What She Left: Enhanced Edition (41 page)

‘Stop speaking in riddles – and what’s this offer? Or was it another one of your lies? If it was, I’m leaving.’

‘There are no free cars or holidays to be had here.’

She snorted. ‘Pah. One paper said it was up to me now to write my own future.’

‘
The Magic Faraway Tree
,’ I replied, recalling the misplaced phrase. ‘That was it. The Enid Blyton book.’

‘You’re barking.’

‘Is it that you’re jealous? Is it that it’s not
you
in the spotlight?’

‘That’s the craziest, creepiest thing you’ve said and you’ve said plenty.’

‘I can give you compliments, if it’s attention you’re craving.’

The radiator clicked, water moving, warmth. ‘I’ve spoken to Liz in recent weeks. She informs me you’re now adamant it was suicide. I’d be interested to hear on what basis.’

‘That bridge is like Beachy Head. Hurl themselves off it like lemmings, they do.’

Larry, I’m not unaware of the structure’s reputation. I regularly used to stroll alongside it; it’s one of the few spots in this city one could court solitude. ‘Wrong answer. Have another go.’

‘I shouldn’t be here; you’d get into trouble if it got out.’

You’ll not get out
, I thought, discreetly eyeing my desk for the door key. ‘Come on, why did she kill herself?’

‘They reckon I’m a bad friend, but I didn’t have a crystal ball. When Alice got drunk she could be stupendously unpredictable – factor in the drugs and that made her so Alice-like it hurt to watch. She’d talked about suicide before.’

I was back to scribe, Larry, a reversion to the role I’d so comfortably slotted into: archivist, analyst, investigator. Evidence-gatherer. ‘Had she? When?’

‘Before. She must have run out of the will to live.’

‘You don’t need will
to
live, Megan. That’s our default position. What you need will for is to stop living, to take your own life.’

‘I don’t have all the answers. I’m not God.’ She sank back in the armchair, fanned her face. ‘Mistake,’ she said. ‘It was a mistake coming here. Should be going. Was supposed to be babysitting this evening. Stop writing stuff down, too!’

I discreetly gathered up the key, shuffled behind her,
pretended to replace a book on a shelf and, temporarily out of her sight line, locked the door. She was going nowhere, this one.

‘Who are you to judge me and my opinions, Indiana?’

Larry, I wasn’t unqualified to have a view; I’d become jolly well acquainted with this young lady – numerous evenings, my wife at bridge or the U3A, side by side at my dining-room table for our ‘project Alice’ sessions. A curious, claustrophobic coupling, sifting through those reams of material, a ghoulish exercise, an exhumation of sorts. ‘How did Alice kill herself, Megan?’

‘None of your questions can bring her back – she’s gone.’ She lunged for a pile of papers, tore out a page. ‘This isn’t her and it isn’t me … we’re more than this.’

Outside, a light was flickering; I made a mental note to ring Facilities tomorrow.

‘I used to be impressed by you,’ she said, her voice raised, ‘but there’s nothing to you. You’re words, wind, hot air … you’re a –’ and she let out a derisive laugh, a LOL, she’d once informed me it was termed – ‘a complete tool!’

One by one, the lights had gone off in adjoining offices, my colleagues drifting away. I bombarded Megan with questions, compliments, questions. Opened a second bottle. She became slightly woozy; it was in her eyes, how she crossed and uncrossed her legs clumsily. She checked her watch at a couple of points, agitated, but she was losing focus. And I willed her whispered words into my head, logged them, because detail increasingly isn’t a strong point of mine (the other day I called Fliss ‘Liz’ – mercifully an oversight she failed to hear).

‘Describe the last occasion upon which you saw Alice,’ I instructed her semi formally.

‘Snow,’ she replied dreamily. ‘There was snow.’

It had only snowed once last winter: the night of February 4.

‘It was by the river, wasn’t it, Megan? You were there, weren’t you? You were in Southampton.’

Dear Larry,

‘Is it normal to be this obsessed by women?’ he asked last night. ‘By sex?’

‘They say sex is like oxygen,’ I told him. ‘You only miss it when you haven’t got it.’

I’m fascinated by the sharp roughness of him, the markings on his body. And yes, before you admonish me, Larry, I’m well aware I should hand the bugger over to the police, but he who is without sin and all that.

‘Alice was my oxygen.’

Mocksy, he calls himself, but his real name’s Gavin.

‘Did collecting her stuff help?’ I asked.

‘Not really. All it was, was her stuff, it’s not as if it was
her
.’

On the floor, gathered for safe return to the Salmons: a set of bangles, playing cards, a print-off of an assignment on Maya Angelou, postcards, pens, a beer mat with a kangaroo on it, a dried rose, a toothbrush, notes for a gig review, a sweatshirt with ‘LAUGH LOVE LIVE’ embossed on the front.

‘Only thing I haven’t handed over to you is the book by the man with the Japanese name and I dumped that on her mum’s doorstep.’

‘My closest friend died recently,’ I said.

‘I still hate a lot of stuff about you.’

‘He was my best friend and I never met him.’

‘Still hate Alice, too.’

‘Be careful of hate, Gavin. It stains you – you take on its colour if you harbour it for too long.’

Larry, it’s a dazzling new concept: trying not to see the worst in someone. A small confession is apposite at this point: I haven’t been unreservedly candid with Fliss about these ‘meetings’. Not that there’s anything untoward to admit, but she wouldn’t approve and that’s perfectly understandable given what the lad did, particularly breaking into our home. He’s self-evidently capable of great malevolence, but underneath – and is that not the job of the academic, to see underneath? – he’s not exclusively bad. No one is. He assures me he wishes to wipe the slate clean, to have a fresh start. A, as we might term it, ‘tabula rasa’.

‘Will I be in this book of yours?’ he asked.

‘You already are.’

‘You better not slag me off.’

‘I’ll display you the same amount of respect as you did me on those forums!’

‘That was only the Internet, a book’s different. They won’t take my posts down, if that’s what you’re angling for. It’s policy not to.’

‘I’ve had worse things said about me. Besides, they’re part of this.’

‘I’ve quit them forums – no more of that lone wolf crap. All that stuff I posted, no one gives a shit about that. Your book’s more likely to make me famous – even if it will be bollocks.’

I like his contempt; it reminds me of my exchanges with that shrink, Carter. Another confession: I’ve tracked that bugger down.

‘I could read the whole thing. Could be your editor!’

‘I’m of the view that no one who’s featured ought to catch advance sight of it.’

‘You have! You don’t trust me to keep my gob shut about the ending, do you?’

The boy went and stood by the window. What a pair we must have made, Larry: two creatures from incommensurable continents. Exhibits A and B. He fiddled with his right ear, one of those hole-in-the-lobe piercings that’s currently fashionable and it gave me a jab of pity that he could mutilate himself in this manner.

‘This office, this university, this town – they’re
your
forums, aren’t they?’ he said. ‘They let you carry on unchallenged.’

Curiously, he’s more articulate in the flesh, less intimidating. The Internet bent him out of shape, his words detached, disembodied, devoid of non-verbal communication – a real-time bar brawl in which the lowest common denominator prevails.

‘She was too strong for both of us, wasn’t she? Alice was.’

‘Desire,’ I said, ‘is hardwired into us. The choice we have is how to respond to it.’ Briefly, I summoned the sequestered complexion of lust – the metallic meatiness of another human tongue, the ancient, uncompromising smell of sex – but it vanished, flitting into faintness as when one recollects scenery from a long-ago holiday, the hills on Skye, say, or the Italian Dolomites. A sex maniac, he’d referred to me as in one of his online rants; an Eighties term, straight out of a
Carry On
. Is this how I’ll be remembered? A remotely comical figure, in his youth shambolically propelled by testosterone and selfishness, dressed up as intellectualism or, more likely, eccentricity.

‘Gavin, learn from my mistakes,’ I said. ‘You defuse situations by making it so your secrets are no longer secrets.’

‘I suppose I loved her,’ he said. ‘Alice. Sort of. My new missus, Zoe, she’s an actual girlfriend – I might love her, as well.’

‘I love Fliss. More, in fact, than I do myself.’

‘Jeez, that much! I reckon women make us better.’

‘Amen to that. But worse, too. They have that in common with religion. I rather wish I could rediscover my faith. In the meantime, I’ll put it in the potential of humans, the power of us.’

‘Do you believe in all that, Iceman? Love and stuff?’

Silence as I, inarticulate and inexpressive, recalled an avenue of research I’d toyed with exploring decades ago, and luxuriated in the recollection of mine and my wife’s definition: her shooing me from the sink in the kitchen to the utility room, the click of her secateurs, the pinch of the ‘world’s best chef’ apron she bought me for my sixtieth, a tea room in a market town, a second-hand bookshop. ‘Yes, I do. Very much so. It’s what remains after everything else. It’s what Alice gave out every day and now she’s gone it’s what she left.’

I went and stood beside him and rested my hand on his shoulder – small yet surprisingly muscled.

‘I’m not gay, Iceman, just so you know.’

I returned to my seat. ‘Me neither,’ I said. ‘Just so
you
know. Trouble with standing back from the herd, young man, is that sometimes we need the herd. Protection, concealment, company, love – we’re social animals.’

We’re not so different, Larry, myself and that boy: our compulsion to be heard, preoccupied with recording our stories, capturing the legacy of our lives, him in a rainbow
of colours on his arms, me in this book, just as our forebears had on the cave walls at Lascaux.

‘Do you really reckon we can change?’ he asked.

‘Yes, I do. It’s what being a human is, to have that possibility. Every day we choose who to be. What clothes to wear, what to say, what to eat, how to behave, what pictures to put on our arms – it’s through this myriad of small decisions that cumulatively we become who we are.’

‘I’ve got a confession for
you
. That Devereux geezer never claimed you were knocking off Alice’s mum the year before she was born. That was one of my flourishes!’

It’s so hard not to hate, Larry, but I’m having a stab at it. I repositioned myself in my chair – the usual stiffness, but an atypical twinge of pain, too, which made me wince.

‘What’s it like, Iceman? Cancer? My gran reckoned it was like being eaten up from the inside out.’

That’s not what it’s like for me, Larry. It’s not the medical procedures or the piecemeal disintegration of one’s physical capabilities, it’s the fluid dread I get at the concept of me not existing yet it all damn well carrying on. We academics spend billions of pounds and invest immense reserves of intellectual energy in pursuit of the most nebulous goals when we haven’t even scratched the surface of how to keep ourselves alive. ‘I shall see justice done before I pass. For Alice.’

‘Hope her mum didn’t read that book I left on her doorstep,’ he said. ‘It’s about people bred to be broken up and used as spares – harvested, donors, clones. All that stuff about living to more than a hundred or dying young, that completion malarkey, that would have been well grim for her to read. Suppose it’s only a story ultimately – like, made up.’

He itched his arm, a nervous habit, and, beneath the war paint, eczema. I intended to say, ‘You shouldn’t have those, you’re a child,’ but it came out as: ‘Does it hurt, getting tattooed?’

‘A bit. It’s worth it, though.’

Yes, give us a few thousand more years, Larry, and we’ll put it all together, this gargantuan jigsaw puzzle. We scientists. We anthropologists. My tribe.

‘Thing is with tats,’ he said, ‘they stay with you, they mark you.’

‘So does life, son. So does life.’