Kiss Me First (13 page)

I did like it when she was nice to me.

Saturday, 20th August 2011

It seemed to be Massage Day at the commune today. When I did my rounds, a proportion of the residents were lying on their fronts like corpses whilst others sat astride them, actually on their bottoms, squeezing their brown flesh in silent concentration. I’d never seen a proper massage before – sometimes I would do mum, but only ever her hands or feet – and I found the sight quite embarrassing. It was also inconvenient as I had to get up close to look at the squashed features of those being pummelled, in order to check whether I recognized them or not.

Eventually I ascertained that they were all ‘old’ people to whom I had already shown Tess’s picture, and there were no new arrivals until mid-afternoon, when three young French men turned up in a puttering orange van. When I approached them they said that they hadn’t been here last summer and that this was their first time at the commune, but I showed them Tess’s photo anyway. ‘
Non
, sorry,’ they said, and one of them added to the other, ‘
Mais, très belle
,’ which I understood from my French GCSE. He had terrible acne, little red volcanoes carpeting all available space on his face and creeping down his neck to meet the hair on his bare chest. I imagined it spreading down his body like slow-moving lava, until eventually only the soles of his feet were left untouched. It was hard not to flinch, and I wondered whether he minded that no one would ever say of him that he was ‘
très belle
’.

Seeing him also reminded me that I hadn’t checked my own appearance since I arrived, so when I got back to the cave I borrowed Annie’s mirror. My reflection was a bit of a shock: despite spending most of the daylight hours under the tree, my skin was as pink as Strawberry Angel Delight. It must have been from my excursion into town yesterday. Annie, who was watching, insisted on smearing my cheeks and nose with something called aloo vera which she claims has ‘healing properties’, although without the Internet I can’t check that assertion.

‘Silly billy,’ she said. ‘Skin like yours, you should be on the Factor 50. Didn’t your mom ever tell you to wear sunblock?’

I informed her that there was no need for such a thing in Kentish Town, especially if you rarely left your house.

I realize that I haven’t mentioned Adrian’s role during the preparation stage. That’s because he was hardly involved at all, not nearly as much as I presumed he’d be. I had expected to report back to him on the progress of my information gathering, Tess’s state of mind and so on, and kept comprehensive notes, but days and then weeks passed and he never asked for them.

A fortnight into the project, with still no word from him, I began to consider that perhaps he expected
me
to get in touch – that this was a kind of initiative test. So, I prepared a progress report and was all ready to email it to him when I realized that I didn’t know where to send it. He had said that day on the Heath that we shouldn’t refer to the case on Red Pill, even in personal messages, explaining that a number of the members were skilled hackers and, such was their devotion to the site, they might take it upon themselves to hack into his mailbox in order to get an insight into his thought processes. However, he had given me no alternative email address or phone number.

I remembered what he said when we met on Hampstead Heath – ‘You are, I presume, on Facebook?’ – which implied that he would be on there too, but his name drew a blank. So I had no option but to send him a carefully phrased PM on Red Pill.

Adrian,

I was just wondering whether there was any information you wanted from me, apropos the ongoing project.

Leila

His reply came seven and a half hours later.

I have complete faith in you, I’m sure you have it under control. PM not good idea.

As I say, I was surprised he wasn’t taking a more ‘hands-on’ approach to the project, but pleased that he trusted me to execute it well without supervision. And something did change after I got in touch: from then on, each Wednesday, he would send me a PM – not mentioning the project, but containing a solitary, unaccompanied, inspiring quote, as if to buoy me from afar.
Great men are like eagles and build their nest on some lofty solitude
or
All men live life, few have an idea about it.

Of course, I also ‘saw’ him every day, on the forums on Red Pill. As we had agreed I continued to maintain a presence on the site, every day logging on and contributing something to whatever discussion was the most high-profile. But my heart wasn’t in it, absorbed as I was in the project, and I felt removed from what was going on there, all the arguing about abstract notions.

It felt odd seeing Adrian’s public face yet having this secret with him, knowing things about him personally that the others didn’t. For instance, during a discussion about a podcast Adrian had posted on sibling rivalry, he referred to his ‘sister’. However, I knew, because he had told me on the Heath that day, that he was an only child, like me. I understood that he was using this ‘sister’ for the sake of his argument, but the others on the site would naturally presume that he really did have one. The idea that I alone amongst the members knew differently was, I admit, exciting as well as unnerving, but I felt that now was not the time for encouraging heightened feelings. I had to keep my head straight and my reasoning clear for the project.

There was also a more prosaic reason for not fully engaging with the site: in those final weeks of preparation, my time was becoming increasingly scarce. The Tess work alone could easily fill every waking hour, but I would not start to receive my £88 a week salary until ‘check-out’ and so, up till then, was also having to keep up with my testing work for Damian.

For the next month, I barely left the flat. I sat at my computer, in the shadow of the restaurant sign, for eighteen hours a day, sometimes twenty. And I must admit that as April 14th approached, I started to feel agitated in a way that isn’t normally in my nature. The realization struck that to fully know the ins and outs of Tess’s life would be a never-ending task, like trying to fill in a hole and realizing that it has no bottom.

Sometimes, during those last days, I felt like this didn’t matter. I wouldn’t actually need that much information to imitate Tess: people were mostly only interested in themselves, and didn’t attend much to others, even their close friends. Then the next moment, I’d feel like I was totally unprepared and would be caught out immediately. I veered between these two feelings, like a volume switch was being turned first far too low and then deafeningly high.

The timeline of Tess’s life was gradually getting filled in, but my new fixation was finding out her opinion on things. In some cases this was packaged up with the information she provided. For instance, when she told me that her friend Susie had recently left her job in advertising to go back to university, it was clear from her comment – ‘Good girl’ – that she approved of the move. But with many other subjects she hadn’t made her views clear one way or another, and I had been so intent on processing the facts that I had neglected to ask for it.

I started another long list of questions I needed to put to her. Our Skype sessions lengthened. Who did she vote for in the last election? What was her favourite flower? Did she take sugar in her tea? Unlike before, Tess didn’t get impatient with my questioning. She was in an odd state during those final two weeks, polite yet distant and preoccupied.

Except, that is, that one evening, when she cried.

‘I’m so fucking scared,’ she’d said. Now, I recall other parts of the conversation. I remember summarizing what Socrates had to say on the matter of death. ‘Death is either an eternal, dreamless sleep where the dead do not perceive anything, or death is when the soul gets relocated to another place.’ Therefore, I explained to her, there was nothing to fear.

When she continued to cry, I quoted Marcus Aurelius: ‘It is one of the noblest functions of reason to know whether it is time to walk out of the world or not.’

It was as if she hadn’t heard me.

‘It’s just . . . the void . . . do you understand?’

She sniffed, wiped her eyes and said again, more clearly: ‘Do you understand?’

She wanted me to switch on my camera, and I’d had to remind her that Adrian had advised against it.

‘Fuck Adrian,’ she’d said.

‘I don’t think it’s a good idea.’

Then, in that unfamiliar, small voice: ‘I can’t do it.’

‘Of course you can,’ I told her.

What else could I say?

The police asked me: ‘Did she ever express any doubts in her decision? Did her resolve ever falter?’ I shook my head.

All I can say is, she was upset and I was comforting her, in the same way mum comforted me when I said I wouldn’t be able to cope without her. ‘Of course you will,’ she told me. ‘You’re my brilliant, strong girl. You’ll be more than fine.’ I didn’t see it as contradicting her desire to go through with the act. Fear seemed part of it. And it wasn’t as if suicide was a spur of the moment decision for her. Tess repeatedly stated that she had been longing to do it for years. If, during one of our conversations, she had said decisively that she did not want to go through with it, then of course I would have been entirely supportive of that decision. Of course I would.

The conversation highlighted the fact that, however much I knew about her, there was something she was holding back from me. As I say, we never agreed to avoid the topic of her suicide – the practical aspects, I mean – but there was an implicit understanding that this was one thing that was not going to be discussed. It was, I suppose, the one private thing she had left.

However, I was conscious, during those last weeks, that whilst I was finalizing the details of my plan, she was, in parallel and in secret, doing the same with hers.

Then, two days before the 14th, we were on the phone and I was asking her to double-check the spellings of some university friends’ names. When she had done so, she went silent. Then she looked at me and tapped on the camera.

‘Do you have everything you need?’

She said it in the empty tone of a bank cashier.

I remember looking up at the chart above my desk, which by then was over two metres long. I had taped extra pieces of paper to it, and it was dense with writing. I had a large quantity of material on my computer too, of course, but this visual chart provided prompts and keywords. I knew that I could go on for ever, fixing another sheet and another until this chart of Tess’s life filled every surface of my flat, flowing out of the front door onto Albion Street and through the Rotherhithe tunnel and beyond, but there had to be a point to stop.

So, I said, ‘Yes. I think so,’

The intense sadness I felt at that point was, oddly, even worse than how it was towards the end with mum; I suppose because Tess’s suffering wasn’t visible, she looked so much younger and healthier. It seemed impossible that she wasn’t going to be in the world any longer, that someone I had been so intimate with was going to disappear.

But, of course, I couldn’t say that. So I said nothing. And then, suddenly, there we were, at our final exchange. Her last look into the camera, that salute; her thanking me; my stupid thanking of her; then staring, drinking in the sight of her, her nose, her cheekbones, her mouth, until she looked up, leaned forward and turned off the camera.

Check-out, 14th April, was in effect a ‘normal’ day. I couldn’t start the job, because ‘Tess’ would be spending all day travelling to Canada, so I had to wait until the following day to send the first emails and texts announcing her safe arrival in Sointula. And not just the following morning, either; because of the time difference, I couldn’t begin work as ‘Tess’ until 5 p.m. UK time on the 15th, which was 9 a.m. in Sointula.

But, of course, it was not a normal day. That morning I found it impossible to do anything except lie on the sofa, my eyes open but not really seeing anything. It was as if I had been deactivated. I wasn’t even hungry. All I could think about was what Tess was doing; yet I had no idea how she was doing it. My mind was whirring, but with no cogs to grasp on to, it produced instead a slideshow of imaginary scenes. Tess on her hands and knees, crawling into a tiny cave on a remote mountain range, her pockets bulging with a jar of pills and bottle of vodka. With her final swallow, she curled up and closed her eyes, rays from the setting sun creeping into the cave and casting a glow over her face. Tess emerging at the top of the tallest building in London, the wind whipping her hair as she took a final look at the silent city below before gracefully leaping off, head first, like a swimmer. Tess, at night, breaking into a zoo and lowering her hand slowly into a tank of deadly scorpions. When the sting came, she barely winced before crumpling to the floor.

Of course, I knew that the cave scenario was the only one likely to bear even the slightest resemblance to reality, it being imperative that the method used left her body undiscovered. I also knew, only too well, that death was not a romantic business. Nonetheless, those were the images my mind chose to dwell on.

I lay there in this disabled state for hours, and then suddenly, with no notice, my bowels turned over and I had the most terrible diarrhoea, so severe I was left panting on the lavatory.

Halfway through the morning the door buzzer rang, a startling occurrence even on ordinary days, and I was so tense I let out a yelp. It was the postman, with a registered letter for me. Inside, folded within a sheet of newspaper, was £88 in cash: four twenty-pound notes, one five, and three pound coins, Sellotaped on a piece of card. Under the coins someone had drawn a mouth, to make them form the eyes and nose of a smiley face. It seemed an unlikely thing for Adrian to have done, so I could only imagine that this first payment had come directly from Tess. None of the subsequent payments had a smile.

Receiving the money galvanized me somewhat – Project Tess was now officially my occupation – so I went to my desk and sent an email to Damian:
I am writing to terminate my employment with immediate effect.
I then tried to distract myself by playing Warcraft, but for once I couldn’t get into it. It seemed pointless, ordering around a bunch of pixels. So instead I turned to Tess’s email and Facebook accounts. Although ‘Tess’ couldn’t send out any messages, emails were still coming in for her, and there was nothing to stop me reading them and formulating her replies, ready to be sent out the next day.