What She Left: Enhanced Edition (20 page)

You tilted your head upwards. ‘Least Ben’s honest about how shit he is.’

I ignored that, whoever the fuck Ben might have been, and for a second had a handle on it, me after you. How this would become a memory – how Amy had, or Alex or Pippa. A fleeting, foggy sense of me looking back on you in a year or two or five; yes, with a twinge of regret, but as a memory. I’d view you as a stepping stone on the way to her – whoever
she
was, my next girlfriend. Maybe it – tonight, this – would become an in-joke of ours, me and her, how I’d once fought with a woman on a bench by a river in the snow. How I’d once followed a girl to Southampton like a love-struck teenager. Dated a journalist. We’d laugh, initially awkwardly but gradually less so, about it, you, us, just as now you and I laugh – laughed – about me and Amy splitting up over a lamb shank or Alex telling me at a bus stop in Neasden that I was emotionally stunted. I hated losing Amy, hated losing Alex, hated losing you. When was this going to end? ‘I love you, Al,’ I said again, and you weren’t the only one who was crying. ‘I won’t let you leave me.’

But you sprung up and when I grabbed you, you were wet from the snow and small; you always maintained you were big – Shrek-like, you claimed – but I felt twice the size of you, three times, ten times, and furious that I couldn’t protect something this fragile, this beautiful.

‘Why does everyone want to put their hands on me? I can’t bear it.’

When you started screaming I put my hand over your mouth because if someone had heard, they’d have been convinced I was attacking you. I could feel your breath, your lips, your teeth, your nostrils, your neck. Over your shoulder there was the faint glow of a cigarette in the distance on the other side of the river.

‘Can’t breathe,’ you squealed.

‘Stop shouting then.’

‘Help, help, someone help me.’

‘Shhh … I’m trying to help you.’

‘You’re hurting me.’

‘You can throw yourself off that bridge for all I care,’ I said, tightening my grip.

You craned your head sideways so you had it in view, but I didn’t let go. I saw your cleavage, and had a vision of you on the bed with no clothes on and lust tugged at me, like a fish on a line. I put my other arm out, but you swiped it away so I grabbed at you; I had to hang on, had to keep you, so I could explain, the realization dawning on me that what I had in my grasp was a handful of your hair.

‘Get off me,’ you screamed.

We’ll miss you and your laughter but not your minging trainers on the radiators!

Amanda

 

It was inevitable that someone with your talent would get poached* sooner or later. It’s a great opportunity and one you couldn’t say no to. Our loss is London’s gain. Thanks for all your hard work and enthusiasm. Maybe we can lure you back one day?

Mark

*Poached Salmon, geddit?!

 

We’ve summoned Rentokil to disassemble your desk. Warned them to expect rats!

Barbara S.

 

Remember the successes like the ‘night stalker’ campaign? You put one of Southampton’s most dangerous men behind bars and you should be proud of that. All the best.

Bev

 

Next stop, the
New York Times
, via a short spell in Balham!

Gavin

PS: If Cazza claims your leaving present was her idea she’s lying. It was mine.

 

Go, Fish Face, go. If you leave your iPod behind, don’t worry, no one will claim it. Thankfully your taste in books is better than your taste in music. Thanks for the reading recommendations and thanks for the memories.

Bella

 

Sob! You’ve been like a big sister to me, does that make you sound old?? Learnt so much from you and you’ve been a brill shoulder to cry on. Have adored every minute of working with you. Tweet me, Miss S!

Ali xxx

 

It’s already passed into legend – the day the new girl stood up to Sexiest Sexton and refused to do a Death Knock.

Gavin

 

Hope you like the Kindle. It’s the new DX one with the big screen! You’ve got absolutely no excuse not to read Kafka now!

Cazza

PS: Gav’s talking out of his posterior!

 

Who’s going to make the tea now, even if you did insist on
having yours so strong you could stand the spoon up in it? Enjoy the big smoke. V jealous! When can we come and visit? Two sugars please.

Phil

 

Friday nights in Flames won’t be the same without you. Make sure you come back and see us. Make mine a double :)

Juliet

 

Good luck.

From Anthony Stanhope

 

You’ve done your best to play it cool, Miss Salmon, but I have it on good authority that you’re crazy about me so let me know when you’re ready for that date! A man like me won’t hang around for ever!

Big Tom

 

Journalist extraordinaire, queen of bakers, runner, charity worker, champion of the dispossessed, tequila enthusiast, brilliant friend. Is there anything you can’t do? Watch out, men of London.

Loads of love and big hugs, Michelle X

My dear Larry,

I went to the river after I’d been to the police station. To the spot where a procession of TV presenters had stood, as
if their geographical proximity gave them some unique insight. ‘It was here,’ they’d say in hushed, authoritative tones, ‘that a promising young life was cut short. Here, at this normally peaceful and tranquil spot, that a young woman died tragically. Here, where an otherwise normal Saturday night out – the sort that thousands enjoy every weekend – reached its horrific conclusion.’ They focused almost exclusively on this stretch, titillated viewers with uncorroborated details about the strength of the current on February 5 (medium to fast), how much she weighed (purportedly anything between 9 stone 4 and 10 stone 5) and what she was wearing (jeans, a purple silky top and boots … that they were knee-length, black, from Topshop – one newscaster got very carried away with that particular kernel of detail).

The scene had been awash with flowers initially: an explosion of winter reds, pinks and yellows – the ideal backdrop for cameramen. Now, just the wilted remains of one small bouquet. There wasn’t a soul around, it was after 1 a.m., and I’d knelt by the water, put my hand in, felt the rush of cold. Initial reports claimed it was a jogger who’d spotted her body, later revised to a dog walker. He’d been shocked when I got in touch, asked if I was official. Yes, I’d reassured him. I’d asked him questions as if I was entirely uninformed, but it seems so important: to fill in all the blanks. He’d thought she was a tree trunk, then it dawned on him they were clothes. ‘I couldn’t take it in,’ he said, this man who I’d met in the Debenhams restaurant. ‘It was as if my brain wouldn’t process it, a dead woman in the water.’ He didn’t use the expression – it’s actually one with which I’ve only recently become familiar – but what he’d seen had been the first-stage ‘immersion artefacts’. Alice’s skin, pimpled like a bad case of goosebumps (cutis anserina, the
technical term is), the smooth softness swollen and wrinkled like a washerwoman’s. Putting his coffee down, he’d said she’d had a stick in her hand. Apparently it’s not unusual for objects to remain grasped after death, fixed by a cadaveric spasm. Left in the water longer, fish and other creatures would have nibbled Alice’s flesh, lips and eyelids. The word for that was a new one on me: anthropophagy. Left longer still she would have sunk, before eventually resurfacing, bobbed back up by the gas produced by her body’s bacteria. ‘Bloat and float,’ I saw that ghoulishly described as in one Internet chat room.

The man in Debenhams was petrified the police would arrest him; put two and two together and come up with five. ‘The council’s replaced a lot of the fences near the bridge,’ he said.

I explained about Alice’s newspaper campaign when she’d worked in the city. How strongly she’d felt about it; how her single-mindedness and tenaciousness had achieved results.

‘They’ve been vandalized, but you’d have had to
want
to jump to get through,’ he said.

I’d had my suspicions at first, but I simply can’t see it: her taking her own life. Not Alice. For every page in her diary she devoted to how bad she felt, there were two to how fantastic life was. She’d got through bad spells before. Liz, bless her, is vaulting from theory to theory. I expect she’ll have crept up to the notion of suicide, edging out to it as one would a cliff, but she’s steadfastly refusing to accept or even acknowledge its plausibility and my conclusions thus far bear that out: time and again that girl had soldiered on, beaten back the blackness, persevered,
lived
.

By the river, I’d put my hand back in, and there was a faint memory of being in a dinghy, leaning out the back, my
hand trailing in water. I dropped down on to my hands and knees. ‘Darling, where
are
you?’ I found myself calling and saw my reflection – the half-moon glasses, the eyebrows, the wrinkles, the tufts of hair – then I was washed away. I wondered what it would have been like to have stepped in, to have followed her, to have gone after her. It’s not the pain of illness that scares me, Larry; that’s not so impossible. It’s the prospect of decline I can’t abide. The thought of Fliss having to watch it. As if I haven’t hurt her enough.

‘You’re not escaping that easily,’ she said when I made a wisecrack about one final holiday to Sweden. Her face had crumpled and she said that life was precious, it wasn’t ours to take and, besides, she cherished every single second with me.

When the boy with tattoos had mentioned ‘hara-kiri’, I tied the little shit up in knots by outlining its literal translation. Explained how defeated samurai would restore their honour by disembowelling themselves, and the displacement was similar to lecturing; if you focused intently on detail, you didn’t see what you were looking at, didn’t feel anything, there was just the banking up of details and facts, the familiar architecture of knowledge. ‘Imagine a shame so great it compels a human being to take their own life,’ I’d said and he did what he’d done previously: asked me why I talked about human beings as if they were a different species, as if I wasn’t one of them. He’d asked for more money and I’d explained how the less noise samurai made after they’d sliced themselves open with their swords – their
wakizashi
– the braver they were.