he did as well. It was exciting and he was glad he came up with the idea.
Alan walked into the middle of the living room where everybody was, and stood on the rug in front of the telly. He cleared his throat in the jokey way that a person does when they want to make a speech.
‘Oh,’ said Anne, another one of Alan’s pals. ‘Here it is.’
‘The announcement,’ said Lisa. ‘At last.’
She really didn’t know what this could be. It could only be a good thing. All of this was a good thing. Alan rarely came up with an idea by himself, but it wasn’t his fault. He’d been struggling for a while, with everything.
‘So,’ said Alan. ‘Here it is.’
He looked nervous. Lisa asked him if he wanted to sit down, but he said that he was fine. He was just trying to think of how to get this across, the thing he had to say.
‘So,’ he said again. ‘As you know, I’ve had … no, in fact, first of all, thanks for coming, everybody, let me just say that first.’
‘You’re welcome, mate,’ said Steven.
Alan nodded and got back into it.
‘Right,’ said Alan. ‘So, as you know, I’m prone to getting a bit down.’
The happy atmosphere in the room subsided. The smiles were still there, but their eyes were no longer smiling. They began to realise that the thing that Alan had to say was a bit more serious than they first thought.
He turned the wrist of his right hand around to face everybody. There was a scar on it. ‘And you all know about this.’
Lisa looked at everybody in the room, and saw that they were becoming uncomfortable. Chris, one of Alan’s cousins, turned his head away to look at the wall to his side, even though there was nothing there of interest.
‘Alan,’ said Lisa. ‘What is this?’
‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘It’s fine. It’s all right, everybody.’
He smiled at everybody until he got a smile back. Then he continued to talk.
‘You all know about it,’ he said. ‘I’ve spoken to you all. You know how hard I’ve tried, you know I’ve tried everything. Pills, counselling, everything. I’ve tried everything. And it worked, for a while. But there I was again. On Monday, I think.’
This was the first time that Lisa had heard anything about Monday. ‘There you were again what?’ she asked. ‘What happened on Monday?’
Alan took a deep breath and just came out and said it. ‘I was about to kill myself.’
‘Jesus,’ said Steven.
‘For God’s sake, Alan,’ said Cheryl, sympathetically. She gave Lisa’s back a rub.
Lisa put her face in her hands and was instantly in tears.
‘I was up at the Erskine Bridge,’ said Alan. ‘I walked all the way up there. Took me over an hour. I walked all the way up there and I was going to throw myself off. And I knew that if I did, that was it.’
He looked at his wrist.
‘No going back this time,’ he said. ‘You step off that bridge, it’s over. No ambulance, no rushing to the hospital. You step off there, and it’s over. Doesn’t matter how much you change your mind on the way down, it’s over.’
‘Shut up,’ said Lisa from behind her hands. ‘Just shut up.’
‘We better leave,’ said Cheryl to everybody else, standing up. ‘We should go. Come on.’
‘No,’ said Alan. He looked at everybody and smiled. ‘Because this is what I want to say. I’ve got something to say. I swear this will be the last time that you’ll hear me talk about this. Will you hear me out?’
Cheryl looked at him and everybody else. Lisa looked up from her hands and waited for Alan to speak. Cheryl sat down and started rubbing Lisa’s back again.
Alan had been standing on the rug, but now he felt like sitting. He pulled over a small table that was behind him, then he sat down on it and began to speak more quietly. He realised that although he was feeling good, he was potentially causing pain to the others, so he didn’t smile, even though he wanted to.
‘I don’t know why I want to die,’ he said. ‘I don’t really know. But I know that I don’t enjoy my life. I’ve gone too far into a life that I don’t like, and I just want it all to end.’
He looked at Lisa.
‘But as I was up there on the bridge, it dawned on me that I didn’t want to end my life, not completely. I just wanted to end this one, if that makes sense. I think I could enjoy life, if I was somebody else.’
‘Then be somebody else,’ said Lisa. ‘Do whatever you want. Leave if you want to. I’d rather you were somewhere else than here and wanting to jump off the fucking …’
She broke down again. Cheryl gave her back a rub and kissed her head.
‘I thought about that,’ he said. ‘I thought about it on the bridge. I thought about just running away. Just getting some money and getting on a plane and going to Canada or somewhere and starting again. But that would cost a ton of money. It would cost a serious ton of money, and I’d have to find somewhere to live and get my head around it all and think about all the forms and, oh, I don’t know. There’s always something. There’s always something.’
He rubbed his head.
‘I want to stay here, but I just want everything to be different. I want to be home, but with different faces and places, doing different things with different … I really don’t know. I know that it all sounds like it won’t change a thing. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me now, but it made sense to me when I was up on the bridge, and I’m not going to go back up there to try and remember. I told myself I was going to do it and that’s why I asked you here and I’m going to do it. I have to.’
‘Do what?’ asked Steven. He looked at Alan’s hands to see if he was holding a razor, in case Alan’s plan was to cut his wrist or his throat, right in front of them all. But there was no razor.
‘Please don’t feel bad,’ said Alan. ‘But I told myself that if I don’t then I’d end up killing myself and I’d never see you again anyway. You’d lose me anyway.’
Anne didn’t get it. She looked at Lisa and she could see that Lisa didn’t get it either. Neither did Cheryl or anybody else. Anne looked to Alan and said, ‘Alan, I don’t think anybody knows what you mean.’
Alan took another deep breath and tried to remember how much sense it made on the bridge, then he said it.
‘After you leave here tonight, you don’t know me. After tonight, my name will be Craig.’
There was quiet in the room as they thought about what he could mean. Steven asked, ‘What do you mean? You’re changing your name?’
‘No,’
