‘I have no idea,’ I said. ‘I think she’s very troubled, and very imaginative, and also desperate to be loved. And she looks up to me. She’s an aspiring writer. I am everything she wants to be. It’s classic stalking material.’
He nodded. ‘If what you’re saying is true, then I think you need to consider taking this to the police.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Bo, come on. What you’re saying is that she’s bombarded you with emails, she’s cooked up some fantasy lesbian relationship between the two of you, she has moved to Grasmere, and then failed to take any notice of the fact that you told her she’d made some strange mistake. She followed you and your family into a café when you were having lunch, and now she’s demanding three thousand pounds. I don’t think you can take this lightly anymore. What will her next step be? Murder to get me out of her way?’
‘I know. I know. You’re right. There’s something very wrong with her. I thought I could help her…’
‘You always think you can help people.’
‘…but she’s just too troubled. I can’t do anything.’
‘People like this need medical help.’
I agreed with him. Then said, ‘I’d like to try and get some more sleep now.’
He left.
I buried my face in the pillow. Oh, God. What had I done? I didn’t want all this. I just wanted my life back. That quiet, old life, unrocked.
Her Majesty’s Prison for Women
Yorkshire
Monday. I’m back now. They let me out on weekend release, to prepare me for my freedom. At last, freedom is coming. They haven’t given me a date yet, but the Governor said sometime next month.
I’m not meant to go and see her, not ever again. And they’ll tell her that if I step within a mile of her house, then she must ring the police and they’ll bring me straight back here to finish my sentence.
But I think she’ll be pleased to see me, once she knows what I have to say. She won’t tell. Perhaps, in time, she’ll give me another chance. Perhaps.
Part Four
WRECKAGE
1
Alice
I slept and woke, then slept again. Time passed, but I barely noticed, or cared. Sometimes it was light and sometimes it was dark, but Bo had done what she’d done and there was nothing else.
Now and then, I prayed for her to come back and for it to be the way it had been, just for that little, magnificent while. I reached into the space beside me, feeling for her. She wasn’t there, and she wasn’t there. I closed my eyes. I wept.
I woke to the sound of a sharp, repeated knock on the door.
Pulling on my dressing gown, not quite sure what time it was, I went to answer it.
Two police officers, one male and one female, stood on the step.
‘Alice Dark?’ the man asked.
‘Yes,’ I said, suddenly feeling criminal to be bleary-eyed in my dressing gown at … oh, what was the fucking time?
‘We’d like to talk to you. Could you let us in?’
I stepped aside. The bed was still down, the covers unkempt, an empty wine bottle and a glass filled with cigarette butts stood on the floor by my pillow. Everything in the room reeked of decay, of someone who hadn’t got her life together, not in any way.
The police officers stood there, looking around, taking it all in.
Then the man said, ‘Have you got any idea why we want to talk to you?’
‘I should imagine it’s because of Bo Luxton.’
He nodded and eyed the books by the bed. Six of them, all by Bo Luxton. ‘Now, you’re not going to go to prison or anything, but we’d like you to come to the station later today. You’re not under arrest right now, so you can refuse to come. But if you don’t come, we can issue a warrant for your arrest.’
‘I’ll come,’ I said.
‘You’re entitled to a solicitor.’
‘I don’t need a solicitor. It’s fine.’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘When can you be at the station?’
‘I’m not sure what the time is now…’
‘Eleven thirty.’
‘Then I can come at twelve.’
He gave me directions and they saw themselves out.
For a moment, I stood in the middle of the room, feeling dazed. I couldn’t be in any real trouble. Bo had asked me to move here, and Bo had left me that note (which I’d found, in the end, under the bed). I could explain everything to them and they’d realise it was nothing.
But I didn’t have the emails anymore. Like some weak and pathetic puppet, at Bo’s bidding I’d deleted them all. Then I’d even sent her a message and said, ‘I have deleted all your emails, as you asked. I can’t believe you’ve done that. They were my most treasured possessions, ever.’
I wondered whether Bo had lost her mind. Maybe she’d panicked when she realised what she was risking, and now she was insane. What could she have said to the police? ‘I had an affair with a woman fifteen years younger than me and now I wish I hadn’t. Please put her in prison.’ But Bo was the one in the wrong. She was the married one. The elder one. The mother. She was the bitch in all of this.
I showered, put my blue French Connection dress on, and applied my best make-up. I wanted to compensate for what the police had seen: the shambles of my flat; me lying in bed nearly until the afternoon, six novels and a pile of papers by Bo Luxton beside me, along with a bottle of wine. It wasn’t looking good, so far as respectability went.
At five to twelve, I walked round to the station and waited. The officers who’d been to my flat came out and met me, then led me through a series of windowless corridors and huge metal doors they had to unlock on the way. I’d seen all this on TV. I was one step away from prison.
Eventually, we arrived at a small reception area, where another officer stood behind a desk, filling out papers. He looked up at me. I started to smile, as I did automatically whenever I met people, then stopped. His gaze was stern, severe, angry.
He put down his pen. ‘Alice Dark,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘I can see from your records that you’re in the worst trouble you’ve ever been in.’
I had nothing to say.
‘You’ve never been in trouble with the police before.’
‘No.’
‘That fact is working for you in this instance. If you had anything – anything at all on your file – I would be arresting you today. But you don’t, so you are going to talk to my colleagues, and after that, the most likely outcome is that you will be cautioned.’
I stared at him, silenced.
He gestured to the other officers. They unlocked the door to a small room and told me to go inside. It was shabby. Bare walls, no windows, nothing but an old table and three hard, black chairs.
‘Sit down,’ the man said.
The woman fiddled with a tape recorder.
I sat.
‘Tape recorder running.’
‘I’d like you to begin by telling us about your friendship with Bo Luxton, from when it began until today.’
I took a deep breath and started.
I spoke quickly: the course; the bond we’d shared; the emails; the visit to Grasmere after I split up with Jake; the love I suddenly felt; the love Bo felt; the visit while Gus was away – I didn’t mention the sex, let them work it out for themselves; the sadness we’d both felt when I went home; the suggestion that I move to Grasmere; the move; the confusion; the note.
‘Is that all of it?’
‘I think so.’
‘Right. Listen to this. This is Ms Luxton’s statement about your friendship with her:
‘“I first met Alice Dark in May 2015, when I taught on a weeklong residential course for aspiring writers and Alice was one of my students. I was immediately drawn to her and her work, finding her to be very talented and also a lively, funny young woman. We got along well.
“Alice described aspects of her life to me. She appeared to be drifting somewhat and had a boyfri
end she described as ‘a waster’. I was concerned that when she went home, she would sink back to unproductive ways, and I wanted to help her make sure that didn’t happen.
“We stayed in touch by email. After a few weeks, Alice said she had split up from her boyfriend. She seemed very, very upset. Really devastated. I invited her to my home in Grasmere to try and help her feel better.
“While she was staying, she confided in me a lot. In particular, she said that when she was a child, her mother used to beat her, and she was removed from the family home and sent to live with foster parents. She hardly saw her mother after that, not until just before she died, which was a year before we met.
“I was deeply moved by Alice’s story. Again, I wanted to help her. I would have described us by this stage as very close. I had quite maternal feelings towards her, and an urge to look after her.
“However, once she had gone home, things changed. She started emailing me compulsively, about fifty messages a day. The number was overwhelming. I stopped reading most of them, but occasionally when I did read one or two, they shocked me. She appeared to be declaring a love for me that was sexual and romantic. She also told me about a past that involved drugs, alcohol and promiscuity, and which led to her having several sexually transmitted diseases. I didn’t know why she would tell me such unsavoury aspects of her life.
“I became afraid of checking my emails and didn’t know what to do. I did send her a message once to say that I wanted her to stop sending such frequent messages and to get on with making her life better – finding a nicer place to live, getting a job, going out and meeting new people. I said I was still prepared to be her friend, but that the quantity of messages was too much for me.
“It was around this time that I foolishly told her that my husband, Gus, was going away for work for a few days. Alice somehow mistook this for an invitation to visit me again. It was during the school summer holidays so I was very busy with my daughters and my own work; without my husband around to help, I would never have suggested she come to stay at such an inconvenient time. However, she did. Still wanting to help her, I tried to encourage her to get out of our house, walk around the countryside. Really I was trying to keep her away from me and my daughters. Fortunately, she left before my husband came home, and I hoped that would be the last I would see of her.
“However, once she returned to Brighton, her emails kept coming, and again I could not read them all. I opened one that said she planned to come and live near me, and another one that said she had emailed my publicist, pretending to be a literary critic with an interest in me, and had persuaded my publicist to send her some of the rare work from my early years.
“At this point, I decided I needed to end my friendship with her entirely, and blocked her email address, expecting that once my messages bounced back, I would move on.
“However, instead of email, she simply found another way to get in touch with me and a couple of weeks later, I had a letter saying she was moving to Grasmere and expected me to meet her at the train station. I spoke to my husband and we decided that I ought to go and make it clear that I wanted nothing more to do with her.
“I did this. When I saw her at the station, she was very different. She used to be smartly dressed and well groomed. Now, she seemed drunk and her clothes were shabby. She smelled of alcohol. I told her I didn’t want her living near me. She cried and shouted and called me a fucking bitch. I left, realising by now that Alice was a very troubled young woman. I was greatly disturbed and also quite frightened of her.
“At times in my emails, Alice had referred to my husband as ‘an overbearing pillock’ and said she wanted to kill him. Although I was offended by this and didn’t like it, I had assumed she was joking. However, I now became concerned for the safety of myself and my family. We all stayed at home for three days, afraid to go out in case she was there.
“It was Wednesday when she came to Grasmere. On Saturday, my family and I went for lunch at a café in town. We had been there just ten minutes when Alice walked in and came to our table. The only thing I could think was that she must have been lurking outside our house all this time and then followed us when we finally had the courage to go out again.
“I told her, calmly and forcefully, to leave us alone. My daughters were deeply distressed. She went, and I hoped that would be the last I would ever hear from her.
“However, when we got home, my husband checked my emails and my Facebook messages for me. There were no emails from Alice, because I had blocked her, but on Facebook there were two messages demanding that I give her £3,000 or she would tell my husband that we’d had an affair. She said she wanted to ruin my life.
“That evening, I went to bed early. I was exhausted from the stress of everything that had happened, but my husband stayed up. He received five silent phone calls between 8 pm and 2 am. I can only assume these were from Alice.
“Alice’s behaviour is having a deep and damaging impact on my family. We are afraid to leave our house, my daughters are frightened and we have reason to believe that she could be violent. We want her to move away from Grasmere and back to Brighton where she lived before. I am not a doctor, but it is my belief that Alice is suffering from some sort of mental illness for which she needs urgent treatment.”’
The police officer put the papers down and stared hard at me. ‘So you see, you and Bo have very different perceptions of your friendship. She doesn’t want your attentions, Alice. She wants you to leave her alone.’
I shook my head, ‘But she knew. She asked me. I…’
He looked hard at me again and said, ‘Can you prove this?’
I shook my head. I couldn’t prove it. The emails were gone. I said, ‘I didn’t keep her emails, but…’ I wanted to suggest I bring him my iPad, so he could search the hard drive and retrieve them, but I could see he didn’t believe a word I was saying. He wasn’t going to listen to me, spend police resources on this. He wanted me out.
He said, ‘I have seen your messages to Bo, and your letter. There is no excuse. You need to leave her alone. We’re not going to arrest you today, but if you make any further contact with Bo, that will be it. You will be arrested and the case will go through the courts. Do you understand?’
I nodded, angry and ashamed. No one believed me. All I wanted now was to leave the police station. I would do anything – anything at all – to get out of this horrible, windowless room.
‘We are going to give you a formal caution. You don’t have to accept it, but if you do, you will be able to leave the station today and put this behind you. If you don’t, then you will be arrested and the courts will be involved. Getting the courts involved is the last thing we want to do with someone who has no previous criminal record and who seems to have just made a very big mistake. I advise you strongly to accept the caution.’
I knew I could do nothing else. Some distant part of me was telling me I could fight this, I could get those emails back. But it was awful there. I just wanted to leave.
I said, ‘Yes, I’ll accept the caution.’
He motioned that I should follow him, back to the reception area, where I would be formally dealt with: cautioned, fingerprinted and then photographed for the police archive.
And so I went.
2
Bo
I let myself into the house after the walk home from school. Already, snow lay on the highest peaks, but it was still autumn here. Outside the kitchen window, sycamores wept their leaves and turned the dying year gold. Autumn’s beauty was pensive, I thought as I hung my coat on the stand; in the soft breeze all around me, I could hear the fierce sounds of winter.
I paused for a moment when I got to the kitchen and wrote that down. I’d be able to find symbolic meaning in the observation one day, stick it in a poem (probably about maturing love – how beautiful it was, and how vulnerable the aging lovers were as time marched relentlessly onward) and let critics speak of my perceptive, subtle genius, even though artists and writers
had been saying all this stuff for centuries and I just echoed those who came before, the ones who had really known it, really felt it. I didn’t experience any of those things other people spoke of – those feelings that marked them out as warm and human, instead of isolated and cold as I often felt myself to be. Dead at the core. I would not be vulnerable as Gus aged.
My love was ice cold.
I went to the larder, took out yeast, oil, salt and white bread-making flour, then fixed the dough hook onto the food processor. Maggie had asked me to make mini baguettes again. I bought mini baguettes for them every week, but both girls insisted they were better when I made them myself. Now and then, when my work had reached a decent cooling point, I left it for a morning and baked instead. It was often when I was up to my elbows in flour that ideas came to me.
Now, as I mixed everything in the processor and set it slowly going, my mind drifted to Alice. I couldn’t think of her these days without fear. I worried about her potential for vengeance. Alice would be vengeful, I was certain of that. She was full of angry energy, and now had enough time on her hands to think and dwell and plot. Yes, that was Alice. Angry, damaged Alice.
Angry and damaged, I told myself. Mad. Remember the emails – so many of them they wore me out to open and read. Remember the demands, the neediness.
Remember the love.
Oh, that endless, selfless love. She’d taken my breath away with her devotion. But surely there was something pathological in a love like that. Alice had practically scratched out her own heart and handed it to me on a plate, and I knew I wasn’t worth taking that sort of risk for. For all my fame, I was just a middle-aged woman, dead at the core. Rotten, I suspected sometimes.
I smeared olive oil round a bowl and tipped the finished dough into it, then covered it with the PTA tea cloth I’d bought when Lola was in year two. Twenty-two self-portraits by Lola and her classmates, with names in lopsided letters underneath them, Lola Hartley being one. The girls had Gus’s surname. I’d kept mine when we married. I’d thought about changing it, in rejection of my mother, but it was such a boring, conventional thing to do, and my mother was so stupid, the symbolism in the act would be lost on her. So I kept it.
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