What She Left: Enhanced Edition (11 page)

My dear Larry,

That lad with the tattoos came back today. I stopped by my office to wade perfunctorily through some funding documents I’d been neglecting and there he was, sitting inside, bold as brass, as if envisaging my arrival. ‘You,’ I said.

‘Hello, Iceman,’ he replied. ‘I figured you’d like to see your letter again.’

He retrieved it from his rucksack. ‘Not sure why I kept it. Maybe it struck a chord with me. Discovering someone else had a thing about Alice too was well weird. It prompted a pretty full-on spell of nicking her stuff. A psychologist would have a field day with that, wouldn’t they? Probably reckon I was upping my game to see off the competition!’

I should have anticipated the document making a reappearance, Larry, but I’d assumed it wouldn’t have survived – lost or become indecipherable or mouldered to zero: it was only paper, after all.

‘Love this city, love being at uni here – even if some freakoid did shove a note under my door in freshers’ week professing their love for me,’ she’d confided in me once, when she joined me in my office for a soupçon of alcohol after our annual departmental bash.

‘How unsettling,’ I’d replied, feigning ignorance. ‘Moths attracted to your bright light?’

‘Flies round shit, more like,’ she’d said.

The boy in my office said: ‘You’d have to be a right screw-up to write this.’

The loop of a ‘B’. The high, sharp point of a capital ‘A’. Mine, all mine.

‘She decided it was a practical joke, but I can spot a sicko when I see one. What do you reckon, Iceman, what’s your sicko radar like? Practical joke or nutter? My money’s on the latter – where’s yours? Come on, where’s
your money
?’

He was toying with me. ‘I need your name,’ I said.

‘They call me Mocksy.’ He fondled my note; he’d no right to dredge it up. Another word I recognized, a turn of phrase, the construction of a sentence. In the right hands, linguistics is like a mini-DNA profile, as reliable as any identity parade. I looked around. My degree certificate, a faded photograph of me with a minor minister, a cutting from a magazine headlined ‘Cooke closes on breakthrough’ referring to some ultimately futile strand of research.

‘Instead of a signature, there’s a question mark. What a wack job! A question mark and a kiss – it’s the sort of thing a kid would do.’

I stared down at the ‘X’. Those two crossed strokes. The twenty-fourth letter of the alphabet, a signifier of ten, an unknown variable, the first letter of the Greek word for Christ. A kiss. ‘You stay away from me and you stay away from Alice Salmon’s memory, you hear.’

‘Why?’ he asked. ‘You’re not.’

We both gazed down at the single sheet of paper. A previous piece of me, toxic, precious.
Sweet Alice, don’t be afraid
, it began.

‘Five hundred quid,’ he said.

I’ve lost track of the number of occasions upon which I’ve unburdened on you, Larry. But I had – I have – so very
few confidants. All those pages we devoted to Descartes and Thomas Aquinas must have paled into insignificance against the space I filled ruminating on Alice in 2004 and prior to that, back in the early 1980s, my marital indiscretion. Remember how I begged you to visit? To make a mercy mission, like some lumbering Saint Bernard bearing brandy and sage advice? We could have gone to the Crown; could have holed up in the back bar and other patrons wouldn’t have been able to work out whether we were perfect strangers or the most intimate of friends, and swapped stories over a pint of the awful, nutty frothy mouthwash they call beer.

‘Five hundred quid,’ the boy with tattoos repeated. ‘Or Mr and Mrs Salmon get to see a copy of this.’

He held it back out and the faintest of smiles broke on the corner of his mouth. I saw another word and it gave me a pinch of melancholy for when I’d been learning to spell: the sense of infinite possibility, the first occasion upon which I’d grasped the concept that our understanding of the world – the world itself, therefore – was dependent on the words we had to explain it.

It’s as vivid now as ever how I’d crept into Bates Hall: its cold stairwells, echoey corridors and frayed carpets. It reminded me of Warwick. The smell of stale food, chilli con carne; the Proustian section of my brain was in overdrive.
You’re not an undistinguished, inconsequential scholar,
I thought as I’d hunted for her room. She had one of those name tags on her door, the sort children do. If she’d opened it, who knows what I’d have done. Said hello? Enquired how she was settling in? Pushed my way in? I’d stridden along the corridor, my brain spinning:
Don’t open the door, open the door, don’t open the door, open the door
. It seemed critical that it didn’t go unsaid, how exquisite she was. Her
having absolutely no idea, of course, merely made her
more
so. She was a carbon copy of her mother.

God, how I adore women. I’ve worshipped the shape of their necks, the colour of their lips, the smell of their hair.
I want to fuck them all, each and every last damn one of them
, I recall once writing to you. It hasn’t, as you know, been exclusively
women
I’ve found myself drawn towards – many is the occasion I’ve recounted my handful of encounters with fellow male undergraduates at Warwick. Why is it, Larry, that when I recall those quick and largely unsatisfactory trysts, it’s with a sense of shame? Hundreds of species of animals have been shown to be homosexual, yet only one –
us
– displays homophobia. I guess any one of those men could have set me on a different course. Instead I buried it away, that part of me, if indeed it
was
a part of me, the portion that had taken me to public parks and strangers’ rooms festooned with the memorabilia of public schools, mostly slightly less minor than mine. It’s irrelevant now. I’ve made my choices.

I’d phrased the letter in a way that I’d hoped wouldn’t scare Alice. Astounding how it’s possible to say so much and so little in nine sentences. I cogitated, as I wrote it:
Am I having a breakdown?
I’ve often grappled with what that would feel like. It’s probably not as dramatic as one imagines: a series of tiny imperceptible and individually invisible steps. But I didn’t care. I’d have been noticed, been heard, been felt.
Me
. Old Cookie. Even if she went public, they’d never twig it was me and, besides, it wasn’t as if my career was going anywhere. Shortly before, I’d been passed over for the departmental headship in favour of a boy from Imperial. ‘It’s not that we don’t recognize your contribution,’ I was informed patronizingly. ‘Rather that the role requires a different skill set to yours.’

Fliss could tell something was amiss. ‘You seem preoccupied,’ she said the night I wrote my epistle. I’d stumbled on an Attenborough documentary that temporarily satiated us, then we went up and she read a South Downs flora and fauna book and I flicked absent-mindedly through mine on the last days of the Iroquoian, and within a few minutes she was snoring and I crept down to my study and dug out my fountain pen.

Fliss reckoned my affair – sorry to keep bouncing around in history, old boy, but that’s how our memories work – made us stronger, but it tore chunks out of us. Trouble is, it’s human nature to look after Number One. We all need to be convinced we’re the most important being on earth; it’s a prerequisite of evolution. Is that a very pessimistic prognosis – a symptom possibly of never having children, as you did? They say having them teaches you to put someone else before yourself. Sure, I’ve made sacrifices. Jesus, watching one’s mother slowly die involves plenty of those – my father and I had severed all contact long before that vicious old bastard snuffed it – but if you’d have said, ‘Her life or yours?’ how would I have responded? How would any of us?

Yes, I have been drinking, but only a little winter warmer. The Balvenie single malt Fliss and I have been saving for a special occasion. Trouble is, I never seemed to have one. I’ve spent my whole life doing that, Larry.
Waiting
.

Maybe the day I sneaked into Bates Hall was a special occasion? Feeling alive, vital, what it is to be a human being, a
man
. I hadn’t felt like that – like this – for years. Sometimes we’re more than science, aren’t we? More than my anthropology or your genetics. We confound logic. That’s when we’re at our best, at our most beautiful. Our most dangerous, too.

‘Would you say I’m a good person?’ I asked the boys in my office this morning, the one sitting opposite me with tattoos and the apprehensive-looking one in the picture on the wall.

‘It wasn’t a good person who wrote this,’ one of them replied. ‘Now where’s my fucking five hundred quid?’

Ten minutes later I was standing with him at a cash point.

Yours as ever,

Jeremy

I’d barely finished my cheesecake and Dad was up on his feet, tapping his glass. ‘Your attention please, for just a few moments. It only feels like yesterday Lizzie was rushed to hospital – and when I say rushed, I
mean
rushed. Our beautiful daughter was nearly born on the A427!’

My parents had booked this amazing restaurant for my twenty-first lunch – one of those places that’s so popular it’s got a waiting list, hence the late celebration! Eighteen of us, rellies, godparents and family friends, the ones I used to call uncles and aunties even though they weren’t. I went for the Scottish smoked salmon (my cannibal tendencies!), which was yummy, although I’d have been tempted by the scallops and lobster with ginger if I wasn’t a wuss when it came to shellfish. It had turned into a double celebration because I’d only gone and been offered a job. Yes, move over Kate Adie, you’re looking at
Southampton Messenger
junior reporter Alice Salmon, start date September 10.

‘We’re all very proud of Alice,’ Dad said. ‘She’s even got a 2:1, despite being adamant –’ cue his favourite uni joke – ‘that she’d only get a Desmond!’

He claimed afterwards it was an impromptu speech but no way José was it, him cracking all those gags like how it was Gordon Brown’s first coup as PM to get me to pay some tax. He was quite the raconteur.

‘I understand the real birthday bash is taking place next weekend in Southampton – somewhere called Flames,’ Dad said and I got a pinch of sadness that he couldn’t picture it – its alcoves and wood, its bright dance floor and dark corners –
the
place to go, we’d been told in freshers’ week – when I’d had so many brilliant nights out there. ‘Men of Southampton, watch out,’ he added, which Aunty Bev obviously assumed was code for ‘slag’ because she made a beeline for me straight afterwards and interrogated me about my love life (she is the god squad side of the family).