What She Left: Enhanced Edition (3 page)

Bought a card but what do you say? How can a card offer even a teensy grain of comfort? Alice is dead. My best friend Alice is dead. Never known anyone my age who’s died before. So unjust so unfair so unreal – like being told there’s a giraffe in the garden. Can’t stop crying. How can you be gone? How can you die when other people go on living? Breathing and eating and walking around, murderers and rapists and scum like that? There’s no justice when someone as wonderful as you can die. You’re not gone for a day or a week or a month or even a whole summer like when you worked in Center Parcs but for ever. Not letting myself dwell on how that might feel or how long that might last.

Couldn’t face being on my own so came home to my mum and dad’s. Dad reckons there’ll have to be a post-mortem because there always is when someone dies unexpectedly. ‘That poor girl, having to go through that as well,’ he said.

Where are you? Where have they taken you? I know some places you’re not – you’re not on top of that hill in the Lakes with me and Chloe and Lauren, us with our hands on the trig point. You’re not in that Thai restaurant we always used to go to on Clapham High Street (a restaurant,
get us
, Alice, haven’t we got all adult?!). You’re not in the minibus on that hockey-club tour singing along to ‘Amarillo’. There’ll be so many places you’re not now. There it is again, the giraffe in the garden: that you’re
not
. But when I look out there’s nothing, just the rusty swing that me and you used to play on, telling each other secrets and making plans for when we grew up and you’ve only got to do a few of them, just as you were getting the hang of life, you crazy silly girl, it’s snapped shut around you. It’s not fair, but when I used to say that to you, you replied that the world wasn’t fair, it was full of injustice, and if people simply opened their eyes they’d see.

I posted the card to your mum and dad. A stupid card with a pink flower on the front and ‘With deepest sympathy’ underneath. Seems surreal that it’s
you
we’ve got deepest sympathy over. They’ll miss you so very much. Robbie will, too. Wish I knew what you’d want me to do about Luke, as well, whether to hate him or not because a bit of me is certain you’d have got back together.

We’ve been friends since we were five. Stuck together through thick and thin … you always used to joke that you were the thick one and I was the thin one … and school and rubbish boyfriends, and we even got to go to uni together and not because we were scaredy-cats, but because Southampton was such a great place and it was fab having you there, even though you were far more in with the in-crowd than I ever was!

Who’s going to keep me on the straight and narrow and tell me I’m weird for having a thing about older men?! You joked we were a
right pair of hopeless cases, didn’t you? You going through what you were with Luke, and me holding out for George Clooney but prepared to accept Harrison Ford at a push.

‘Anyone who’s anyone dies at twenty-seven,’ you said after Amy Winehouse OD’d, but you only said it to spark a debate. You used to do that a lot, and you didn’t even make it to twenty-seven. Dies – that’s a horrible word, a hateful word. There are all sorts of theories flying around, but why were you by the river in the first place? You hated water.

Alice, babe, hope you don’t mind me putting this stuff on the blog. You’d have probably done the same. ‘Get it out,’ you used to say. ‘Spit out the pain. Throw it all back at the world.’

Spoke to Chloe and Lauren earlier. Didn’t talk much; we just cried. Rang your mum and dad, too, but they were on voicemail. We’ll all have to be strong for them now: your lovely dad with his mad sweaters and that way he has of saying Al-ice, pausing between the ‘Al’ and the ‘ice’ as if he’s asking a question, and your mum, your gorgeous mum, a one-woman dynamo, who you’re an absolute spitting image of and take after in so many ways, but you won’t take after anyone any more. It’s stopped, you have, a line’s been drawn under you, the last page in your book, and there’s a huge hole where you and that laugh and that AWFUL taste in music and those OUTRAGEOUS leggings should be.

I’ve just rung your mobile because I wanted to hear your voice.
Not here. Obviously. Would love to talk to you though so pleeeeease leave me a lovely message and we’ll chat very soon …

My mum’s come in and said we have to remember the good times because that’s how people live on. I looked over her shoulder at the rusty swing. ‘There’s a giraffe in the garden,’ I said.

She must have thought I was mad.

A light has gone out. Love you, Alice Palace …

‘Why I exhumed the past’

 

Professor Jeremy Cooke has gone from unknown academic to household name in twelve months. In this personal piece, he candidly explains how the discovery of a body sparked his ‘research’ and changed his life forever.

 

It was hardly a Eureka moment, although possibly as close to one as I was ever going to get.

I’d been in the library and had seen a student scrawl his initials in the condensation on the window.
RP
. Robert Pearce, I think his name was, although that’s immaterial. I’d been transfixed by the letters and, after he’d left, had found myself inserting an ‘I’ between them. One of the librarians smiled awkwardly at me.
Old Cookie
, she was probably thinking,
he’s an odd one
. I sat down in the student’s vacated, still-warm seat. It stayed for hours, the RIP, so I did, too. I must have dozed off and, when I woke, it was gone. RP – RIP – had been there, then not there. That was when it struck me. How each of us does this every day: leaves a trail, an imprint, a mark.
Our
mark. Might it be possible, I pondered, to reconstruct a life out of such fragments? To reassemble a person, piece them back together from such soluble shards? Because I had the perfect opportunity. A life – actually,
a death
– on my very own doorstep. There, right under my nose. Alice Salmon.

It was definitely, to use the modern parlance, ‘a moment’. Seeing that geographer finger his initials in the condensation and feeling the quick, unfamiliar, arresting joy of a new idea. It had been a few days earlier that Alice, as one account euphemistically put it, ‘went in the water’. It had been, a coroner was later to
conclude, between midnight and 2 a.m. on 5 February 2012. But it had been eight years earlier, the autumn of 2004, when she’d first come here. Of course to the world at large – and indeed me initially – she was just another fresher then, one of thousands I’ve seen over the decades. I recall spotting her a few times early in that term: tallish, long hair, striking.

Much has inevitably recently been made of our ‘connection’, but regardless of that she was perfect for my purposes on so many levels. Not just because of how she died, more because of when she lived. The way we communicate has changed more in the past twenty-five years – in one lifetime – than it did in the previous thousand. The Internet has rewritten the rule book. Her generation has seen that change, has
been
that change.

Naturally, I had no idea where it would lead, but I wasn’t allowing for the law of unintended consequences. As far as I was concerned, it was going to be a straightforward, hopefully illuminating piece of work, admittedly one that would require sensitivity. It wasn’t so much a case of attempting to prove a thesis; I merely sought to map a life. Hers. Yes, because of our ‘association’, but more because she was like the rest of us: complicated, fascinating, unique, human.

‘Isn’t it all a bit lowbrow?’ one or two of my colleagues enquired.

But bugger them. For once I went with my heart. I wanted to see how much of that dear, beautiful girl was left behind, what remained. After all, it wasn’t until relatively recently – it’s worth reminding ourselves that in evolutionary terms, almost everything is relatively recently – that unless you were a nobleman or a royal, your life and death would pass unrecorded. Beyond your immediate family and perhaps a small peer group,
unnoticed
. You’d be remembered briefly by those surviving you, but beyond that,
nothing
.

It wasn’t exactly ‘research’ I embarked upon, not in the traditional sense. That’s too grandiose a description and alludes to a more methodical approach than I was able – or inclined – to apply. ‘Obsession’ was a word others were quick to use and
perhaps there was some verisimilitude in that. To ape the Scout movement’s motto, I’ve done my best.

My ‘findings’ are all in my book. Some light editing has been necessary to avoid ambiguity, but I’m confident that what’s left is representative, if not entirely comprehensive. I hope it does her some sort of justice and, more critically, that it
brings
justice. Because that is my sincere wish: that the contents are treated as evidence.

Twenty-five, she was – poor, precious little thing – when she went in the water.

Perverse, how the world often only takes an interest in you after you’re gone, but t’was ever thus.

Ironic that it’s resulted in me becoming a minor celebrity. All my work on ethnolinguistics and the Sami languages passed without notice, other than among a small circle of academics. I was suddenly in demand. Sky News sent cars to my house at ungodly hours to whisk me to studios where young blonde women dabbed make-up on my cheeks so the cameras would ‘love me’. Their questions frequently referred to a ‘journey’: hers, mine, theirs, everyone seems to be on one these days. Anthropologist. They all clung to that word. It was as if it gave them authority, authenticity.
We’ve got an anthropologist: a real, live one, here in the studio
. Soon it wasn’t even solely my area of expertise I was in demand to pontificate about; I found myself called upon to discuss all manner of current affairs. Afghanistan. Abortion. The new iPhone. Even once, on Channel 5, our obsession with daytime TV – an irony that was clearly missed on the producer.

In the face of this new-found currency, my paymasters were conflicted: I brought kudos to their establishment, but the Alice affair was a mixed blessing, with reporters descending on the faculty, as they have my home.

Nowadays that’s how I’m introduced. The Alice Salmon anthropologist. The man who unearthed the truth about the River Dane girl. Once, heaven help us, the boffin-turned-sleuth. Alice
and I have become a corollary of each other. A footnote in each other’s stories. Although we always would have been that anyway.

An early proof of the book is on my desk: Alice’s face peering out at me from the cover. Should you choose to read it, by the time you turn the final page you’ll know the truth about Alice Salmon. I’m wary of deeming every word strictly true because those whose lives she touched are inherently subjective: layered with love or, as I was to discover, in some instances, hate.

On the whole, people have been remarkably helpful, even when I explained their contributions could end up in the public domain. I was clear from day one: there was to be no sanitization. It was going to be the lot, however shaming or shocking; an approach, incidentally, I steadfastly extended to myself.

Given the territory I was in, it was inevitable that I would meet some opposition, but I couldn’t have predicted the reaction from some quarters: that sabotage attempts would be made on my work, that my reputation would be systematically tarnished, my wife targeted. They called me sacrilegious, branded me a pervert, accused me of trying to dig up the dead. But we Homo sapiens have a duty to do that. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t know about Tutankhamun or Machu Picchu. Without that probing sense of curiosity, without constantly looking over our shoulder, we wouldn’t know about the cave paintings at Lascaux, wouldn’t be able to stand there and stare at those magnificent running Palaeolithic bulls, marvel at the sheer damn
wonder
of them coming alive in front of us, now and 17,000 years ago. I hope I still have time to see them again one last time. I’m looking forward to the next chapter in my life, even if it will be a short one.

I’m wary of slipping into lecturer mode, but what we call ‘communication’ today – speech – actually originated about 100,000 years ago. Non-verbal means evolving into verbal ones. Writing was a seismic step: it gave us the ability to record, to
remember. It speeded the spread of knowledge. It was both evolution and it quickened evolution. It’s what sets humans apart, defining how we live and who we are. Alice was a brilliant communicator. I was determined to let her speak for herself. As one of my former colleagues put it with uncharacteristic sagacity:
Let her be her own story
.

I like to think, as well, that I’m a better man than before all this began. I’m definitely less pompous, although perhaps assuming one is so marks the height of pomposity.

When I run my finger across the cover of the book, I resist my natural inclination to conclude that it, like any book, is inadequate – pages, ink cast into shapes, the white fading to yellow, the paper crumbling and disintegrating. A lifespan of its own. I remind myself of its power, its potential. That justice will follow. It must.

I remind myself as well that human beings I’ve never met – who I can’t ever visualize – will cradle this paltry offering in the palm of their hands (I’m no technophobe, but am of the generation that envisages it as a tangible, corporeal object rather than an electronic one). That I’ll be heard, that I’ll speak to strangers, and my words will connect, like sinewy tissue between us. Perhaps it’s absolution I’m seeking. Atonement. Forgiveness. Of course there’s one person in this whole sorry saga who I’ll never, ever forgive.

Possibly there was a little truth in those comments, after all. About why I chose the girl I did, why I wanted, needed, to put her back together again. To make her live. Because that’s what we all crave, isn’t it? To feel we’re important, that we’re desired, that we’ve been noticed. That we’ve made a difference. That we’re missed. That each of us is remembered. To feel, as my colleagues in her old department might say,
blessed
on this earth.

But more than that. More than that and less than that.

Simply, that each of us is
loved
.

Alice Salmon, RIP.

• What She Left
  by Professor Jeremy Cooke is published next month by Prion Press, priced £9.99.
  Anthropology à la Mode
  readers can get a discount if they order a copy via the number on p. 76.