What She Left: Enhanced Edition (30 page)

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: Tell me

 

My dear Liz,

 

I was going to email you so you heard it from me, but events have overtaken me. That note was –
is
– indeed attributable to me. My handwriting’s always been spidery.

 

You may not believe me, but when I initiated my Alice research, I barely remembered the note. I’d been in a right imbroglio in 2004. Then Alice arrived and she reminded me so much of all the emotions I’d tried – and largely succeeded – to subjugate.
You
, basically. Then, discovering who she was, it was as if a piece of my past – a piece of me – came back to life. Once I invited her to a drinks party, the annual anthropology bash.

 

‘That sounds like a barrel of laughs,’ she’d joked. ‘Won’t it be just academic staff?’

 

‘You get a special dispensation because your mother used to work here.’

 

She’d hesitated.

 

‘There’ll be free alcohol,’ I informed her and that was the clincher.

 

‘You lot really know how to let your hair down,’ she’d said, observing us shuffling around like warmed-up cadavers. ‘Where’s the music? Where the
booze
?’

 

Three hours later we were in my office. She’d pulled a joint out of her pocket, we passed it between us and it reminded me of what I’d frequently felt my uni days
should
remind me of. She said she felt woozy, came and sat on my lap and I said, ‘No, don’t.’ Later she fell asleep on the sofa in the corner and I lay my sweater over her, went to pull it up around her, tuck her in, but she put her arms round my neck. ‘Smell nice,’ she said. Wasn’t intending to do what came next – you’ve got to believe me, Liz – but my hand brushed her hair and it was like an electric shock: a jolt of you coursing up into me.

 

I’m drunk, Liz. Not that it’s apparent. Can’t even do that well: get drunk. Look at this email: even the god-damn punctuation is right. I’m going to have another drink. The lecherous lecturer is going to get pie-eyed. A sober drunk. That’s an oxymoron if ever I heard one. Listen to me,
an oxymoron
. I’m even pretentious when I’m sozzled.

 

Fliss knows all about our affair. Finding out what I did with Alice will break her heart, but I owe her the truth. We mustn’t die with secrets and frankly I’m drowning under them. I wish I’d been let in on that particular one earlier: that they corrode the soul.

 

You often used to refer to the here and now, Liz – well, the trouble with that is it’s so bloody fleeting. Who’d have thought it, eh? The big C. A bugger of a brand, which is sufficiently rare that its evolution is impervious to predictions. It won’t finish me off forthwith, but it’s questionable whether I’ll become a
septuagenarian. I’m sorry if this is unpalatable but illness, like age, does that: makes one less empathetic and more immune to embarrassment.

 

Might you have it in your heart to not completely detest me? The Liz I shared part of my life with would. The one with whom I stood on Chesil beach, who whooped with pleasure at the Titians and Caravaggios in the National, who – aged twenty-something but little-girl-like – beamed when she learnt that the fur on a deer’s antlers was called ‘velvet’. Understanding and forgiveness: that’s pretty much all there is. And justice.

 

We shouldn’t be ashamed of us; we mustn’t whitewash ourselves out of history. We had a relationship, we slept together, we fucked. We matter.

 

It’s raining. I might sleep here tonight. It wouldn’t be unprecedented for me to wake among the chaos of paperwork, my phone bleeping from missed calls from Fliss. I’ve put that woman through so much worry. I’ve been such a selfish man, but shouldn’t it be how one typically behaves that dictates how one is judged? The person one is day in and day out over the long haul, rather than the best or worst thing one’s done. Wouldn’t that be a fairer barometer of the life you’ve led, the person you are?

 

When I wake it might be better. Tell me it will be. Tell me I’ll sleep. Tell me I won’t be staring at the walls in the night, concentrating on not screaming, or hugging my books, or writing in the condensation on the window: JFHC RIP. Tell me I’ll wake and I’ll be nine again – nine, say, or fourteen or even thirty-five would do. I’d take the sharp sting of my father’s belt, that evil old bastard, the schoolyard taunts, the coalescing gloom of Fliss’s hospital visits and those ever-more hypothetical conversations about names and nurseries and schools, or the emptying despair of middle age. I’d
take any of it not to be a man who feels the black end pressing down on me.

 

Let me sleep a good sleep. Let me whisky. Let me go gentle.

 

Was it gentle for you, when you so nearly went into that good night? That day in the refectory, the black beams of Tudor warships above your head, the table smooth from the rubbing of generations of academics’ elbows too far below your feet. You must have felt so utterly alone.

 

I saw a shrink after we split up and he was fond of one particular epigram: pain has to go somewhere. Right now mine is going to you. It’s unfair, but where else is there? Where it goes after that is up to you. I’m too tired to care. Isn’t this a turn up for the books? The man who’s zealously guarded his own decision-making, putting his fate in the hands of another.

 

Have pity on me. Throw me to the lions. It’s your call.

 

She’ll come into her own after I’m gone, Fliss will; I just
know
she will. She’ll make me proud. I wish I could say the same of myself.

 

Goodnight. Sleep tight. Don’t let the bedbugs bite. That’s what I would have said to my kids if I’d ever had them.

 

I’m sorry.

Love Jem

A 27-year-old man arrested on suspicion of the murder of a former Southampton resident has been released without charge.

Police have confirmed that the man has been freed from custody following questioning in relation to the February 5 death of Alice Salmon.

Police made the arrest yesterday after a new witness came forward in connection with the case, but the man from south London was released this afternoon.

Detective Superintendent Simon Ranger says: ‘Our investigations continue into the exact circumstances surrounding Alice’s death. A post-mortem has concluded that she died by drowning, but we are systematically working to establish her last movements.

‘I would like to thank members of the public who have assisted thus far and stress we remain keen to talk to anyone who saw Alice that evening or witnessed any activity near the River Dane.’

Alice Salmon’s body was discovered at 07.15 GMT on February 5.

If you have any information that could assist the investigation, please contact the incident room or call Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555111.

Interviewee stands up and paces around the room … cries again …