Tuesdays Are Just As Bad
Page 17
He seemed genuinely surprised by this breathless condolence. I was unclear if this was a good thing or bad, so I continued anyway, as what I had to say was not going to get any better.
‘Number 2. It’s not my fault. I’m not sure what Chris was going through, but what he did, he was going to do because of him and not because of me. He didn’t see me and think “Hey! Adam is a cool dude. I should try that.” I do realise this may not be the most appropriate thing to say to a grieving person, but you have made my life more crappy than it needs to be and I would prefer if you stopped. I’m not asking to be friends or anything and I’m not blaming you for what happened after Christmas, but please, when you see me in the future, just ignore me.’
Philip stood there. I could not tell what his reaction was. I tensed my leg muscles in case I had to run away. But after a few moments he nodded.
‘Can I ask you a question, Adam?’ he said.
‘Sure.’
‘When you did try to kill yourself, with the hammer or the other time, why did you do it?’
‘Do you really want to know?’
‘Yes, I want to understand.’
I had not expected this development.
‘Well, it might take a while.’
‘I’m free now if you are.’
‘I guess.’
We spent the next three-quarters of an hour sitting upstairs in Marks and Spencer’s café, just having a chat. He apologised for the fight (apparently Chris’s inquest was later that week and he wasn’t handling it very well at the time) and I just talked about me and my problems out loud. We parted not as friends or enemies, but as two guys from the same class who’d both had a bad year.
***
Here are things I have learned recently.
Overdosing on pills has a surprisingly low success rate for suicide.
Having your stomach pumped is an extremely unpleasant experience.
Learning the previous two things puts a damper on your day.
Something seemed different after the second attempt. I’m not sure what, although starting on medication probably helped. There was no question of me not taking pills after my second attempt. My parents made me take them in front of them for the first two months (and still check if my supplies are depleting at the correct rate).
Still, even after everything, I’ll admit I was scared of the effect they might have. While I didn’t like me, I didn’t want to change me, lose any important part of me. I worried I wouldn’t be able to write any more, that the part of me that distinguished me from everyone else in a room would fade away, vanish in a plume of smoke.
After two weeks on the medication, I sat down, paper on the desk, pen ready for action (the first week on the pills was rough, but things smoothed out somewhat after that). I put the tip to the page and, after a moment’s hesitation, I began to write. I wrote for three pages, a story about a hungry kid on the street chasing a rat so he would have something to eat. I was still worried about things. The stuff I wrote was still grim and depressing. I was still me. So I remained the same, except everything felt more even.
Going back to the day I ambushed Philip, that evening I walked with Aoife along the river, headed towards the Observatory. The occasion was the exciting comeback/second gig of The Laypersons, with the trio together again at last – Douglas, Barry and Sinead. The reason for the reunion of the original crew depended on who you asked. Barry said that The Laypersons couldn’t survive without his precision drumming. Douglas said Barry’s playing was cheaper than buying batteries for the drum machine. I don’t really know what Sinead said since I don’t know her very well, but we have hung out a few times since then and she seems cool.
Aoife and I are still somehow friends, but we agreed that our relationship was probably not a good idea, at least until we both figured ourselves out. She is still amazing, though, smart and pretty and all those things. I thought of that as we got closer to the large telescope which pointed skyward. It was a bit of a walk from the city centre so we had lots of time to talk about what we were writing at the moment, the new haircut of Fintan from our writing group and whether I should get the same haircut to confuse people.
The stage was still being set up as we arrived. We could see Linda and Andrew waiting in the crowd. The band were tuning up.
‘Soundcheck guy, can you please check our sound?’ said Douglas.
They hadn’t seen us yet, so before we joined them we gazed up at the stars poking through the sheet of space. It was infinite, which, to be honest, I don’t really understand, so instead I thought of it as really deep, a well with no visible bottom, with dots of light reflecting.
‘At last, I’ve shown you some real stars,’ I said.
Aoife laughed. ‘Man, you would be a great boyfriend if you weren’t such a terrible boyfriend.’
‘That’s fair.’
We sat on the grass, our hands tantalisingly close. For now, the dew on the grass would have to do. I really owe Aoife so much. What happened was that when I told Linda to tell her to get well soon, I hadn’t realised that no one knew she was sick, since it had just come on that morning. Linda texted Aoife to find out what was going on and Aoife, who had been woken up by her mother at this point, realised the only way I could have known was if I had been in the house. She put two and two together and saw that the bathroom pills were gone. Then she rang my phone and when she saw it was off, she rang the radio station my mum worked at. Fearing the worst, Mum raced home, ringing the landline as she drove, and found me.
I owe Aoife so much that the least I could do was not try to get her to go out with me again.
I do owe one other person, although it was also kind of his fault, so only partial credit. When I woke up in the hospital, my stomach in bits and my head a mess, the room was filled by my parents and doctors, but he was there too, standing in the corner. He was, as usual, pale as a sheet, with eyes which looked permanently forlorn. After all this time, he had the exact same appearance, a monochrome copy of me the night I died: his face and T-shirt covered with blood, one shoelace permanently untied for eternity. It’s strange, he looked like me but in the way a painting looks like its subject, somehow both vivid and flat. I remember the first time I saw him I was so frightened, but this time he was the one who looked scared.
‘Hey you,’ I said and he smiled.
Sometime later, at night, when we were alone, he told me he had a theory about why he was able to move around at night when I was asleep. He partly realised it the night Aoife and I had … you know, but finally figured it out later. If I wasn’t thinking of him, he was no longer tied to me. That was the first night I completely let him go.
‘That’s it?’
‘That’s it.’
‘You sure?
‘Well, we have to test it.’
‘Okay. How?’
‘I guess you should try to forget me.’
It’s hard to forget your own ghost, you know, but he tried his best to help. For the next month, he stayed quiet and out of sight, hiding behind my back, although I always knew he was there. I thought this was silly.
However, one Friday, Aoife and Douglas and co. visited and I was so delighted that I completely forgot about him. When they left, I suddenly remembered and, poof, he appeared in front of me.
‘Where did you go?’
‘Oh, just down the road. Snooped in the shop.’
‘That’s pretty anticlimactic.’
He laughed.
So that was it. Sometimes I see him and sometimes I don’t think of him.
That evening I sat under a purple sky watching the band tune up. I could see him, he was still here, my ghost. I thought about everything that had happened during the past year. Then, a second later, Aoife’s fingers touched mine and didn’t move away, so now I’m smiling at nothing because I’m still here.
Acknowledgements
I have the odd habit of checking the acknowledgements at the back first when starting a book, so I can’t tell you how
excited I am to finally write my own. Fortunately, I have many people to thank, thus filling up this page nicely.
First I would like to thank Wendy, Deirdre, Sarah and everyone else in Mercier Press. It was an honour to be published by them and if the book is any good, it’s because of their hard work.
To my family, who supported my ambitions of being a writer, I do apologise and can now prove that I was doing something when not tidying my room. Thank you Ceilinn, Cillian, Síofra, Fionn, Cian, Dad and Aunt Rose.
I would also like to thank Nellie for her advice, Gráinne for inspiring the title, and my various early readers: Rachel, Barry, Meredith and Síofra. Most of all, I would like to thank Laura Jane Cassidy, who read a very early draft and whose enthusiastic thumbs up and excellent advice are the reasons this book exists in your hands now.
Finally thank you, reader. I hope you liked it.
June 2018
About the Author
Cethan Leahy is a writer, filmmaker, and editor of Irish literary magazine ‘The Penny Dreadful’. His short stories are published in ‘The Looking Glass,’ ‘Wordlegs’ and ‘Five Dials’ and he has written two Fiction Express eBooks for Middle Grade, ‘The Chosen One (and his mum and his dad and his sister)’ and ‘Prince Charming and his Quest for a Wife’. Cethan’s animation short ‘The Beast of Bath’ was broadcast on national television. His short film ‘The Amazing’ appeared in Cork film anthology ‘Cork, Like’ in 2013. His radio programmes, including children’s drama ‘Tales from the Fairy Fort’, have appeared on LifeFM and RTÉJnr digital radio. He has also contributed illustration work to Cork comics press Turncoat Press.
About the Publisher
We hope you enjoyed this book.
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Table of Contents
I – The Stranger Song
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
II – Everybody Knows
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
5/10/17 Adam Murphy
Sixteen
CHANGES
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Ghost Sickness
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
III – Ain’t No Cure For Love
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
IV – Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye
Forty
Forty-One
Forty-Two
Epilogue – The Future
One
Acknowledgements
About the Author
About the Publisher