Kiss Me First Page 7

  At 5.30 p.m. I met Annie at the van and we drove back. Arriving into the commune car park, I heard music coming from a van I didn’t recognize: new arrivals. I asked Annie to let me out and went over to them. The door was open, and a group of young men were lounging around inside, a mass of brown, hairy legs. They were foreign – Italian, I think – and, although they had what I think of as the ‘commune look’ – messy hair and bare chests and wooden bead necklaces – they didn’t yet have the mouldy appearance that the others here have. I gave them my Tess story and showed her picture. They gathered around to peer at it. One of them then said, ‘Ah, yes, Luigi remembers her, don’t you, Luigi?’ and then did a sort of sideways kick aimed at his friend next to him on the settee. They all started laughing, and one of them said something in Italian I didn’t understand and swivelled his hands in what I suspect was a rude gesture. I had to question them further, quite sternly, to ascertain that no, they did not know Tess, but were simply having a joke.

  I noticed that they were drinking wine from a bottle and so, as I left, I informed them that the commune was alcohol-free.

  I spent the rest of the evening under the tree, then had some food and a wash with my Wet Wipes. Now it’s 9.46 p.m. and I’m back in the tent. Outside, the sound of drumming has stopped, and the insects have taken over.

  Embarking on Project Tess, it didn’t take me long to realize that if we were ever going to get the job done I would have to take matters into my own hands. Over the next few days, she forwarded to me seemingly random email exchanges, photographs and diary entries, with no supporting information or context attached. It was like someone packing for a holiday by sticking their hand in their wardrobe, pulling out the first thing their fingers touched and flinging it into a suitcase. There was no system to it at all.

  Just one example: early on, she sent me a photo of herself and another woman, labelled Me and Debbie. But there was no context – when the photograph was taken, who ‘Debbie’ was, the history of their relationship – without which the photo was near to useless. And, when she did explain things, they often didn’t make sense. For instance, on questioning, Tess revealed that she and this Debbie had been close friends for a while until, out walking one day, Debbie had neglected to stop and stroke a cat they passed on the street. Tess seemed to think that this was sufficient cause to terminate an otherwise good friendship. As I say, one’s natural presumption is that people do things for a reason, that there’s consideration and meaning behind their actions, but with Tess, more often than not there wasn’t.

  Furthermore, the information she provided was riddled with inconsistencies. The Grievous/Godless Mary question was only the start of it. (It turned out to be Godless.) She seemed hazy on details, as if they didn’t matter. Oh, sometime in the summer, she’d say; Jim Something. Part of it was her ‘flaky’ personality; part, I suspected, her condition. I had done some research into bipolar disorder and depleted memory was a common symptom. It was exacerbated by drugs; in Tess’s case, lithium. Energy is profoundly dissipated, the ability to think is clearly eroded, I read. I resolved to contain my irritation, and take control of the situation.

  I made up a spreadsheet of what I would need from her, and in what order. The first request was for basic practical information: full names, addresses, phone numbers and dates of birth of herself and her family, plus bank-account details and other things of that sort.

  A fairly simple request, you’ll agree. But even this she seemed to find difficult. For instance, she claimed to not understand the need for her National Insurance number – my brother’s hardly going to ask for it, is he? – and then, when I pressed her, she said that she didn’t know it and didn’t know where to find the information. To speed things up I told her to phone the tax office. When a day had passed and she hadn’t done it, I phoned them up, pretending to be her, and got it myself.

  I also asked her for the passwords to her email – she had two, the smellthecoffeesweetheart Gmail one, which was her primary account, and an old Hotmail address – and her Facebook account. Thank goodness she wasn’t on Twitter: after a few weeks of enthusiasm in July 2010, she had lost interest. Of course, I would need these passwords when I started the task properly, but for now my plan was to comb through her accounts and glean information.

  My first step was Facebook, for an overview of her life. To all appearances, her page looked perfectly normal. Her profile picture showed her in a gallery – the Louvre in Paris, I later learned – affecting the same pose as the statue she was standing next to, one hand on her forehead as if in a dramatic swoon. She had three hundred and sixty-seven friends which, looking at her friends’ profiles, seemed about average for her generation. She subscribed to a long list of groups, and the random nature of the subjects – showing solidarity to Tibetan monks, saving an old music hall in East London, campaigning for Pizza Express to reinstate their original tomato-sauce recipe, supporting obscure bands, books, restaurants and ventures, as well as a myriad of whimsical ‘causes’ such as Stop Aisling Wearing that Yellow Parka! and I Like The Way Huw Edwards Pronounces the Word Liverpool – made me suspect she was rather indiscriminate in the things to which she pledged allegiance.

  She was tagged in a hundred and forty photos; far less than most people my age, but seemingly average for hers. Tess and her friends didn’t pose nearly as much, either. The majority of shots depicted ‘spontaneous’ moments at parties and picnics and pubs, and even in the posed scenes, the subjects tended to be smiling at the camera in a natural way, or pulling silly faces, rather than tilting their heads and sucking in their cheeks like the girls from my school. The other big difference was the children; Tess’s friends’ albums were filled with endless, near-identical images of themselves, their partners and their friends in the company of small children, and several of them even had photos of babies as their profile shots.

  Although Tess had no special fondness for children herself – ‘ankle-biters’ and ‘little squits’ were some of the ways she referred to them during our conversations – she had not escaped this seemingly compulsory interaction with them: I counted twenty-eight photos of her holding friends’ babies. The child who featured most regularly, from a newborn baby to a five-year-old, was Tess’s godson Mowgli, who belonged to one of her best friends, Justine.

  Some of Tess’s own pictures were non-peopled shots, like close-ups of grass and sunsets, a pair of hands, drops of water on a bathroom sink; proof of her ‘artistic nature’. More interestingly, there were also some grainy pictures posted from long ago, in the pre-digital era, which must have been scanned in. One showed Tess as a young woman, somewhere around my age – ‘early twenties, probably’ was all she could give me when I pressed her on a date. The scene it depicted was a jolly one; Tess and two girlfriends in some front room, giggling as they got ready to go out. It took a moment to identify Tess; all three looked very similar, with frizzy hair and flat stomachs, each wearing trainers, a little top like a sports bra and tight, brightly coloured leggings or shorts. I presumed that they were preparing for some team exercise, but when I asked her about it later, Tess, laughing, said, ‘Ah, sweet!’ and told me that they were actually off to a ‘rave’.

  She said this when we were talking on Skype. Tess was in a good mood that evening, and the mention of this ‘rave’ seemed to evoke happy memories. She started doing some odd movements with her hands, making the shapes of squares in the air, whilst saying, ‘Big box, little box, big box, little box.’ At least two minutes were wasted in this activity, and when I asked her to explain her strange actions she said, ‘Ah, never mind.’

  Another of these old pictures was easier to place, even with the little knowledge I had then: a close-up of Tess with very short hair, not longer than a centimetre. This must have been shortly after the head-shaving incident at art school mentioned in her biography. Even then, though, she looked good; the sharp contours of her face and her dark, wide-apart eyes were able to carry the odd style, and she was smiling up at the c
amera confidently. You would never have guessed from the picture – from any of the photos on her Facebook – that she was anything other than happy.

  After that initial look at Facebook, I tried to proceed in a systematic way. First, I asked her for a list of her immediate family and most important friends. Then I made up a spreadsheet and listed the relations – her mother, Marion, her father, Jonathan, and half-brother, Nicholas. Nicholas was the product of Marion’s first marriage, to another English man – Marion herself was from Chile – whom she had left when Nicholas was young, and married Jonathan, who was fourteen years her senior. Tess was born the following year. Nicholas was married to a woman called Isobel and had two children, six-year-old Poppy and five-year-old Luke.

  Under columns titled age, occupation, home life, personality traits, etc., I first noted what I knew of each of them from the information Tess had provided. Then I did a search through Tess’s emails for each of them, bringing up their messages and Tess’s responses, and added what I gleaned from them to columns titled additional information, email frequency, writing style and so on. Tess had had her Gmail account for six years and her Hotmail for ten, so there was a lot to wade through. I then moved on to her three closest friends, Simon, Justine and Shona.

  For each person, I asked Tess to send me at least one, preferably two photographs. Of course most of the significant people were on Facebook, where I could find reams of photographs, but some were not, including her parents. Besides, I reasoned that the pictures posted on Facebook were often carefully selected to show the subject at their best, whereas those taken casually were more likely to be truthful and reveal something of their character. As well as storing these on my computer, I printed one photo for each significant person and stuck them above my desk, labelled with their name and basic details. The space above my desk started to resemble a board for a murder inquiry in a police detective series.

  Tess sent me a group shot of her family. It was taken at Nicholas and Isobel’s holiday home in the South of France, on the occasion of Jonathan’s seventieth birthday; even Tess could remember that. The family had gone out for the weekend, along with Jonathan’s best friend, a man Tess called Uncle Frank, although he was not a real uncle. ‘He used to be a top rozzer, then he got done for taking backhanders’, was how she described him, which I eventually ascertained to mean that he was a former police chief inspector who had been forced into early retirement after questions arose about his integrity.

  The photo showed them all – except Tess, who was behind the camera – seated around a table outside, at the end of a meal. Marion, her mother, was in the middle of the group. She looked quite similar to Tess, with the same dark hair and skin, but even sitting down you could tell that she was shorter – five foot three inches, compared to Tess’s five foot seven – and skinnier. Tess told me she was anorexic. She had on a white shirt with the collar turned up and a necklace made of giant green stones, under which you could still see her chest bones jutting out like a grille. Tess told me that Marion saw her jewellery as her ‘signature style’, whatever that means, and, after being frequently complimented on it by friends had started a small business importing it from Chile and selling it online. Her hair was in a high bun, like a bread roll on top of her head, and her lips were bright red. Everyone had their glasses raised to the camera, but whereas the others were half empty Marion’s glass was full, and her smile seemed tight and unnatural.

  Beside her was Jonathan. This was shortly before his dementia was diagnosed. Tess told me that on the trip he had forgotten where the bathroom was, despite having been to the house many times before, and had struggled to find the word for cheese, but they all presumed it was just the usual softening of old age. His hair was as white as Gandalf’s, short and neat across his head, and he was grinning broadly, his cheeks pink and shiny. He reminded me somewhat of Richard Briers, who my mum always said she’d like to be married to.

  Next to Marion was Nicholas, who was dark like Marion and Tess but had a more ordinary face, doughy and unsculpted. He wore a pair of thin frameless glasses and, like Marion, gave a controlled smile. Next to him, his wife Isobel had shoulder-length blonde hair and a face so regular and unmemorable it could have been computer-generated. Luke, who was similarly fair, was on her lap, with the slightly darker-haired Poppy in the next chair. Both were very pretty and clean, like children on TV. Isobel’s Facebook pictures showed the family engaged in a variety of activities; in one they were on a boat, in another, walking through the snow with their big yellow dog, the children wearing matching red all-in-one outfits.

  Tess didn’t get on with Isobel. She described her sister-in-law as an ‘uptight WASP bitch’ – the acronym, I learned, means White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, but can be applied in a derogatory way – who had a limit of two glasses of wine a week and made her children wear safety helmets when they played in the communal gardens of their Holland Park house. Since marrying Nicholas, Isobel had given up her job and assumed control of renting out their properties. When Tess had asked to use the France house for her thirty-fifth birthday party, Isobel had made a big deal out of giving her ‘family rates’, which turned out to be only 10% off the regular price. She pretended to be jealous of Tess’s ‘wild life’: ‘I wish I had the time and energy’, she’d say.

  Tess was particularly annoyed that Nicholas and Isobel had recently got into collecting contemporary art, favouring what Tess described as ‘bogus conceptual crap’ – the opposite of the kind of paintings Tess did and therefore, she thought, a snub. Isobel would pretend to be interested in Tess’s opinion on current artists: ‘Who do you rate at the moment, Tess?’ Tess would reply, ‘Dürer’ or ‘Otto Dix’, who are, apparently, old artists, and not what Isobel meant.

  Relations were also strained with Nicholas, Tess informed me, and a read-through of their email exchanges confirmed this. When corresponding with him, Tess dispensed with her customary kisses, whilst he signed off his messages to her with Best wishes. In one exchange Tess complained to him about their mother and he defended Marion, saying she had always done her utmost for her children. Tess replied with an angry diatribe about how he was always Marion’s favourite, the golden boy, and he couldn’t possibly understand, and how the fact that Marion professed to be so Bohemian and unconventional yet revelled in Nicholas’s success in the City revealed just what a ‘phoney’ she was. Nicholas hadn’t replied to that – or, if he had, Tess had deleted it. She claimed she couldn’t remember.

  Tess only ever really saw her brother and sister-in-law on family occasions and there was no record of any ‘chatty’ online relationship, so I didn’t see them as a big challenge for my future work. But I was worried about Marion. However badly she and Tess got on, it seemed highly unlikely, if not impossible, that she would not want to speak to Tess on the phone at some point. I mean, on the rare occasions I used to go out when mum was alive, she would call me several times an hour.

  When I had raised my concerns during our meeting, Adrian had assured me that Marion relied on email more than the phone to keep in touch, because she was quite deaf.

  Tess was equally dismissive of my worries.

  Oh, she’ll just be pleased I’m out of the way, she wrote. We hardly speak anyway.

  This seemed odd to me, but as I combed through the emails between Tess and Marion I could see that it was indeed an unusual, difficult relationship. There were lots of them in sporadic bursts, and most were short and factual – what each of them was up to, how Jonathan was. But Tess’s accounts of her life were often far from the truth. She would often tell her mother that everything was fine and she was in what she called a ‘good place’; but an email sent to a friend on the same day would paint a very different picture, describing an afternoon spent crying in the bath until the water got cold and her legs cramped, or going out to a bar by herself and getting drunk and blacking out until she came to on a sofa in the flat of a man she had never met before.

  Every six months or so there would be a
long, heated and bitter exchange between them in which Tess would be scathing, telling Marion what a bad parent she was (I’ve internalized your craziness, you make me feel like I have no right to exist), how she was just a trophy wife and, more recently, accusing her of resenting Jonathan for getting Alzheimer’s and having to care for him. There were also references I didn’t understand: spiteful tones at dinner, ruined Christmases and the like. When you came to get me from the flat that time after the hospital, I didn’t want you to; because I knew you’d use it against me FOREVER as proof of what a great mother you are, Tess wrote.

  Jonathan was less of a concern. There were only thirty-two emails between Tess and her father, spread over seven years, all affectionate but formal, mostly concerning money: he had given her several loans over the years which, as far as I could tell, had not been paid back. Tess told me that they didn’t chat over email very much before he got Alzheimer’s, and now he couldn’t. Don’t worry, she wrote, in a few months he won’t even remember he’s got a daughter.

  I started a series of timeline charts to plot events in Tess’s life. One was for major events, which I defined as the things her parents would be aware of: job changes, flat moves, her grandfather’s death, her brother’s wedding and the births of his children. Another was for those things it was likely her family did not know about: random encounters with men, arguments with friends, drug taking, and so forth. For each event I had a column listing the people who, as far as I was aware, knew about it, what exactly they knew and what their thoughts on it were, as far as I could gather.

  There was so much information to deal with that I found that just recording things on my laptop wasn’t enough. Ideally I’d have an extra screen to work from but I couldn’t afford to buy one, so I ended up handwriting a chart on a big piece of paper with linking arrows, which I pinned up on my wall next to the photos.