The Suicide Sun

Chapter one: The Long Haul

From the diary of James Down:

Friday, January 20th.

Sometimes I think I'll survive the long haul. The odds are against it (they're long odds), but sometimes I think I'll make the journey. Then I look around--and I don't have to look far, or for very long; the evidence is all around, in body bags--and I realise that nobody really makes it; nobody has the stamina. We're all exhausted. Everybody's knackered from all the effort it takes just to stand still. Standing still takes it out of us. Better to lie down, just for a few minutes, to rest our vampire eyes and block out the sun.

Sleep...

I sleep too, sometimes. (It's always sometimes with me--the only thing I do all the time is think about the things I sometimes do, like remembering to breathe.) It's good stuff, sleep. I recommend it. It's something to do, a way to spend some time without too much effort. And it gets you out of the world for a bit, and who doesn't need to do that? There's in-flight entertainment, too--though now and again the projectionist in my head plays horror movies for a laugh. They're the real things, these horror-dreams. They're X-rated video nasties starring Things From Other Dimensions, entities of pitch-black death that crawl through my skull and eat my heart. I long for censorship, for sensible regulations, for slapstick comedies, for a different projectionist. Dreamless sleep...

But overall, sleep is a winner. We crave it, we demand more and more, and like petulant lovers, we get extremely pissed-off when it doesn't call on time, when sleep misses a date. The only bad thing about sleep is that you have to wake up, feeling knackered.

#

Dr Blight held up a card, and asked in measured tones, "What do you see?"

Down stifled a yawn, scratched his head, and peered closely at the image on the card. An abstract pattern. Black on white, a symmetrical jigsaw of fragmented shapes.

It looked like a map having a nervous breakdown.

"What do you see?" persisted Dr Blight.

"Black Dogs. I see Black Dogs. They're everywhere."

"On the card?"

"Everywhere."

"How does that make you feel?"

"Depressed."

"I see."

Just another session with Dr Blight...

Down regarded these therapy sessions as a necessary evil. The local Health Authority had an obligation to make certain that Down was no longer a danger to himself, or to others, so to cover their backs after his release from hospital they had dumped him on Dr Blight, and had basically told the old doctor, "Look after Mr Down for us, will you? Make sure he doesn't top himself. Ta."

To be fair, they had tried everything else first: outpatient clinics, home visits, threats of 'sectioning'... The worst thing had undoubtedly been the group therapy sessions he had been forced to attend. A circle of doped-up zombies had taken it in turns to stand up and introduce themselves as suicidal depressives, like a comedy routine looking for a punchline, or a sympathetic audience. Down had only attended two sessions--on the second and final visit, Down had been intrigued to note that the group had been halved in number, and when he had asked the group counsellor about the missing fifty percent, he was told that half the group had killed themselves in a bizarre suicide pact, presumably to avoid attending any more meetings. Down had shaken his head and had walked out of the building, feeling stunned and thoroughly miserable.

Fridays, Down found himself in Dr Blight's archaic consulting room, playing silly word games or even sillier card tricks, or making up any old rubbish about his childhood in order to appease Dr Blight's alarmingly outdated view of psychoanalysis, which seemed to Down to be lifted wholesale from Freudian textbooks.

To Dr Blight,everything was about childhood and sex. To Down, who hadn't had a sniff of sex until he was a desperate twenty-two, everything was a crushing disappointment.

"These black dogs," Dr Blight wasn't about to let this significant discovery go to waste. There was a Freudian gold mine in Down's lazy response, and Dr Blight could already see a potential book in it. "Are they having sex?"

"Oh dear God!"

#

The world needs sleep. The frenetic brightness of the day, with its local interests and its universal concerns, gives way to necessary languor--to low lighting. Down had not slept through the night. He had been wide-awake through the yawning zero-hour wails of police traffic, and the infant communications of hunger and need... While everybody else--and we must exclude here the professional night-crawlers, the willing insomniacs--while everybody else slumbered peacefully, or fitfully, or lovingly through the night, Down had been horribly, depressingly awake. He simply wasn't getting enough sleep, and it was killing him. Even junior doctors managed more shut-eye.

Down shuffled out of Dr Blight's consulting room ten minutes earlier than usual. Dr Blight had noted Down's permanent condition (he was permanently depressed, and knackered) and had broken all the rules by writing him a prescription for high dosage sleeping pills. Seemingly, Dr Blight was past caring about his reputation, or even his patients. The pills he had prescribed could knock out an eco system--they were the nukes of the pharmaceutical world. Sleep? You wouldn't be able to wake up.

For the sixth time that day (and it was only yet ten in the morning, when postmen were finishing their first deliveries, and people were still yawning down coffee), Down's bleary head swam with thoughts of suicide: Dr Blight had provided him with a perfect suicide plan, state approved, guaranteed effective... The devious old bastard. Out... out into the sunlight (Jesus, couldn't somebody do something about all that sunlight? What was the sun doing? Was it on a suicide trip? Was it sending out an ultra violet resignation letter--was the sun getting out of the universe? The sun... Jesus!) and Down felt the need to be sick. He felt unhealthy. He felt undeserving of his body, which was gamely struggling on through the day (a day of being suicidal) while his heart had already called it quits on life and his brain just needed a good night's sleep.

Down continued his shuffling through the car park, past the small patch of invalid grass that was wilting under the sun, and the stunned-looking patients on the benches who couldn't believe how bad things had become for them, but who were beginning to suspect that things were going to get even worse; past the red-bricked monolith that housed the junior doctors and the jaded nurses, and through the maze of walkways and thoroughfares that led to Paediatrics, to X-Ray, to Theatre, to the morgue.

At the hospital gates, Down paused to look down the hill at his home city. Bristol didn't look much, from a distance. It didn't look much close up, either; it exhibited a junkie hollowness that came from too much partying, too much money, too little care and too much, too much. Bristol had had an expensively good time--at somebody else's expense. And it stank of guilt--for its past, for its present, but it was the kind of city that only made half-arsed attempts at an apology because deep down it really couldn't give a fuck, and it knew that nobody else could give a fuck, too. Bristol, where nobody could give a fuck...

Down sighed, then yawned expansively, and trudged down the hill, into Bristol, into the pub, into all that guilt.

#

"Benzodiazepine," said Pub, examining Dr Blight's heart attack scrawl, "is the family name of a bunch of sedatives that includes diazepam and triazolam, and what you've got here is a cocktail of the shit, a super-sedative, King Kong's sleepy dust. Strong stuff. Very strong stuff. Where d'ya get it? Are you banging your G.P.?"

It was an hour later, and Down was in a shit-hole calledThe Dog and Duck. It was the kind of pub that resisted all attempts at civility, especially from the regulars, who were Rottweiler-territorial about it; they marked their scents with piss and beer, and defended it from intruders with low guttural growls from foam-filled mouths.

The Dog and Duck at 11:00 A.M.--already drunk on testosterone, sick of itself, and pleading for female attention. Sunlight cowered timidly in the corner, afraid to go further into the world of men. You wouldn't want to be there. Not at 11:00 A.M. Not at 11:00P.M., or all the hours in between. Not at anytime.

"I don't have any money on me," said Down, snatching back his own death sentence before Pub could pocket it and sell it later to one of his many dubious friends. He patted his pockets, theatrically. "Could you...?"

Pub sighed complicatedly, somehow managing to appear exasperated, generous and sinned-against in the same tobacco-drenched breath, but he reached a scrawny hand into his jeans and it emerged with a crumpled fiver.

"Here. And mine's a Guinness, right? And we're off to the cash point after this, surely...?"

Down crossed the room as carefully as he would negotiate a minefield, but with the unaffected nonchalance of the truly brave. In the environment ofThe Dog and Duck, any whiff of vulnerability was fatal. He ordered a round of drinks in casual pub-speak, and as the bar girl with the Page Three-looks and Accident-and-Emergency-toughness did the business with glass and pump, he stared vacantly at a slot machine that penetrated the gloom with robotic balefulness.

When Down returned with a pair of ill-looking pints, he found Pub fussing with his mobile phone.

Pub's real name was Alexander Salmon, a good, respectable, sober name, but he was the kind of idiot who insisted on being referred to by a nickname. Throughout his childhood he had been the obligatory 'Spud': "Alright, Spud?"; "Cheers, Spud"; "Where's Spud...?"; in his teens he had experimented with various fish-themed monikers in a misguided effort to appear witty and self-deprecating; hence the gruesome 'Fishman', the magnanimous 'GillFucker', and the androgynous 'Sally'. Eventually he had decided on the name 'Pub', since he spent almost every waking moment of his life in one.

Pub was professionally unemployed, which meant that he had a lot of free time, a disdain for responsibility, secondhand opinions on the government gleaned from genuine dissenters who had long since recognised his innate laziness and woolly thinking, and an addiction to tinned soup.

Pub was also mysteriouslyloaded. Pub had a bank account that was smugly satisfied with itself, with its exciting abacus of positive zeroes. Bank managers called him by his first name, and heartily slapped him on the back while they offered him cigars and high interest. Pub was on the dole, but he was high-denomination. He had a business card. He had a mobile.

Down constructed a cigarette while he looked at his friend.

"Stop fucking about with your mobile. It's distracting. No, it's annoying. What are you doing with it, anyway? Leave it alone. For fuck's sake."

Whenever he was in the company of his friends, or anybody his own age for that matter, Down found his language spiralling downmarket into a punctuation of 'fucks'. He couldn't help it. Everybody he knew in their late twenties/early thirties, said 'fuck' like it was going out of fashion. 'Fuck' was in fashion (had it ever beenout of fashion?), it was on the high streets. Everybody said 'fuck' in the movies. Well, in the movies that people who said 'fuck' went to see, anyway.

"You going to take these?" Pub waved airily in the direction of the prescription buried in Down's trouser pocket.

"It'll take a fucking atom bomb or something to wake you up when you take them. What was the dosage? Twenty mil? Strong stuff, Jimbo." Pub's pharmaceutical knowledge... Wheredid he get it from? Pub narrowed his eyes as a slow speed thought drifted by.

"Hang on, you're not thinking about...?" He pulled a bony finger across his throat and made a noise like a constipated duck.

"No."

"Yeah, well with you... you're a miserable bastard and you can never tell, can you? I mean, it's not as if you haven't fuckingtried, is it? Bad news, Jimbo." Pub took a disapproving sip of Guinness.

"Pub, please don't call me Jimbo. And please don't muck around with that fucking mobile."

The mobile rang, a jaunty modern pop tune, which was Pub's idea of being ironic. The ring tone had been chosen carefully to express Pub's inclusiveness of disposable modern culture, while at the same time making absolutely clear that he was much more discerning in his tastes.

"Yeah?" said Pub into his phone. He listened for a moment then handed the phone across to Down.

"It's for you. It's George. She wants to know where the fuck you are, and why you're not at something. Or something."

"Oh fuck," said Down, as he took temporary possession of the mobile and wondered what lies he was going to tell his girlfriend.

#

Georgette stood in the centre of her living room. She folded her arms self-consciously and opened her eyes. She deliberately didn't look at the thing on the table. Instead, she examined the floor, with its threadbare rug; the walls, which were adorned with unabashed abstracts; the ceiling, with its artful cobweb that danced the length of the room.

George thought about dust for a few seconds (she possessed a busy mind): its applications, its random formations, its texture. Then she directed her field of vision to the table, and to the thing that rested upon it.

George liked to look at things from all sorts of angles, and from all distances, but the thing on the table could only be looked atin surprise.

It was head-shaped and head-sized, and it looked... well, it looked like a head. The observer's eye had no problem with this. It saw the head-shape and the head-size, and it reported back to the brain with a simple, "It's a head." It was the face of the thing... The face on the head was a surprise. The face was awful, no two ways about it. The face gave no room for ambiguity. It was dreadful, and surprising. To George, who had given life to it, it was remarkable.

"Wow!" She admitted to the head. "You need a name, I think." And it did need a name--it needed identifying, so that it would be less surprising. It needed to be christened 'ATTILLA!', or 'RAPE!', or 'MUSTARD GAS POISONING!'. It needed police protection and immediate counselling.

George was twenty-seven, and she thought like an artist. No, she thought like an Artist, and that was because she was one. George was an Artist. Georgette's world--her daily life, her time travel, her dreams--was filled with colours and shapes and spaces and constructions and questions and with wit and vibrancy and pragmatic intelligence. George was pretty, which was better than beautiful because it required less effort, and she was in love. She was in love with Art, and Art was perfect for her because it returned her passion and always promised more.

George tiptoed barefoot over to her Head (She had named it now: it was 'Head') and kissed the crown. The Head made a loud buzzing sound in reply, which alarmed her (it was a surprising Head) until she realised that the sound had come from the intercom on her wall, and announced the presence of Down, who was, to her, a work of Art himself--A Francis Bacon, perhaps, or Munch'sThe Scream.

She left the Head and walked to the wall.

"It's open," she breathed into the intercom.

#

"Jesus, what the hell is that?"

"What does it look like? Hello. Where's my kiss? Where have you been? Why are you late? How many have you had?"

"It looks like... I don't know what it looks like. It looks like the dismembered head of a Gestapo Officer.Christ. What's it made from?"

"Papier Mâchè and bone."

"Bone? What sort of bone?"

"There's only one sort of bone. You haven't answered my questions. How did it go with Dr Thingie? White."

"Blight. He says I'm not sleeping enough. He thinks it might be something sexual from my childhood."

"You look terrible. Forget about the kiss. Anyway, we have to go."

"We do? Where...?"

George was used to Down's unpunctuality, and his utter lack of enthusiasm for everything, but it still hurt when he forgot the important things–-and to George, who loved life and was bright enough to see the Big Picture, and the silliness of most things–-this was important. And he had forgotten. Bastard.

Down saw the look that bruised her face, and sensed the abrupt mood shift from comfortable geniality into disappointment and inner-hurt, and he had the good grace to be ashamed of himself. George was the closest thing he had to a Good Reason For Staying Alive For Another Day (he really did think like that--in capitals), and though he often caused her pain and distress (he was her boyfriend; it was his duty), he never did it deliberately.

"I'm sorry. I really am..." He kissed her then, awkwardly, as if he had forgotten how to do it, and he followed the kiss with a rare smile, a gift to her. "Happy Anniversary."

George softened, as she always did, but she turned from him quickly, letting him know that she was still disappointed and angry with him, but that it would be filed away for now, in the folder marked 'regret', in her busy, clever and compassionate mind.

"I made him for you," she said absently, indicating the Head. "It's what I think is in your head sometimes."

"Papier Mâchè and bone?"

"No, surprise."

"Ah. I don't know what is in my head."

"Yes you do. That's why you're depressed."

And he had no answer to that, so he followed her out of the room, out of her flat and into the sunlight, into Her World. And he went willingly, though really, he never went at all.

#

January, by and large, is never a good month for public parks. This January, with its cancer heatwave from a suicidal sun, was an even worse time for all the parks. Parks expected the January numbness, the New Year hangover. Parks had been around for a long time, and had long ago made provision for seasonal changes. (Lovers walked through them in autumn, chased each other through summer, and broke-up in winter--it was a neat arrangement.) But this was out of order. The sun was killing all the park life. Ducks were dying of thirst in dehydrated streams; trees were thawing rapidly, then drying out alarmingly, sapped of life; dogs and Englishmen were going mad in the midday sun.

One newspaper headline said it all: "What The FUCK??!!".

Down had met George in a park three years ago today. Now he walked hand in hand with her as they passed the corpses of alarmed-looking animals. It was a metaphor for his life, he thought to himself. He found them a bench that hadn't been vandalised, and they sat together, close and comfortably quiet, as if they were already middle-aged and satisfactorily married.

Down was aware that acquaintances were often baffled as to what sort of relationship George and Down had created for themselves (let's be honest: they wondered what on earth she saw in him), but equally he knew that sometimes they were surprised and a little jealous of the easy, unaffected way that he and George were with each other. They looked right together. They had the right shape, somehow.

"What are you thinking about?" George asked him, though he guessed that she knew perfectly well what it was.

"Us," he admitted. Down often found it difficult to look her in the eyes, so he looked away, to the distance.

"Us with a capital 'U', or just us?"

"Um... What's the difference?"

George closed her eyes so that her other senses could take over for a while.

"Us with a capital 'U' signifies Big Things. Relationship stuff. Where we are, where we're going, how we feel. Is it working out? Is it time to move on? What about moving in together?"

"Christ."

"Marriage? Kids?"