Kiss Me First Read online

  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.

  I logged on to her Facebook. By now, Tess’s passwords were second nature; it was my own I hesitated over. We had decided on the wording of her final status update together, and she had posted it the evening before: Finally, I’m off! A new life awaits. I love you all. There were twenty-three messages underneath, all variations on Good luck! and You’ll be missed! She had five new emails that day, excluding spam; four wishing her all the best on her travels and one from a woman called Marnie who obviously didn’t know she was leaving, inviting her to a 40th birthday party in Clapham later in the month: dress code: mutton dressed as lamb.

  I didn’t check my Red Pill messages until later that day, when I found a PM from Adrian. It contained nothing but a quote from Aristotle: Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

  As I’ve said, I now have some idea about what happened that day, from the police trace on Tess’s passport. She travelled to Portsmouth and from there boarded the night ferry to Bilbao. She arrived in Spain at lunchtime the following day, and her passport was checked at the port. From then on, nobody knows where she went or what she did. She disappeared.

  I’ve looked up the boat she would have travelled on, the Pride of Bilbao. There are some videos on YouTube by people who have been on the crossing, and I’ve watched them all. It looks awful. The cabins are as basic as hospital waiting rooms. The passengers seem to be either very old, sitting silently over cups of tea in the lounge, or young, squawking, single-sex groups of idiots slopping plastic glasses of beer over each other. There are many rows of arcade machines and a gift shop selling cheap cuddly toys and packets of Minstrels. It is not Tess’s kind of place at all.

  The most obvious explanation for the unlikely choice of transport is that she had planned to jump off the boat in the middle of the night but then, when it came to it, had lost her nerve. I thought of her alone on the deck in the darkness, leaning against the rails and looking down, unable to see the sea but hearing it churning away, ready to receive her.

  But if she had intended to kill herself then – why didn’t she?

  I’ve often thought about Tess on that ferry, lying in her tiny plastic cabin, on that flat pillow, listening to the whoops of drunken yobs in the corridor outside. One of the videos shows dolphins swimming up alongside the boat. I hope she saw some of them, at least.

  As I say, when she got to Spain, the trail goes cold.

  But back to checkout day. Eventually, I couldn’t bear watching the hours tick by, my head whirring with unproductive thoughts, and in the mid-afternoon I did something I hadn’t done before: took one of mum’s sleeping pills and knocked myself out.

  I woke, groggily, at lunchtime on the 15th and, eventually, it was 5 p.m. and time to start. I logged onto Tess’s email and sent my pre-prepared messages to her mother and her friends Simon and Justine. The main body of each email was the same: that I had arrived; it had been an endless journey; I’d glimpsed a seal on the ferry crossing over, the island was beautiful, and I’d taken a room at a guesthouse a street away from the sea. For Simon and Justine I added that there was a man playing the ukulele on the pier when the boat pulled in like a welcoming committee, as if he knew I was coming, and that the guesthouse was charmingly batty, with pink gingham curtains and concrete animals in the garden.

  Next, I updated her Facebook. This I was more nervous about, as unlike emails it was ‘live’. The update read: Finally landed! Knackered but happy. Saw my first seal! I misspelled the word ‘knackered’, without the ‘k’, as I thought Tess would.

  Almost immediately, people started responding with cheery messages of excitement and goodwill. I had decided that I wouldn’t reply immediately, because after going on Facebook to post the update I – Tess – had gone to bed to sleep off the jet lag.

  This may sound odd, but from the start Tess’s new life in Sointula felt real. It wasn’t that I was being imaginative; rather, that I had done so much research on her and the island that every detail was fleshed out. I remember that after logging off Facebook that first day I lay down on the floor and closed my eyes. The sounds of Albion Street fell away, and I was Tess lying on her guesthouse bed, jet-lagged and drowsy, thousands of miles from anyone who knew her. She hadn’t closed the curtains fully and the late afternoon sun lit up a slice of the room, warming up the dust in the air. I heard the shriek of gulls from the sea and the occasional car driving slowly past outside.

  I knew exactly how the rest of her day would proceed. She would wake from a fitful sleep, pull on her denim shorts, even though the weather wasn’t quite warm enough for them, and wander down to the island’s main road, a few blocks away. She’d go into the grocery store and stand in front of rows of strange Canadian foods, and think to herself that soon the foreign brands of bread and soup were going to become familiar and unremarkable. I imagined her walking through the streets, looking through the windows of the clapboard houses; seeing a For Rent sign painted on a piece of driftwood outside one of them and wondering whether that could be her new home.

  Of course, I already knew which flat she was going to rent – I had it all planned and researched – and it wasn’t that one. But it was as if the Tess in my mind didn’t know that yet. I was imagining it as if Tess was still alive, and this was real; like she was a character who really was setting off on this adventure, this ‘voyage into the unknown’. As if she didn’t know that I was responsible for her fate.

  Those first few weeks of Tess’s new life in Sointula were the busiest, in terms of the volume of correspondence, but also the most straightforward. All the emails she sent and received were along the same lines: impressions of the island, exclamation-mark-ridden expressions of excitement at seeing an albatross, and, for not-so-close friends who hadn’t already heard them, earnest explanations of why she was embarking on this new life, and that the name Sointula meant ‘place of harmony’ in Finnish. I had spent so long preparing every detail of her new set-up, I didn’t have to create anything. It was just a case of rationing out the information, like taking an exam I knew all the answers to.

  Of course, there were a few messages that didn’t fit that template. For instance, ten days in, Tess received an email from a woman called Jennifer, who wasn’t on Facebook and clearly didn’t know Tess had gone to Sointula, saying she had seen Tess the previous day
at the Alhambra, an attraction in Granada, Spain. I was going to come over and say hi but Ned was having a major meltdown, she wrote. And by the time I sorted him out, you were gone. Ps – Love your new hair! I considered replying to say it was a case of mistaken identity, but had no notes on this Jennifer, and it wasn’t clear whether Ned was her child or husband, so I left it.

  For those first few weeks in Sointula, Tess relaxed and explored the island. She discovered charming features such as the public sauna and the cooperative shop, where volunteers worked for two hours a week in return for discounted groceries. The island had a single ATM machine and a bar run by an ancient old man who had introduced himself as she walked past (not that she would be drinking alcohol in the bar; she was going to be teetotal in her new life). Quaint was a word she used a lot. She bought a second-hand bicycle for thirty dollars. Over breakfast of buckwheat pancakes, her landlady told her that a killer whale had been spotted near the coast the day before Tess arrived. She adored the peace, and the slow pace of life: I feel like I can breathe for the first time in years, she wrote. She had no doubts she had made the right decision in coming here.

  On the fourth day, I changed her profile picture to a new photo of her standing on Sointula beach. This I created by carefully cutting out a picture of Tess in shorts from the photo shoot in her bedroom and superimposing it onto a shot of Sointula beach I found on Flickr.

  After six days Tess found her flat, and moved in a week later. I wrote a flowery description of her new home: how it was tiny but sweet, and she could see a sliver of the sea from the kitchen window. She even found the half-bath in the bathroom quaint.

  There was one thing I did not find easy that first week. On the fifth day, I left a pre-recorded message for Tess’s mother. Tess had assured me that Marion was without fail out at her book group on Wednesday evenings and no one else answered the home phone, but as a precaution I withheld my number. All went according to plan. Marion didn’t pick up, the call went to answerphone and I started my recording at exactly the right time. But hearing Tess’s voice – ‘Hey, it’s me, just wanted to let you know that I’m safe and well’ – had an unexpected effect on me, bringing back up the thoughts I had suppressed since checkout day. Somewhere, she was lying dead. How did she do it? Where was the body? Had anyone found her? The images that flooded my head were no longer sentimental: the sun’s warmth had long ago deserted the cave and Tess’s tiny, curled-up body was cold and stiff. How lonely it must be to be dead, I thought, irrationally.

  I tried not to indulge such thoughts, however, as those first few weeks were a busy time. I immersed myself in building up Tess’s life, imagining what she was going to wear that day, and have for her lunch, and the next thing she was going to buy for her new flat. It was like having an avatar, but much better.

  There were rules, however: or, rather, one major rule. Whatever ‘Tess’ did, it had to be something that the real Tess would have done. I had to remain true to her character, even with regard to tiny things that wouldn’t be noticed by people back home.

  For example: through my research I discovered that there was a small antiques business in Sointula, off the main street. It was run by a woman from the front room of her house and open by appointment only. I could easily not have mentioned this place in any emails – I had no interest in antiques, and none of her family or friends would have been any the wiser. But I knew the odds were that Tess would discover it. She liked walking, and because the island was so small it was likely that she would have passed down the street and noticed the sign in the window of the woman’s house and called to make an appointment to see the woman’s goods. So, I had her do that, and devoted a long email to Justine about what she found there. Her prize acquisition was a pewter soap dish shaped like a scallop shell. I had spotted it on the shop’s website and decided it would take pride of place beside her half-bath.

  By the same token, I found that I had to know everything about what Tess would be doing or wearing, rather than just the bit I needed to know about for the purposes of Facebook and email. It felt important to know every detail of her day, even if it wasn’t going to be used.

  I’ve always been like this. When we thought I might be going to college, mum said I should wear a suit for the interview so we went to buy one from Evans in Brent Cross. The suit jacket we found had a bright pink lining, but only at the collar and the cuffs, so when it was on it looked like it was fully lined, but when you took it off you could see the unfinished nylon underneath. I didn’t like that at all, and asked mum if we could get one which had lining all the way through, even though it was £20 more expensive. She said it didn’t matter, because I wouldn’t take the jacket off during the interview, but the thing was that I would know that the lining didn’t go all the way through. It was one of the only times I can remember really disagreeing with her.

  Given the time difference in Sointula I could only be ‘Tess’ in the evening and at night, and I quickly got into a routine of working from 5 p.m. to 8 a.m., sleeping during the day and waking again at 3 p.m. to prepare for the next day’s work. I was once told that before they go on stage theatre actors are given half an hour alone in the dressing rooms so they can ‘inhabit’ their character. But that’s only for a two-hour play, and all their lines are scripted. For me, the moment it struck 9 a.m. in Sointula, I was on stage as Tess, and I remained so for the next sixteen hours. I had to improvise on my feet, and the story could go in any direction.

  Of course, I wasn’t actually sending and receiving messages every moment of the day, but even when not actually online, I was still working. I had to plan my responses, check details, research anecdotes I was planning to use later. I also had to plot her next moves, which required a lot of thought. I found a site for fiction writers that suggested compiling a ‘back story’ for your characters, to help bring them to life, and so I resolved to do this for each new person who entered Tess’s life. I found it hard going until one day I realized that I could just borrow bits from the people I knew. So Jack, the elderly man Tess got chatting to outside the sauna, had lost his wife of thirty-seven years to ovarian cancer, drank a large glass of Bailey’s Irish Cream each day at 5 p.m. and had a secret online gambling habit – just like Mr Kingly, mum’s manager at Bluston’s. The mother of Tess’s pupil Natalie was modelled on our neighbour Ashley, who lived two doors down on Leverton Street. She bred guinea pigs, and we could hear their squeaking from our garden.

  I also had to practise writing like her. We had very different styles – she rarely wrote in complete sentences, for instance – and even the most simple, everyday word had to be checked to ensure it sounded authentic. I had to concentrate on the most brief, straightforward emails and status updates. She tended to address her recipient emphatically, using exclamation marks and sometimes capital letters – NINA!! – and often a nickname – Sugarplum, Pauly, Big J. On top of her erratic spelling and grammar she used unfamiliar slang – that’s mint; did you get arseholed last night? Sometimes, even an extensive Google search couldn’t shed light on a phrase and I would have to take an educated guess. I still don’t know whether calling someone a ‘nelly’ is a compliment or not.

  Throughout the pre-check-out stage I had been practising writing as Tess, under her supervision. Because I had access to her email and Facebook accounts, and looked at them more regularly throughout the day than she did, I would often be the first to see when a message came through for her, or when someone wrote on her wall. So, we had this system set up where I would write a response to the message, as Tess, and save it in her Drafts folder. Then, when she signed in to her account, she would look at my efforts and critique them over Skype that evening, like she was my teacher.

  ‘Don’t use yo as a greeting for Misha Jennings,’ she’d say. ‘I only say that to Daniel Woolly, it’s this little thing we have. For Misha, I usually use Babe at the beginning, but sign off la di da. It’s a reference to the film Annie Hall.’

  Or,

  ‘Just because
I wrote to Alex that Steve’s party was A.W.E.S.O.M.E., doesn’t mean that you should put full stops in every adjective I use. I just do that occasionally for fun, it’s not a habit.’

  There were many little things to learn, codes, in-jokes, habits, and although I noted everything in my files I still didn’t feel confident enough to write as her without cross-referencing and double-checking. And, of course, there were still the mysteries which had never been resolved: in 2008, for instance, she made several references to someone she called ‘the Zetty’, but try as I might I couldn’t discover who this person was or why she gave them an unnecessary definite article.

  Then there were the photos. I had to find appropriate backgrounds on Flickr, which could pass for Sointula without being too distinctive, which had been taken at the right time of year and showed the current weather for the island and which also suited the poses Tess would adopt in them.

  For that first month, then, I left the flat only to stock up on food. Tesco Extra was open twenty-four hours a day, and so once a week I would take a break from work and go in the dead of night, at 4 a.m., when it would only be me, shelf-stackers plugged into earphones and a solitary cashier too drained to attempt chitchat. Thus, my contact with the ‘real’ world was minimized to the point where I could effectively ignore its existence.

  My own life, such as it was, I put to one side. I still checked my Facebook and email each day, the former out of habit and the latter in case there was a message from Adrian. Aside from the weekly quotes he sent me through Red Pill, I hadn’t heard from him since checkout – and actually, for some time before that. His Red Pill address was the only one I had for him, my only means of contact, but he had made it clear that we shouldn’t discuss the subject on there for fear of eavesdropping hackers. I knew he could find my regular email from my registration details on the site and so presumed we would communicate about the project on that.