Undone (2 page)

I’m not sure what kind of reaction I was expecting, but it wasn’t hysterical laughter. He stopped laughing when he saw the look on my face. ‘What’s so funny?’

‘Sorry. It’s just . . . I thought you
knew
.’ He was sort of wincing now.

‘Knew what?’ I had no idea what he was talking about.

‘That I’m gay.’

I’d had no clue whatsoever. The thought had never ever crossed my mind. Very-nearly-thirteen-year-old boys were not gay. There were gay men on the telly and stuff, but they were
grown-up
men. The only gay man I knew in real life was a random cousin of Dad’s, and I’d only met him once. He danced with me at a family wedding, twirling me around the dance floor until I nearly puked. Then he danced with his ridiculously good-looking boyfriend, which was the first time I’d ever seen two men dance together.

I tried to act cool with Kai, like people telling me they’re gay was an everyday occurrence. I shrugged
and said, ‘Oh yeah, I totally knew. I was just messing around.’ I could tell Kai wasn’t buying it, but he let me off because that’s the kind of person he was.

So my crazy dream of marrying Kai went straight out the window. But I never lost the certainty that he was the perfect boy. The perfect boy for me anyway. I just tried not to think about it, because it made me ache inside.

Only four people knew about Kai being gay. His parents knew and were totally cool with it. I knew and was totally mixed up about it. Then Louise found out and was very definitely totally not cool with it.

I was never quite sure
how
Louise found out; Kai refused to tell me. But things changed between the three of us almost instantly. She didn’t follow us around like a little lost puppy any more. And although I’d always acted like her constant attention annoyed me, I actually missed it. I could tell Kai did too, but he didn’t like to talk about it.

I only realized Louise wasn’t OK with the whole gay thing when she caught me and Kai ogling some shirtless guy on the Internet one day (Kai was doing most of the ogling, I was merely agreeing with everything he said). She rolled her eyes and made a sound in her throat that could only be interpreted as one thing: disgust.

Kai quickly closed the browser window, blushing like he’d been caught doing something seedy and shameful. I was baffled. ‘What?’ I asked her.

She flicked her hair (an annoying habit she’d acquired since starting secondary school) and said a sullen ‘nothing’.

‘It didn’t sound like nothing.’ Kai put his hand on my wrist and told me to leave it. I shook him off. ‘Louise? Is there something you’d like to share with the group?’ This was my new favourite catchphrase; I’d picked it up from my English teacher.

Louise sighed and twirled some hair between her fingers, acting as if checking for split ends was more interesting than talking to me and Kai. ‘It’s, like, gross.’ This was something else Louise had picked up in the last few months – a completely new way of speaking that drove her parents crazy.

I asked her what was gross, because I genuinely had no idea what she was on about.

She sighed again, even louder this time. ‘Boys liking boys. Becky’s dad says it’s sinful.’

I’d never heard Louise mention Becky before, let alone Becky’s dad. I laughed. ‘Are you for real?’ The looks between Kai and Louise answered my question. This ground had clearly been covered before. ‘What does Becky’s dad know about anything anyway?’

Louise narrowed her eyes at me. ‘He’s, like, a really important businessman. He drives a BMW.’

‘Good for him.’

The sarcasm was lost on her. ‘I know, right? Anyway, he said it’s probably just a phase.’ Louise looked shifty all of a sudden.

I felt Kai’s grip tighten around my wrist but he still said nothing. So it was left to me. ‘
What’s
probably just a phase?’

‘Kai being . . . you know . . . bent.’

My temper flared. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. ‘You take that back. Right now.’

Louise stuck out her bottom lip. ‘Will not, and you can’t make me.’

I pushed my chair back fast and Louise backed away, but Kai’s hand was still clamped to my wrist. ‘Jem, leave it. Please. She doesn’t understand. It’s OK. Really.’

She was smirking, knowing full well that her brother would protect her even though she was the one who was attacking
him
. The gap-toothed, cute-as-a-button, only-slightly-annoying little sister had turned into someone else – almost overnight, it seemed. And I wasn’t sure I liked this someone else. At all.

Kai said it didn’t bother him. He said she was young and would come around to the idea eventually.
My argument that she was only a year younger than we were and that she shouldn’t give a toss if he was gay because HE WAS HER BROTHER fell on deaf ears.

She
did
come around to the idea eventually. She stopped saying stupid things in front of me, at least. But that might have had something to do with the fact that Louise and I started studiously ignoring each other – as if by some unspoken arrangement. I couldn’t forgive her for being horrible to Kai, and she . . . well, I was never quite sure why she began ignoring me. Maybe because I started dying my hair and wearing black and listening to decent music and she turned into a plastic, popular person. It was as if some kind of mystical divergence had occurred, leaving Kai in the middle, loving us both, wishing everybody could just get along. He never did get his wish. He never got a lot of his wishes.

And now he won’t ever get his driving licence. Or buy alcohol in a pub. Or vote. Or fall in love.

Kai will do none of these things. All because of what they did to him.

The idea of life without Kai was unthinkable. My brain couldn’t accept it. The thought of going to school every day. Alone. Evenings and weekends. Alone. My whole life stretching out in front of me – without him. It was unacceptable.

For the first couple of weeks I couldn’t even get out of bed. Mum was frantic, begging me to talk about it. Pleading with me to get up and get on with my life. I couldn’t even hear her. I became a master at tuning everything and everyone out of my mind. Everyone except him. Kai was all I wanted to think about. Thinking about anything else felt like a betrayal and I felt like he’d
know
.

Mum and Dad were on suicide watch. They’d spoken to a counsellor about it and apparently there was a ‘significant risk’ that I would top myself.

I can’t really blame them for thinking like that.

After all, I
was
spending a considerable amount of time working out the best way to do it.

After much deliberation, I settled on pills. I was going to polish off Mum’s Valium. There were thirty-one pills left in the bottle. I figured that was more than enough. A quiet, peaceful way to die. Not too traumatic for my parents either. I mean, obviously I knew it would still be traumatic, but it would be way worse if I hung myself in the garage or slit my wrists in the bath. Or jumped off Boreham Bridge.

I’d talked about suicide since I was fourteen or so. Some people were sporty or musical or collected model animals . . . I was into death. It was kind of my thing. People didn’t necessarily
know
that about me, but the black hair and the black clothes identified me as emo or goth or whatever other bullshit label they wanted to pin on me. I hated them for it. No one knew me. No one except Kai. He was the only one who bothered to look beyond the facade. Kai was the one who would listen to me moan about the world and how unfair everything was and how I was never going to be happy and how I hated my parents and how no one understood. He never acted bored or tried to change the subject. He
listened
. I didn’t know how lucky I was to have someone who really listened. Someone who understood me on every level. Who seemed to love me
despite me being a whining, miserable bitch. I mean, I wasn’t like that
all
the time or anything. We had fun together too. We made each other laugh. Best friends for life, that’s what he said. (He lied.) And despite the fact that I liked to talk about death and suicide, I think we both believed we’d end up growing old together (if not
together
together). But Kai will never grow old.

I was sure I wanted to die. There didn’t seem to be any other option.

Every day I woke up thinking that today would be the day, and every day I found some excuse not to do it. Every day Mum nagged me about going back to school, and every day I told her to leave me alone. Since I refused point blank to leave the house she even got the doctor to make a house call and she somehow persuaded him to sign me off school for longer than he wanted to. The school was fine with it as long as I kept up with my work, because (as everyone and their dog kept reminding me) it
was
GCSE year. Like I cared.

A month to the day after Kai’s death, I was finally ready. There was something poetic about the timing, I thought. I tried not to think about Mum or Dad or Noah, telling myself they’d get over it, in time. They’d understand. It’s amazing, the lies you can tell yourself. Even more amazing, the lies you can believe when you’re desperate enough.

I wrote a pretty standard sort of note: I said I was sorry, how much I loved them, told them they shouldn’t feel bad. It was painfully inadequate, but it was the best I could do. And it was better than nothing. Marginally.

For the past few weeks they’d been taking turns staying home, using up their holiday days in a vain attempt to make sure I didn’t kill myself. But their bosses were losing patience, so they’d eventually resigned themselves to leaving me on my own for a few hours a day.

Mum and Dad were at work and Noah was at school and I was going to be dead by the time they got home. I would get a glass of water, or maybe a bottle, because there were a lot of pills to be swallowed. I didn’t want to be ten pills down and suddenly realize I couldn’t swallow them because I was out of water. It would be disastrous if I passed out without finishing the job. That would mean being rushed to the hospital, having my stomach pumped, having to face my parents, having to face Noah.

Thinking about Noah hurt the most. He wouldn’t understand. He was only ten, and for some reason he still thought his big sister was awesome. He had yet to discover what the rest of the world thought of her. Emo. Loser. Goth. Freak.

Noah would be better off without me though. Mum and Dad would pay him loads of attention to compensate for the trauma of having a dead sister. He’d get spoiled rotten. He might even be allowed that mountain bike he’s been after forever. Those were the kind of lies I told myself.

After a long hot shower, I raided the fridge to make a sandwich. My last meal. I would have preferred something like Mum’s lasagne or a Chinese takeaway, but Mum hadn’t made lasagne since Kai died and it seemed crazy weird (even for me) to order up a Chinese banquet before I topped myself.

The sandwich was dry and tasted terrible, even though it had all my favourite things and plenty of mayonnaise. I didn’t even manage to eat half of it, probably because I couldn’t shake the image of what it would look like in my stomach – all chewed up and partially digested. There was a good chance that I would choke on my own vomit. That’s how you die, sometimes. The drugs knock you out, your stomach revolts against what’s in it, you spew, but you’re still knocked out, so you choke and drown in your own sick. Pretty disgusting, really.

I was regretting not considering this sooner, and carefully washing the chopping board, knife and plate, when the doorbell went. It was probably the postman;
our stupidly small letter box means that only the slimmest of envelopes make it through.

The doorbell rang again and again.
Go away! Go the fuck away!
I covered my ears with my hands to try to block out the sound.
Why won’t they leave me alone? Why won’t everybody just leave me alone?
I felt like stabbing myself with the knife then and there.

Then whoever it was started banging on the front door with their fist. The banging interspersed with the ringing made me reconsider stabbing myself and think about stabbing the mystery caller instead. Then there was a voice. A voice I recognized, shouting, ‘Jem! I know you’re in there so just answer the fucking door, OK? I’ve got better things to do than hang around here all day. Jem!’

I froze. It was Louise.
Shit.

I couldn’t ignore her. No matter how I felt about her, she was still his sister. Kai wouldn’t want me to ignore her. Kai would probably want us to reforge a friendship based on our mutual grief.

I trudged towards the front door to find her peering through the letter box like some kind of crazy stalker. As I was opening the door I heard her mutter, ‘About bloody time.’

I was slightly lost for words at the sight of her. It was like looking in a mirror. A strange sort of mirror.
Of course we looked worlds apart – she hadn’t gone and dyed her hair black or anything. It was still way blonder than the natural, beautiful golden colour she’d shared with Kai. But she wasn’t wearing a scrap of make-up, which was pretty much unthinkable to the popular, slutty girls she was friends with. But there was something in her face that I recognized – something I’d seen whenever I’d looked in the mirror since Kai’s death. There was something hopeless about us both. Like we’d disappeared into a place that no one else could reach. I almost wanted to hug her (and wanted her to hug me). But that would probably have freaked her out. I’d steered well clear of her at the funeral to avoid a potential hugging scenario. And because I’d started having some kind of weird panic attack, which meant Mum had to escort me out of the church halfway through the service.

‘Aren’t you going to invite me in?’ This was more like the Louise I knew.

‘Sorry, of course, yes.’ I stepped aside to let her pass. She was carrying a big brown envelope.

She rushed into the living room and sat down on the sofa. I couldn’t get over how different she looked with no make-up on.

‘Um . . . do you want a cup of tea or something?’ I hovered in the doorway to the kitchen.

Louise shook her head and didn’t even bother to say,
No, thanks
.