What She Left: Enhanced Edition (37 page)

I’d practised my posh accent, learnt a few new words and bish bash bosh it was soon flooding out of the old boy Devereux. He was lonely and itching to talk. I’d told him Cooke was billing himself in his book as the university’s top academic and predictably he took the bait and said he was a shit.

This was my third visit. The second had been a right balls-up: he hadn’t slept the previous night because an ambulance had come to take one of them from the home and he had been dopey and nice, and that was no use to me. Today he was wound up and perfect.

‘He’s not in your league,’ I said, rattling off the list of prizes this old turd had won – he even had his own Wikipedia page and how vain is that? I might have ‘slipped’ into the conversation that the word Cooke would use to describe him was ‘limited’.

‘ “Cock” we called him,’ he announced, gob gathering round his mouth. ‘ “Jeremy Cock”.’

I’ve got a gift for seeing inside people and there was more here, I just needed to scratch the scab, so I concocted some story about how Cooke had been spreading it around the university that he was a cabbage.

‘He slept with the girl’s mother back in the 1980s, too.’

I didn’t respond. Alice told me in Caledonian Road how journalists use silence because we’re all frightened of it and so tend to fill gaps.

‘Mullens,’ he said. ‘Elizabeth Mullens.’

Well, well, so the Iceman boned Alice Salmon’s mum like he did her. Result! I pictured myself back in my room on the third floor posting this info and waited for more silence to do its work, except there was a long wail from another room and someone crying, ‘Nooooo.’

‘She tried to kill herself when he ended it. He should have lost his job.’

‘He might yet,’ I laughed. ‘He might yet.’

Pointless
was on the telly and I came out with some rubbish about how Mullens must have hated the world to attempt the old hara-kiri.

‘Suicides hate themselves first and foremost,’ Devereux answered. ‘Though expediting the end goes against God’s plan. Ah, God’s plan. Another bone of contention between Cock and me.’

‘You’re well smart, aren’t you?’

‘The body might be frail, but the spirit is still willing.’

They’d have you believe they’re better than the rest of us, these professor types, but they’re like kids. His and Iceman’s feud began with
a petty dispute over departmental budgets apparently and rumbled on for three decades, squabbles over research grants, politics, offices, teaching methods – you name it, the pair were at each other’s throats over it.

‘He’s still at it, the shagging,’ I said randomly, in a bid to coax out more.

One of the orderlies came in and announced that it would be dinner soon, roast lamb.

‘His misdeeds weren’t limited to the bedroom. Plagiarism is not an accusation I level lightly. Budgets were also questioned; money went unaccounted for. Naturally, it may have been innocuous.’

‘Your memory – it’s friggin’ amazing,’ I said, buttering him up.

Don’t judge me, what did we agree about ends justifying means, and professors who shag students and Icemen who kill salmon?

‘It wasn’t solely the anthropology party itself that was a great tradition,’ he said. ‘Cock taking a drunk victim back to his office afterwards was, too.’

‘Let’s destroy him,’ I whispered.

He stared at
Pointless
and there was a smell that reminded me of piss.

‘The Mullens girl nearly died and he still couldn’t leave her alone. They were at it again years later, you know. When she was married. Convinced they kept it quiet, they were, but I was on to him. It was three years after their affair.’

I did the maths. It would have been the year before Alice was born.

What is dying?

I am standing on the seashore.

A ship sails to the morning breeze and starts for the ocean.

She is an object and I stand watching her

Till at last she fades from the horizon,

And someone at my side says, ‘She is gone!’ Gone where?

Gone from my sight, that is all;

She is just as large in the masts, hull and spars as she was when I saw her,

And just as able to bear her load of living freight to its destination.

The diminished size and total loss of sight is in me, not in her;

And just at the moment when someone at my side says, ‘She is gone’,

There are others who are watching her coming

And other voices take a glad shout,

‘There she comes.’

And that is dying.

Mustn’t stop writing … need to occupy my mind … have to keep the demons at bay …

I presume Luke went home, but he might be sleeping on a bench in Balham station for all I care.

‘There’ll be no trains,’ he’d whinged, when I’d booted him out. ‘It’s late.’

‘Walk then or get a cab – it’s not my problem.’

He’d quibbled about the cost of a taxi, but he always had plenty of cash for lads’ nights out or excursions with the boys to expensive European cities.

I rang Meg as soon as I’d slammed the door on him.
‘Ring me, babes,’ I pleaded into her voicemail. ‘Desperately need to talk.’

I sat on my bed and the texts arrived – sorry, can’t live without you, I’ll change, never do it again, love you more than anyone, blah blah blah. ‘Which bit of no contact do you *not* understand?’ I typed, and it felt peculiar, not signing off with an x, but I deleted it before sending.

The bastard, how could he?

I lay on my bed and flicked through the photos on my phone. So many of
him
. Was there no part of my life he hadn’t infiltrated? One by one, I hit the dustbin icon. Then I pulled up his number and deleted that, too.

Outlandish notions of how I could get back at him boomeranged around the room.

Music from the flat upstairs. A door slamming, a toilet flushing, muffled conversations in Alex and Soph’s rooms, them and their respective OHs.
Don’t go to bed
, I thought.
Don’t leave me the only person awake
.

Tried Meg again. Voicemail. Why isn’t she answering? ‘What’s happened
now
?’ she might enquire, exasperated. ‘Never trust a man, Salmonette,’ she used to say, and before Luke I’d always agreed. Now I hated him for proving her right. ‘Forget the fellas, it’s friends who last forever,’ she declared once, finding me on her doorstep after some drama with Ben. She’d taken me in, put
Hollyoaks
on and said, ‘They’re bastards, each and every one of them, ruled by their dicks,’ then she poured some wine and the hurt seeped away.

Ben had been in touch out of the blue a few weeks ago: an innocuous enough text enquiring, ‘What’s occurring, Fish Face?’ I’d ignored it, conscious of where exchanges like that could lead, but now I take up my phone, my hands shaking, and stab in a short message to him.

Luke, you complete and utter bastard, how
could
you? We had enough cash saved for a deposit and our first month’s rent. Had put it into our joint bank account – Miss A. L. Salmon and Mr L. S. Addison – periodically totting up the tally, its rising total a springboard to conversations about ‘the flat’ – an increasingly real concept as we’d traipsed around Wandsworth and Lambeth and out into the badlands of Denmark Hill and even into pretty Pimlico to see how the other half lived, settling on Tooting Bec, which we’d decided was affordable but on the up (‘It’s the next Shoreditch,’ one agent optimistically assured us). We hoped to get two rooms, but could cope with one. Fancied purpose-built rather than a conversion. Preferred no one above us to avoid noise. Maisonettes were a no-no. A garden would be a bonus, but the absence of one wouldn’t be a deal-breaker. There was only one deal-breaker here. Luke.

Only one heartbreaker.

I could go to Australia
, the prospect a brief fluorescent light of positivity.
I
am
only twenty-five
. I’d known it was a mistake, settling down at twenty-five; that’s what thirty-year-olds do! But the brightness dimmed as swiftly. What fun would it be without Luke?

Needed air, space. I’d walk. Often, when I was out on the common, I’d go on Facebook or Twitter and trace friends’ friends or followers’ followers outwards in concentric circles until they were perfect strangers, then message them, saying, ‘Hey, how are you?’, or in case they thought it was spam I’d send a personalized one like, ‘How was the theatre?’ or ‘I like that dress in your profile picture’. One night some randomer asked, ‘Where are you?’ and I replied, ‘Standing by the pond on Clapham Common staring into the water’, and that was the end of that conversation. Meg says it’s weird conversing with people I don’t know, but
living in a city’s weird, cooped up like battery hens, sleeping inches from strangers, emailing colleagues when they only sit a few feet from you.

Why aren’t you calling me, Megan?

‘They’ll never have what we’ve got,’ she’d said once when we were teenagers. ‘Whoever we meet, whoever we marry, they’ll never have what we’ve got.’

The traffic died away and I didn’t ring him and I didn’t text him. I hung on to that crumb of control. I opened my laptop and made myself type. Did what Luke often did, summing up situations in tabloidese.

The girl threw the miniature Christmas tree out of the window.

The girl felt an old, familiar detachment, almost as if she was floating.

The girl lay awake wondering where the fox she’d once been friends with had gone.

I will
not
let him wreck Christmas. Was so looking forward to it, too – seeing my folks, Mum’s food, playing Aunty Alice. When I was eighteen, I couldn’t wait to get away from the burbs, but when I’m stressed now it can exert a near-magnetic pull on me –
home home
. The bedroom where me and Meg (‘It’s Meg and I,’ Mum would insist) would spend lazy, stretched Sunday afternoons, bikes zigzagging along the street, the smell of barbecues, recorders being badly blown, figures at computer screens and families framed by alcoves in the evenings, cats on doorsteps and dewy lawns in the mornings waiting for the jangle of keys, kids shouting demandingly and lovingly: ‘
Muuuuuuum
’. What will Mum and Dad make of this? They like Luke. Won’t when I fill them in on the real Luke, his aversion to hard work, his indecisiveness about his career, his boy-like vulnerability, his temper. Well, we can add his pathological inability to be faithful to the list.