Chapter Eleven. Horror.
The term finished but Kevin and I stayed on in the flat, postponing the
move to London until nearer the start of my teaching course.
One of the requirements was to have done a week’s observation in an
infants’ school and somehow it seemed to be expected that I would do it
in Derby. Although I didn’t want to leave Kevin and stay with my parents
for a week I didn’t get around to changing this. It was only a few days.
Kevin saw me off on the bus, he ran alongside it in the dark, waving.
Relations with my parents were still difficult and I said maybe he
shouldn’t phone. He must have felt a bit lonely and afraid, abandoned,
although I thought of him all the time and wanted to be back with him as
soon as I could. He knew I loved him. We told each other we loved each
other.
Kevin went off for a drink with Dick and Helen, didn’t want to go straight
home alone and wandered along the main road towards a late night
cafe.
I was out with my parents at a play and then came home and watched a
sitar concert on t.v., thinking how Kevin would like it, trying to remember
all about Ravi Shankar to tell him. There was no phone in the flat so I
couldn’t phone him.
The Infant School was just down the road from my parents’ house. I had
been reading John Holt’s books about education and I sat trying out his
theory with a little boy using cuisinaire rods, taking two away from ten,
counting the eight left, putting them back and counting the ten, taking
them away again, waiting for the wonderful moment when the penny
would drop and the boy would be certain of the number without
counting, would know it was going to be the same and always the
same. I was going to enjoy that moment of certainty. I was starting to
look forward to the teaching course, to moving to London, to a new
phase of life with Kevin, to being a couple in a new place. The Head
came in and was pointed towards the student observer, who was sitting
with a small boy doing maths with the cuisennaire rods. There was a
message, I had to go, something had happened involving police, a
phone call, we had to go to Nottingham. No one would say much.
I got to my parents house and ran to the toilet just in time as my bowels
emptied. I was hoping and praying, but Kevin had been attacked, I was
praying that he was alive, I was hoping he wasn’t a brain damaged
vegetable, but no one said.
My mother stayed home and my father drove me. We went into a room
upstairs on a high floor and a detective came in and told me that Kevin
was dead.
We couldn’t see the body. It was impossible, it was unbearable and I
wanted to throw myself out of the window, which was barred, and I
screamed and beat on the door when the policeman went out and
locked it.
I had to sit with the detective and give a statement. He forgot we were
talking about a dead man who I loved and made a stupid remark about
what a great time we students had.
How much can I hurt and cry?
I insisted on going back to our flat to look after the dog. My Dad was
forced to leave me there. He was grey with worry like when I was lost
on the cross channel ferry and they thought I’d been swept overboard.
But what could he do now? My mother asked me to phone each day.
That was all she could do. Everyone was sorry of course, some could
not speak, a stupid girl from up the road told me Kevin was in a better
place now. Jane’s chap Steve came and sat in the room for several
hours just to be there, while I lay in bed, with a cold, unwashed, with the
dog beside me and time passed very very slowly.
I went to my sister’s one day and one of the little girls said I shouldn’t
have any dinner because Kevin couldn’t have any, which was exactly
how I felt.
The local paper had headlines, ‘Hunt for killers as body found in city’.
Kevin’s body had been found on the Monday by a man on his way to
work, down a side street near some waste ground, under a bush. Maybe
he’d gone down there for a pee. His head was smashed in. There was
a mark from a belt buckle on his neck.
Two men who had never met Kevin before were arrested the next day.
They had told several people they knew that they had killed a man and
someone had gone to the police.They had enacted how they did it, how
thye had a mangle roller with a steel rod up the centre with them in
order to attack someone, anyone, they showed the older one’s girlfriend
how they did it. She went to the police.
They were charged with murder.
If I had not gone to Derby, if I’d asked him to phone so he felt less alone,
if I hadn’t bloody gone he’d be still alive.
I became preoccupied with death, my own. It wasn’t bearable to go on
dragging myself from day to day. I wore black, the same black wool
dress all the time. I took the dog to the park, I phoned my mother every
evening. I wept and my head was constantly hurting from the crying,
and I thought about how to kill myself.
A few week’s before a sort of survival guide had arrived in the post,
delivered free. If you read it in reverse it provided a suicide guide. It told
you which tube rail was live, how to cut your wrists, how much aspirin or
paracetamol was lethal, how long gas took to kill you
.
I went into town to buy enough paracetamol and razor blades and a
bottle of gin. I met the stupid woman from up the road and she said was
I just going into town to cheer myself up.
Its an odd thing to go for a last walk, to have a last conversation with
your mother, to burn your diaries, to wait for the woman upstairs to go to
work, to take the dog a last walk, to leave a note to ask for Kevin’s
family to be asked to take the dog, to go into the kitchen and seal the
doors, to turn on the gas, to sit on a cushion on the floor and listen to the
gas hiss but hardly smell it because of my blocked up nose, to start on
the tablets and the gin.
I had always been bad at taking tablets so it took a while to get even a
few down and I wasn’t used to gin at 9 am . I thought if I slashed my
wrists I’d run into the street. I was so tired and so very unhappy but I
started to worry if any one would take care of the dog, Butch.
I was sorry to hurt my family, my mother, I started to imagine my
mother’s grief.
I thought of the gas escaping into the garden, that some one might
come round to the back door and light a cigarette and it would all
explode and they would die and I would be left permanently disabled but
alive in a wheel chair. I thought that I didn’t believe in a life after death
so I wouldn’t see Kevin ever again whatever I did.
All this, the hiss of the gas, the horridness of the gin, of gulping down
the pills, of having a headache, of thinking of the dog alone, of my
mother crying. My mind would not stop.
Eventually , suddenly, I noticed my mind change. I opened the back
door to let out the gas, threw out the big brown jar of paracetamol, kept the
Gordon’s, took the dog out, phoned my mother as usual and told the
woman upstairs when she came home from work that she couldn’t smell
gas,she was mistaken, I couldn’t smell it.
And that was it.
I had to live.
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