The Life I Left Behind

by Colette McBeth

  Melody shakes her head. She wants to get this over with. Closing her eyes for a second to remind herself where she was, she continues where she left off, walking down Uxbridge Road. She sees herself like a figure moving through a Google Street View. There were people around, the late-night throng, slouching bus queues, shouted conversations, air thick with halal kebabs.

  Noise and people and movement.

  And then they receded. Voices slipped from her earshot. Her skirt lifted in the breeze. Lights from a car coming her way. Too bright; she blinked, felt herself dissolving. Just walk, Melody. Was that her voice speaking? Her heels dragged on the pavement, footsteps echoing. She stopped, no point moving forward; the pavement had turned liquid. Her name was called. A car door opened. She couldn’t see the driver, out of her sight line, but the voice was friendly, familiar. She got in, thankful to have her body melt into the seat.

  The forward motion of a car going beyond their destination. She didn’t understand, wanted to turn back, but words were too heavy, she hadn’t the strength to speak them.

  ‘Sshh. Just close your eyes and sleep.’

  Her eyes obeyed.

  Then, a slippage, and darkness filled her.

  There’s a stain on the table, darker than tea, black coffee perhaps, or Coca-Cola, although the police do not provide complimentary Coca-Cola. She runs her finger over it, feels its groove. She thinks about all the other people who have sat here before her with their stories of violence and damage that cannot be undone whatever they might like to think.

  DI Rutter speaks. ‘Did you have a boyfriend at the time?’

  ‘No,’ she says.

  ‘Was there anyone you were seeing, more casually perhaps?’ (For sex? Melody knows she’d like to add.)

  There is a pause, a waiting, as if she is being subjected to a test. ‘No.’

  This is not true, much as she’s tried to recast her history. But she’s repeated it so many times it doesn’t feel like a lie any more.

  ‘How old was she? Melody asks DI Rutter when she’s finished remembering.

  ‘Eve Elliot was thirty.’ Another parallel, she thinks, the same age I was when I was attacked six years ago. ‘I have a photograph of her here,’ DI Rutter says. Melody isn’t sure she wants to see a photograph, but before she has time to convey this, the DI has pulled out a large picture from the file on the table next to her.

  ‘Here,’ she says, handing it to her. ‘Her mother tells me this is recent, taken in the spring.’

  Eve has blond hair and green eyes. She is smiling, of course she is. That’s how everyone likes to remember the dead. Who wants to dwell on the last few hours or minutes of their lives? She wouldn’t have been smiling then, Melody thinks, before she swats the thought away.

  Sam is watching her, DI Rutter is watching her, the DC who told her his name but which she promptly forgot is watching her.

  She starts to cry.

  It was easier when Eve was only a body. Just a physical structure of flesh and bones and organs. A body doesn’t smile and show a gap between her front teeth that makes her look oddly beautiful. Nor does it wear a green fleece and a red scarf wrapped tightly around her neck. A body doesn’t have chin dimples and blond hair that’s been pulled back into a ponytail but has found its way out, streaking her face. It doesn’t look red-cheeked from exertion, elated. A body doesn’t look like it’s at the top of the world (although really it’s just the peak of the Old Man of Coniston).

  Eve is no longer a body. She is a name and a face.

  A face that looks remarkably like her own.

  ‘Are you OK, Melody?’ DI Rutter asks. ‘Do you recognise her?’

  She shakes her head. She recognises her in the way that she recognises herself when she looks in the mirror. The blond hair, green eyes, the tone of their skin. They could be interchangeable, Eve and Mel. Mel and Eve. All that separates them is chance. A discovery made when Melody still had a thin pulse. Their fates could have been the same.

  ‘We understand she knew David Alden.’

  Melody hangs her head. A tear drips from her face and splats on to the table in front of her. She feels in her pockets for a tissue.

  ‘I want to tell you in case you hear it from any other sources …’ She looks up, sees DI Rutter’s face flushed. ‘We understand Eve was trying to help him.’

  ‘Help him?’ The air tightens around her, crackles with static. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We think she might have been investigating the case against him to help him clear his name.’

  Melody turns to Sam but he is cradling his head in the palms of his hands.

  Look at me, she wants to scream. Look at me and tell me this is not true.

  The coffee she drank half an hour ago burns in her throat. It tastes metallic, bitter, makes her want to retch.

  ‘We’re still gathering the facts, as you can appreciate. We don’t know how far she had got with this or if it is connected to her death in any way.’

  Melody pushes the photograph of Eve back across the table towards DI Rutter. It catches a gust from the air conditioning and floats towards the floor. The DC reaches down to pick it up.

  You’re not supposed to think ill of the dead, unless they are Hitler or Myra Hindley or the 7 July bombers, and Eve is none of those, but right now there are two words flashing in Melody’s head.

  Fucking bitch.

  Why was she digging around in the debris of Mel’s life, trying to unpick the facts that she has spent years trying to settle in her mind? Her friend attacked her. Her friend and next-door neighbour. A man she trusted. What was it, a whim? A project? Did she have any understanding of what she was doing?

  ‘Melody, I want to assure you that everyone here is convinced we got the right result.’

  She pulls at her top, needs to let air circulate through it. Sweat is building under her bra, down between her shoulder blades. There’s an itch on her back that she tries to satisfy by scratching, but only succeeds in displacing it. The ants are back, parading through her hair.

  She has the impression of being undone, that the contents of her head are spilling out into the room to dance before her.

  Chapter Eleven

  Eve

  TO BE FAIR, Mel had a point. Taking on David Alden’s case wasn’t a whim. That would have been stupid and callous and I like to think I was neither of those things. But it may have fallen under the banner of ‘project’. In the beginning, at least, my motives were not entirely altruistic.

  That’s not to say I didn’t believe him. I wouldn’t have gone ahead otherwise. The process is long and laborious, with obstacles every step of the way. You’d have to be crazy to do it if you weren’t convinced of a person’s innocence.

  But he caught me at a time when I was floundering, personally and professionally. I needed a distraction and a purpose. In that respect it was as much about saving me as it was him.

  Saturday morning, the first week in February, my boyfriend Mark and I were sitting at the kitchen table. Our flat was on the second floor of a four-storey terrace, the height affording us a decent if narrow view of the street and a slice of skyline thrown in for good measure. A weak winter sun was straining through the window. In the distance a ridge of dark cloud sat on top of an expanse of blue, as if someone had drawn a line in the sky and shaded one half black. Rain. No rain.

  We shared a paper. The Times, if I’m not mistaken. I was reading the magazine, or rather pondering a recipe for onglet, pickled walnuts and horseradish. It’s probable I looked a little pained, like I’d sucked a lemon, which was part reaction to the idea of pickled walnut, part evidence of my annoyance at the pot of tea on the table. Although I rarely drank tea – it lacked the kick of a strong coffee – I had nothing against it or the people who did drink it. But that morning the tea in the pot, the studied manner in which Mark poured it and the sound effects that accompanied him swigging it (slurp, then an agghh) sent me into a spin. He’s only drinking tea. How can that possibly produce su
ch a violent reaction? You are being unreasonable. You can’t blame him for appreciating the difference between a bag dunked in a mug and a pot perfectly brewed. Can you? Can you?

  That was when I knew it was over. When your partner’s habits – the sound of them swallowing food, the way they drink their tea (the way they breathe!), the whole package – begin to grate and you stop being a rational, thinking being, that’s when you know your relationship isn’t going anywhere.

  I loved Mark because he was kind and good and because I had once been crazy about him. Because I thought he was the one. Because I wanted him to be that person. But I wasn’t in love with him.

  I hung my head and studied the onglet recipe: trim the excess fat and sinew, lightly oil and season with salt and pepper. Tears swelled in my eyes. Was I really going to do this? It had been brewing a lot longer than the tea. Months. The nagging sense of dissatisfaction. A growing restlessness that I needed to break out of. I had tried trawling our past to revive the old flare of excitement and work out where we had taken a wrong turn. Mark was the last person I wanted to hurt. I wanted to make it work. I recalled our first encounter, New Year’s Eve 2010, countless times. We had swigged champagne from the same bottle, screamed out the last seconds of the year together with two million others. FIVE, FOUR, THREE, TWO, ONE … The London Eye had turned into a circle of fire, fountains of orange sparks sprayed up in the air, rockets exploded like giant dandelions in front of our eyes. We looked up to Big Ben, illuminated in a white glow. The first minute of 2011. We kissed. When had we stopped kissing?

  I thought of the time we ‘got lost’ in the New Forest and had a shag because we couldn’t wait, we needed each other at that precise moment. How could that have faded into twice-monthly sex, reserved for the occasions when we got spectacularly drunk? What about the time we spent a whole month on a beach in India, eating kingfish for lunch, watching the dolphins rise and dip in the sea in front of us. Swinging in hammocks as the sun set over the horseshoe bay of Odayam Beach in Kerala and thinking that if it never rose again we’d die happy, contented with each other in the gentle night breeze. And now the thought of a long, yawning weekend had me breaking out in perspiration.

  Was this it? Was this just a case of life happening to us, the same way it happened to everyone else? The couples who could quite easily go a full year without feeling the need to touch or kiss or fuck each other? Did I need to bring my expectations down a peg or two? Settle for Mark, because on paper he was everything I thought I wanted, and slurping aside, I enjoyed his company?

  I had tried. Honestly I had. I’d even started wearing matching underwear again in the lame hope it would rekindle what we had.

  ‘I can’t do this any more, Mark.’ I blurted the words out hoping that if I said them quickly they’d hurt less. I heard the newspaper rustle. Slowly his head appeared from behind it.

  He was dressed in a white T-shirt he wore for bed. A faint shadow of stubble covered his chin.

  ‘Do what?’

  I tried pointing to the table, the paper, the teapot, as if they were his answer. No, Eve, he deserves better.

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Mark. I just don’t think this is working.’

  He paused, gave a nervous laugh as if I had cracked a bad joke. Slowly the smile fell off his face. ‘I don’t understand.’ His skin had turned the same washed-out white of his T-shirt.

  I wanted to tell him that I didn’t understand either. I wanted to say, ‘If only you knew the hours I’ve spent trying to make sense of it. The endless logic and reason I’ve struggled to apply. On paper you have everything I need, a whole list of attributes: you are funny, kind, thoughtful, you put the toilet seat down when you’re finished, you cook and clean up after yourself, you love me. I hate myself for not feeling it.’

  ‘Neither do I,’ I said. ‘I just don’t …’

  ‘Don’t what? You don’t love me? Say it, if that’s what you mean.’ His eyes were glassy with anger. ‘Why don’t you come out and say it.’

  ‘Because it’s not true. I do love you, I just …’

  ‘Don’t want to be with me? Fuck, Eve, spare me the clichés. That’s not love. That’s something else … friendship. It’s not fucking love.’ He pushed himself away from the table and started prowling the kitchen. It was a small space and Mark was a tall man. He looked like a tiger penned in a tiny enclosure.

  ‘God …’ He cast a look over to me. ‘You’re serious, aren’t you? Did you not think to mention this, not once, you know … the whole time we were agonising over Pure White or Wimborne White for the walls, or booking a summer holiday? All the plans we were making together for the future. Our future, Eve. I thought you were it. Me and you together. Jeez …’ He grabbed fistfuls of his own hair.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mark …’

  ‘Don’t say you’re sorry. I don’t want to hear it.’ He peered over at me sitting hunched at the table. He sniffed and wiped his nose with his hand. ‘I just don’t get it. I thought we had something. God, I’m an idiot.’

  ‘Don’t, Mark, please, it’s not your …’

  ‘If it was anyone else I would say let’s try, we have something worth working for. But I know you, Eve, once you’ve made your mind up, that’s it. You’re all or nothing.’ We locked eyes and I could see he was begging me to correct him. My vocal cords were straining to tell him what he wanted to hear. It took all my willpower to say nothing.

  ‘I thought as much,’ he said as I pulled my gaze away from his. He walked to the door. ‘It’s why I fell in love with you in the first place.’

  I broke up with Mark because I couldn’t lie to him or to myself, because I wanted the big, once-in-a-lifetime love. But being dead forced me to question my decision. Would I have stayed with him if I knew I wouldn’t find that love? That Mark was the last person I would wake up next to, the last person I’d ever have sex with?

  In the end I always come back to the same conclusion. If I had stayed with him it would have been out of fear. And love can’t thrive on fear in the same way it doesn’t pay attention to reason and logic. It’s not a mathematical equation. You can’t draw up a list of requirements and hope to find love with the person who meets them. It’s intangible, unquantifiable. It’s about coming across a person who has something you didn’t even know you wanted. An unknown planet colliding with your own in a moment of sheer cosmic brilliance to make you more than you could ever have been yourself. It’s that knowledge that sustains you through tough times, the certainty that you will always be less without each other than you are together. And just because I will never find that love now doesn’t mean I was wrong to go searching for it.

  That’s not to say I didn’t have a few wobbles. In the weeks after Mark moved out (it was my flat, bought with a small inheritance from my dad and a huge mortgage) I was spun out wondering whether I’d made a huge mistake. I missed his friendship, noticed all the little things he’d added to my life that hadn’t registered when he was there. The music on his laptop, our chats after work over a bottle of wine, and yes, his technical know-how – who was going to fix my computer now? I missed having someone to cook for, to heat the bed. More than once I had been on the verge of calling him to beg him to come back. But I told myself my concerns were selfish, that I’d find myself in the same position again. Hold your nerve, I said.

  Then the boiler broke.

  It was Friday night. I was alone in the flat. A fierce cold hung over it. I’d had a crappy day at work and all I wanted to do was sink into a hot bath and drink red wine. I didn’t want to find a plumber. Call a plumber. Hope he wouldn’t rip me off. Stress about the price of a call-out. Whether I had enough money left on my overdraft to pay for it. I didn’t want to be in the flat. Cold, alone, breathing clouds of air into the room.

  Two plumbers didn’t answer. The third said he could come round tomorrow; one hundred and eighty pounds for a call-out charge plus parts.

  I told him I’d think about it and ring back.

  I b
rought the duvet from my bed, a bottle of wine from the cupboard, ordered a takeaway and settled down in front of the television. Then I started to cry.

  Kira called five minutes later.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Waiting for a takeaway,’ I said, cradling the phone in between my chin and shoulder.

  ‘You’ve just about got time to eat it before we go out.’

  ‘I’m not going out.’

  ‘So what are you doing instead and what’s the matter with your voice?’

  ‘Nothing.’ I tried to make my tone high and chirpy. ‘I’m going to eat some food and then watch TV. I’m knackered. I can’t face going out.’

  ‘Is that EastEnders in the background? Oh my God, you’re watching EastEnders on a Friday night. You are watching EastEnders instead of coming out with me to the party.’

  I reached for the remote and turned the TV to standby. ‘I am not watching EastEnders.’

  ‘Don’t lie, that appeals to you doesn’t it? The misery of it? I’ll be round in half an hour in a cab.’ She hung up.

  True to her word, Kira arrived half an hour after the phone call. In the cab she gave me a funny look before thrusting her make-up bag at me. ‘Lipstick might help.’

  ‘I had no time to get ready, all right.’ My face felt scuzzy with the remnants of make-up I’d applied for work more than twelve hours ago. I glared at her and saw her features crease into a smile.

  ‘Anyone would think he’d dumped you.’

  I chose a nude colour from her bag and applied it just as the cab was swinging around a corner. ‘Thanks,’ I muttered.

  It was Sadie’s thirtieth birthday. A party to which I had been invited but had politely declined, using erratic shift work as a cover. It was held in a pub in Notting Hill not far from Portobello Road. Its name, The W11, the same as its postcode, was written in large silver letters above the door. Outside there was a dark grey awning under which a group of smokers huddled together in the orange light of an outdoor heater. As we got out of the cab Kira said hi to one of them, a girl I didn’t recognise, before we slipped inside.