pinned on the ceiling to cover a large stain. His Adam’s apple bulges in his outraged scarlet throat.

  ‘I gave my computer to Eduardo when I — well, you know. I didn’t think I’d need it again.’ Sitting at knee-level, staring at the knife-edged creases in his father’s trousers, he feels ridiculously small. Soon he will be no bigger than the jaunty thumb-sized figure on the spine of his copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

  ‘Air.’ His father is tugging at his collar. ‘I need air.’ Before Bright can stop him, he’s taken one and a half steps to the window and is reaching for the latch.

  ‘I wouldn’t do that.’ Bright flinches.

  ‘What on earth is this — some kind of joke?’ The Reverend taps on the window with his signet ring. A thin crack appears, spreading over the grimy white window-frame and into the encircling ivy.

  ‘Not a joke. Beautification.’ Even Bright’s voice is shrinking. It rolls slowly through the book stacks, barely reaching his father’s well-polished Hungarian leather shoes. ‘Storerooms don’t usually have windows. So I painted one — pretty well, if I may say so. Sometimes it even fools me.’

  Stepping back as if the artificial window is toxic, his father knocks over a tower of children’s encyclopaedias retrieved from a dumpster. Half the alphabet and its thousands of possibilities topple, crashing into a stack of Nature magazines, which tumble into the Russian plays. Oblivious to the literature crashing around his ankles, the Reverend stares down at Bright: tiny Bright, hunched on his makeshift stool that drives splinters into his thighs when he’s writing in his underwear.

  ‘So this is where you’ve lived for the past year. In a cupboard. You wrote a literary bestseller from a broom cupboard.’

  ‘A supply cupboard, in an upmarket neighbourhood! You said so yourself! I wouldn’t be able to afford to live here if I didn’t live in a cupboard.’ But Bright is also beginning to wonder — is it really possible to sit so low and aim so high? To be as skinny as a pencil, in danger of being rubbed off the page when a family member comes close to him, yet still write something in the hope of changing the world? He tilts his head right back and surveys his notebooks from upside down. The notebooks have also become less than themselves: nothing but flimsy paper and cobweb words. ‘My book didn’t make as much money as you’d think.’ His voice is squeezed. ‘I may be sort of famous, but I’m certainly not rich.’

  ‘Rich!’ His father gives a loud cracked laugh. ‘I’ll tell you what’s rich. You shun your family, turn your back on a perfectly good home, and choose to live in an unheated cubbyhole with no windows.’

  ‘You should be glad about that. At least I can’t jump!’ Bright sits bolt upright and the room spins. It’s all horribly familiar: the terrible needling, the mounting pressure, the flickering at the edges of his vision.

  ‘Don’t say things like that.’ His father sounds aghast. ‘How do you think we felt, thousands of miles away, hearing what you’d done? Unable to get a flight home, realising by the time we got back it’d be all over the news. Considering this, do you think your jokes are seemly?’

  ‘Seemly?’ Bright stands up so fast that his crate crashes against the bed. ‘How seemly is it to have a second wife who’s made a fortune selling sex toys on the internet?’

  His father turns even redder. ‘That was a long time ago. She was young and she bitterly regrets that phase of her life. People change.’

  ‘Not as often as one would hope.’ Bright is sickened by the predictability of the
reproaches, the accusations — and his naïve longing for a truce. Splintered wood crunches under his feet, nausea swells behind his eyes.

  ‘By the way,’ adds his father, ‘Mimi sends her best wishes for a speedy recovery.’ Sure enough, here it is, the new but expected tone. There’s a plan afoot.

  ‘Is that why you’ve come?’ Bright edges backwards to stay clear of the undertow. ‘To pass on Mimi’s regards? How nice!’ The stepmother with the nickname of a French poodle sends salutations to her stepson who’s been inconsiderate enough to interrupt her holiday by jumping from a rooftop — and surviving.

  ‘She would have come herself, but she’s…’ His father hesitates.

  ‘At the beautician?’ Bright has another nickname for his father’s wife: the Paper Doll. Thin, brittle, forever advising other women not to sleep on their sides to avoid causing permanently creasing of the décolletage.

  His father flares with indignation. ‘We have fifteen coming for dinner on Saturday, including the Archdeacon! Mimi is invaluable when it comes to entertaining important guests.’

  Bright tries to whistle ‘The Entertainer’ but his mouth has shrivelled like an old lemon. ‘So why exactly have you come here today?’ His voice is clumsy, loud with anger and despair.

  ‘To check that you’re okay. Is that so strange? You’re my only son.’

  ‘Bullshit.’ Bright can smell the lie, his nose clogs up with its grey polluted dust. ‘Since when has my well-being ever been on your list of priorities? Did you come to extract an apology for embarrassing you? For besmirching the family name by botching my own death?’ By now he can barely see his father through the whirling stress: a smudge of silver hair, a pale area that might be a face, dark splodges suggesting eyes and mouth.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ protests his father — but Bright can no longer listen. Parental responsibility! he hears from a distance. Can’t help assuming… possible errors in upbringing… Feeling as if he’s choking, he turns his back on the noise, places his left foot on the bed and starts tightening his bootlace. Behind him his father’s voice rants on but Bright keeps at his task, pulling on the long nylon laces, hauling at them as if raising the mainsail on a yacht. Giant waves rise around him, salt fills his eyes and throat, and finally he can hear nothing and see nothing, succumbing with a grateful sob to the drowning.

  When he becomes aware of a burning in his foot, he lets go of the laces. His hands have red welts. Slowly, cautiously, he raises his head.

  ‘Last year it was based in Switzerland.’ Miraculously, his father is still talking as if he hasn’t noticed the storm. ‘In fact, it was Switzerland for many years.’

  Bright wipes sweat off his top lip, looking around for the bottled water that Eduardo leaves at his door each day. ‘So where is it now?’ He has no idea what his father is talking about. His head is a deflated balloon: empty, wrinkled, purposeless.

  ‘Still to be decided, apparently.’ The Reverend gazes at a sheaf of papers in his hand. ‘I must say, considering the timeframe, they’re cutting it fine. But somewhere in the Alps — France, perhaps. Or possibly Italy.’

  Swallowing a mouthful of tepid water, Bright is just about to say ‘When do you leave?’ when his father speaks again. ‘I’m not sure location is such an important issue. You’ll like either place well enough. Mountains. Fresh air.’

  Bright has just noticed that Crime and Punishment is slithering out from its place in the C stack. Carefully, still feeling unbalanced, he kneels. It appears that he may be going somewhere; he feels his way in. ‘Could you explain in a little more detail? What’s the precise nature and purpose of the trip?’

  Rather than explaining in a little more detail, his father looks surprisingly shifty for a man in a Ralph Lauren jacket and ministerial collar. ‘Well, we’re not talking about finishing school. Nor summer camp.’

  ‘Clearly not summer camp,’ agrees Bright, ‘as it’s early autumn.’ He waits. If only his father would get out of the room, he could breathe again and focus on the possibilities for rearranging his books: by author, or even chronologically? The current alphabetical system suddenly seems puerile. ‘So why should I go, exactly?’

  ‘Let’s say they would greatly benefit from your help. You have a depth of experience that most researchers would gladly pay for. And after what’s happened, it might be good for you to get away for a few weeks.’

  Get away. Getawaygetawaygetaway. The words ring like bells in Bright’s muffled head and his eardrums pop. ‘Oh YES.’ He speaks into a suddenly loud-and-clear world. ‘Getting away. What a wonderful idea.’ France or Italy; research of any kind; new faces, unknown landscapes — and not seeing the high beckoning building every time he steps out the door.

  His father rubs his hands together. ‘Good, I hoped you’d agree. Aiding scientific research can be exceedingly beneficial for a CV. When you come to apply for a real job, we can make it look like some sort of community service.’

  ‘Scientific research? You’ve told them I’m a novelist, right?’

  ‘They know all about you. You only need to answer their questions. Discuss whatever they consider relevant. Reveal how the human mind works. Piece of cake.’ Hastily the Reverend shuffles the papers back into the briefcase. ‘You don’t need to look at these, I’ll sort out the paperwork. We should know the location by the end of the week.’

  ‘And then — will you take me there? Wherever “there” might be?’ Some unaccountable part of Bright wants this more than anything. His father and him in a car, on a trip, without Mimi and hopefully without God. The road unravelling before them, his father buying sandwiches from service stations — D’you want ham and cheese, or curried chicken? And something safe to listen to, like John Betjeman reading his rhyming poems about old England, all the way to Continental Europe.

  ‘You want me to take you there?’ His father looks startled. ‘I suppose I could. Though I’ll have to check my schedule — it depends on whether I’m appointed to the new post, my inaugural sermon, et cetera.’ Suddenly he seems keen to leave, tightening the Velcro fastening of his collarette as another man might belt his coat before leaving.

  ‘Could Eduardo come along too? He doesn’t have a nine-to-five job either.’ Bright’s bonhomie is rising uncontrollably; he’s glowing, light leaking out of his ears and eyes. ‘Perhaps the researchers would be interested in him, too.’

  ‘Your upstairs neighbour?’ His father steps backwards into the K stack, sending Kipling, Kafka on the Shore and Keats flying. ‘Of course not!’

  ‘If it’s a case of money…’ Bright hesitates. Will Eduardo’s wealth impress his father or will it lead to tricky explanations about gambling? The Reverend’s moral boundaries are never easy to divine.

  ‘It’s not money,’ replies his father briskly. ‘Just a matter of experience. I’m assuming Eduardo hasn’t been through what you have.’

  ‘Been through what I have,’ repeats Bright. He’s lost again. Why the hell had he let himself become swamped by panic? If he’d only heard more about what the near future holds — or at least got a look at the papers so he knows the name of the institute.

  ‘When Eduardo has been through a near-death experience,’ says his father, sounding almost sarcastic, ‘we will take him to Switzerland. Until then he can continue living the life of the idle and privileged youth.’

  ‘A near-death experience? Switzerland?’ The second question is the only one Bright’s sure of. ‘But you said it wasn’t Switzerland. You said Italy.’

  His father starts and his hand flies to his heart. ‘What the —?’ He extracts a sleek new phone from his jacket pocket. ‘Oh, the silent vibrate function. Always a shock. Feels as if I’m having a coronary.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s a call from God?’

  His father looks stony-faced. ‘I have to go. I’ve been here far longer than the allotted time.’

  If only someone else was in the room to share the joke! If only Bright had a brother to spend some unallotted laugh-time with him! H
e glances up. Loneliness is there, ready to swoop from the ceiling with its dusty grey wings. Ready to smother him.

  Already his father is stepping too high back over the threshold. Standing on the side of normality at last, he thrusts his hand back into his son’s cramped and perilous life. ‘Goodbye, Brian. I’ll ring you.’

  Bright leans on the doorjamb, listening to the sound of his father leaving. His footsteps sound like clapperboards on a film set:

  Take 452: Venturing into a Dark Cramped Cupboard

  Take 453: Conversations with an Exceedingly Difficult Son

  Take 454: The Eternal Disappointment of a Distinguished Father

  But there’s something Bright has forgotten to say. He hobbles as quickly as he can onto the landing. ‘Excuse me —’ He leans into the circular stairwell and suddenly realises. He doesn’t know — has never known — how to address his father. ‘Excuse me, sir…? Reverend? There’s something very important I need to tell you!’

  Right left right left. Clack clack clack clack. The implacable sound of his father marching across the marble foyer, making a fast exit.

  ‘Please listen to me,’ cries Bright to the man he can’t name. ‘I didn’t jump! In the end I wasn’t sure I wanted to! I was —’

  The slam of the front door cuts off his final word. His confession or plea or wish echoes in the circular chamber and rises back up towards him. Even as he stares at his words, they vanish.

  WHEN THE RAIN BEGAN

  IT STARTS AS LACE is leaving the club, seeming to arrive out of nowhere. If only there were a human Met Office to keep an eye on our fluctuations, we might be better prepared for the consequences!

  It’s early evening, and leaves press their damp hands against the pavement. The ropes have already been placed out for tonight’s show, stained loops hanging from tarnished poles. Lace weaves her way out. In six hours’ time, club-goers will be here, queuing up to see her.

  Why had Johnny Jackson called a rehearsal this afternoon? Lace suspects it’s an excuse to see her. Since Johnny’s wife had a second baby, he’s had less time to sit around the club, cracking jokes. ‘Now all I’m doing is cracking up,’ he says, although his smooth forehead and springy hair belie his complaint.