If the urge to go back into the bathroom seized me, when what I later came to refer to as IT was pressing in on me, I’d open my laptop. Often I’d write in the night or in the deep gnawing trough of a hangover, but the compulsion could grip me without warning. Only later did I learn the expression ‘displacement’. Learnt, as well, that alcohol and drugs had the same mitigating effect, but they weren’t consequence-free. I’d see my reflection on the screen, let go, hang on, make some sense of the madness, my antidote to life, my stereo, then later my iPod, on shuffle, bouncing from Ricky Martin to Pink, or Robbie to the Peppers, or Steps to R. Kelly.
I realized no one would be interested in it and anyone reading it would be convinced I was delusional, but I didn’t care. I could breathe.
When I was sixteen I lost my eyebrows in a fire.
I had to burn my diaries, you see, I simply had to. Like a shop closing-down sale, everything had to go.
I’d come home early from school and my mum had them spread open on my bedroom floor. ‘What are you doing?’ I said. ‘Why are snooping through my stuff?’
‘Baby, you never told me.’
I’d been desperate for three years to tell her about the faint white lines on my left wrist, how they weren’t in fact from a nail on a wall or a broken sash window, a fight with some glass that the glass had won, but now my head went to mush. ‘Get out.’
‘I’m your mum.’
‘How dare you go through my stuff?’ I shrieked. ‘This is private.’
‘There’s so much of me in you,’ she said, and she might have glanced down at my wrist, but the stuff about that was in a leather-bound pad Aunty Anna had given me one Christmas and there was no sign of that. ‘I’m your mum,’ she repeated.
‘Yes, unfortunately,’ I said, the old urge galloping through me – to run and not stop until I’d got so far no one would recognize me and then I’d be a different me, unspoiled and cool. ‘I wish you were dead! I wish I was dead.’
As soon as I’d got shot of her, I fired up my laptop and repeatedly hit delete. Later, when Mum and Dad had gone out – she was reluctant to leave me, but I’d promised if she gave me an hour’s peace we’d chat later – I gathered up my paper diaries and dumped them in the metal barrel Dad burnt garden rubbish in. Then I threw a load of petrol over the top from a can in the garage and whoooosh it went up in a ginormous orange flame that took off my eyebrows in a rush of warmth and fear.
‘Burn,’ I screamed, ripping the pages out, feeding the flames. I felt nothing for the girl who’d written this rubbish. I was a new me.
It was my sixteenth birthday.
The day after I burnt my diaries, I went back into the garden. Charred scraps of paper had blown on to the lawn. A robin appeared on the edge of the bird bath. He flapped his wings, splashed. He was having the best time. It occurred to me that I’d like that – to be in water. Swimming. I’d always been rubbish at it, but it would feel lovely: the cool currents, me held up, buoyed, as if I weighed less than myself.
‘It didn’t all burn, love,’ Mum said later that afternoon. ‘I haven’t read any, I swear, but I fetched it in because you might like to have it one day.’
I’m twenty-four now and I still haven’t told my mum about the diary entry I burnt from when I was thirteen called: Why I went to the bathroom to let the pain out. This article will force a conversation I’ve been delaying for almost a decade. Perhaps that’s why I was so keen for it to be published. I’ll have that conversation before she reads this piece – and she will read it because she reads everything I write, even the dull stuff about planning appeals and nightclub fights; she reads it meticulously. She’s given up cutting them out, her scrapbook got too big – but she never fails to proclaim how wonderful they are and I never fail to get that warm, uplifting bloom: my mum’s proud of me.
I wasn’t trying to kill myself, I’ll tell her first off; all I was trying to do was let the bad stuff out. I’ll tell her, as well, that those feelings never disappear, but you learn coping mechanisms, and for me keeping a diary was the best. Because here’s the strangest thing – guess what I did after she’d given me the carrier bag containing the black and burnt fragments of me between thirteen and sixteen? I went upstairs, flicked open my laptop and began writing.
Alice Salmon, age sixteen, I began.
I wrote about how the charred paper had left soot on my fingertips and how I’d smelt it like a baby instinctively exploring the world. I wrote about the robin, how the red of his tiny chest wasn’t exactly red – actually more ochre. How he’d ruffled his feathers and shook himself: his existence the most important thing in the world to him, the only thing in the world.
Sometimes it’s easier to forget, but remembering is what makes us human. Diaries help us do that, leafing those layers of life into order and logic. Anne Frank and Oscar Wilde recognized that. Samuel Pepys did. Sylvia Plath. Even fictitious characters like Bridget Jones do. But most are kept by ordinary people like you and me, and it’s our scribblings that a ground-breaking project aims to celebrate. The National Diary Archive plans to preserve our everyday observations. I might well hand over a copy of mine.
What I did wasn’t unusual; statistics suggest that more than one in ten girls self-harm. I was one of the lucky ones: I got away with it, the small scar virtually invisible now, apparent only at certain angles and in certain lights and only then if you know where to look.
I don’t hate the girl who did it: the one who used to stare at the scalpels in art classes or her dad’s razors in the medicine cabinet and think it would be so easy, so easy to drag one of those along the inside of her arm, the little white wrist like the tummy of a fish – one straight line would do it, like she was doing up a zip or tearing pieces of bread to feed the ducks. Far from it. She’s my secret.
‘Are you ready, Alice?’ Mum had called up when I was sixteen and a day.
‘Surprised T.G.I. Friday is open on a Thursday,’ Dad said in the car, his ‘restaurant’ joke.
I laughed and decided to hang on in there, to see how far I could get and where this thing might take me, life. A levels next. Then university, the prospect remote and intriguing: parties, brainy debates, freedom – me, my very own Joey Potter from Dawson’s.
I even wrote that down like it mattered. Because it did. It does. It was a diary and I knew all the while I kept one there’d be no blood on the bathroom floor.
* More information is available at:
www.youngminds.org.uk
www.selfharm.co.uk
www.mind.org.uk
Voicemail message left by Alice Salmon for Megan Parker, 4 February 2012, 13.44 p.m.
Fuck, Meg, call me urgently … Can’t believe the email I’ve just seen … Call me, need to talk to you before I get hold of Mum … I only went into her email to find a voucher thing … It looks genuine but it can’t be. It’s too awful to contemplate. I know you’re on a hill squillions of miles away but pick your phone up please … I’m still on the train. Fuckety fuck. I’m going to get drunk tonight. Jesus, I can’t cope with this. Am so out of my depth. Call me …
Letter sent by Professor Jeremy Cooke,
6 July 2012
Dearest Larry,
You died in November, but I didn’t hear until January. Transpires there’d been quite a few obituaries, but I avoid reading the newspapers: it’s all feral youths running riot, superinjunctions and the double-dip recession. They called you ‘great’, a ‘game-changer’, a ‘man who redefined his field’. Qualities they’ll never attribute to me.
We’ve been acquainted for more than fifty years. ‘Anyone know what a penfriend is?’ my English master had asked. ‘Cooke, you’re to be paired with a boy in Canada. Specifically, New Brunswick.’
I pored for hours over my first communication to give the right impression. I even admitted – superciliousness disguised as humour you mistook for irony – I was disappointed not to have been conjoined with a Papua New Guinean headhunter.
Your reply beg
an ‘Hiya Jeremy’, a greeting that leapt out at me for its informality. ‘I’m Larry Gutenberg and I’m eleven years old and I’m a pupil at Adena Elementary School.’
‘I wish to be a great scientist,’ I informed you. It was a badge of honour that my letters were as free from spelling mistakes as yours. I used to imagine you reading them, nodding, impressed, thinking: He’s like me, this Cooke chap.
‘I was wondering whether I might be able to visit my chum Larry,’ I enquired of my father after we’d been corresponding for some months. ‘I’d be incredibly grateful.’
‘You two are like a pair of little homos,’ he said dismissively. I later learnt it was my mother, not he, who wanted children.
We wrote every quarter, through O and A levels. The swinging sixties might never have happened as far as I was concerned. ‘I’m going up to Warwick in the autumn,’ I informed you when I was in the upper sixth, aping the language of Oxbridge and you never drew me up on that, despite presumably spotting my ruse.
Then there were your ideas. Already then they were arcing away from me. You were leaving me. It came to me as a revelation, in some ways a Eureka moment, the instant when I felt: This is as far as I can go. By the time I was in my mid-twenties, I realized I was never going to be a truly phenomenal scientist.
While my research kept running into dead ends and cul-de-sacs, while I kept returning like some fated migratory animal to the point where I’d begun, your work attracted ever more plaudits. I witnessed your successes with an alien sensation: one almost entirely devoid of jealousy. I wanted to be there with you, to celebrate, to stand alongside you. You were the scientist I’d always wished I could be: intuitive, brilliant, fearless, alive. They even named a law after you. Gutenberg’s Theorem. When I heard the term uttered in revered, respectful tones, I felt like screaming: He was mine long before the eponymous law. Mine, all mine.
Then came 2004 and The Genes Department. The holy grail: a serious science book that flew off the shelves. As I turned the pages, swept along by your intoxicating currents of theory, as I was taken on those elaborate, delicious tangents, I felt a mounting sense of rage. Blind fury, in fact. Every damn page bathed in this white light. It was like I was holding the very essence of science in my hand. Bright and beautiful and simple, but new and incredible. Moment after moment of it. I’d have given my life for just one of those pages, one of those moments. Jealousy, hitherto so conspicuously absent, flooded into me. You complete bastard, I’d thought. It was like you’d been unfaithful to me. The one thing I always wanted to do, write a book, and you beat me to that.
I distinctly recall when I finished reading it. It was the afternoon of 9 December 2004. I know because it was the day of the annual anthropology party and that bash is always on the first Thursday of December. Walking to it, my head full of vitriol, I’d bumped into Alice. Well, well, I’d thought. What a coincidence. You.
You never realized, Larry, but you were partly responsible for what transpired that night. You’d quoted the opening stanza from Robert Herrick’s poem in your final chapter. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may. I’d interpreted it as I had so much of what you said: advice, instruction, gospel.
How do you feel about featuring in my Alice book, old chap? I’m immensely excited. Possible titles keep presenting themselves to me. The Sum of the Parts is my current favourite. It’s a source of immense regret to me that you’ll never read it.
Unlike the pyretic media coverage, my watchword shall be ‘balance’. Jesus, the story is still front-page news as the public canters from theories of accident to suicide to worse. The more coverage it gets, the more coverage it gets. Our journalists do this: jump on isolated tragedies, treating them as talismanic of all the other similar such ones they don’t have the time or space or budget to cover. Alice Salmon: the perils of a night out when you’re twenty-something.
‘I’m Larry Gutenberg’s wife and I have bad news,’ the note from Marlene began. She only contacted me because she’d stumbled across our letters when sorting through your possessions, a task she’d put off until after Christmas. I can understand why you wouldn’t have shared our correspondence with your wife. A man needs secrets, a sense that he’s more than what those around him imagine.
Marlene says you finished your coffee, pulled on your favourite jacket, announced you were taking the dog out and never came back. I’ve tried to view it as a Captain Oates-like episode: in reality, you stumbled on the pavement and were dead by the time the ambulance arrived. Not a way for a man who had a theorem named after him to go. My friend, the great Larry Gutenberg.
You going off radar has knocked me for six, old chap. That you could slip out of view, unnoticed. Remember how I used to badger you to write your autobiography? ‘Shucks,’ you’d said, ‘isn’t the science enough?’ Sooner or later someone was bound to write your biography. Wondered what they’d have said about us? I know what I would have. What I will say. Three words. I love you.
I’ll treat you well in my book, Larry. I promise. I’ve arranged with Marlene to take possession of our correspondence – she sought approval from your sons first – and I rather fancy I’ll be including it in my little tome. After all, I’m never more honest than I am with you, Larry, and we’d all benefit from a smidgen more honesty. No one more so than Alice.
Kids don’t get to become penfriends now, do they? The Internet’s opened the globe up, taken away that mystique and intrigue. It’s made everyone a potential penfriend. Either that, or a stalker.
Yours as ever,
J
Email received by Alice Salmon,
4 February 2012, 13.52 p.m.
Subject: Delivery Status Notification (Failure)
The email titled ‘You????’ you attempted to send at 13.51 p.m. on 4 February 2012 failed to reach the chosen recipient – [email protected] – because the destination mailbox is not recognized.
Please do not reply to this email as it is an automatically generated delivery status notification.
Voicemail message left by Alice Salmon for Megan Parker, 4 February 2012, 18.31 p.m.
Left about twenty messages for my mum but can’t talk to her now, not like this. Been drinking and bad Alice has come out to play, old Alice. Wish I was on a hill in the Lakes with you guys, a long way away from all this shit … The evening’s going tits up and talk about a rave from the grave, I could have sworn I spotted that freak Cooke earlier. He’s either got a dopplegänger or I imagined it. My head’s all over the place after seeing that email … It can’t be, Meg, surely it can’t. It’s too gross to consider. It makes me want to puke; it’s too yuck. ‘The days of us’ – what the fuck does that even mean? Will ring Mum tomorrow; could be a sick hoax I suppose. Maybe I should pretend I never saw it? Guess who texted me earlier too? Ben! Wish I was sober and could talk to you and listen to you. All I do is talk at you these days … So sorry for getting that drunk last time we saw each other; my ankle’s still killing me! Am seeing Lukey Monday, def made my mind up about him. All clear … wine and lager clear! How long do voicemail messages go on for, Parkster? Can talk for England, that’s what you always say. Wonder where I got that from? Pick up pick up pick up pick up. Piiiiiiiiiiccckup, Megan. Please. Am outside pub. All changed down here. Don’t recognize this street. Can hear the river. Nothing’s forever, we’re all something passing stopped. This email to Mum –
Part IV
* * *
TRANSLATING THE WORLD
Post on Truth Speakers web forum by Lone Wolf,
21 June 2012, 23.22 p.m.
Here’s a fact about little miss perfect Alice Salmon. All over the media she is but no one’s mentioned she got her boyfriend to try to KILL me. His name was Ben Finch and he was a C**T. Sorry, I realize swearing’s against forum rules, but it’s the truth, plus I’m a moderator, so report me!
I tried spinning him a line about the photos he’d found of Alice in my room being for a night-school project but he totally flipped out. ‘She’s mine,’ he was yelling
as he stuck the boot in. ‘Mine mine mine.’ My face, my gut, my back, my bollocks, my kidneys – they taught him well at Eton or Harrow or whichever institution he was programmed in. Yes, that C**T knew where to kick all right!
She was different, though. Me and her we had a connection. We shared a dump of a house in the second year, 2 Caledonian Road, and we’d meet in the lounge in the night. ‘What’s keeping you awake, Mocksy?’ she’d ask and we’d confide in each other, and I could forgive her Ben Finch then. ‘We need to stick together,’ I said once and she didn’t disagree.
‘Dump him,’ I begged, the morning after he’d given me the pasting. ‘He’ll do this to you one day.’ I showed her the bruises that had gone all purple, although they’d had a bit of help from me and a bicycle pump – well, I had to leave her in no doubt what sort of psycho Ben Finch was.
What She Left: Enhanced Edition Page 18