What She Left: Enhanced Edition

by T. R. Richmond

  ‘Are you a fan of The Rolling Stones?’ Richard Carter had asked.

  ‘I’m familiar with them.’

  ‘Because Mick Jagger wrote a song called “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”. He might have a point.’

  I rebuffed him. ‘Humans aren’t constructed that way.’

  ‘I disagree. We’re capable of immense displays of selflessness, often at great personal sacrifice.’

  ‘We’re selective about our altruism. It’s targeted – typically at kin, in a direct bid to ensure reciprocity.’

  ‘Not so. I have a direct debit to a charity that digs wells in eastern Uganda – how does that benefit me?’

  ‘It might enable you to sleep at night, or to highlight it to me, in so doing potentially enabling you to execute your job more efficiently.’

  ‘That’s a phenomenally bleak prognosis,’ he said. ‘Altruism can be pure. There are female spiders that let their offspring eat them to improve their chances of survival. Similarly, male ones that allow the female to eat them after they’ve mated. Fairly one-sided relationships, wouldn’t you concur?’

  ‘Typical bloody woman.’ I wondered if Liz had heard about the spiders; she’d be fascinated by them.

  ‘But we’re not talking about animals or evolution,’ he said, ‘we’re talking about you.’

  ‘So we are talking precisely about animals and evolution.’

  Can’t recall if I expounded the full saga back then, Larry, but I was summoned in front of an academic ‘panel’; a bloody kangaroo court, where they’d regarded me quizzically – the plaster on my forehead, the rumpled clothes – and graciously informed me that if I cooperated in preventing this ‘debacle’ from reaching the press, they’d regard that favourably. I still had much to offer. ‘Something’ rather than ‘much’ might have been the actual descriptor they used; it’s hard to tie down specifics.

  ‘Could the reason you sought out an extra-marital relationship be a response to you not having children?’ Richard had asked.

  Fliss and I hadn’t entirely relinquished our parenting ambitions prior to my dalliance with Liz coming to light, but it had become ever-more hypothetical: like the IRA quitting its bombing or me attaining a breakthrough in the work in which I was involved (basically a derivative offshoot of Chomsky). Liz, meanwhile, had been desperate to get married and have a family; it was the Eighties, women still did. She could reel off examples of animals that mated for life – a type of antelope, black vultures, sandhill cranes, a species of fish called the convict cichlid – but she kept making bad choices and, frankly, I was the worst.

  ‘Do you feel responsible for what Liz did?’ Richard asked.

  She’d hung herself from a beam above top table in the refectory. A fascinating room, that. High ceilings, leaded-light windows, rafters from an old Tudor warship. A cleaner popped in to fetch a tub of floor polish and found her dangling, drunk, her beautiful long spider legs stretched out beneath her, the flap expiring from them.

  ‘I can’t exculpate myself of blame.’ I had a desire to crawl back to my office, where I knew all the rules. Imagined immersing myself in marking, like collapsing on to a soft bed. ‘Have you ever read Tolstoy, Richard? His contention was that happy families are all alike and unhappy ones are unhappy in their own way, but he got that wrong. Unhappiness is crushingly predictable. It’s making sure one’s pockets are empty before putting one’s trousers in the laundry basket, it’s bathing to rid oneself of an unfamiliar perfume before scuttling into one’s marital bed, it’s familiar faces contorted into unfamiliar shapes by pain and drink. Happiness is what’s unique. The minutiae of two lives spent together: the warm and unshowy mechanics of a monogamous relationship.’

  ‘But you slept with another woman.’

  ‘Yes, because lust is a drug; it addles our brains.’

  ‘Did the pain you’d inevitably inflict not cross your mind?’

  ‘I could anticipate it, I could rationalize it, I could hazard a guess at the magnitude of it, but I couldn’t feel it. Does that make me a psychopath?’

  That night she confronted me in the kitchen, Fliss demanded I explain what this Elizabeth tart had that she didn’t, and when I stated it wasn’t like that, she said: ‘I feel so let down, so stupid.’

  ‘What’s your wife’s view, now you’ve both taken stock?’ Richard had asked.

  ‘She’s in Lincoln.’

  ‘Ah, still Lincoln. Beautiful cathedral,’ he said. ‘Much underrated.’

  I’d come to expect these switches of direction. It was a device my favourite political pundit, Robin Day, was wont to use: a random catechism. ‘She’d probably be pleased I’m sticking with these sessions,’ I said, ‘she’s always had me down as a slogger. Bless her, she means it as a compliment, but the tag rankles. Sloggers dig roads and pack boxes in factories. It’s originality I’ve sought.’

  ‘Personally I’d take happiness over originality,’ my shrink declared. ‘I’d take an absence of pain.’

  ‘The absence of pain and happiness aren’t synonymous. The former is merely that – the lower tranches of Maslow’s triangle fulfilled.’

  ‘Don’t knock it,’ he said, checking his watch, ‘millions of people would kill for that.’

  Extract from Alice Salmon’s diary,

  3 September 2011, age 25

  ‘We should get a place,’ Luke said.

  Going away often prompted conversations to arc off into territory beyond the norm; it was as if under the surface there was a slight rebalancing of our relationship. It wasn’t until Malta – six months in – that he’d revealed how infrequently he saw his parents.

  ‘What I mean is,’ he added, ‘I’d like to live with you and I hope you do me.’

  ‘Luke, it’s a great idea. I wasn’t expecting you to ask, that’s all – or not today.’

  ‘We’d need to save up for a few months, but we could get a half-decent place.’

  ‘Where?’

  He stabbed one of his chips with his fork and tossed it to a gull. ‘If this was a movie, this would be when the schmaltzy music would cut in and I’d say, “I don’t care as long as we’re together”. But I’m not living in Stockwell!’

  ‘Or New Cross.’

  ‘Ultimately I’d like to get out of London,’ he said. There was a new urgency about him; it was as if he’d stored this up and now couldn’t contain it. ‘It’s about time you settled down. You are twenty-five, after all!’

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘Aaaarrrrgghhh!’

  The gull had flapped up, wheeled in a circle and landed on the rusty railings in front of us. Luke went into his pocket and a crazy notion popped into my head that he might be about to propose, but it was his cigarettes he pulled out. He lit up, blew smoke out and it trailed off into the bright, brittle seaside light.

  ‘We could actually go anywhere,’ he said and he was giddy, boy-like. ‘Carpe diem and all that.’

  ‘Go fishing? ’ I quipped, one of his favourite lines from The Inbetweeners. Only last week, he’d joked that one of his prerequisites for choosing a flat was having sufficient space for his DVD collection, so he must have had the moving-in conversation in mind then. When we’d met in Victoria yesterday he would have done, as he would when he’d returned from the buffet car with my skinny frothy latte and his tea, or when he’d said at Faversham, after I’d finally sussed where we were headed, ‘Barbados has got nothing on the white sands of Margate.’

  ‘It is OK for you here, isn’t it?’ he asked. ‘I almost went for Paris, but this seemed more you.’

  ‘Luke, it’s perfect.’ It was, too. Its faded glamour, its lack of ostentatiousness, its unpretentious approach to fun; I adored it.

  ‘Anyway, I couldn’t take you to Paris because you’ve had a dirty weekend there before!’

  I remembered the hotel where a doorman – ‘the twat in the hat’, Ben had dubbed him – had referred to me as ‘madame’ and how we’d clinked glasses over a bowl of moules marinière and he’d said, ‘To
us, Lissa,’ and I could have cried. So much for the City of Light.

  ‘We can save Paris,’ Luke said.

  It gave me a warm shiver: us saving stuff, having it still to do.

  ‘Margate used to have a Victorian pier,’ he said. ‘A Eugenius Birch one. Spot the frustrated architect!’

  It pained me that he might have regrets, because twenty-seven might be ancient, but it was too early for regrets. I didn’t want this man to ever have regrets.

  ‘We can do anything,’ he said. ‘If it’s me and you – us against the world – we’ll be unstoppable, Al.’

  I leant in and kissed my boyfriend.

  ‘What was that for?’

  ‘For bringing me here, for being you.’ Tell him everything about yourself. The nights you couldn’t sleep, the disastrous deliciousness of that relationship with Ben, how you’d perpetually felt thin (not thin-thin, I wish!) and insignificant, even the day in the bathroom when you let the pain out – tell him. Have this gorgeous man hear it from you. The tide was out but when it reaches the top of the beach you could have told him and when it recedes all that crap would have been washed out to sea, and you could move forward together.

  ‘What’s the one thing you’d most like to change about yourself?’ he asked.

  ‘Right now, nothing – because if I did we might not be here. Maybe now’s when the schmaltzy music should play!’

  He bowed his head. He was welling up. Luke was actually crying. ‘I love you, Al Salmon,’ he said.

  ‘I love you, too,’ I said.

  He’d taken a few months to say it, but I’d blurted it out after five weeks, probably way too early.

  ‘What about you?’ I asked. ‘What would you change if you were the one with the magic wand?’

  ‘I have got one,’ he said, smirking and glancing down at his lap.

  Now he’d been serious, he needed to let go – it was palpable, the tension draining out of him. He was in pub mode. ‘You’re not getting off the hook that easily,’ I said. ‘Come on, what?’

  ‘I’d have met you when I was younger.’

  ‘Good answer!’

  ‘Before we had baggage.’

  ‘Speak for yourself!’

  ‘There’s other stuff, too.’

  A kid hurtled along the prom on a scooter, flying by, having simply the best time and then the conversation was back on ‘the flat’ and the respective merits of Streatham versus Clerkenwell. I’d get to collect the slow cooker and pictures I’d deposited at Mum and Dad’s, unpack the boxes of books in their loft, might even dust down the ‘best newcomer’ trophy I’d won at work and put it on the fireplace – imagine that, a fireplace. Friends would pick it up and turn it over when they came for dinner. It would spark conversations: jokes about its weight, how you could do someone some serious damage with it, discussions about crime and politics unfolding over the Greek salad or white chocolate and passionfruit mousse I’d got from Nigella. ‘Do you know what I like about you most?’ I asked.

  ‘My killer good looks? My charming personality? My forensic wit?’

  ‘It’s what a good listener you are. Has anyone ever told you that before?’

  ‘Probably. But I expect I wasn’t listening!’

  He’d get drunk tonight. I could tell. His answers, the way he was throwing chip scraps to the gulls, even the way he was smoking. And it would be nice – the two of us holed up in a pub in an out-of-the-way town. There was an illicit quality about being here: away from London, from the girls, hidden. We were going to move in together. I could hear the conversation I’d have with Meg. We’d hug and she’d hang on. ‘I’m not going to lose you, am I?’ she’d texted randomly earlier, when I mentioned Luke had taken me on a surprise weekend away. ‘You’re like a sister to me.’

  Luke sparked up another cigarette, gave me one and said: ‘When you said about giving up, you meant after we finish this packet – obviously.’

  This is my life, I thought. This is where my life is happening. In a seaside town where the colour of the pebbles makes me wish I could paint, on rickety trains out of Platform 2 in Victoria with conductors who still say, ‘Good evening’, with a man called Luke Stuart Addison who’d admitted when we’d joked about riding the carousel that he’d topped the thirteen-stone mark, which prompted me to instigate an immediate mid-week curry ban. Finally, finally, it felt enough. ‘This all feels very grown-up,’ I said. ‘I need wine.’

  ‘Beer o’clock,’ Luke said.

  Walking back to the hotel, I thought: This is ours now, too. Margate. Even the minimart we’d bought Fanta in. I’d add them to the ‘ours’ we already had: how our ‘treat’ restaurant was Thai House on Balham High Street, how our ideal Thursday was a movie at Clapham Picturehouse, how our favourite music venue was Brixton Academy. I felt on more of an even keel than I had for years: an equilibrium. I typically swerved the corollary (that’s definitely my word of this entry) that Luke had made me happy because none of us needs a man for that, right? But it was inescapable: I was happier since I’d met him.

  And now he’s gone to buy cigarettes. Our final, final packet. Strange that I once waited for another man in another hotel while he went out for cigarettes. I had a vision of that lovely old dear, Queenie, riding the roller coaster at Thorpe Park: hanging on for dear life with her marbly liver-spotted hands, her wrinkly face flattened with the G-force, her gummy mouth exhaling crackly screams of terror and joy. I hope she makes it there. ‘I translate the world in words,’ I’d told her. So as for my word of this entry? Bugger ‘corollary’, that’s old school, that’s one I’d have picked at eighteen when I pretentiously sought the erudite or many-syllabled. Sometimes the simplest express the most. Like ‘boyfriend’ or ‘trust’ or ‘commitment’. Or even ‘love’.

  Yes, that’ll do nicely. Love.

  Blog post by Megan Parker,

  7 April 2012, 11.20 a.m.

  OMG just read on the Internet that Luke’s been taken in by the police. Can’t believe this; he’s been taken to a station in Southampton. Apparently they could charge him. There’s nothing on the police’s website, no statements, but Twitter’s ablaze with it.

  Knew there was something about him. Tried telling Alice once but she wasn’t having any of it – she was always so headstrong when it came to men; she could be blind to their faults. She had a right go at me and accused me of being jealous.

  Seriously, I had half a mind to blog about my suspicions that he could have been dodgy, but Jeremy said I needed to be careful what I put on here, and reckoned I could get into trouble if I bandied accusations around but, holy shit, Luke?!

  You could see it, the way he was around Alice. He had a jealous streak and you wouldn’t have wanted to get on the wrong side of him – he’s built like a barn door. Alice confided in me that he had yelled at her once and I did witness him get lairy in a pub – yes, it was handbags, but he had that edge. He’d only been on the scene recently, but tried to paint me out to be some peripheral afterthought; she was my best friend not his.

  Jesus, I can’t believe this. I went and offered the police a second statement after that newspaper ran the story about the dead flowers, but they hadn’t seemed that interested. The nice police lady heard me out, but when you’re mega upset stuff comes out wrong and then you begin to doubt yourself and that makes you sound doubly implausible. She probably had me pegged as ‘emotional’. Course I’m emotional, wouldn’t anyone be if their best friend had died? It’s like half of me has died.

  I say ‘died’ rather than ‘was killed’ because that’s where we were at with it. If one of the scumbags she brought to justice wasn’t responsible and she didn’t do it herself, then we’d all come to the conclusion it was a dreadful accident – but why are they now talking to Luke? Jesus, LUKE. The police don’t drag someone in without a reason and he was furious about Alice dumping him; she said he was absolutely gutted when she did the deed, and behaved like a madman. His eyes, she said, were wild. If he genuinely loved her how could he
explain Prague? See, Alice and I confided in each other; girls do, best friends do. How much hate must you have to have in your heart to cheat on someone as trusting as Alice?

  Nothing’s ever as simple as it seems, Jeremy reckons, but he often talks in riddles and answers real questions with theoretical answers. ‘A man is not dead while his name is spoken,’ he keeps saying, conveniently omitting to mention it’s a Terry Pratchett quote. It’s like he’s hoping I’ll conclude he made it up.

  He tells me I ought to be careful blogging, that I might inadvertently give a distorted impression, but that TV interview I gave turned out to be a bad move. I didn’t even look like myself. Someone posted paraphrased chunks of what I said on to Alice’s Facebook wall and a local paper reporter then recycled extracts of those (not even accurately, but I was beyond caring by that stage because the clip that went out on telly wasn’t in itself representative of what I’d said) and attributed them to Megan ‘Harker’, which prompted more people to dive headlong on to Facebook and spout off about the comments I’d purportedly given the newspaper.

  Thing is, when you lose someone close to you, you get properly paranoid, you get suspicious of everyone. I’ll be honest here, even Jeremy’s beginning to creep me out a bit. The way he refers to his wife, it’s like she’s some inferior species. No way would I let a man speak about me like that and Alice a hundred per cent wouldn’t; she’d have told the chauvinist it was 2012 not the flipping Stone Age.

  Then the other night he invited me over to catalogue more ‘submissions’ and meet his wife, except his wife wasn’t there so he opened a bottle of wine, a Chilean red that he described as a punchy little number, and we chatted about the options for me going back to uni. He promised to write me a reference, even though he’s only known me a short while. I’d get a special dispensation, he says, because of Alice. Because I got a bit drunk, I ended up staying over.