What She Left: Enhanced Edition (15 page)

I know where you live, Mr Hotshot Professor … Could track you down as easily as order a pizza … You better leave her alone … none of your business … Wouldn’t be so keen to dig up the past then, would you, Mr Anthroporologic? [sic] … She died … [indistinguishable word] … dead … gone … Which bit of that can’t you grasp? She [indistinguishable words] bridge. [Indistinguishable words]. Should be ashamed, ashamed … No more opening old wounds, no more … [indistinguishable words] loved Alice. Watch yourself, old man, because bad things happen, accidents happen.

Between Luke Addison and Alice Salmon

10.06 a.m.

15.42 p.m.

20
.
02 p.m.

23
.
41 p.m.

Between Charlie Moore and Luke Addison

18
.
20 p.m.

It’s eighteen minutes past four and I can’t sleep.

A new city, a new job, new flatmates. It’s like freshers’ week all over again. I’ve decided life’s one giant game of snakes and ladders: get to the top of one ladder then, bam, down a snake you go!

Nights feel most like the snakes. Should make a rule: no entries after 11 p.m.

That fox is outside. He always hangs around. A boy fox, I reckon, big but raggedy like a doll. Must be very lonely out there among the bins and the buses, and how much would
he like even just once to feel grass under his paws? Hope he finds a girl. Or sounds like he’s already found more than one, the plaaaaayer.

How can I feel this lonely when there are seven million people in London? I watch them on trains – in their skinny jeans and big glasses, reading the
Metro
and texting, tinny traces of Dizzee Rascal or Kaiser Chiefs escaping from their earphones – and imagine their existences unfolding alongside mine. Listen to their conversations and try to piece together whole lives from overheard fragments.

‘You overanalyse stuff,’ Meg said once, and perhaps this is what she means. Watching a fox in the garden – rather, the stamp-sized square of concrete we share with the possibly pregnant lady downstairs, Maybe Baby, and the Polish family upstairs we call ‘When’s Bins?’ because that’s as far as their conversation with us has gone.

Am I not too old to feel like this, to still surprise myself? To catch myself in the mirror and think:
Alice, WTF
? All those promises I made myself as a starry-eyed teenager – to never touch drugs, never get in debt, never let anyone down. Life overtakes you. Never imagined I’d get a tattoo and, OK, it’s discreet, but it’s still a tattoo and my parents would go ballistic if they saw it. Vowed never to let myself get messed around by a man, too, but here I am still swapping texts with Ben. He even gatecrashed my twenty-first lunch in Corby.

‘You seeing anyone these days?’ he’d asked uninterestedly after breezing in.

‘No. You?’

‘Nothing serious.’ It all had a certain reassuring familiarity. ‘Remember when we stood on the Pont des Arts?’ The way he pronounced it sounded very French. ‘That was special.’

‘I’m not going to spend the night with you.’

‘We’ll see.’

‘I mean it.’

‘You were quick enough to let me buy you a drink.’

‘Don’t spoil it, Ben. Let’s end today on good terms. Let’s prove we can do that.’

He put his hand on my knee. ‘I’m still mad about you.’

‘You’re not. You’re mad about the idea of me. In practice, you can’t cope with a girlfriend. And take your hand off me, too.’

It was like a game of pontoon where he kept on twisting: that was him all over, keeping on twisting even though he knew he’d bust because he always did. A bit of me felt ashamed that I’d fallen for him; Meg always said he was a dick.

He’d moved his hand up my leg. ‘What have we got here? You like that, don’t you?’

‘Get your hand off me.’

‘You’re a prick-tease, Lissa, that’s what you are.’

I slapped him. Once, quick and hard across the face and it was first time I’d ever slapped anyone and immediately felt compelled to ask if he was all right. A red mark began blooming on his left cheek. ‘She loves me really,’ he laughed to a man on a nearby table. ‘I will sleep with you again,’ he said to me. ‘If not tonight, one day.’

I left him in the bar.

Had a good feeling about this place as soon as I saw it on Gumtree.

‘The room catches the sun – in the evening it shines right in,’ the ad had said and three hours later I was having coffee with Alex and Soph.

‘We’d like someone we can get on with,’ he said.

‘But failing that, we’ll settle for someone who’s not a serial killer,’ she added.

They showed me the room and the sun was shining right in. ‘When can I move in?’ I asked.

It isn’t shining in now.

He’s still out there, that fox. Rusty, I’m going to call him. Little Rusty. I’m going to make him my word of this diary entry. I’d put food out, but Soph reckons he’ll have fleas and could bite, so sorry, little man, you’re on your own; we’ll have to just talk for now.

I look myself up and down in the mirror. Still as alien to myself as when I was a teenager: this thing I carry around, that carries me around, this
body
. I touch my hair, my face, my hips. Trace the tiny scar line on my wrist. It scares me: what she, that woman I’m looking at, is capable of.

Thing is, it’s not solely in bad ways I surprise myself. Wouldn’t have imagined in a million years I’d have it in me to sit in court when I was in Southampton and watch that animal I helped bring to trial for assaulting the old lady get sentenced and not flinch even when he blew me a kiss. Then there was the course after I’d started work when I had to give the presentation to all the bosses and I didn’t get my words garbled (‘Engage brain before mouth, salmon fry,’ Dad used to tell me), didn’t even need my crib cards, and when I’d finished they’d all clapped; seriously, they all clapped and not piss-taking, either.

I’m probably being a drama queen. That’s what Dad used to call me, and then later when I loved to dance he’d say I was more of a dancing queen than a drama queen and I loved dancing for him and I still love dancing now, I love it, love it, love it!

It’s no big deal. Lots of people don’t sleep – Mum included. I know because she told me once. She said when she was young she had spells when it all felt pointless: too little, too much, too overwhelming. ‘You will talk to me, if
you ever feel like that?’ she’d asked. ‘Promise you’ll talk to me, Alice.’

You’ve got to look at your monsters, she always says.

I’m lucky. I don’t have many monsters. One, perhaps, that I’ve never dared properly look at. Old Cookie.

‘I met an old friend of yours,’ I’d said, fishing for information, the next occasion I rang Mum after the anthropology party. ‘A Professor Cooke. What’s he like?’

‘He’s bad news, Alice, that’s what he is,’ she’d replied.

I’d largely managed to avoid him for the next three years, despite his periodic, clumsy attempts to ingratiate himself with me. Once, crazily, buzzing and bold after a night dancing in the Union, I took a detour and walked past his office, curiosity made me – the urge to know what happened gradually growing stronger than the desperation to forget, a propelling impulse to shout the odds at the old bastard. He was at his desk, gawking vacantly out of the window, like how Mr Woof used to at the back door when he was waiting to be taken out for a walk. I almost tapped on the glass to check he hadn’t died. Then I recalled his hands, and ran again …

Twenty to six. The toilet’s just flushed. Alex will leave for work at ten to seven and Soph will go to the gym. Weird how I know their routines: these strangers who a ten-minute walk to a station brought together. They know I block the hall up with my bike and like to eat late, but they don’t know that when the world is asleep Rusty and I are friends. Alex will have toast, Soph a black coffee, our three lives crossing briefly in the kitchen. ‘Have a good one,’ we’ll say. ‘See you tonight.’ I won’t mention I’ve been awake half the night; Soph won’t mention another day’s swung by with her barely eating; Alex won’t mention he’s still crazy about
his ex. But I know, because our Venn diagrams overlapped here: Flat 8, 25 Bedlington Road, Balham SW12. The prospect of one day falling out of touch with them gives me a sinking dread.

But tonight it’s drinks and dinner after work with the team. In some warm restaurant on the South Bank, the click of chopsticks, the ebb and flow of conversation about Boris bikes and Heath Ledger, the jokes about Wayne and Coleen or Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross; in that bubble of laughter, this will be a mere memory.

A quick bath, a cup of tea, a glance at the headlines on my phone – they reckon the snow we had was the worst for twenty years – and she’ll be here, the me who’ll be on the South Bank in twelve hours, a mere half a day away, laughing, the life and soul of the party, the me in the mask.

Being single rocks, but it’ll be shit to never have anyone and I sure have a knack for telling men who want to keep it no big deal that I need more, or men who want to get serious that we should take it easy (not that there’s been too many of those: basically only Josh and we were only sixth-formers). Always seem to get relationships the wrong way round, like I’m seeing the world through a mirror.

Were you awake at ten to four this morning? Did you look down at the garden and feel dizzy? Did you whisper to Rusty?

Tell me about those moments you have, you and only you.

Who are you?

Who am
I
?