LET ME JUST get something straight. When I signed the Charter, I had no intention whatsoever of killing myself. I don’t think any of us did. Not even Craig with his history of mental illness. You see, we all knew that killing yourself has more than one victim – it rips entire families apart. We even had a good laugh about how bitter Freddy sounded in his writing. But in the candlelight, with vodka in our throats, we each took Freddy’s pen and scribbled our signatures above our typed-out names on each other’s sheets of cream paper.
A lot of people have asked me since whether or not I thought Freddy actually expected us to kill ourselves when he wrote the Charter and I can only answer the question honestly: I don’t know. I’ve thought about it loads but I just can’t come up with an answer. I don’t know what he was thinking.
The following Monday was my final counselling session before Christmas with the dreadful Sylvia Bowler. Our last few sessions had descended into ridiculousness because I couldn’t take her seriously. We had a healthy dislike for each other. As far as I was concerned, the only good thing to have come from these sessions was that nobody in school had actually found out about them.
However, when I went to see Sylvia on that day my mouth almost dropped to the floor. Instead of Sylvia, sat at the head of that big meeting table was a vision of sheer perfection. There was a woman, or maybe she was girl, of about twenty. I could try to describe her but I don’t want to sound clichéd by saying that she had olive skin and perfect features, so I won’t. But that was what she looked like. She was amazing. One thing was for certain: I would not want to beat this woman up like I sometimes wanted to do to Sylvia the fat old hag (I’m showing off – I would never hit a woman).
‘Hello,’ she said. She got up from her chair and went over to the unit at the side of the room where a coffee pot had been added. She poured herself a cup and I saw that her body was amazing as well, and I would not usually say something sexist like that so it must have been excellent.
‘Hi,’ I said. ‘Uh, where’s Sylvia?’
‘Sylvia’s gone.’ She didn’t say it mysteriously. Her voice was beautiful and I never use that word because it’s become so passé.
‘Gone where?’ I sat down.
‘Would you like some coffee?’
‘Yes please,’ I answered.
‘Sylvia told me your parents don’t like you drinking coffee.’
‘Yeah.’ I paused, looked at her. ‘I didn’t really like Sylvia. She was a know-all.’
The new girl went back to her seat.
‘I guess there’s not much point talking in depth,’ she said. ‘You’ll be breaking up for the holidays soon so we can start properly next term, if that’s OK with you.’
I was pleased that I was in my last session before Christmas but I was also looking forward to my next one in the new year if it meant that this woman would be my counsellor.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked.
‘Emma.’
I liked the way she wasn’t too friendly with me. No doubt Sylvia had had a part in that. I used to ridicule her intelligence by researching a psychological trait the day before a session and then pretending to have that thing wrong with me, getting Sylvia to think that she knew what was going on in my head. But then I would explain to her my game. She hated it, I could tell.
‘My mother’s name is Emma,’ I beamed.
‘Really?’
‘No.’
She laughed. I didn’t expect her to laugh because she was an adult and I was still, basically, a child, and adults and children don’t operate on the same level because of the idea of respect, you know? Telling jokes like that might have come across as precocious.
‘Can I ask you a question?’
‘Of course you can.’ She still wasn’t friendly.
‘Sylvia once gave me an orange ball and told me to “peel the orange”. What does that mean?’
Emma smiled. Her whole face changed when she smiled. She was radiant.
‘Why don’t you look it up? I hear you’re into that.’
Now it was my turn to smile.
‘Do you think I’m going to ask you about your qualifications?’ I was sort of seeing how far I could push her. I was flirting with her and must have looked like a complete idiot.
‘Maybe.’ I never did find out how many A levels she had, but I knew by the very fact that she refused to answer my question that she had done well and gone to a good university. ‘Now let me ask you a question,’ she said.
I sat there and listened.
‘Do you feel that you’ve got anything out of your sessions with Sylvia?’
I sighed.
‘No,’ I said honestly.
‘You don’t go in for us social workers then?’
‘Don’t say that word.’
‘Social workers?’
‘It’s so meaningless. You must know that.’
She just smiled.
‘You know what, Rich? You might find this hard to believe but there are good people in the world who genuinely want to help. I have chosen this career to try and put kids back on the right track. Do you think there’s something wrong with that?’
‘I’m not disaffected,’ I said right out. ‘I know that there are good people in the world. My all-time hero is Bob Geldof. What he has done is mind-blowing. But for every good person, there’s a know-all like Sylvia. There’s a difference between the two. She’s not a good person. She’s a busybody.’
‘Tell me what you want to do with your life.’
‘I want to make cartoons,’ I said. I had never told an adult this in my life, not even my parents, mainly because I knew how far-fetched it sounded. Only a handful of my friends knew what I wanted to do. When people asked me, I would say that I wanted to be a vet. But here I was blurting it out.
‘Cartoons?’
‘Yeah. Kids’ cartoons. I want to write the scripts. I can’t really draw very well, but I can come up with ideas and stuff.’ I felt like I was unshackling chains from around my chest as I spoke. ‘And I mean cartoons for kids, not ironical things that can be enjoyed on “two levels”, I mean cartoons for kids.’ I paused. ‘I want to make a cartoon that parents and kids can enjoy together on one level, you know? I want it to be completely innocent.’
She seemed impressed by what I had said because I could feel her warm to me.
‘Have you got any ideas?’
‘I have but I don’t like talking about them.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not embarrassed – I just haven’t fully formulated what’s in my head. If I told you about my ideas, they would sound terrible because they’re all over the place. When I write everything down in an order, I’ll be able to tell you.’
‘I look forward to that.’
I paused and leaned forward on to the table. I had to tell her something important. And when I said it, I meant it.
‘Emma. I didn’t mean for any harm to come to the falcon.’ An image of Freddy flashed in my head, his face all aglow in candlelight. He was signing the Suicide Club Charter. Whoa! That felt . . . sinister.
Emma was smiling at me.
‘I think I know that,’ she said.