As a thank you to everyone who has brought Underdogs: Tooth and Nail to within 8% of its target (at time of writing), here is the second short story I promised as exclusive bonus content. Jack's story won the poll by a single vote... and as a result I've had to write one of the most challenging stories I've ever attempted. One where a character I love (those who have read Underdogs will understand exactly why I love Jack Hopper so much), has a talk with his father about a recent suicide attempt.
Obviously, before we go any further- BIG TRIGGER WARNING FOR SUICIDAL IDEATIONS AND DESCRIPTIONS OF A SUICIDE ATTEMPT.
It's not a pleasant story, but surprisingly I'm happy with it. I hope I've done it justice.
United by our differences,
Chris Bonnello
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Jack Hopper talks to Dad
The drive home from the hospital had been silent. But not the calm, inactive kind of silence that Jack loved and often relied on. This was a different kind of silence, one which seemed loud on the inside of his head.
There was no making sense of it from a logical perspective. But the longer Jack lived, the less he was bothered about logic. He was thirteen now, and his logical approach to life had got him nowhere positive.
Then again, his emotional approach had got him here: with troubling stomach pains, an overnight stay in hospital, and a bunch of NHS mental health leaflets he was pretending to read on the journey home.
Well, at least I got the day off school today.
Dad pulled into the driveway, left the car and walked to the front door. Jack was taken aback by the man’s apparent lack of emotion. Then again, perhaps his father was doing what Jack had spent the last year doing, and keeping his emotions firmly inside his brain.
Jack followed, also wordless. Dad unlocked the front door, and they walked inside. If a stranger were watching and listening they wouldn’t have detected anything different to a father and son coming home from a bad parents’ evening. It all looked so normal and boring.
Jack’s brain began to scream, as he wondered what the hell Dad was going to say once the front door was closed and they were out of public view.
The door closed.
His father didn’t look at him.
‘Stay here, Jack.’
Jack was in no mood to protest as his father ran up the stairs to the bathroom.
He looked at the family photo to the left of the front door – the one which they had both agreed not to move despite the pain brought on by the sight of it. Jack, Mum and Dad, on holiday in Torquay after the end of Year Six. Back before the bullying had started. Back before Jack found himself in a secondary school that was more interested in changing his Asperger’s than changing the bullies’ actions. Back before cancer had removed his mother from the family, choosing to do so at the exact same time as all the other crap was happening to him.
Last night when Jack had last visited the bathroom – where his father currently stood emptying the medicine cabinet – a thought had crossed his mind about the possibility of seeing her again. Jack had never believed in such things, and found it hypocritical to change his mind at the last minute just because he wanted to see Mum. He hadn’t done what he did to reach Heaven or wherever. He had done it because nothingness had become a more pleasant prospect than continuing with life.
Dad ran down the stairs, a carrier bag full of cabinet medicine in his arms. He ran into the kitchen and searched through the cupboard under the sink.
I wouldn’t have used the bleach, Dad. That would have hurt like hell. And I’d only have thrown it right back up anyway.
Jack being Jack, he had done his research before choosing a method. If someone had checked his internet search history, they would have called the emergency services long before he did what he did.
Dad came out with two carrier bags of hazardous materials, and stood dumbfounded in the hallway. Now the suicide tools were in his arms, he was clueless about what to do with them. Perhaps after a sleepless night, his forward-thinking skills were suffering that morning. After a moment of deathly silence, he headed to the living room and sat in the armchair, the carrier bags still in his hands.
Jack stood in the hallway for several minutes, staring at the side of his father’s blank face in the living room, until the faint sound of the television started to echo.
‘I’m going to my room,’ he said.
‘No you are bloody well not,’ answered his father. ‘I’m not stupid enough to leave you alone today. Lie down here if you’re tired.’
‘I’m not going to do it ag-’
‘Lie down here if you’re tired.’
Jack dipped his head. He already knew in his own mind that he would survive the day. Barring some kind of unexpected heart attack, anyway. He certainly wasn’t planning anything else.
But his father didn’t share that knowledge, and it wasn’t the inside of Jack’s head that mattered in this scenario.
In Jack’s experience, the inside of his head rarely mattered to others.
Jack decided not to argue, and walked to the living room. He sat at the edge of the sofa, furthest away from Dad, and checked his watch. Eleven in the morning, with no school and no ability to leave his father’s sight. It was going to be a long, long day.
For the next forty-five minutes, nothing happened. The television played an episode of Doctor Who: it may have been a good one, but the timing of it had ensured that Jack would never watch it the same way again. For the rest of his life – however long his life ended up being – the sight of Matt Smith facing the Silurians would forever remind him of the night he tried to take his own life.
Once it ended, his father loaded up some type of dinosaur documentary. It was an act of kindness towards his dinosaur-obsessed son: kindness in a way that Quinn Hopper knew how to express. Jack’s father had never been good at talking things through. His mother had been the translator between them.
In all fairness, I was never good at talking things through either. Maybe that’s how it came to this.
Or maybe it’s not. Maybe the adults wouldn’t have listened to me either way. Because who gives a crap about the autistic kid getting bullied? It’s just part of the standard autism experience. It’s not even anything special.
I mean bloody hell, they probably have interventions in place to make sure the non-bullied autistic kids get offered the expected programme of bullying so they can match expectations.
Jack dared to smile at his own brand of gallows humour, before the bigger part of his brain told him he wasn’t allowed to smile. The silence continued, except for the narrator saying something-or-other about the archaeopteryx. Jack couldn’t concentrate enough to work out what.
In a way, Jack envied the dinosaurs. As far as palaeontologists knew, there had never been a case of a dinosaur taking its own life. Then again, most dinosaurs were only smart enough to think about immediate-term issues: feeding, sleeping, mating, and that was all. The natural intelligence of humans was often a disadvantage to the species, as it made them clever enough to question the point of existence.
Perhaps that explained why the bullies seemed so happy with their lives while their victims were taking their own. The bullies were too stupid to think of anything beyond eating, sleeping and screwing girls, and it made them an ignorant kind of happy.
Jack, personally, would rather have been dead than have their lifestyle. And he had proved it.
‘During the early Cretaceous period,’ said the narrator, ‘it would have been impossible to imagine that the world of the dinosaurs would one day come to an end. The very possibility of a land without such gargantuan reptiles…’
The same could not be said for the extinction of Jack Hopper. He had frequently imagined what the world would look like without him.
He hadn’t even been suicidal at the time. It had just been playful escapism that had sowed the seeds of an idea in his mind: that being dead wouldn’t be all that bad. After a childhood of daydreaming to keep himself busy – daydreaming about being the triceratops kid who saved his family from raptors, about leaping personally into his favourite video games and fighting alongside the characters who had become his best friends – the daily daydreams became stories about other people at his theoretical funeral, how they would react, how he would be remembered, how the bullies would repent. How his mum’s cancer would be blamed for his crushing mental health issues, and people would donate so much to cancer research charities that it would fund some kind of breakthrough, so a load of good would come from his death after all.
Those thoughts had cheered Jack up in his worst times. It didn’t take long before he applied his imagination to researching suicide methods on Google – all theoretical of course – until the age of thirteen when he had finally admitted to himself that his thoughts had become serious and real.
Jack missed the rest of the documentary. He was too busy telling himself the rest of the story of how he had turned from an eleven-year-old happy quirky intelligent child, to a thirteen-year-old suicide case with a dead mother and half a dozen bullies. It had been a collection of events that had built up invisibly, like the insides of a volcano before a Krakatoa-scale eruption.
Kind of like the non-conversation he was having with his father. The tension had been rising since they had left the hospital, and now stuck inside the walls of their small house and the promise of the whole day ahead of them, the pressure was building up here too.
The silence was dreadful, and Dad wasn’t letting him leave his sight. There was only one option. Jack had no idea whether it would help or not, but not discussing the issue wouldn’t do him any good.
Ha, I wish I’d learned that lesson before last night.
Jack Hopper took a deep breath, and took the plunge.
‘So… are we going to talk about it or what?’
Slowly, Dad turned his head.
Ah crap, too late to change my mind now…
There was a moment of uncomfortable eye contact, no more pleasant for Jack’s father than for Jack himself. He lifted the remote control and muted the television.
‘Let’s sit at the table, Jack.’
Jack didn’t understand the difference between talking about his suicide attempt at the table and talking about his suicide attempt on the sofa, but it was better not to start the conversation with defiance. His father walked to the dining room table, both carrier bags of dangerous goodies around his arm. Jack followed him and took his seat.
‘So,’ started Dad, ‘why did you do it?’
It was the question Jack had dreaded, but had known it would be his father’s first question. The thought of having to answer it had been so painful that he had avoided preparing an answer. Therefore, he shrugged his shoulders.
‘Oh come on Jack,’ said Dad, the hurt in his voice instant and horrible. ‘You must have some idea!’
This is how we’re starting? No kind of reassurance or comfort or anything, but straight into the analysis?
That was how Dad dealt with problems, as one would expect of most mechanical engineers with his kind of brain. He treated emotional issues like equations to be solved or machine parts to be redesigned.
‘I… just didn’t want to live anymore.’
‘Well yes, I gathered that. But come on Jack, why not?’
‘Because it’s painful being alive.’
‘How, Jack? How is it painful?’
Jack clenched his fists. He forced himself to tolerate his father’s relentless questioning, knowing deep down that it came from his own hurt. Once again it was his father’s own expression of love, from a man who cared about others but was emotionally illiterate when trying to read them.
Even now, Jack was hoping for his mother to step in and act as a translator for both of them.
Alone on his side of the conversation, Jack tried to make sense of his own thoughts.
‘The bullies… they’re making everything awful. It won’t end. And even if I live to the end of my GCSEs I won’t be able to do anything after I leave school because my head will be screwed up by then… it’s torture. I’m sure by the standards of the United Nations it is literally torture. These twats are committing actual crimes and the teachers are pretending nothing’s going on, paying lip service to their behaviour policy but not giving any actual consequences, because these guys are predicted to get good grades and will push the school average up. I mean, so am I, but there’s six of them and one of me and you’d rather have six people pushing your average grades up, so the school would let them get away with murder… and it should count as murder, if someone in their school kills themselves because they made them do it…’
Jack ran out of words sooner than he had thought. But he hadn’t done badly for a completely improvised speech.
His father leaned closer, pain etched across his face.
‘And your solution to this was to leave me on my own?’
Jack’s gaze dropped to the table. He had no answer for that. At some point along the way, he had tricked himself into thinking Dad would be better off without him, but he had justified it to himself so long ago that he had forgotten how he had done it.
‘Janet died less than a year ago,’ Dad continued. ‘And I’ve not been coping well either. I’ve kept myself going for you, Jack. I’d hoped you’d be able to do the same for me. It’s what Janet would have wanted.’
Mum. She was Mum to me, not Janet.
In fact, she had been more than Mum. She had been the bridge between Jack and his father. The engine oil that stopped them from grinding each other’s gears and allowed them to cooperate and communicate. Jack had no idea how Quinn and Janet Hopper had combined so well as a couple, but it probably explained the rest of the family dynamic. Mum had been so good with him because she had known him before he was born: Jack and his father were almost the same person, just a few decades apart and Jack with a better sense of humour. Jack had found it surprising from a young age that he and his father had not had the same chemistry, despite being so similar as humans.
It was a phenomenon only explained when Jack had learned about magnetism in primary school, and realised that identical north poles of a magnet repelled each other. His mother had been the south pole that had connected all three parts together as one.
With her gone…
‘Imagine yourself in my position, Jack,’ his father continued. ‘This time last year I had a wife and son. If I hadn’t found you in time last night, today I’d be the last survivor of this family, and grow old as some kind of lonely man who once had people who loved h-’
‘This isn’t about you, Dad.’
At first, Jack was pleased with himself for having the confidence to stand up for himself. It was immediately followed by guilt and crushing compassion for a man who missed the same woman as he did, and was probably bullied at school too.
‘I’m sorry…’
‘Good. That was rude, Jack.’
Jack lay back in his chair and looked up to the little cracks on the ceiling, hiding his disgust at his father’s response.
I kind of wish I hadn’t apologised now.
In fact… did I even have to apologise? What was he going to do if I didn’t? I could have died last night – nothing he could have done would have been worse than that, objectively speaking.
Jack’s thoughts wandered to the bullies at Ridgelands Secondary School. His brain started to perform some calculations, and he came to realise something incredible.
It wasn’t until Jack had almost lost everything that he realised how powerful he was. He had swallowed a deadly amount of pills and nobody could do anything about it. He could have chosen not to apologise to his father, and nobody could have done anything about it. What else did he have the ability to do?
There was power in escaping death. And Jack had found that power. He had come to learn that the one thing stopping him (and humans in general) from getting what they wanted, was that most people didn’t realise they were able to just get it.
‘I’m never going back to Ridgelands,’ he said. ‘Ever.’
His sudden confidence took his father aback.
‘You can’t just decide not to go to school…’
‘Yes I bloody well can,’ answered Jack. ‘And I’ve decided, right here, right now, nothing that anyone does can ever bring me back to that place.’
His father’s jaw opened and closed multiple times, as if nearly-but-not-quite formulating a response. Jack felt a twinge of pride. He had reactivated his logical side, and could see his options for what they truly were.
He could either:
1) Follow his father’s and teachers’ commands, and continue attending Ridgelands until it literally killed him.
2) Take any measure necessary to never, ever return, and make things even worse than his current situation (which would end up killing him too).
3) Take any measure necessary to never, ever return, and make things better until life became worth living again.
Two of those options involved death, which would mean the same net result either way. It made no difference whether he had a crap month and died, or had an even worse month and died. So all things considered, resistance was worth the gamble.
‘The police and the courts would get involved,’ his father said, beginning to tremble.
‘Let them try. They can’t physically force me to go there.’
‘They’ll fine us into poverty! We won’t be able to afford-’
‘I’m not dying for you to save money.’
‘We could be prosecuted…’
‘Not if you homeschool me.’
‘I can’t teach you while I’m at work!’
‘Then find another school. There’ll be ones out there for autistic screw-ups like me.’
‘That could take-’
‘Dad, are you going to spend the rest of the day telling me what you can’t do, or are you going to think of something you can do?’ Jack fought through the pain of staring deep into his father’s eyes. ‘Because five days a week at Ridgelands stopped being an option when I walked into the bathroom, gathered a crapton of pills and forced them down my throat in order to make myself stop existing. I know you’re not a big fan of change but the status bloody quo isn’t bloody working, Dad. And deep down you must bloody know it.’
Dad didn’t say a bloody word. There was silence for a minute. Then two, then three. And then, still wordless, Quinn Hopper rose from his seat, headed back to his spot on the sofa, dumped the bags of medicine at his side and picked up his laptop from the coffee table. It was still open from the day before, when he had left the house in an ambulance in a deathly hurry.
Jack took the remote control and unmuted the television. The documentary had reached the extinction of the archaeopteryx, but had a nice part at the end about how its descendants and evolutionary cousins had survived, some of which had evolved into four hundred billion birds that lived today.
It was long and poetic with a bunch of big words, but the message was clear. Some specimens adapt, and others simply die. Jack Hopper was going to be one who adapted.
Evidently, his father was adapting too. When he stood up from his laptop and headed towards the phone, Jack leaned across far enough to see the legal advice on his screen.
The more Jack read, the more he smiled.
‘Hello,’ came his father’s voice from the hallway, ‘this is Quinn Hopper. Jack Hopper’s father. You may be aware of yesterday’s incident.’
Ha, I doubt even a school like Ridgelands would forget a thing like that. In fact, they’re probably worried sick about whether they’ll have to take action against those poor bullies.
Jack stood up and walked to a place in the room where he could see down the hallway. Something told him he would want to witness this.
‘I’m aware that despite repeated offences, you have made a deliberate and concerted effort to not exclude the people who made my son make an attempt on his life yesterday. You will understand, of course, that this negatively impacts the level of trust I am willing to place in your school.’
The conversation went on – well, it was a more like a one-sided monologue – during which the poor receptionist at the other end was subjected to the details of every failure the school had committed. And as much as Jack sympathised with the receptionist, it felt incredible to hear his thoughts coming from the mouth of another person.
‘I require you to remove Jack Hopper from your school roll,’ Dad finished. ‘With immediate effect, he will be educated using alternative provision, in which Ridgelands Secondary School will not be involved.’
Without another word, Dad hung up the phone. It couldn’t possibly have been as simple as that, but the intent was clear. However long it would take to do all the official stuff, Jack was no longer in mainstream education.
When Jack lifted his hands to cover his face in shock, he noticed he was crying. But it was a type of crying he had not experienced before: one that came from the overwhelming feeling of relief, rather than sadness or victimhood or bereavement.
Jack didn’t care. He could cry that day as much as he wanted. Ridgelands was gone from his life, and every terrible person who lay inside it. Jack didn’t even care what the future held or what the ‘alternative provision’ would be, and clearly neither did Dad. Jack ran through the hallway and up the stairs, checking his father’s facial expression to make sure he had permission.
There were no words of protest against his son. Just a simple nod and a hand that waved him upstairs.
It was love, in a way that his father knew how to express.
As Jack walked into his room and lay on his bed, he started to plan his next daydream. Just for that day he was going to daydream about dinosaurs again, like he had during his childhood.
Specifically, he was going to be an archaeopteryx who learned to adapt.
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Copyright © Chris Bonnello 2019