What She Left: Enhanced Edition (44 page)

BOOK: What She Left: Enhanced Edition

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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.

It’s also been a privilege to work with the super-talented Rowland White at Michael Joseph/Penguin. Rowland’s enthusiasm and vision from day one have meant a huge amount to me and I’ve been incredibly lucky to have benefited from his inspired editing. Massive thanks as well to Emad Akhtar for all his astute advice, plus the rights team.

Finally, I’m also grateful to Sarah Knight at Simon & Schuster in the US who has been a constant source of fabulous ideas as this book has taken shape.