Kiss Me First (12 page)

‘How much does it cost?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘A girl never has to buy her own drugs, right?’

‘Well
, you
might not have to,’ I said, ‘but I’m sure
some
girls do. It’s likely that someone would only give you drugs for free if they liked you and wanted you to like them, but not everyone is “sexy” like you. You’ve done this before – when you use the phrase “a girl”, you actually mean: “a girl like me”.’

It was something I’d been wanting to say for a while, and I was gratified to see Tess look slightly taken aback. She took a long suck on the cigarette, and said, ‘Maybe you’re right.’ It seemed to pique her curiosity, and she started one of her barrages of questions about my childhood and parents, etc. I told her about mum and the MS, and she became animated.

‘Like dad. God, isn’t it shit? How did you cope?’

I told her that I imagined Alzheimer’s was worse than MS, for one reason: mum was always compos mentis, and remained herself up to the end, whereas her dad, Jonathan, had effectively lost his identity. When I thought of Jonathan I had the image of a tin of Quality Street, like the ones we used to get at Christmas, but inside was just full of empty wrappers. I didn’t say that to Tess, though; I just said that it must have been very hard watching helplessly as her father’s memories leaked away, until he had forgotten he even had a daughter.

Tess nodded.

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘He basically died years ago.’

And then, stubbing out her cigarette in a little shell ashtray by her bed, she said, ‘I’m glad I’m not going to get old.’

Gradually, the spreadsheets were filling up. There was now a pleasing rhythm to my work: at night we would have our conversations, then the following day I would transcribe the tapes, catalogue the facts and make a note of any extraneous but useful details that had emerged, such as unusual words she used or aspects of her character Tess inadvertently revealed.

The more information I harvested, the more my confidence grew, but there remained an area of concern: phone calls. Despite the reassurances of Adrian and Tess to the contrary, it seemed likely that there would be times in the future when a call from Tess would be desirable, even if not strictly necessary; festive occasions, for instance, or in the event of an accident.

Then, one day, as I listened to our taped recordings, something occurred to me. There seemed to be no reason why we shouldn’t record generic messages, which I could then play down the phone, onto the recipient’s answerphone, at times when I knew they would not be able to pick up.

I put the idea to Tess that evening, and she agreed. ‘No time like the present!’ I said. It took a while, and I had to keep asking her to repeat because her tone wasn’t right, but eventually we had several different recordings. One was for the occasion of a birthday, one for Christmas, and then there were three general ones, variations on ‘Hello, it’s me, sorry to miss you’. For her friends, Tess’s tone was slangy – ‘Hey, babe’ – while those for her family were more formal. I got Tess to make me a list of when her closest family and friends were likely to let their phones go to voicemail; her mother, for instance, went to her book group every Wednesday evening – what she called her ‘me time’ – whilst those friends with children would be busy collecting them from school during the mid-afternoon.

I also decided that we should take photos of Tess for me to later superimpose on scenes of wherever it was she was going, to post on Facebook. One evening I asked her to show me the clothes in her wardrobe, and she positioned the laptop on the side of the bed and pulled them out, one by one, holding them up against her. Once we had agreed on certain outfits, suitable for different seasons and weather conditions, she put them on, not bothering to move away from the camera, so I saw her strip down to her knickers.

As she got changed, I examined her body. It was so different to mine. Her lack of flesh meant I could see parts of her skeleton I had never seen on myself: the knobbles on her spine and her ribcage as she bent down, her hip bones as she lifted her arms to pull on a top. It was as if she only had a fine sheet draped over her frame, whereas mine was buried under a duvet.

Once dressed, I directed her how to use the self-timer on her camera to take photos of herself wearing various outfits against a blank wall in her room, in a variety of poses. She then emailed them over for me to check.

Tess seemed to enjoy the session, happily rummaging through her stuff, holding things up for my opinion, exclaiming with delight as she chanced upon a favourite jacket she thought she’d lost. I don’t have any interest in clothes and didn’t know what she was talking about most of the time –
vintage Ossie, my old Dries top
– but I quite enjoyed it, too. It pleased me to see her happy. I remember thinking about that photo on Facebook of her and her friends getting ready to go out, when she was my age, and wondering whether what I was experiencing with Tess was something similar to that. ‘Girly fun.’ I felt close to Tess, then, and it was a nice feeling.

Not long after, however, something happened that jolted our relationship back to the professional, and made me feel that I hardly knew her at all. One morning, as usual, I logged onto her Facebook account, and saw that she had sent out party invites to her entire friends list. She must have done it sometime after we had Skyped the previous evening.

Tess’s Farewell Fiesta
, the invite read.
Join me for a glass or five before I set sail for pastures new
. The date was the following Friday, and the venue a pub in Bethnal Green. Already, eighteen people had accepted the invite, and her wall was filled with messages from bemused friends:
Wait, you’re leaving? Where? When? What’s all this? Why didn’t I know about this?

I immediately emailed Tess asking why she hadn’t consulted me before such a major move, but she didn’t reply all day, and I had to wait for that evening’s Skype session to hear her explanation.

‘Oh yeah,’ she said, with an infuriatingly breezy manner, ‘I thought I should have a bit of a send-off.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

She shrugged, looking off-camera.

‘It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. Anyway, you know now, don’t you?’

‘But you can’t have a leaving party yet! We haven’t worked out where you’re going, or when or . . .’ I heard my voice rise, and paused to calm down. ‘What are you going to tell everybody?’

‘Oh, I’ll think of something,’ she said, turning back to me with a touch of irritation in her voice. ‘I’ll say I’m moving abroad. Stop being such a fusspot.’

‘
I’ll
think of something, you mean,’ I replied, almost under my breath, but Tess gave the camera a quick, narrow-eyed glance and I knew she had heard.

‘Oh, and I’ve told everyone I’m leaving in a month,’ she added, and smiled sweetly.

As you can imagine, this rather took me aback. No dates for ‘check-out’ had been discussed up until now, and I had foreseen the information-gathering process continuing for at least another two months. I had seen no evidence on email or Facebook to support this new claim from Tess, and it crossed my mind that she had just thought up the deadline on the spot in order to fluster me. But, whatever the case, once she had said it she refused to budge, insisting we had to wrap everything up within four weeks.

‘In that case,’ I said, ‘we need to start planning your future.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Your new life,’ I said, doing my utmost to remain measured. ‘Where you want to live, what you want to do, everything. We’ve got to work it all out.’

‘I don’t care,’ she said, with an impatient sigh. ‘I’m not going to be there, am I?’

This was true, of course, and by that point I probably did have enough knowledge of her to make an informed decision about the kind of place she might go and the job she might take, and so on. But I felt both annoyed and hurt by her offhand manner.

‘I mean, that’s what you’re here for, isn’t it?’ she added, to rub salt into the wound.

I brought the conversation to an end on quite bad terms, but I soon rallied. I had to be professional; I was here to do a job. I sat down and tried to be rational and think of good places for Tess to go. It took quite a bit of Internet research before I found the answer.

Obviously, the main criterion was that it was a long way away. In my initial meeting with Adrian he had mentioned Australia as a possible location, but that didn’t seem right. Even leaving aside the major new fact that her ex-husband Lee was Australian, I knew that the major cities in the country were popular destinations for travel. And even if Tess lived outside one of the main cities, I thought that if one of her family members or friends had already taken a twenty-four-hour plane journey out to Sydney, say, it was likely they would make the small extra effort to go and see her.

Besides, for it to seem authentic there had to be a reason for Tess choosing the place she ended up in. She was, she told me, ‘very sensitive to environment’ and had to be ‘around beauty’, and it would be unlike her to just go anywhere. There would have to be something there that was obviously attractive to her.

So, in summary, it had to be a place that was difficult to get to, had enough ‘charms’ for Tess to want to settle there, yet not somewhere where people might think, ‘Oh, I’ve always wanted to go there and here’s my chance.’

Furthermore, it would make sense for Tess to move to a place that was entirely different to where she was now, in Bethnal Green. And, I realized, it would make sense for her to move to somewhere ‘spiritual’.

This ‘spirituality’ was a side of Tess I found hard to deal with. She eagerly embraced mystical fads, becoming obsessed with homeopathy and crystals, earnestly telling me about ‘cupping’ and ley-lines. To be frank, it offended me, and I challenged her on it a couple of times – ‘Where is the proof?’ – but she stubbornly insisted that it made her feel better.

So, with that in mind, I found some ‘New Age’ websites, and lurked on a few forums. I noted what they were chatting about, and when someone mentioned a place, I looked it up. And that was how I came to hear of Sointula.

Sointula is on an island off the coast near Vancouver, a former hippy colony that had been founded as a ‘socialist utopia’ in the 1970s. It has become more of a normal place, a fishing colony, although it still retained some of that spirit and was something of a destination for the ‘spiritually inclined’. From the pictures it looked quite nice, with empty beaches and simple, low-level buildings. There were a sufficient population to provide employment, but it was quiet enough for it to convincingly be a refuge for a ‘damaged’ person like Tess.

Most crucially, it’s very difficult to get to. You have to fly to Vancouver, get another flight to Port Hardy, a half-hour taxi ride to another port and then a ferry. There was no way that her parents could make that trip with Jonathan in his current state. It would, I hoped, put off even the hardiest of her travelling friends; even Sharmi, who had been to Papua New Guinea. Besides, of course, Tess would be making it expressly clear that she didn’t want anyone to come and see her; that she wanted to start afresh.

Once I had decided on Sointula, I spent a day sketching out Tess’s life there. I looked up estate agents and found her a flat to live in. It was a nice little place, on the ground floor of a detached clapboard house, with a part share of the garden. The photographs showed airy, bright rooms, with windows from floor to ceiling, hung with checked curtains, and white wooden floors. The flat was furnished very simply, with the bare minimum – a neat little sofa, a round, four-seater table – yet managed to look cosy.

For a brief moment, looking at the flat, I felt a pang: that I would like to live there myself. It was, I recall, a Friday night, and out of the window Albion Street was extremely noisy; the smell of onions was seeping up into the flat, and there was the sound of breaking glass and drunken laughter from the pub.

The estate agent’s website said that the Sointula flat was on the ground floor of a house lived in by the landlady. She, I decided, was a widow called Mrs Peterson, who looked just like mum.

After finding Tess’s flat – or apartment, I should say – I began searching for a job for her. As mentioned, she had had a chequered employment history and it would be perfectly plausible for her to work in a lowly capacity, for instance as a waitress in one of the island’s restaurants. But I wasn’t happy with that. This was her ‘new life’, and I wanted something better for her. Besides, I thought there was a possibility that if there was an emergency at home, and someone wanted to get in touch with her urgently, it wouldn’t take them long to discover the names of the few restaurants on the island and call them direct to speak to her.

So, I went through the other options. Sointula had a clothes shop called Moira’s and a small library. I considered the library, but then, as I was poring over my Tess files looking for inspiration, I was reminded of her brief spell at art school, and it came to me. Tess could be a private art tutor for the child of one of the island’s families.

I admit I was rather pleased with this. It meant that Tess could plausibly have her phone turned off for a lot of the time and therefore be unreachable. The role of Tess’s mobile in her new life had been a matter of some concern to me, not only the obvious problem of the difference in our voices but also because I realized that phone ringtones are different abroad, and anyone ringing Tess’s phone would be able to tell that it was still in the UK. A good reason for it not to be switched on was a pleasing solution.

House and job decided, I put together a package for Tess, with pictures of the island and details of the flat, as if I was selling it to her. She emailed back uncharacteristically quickly, her tone once again shifted from grumpiness to appreciation. She said she loved the idea of Sointula, the flat looked gorgeous, and that it was a stroke of genius to think of tutoring.

It’s so fab, I almost want to go there myself!
she wrote.
Darling, you’re a star.