Kiss Me First Read online

  Obviously, the main criterion was that it was a long way away. In my initial meeting with Adrian he had mentioned Australia as a possible location, but that didn’t seem right. Even leaving aside the major new fact that her ex-husband Lee was Australian, I knew that the major cities in the country were popular destinations for travel. And even if Tess lived outside one of the main cities, I thought that if one of her family members or friends had already taken a twenty-four-hour plane journey out to Sydney, say, it was likely they would make the small extra effort to go and see her.

  Besides, for it to seem authentic there had to be a reason for Tess choosing the place she ended up in. She was, she told me, ‘very sensitive to environment’ and had to be ‘around beauty’, and it would be unlike her to just go anywhere. There would have to be something there that was obviously attractive to her.

  So, in summary, it had to be a place that was difficult to get to, had enough ‘charms’ for Tess to want to settle there, yet not somewhere where people might think, ‘Oh, I’ve always wanted to go there and here’s my chance.’

  Furthermore, it would make sense for Tess to move to a place that was entirely different to where she was now, in Bethnal Green. And, I realized, it would make sense for her to move to somewhere ‘spiritual’.

  This ‘spirituality’ was a side of Tess I found hard to deal with. She eagerly embraced mystical fads, becoming obsessed with homeopathy and crystals, earnestly telling me about ‘cupping’ and leylines. To be frank, it offended me, and I challenged her on it a couple of times – ‘Where is the proof?’ – but she stubbornly insisted that it made her feel better.

  So, with that in mind, I found some ‘New Age’ websites, and lurked on a few forums. I noted what they were chatting about, and when someone mentioned a place, I looked it up. And that was how I came to hear of Sointula.

  Sointula is on an island off the coast near Vancouver, a former hippy colony that had been founded as a ‘socialist utopia’ in the 1970s. It has become more of a normal place, a fishing colony, although it still retained some of that spirit and was something of a destination for the ‘spiritually inclined’. From the pictures it looked quite nice, with empty beaches and simple, low-level buildings. There were a sufficient population to provide employment, but it was quiet enough for it to convincingly be a refuge for a ‘damaged’ person like Tess.

  Most crucially, it’s very difficult to get to. You have to fly to Vancouver, get another flight to Port Hardy, a half-hour taxi ride to another port and then a ferry. There was no way that her parents could make that trip with Jonathan in his current state. It would, I hoped, put off even the hardiest of her travelling friends; even Sharmi, who had been to Papua New Guinea. Besides, of course, Tess would be making it expressly clear that she didn’t want anyone to come and see her; that she wanted to start afresh.

  Once I had decided on Sointula, I spent a day sketching out Tess’s life there. I looked up estate agents and found her a flat to live in. It was a nice little place, on the ground floor of a detached clapboard house, with a part share of the garden. The photographs showed airy, bright rooms, with windows from floor to ceiling, hung with checked curtains, and white wooden floors. The flat was furnished very simply, with the bare minimum – a neat little sofa, a round, four-seater table – yet managed to look cosy.

  For a brief moment, looking at the flat, I felt a pang: that I would like to live there myself. It was, I recall, a Friday night, and out of the window Albion Street was extremely noisy; the smell of onions was seeping up into the flat, and there was the sound of breaking glass and drunken laughter from the pub.

  The estate agent’s website said that the Sointula flat was on the ground floor of a house lived in by the landlady. She, I decided, was a widow called Mrs Peterson, who looked just like mum.

  After finding Tess’s flat – or apartment, I should say – I began searching for a job for her. As mentioned, she had had a chequered employment history and it would be perfectly plausible for her to work in a lowly capacity, for instance as a waitress in one of the island’s restaurants. But I wasn’t happy with that. This was her ‘new life’, and I wanted something better for her. Besides, I thought there was a possibility that if there was an emergency at home, and someone wanted to get in touch with her urgently, it wouldn’t take them long to discover the names of the few restaurants on the island and call them direct to speak to her.

  So, I went through the other options. Sointula had a clothes shop called Moira’s and a small library. I considered the library, but then, as I was poring over my Tess files looking for inspiration, I was reminded of her brief spell at art school, and it came to me. Tess could be a private art tutor for the child of one of the island’s families.

  I admit I was rather pleased with this. It meant that Tess could plausibly have her phone turned off for a lot of the time and therefore be unreachable. The role of Tess’s mobile in her new life had been a matter of some concern to me, not only the obvious problem of the difference in our voices but also because I realized that phone ringtones are different abroad, and anyone ringing Tess’s phone would be able to tell that it was still in the UK. A good reason for it not to be switched on was a pleasing solution.

  House and job decided, I put together a package for Tess, with pictures of the island and details of the flat, as if I was selling it to her. She emailed back uncharacteristically quickly, her tone once again shifted from grumpiness to appreciation. She said she loved the idea of Sointula, the flat looked gorgeous, and that it was a stroke of genius to think of tutoring.

  It’s so fab, I almost want to go there myself! she wrote. Darling, you’re a star.

  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 a
t 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 ‘checkout’ 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.

  Checkout, 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.