What She Left: Enhanced Edition (4 page)

‘Grammar is the difference between knowing your shit and knowing you’re shit.’

Anon.

 

‘Be the heroine of your life, not the victim.’

Nora Ephron

 

‘The truth hurts for a little while, but lies hurt forever.’

Anon.

 

‘We’ve all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.’

Robert Wilensky

 

‘Youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.’

F. Scott Fitzgerald

You never knew I was going to propose, did you? Well, add it to the list of things I never told you. The night you confronted me about Prague – the night you said we had to take a break from each other – I had a ring in my pocket. Been planning it for weeks. Was going to tell you the next morning to pack an overnight bag; we’d walk to the station, go to Gatwick, then Rome. It was all booked.

‘Luke, I’m going to ask you a question and I need you to answer honestly,’ you’d said before I had a chance. ‘Can you promise me you’ll do that?’

‘Course,’ I’d replied. I was picturing your face: how you’d look when I explained you didn’t need to go to work on Monday, how I’d cleared it with your boss, it was all sorted. It was delicious: knowing that the eighteen months we’d been together was only the beginning. Yes, we might have been a bit young – no one ties the knot until at least their late twenties these days – but why wait? You weren’t the only one who could be impulsive.

‘That rugby weekend you went on in Prague – did you sleep with someone?’

The air went out of the room. I sat down on the end of your bed and felt the jeweller’s box in my pocket, a rigid square weight. I couldn’t lie, not to you. ‘Al, it was nothing.’

‘Who was she?’ you asked, a flat, resigned tone to your voice.

It had been seven weeks after we’d met. I’d known exactly how long it was because I’d decided if it was less than two months I’d keep quiet, if it was more then I’d confess. ‘It doesn’t matter who she was.’

‘It matters to me,’ you bit back. ‘Believe me, right now it matters to both of us.’

‘It was a girl on a hen weekend. I was drunk.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Another new tone to your voice: hard, unyielding.

‘I was scared you’d dump me.’ I fingered the ring in my pocket. Thought:
Should I just do it?
Never mind waiting until we’re in the restaurant in the Campo de’ Fiori – I’d picked it because it was famous for its prosciutto and that was your favourite; the table was booked; I’d even tipped off the maître d’. Just do it. Prove how much I loved you, prove that what happened seven weeks after we met was no more than a girl whose name I could barely remember on a weekend I could barely remember. But you started crying and when I reached out you batted away my hands and slumped down on the side of your bed so we were at right angles. Flashes of Prague had come back to me: the Irish bar, her and her friends on the table next to us, a cobbled street in the half-light – it was nearly four in the morning – turning left towards my hotel and her with me, that girl from Dartford or was it Dartmouth? Jen – no, not Jen,
Gill
. It had all felt so far away from my real life. ‘It meant nothing,’ I repeated, twisting round and taking your hand. I watched you crying, the miniature Christmas tree flashing on the chest of drawers over your shoulder. More of the Prague trip had come back to me: the smell of wet cobbles, the
rohlík
signs in bakers’ windows, how it had felt like the end of an era. I knew you were the one, Al, even seven weeks after meeting you I did, but I knew as well that you’d mean an end to the me I’d got used to: the lads’ trips abroad, the 4 a.m. finishes to drinking sessions, the random encounters in bars, and I wasn’t sorry; I’d miss that, but I had you now and that would be better. Already then I loved you, Alice, but it was as if I had to say goodbye to the old me first, send that person out with a bang. One last, huge blowout.

‘I think you should go now,’ you said.

I visualized our plane taking off for Rome and the two empty seats, yours a window because you loved the view.

‘You don’t get to have your cake and eat it, Luke. Life’s not like that.’

‘Fucking Adam,’ I said. ‘The gobshite.’

‘Secrets rarely stay secret.’ You wiped your eyes. You’d loved the last eighteen months, you said. But we were in our mid-twenties now and relationships were too important to risk getting wrong. ‘We need to work out how we feel about each other.’

‘I know how I feel,’ I said. ‘I love you.’ I wasn’t going to let this happen, not again, not with you. I’d wondered again about pulling out the ring. Saying:
Look?
But it was all wrong; I’d made it all wrong. Plus your mind was made up.

‘Well, I don’t,’ you said. ‘Right now, I don’t know whether I love you. Or I do, but I don’t know if I love you enough.’

‘I’m the same person I always was,’ I said.

‘No, no you’re not.’ You were close to losing your temper; I’d only ever seen that once before, when you’d seen that man on a bus slapping a little boy.

‘I’ve never claimed to be an angel.’

‘Don’t you dare try to make this my fault, Luke.’

‘It was only seven weeks after we’d met, for God’s sake! We weren’t even referring to each other as boyfriend and girlfriend by that stage.’

‘Go, please, just go. I can’t be with you for a while.’

‘We’re not splitting up, are we? We’re not.’

‘I want us to take a break. No texting, no emailing, no nothing.’

In other circumstances, I’d have picked you up on that – laughed, said, ‘ “No nothing”, that’s a double negative, that means I can’, but tears were streaming down your face. It was only a fortnight to Christmas.

‘No contact for two months,’ you said.

It seemed an odd, arbitrary too-long length of time, but it struck
me as better than the alternative – nothing
but
weekends like Prague for the rest of my life.

‘Now get out of my flat.’

You used to be scathing about people with complicated love lives. It’s very simple, you said, you either love someone or you don’t. But I turned you into one of those people. That was my gift to you and now you’re dead. You’ve been dead for three days and it’s impossible, Al. Sleeping. Getting up, eating, showering, shaving, sitting on a Tube, answering the phone. It’s meaningless. You told me you once had a spell feeling like that when you were a teenager and I never understood, but now I do. Finally,
finally
, now it’s too late, I get a little sense of what it might have been like for you, what it might have been like to have been you, Alice Louise Salmon, the girl I met on Friday 7 May 2010 (see, I
do
remember our anniversary) in Covent Garden. You’d come and stood next to me – my animal magnetism, I later joked. You got served before me and I’d said, ‘There’s a woman with bar presence,’ and quick as a flash you’d replied, ‘There’s a man who looks as if he’s trying to jump the queue!’

I couldn’t live with you alive and us apart, and now I can’t live with you dead and us apart.

I was never one for writing stuff down, but you said if no one ever did, how would we share and learn and get better, so here I am writing what I’m feeling, like you used to – like you said could make all the difference.

You want me to be honest, Al? OK, well, here’s honest. I got in a fight –
two
fights. You never knew about the second one because it was last Sunday, the day after you died, but you knew all about the first one because it was with you.

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: Stay Away

 

Jeremy,

 

I can’t believe I’m contacting you after all these years. I vowed I’d have nothing more to do with you – seems whoever determines our fate had a different plan. Let’s skip the pleasantries. What the hell’s going on? I hear you’re gathering information about Alice. God only knows why. They tell me it’s for some sort of research project. Frankly I don’t care, whatever it is you need to quit it now.

 

My son, he works for a firm of solicitors, he drafted you a letter. I told him I’d posted it, but threw it in the bin. It was full of legalese, highlighting how much we would appreciate privacy, asking that you desist any such work forthwith and including a veiled reference to possible legal action. I know you better than that. I’m warning you.

 

They say it’s a scrapbook you’re compiling. Well, put this in your scrapbook.
I’m proud of my daughter
. I don’t give a damn what anyone says; I’m proud that she grabbed life by the scruff of the neck and lived it. I don’t care where I am, sometimes I find myself shouting it:
Alice Salmon was my daughter
. I go into her room and tell her clothes and her CDs and her pink polka-dot piggy bank. I say goodnight and good morning and that I love her and that she may have done something silly or stupid but we don’t hold it against her, course we don’t; all we do is miss her. None of us are completely in control of our destinies and when it comes to silly or stupid I’m hardly one to preach now, am I?

 

You always were prone to misinterpreting situations, so be in no doubt here, the sole reason for this email is to tell you to quit whatever bizarre and macabre exercise it is you’ve embarked on. I’m not even going to get into discussing the email you sent me just before she died. Sentimental, inexpedient and offensive.

 

They say God looks after drunks and little children. Well, where was God on February 5, Jem? If you’re such a smart man you answer me that. Actually, no, don’t – don’t even reply, just leave me and what’s left of my family alone. Do that for me and, if not for me, then do it for Alice.

 

Elizabeth