Acid Rain by R.D Rhodes (literature books to read .txt) 📗

I looked back at Harry. “Is there anything I should know, or be worried about here. Sanders? The patients?”

Harry sat back down. “Your main worry should be getting out. No. Like I said, the worst patients aren’t here.”

He caught me looking, yet again, at his neck. Looking at it was like having a scab on your arm you couldn’t help but pick. It looked so bad it still looked sore.

“It’s alright.” he said. “Everyone looks at it.”

“What really happened?”

“I told you.” he smiled. But when he saw the joke had died, he said, “I hung myself.”

Chapter 22

I waited for him to expand.

“And.. it didn’t work?…”

“No. Well it probably would have done, but a bunch of kids saw me. It’s a long story.”

I waited.

H e drew a breath. “Well, basically I just had enough of it all. I couldn’t eat. Couldn’t sleep. Had crippling depression, usually long bouts of it that came and went. But then it came and didn’t go away. It was like a black cloud hung permanently over my head. I couldn’t see the point in anything anymore. Suicide was on my mind all the time. I used to think about it just once a day, but I became obsessed. Everywhere I went I pictured nooses for me to swing from- above swings in parks, dangling from the crossbars of football goals, and especially from trees. Almost every tree I passed I seen a rope around one of the boughs and a noose dangling from it. A lovely, enticing little hoop, just waiting for my neck. It was like it was goading me, inviting me into it.” He coughed and covered his mouth and looked at me then back out the window.

“So I had had a really shitty day, one of the worst, and there didn’t seem like any other way out. So I went to these woods near the town I was living in. I had bungled up a couple of years before, so I wanted to make sure I did it right. I went to the most remote place I could find. It was half a mile, at least half a mile, from the nearest track where people walked their dogs, and I cut off and went way out through the weeds and bushes and right in amongst the trees with my rope in my bag. I found a tree. One with a big thick branch high enough off the ground. A beech tree. And I climbed up. Looped the rope round, made a noose on the bottom, got my neck in, and jumped.”

“It’s sore,” he continued, “especially when you drop down and the rope yanks back on your neck. It tears your breath away, and it hurts. Sometimes it breaks your neck. But not with me! But I was out in about twenty seconds. Next thing I know I’m lying on the ground and these kids are looking down at me. They’d come out there to build a fucking den!”

“Bloody hell!” was all I could say. “What happened?”

“The branch snapped.”

I laughed.

He looked at me, then chuckled too. But his face immediately went grave with recognition of something. “Those kids. Apparently they’d seen me walking in and followed me. For half a mile. In the middle of nowhere. I think they were pretending I was part of a game or something. I was homeless at the time, so they were maybe just wondering where homeless guys slept. I don’t know. But they were hiding in the bushes watching me and saw the whole thing. They said it snapped about ten seconds after I had jumped.”

How stupid could you be, I thought. He couldn’t really have meant to do it.

“But it was a big branch.” he said, almost reading my thought. “It was thick. Wider than my waist. Proper sturdy.”

“So, did the kids phone the police?”

“Yeah.” he said. “And you don’t get a choice about it either when they take you in to commit you. If they think you’re a danger to yourself or others, they’re allowed by law to put you in here. Suicide is taboo in this fucking society. There’s discrimination against it.” He stared at the ground. The rat-like narrow face, with that pointed chin and pointed nose, didn’t appear so rat-like as it distorted in pain. His sly, black, pondering eyes became wrought with worry under his arched brows. His hands went to his head, and he clawed and gouged at his hair then rubbed his fingers into his forehead. “The kids’ faces though, when I was lying there looking up at them. They were so scared. Their eyes were wide and... I could see the confusion in them, thinking why would he do that? They couldn’t understand. They were only about eight or nine, they shouldn’t have witnessed that. It wasn’t fair.” He bit his lip and shook his head.

“But there’s nothing you could have done.” I said reassuringly. “You couldn’t have predicted they would turn up.”

He clasped his hands in front of him. “When I was lying unconscious one of them ran off to get help. It didn’t take long for the police to get there after that. I broke my ankle when I fell so I couldn’t go anywhere.”

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. Do you want to talk about this?”

He was lost in thought though. He went over it as if I wasn’t even in the room, as if he was just telling it to himself, “I saw their faces and I did think about trying to make them feel better. I thought about telling them a load of crap. That I was testing the weight of the tree, that it was an accident. But kids aren’t stupid. In that moment I thought, I can’t lie to them. I had to tell them the truth. So