What She Left: Enhanced Edition

by T. R. Richmond

  ‘Had no choice. Luke was in the clear, the suicide theory was getting sidelined – you were the next best suspect.’

  So my hypothesis was correct. Chameleon-like, she’d backed whatever the prevailing premise was, then, when it became expedient, fixed her crosshairs on me.

  Larry, an impartial observer may decree that I myself have an agenda here. Clearly, a book such as mine – What She Left is the title we’ve opted for – could benefit from a revelation such as this. A twist. But it’s the truth and one can’t be partly truthful, any more than one can be partly blind, or partly dead, or partly pregnant.

  I stared out at the night. I’d be out there soon. The fact blackjacked me: I’m dying. ‘You don’t deserve to be a mother. If you had a child, you’d destroy it.’

  ‘I pushed her and I heard her screaming and I walked away and I’m glad I did.’ Her head lolled sideways. ‘Feel sick,’ she said. ‘Didn’t even want a baby; I’m too young to have a kid. Just my luck, a one-night stand with some douchebag from work and I end up pregnant! But once I realized, it felt so right.’ She hugged her knees, buried her face in her hands. ‘Priest I should be talking to, not a has-been lecturer. How can you miss something you never had?’

  ‘Easy. It’s called imagination. You’ve had ours running ten to the dozen.’ We sat and in the eerie quiet I thought: After tonight, I’m never going to make anyone cry ever again. ‘That text, it was Wilde originally. Plath appropriated it.’

  ‘Me too.’ Then after a pause, she added: ‘Her phone was on the ground. After she went in the water – jumped, slipped, you pick – after it had gone quiet, I grabbed it and, bingo, off the text went to Mummy. Far as Liz was concerned, I was Alice. I was Alice saying goodbye.’

  It was that effortless, Larry – the press of a few buttons, a couple of exclamation marks, an emoticon or two. That’s all it takes to say goodbye. That’s all it takes to die.

  ‘Crocodile tears,’ I said. ‘All crocodile tears.’

  ‘An eye for an eye, Indiana. A tooth for a tooth. She was a murderer.’

  The little vixen may be confident she’s got away with it, but I shall bring her in front of the courts. I shall put my head above the parapet, I shall stand on the ramparts and shout, and she will not escape the long arm of the law. I, too, shall ‘publish and be damned’ and this iniquity will not stand. Larry, I was shedding a tear or two myself. It felt warmly cathartic. I could cry, I could.

  ‘You can’t touch me,’ she said.

  ‘I can,’ I said, crabbing towards her, raising my hand. ‘And I shall.’

  She looked up and there was more than fear in her eyes.

  Email sent by Professor Jeremy Cooke,

  25 August 2013

  From: jfhcooke@gmail.com

  To: marlenegutenberg@gmail.com

  Subject: Departure

  Dear Marlene,

  I have a little time on my hands ahead of tomorrow’s flight so will take this opportunity to pen slightly more than my rushed-off, phlegmatic dispatch of yesterday.

  My most recent consultant’s appointment didn’t go well. Three years is his current best guess, five at a push. So much for a bloody book making you immortal, eh?

  I’m reasonably reconciled to my fate. Ironically, the news often elucidates more vexation among those with whom I share it. I haven’t perfected the language of such exchanges yet. A Guardian crossword compositor I’m fond of latterly announced his terminal illness through his clues: a sign of growth (6) and a food transporter heard to gradually reduce an endless effusion (10). ‘Cancer of the oesophagus’ it dawned on me as I filled in the boxes in the SCR.

  There shall be no more hanging on, limpet-like, for redundancy. I am to retire. I’d prefer to slip away, but they’re planning a bash. So, a warm glass of mediocre wine, some canapés and a few words from my leader (take the tie off him and he could pass as a student himself), inevitably referring to my ‘contribution’ and ‘unique’ methodology, then after that brief bout of bonhomie I’ll pack away my office, wipe clean the desk, click the door shut behind me and head home to Fliss and the dog.

  My wife is reacting to the circus that’s building around the forthcoming publication with characteristic fortitude and grace. Dutifully, she ploughed through a proof in one sitting before wheeling round to an apprehensive me and declaring, ‘Well, well.’ I may not give a fig about the critics’ response, but my wife’s I most definitely do. ‘I’m not proud of what you did, but I’m proud of you for getting to the truth,’ is her official line. Behind the scenes, off-camera, there have been tears and smashed kitchenware: the lightning bolt that Liz’s maiden name was Mullens a notably distressing one.

  She jokes about me becoming a media luvvie because of my TV and radio appearances. Inscrutably honest (I’m hardly in a position to self-censor now, am I?), unintimidated by controversy, prepared to vault from a discussion on contemporary cocaine usage to ethnography, I’m arraigned on panels with genial presenters who grapple with how to pitch me: ‘tireless pursuer of justice’ or ‘old lech’.

  Hitherto, I’ve zealously resisted disclosing my final revelation, deflecting such hungry demands with the riposte that my principal wish is to bring the guilty party to justice and that necessitates imparting an unabbreviated story. It’s also, of course, the book’s denouement and spoilers hit sales.

  Perhaps I should have gone public with my theory as soon as it dawned on me; but I’ve learnt the dangers of going off half-cock. Instead, I redoubled my efforts, prompting Megan to do likewise. Surreal, with hindsight, those research sessions we shared: an elaborate chess game, Alice’s past the pieces, moves and counter-moves, my suspicions blooming, her attempts to influence my conclusions becoming more craven, her ever-more desperate bid to create her own narrative, the one she’d have written, the past she would have wished, the future she sought. I was on to her long before her one ill-advised reference to the text she’d sent from Alice’s phone, but that was the clinching corroboration. Fiction aficionados refer to ‘the lie that reveals the truth’. Well, so it was for me. The lie that revealed the truth in this case an electronic message about lying in the grass and having no yesterday or tomorrow, and being at peace.

  I am not blind to the fact that claiming publicly someone murdered their best friend is potentially libellous. Even intimating one didn’t do all one could in that situation could be construed as defamatory. But the truth is an indefatigable defence against libel. Plus, there is a precedent. Media scholars will be familiar with a Daily Mail front page from 1997. Under the headline ‘Murderers’, it published photographs of five men, so convinced was it they were responsible for Stephen Lawrence’s death. ‘If we are wrong, let them sue us,’ it said.

  Come on, Megan. If I’m wrong, if I’m lying, sue me.

  As for Alice herself, I’ll never claim my volume is encyclopaedic. One merely has to recall coverage of the Joanna Yeates case (Fliss berated me for taking an ‘unhealthy’ interest in it) to be reminded of this. Her Wikipedia page proffers her alma mater, her height, the pub in which she was last spotted, it even apprises you of the last CCTV footage of her – buying a pizza – but, ultimately, such paucity of detail. It may give you the grid reference where her body was found, but it doesn’t give the coordinates of her heart.

  No doubt readers drawn to its novelistic qualities will also castigate me for partly giving away the finale at the beginning (our heroine dies in Chapter One). But that’s how life is; it’s not as if one’s unaware at the start what’s going to happen at the end.

  Fliss teases me that it’s destined for the remaindered pile, but success is a lottery. Coincidences, luck, assumptions, misunderstandings – these are the primary drivers of fate. If Liz hadn’t mistakenly assumed the book deposited on her doorstep was put there by Megan, rather than Gavin, she may have never visited her and, in turn, might never have arrived, waif-like, on my doorstep. It was one of Alice’s favourite books, Never Let Me Go.

  I can’t wait until the m
orning; I’ve planned it down to the nth degree. Fliss has always dreamed of visiting California and tomorrow I’ll make that dream come true. All those holidays traipsing around the Valley of the Kings and the Panathenaic Stadium and the Ades Synagogue were utterly spellbinding, but this will be two weeks of unashamed fun. We’ll lap up the sunshine and eat cardiac-inducing servings and drive too fast in our 1970 Chevy – hideously impractical, of course, and an atrocious gas-guzzler, but to hell with the bicycle for a fortnight, it’s one of my bucket-list items. I wonder when exactly the penny will drop with Fliss – when I announce she’ll be missing night school, when I inform her we need to drop Harley off at the kennels, when she sees her passport? That’s one of the things I’m most looking forward to: a smile breaking on my wife’s face. Because she’s got the most beautiful smile.

  Marlene, I’d be a liar if I claimed it hadn’t crossed my mind that you and I take up corresponding. But I won’t be writing again, for similar reasons to why I’ve drawn a halt to my tête-à-têtes with young Gavin. We’d hate anyone to get the wrong idea now, wouldn’t we? Whatever might they say? He’s an odd one, that Old Cookie. You’ve got to watch him. Let’s leave it at this, eh? At yours sincerely.

  Let me instead dream often of visiting your great country. Arriving unannounced on your doorstep, your husband bowling out to greet me. ‘Well, I’ll be jiggered,’ he’d say. We’d take a dram together and put the world to rights and reminisce and head out on day trips, two old buddies, two brilliant minds, two old rogues, driving along Route 1 or Route 11 and visiting Fredericton and Moncton, specks against the mountains. The great Larry Gutenberg and I.

  Now I shall return to my packing. First, though, I shall go to the condensation-covered window and, with a flicker of déjà vu, draw the outline of a heart and in it write my and my wife’s initials. That’s enough. For now at least, that’s more than enough.

  Yours sincerely,

  Jeremy Cooke

  Epilogue

  Letter written by Alice Salmon,

  8 September 2011

  Dear Me,

  You’re probably wondering why I’m writing to you. A twenty-five-year-old journalist living in south London. Don’t worry, you’re not in trouble. I’m not about to do some awful exposé on you, either. That’s not my style.

  It’s because I’m reading this fantastic book called Dear Me, full of letters people have written offering words of wisdom to their sixteen-year-old selves. I’m going to use the idea at work and would like to launch it with mine. With yours.

  You need to go with the flow a bit more, young lady. Lying awake stressing in the middle of the night doesn’t achieve anything. As a boss you haven’t yet met will be fond of saying when there’s a cock-up: Ultimately no one’s died.

  It’s OK to be scared. It’s fine. What’s important is that you don’t let fear hold you back. Sometimes you’ve just got to throw yourself in at the deep end.

  Stop beating yourself up about how you look, too. You haven’t got coypu feet or weightlifter’s shoulders. You’re unique. It might take a while to find out exactly who that is, but it’ll be worth the wait because as your dad – my dad, our dad – used to say, there’s only one you, Ace Salmon.

  I hope reading this doesn’t embarrass you. If it’s any consolation, the Advertiser (that’s the paper you’ll go on to work for) has only got a circulation of about eighty-one so it’s hardly going to go viral (I’ll obviously edit this line out before the boss sees this, ditto the swear words). Either that, or I’ll publish and be damned. I’ll publish and be ‘out there’, but that in itself is part of who we are: products of the Internet generation.

  I doubt you’ll listen to me because to you I’ll be past it, middle-aged, virtually dead, and I can’t blame you because right now I wouldn’t pay any attention to my thirty-something-year-old self if she was banging on about pension plans and school catchment areas. But can I at least suggest a few don’ts? Don’t do drugs, don’t drink so much, don’t get in debt, don’t spend as much time online, don’t lose sleep over what people think (this is beginning to sound like that Sunscreen Song from the 1990s), don’t worry about men and certainly don’t hate yourself. Then again, don’t entirely don’t because, as a seedy scumbag of a professor will one day inform you, *said in my best posh voice*, you tend to regret the things you don’t do, not the things you do. He was wrong. Sometimes you regret the things you do, too. I know that. He should as well. Him more than anyone.

  Try to be nicer to your mum, as well. She hasn’t had it easy and has secrets of her own, secrets she couldn’t admit to you at sixteen, that she still can’t to me at twenty-five. One day she’ll share them and I’ll be here to listen. Fact is, there was a her before me, just as there’ll be a me after her. Remember how you were convinced that turning into your mum would be a fate worse than death? Well, you’ll get to a stage when sometimes you positively can’t wait. When it feels like it would be a privilege.

  Be nicer to the Robster, as well. You might have stopped pinching him by sixteen, but you weren’t the easiest teenager to live with and he always had your back: his kid sister who obsessively wrote it all down then was so desperate to get away from what she saw that she burnt her diaries in a fit of disgusted rage.

  Well done, incidentally, on winning that What’s in a Name? writing competition. I’m not sure I’ve ever congratulated you. As a go-getting journalist (Caitlin Moran, watch out), I have to point out it had too many brackets and exclamation marks (as if this doesn’t!) and didn’t exactly answer the question (what’s changed?). Plus, you only used 996 of the 1,000 allowed words. But the fact is, you won. Still strikes me as strange nearly a decade on. You – I, we – won.

  What, of course, you didn’t know as you were writing those 996 words is that you’d soon come to think fondly of the town you were so desperate to get away from; that Southampton would be the uni you’d head to (smart move turning Oxford down BTW); and that you’d get over your Leonardo DiCaprio crush within about twelve seconds of hitting the send button. You didn’t know any of this any more than you knew that the track you’d be playing on your iPod ten years later as you write this, ‘Iris’ by The Goo Goo Dolls, would have become your favourite song ever, that you’d meet a man called Luke in a bar in Covent Garden or, for that matter, that the very day after you’d heard you’d won the competition, the Twin Towers would come down and the world would spend the next decade looking for the man who was responsible, only to find him a few months ago in Pakistan, the first inkling of his death permeating via the web, a neighbour tweeting about the noise of American helicopters overhead.

  You’d like Luke. You used to say the word ‘boyfriend’ secretly out loud, didn’t you? Enjoying its lush round shapes, the way pronouncing it made your mouth move, its hypothetical possibilities. You’ll learn it’s a complicated word, one with many sides and interpretations and degrees of definitiveness. But Luke’s my boyfriend and it feels right.

  A few more Alices have become famous since you listed some, like Alice Cullen who shot to fame as a character in Twilight and Alice Munro, who was actually always famous but you only discovered her recently. Our name clearly does a good line in writers. I’ve come to adore Alice Walker’s The Color Purple since I was you, even if I did have to look up ‘epistolary’. Who knows, if my music reviewing takes off, I could even join the roll call. Imagine. Immortalized like some romantic heroine. Me. This Alice. Alice Salmon.

  For now, though, I’ll be the slightly too tall one who’s grown into my body, who’s learnt to live with it, who gets a fizzying zip of joy at being among her friends, who still loves a box set of Dawson’s Creek, even if she occasionally finds herself listening to those teenagers’ wise proclamations and muttering quietly: Yeah right. Because life’s not all beach parties and autumn-hued landscapes. It’s complicated and doesn’t necessarily have a happy ending. It’s not all days when everyone’s on your side, when everyone’s team Alice. But it’s like in Finding Nemo (I’m as
bad as my OH Luke, quoting films) when the fish says if life gets you down you’ve got to just keep on swimming. That’s what I’ll do: keep on swimming.

  Yes, take heart, because in ten years you’ll feel like you’re where you’re supposed to be. You’ll have even stopped wishing the time away and you were always prey to that, weren’t you? Wanting it to be the next thing.

  Ultimately, all you can do is get on with it, this thing we call ‘life’. No one gets through entirely unblemished, but it’s our scars that show who we are, where we’ve been, how we’ve fought on, how we’ve won. When you slide down a snake, climb straight back up a ladder. Remember, it’s like Scrabble: use your good letters as soon as you get them.

  And as for those missing four words? What they would have been, what they are. That’s easy.

  I am Alice Salmon.

  Acknowledgements

  I’d like to thank everyone at Janklow & Nesbit, particularly Kirsty Gordon, who once gave me some encouragement that I’ll never forget, and my amazing agent Hellie Ogden. Without Hellie’s editorial brilliance, commercial acumen and unwavering support, this book quite simply wouldn’t have happened.