Does the Helpline Heroine post here?
No, she’s pro. She keeps it on the downlow cos she works for a suicide helpline called End of the Line or something like that. Lol. Someone recommended her to Chloe4.
I let out a deep breath I didn’t know I’d been holding, prised my eyes away from the screen and glanced outside. The darkness was making way for a rising sun. An occasional car headlight illuminated the road as commuters began their new day.
I’d spent months searching for something – anything – to explain why Charlotte had ended her life and why it was with a complete stranger. Now something told me that if the ‘Helpline Heroine’ actually existed, she would have an answer for me.
CHAPTER TEN
FOUR MONTHS, ONE WEEK AFTER CHARLOTTE
It was like banging my head against a brick wall.
It had taken effort, skill and organisation and where was I? Nowhere. Try as I might, I was no closer to finding out whether the Helpline Heroine was a real person or the figment of a morally bankrupt website’s imagination. However, the one thing searching for her had given me was purpose.
The day after first reading the post about her, I did a keyword search on the same message board and four others. Her nickname was buried within hundreds of other posts but she’d definitely been mentioned a couple of dozen times, although not as often in recent years. Like every decent urban myth, nobody could actually verify her existence. I guessed if she was that good at what she did, the proof of her successes were lying six feet under, not boasting about her online.
I still struggled to comprehend that someone who worked for a helpline might have an ulterior motive. I don’t know why though – until a day earlier, I hadn’t realised message forums existed to encourage suicidal people to die. If she was real, I’d hunt her down and lure her out from beneath the rock where she was hiding.
I set up camp on the dining room table and created a profile for my own message board account. When R.I.P. ignored my direct message, I turned to GrlInterrupted instead.
Hi, sorry to bother you, I typed, I just wondered if you had any luck trying to find the woman from End of the Line that R.I.P told you about? The Helpline Heroine?
I paced the flat as I waited for an alert to say she’d replied. Within the hour, she had.
No, sorry, bro. R.I.P didn’t know anything more about her. Even called the branches myself but kept getting different folk. Like finding a needle in a haystack, eh? Not sure what I’d have said anyway – ‘hi, which one of you bitches wants to listen to me die?’ Lolz.
I replied with a ‘lolz’ of my own but nothing about this amused me.
I needed air and caffeine so I swapped the flat for a nearby parade of shops. I used to be a regular at the café most Sunday mornings, and I’d return home with a bag of muffins, cinnamon swirls and hot drinks for Charlotte and me. It was the first time I’d gone back since she’d died and it felt peculiar ordering for one.
I asked for a double cappuccino and, as the coffee machine spluttered to life, a wave of guilt washed over me in a sliding door moment. I wondered how different my life might be if only I’d been a better, more attentive husband. A man who wasn’t so insistent that his way was the right way. That Ryan would have realised earlier just how serious Charlotte’s depression was, and listened to her instead of trying to cure her. Now Charlotte would be standing with him in the queue, one hand clutching her purse and the other clasping the handle of Daniel’s pram. I shook my head and the alternate universe melted away like a snowflake.
I took my drink back to the flat, trying to guesstimate how long it might take to prove or disprove the Helpline Heroine’s existence. The only way would be to call, and to keep calling the helpline until I tracked her down. The odds were against me. Northamptonshire had ninety-four part-time volunteers, Leicestershire eighty-six, Warwickshire fifty-eight and Bedfordshire sixty. Give or take a few who might have come and gone since the last tally was published in its annual report, I had about a one-in-three-hundred chance of finding her.
I couldn’t think of a way to cut corners and speed up the process. And that was assuming the person I was looking for really was a her. The heroine could very easily have been male. Either way, they’d need to be convinced I was for real.
I devised a backstory for myself. I’d claim depression was ruining my life and that I didn’t see any purpose in continuing. I’d tell them not only had I contemplated suicide but I’d almost gone ahead with it; however, something had held me back. I needed someone to help me take those extra few steps forward because I couldn’t do it alone.
To make it work, I needed to be organised. I opened up a blank Excel spreadsheet on Charlotte’s laptop to make a note of the name of each End of the Line volunteer who answered. I’d add the time of the call and a brief outline of their responses to what I told them. Some likely shared the same Christian name, so I’d type adjectives like ‘old’, ‘young’, ‘nasal’, ‘regional’ or ‘foreign accent’ to separate them.
I’d give them my middle name, Steven, and I’d adjust my sleep pattern to cover all their shifts. The task ahead of me was Herculean. But the quicker I cracked on, the quicker I’d know for sure if I was hunting for a real person or a ghost in the machine. I even got hold of a Dictaphone, and with a little bit of gadgetry bought online, I could plug it into my phone and record all my calls in case it was her.
Each day, I spoke to as many different volunteers as I could. My conversations continued for as long as necessary until I could either include them on my spreadsheet as a ‘yes’, a ‘maybe’ or a probable ‘no’. Patterns began to emerge of who worked when, how frequently, and which days of the week I could find them.
A little over a fortnight later and my spreadsheet went on for pages, packed full of names, dates, times and descriptions. But there had been no obvious ‘yeses’.
I felt shitty for abusing End of the Line’s resources by calling so often and for pulling the wool over their eyes, especially as they seemed like good people. They didn’t try to talk Steven out of wanting to end his life; instead, they listened, helped him explore what he was feeling and let him find his own way forward. Without exception, every voice was coming from a place of goodness. I had to keep reminding myself that so was I.