Kiss Me First (11 page)

When I put this to Tess, she replied that she was sure that it was the ‘real her’. I pointed out that, surely, she couldn’t be
sure
– she could only take a position. Her tone changed then, becoming harder.

‘I thought you were here to help me, not try and talk me out of it.’

So then I had to explain that I was indeed here to help, and had no intention of talking her out of it. I was just interested in debating the point. It was clear she hadn’t really done any philosophy before, so I told her that was what I liked to do, examine things from all angles.

At that, she relaxed again and then said another thing that threw me. She said that her ‘husband’ thought it was something that possessed her, and that he called her moods ‘the beast’.

I was momentarily lost for words, and then asked her to confirm that she had just revealed that she was married. She sounded surprised, and said, ‘Oh, have I not mentioned it?’ as if it was a trifling matter.

It turned out that she had been married briefly, ‘in my early twenties’. I pushed her for an exact date, and it took her a while to remember that it happened when she was twenty-four. It was to an Australian man called Lee, whom she had met in a queue at a bank in Delhi, and married in London five weeks later. Within a year they had split up and Lee had gone back to Australia. ‘Some time later’ they had got a divorce. Tess said it was a ‘moment of madness’, and seemed to think it was hardly worth remarking on. She added that they didn’t speak at all now and it was highly unlikely he would be in contact.

‘I told you,’ she said. ‘I’ve done lots of silly things.’

The odd thing was, although she had married Lee, she didn’t even count him amongst what she called her ‘great loves’. The top spot went to a man called Tivo, a DJ whom she had been with for a year when she was twenty-seven. A picture showed quite a short, dark man wearing a trilby hat; Tess was sitting on his lap and did indeed look happy, gazing up at him with adoration.

‘He just got me,’ she said. ‘We got each other.’

I asked her to elaborate.

‘Oh, you know,’ she said.

‘No, I don’t.’

‘It’s like, when we were together things made sense. He understood everything I said, even things I didn’t fully understand myself. I could tell him anything, and he would go with it. But he also knew when to tell me to shut up and stop being silly.’

It ended when she slept with someone else – ‘the biggest mistake of my life’ – and he found out.

The person she had been out with the longest was Matt, who she was with between the ages of nineteen and twenty-three. He was a ‘nice boy’, Tess said, but as if this was a bad thing. Marion thought she should have married him – he was now a very successful hotelier, she kept on reminding Tess – and that she had blown her chances.

Tivo aside, Tess didn’t have a very high opinion of men. She thought they were weak and simple, and used to leave them for what seemed to me to be innocuous transgressions. When I asked about Charlie, whom she had gone out with for six months in 2004, all she said was that, on a trip to Rome, he had asked for his suitcase to be wrapped in plastic at the airport. This, it seemed, was enough for him to be discarded.

Tess’s marriage was not the only surprise. It turned out she had had a very short-lived TV career co-hosting a late night ‘magazine show’ on Channel 4 in 1997 called
Gassing
, in which she interviewed what she called ‘Z-list fuckwits’. It was only a ‘pilot’ show, and the series never got made.

It was not only most of her experiences that were foreign to me, but her attitudes, too. She frequently bemoaned getting older, fearing the loss of her looks and ‘becoming invisible’. When I pointed out that it was irrational and pointless to fear something that was inevitable and happened to everyone, she laughed dryly and said, ‘Just you wait.’

Other times, I could understand her attitude, but not her reasons behind it. Like me, she disliked travelling on the tube, but whilst I found the crowds and shoving and hectoring announcements uncomfortable, her explanation was baffling: she ‘empathized’ too much with her fellow passengers.

‘I look at these people and imagine whole scenes from their life. Like, let’s say there’s a man wearing overalls, obviously a manual worker. I’ll think of him down the pub, on his fifth pint of the day, saying, “Well, it’s just a job, innit?” Or if there’s a girl with red hair, I’ll imagine the office sleazebag at the Christmas party saying, “So, Lucy, there’s something we’ve all been wondering – do the cuffs match the collar?”’ Once, she described seeing an old man in a flat cap taking a packet of Bourbon biscuits out of his shopping and looking at them before replacing them in the bag; a sight, she said, that reduced her to tears. ‘He was just looking forward to his tea. Such simple pleasures. I think I’m too sensitive for this world. Do you know what I mean?’

I didn’t, but there was the odd occasion when I understood both her attitude and what lay behind it. For instance, one night she told me about how the previous evening she was at a friend’s house for dinner and had been sat next to a boring woman. ‘She spent literally half an hour telling us all the countries she had ever been to – including, get this, the airports she had just stopped over in, as if they counted.’

I told her that Tash Emmerson had done that at school, and that I found it equally annoying. She even had the countries listed on her Facebook page.

‘Fucking hell,’ said Tess. ‘Unfriend her immediately. Why are you friends with these people?’

I explained that I didn’t like Tash or ever see her, but that everyone at school had everyone else as their Facebook friends, because they wanted to have as high a number as possible.

‘Yeah, maybe for those silly bitches,’ she said, ‘but you’re cooler than that, aren’t you? Just ignore the lot of them.’

I told her that if I unfriended everyone who wasn’t my real friend, then I would only have Rashida left. I decided not to mention that I didn’t even see her any more.

‘So what?’ she said. ‘Who gives a fuck? Strike out. Be cool.’

I appreciated what she was saying; I was a free thinker, after all. But I had a vision of my profile:
Friends (1)
.

‘I can’t,’ I said.

‘God, I’m so glad the Internet didn’t exist when I was younger,’ said Tess.

At these rare times when she was concentrating on me, rather than talking about herself, I was keenly aware that we were wasting time, and I made efforts to remain professional and steer the conversation back to her after a few minutes. But I admit that I quite enjoyed it when she decided to pay attention to me; she had a way of making me feel that she was really interested, that she really cared.

One night, she decided that she was going to give me some advice. ‘I don’t have a daughter, you’re the next best thing,’ she said. ‘I’ve been thinking about this all day.’

I started to protest, but she continued.

‘Firstly,’ she said, ‘you’re not as crap as you think you are.’

‘I don’t think I’m crap!’ I said.

She shushed me, and carried on with her list. ‘Wait until a man has been divorced a year before you think about going near him. It’s OK to dislike your family. You’ll spend your life chasing the feeling of your first line of coke. It’s worth spending money on a good haircut.’

I told her that none of the above applied to me, nor could I envisage them ever doing so – and added that, although I appreciated her concern, her energy would be better spent remembering where she was between February and May 2008.

She laughed. ‘Ah, you’re so young, there’s still time. Just you wait.’ Then she sighed, and her mood shifted, as it did. ‘But then, before you know it, you’ll be old. Life is horrifically short, you know.’

I said, without thinking, ‘Well, especially for you.’ There was a long silence at that, and I felt I had said the wrong thing. I stared at the little black Skype box on the screen until I thought of something to say:

‘It always seems to be Thursday.’

I said it because I wanted Tess to feel she wasn’t alone, that I understood, but it also happened to be true. The days seemed to slip away with no resistance: it always seemed to be 3 p.m., and then it always seemed to be Thursday again, and another week, another month gone for ever.

Other times, as I’ve said, our conversations were unsuccessful from the start. If she was in the wrong mood, I could barely get a scrap of information out of her. She would give short, brusque answers, say ‘I don’t know’ to everything and generally act like a child. She’d whine, ‘Oh, when will this all be over! I just want it to be OVER. You said we’d be finished by now!’ I’d have to remind her that I had said nothing of the sort: there had been no completion date set at that stage. Sometimes I’d have to be quite sharp.

She could also be spiteful. There was one particular night when I was trying to establish some detail – I think it was whether her friend Katy Wilkins was the same person as a ‘Catatonic Katie’ she mentioned in another email – when she turned on me. She said, ‘Don’t you have anything better to do with your life than this? I mean, really? What do you
do
?’

She kept badgering me, until she suddenly stopped and gave a big sigh, like she was bored. ‘Never mind. I suppose it’s in my interests that you’re a sad-sack,’ she said.

I’m not proud to say that I let my professionalism slip.

‘Well, maybe I won’t do this any more,’ I said. ‘You’re right, I’ve got better things to do.’ And I terminated the call. I was shaking, so upset that when she tried to ring me back, I ignored her. I let it ring four more times.

When I finally accepted the call, she began to apologize and then said, ‘Wait.’ The next thing I knew, she had turned her camera on. Suddenly there she was, in the little Skype screen, looking straight at me. I think I might have even given a yelp, so surprised was I at her actually being there. It was rather like seeing a ghost, not that I believe in ghosts. She was wearing a white vest, bright against her skin, and her fringe was pinned back from her face. She looked very young. Her face was close to the camera and was frowning, that little line clearly visible between her eyebrows.

‘Darling,’ she said. ‘Please forgive me.’

She apologized for ‘lashing out’; it had been a bad day, she said. Then: ‘I need you. You know that. I really need you.’

She put her hand up and touched the camera lightly, like she was blessing me.

From then on, without discussing it, she left her camera on when we spoke. I still left mine off. I had seen many photos of her, of course, but it was quite different observing her as a live, breathing person. Generally, the view was on her face from below; her usual pose was, I could see, reclining on a bed with her computer on her lap. On the wall behind her I could see the corner of a poster of what looked like a giant spider. I asked Tess to move the camera to show me the whole thing; she did, and told me it was a picture by an artist called Louise Bourgeois. I noted this, and during our next session, asked her to pan the camera around her room so I could see more fully how she had decorated it.

Her room was absolutely crammed full of stuff, junk really, which made me feel queasy to look at – dusty peacock feathers, stacks of magazines, clothes in heaps on the floor reminding me of the piles dumped overnight outside the Cats’ Protection League shop in Kentish Town. On top of a chest of drawers, jars lay on their sides or with their lids off, and around her window was a string of Christmas-tree lights. There were some unusual objects, too, which I asked her the background to; a huge white shell, the size of a pillow, which she had bought at an antique shop in Islington; a painted wooden sun which took up half a wall, which she said she had made for a play. A small gold Buddha sat on her bedside table, and even through the camera I could see the incense ash coating it.

Seeing her possessions like that made me think: what would Tess do with all of this stuff when she checked out? I knew that such a query was edging toward forbidden territory – although there had been no official agreement as such, Tess had conspicuously avoided discussing the practical details of her suicide – so I asked rather tentatively, ‘Do you have a plan for your things?’

She looked confused for a moment. Then she understood. ‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘Not yet. I haven’t thought about it.’

I told her that I used a storage place that was good value, if she wanted the number. She nodded, vaguely, so I emailed it to her afterwards.

The camera was useful, because I could pick up better on her mood when I saw her facial expression: although, I must say, when she was ‘down’ it was often quite obvious by her voice. It would go thick and heavy, as if she was sedated. And there were little visual things note. For instance, I saw that she was left-handed, and that, in addition to the little line between her eyebrows, she had one on either side of her mouth, as delicate as fallen eyelashes. One night I noticed a small red mark above her lip. I asked her about it and she said it was a cold sore. I might not have known that she got cold sores if I hadn’t actually seen her – and I made a note to give her one at various points in the future. Tess could make even a cold sore look good, like a beauty spot.

She also tended to smoke when she talked to me. I presumed they were cigarettes, but when one day I watched her crumbling something into the tobacco and realized it was cannabis, I asked her to confirm it was drugs, and she laughed.

‘Are you shocked, Mary Whitehouse?’

After ascertaining the meaning of this reference – Mary Whitehouse was, Tess explained, ‘a famously disapproving old bag with a mouth like a cat’s arse’ – I explained that I didn’t disapprove at all, and that she was totally within her rights to do whatever she wanted with her body. But, I added, wanting to make my position clear, ‘if it affected someone else – if you had a small child in the room, for instance – I could not condone your actions. But, as you are, feel free to carry on.’

‘Why, thank you,’ said Tess. ‘You’re very kind.’ She seemed amused by this exchange and smiled as she licked the paper of her cigarette.