Kiss Me First (18 page)

The directions she gave me sounded needlessly complicated. After all, I thought, as long as I kept walking downhill, I couldn’t go far wrong. I set off down a little rocky path lined with scrubby plants at the south end of the site, and before long the sounds of the commune, the bongos and the barking, faded. The sun was high and scorching. I had forgotten to wear my hat, and quickly found myself weakened by the heat. Sharp bushes nipped my ankles. I started walking straight down but the ground was uneven and I kept finding myself going uphill again. The sun was really beating down on my head, my hair felt heavy as a helmet and my limbs like swollen pieces of meat attached to my body. I started to feel disorientated, so I headed for the shade of some trees. I got some relief from the sun but the problem then was that I couldn’t see where I was going, because of the trees. By now the noise of the commune had entirely receded, replaced by the fierce chirrup of insects and, under that, what I imagined was the distant rush of water. It was then, in the woods, that I had the oddest sensation. I felt suddenly, intensely lonely; more so than I had ever felt in my life, even after mum died. In fact it was an entirely different feeling – more fear than emptiness.

I’m finding it hard to describe.

I remember Tess once saying that sometimes when she was depressed she felt like she was just a sum of her parts, her upbringing and influences – that there was nothing intrinsically, uniquely ‘her’. At the time I didn’t know what she meant. But at that moment, I understood. And then I had this sudden, overwhelming realization that one day I wouldn’t exist. I felt like screaming, but even screaming as loud as humanly possible wouldn’t have been enough to express how I felt. And after this thought that was too huge and formless and awful to grasp, I started to think about tiny, specific things: that after my death someone else would move into my flat and set up their computer by the window, they would still be selling tents in Tesco Extra, another set of old men would be eating pickled eggs at the Queen Bee pub. People and things would continue to exist in a world where I did not, and no one would ever think of me.

And, if that were the case, then what was the point of existing in the first place? I could expire just here, under this tree. I imagined my body in time-lapse, decomposing and sinking into the soil until, within a matter of seconds, there was no trace of me left.

Maybe, I thought, this was the exact spot where Tess died – it wasn’t impossible. She could already be down there, in the ground; I could join her, our molecules blending together in the soil. The thought was not unappealing.

I must stress that I wasn’t feeling that I wanted to die, exactly – more that not being alive might not be such a terrible thing. After all, Tess was not alive; mum was not alive.

I don’t know exactly how long I was there in the forest. At some point, what I suppose was a survival instinct kicked in, and I started walking towards the sunlight and out of the forest and uphill and eventually the sounds of the commune grew louder and I arrived back at the tent. Annie was cooking dinner and cheerily asked me how my swim went.

‘Did you manage to find any water? There’s just a trickle left. Sad, isn’t it? I don’t know how the poor animals are coping. If it doesn’t rain soon it’ll dry up completely. Do you want some dinner?’

All I could do was shake my head.

Sunday, 21st August 2011

The commune was almost deserted when I woke today. Annie told me that on Sundays there’s a market in the nearby town, where everyone goes to try and sell the tatty rubbish they’ve been making all week to tourists. Only she didn’t use that phrase; she said ‘handicrafts’. She hadn’t gone herself because the baby was poorly. The site was eerily quiet, and it felt like we were the only ones left behind: the same feeling I used to get when I stayed at home with mum instead of going to school.

I probably should have gone to the market; it would have been a good place to show around Tess’s photo. But I didn’t. Partly because of the effort involved in the heat, but also because I am starting to think that this whole exercise is pointless. Even if I do manage to find someone who positively identifies Tess, who says they saw her here last summer and could back up their claim with sufficient evidence, what then? In order to fully complete my mission, I would still have to find her body, and how can I do that? I can hardly search the entire mountain, especially not in these temperatures. And even if she did spend her last days in the commune, who’s to say she didn’t travel elsewhere to carry out the act, and her body is lying in another forest or up another mountain or in a lake, twenty or eighty or two hundred miles away?

Instead of going to the market I lay watching Annie make her stools. In the shade of the van’s canopy she was sanding the slices of wood, Milo helping out. The repetitive motion of the sander over the surface of the wood was rather hypnotic, and the work looked satisfying and not too onerous, so after a little while I asked her if I could have a go. As we worked, I told Annie about how I sometimes used to help mum paint her miniatures, which was really the opposite of what we were doing – all about tiny little strokes rather than big sweeping gestures – but was similarly relaxing.

At one point, Milo started talking about his school, how he was looking forward to going back but found the maths lessons hard. Except he said ‘math’, without the ‘s’. I was very good at maths, so I asked him what it was he found difficult, and we talked about it for a while.

‘It’s good, you talk to him like he’s an adult,’ Annie said. ‘Most people don’t do that.’

A little while later, when we had each finished the slice of wood we were working on, she said to Milo, ‘I think it’s time to cut your hair, little legs.’

She got out some tiny scissors and started hacking away at his curls. I watched, and the thought of feeling air on my neck was such an enticing one that I asked her whether she would cut mine, too.

‘Certainly,’ she said, and finishing with Milo she came and sat behind me with the scissors.

‘Just a trim today, madam?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘up to here,’ and indicated just below my ears.

‘Are you sure?’ she said. ‘It looks like you’ve been growing it for years.’

She was right, I had. I nodded. Annie cut slowly and carefully, and it was half an hour later when she came round to inspect me from the front, head tilted in a critical manner.

‘OK, I think that’s as neat as I can make it. I think you look rather like . . . who was that old movie star? The one with the dark bob?’

She offered to get a mirror so I could see what I looked like but I said, no, I didn’t need to. I felt a stone lighter, and kept stroking my newly exposed neck, a part of my body that hadn’t seen the daylight for decades.

The problem with having all this time and no Internet is that unhelpful thoughts float into one’s head. I don’t just mean what happened yesterday in the forest; smaller matters, too.

This afternoon, after the haircut, I was in my usual position under Annie’s canopy when, out of nowhere, I remembered something Tess once said about Adrian. It was after that time she told me I was sad and pathetic, and she was trying to make it up to me, being nice and saying how lucky she was to have me and how perfect I was for the job. ‘Adrian isn’t stupid,’ she said. ‘He did his research well.’

I didn’t really think much of it at the time, but today, lying on my mattress, that memory linked up with another one, like the way that bubbles used to rise up and merge in my lava lamp. It was about my meeting with Adrian by the hospital. I was thinking again what a coincidence it was that, out of all the places in London, he asked to meet somewhere so familiar to me, and the revelation that his wife had also had MS. And then it occurred to me that perhaps it wasn’t really a coincidence after all.

You see, two years ago, when mum could still use her hands, I suggested to her that she should get involved with the forum on an MS website. This was after I had started contributing to the Carers section and I thought it might be good for her to communicate with others in the same predicament. She was quite active on the forum for about six months, until it became uncomfortable to type, and on it she mentioned appointments at the Royal Free. I posted on the site’s
In Memoriam
board when she died: nothing fancy, just the bare facts of her death along with a note that she was
the best mother who
ever lived
.

The site was public, so Adrian could, in theory, have found it, if he had Googled me. The thought came to me that perhaps the reason he asked to meet at the Royal Free was because of the connection with mum. To remind me of her illness and the general misery of the artificial prolonging of her life, in order to increase the likelihood of me being sympathetic to the idea of someone wanting to take control of their own death.

Of course, I reasoned, the location could have been pure coincidence, as I’d previously assumed. But even if it wasn’t – if he had indeed done his research – did it matter? You could say it didn’t reflect negatively on Adrian: that, in fact, it demonstrated his commitment to Tess and the cause, since he wanted to do all he could to ensure that I would help her. And I was almost certain it hadn’t affected the outcome of the meeting, either. I had considered the proposition with independent thought. Even if he had put the idea to me in, say, a wine bar, I think I would have agreed to take on the job. So the fact that he might have been more calculating than he appeared did not actually alter the course of events, did it?

I was also thinking today about the horoscope moment with Connor. How it changed things, and whether it would have happened if I hadn’t found the original emails between him and Tess.

Through what Connor had said, I had built up a picture of what had happened between them. They had had a short relationship sometime between 2001 and 2002: she had ended it, and he had been devastated. But it still bothered me that I couldn’t find any evidence of the relationship in Tess’s files. I felt I needed it in front of me. Every time Connor gave me a new clue in an email, I would follow it up, searching through my notes.

The breakthrough came two weeks after Connor first got in touch. He made a passing jokey comment about being
a former Renegade Master
, and the odd phrase rang a bell. I did a search in Tess’s file and found it in a folder named ‘Unimportant men’: short-lived email correspondence, mostly from her old Hotmail account, with men that either Tess couldn’t remember or claimed were of no importance. ‘Just some bloke. Not worth spending any time over, honestly.’

[email protected] was the address. There weren’t that many emails between them, eighteen in all, which was explained by the fact that the affair took place mostly over the summer. At that time Tess did not have a desk job and was painting backdrops for festivals, so they’d have been mainly texting instead. And this was before Facebook, of course.

So, now I had more details of their relationship. They met at the party in Brixton –
did you get a nosebleed going south of the river?
he wrote in his first email – and he had been crazy about her, it was clear. Even though his emails were not ‘love letters’ as such, and he was trying to be casual, you could tell how much thought had gone into even the briefest of messages, how carefully selected the jokes and links he sent her were, and how quickly he responded to her emails.

Tess’s emails to him were much more dashed-off, as was her style, but at first, she responded in kind to Connor’s larkiness. She would come back with a joke or link of her own and would make an effort to be flirtatious.

As the weeks went on, however, you could trace the drain of interest, the same pattern as in so many of her other relationships. She started to make less of an effort, to take a few days to reply, to not acknowledge his jokes. It made him look a bit foolish.

This was illustrated by one rather bizarre exchange. On Monday 17th June 2002, at 10.13 a.m., Connor wrote a one line email to Tess:

I want to lick your armpits.

Tess replied,

I haven’t shaved them for five days.

Connor wrote back:

All the better. I want every bit of you I can get. Any toenail clippings going spare? xxxx

Tess had not replied to that for fifteen hours, and then when she did it was just an
Ugh.
No kisses.

Another difference was that before, in their early flirting days, their habit was not to give each other a straight answer to questions – everything had to be at a sort of ‘angle’ to the point, witty or whimsical. As Tess’s interest ebbed, however, she became more and more to the point. And she was, I thought, quite unfair to him.

For example: at the beginning, Connor had tried to organize things for them to do when they saw each other, until Tess had told him in no uncertain terms that she disliked plans, preferring to be ‘spontaneous’ (which is rather ironic, considering our project). But then, in one email he wrote of his excitement at seeing her that evening and added, in a fanciful and high-spirited manner,
The world is our oyster, Heddy. Shall we get smashed in Claridges? Hop on a train to Brighton?
In other words, he was doing exactly what she wanted, being adventurous and spontaneous. But she wouldn’t play along. Her brief reply stated that she didn’t know how she was going to feel that evening.

To wards the end, in late July 2002, she wasn’t even bothering to reply to his messages, and it was clear that he sensed something was wrong.

Was something worrying you last night? You were a bit quiet.

In reply, she wrote:

We need to have a chat.

That was the last in their exchange.

Reading the emails, I felt that Tess had not behaved very nicely towards Connor, and felt a little sorry for him. And it was perhaps that which led to what happened with the horoscopes.

As I’ve mentioned before, I had one strict rule with my Tess work. Whatever I did or said as Tess had to be something that
she
would do or say, to the best of my knowledge of her character. And, as I’ve also mentioned before, part of her character was a belief in all sorts of mumbo-jumbo. Sometimes it was just a phase she went through, like homeopathy and reiki – even, for seven months, Christianity, after she attended something called the Alpha Course at a church in west London. But she retained a constant, infuriating faith in horoscopes. Not so much the daily predictions in newspapers – although she did read those – but the notion that our personality traits are somehow predestined by the stars.