Suicide Club, The

by Quigley, Sarah

  While he’s been sleeping, the light has leapfrogged across the sky. Now it’s rushing in from the west, past blue emergency telephones and over wire fences. Empty hills crouch low in the departing day. He shivers and pulls the rug around his shoulders. ‘Where are we? How far to go?’

  ‘I’ll just check.’ Lewis taps his navigator screen, as if it will pour out answers to all possible questions: minutes remaining to destination, estimated time of arrival, the likely state of Bright’s mind when he gets out of the car and sees —

  ‘What the hell?’ He’s already said this in the past five minutes, and he detests repetition, but he’s just caught sight of a large green road sign. ‘What’s going on? Are we in Germany?’

  ‘That’s right. We’ve been in Germany for a while now. You’ve slept through most of it.’

  ‘Lewis, what have you done? Talk about missing the mark! I guess you turned left when you should have turned right.’ He starts to laugh, partly from relief; he’s just realised his extreme reluctance to arrive anywhere, to throw off the rug and open the door and emerge into a chilly unknown evening. ‘I suppose we’ve got a bit of backtracking to do.’

  ‘What? There’s no mistake.’ Lewis swivels the rear-view mirror so he can get Bright in his sight again. ‘We’re in Bavaria, where we’re supposed to be. See?’ He points to the coloured spaghetti lines on the navigator screen. ‘In fact, we’re nearly there.’

  ‘In Bavaria? Where we’re supposed to be?’ There’s a croak in Bright’s voice. He coughs up phlegm and tries again. ‘My father told me the Dolomites.’

  ‘When did he tell you that?’ As Lewis speaks the sun fades from the car, and everything falls into grey.

  ‘I don’t know. A couple of weeks ago?’ Bright edges closer to the window, gripping the door handle.

  Clunk. It’s the heavy sound of central locking. ‘I guess if you’d answered your phone since then…’ Lewis sounds unbearably apologetic. ‘If you can get into your mailbox, you’ll probably find…’

  Suddenly Bright is incandescent with rage. His anger blazes through the locked windows, illuminating the road and the speeding cars around them. ‘That’s your answer to everything!’ he shouts. ‘So you think I’m an idiot and a liability because I can’t use my phone?’

  ‘Don’t say that. Don’t be like that.’ Lewis scrunches his head into his tortoise neck. ‘We’re friends, you and I. We can always be friends. We know how to talk.’

  ‘You’re not my friend.’ Bright wrenches at the door, pounds at the padded panels with his fists. ‘You don’t even trust me to sit in a car without jumping!’

  Lewis doesn’t answer. He takes a firmer grip of the wheel and checks his mirrors, but a bead of sweat runs down behind his ear, leaving a tiny wet streak on his collar.

  And so Bright is driven into a Bavarian village in the same way that, more than twenty-four hours earlier, he left his home. Half-lying in the back of a car driven by a silent uniformed chauffeur, fists splayed by his sides, and in his chest a messy crumbled weight that, on better days, passes for his heart.

  ‘Here we are, then.’ The words come from the cavern of the driver’s seat: something that might be said to a child delivered to a foster home, or an elderly person to a hospital, or a prisoner to his cell. ‘Here we are, then!’ — the single point being that there is no we. Only one person will be staying; the other gets to drive away, free.

  The engine is turned off but Bright doesn’t move. For several minutes he lies there, slumped against the window, looking out at what, apparently, is here. A waist-high wall of crooked stones, an open gate. A shiny new sign, black metal letters lit by white lights: THE PALACE. A weedy gravel path, and across an expanse of grass, floating like a ship, a large dark building.

  He sees two pale faces at dimly lit windows: one on the second floor, the other directly above it. Here we are, then. They stare out of their separate frames, seemingly unaware of each other, looking across the garden towards the road. Can they see him lying there in the black car? He doesn’t know but he stares back, feeling strangely short of breath.

  Lewis is opening the driver’s door, getting out. A blast of cold air. Still he can’t move: paralysed with indecision, crippled with fear. Where are the hands now? That pair of hands nudging him in the small of the back, pushing him off the edge and into the future? For the first time he admits doubt: a tiny but undeniable leak in his previously watertight conviction. Had there really been someone else up there? Or had he simply needed the final, terrible decision to be made for him? Now, acknowledging this possibility — and the next second recognising it as probability — it’s worse than ever. Can’t retreat, can’t go forward, can’t escape. When his door is opened from the outside he falls like a dead man into the street.

  PART THREE

  * * *

  THE CORRIDOR

  THE FIRST THING HE notices about The Palace is the smell. It does strange things to his head, takes him back to a time when he was too small for his age — with the exception of his startlingly big feet.

  ‘They take up half your legs!’ smirked the shoe-shop woman.

  It was already an all-wrong day, floating and undirectional. The Reverend rarely went shopping but someone had to buy Bright a pair of school lace-ups, and Bright’s mother, initially so reluctant to go to Africa, had taken to Swaziland with an enthusiasm far greater than she’d ever shown for motherhood.

  So there they were, Bright’s mother far away, gazing with reborn eyes on dusty slums, and his father trudging one last pedestrian street before he could also abdicate parental duties, thanks to the invention of boarding school. ‘Are you implying —’ he frowned at the shop woman — ‘that my son has abnormally large feet? I hope your shoes aren’t priced according to size.’

  ‘Fortunately for Thumper here,’ the woman said, her moustached lip quivering with amusement, ‘all sizes cost the same.’ She’d brandished a pair of lace-ups long enough to accommodate a rowing team, making Bright blunder backwards into a stack of empty shoeboxes. For the rest of the day, he heard their soft, papery crashing echoing in his embarrassed ears.

  The Reverend had clicked his tongue at him in a disappointed manner — ‘I hope you’re not short-sighted into the bargain!’ — while the shop-woman snickered, ‘Two left feet!’ Staring at the top of her head as she knelt in front of him, manoeuvring his feet into the cavernous shoes, Bright wanted to fell her with one vicious karate chop. An acrid smell wafted up from her blouse, making him screw up his nose — and from that day on he’d walked in an odd, hobbled way, with his toes scrunched up as if trying to shrink his feet.

  He’s doing it now, trudging down the corridor with retracted toes. With every step, the fragments rattle in his head, neither touching nor connecting. What is it that’s dragged him so far back to that sticky August day? ‘The smell,’ he realises. ‘The scorn. The shoe-woman. The Shoe-woman, the Scorn, the Smell.’ Soon he’s marching in time to his chant.

  The corridor seems to go on forever. Squeaking floor, mounting boredom, suppressed nerves: again, back to his school days. He looks at the paper screwed up in his sweaty right hand. 69. Stopping to blow his nose, he turns the paper upside down. 69! Is it possible that he’s the only person to have reached the age of twenty without realising that this suggestive number reads the same both ways up?

  The very last door matches the number. Long scratches in its dark oak face. He raises his knuckles to rap on wood —

  but already the door is opening from the inside.

  ‘Shoe-woman, scorn —’ Bright almost falls through the doorway, but his robotic chant continues regardless. ‘Scorn, smell — hello!’

  ‘Careful.’ The woman steps back as he staggers inside. ‘Are you all right? I heard you stop somewhere along the corridor, and that was about five minutes ago.’

  ‘I was clearing my olfactory passages. This place smells very odd.’

  A slight cloud crosses the woman’s smooth thirty-something face. ‘Good to me
et you.’ She sounds reproving. ‘Welcome to The Palace.’

  It’s hard to focus on what she’s saying because of her breasts. They’re enormous. They’re buttoned into a tight white coat that is hardly sufficient to restrain them. Mesmerised by their thrusting swell, Bright realises too late he’s supposed to have shaken hands — but he wouldn’t trust his fingers near that cleavage.

  ‘Let’s get started, shall we?’ Pushing back her hair, the woman motions him into a chair and retreats behind her desk. This is no better: now her breasts rest on top of her blotter pad, and a glimpse of cream lace peeks out of the white coat.

  Leakage! thinks Bright, desperately trying to stop his eyes from straying. And — ‘Chlorine!’ He says this out loud, suddenly, belatedly, identifying the smell in his nostrils. Yes, it’s chlorine, and its thin acrid smell seeps down the corridor, out the front door and onwards, through Germany and through France, over the grey choppy Channel, all the way back to that suffocating childhood summer when a suburban shoe-shop owner had laughed at Bright, her clothes quietly reeking of bleach, and her breath of bad humour and —

  ‘Garlic!’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ The strawberry-blonde woman looks up from her folder, trying to look unconcerned.

  ‘No, I beg your pardon.’ He’s being sincere but somehow, in this apricot-painted room crammed with inappropriate office furniture, it sounds ironic. ‘I’ve finally identified the odours. At least, two of them.’

  But the woman doesn’t seem keen on hearing any more about bad smells. ‘Let’s start with introductions, shall we?’ She smoothes the consternation from her forehead with her fingertips. ‘At least for this initial session.’

  ‘Aren’t initial sessions the only ones that necessitate introductions?’ Bright winces. Unintentional irony again!

  She ignores this. ‘You’ll already know my name from the introduction pack. I’m Dr Mammary.’

  Bright bends forward in his chair. He feels light-headed. The only thing he’s eaten since watching Lewis drive away into the darkness is a Mars Bar unearthed from his suitcase. ‘Dr Mammary!’ He laughs quietly into his knees. ‘Dr Mammary!’

  A piece of paper is slapped down on the desk in front of him. Straightening up, wiping his eyes on his sleeve, he sees DR MALLORY written in sharp capital letters. ‘Please don’t try to be funny,’ says Dr Mallory crisply. ‘Here at The Palace jokes can be dangerous things. All too easily misunderstood.’

  To stop himself laughing, Bright stares hard at his hands. There’s a deep cut on his thumb, running across the flesh, almost splitting the nail in two. It’s encrusted with blood, dark red, gluey, like the filling of an old jam tart. I was clawing at Lewis’ car door. This works instantly. ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ he says seriously. ‘I must have misheard. I never joke about people’s names. Names are important.’

  ‘Apology accepted.’ Dr Mallory’s eyelashes dip behind her tortoise-shell-rimmed glasses. ‘Now you can introduce yourself to me.’

  ‘You have my name right in front of you,’ points out Bright. ‘Unless you’re reading notes on the mating habits of voles, or the regional delicacies of Bavaria, or —’

  ‘That’s not the point.’ Dr Mallory’s breasts quiver in beautiful reproach. ‘We had a deal. We agreed that we’d introduce ourselves.’

  As the clock on the wall ticks on, Bright’s stomach rumbles. ‘I’ve just realised I’m hungry.’

  She sighs again. ‘Hello, I’m Dr Mallory. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Brian O’Connor.’

  Bright’s chair swoops under him, throwing him once again into the past. Why are you so clumsy, Brian? I can’t understand where you get it from. Not even your mother, for all her faults, was so elephant-footed. The acrid smell he’d noticed in the corridors surrounds him, filling his nostrils, choking him.

  ‘Brian? Brian!’ Dr Mallory is kneeling beside him, cheeks flushed with alarm.

  Strangely, he finds he’s lying on the floor, with hard carpet against his cheek. ‘Bright! My name is Bright. Not — not that name. You mustn’t use that.’

  ‘What happened?’ She heaves him to his feet, offering him an alarmingly tempting close-quarter glimpse of softly freckled breasts. ‘Would you like to see a doctor?’

  ‘I’m already seeing one,’ he says weakly, averting his eyes from the swell of her chest. ‘Sorry. I mean, no.’

  Dr Mallory settles him back in his sticky vinyl chair and retreats behind her desk again, flicking through notes. ‘Is this sort of fall a regular occurrence?’

  It’s hard to remember, let alone think, with the persistent drone of his father’s criticism in his ears. ‘I don’t think so. It’s probably — low blood sugar.’ Yes, this sounds like a plausible reason for falling off a chair. ‘Low blood sugar,’ he repeats. ‘I’m sure that’s what it is.’

  ‘You weren’t at the Welcome Buffet last night, were you? Nor did I see you at breakfast.’

  ‘I was tired after the journey. I slept through both.’

  ‘That’s a long time to go without food.’ Dr Mallory bites her lip with even white teeth. ‘We don’t serve cooked lunches but there’s a snack bar in the New Building. And unfortunately dinner isn’t until seven o’clock.’

  ‘Seven o’clock! Seven o-fucking-clock!’ He stares. ‘I never eat that early! I haven’t eaten that early since I was —’ He swallows painfully. ‘Since I was at boarding school.’

  ‘You’re at The Palace now, so I’m afraid you’ll have to.’ She adds a few quick scribbles to her secret folder. ‘It’s only for a month.’

  ‘A month!’ He leaps up, sending his chair crashing to the floor. ‘What the hell are you talking about? I’m only supposed to be here for two weeks!’

  Dr Mallory also rises to her feet. A strand of her strawberry-coloured hair falls forward; even though her face is large and square, she looks almost pretty. In spite of his consternation Bright’s disobedient eyes stray downwards again, past the thin gold necklace, across the lightly freckled chest, to the irresistible swell. She’s too old for you! he babbles silently. She must be nearly forty. He wrenches his gaze away and fixes it on the scenic calendar behind her: golden daffodils, green fields.

  She’s talking: something about making a mistake. He keeps his eyes on the name of the month, written in several languages, and blanks his mind. ‘April,’ he says. ‘Is it April?’ This is better. In losing his memory, he also loses his lust.

  ‘You know it’s not April.’ Dr Mallory glances at the calendar. ‘That was left behind when the hotel closed. Let’s concentrate on this latest misunderstanding, shall we?’

  Bright risks looking at her, but only out of the corner of his eye. ‘Your administration person must have made a mistake.’

  ‘I was saying,’ she repeats, ‘that perhaps the mistake was yours?’

  ‘There’s really no way I can stay a month.’ He tries to sound assertive. ‘I have things to finish up at home. Besides, I’m doing you a favour. It can’t be all that easy to find people who have stared death in the face and are willing to talk about it.’

  Dr Mallory seems to be tiring of this conversation. She opens a drawer and rummages around amongst printouts. ‘I must get my computer set up,’ she says with sudden annoyance. ‘Clearly you’ve got the wrong end of the stick. You’ll have to talk it over with Geoffrey.’

  ‘What? So who gave me false information? Who betrayed me?’ Confusion and exhaustion strike, a double whammy, making him clutch the edge of the desk. The calendar winks at him with one black-rimmed square eye. ‘The twenty-third of April,’ he mutters. ‘Is that Hitler’s birthday? Or Shakespeare’s?’

  But Dr Mallory, well endowed physically, appears to be sadly lacking when it comes to historical knowledge. Clearly she neither knows nor cares whether the twenty-third of April spawned a literary genius in 1564, or a lame megalomaniac in 1889. She’s holding the door open for Bright to leave, though as she looks at him there’s a softening in her face that, once again, makes her seem younger and more b
eautiful than he’d like. ‘So, to backtrack slightly,’ she says more gently, ‘you smell things?’

  ‘Of course I smell things. Being born with anosmia is a rare phenomenon. It afflicts only one per cent of the population.’ He doesn’t feel happy about resorting to sarcasm, but it’s the only way to avoid falling for her.

  ‘I only meant…’ she begins, while, above her tumbling hair, the halo of patience grows in radiance. ‘I only meant that there’s no discernible smell in this corridor. It was thoroughly cleaned just before you arrived. One might possibly pick up a hint of green-apple floor polish. But that’s all.’

  Bright joins her at the door, inhaling deeply. ‘Chlorine,’ he contradicts. ‘And garlic, and some kind of sulphur.’

  Dr Mallory is taller than he is. When she sighs, her breath is sweet with lip gloss but heavy with experience. ‘You know that this used to be a spa hotel. The area is famous for its natural springs and traditional cures. You’ve read all this in your introductory pack, so now your mind is conjuring up appropriate smells. The water, the health foods and the minerals.’

  ‘That’s not correct!’ protests Bright. ‘I haven’t even read the fucking introductory pack.’ He feels like punching her on her ridiculous square chin, while also wanting so badly to kiss her that he has to step on his sore foot to distract himself with pain.

  ‘We’ll save this for the first group session. It might lead somewhere. Now, why don’t you visit the snack bar? You look like you need some protein. You’ll find peanuts there, and biscuits. I think they even have carob bars.’

  ‘Carob bars!’ Bright gives a stagy laugh. ‘I’d rather have a G&T, but I suppose that’s out of the question.’

  ‘I sincerely hope you’re joking.’ Dr Mallory looks forbidding: an unappealing expression that he hopes he’ll be able to recall later, to avoid being kept awake by memories of her much more appealing curves. ‘The Palace has very strict rules about alcohol.’