"Ah." Ramsay's mouth downturned at the corners. "Well now. You can stop there if you like. You don't have to go on."
"No, you asked for it, you wanted it, you're getting the lot, all of it. I drove down to Beachy Head a couple of times. That's a cliff on the south coast of England. It's a beauty spot and also where dozens of people a year throw themselves off. Don't ask me if the two things are connected. I stood there looking out to sea, but I couldn't quite do it, couldn't quite step over the little barrier and then take the next step, right off the edge. So that was a washout, but I had pills at home. Sleeping tablets. I was needing them at the time, and one night I laid out ten of them in a row on my bedside table instead of the usual one, and I placed them all in the palm of my hand, and I even got as far as tipping them into my mouth. But I spat them out. I didn't fancy just falling asleep and not waking up. I wanted to feel my death. I wanted to experience it. So then, the final time, there was a hot bath and the blade from Ade's razor. Ade liked a proper blade. Not one of those clip-in multi-head ones with bits of wire across them for extra safety — a proper old-fashioned thin bendy metal blade with two cutting edges. I lay in the bath and I held the blade at the crook of my elbow. You have to slice down along the inside of the forearm, open up as much of the length of the ulnar artery as you can. I'd seen the body of a young woman who'd topped herself like that, done it the way it should be done. She was anorexic, a heroin addict, in an abusive relationship, and she'd 'ridden the Gillette train out of the station,' as Prothero said. I couldn't understand at the time why she'd done it. Her life was shit, yes, but I thought she'd just been a coward. Why didn't she ditch the bastard of a boyfriend, get into a rehab program and just try and sort herself out? Make an effort, the stupid, self-pitying cow. But I got it later. When I was on the brink of killing myself in the exact same way, I understood. It was the only form of control she had left over her life, the only decision she could still make that would have any effect. Everything else had got the better of her. This was the one way she could still score a victory. Self-pity didn't come into it. It was all about recovering some small shred of dignity while she still could."
"Slashing your wrists in a bath ain't dignified."
"But when you're in that particular mindset, it is. And there's also an element of 'There. See? See how truly miserable I am?' You're leaving your body as a message to the world: life hurts, it hurts too much to bear, this is the only sane solution."
"But actually the sane solution isn't to end it all, it's to go on living," said Ramsay. "Stand up and say 'fuck you' to the pain and bludgeon on."
"I realised that. At the very last moment. Look." She rolled up her sleeve and showed him the inside of her left elbow. "You can just see it. There. Tiny little scar. That's how far I got with the razor blade. Less than a centimetre. It stung like fuck, and I just couldn't continue. That pain was sharper, more real, than the other kind of pain, and it brought me to my senses. The way out, I realised, was worse than the situation. The cure was worse than the disease. It seems trite, looking back, but it honestly was a revelation. I was clearly not suffering as badly as I thought I'd been, if I could be deterred by a little bit of 'ouch' and a trickle of blood. That put things into perspective. I didn't climb out of that bath any happier than when I'd got in, but I did climb out knowing I'd troughed, I'd found rock bottom, and the only way from there was up."
"Wanna know something?" Ramsay said. "Something I've never, ever told anyone else?"
"OK."
"I tried it too. Suicide. Just me, the bathroom mirror, and my Marine-issue pistol. After Ethan, every morning for about a month I'd stand at the sink and look at myself and put the barrel of a MEU(SOC). 45 in my mouth and almost nearly pull the trigger. Morning after morning. After a while, the taste of gunmetal and grease got so familiar, I couldn't get rid of it. There on my tongue the whole time. Everything I ate or drank seemed to have the tang of it. In the end, it started to make me feel sick. That was why I stopped wanting to blow my brains out, after a month of repeatedly trying to summon up the guts to and failing: I hated eating a breakfast that tasted of sidearm. It was a small thing, a stupid reason for going on living, but sometimes a stupid reason is enough, especially when the alternative is nothing. At least it's a reason."
"You chose to live because you like your food, is that what you're telling me?"
"I like my meals to taste like a meal should, hell yeah."
Sam couldn't keep a straight face, and didn't think she was meant to. "That is so a Rick Ramsay thing to do, go off the idea of suicide for your stomach's sake."
"Hey, never underestimate the power of the stomach. Or the tastebuds."
Their laughter dwindled into silence. The fire embered, the cicadas shook their maracas.
"See?" Ramsay said. "You've talked, and it hasn't made your head fall off or anything."
"And you haven't hit on me, either."
"So the worst didn't happen."
"Halleluiah."
Some time later, she stood up. "I'm going to turn in."
"I'm going to stay here a little longer. It's a nice night. The stars are pretty."
She touched his shoulder. "Thanks, Rick."
"All part of the service, ma'am."
She knew then that, at some point, she was going to sleep with this man.
But not tonight. That would be like giving the dog a treat as a reward for having nipped her finger.
33. HAUT-PIETRA
A nother day was spent looking, in vain, for the Minotaur. The monster was proving more elusive than any they'd hunted so far.
A third day passed, with a similar lack of results, and at the end of it, as the Titans were trudging back to camp, Hyperion said, "Base, we're wasting time here. Time and power cells. The forests round here are as dense as Daffy Duck, and the damn monster seems to know how to make itself scarce if it wants to. Is there any way you guys can help?"
"How do you mean?" said Landesman.
"You've got computer geeks there. Couldn't you get them to, I don't know, take over a spy satellite and try and pinpoint the Minotaur from space by its heat signature or some such?"
"Speaking as one of those computer geeks," said Patanjali, "I have mad skills, but I'm still not that good. No way could I infiltrate anybody's defence surveillance system without Argus noticing and tracing the hack back to here."
"Sorry, Hyperion," said Landesman, "but you're just going to have to keep doing it the hard way."
"All right then, how about this? In the Gulf, when our side needed to track down a bunch of insurgents, often as not we'd draft in some local help. Nobody knows the lay of the land better than the folks who live there. And there's guys here who'd be willing, I reckon, to work with us."