What She Left: Enhanced Edition (25 page)

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: The days of us

 

Dear Elizabeth,

 

Long time no speak – or rather no ‘e-speak’, as contemporary phraseology would have it. How the devil are you? It feels like an eternity since the days of us.

 

You’ll be perplexed as to why the hell this old dinosaur is making contact – well, I’ve picked up from the Internet that Alice may be back in this fine city for some sort of reunion this weekend and it’s rather sent me diving headlong into the past, sentimental old buffoon that I am. Life’s short, Liz, or it certainly is in my case – so why shouldn’t I reach out?

 

I bear scant resemblance to the old me. In fact, with the exception of my regulation uniform of cords and tweed, you’d barely recognize me. Would I you? I’ve tried googling you with limited success, unlike Alice who’s virtually omnipresent online. A bad guitar player but a good cook of Italian food – that’s the résumé she gave one site. I never realized she played the guitar.

 

I’m not expecting a visit – our contact was minimal when she was a student here – and knowing her, she’ll make a beeline straight for a public house. I’m not unreservedly repugnant to former students, though; I do keep in touch with a few. Their motive may be that they’ve identified me as a prospective referee, but it allows me to feel my endeavours are not entirely wasted.

 

I wasn’t entirely repugnant to you Liz, was I? I do regard our spell together with great fondness. You were beautiful. You still are, I expect. I was in pieces after we went our separate ways, not least due to the circumstances, particularly vis-à-vis your actions.

 

I’m not anticipating a reply to this email – although one would be most welcome – but felt compelled to reach out. Metaphorically speaking, of course. Which, with hindsight, is how the majority of my existence has been. It’s as if these last sixty years have been, not so much an act of living, but more an act of observing. We weren’t metaphorical, though, were we? We were very real, very literal.

 

Apologies for the intrusion. It felt important to say I hadn’t forgotten us. There’s a curious sentiment.
Us
.

 

Yours,

Jem

I defy anyone not to have been creative with the truth given the circumstances.

I couldn’t exactly tell the police the facts – that I’d yelled at you and grabbed your hair – could I? They’d never believe that was the extent of it.

There’s another factor, as well. Huge chunks of that night have disappeared. I simply can’t recall them. That’s how pissed I was. Yes, officer, I did have her by the hair but I can assure you I wouldn’t have subsequently hurt her, even though I can’t actually remember. I might as well sign my own arrest warrant.

What I mustn’t do – what I’ve promised you I won’t do – is forget the bits of you I can remember. Your green eyes and the crow’s feet you once claimed in a startled panic to have spotted. Stuff like that, it vanishes so quickly and the rest of the world is dead set on making me forget. It wouldn’t take much. My boss encouraging me to oversee a big project; it might be exactly what I need, to get my teeth into something concrete. The lads at the rugby club insisting I come over on Saturday for a run-out: it’ll do me a power of good. Letting my colleagues persuade me to go to the Porterhouse for a quick one: come on, it’ll be a laugh, I deserve it, the whole team will be there – and three hours later another girl could be ringing me so I’ve got
her
number in my phone and you’d be a former girlfriend, the one who died, the one I’d taken to Margate, the one I’d get over. No. No. NO.

I stand in Waterstone’s and leaf through books you loved. I listen to your summer 2011 playlist because that was the best summer
ever
. I go back to Southampton to immerse myself in your favourite city, back to the river, the scene of the crime, the place where we’d fought. I stare at photos of you on my phone as if you might materialize by magic if I can only concentrate enough.

At work I sit like a zombie and shrug when clients ask ‘Where are you on this, Luke?’ Spreadsheets swim in front of me. Voices echo unanswered around meeting rooms. What are we forecasting for third-quarter profits? What will 2013 look like for our business? Where can we take out costs?

Colleagues reassure me it’s normal, but covertly they love it: a story that’s on the Internet in
their
very own office. A death, the whiff of a crime. I pass their desks and they frantically close browsers or snap shut their phones. You don’t have to be a genius to establish the rest of those exchanges. He’s holding up remarkably well. He’s falling apart. He’s almost
too
calm.

And now I’m writing this down, despite my natural comfort zone – as you so frequently pointed out – being diagrams and numbers. ‘Bet you’ll put
this
in your diary, won’t you?’ I’d snapped by the river. ‘It’s pathetic, the way you’ll pour your heart out on a piece of paper.’

‘S’laptop,’ you’d said and rage had boiled inside me.

You can forget pretty much anything. It’s easy, you merely have to set your mind to it, block it out or keep replaying an alternate version so frequently that it becomes the reality. But I knew I’d never forget grabbing your hair.

‘If you ever touch me like that again I’ll report you to the police,’ you’d said.

It had started to go curly where it was wet from the snow and the palm of my hand tingled from its touch.

Afterwards, I walked until I found a late bar and necked cider and stabbed at a jukebox and danced on my own and when two lads laughed I thought,
You know nothing about me or what I’ve done
, and I had whisky and woke at five on the floor of my hotel room, my arm up on the side of the bed like I was clinging to a shipwreck, sick on the carpet, flashbacks to the night before breaking into my consciousness like stones smashing glass. Then I’d sat on the floor in my boxer shorts and tried to piece together the previous few hours, as we’d done so often, and I cried like a baby.

I’d had a scalding shower, scrubbed myself: had to get what had happened off me, had to get
you
off me, then got a
train back to Waterloo. Crossing the platform, scuttling past Smiths, the newspaper headlines jumped out at me – middle- class incomes under pressure, Facebook valued at £100 billion, the charges that might be brought as a result of the
Costa Concordia
disaster – and it had winded me. What I’d done. I went to the nearest pub, bought a pint of Stella and a double vodka and Coke.

‘I didn’t kill her,’ I said to Charlie a few days later.

‘Mate, no one suggested you did,’ he replied.

Bizarre that we weren’t spotted by the river or caught on CCTV.

Last night I read it’s vital that victims of crime cooperate to produce a photofit within twenty-four hours. Otherwise the impression they generate can diverge wildly from the reality. If the police don’t solve a crime – especially a serious one – within twenty-four hours the chances of doing so plummet, this article said.

In that beer garden in Waterloo, my phone rang, a number I didn’t recognize. ‘It’s Robert Salmon speaking. Where are you?’ he asked. ‘Are you alone?’

That was when I started lying.

Later still – two Stellas and two double vodkas later – that massive man at the bar, me thinking:
You’ll do.

And now I’m staring at the email you sent me on Friday 3 February, the day before you died, marginally before our two months was up. I’d found it three weeks after you died in my junk folder, shunted there because of the attachment, which seemingly flagged it as a virus risk, sandwiched between spam from a man claiming to need urgent cash because he was stranded in the Philippines and one offering me affordable office supplies.

‘
US
’, you’d typed in the subject field and my initial reaction had been: Why had Al emailed me about America? But
then I’d recalled we’d talked about a holiday there – visiting Ground Zero, the Empire State, eating bagels, taking in a show on Broadway. Maybe head out to the west coast.
Dawson’s Creek
,
The O.C.
,
90210
. ‘The vicarious landscape of my childhood,’ you referred to it as.

I count the days since you died. Thirty-two. 768 hours. A photofit now would bear a barely approximate resemblance.

The police, your family, your friends, that man in the pub, Megan, the contractor who I sat in a meeting room with today and complained about ‘under-delivery’. Stupid, they are, all of them, ignorant and in the dark. It’s me and you, we’re the ones who know what happened. It’s our secret.

‘Hey Mr L,’ your email began.