Pills

The bottle of pills is brown, with a yellow label on it covered in tiny black writing, probably all warning me against the thing I am preparing myself to do. My hand is steady as I tip the round white pills out into my palm. My heart shudders at the sight of them. They are enormousI think. Look at the size of them! I can just see them blocking up my whole windpipe, top to bottom!It’s a bit of an exaggeration I suppose, but if anything suffocation would probably be faster. Still, it’s going to be a struggle.

            I should explain: I’m about to kill myself. Not in a dark, grimy, dramatic sort of way, I’ve just reached the end of the line. There is no foreseeable future ahead of me, and I can’t do this anymore. For the last year I have simply been killing time rather than living. I’m not afraid of death, never have been, even as a child. It’s my time, and I know it. There’s nothing at all sentimental about this exercise, in fact it has been quite the opposite, and has somehow become a battle of practicality. It’s taken me a week to reach this final decision, and even now I’m still not entirely sure it’s the right one. I’ve gone through all the options: hanging; nowhere to safely hang myself from without the fear that the rope or its mooring might break. Slitting my wrists: I cannot abide the sight of blood, I may not be afraid of death but blood is a whole other matter. Jumping off a tall building/cliff/other object of altitude: well for starters if I were to jump off a building or other public structure then some poor bugger will have to clean me off the pavement, an experience which could be extremely traumatising for everyone involved, and secondly there are no cliffs around these parts and I don’t have a car anymore or enough money for a train ticket. Head in the oven: I know this will probably come as terribly amusing, but I’m claustrophobic. I know phobias shouldn’t have much bearing on one’s suicide, but trust me it’s hard enough to fight against your natural instincts without an irrational fear taking over what’s left of your already biologically weakened brain.

            The problem I am left with is that I have always abhorred swallowing pills. Can’t stand the things, the way they stay solid as they pass down your throat and how you can still feel them going down even minutes later when they’re probably already in your stomach. Ghastly things, but sadly they are the only option I have been left with.

            I realise I have been staring at the pills for quite sometime now, contemplating their size. I suppose this is the point where people might have second thoughts about killing themselves, but all I can think is is there another way to do this that I might have missed? There’s no time left though, no turning back. I needto do this.

            I pour myself a glass of water and hold the pills out before me, I’m about to begin choking them down when–

            Bang!

            The sound makes me jump, causing my previously steady hand to spill half the pills onto the grubby linoleum floor of the kitchen. I stand, frozen to the spot stupid human instincts letting me down again. Someone calls my name.

            “Desiree!”

            The voice is male, young, and after only a few seconds I realise who it belongs to. It’s Lou, Gavin’s ex-boyfriend. How on earth did he get in?

            Now that I know who it is, I put the pills down on the kitchen counter and shuffle out into the hall. For one god-awful moment I think he might have come to try and stop me from killing myself, but then I notice the gun wrapped in his fingers. 

            For a moment I am completely taken aback by the sight before me, but then my eyes lock onto the gun that is pointing at me from between Lou’s shaking hands. Yes says my brain this is your way out, it would be quick and easy and you won’t have to swallow those awful pills! I imagine a bullet flying from the barrel and burying its way into my skull, or my chest perhaps. A rather messy thought, I’d have to put some plastic down so the cleaners don’t have too hard a job.

            Lou’s voice brings me back to the matter at hand.

            “Desiree,” he says, his voice shaking a little, “I know it was you. I know what you did.”

            I drag my eyes from the revolver to look up at Lou, “I beg your pardon?”

            He takes a shaky step towards me, “I know it was you.”

            I frown, “And what did I do exactly?”

            “You killed him.”

            I should mention now that Lou is a little schizophrenic, perfectly ordinary whilst on the right medication, but when he doesn’t take it, well… Things have been known to get nasty. Gavin loved him though, reallyloved him. He looked after him so well; I always admired his strength, enough for the both of them when it was needed.

            “Now Lou, I think you’d better calm down,” I begin to say, but then I look back at the gun and wonder is this really what I should be saying to him? If I keep him riled up like this then maybe he’ll do the job for me.

            “I do not need to calm down!” snaps Lou. “They told me. They told me you did it.”

            I needn’t ask to whom he is referring. I know he hears voices when he’s going through the worst of it. They were always the bringers of some kind of bad news, something that had perhaps been lurking in his subconscious in the way we all have sometimes, but the problem with Lou is that the voices like to dredge up those things and make him believe they are real.

            I’m still toying with the idea of making him shoot me, but then I think of what will happen to him if he does kill me. A lifetime sentence for murder? Or what if he was locked up in some kind of institution for being mentally unstable and a danger to society? I hear Gavin’s voice inside my head “He’s only as fucked up as the rest of us, it’s just a bit more concentrated because of his brain chemistry.” 

            Gavin would never forgive me if I let Lou get arrested for murder.

            I sigh; I suppose I shall just have to wait a bit longer.

            “Lou, whatever they’ve told you, it’s not the truth. Remember what we used to do? How you could tell if it was real or not? You ask somebody else if they can hear them too?”

            “People lie,” panted Lou. He was visibly sweating, droplets sliding down is freckled forehead all the way from his hairline. “You lie.”

            “What do I lie about, Lou?”

            “About him,” I can see now that he’s trying not to cry. “You lied about him. You never loved him, and you never accepted me.”

            “Why wouldn’t I accept you?” I ask. “After all these years, Lou, why would you think that?”

            “Because you killed him!” he almost screams. He holds the gun close to my face, his trigger finger shaking dangerously. He looks at me for a second, frowns and says, “Why aren’t you scared? You should be scared why aren’t you scared?”

            I sigh again and shake my head, “That, dear Lou, is a story for another time. Now, put the gun down and let’s talk about this.”

            He looks as though he is considering things for a moment. Then he gestures to the living room, “In there.”

            I do as he says, stepping into the living room and going to sit down on the couch. Lou draws up a chair and sits in front of me, the gun lowered but still vaguely pointing in my direction.

            “Just tell me why you did it,” he says weakly.

            “Why I did what?”

            “Why you killed Gavin.”

            I had known whom he was talking about from the start, but it still stings to hear his name spoken in that same sentence.

            “I didn’t kill Gavin, Lou. It was an accident.”

            “No!” he shouts almost involuntarily, tears beginning to leak from the corners of his eyes, “You did it, they told me! You cut the brakes on the car, I know you did.”

            I reach forward and touch the hand that is holding the gun. He flinches a little, but doesn’t pull away as I wrap my hand around his, and the gun inside it.

            “Lou, listen to me. If I had cut his brakes then everyone involved would know that the breaks had been cut. The car was examined afterwards and no one said anything about the breaks being cut.”

            Lou looks down at our hands and shakes his head, then the shaking seems to progress from his head down the rest of his body before he wrenches his hand from mine and points the gun at me once again.

            “How do I know you’re telling the truth?”

            A small part of my imagination starts reeling out a fantasy in which I grabbed the gun, pressed it to my forehead and pressed Lou’s finger down on the trigger. But then I think of the upholstery and that brings me back to reality with a jolt.

            “Lou, if you really are going to shoot me could you at least let me put some plastic down first?” I say without thinking.

            “What?” he gasps through a sob.

            I realise just how much he is actually crying and take pity on the poor boy.

            “Come here,” I say, putting out a hand and firmly removing the gun from between his fingers. It really doesn’t take much effort. I set the thing down on the coffee table on top of one of those awful doilies that my downstairs neighbour Marjorie knitted for me, and then turn back to Lou. He looks like a sad, frightened little boy, and what’s left of my stone heart melts as I think of Gavin, aged eleven, coming home and telling me that one of the boys in his class called him a fag and tried to give him a Chinese burn. I’d hugged him and sat him down at the kitchen table where I rubbed his arm and told him that that boy was really sad or scared inside and he was taking it out on Gavin, and that it had absolutely no reflection on Gavin whatsoever and he could be whomever he chose to be. Then I’d made him toast and jam and we’d sat in the garden watching the bees. I feel my stone heart crack.

            I take Lou in my arms and hug him, whispering that it’s all OK and that the voices aren’t real, that I love him and Gavin loved him and Gavin would never have wanted this for either of us.

            After what feels like an eternity, I let him go. His face is red and blotchy and the skin around his eyes looks a little swollen. I tell him to sit back down and say I’ll make us both some tea. He nods slowly and thanks me. I pick the gun up off the table and take it with me into the kitchen, still wondering where he got it. I put it in a biscuit tin and slide the tin into an empty cupboard for later, hoping that Lou will forget about it.

            As I make the tea, I notice that there’s still some bread left in the breadbin. I call out to Lou, almost without thinking, “Would you like some toast and jam?”

            There’s a pause before he calls back, “Yes please.”

            I smile to myself as I slice the bread and pop it into the toaster.

            When I re-enter the living room with the tea and toast on a tray, Lou is looking out of the window, his face almost back to normal now. 

He looks up, “Thank you, Desiree,” he says, smiling sadly. “I’m so sorry about this.”

            “It’s all right,” I tell him, setting the tray down on top of the doily and handing him his tea. I sit down beside him on the sofa before asking, “Are you still taking your medication?”

            He stares into the mug, watching the steam rise and says, “I have but… I’ve missed a few days. I’ve just been forgetting a lot, working, out, not sleeping all that well. It feels like this has been building for a while.”

            I put a hand on his shoulder, “You should go back and see that lovely therapist, what’s her name? Norah?”

            “Eleanor,” he smiles, “yes, yeah I’ll book an appointment when I get home.”

            “Good.” 

            Lou bites into a piece of toast and chews. When he’s swallowed it he turns back to me and says, “Why weren’t you scared, Desiree? You hardly blinked when I… well, you just looked so calm. I don’t understand, is everything OK?”

            “I’m fine,” I tell him, not missing a beat, “It’s funny, sometimes when you get old it seems there’s nothing left to be afraid of.”

            He chuckles, “That sounds nice,” he looks at me again, “I really am sorry.”

            “Shush now, there’s no need to apologise.”

            We sit in silence, drinking our tea and munching on our toast. I think about telling Lou the story about Gavin when he was eleven, but I realise that I can’t quite bring myself to mention it out loud.

            Eventually Lou stands up, “Well, I should go,” he says sheepishly.

            I stand up too, a lot slower than Lou, but I get there eventually.

            “Do you need me to see you home or do you think you’ll be OK?”

            “I’ll be fine. It’s not far from here.”

            “All right. Don’t forget to speak to Eleanor, I think it’s best you speak to her as soon as possible.”

            He nods, “I will. Thank you Desiree, you’re really being too kind.”

            “Nonsense,” I give him a hug as we reach the front door. I glance at it over his shoulder and realise that he did nothing as dramatic as I had been led to believe by that bang, I had simply not locked the door and he had slammed it closed, making that awful noise. Of course, I remember now, I had wanted to make it easy for someone to enter and find me, just to save the trouble of the door being broken in some way.

            Lou opens the door, “Thanks again, Desiree. I’ll see you around.”

            “Goodbye Lou,” I say, and watch as the door closes.

            I am alone again. 

One hour later I am sitting in the bath, fully clothed, the gun resting on the side. There is a note clutched between my hands, which I am still contemplating even though I wrote it over twenty minutes ago. There is something that I am still unsure about adding to it, but I don’t know if I can bring myself to tell Lou the truth.

            Lou wasn’t entirely wrong about me. Or at least, the voices in his head weren’t. I never cut the brakes on that car, which crashed headlong into a wall at the bottom of a hill and sent various parts of its insides into the insides of my son. I wouldn’t dream of doing such a thing, even the idea makes me queasy. But it goes without saying that my darling Gavin’s death was, partially, my fault. The car was mine, borrowed for the afternoon to take Lou on a romantic getaway for the weekend. Gavin had been going on and on at me for the past month about getting the car serviced, not because of the trip but because he was convinced I was about to kill myself in ‘that old scrapheap on wheels’ as he called it. I had eventually looked into getting it serviced, but the amount of money it cost had nearly sent my eyes flying out of my head. The car seemed fine, nothing leaking or groaning, and it wasn’t yet due its MOT so I decided that Gavin was just being overly cautious and it would be perfectly fine for another few months. If I’d known Gavin was going to be using it at the time, I would have gotten it serviced right away.

            The request to borrow my car had come unexpectedly, only three days before. I had forgotten the whole servicing debacle by that point and said yes of course he could use the car how lovely! and that was that. And then, that really was that.

            The breaks had given out. A ridiculously simple notion, but there we have it. It probably would have happened months before if I ever actually drove up and down steep hills, but I somehow managed to avoid them. Gavin was not so lucky.

            I read the note over again. It’ll do, I think. Enough to convince the police that this had nothing to do with Lou, anyway. Nobody writes themselves into a fake suicide note if they’re about to murder someone. I don’t think I’ll mention the car thing though. It doesn’t matter now anyway. If it really was my fault then I suppose I’m about to get my comeuppance aren’t I?

            I set the note down on the toilet lid and lie back in the bath. I chose the bathroom because it should be easier to clean tiles than fabric, although I do worry a little about the cracks in between. Perhaps they’ll just re-do the whole thing, which is a pity but I suppose it needs doing anyway. The tiles are ancient and rather discoloured. 

            The gun feels heavy in my hand, still, it’s far better than those awful pills isn’t it?