It was not the first suicide in room 6. It was the fifth.
We were working Saturday evening when the next one arrived. I don’t mind working it, I prefer a Sunday free. Sunday is a day for facing down a finish, no glittery glamour left, just the washing up, the packing up. A day of goodbyes to one week and hello to the next, goodbye my love, hello sailor. Though it looks like this one wanted her goodbye early. She was a sad, grey lady with darting eyes, like goldfish won at a fair in too small bags. Those eyes were the only life left.
“Room 6,” she says in a small, determined voice.
I’d already known it was room 6. Not based on her demeanour – anyone coming through Whitelea looks half dead and they’re not all checking in to suicide themselves – but I’d noticed when I’d looked at the booking system. In Whitelea we lose internet so much that everyone uses pen and paper. If someone books a room via our fancy online system, we still write it down in the Every Day Book because it’s 50/50 we can use a computer later on.
Odds are worse in winter.
Our winters are gloomy even at Christmas, which is 3 days away. I come from a big town full of strangers where December is lights and feasts, gaudy delights. Here, twinkling takes up too much power from the genny so you just pop a wreath on the door, and a little holly in a hallway. Half the homes chop down any old conifer to stick in their front room. There isn’t much going in the way of jobs here so it was serendipity that the suicides started. The receptionist before us had to resign with her nerves. Some women do not handle a bit of drama. She couldn’t deal with the bodies and the press attention. Our little rogue town became of interest to visitors after all. Because most of us want to gawp at tragedy even if some don’t want to be right there in it. After the third corpse, there was a job not just for me but for Robbie, and we were running the show. The owner is rarely here because he could afford not to be.
“Room 6,” I repeat, opening the Every Day Book. Robbie jerks like he’s fitting and stares at the lady. Soon as she’s gone I’m going to say, “How will we know if she’s dead or not in the morning?” And he’ll open those brown cow eyes super wide and his mouth too, all agape and aghast and amused—unable to believe his luck in finding someone as terrible as me.
She nods and looks down as if that will stop us knowing she’s another one.
We’ve had special training for this. We have to ask questions and grade them. If they pass, they get the room. Questions like, “Do you ever have suicidal thoughts?” Often. Sometimes. Never. We don’t embarrass the guests—they get a pen and questions privately.
It’s called safeguarding.
The guest fills in the sheet and then Robbie does the worried face at me like we maybe need to report this to the absent manager. I’m thinking instead of another added clause in our contract. We get a week off if we deal with a body and the police and all that. For our mental wellbeing. I wouldn’t want someone to kill themselves but, on the other hand, a week off could be a trip somewhere with lights and regular internet. Sometimes I’ve had a week off and never gone back to where I’m calling home. Sometimes you need a week off to remind yourself you can do that.
Robbie’s lived here all his life and I know a lot more of his backstory than he knows of mine. His is a small story with a couple of big moments, most notably when his twin brother died of a heroin overdose. So Robbie has sworn off drugs and intends to live to 100. Robbie only does alcohol and prescription meds, his own and other people’s traded for his leftovers. Robbie’s vaping to cut down on smoking and midway in the process, so does a lot of both. He goes outside in the cold to smoke during a vaping break, so at least gets some fresh air. Robbie lives off crisps and hot dogs which is basically the traditional cuisine of Whitelea, but goes catching rabbits once a week in the woods everyone gets Christmas trees from. He gets both his exercise and his nutrition. In Robbie’s small story his other big moment was getting me for a girlfriend, and, relatedly, this job.
I’m not vain saying this: I’m maybe not the prettiest girl in the town I’m from but I’m the prettiest girl here. In a poll, 100% of Whitelea would vote ‘yes’. Robbie’s punching way above his weight. I’ve had a lot better. Many a lot better. Mind you, I’ve had a lot worse.
You’d think in a dead-end brutal place like this, locals would be curious about newcomers. Interested in their stories. Something to liven up their day. But nobody is. It isn’t politeness that nobody asks you about yourself, merely an astounding lack of imagination. Any Whitelear with curiosity left town a long time ago. All you have left is the dying and the dead and, occasionally, a pot of gold at the end of the weak shadowy rainbow. A sweet boy like Robbie, who won’t make anywhere close to 100.
If anybody bothered thinking about it, it’s quite odd that someone like me lives somewhere like this.
I don’t know much about the first three bodies but Robbie found the fourth and he called me and I called the police. The third suicide was all over social media so the fourth one happened within a couple of weeks, before the safeguarding training. Someone had seen it and booked in and done it exactly the same way. That fortnight Whitelea hit the news in a big way. By news I don’t mean newspapers because they were already reporting the suicides, I mean the real news that people post themselves. It was spring. If you absolutely have to visit, it isn’t a bad time. There’s hiking trails with meadow flowers and suddenly all the farms were petting zoos, with lambs getting stroked by sticky fingers for a month before slaughter. Two posher houses opened up as rustic restaurants, dishing out overpriced venison and trout brought in by men at the weekends, until one of the men shot the other in the leg for some convoluted incident nobody told right.
I got the job here, not for being pretty but for being prettier than anyone else. Robbie got the job because the owner was his uncle’s cousin and because I asked. I was scared at first. In the beginning we were careful. When some Goth girls offered us a hefty tip to give them 6 – rich kids but sad ones covered in those self-harm scars up their arms – I said ‘no way’ and Robbie did too. We threatened to call management. We even wrote it down in the incident book. But two months into the short cold days we were drained of all resistance, and saving lives wasn’t interesting to me anymore. I hadn’t been scared of finding a self-checkout, but with all the publicity someone from my old days might appear and drag me back to old habits. I didn’t want to be that person anymore.
“We should have stopped her,” says Robbie.
Sweet Robbie, who won’t live to 100. I wonder if he’ll make 40.
“Seems like her choice, Robbie. Who are we to say she has to stay alive and miserable?”
Poor Robbie looks bewildered and done for, like I’ve outsmarted him with my crushing intellectual reasoning.
Robbie goes for a cigarette, a real one. His skin is smooth like all the beautiful boys in their 20s, staying the right side of gorgeous with a rabbit a week. It doesn’t last, the looks or the sweetness. Then again, what does?
I’ve seen them way more bewildered and done for than Robbie increasingly looks, on their knees, desperate, screaming my name, kind of done for, and as I remembered that, like a shooting star in the periphery of my cornea, I get a whisper of the good old times. Maybe spurred on by the promise of a week-off somewhere bearable looming. Ah man, soon as I get that flicker I feel it pulling me, like I’m a dog on a leash, a cat toward a light, a boy toward me, a sad grey lady toward Room 6.
I had a habit. I’m in recovery. You might say it’s like Robbie’s brother’s habit. Mine was relationships, those boyfriends I’ve mentioned. But it wasn’t romance and wasn’t sex, wasn’t adventure and wasn’t money though I’ve had a fair bit of all of that. My poison was The Break Up. The beautiful dream. That sweet, delicious moment of saying those most intimate words. I’m sorry, my darling, I’m leaving you.
If you’re thinking I’m a serial killer then you’re way off, but I’ve had a few say I’ve killed them or they want to die. I see the grief in them when I end it. Indeed, I feel it in me when I’ve timed it right, when I’m properly invested and in love and it destroys me to leave, when we are both enmeshed and those words devastate us.
Like a homemade nail bomb.
I came to this end of hope place to escape hurting the people I made myself love and the ones I made love me. So don’t think for one moment I took pleasure in the horrible act of upsetting anyone. I felt awful after and always swore off the short-lived buzz. Whitelea was supposed to be rehab. But it turns out everyone trades in rehab anyway, or so Robbie told me.
We trade all the time. This moment for my future, my future for this moment. Someone limping on, living for a week off work. Never touching heroin for always touching cigarettes and booze. And oxycontin. And tramadol. And Ritalin.
We didn’t check room 6 until morning, but, no surprises, we knew she would be dead-dead, not just half dead. I don’t like to share the details out of respect and to be fair, this one shook me up more than the last. Maybe because it was me who had to crack the door open, peer into the abyss of another tomorrow. Sniff the air.
“Call the cops,” I said to Robbie, who was a few steps behind me.
He didn’t look.
It’s contractual, that week off, following on from as soon as the room is cleaned and cleared. So it had to be immediate. I didn’t have to take Robbie into room 6 for it but I felt there was some dramatic irony to it, some sense of closure, and we would both get a story. Not that I’d tell anyone. Not that anyone would ask him. So we go in, don’t we, and we sit on that just tidied up bed that smells so easily of clean linen, not a corpse.
Finally I felt the rush I had chased and missed every time Robbie and I had touched flesh, looked at each other’s faces. Our tears. The oxytocin, the bonding chemical, when we’ve cried long and hard enough. I knew him in his deepest moment of intense pain, I felt the most feeling I could possibly have for him. It wasn’t the best hit but fuck me it had been a long time sober and no other ending, no sweeter ending, no freer, worse, better Christmas story than when I oh-my-god-yeah said those words…
“I’m sorry, my darling, I’m leaving you.”
BIO:
Tabitha Bast lives in Bradford in the UK and works as a sex and relationship therapist, loves nature, and revolutionary struggles.
She writes a personalised feminist blog on positive masculinity: https://theboysarealright.substack.com/
Tabitha has 15 short stories in print and online anthologies and is currently working on a collection of Climate Change stories set in 2030. So far in 2024 has published: “Dear John” with Urban Pigs Press, “The Creation of Adam with Discourse, “Be True to Your Bar” with Punk Noir Magazine, and “Because of What is Out There” in “Hunger: An Anthology” with Urban Pig Press 2024.
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