Nine Perfect Strangers

He was not broken. He would never stop grieving for Zach, but he had made a decision in the week after the funeral. He must not break. It was his job to heal, to be there for his wife and his daughter, to get through this. So he studied the literature, he bought books online and read every word, he downloaded podcasts, he Googled the research. He attended the Tuesday night Survivors of Suicide group as faithfully as his mother once went to Sunday mass, and now he ran the group. (Heather and Zoe thought he talked too much, but that was only in social situations. On Tuesday nights he hardly spoke a word; he listened and he listened on his fold-out chair and did not flinch while a tsunami of pain crashed all around him.) He gave speeches to parent groups and schools and did radio interviews and edited an online newsletter and helped with fundraising.

‘It’s his new hobby.’ He’d overheard Heather say that on the phone one night to someone, he never found out to whom because he never mentioned it, but he never forgot it, or the bitter tone; it sounded close to hatred. It hurt because it was both a malicious lie and the shameful truth.

He could find hatred in his heart for her, too, if he went looking for it. The secret of a happy marriage was not to go looking for it.

He saw his wife’s thin arms curved up towards the sun to ‘master its life force’ and his heart filled with painful tenderness for her. She could not heal and she refused to even try. She never went to the support group except for that one time. She did not want to hear from other parents who had lost sons because she believed

Zach was superior to their stupid sons. Napoleon thought Zach was superior to their stupid sons too, but he still found solace in giving back to this community he had never asked to join.

‘The white crane spreads its wings.’

Sometimes there are no signs.

That’s what he told the newly grieving parents at the Tuesday night group. He told them there was research to suggest that teenage suicide was often the consequence of an impulsive decision. Many had suicidal thoughts for only eight hours before their attempts. Some idiotic kids put as little as five minutes’ thought into their catastrophic choice.

He did not tell them other things he had learned from his research, such as that suicide survivors often reported that their first thought after they’d swallowed the pills, after they’d jumped, after they’d cut, was a version of: My God, what have I done?! He did not tell them that many survivors of suicide are transformed by their experience and go on to live happy lives, sometimes with little psychiatric intervention. He didn’t tell them that if the decision to take their lives was in some way thwarted, if the means was removed, their suicidal thoughts often disappeared with time and never returned. He didn’t tell them how Britain’s national suicide rate dropped by a third when coal gas was phased out, because once people no longer had the option to impulsively stick their head in the oven, there was time for their dark and dreadful impulses to pass. He didn’t think it was helpful for parents to know just how much bad luck was involved in the loss of their children; that perhaps all they’d needed was a well-timed interruption, a phone call, a distraction.

But Napoleon knew it, because that was Zach. Impulsive. The absolute definition of impulsive. He never thought things through. He never thought of the consequences of his actions. He lived in the moment, as you were meant to do. He practised mindfulness. No yesterday. No tomorrow. Just now. I feel this now, so I will do this now.

If you chase the waves along the beach your new runners will get wet and they will stay wet for the rest of the day. If you run about outside when the pollen count is high (even though we told you to stay indoors), you will have an asthma attack. If you give up your life, you won’t get it back, kid, it’s gone.

‘Zach, you’ve got to think!’ Napoleon used to yell at him.

That’s why Napoleon knew without a doubt that if he’d got up at the time he’d originally planned, if he hadn’t pressed the snooze button on his alarm that morning, if he’d knocked on Zach’s door and said, ‘Come paddling with me,’ then right now he’d have a wife who wasn’t broken and a daughter who still sang in the shower and a son about to celebrate his twenty-first birthday.

Napoleon was meant to be the one who knew and understood boys. He had a drawer full of cards and letters from the boys he’d taught over the years, and their parents, all telling him how very special he was, how much he’d contributed to their lives, that they would never forget him, that he’d pulled them back from some terrible brink, a wrong path, that they’d be eternally grateful to their wonderful teacher, Mr Marconi.

Yet he’d somehow failed his own boy. The only boy in the world who mattered.

For a year he’d searched for answers. He’d talked to every friend, every teammate, every teacher, every coach. None of them had answers. There was nothing more to know.

‘Fan through the back,’ said Yao.

Napoleon fanned through the back and felt his muscles stretch and the sun warm on his face as he tasted the sea from the tears that ran heedlessly down his face.

But he wasn’t broken.

chapter twenty-seven

Zoe

Zoe saw the tears slide down her father’s face and wondered if he knew he was crying. Her dad cried a lot without seeming to realise he was doing it, like a scratch he didn’t know was bleeding, as if his body excreted grief without his knowledge.

‘Touch the sky,’ said Yao.

Zoe followed the graceful arc of Yao’s arms and turned now in her mother’s direction, and saw the deep crevices in her mother’s face and heard once more the sound of her mother’s scream that awful morning. Like the scream of an animal caught in a trap. A scream that tore straight through Zoe’s life like a razor blade.

Tomorrow it would be three years. Would it ever get any easier for her parents? Because it sure didn’t look like it was getting any easier. There was no use hoping that once they got through this next anniversary, things would get better, because she’d thought that the last two anniversaries. She knew that when they went back home it would all be just the same.

It felt like her parents were sick with a terrible, incurable disease that ravaged their bodies. It felt like they’d been assaulted. As if someone had come after them with a baseball bat. She had not realised that grief was so physical. Before Zach died, she thought grief happened in your head. She didn’t know that your whole body ached with it, that it screwed up your digestive system, your menstrual cycle, your sleep patterns, your skin. You wouldn’t wish it on your worst enemy.

Sometimes it felt like Zoe was just waiting out her life now, enduring it, ticking off events and days and months and years, as if she just had to get herself through something unspecified and then things would be better, except she never got through it and it never got better and she would never forgive him. His death was the ultimate ‘fuck you’.

‘At least you weren’t close,’ said her friend Cara in her head.

At least we weren’t close. At least we weren’t close. At least we weren’t close.

chapter twenty-eight