Most people would probably have a more tech-efficient way of spreading the news. WhatsApp, perhaps.
Even as recently as five years ago, well after he’d left the tech world, James would still have found it difficult to imagine not having a Facebook account. But then, he would also have found it difficult to imagine not having a girlfriend, or best mate, a healthy relationship with his sister, a purpose. He’d come off Facebook, and everything else like that, as soon as Michaela left.
This was his final act of sharing, you could say. It was a bit of a clumsy way to do it, he reflected, reading the message which was about to be dispatched to his entire phone book one more time. The ‘James x’ looked ridiculous to James’s own eyes. He never normally signed off with an ‘x’. He’d been left behind by the age of over-familiarity between virtual strangers. Only recently, before he got sacked, a passenger he was picking up – a total stranger – had sent him a GIF of a goat eating a chocolate bar whole, with the caption ‘SWEEEEET!’ Again, at one time James would have found that funny, responded with something similar. But when you were lonely, fake displays of friendship made things feel lonelier still. And fake was all he had, now. A brief smile exchanged at the table with his flatmate, a friendly nod on the way into work. They weren’t enough. You couldn’t be almost forty and be living off these crumbs of affection. And now he wasn’t going to, any more.
They can have the ‘x’, he muttered to himself, with a private little smile. He felt the lightest he’d been for a long time: light both in the head and in this flabby body he’d come to despise. Neither brain nor body mattered so much, now that he was almost done with them. They can have the ‘x’ just this once.
He could feel his heart skip against his ribs as his finger slid onto the screen. This was it. There was no recalling this message; it would be out there immediately. Everyone knew how unforgiving it was, the instant-contact world they all lived in. Michaela had once written the sentence ‘my tits feel like they’ve been through a mangle’ and sent it by mistake to a colleague. He could remember how she described the realization, the dizzying rush of stomach into mouth. James almost smiled again at the memory of his ex, but this time the smile died, and he took a deep breath and pressed send.
The moment itself was curiously undramatic. It wasn’t even one single ‘moment’, as James had imagined it when he’d looked ahead to this night – which he had naturally done a lot. Some of the numbers in the phone book were out of date, some phones were switched off this late; exclamation marks immediately started appearing on the screen. It was not immediately obvious who had got the message and who would remain ignorant of his plan until he was already gone. But he wasn’t about to find out. The phone was going onto flight mode and would stay that way.
Of course, nobody could find him here – he had planned it well. Nobody could physically stop him; that had been a given as soon as they pulled out of the station. All the same, he didn’t want to be bothered, over the next few hours, by people’s responses. This wasn’t a proposal: it was a done deal. Flight mode was a good compromise. He didn’t want it off altogether, because the phone was his only timepiece, for a start. It would be reassuring to keep an eye on the time. To know how close he was to half past seven in the morning, when it was going to happen. The phone would be by his side, but surrounded by a force-field. Nobody could touch him, now.
A little aeroplane icon popped up at the top of the screen to confirm that it was no longer possible for any of James’s contacts to speak to him. This time, the moment was as rewarding as it should be, did feel as significant as it should. Admittedly, it wasn’t quite the end of his interaction with the rest of humanity. It was possible he’d have to speak a few words here and there before 7.30 a.m. But no real conversations. Those were done with. No more opportunities to mess up, to disappoint others, or himself. It was done.
James rummaged in his plastic bag, bringing it up onto the narrow bed with him. For his final meal on this mobile Death Row he had brought two pork pies, a six-pack of beers and a packet of plain chocolate digestives. What a spread, he could hear his sister Sally saying, in the mock Famous Five voices they used to adopt in their early twenties: the youthful person’s mockery of the only-just-past. He removed the biscuits from the bag. Tearing off the yellow strip to open the packet, stuffing the first biscuit into his mouth, provoked the usual rush of guilt and shame. It was a conscious effort to remind himself that those feelings were obsolete now, that he was free, he could eat whatever he wanted. Do whatever he wanted, for the whole of this ghostly night that was left to him.
It had surprised him a little, how slow the adjustment was. The way that, even though he had made his decision weeks ago, the body and mind kept on with their business. That was what life was like, he supposed. An amazing amount of it was lived almost automatically, and could be for many years, unless one found the courage to change it – or do what he was doing now, escape it.
James’s actions this afternoon wouldn’t have looked to an outsider like those of a man about to kill himself. He’d approached it like any other day off work. He’d cleared up the crumbs of cheese left from his mid-afternoon snack, polished the kitchen surfaces, hoovered, straightened the jumble of shoes by the front door and hung up his flatmate’s jacket, which was lying in the hall. Before leaving the flat for the last time, he had gone into the bathroom and made sure the shower dial was turned tight to the top, because the shower had a habit of spewing water out of its pipes at unpredictable times – noisily and sometimes for several minutes, as if it had an invisible user standing under it. Admittedly, these actions hadn’t been for James’s own benefit – it made no sense to talk about ‘benefit’ when he wasn’t going to be alive this time tomorrow. But there was his flatmate, Steffi, to consider.
‘Flatmate’ was a generous way of describing their relationship, as was the case with all the people who had moved in and out in the three years since Michaela left. The two of them weren’t close; they’d barely had a detailed exchange until that recent night, still mortifying to think about, when she’d seen him crying. James generally came home from work at the station at around seven, and usually Steffi was already out, waiting tables, by then. Their main transactions revolved around the Amazon packages which Steffi was always receiving early in the morning, and which James collected for her because he knew she would still be asleep. Sometimes he thought he had more conversations with the delivery man – who always said the same thing, ‘just a signature here please, chief’ – than with Steffi herself. But he certainly didn’t want her to think badly of him now he was gone. That was why, as well as making sure the flat was nice, he had left her an email with detailed instructions: how to contact Michaela, who was still the landlady, and what to say to anyone who got in touch.
Steffi (there was no denying it) would be inconvenienced a little by what he was about to do. It was bad news logistically if the other person in your flat killed himself. But she was a capable, practical woman – he knew that much about her. She’d be fine.
Everybody would be fine. In a few cases their lives would be better, in fact, as a result of this. If James hadn’t believed that, he would not have made this decision. He helped himself to a second biscuit, turning it upside down as usual to enjoy the hit of the chocolate coating a couple of seconds more quickly.
‘God, that’s nice,’ he found himself muttering, and grinned at the oddness of the situation. It was so freeing to have made this decision. I feel alive, he thought, somewhat ironically.
A third biscuit. Eighty-six more illegal calories. He could still remember the figure from the weight-loss app that used to patrol his and Michaela’s diets like a prison guard. Eighty-six calories, astoundingly, in a single biscuit. But it wasn’t illegal any more. There could be eight million calories in a biscuit, he thought, and it wouldn’t matter. Nothing was a problem any more. He visualized for a second an insanely large biscuit, himself eating his way through it, and almost smiled again as he realized where the thought came from: Sally had once helped him get off to sleep with a made-up story in which he was trapped inside a giant peach, like his Roald Dahl namesake. But the thought of her gave him a pang of sorrow – they would never be young and full of in-jokes and cynicism again, never