What She Left: Enhanced Edition (7 page)

Paris, I’m only in Paris!

I hadn’t spoken to Ben for weeks, but he called on Wednesday and asked if I fancied a weekend away, his treat.

‘I’m busy,’ I said. ‘Working on my dissertation.’

‘How about if I said you’d need your passport?’

There’s no word for what we are. We’re not dating, but we do stuff together. We’re not boyfriend and girlfriend, but we intermittently act like it. Sort of. It had been the same ever since I’d met him at that photography talk. And here we are in Paris.

‘It’s a bit small,’ he said about the
Mona Lisa
.

‘Yes, but look at those eyes. She wouldn’t take any shit.’

I had to explain that the
Venus de Milo
was Aphrodite, but his only comment was it was a shame they couldn’t be arsed to finish it. Then, when I’d cracked up, he said: ‘See, told
you a break from your thesis would do you good. How’s it coming along, the dreaded
faeces
?’

‘Dreadfully. Feels like I’m drowning. Why, you offering to help?’

‘I’d rather stamp on my own testicles!’

We’ve been up the Eiffel Tower where Ben gleefully informed me that if you dropped an apple off the top it would kill someone at the bottom, then visited the bridge with all the padlocks on, the Pont des Arts (see, I knew my French GCSE would come in handy!). ‘Couples put them here then throw the key in the river to demonstrate their commitment to each other,’ I said. ‘They say if lovers kiss here, they’ll be together forever.’

He looked nervous. ‘Don’t get any funny ideas, Fish Face.’

It tugged at me again, the unsatisfactory sense of what me and this man were. ‘Friends with benefits,’ he’d once described us as. But I’m going to be twenty-one soon; he already is. A year or so ago when we’d first met, fine, but I’m not going to be pissed around now. ‘We could do this stuff more often,’ I said. ‘Like, be a proper couple.’

‘It works for me as it is.’

Meg reckons he’s a complete idiot, but she doesn’t – sick buckets at the ready – see the side of him that I do. Like when he appears on the doorstep with flowers, or introduces me to people as Miss Something Passing Stopped. ‘It wouldn’t be so terrible, would it, dating like normal people?’

‘Thought you hated normal?’

‘I’m not advocating settling down and buying a caravan. I’m merely suggesting we could see a bit more of each other. It might be fun.’

‘You know me, Fish, I’m not after anything heavy.’ He stared down into the water. ‘I like as and when.’

We’d had a brilliant day and now I knew this conversation would eat away at me. Even if we changed the subject – and of course we’d change the subject – it would be there. ‘You are allowed to change,’ I said, forcing a smile.

‘Don’t spoil this weekend,’ he said.

‘Don’t make me then.’

Screw you, Ben
, I thought. I’m worth more than as and when. I ran my hand along the padlocks and it occurred to me that maybe it would be here – on Lovers’ Bridge, the lights of the Eiffel Tower twinkling in the distance, in Europe’s most romantic city – where our so-called relationship would end.

Then again, I’d thought that before.

I shouldn’t have come to Paris.

It’s one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done. I should have stayed at home and ploughed on with my dissertation (no debate what this diary entry’s word is going to be – dissertation!). Dr Edwards, my tutor, says I could be on course for a first, reckons I’ve got – and I quote – an extremely mature appreciation of Austen’s work. ‘You’re a sensitive reader, Alice,’ he told me. ‘You’ve also self-evidently got a soft spot for doomed heroines.’

None of his encouragement stops me getting stressed out. It wouldn’t be so bad if it was going to disappear once I’ve handed it in, either, but then there’ll be job hunting. (It’s all right for Ben, because you don’t need a job if Mummy and Daddy are bankrolling you.) Sometimes it feels as if I’m simply not smart enough to keep up. I mean, I might get ten or eleven questions right on
Mastermind
, but I’ll only get four or five on
University Challenge
. If I was an
electrical appliance, an iPod or a washing machine, they’d have put a product recall out on me and I’d get taken back and fixed, but you can’t do that with humans because we don’t come from factories, and if you look at who made me – certainly Mum – she’s just as bad, although if I ask her what she was like when she was my age she clams up. ‘It’s not about waiting for the storm to pass,’ she once said. ‘It’s about learning to dance in the rain.’

I used to be convinced that keeping this diary was a pressure valve, but it doesn’t help, any more than expanding your vocabulary helps, because you can be as articulate as Stephen Fry and all it means is that you’ve got more ways (a veritable cornucopia of ways!) to describe how shit you feel. Not one of those words he spouts on
QI
can make
IT
go away. All they do is give it a new form, a new shape, a new sound.

There is one way to make the stress go away, of course. Earlier I looked towards the hotel-room bathroom and recalled another bathroom a few years ago, quietly opening the medicine cabinet and taking out the contents – the plasters, the eye drops, the nail scissors, the paracetamol – and putting them on to the side of the bath then sliding them into a nice line like I was moving my token on a monopoly board (I was always the Scottie dog).

I shivered and picked up my phone. Ben had supposedly nipped out for ciggies but he was probably in a bar.
Come back
, I texted him. Last night was how it always was after our conversation on the bridge. We didn’t resolve anything. Nothing changed. I frantically called him.

‘
Alice
,’ he answered, as if he was expecting someone else.

I had a vision of him leaning on a bridge, tilting his head upwards, blowing out smoke and thinking of me and I felt a
bit like a character in a book, but couldn’t decide what I’d be: flawed and tragic or ballsy and not about to take any shit. ‘Where are you?’

‘Buying apples!’

‘I’m serious. Where are you?’

‘Out.’

He was slurring. I decided this definitely couldn’t go on. It was over and realizing I’d be the one who’d end up in tears made me hate him a tiny bit.

‘Actually, I’ve been getting you a present,’ he said. ‘Got you a surprise.’

Half an hour later, another text:
That present I told you about, you’ve gotta model it for me when I get back
.

I felt a little thrill, or maybe the bloom of shame.

‘Are you my Aphrodite?’ he asked later as we drank the wine he’d ordered on room service.

It’s true: I do have a soft spot for the doomed heroine.

I was trying to work on my dissertation, but abandoned that and watched the countryside whizz by and switched to my diary.

When I was twelve or fifteen or seventeen, this wasn’t how I’d have imagined I’d be at twenty – on the Eurostar, having spent a weekend in Paris with a man who couldn’t bring himself to utter the word ‘girlfriend’.

Ben was out for the count. So trusting, so vulnerable, his mop of blond hair and those perfect white teeth. He probably wouldn’t budge until we got to Waterloo then he’d wake, startled, stretch, reach up for his rucksack and then we’d head to Southampton and he’d go to ground for a few days, then maybe a text, something silly about this weekend – Nina Simone in that brasserie or the Venus de Milo
or the apples. Yes, he’ll like that, he’ll remember that: that you can kill someone by dropping an apple on them from the top of the Eiffel Tower.

He won’t get a reply, though.

‘We’ve got to stick together,’ he once said, flushed with panic after I’d shouted at him. ‘Besides,’ he’d added, the old confidence flooding back into him, ‘you can’t dump me because we’re not actually dating!’

There’d been a longer gap after that exchange than usual: months instead of weeks. But I still let it happen again: the end of an evening, the bit when the band finishes or you’re standing next to someone in the union or the point in a house party when there’s two of you left in the kitchen – a heavy inevitability about it, me and him. That’s me all over, doing stuff even if every bone in my body is screaming (can bones scream?)
don’t
. Getting into debt. Telling my landlord he was a parasite. Getting wasted at the anthropology department Christmas party in the first year. Part of me is glad I can’t remember more of that, but a bigger part
needs
to. All I’ve got are flashes. Anchovy canapés. Chatter about some discovery in Indonesia, a hobbit-thing. Cold wine (‘Not terrible,’ Professor Cooke had said, although he’d have preferred a red, spouting names and grape varieties that might as well have been a foreign language to me). Then later trying to read a plaque on the wall and the letters swimming out of focus. Laughing, and Old Cookie saying: ‘Time we got you out of here, young lady.’

Ben twisted in his seat, and asked sleepily, ‘Where are we?’

It made me sad that we wouldn’t be able to reminisce about this weekend together. We’d be remembering the same thing, but from different perspectives.

Dr Edwards is forever banging on about perspective.
‘Whose eyes are you looking through?’ he asks. ‘Who’s the narrator in this story? Who’s the hero?’

Ben came to, yawned and rubbed his face, and for an instant I wavered.

Too late
, I thought.

‘We’re all the heroes of our own stories,’ Dr Edwards once said.

‘Or heroines,’ I responded. ‘Don’t forget the heroines. After all, for much of history, anonymous was a woman.’

‘Very true. A bastardization of a Woolf quote, I believe.’

It had been a light-bulb moment. In my story it was me. Always me.

‘We could get bagels,’ Ben said and I thought:
You idiot, we
could
have got bagels, but you’ve blown it. No second chances. Or rather, you’ve had about six second chances. No seventh second chance.

He didn’t have a clue what he had coming. I almost felt sorry for him.

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: Stay Away

 

Dear Elizabeth,

 

I’m immeasurably sorry about Alice. It’ll mean nothing to inform you of that, but I am. One’s forever talking about the power of words yet they seem woefully inadequate at instances like this. I
debated whether to send you a condolence card, but concluded it would be safer not to, especially after my ill-judged earlier email. Apologies if that was insensitive.

 

I can understand why you’re so protective of Alice, what parent wouldn’t be, but perhaps I should explain precisely about my ‘research’. I view it more as tribute than obituary; it certainly isn’t about exposing her foibles because we all have enough of those. You know me, Liz: I’m interested in people, people in all their brilliant technicolour detail. And they don’t come much more brilliant or technicolour than Alice.

 

Quasi-academic endeavours are like a life. They’re hard to judge part way through; you have to view the end results, but can you not draw reassurance from how many of Alice’s friends and colleagues are coming forward to help? You also have my word I’d never treat her memory with anything but respect.

 

I should stress this is a personal project, not one conducted under the university’s auspices. Frankly, I’m sick of academia: its snobbery and small-mindedness. Of course, I say I eschew the word ‘research’, but I can’t
not
be an academic, any more than you can’t
not
work in a building society or your husband can’t not be a heating engineer or your son can’t not be a lawyer. See what I mean about our traces, a brief foray into the Internet has revealed some of
yours
.

 

I see your son’s got two children (gosh, Liz – you, a grandmother) and a partnership in such a reputable firm is a huge achievement for a man of his age. I probably shouldn’t refer to him as ‘young’, but you get to an age when virtually everyone seems exactly that – except one’s peers, of course, who start falling off their perches with alarming alacrity. Funerals are the only occasion I have any contact with most of my contemporaries these days. Two of the bloody things I’ve been to this year and it’s only March. I’m
jolly proficient at them: the walk, the handshakes, the awkward first lines, even the hugs and as you know I’ve never been a hugger. I know sodding
Abide with Me
off by heart.

 

Could we get together for coffee or something stronger? We could meet somewhere ‘neutral’ if this place harbours ghosts for you. I could share some of my – again, forgive the insensitive word – ‘findings’.

 

If you’d like my view, it’s that Alice, the real Alice, the one I’ve come to only properly know over these past few weeks, was very different to the one most people encountered. Deeper, more complex. She’s extraordinarily similar to you.

 

How have
you
been, Liz? I gather you stayed in Corby. No doubt Southampton seems a lifetime ago now. I never escaped; I’m even in the same bloody office. It’s my birthday soon, a big one: sixty-five. Guess that’ll make you fifty-four. I’m not in great health, but Fliss is taking me out for dinner: a country-house hotel in the New Forest. They do some great Italian reds and the venison is spectacular. We go there every year, sit at the same table. I like tradition.

 

No one calls me Jem these days.

 

Yours,

Jem