What She Left: Enhanced Edition Read online

  ‘Bad things happen when you’re that drunk,’ she said, stroking my forehead.

  That was her all over, assuming life is a series of disasters waiting to happen. Well, it might have been for her but it won’t be for me. ‘Bad things happen when you’re sober,’ I replied enigmatically.

  ‘For once, listen to me, Alice!’

  That was libellous too because I spent most of my life doing that – I had no choice. ‘I can’t wait to move out,’ I said. I’m counting down the days. The end of September and, Southampton, here I come. Mum was adamant I shouldn’t go there, banged on about how I must go to Oxford, said it was nuts to turn a place down there. That was so typical of my mother – quick enough to dole out advice as long as it doesn’t impact on her. As long as I become the vision of me she has in her head: the hard-working grade-A student who gets a nice husband and 2.4 kids or becomes a teetotal nun. Well, no way was I going to Oxford with a bunch of toffs. She’s also now insisting I’m home before midnight next Friday and out of the blue yesterday announced she wasn’t sure about me going to V. ‘Maybe you ought to drink. It might make you less boring,’ I said.

  She began picking up my clothes off the floor, hunched over like an old granny, frantically tossing them in the washing basket. She was in a right strop.

  ‘For God’s sake, leave my stuff alone! You’re always on my case.’

  She did that thing then when she bites her lip and looks all deflated like a balloon at the end of a party. ‘Well, I’m sorry for being concerned about my daughter’s welfare. I’m sorry for loving you!’

  ‘I didn’t mean that, I meant –’

  ‘What exactly did you mean?’

  ‘You’re just so sanctimonious,’ I said, deploying my current favourite word. I used to include a new word in every diary entry when I was a kid, ideally making them many-syllabled or erudite (that may have even been one), complicated commendations that would have impressed anyone who stumbled across my scribblings, not that I let anyone within a mile of them. All the old diary stuff’s gone – burnt – and this, dear reader, is the eighteen-plus edition! This is the bits of me people don’t see. Like the black-box recorder in an aeroplane. I might as well write this stuff down because no one round here listens to me, I might as well be invisible.

  Mum says she’ll miss me like crazy after I fly the nest and it makes me imagine myself as a baby bird, a big ugly one like an ostrich or a stork, not an elegant graceful one, and remembering that when she was in my bedroom made me want to take back the last few minutes. ‘Why don’t you drink?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s a long story,’ she said. ‘It’s complicated.’

  But even that annoyed me. I was the one with the complicated life. All she had to do was go to her stupid job in the building society wearing an ‘Elizabeth Salmon Mortgage Adviser’ badge and either give money to people who couldn’t afford to borrow it or not give it to those could. She never talks about her academic career, but it must have been a million times more interesting than working on a shitty high street. I imagined V again – the texts arriving from Meg, the photos of Pink and Kings of Leon on stage between all the outstretched arms in the sunshine – and felt a burn of anger. ‘You’re just jealous,’ I said.

  ‘Of what exactly?’

  ‘The fact that I’ve got a life. It’s like a graveyard round here.’

  I was out like a light the second she left the room.

  A bit later I went down to the kitchen and Mum was stacking the dishwasher. I put some toast on. ‘How are you feeling now?’ she asked. ‘We could go for a walk later if you fancy it. Fresh air helps.’

  I munched my toast. It tasted of nothing, but made me feel sick.

  ‘That stuff you said, Alice, you don’t really think that’s the case, do you?’

  Right then I couldn’t recall exactly what I had said. A motor had been turning in me, that thing that made me say what I shouldn’t, do what I shouldn’t, and now I felt shit – hungover shit but shit-shit, too – just plain bad. I put my hand on the sleeve of her faded pink dressing gown (Dad bought it for her one birthday – I helped him choose it, OK, I chose it for him) and felt ashamed. It occurred to me that maybe she simply wasn’t happy.

  I gave her a big hug and cried a bit and she hung on.

  ‘There there, sweetie,’ she said, rubbing my back. ‘Let it all out. There’s no harm done. Parents have to let their kids grow, but they also have to let them go. You’ll understand that one day.’

  I pulled a face.

  ‘That’s all for the future,’ she said. ‘You’ve got a lot to fit in before then. There’s university, for starters. Imagine, both my babies away at uni.’

  We don’t see much of Robbie now he’s at Durham. He’s been in Australia this summer, the lucky sod; I get pictures of beaches and messages like ‘How’s Corby, loser?’

  ‘Sorry about earlier,’ I said. ‘I’m so stupid.’

  ‘You’re your mother’s daughter all right.’

  We did a bit of surfing then, reading the NUS and various uni sites to check what I was supposed to be taking (the list gets longer by the day!) and studying the pictures of girls playing hockey or wandering in twos and threes between brick buildings with books under their arms or holding their mortar boards in the air – it all felt unreal. Soon I’m going to move out.

  ‘You’ll be fine, sweetie,’ Mum said, reading my mind. ‘You’ll be absolutely fine.’

  Maybe this, I thought, sitting at the kitchen table, is nostalgia – the swoosh of the dishwasher, the smell of the pine floor, the click of the boiler – maybe this will be what I’ll come to remember, come to miss. Mr Woof came up and nuzzled into my lap. It’s as if even he knows I’m going.

  ‘What does it make you feel like, drinking?’ Mum asked.

  I nearly said awful, but I recalled the night before. The Peppers were playing and one of the guys was dancing on a table and I’d had a huge gulp of punch, tasted the pineapple and it had struck me how brilliant it would be if life could stay exactly like this for ever. ‘Guess it makes me feel kind of better,’ I said. ‘Not like I am, not like Alice.’

  ‘Sweetheart,’ she said. ‘It’s an illusion. How you feel when you’re full of gin is not real.’

  ‘Hate gin,’ I said.

  ‘Wish I had,’ she said, half smiling. ‘This is real. The morning after, the regret, the shame, us arguing, that’s the worst – although we’ll put it right, we’ll always put it right, you and me.’ She was running her hand through my hair how she used to when I was a little girl. ‘Look how beautiful you are,’ she said.

  ‘I hate arguing with you,’ I said.

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘You’re the best mum I’ve got by far!’ I said, laughing, wiping snot from my nose.

  ‘And you’re the best daughter I’ve got by far.’

  Letter sent by Professor Jeremy Cooke,

  7 February 2012

  Larry,

  Two letters in two days, this must be a record – certainly as regards our recent correspondence.

  It’s appalling the way a death brings out the worst in people. The students have been positively feasting on this Alice business, despite none of the current crop actually having known her. As you can imagine, the campus rumour mill has gone into overdrive – it’s replaced the Arctic weather as the main topic of conversation. The students have taken to their phones, laptops and iPads to trade theories. They shake their heads and nod enthusiastically in the canteen and in lecture halls and stand around, stamping the snow off their feet, gossiping in chilly huddles in the quad outside my office. There I go again, old chap, referring to it as a quad: that ostentatious habit I cultivated when I fostered pretensions of Oxbridge; it’s actually a concrete space through which the students shuffle directionless, an apt metaphor for their futures if ever there was one.

  I’d cycled back to my office from the SCR on Monday, eschewing my lecturing duties by feigning sickness (an irony there) and searched for Alice onli
ne. There were lots of Alice Salmons, but I soon found the one in question. Social media was awash with it; who the hell says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, eh Larry? This is how news works these days: a giant, grotesque game of Chinese whispers. Titbits of gossip, fag ends of conversations, nuggets of recycled information overheard between four down and nineteen across. But such tosh: she wasn’t a bubbly blonde, she wasn’t a feminist crusader, she wasn’t Fleet Street’s finest. It was all so damn reductive. I saw her variously described as happy-go-lucky, perfect, irresponsible, unlucky, stupid, fit, fat, gorgeous, a one-in-a-million.

  ‘No,’ I heard myself muttering. ‘Stop it.’

  Perhaps this is how youngsters grieve nowadays? That shrink I had a brief flirtation with many years ago (it would have been shortly after I knew Alice’s mother, as you may recall) used to say that pain had to go somewhere.

  I read everything about her and by her I could find. ‘Your with the angels,’ someone had written on her Facebook page and it gave me a little stab of sadness. At least get your damn spelling right. I cut and pasted it all on to my desktop and experienced a rare sense of satisfaction, of calm. There. I had a little bit of her. It struck me that if I’d discovered all this after a few minutes, how much I could learn if I delved deeper. I’d like to hope we’re all more than the sum of our parts. Even me. A sixty-four-year-old academic whose place in the world has never felt entirely set.

  I’ve just re-read this dispatch; I did it out loud because I like to get a measure of cadence. Something too awful about the sound of one’s own utterances, though; it’s like hearing someone else. The tired, treacly public-school vowels; not even a trace of Edinburgh. Strange that that’s me, my voice. Old Cookie. Is that what the students have had to listen to all these years, poor blighters? I’ve been trying to recall Alice’s voice. An accent that was hard to place. Socially mobile parents. A grammar-school inflection. Shot through with laughter. Where’s it gone, the voice that once said to me, ‘Why do you treat me as if I’m special?’?

  I can hardly contact Elizabeth, but I could go to her friends and colleagues. I could go to the brother. I found him on his firm’s website, along with a potted biography and a black-and-white photo. Robert. He doesn’t look much like his sister or his mother. It wasn’t hard to track down her friends, either. They work in marketing and property and finance; a few have young families, little Sophies and Georges. The children Alice will never get to have. One by one, I contacted them. ‘We haven’t met,’ my communications began, ‘but we have something in common …’

  To research, to record, to collate – yes, this is the role of the anthropologist. Larry – might it not bring her family some comfort, happiness even, if I could pull together some such information? Breathe a flutter of life back into her? Make her dance once more, because she always was a dancer. She must have got that from her mother: Elizabeth loved to dance.

  It would be grand to hear your take on this. Despite your credentials, you’ve always been far more grounded than me, always been regarded as – a ghastly phrase, admittedly – a man of the people, even if I have viewed you exclusively as mine. You’ve been the one person to whom I’ve been able to turn. ‘Inspiration’ is an overused word, but that’s what you’ve been to me. You’ve never judged me. I’ll never be able to repay you, although I have this week made provision for your children in my will.

  Ah, the delicious indulgence of writing longhand. As a child, it used to worry me that my handwriting kept changing style: I feared I’d never be an adult until it stayed constant. That would then be me, formed. How do people develop that sense of self nowadays, when all they write on is keyboards? I’m determined to continue corresponding with you in this way. It’s one of our traditions, one of our secrets. One of our many.

  You won’t be surprised to hear this Alice news has hit me for six. I’m not going to pretend it hasn’t; why would I? Whoever else we’ve duped, we’ve never lied to each other. That was our pact: no lies. In a world where secrets were omnipresent, our honesty has been one of life’s few constants. You’re like a compass bearing for me.

  ‘Partners in crime,’ you once joked.

  I’ve dragged all the information into a ‘Save Alice’ folder. Calling it that made me chuckle; naming a piece of work has always been one of my favourite parts. The first reply from one of her friends came within ten minutes.

  Forget Ophelia, it’s Alice Salmon I’m going to paint.

  Blog post by Megan Parker,

  6 February 2012, 22.01 p.m.

  Bought a card but what do you say? How can a card offer even a teensy grain of comfort? Alice is dead. My best friend Alice is dead. Never known anyone my age who’s died before. So unjust so unfair so unreal – like being told there’s a giraffe in the garden. Can’t stop crying. How can you be gone? How can you die when other people go on living? Breathing and eating and walking around, murderers and rapists and scum like that? There’s no justice when someone as wonderful as you can die. You’re not gone for a day or a week or a month or even a whole summer like when you worked in Center Parcs but for ever. Not letting myself dwell on how that might feel or how long that might last.

  Couldn’t face being on my own so came home to my mum and dad’s. Dad reckons there’ll have to be a post-mortem because there always is when someone dies unexpectedly. ‘That poor girl, having to go through that as well,’ he said.

  Where are you? Where have they taken you? I know some places you’re not – you’re not on top of that hill in the Lakes with me and Chloe and Lauren, us with our hands on the trig point. You’re not in that Thai restaurant we always used to go to on Clapham High Street (a restaurant, get us, Alice, haven’t we got all adult?!). You’re not in the minibus on that hockey-club tour singing along to ‘Amarillo’. There’ll be so many places you’re not now. There it is again, the giraffe in the garden: that you’re not. But when I look out there’s nothing, just the rusty swing that me and you used to play on, telling each other secrets and making plans for when we grew up and you’ve only got to do a few of them, just as you were getting the hang of life, you crazy silly girl, it’s snapped shut around you. It’s not fair, but when I used to say that to you, you replied that the world wasn’t fair, it was full of injustice, and if people simply opened their eyes they’d see.

  I posted the card to your mum and dad. A stupid card with a pink flower on the front and ‘With deepest sympathy’ underneath. Seems surreal that it’s you we’ve got deepest sympathy over. They’ll miss you so very much. Robbie will, too. Wish I knew what you’d want me to do about Luke, as well, whether to hate him or not because a bit of me is certain you’d have got back together.

  We’ve been friends since we were five. Stuck together through thick and thin … you always used to joke that you were the thick one and I was the thin one … and school and rubbish boyfriends, and we even got to go to uni together and not because we were scaredy-cats, but because Southampton was such a great place and it was fab having you there, even though you were far more in with the in-crowd than I ever was!

  Who’s going to keep me on the straight and narrow and tell me I’m weird for having a thing about older men?! You joked we were a right pair of hopeless cases, didn’t you? You going through what you were with Luke, and me holding out for George Clooney but prepared to accept Harrison Ford at a push.

  ‘Anyone who’s anyone dies at twenty-seven,’ you said after Amy Winehouse OD’d, but you only said it to spark a debate. You used to do that a lot, and you didn’t even make it to twenty-seven. Dies – that’s a horrible word, a hateful word. There are all sorts of theories flying around, but why were you by the river in the first place? You hated water.

  Alice, babe, hope you don’t mind me putting this stuff on the blog. You’d have probably done the same. ‘Get it out,’ you used to say. ‘Spit out the pain. Throw it all back at the world.’

  Spoke to Chloe and Lauren earlier. Didn’t talk much; we just cried. Rang your mum and dad,
too, but they were on voicemail. We’ll all have to be strong for them now: your lovely dad with his mad sweaters and that way he has of saying Al-ice, pausing between the ‘Al’ and the ‘ice’ as if he’s asking a question, and your mum, your gorgeous mum, a one-woman dynamo, who you’re an absolute spitting image of and take after in so many ways, but you won’t take after anyone any more. It’s stopped, you have, a line’s been drawn under you, the last page in your book, and there’s a huge hole where you and that laugh and that AWFUL taste in music and those OUTRAGEOUS leggings should be.

  I’ve just rung your mobile because I wanted to hear your voice. Not here. Obviously. Would love to talk to you though so pleeeeease leave me a lovely message and we’ll chat very soon …

  My mum’s come in and said we have to remember the good times because that’s how people live on. I looked over her shoulder at the rusty swing. ‘There’s a giraffe in the garden,’ I said.

  She must have thought I was mad.

  A light has gone out. Love you, Alice Palace …

  Article in Anthropology à la Mode,

  August 2013

  ‘Why I exhumed the past’

  Professor Jeremy Cooke has gone from unknown academic to household name in twelve months. In this personal piece, he candidly explains how the discovery of a body sparked his ‘research’ and changed his life forever.

  It was hardly a Eureka moment, although possibly as close to one as I was ever going to get.

  I’d been in the library and had seen a student scrawl his initials in the condensation on the window. RP. Robert Pearce, I think his name was, although that’s immaterial. I’d been transfixed by the letters and, after he’d left, had found myself inserting an ‘I’ between them. One of the librarians smiled awkwardly at me. Old Cookie, she was probably thinking, he’s an odd one. I sat down in the student’s vacated, still-warm seat. It stayed for hours, the RIP, so I did, too. I must have dozed off and, when I woke, it was gone. RP – RIP – had been there, then not there. That was when it struck me. How each of us does this every day: leaves a trail, an imprint, a mark. Our mark. Might it be possible, I pondered, to reconstruct a life out of such fragments? To reassemble a person, piece them back together from such soluble shards? Because I had the perfect opportunity. A life – actually, a death – on my very own doorstep. There, right under my nose. Alice Salmon.