THE NEXT MORNING I awoke on one of the settees in the living room. Cold, grey light lasered in through the window. My clothes were soaking wet from the melted snow and I was freezing. But I felt alive. Each cell in my body was tingling with a new energy. I felt like I was a little kid again.
Looking around the room I saw it was empty. Crushed cans and half-full glasses had been left on the tables and arms of chairs. I sat up and rubbed my eyes. I found my bag, jumped in the shower, cleaned my teeth and got changed into my spare clothes. By now I felt even more refreshed than before.
When I went back downstairs, Johnny was watching TV with a bowl of cereal.
‘Are you nervous about tonight?’ I said.
‘Not really. I’m a professional.’
I sat down in the armchair next to his.
‘Yeah, right.’
‘You and Sam seemed to be having a good time last night.’
I looked ahead at the TV, trying to avoid the question.
‘Is she going tonight?’
‘I think so.’
I knew that I didn’t love Sam, but I did like her. I hoped that we could be friends and never mention what had happened the night before. I don’t know why I felt that way and in that respect I guess I was a hypocrite because I don’t like it when people have sex just for the sake of the physical sensation, which is a self-righteous thing to say I know, but it’s just the way I feel. Actually, that’s not entirely true. What I should have said is that I don’t like it when people have sex just for the physical sensation and then brag about it to their friends – that’s what I don’t like because it means they don’t get how deep human emotions can go and that makes me sad. And on that point I was not guilty.
The afternoon was bitterly cold. I was glad that Johnny had lent me his scarf and gloves to cart the band’s equipment from the house to the pub. The sky was a deep, deep blue because there was no pollution hanging in the air – that had been washed out by the snow, which was now clinging to the insides of kerbs and shady walls. Little cotton-wool balls of cloud were in the sky and I knew that the day was going to turn into one of those days that you look back on because something magical happens and it gets ingrained into your memory. Nothing ever happens on such days; there’s just something in the air, you know?
I spent the afternoon drinking cans of Coke whilst the band did their sound checks. I even smoked a few cigarettes, which was totally unlike me, because I wasn’t drunk. But they made my head feel great.
The day disappeared beneath me, like the road when you’re riding your bike and you look straight down.
By eight o’clock the pub was packed and that’s when I caught my first glimpse of Freddy. I saw him just as a flash as he moved into a gap between two groups of people before disappearing again like a shark. When I saw him I got a sudden jolt in my upper body. I couldn’t quite place the feeling at first. I hadn’t seen him since that day in the school toilets when he had said that he wanted us to talk Craig into killing himself. I suddenly knew what the feeling was: dread. I dreaded Freddy.
I moved in the opposite direction to that in which he was moving.
‘Rich,’ I heard a voice call. I looked up. It was one of Johnny’s friends. He was stood in a group of boys, some of whom I recognized, some of whom I didn’t.
I went over to them but couldn’t follow the thread of the conversation because I was thinking about Freddy. Why did he have to be here? Why couldn’t I have this time? Why did he have to push in on it?
I kept looking over my shoulder, expecting to see him standing right behind me with that smile of his all over his face. Suddenly the jukebox kicked into life and I jumped. My skin started to crawl when the music came on. It was that Green Day song that has those lines about being alone, and lonely streets.
I hoped to God that the song wasn’t symbolic for the moment. I had been feeling so great lately but now I was receding into a malaise. Just because I had seen Freddy. I hadn’t even spoken to him.
My frame of mind switched in my head and I started looking at Johnny’s friends. I can’t explain it, but something changed. Emma, my counsellor, had told me that I had two sides to my personality; one was the nice kid and the other was the self-destructive kid, and I think I had just flicked the switch. My skin went clammy and I hated myself for thinking too deeply about things when there was life out there to live. So why did I have to hit these troughs where everything seemed so black? Why couldn’t I be the nice kid all the time? How could I change so instantly?
I turned to move away from the group of kids and saw, straight ahead of me, staring at me, Craig Bartlett-Taylor. My heart froze when I saw him. He had his vacant stare on his face. I could tell that he had reverted to his old depressed self. I could tell instantly. He had receded with me, like our souls were intermingled and dependent on each other. I took a few steps towards him. As I got closer, I saw that his face looked swollen somehow. It was darkish and I couldn’t really see him in the low light. As I got closer I saw that he had a black eye.
‘Shit,’ I said. ‘What happened to you?’
‘Hey,’ called a voice.
I swung round just as a pair of hands pushed into my chest and knocked me backwards. I almost lost my footing but my good balance prevented me from falling. I looked at who had pushed me. There he was, haircut and all. Chad. The American kid from the base.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’ I said, sort of offended. I only wanted to help.
‘Get away from him. He doesn’t need you, man.’
‘What the fuck would you know, Chaaaad?’ I looked at Craig. ‘Who hit you?’ I said.
‘What the fuck do you care?’ Chad snorted.
I felt somebody on my left flank. I knew who it was immediately.
‘What’s going on?’ he said.
‘This moron just pushed me,’ I said.
Matt looked at Chad.
‘Why did you do that?’
‘You can fuck off as well, Matt. You used to be a nice guy and now look at you.’ Chad pointed to the scarf tied around Matt’s neck.
Matt just sneered at him, like he was a lower life form.
‘Are you OK, Craig?’
Craig looked at Matt.
‘I’m OK. The kids from my new school don’t like the exceptional.’
Whoa! I didn’t like it when Craig said that. I didn’t like it at all. When I had spoken to him in his bedroom, he had seemed to be thinking so straight, but now here he was speaking like Freddy.
‘Come on, man,’ said Chad. ‘Let’s get out of here.’ He threw one of his massive arms around Craig’s neck and pulled him away from us, cutting the golden ropes from that rancid bond that had burned up between the three of us when he said the word ‘exceptional’.
And then, just as sharks can smell the scent of blood from miles away, they had all swarmed around me. Freddy was grinning at me, but his eyes looked cold. Clare had her hands in her pockets, her face ashen. Jenny was there with her warm colours but her insides were all twisted up and rotten. I was trapped.
‘You OK, Rich?’ Freddy said.
I looked at their faces.
‘Why are you standing so close to me?’
‘What do you mean?’ he laughed. There was a pause. ‘What happened to Craig?’
‘I don’t know.’ I couldn’t understand why my heart was thumping so hard.
Jenny folded her arms. She had on her rainbow sweatbands.
‘Tell them what you said to me,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Tell these people, your friends, what you said about them.’
I was even more nervous now. It was like I was being hunted. I wondered if this was how people had felt when we had spoken to them. I wondered if I had ever been this intimidating.
‘I don’t know . . .’ I trailed off.
‘Why did you say that stuff ?’ His voice was like a drone, like he was a zombie. Freddy’s grin had gone. ‘Are we not good enough for you any more?’
There was that brewing, undefined craziness in his eyes. I thought he could lash out at me any second like a tentacle thrashing out of a sea monster.
‘I didn’t say anything,’ I said, searching for some inner strength.
‘You said you don’t want to hang around with us any more.’
A new song came on the jukebox now. I didn’t know it. It was alien. I was detached from the rest of the pub. All there was now was me and the Suicide Club and the wooden floor on which we stood.
‘I didn’t say—’ I didn’t know why I was being so pathetic.
‘You said it,’ said Freddy. ‘I just want to know why.’ He took a step in, even closer.
I glanced at Clare, who I expected to have a smug grin on her face. But she didn’t. She was almost crying. I knew her well enough to know that.
I looked Freddy in the eye.
‘I didn’t say that, Freddy. I said that I didn’t want to hang around with you any more.’ And I pointed at his face so that he knew exactly what I was saying.
The surroundings suddenly re-emerged out of the ether and I was back. I took a step away from Freddy and looked at Clare. She broke the eye-line and looked at her shoes. I almost died when she did that, but instead I turned around and walked off into the crowd.
‘Hey,’ I heard from behind me. Freddy’s voice sounded angry. I stopped and swung back, expecting him to hit me. ‘You’re not what I thought you were,’ he shouted across the ten yards between us.
The jukebox died out and instantaneously there was a squeal of feedback from the PA speakers. I winced as the noise drilled into my skull.
Then I heard Johnny’s voice.
‘Good evening,’ he shouted into his mike.
I looked at the stage. The whole band were up there, lights singing out from behind them like heaven, cutting five heroic silhouettes out of space. The crowd cheered.
They were ready to go.
‘We’re Atticus.’
And then the guitars raged into the room like the SAS storming a building. The drums were crisper, the bass louder, the guitar seething with divine angst.
I turned back to Freddy.
‘I thought you meant it, Rich.’ I caught a strange look on his face as it flashed across his features. Sorrow. I shook my head, confused. Was I witnessing vulnerability? For a second I saw the Freddy who I had fallen in love with, the little lost schoolboy sent away by his parents.
I went to say something but my words caught. I didn’t know what I wanted to say to him.
Suddenly, there was a commotion near the stage and feedback ripped out into the room again like a snaking electrical wire spewing blue energy in incandescent sparks. My head snapped around quickly. Something was happening. I didn’t get a forewarning of doom, I just knew that something was happening. There was a sudden unity of screams from the crowd at the front of the stage. The drums were still banging and the one guitar was still thrashing. I craned my neck. Craig Bartlett-Taylor was on the stage. The spotlights showed everybody how puffed up his face was, his eye purple and black. Tears scored his cheeks like acid. Something metal glinted in his hand as he raised it to his head.
I had stopped breathing. There was another scream, a frantic, chaotic, atomic mass of distributed shock. Johnny moved in for Craig but he stepped to one side and looked out into the crowd. Whispers of smoke were in the air and time moved so fast that there was nothing that anybody could do. Craig moved something underneath his thumb. A third scream crashed from the front of the stage to the back of the room like a tsunami and then, right in front of everybody, and in an act that sent into oblivion all of his pain and anger and sadness and indifference, Craig Bartlett-Taylor pulled the trigger and blew his brains out.