What She Left: Enhanced Edition

by T. R. Richmond

  ‘They say you don’t get better, that you never get over it. You learn a new reality, you learn to adapt.’

  On the table, cigarettes, a brown bottle of tablets, leftover weekend papers, headlines about President Obama’s debate with Mitt Romney, a ferry collision in Hong Kong, a Georgian woman who’d purportedly died age 132. Her new reality. ‘It’s nothing to be ashamed of, bearing the scars – it makes us who we are.’

  Meg’s presence was making Alice’s absence more real, her aliveness throwing my daughter’s deadness into sharper focus: giving colour and depth to her distance. I recollected their voices upstairs, squeals of laughter, whispers, plotting, singing, saving up for Rollerblades. Later, getting ready for nights out, hours in front of the mirror: excited, fearless girls. ‘Some parents name stars after their dead children,’ I said. ‘Next time it’s a clear night, Meg, gaze up. There’s a whole galaxy of our kids up there.’ We wiped the tears from each other’s cheeks; skin Alice had touched. ‘One day, love, you’ll have beautiful babies and they’ll bring you as much joy as Alice did me, as Alice does me.’

  ‘Why did she do it, Aunty Liz?’

  I carried on running my thumb across her face, like I was trying to erase an invisible smudge.

  ‘Why did she choose this way? She didn’t have to …’

  It took me a few seconds to twig what she was alluding to; a lever in me recalibrated itself. ‘Love, it was an accident.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Aunty Liz, but we can’t help each other unless we’re honest.’

  ‘Alice would have never done that.’

  ‘But she did.’

  ‘No, you mustn’t say that.’

  ‘I’m sorry it’s me who has to, but we won’t be able to move forward until we face this. You mustn’t be ashamed. People kill … I mean, they take their own lives for a million reasons. It’s too horrid to fathom, but ultimately it was a choice she made.’

  ‘My daughter wasn’t like that.’

  ‘It’s not about what she was like; there isn’t a template. Anyone could get to that point.’

  The breathy panic constricted around me: I’m never going to see Alice again.

  ‘She told me about what you did when you were in Southampton. How you’d … you know … how … She confided in me that her grampy had let it slip.’

  ‘That was thirty years ago.’

  Jem, they reckon there are no secrets in this Internet age, but there are. I received a text from Alice.

  Cell site analysis, the family liaison officer called it. Forensic data recovery. Alice’s texts, her calls, even her Internet browsing history percolated into the public domain – released by investigators or guessed or leaked or shared by those she’d been communicating with. Amid the swooshing untruths, from the iPhone she so loved that they fished from the river, facts from fiction, matter from myth. But not all her texts came to light. Most did, but one didn’t. One she sent me on her final night.

  See, secrets.

  What am I going to do, Jem?

  Yours,

  Liz

  Reading by Elizabeth Salmon at Alice Salmon’s funeral service, 13 February 2012

  Death is nothing at all.

  I have only slipped away to the next room.

  I am I, and you are you.

  Whatever we were to each other,

  That, we still are.

  Call me by my old familiar name.

  Speak to me in the easy way

  Which you always used.

  Put no difference into your tone.

  Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.

  Laugh as we always laughed

  At the little jokes we enjoyed together.

  Play, smile, think of me. Pray for me.

  Let my name be ever the household word

  That it always was.

  Let it be spoken without effect.

  Without the trace of a shadow on it.

  Life means all that it ever meant.

  It is the same that it ever was;

  There is absolute unbroken continuity.

  Why should I be out of mind

  Because I am out of sight?

  I am but waiting for you.

  For an interval.

  Somewhere. Very near.

  Just around the corner.

  All is well.

  Letter sent by Professor Jeremy Cooke,

  10 October 2012

  Larry, she’s been here. No appointment, no warning; merely a knock on the door and there she was.

  She’s still beautiful. Scruffily dressed and a touch scatty; a hint of the Redgrave or Hepburn. Presumably it’s politically incorrect to compare a woman with a fine wine, but she’s matured impressively. ‘Where are your answers then?’ she demanded.

  ‘Liz. How are you?’

  She took a seat, perched on the edge. ‘Come on, Doctor Death. All this research you’ve been doing – where are the conclusions?’

  So much for pleasantries or small talk. Tone-wise, we’d taken up exactly where we’d left off three decades previously.

  ‘If you’re such an intellectual heavyweight, you explain – what happened to my daughter? Come on, I’m waiting.’

  There was a waft of booze, but it wasn’t emanating from her, it was the glass of red on my desk. A memory filtered back at me: watery and indiscreet.

  ‘What if it’s true, what if she did kill herself?’

  ‘Liz, she didn’t.’

  ‘Megan’s convinced.’

  ‘I’d take anything Ms Parker says with a pinch of salt.’

  ‘You need to get over your ridiculous dislike of her. The way you’ve been so publicly critical of her, accusing her of being a “fantasist”, it’s not helpful. It’s infantile.’

  I went to recount what Fliss had said, how Meg clearly had a thing about me, but halted myself. It felt wrong, mentioning my wife to her – as it would later, were I to communicate this encounter to Fliss.

  ‘Megan was her best friend.’

  I was in a quandary, Larry. I’d had a run-in with Alice on her last night, remember, and she was indignant, but her behaviour most definitely wasn’t that of someone on the brink of suicide (not that I was ready to furnish Liz at that stage with that scrap of information; to her and the world at large, our exchange had never happened). Plus, when you spend hundreds of hours trawling through the minutiae of a life, you get a handle on a person’s personality. The notion that she might have killed herself: it simply won’t wash. ‘Liz,’ I said and almost reached out.

  ‘The one thing I had, that I hung on to, was that it wasn’t that – and now it feels like everyone’s saying it is.’

  ‘No, she was strong.’

  ‘Jem, you utter moron, you don’t need to be weak to take your own life. Suicide’s like depression; it’s a disease of the strong.’

  We sat and she scrutinized my office, the empty in-tray, the box files, the stone paperweight she’d bought me a lifetime ago. I recalled hotels, motorway services, fights, the elastic stretch of her bra.

  ‘What if I have been wrong all along?’ she said. ‘Suicide’s the one outcome I couldn’t take, simply couldn’t – that my baby girl might have felt that bad. I’ve spent the last eight months denying it, but maybe you can’t deny the undeniable.’

  Shadows around her eyes; a fellow insomniac. Us at a concert, eating mackerel in a wood-panelled room, a boarding house in a provincial seaside town long prior to it going upmarket, the leather and fabric seats of my TR7, tan-coloured and sticky. One memory prompting another – layers of them, accretions, like strata in rock.

  ‘There was the text, too.’

  ‘The text?’

  ‘She sent it at twenty-one minutes past midnight, but I didn’t see it until the Sunday morning.’

  ‘The text?’

  ‘Wasn’t fazed by it initially, Alice was forever drunk-texting, but by about ten I was in a proper tizz at her not returning my call. Then the knock on the door – a policeman and a policewoman.
I knew it was bad because they don’t come to your house unless it’s bad.’ She dabbed at a mark on the arm of the chair. ‘It was still an ordinary Sunday morning when I read that text, the last ever ordinary Sunday morning.’

  ‘Liz, talk to me. What text?’

  ‘It was Plath. That fucking woman. The line about lying in the grass – it’s a suicide line.’

  She licked her finger and had another go at the mark on the chair more frantically, chipping at it with her nail. ‘Won’t come off,’ she said and compassion gripped me, like a vice. ‘The press got everything else, but they never got that. I haven’t been able to face it until now, but it can only mean one thing. I couldn’t bear those to be her last words so I’ve never mentioned it to a soul, I couldn’t, not even David.’

  ‘But the police –’

  ‘Not the ones who came to the door but the ones afterwards, they’re up to speed on it, but no one else is. It’s one of the few pieces of Alice that isn’t public property. It’s no one else’s business.’

  We sat and there was a brittle, taut atmosphere, like the aftermath of an argument we’d never actually had.

  ‘I guessed she’d been at the wine because she’d mangled the quote and my Alice was a stickler for getting quotes right.’ She sniffled, half smiled, but that fell away. ‘You’re never short of an opinion – what do you make of this then?’

  It could have been thirty years before, her spitting: ‘You’re never going to leave your wife, are you?’ Back then, my desire for her had been feverish: the inescapable apogee of it, her unravelling. Now, her dismantled, that desire had transmogrified into only one wish: to ameliorate pain.

  ‘I think due process will eventually prevail. But for now, I don’t think you should be here. Can I give you a lift anywhere – home, for example?’

  ‘It’s miles.’

  ‘I’d do that, you know I’d do that for you.’

  ‘And I’d avoid my husband, if I were you.’

  I poured myself a top-up and an image of Liz presented itself: red wine on her teeth. Guilt chafed at me, but I’d done nothing wrong, Larry. I’d depart this rendezvous in a few minutes and head home to another woman with similarly greying hair: a man in his sixties who suffers from heartburn and strains to read train departure boards, when thirty years ago I’d done likewise, except I was someone who’d bore along green lanes in a sparkling sports car, and go five games on the squash court then jump on my Raleigh Europa, and was cancer-free.

  ‘Does David know you’re here?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  As in 1982, questions engendering questions.

  ‘Dave and Robbie are convinced I’m still vulnerable; they’re babying me. I’m no baby.’

  ‘You’re strong.’

  ‘I’m not strong, Jem. Who’d be strong?’ She crossed her arms, rubbing herself as if she was cold. Her shell. Besides us, the sofa that her daughter had slept on drunk eight years ago.

  She said: ‘You need to know, Jem, that I love my husband very much.’

  ‘Sandhill cranes, eh?’

  ‘Sandhill cranes. I presume you picked up on the flurry of puerile speculation you were Alice’s father.’

  ‘Mocksy,’ I said. ‘Stoked up by Devereux. My nemeses.’

  ‘I’d never cheat on a man as good as David.’

  Alice used to remind me of her, Larry, but at that instant it was the other way round: it was she who reminded me of Alice.

  ‘You ought to read Fanthorpe’s “Atlas”,’ she said. ‘That sums marriage up perfectly.’

  I wiped the lenses of my glasses; it used to be prescient to have a stock of tissues on standby to dispense when freshers bared their souls, but latterly they only visited to assert their rights and demand a re-mark. I’ve got my own theory, Larry. More than a theory, a fact. It doesn’t involve suicide, either.

  ‘Are you going to be OK?’ I asked.

  ‘The blue of police uniforms isn’t how it is on the telly when you see it in the flesh.’

  ‘Liz, are you going to be OK?’

  What I was about to do might mean she’d never be OK ever again.

  Transcript of live phone-in on Martin ‘The Morning Man’ Clark’s show on Dane Radio,

  2 September 2012

  MC: Later we’ll be getting political and hearing your views on opening up our borders, but first it’s serendipity and when you’ve experienced it … We’re after the lowdown on your most splendidly bizarre encounters and to kick us off we’ve got Ellie on the line from Southampton. Ellie, a big fat breakfast show welcome, what’s on your mind?

  EE: I’m ringing about the serendipity stuff. I had it with that dead girl who was all over the news.

  MC: Right, OK. What dead girl in particular is this?

  EE: Alice Salmon. I chatted to her on the day she died.

  MC: This is … a little … off-piste, but let’s go with it …

  EE: I was seven months pregnant and she gave me her seat on a bus. ‘You look like you could do with taking the weight off,’ she goes, then asked if I was having twins and when I said no she said she really had to learn to engage brain before gob, but I said it was an easy mistake to make because I was like a barge and she said she was too but without the excuse! She said I was glowing. A woman I work with had been going on about this book called Random Acts of Kindness and that’s what that was because no one normally talks on buses.

  MC: You’re bringing a much-needed element of culture to this show, Ellie – we even give listeners reading recommendations! But we were all profoundly touched by that incident and your take on it sounds heartbreaking and profound … fill us in on the details.

  EE: It was only a few days later I twigged she was the girl who was plastered over the news.

  MC: Yes, we’re sadly familiar with Alice’s tragic tale. We had guests in the studio in the aftermath to discuss it. Your anecdote – it’s touching, but if I was being devil’s advocate I’d say more sad than serendipitous, Ellie?

  EE: Was going on to that – see my husband texted me out of the blue while I was on the bus suggesting Alice as a name for our baby. ‘That’s my name,’ the lady said when I told her.

  MC: Thanks, Ellie, and join in, south coast, have you got a serendipitous story that can beat this one? The killer coincidence, the roll of the dice, the hand of fate … get involved in all the usual ways, details on the website.

  EE: She said she was going to get right royally blotto and I said I wished I could. She looked at my tummy and said it must be exhausting lugging that around and then that we don’t make it easy for mums do we? But they always stand by us and sometimes in the end we have to stand by them.

  MC: That’s a lovely point, Ellie, thanks for calling … I nearly forgot to ask, what did you call your baby in the end?

  EE: Alice, we called her Alice.

  MC: We’re going to have some music and go to the traffic then we’ll be right back with more of your stories of serendipity …

  Extract from letter sent by Professor Jeremy Cooke,

  6 November 2012

  ‘You asked to see me,’ she said. ‘Here I am.’

  ‘So you are, young Megan. Please, come in.’

  She did as instructed, unravelled her scarf, then declared: ‘You’re a bit old to be creeping around leaving notes, aren’t you?’

  Larry, if she’d responded to my correspondence I wouldn’t have needed to resort to the old note-under-the-door trick. ‘I wish to make amends for my actions,’ I’d scribbled, confident that would flush her out. ‘Drop by; it could be the most lucrative hour you ever spend.’ She was wearing boots and black tights and had opted for a short skirt, despite the inclement weather. ‘You look well,’ I lied.

  She slipped out of her coat and draped it over the arm of a chair. ‘It’s like a dungeon in here; there’s no air.’

  I passed her the wine I’d kept on hand for her arrival. White, very chilled: how she preferred it. ‘Make yourself at home, sit.’

 
She did, then asked: ‘So, this offer?’

  I’d alluded in my missive to securing her a couple of museum accounts for her new PR firm; her intention to re-enter the world of academia seemingly abandoned. Our relationship had degenerated, but I suspected her greed for business would outweigh any misgivings on her part about visiting. Now, reeling from some not such good news from my consultant, I had a brash, confrontational edge. ‘Why did you claim I touched you?’

  ‘If the cap fits.’

  ‘But it’s not true.’

  She took a big disdainful glug of the wine. ‘What is this stuff?’

  ‘Gagnard-Delagrange. It’s phenomenally good.’

  ‘Rarely drink these days,’ she said. ‘After what happened to Alice, it scares me. When I see girls trolleyed, I get the urge to lecture them on the dangers of alcohol. Must be getting old!’