david hay – excerpt from how high the moon

       Jean picked up his duffel bag and put it upon his shoulder. His white T-shirt was speckled with bits of dirt and smudges of grime. The sweat patches under his armpits were just becoming noticeable. He was meeting Natalie outside her café in the Northern Quarter, about a twenty-minute walk from his flat on the outskirts of Ancoats. He hadn’t spoken to her properly in a few days. He had been out of the country visiting Tom, who had tried to kill himself by driving his car into a brick wall but had only been rewarded with two broken ribs and a fractured wrist. 
       Tom had phoned him up, and after pleasantries that sounded even flatter than usual, he had told him how he had tried to kill himself; he didn’t say why. Tom asked that if Jean weren’t too busy, would he be able to fly out there and spend a few days with him? His failure hadn’t deterred him completely from trying again, but it had certainly caused a few ripples of doubt. Jean wasn’t as shocked as Tom had expected him to be. He thought he would be all gasps and frantic whys, but Jean simply said of course and began to book the cheapest flight he could get later that day. ‘I’ll reimburse you, of course.’ Jean ignored this and told him, ‘Go to a bar. It won’t make you stop wanting to die, but it will be harder if there are a bunch of people around. Just make sure you go to one of the bars on your street.’ Jean wasn’t surprised because he always figured Tom would do something like this. He just had something about him that screamed death by suicide.
       He was twenty-three but he still looked like a kid. He had puffy cheeks that swelled as he drank. His hair was formless and generic. Jean didn’t think Tom had ever thought about it, how other people would see it, or even how girls would judge him for it. He was still a boy with slouching thin shoulders and eyes, which looked like they hadn’t discovered humanity’s ugly side yet. But this was a con to others and himself. Jean’s father had told him when he was a child and devoted to the teachings of Jesus and all the ways of virtue that the world was no place for anyone who was good. If you lived past sixteen, he said, and you were still innocent and whole, the world was going to eat you up and spit your corpse back up for the papers to gawp at and the public to deride. His father didn’t have a sense of humour. He was a bit of a bastard, really.
       Jean hadn’t thought about these kernels of wisdom too much; his father was a man who could only ever see the world in one way; the scenery never changed, no matter what was happening just beyond his periphery. But as much as he hated to admit it, his father had a point. It was the only fragment of truth that he had ever given and probably ever would. Jean believed Tom was a decent person, even if the only way he stayed so was through a mirror hall of deception, where he never allowed himself to truly be seen, where his actions, his thoughts when he perceived them to be negative were projected onto these other selves, which lingered in the boundaries between fiction and reality. He was a friend, and friends are often exempt from piercing criticisms. Jean had worried about Tom since the moment he met him. He was someone you knew you needed to protect even if you couldn’t. That if something happened to him, humanity would have been lessened somehow for his loss.
       When Jean’s flight was booked, and as he was packing his bags with the few clothes, he had that were clean or at least not disgusting, he tried to think what he would say. He imagined himself giving a speech in which he would sum up all the beauties and wonders of life and convince Tom once and for all that it was worth the shit and pain and that, ultimately, to exist was a far greater outcome than death. Most people get this. They already know. But Tom didn’t and probably would never get it in the way others do. It would be like explaining the fulfilment and worth found in faith to a man of science who had cut ties with any notion of the existence of god. It couldn’t be done. Death, as melodramatic as it sounded to Jean, was the one constant in Tom’s life. It never left him, and he never stopped thinking about it. It was, in a way, his religion. Jean had briefly held the same thoughts as Tom when he was a teenager. He, too, had been tied down by feelings, which consumed every thought and altered each cell of perception until all you knew was that feeling, which couldn’t be called sadness but contained many of its hallmarks. He thought he would have learned something and found at least part of the equation that found the answer, but if he had figured it out, he couldn’t remember it now. He felt like a child again in this moment of bewilderment. But his innocence had been leached from him long ago, and if he was honest, he was glad it was gone.


Doctor Lazarus, a narrative poem, was DAVID HAY’s first published piece. Since then, his work has appeared in numerous online journals. He has a collaborative piece, Amor Novus / A Spontaneous Prayer published with Soyos Books, Saxon Suites by Back Room Poetry. His debut novel How High the Moon is out now from Anxiety Press and his debut poetry collection has been published by Ballerini Book Press.


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