by Kim Newman
You’ve had to stop every few yards to have a cough
because you’re a fucking walking dead man
and a rest.
You’re in so much pain you know you won’t enjoy this. But it has to be done. There has to be an answer.
Should you ring the doorbell?
Adlard might be out. Then you’d have to wait.
No. If he’d gone out, he’d have seen that untidy bicycle besmirching his lawn. Neat Boy would have tidied it up, put it in some bicycle-shaped spot, battened it down as tight as a cat’s arsehole. Neat Boy probably numbered, weighed and sorted into alphabetical order his bowel movements.
You hump the sloshing suitcase across the lawn. The bottom leaks. One of the bottles must have been cracked.
Too late to worry about that.
It’s nearly over.
You don’t think of your wife and children. You think of Neat Boy. And the killing concrete in your chest, clogging all the passages, spider-leg tendrils of pain winding throughout your whole body.
You get the case up on the doorstep and have a coughing fit. It must be louder than ringing any bell could possibly be. You thump the wall and hawk. Black stuff, with bloody chunks in it, comes up. That’s lung tissue, that is. That’s disease in a basket, death on a stick.
The world is going to end. For you. No. For everyone. Without you, nothing counts. Before then, though, scales can be adjusted.
You stand on a porch, looking at a panel door. There’s an ornamental knocker and a functional bell. Frosted glass side-panels, with etched naked fat babies playing musical instruments. A sunrise-pattern semi-circular fanlight, segmented like an orange, each segment a different-coloured glass. Slumped over your suitcase, you must look like a demented door-to-door salesman.
death of same
You brought the hatchet just in case. After the spasms have subsided, you chop at the door, by the chest-height lock. The hatchet embeds itself. As you pull it out, the door opens inwards.
Neat Boy looks at you through an adult mask, an absurd wisp of blond moustache gummed to his lip. He is thinning on top. He wears only a towel. You can’t help noticing he has an erection.
‘Good God, no!’ he gasps.
Hatchet in one hand, dragging the case with the other, you lurch at him, pushing him aside, and stagger into his hallway. The weight of the case has an independent impetus, and dredges an occasional table from the wall, scattering a telephone and an answerphone, smashing a pot-plant.
‘We can be reasonable,’ Adlard says.
You have interrupted something, but don’t care. Neat Boy didn’t just interrupt you. He ended you.
will end you
‘It’s unconventional, Mr Pelham. But Aimée is over sixteen. She …’
A chubby girl stands at the top of the stairs, a sheet wrapped around her, held to her chest.
‘That’s not my father,’ she screams.
Adlard lays a hand on your shoulder.
Coughing, dribbling blood, you whirl round, hatchet outstretched. Adlard gets out of the way, losing his towel. Through pain, you focus on your case, which lies flat and leaking a few feet away, at the foot of the stairs.
You chop down, rupturing the case, and chop again, aiming for the clasps. You wrench the case open and chop at the bottles. They roll and rupture and squirt. You lose the hatchet.
‘Petrol,’ the girl shouts.
You empty the bottles on the floor, on the stairs, on yourself, on the walls. It gets in your eyes. You don’t think you’re breathing any more. You’re so clogged up you’re just going to stop.
Soon.
Then, the bottles emptied and strewn about Neat Boy’s hallway, messing it up beyond repair, you turn and look for Adlard. Naked, appalled, not understanding, he stares at you. You want him to recognise you, to remember. You try to explain.
But you can’t talk, you can only choke.
You take Stephen Adlard by his skinny shoulders and pull him to you. Hugging tight, you fall on to your case, empty and broken plastic bottles beneath you. Adlard struggles but your grip is fixed, iron.
He was the one who used to have the light. Now it’s you.
You get Neat Boy in a neck-lock and probe in your pocket for the disposable lighter. You took a fresh one from the kitchen drawer.
Adlard’s heels skid on his petrol-sodden carpet. He is not impressing his girlfriend now. His neatness means nothing
this close to death
his crimes are about to come home.
Your thumb scrabbles on the lighter.
The girl screams.
You toss the lighter, like John Wayne hurling the lamp to burn down his life after Jimmy Stewart has taken the credit for shooting Liberty Valance and stolen away Vera Miles.
You hear the fire before you feel the heat. It starts as warmth, then becomes biting pain, nipping through even the bled-out aches in your chest.
The whole world is screaming.
A rivulet of fire runs up the stairs, towards the yelling girl’s naked feet. You smell Neat Boy’s cooking meat. You can’t relax your hold on him.
Something caves in inside you.
Go to 0.
97
There’s a tiny sting as the edge of the blade slips in. You instinctively put your hand under water. The heat covers the sting. A flower of blood blooms in the bath. It’s very pretty.
Are you sure about this?
You cut. Another flower.
Sure you’re sure.
Further. A big, gulping, blossoming rose explodes from your wrist.
That’s it. The vein cut.
You drop the blade. You’re too weak to do the other wrist.
You feel you’re draining.
The bathwater is mostly red. It laps at your body, leaving a red-wine-dreg bath-ring on your white skin.
It doesn’t hurt.
You pull the plug with your toes, but turn the taps back on with your left hand, keeping your bleeding right wrist under the water all the time.
Water flows. You lie back in the warm and let it flow.
You can’t remember why you’re doing this.
Blood slips slowly towards the plughole, swirls in the mini-maelstrom, and slides away.
You don’t pass out. You look at the ceiling light fixture.
The water has drained from under you.
Hot and cold water pours on to your ankles, scalding and chilling.
You’re bleeding less. The end must be near. You must be empty.
No time for regrets.
Should you have written a note? No. This will be a mystery. Everyone will blame themselves: Ro, Victoria, your parents, your lecturers, everyone. They should have seen it coming.
Your ankles really do hurt. You shift them out of the way, and sit up.
You’ve stopped bleeding.
Your right ankle is scalded badly. It hurts like a bastard.
You must have no blood left at all, eight pints gone. Your heart thumps, trying to propel smidgens through collapsed arteries and veins.
You do feel weak.
You don’t get up. Your ankle throbs. The running taps sound like waterfalls. You are very cold, chilled from the water, your lobster-boiled skin cooling fast.
You lie there for a long time.
You don’t die.
You did it the wrong way. Serious suicides cut down. Just-a-plea-for-help bogus self-murder feebs cut across.
You could get up and tidy things away.
No, you’ve lost too much blood. You don’t have the control.
You hear, distantly, your family coming back home, bustling through the front door.
Who’ll be first for the bathroom?
There’s no way of explaining this as an accident. They’ll know what you’ve tried to do. It’ll change the way they think of you. Doctors will be called. You’ll be taken to hospital. Then the police, maybe. Psychiatrists, certainly.
You’ll be a freak celebrity specimen. The Boy Who Tried to Ki
ll Himself.
This is indeed what happens. As you predicted, everyone blames themselves. Your parents are distraught and keep apologising to you in different ways. They argue quietly when they think you can’t hear, blaming each other. This gets increasingly bitter and, after twenty-five years, they break up, ripping apart your family. In hospital, you are visited by Victoria and Rowena, but have no explanation for them and don’t know how to accept their apologies. Relatives and friends visit, all cheery. Even your lecturers. Everyone walks on eggshells around you. It gets irritating. You wish someone would give you a hard time, tell you off, shout at you. Even Victoria is conciliatory, which disappoints you. She ought to be the one to scream and shred your pose. You sense the power your act has given you, the enormous hold your weakness gives you over others. You hate yourself for it but it becomes the keynote of your life. You’ll always be the Boy Who Tried to Kill Himself. No matter what you do, everyone will always remember.
Maybe you go to university and word gets out there, lending you a certain neurotic glamour. Maybe you take months off college and miss your A Levels, becoming an oddly healthy invalid, hanging around at home as if you were retired, holding audiences with supplicants. Everyone wants you to forgive them. Since you have shown yourself too precious for the world, maybe you are looked after by everyone. Cotton wool is wrapped round you and you don’t interact with the world. You don’t leave home, but your home leaves you when your parents split. You’re still clever. You can catch up in schoolwork. You can get on with your life. With your first family gone, you can get another — you could ask Ro or Victoria or any one of a dozen others to marry you, and they would through love or guilt or fear of what you’ll do if they don’t or a belief that they alone can save you. And you’ll always be the dominant partner, because you’ve proved what you’ll do, how awful you can make it for people, if you’re not allowed to have your way.
You live a long life. If others get fed up with you, they have to keep it to themselves. You can have children and extend your powers over them too. Even grandchildren will be wary of you. Whispered tales of the Boy Who Tried to Kill Himself will pass down in your family. You never explain, never tell why. Within months, you don’t remember anyway.
When, finally, you are dying, of natural causes, you don’t recognise the shadows around your bed. There are too many people in the way, people who genuinely love you because they have no choice, pushing the darkness back out of the family circle.
You ask a grandson if he likes imaginary stories and he doesn’t know what you mean. He is a grown-up. He has lived with your legendary potential for self-murder all his life. From whispered family rumour to calmly repeated and much-embroidered anecdote, he has known about this.
You have to tell someone at the end.
That you didn’t mean it.
But you don’t.
Go to 0.
98
There’s a vicious sting as the edge of the blade rips in. You yelp with pain. Blood dribbles. You drop the razor-blade. Blood squirts. You try to staunch it with your hand.
What the fuck are you doing?
You stand up in the bath. Blood pouring out of you.
You don’t want this.
That bitch Rowena has no right.
So she didn’t phone you back. Tough fucking luck. Big fucking deal.
You just wanted to apologise, to make her feel better, and she’s nearly murdered you.
No. That’s not fair.
She’s locked in her own Roger-and-Victoria-and-Rowena misery and just let you in for a while. She didn’t understand what you could have done for her. She thought you were disposable.
She was thinking like a bloke. Fuck ’em and dump ’em.
You grip your wounded wrist hard. The blood makes the grip slippery.
Your feet are boiling. You step out of the bath and sit naked on the toilet.
You’ve come back from a trip into the shadows.
You have no idea how you could have let it get so out of hand. How you could have thought yourself into such a hole.
There’s a horrible possibility that Ro is in her bathroom doing exactly the same thing, but she’s thinking about Roger not you.
What a fucking mess!
Make that a literal mess. There’s a bath speckled with blood. And a used razor-blade. And you’re still bleeding like a pig.
The bathroom cabinet is still open.
You open your hand and look at the cut. It’s tiny, not deep, but it’s bleeding profusely.
Before you can put on a jumbo-sized plaster and think up an excuse you have to wash the wound. You pull the bathplug and stick your wrist under the cold tap. Blood pours out, washes away. You worry that you may die after all.
You came close. Now you’re thinking, you remember that cutting down is the not-a-plea-for-help-actual-attempt-at-self-slaughter method.
You are an idiot.
Your wrist is clean. Blood is still welling. You dab with a dry flannel. You have to blot the water before you can use the plaster.
Ready.
Only now you have, one-handed, to get a plaster out of its paper packet and peel off the backing. You do it, using your left hand as a last resort, but now there’s blood all over your wrist, chest, the sink and — God, you can’t clean it — the bathmat.
You wipe the blood away and put the plaster on skewed. It soaks through at once.
You expect it to be washed away.
You are angry with yourself. This would be a stupid way to die.
You look at yourself in the mirror. The shadows are gone.
‘Fuck you,’ you tell yourself. ‘You’re the pillock of the century.’
Then, with difficulty, you clean the bathroom. You’ve ruined a flannel, but you can bin it and no one will notice. The coin-sized blood-spots on the bathmat have faded. They resist scrubbing, but they look like spilled oil or something.
By the time your parents are back, you’ve tidied everything, got dressed and are watching Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb on BBC2. You can look at severed bleeding hands without feeling queasy. It’s just a film.
‘I thought you wanted to get your head down early,’ Mum says.
‘I changed my mind,’ you admit.
For weeks, you walk around with a sense of your own power. You’ve been to the worst place in the world and have come back. You are invulnerable. You see Rowena at college and she is obviously not comfortable around you, but you remain civil, distantly amiable. By Easter, she has apologised for her behaviour and you have told her it was all right and said that you were just worried about her. She confirms Rag Day was all about her and Roger. You just got in the way. You hug her and become her friend. Maybe more than that. But maybe not. It doesn’t matter. It can’t hurt you any more.
You are more relaxed with your family and your peers. You discover talents beyond those programmed into you. You are surprised to find that people like you. Even stranger, you like them. That was more difficult than loving. And you explore your ability to love too, not just in connection with sex but in your other relationships. A distance you have always felt, between you and other people, between you and yourself, fades like the tiny scar on your wrist.
Only you know about the night in the bathroom.
Eventually, years later, you will tell someone. In return for their deepest, darkest secret, you will explain.
She won’t quite believe you, but she will love you.
Even if she’s Rowena.
There are still shadows in your life. There’s no escaping from that. But there is so much else.
And so on.
Begin again?
99
Finally, you understand.
The struggle is not over. But you realise that the struggle is what keeps you alive. It is the light you love and the dark you fear, wrapped together.
You are not alone.
‘I know what love is, Keith. Love is us.’
It is possible. It can be done.
<
br /> You love and are loved. You have the respect of your peers, and the admiration of society.
You can be rich and happy.
You truly live your life, swimming along in the mad, glorious, fascinating, ever-changing torrent.
‘You know, Keith, sometimes I think I’d like to be like you. But you’re one of a kind. When they made you, they broke the mould.’
‘A good job too,’ you say, pleased.
You are a success as a son, a lover, a husband, a father. Your work is satisfying, challenging, remunerative, important. Your home is an endless, absorbing, rewarding project.
‘Thank you, Dad. Thank you for everything.’
You have friends who don’t envy you your luck. You are a part of many groups, always close to the centre. You are admired, not piously. Your advice is sought, listened to, often acted on. If you’re not there, people wish you were.
‘Keith, no one will ever know what this means to me. But I won’t forget.’
You leave the world a better place than it was when you found it. And you are remembered.
Your children carry on.
In the light, you understand everything.
‘You always knew, Keith. I never had to do anything. This was just what you expected.’
And so on.
Begin again?
100
But where do you want to be? What do you want to change?
If you want to be a child again, go to 107. If you want to be a teenager, go to 111.
101
You’ve had sex with your sister. On a cosmic scale, this is not reckoned a good thing.
You can’t even blame raging, blazing hormones. An irresistible, blinding lust didn’t fall on the both of you like an epileptic fit. It just happened.
It was slow, awkward, gentle. You’d like to think it was a hypnotic spell. But it was what you both wanted to do. And did.
