Suicide Season

To say that the journey back to the buses was odd would be a gross understatement.

After Jez had managed to find the right way out of the moor the pair had stumbled upon a rather dilapidated cottage where a friendly sheep farmer and his wife took them in and fed them rich tea biscuits and milky coffee before the farmer promised to ring for some help to fix he buses. This completed he then offered to give Jez and Oli and lift back to the main road on his tractor.

Oli graciously declined, wanting to save some of the little dignity that he had left, but the reproachful face of Jez and the hurt expression that the farmer wore forced Oli to change his mind.

Of course everybody back at the buses laughed at the style of Oli and Jez’s arrival, but their laughter was silenced almost at once when they saw the furiously stormy expression that Jez wore etched into her face.

She jumped off the tractor and gave a fleeting, but yet still friendly, good-bye to the farmer before fleeing to the warmth of the bus, where she then threw herself onto her bunk and screamed into her pillow.

Outside the farmer had brought out his toolbox and helped the boys fix what they could before an engineer from the near by town came by.

Oli watched nonchalantly from a distance as everyone fussed around the bus, he was still unable to clear his mind of the argument that had passed between him and Jez only a few hours to go. He hated not knowing everything, especially when it concerned Jez.

He decided to try and be a gentleman about it.

For the rest of the day he attempted to humour Jez. He gave her space and let her do what she wanted, even going so far as to laying down no objections when she blasted Lady GaGa on the bus, all in an attempt to appease Jez.

By the end of the day everybody was downright frustrated. They couldn’t take anymore of the dance music and they certainly couldn’t stand Oli being such a puppy around Jez. In the end it was Tom who saved the rest of Bring Me The Horizon by threatening to throw Jez’s favourite TopShop shoes out if she didn’t turn the ‘wailing’ tunes of Lady GaGa off.

The rest of the day was spent waiting for the engineer. When he did finally arrive it only took half an hour to determine the problem and an hour and a half to fix it. In the end they did make it to Manchester. Albeit later than anticipated but the show still took place, Jez watching from a safe distance at the bar, still visibly fuming. In her hand she was holding a beer to the surprise of everyone, especially Sean who had been the first to hear why she did not drink around Bring Me The Horizon.

Jez let out a sigh as she watched the gross chaotic scene in front of her that standard when Bring Me The Horizon hit the stage. Oli pumped the crowd up so much that you could almost taste the anger and frustration. Jez thought it all rather ironic. But she simply sipped her beer and watched kids punch each other in the face and almost kill each other in various mosh pit attempts.

Two days wore on in this way, and the aggression and frustration that Jez had only previously felt from the crowd during sets, slowly but surely began to make its presence known within herself too. She was digging herself into a rut and she knew it.

The evening of the second day after the bus breakdown she finally cracked.

“I hate you! I hate this tour and I hate this goddamn bus and it’s bloody smell!” Jez shrieked agitatedly as she stormed towards the fridge in the bus and wrenched the door open, producing from the cool inside a glass pot that held chocolate mousse from Marks and Spencer’s.

“Jez love, please calm down,” Curtis tried to reason with the angry girl as he walked towards her. But to no avail, she simply wheeled around and waved a long silver spoon threateningly in his face.

“No! I will not calm down and don’t you dare come anywhere near me you’ve not had a shower in the whole week that we’ve been on tour!” Jez shouted waving her silver spoon in the same way as knight wields his sword.

Curtis looked imploringly at Oli, who had watched the enfolding scene from his place on the slightly stained sofa, with an amused look on his tired face. Oli caught the look that Curtis sent him his way, and sighed with resignation.

Oli knew that Jez was tired. He knew she was exhausted after an intense week that had carried on rolling without a free day, and without another opportunity for her to see Alex. He knew she wasn’t eating properly, he knew that her philosophy was rather eat nothing than all that shit that came out of the microwave with that ear piercing ‘ding’. He knew she was getting frustrated because her beloved clothes were crumpled and that the smell of home laundry had been replaced with the smell of deep fry and boy. So in Oli’s way of thinking Jez was perfectly entitled to an emotional spat.

But ‘spat’ didn’t really cover it anymore. Total frustration and anger boiling up to the surface and causing a volcano like explosion would have been a more apt way of describing it.

With a sigh Oli heaved himself off the sofa and also attempted the walk towards Jez but the same flash of emotion lit up Jez’s eyes and she immediately went on the defence again.

“You haven’t had a shower either and you’re the smelliest one!” Jez shrieked and pointed accusingly at Oli with the silver spoon. “Stay away!”

With those final two words she ripped the bus door open and stomped down the steps before proceeding to slam the door shut again with so much force that the insides of the bus reverberated.

“Oli please do something,” Lee said desperately. “I hate it when she’s like this, it’s not good for her to go off the rails like that.”

“She’ll bite my head off why do I have to talk to her? It’s been bad enough trying to get her to talk to me for the past two days!” Oli wailed, he didn’t want to be sorting her problems out when he had so many of his own problems that involved her.

“Because you’re her best friend that’s why,” Matt Nicholls said firmly.

Outside Jez was sat cross-legged on the slightly damp tarmac and was spooning the chocolate mousse out of the glass pot with surprising ferocity. She was shivering slightly because in her dramatic exit she had forgotten to grab a jacket and so she was sat there in the middle of the parking lot in Newcastle dressed in little dark blue shorts and a cream blouse from TopShop, hardly the best outfit for one of England’s coldest cities. But Jez was not going to admit defeat just because of the cold and go back inside, even if that meant she was going to catch a cold or the flu.

She carried on digging her way through the mousse when a jacket suddenly fell around her shoulders and some warmth was restored to her.

Jez looked up and saw Oli. She glanced back down at the hoodie and saw that it was a Drop Dead hoodie. She let out a sigh and turned back to her chocolate desert.

Oli didn’t say anything either and just sank down on the tarmac next to her, crossing his legs. He was sat so close to her that their knees were touching. It unnerved Jez slightly.

“We’ve not talked for a while,” Oli said gently.

“That’s because everything’s been said,” Jez said firmly, finishing her pudding deftly and placing the empty glass on the ground, trying to keep herself busy so she wouldn’t have to make eye contact with Oli.

“That’s not true. You haven’t told me what happened when you had… the eating disorder.”

He had stumbled on the last two words, an incredible amount of guilt writhing up inside him when he had finally managed to pronoun them. Those two words stood in recognition of his failings as a best friend.

“You just don’t give up do you? It’s not going to make you happy when I tell you,” Jez said annoyed at herself that Oli’s feelings were still such a priority for her.

“I want to know.”

Even as he said those words he knew he was going to regret asking her to tell him. But there was no back tracking now. He sat in painful silence as Jez told him about how pressure at university and at home had gotten hard to handle. There had been no dramatic moment of abuse or any other clique that had rendered her to that former state. She was an ordinary girl and she needed a way to bring control into her life. Food had been the easy option.

An uncomfortable stab of emotion seared through him as Jez described how after a while even the size six jeans from her favourite shop were too baggy on her. What annoyed him more was how Alex was ever present in her tale, trying to get her to eat and telling her that she was beautiful as she was.

“Why did you never call me?” Oli asked quietly, trying to keep his voice clear of tell tale emotions.

“I did. You just never called back.”

The final stab came when Oli found out just how much Alex had actually done for Jez.

“There was a point when it got really bad. Worse than it had been before. It was about three days before Alex was due to go on tour. He’d been making me eat and tried everything but I couldn’t do it. Three days before they were due to leave my body sort of gave up and I had to be brought to hospital.”

Jez had kept surprisingly calm throughout her retelling; maybe it was a merit to her healing capabilities.

“Alex cancelled the tour. He swore he wasn’t going to leave Sheffield with me like that and he knew that taking me on tour was possibly the worst thing for me.”

“And so what?” Oli said almost angrily. “What’s the big deal about him cancelling a tour? Not like he needs the money anyway…” Oli scoffed, but the minute the words were out he knew he’d put his foot in it again.

Jez looked up at him through her lashes, not in a reproachful way, but in a way that was as if she felt sorry for him.

“It wasn’t just any tour Oli, it was their first ever headline tour.”

It felt like a slap in the face for Oli and once again he was hit with his own incompetency as a best friend. He had failed in every sense of the word.

“Alex tried to call you that night, he tried to get through to you but you never answered your phone and neither did any of your friends or band mates. I wanted you to know, I wanted you to come home but I guess you just didn’t want to be reached…” Jez tailed off, the memory of that night was still far too strong for her likening.

Then a vague memory hit Oli. A daze of an evening swam back to him. It had been a great show that night and the after party was happening. There were girls everywhere and the beer had never tasted better. His phone had vibrated sometime that evening in his pocket and he had checked the display. When he saw the name ‘Alex’ he had had to work very hard to resist the impulse to throw his phone against the wall.

Oli had consciously ignored the call and he vowed that Jez was never going to find that out, because that would be the end of it all.