Sinew

Families are a curse. You have a duty to them. It’s hard to die and make it look like an accident. Suicide is just leaving early, when you’ve had enough, don’t want to do this anymore, just can't stick it.

Queer how people are about it. It’s like caring about a person’s taste in coffee. Black, milky, with whipped cream, foamy milk or flat white. Almond milk, even. Who cares? Private business, I’d have thought. 

‘Do you ever have thoughts of harming yourself?’ she asks, her eyebrows are up, her mouth a tight straight line and her body craning in towards mine. Her flowery perfume catches in my chest. A mixture of Deep Heat and roses. I can imagine the scorchy smell coming off the iron that made those sharp creases on her pink blouse. 

I used to love watching Mainey when she was ironing. Her sliding the turn of the shirt shoulder over the curved end of the ironing board, then nosing the iron across the double panel of cotton towards the other side. Then switching sides. Steam rising up to her face as her shoulder leaned into the work, her elbow out from her waist.

‘Good,’ the psychiatrist says, when I answer her. Her pen scratches notes in my file and the leather chair groans as she relaxes back. 

Her eyes flick over my head to the clock above the door then back to the list of patient names at her elbow. Midway down that list she crosses off my name. I’m no longer interesting.

‘Well, best continue on the same medication so,’ she says, ‘and we’ll see you again next month.’  

She smiles her must-be-cheerful-with-the-patients-poor-fuckers-that-they-are smile, rips the sheet off the pad and hands it to me. Blood red lipstick stains one of her eye teeth.  

Before closing the consulting room door, I see her open the next patient’s file. Her eyes scan the notes while she pushes a thumbnail between two lower teeth. I wonder will it come away clean. She couldn’t possibly have neglected to floss.

I crumple the paper into my trouser pocket. My sister found last month's prescription when she was loading the washing machine.

'How do you expect to get better, Jack, if you don't take your tablets?' said she. 

I checked her face to see was she serious, just in case. 

❦ ❦ ❦

Thinking up ways of dying is the only thing that gives me a smile these days. It fills my daydreams.

I have my wish list, of course.  

First up is the car crash; I imagine bursting through a low brick wall into a field. The bricks ripping apart from each other like a page from a jotter. I even have the wall picked. One with a springy bog behind it. Just an hour from here, in County Clare. A lovely fish restaurant nearby for a tasty meal and dessert, lashings of cream and why not? It’s not like cholesterol is a priority. 

I drive down the bottom of the big hill. Galway Bay to my right. The hill, very steep, certainly a contributor to my car going out of control. The sun bounces off the bay, lighting up the inside roof of my car. Luminous in the afternoon sunlight. I press in the clutch, freewheel down the hill, the only sounds, my tyres tracking on the sticky tarmac and birdsong playing in the background. The road turns sharply at the bottom. I don’t. In an instant, I change from flying it, at over sixty miles an hour, to a sudden zero. Stand stock still. The airbag doesn’t inflate. 

That self-same force that rips the brick wall apart, guns through my body, the contre-coup, smashing my ribs, puncturing my lungs, drowning me from the inside. And if that doesn’t kill me stone dead then blood vessels wrenched from my internal organs, like ripe blackberries plucked from a bush, will bleed me out. 

So, no more. No more me. No. No more every day. No. No more bloody life. No. And so sad. Yes. Instant fatality. Yes. At least it happened quickly. Yes. And he didn’t suffer. Yes. I mean, no. Not once he was dead, no. What? Nothing.

But then last winter the field behind that wall became a lake. If hitting the wall didn’t kill me outright, a watery death would be too cold, too slow. I wouldn’t want to suffer. It would defeat the purpose. Pulling out of my driveway in a wetsuit wouldn’t be an option. 

❦ ❦ ❦

When I get back home, my daughter’s eyes follow me around the kitchen. Questioning me. I answer out loud.

‘No. And don’t keep asking.’

She flinches but she'll be at it again, give her a month or two. 

Her garsún gets her off my case, gives her licence to smile without it seeming in poor taste. He’s a bonny little lad. Rolls and chortles without a care in the world, he makes her happy. I like it that he disturbs things too in a random way, moves stuff around in my home. Otherwise the snow globe and the doo-dads would stay in the same spot on the small table, the crochet blanket would rest folded on the arm of the couch. I’ve to stop myself from stroking it flat, like Mainey used to.

❦ ❦ ❦

Second up in my suicide wish list is a parachute jump, the clouds so hypnotising, I forget to pull the cords. My body telescopes into the ground, the two uninflated parachutes still attached to my shoulders. It’d do nicely. The problem is the buddy system. There’ll be a well-meaning instructor. A mature man, weathered, I can see him in his sandals on a cool sunny October day, toes tanned and widely spaced. Long finger nails on his right hand for strumming the guitar. Or maybe he'll be left-handed. 

He’ll have me so well-trained from our previous jumps that my hands will itch to pull those cords to inflate that parachute, just to please him. If I don’t convince him of how sure I am of all I need to do, then he’ll jump with me. Hell on earth, to see my reward within reach and not be able to grasp hold of it. 

Then, there’s choosing where to land. That’s a consideration. If I let the parachute inflate then I can steer. Steering would be good craic. I could choose my grave.

‘I’ll have that one. Over there. Yeah!’  

Something to be happy about.

But I’d run the risk of not unclipping the harness from my chest in time. Freeing yourself from an inflated parachute is not something you can practice. A half-arsed job’d land me in a wheelchair, God forbid, rather than in the velveteen folds of my coffin. 

And if I can choose my landing spot, where will I choose? The surf tide lashing over the rocks at the bottom of a cliff sounds about right. For that to be my final resting place would be heaven on earth.

❦ ❦ ❦

My sister fusses. You should this and you should that and why aren’t you and don’t you think now, it’s time?

‘No.’ I say. ‘I shouldn’t.' 'I won’t.'  'I’ll not' and 'I don’t.’

She is better at taking no for an answer. Drives her bananas but, unlike my daughter, it doesn’t hurt her. 

My sister bustles about the kitchen with her special plastic containers that stack for the freezer. She's very happy they have click down sides.

'See?' she says. Click. Click. She turns one upside down. 'No leakage. Now, when you’re finished, don't throw them out. They cost good money, you know.'

Chicken curry, lasagne, beef stroganoff. One end labelled with washable marker, in her loopy national school teacher writing. She's quite the cook, packing the freezer with dinners I never touch. Oh, I defrost them periodically and scoop them into the brown bin then save each container, nice and clean, for her next visit. Click. Click. I do what I’m told, in the main.

Her final job of the day is to hoover, only downstairs, mind, where I seem to live now. She hoovers around me, banging the chair legs against my shins and the grey plastic nozzle against the bumps of my ankles. They make the same sound, my bones and the chair legs. Bok. I check her face for spite. Not a whiff. Maybe it’s not in her.

‘I’ll leave you, so,’ she says, finally.

‘Hmmph,’ I say and wait till the door slides shut. I enjoy the silence and then I set about re-arranging everything back the way I like it, the way Mainey used to have it. 

You’d think half of two would be one. But it’s not one, it’s less than one.

❦ ❦ ❦

My third choice, has a fancy name, rapture of the deep. Out on a scuba dive, snug in my wetsuit, nitrogen numbing my nerve cells. I slip off my mask and tank and swim away into the dark, feeling only lightness then nothing at all, as I breathe in full lungs of chilled salty water. The down side, my buddy-diver, like my parachute instructor, will suffer. He’ll believe he has failed me. There’s no winning with death, always casualties.

❦ ❦ ❦

There's the phone call. I let it ring five times. Pick up and wait.

'Daddy?' she says, her voice rises. 

Who else would it be? I’m a bastard.

'Yes, pet.'

'I thought ... did you watch the news?'

I pull away my eyes from the last light of the evening sky, and look around the sitting room, where I can just about make out the shoulder of the couch and the old television hulking on the sideboard.

‘Did I miss something important?'

'I was watching what happened to those poor children in that bus accident.'

'Oh yes, pet, very upsetting.'

'Have you taken your tablets?'

‘I have. Is the baby settled for the night?'

'He's fast asleep ... nighty night, daddy.'

'Nighty night.'

I’m being mothered by them, like it or not, and me an aging man. Means that if I’ve a heart at all, I have to look out for them.

❦ ❦ ❦

Another way is alcohol poisoning. I could start with a red. Spanish, maybe. A bit of soakage with crusty bread and cheddar cheese. No point going all fancy with Gruyere or goat’s cheese, one good heave and all the effort’d be only wasted. I’d move onto spirits after that. No messing with cocktails, nuts or crisps. Go straight for the one-litre bottles. Normally I don’t drink, makes me sad and I don’t like feeling that way. Three bottles of spirits, maybe four, should wind down my breathing, should stop that endless tide of air, its suck and release. Instead pause, then slow, then still.  

There’s those who string it out, the drinking. But then you’ll be pestered with advice, how you’d best pull yourself together or you know what’ll happen. 

No doubt there’s those others who’d enjoy watching me go down, slowly. You’ll have that.

❦ ❦ ❦

There’s those that don’t bother at all. Hiding it, that is. They leap off cliffs, fling themselves from buildings and bridges, slit wrists and throats, blow their heads off with shotguns, drive at full speed from piers, even, or kick away chairs from under them and dangle from ropes, till life leaves their bodies. I don’t feel any sadness for them, just jealousy. ‘Cos they’re free and I’m stuck here. Stuck here with me and my moral fibre. The one that stops me from hurting what's left of my family. The one that stops me from reaching out and grasping hold of my death and not letting go.

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