Read What She Left: Enhanced Edition Online
Authors: T. R. Richmond
What She Left: Enhanced Edition (33 page)
5 April 2012, 17.20 p.m.
SR: You said the girl on the weir was about to jump, then what?
JB: She started singing.
SR:
Singing?
JB: I was waving and stuff and reckoned I’d got her attention because she waved back. I could see her phone going through the air, the light of the screen, like.
SR: How did you respond?
JB: What sort of a world is it my baby’s going to grow up in when a girl can die and no one notices?
SR: How did she respond when you waved, Jessica?
JB: On Facebook someone’s put ‘She’s gone to a better place’, but guess what some sicko’s wrote? ‘That rules Portsmouth out.’
SR: Jessica, can you please focus? What happened next?
JB: She stopped waving and stood still on the weir and that made me calmer because I figured if you were going to do something dreadful you’d be more careless, you wouldn’t give a shit, would you? Way she’d been screaming at that fella, too, she had too much fight in her; women like that don’t top themselves. Good on her, I say. No offence, like, but most men are utter wankers.
SR: So the man she’d been with – any sign of him at this point?
JB: He was long gone.
SR: But he could have returned unbeknown to you?
JB: You reckon it was him?
SR: One of our lines of enquiry is that she wasn’t alone when she entered the water.
JB: My boyfriend’s right, he says you lot haven’t got a clue.
No wonder the newspapers are giving you a kicking. They reckon she was being stalked – was she?
SR: What did Alice do after she’d stopped waving?
JB: She was pacing around and I was all, ‘Shit, what do I do? What do I do?’ So I yelled ‘hello’, then grabbed my phone. I weren’t sure who to ring, whether to call the police or what, but there was no signal and that was when I twigged why she was up there waving her arms. She went up there to get a signal.
SR: That seems a wee bit far-fetched.
JB: You do weird stuff when you’re pissed; crazy stuff makes sense and normal stuff feels crazy. She kept putting her phone in front of her face; I could see the light from the screen. She must have been texting or picking up a message.
SR: Jessica, I’m going to ask you a very simple question and it’s crucial that you answer honestly. What did Alice do next?
JB: She climbed down, swear on my kid’s life, she climbed down.
SR: Would you be prepared to swear that under oath in a court of law?
JB: Yes, defo. I did make out someone else on her side of the river a bit further up when I left – some old grandad. Must’ve been out walking a dog. I didn’t see no dog, but why else would you have been out there, it was about minus 200.
SR: You were.
JB: I’ve explained that. I’d never have left her if I’d known she was going to die, would I? You can’t blame me …
SR: You’re not a suspect here.
JB: I remembered when I was on the bus coming here what song it was she was singing. It was like she was doing karaoke with no one listening.
SR: Elaborate on this ‘old grandad’ walking a dog.
JB: Can’t get the tune out of my head now. It was ‘Example’ because she sang the line about the love kickstarts again. Says on the Internet it was one of her favourite songs. I ain’t no policewoman, but if she was going to jump she’d have done it on the weir and she wasn’t so hammered that she slipped, so from where I’m sitting that leaves one thing.
SR: Which is what, Jessica?
JB: Obvious, isn’t it? She was murdered.
4 January 2012
Jackess of all trades. Neither fish nor fowl. Personal views – some borrowed, some blue (mainly blue at mo). Remember, it’s not about the money, money, money …
25 July 2012
Dear Larry,
You’ll have to excuse my preoccupation with the past; 1982 feels remarkably
present
. I stuck with Dr Richard Carter into the autumn. His observations remained challenging,
but I’d begun to derive a nebulous satisfaction from them. When I wobbled, Fliss reminded me of our deal. She’d keep me, she’d said, as if referring to an old piece of furniture or an unpleasant pet – a dog, perhaps, that had taken to biting – as long as I persisted with the ‘consultations’.
I’d pulled into the drive one evening after six or so weeks of her absence – don’t quote me on that, time morphs and bends at the edges – and the sitting-room light was on. ‘You’re back,’ I’d said.
‘Don’t mistake this for weakness,’ she replied. ‘Don’t ever mistake this for weakness.’
Communication between us was clumsy and maladroit in the period following her return. She’d been astounded when I’d initially confided where I was creeping off to on Wednesday afternoons. ‘My profession,’ I’d informed her with more than a hint of pretension, ‘is quick enough to hold up a mirror to mankind so I figured it was appropriate I did so to myself.’
Richard was suitably enervated when I articulated my contrition. My sparring partner even proffered up a few snippets of himself: he had a fiancée, an interest in arboriculture, a penchant for the gothic. He had unconventional yet fascinating views on Jung. ‘Of all the careers you could have chosen, why this one?’ I enquired.
‘There’s not a whole lot else to do on a Wednesday afternoon,’ he said and we both chuckled; another watershed.
In fact, three decades on, I’ve half a mind to root out Dr Richard Carter again; we’d have a whole new raft of issues to, as he might term it, ‘explore’. But back then I was witnessing a most implausible phenomenon: progress. I felt like a new man. In November I asked Fliss if she concurred.
‘It’s not a new man I’m hoping for,’ she said, ‘just a slightly improved version of the old one. My dad said you
might ultimately not be very nice, but I disagree. You’re a fool, but you’re not fundamentally bad, not at heart.’
‘I’ve been so very stupid.’
‘You’ll not get an argument over that.’ She’d carried on preparing the pastry, a Delia recipe probably, she was all the rage back then, as indeed she’s become again thirty years later. ‘What did you see?’ Fliss asked, smoothing her hair back behind her ear and inadvertently leaving a dab of flour there. ‘When you held up that mirror to yourself?’
‘Someone who’s very lucky. Someone who won’t ever make the same mistake again.’
I reached out and brushed the flour off her hair. I was glad she’d rumbled me. I couldn’t carry the weight of my secret any more. ‘Evolution is supposed to make us better, but I fear we’re going backwards,’ I said. ‘We’re becoming less human. I read yesterday that well over 10,000 people have been killed in this latest outbreak of war in Lebanon. Can you believe that it’s 1982 and we’re still killing each other over
ground
?’
She did her best to buoy me up, dubbed me a pessimistic old stick – reminded me there was plenty of good news around: the man at the University of Utah who’d had the world’s first artificial heart;
Columbia
striking out into space; our engineers beating back the watery forces of the Thames before they engulfed London; even, she said apprehensively – aware that despite my left-leanings I was sceptical of that ragtag bunch of lesbians at Greenham Common – the backlash against the arms race.
Larry, I’d never expected a Damascene conversion. Richard had warned me that there wouldn’t be a light-bulb moment, but I was revitalized. That said, it would be a misrepresentation to assert I’d had some sort of personality re-engineering, because I was lobbying hard behind the scenes to get that turncoat Devereux relieved of his duties, on account of the
bastard’s one-man campaign against my ‘lack of moral integrity’. (Ultimately, as you’ll recall, my efforts were thwarted because he was so chummy with the top brass.)
‘With the benefit of hindsight, how might you describe your actions?’ Richard had asked in one of our final sessions, the question reminiscent of school. I was never in trouble so only heard it second-hand, but the fierier boys, the ones with real spunk – the ones who I’d later read in the alumni magazine had become venture capitalists or relocated to Kuala Lumpur – would recount how the headmaster, mid-admonishment, would ask how they’d describe their actions.
‘Shoddy,’ I said. ‘Bad form.’
Then one afternoon, clearly having concluded our relationship had moved into a new plane, Richard let rip. ‘There’s much I admire about you, Jeremy, but you do realize you’re a tremendous hypocrite. You cite our insignificance, but at heart you believe that you’re the most special creature that’s ever set foot on God’s earth. You can’t accept the self-evident truths you preach to your students. For all your qualifications – and please spare me any more of the Oxford bullshit – you can’t reconcile yourself to one fact. You’re mortal. You’re going to die. You won’t change the world. Plus, were this a lecturer and student relationship, I’d feel duty-bound to remind you that you’ve never satisfactorily answered my initial question as to why you come here!’
‘I needed some forgiving.’
‘That’s beyond my remit,’ he said, inclining his head to the heavens.
I remembered my school motto,
dulcius ex asperis
. ‘I wanted to be better,’ I said. ‘I wanted to stop hurting people.’
‘See,’ he said, with the faintest trace of smugness. ‘Altruism! It’s not as if you’re even referring to your kin, either.’
Larry, I’d often grappled with whom ‘kin’ constituted in my
case. Both parents in the ground: one service attended, the other boycotted. No siblings; a cousin in Edinburgh I hadn’t encountered in a blue moon. Fliss was the nearest I had, the woman I’d married in a small flint church in Wiltshire, the sunshine spearing through the stained-glass windows.
‘How would you
love
, if you had an artificial heart?’ she’d asked once, fascinated.
‘One hasn’t performed overly proficiently with a real one,’ I’d replied.
‘Same time, same place next week?’ Richard said in December.
‘No,’ I said. ‘We’re done.’
‘They all abandon me eventually,’ he chuckled.
‘We’ve got that in common. The students do that to me. Thanks for everything. I feel better. I’m cured.’
‘That’s not a description I tend to use. I’d view you as “in remission”.’
I jumped in my car – the TVR I’d bought on a whim the previous summer – and played my new favourite song, ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’.
Doctor Richard Carter had become one of my closest friends.