1. The Christmas season arrived, bringing with it carol singers, cards of good will and the first snowfalls. Chloe and I had been due to spend the Christmas weekend at a small hotel in Yorkshire. The brochure sat on my desk: ‘Abbey Cottage welcomes its guests to warm Yorkshire hospitality in exquisite surroundings. Sit by the open fire in the oak-beamed living room, take a walk along the moors, or simply relax and let us take care of you. A holiday at Abbey Cottage is everything you always wanted from a hotel – and more.’
2. Two days before Christmas and hours before my death, at five o’clock on a sombre Friday evening, I received a call from Will Knott:
‘I thought I’d ring to say goodbye, I’m due to fly back to San Francisco on the weekend.’
‘I see.’
‘Tell me, how are things with you?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Is everything all right?’
‘All right? Well, yes, you could put it that way.’
‘I was sorry to hear about you and Chloe. It’s really too bad.’
‘I was happy to hear about you and Chloe.’
‘You’ve heard. Yeah, it just worked out. You know how much I always liked her, and she gave me a call and told me you guys had split up, and things moved from there.’
‘Well, it’s fantastic, Will.’
‘I’m glad to hear you say it. I don’t want this to get between us or anything, because a great friendship is not something I like to throw away. I always hoped you two could patch things up, I think you would have been great together, it’s a real pity, but anyway. What are you doing over Christmas?’
‘Staying home, I think.’
‘Looks like you’re going to get a real snowfall here, time to bring out the skis, eh?’
‘Is Chloe with you now?’
‘Is she with me now? Yes, no, I mean, she isn’t actually with me right now. She was here, but she’s just gone off to the store actually, we were talking about Christmas crackers, and she said she loved them, so she’s gone to buy some.’
‘That’s great, give her my regards.’
‘I’m sure she’d be delighted to hear we spoke. You know she’s coming with me to spend Christmas in California?’
‘Is she?’
Yeah, it’ll be great for her to see it. We’ll spend a couple of days with my parents in Santa Barbara, then maybe go for a few days to the desert or something.’
‘She loves deserts.’
‘That’s right, that’s what she told me. Well, listen, I’d better leave you to it, and wish you a happy holiday. I’ve got to start sorting my stuff out around here. I may be back in Europe next fall, but anyway, I’ll give you a call, and see how you’re doing . . .’
3. I went into the bathroom and took out every last tablet I had collected, and laid them out on the kitchen table. With a mixture of pills, several glasses of cough syrup, and whisky, I would have enough to end the whole charade. What more sensible reaction than this, to kill oneself after rejection in love? If Chloe really was my whole life, was it not normal that I should end that life to prove it was impossible without her? Was it not dishonest to be continuing to wake up every morning if the person I claimed was the meaning of existence was now buying Christmas crackers for a Californian architect with a house in the foothills of Santa Barbara?
4. My separation from Chloe had been accompanied by a thousand platitudinous sympathies from friends and acquaintances: it might have been nice, people drift apart, passion can’t last for ever, better to have lived and loved, time will heal everything. Even Will managed to make it sound unexceptional, like an earthquake or a snowfall, something that nature sends to try us, and whose inevitability one should not think of challenging. My death would be a violent denial of normality – it would be a reminder that I would not forget as others had forgotten. I wished to escape the erosion and softening of time, I wished the pain to last for ever only so as to be connected to Chloe via its burnt nerve endings. Only by my death could I assert the importance and immortality of my love, only through self-destruction could I remind a world grown weary of tragedy that love was a deadly serious matter.
5. It was seven o’clock, and the snow was still falling, starting to form a blanket over the city. It would be my shroud. The one reading this will be alive, but the author will be dead, I reflected as I penned my note. It was the only way I could say I love you, I’m mature enough not to want you to blame yourself for this, you know how I feel about guilt. I hope you will enjoy California, I understand the mountains are very beautiful, I know you could not love me, please understand I could not live without your love . . . The suicide text had gone through many drafts: a pile of scrapped notepaper lay beside me. I sat at the kitchen table, wrapped in a grey coat, with only the shivering of the fridge for company. Abruptly, I reached for a tub of pills and swallowed what I only later realized were twenty effervescent vitamin C tablets.
6. I imagined Chloe receiving a visit from a policeman shortly after my inert body had been found. I imagined the look of shock on her face, Will Knott emerging from the bedroom with a soiled sheet draped around him, asking, ‘Is there anything wrong, darling?’ and she answering ‘Yes, oh, God, yes!’ before collapsing into tears. The most terrible regret and remorse would follow. She would blame herself for not understanding me, for being so cruel, for being so short-sighted. Had any other man been so devoted to her as to take his own life for her?
7. A notorious inability to express emotions makes human beings the only animals capable of suicide. An angry dog does not commit suicide, it bites the person or thing that made it angry, but an angry human sulks in its room and later shoots itself leaving a silent note. Man is the symbolic, metaphorical creature: unable to communicate my anger, I would symbolize it in my own death. I would do injury to myself rather than injure Chloe, enacting by killing myself what I was suggesting she had done to me.
8. My mouth was frothing now, orange bubbles breeding in its cavity and exploding as they came into contact with the air, spraying a light orange film over the table and the collar of my shirt. As I observed this acidic chemical spectacle silently, I was struck by the incoherence of suicide: I did not wish to choose between being alive or dead. I simply wished to show Chloe that I could not, metaphorically speaking, live without her. The irony was that death would be too literal an act to grant me the chance to see the metaphor read, I would be deprived by the inability of the dead (in a secular framework at least) to look at the living looking at the dead. What was the point of making such a scene if I could not be there to witness others witnessing it? In picturing my death, I imagined myself in the role of audience to my own extinction, something that could never really happen in reality, when I would simply be dead, and hence denied my ultimate wish – namely, to be both dead and alive. Dead so as to be able to show the world in general, and Chloe in particular, how angry I was, and alive, so as to be able to see the effect that I had had on Chloe and hence be released from my anger. It was not a question of being or not being. My answer to Hamlet was to be and not to be.
9. Those who commit a certain kind of suicide perhaps forget the second part of the equation, they look at death as an extension of life (a kind of afterlife in which to watch the effect of their actions). I staggered to the sink and my stomach contracted out the effervescent poison. The pleasure of suicide was to be located not in the gruesome task of killing the organism, but in the reactions of others to my death (Chloe weeping at the grave, Will averting his eyes, both of them scattering earth on my walnut coffin). To have killed myself would have been to forget that I would be too dead to derive any pleasure from the melodrama of my own extinction.