‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ve decided.’
Roland looked at her, carefully. ‘And …?’
‘And I want to know.’
‘Are you sure?’ asked Francis.
‘Positive.’ Jessica looked very determined. ‘If Roland’s right, I’ve got to know sometime anyway, haven’t I?’
‘It doesn’t have to be now …’
‘It might as well be.’ Jessica turned to face Roland and took a deep breath. ‘OK. You can tell me. How did I die?’
‘You killed yourself,’ said Roland. ‘You committed suicide.’
Nobody spoke. Nobody moved. The silence in the room was so thick that it was difficult to breathe. For a moment Jessica’s ghost body shimmered and dimmed, but then flickered back to normal.
‘Is that true?’ asked Francis quietly. ‘Is that what happened?’
‘Mm?’ Jessica turned to him. ‘Oh … yes … Yes, it is.’
‘And you remember it?’
Jessica nodded. She remembered everything now. All the days of preparation and planning, the weeks it had taken to get together enough pills, then the waiting for a time when both her aunt and uncle would be out, and the walking out into the woods at the back of the house …
‘Why?’ It was Andi who asked the question. ‘Why would you want to kill yourself?’
Jessica didn’t answer. She was staring into the distance, lost in thought.
‘Was it your aunt and uncle?’ asked Francis. ‘Were they … doing something to you?’
‘No, no, it wasn’t anything like that,’ said Jessica. ‘They were nice. Everyone was always … very nice.’
She could remember how nice everyone had been that day her mother had collapsed and died in the kitchen from a brain tumour. Her grandmother had been particularly nice. She had taken Jessica in and looked after her and then, when she had died of cancer a year later, everyone had been nice all over again.
Aunt Jo and Uncle George had been nice enough to say she could come and live with them and they had come to collect her and packed up all her things and been as nice as they knew how … But by then, of course, she was in The Pit, and when you were in The Pit, people being nice to you didn’t mean anything. Nothing did.
‘It’s funny, isn’t it,’ said Roland, ‘how people being nice doesn’t help when you feel like that. You know they want to help, you know they’re trying to help, but it’s like they’re in another world. They have no idea how you’re really feeling. Or what to do about it.’
Yes, thought Jessica. Yes, that was pretty much how it had been.
‘And you can try and pretend that everything’s OK.’ Roland was still talking. ‘You can act as if you think it matters whether you’ve done any school work or what you eat or what you wear, but in the end … the pretending is such an effort, and you get so tired, that all you really want is for it to stop. For everything to stop.’
His words jolted another memory in Jessica. It was the exact moment, walking back from school one Friday, when it had first occurred to her that there was a way to make it stop. A very simple way to finish with all the pain and the pretending and The Pit. And once the idea was in her mind it had held a strange fascination. She had tried to push it away, but that only seemed to make it stronger. It was such a warm and comforting idea, such a reassurance when she was feeling so bad …
‘And then once you’ve had the idea,’ said Roland, ‘it won’t go away. You find yourself coming back to it again and again.’
Jessica looked at him. ‘Did your friend tell you all this?’
Roland shook his head. ‘I didn’t need anyone to tell me stuff like that,’ he said.
It was a moment before Jessica understood what he meant.
‘You?’ She stared at him. ‘Seriously?’
Roland gave a little snort. ‘Have you any idea how it feels to be like this?’ He gestured down to the bulging mass of his body. ‘To have everyone looking at you wherever you go, staring, laughing, calling you names when they think you can’t hear, calling you names when they know you can …’ There was a bitterness in his voice as he continued. ‘You look round, and everyone else seems to be able to get up in the morning and smile and laugh and enjoy themselves … and you think, why can’t I do that? Why can’t I be ordinary? Why do I have to be different from everyone else?’
‘And that’s what gets to you in the end, isn’t it?’ It was Francis who was speaking now. ‘The being different. You want so much to be like everyone else but …’ He looked sympathetically across at Roland as he spoke. ‘… you know it’s never going to happen. You’re always going to be different. With you it’s your weight, with me it was all this.’ He gestured to the drawings on the walls and the dolls on the shelves, then turned to Jessica with an odd, lopsided smile. ‘You remember that first day, when you came and sat on the bench? That’s what I’d gone there to think about. I don’t know if I’d have actually done anything, but … that’s what I was thinking about.’
‘So …’ said Roland, ‘that means all three of us were …’
‘Four.’
The voice was Andi’s, and she spoke with her gaze fixed firmly on the floor in front of her, her fingers picking aggressively at tufts in the carpet. ‘If you’re talking about what it’s like to be different, try being short and ugly when everyone else is tall and pretty. Try beating the living daylights out of anyone who dares to laugh at you … and then realising that means there’s no one left to talk to.’
She looked up and stared defiantly at the faces around her. ‘I was all set to do it, before Mum brought me round to meet Francis that day. And I’d have done it, too. I know I would, because things had got so bad that …’ her gaze returned to the carpet ‘… that it felt like the only way out.’
For almost a minute, nobody spoke, and it was Francis who finally broke the silence.
‘You know you thought we were all here to help Jessica?’ he said, looking across at Roland. ‘Seems to me it’s more like she’s here to help us.’
19
Neither Francis, nor Andi nor Roland, had ever told anyone they had been thinking about ‘ending it all’, and to find they could share these thoughts and talk about them with others who had felt the same way, was curiously liberating. It might sound strange, but they spent the rest of that morning talking – and sometimes even laughing – about how the idea had first occurred to them, how they had thought they might do it, and wondering whether any of them would really have gone through with it.
They looked at the newspaper articles that Roland had downloaded about Jessica’s death – though there wasn’t much to laugh at in them. The first was a description of how Jessica’s body had been found by a woman walking her dog, and taken to the hospital, and the other was a description of the funeral which, to Jessica’s surprise, had been attended by several hundred people from the village and from her school. Reading about it was, she found, slightly embarrassing.
Jessica had never really considered that killing herself might have an effect on the lives of the people around her. She had thought, if she had thought about it at all, that her absence would probably make things easier for the people she knew. Nothing could have been further from the truth, as a look at the website her aunt had set up made clear.
On the site’s home page was a big picture of Jessica – the same as the one that hung in the hall of the house in Bannock Lane – with a piece beneath it by Aunt Jo explaining how, after what had happened to her niece, she had given up her job and now spent her time trying to prevent something similar from happening to anyone else. She had trained as a counsellor, set up the website, and if you wanted to get in touch with her you could email her or call the number that was given at the top.
There were some interesting pages on the site describing the feelings that Jessica had privately called Being In The Pit – the feeling that nothing meant anything or ever could, of being different, of being completely alone.
There were a lot more pa
ges on what caused people to feel this way and what they might do about it, with pieces by doctors on the medical causes and the drugs that can sometimes help you feel better, with descriptions by psychologists of techniques that some people had found helpful, phone numbers you could call, books you could read, websites you could visit, and – perhaps most interesting of all – pages of letters from people describing what it had been like for them, and what they had done to get themselves out of The Pit. Or to stop themselves falling back into it.
It was one of these letters that described something Jessica remembered and that the others instantly recognised as well. It talked about the extraordinary speed with which the feeling that ‘life had no meaning’ could disappear on certain occasions and everything become ‘normal’ again – for a while at least. How one day you could be in the depths of despair and the next you could wake up feeling … OK. How little things like something someone said, or a scene from a film, or even a piece of music could change your mood in the blink of an eye. And how, when you were in one mood, the other seemed so silly. When the sun was out you could hardly remember the clouds and, when you were in The Pit, it was difficult to believe that sunshine had ever existed.
‘Like me, yesterday morning,’ said Roland. ‘I was feeling really bad before you two came round.’ He nodded at Francis and Jessica. ‘But then, when I started talking to you, suddenly everything was different. I don’t know why … It just was.’
‘I think it’s the shock of seeing Jessica as a ghost that does that,’ said Andi. ‘It sort of snaps you out of yourself. I remember when Francis took me up to his room and Jessica walked through the middle of the bed … It was just so interesting. Much more interesting than being angry or miserable.’
Francis did not think it was the shock of Jessica being a ghost that had caused his own mood to change. He thought Jessica had done that simply by … being Jessica. He had never really been interested in the fact that she was a ghost. It was Jessica as a friend that had made the difference.
Whatever the reason, however, the one thing they all agreed was that everything had changed since Jessica appeared. None of them had been in The Pit since they had met her. Which made Francis’s idea – that the reason they could all see Jessica was so that she could stop them doing what she had done – particularly convincing.
Jessica herself was less sure.
‘If it’s true,’ she said, ‘that I’m here to stop you all making the same mistake I did, and I’ve done it … Why am I still here?’
Everyone looked at Roland. He was the one who’d read the books and seemed to have all the answers.
‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘the obvious answer is that there’s someone else.’
‘Someone else?’ Jessica frowned.
‘Well, you were a ghost for almost a year before you met Francis,’ said Roland. ‘Then it was another month before you met Andi. Then me yesterday. Why should it stop at three? Maybe there’s someone else you still have to help.’
They were still discussing this possibility when Francis glanced at his watch, saw it was lunchtime, and said that if anyone was hungry there was probably some bread and cheese in the kitchen.
‘Oh, yes …’ Roland gave a little cough. ‘I meant to say. Mum said I was to invite you all back for lunch at my house. If you want.’ He blushed slightly. ‘But it’s all right. You don’t have to come if …’
‘Francis told me about the food your mum cooks,’ interrupted Andi. ‘And you have a pool as well, don’t you? Can we go for a swim after?’
‘Sure.’
‘Well, that settles it.’ Andi stood up. ‘Come on, you lot! Let’s go!’
Francis watched as she and Roland headed for the stairs.
So that’s it, he thought. You spend the morning talking about suicide with two other people who have been thinking about it and the ghost of someone who’s already done it … and then you push off for lunch and a swim.
He glanced across at Jessica who was thinking herself into a coat.
‘Funny sort of morning,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘Are you OK?’
‘I think so.’ Jessica floated over to join him. ‘That first day, when I came and sat beside you on the bench … You said you were wondering about it then?’
‘Yes.’
‘You never said anything.’
‘No.’
‘Not to anyone?’
‘No.’
‘Nor did I,’ said Jessica. ‘And, looking back on it, that was definitely a mistake.’
20
Lunch at Roland’s house was a remarkably cheerful affair. Mrs Boyle had roasted three chickens, along with a mountain of roast potatoes, roast vegetables, sausages, bacon, bread sauce, onion gravy, and a basket of freshly baked rolls in case anyone had the odd corner that still needed filling.
Roland’s father carved the chickens. He was a tough, wiry looking man not much bigger than his wife and Francis couldn’t help wondering how two such diminutive people could have produced a son who was bigger than both of them put together.
When Jessica got Andi to ask Mr Boyle what he did for a living, they discovered he had started out as a crane operator, before borrowing enough money to buy his own crane and, finally, setting up his own company.
‘He goes all over the country,’ said Mrs Boyle proudly. ‘You want something heavy lifted, my Ronnie’s the man to do it!’
He had, it turned out, recently been involved in lifting railway carriages from a steep embankment after a passenger train had come off the line near Doncaster. And while Mrs Boyle cleared the plates before bringing out the puddings – two apple pies, a large bowl of chocolate mousse, a fruit salad and a jug of cream – Mr Boyle used some spare cutlery and some string to give a demonstration of the problems involved in lifting something weighing fifty tonnes, without it slipping out of the harness and killing the people underneath.
When lunch was over, Francis and Andi offered to help with the dishes, but Mrs Boyle wouldn’t hear of it.
‘Ronnie and I will look after all that,’ she said, shooing them towards the door. ‘You go and watch one of Rollo’s films or play on his computer. Save your energy for a swim later.’
Roland had an impressive collection of films and games, but Andi took one look at his room – with the drink cans littering the floor, the plates with the half-eaten remains of food, and the dirt and dust – and said there was no way she was doing anything until there was somewhere she could sit down without risking serious infection.
Before they knew it, Roland had been dispatched to find a Hoover, dusters and cleaning fluid, Jessica had been told to float up in one corner of the room and keep out of the way, and Francis had been sent back to the kitchen with a pile of dirty plates, and told to bring back some bin bags.
Mrs Boyle asked what he wanted the bin bags for.
‘Roland’s tidying his room a bit,’ Francis explained, ‘and he needs something to put the rubbish in.’
‘Tidying his room?’ Mrs Boyle stared at him. ‘Really?’
‘It was Andi’s idea,’ Francis admitted. ‘She sort of told him he had to.’
‘And he’s doing it?’ Mr Boyle looked equally astonished.
‘Andi can be quite forceful when she sets her mind to something,’ said Francis … ‘I don’t think she gave him much choice.’
Mrs Boyle had taken a roll of black bin bags from a drawer, but did not pass them to Francis. ‘If you don’t mind, I’ll take these in myself.’ She headed towards the door. ‘Perhaps she can get him to change his sheets at the same time …’
‘I’ll look after those, shall I?’ Mr Boyle gestured to the pile of plates Francis was carrying. He took the plates, scraped the bits of food into a bin and began loading them into the dishwasher. ‘She hasn’t been able to get in to his room for weeks, you know. Roland wouldn’t let her. He wouldn’t let anyone in. I don’t mind telling you, we were getting worried. We knew he was unhappy about something …
but we didn’t know what, and he wouldn’t say. He wouldn’t see anyone, didn’t want to go out …’ Mr Boyle turned to look across at Francis. ‘And then you come along and … bingo … All the lights are back on and he’s asking if he can invite people back for lunch! I don’t know what you did to him, but … What did you do to him?’
‘Nothing really,’ said Francis. ‘We just … talked, you know.’
‘Talked …’ Mr Boyle let out a long sigh. ‘We tried that. Trouble was we could never get him to talk back. But Angela says you had him chatting away almost as soon as you walked in the door. She doesn’t know how you did it, but …’ He paused, a frown of concern on his face as he looked carefully at Francis. ‘Are you all right? You look a bit tired.’
It was only now it was mentioned, that Francis realised he was tired. Very tired. It had, looking back on it, been an eventful morning.
‘Why don’t you go and have a lie down?’ said Mr Boyle. ‘Leave the tidying up to the others, and go and have a rest. Use one of the loungers by the pool.’
‘Yes,’ said Francis. ‘I think I will.’
He walked through to the pool, lay down on one of the loungers, and fell almost instantly asleep.
When he woke, it was to find Jessica lying on the lounger beside him, propped up on one elbow, looking at him.
‘You’ve been dribbling,’ she said.
‘Thank you.’ Francis pushed himself up to a sitting position and noticed that someone had covered him with a rug.
‘That was Roland’s mum,’ Jessica told him. ‘She’s been coming in every quarter of an hour to check you’re all right.’
‘Oh …’
‘She comes on tiptoe, so as not to wake you. The others wanted to come in earlier for a swim, but she wouldn’t let them. She said you needed your rest.’
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