What She Left: Enhanced Edition by T. R. Richmond Read Free Book Online Page B

cards above carpets chosen to conceal ‘accidents’– even that, reduced, childlike, embarrassingly charged with sexual ambition, even that would have been better than what I am facing: the nothingness.
    I suppose I shouldn’t complain: I’ll still get to see well over twice as much life as Alice did. Isn’t this a turn up for the books, Larry? I rather thought dying was something that happened to other people, like arguing in public or bankruptcy. All these millions of years of evolution and we’ve never fixed the inescapability of this particular defect of being human, have we?
    ‘Sounds like there’s some displacement going on here,’ Fliss had said softly, when I’d informed her of my plan to ‘catalogue a deceased ex-student’.
    It’s certainly proving a diversion, filling the gaps into which fear would otherwise rush. In fact, it’s positively flooding in – Alice’s past, served up in photos, emails, texts, Twitter exchanges, anecdotes, even some half-baked theories, one purporting she was a heroin user. To think, we used to be no more than a few formal records, papery and objective: a birth certificate, a driver’s licence, a wedding certificate, a death certificate. Now we’re in a thousand places: disparate but complete, ephemeral yet permanent, digital but real. This huge repository of information
out there
. God, it’s impossible to have secrets any more. We’dhave never slipped under the radar if we’d been born forty years later, old boy, that’s for sure.
    A few have even arrived in person, too, reaching into their short memories or scruffy pockets and prompting me to instinctively take up my notebook or Dictaphone. Capturing these details, it’s becoming compulsive.
    ‘Are you the Alice man?’ one young lady asked this morning, a sobriquet I didn’t dislike. She held out her mobile like a supplicant. ‘It’s only a text, but it’s the last one we swapped.’
    Flicking through what I’ve collected earlier, I pondered: What actually
is
this? This photo from a school friend of Alice beside a tent for her Duke of Edinburgh. This picture of her on a trip to the Brontës’ parsonage – ‘Poor residents of Haworth didn’t know what had hit them’, the accompanying email said. This note from a couple who lived next door to her when she was a kid and ‘used to see her bouncing up and down on her trampoline over the fence’.
    ‘Sounds a bit like a belated obituary,’ Fliss had said.
    ‘Indeed it is,’ I’d replied, picturing the paucity of mine: a few paragraphs in the university journal, a couple of column inches in one of the broadsheets.
    I’m dying, Larry. There, I’ve said it. It took a while, but I can now. Not in a philosophy undergrad ‘we’re all dying’ sort of way, but actually,
literally
. Nothing imminent. I’ll see next Christmas, the one after, probably the one after that, too. Me all over, isn’t it? I can’t even die dramatically.
    I wonder what it’s actually like, the point of demise? Where it’ll be? How it’ll feel? One’s wife beside one’s bed, clenched held hands – or conceivably that’s merely the sanitized TV version. Perhaps I’ll never know it’s happened. Or worse, I will – but it’ll be ambiguous and confused: some complicated transition to … to where? Another thingus so-called smart scientists have never been able to answer. I have no intention of going gracefully into that good night, Larry. It’s time to be honest, to set the record straight. About Alice, about me, about everything.
    Not sure how they’d have been at your university, but some of the faculty here are jolly sniffy. ‘How’s
project Salmon
progressing?’ one enquired this morning, barely concealing his disdain. But sod the lot of them. I’ve spent a lifetime seeking the approbation of my peers when they only follow your ideas to steal them or rejoice in their shortcomings. God, how did I ever enjoy the company of these people? They’re like foxes