What She Left: Enhanced Edition

by T. R. Richmond

  Q: Biggest achievement?

  A: Winning a writing competition when I was fifteen.

  Q: Biggest regret?

  A: Je ne regrette rien. Or actually I do, but if I told you I’d then have to kill you …

  Q: Finally, tell us a secret about yourself.

  A: When I was a child I’d pretend to be someone entirely different to strangers, make up new names and construct a whole new background and identity for myself.

  Want to feature in this slot? You won’t get any dosh, but you will get to see your words appear in Southampton’s most exciting zine and you’ll get your fifteen minutes (well, fifteen questions) of fame.

  Email sent by Elizabeth Salmon,

  18 March 2012

  From: Elizabeth_salmon101@hotmail.com

  To: jfhcooke@gmail.com

  Subject: Stay Away

  Same old Jem, you haven’t changed a bit, have you? Your work, your birthday, your wine – this isn’t about you. Don’t treat me like one of your students. Am I supposed to be impressed that you looked us up on the Internet? It’s hardly a revelation that we’re all there, you included. Some things haven’t changed. The undergrads clearly still regard you as detached and conceited. The breakthrough with your phonology research obviously eluded you. Ditto the once-talked-about MBE. Not nice to see your shortcomings in black and white in front of you, is it? Sounds to me as if it’s your life not Alice’s that’s in need of some reconstruction. Are you happy? How’s your marriage? Does your lack of children prey on your mind? See, having your existence held under a microscope is not pleasant, is it? I wouldn’t normally dream of asking such questions, but that’s what you’re doing with Alice; you’re the one who’s put us in this situation. We all have parts of ourselves we’d prefer to keep private. Isn’t one post-mortem enough? You quit this now … please … none of your fancy highbrow explanations or justifications but stop.

  I bet you’ve never had anyone knock on your door asking for a quote about a dead relative, have you? David and I have. Journalists call it the death knock. They used to come for pictures, but nowadays they rip those off the Internet so it’s quotes they’re scavenging for. A few weeks into her first job, Alice was told to death knock the mother of a boy who’d been killed in a hit-and-run. She refused. Can you imagine – fresh out of college, barely learnt where the kettle is, standing up to an editor? She told him that wasn’t why she went into journalism. It didn’t poison her against her choice of career but she never did do a death knock.

  So sick of reading rubbish about my daughter. She’s in danger of sinking under the sheer weight of it. We’re well aware of the facts. She had 210 mg of alcohol in her bloodstream. Which bit of the word ‘accident’ do these bloodsuckers not understand?

  Here’s an irony for you. Alice nearly didn’t go to Southampton at all; she was offered a place at Oxford. Merton. Of course I championed the merits of that location – anywhere but Southampton was fine as far as I was concerned – but she preferred somewhere ‘real’. I’m glad I got away from your city. Academia was a horrible, tribal existence. A small world, too, and I was tainted.

  She’s not some sort of join-the-dots exercise, Jem, some dusty archaeological artefact for you to brush off and exhibit. She isn’t yours. Enough people have raked over her life. Hunt someone else and leave our Alice alone. Don’t do what you always did – run away with an idea, confuse facts with fiction, warp the world to fit your reality. No, I most certainly won’t be joining you for a drink – I quit a long time ago and I can’t imagine my husband being exactly enamoured by the prospect of us meeting in a social capacity. He’s a sensitive man, so I haven’t mentioned us emailing; please have the decency to treat this contact in confidence.

  Was going to make another point, but lost my thread … don’t bother replying – unless that is you’ve worked out how to bring the dead back to life and I’m assuming even an esteemed anthropologist like you hasn’t quite managed that yet.

  I’ll ask you once more nicely. Whatever you’re doing, stop. I’ll beg if I have to. I miss my baby girl so very much, Jem.

  Liz

  Statement issued by solicitor acting on behalf of Holly Dickens, Sarah Hoskings and Lauren Nugent,

  6 February 2012, 10 a.m.

  Alice Salmon was a kind, generous and wonderfully warm human being and it’s incomprehensible that she’s been taken from us.

  She was bright, beautiful and popular and we’ll always count ourselves lucky to have been among her many friends. We feel an immense weight of grief, but our sadness and loss is dwarfed by that of her family. We can’t begin to comprehend the pain they must be experiencing. Our hearts go out to them.

  As has been widely commented, the three of us spent the early and middle part of the evening of Saturday the fourth of February with Alice in Southampton city centre. Obviously we have cooperated with the authorities in every way we can, and will continue to do so. We are confident – and sincerely hope – that they will soon configure the tragic chain of events that immediately preceded Alice’s death. This won’t bring her back, but may offer a fragment of comfort to her family. Regrettably, we are unable to shed any light on Alice’s movements or whereabouts after about 10 p.m.

  It’s torture to think of what our friend might have done or where she might have gone in the few short hours between then and her death. We’ll regret not taking better care of her, and not preventing what came next, for the rest of our lives. For that, we are truly sorry.

  We collectively feel the way we can now show most respect to Alice is to not fuel the fire of speculation. For this reason, we have elected to not speak publicly about her. Indeed, the police have recommended we adopt this course of action. Meanwhile, we would urge everyone to respect the Salmon family’s right to privacy.

  Letter sent by Professor Jeremy Cooke,

  30 May 2012

  I’ve had rather a shock, Larry.

  Some raggedy urchin barged into my office this morning and announced: ‘You’re the bloke who’s bringing the dead girl back to life, aren’t you?’

  ‘I wouldn’t exactly describe it like that,’ I replied.

  He slapped a rucksack down on my desk, pulled out a CD, a pair of trainers, a mug and an earring.

  ‘What the hell –’

  ‘I come bearing gifts,’ he said. ‘These are Alice’s.’

  ‘You stole these?’

  ‘That’s one way of putting it. Not that she gave a toss about me, but I was mad about her and seeing as we weren’t going to get it together I decided to at least nab a few reminders!’

  ‘If this is genuine, you should give it to Liz. Elizabeth Salmon, her mother.’

  ‘It’s genuine all right.’

  ‘Who are you? What’s your name?’

  ‘That’s not relevant.’

  ‘It’s important – for completeness, for my records.’

  ‘Put me down as an interested party,’ he said. ‘Yes, a very interested one. I knew them all,’ he said. ‘Her and her crowd – I was at the heart of it.’

  ‘You were a fellow student?’

  ‘Yes, former housemate, too. We shared a gaff in the second year. An insider me, buddy.’

  ‘So the pair of you were close?’

  ‘Proper close.’ He held his hand up and crossed his fingers. ‘Was like that with her, her mates, her fellas, the lot. Give you full chapter and verse I can, for a price!’

  He extracted a white T-shirt from the rucksack and unfurled it; it said on the front: If they don’t have chocolate in heaven, I ain’t going. He held it to his nose, breathed in deeply, deliriously. ‘I’ve got all sorts. It’s like treasure.’

  ‘Is that hers? Why have you got that?’

  ‘It was a big house, six of us shared it. Shit got lost. Shit got mislaid. Sadly,’ he said, grinning wolfishly, ‘she was one miss I didn’t lay! Actually it was easy, she was forever losing stuff on nights out when she was hammered. I took stuff cos it made me feel closer to her. I’m
not stupid, I did it bit by bit. You ought to be careful what you’re doing – it’s like messing with a Ouija board.’

  ‘It’s hardly that.’

  ‘Is she going to get a plaque?’

  ‘Universities aren’t too keen on advertising former students who die in questionable circumstances.’

  ‘They must hate what you’re doing then, dude; you’re making her famous.’ He gazed off absent-mindedly. ‘She was mega fit.’

  It used to pain me to think of the men in her life. The first few months she was here, I was angry at every fresher boy I saw – the prospect of them with their rucksacks and badges and toothy smiles potentially getting their hands on her. You’ll well remember my preoccupations back then, Larry. One day I spotted her coming out of halls. Actually, I’d asked a warden where she was rooming – D3, Bates Hall – and waited for her. I almost reached out. Would that have been so very terrible, when I was padding along behind her, to have stretched out and put my hand on her shoulder or touched the small of her back? Taken her hand, maybe?

  ‘Want to see one of my favourite items in the collection?’ he asked. He held out a pair of purple knickers.

  ‘You sick bastard.’

  ‘Now, now, no need to be like that. We’ve got a lot in common, you and me. Besides, I’d give them back, but she hasn’t got a lot of use for knickers where she is now, has she?’

  You weren’t unaware of the charms of the younger woman yourself, were you, Larry? The smell of perfume, you once said with that poetic sensibility of yours, was like Handel at his best. Sometimes you became dizzy, you once confessed, watching the students from your office window, even if it was a scientific objectivity with which you made such observations. I liked to think of us as aesthetes. Spend long enough on a campus, too, and even the ugliest, most socially inept men (naturally I’m referring to myself, you’re neither) find themselves presented with certain ‘opportunities’.

  ‘What are you planning to do with this stuff you’re collecting anyway?’ the boy asked. He looked around as if he was expecting to see a box marked ‘SALMON A’. ‘Sounds like a giant jigsaw – wonder what it’ll look like when it’s done? I reckon she did herself in. That must have crossed your mind, the old hara-kiri.’

  I recalled the sharp, sterile smell of my consultant’s room, how I’d reacted abrasively to his diagnostic ambiguity. ‘I’m not paying you all this money for best guesses,’ I’d snapped, as he added to my burgeoning case notes on his computer.

  The boy in my office and I sat in silence for a few seconds, then infuriated by his manner I said: ‘Do you know what that expression actually means?’

  ‘Yes, course – top yourself.’

  ‘No, how it literally translates?’

  He looked at me vacantly.

  ‘It’s Japanese, it means “stomach cut”.’

  The boy didn’t reply. How terrible to be inarticulate, I thought. To never be heard. Perhaps that’s why we write? Why Alice kept a diary? She put it beautifully once: said it wasn’t about standing up and shouting, ‘Look at me’, more about standing in the crowd and shouting, ‘Listen to us.’

  ‘ “Seppuku” is the more formal word for it,’ I said. ‘That’s the written form, but “hara-kiri” is more commonly used in speech.’

  ‘Whatever. What I asked was if your little investigation was looking into that?’

  ‘No,’ I said, but the notion had been on a loop in my mind. The desperate and the displaced had always been drawn to that stretch of river – I’d occasionally sat there myself – but it was clear-cut as far as the police are concerned: she was drunk, she slipped, she drowned.

  ‘Why’s everyone always nice about people when they’re dead? She was a right headcase when she was alive.’

  I fondled the stone paperweight on my desk. A present from Elizabeth, my sole memento. No photos, no letters (we never dared), just this one precious dense grey object, smaller than a baby’s head, smaller than a fist. That whole period of my life reduced to this: a lump of chert from Chesil beach and our memories, the vestiges of chemical reactions in the sappy, subjective 1.5 kg of jelly-like grey matter we call our brains.

  He stood up, sauntered around my office, ran his finger along the spines of a few books. Professor John Winter’s Man to Man, Margaret Monahan’s Where the Body Becomes the Brain, Guy Turner’s Painting the Past.

  ‘Don’t touch those,’ I snapped.

  ‘Who writes this stuff?’

  ‘Among others, me. At least, I’ve contributed to a few.’

  ‘Always the bridesmaid, hey?’ he said, with surprising perceptiveness.

  A lecturer falls for a student, it’s such a colossal cliché, isn’t it, Larry? But that day I was trailing her, my heart beat faster, my teeth gritted, my fists clenched. It was like I was an undergraduate again myself. She appeared nervous, fresher-nervous, but she laughed a lot and the ones who are quick to laugh are always all right. I wish I could laugh more. Remember that statistician with the penchant for pink gin and boys I told you about who used to room near me? He once accused me of being a ‘dry old stick’. I took it as a compliment: I was honing my too-intelligent-to-find-funny-what-the-rest-of-the-world-finds-funny demeanour and considered it a necessary attribute for the original thinking I was intending to do. I got damn good at it; shame the same can’t be said of the original thinking.

  ‘For God’s sake, put them away,’ I said, nodding at the underwear. ‘Whoever’s they are.’

  ‘Oh they’re Alice’s all right. You’re welcome to keep them,’ he said. ‘Call it a token of my goodwill, a gift, although there’s no such thing as a free lunch, is there, prof?’ He reclined in the chair and draped the underwear over the lamp on the table next to him. ‘Unrequited love is a bummer, isn’t it?’

  On the wall, a photo of my wife. One of Milly, a Labrador of ours back in the 1990s. A black-and-white picture of me with my mother. What did he know, that boy in the photo, of the things he’d go on to do, to become? He was grinning, but even then it was an apprehensive grin. Bet it never once crossed that boy’s mind that it might come to an end, his life, this thing that woke him up in the morning, that made him press wild flowers between the fragile pages of his grandfather’s Bible, made him stare wide-eyed at atlases and into microscopes. How could he have imagined the moment of its coming, the first true sight of mortality? A doctor’s words: The tests have thrown up some results that we need to address.

  He poked at the stack of books on to which the knickers had fallen. ‘Wow, these are sick.’

  Not sure whether that expression will have reached you, Larry, but I gather it means ‘good’. Not sure, either, if I ever will get to visit your great country now. People in my condition probably shouldn’t fly; I doubt it’s advisable for them to be that far from home and their doctors and tablets and treatments. This, I’m learning, is how illness works: one by one taking away your constituent components. The ability to travel, one’s sex drive, one’s sense of purpose. It’s like randomly taking figures out of equations or unpicking a molecular model until you’re left with something that doesn’t work, that doesn’t even remotely resemble you.

  ‘These books, this office, you’re like something from a movie. You’re great.’

  ‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’

  ‘Take it how you want, but we need to talk about the letter.’

  ‘What letter?’

  I noticed his forearms: completely covered in tattoos, reds and greens and blues and yellows. ‘I take it you’re aware there’s nothing original in what you’ve done there,’ I said, captivated. ‘Humans have marked their bodies for thousands of years. Ötzi had them.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Iceman. The Stone Age cadaver we unearthed in 1991. He was over five thousand years old.’

  ‘Holy shit,’ he said.

  There was no ‘we’ about that discovery, I thought. Yet again, I’d been a bystander. ‘He had brown eyes, he was blood group O, he was forty-five year
s old when he died – when he was murdered; we’ve even established what his final meal was: chamois. Speculation is that his tattoos were an attempt at pain relief; the poor chap had arthritis.’

  ‘You are one yourself,’ he said.

  ‘One what?’

  ‘You say humans have marked their bodies, but that’s a weird way of putting it. You ought to say our bodies because you are one, a human. But enough of that crap, what are we going to do about the letter, Mr Iceman?’

  ‘What letter?’

  ‘Don’t play the innocent. Your letter. You’re a local celebrity, dude, imagine the shitstorm there’d be if the media turned on you. They’d savage you, you and your missus.’

  He delved into the rucksack, extracted a carefully folded piece of paper and slid it halfway across the desk, keeping his hand on the top. I recognized my handwriting and my heart did a little flip. ‘Sweet Alice,’ it began.

  ‘Get out or I’ll throw you out,’ I said, anger seizing me. It was reminiscent of when I was in my fifties or maybe my forties. I actually felt something. I fondled the paperweight and the most peculiar question unfurled in front of me: What would it be like to bring it down on his head? Make him go away, shut him up, make him know what it’s like to be mortal, finite. I rubbed my face, composed myself. ‘She made people feel different about themselves,’ I said. ‘She touched people.’

  ‘She didn’t touch me. Maybe she did you? Maybe you did her? What’s the matter, you look like you’ve seen a ghost!’