Too Good for this World Read online

  Too Good for this World

  L.K. Chapman

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1 – 2015

  Chapter 2 – 2013

  Chapter 3 – 2015

  Chapter 4 – 2008

  Chapter 5 – 2015

  Chapter 6 – 2013

  Chapter 7 – 2015

  Chapter 8 – 2012

  Chapter 9 – 2015

  Chapter 10 – 2011

  Chapter 11 – 2015

  Chapter 12 – 2014

  Chapter 13 – 2013

  Chapter 14 – 2015

  Chapter 15 – 2013

  Chapter 16 – 2015

  Chapter 17 – 2013

  Chapter 18 – 2015

  Chapter 19 – 2008

  Chapter 20 – 2015

  Chapter 21 – 2013

  Chapter 22 – 2015

  Find out where it all began

  Connect with LK Chapman

  Copyright 2015 LK Chapman

  Smashwords Edition

  Cover image by Ashley Chapman

  Thank you for downloading this ebook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form. If you enjoy this book, please return to your favourite ebook retailer to discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support.

  The characters, events and locations in Too Good for this World are fictitious and any similarity to real people, events or locations is not intended by the author.

  To my husband, who makes all of this possible.

  2015

  They called it the only suicide note that any of the players had left. Imogen held it in her hands, clutched it to her chest, and then pressed her lips against it, as she had done almost every day in the two years since Jonny’s death. Because of its links to the worldwide phenomenon that was Affrayed, the note had been shown on the news, and people had tried to decipher it- the last ever communication from her husband to the world he’d left behind. Many people put forward possible explanations. Everyone had an opinion. But nobody knew. What could anybody hope to understand from a stupid picture? That’s all it was, a stupid picture on narrow ruled notepaper of stick people on top of skyscrapers. The people had their arms stretched up to the sun which was beating down on them, except instead of rays of light the sun beat down rays of weird code- 0G11ATC00G- repeated over and over, the order changing, but the letters and numbers always the same. Above the whole scene, written dark and black across the page, was the statement “I’m not Affrayed anymore”. The words had some obvious potential meanings, but people had had a go at interpreting the “code” as well. The letters A, G, C and T had been suggested to represent the four bases in a strand of DNA- adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine- that made up DNA sequences. This made no sense to her. Jonny hadn’t been a doctor, or a biologist, or anything like that. As for the zeros and ones, even she could see that they were binary sequences, but that made no sense either. Jonny hadn’t been a computer programmer, or a mathematician, or a physicist so she didn’t know why he’d draw anything full of binary code. He wasn’t sciencey like that. He had been a thinker, but he hadn’t thought about science. He thought about people, and the world. That was what he loved. It was that love which had killed him.

  2013

  It was late. She had just finished the stack of marking and sat back with a sigh at the little round dining table by the window. Jonny was at the computer, hunched over below his shelves of books- books about all sorts of things; philosophy, sociology, religion, psychology. Over the past couple of years he’d added a collection of books about how to survive in the wilderness, or the accounts of people who had done just that, and he had been reading these avidly- more avidly with every passing day. Until recently.

  ‘Jonny?’ she said.

  There was no response from him. The light from the computer screen flickered across his lifeless face.

  ‘Jonny, it’s late,’ she said, ‘let’s go to bed.’

  He didn’t even look round. He was playing Affrayed. He played Affrayed every evening now, and half the night more often than not. Imogen got up and went over to him, feeling the beginnings of anger, but trying not to let it show. ‘Jonny,’ she said again. He was still completely absorbed, so for a moment Imogen watched the action unfolding on the screen.

  Try as she might, Imogen couldn’t see the attraction of Affrayed. Apparently it had originally been something else, some sort of elaborate multiplayer game of hide and seek, but then it had changed- evolved into a huge online game of survival. Imogen didn’t understand how a game could change, but how a game could change was not important. The fact that the game had changed her husband, that was what she worried about. Because he had changed. As each day went by she became further and further locked out of his life, and out of his thoughts. She looked again at his face. His blue eyes were glassy, his scruffy hair beginning to get the sheen of grease that it always had by the end of the day. He looked like he was barely alive. This was going to take some doing.

  ‘Jonny!’ she shouted, right next to his ear.

  ‘What?’ he said, blinking like he’d just woken up, ‘what’s happening?’ He looked around as though expecting to see a fire, and then his eyes rested on her again.

  ‘Nothing’s happening,’ she told him quietly, ‘I just wanted to snap you out of that game.’

  Jonny rubbed his forehead. She saw his eyes slip longingly back towards the screen, but he forced them away again. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry, Gennie. What time is it?’

  ‘Quarter to twelve.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. He closed the game with obvious reluctance, and when he followed her into the bedroom he still looked distracted.

  Imogen started to get undressed, hoping to attract his attention, but when her body failed to draw so much as a glance from him she gave up and pulled on a baggy old t-shirt. She thought Jonny might at least say a few words to her, but he was just sitting silently at the end of the bed, so she sat down by his side and nudged his knee with hers.

  ‘Are you alright?’ she asked him.

  He continued his silence as though she hadn’t spoken. Imogen looked at her hands in her lap, then at Jonny’s hands, and was alarmed to see they were shaking.

  ‘Jonny?’ she said, touching his arm gently. ‘Jonny, what’s wrong?’

  ‘The game,’ he said, ‘Affrayed.’

  Imogen took a deep breath to calm herself. She was sick of hearing about it. ‘What about it?’ she asked, as patiently as she could.

  ‘When I was playing it just then,’ he said slowly, ‘I… I swear it was responding to me without me actually doing anything.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Imogen said. She began to feel frightened.

  ‘Well, when you came and interrupted me my hands were in my lap,’ he explained, ‘and I think they’d been there a long time. Didn’t you notice?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘why, what… what are you saying?’

  ‘Think about it,’ he said, ‘the keyboard was on the desk. My hands were in my lap. But I was playing. I was still playing.’

  2015

  Conversations like that one played on her mind now. She couldn’t remember where his hands had been. She hadn’t been paying attention. She’d probably just assumed they were on the desk because that’s where they would normally be, and if they had been anywhere else it simply hadn’t registered with her.

  She was distracted from looking at Jonny’s last message to the world when she heard her mum get home. She put the picture away carefully in the drawer in her desk. Her mum disapproved of her looking at Jonny’s suicide note. She said it was morbid and wou
ld do nothing to help her move on. Reluctantly, Imogen decided she should go downstairs. She didn’t feel like talking to her mum, but she found people were more inclined to leave her to her own devices if she made an effort now and then. If she shut herself away they started to get worried; they started to think she might go the way Jonny had.

  When she walked into the kitchen she found her mum making a cup of awful-smelling fennel tea and Imogen wrinkled her nose in disgust. Her mum loved her weird teas, her superfoods, her herbal remedies and horoscopes and tarot cards and helpful anecdotes. Imogen had the sense that to her mum nothing was so catastrophic as to be permanent, not even death. She spoke a lot about the world having its own wisdom and its own designs. Apparently Jonny killing himself was part of some design for Imogen. Her mum said that people weren’t sent any tests they didn’t have the strength to deal with, and that one day the grief would make Imogen stronger. Imogen had pointed out that Jonny had clearly been sent a test too big for him to deal with, but her mum had simply said, ‘Jonny was too good for this world,’ and that was apparently that.

  ‘You know,’ Imogen’s mum said, ‘I was talking to a woman today who met her second husband on one of those dating websites.’

  Imogen rummaged in the cupboard for a jar of instant coffee and started to make her own, more appetising beverage. ‘Is that right?’ she said, careful not to show any emotion.

  ‘She said the whole thing was a much better experience than she expected. Not creepy or anything.’

  Imogen sat down at the kitchen table. There was a stack of books in the middle- one about herbs, one about mindfulness, one about eating for better mental health, and one about the healing properties of gemstones. Her mum had given her a gemstone last week. Amethyst. For grief.

  While her mum babbled on about dating sites, Imogen looked down at the gold wedding band and sapphire engagement ring on her finger. Both were second hand- Jonny wasn’t keen on buying new things. He’d said the meaning was far more important than something new and shiny, and that the fact these had been owned by somebody else meant that their lives and their marriage were linked to the past, to the larger world. She’d suggested that perhaps they’d been owned by someone who had got divorced. ‘They weren’t,’ he’d told her, ‘I asked the man in the shop. They were owned by a woman who was married to her childhood sweetheart her whole life.’ Imogen had never been sure how he could know this for certain, but Jonny never told lies. Maybe the man in the shop had, though. That wouldn’t have crossed Jonny’s mind. He thought everyone was as honest as he was.

  ‘I had a look at a few myself,’ her mum continued, oblivious to Imogen’s disinterest, ‘some of them don’t seem quite right for… for you… but there are others that match you really carefully, you just fill in a personality-’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about this,’ Imogen said.

  ‘Gennie,’ her mum said, ‘listen to me. I know it’s hard, but all the signs are that it’s time-’

  Imogen shoved her chair back and stood up. ‘Jonny wouldn’t want me to go on a dating site,’ she shouted, ‘he wouldn’t want me to put up an advert for myself and try to sell myself to people. He… he hated advertising!’

  For a moment her mum was too astonished to speak. Imogen stood frozen to the spot for a second longer, then, before her mum could open her mouth again, she ran from the room.

  2008

  Twenty one was young to get married. That was what everyone said. They’d only just finished university; Imogen was going to train to be an English teacher, and Jonny was determined to get a job campaigning or raising funds for a charity. He hadn’t decided which one- he supported many different causes, and would be happy to work for any of them, just so long as it was a charity. That was apparently the only employer he would consider, since he refused to work in the private sector or for the government. Strangely, while he looked for his ideal job, he had no hesitation getting paid for waiting tables in a restaurant. ‘Money isn’t really real,’ he said. ‘Sometimes you have to play the game, but if you don’t use it the way they want you to, then you’re still following your own rules.’

  Two weeks before the wedding they went camping, even though there was still lots of planning to be done and they could barely spare the time. They sat outside their tent while the stars came out and Imogen said, ‘do you think we’re too young to get married?’ She didn’t look at Jonny and made a show of stretching out her legs and seeming casual.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Do you?’

  ‘Other people think we are.’

  Jonny laughed. ‘Other people can say what they want. I know my own mind. Don’t you?’

  Imogen smiled. ‘I guess,’ she said, ‘but not the way you know yours.’

  ‘Why do people think we’re too young?’

  Imogen waggled her toes in the cool breeze. It was getting a bit chilly to still be outside in shorts. She began to wish she hadn’t brought this up.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘but… people say you should have fun while you’re young, don’t they? That you should… you know… have lots of different experiences…’

  ‘You mean fuck lots of different people?’ Jonny asked.

  Imogen’s cheeks turned pink. ‘I’m not saying I want to-’

  ‘People are obsessed with things being new,’ Jonny said, ‘if you only care about being with someone new all the time you’re never going to be happy, because new things don’t stay new. I’m not interested in having sex with anyone else now I’ve found you.’

  Imogen nodded. She felt awful for starting this conversation. She felt she’d let Jonny down, and it wasn’t that she was even genuinely worried, people’s attitudes just confused her, that was all.

  Jonny gave her a one-armed hug. He didn’t seem to be angry. ‘Surely you don’t think we’ve already done everything together that we’re going to do?’ he said, giving her a squeeze, ‘believe me, we’ve barely even started yet.’

  Imogen snuggled against his shoulder. She wasn’t sure if he was talking exclusively about sex now or about their lives in general, but it didn’t really matter. Either way, she knew he was right, and she couldn’t wait for the rest of their lives to begin.

  2015

  Imogen slammed her bedroom door, but her mum followed her upstairs anyway and even though Imogen told her to go away she came inside.

  ‘Gennie,’ she said gently, ‘I’m sorry if I upset you.’

  Imogen sat down on her bed, and her mum sat beside her.

  ‘The longer you leave things, the harder it will get,’ her mum said.

  ‘I don’t care.’

  Her mum gave her a reproachful look. ‘I know Jonny’s death is still very raw to you,’ she said matter-of-factly, ‘but there’s only so long you can hide away.’

  Imogen drew her knees up to her chest and rested her chin on them. She wanted to be left alone. That’s all she ever wanted. ‘You knew Jonny,’ she said, ‘you knew what he was like. How could I ever find somebody else like him? How could you even suggest that I try?’

  ‘Why don’t I show you the website I found?’ her mum asked, ‘you don’t need to do anything today, just have a look. I’m sure it would be good for you. I was thinking just before the woman came into the shop and told me about how she met her husband that I wish I could be sent a sign of how I could help you-’

  ‘I let Jonny down,’ Imogen said, ignoring her mum. ‘He turned to that game because he couldn’t get what he needed from me. I was… I was a terrible wife.’

  2013

  He tried to talk to her about the game one Sunday lunchtime in mid June. Some friends had invited them over for dinner, but Jonny had been playing Affrayed in the morning and he was agitated before they left.

  ‘Gennie,’ he said urgently, while she was trying to decide what to wear, ‘I have to talk to you.’

  She carried on looking through the wardrobe. ‘Go on, then,’ she said.

  ‘It’s about Affrayed.’

  She slam
med the wardrobe door closed. ‘I don’t want to hear it.’

  ‘You have to listen,’ he said, ‘and you have to believe me. It’s not just a game. I’m sorry I spend so long on it, but you should play it too. It… it’s important.’

  Imogen turned to him. ‘It’s a game,’ she said. ‘Maybe it’s fun, maybe it’s interesting. It is not important. Not more important than your real life.’

  ‘Gennie,’ he said, ‘you know I wouldn’t be saying this if I didn’t believe it. I know I sound like I’ve lost my mind, but you’ve seen me play without touching the keys-’

  ‘I haven’t,’ she said. It was true that sometimes she’d turned and seen him with his hands in his lap, but as soon as she looked at him- when she really looked at him to try to ascertain whether his claims were true- he’d snap out of the game and come back to reality again. She had never actually witnessed him controlling Affrayed with his mind as he claimed.

  ‘Please,’ he said, ‘Gennie…’ he sounded so desperate, and when she replied a little sob crept into her voice. ‘Jonny, I don’t understand,’ she said, ‘it’s a game. You have to let it go-’

  ‘But it links me to the other players,’ he said, ‘I know things about them. Things I couldn’t possibly know. And there’s something else as well, it links me to something else, to this… being. I can sense it-’ her face must have shown what she thought because his desperation increased. ‘I’m not crazy,’ he said, ‘when I’m in Affrayed it links us together and I feel… I feel part of something. I’ve always said there has to be a better way of living and I think Affrayed-’

  ‘It’s a game,’ Imogen said, ‘a game where gangs of people roam around killing each other for resources. I’ve heard about it. They talk about it on the news. How can you say it’s a better way of living? I’ve heard the sorts of things people can do to each other in that game and it sounds… it sounds disgusting to me. The people who made it should be ashamed.’