‘That’s my girl,’ Ben said as I angled my head downwards.
It felt so good I could have cried.
Part II
* * *
NO WORD FOR WHAT WE ARE
Letter sent by Professor Jeremy Cooke,
17 February 2012
Good afternoon, Larry,
I used to think I’d make old bones. Was convinced I’d be one of those old boys who shuffles along the high street in a cap and coat regardless of the weather. Who loses track of time and looks suddenly and startled at his watch then mutters. Who, when he tries to speed up, resembles some mechanical object put together wrongly. Who doesn’t notice blobs of snot on his nose, spittle on his chin; has a vacant wateriness in his eyes and steadies himself on tables and chairs, as if against an increasingly fast-spinning, ever-more incomprehensible world. But obviously not. It’s a spot on my prostate: a hard, cancerous spot. The doctor and I traded best- and worst-case scenarios and hearing him articulate words with which I either wasn’t familiar or had certainly never associated with myself – ‘biopsy’ and ‘metastasis’ and ‘Finasteride’ – I decided to get flowers for Fliss on the way home: a huge bouquet with asters and iris and baby’s breath. Maybe cook a roast: pork, that’s always been her favourite. She knows, of course, but you should, too. This last bout of appointments have made me realize quite how lucky I’ve been to have had her by my side all these years.
I wanted to spend my retirement pottering, Larry. Pottering around the garden with my trowel, around antique shops in Winchester, around the house with my coffee cup that says: World’s Grumpiest Man. I rather fancied temporarily discounting my fossil fuel concerns and buying an old sports car, tinkering under the bonnet. Was going to get a pair of overalls – not sure I’ve ever had overalls – and would have left oily fingerprints on the kettle. Even, God forbid, if I’d ended up in a home, lined up along a wall with the other inmates as if we were waiting for a firing squad or sat in circles turning over cards above carpets chosen to conceal ‘accidents’– even that, reduced, childlike, embarrassingly charged with sexual ambition, even that would have been better than what I am facing: the nothingness.
I suppose I shouldn’t complain: I’ll still get to see well over twice as much life as Alice did. Isn’t this a turn up for the books, Larry? I rather thought dying was something that happened to other people, like arguing in public or bankruptcy. All these millions of years of evolution and we’ve never fixed the inescapability of this particular defect of being human, have we?
‘Sounds like there’s some displacement going on here,’ Fliss had said softly, when I’d informed her of my plan to ‘catalogue a deceased ex-student’.
It’s certainly proving a diversion, filling the gaps into which fear would otherwise rush. In fact, it’s positively flooding in – Alice’s past, served up in photos, emails, texts, Twitter exchanges, anecdotes, even some half-baked theories, one purporting she was a heroin user. To think, we used to be no more than a few formal records, papery and objective: a birth certificate, a driver’s licence, a wedding certificate, a death certificate. Now we’re in a thousand places: disparate but complete, ephemeral yet permanent, digital but real. This huge repository of information out there. God, it’s impossible to have secrets any more. We’d have never slipped under the radar if we’d been born forty years later, old boy, that’s for sure.
A few have even arrived in person, too, reaching into their short memories or scruffy pockets and prompting me to instinctively take up my notebook or Dictaphone. Capturing these details, it’s becoming compulsive.
‘Are you the Alice man?’ one young lady asked this morning, a sobriquet I didn’t dislike. She held out her mobile like a supplicant. ‘It’s only a text, but it’s the last one we swapped.’
Flicking through what I’ve collected earlier, I pondered: What actually is this? This photo from a school friend of Alice beside a tent for her Duke of Edinburgh. This picture of her on a trip to the Brontës’ parsonage – ‘Poor residents of Haworth didn’t know what had hit them’, the accompanying email said. This note from a couple who lived next door to her when she was a kid and ‘used to see her bouncing up and down on her trampoline over the fence’.
‘Sounds a bit like a belated obituary,’ Fliss had said.
‘Indeed it is,’ I’d replied, picturing the paucity of mine: a few paragraphs in the university journal, a couple of column inches in one of the broadsheets.
I’m dying, Larry. There, I’ve said it. It took a while, but I can now. Not in a philosophy undergrad ‘we’re all dying’ sort of way, but actually, literally. Nothing imminent. I’ll see next Christmas, the one after, probably the one after that, too. Me all over, isn’t it? I can’t even die dramatically.
I wonder what it’s actually like, the point of demise? Where it’ll be? How it’ll feel? One’s wife beside one’s bed, clenched held hands – or conceivably that’s merely the sanitized TV version. Perhaps I’ll never know it’s happened. Or worse, I will – but it’ll be ambiguous and confused: some complicated transition to … to where? Another thing us so-called smart scientists have never been able to answer. I have no intention of going gracefully into that good night, Larry. It’s time to be honest, to set the record straight. About Alice, about me, about everything.
Not sure how they’d have been at your university, but some of the faculty here are jolly sniffy. ‘How’s project Salmon progressing?’ one enquired this morning, barely concealing his disdain. But sod the lot of them. I’ve spent a lifetime seeking the approbation of my peers when they only follow your ideas to steal them or rejoice in their shortcomings. God, how did I ever enjoy the company of these people? They’re like foxes sniffing each other’s arseholes.
I doubt our news, however grave, gains much prominence in your corner of the globe, but it’s not inconceivable that you’ll have picked up parts of this story independently. The media here are gorging on it and they’re ignorant to the half of it. At least, for now. Forgive me if I omit any facts in my recounting, but I will do my best to be comprehensive and equitable. Never trust the teller, trust the tale, that’s what Lawrence said – well, you may have to bear with me because my grasp on detail isn’t what it was. I’ve never lied to you, not wittingly, but I expect I’ll be tempted over the coming weeks and months. I shall resist: even the less flattering bits and, jeepers, there’s enough of those. Untruths, infidelities, obsessions, subterfuge – where do I begin?
I’ll have to be careful, given when the last time I saw Alice was, but I have to do this. Indubitably, as a portrayal of Alice it can’t be infinite in its reach, but one is mindful of the Japanese term ‘kintsugi’ – the celebration of the break, of the flaw, the put-back-together version becoming part of the history of the object. And as swansongs go, there could be worse.
Then this morning, this girl in my office, cradling her phone in her hand as if it was a historical artefact. Megan, her name was: a pretty little thing who worked in PR. ‘I loved her,’ she said.
I couldn’t think of anything other than what it would feel like to have her hands – the red nails – on me, on my papery and pale skin. ‘Do you not still?’ I asked. ‘Do you not still love her?’ Strange, how we grapple with tenses. Loved. Love. Knew, know. Wanted, want. Friends of ours – I refer to them as ‘friends’, but we’ve long since fallen out of touch – lost one of their boys as a teenager. One of the questions afterwards they found hardest to cope with – perhaps they still do – is one of the simplest: How many children have you got?
‘I love her,’ she said.
‘I know, sweetheart,’ I said, reaching out.
She shrank back as if there was nothing more repulsive in the whole world than an old man. ‘How? How do you know?’
‘Because I do, too.’
Article on Nationalgazette.co.uk website,
6 February 2012
‘Tragic girl dies near bridge she battled to close’
A young woman has died ne
ar a bridge she campaigned to close.
The body of 25-year-old reporter Alice Salmon is believed to have been discovered in a canal in Southampton early yesterday morning (Sunday).
Sources say Salmon, who had studied in the Hampshire city, but more recently lived in London, was back there on a weekend visit.
The police are staying tight-lipped, but the theory that’s emerging locally is that the keen festival-goer got separated from her friends and was heading across the bridge after a long day of celebration.
In a cruel twist of fate, her first job on a local paper in the south-coast resort saw her lobby for better safety at the exact location where she is thought to have plunged to her icy death.
In one article she’d dubbed the bridge, which is 25 feet above the water and a popular pedestrian route, ‘an accident waiting to happen’, and called on the authorities to erect higher fences along it. ‘The question shouldn’t be how much would it cost – the question should be what might the cost be of not doing it,’ the extrovert Salmon wrote in the Southampton Messenger.
Former colleagues will remember her as a fearless campaigner on crime – a passion she developed with her ‘Catch the Night Stalker’ campaign, which led directly to the conviction of a man who had violently assaulted an 82-year-old great-grandmother.
Social-media websites were soon awash with theories. One Twitter user said the bridge was ‘the ideal spot for summer drunk-diving’. Another, who purportedly knew the victim, claimed she had a ‘complicated love life’.
Her parents declined to comment when the National Gazette contacted them, but a neighbour is reported as having said they’re ‘literally in pieces’.
Also look out for:
Youngster set for England football debut
Outrage at government plans for budget U-turn
Car factory crisis sparks redundancy fears
Notes made by Luke Addison on his laptop,
9 February 2012
When I said I got in a fight, Al, that’s not right and I have to get this right. I didn’t get in a fight, I started one. This poor bloke hadn’t done anything wrong but I took a swing and then we were rolling around on the floor and he was massive – that was why I’d picked him – and he was on top of me and his fist was smashing into my face. ‘Hit me again, you bastard,’ I was screaming, every punch a brilliant flash of pain, momentarily pummelling out the previous twenty-four hours from my head. As soon as it stopped, you rushed into the void and my face is a right mess but he walked away without a scratch, not that I was trying to hurt him; there’s enough pain in the world without twats like me doling out more, like we’re spreading confetti at a wedding.
It had been in some shitty pub by Waterloo. I’d just got back from Southampton. My head was all over the place. Had grabbed a pint and been in the beer garden when the call had come from your brother. ‘Where are you?’ he’d asked.
I didn’t tell him, course I didn’t. What was I going to say? Just arrived back in London, having followed your sister to Southampton. Merely replied as casually as I could: ‘Out.’
He knew we were having time apart. He’d never liked me, never said as much, but it had been obvious. ‘I’ve got some terrible news,’ he’d said and it didn’t sound as if it was the first time he’d said it. I could hardly hear him; the beer garden was rammed. I did hear how it was impossible to take in, precise details weren’t yet clear, the night before, utterly unreal, your parents were in bits … I’d stood there pulling the chalky smoke of a spliff as deep into me as I could, feeling the wheezy rush, a gang of feral teenagers circling me. But they didn’t have the faintest comprehension of how incapable they were of hurting me, them or their mates inside. I was dead myself. ‘Run along home now or I’ll put this glass in your face,’ I said to one. It was a wild, rocking feeling: the Stella, the weed, the need in me rising incrementally to dowse one fire of pain with another.
Later, a text from your mum saying, ‘Come and see us’. Then, later still, when I was suffocating under the guilt, a massive bloke at the bar. Me thinking: He’ll do.
Those two months we were apart, Al, I did what we agreed; I got my head straight and worked out what I wanted. Not that I needed to, I knew – it was you. I’d worked hard, saved a load of dosh, even viewed a few flats for us. I didn’t see anyone else, but did you? Who the fuck was this Ben you’d been swapping messages with on Twitter? You were clearly hiding something from me when we were arguing that last weekend. It cuts both ways, Alice. It was our future, not solely yours, ours. And now you’re dead and whoever he is you’re not seeing him any more, are you? Any more than you’re not seeing me and that’s what jealousy does to you, that’s what happens when you’re in love, and I was in love with you, Al. Prague was nothing – it was a girl from a place beginning with a ‘D’ that I couldn’t even remember the name of in a grotty hotel room. We barely exchanged more than a few dozen words, then as she was collecting up her stuff to go she’d said: ‘You’re in love, aren’t you?’
‘What makes you say that?’ I’d asked.
‘Because I’m not and when you’re not you notice it in other people.’
I was half expecting her to come out with some quote – you so would have done in a situation like that – explaining exactly what she was getting at, but the woman who wasn’t you merely wiped either a tear or some mascara off the side of her eye and let herself out of my room.
But all this isn’t because of her, it’s because of me. I have to write that.
‘If no one ever wrote anything down, we wouldn’t have Jane Austen and imagine a life without her,’ you said on one of our first dates. I’d been stumped for a reply so stayed schtum because I didn’t want to appear a philistine, although you soon rumbled me on that one!
Lives are like that world-record domino attempt I saw on TV when I was a kid: one thing out of place changes everything that comes afterwards. If it hadn’t been for Prague, you might not have been in Southampton or, even if you had, you might not have been so drunk or might not have gone down by the river and I certainly wouldn’t have been down there with you. Or maybe you’d have texted me during the evening and I’d have realized you were wasted because of your dodgy punctuation and it would have been like a phosphorus flare and I’d have replied, ‘Babe, be careful’ or ‘Go back to your friends’. Usually when you were pissed I could get through to you, though sometimes it was as if you were behind a pane of glass.
You used to say I was a fun drunk, a funny drunk, but I’m a messed-up drunk, a scared drunk, an angry drunk and my face is a right mess, but why shouldn’t other people see what I’ve done to myself, what you’ve done to me, to us? I used to imagine what our kids would look like, whether they’d get my nose and your freckles, my chin and your hair, my ears and your dimples – I used to put that picture of our future together in my head – but you smashed it to pieces when what I did in Prague was only seven measly weeks in, we weren’t even a fucking item.
Strange how being punched was the first time I’d felt even remotely human for almost two months. Since you said, ‘I want us to take a break.’ Since you’d said, ‘No nothing.’
Strange as well that the police aren’t asking more questions, that they’re not more suspicious. All they’re doing is appealing for witnesses, especially those who were with you in the run-up to Saturday night. Suppose a drunk girl dying isn’t so unusual. Every minute of every day someone’s dying.
‘I understand you were having time apart,’ one policewoman asked me. ‘That must have been difficult? Had you and Alice argued?’
I laughed at that one, laughed out loud in her clever, smug, probing little face.
Extract from Alice Salmon’s diary,
3 December 2006, age 20
Paris, I’m only in Paris!
I hadn’t spoken to Ben for weeks, but he called on Wednesday and asked if I fancied a weekend away, his treat.
‘I’m busy,’ I said. ‘Working on my dissertation.’
&n
bsp; ‘How about if I said you’d need your passport?’
There’s no word for what we are. We’re not dating, but we do stuff together. We’re not boyfriend and girlfriend, but we intermittently act like it. Sort of. It had been the same ever since I’d met him at that photography talk. And here we are in Paris.
‘It’s a bit small,’ he said about the Mona Lisa.
‘Yes, but look at those eyes. She wouldn’t take any shit.’
I had to explain that the Venus de Milo was Aphrodite, but his only comment was it was a shame they couldn’t be arsed to finish it. Then, when I’d cracked up, he said: ‘See, told you a break from your thesis would do you good. How’s it coming along, the dreaded faeces?’
‘Dreadfully. Feels like I’m drowning. Why, you offering to help?’
‘I’d rather stamp on my own testicles!’
We’ve been up the Eiffel Tower where Ben gleefully informed me that if you dropped an apple off the top it would kill someone at the bottom, then visited the bridge with all the padlocks on, the Pont des Arts (see, I knew my French GCSE would come in handy!). ‘Couples put them here then throw the key in the river to demonstrate their commitment to each other,’ I said. ‘They say if lovers kiss here, they’ll be together forever.’
What She Left: Enhanced Edition Page 5