What She Left: Enhanced Edition (39 page)

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: Her

 

Dear Jem,

 

Bet you didn’t expect to hear from me again, did you? I never expected to be back in contact. I never expected any of this. Well, don’t fret, I’ll be out of your hair soon. But having chatted to Meg, I feel obliged to email. I appreciate the two of you no longer see eye to eye, but you need to put aside your silly prejudices. She’s opened my eyes.

 

‘Sorry for not being in touch recently,’ she said. ‘Sometimes it’s easier to avoid reminders. The longer I left it, the harder it got.’

 

‘Sweetheart, come here,’ I said. She tumbled into my arms and I inhaled deeply: a smell that reminded me of a smell that reminded me of Alice.

 

I visited under the pretext of returning the Kazuo Ishiguro book. Bless her, clearly unable to face knocking she’d left it on my doorstep one night, but I figured if Alice gave it to her, it meant she’d have wanted her to have it.

 

‘I still miss her every single day, Aunty Liz.’

 

It must have been well over ten years since she’d called me that: the ‘aunty’ unshowily dropped at exactly the point Alice abandoned calling this girl’s mum ‘Aunty Pam’.

 

‘They say you don’t get better, that you never get over it. You learn a new reality, you learn to adapt.’

 

On the table, cigarettes, a brown bottle of tablets, leftover weekend papers, headlines about President Obama’s debate with Mitt Romney, a ferry collision in Hong Kong, a Georgian woman who’d purportedly died age 132. Her new reality. ‘It’s nothing to be ashamed of, bearing the scars – it makes us who we are.’

 

Meg’s presence was making Alice’s absence more real, her aliveness throwing my daughter’s deadness into sharper focus: giving colour and depth to her distance. I recollected their voices upstairs, squeals of laughter, whispers, plotting, singing, saving up for Rollerblades. Later, getting ready for nights out, hours in front of the mirror: excited, fearless girls. ‘Some parents name stars after their dead children,’ I said. ‘Next time it’s a clear night, Meg, gaze up. There’s a whole galaxy of our kids up there.’ We wiped the tears from each other’s cheeks; skin Alice had touched. ‘One day, love, you’ll have beautiful babies and they’ll bring you as much joy as Alice did me, as Alice does me.’

 

‘Why did she do it, Aunty Liz?’

 

I carried on running my thumb across her face, like I was trying to erase an invisible smudge.

 

‘Why did she choose
this
way? She didn’t have to …’

 

It took me a few seconds to twig what she was alluding to; a lever in me recalibrated itself. ‘Love, it was an accident.’

 

‘I’m sorry, Aunty Liz, but we can’t help each other unless we’re honest.’

 

‘Alice would have never done that.’

 

‘But she did.’

 

‘No, you mustn’t say that.’

 

‘I’m sorry it’s me who has to, but we won’t be able to move
forward until we face this. You mustn’t be ashamed. People kill … I mean, they take their own lives for a million reasons. It’s too horrid to fathom, but ultimately it was a choice she made.’

 

‘My daughter wasn’t like that.’

 

‘It’s not about what she was like; there isn’t a template. Anyone could get to that point.’

 

The breathy panic constricted around me: I’m never going to see Alice again.

 

‘She told me about what you did when you were in Southampton. How you’d … you know … how … She confided in me that her grampy had let it slip.’

 

‘That was thirty years ago.’

 

Jem, they reckon there are no secrets in this Internet age, but there are. I received a text from Alice.

 

Cell site analysis, the family liaison officer called it. Forensic data recovery. Alice’s texts, her calls, even her Internet browsing history percolated into the public domain – released by investigators or guessed or leaked or shared by those she’d been communicating with. Amid the swooshing untruths, from the iPhone she so loved that they fished from the river, facts from fiction, matter from myth. But not all her texts came to light. Most did, but one didn’t. One she sent me on her final night.

 

See, secrets.

 

What am I going to do, Jem?

 

Yours,

Liz

Larry, she’s been here. No appointment, no warning; merely a knock on the door and there she was.

She’s still beautiful. Scruffily dressed and a touch scatty; a hint of the Redgrave or Hepburn. Presumably it’s politically incorrect to compare a woman with a fine wine, but she’s matured impressively. ‘Where are your answers then?’ she demanded.

‘Liz. How are you?’

She took a seat, perched on the edge. ‘Come on, Doctor Death. All this research you’ve been doing – where are the conclusions?’

So much for pleasantries or small talk. Tone-wise, we’d taken up exactly where we’d left off three decades previously.

‘If you’re such an intellectual heavyweight, you explain – what happened to my daughter? Come on, I’m
waiting
.’

There was a waft of booze, but it wasn’t emanating from her, it was the glass of red on my desk. A memory filtered back at me: watery and indiscreet.

‘What if it’s true, what if she did kill herself?’

‘Liz, she didn’t.’

‘Megan’s convinced.’

‘I’d take anything Ms Parker says with a pinch of salt.’

‘You need to get over your ridiculous dislike of her. The way you’ve been so publicly critical of her, accusing her of being a “fantasist”, it’s not helpful. It’s infantile.’

I went to recount what Fliss had said, how Meg clearly had a thing about me, but halted myself. It felt wrong, mentioning my wife to her – as it would later, were I to communicate this encounter to Fliss.

‘Megan was her best friend.’

I was in a quandary, Larry. I’d had a run-in with Alice on her last night, remember, and she was indignant, but her behaviour most definitely wasn’t that of someone on the brink of suicide (not that I was ready to furnish Liz at that stage with that scrap of information; to her and the world at large, our exchange had never happened). Plus, when you spend hundreds of hours trawling through the minutiae of a life, you get a handle on a person’s personality. The notion that she might have killed herself: it simply won’t wash. ‘Liz,’ I said and almost reached out.

‘The one thing I had, that I hung on to, was that it wasn’t
that
– and now it feels like everyone’s saying it is.’

‘No, she was strong.’

‘Jem, you utter moron, you don’t need to be
weak
to take your own life. Suicide’s like depression; it’s a disease
of
the strong.’

We sat and she scrutinized my office, the empty in-tray, the box files, the stone paperweight she’d bought me a lifetime ago. I recalled hotels, motorway services, fights, the elastic stretch of her bra.

‘What if I have been wrong all along?’ she said. ‘Suicide’s the one outcome I couldn’t take, simply couldn’t – that my
baby girl might have felt that bad. I’ve spent the last eight months denying it, but maybe you can’t deny the undeniable.’