Mary was halfway through cleaning the dishes when the urge to venture into her son’s room arose. She did not know why. She knew it would hurt her, but she went anyway, pulled down the hall by an overwhelming unseen tide. She flicked on the light switch; the curtains had still remained closed, as they had been on the day Keith had left the house for the last time. Mary tiptoed across the room as she had done many times. It wasn’t that the room was messy; on the contrary, Keith’s things were always carefully stacked. It was just that there was so much stuff that one wrong step could send all the books, magazines and comics into a domino that really would make the bedroom messy.

Mary opened the curtains as she had done on countless other mornings. Keith always kept his curtains closed. Why did he always do that? He wasn’t one of those Goth types that were into the dark stuff, and he didn’t have a physical reaction to light or have photosensitive epilepsy. Did he close his curtains to hide from the outside world? Scared of something perhaps? He did not seem like the type of person to have paranoid tendencies, nor did he seem like the type of person who was being bullied. He showed no signs, but a lot can be hidden in the silent functions of daily life, and a lot of things can be hidden if there is nobody searching. Your average teenager; that is how a lot of people summed up Keith. To Mary he was so much more, but it was an apt description. The average teenager; that didn’t necessarily mean happiness, but it certainly did not imply suicide. Mary and Jack had both read in the papers that the highest amount of suicides were in young men; never did they think that their son would be a part of that statistic.

Mary went back to the doorway and turned off the light, again a force of habit. She always did this on weekdays whenever Keith left the curtains closed – he did not always have them closed. After she flicked the switch Mary turned round to see Keith’s room in the full light of the late morning sun. All of the mist had now burned away, leaving things bright and fresh looking. Mary surveyed the room with calm dry eyes. Each object gave her a warm memory. Mary’s eyes fell upon the floor, drawn to the brightly coloured cover of a comic book. She walked over and picked it up; The Sub-Mariner, one of Keith’s first comic books. She sometimes wondered, was it these that drove Keith to suicide? They seemed harmless enough, with the exception of that violent Judge Dredd comic.

She had only glanced at them, not really sat down and read them from front to back. She opened the old American comic to find a detailed mishmash of adverts of a whole array of fantastic treasures. Venus fly trap seeds, or an insect devouring plant as the advert heralded it. On the opposite page was a pastel coloured scene of a pointy-eared muscle bound man with flattop black hair. The character appeared to be swimming; this was evident from the bubbles and the pose of the character or superhero as they are called, with fingers tightly pressed together stretched out in front of him. Namor, the prince of Atlantis, this character was called. It brought a tiny flicker of a smile to Mary’s lips. Back in her day Mary was always lost in the imagination of Lewis Carol and Enid Blyton. She reached for another comic. It was Keith’s favourite superhero, The Amazing Spider-Man. On the cover was a picture of Spider-Man or Spidey as he was also known, swinging from the high buildings of New York.
Mary recalled the time they, with the exception of Miles because he was too young, went to see the first Spider-Man movie. When they stepped out of the cinema Keith announced, “I want to be a comic book writer.” A dream unlived. Keith did not jump from the bridge because he was emulating Spider-Man. Mary knew that for sure. Her son was far too intelligent and sensible to be doing something like that. The next thing Mary’s eye drifted to was Keith’s computer game console. It was the only thing in Keith’s room that Mary disapproved of. The strangest thing was that most of Keith’s games were sports games, Pro Evolution Soccer and a whole host of games with Tony Hawk and skateboarding in the title. What was strange about these games was the fact that Keith could have been playing them in real life. Well, maybe he wouldn’t actually be playing against the Brazilian national football team or performing a three sixty firebird or whatever those skateboarding moves were called, but there were football clubs and basketball clubs and no doubt some skateboarding places that he could have gone to. The society of today also fails to comprehend the dire implications of their actions. Why do so many young people choose to fight and take risks? Is it a natural part of youth? Don’t they understand how precious life is? Mary hurled the box to the floor.
“Why?”

She clasped her hands tightly to her face to try and stop the tears from coming. That familiar pain in her heart started clawing her down into the deep chasms of despair. She ran out of the room to escape it. Outside in the hall she propped herself up with a shaky arm leaning against the wall, such was the intensity of her grief. She shouldn’t have gone in there, and she didn’t look back as she walked down the hall away from Keith’s room, though she knew that the door was still ajar. Mary went into the kitchen, because it was the first area you see when you exit the hall and because she was not going back to bed. In the fridge she saw an old bottle of wine.

Jack arrived at his office in time. The frustration at the school had all been for nothing. The moment he stepped into the building he could feel the change in his employees, the eyes quickly darting, unsure of where to focus, the sharp intake of breath. The first to approach Jack was Arnold, the most experienced of Jack’s gardening staff with over a decade of training in both parks and forestry, and able to use almost every garden tool known to man. Arnold was also a father; he had three children, two girls and one boy. One of the girls, Stella, was the same age as Keith. The other girl, Kate, was twenty-five and married with a child of her own, and his boy Paul was five. Arnold approached Jack with his head bowed low, with eyes looking at Jack, then quickly falling to the floor. When standing in front of Jack Arnold became his usual composed self.

“Jack, me and everyone here.” This caused Jack to really look at his staff this morning. The last time he saw them was at the funeral. They all looked so different then, wearing black suits. The vision he was used to was casual in every sense of the word, but with faces that held a strong honest benevolence. You can’t judge people by the clothes they wore, he realised at that instant.

“Once again we would like to say how sorry we are at the death of your son, and if there is anything we can do for you we’re here for you.”
“Actually, there is something you could do for me” Jack said, concealing a smile; it was the perfect set up for a joke, and he had their undivided attention. “Work without pay” he chuckled softly, and slapped Arnold on the shoulder, who laughed when Jack did this. Arnold had a gleam of admiration in his eye; he like the other four gardeners respected strength, and Jack was displaying a lot of that by telling a joke and giving a smile.