The kid did not leave a note or a text. He did not choose to explain his actions.
‘Carry the tiger over the mountain,’ said Yao, who was a young man, maybe only ten years older than Zach. Zach could have worked somewhere like this. He could have grown his hair long. He would have looked good with one of those beards they all had these days. He could have lived a fantastic life. So many opportunities. He had the brains, the looks, the facial hair. He was good with his hands. He could have done a trade! He could have done law or medicine or architecture. He could have travelled. He could have done drugs. Why didn’t he just do drugs? How wonderful to have a son who made bad choices but not irreversible bad choices; a kid who did drugs, who dealt drugs even, who got arrested, who went off the rails. Napoleon could have got him back on the rails.
Zach never even owned his own car. Why would you choose to die before you knew the pleasure, the spectacular pleasure, of owning your own car?
Apparently, that young bloke in front of him drove a Lamborghini.
Zach had chosen to turn his back on this beautiful world of whipbirds and Lamborghinis, long-legged girls and hamburgers with the lot. He chose to take a gift from his mother and use it as a murder weapon.
That was a bad choice, son. It was the wrong thing to do. It was a really bad choice.
He heard a sound and realised it was him. Zoe turned to look at him. He tried to smile at her reassuringly. I’m fine, Zoe, just yelling at your brother. His eyes blurred.
‘Needle at the bottom of the sea,’ said Yao.
My boy. My boy. My boy.
He was not broken. He would never stop grieving for Zach, but he had made a decision in the week after the funeral. He must not break. It was his job to heal, to be there for his wife and his daughter, to get through this. So he studied the literature, he bought books online and read every word, he downloaded podcasts, he Googled the research. He attended the Tuesday night Survivors of Suicide group as faithfully as his mother once went to Sunday mass, and now he ran the group. (Heather and Zoe thought he talked too much, but that was only in social situations. On Tuesday nights he hardly spoke a word; he listened and he listened on his fold-out chair and did not flinch while a tsunami of pain crashed all around him.) He gave speeches to parent groups and schools and did radio interviews and edited an online newsletter and helped with fundraising.
‘It’s his new hobby.’ He’d overheard Heather say that on the phone one night to someone, he never found out to whom because he never mentioned it, but he never forgot it, or the bitter tone; it sounded close to hatred. It hurt because it was both a malicious lie and the shameful truth.
He could find hatred in his heart for her, too, if he went looking for it. The secret of a happy marriage was not to go looking for it.
He saw his wife’s thin arms curved up towards the sun to ‘master its life force’ and his heart filled with painful tenderness for her. She could not heal and she refused to even try. She never went to the support group except for that one time. She did not want to hear from other parents who had lost sons because she believed Zach was superior to their stupid sons. Napoleon thought Zach was superior to their stupid sons too, but he still found solace in giving back to this community he had never asked to join.
‘The white crane spreads its wings.’
Sometimes there are no signs.
That’s what he told the newly grieving parents at the Tuesday night group. He told them there was research to suggest that teenage suicide was often the consequence of an impulsive decision. Many had suicidal thoughts for only eight hours before their attempts. Some idiotic kids put as little as five minutes’ thought into their catastrophic choice.
He did not tell them other things he had learned from his research, such as that suicide survivors often reported that their first thought after they’d swallowed the pills, after they’d jumped, after they’d cut, was a version of: My God, what have I done?! He did not tell them that many survivors of suicide are transformed by their experience and go on to live happy lives, sometimes with little psychiatric intervention. He didn’t tell them that if the decision to take their lives was in some way thwarted, if the means was removed, their suicidal thoughts often disappeared with time and never returned. He didn’t tell them how Britain’s national suicide rate dropped by a third when coal gas was phased out, because once people no longer had the option to impulsively stick their head in the oven, there was time for their dark and dreadful impulses to pass. He didn’t think it was helpful for parents to know just how much bad luck was involved in the loss of their children; that perhaps all they’d needed was a well-timed interruption, a phone call, a distraction.
But Napoleon knew it, because that was Zach. Impulsive. The absolute definition of impulsive. He never thought things through. He never thought of the consequences of his actions. He lived in the moment, as you were meant to do. He practised mindfulness. No yesterday. No tomorrow. Just now. I feel this now, so I will do this now.
If you chase the waves along the beach your new runners will get wet and they will stay wet for the rest of the day. If you run about outside when the pollen count is high (even though we told you to stay indoors), you will have an asthma attack. If you give up your life, you won’t get it back, kid, it’s gone.
‘Zach, you’ve got to think!’ Napoleon used to yell at him.
That’s why Napoleon knew without a doubt that if he’d got up at the time he’d originally planned, if he hadn’t pressed the snooze button on his alarm that morning, if he’d knocked on Zach’s door and said, ‘Come paddling with me,’ then right now he’d have a wife who wasn’t broken and a daughter who still sang in the shower and a son about to celebrate his twenty-first birthday.
Napoleon was meant to be the one who knew and understood boys. He had a drawer full of cards and letters from the boys he’d taught over the years, and their parents, all telling him how very special he was, how much he’d contributed to their lives, that they would never forget him, that he’d pulled them back from some terrible brink, a wrong path, that they’d be eternally grateful to their wonderful teacher, Mr Marconi.
Yet he’d somehow failed his own boy. The only boy in the world who mattered.
For a year he’d searched for answers. He’d talked to every friend, every teammate, every teacher, every coach. None of them had answers. There was nothing more to know.
‘Fan through the back,’ said Yao.
Napoleon fanned through the back and felt his muscles stretch and the sun warm on his face as he tasted the sea from the tears that ran heedlessly down his face.
But he wasn’t broken.
chapter twenty-seven
Zoe
Zoe saw the tears slide down her father’s face and wondered if he knew he was crying. Her dad cried a lot without seeming to realise he was doing it, like a scratch he didn’t know was bleeding, as if his body excreted grief without his knowledge.
‘Touch the sky,’ said Yao.
Zoe followed the graceful arc of Yao’s arms and turned now in her mother’s direction, and saw the deep crevices in her mother’s face and heard once more the sound of her mother’s scream that awful morning. Like the scream of an animal caught in a trap. A scream that tore straight through Zoe’s life like a razor blade.