Kiss Me First (35 page)

But I’m getting ahead of myself. First, I need to explain what happened to me in Spain, and why I left the commune so abruptly.

On the Wednesday morning, I was dozing under the tree when I heard the sound of first Spanish being spoken close by, then English. I felt a hand on my shoulder, shaking me awake. Semi-conscious, my first thought was that it was Milo, but this grip was far heavier and more insistent, and I opened my eyes to see a man looming over me. The sun was behind him, so at first I couldn’t see that he was wearing a uniform, and my first thought was that he was someone from the commune, perhaps sent by the annoying woman who kept going on about me not using the official toilet.

Then he said, in heavily accented English, ‘Please, get up.’

I sat up and saw that there was another man there too, standing off to one side, and that they were wearing police uniforms. Such was my befuddled state, I had the notion that the account I had been writing of Tess had somehow bled into real life. After all, I had reached the point in the story when I was at the police station in London: by writing about the police, perhaps I had conjured them into existence. Somehow, they had found out why I had come to the commune and were here to tell me that Tess’s body had been discovered.

I got to my feet. They were both large, bulky men, wearing sunglasses and sweating in their uniforms. Behind them there was a police car and, beside it, a flattened rectangle of grass where Annie’s van had been. One of them asked me to spell my name, and then informed me that I was being arrested on suspicion of murdering my mother.

Feeling like I still wasn’t fully conscious, I got into the back seat of the car. Oddly, I didn’t feel nervous. We drove back down the track and towards the main town. The two men didn’t speak, to me or to each other, and the only sound was the occasional outburst in fast Spanish from the radio. When we reached the plastic greenhouses, I thought of my tent and belongings and wondered what was going to happen to them now. Apart from that, and odd though it may sound, I didn’t really think or feel anything during the journey. It was as if my brain was offline. The air-conditioning was on full blast and it was deliciously cool. Sitting on that cracked plastic seat, I was the most comfortable I had been throughout my week in Spain.

At the police station, I was taken into a room, decorated with tatty posters warning of the dangers of thieves and timeshare touts. Other than that, the set-up was the same as it was in Fleet Street – a table, four chairs and a tape recorder, which was even more clunky than the one in London.

As he stated the charge and read me my rights, the policeman’s voice was flat, as if this matter was of no more importance than a stolen handbag. I had the right to an English-speaking solicitor, did I know of one? After he repeated the question, I found the strength to shake my head. Would I like them to find me one? I nodded.

I was told I could make a phone call, and was shown to a plastic covered phone in the corner of the room. The problem was, I didn’t know who to call. The only person I could think of was Jonty, but I didn’t have his mobile number on me. So I phoned the only number I knew off by heart, which was the landline of our old house in Leverton Street. A man answered, presumably the person we had sold the place to. ‘Yes? Who is this?’ he said, and when I didn’t reply, he swore and put down the phone.

I returned to my seat. One policeman had left the room, presumably to find a solicitor for me; the other sat by the door, showing so little movement he could have been asleep behind his sunglasses. I looked at the posters on the walls, with their cartoon warnings against tourist crime – one showed a handbag hanging over the back of a chair with a red line through it – and thought that by the time people saw them, here in the police station, surely it would be too late to heed the advice.

I stared at the words BE CAREFUL!, and thought about the flattened rectangle of grass where Annie’s van had been. I wasn’t disappointed with her for telling the police, but rather with myself and my judgement. I had got her wrong. ‘I understand,’ she’d said when I told her, but she hadn’t, really. Just like Connor had said ‘I love you’ but he hadn’t, really. I should have learned by now that people do not always mean what they say.

Then I thought about the word ‘murder’, and the idea of it being applied to what I did to mum was so ludicrous I almost laughed.

And then, suddenly, I was very scared. I did not want to be locked up. That I knew with absolute certainty. When I had walked into the police station in London, I welcomed the idea of prison, but now things were different. The thought of it made panic course through me; I glanced at the non-moving policeman and, for a wild moment, considered making a run for it.

Part of me felt that if I explained it all, they would understand – how could anyone not? – but I was not naive. Since mum had died I had kept an eye on reports of euthanasia trials and knew that whilst some judges were sympathetic and showed leniency, others did not. The fact that mum had not been a member of a right-to-die organization and had never publicly registered her wishes would not count in my favour, nor would the fact that I was the sole beneficiary of her estate.

Suddenly, I missed my mum so much it stopped my breath. I pictured the door opening and her rushing in to rescue me. She would hold me and take care of me, just as I had taken care of her. We would burst out laughing; it had all been a terrible mistake and she was fit and well again, we were back in Leverton Street, me sitting at the table, her jiggling around to Radio 2 whilst she cooked. I was safe and loved, and when they bullied me at school she would be waiting at the gate with a bag of doughnuts from Greggs the bakers, and she would hold my hand tightly, just as I held hers when her own breath finally stopped.

The policeman looked in my direction. I gripped the plastic table and inhaled deeply, trying to regain control. Then the door opened and the other policeman reappeared. Behind him was someone else, but it was not an English-speaking solicitor. It was Annie.

She had Milo and the baby in tow, and looked even more pink than usual, her hair damp and plastered to her face.

‘Are you OK?’ she said.

I looked at her in astonishment, and nodded.

‘I was at the supermarket,’ she said. ‘When I got back, I couldn’t see you and then I heard that you’d been taken away by the police.’

She said it was Synth who had told her, and that she could tell by her expression that it was she who had called them. Synth must have overheard us talking at the bonfire.

‘I’ve been explaining to the police that there’s been a misunderstanding,’ she said. ‘Synth’s English isn’t good, and she misheard what you said. You didn’t mean
killed
, you meant
died
. You meant your mother had died naturally, as a result of her illness.’ She looked straight into my eyes. ‘I told the police that you’d be prepared to make a statement confirming this, and that you’d cooperate fully in giving them details of your mother’s death so they can corroborate the facts.’

I just nodded. Annie then addressed the police, speaking in fast, complicated Spanish. I didn’t know she could speak so fluently.

Annie and I were in the police station for another three hours. They found me an English-speaking solicitor, a thin middle-aged woman called Maria, and I repeated Annie’s story. I talked them through the night mum died, omitting my involvement, and gave them the name of Dr Wahiri, who had come in the next morning and signed the death certificate stating she died of complications arising from MS.

They said they would have to phone England and check the story. Whilst we were waiting, Annie pulled up a chair beside me. We didn’t talk about what was going on, but she kept up bright, cheery conversation about other things, whilst Milo wandered around the room, kicking at chair legs. At one point she gave me the baby to hold. It was the first time I’d had one in my arms; it was the same weight and temperature as our old cat, Thomas.

After an hour, Annie went out to buy us some drinks, and while she was gone I heard the sounds of raised, angry voices through the door, coming from the front desk. I became worried, but when Annie returned she told me that the altercation had nothing to do with our case. Whilst she had been grappling with the vending machine in the reception area, two men had been brought in, charged with assault. It was some argument over water, apparently.

‘From what I could hear, one of them’s a farmer,’ she said. ‘He’s been siphoning water from those greenhouses, the ones near us. He says it’s his water because it goes through his land. Everyone’s getting desperate because of the drought.’

I didn’t think much of this at the time. I was still too preoccupied with the police phoning Dr Wahiri. You see, that morning, when he came in to examine mum, and I was telling him about waking up to find her dead beside me, he had given me a look. It was very brief, a fraction of a second, and at the time my reading of it was: I know what you did, and I understand. But perhaps yet again I had misunderstood, and the look was one of suspicion.

Another half-hour passed and I grew more and more worried. The baby started crying so Annie pulled up her T-shirt and started feeding it. Milo was whining, too, so I tried to amuse him by doing the pee-po game through my fingers, the same one mum used to do with me. It worked for a bit – he actually laughed – but then he got bored again and tugged at his mother’s skirt.

Then we heard footsteps approaching. Annie had finished feeding, thank goodness, as the door opened and the older policeman came in. He spoke in Spanish to Annie, who nodded. I couldn’t tell from her expression what he was saying. My heart thumped.

She turned to me and said, ‘Dr Wahiri has confirmed the death was natural. Because the accusation against you was based on hearsay and there’s no supporting evidence, we’re free to leave.’

It was dark by the time we drove back to the commune. Annie asked what I was going to do now.

‘I think I should probably go home,’ I said.

Early the next morning, I packed up my tent and Annie drove me to the airport. We didn’t speak much on the journey. It wasn’t an awkward silence, though. At the airport, she parked her van crookedly, blocking the taxi lane. I said goodbye to Milo and then, to her, ‘Thank you very much.’

She waved it away, as if it didn’t need to be said.

‘Good luck out there.’ And then, as she started the engine and I walked towards the airport entrance, she called after me,

‘I’m on Facebook, look me up.’

Three days ago there was an interesting development.

Annie has Facebooked me several times since my return from Spain – chatty, inconsequential reports of her and Milo and, once, an invitation to an exhibition of wood craft which she helped organize in Connecticut. For my reply to that I recycled Tess’s response to Connor when he first asked her out for dinner:
Would love to, but not quite worth a 10,000 mile round trip.

This latest message, however, contained some real news.

Have you heard that it hasn’t rained in the Alpujurras since we were there? It’s the worst drought in living memory, apparently. The river has entirely dried up and there’s been more trouble between the farmers and the agri-business. It’s the poor wildlife I care about.

I checked Spanish news sites, which confirmed the ongoing drought in the region. As I was doing so, a small item caught my eye. It mentioned that a female human skeleton had been revealed on the dry river bed, about four miles from the commune.

I sat there, thinking, for some minutes, until my laptop logged me out.

Once, on the phone, Tess had mentioned drowning. She had just seen a film about a writer called Virginia Woolf, who committed suicide by walking into a river with stones in her pockets. ‘It’s the best way to go, apparently,’ she said. ‘You struggle and panic at first, but then when your oxygen runs out you surrender and then there’s this moment of bliss, and that’s the last thing you know.’

Of course, it may not have been her. The skeleton could have been there for years. It could have been a walker who got disorientated in the heat, a murder victim, another suicide. It could be an illegal immigrant, one of the workers in the greenhouses, somebody who would never be missed.

But it could have been her. A scenario took shape. On check-out day, Tess took the ferry to Bilbao, and from there either hitch-hiked or took the train to the commune. There she spent a week, punctuated with her visit to the Alhambra in Granada
– Visit the Alhambra before you die!
I read on one website – until she decided she was sure of her decision and ready to proceed. That evening, she would have walked to the river and, after disposing of her possessions, waded in. Perhaps she waited until darkness fell.

It would appeal to Tess’s romantic nature, I thought, to disappear like that. I pictured her in the moonlight; she would most probably have taken some alcohol with her – a bottle of tequila, perhaps. I pictured her listening, for one last moment, to the sound of the crickets in the trees.

After two days of deliberation I emailed Marion. I told her about my trip to Spain and what I had discovered, laying out my thoughts about the drowning. I left it up to her to decide if she wanted to investigate further. She hasn’t replied, but then I didn’t really expect her to.

I’m glad, actually. I don’t want to know if they find Tess’s body. Because that would destroy the other possibility: that she’s still alive. Maybe, during that week at the commune, she decided against it. Maybe she thought that now she had shaken off her old identity, life would be bearable. She could reinvent herself, start afresh as a new person, and this time get it right.

Maybe, when she left the commune, she just hitchhiked to another one, and was still there now, sitting around a different camp fire, making something out of feathers and string, discussing the price of bread with some ratty-haired Australian. Maybe she has fallen in love with a man and is now roaming the country with him in his camper van. Or maybe she has left Spain altogether; when she was in Granada, she might have gone into a bar and asked a shady-looking person to make her a false passport, and gone anywhere in the world.