Episode 27 - Myths Of The Near Past (pt 5)

The phone rings and I answer it. It's Sian and she wants to discuss the up coming wedding. The phone call went as follows - a small talk starter, before the wedding main course and the deserts which, as it happens, were to be far from sweet.

Even though I had said how we wanted things to be and then having spectacularly caved into demands from her parents, the little finger of rebellion had been tickling my brain with increasing regularity. I had been brave and decisive, cowardly and weak, but it now seemed that a sense of defiance - or was it self preservation - was kicking in. Its appearance as mystical as my spineless back tracking over the wedding. It chose to explode into this particular phone call.

One minute I was talking to Sian, the next minute her mother and it was during this bit with her mother that all my inner turmoil poured out. I know that the call ended with, "........Go fuck yourself, you black mailing cow!" and then slam, the hand set was back in its cradle. I remember very little else, but something must have happened to make me do that. Maybe that little finger of rebellion had hit the right button?

Within 12 hours of that call ending, I was laying there in the dark waiting for my escape from this self constructed nightmare.

The phone rings again, and in a daze I answer it. Its Sian's Dad and he wants to discuss with me my comments. He tells me that it wasn't the right thing to do, that i could consider my involvement with his daughter over and that it was his view, that should I be seen again by him or any of his sons, they would consider it their duty to kill me. Slam and the line went dead.

Oh fuck. I've pissed them off now. Now that little finger of rebellion was pushing other buttons - wrong ones - despair, fear, hopelessness. My mind started working on how I could retrieve the situation and make everyone happy again, or more importantly, how was i stop Sian's family from doing me in (self preservation makes cowards of us all).

I picked up the phone and dialed. Sian's father answered. He repeated in more forthright terms his earlier stated views and soon i was listening to the dialing tone again. The rebellious finger disappeared from whence it came, leaving the despair, fear and hopelessness buttons jammed in their casings, permanently on.

My world darkened as the evening gloom closed in.

All through this my mother was outside talking to a neighbour, oblivious to her youngest child taking a turn for the worse. I went up to my bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed and stared into the abyss where my carpet used to be. Outside the sun was setting but inside it was already below my inner horizon. Deep inside out of the growing darkness came a fist, tight and frenzied, metaphorical and real - I went into a daze - and came out of it with blood on my knuckles and a hole in my bedroom door.

Down in the street my mother looks up from her neighbourly conversation, liked she'd heard a noise.

Much later, I lay there on my bed with the lights out. I weighed up my limited options, considered the glowing embers of my burnt bridges. But in lots of ways (retrospection is a wonderful thing), my outburst was inevitable.

My parents are deeply middle class. My father, a civil engineer, is a man with precise views. He had aspirations for his son. He wanted me to do well, to achieve something and to be someone that he could be proud of. My mother too, wanted only good things for her little boy. Neither of them wanted their son to get his 18 year old girlfriend pregnant. Neither of them wanted their son to get married because of a baby either. For them these things were a vision of hell.

I had given them the opposite of what they wanted. I had not covered myself in glory. I'd started off well by saying what I thought was best - no marriage, wait and see - and then acquiesced to the needs and wants of Sian's parents and Sian herself (who'd become convinced that a weeding was best). My capitulation deepened my parents sense of middle class outrage and served to piss them of more than I could've believed. Through all of this my own sense of how things were lurched from triumph to abject defeat, from sensibility to rank stupidity, from white(!) to black.

Somewhere inside me, the pressure was building and like all pressure, something has to give.

And it did. The pressure blew away the sense of loss of control - I had gone from control to being controlled - and in desperation I had blurted out how I really felt and in fairness I did feel these things from the beginning but had allowed others to change things. The natural order had to be restored - these feelings refused to be suppressed.

Hence the inevitability. (I know I may not be making much sense, but looking back there is a lot I do not understand and more that I cannot remember clearly)

It was in these circumstances and with these feelings inside, I crept downstairs to the medicine cabinet. Suicide seemed the best way to resolve things - I had let everyone down and most of all I had let myself down. I remember thinking that it was something I was capable of. It was the ultimate escape. Selfishly, I probably didn't consider the effect on those left beside. I only thought of myself, my little world, my feelings and no one else. I wonder if all suicides are selfish? I think I was - after what I had put my family through I hadn't a care for what else I was going to inflict on them.

It hasn't escaped my notice that I am not really a sympathetic character in this particular phase of my life, but then again I should be happy that I'm here to say this!?

I opened the cabinet and looked inside. Plenty of pills to found. I grabbed a bottle, emptied it into my mouth - the bottle looked important enough and I figured the lot would do the trick. To this day, I don't remember what they were. A glass of water to wash them all down and I was soon back in my bedroom, waiting.

I contemplated what I had done. Too late to back out now - I could vomit, but why should I? I was as serious as I could be and my mind was set. I lay there, listening to the house, listening to the silent night. The darkness in my room seemed to get darker - blacker? My breathing got shallower and my chest seemed to get heavier, the weight of the duvet pressing down.

The fact that I'm writing this makes the outcome obvious. My attempt failed and aside from a missing pill bottle no one in the house that night would have been any the wiser.

The sun rose, the world turned and another day began. My plans not to be a part of it hadn't worked out, but I wasn't disappointed - I was calm.

One thing was clear, though. No more laying in the dark waiting for my breathing to stop.