What She Left: Enhanced Edition

by T. R. Richmond

  Notes made by Luke Addison on his laptop,

  26 February 2012

  It was never my plan to confront you by the river.

  I’d been trying to get you on your own all evening, watched you in every pub you went in, but you were never not with someone. I’d nearly had an opportunity when you went to the loos in one, but you started gassing to some old boy. God knows who he was. He stood out like a sore thumb in a tweed jacket; maybe he owned the place.

  Initially I’d searched all over, then it had dawned on me. Facebook and Twitter. ‘Started working on tomorrow’s hangover,’ you’d tweeted at 4.12 p.m. ‘Nando’s it is then,’ at 5.20. ‘Soton rocks,’ at 6.12. I’d flicked back through earlier tweets. 1.41: ‘Do we ever really know anyone?’ 1.51: ‘Going to get blitzed.’

  You did a double take when you eventually saw me. It was as if you didn’t trust your own eyes. ‘Luke,’ you said. ‘Luke.’

  ‘Hey, Al. Surprise! Came to see you.’

  ‘Don’t want to be seen.’

  We were by the river and you were on a bench. ‘You’re like buses,’ you said and laughed, but it wasn’t a happy laugh.

  ‘You’re drunk.’

  ‘Who are you, my dad?’

  It was dark and a few flakes of snow began to fall. ‘Look, snow,’ you said, except it sounded like ‘lukesnow’. ‘It’s a long way down when you fall, isn’t it?’ you said, taking a swig from a can of gin and tonic. You started sobbing and I reckoned your drink could have been spiked and the notion of you, my beautiful Al, out there drunk with men prepared to do that to you and all because of me made me furious. All it would have taken would have been for you to have stood a few feet further along the bar in the Porterhouse, a thirty-second delay on the Victoria line, my four thirty meeting running on by a few minutes: a colleague asking one more question under AOB. Any of these and you wouldn’t have ended up with me. ‘Been trying to call you all evening,’ I said.

  You started frantically patting your jeans pockets. ‘Lost my phone.’

  ‘No you haven’t, sweetheart, it’s here.’ I picked it off the ground and handed it to you. It must have clicked on when it hit the ground because music was playing, one of your favourite bands, The XX. ‘You look cold,’ I said.

  ‘Cold hands, warm heart.’

  Your face was red, hair all over the place: it reminded me of you after sex. Maybe sleeping with you would fix this – breaking ourselves down into random parts, then when we came back together we might be different and I might not be such a dick. I reached out to take your hand but you pushed me way. ‘Who’d have thunk it, huh, my mum!’

  ‘What are you on about, Al?’

  I got an image of her, pouring coffee and enquiring about my job. ‘Bet she was gorgeous a few years ago,’ I’d said after we’d been introduced, ‘definite MILF,’ and you’d said, ‘Oi, enough of that,’ then that she still was. Gorgeous, that is, not MILF!

  ‘What about the lemmings?’ you said. ‘You never replied to the lemmings email.’

  Course I hadn’t, I hadn’t seen it at that point. You were talking gibberish as far as I was concerned and frustration fired up in me. ‘Me and you, Al,’ I said. ‘It was going to be me and you against the world.’

  ‘Me and you and a girl in Prague!’

  Mention of that place was like a fresh blast of cold air.

  ‘Why can’t I stop feeling like this?’ you said.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like me.’ Except it sounded a bit like ‘smee’.

  There were wet patches on your shoulders, I’d have given you my coat if I’d had one. ‘There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re perfect.’

  ‘Perfect people don’t end up here.’

  I saw an ice-cream hut, steps down to the water, the bridge. We’re both seeing the same things, I thought, but it doesn’t help. ‘Being on your own is shit.’

  ‘Being with someone shit’s shitter. You don’t get to choose which bits of me you like and which you don’t. That isn’t how it works. I’m not some sort of pick-and-mix. You should care about me whatever; you said you would.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘You do when it suits you, when it’s easy, but what about when it’s hard? Because that’s what counts. Asked you to give me more time, why’d you ignore that?’

  I wondered how we’d remember this. Piecing big nights out together had been a regular morning-after occupation for us, and I loved those nights, but recently the ones I’d liked best were the quiet ones, the ones when we were sober, when it was just us. I recalled watching you undress one night shortly after we’d met, seeing you taking off your make-up, and how it had come to me as a revelation: I didn’t have to be a shit boyfriend. ‘I do love you,’ I said.

  ‘Do you never want to swim away from it all, Luke? Because I do. I don’t know who I am any more.’

  ‘You’re Alice.’

  ‘Good one,’ you said, as if I’d cracked a joke. Then: ‘Who is that? Who is Alice?’

  A police car went by and it was as if the noise of the siren opened up a hole in the seal around us and another wave of drunkenness crashed over you. ‘Want my friends,’ you said. ‘Want to go home. Where is home?’

  ‘Balham,’ I said. ‘You live in Balham.’

  ‘Not there,’ you said. You shivered and put your arms round yourself, rubbed yourself. Tiny arms, bones with a thin covering of flesh. ‘Don’t sleep. Winds on snow.’

  ‘What are you on about, Al?’

  ‘Am wrong,’ you said. ‘S’diamond on the snow. Gotta get it right.’

  An ambulance raced by, lights and sirens on.

  ‘Someone’s evening’s ended badly,’ you said.

  You’d often do this – have moments of near sobriety in drunkenness, as if you were coming up for air. You brushed a few flecks of snow off your lap and it occurred to me you must have bought these jeans since I’d last seen you. What else had happened in those eight weeks? This is how it happens, how couples split up, they simply let it happen and I thought, Fuck it, why not, there’s probably never a perfect – or rather, entirely wrong – time, and dropped on to my knees. ‘You’re the one, Alice,’ I said.

  But you must have thought I’d slipped because you burst out laughing. ‘Stand up, man,’ you said. ‘Man up, man!’

  I pulled myself up, anger suddenly punching through me. I tried to control my breathing, made myself stare at the plaque on the bench, something about a dead woman. She’d often sit here and watch the world flow by. You lit a cigarette, had two long drags and blew the smoke up in my face.

  ‘Don’t make me hate you,’ I said, which wasn’t what I’d planned.

  You had another swig of drink, another drag.

  ‘Don’t fuck with me,’ I said.

  ‘You’re the one who fucked around.’

  ‘Once, Alice, once. Since when did once constitute fucking around?’

  ‘Once more than I cheated on you. I’m more shat upon than shitting,’ you declared, laughing. ‘S’Lear.’

  A group of men bowled by in the distance singing. ‘Why can’t you all stop following me?’

  I wondered if you meant that guy you’d been flirting with in All Bar One? You were virtually on his lap. I’d stared in through the glass, the way we had at those sharks in the aquarium, and had to stop myself charging in. Maybe there was some history there – you hooking up with an old flame, getting back at me for Prague. I deserved it. Jealousy’s like grief: it multiplies up and out, spreading hate and hurt, but all I want is to go back to how it was. You, coming round for Live at the Apollo. I’ll even let you watch Wallander. Coming and complaining about the piles of dishes and the three-day-old pizza boxes, running back to my room from the shower, shivering and dripping water, then saying it wouldn’t be massive and it might not be the poshest burb, it might end up being Tooting or Brixton or Elephant, but we could just about afford to rent our own flat if we pooled resources.

  ‘Was honest about how I feel,’ you said. �
�Love’s not like a tap, you can’t simply turn it off. Wasn’t it enough for you – me baring my heart and soul in an email? Can’t believe you ignored it.’

  ‘You look like you need a hug.’

  ‘I do, but not from you, not now.’

  A nugget of resentment formed in me. I was on repeat, destined to keep messing up like some awful Groundhog Day parody. I’m twenty-seven, I thought. I’m too old for this.

  ‘Remember when we went skinny-dipping?’ you said. ‘Let’s do it now.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, it’s snowing.’

  ‘You’re the ridiculous one, shagging around.’

  That nugget of resentment hardened so I tried to count to ten before speaking, heard water tumbling over the weir in the distance, but at about six I heard myself say: ‘Look at the state you’re in. You’re an embarrassment.’

  ‘You’re no better. We’re as bad as each other. You, me, even my mum.’

  The urge filled me to get wasted. I’d had six or seven pints, but all I felt was half – half sober, half drunk, half empty, half full, half what we had been. I needed to get so shit-faced I wouldn’t even know how much I was messing up. ‘Can I have some of that?’ I asked, nodding at the can.

  ‘S’gone,’ you said. ‘All gone.’

  This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. I was going to propose and I wasn’t planning to hurt you, I’d done that enough, but I could feel anger mushrooming in me, musty and sour and spiteful. A new feeling that wasn’t love: barbed and uncontainable. ‘Come back to my hotel.’

  ‘Rather sleep on this bench.’

  You focused dejectedly on the dead-woman plaque, then squinted at my trousers. ‘They your keys or you just glad to see me?’ you asked, giggling.

  I cast my eyes down to the outline of a small jeweller’s box. I’d even got proposing wrong. You’d made me get it wrong. I’d pictured myself sharing the news with Charlie, putting a brave face on it. Texting him from the hotel bar or the train tomorrow. ‘Back on the horse, mate. You’ve got your wingman back. Beers Friday?’ I couldn’t discern whether what I felt was elation or despair. I took out the box, hurled it into the river and it made a plink.

  ‘What was that?’ you enquired indifferently.

  ‘History, that’s what it was – which is what you’re going to be soon.’

  ‘Very profound,’ you said and maybe if you hadn’t laughed I wouldn’t have done what I did next, but right then – hair in your face, the half-smoked gone-out cigarette by your feet – you were the one person I hated more than myself. I had to break it – had to break us – so completely we couldn’t hurt either of us any more. ‘That girl in Prague, she was gorgeous,’ I said and recalled with a bright clarity how I’d been before you: on my own, nothing to lose, no one to care about, no one to let down, no one to be let down by. ‘The sex was dynamite. I might as well be dead as in bed with you. You might as well be dead as in bed with me.’

  ‘Funny you should say that.’

  You sucked futilely at the empty can. I reached out and there was a rip. Saw your black frilly bra, the one I’d bought you for Valentine’s Day. Needed to pull you so close it would drown it all out, or push you so far away I’d never see you again. Yes, that was it, no one to hurt, no one to hurt me. I could live like that. I could survive. I had to live like that to survive – shepherding girls I’d met on Saturday nights to the front door on Sunday mornings, kissing them on the cheek and saying, ‘I will,’ when they enquired casually if I was going to call, then texting Charlie, Mr Single, saying, ‘Mate, I pulled an uber-hot chick last night!’ Only had the confidence to talk to you the night we met because I had nothing to lose and I’d been so glad I’d left all that shit, that me, behind, but now I’d go back to it and I’d cope and it couldn’t be any worse than this, but I needed you gone first, erased. Right then I loathed you, Al, for making me think there was an alternative. I saw the bridge with its trusses and cantilevers, and recalled I’d once set my heart on being an architect. Another abandoned dream. ‘Come back with me, please,’ I said. One final pathetic effort.

  You tilted your head upwards. ‘Least Ben’s honest about how shit he is.’

  I ignored that, whoever the fuck Ben might have been, and for a second had a handle on it, me after you. How this would become a memory – how Amy had, or Alex or Pippa. A fleeting, foggy sense of me looking back on you in a year or two or five; yes, with a twinge of regret, but as a memory. I’d view you as a stepping stone on the way to her – whoever she was, my next girlfriend. Maybe it – tonight, this – would become an in-joke of ours, me and her, how I’d once fought with a woman on a bench by a river in the snow. How I’d once followed a girl to Southampton like a love-struck teenager. Dated a journalist. We’d laugh, initially awkwardly but gradually less so, about it, you, us, just as now you and I laugh – laughed – about me and Amy splitting up over a lamb shank or Alex telling me at a bus stop in Neasden that I was emotionally stunted. I hated losing Amy, hated losing Alex, hated losing you. When was this going to end? ‘I love you, Al,’ I said again, and you weren’t the only one who was crying. ‘I won’t let you leave me.’

  But you sprung up and when I grabbed you, you were wet from the snow and small; you always maintained you were big – Shrek-like, you claimed – but I felt twice the size of you, three times, ten times, and furious that I couldn’t protect something this fragile, this beautiful.

  ‘Why does everyone want to put their hands on me? I can’t bear it.’

  When you started screaming I put my hand over your mouth because if someone had heard, they’d have been convinced I was attacking you. I could feel your breath, your lips, your teeth, your nostrils, your neck. Over your shoulder there was the faint glow of a cigarette in the distance on the other side of the river.

  ‘Can’t breathe,’ you squealed.

  ‘Stop shouting then.’

  ‘Help, help, someone help me.’

  ‘Shhh … I’m trying to help you.’

  ‘You’re hurting me.’

  ‘You can throw yourself off that bridge for all I care,’ I said, tightening my grip.

  You craned your head sideways so you had it in view, but I didn’t let go. I saw your cleavage, and had a vision of you on the bed with no clothes on and lust tugged at me, like a fish on a line. I put my other arm out, but you swiped it away so I grabbed at you; I had to hang on, had to keep you, so I could explain, the realization dawning on me that what I had in my grasp was a handful of your hair.

  ‘Get off me,’ you screamed.

  Comments left in Alice Salmon’s leaving card from the Southampton Messenger, 20 November 2009

  We’ll miss you and your laughter but not your minging trainers on the radiators!

  Amanda

  It was inevitable that someone with your talent would get poached* sooner or later. It’s a great opportunity and one you couldn’t say no to. Our loss is London’s gain. Thanks for all your hard work and enthusiasm. Maybe we can lure you back one day?

  Mark

  *Poached Salmon, geddit?!

  We’ve summoned Rentokil to disassemble your desk. Warned them to expect rats!

  Barbara S.

  Remember the successes like the ‘night stalker’ campaign? You put one of Southampton’s most dangerous men behind bars and you should be proud of that. All the best.

  Bev

  Next stop, the New York Times, via a short spell in Balham!

  Gavin

  PS: If Cazza claims your leaving present was her idea she’s lying. It was mine.

  Go, Fish Face, go. If you leave your iPod behind, don’t worry, no one will claim it. Thankfully your taste in books is better than your taste in music. Thanks for the reading recommendations and thanks for the memories.

  Bella

  Sob! You’ve been like a big sister to me, does that make you sound old?? Learnt so much from you and you’ve been a brill shoulder to cry on. Have adored every minute of working with you. Tweet me, Miss S!


  Ali xxx

  It’s already passed into legend – the day the new girl stood up to Sexiest Sexton and refused to do a Death Knock.

  Gavin

  Hope you like the Kindle. It’s the new DX one with the big screen! You’ve got absolutely no excuse not to read Kafka now!

  Cazza

  PS: Gav’s talking out of his posterior!

  Who’s going to make the tea now, even if you did insist on having yours so strong you could stand the spoon up in it? Enjoy the big smoke. V jealous! When can we come and visit? Two sugars please.