Contacts

by Mark Watson

similar. But when you were lonely, fake displays of friendship made things feel lonelier still.

the phone was his only timepiece, for a start. It would be reassuring to keep an eye on the time.

The phone would be by his side, but surrounded by a force-field. Nobody could touch him, now.

He put the phone down on the sad little ledge that passed for a bedside table here. It was odd how small the phone looked, all of a sudden – a trick of the mind, perhaps, now that it had been stripped of its powers. It was an object again, inert like a brick, rather than an ever-watchful second brain. It might as well be a toy.

From being protected, feeling that you had a place in the world, to this: sitting on a sleeper train, with a bag of beers, knowing you were going to commit suicide shortly after the sun came up.

It was a product of the slavishness which the world had wandered into; of the mental pattern established by checking a single device hundreds of times in a day.

Being active while others slept: it had felt like a superpower of some kind.

There was nothing an individual could do about the potential for mayhem that existed when humans tried to carry out their plans at the same time as one another.

didn’t buy eggs and then two days later overdose or something. ‘It shouldn’t be too complicated.’ Was he taking the piss? What was this?

it turned out there was something worse than the adrenalin of a crisis: the endless flat grey afternoon of depression.

He had no plans; nobody would want to see him. Everyone had kids, or they were in couples having brunch, or they were just mysteriously away as people so often seemed to be when you were yearning for them.

That everyone ended up being a minor curiosity, given time; all lives ended up as footnotes, often full of factual errors. He needn’t have seen himself all this time as a major character, every decision triggering grave consequences.

There was another category of people, of course: those who did not receive the message, were not on James’s phone, but would find that their lives were affected by James’s even in the time he had left. These people could be anywhere, because of the paths technology had built, because nobody was very far from anybody any more. Indeed, one of them was on his train.

If his life were worth sentimentalizing like that, he wouldn’t be finishing it this way.

The sunlight, fizzing like a firework before it died, beamed off the golden letters of the Scotsman building.

Their grief, in a three-person huddle at the front, had been wildly and inevitably out of proportion with anyone else’s:

James no longer had to care about other people. All that mattered was his own welfare.

He had far more female friends than actual girlfriends. That was what happened if you were a good listener, but not very tall.

And someone you had lived with, slept with, loved, now wanting to be dead, perhaps already having taken his own life, while you’d been out drinking with the person who replaced him.

He felt, instead, stuck. Stuck in a cage he’d built for himself: in the car, driving some prick up the motorway, powerless to stop his friend from doing something that would destroy both of them.

The night seemed so thick when you were trapped in it, but being up and busy reminded you of how brittle it was. Soon, there would be no night left.

The sky was mauve, the sort of darkness that looked like it would give way to grey rather than to genuine light.

It was a chemical response, a sort of heightened aliveness, like the bristling of nerve-endings before lightning strikes.

How could you trace a straight line from a happy, functioning James to this finished one?

he had given the world a reasonable chance to prove that it ‘didn’t have to’ be like this, and the fact was it did have to, it was going to keep being like this, and he would much, much rather not be in the game than keep on losing it over and over again.

The locations of his life were gone now, the locations and the people who’d lived there. He couldn’t go back to them, any more than those kids – in the book Sal used to read him extracts from – could get back to Narnia if the wardrobe were taken away one day.

The train, hemmed in for so long, now charged through the widened space like an animal.

The sky would be streaky by that point, light leaking into it.

Maybe I don’t have a kind mode, she thought; maybe I’m a bitch, pure and simple.

It was impossible that there would be cricket matches in the summer, and the Edinburgh festival, and those cloud-filled changeable days he loved – they would come round again and again, without him.

If the loss of her son was a problem that could be solved by carbohydrates alone, as he seemed to believe it was, it would all be over by now.

It was just not at all clear what they could do about this.

I’m worth more dead than alive. It sounded ghoulish, the same way the word ‘suicide’ did, because it felt like something to be screamed down from a ledge at a would-be rescuer. But there was nothing dramatic about it as an idea; there was no self-pity in the way it nestled in his brain. It was a calculation, and James found it quite a cheering one. He was going to give people something they’d remember, act on. A harsh way of doing it, perhaps. But life was harsh, wasn’t it? Life was harsh, that was why he was here.

You didn’t need a big grand reason to do it. You just had to have run out of ideas, as a human, and be brave enough to admit it.

In the end, you could always stay in control. The moments in between were the illusion. This was real.

She’d just been living, getting up each day, assuming at some point a signpost would point her towards something of substance. And all this time, there were people out there who desperately needed the help of someone like her. You defined yourself by participating in other people’s lives.

Along the invisible train tracks in the sky raced the fragments of appeal sent up endlessly by James’s would-be rescuers.

He felt light-headed and foggy in the way he normally did after a whole night awake. That was fine. They were the right mental conditions to be in.

When the body fell, the person inside it remained a person for the few seconds it took to hit Market Street below.

He had never intended to be standing here. This was an afterlife, of sorts.

It wasn’t as if he’d been talked out of it. Events had just stopped him. The universe, if you believed in phrases like this, had had other plans.

For now, he was alive, and in the morning he would start to think about what that meant.