Kiss Me First (10 page)

There was so much information to deal with that I found that just recording things on my laptop wasn’t enough. Ideally I’d have an extra screen to work from but I couldn’t afford to buy one, so I ended up handwriting a chart on a big piece of paper with linking arrows, which I pinned up on my wall next to the photos.

As you can imagine, all this took a lot of time. Tess’s life had been chaotic, and, as quickly became clear, she told different versions of events to different people. Add to that the fact that she was vague on names and locations, and you can imagine the difficulty.

There were many things that didn’t make sense or add up. Some were fairly major facts – in one month, for instance, she claimed to two different people to live in both Shoreditch and Bethnal Green, although there was no record of her moving. There were minor references that could be solved by Google – Farrow and Ball, the Groucho Club, that house Virginia Woolf lived in – but others that could not. For instance, in one email she described a woman as having
National Theatre hair
; in another, she told her friend Simon how much she liked
the way boys take their jumpers off
.

In other cases the facts themselves were clear, but I couldn’t understand her reaction to them. For instance, an exchange on 17th August 2005 between Tess and a friend called Zanthi. They were having an argument because Zanthi had apparently been staying at Tess’s flat for a weekend and had thrown away some dead flowers that Tess had been saving
because of their beauty
. Tess seemed to think that Zanthi not realizing this was indicative of a lack of understanding of Tess’s character and what she called
the poetry of life
, and declared that Zanthi could no longer be her friend. Odd behaviour in itself; but then, two weeks later, the two were emailing merrily as if nothing had ever happened.

When I asked Tess about these things, more often than not she couldn’t remember the details, or even that they took place at all
.
I told you
, she wrote.
My brain is fucked
. Once, she elaborated:
I’ll tell you what it’s like. You know those grabby mechanical hands in amusement arcades, which you use to try and pick up some shitty teddy bear? It’s like me, feebly trying to latch on to a memory or an idea. And if I do manage to grab it, it’s just cheap tat
.

Furthermore, there were lots of blank periods to fill in, the times when she wasn’t communicating with anyone at all, when – as I know now – she was seriously depressed and couldn’t even summon the energy to wipe the hair off her face, let alone write an email.

Alongside all this, I was making a note of the non-personal emails Tess received. There were receipts for theatre and cinema tickets and Amazon purchases, all of which I catalogued in a file about her tastes. She did a lot of online shopping and the things she bought tended to be either bafflingly expensive – a single pair of knickers that cost £230 – or cheap, like a 20p ‘vintage coaster’ from eBay. There were days when she spent vast amounts of money, thousands of pounds, on things that it didn’t seem like she could possibly need or in bewildering bulk. One receipt, I remember, was for twenty white tea towels, each costing £12.

With each of these, I recorded the date and details of the transaction in a separate spreadsheet. How could she afford a £120 pot of moisturizer when she was working as an artist’s model, earning £60 a week? I would then cross-reference her online bank statements, to see whether she had taken out a loan or gone overdrawn.

My initial trawl through her inbox left me with a lengthy list of questions to ask Tess, and the large holes in her biography took first priority. Her replies were more often than not unsatisfactory. I would ask a perfectly simple question, such as what TV shows she watched when she was thirteen, and she either wouldn’t reply for days, or get angry and say she couldn’t remember, or name a programme that, when I checked, turned out to have been first transmitted when she was fifteen.

I tried hard to remain professional in our emails, but sometimes firmness was required. I would remind her of the seriousness of the undertaking and my requirements for the job. In reply, she’d write
Oh god, don’t have a go at me, I can’t fucking remember!
Or, if she was in a sadder, more reflective mood she’d apologize repeatedly, saying what a terrible person she was and that she didn’t deserve my help.

After a few weeks, I became quite frustrated. I was still doing my testing work, but increasingly I found myself sidelining the reports and instead just waiting for her emails. Tess kept going on about how quickly she wanted it all to be done, how desperate she was to ‘check out’ – that was the phrase that we used. But it had become apparent that if we kept going at this current rate, with her taking days to respond to an email and then not even answering my questions properly, it would be months before we were anywhere near ready.

So, I had an idea. We had agreed not to meet in person, but there seemed to be no reason why we couldn’t talk. It would speed things up considerably, and if we used Skype, it wouldn’t cost anything. I considered asking Adrian first, but decided the matter wasn’t worth bothering him about. However, I recalled that, on the Heath, he had stressed the importance of ‘limited emotional engagement’ between Tess and myself, and so decided it would be best if we left the cameras off when we spoke.

I messaged Tess to suggest this, and she agreed. We arranged a time for me to call, at 11 p.m. one evening.

I composed a list of questions that had arisen so far:

1. In an email dated 27/12/08, Nicholas wrote, ‘Thank you for ruining lunch’. What did you do to ruin lunch? And why is he thanking you?

2. Did you ever meet up with ‘Pete the Provider’ on Valentine’s Day 2006 in St Wenceslas Square, as promised in an email sent 02/10/05?

3. Was the nickname ‘Sugartits’ widely used, or just by Steven Gateman?

4. What is your father’s prognosis for Alzheimer’s?

5. In one email regarding a date with a man called Jamie in May 2009 you wrote, ‘he was intellectually beneath me.’ Yet you only got one A-level yourself, in art. What kind of qualifications did he get?

6.  There are no emails or trace of you between February and April 2008. Where were you and what were you doing during that time?

7. At various points you claim that ‘You’re Nobody till Someone Loves You’ by Dinah Washington, ‘Natural Woman’ by Aretha Franklin and ‘I Want You Back’ by The Jackson Five are all your ‘favourite song ever’. Which one is it?

8. In an email to Shona regarding a dinner party you attended the night before, you write that you hated your host for claiming she liked ‘to cook to relax’. This seems like an inoffensive statement to me. Can you explain?

9. In an email to your mother dated 03/06/07 you say she was a terrible mother when you were a child, yet in your psychologist ‘autobiography’ you say you had a relatively normal, happy childhood. Which was it?

10. You registered once at the site adultfriendfinder.com in February 2005. What was the nature and frequency of your usage of the site?

11. On 16/05/08, you wrote to Mira Stollbach that you ‘ couldn’t wait’ to attend her wedding that summer, but then in an email to Justine on June 2nd of that same year, wrote that you ‘hate fucking weddings’. Can you explain?

12. In that same exchange with Justine, in reply to her wondering whether she should stay with the man she was going out with despite finding him unsatisfactory in several areas, you advise her not to ‘settle’. Justine replies, ‘That’s easy for you to say.’ Why is that?

13. Your sign-offs are inconsistent, even in correspondence with the same person. Sometimes you will end with one ‘kiss’, sometimes two, sometimes many and sometimes none. What are the rules governing your sign-offs? Do they change according to the level of affection you feel for that person at that particular moment?

14. In an email to [email protected] on 17/09/10 you wrote that you didn’t think you were going to make it through the night. Did you attempt suicide that evening?

I was oddly nervous before speaking to Tess for the first time. You have to understand that by that point I had spent three weeks completely immersed in her life, reading her emails, examining photographs of her and her friends, trying to catalogue the chaos of her past. Looking back, even at that early stage I probably knew more about her than anyone else alive, because she gave such different accounts of herself to different people. But because everything had been done electronically, it was almost like she wasn’t a real person.

I decided it would be best if I recorded our conversation and transcribed it afterwards, rather than try and note down information as Tess spoke. That way I could give her my full attention; I’ve never been good at doing two things at the same time. I read once that it was illegal to record someone without their knowledge, but decided not to inform Tess that I was taping our conversation, in case she made an irrational fuss and further held things up.

It was 11 p.m., on a Tuesday. I had my list of questions ready. Tess’s laptop rang eight times before she answered, and her ‘Hello?’ was wary. When I introduced myself, she sounded surprised, even though the call had been scheduled. Then she laughed, and said, ‘Oh fuck, sorry. I was expecting you to be Sylvie.’

I hadn’t heard mention of Sylvie before, so immediately, before we’d even begun, I had to deviate off my planned list of questions and ask her about this new character. As we spoke, I searched Tess’s Facebook friends and found Sylvie: she had a long, sad face and thick dark red hair that, when pulled over one shoulder, looked like a fox’s tail.

I didn’t think I had any preconceptions about what Tess would sound like. But I suppose I must have, because I remember being surprised by her tone of voice. It was deep and clear and well-spoken, not at all anguished.

After she had told me something about Sylvie – a teacher who hated her job, was married to an Italian man twenty years older than herself and was contemplating an affair with someone at work – I started on my list of questions. I was pleased to find that my Skype suggestion was vindicated. It was far more efficient than email. When Tess drifted, I could direct her back onto the topic.

That first session lasted twenty minutes before Tess became tired and lost focus. We arranged to Skype again the next evening at the same time, and she was more vocal that night. Too vocal, in fact: she went off on tangents all the time, hardly editing her thoughts. I asked her about her job at Threads, a vintage clothes shop in Bethnal Green that she managed for four months, and she segued into a long account of a festival she went to where everyone dressed up in vintage clothes and slid down a helter-skelter, which led to a story about how her mother had saved her lots of her designer clothes from when she was younger, but had been very disappointed when Tess couldn’t fit into them: ‘You’ve inherited your father’s shoulders.’

The third occasion we spoke, she was in an upset state. She had been to the matinee of a play that afternoon and a woman sitting in the row in front had been rude to her. She couldn’t stop talking about it. Ranting, I’d say. When she was in a certain mood these sorts of small things bothered her greatly: even when I thought I’d steered her off the subject she’d return to it repeatedly. Any perceived act of thoughtlessness or rudeness would do it (although, ironically, Tess could be very thoughtless and rude herself). For instance, she hated it when people walked past her on the tube platform to get a good spot next to where the doors would open. ‘I hate the sound of their clackety heels as they look after number one,’ she said. She got offended if, when waiting at a pedestrian crossing, other people would join her and press the button – did they not think she would have pressed it? That she was stupid?

Transcribing the tapes afterwards, I was listening to one of these tiresome deviations when she mentioned some detail that I hadn’t known: Jonathan had once lived in Singapore. It occurred to me then that actually, even though these ramblings of hers were not directly answering my questions, and my natural tendency was to filter out everything she said except the facts, they might be quite useful. Not only in the accidental details they might provide, but because they revealed something of her character.

In other words, I realized that the digressions might be as important to note as the actual facts I was gathering. If I was going to ‘be’ Tess, I needed to record all aspects of her character.

On our next session, Tess’s mood changed yet again. This time she was reflective and, for the first time, asked me questions about myself. She asked me about how old I was, where I lived and why I was doing this for her. I wasn’t very comfortable talking about myself, conscious that every minute we spent on me would mean less time for her to answer questions. But I replied, telling her that I was doing it because I believed in self-ownership and her right to control her own death. She asked me what I thought about Adrian and I replied he was a great man, and that Red Pill had opened up my mind to new ways of thinking. To that, she said something that surprised me.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I really must look at it one day.’

I had presumed, you see, that she knew Adrian from the site. Of course, in retrospect, I can see she would not have lasted a minute on Red Pill with her fuzzy, illogical thinking, but it hadn’t occurred to me that she had met him elsewhere, in a different context.

‘So how do you know Adrian, if not from the site?’ I asked.

Her answer was typically vague.

‘Oh, I can’t remember exactly. Some party or something.’

I couldn’t imagine Adrian at the kind of parties Tess went to and pressed for further details, but she claimed she couldn’t remember.

Then, because the site had come up and our conversation seemed to have taken a more intimate turn, I asked her something that was not on the list of questions, but which I had been thinking about since we had started the project. Tess talked a lot about how these dark and manic moods were part of her, how she was flawed, how there was, to use her favourite quote, ‘no hope of a cure, ever, for being me’. It had got me thinking: how did she know that these extreme states were her ‘true’ character? Maybe they were something that altered ‘the real her’, like being possessed by an outside force.