‘What’s wrong with me? I’m such an idiot,’ she said, then got defensive and full-on denied it was him, but he’d have sworn her to secrecy. Yes, that BULLY would have forced her to keep schtum because this would wreck his rep, good old Ben Finch, the life and soul of the party, prizes from the rowing club, destined for the board of Daddy’s business.
‘I don’t care if it hurts if it makes you see sense,’ I told Alice. ‘Can I have a kiss?’
‘You’re such a freak, Mocksy,’ she said.
‘I’ll kiss you one day.’
Then she went schizo. ‘I’m glad Ben did this,’ she said. ‘You deserved it. I asked him to warn you off.’
See, the TRUTH will out if you push hard enough and her dying is justice because bad shit happens to bad people and she probably got off on it, picturing his size ten brogues stomping down on me.
I tried to sell a piece about her to the nationals after she snuffed it but they weren’t interested, the idiots. Billed it as the real deal: all the goss from the man who knew her best. Student housemate, yes, virtually an ex-boyfriend, I said. Offered it to them all as an exclusive, but the tossers wouldn’t recognize good writing if it bit them on the back of the hand. Once they read what I’ve got to say they’ll come running, though.
After the Caledonian Road lot went out, I lay on Alice’s bed and imagined her washing my wounds and they hurt but it was a nice hurt and it made me love her more so I added her mug with the elephant in it to the collection of her stuff stashed in my wardrobe – a scarf, a pen she’d chewed the top of, a bra. I pretended they were gifts from her.
‘It got broken,’ I said to Alice when she enquired about her mug. It was no big deal; a lot got broken in Caledonian Road.
I’ve gone off topic because I began this thread to talk about an EVIL university professor. I’ve been doing research of my own, you see, and soon the individual in question will be brought to his knees. Justice is coming.
Extract from Alice Salmon’s diary,
18 March 2011, age 24
‘What’s the secret to a long marriage?’ I asked. (Yes, yes, I appreciate it’s a clichéd question, but readers would be interested.)
‘Letting the other person think they’re in charge,’ Queenie said.
‘Agreeing,’ Alf added, grinning.
They’d shepherded me into the front room, brought tea and biscuits on a chintzy tray and passed me their ‘diamond wedding’ album. ‘If we get to our sixty-fifth anniversary, we’re going to the fun fair,’ Queenie said.
‘The posh one at Thorpe Park,’ Alf said, hobbling off to let the dog out.
‘I’ll definitely come back and interview you after that,’ I told them.
‘You’ll have long since moved on by then, dear,’ she said. ‘Clever girl like you.’
I’ve just been promoted. Chief reporter, no less. Woop woop!
They showed me their drawings of the South Downs. The painting pensioners. The green-fingered eighty-somethings. The love-struck octogenarians. This is how this job conditions your brain: sound bites.
‘I’ve got a confession for you, Alice,’ Queenie said. ‘I rarely read newspapers. There’s more truth in a decent novel.’
I could almost hear the editor sneer: How were the crumblies? Live out the interview, did they? Juicier quotes, he’d be after. I enquired: ‘Have you got any advice for youngsters, Mrs Stones?’
‘Live every day as if it’s your last,’ she said.
That’s not a bad quote, I thought. But ‘depth and conflict’, that was the editor’s adage. ‘You must get on each other’s nerves a teensy bit?’ I said, aiming for that grey area fractionally beyond rhetorical.
‘He can be a cantankerous old goat, but I wouldn’t be without him.’ We watched Alf on the patio, waiting for the dog to wear itself out. ‘I expect you went to university, didn’t you?’ she said. ‘I wish I had. We didn’t back then, particularly girls. If you need a line or two about regrets for your article, that’s one.’
‘I studied English,’ I told her.
‘That’s what I’d have done.’ She shook her head fondly at her husband, manoeuvring himself sideways down a patio step. ‘Soppy old bugger reckons I’ll always be his princess.’
Always won’t go on for ever, I could have said. But I’d learnt to expect this particular contradiction: how happy stories could make me sad.
‘Presumably you’re courting. What’s he like, your young man?’
‘He’s called Luke.’
‘Luke, that’s my grandson’s name. Handsome, is he?’
I pulled out my phone, skipped to the photo of him on his bike outside the Houses of Parliament and when I passed it to her she avoided touching the screen, as if she was fearful she’d smudge it.
‘He’s got a kind face. Handsome, mind.’
The TV was on mute, Radio Times on the arm of the settee, Poirot circled in red.
‘We lost a child,’ Queenie said, unprompted.
A life not without tragedy, I thought. No, I will not go there. I put my notebook down and she leafed through pictures of a teenage boy, ten or eleven or twelve – kids that age all merge into one – and traced her finger round his black-and-white outline. ‘You can never have enough photographs because this can be an unreliable tool,’ she said, tapping her head. She’d had her hair done – presumably for the interview, for me. It seemed so disrespectful, attempting to distil their lives into this one thing – an article, a diamond wedding, an article about a diamond wedding – because a life’s not one thing, it can’t be, it mustn’t be. She said: ‘You get to a point where you forget what you’ve forgotten.’
‘I write stuff down in a diary.’
‘We all translate the world in different ways,’ she said. ‘I like photographs. Incidentally, can we get a copy of the ones the man takes later?’
He’d stand them in the doorway or persuade them to sit on the bench in the garden, holding hands or the picture of their dead son. He’d say ‘smile’ and ‘lovely’ and ‘that’s perfect’ and go back to the office and burn the shots of them on to a disc, correcting the colours and the exposures and balancing skin tones and erasing ugly details, then do his expenses and get a flyer to beat the traffic.
‘He looks a nice lad, your Luke.’
When he’d enquired about my day, I’d explained I’d met this incredibly sweet couple and they’d said he was handsome and referred to him as a lad. Tomorrow morning, at six forty, the alarm having gone off twice, I’d nudge him sleepily and say, ‘Come on, lad, shift yourself.’ Then later, when he makes me a playlist or buys flowers or leaves surprise parcels on the doorstep, chocolates or a soppy note, ‘You’re a good lad.’
‘You love him, don’t you?’
‘It’s early days yet.’
‘Don’t be coy. You do, don’t you? I’m eighty, I can tell.’
There was grunting from the kitchen and a bowl clattering to the floor, where Alf was feeding the dog. I tried to visualize Luke old, but couldn’t get beyond him in the fancy-dress outfit he’d worn to that party – the cardy with leather buttons, the stick, the flat cap. Perhaps he’d be cantankerous? It was an old person’s sentiment, an old person’s word (and definitely my word of this entry!).
‘You’ll probably live together before you get married, won’t you, you and your Luke?’
‘We’ve only been seeing each other a year,’ I said.
The term ‘housewife’ skittered into view. Sod that. What about all the alternatives? Alice Salmon, investigative journalist. Editor. Music journo. Charity worker. Traveller. Famous novelist. Party animal. Fuck-up. I said: ‘Maybe at some point in the future.’
‘Dear, the future isn’t all that far away.’
‘I still haven’t ruled out jacking it all in and doing a world tour,’ I said as a compromise. ‘Australia, Argentina, Thailand. I’ve always fancied Mexico. No one settles down until they’re at least in their late twenties these days.’
She spread out her family
tree on the table: a patchwork of names and numbers and interconnected lines, grooving backwards, upwards, the dates increasingly remote, the names those in novels: Winston, Victoria, Ethel, Alfred. There, a bit up from the bottom – beneath them four children, seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren – and connected by a single sharp line: Alfred Stones and Maud Walker.
‘Maud’s a pretty name,’ I said.
‘I always fancied myself as more of a Rose. Can I give you a bit of advice? For you, not for your newspaper. Don’t try to be everything. Your generation is lucky, but you have to pick your path.’ She touched a corner of her family tree. ‘For me, having my place on this feels comfortable.’
What a peculiar job I have, paid to sip tea and pry into the hearts of strangers and capture the outpourings on a Dictaphone or in the shorthand I’ve got to 100 w.p.m.
‘When I heard you were popping round to visit us, I worked out how many days sixty years is,’ Queenie said. ‘It’s 21,900 – excluding leap years. “Where can we live but days?” Expect you’re familiar with that poem, aren’t you? It’s Larkin.’
‘My mum likes him – or she likes to hate him.’
‘He was a foul specimen.’
A hazy memory stirred in me. School, and Meg scribbling on the inside cover of my file. A clock on the wall, ten minutes till the end of the period. It was a Friday, as today was. Days. I saw myself at my desk in the office, Sky News on the TV on the wall above my head – coverage of the Fukushima meltdown on loop – glancing at that clock and rushing this piece so I could get away to meet Luke.
‘There’ll come a day when they don’t wake us,’ Queenie said, pouring the last of the tea, bony marbles under the skin of her knuckles. ‘The days.’
‘Where can we live but days?’ I said, reciting two or three lines of the poem automatically.
Alf reappeared. ‘Feel free to portray me as a love rat,’ he said. ‘Just don’t have us on a bloody journey. We’re going to be on a proper one of those soon – the biggest one!’
I went back to the office and cobbled the story together, then wrote this. I needed to get the details down so I’d have something to remember when all I could do was remember, especially if you get less good at it, as Queenie maintains. I’d also like to have something to show a young me if she came knocking to ask about me and my life, when I was eighty. I wasn’t appalled at how the piece turned out. It did them about as much justice as you can in 500 words. I kept a few bits back – quotes I assumed they’d rather me not include, which I’m not sharing even here, and the aspects of me that I obviously saved for here. Like how Queenie had asked: ‘How do you feel when you’re not with Luke?’
‘As if something’s missing,’ I’d replied. ‘As if a piece of me is missing.’
Email sent by Professor Jeremy Cooke,
2 February 2012
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: The days of us
Dear Elizabeth,
Long time no speak – or rather no ‘e-speak’, as contemporary phraseology would have it. How the devil are you? It feels like an eternity since the days of us.
You’ll be perplexed as to why the hell this old dinosaur is making contact – well, I’ve picked up from the Internet that Alice may be back in this fine city for some sort of reunion this weekend and it’s rather sent me diving headlong into the past, sentimental old buffoon that I am. Life’s short, Liz, or it certainly is in my case – so why shouldn’t I reach out?
I bear scant resemblance to the old me. In fact, with the exception of my regulation uniform of cords and tweed, you’d barely recognize me. Would I you? I’ve tried googling you with limited success, unlike Alice who’s virtually omnipresent online. A bad guitar player but a good cook of Italian food – that’s the résumé she gave one site. I never realized she played the guitar.
I’m not expecting a visit – our contact was minimal when she was a student here – and knowing her, she’ll make a beeline straight for a public house. I’m not unreservedly repugnant to former students, though; I do keep in touch with a few. Their motive may be that they’ve identified me as a prospective referee, but it allows me to feel my endeavours are not entirely wasted.
I wasn’t entirely repugnant to you Liz, was I? I do regard our spell together with great fondness. You were beautiful. You still are, I expect. I was in pieces after we went our separate ways, not least due to the circumstances, particularly vis-à-vis your actions.
I’m not anticipating a reply to this email – although one would be most welcome – but felt compelled to reach out. Metaphorically speaking, of course. Which, with hindsight, is how the majority of my existence has been. It’s as if these last sixty years have been, not so much an act of living, but more an act of observing. We weren’t metaphorical, though, were we? We were very real, very literal.
Apologies for the intrusion. It felt important to say I hadn’t forgotten us. There’s a curious sentiment. Us.
Yours,
Jem
Notes made by Luke Addison on his laptop,
7 March 2012
I defy anyone not to have been creative with the truth given the circumstances.
I couldn’t exactly tell the police the facts – that I’d yelled at you and grabbed your hair – could I? They’d never believe that was the extent of it.
There’s another factor, as well. Huge chunks of that night have disappeared. I simply can’t recall them. That’s how pissed I was. Yes, officer, I did have her by the hair but I can assure you I wouldn’t have subsequently hurt her, even though I can’t actually remember. I might as well sign my own arrest warrant.
What I mustn’t do – what I’ve promised you I won’t do – is forget the bits of you I can remember. Your green eyes and the crow’s feet you once claimed in a startled panic to have spotted. Stuff like that, it vanishes so quickly and the rest of the world is dead set on making me forget. It wouldn’t take much. My boss encouraging me to oversee a big project; it might be exactly what I need, to get my teeth into something concrete. The lads at the rugby club insisting I come over on Saturday for a run-out: it’ll do me a power of good. Letting my colleagues persuade me to go to the Porterhouse for a quick one: come on, it’ll be a laugh, I deserve it, the whole team will be there – and three hours later another girl could be ringing me so I’ve got her number in my phone and you’d be a former girlfriend, the one who died, the one I’d taken to Margate, the one I’d get over. No. No. NO.
I stand in Waterstone’s and leaf through books you loved. I listen to your summer 2011 playlist because that was the best summer ever. I go back to Southampton to immerse myself in your favourite city, back to the river, the scene of the crime, the place where we’d fought. I stare at photos of you on my phone as if you might materialize by magic if I can only concentrate enough.
At work I sit like a zombie and shrug when clients ask ‘Where are you on this, Luke?’ Spreadsheets swim in front of me. Voices echo unanswered around meeting rooms. What are we forecasting for third-quarter profits? What will 2013 look like for our business? Where can we take out costs?
Colleagues reassure me it’s normal, but covertly they love it: a story that’s on the Internet in their very own office. A death, the whiff of a crime. I pass their desks and they frantically close browsers or snap shut their phones. You don’t have to be a genius to establish the rest of those exchanges. He’s holding up remarkably well. He’s falling apart. He’s almost too calm.
And now I’m writing this down, despite my natural comfort zone – as you so frequently pointed out – being diagrams and numbers. ‘Bet you’ll put this in your diary, won’t you?’ I’d snapped by the river. ‘It’s pathetic, the way you’ll pour your heart out on a piece of paper.’
‘S’laptop,’ you’d said and rage had boiled inside me.
You can forget pretty much anything. It’s easy, you merely have to set your mind to it, block it out or keep replayi
ng an alternate version so frequently that it becomes the reality. But I knew I’d never forget grabbing your hair.
‘If you ever touch me like that again I’ll report you to the police,’ you’d said.
It had started to go curly where it was wet from the snow and the palm of my hand tingled from its touch.
Afterwards, I walked until I found a late bar and necked cider and stabbed at a jukebox and danced on my own and when two lads laughed I thought, You know nothing about me or what I’ve done, and I had whisky and woke at five on the floor of my hotel room, my arm up on the side of the bed like I was clinging to a shipwreck, sick on the carpet, flashbacks to the night before breaking into my consciousness like stones smashing glass. Then I’d sat on the floor in my boxer shorts and tried to piece together the previous few hours, as we’d done so often, and I cried like a baby.
I’d had a scalding shower, scrubbed myself: had to get what had happened off me, had to get you off me, then got a train back to Waterloo. Crossing the platform, scuttling past Smiths, the newspaper headlines jumped out at me – middle- class incomes under pressure, Facebook valued at £100 billion, the charges that might be brought as a result of the Costa Concordia disaster – and it had winded me. What I’d done. I went to the nearest pub, bought a pint of Stella and a double vodka and Coke.
What She Left: Enhanced Edition Page 19