What She Left: Enhanced Edition (24 page)

Dearest Larry,

You died in November, but I didn’t hear until January. Transpires there’d been quite a few obituaries, but I avoid reading the newspapers: it’s all feral youths running riot, superinjunctions and the double-dip recession. They called you ‘great’, a ‘game-changer’, a ‘man who redefined his field’. Qualities they’ll never attribute to me.

We’ve been acquainted for more than fifty years. ‘Anyone know what a penfriend is?’ my English master had asked. ‘Cooke, you’re to be paired with a boy in Canada. Specifically, New Brunswick.’

I pored for hours over my first communication to give the right impression. I even admitted – superciliousness disguised as humour you mistook for irony – I was disappointed not to have been conjoined with a Papua New Guinean headhunter.

Your reply began ‘Hiya Jeremy’, a greeting that leapt out at me for its informality. ‘I’m Larry Gutenberg and I’m eleven years old and I’m a pupil at Adena Elementary School.’

‘I wish to be a great scientist,’ I informed you. It was a badge of honour that my letters were as free from spelling mistakes as yours. I used to imagine you reading them, nodding, impressed, thinking: He’s like me, this Cooke chap.

‘I was wondering whether I might be able to visit my chum Larry,’ I enquired of my father after we’d been corresponding for some months. ‘I’d be incredibly grateful.’

‘You two are like a pair of little homos,’ he said dismissively. I later learnt it was my mother, not he, who wanted children.

We wrote every quarter, through O and A levels. The swinging sixties might never have happened as far as I was concerned. ‘I’m going up to Warwick in the autumn,’ I informed you when I was in the upper sixth, aping the language of Oxbridge and you never drew me up on that, despite presumably spotting my ruse.

Then there were your ideas. Already then they were arcing away from me. You were leaving me. It came to me as a revelation, in some ways a Eureka moment, the instant when I felt:
This is as far as I can go
. By the time I was in my mid-twenties, I realized I was never going to be a truly phenomenal scientist.

While my research kept running into dead ends and cul-de-sacs, while I kept returning like some fated migratory animal to the point where I’d begun, your work attracted ever more plaudits. I witnessed your successes with an alien sensation: one almost entirely devoid of jealousy. I wanted to be there with you, to celebrate, to stand alongside you. You were the scientist I’d always wished I could be: intuitive, brilliant, fearless, alive. They even named a law after you. Gutenberg’s Theorem. When I heard the term uttered in revered, respectful tones, I felt like screaming: He was mine long before the eponymous law. Mine, all mine.

Then came 2004 and
The Genes Department
. The holy grail: a serious science book that flew off the shelves. As I turned the pages, swept along by your intoxicating currents of theory, as I was taken on those elaborate, delicious tangents, I felt a mounting sense of rage. Blind fury, in fact. Every damn page bathed in this white light. It was like I was holding the very essence of science in my hand. Bright and beautiful and simple, but new and incredible. Moment after moment of it. I’d have given my life for just one of those pages, one of those moments. Jealousy, hitherto so conspicuously
absent, flooded into me.
You complete bastard
, I’d thought. It was like you’d been unfaithful to me. The one thing I always wanted to do, write a book, and you beat me to that.

I distinctly recall when I finished reading it. It was the afternoon of 9 December 2004. I know because it was the day of the annual anthropology party and that bash is always on the first Thursday of December. Walking to it, my head full of vitriol, I’d bumped into Alice.
Well, well
, I’d thought.
What a coincidence
.
You
.

You never realized, Larry, but you were partly responsible for what transpired that night. You’d quoted the opening stanza from Robert Herrick’s poem in your final chapter.
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may
. I’d interpreted it as I had so much of what you said: advice, instruction, gospel.

How do you feel about featuring in my Alice book
,
old chap? I’m immensely excited. Possible titles keep presenting themselves to me.
The Sum of the Parts
is my current favourite. It’s a source of immense regret to me that you’ll never read it.

Unlike the pyretic media coverage, my watchword shall be ‘balance’. Jesus, the story is still front-page news as the public canters from theories of accident to suicide to worse. The more coverage it gets, the more coverage it gets. Our journalists do this: jump on isolated tragedies, treating them as talismanic of all the other similar such ones they don’t have the time or space or budget to cover. Alice Salmon: the perils of a night out when you’re twenty-something.

‘I’m Larry Gutenberg’s wife and I have bad news,’ the note from Marlene began. She only contacted me because she’d stumbled across our letters when sorting through your possessions, a task she’d put off until after Christmas. I can understand why you wouldn’t have shared our correspondence with your wife. A man needs secrets, a sense that he’s more than what those around him imagine.

Marlene says you finished your coffee, pulled on your favourite jacket, announced you were taking the dog out and never came back. I’ve tried to view it as a Captain Oates-like episode: in reality, you stumbled on the pavement and were dead by the time the ambulance arrived. Not a way for a man who had a theorem named after him to go. My friend, the great Larry Gutenberg.

You going off radar has knocked me for six, old chap. That you could slip out of view, unnoticed. Remember how I used to badger you to write your autobiography? ‘Shucks,’ you’d said, ‘isn’t the science enough?’ Sooner or later someone was bound to write your biography. Wondered what they’d have said about us? I know what I would have. What I
will
say. Three words.
I love you
.

I’ll treat you well in my book, Larry. I promise. I’ve arranged with Marlene to take possession of our correspondence – she sought approval from your sons first – and I rather fancy I’ll be including it in my little tome. After all, I’m never more honest than I am with you, Larry, and we’d all benefit from a smidgen more honesty. No one more so than Alice.

Kids don’t get to become penfriends now, do they? The Internet’s opened the globe up, taken away that mystique and intrigue. It’s made everyone a potential penfriend. Either that, or a stalker.

Yours as ever,

J

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Left about twenty messages for my mum but can’t talk to her now, not like this. Been drinking and bad Alice has come out to play, old Alice. Wish I was on a hill in the Lakes with you guys, a long way away from all this shit … The evening’s going tits up and talk about a rave from the grave, I could have sworn I spotted that freak Cooke earlier. He’s either got a dopplegänger or I imagined it. My head’s all over the place after seeing that email … It can’t be, Meg, surely it
can’t
. It’s too gross to consider. It makes me want to puke; it’s too yuck. ‘The days of us’ – what the fuck does that even
mean
? Will ring Mum tomorrow; could be a sick hoax I suppose. Maybe I should pretend I never saw it? Guess who texted me earlier too? Ben! Wish I was sober and could talk to you and
listen
to you. All I do is talk
at
you these days … So sorry
for getting that drunk last time we saw each other; my ankle’s still killing me! Am seeing Lukey Monday, def made my mind up about him. All clear … wine and lager clear! How long do voicemail messages go on for, Parkster? Can talk for England, that’s what you always say. Wonder where I got that from? Pick up pick up pick up pick up. Piiiiiiiiiiccckup, Megan. Please. Am outside pub. All changed down here. Don’t recognize this street. Can hear the river. Nothing’s forever, we’re all something passing stopped. This email to Mum –

Here’s a fact about little miss perfect Alice Salmon. All over the media she is but no one’s mentioned she got her boyfriend to try to KILL me. His name was Ben Finch and he was a C**T. Sorry, I realize swearing’s against forum rules, but it’s the truth, plus I’m a moderator, so report me!

I tried spinning him a line about the photos he’d found of Alice in my room being for a night-school project but he totally flipped out. ‘She’s mine,’ he was yelling as he stuck the boot in. ‘Mine mine mine.’ My face, my gut, my back, my bollocks, my kidneys – they taught him well at Eton or Harrow or whichever institution he was programmed in. Yes, that C**T knew where to kick all right!

She was different, though. Me and her we had a connection. We shared a dump of a house in the second year, 2 Caledonian Road, and we’d meet in the lounge in the night. ‘What’s keeping you awake, Mocksy?’ she’d ask and we’d confide in each other, and I could forgive her Ben Finch then. ‘We need to stick together,’ I said once and she didn’t disagree.

‘Dump him,’ I begged, the morning after he’d given me the pasting. ‘He’ll do this to you one day.’ I showed her the bruises that had gone all purple, although they’d had a bit of help from me and a bicycle pump – well, I had to leave her in no doubt what sort of psycho Ben Finch was.

‘What’s wrong with me? I’m such an idiot,’ she said, then got defensive and full-on denied it was him, but he’d have sworn her to secrecy. Yes, that BULLY would have forced her to keep schtum because this
would wreck his rep, good old Ben Finch, the life and soul of the party, prizes from the rowing club, destined for the board of Daddy’s business.

‘I don’t care if it hurts if it makes you see sense,’ I told Alice. ‘Can I have a kiss?’

‘You’re such a freak, Mocksy,’ she said.

‘I’ll kiss you one day.’

Then she went schizo. ‘I’m glad Ben did this,’ she said. ‘You deserved it. I asked him to warn you off.’

See, the TRUTH will out if you push hard enough and her dying is justice because bad shit happens to bad people and she probably got off on it, picturing his size ten brogues stomping down on me.

I tried to sell a piece about her to the nationals after she snuffed it but they weren’t interested, the idiots. Billed it as the real deal: all the goss from the man who knew her best. Student housemate, yes, virtually an ex-boyfriend, I said. Offered it to them all as an exclusive, but the tossers wouldn’t recognize good writing if it bit them on the back of the hand. Once they read what I’ve got to say they’ll come running, though.

After the Caledonian Road lot went out, I lay on Alice’s bed and imagined her washing my wounds and they hurt but it was a nice hurt and it made me love her more so I added her mug with the elephant in it to the collection of her stuff stashed in my wardrobe – a scarf, a pen she’d chewed the top of, a bra. I pretended they were gifts from her.

‘It got broken,’ I said to Alice when she enquired about her mug. It was no big deal; a lot got broken in Caledonian Road.

I’ve gone off topic because I began this thread to talk about an EVIL university professor. I’ve been doing research of my own, you see, and soon the individual in question will be brought to his knees. Justice is coming.

‘What’s the secret to a long marriage?’ I asked. (Yes, yes, I appreciate it’s a clichéd question, but readers would be interested.)

‘Letting the other person think they’re in charge,’ Queenie said.

‘Agreeing,’ Alf added, grinning.

They’d shepherded me into the front room, brought tea and biscuits on a chintzy tray and passed me their ‘diamond wedding’ album. ‘If we get to our sixty-fifth anniversary, we’re going to the fun fair,’ Queenie said.

‘The posh one at Thorpe Park,’ Alf said, hobbling off to let the dog out.

‘I’ll definitely come back and interview you after that,’ I told them.

‘You’ll have long since moved on by then, dear,’ she said. ‘Clever girl like you.’

I’ve just been promoted. Chief reporter, no less. Woop woop!

They showed me their drawings of the South Downs. The painting pensioners. The green-fingered eighty-somethings. The love-struck octogenarians. This is how this job conditions your brain: sound bites.

‘I’ve got a confession for you, Alice,’ Queenie said. ‘I rarely read newspapers. There’s more truth in a decent novel.’

I could almost hear the editor sneer:
How were the crumblies? Live out the interview, did they?
Juicier quotes, he’d be after. I enquired: ‘Have you got any advice for youngsters, Mrs Stones?’

‘Live every day as if it’s your last,’ she said.

That’s not a bad quote
, I thought. But ‘depth and conflict’, that was the editor’s adage. ‘You must get on each other’s nerves a teensy bit?’ I said, aiming for that grey area fractionally beyond rhetorical.

‘He can be a cantankerous old goat, but I wouldn’t be without him.’ We watched Alf on the patio, waiting for the dog to wear itself out. ‘I expect you went to university, didn’t you?’ she said. ‘I wish I had. We didn’t back then, particularly girls. If you need a line or two about regrets for your article, that’s one.’

‘I studied English,’ I told her.

‘That’s what I’d have done.’ She shook her head fondly at her husband, manoeuvring himself sideways down a patio step. ‘Soppy old bugger reckons I’ll always be his princess.’

Always won’t go on for ever, I could have said. But I’d learnt to expect this particular contradiction: how happy stories could make me sad.

‘Presumably you’re courting. What’s he like, your young man?’

‘He’s called Luke.’

‘Luke, that’s my grandson’s name. Handsome, is he?’

I pulled out my phone, skipped to the photo of him on his bike outside the Houses of Parliament and when I passed it to her she avoided touching the screen, as if she was fearful she’d smudge it.

‘He’s got a kind face. Handsome, mind.’

The TV was on mute,
Radio Times
on the arm of the settee,
Poirot
circled in red.

‘We lost a child,’ Queenie said, unprompted.

A life not without tragedy
, I thought.
No, I will not go there.
I put my notebook down and she leafed through pictures of a teenage boy, ten or eleven or twelve – kids that age all
merge into one – and traced her finger round his black-and-white outline. ‘You can never have enough photographs because this can be an unreliable tool,’ she said, tapping her head. She’d had her hair done – presumably for the interview, for
me
. It seemed so disrespectful, attempting to distil their lives into this one thing – an article, a diamond wedding, an article about a diamond wedding – because a life’s not one thing, it can’t be, it mustn’t be. She said: ‘You get to a point where you forget what you’ve forgotten.’

‘I write stuff down in a diary.’

‘We all translate the world in different ways,’ she said. ‘I like photographs. Incidentally, can we get a copy of the ones the man takes later?’

He’d stand them in the doorway or persuade them to sit on the bench in the garden, holding hands or the picture of their dead son. He’d say ‘smile’ and ‘lovely’ and ‘that’s perfect’ and go back to the office and burn the shots of them on to a disc, correcting the colours and the exposures and balancing skin tones and erasing ugly details, then do his expenses and get a flyer to beat the traffic.

‘He looks a nice lad, your Luke.’

When he’d enquired about my day, I’d explained I’d met this incredibly sweet couple and they’d said he was handsome and referred to him as a lad. Tomorrow morning, at six forty, the alarm having gone off twice, I’d nudge him sleepily and say, ‘Come on,
lad
, shift yourself.’ Then later, when he makes me a playlist or buys flowers or leaves surprise parcels on the doorstep, chocolates or a soppy note, ‘You’re a good lad.’

‘You love him, don’t you?’

‘It’s early days yet.’

‘Don’t be coy. You do, don’t you? I’m eighty, I can tell.’

There was grunting from the kitchen and a bowl
clattering to the floor, where Alf was feeding the dog. I tried to visualize Luke old, but couldn’t get beyond him in the fancy-dress outfit he’d worn to that party – the cardy with leather buttons, the stick, the flat cap. Perhaps he’d be
cantankerous
? It was an old person’s sentiment, an old person’s word (and definitely my word of this entry!).

‘You’ll probably live together before you get married, won’t you, you and your Luke?’

‘We’ve only been seeing each other a year,’ I said.

The term ‘housewife’ skittered into view. Sod that. What about all the alternatives? Alice Salmon, investigative journalist. Editor. Music journo. Charity worker. Traveller. Famous novelist. Party animal. Fuck-up. I said: ‘Maybe at some point in the future.’

‘Dear, the future isn’t all that far away.’

‘I still haven’t ruled out jacking it all in and doing a world tour,’ I said as a compromise. ‘Australia, Argentina, Thailand. I’ve always fancied Mexico. No one settles down until they’re at
least
in their late twenties these days.’

She spread out her family tree on the table: a patchwork of names and numbers and interconnected lines, grooving backwards, upwards, the dates increasingly remote, the names those in novels: Winston, Victoria, Ethel, Alfred. There, a bit up from the bottom – beneath them four children, seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren – and connected by a single sharp line: Alfred Stones and Maud Walker.

‘Maud’s a pretty name,’ I said.

‘I always fancied myself as more of a Rose. Can I give you a bit of advice? For you, not for your newspaper. Don’t try to be everything. Your generation is lucky, but you have to pick your path.’ She touched a corner of her family tree. ‘For me, having my place on this feels comfortable.’

What a peculiar job I have, paid to sip tea and pry into the hearts of strangers and capture the outpourings on a Dictaphone or in the shorthand I’ve got to 100 w.p.m.

‘When I heard you were popping round to visit us, I worked out how many days sixty years is,’ Queenie said. ‘It’s 21,900 – excluding leap years. “Where can we live but days?” Expect you’re familiar with that poem, aren’t you? It’s Larkin.’

‘My mum likes him – or she likes to hate him.’

‘He was a foul specimen.’

A hazy memory stirred in me. School, and Meg scribbling on the inside cover of my file. A clock on the wall, ten minutes till the end of the period. It was a Friday, as today was.
Days
. I saw myself at my desk in the office, Sky News on the TV on the wall above my head – coverage of the Fukushima meltdown on loop – glancing at that clock and rushing this piece so I could get away to meet Luke.

‘There’ll come a day when they don’t wake us,’ Queenie said, pouring the last of the tea, bony marbles under the skin of her knuckles. ‘The days.’

‘Where can we live but days?’ I said, reciting two or three lines of the poem automatically.

Alf reappeared. ‘Feel free to portray me as a love rat,’ he said. ‘Just don’t have us on a bloody journey. We’re going to be on a proper one of those soon – the biggest one!’

I went back to the office and cobbled the story together, then wrote this. I needed to get the details down so I’d have something to remember when all I could do was remember, especially if you get less good at it, as Queenie maintains. I’d also like to have something to show a young me if she came knocking to ask about me and my life, when I was eighty. I wasn’t appalled at how the piece turned out. It did them about as much justice as you can in 500 words. I kept a few bits back – quotes I assumed they’d rather me not
include, which I’m not sharing even here, and the aspects of me that I obviously saved for
here
. Like how Queenie had asked: ‘How do you feel when you’re not with Luke?’

‘As if something’s missing,’ I’d replied. ‘As if a piece of
me
is missing.’