Kiss Me First (16 page)

Often I cut short the interviews myself, when it clearly wasn’t going to work. One applicant, an old man who was bald except for a band of hair around his head, like the rings of Saturn, and reeked of body odour, informed me that he was ‘into big girls’. Another, a young African man, had a Bible in the pocket of his corduroy jacket which meant he had to be excluded, although he otherwise fit the criteria; he barely said a word and just nodded and smiled.

The majority of applicants were foreign, students from Africa or Eastern Europe. I couldn’t decide whether it would be better to have someone foreign, because their English would be more limited; or worse, because they would invariably be learning the language whilst they were over here and might want to practise on me. After some thought, I decided that foreign would be better: it would also work to my advantage for the person to be unfamiliar with British customs and habits, so they were more likely to accept mine.

It is rather ironic, then, that I ended up with Jonty, who is not only English – well, Welsh – but possibly the most talkative person I have ever come across. But I didn’t know that when I agreed to him moving in. He gave a misleading first impression. During our interview he was uncharacteristically quiet: later I discovered that he was so hungover he was afraid he would be sick if he opened his mouth. His appearance was striking, but not unpleasant: short and square, with disproportionately broad shoulders under his duffel coat and spiky dark-blonde hair. Although he said he was twenty-five, his face looked much younger.

He nodded yes when I asked him whether he would be out of the flat a lot, and nodded again when I explained that my work required a lot of concentration, and that I had to work at night and then sleep all day, so if he was looking for a ‘mate’ then he was in the wrong place. He shook his head when I asked whether he had many possessions. He seemed to genuinely like the flat, which was odd. He didn’t mind it was a single bed – ‘I never get lucky anyway’ was one of the few things he said – and expressed no surprise at the lack of curtains and other furniture. So I decided on the spot that he would do. I was tired of seeing all these people, it was taking up a lot of time that I should have been devoting to Tess, and I had run out of money.

On the day he moved in, with a single sports bag – a lack of possessions was the one promise he kept – he was, to my dismay, much more chatty. He knocked on my door and barely waited for a reply before entering, as if a conversation in my bedroom had been part of a pre-arranged schedule. Thank goodness I had had the foresight to cover up my Tess notes with a poster. He sat on the sofa, which was now my bed, and – told me all about himself. Originally from Cardiff, where he had had a successful career working in sales at American Express but had decided to give it up and come to London to be an actor. He told me a long anecdote about his ‘moment of revelation’, when he had been persuading a woman to get another credit card and suddenly realized he had to do something more worthwhile with his life: ‘follow my dreams, all that bollocks’. He had enrolled with a drama school in King’s Cross and given himself a year to make it, which was how long his savings would last.

Jonty didn’t seem to be able to do anything without informing me about it. On his first evening in the flat he knocked on my door to announce he was going to ‘explore the neighbourhood’. I told him, through the door, that that wouldn’t take long, that there was nothing to see in Rotherhithe. I heard him come in a few hours later, but when I left my room to go to the loo his door opened and he started babbling about his evening. ‘You didn’t tell me we were so close to the river!’ he said – I didn’t know that we were – and went on about this ‘amazing’ pub in the next street called the Queen Bee that was, I quote, ‘full of these crazy old dudes, seriously old school’. One of them had bought him a pickled egg from a jar beside the bar. I knew it would lead to further exhausting conversation if I told him I hadn’t ‘explored’ further than Tesco Extra.

That’s the thing about Jonty. Any response you give, even a ‘Really?’ is like throwing a log on a fire. So when he’d come back home with all these stories of his adventures around London – finding a shop that sold taxidermied animals in Islington, swimming in an open-air pool in Brockwell Park – I nodded but didn’t respond. Even though he claimed not to know anyone in London, he seemed to make friends very quickly. One night, only a few weeks after he arrived, his new colleagues from drama school put him in a dustbin and rolled him down Primrose Hill. Apparently, this was a gesture of affection.

Luckily, his desire to ‘suck the marrow out of London’ did mean that he was out most nights, but I still had to take precautions because I never knew when he would be coming back. I hid my Tess timeline behind three large
Lord of the Rings
posters and got a lock for my door. I also took up the carpet from the corridor, so that I would be able to hear him approaching on the bare boards. He would return in the middle of the night, when I would be up doing Tess work. When I heard his footsteps I would freeze, and stop typing. I’d listen to his footsteps pause outside my door, and then retreat back to his room.

Nevertheless, the day-to-day practicalities of communal living were a challenge. Luckily my Tess schedule meant I could use the kitchen at night, when he was asleep, but once or twice he was still up and, when he heard me in there, came through in his tracksuit bottoms for a ‘chat’. He would sometimes get a take-away from the restaurant below and the waiters would bring it up to the flat; the first time the doorbell rang, I nearly fell off my chair. He quickly got to know all of them, and I would hear him on the street outside, chatting to them as they smoked. He would tell them about his auditions and ask them about themselves, as if they were his friends.

Even when absent, his presence was felt. He liked to cook himself elaborate meals using strange ingredients from ethnic supermarkets, and I would often find a streak of his latest dish down the side of a kitchen cabinet and a jar of strongly smelling sauce in the fridge with its lid half off. In the bathroom, globules of his shaving foam, flecked with hair, hardened on the sink.

After not really having any contact with men before, suddenly, there were two. Because it wasn’t long after Jonty arrived that I had my first email from Connor.

This was six and a half weeks after Tess had checked out. In Sointula, all was going smoothly. Tess had moved into her flat and had started her job, teaching art to Natalie, who was being home schooled by her parents. She attended yoga lessons three times a week, and, much to her surprise, had developed an interest in fishing. She had also made some new friends and that day, the day Connor emailed, I had decided that she was going to take a day trip to the mainland with her new friend Leonora, an older woman who ran a
quaint
cafe on the island.

Her Facebook update for that day was an elliptical one:
Wanted a pineapple, got some feet
. Tess was fond of those sorts of mysterious updates, and so I made sure to include one every so often, even though I didn’t like them – partly because I disapproved in principle, but also because they invariably elicited curious responses from her friends to which Tess then had to respond.

What happened was that the previous evening, Tess and Leonora had been having tea at Leonora’s house. Tess had admired a pineapple-shaped ice bucket in the front room, and asked where Leonora had got it. Leonora replied that she had bought it from a shop on the mainland that sold inexpensive, ‘quirky’ furniture and household items. Tess, whose flat was still quite unfurnished, was keen to have a look, and they decided they would take a trip to the mainland the following day.

The two of them caught the 9.20 a.m. ferry, landing at 10.30 a.m. They took a bus to Main Street, where the shop was located. There were no more pineapple-shaped ice buckets, but Tess spotted some bookends that she liked, stone casts of a pair of man’s feet.
I know they sound gross
, she wrote in an email to Justine later that day,
but honestly, they’re kind of cool. You look at them and think – where have those feet been?
She also bought a red silk throw for her bed, eighty inches by forty inches in size.

There was also a light-blue armchair that she liked the look of; however she wasn’t sure whether it would fit into her flat, so she asked the shopkeeper to hold it for her so that she could go home and measure the spot where it would go. She would phone later that afternoon if she wanted it. Then, she and Leonora browsed some of the other shops on the street. Tess considered buying a jumper with rainbow stripes, but stopped herself.
This place is so fucking folksy
, she told Justine
.
I’ve got to resist turning into an old hippy with chin hair and Cornish pasty shoes.

They had lunch in a cafe called the Rosewood, where Tess had a quinoa salad. Although it was tough, she was persevering with the veganism: she found that it made her calmer and her digestion better, and she could swear that the whites of her eyes were brighter. She also felt it ‘morally right’. When Tess mentioned turn-ing vegan in an email to Justine, Justine pointed out the contradiction between this anti-meat stance and her newly discovered interest in fishing;
And since when was I consistent?
Tess replied. I was quite proud of that.

Anyway, in the Rosewood cafe the two women talked about Leonora’s new boyfriend, a local man called Roger who ran whale-watching trips and was kind and attractive, but had suspected ‘commitment issues’. Tess confided in Leonora about her brief marriage to the Australian. Tess liked Leonora, although she was quite earnest and probably not the sort of person she’d have been friends with back in London.
That’s the thing about this place. Broadens your horizons, makes you consider things you wouldn’t normally.

After lunch, the two women took the 2.30 p.m. ferry back to Sointula, where Tess spent the rest of the afternoon reading a Russian novel called
Anna Karenina
, which she had always meant to read and was finding very affecting. At 7.40 p.m. she watched a black and white film called
His Girl Friday
on CBC Canada and ate some brown rice with a tofu and cabbage stir fry, before going to bed at 10.30 p.m.

When Connor’s email came through, though, none of this had happened yet. It was 12.58 p.m. Sointula time and Tess was offline, in the middle of lunch at the Rosewood Cafe. I was at my computer preparing the account of her trip for her to send to Justine when she got home. I checked her emails, as I did several times an hour, and saw one from asender I didn’t recognize, Connor Devine. The subject line contained just one word:
So . . .

The email continued: . . .
Remember your theory about Benny? I’ve decided that you were right. He was definitely fucking both of them.

That was it. No sign off or anything. A line at the bottom indicated that the email had been sent from a BlackBerry.

As you can imagine, I was perplexed. Both the sender and the subject to which he was referring were unknown to me, yet the email was written in a very informal and immediate style, as if he and Tess were in the middle of a conversation. I searched for the name in both of Tess’s email accounts and there was no record of Connor Devine, nor in the notes from our Skype sessions. I knew he wasn’t one of her Facebook friends, but I checked to see if he was friends with any of her friends. The name was a surprisingly common one – there were thirty-eight of them listed in London alone – but none of them had any links with anyone Tess knew. I searched in my Tess files for ‘Benny’ but nothing came up on that name either. I did a Google search but, like I say, there were many results for Connor Devine and I could find no obvious link to Tess with anyone of that name.

This wasn’t the first time Tess had received an email from a sender unknown to me. A few weeks previously there had been a Facebook message from a woman called Chandra Stanley, but it had been a standard
,
Hi, how are you, wow, how’s Canada?
and I could give a standard response. This one, though, was difficult. The sender’s tone was ‘larky’ and the contents clearly referred to a private joke between the two of them.

I decided to ignore the email, thinking that it must have been sent by mistake. But then, the next afternoon, I heard again from Connor Devine.

Fancy some bone marrow at St John? Sans parsley?

Parsley was one of Tess’s dislikes, so it seemed likely that the sender knew her, and that the first email hadn’t been a mistake. The name ‘St John’ also rang a bell. Eight years previously, Tess had had a short-lived relationship with a chef called Toby who had worked at a restaurant called St John in east London. It was a disgusting-sounding place that served up bits of animals that shouldn’t be eaten. Toby weighed twenty-three stone, Tess had told me one evening, and she had slept with him because she had never been with a fat man and wanted to see what it was like. Apparently, grabbing handfuls of his flesh ‘was like ascending a climbing wall’ and his skin gave off a sweet, yeasty smell, similar to that of digestive biscuits. She liked him because he was ‘so pathetically grateful’, but the novelty soon wore off.

Curious, I went through my notes for that time in her life, when she was living with Catatonic Katie and managing the vintage clothes shop in Spitalfields. She had had relationships with various men, but there was no mention of this Connor. Neither did he have any association with the restaurant that I could find.

Also, I discovered, the restaurant had been open since 1994, and a dish containing bone marrow was mentioned in a newspaper review in that same year, so, really, the time frame was hardly narrowed at all: Connor and Tess could have eaten there at any point in the past seventeen years.

The message did reveal one thing, of course: Connor Devine almost certainly did not know Tess was in Canada. I decided to reply.

Sounds great, but not quite worth a 10,000 mile round trip.