The Suicide Club Read online

  About the Book

  Craig had tried to kill himself before, and when he took an overdose at the back of Mrs Kenna’s classroom Richie thought he had finally succeeded. But then the new kid at school, Freddy steps in and saves Craig’s life. But all too soon, Richie finds himself committed to a sinister pact. It’s true that Freddy saved a life – but could he take one, too?

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  So . . .

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  For Mum and Dad

  The vast bulk of humanity is irredeemably mediocre.

  – Ronald Hayman describing Friedrich Nietzsche’s beliefs

  Do not go gentle into that good night . . .

  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

  – Dylan Thomas

  1

  CALL ME ISHMAEL. Apparently, you have to have a good line to start a book so I stole that one from Moby-Dick, which is a book about a whale that I’ve never read. You know when I said call me Ishmael? Well, call me Richard Joseph Henry Harper because that’s my name. Yes, it’s a stupid name, I know. This book is about me and my friends and it gets a bit messy later on, I have to warn you. Only in terms of raw human emotion though. But I digress. It all started with Freddy.

  I remember it well, the first time that we met. Mrs Kenna was telling us about the champion British miler, Roger Bannister. Mrs Kenna was an elderly lady with whom I had a mild fascination (if that’s not too oxymoronic). Her husband and son had both died of a rare brain cancer so her whole existence was coated in tragedy. And I love people with a tragedy, genuinely love them. There’s something about those emotions at the end of the spectrum that really gets me. And this woman had them in spades, poor thing. She always spoke with eloquence, as though a blanket of words had been pulled over her grief, smoothing the bumps, ironing out all that furious emotion, and for that I admired her because I have my very own furious emotion. Boiling inside me like acid. But only sometimes. And not really.

  Anyhoo, I was listening to the lesson. Apparently Roger Bannister, who was the first man to run a mile in under four minutes – big wow – was also a brilliant doctor. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean ‘big wow’ just then, I was just showing off. I always do that – say something that I don’t mean just to show off. I know it’s a bad thing though. Being the first man to do anything is good, but running a mile in under four minutes for the first time must have been a pretty big thing. You know, back in the fifties.

  I’m going to say something a bit weird now, but don’t worry because it’s important that I tell you this early on. Sometimes a mental image, like a photograph, will explode in my brain and it’s the most horrendous thing you can imagine. For no reason, it just shoots into my head and there it is, unblinking, deadly: c, the Worst Case Scenario (‘c’ stands for ‘constant’ by the way because a Worst Case Scenario is always constant). Let me give you an example of what I mean.

  My Worst Case Scenario for Mrs Kenna is she’s sitting at the side of her dead husband and son’s graves and somebody comes over and rapes her, then kills her right there on her husband’s tombstone. So not only does she die but the guy who kills her robs her of her dignity too. She’s naked and bloody on the grave. I know it’s awful, that’s why it’s a Worst Case Scenario. That image always came to me in history class and I hated it because it’s not healthy.

  It’s sort of like a gift I have, imagining these sorts of things, though it is equally a curse (God, that’s cheesy – in truth it’s just a curse). No matter how well something is going I can always imagine something terrible out of nowhere, all black and arachnoid, first of all blurring the edges like a creeping cataract and then consuming the whole thing like carbon monoxide petrified and leaden with mass. W–C–S.

  It doesn’t matter if it’s the first or the hundredth time you’ve thought about it, it never becomes more or less shocking because it is not mutable – that’s why it’s a Worst Case Scenario. It’s the worst possible thing that can possibly happen. I told you it was a bit weird but, as you’ll see later on, it’s important that you know I have these Worst Case Scenarios.

  Then, all of a sudden, Craig Bartlett-Taylor started saying something from the back of the class. Lots of kids in my school have double-barrelled surnames because I go to a very good school.

  ‘Miss,’ is what he said.

  We all turned round to look at him – he always sat at the back of every class because he was a bit of a freak. Today, Craig Bartlett-Taylor looked pale as hell. He looked like he was wearing make-up or something, but that’s fine because loads of my friends wear some sort of make-up for the image, but Craig looked like he didn’t know he was wearing make-up. He looked like a porcelain doll.

  ‘I’ve just taken a whole bottle of pills, Miss.’

  It was really weird when he said that. He said it so crisp and clear, like a snowflake. You know? Mrs Kenna was floundering, I could tell. Just more tragedy for her. Honestly, the tragedy was bursting at the seams, seeping through the pores for Mrs Kenna. She clearly didn’t know what to do, even though she said, as she ran over to Craig, ‘Show me the bottle.’

  She looked funny running. Old people do. Their legs need WD-40.

  Suddenly, Bartlett-Taylor fell off his chair on to the floor. The other kids gasped with the drama of it all. My heart was going mad. I sat up a little in my seat to see if he was frothing at the mouth – that’s always a bad sign. But his mouth looked pretty dry. There didn’t seem to be a pill bottle anywhere and we all said later that he must have taken the pills at the end of lunch or something.

  Craig didn’t even start having a fit or anything like that. He just lay there, his eyes half open like he was just drifting off to sleep. A sleep from which he will never awake, a stupid Count Dracula voice said inside my head. I was worried for Craig but trying not to show it. I’d grown up with him and seeing him like that made my skin crawl a little. I wanted to do something, but I didn’t know what. So I just sat there like a moron.

  And that was the first time I saw Freddy. Frederick Spaulding-Carter. He was out of his chair straight away and running over to Craig like the wind. His chair upped itself on to two legs and then fell to the floor in a swirl of drama.

  People always say that when dramatic things happen time slows down and everything goes in slow motion. I’d never really known anything truly dramatic so I wasn’t sure if it was true. But I swear t
o God when Freddy ran to save Craig the world didn’t slow down at all. It happened at the exact same speed that I’d lived the whole of my life.

  He reached Bartlett-Taylor and slipped his arm under his body, lifting him on to his side. Then he grabbed his other arm and pulled it across his chest. I can’t remember it exactly but he was doing what’s called the Recovery Position. You do it if someone’s out cold. I don’t know what it does, maybe it straightens your windpipe into your lungs so you can access air more easily. I’m not sure.

  ‘Call an ambulance,’ he said. It came out as both quiet and loud. His black hair had flopped in front of his eyes. I had never seen this boy before so why the hell was he sat at the back of my classroom?

  Mrs Kenna shouted to me to go and get the headmaster and tell him what had happened. Me. Why did it have to be me? I was good in class and I did my homework most of the time so why should I miss out? By the time I finished having this thought I was halfway down the corridor because in truth I was a little bit terrified that Craig was in real trouble. I’m not disaffected or anything like that. I’m a normal kid, and I have a good soul.

  As I ran I Worst Case Scenarioed the fate of Bartlett-Taylor. It was pretty bad. At his funeral, his dad, who was about seventy because they had Craig when they were too old, was crying. It was terrible because parents who have kids who die never, ever recover. It’s impossible to recover from it because it’s Not Natural. We as human beings are a Natural phenomenon and when things that are Not Natural happen, like a kid dying before their parents, you can’t get over it properly because it’s against the normal grain of the universe, right? So anyway, his old dad was crying as he lowered his boy’s coffin into the ground. It was raining and the mud at the graveside was slippery. The old man, who had a frail skeleton, couldn’t keep his footing because he was just an old man, and he fell over. The coffin slumped to one side and made a horrible thud as it smacked against the walls of the grave before dropping into the pit and cracking. The coffin came to a stop and everyone knew that the boy’s corpse was inside the casket, lying deathly still, nothing more than a slab of meat. Bartlett-Taylor had lost his dignity and it was all because his old man was too old and weak.

  Suddenly I remembered something. A memory from when I was little. Craig and I had been playing bows and arrows. We were in the same team. It was one of those long summer days that you only really have when you’re a kid. We were hiding behind this weird grass hummock in the woods. We were on our backs, our heads lying against the grass, watching the branches of the trees swaying overhead. It was so still. We had never been the greatest of friends and in truth I had teased him a little bit along with the other kids, but I had still known him since I was three and that counts for a lot. I’d forgotten all about that day in the woods, but now there it was, in my head, making my heart beat with fear.

  I smacked on the headmaster’s door but he was on the phone when I burst in. He looked at me like I had just committed some terrible crime. His face was turning red and I thought that when he was through with his phone call he was actually going to murder me. He didn’t like me much. I think it’s because I sometimes used to get in trouble but still did well in examinations because I’m naturally intelligent. If I applied myself I reckon it’s possible I could do well in life and I think, later on, I will apply myself and do good things for other people.

  ‘Sir,’ I shouted. Too loud.

  His eyes bulged like the guy at the end of Total Recall when he goes out into the Martian atmosphere and the pressure basically crushes his skull.

  ‘Sir, Mrs Kenna sent me. There’s been the most terrible incident.’ It was a ridiculous thing to say but sometimes I can’t help saying ridiculous things to people I consider ridiculous. ‘Craig Bartlett-Taylor’s taken an overdose and he’s collapsed off his chair.’ The words spewed out fast and clear. I knew that I had to get the message out quick – the clock was ticking.

  He didn’t take his eyes off me as he cut his call short and dialled for an ambulance. When he was finished he asked which room Craig was in and walked out of the office. He sort of ran but he sort of walked too. Like a few steps and then a skip so that he didn’t look like he was too concerned. Even though a child could be potentially dying right now.

  This wasn’t the first time that Craig Bartlett-Taylor had done something like this. He’s got this thing in his head where he just hates everything. At least, that’s the impression I get. When he’s being nice, he’s too nice, you know? Like it doesn’t mean anything and he’s just going through the motions. I think he’d had a nervous breakdown. You never recover from one of those because it’s Not Natural.

  Once, when we were kids, we were making fun of him. So he said he was going to throw himself in the river and end it all. He strode off down the street and around the corner. We knew he wouldn’t go through with it though. He was feeling bad because his mother had just had a stroke and one of the older kids had stolen his ice cream and thrown it at the church. We were only about ten at the time. Any way, he came back five minutes later. We asked him why he was still alive and he said, and this is completely true, that he’d forgotten his bathers.

  Then he tried to kill himself again when he was thirteen, but this attempt was more serious. He threw himself out of his bedroom window. But only broke a leg. His parents must have been cartwheeling with worry. That was around the time when I stopped making fun of him.

  For some reason I started wondering if my MCR album had turned up from Play. My Chemical Romance are a band that I really like. They’re punkish but they get slated and called emo a lot, though that’s not really what they are. Sometimes they are a bit though. Lots of people don’t get it, but that’s not my fault. I love them. Play is the Internet shop where I get most of my albums. It’s my parents’ account but they let me use it as long as I tell them. It delivers for free and the albums are cheaper than anywhere else I can find in the real world. Even cheaper than Tesco, and they’re pretty good. Sometimes I’ll still go into HMV to get an album, but they’re more expensive – I just go there because sometimes I like going into record shops because there’s always a good feeling in those places. In truth I probably started thinking about the album to distract myself from Craig. I do that a lot. But now I’ve totally lost the thread of the story so I’d better get back to it.

  We were all outside because we’d been told to wait in the yard. The flashing blue lights of the ambulance were shining off all the walls – you can see them from around corners they are so powerful. The drama of it all made some of the girls cry and you can’t blame them: death’s an awful thing.

  One of my best friends, a girl called Clare, who has really black hair and wears pretty cool clothes which she designs herself, was stood on her own. It was strange for her because she was one of the most popular girls in school and always surrounded by an entourage of other girls. I was with a couple of my friends, but she looked so pretty stood all on her own that I wanted to talk to her, so I went over.

  ‘I hope he’s OK,’ I said, as if I was full of worry and concern. Which I was.

  ‘What the hell was he trying to do anyway?’ she said.

  Clare was pretty great because if she was just hanging around the streets she’d wear jeans, studded belt and some hoody, but when she went out she’d wear skirts and look awesome. She liked the same sort of music as me but, just like me, she wasn’t into it so much that she was like a goth or anything. You could say we were emo, which is short for emotional. It’s sort of a term used for more sensitive kids who like music and films more than sport, I guess you could say simply, but it’s a word I don’t really like because I don’t think you can put people into groups so easily, and I’m not really emo anyway, only a little bit, but I guess if you had to stick a label on me then it would be the closest thing. Maybe I’m a hybrid of emo and indie. Clare was more emo than me. But only just. Although extremely pretty she was one of those girls who you’ve known for so long you don’t really think like that a
bout them but sometimes you also do, you know?

  ‘I guess it all got too much for him,’ I said sarcastically, to cover up my fear.

  ‘You really do say some weird stuff sometimes, Richie.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  We both looked at one another and tried not to laugh. There was a small red blotch next to her nose that I guessed was the start of a spot, which was strange for Clare because her skin wasn’t like that.

  ‘He probably did it as a plea for attention.’ I said ‘plea for attention’ because that’s what morons would say.

  ‘You shouldn’t joke about it – he must be pretty fucked up to do that. He could die.’

  When she said that, some weird distant thought climbed inside my head, which I didn’t want to think about in case I started doing something stupid, like crying. I had to change the subject. It was best to think about something else entirely so I tried my best to pack the thought of Craig up into a box and lock it away.

  ‘Are you going out tonight?’ I said.

  I felt bad because I was picturing her naked, even though she thought I was just her friend. That made me feel sleazy. She didn’t realize that I sometimes thought of her in that way. When I spoke to her I was sometimes getting something out of it that she didn’t know about, because she thought we were friends, and that’s not the right thing to do.

  She shrugged and looked at me with that wicked twinkle in her eye, as if she knew what I was thinking.

  ‘Why don’t you just ask me out?’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  ‘I’m serious.’ She took a step closer to me. We always played stupid little games like this. ‘You like me, I like you. We could do stuff.’

  I thought she might actually grab me and get off with me right there, but she didn’t.

  ‘You’ve got an overinflated sense of ego,’ I quipped.

  ‘You just don’t want to admit how you feel.’

  ‘Who the hell was that kid who put him in the Recovery Position anyway?’ I asked. I wasn’t changing the subject because I had just seen the same kid out of the corner of my eye and it was a natural progression for the conversation. He was dressed quite strangely because instead of wearing the school blazer he wore a sweater.