Kiss Me First Read online

  ‘I look at these people and imagine whole scenes from their life. Like, let’s say there’s a man wearing overalls, obviously a manual worker. I’ll think of him down the pub, on his fifth pint of the day, saying, “Well, it’s just a job, innit?” Or if there’s a girl with red hair, I’ll imagine the office sleazebag at the Christmas party saying, “So, Lucy, there’s something we’ve all been wondering – do the cuffs match the collar?”’ Once, she described seeing an old man in a flat cap taking a packet of Bourbon biscuits out of his shopping and looking at them before replacing them in the bag; a sight, she said, that reduced her to tears. ‘He was just looking forward to his tea. Such simple pleasures. I think I’m too sensitive for this world. Do you know what I mean?’

  I didn’t, but there was the odd occasion when I understood both her attitude and what lay behind it. For instance, one night she told me about how the previous evening she was at a friend’s house for dinner and had been sat next to a boring woman. ‘She spent literally half an hour telling us all the countries she had ever been to – including, get this, the airports she had just stopped over in, as if they counted.’

  I told her that Tash Emmerson had done that at school, and that I found it equally annoying. She even had the countries listed on her Facebook page.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ said Tess. ‘Unfriend her immediately. Why are you friends with these people?’

  I explained that I didn’t like Tash or ever see her, but that everyone at school had everyone else as their Facebook friends, because they wanted to have as high a number as possible.

  ‘Yeah, maybe for those silly bitches,’ she said, ‘but you’re cooler than that, aren’t you? Just ignore the lot of them.’

  I told her that if I unfriended everyone who wasn’t my real friend, then I would only have Rashida left. I decided not to mention that I didn’t even see her any more.

  ‘So what?’ she said. ‘Who gives a fuck? Strike out. Be cool.’

  I appreciated what she was saying; I was a free thinker, after all. But I had a vision of my profile: Friends (1).

  ‘I can’t,’ I said.

  ‘God, I’m so glad the Internet didn’t exist when I was younger,’ said Tess.

  At these rare times when she was concentrating on me, rather than talking about herself, I was keenly aware that we were wasting time, and I made efforts to remain professional and steer the conversation back to her after a few minutes. But I admit that I quite enjoyed it when she decided to pay attention to me; she had a way of making me feel that she was really interested, that she really cared.

  One night, she decided that she was going to give me some advice. ‘I don’t have a daughter, you’re the next best thing,’ she said. ‘I’ve been thinking about this all day.’

  I started to protest, but she continued.

  ‘Firstly,’ she said, ‘you’re not as crap as you think you are.’

  ‘I don’t think I’m crap!’ I said.

  She shushed me, and carried on with her list. ‘Wait until a man has been divorced a year before you think about going near him. It’s OK to dislike your family. You’ll spend your life chasing the feeling of your first line of coke. It’s worth spending money on a good haircut.’

  I told her that none of the above applied to me, nor could I envisage them ever doing so – and added that, although I appreciated her concern, her energy would be better spent remembering where she was between February and May 2008.

  She laughed. ‘Ah, you’re so young, there’s still time. Just you wait.’ Then she sighed, and her mood shifted, as it did. ‘But then, before you know it, you’ll be old. Life is horrifically short, you know.’

  I said, without thinking, ‘Well, especially for you.’ There was a long silence at that, and I felt I had said the wrong thing. I stared at the little black Skype box on the screen until I thought of something to say:

  ‘It always seems to be Thursday.’

  I said it because I wanted Tess to feel she wasn’t alone, that I understood, but it also happened to be true. The days seemed to slip away with no resistance: it always seemed to be 3 p.m., and then it always seemed to be Thursday again, and another week, another month gone for ever.

  Other times, as I’ve said, our conversations were unsuccessful from the start. If she was in the wrong mood, I could barely get a scrap of information out of her. She would give short, brusque answers, say ‘I don’t know’ to everything and generally act like a child. She’d whine, ‘Oh, when will this all be over! I just want it to be OVER. You said we’d be finished by now!’ I’d have to remind her that I had said nothing of the sort: there had been no completion date set at that stage. Sometimes I’d have to be quite sharp.

  She could also be spiteful. There was one particular night when I was trying to establish some detail – I think it was whether her friend Katy Wilkins was the same person as a ‘Catatonic Katie’ she mentioned in another email – when she turned on me. She said, ‘Don’t you have anything better to do with your life than this? I mean, really? What do you do?’

  She kept badgering me, until she suddenly stopped and gave a big sigh, like she was bored. ‘Never mind. I suppose it’s in my interests that you’re a sad-sack,’ she said.

  I’m not proud to say that I let my professionalism slip.

  ‘Well, maybe I won’t do this any more,’ I said. ‘You’re right, I’ve got better things to do.’ And I terminated the call. I was shaking, so upset that when she tried to ring me back, I ignored her. I let it ring four more times.

  When I finally accepted the call, she began to apologize and then said, ‘Wait.’ The next thing I knew, she had turned her camera on. Suddenly there she was, in the little Skype screen, looking straight at me. I think I might have even given a yelp, so surprised was I at her actually being there. It was rather like seeing a ghost, not that I believe in ghosts. She was wearing a white vest, bright against her skin, and her fringe was pinned back from her face. She looked very young. Her face was close to the camera and was frowning, that little line clearly visible between her eyebrows.

  ‘Darling,’ she said. ‘Please forgive me.’

  She apologized for ‘lashing out’; it had been a bad day, she said. Then: ‘I need you. You know that. I really need you.’

  She put her hand up and touched the camera lightly, like she was blessing me.

  From then on, without discussing it, she left her camera on when we spoke. I still left mine off. I had seen many photos of her, of course, but it was quite different observing her as a live, breathing person. Generally, the view was on her face from below; her usual pose was, I could see, reclining on a bed with her computer on her lap. On the wall behind her I could see the corner of a poster of what looked like a giant spider. I asked Tess to move the camera to show me the whole thing; she did, and told me it was a picture by an artist called Louise Bourgeois. I noted this, and during our next session, asked her to pan the camera around her room so I could see more fully how she had decorated it.

  Her room was absolutely crammed full of stuff, junk really, which made me feel queasy to look at – dusty peacock feathers, stacks of magazines, clothes in heaps on the floor reminding me of the piles dumped overnight outside the Cats’ Protection League shop in Kentish Town. On top of a chest of drawers, jars lay on their sides or with their lids off, and around her window was a string of Christmas-tree lights. There were some unusual objects, too, which I asked her the background to; a huge white shell, the size of a pillow, which she had bought at an antique shop in Islington; a painted wooden sun which took up half a wall, which she said she had made for a play. A small gold Buddha sat on her bedside table, and even through the camera I could see the incense ash coating it.

  Seeing her possessions like that made me think: what would Tess do with all of this stuff when she checked out? I knew that such a query was edging toward forbidden territory – although there had been no official agreement as such, Tess had conspicuously avoided discussing the practical details o
f her suicide – so I asked rather tentatively, ‘Do you have a plan for your things?’

  She looked confused for a moment. Then she understood. ‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘Not yet. I haven’t thought about it.’

  I told her that I used a storage place that was good value, if she wanted the number. She nodded, vaguely, so I emailed it to her afterwards.

  The camera was useful, because I could pick up better on her mood when I saw her facial expression: although, I must say, when she was ‘down’ it was often quite obvious by her voice. It would go thick and heavy, as if she was sedated. And there were little visual things note. For instance, I saw that she was left-handed, and that, in addition to the little line between her eyebrows, she had one on either side of her mouth, as delicate as fallen eyelashes. One night I noticed a small red mark above her lip. I asked her about it and she said it was a cold sore. I might not have known that she got cold sores if I hadn’t actually seen her – and I made a note to give her one at various points in the future. Tess could make even a cold sore look good, like a beauty spot.

  She also tended to smoke when she talked to me. I presumed they were cigarettes, but when one day I watched her crumbling something into the tobacco and realized it was cannabis, I asked her to confirm it was drugs, and she laughed.

  ‘Are you shocked, Mary Whitehouse?’

  After ascertaining the meaning of this reference – Mary Whitehouse was, Tess explained, ‘a famously disapproving old bag with a mouth like a cat’s arse’ – I explained that I didn’t disapprove at all, and that she was totally within her rights to do whatever she wanted with her body. But, I added, wanting to make my position clear, ‘if it affected someone else – if you had a small child in the room, for instance – I could not condone your actions. But, as you are, feel free to carry on.’

  ‘Why, thank you,’ said Tess. ‘You’re very kind.’ She seemed amused by this exchange and smiled as she licked the paper of her cigarette.

  ‘How much does it cost?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘A girl never has to buy her own drugs, right?’

  ‘Well, you might not have to,’ I said, ‘but I’m sure some girls do. It’s likely that someone would only give you drugs for free if they liked you and wanted you to like them, but not everyone is “sexy” like you. You’ve done this before – when you use the phrase “a girl”, you actually mean: “a girl like me”.’

  It was something I’d been wanting to say for a while, and I was gratified to see Tess look slightly taken aback. She took a long suck on the cigarette, and said, ‘Maybe you’re right.’ It seemed to pique her curiosity, and she started one of her barrages of questions about my childhood and parents, etc. I told her about mum and the MS, and she became animated.

  ‘Like dad. God, isn’t it shit? How did you cope?’

  I told her that I imagined Alzheimer’s was worse than MS, for one reason: mum was always compos mentis, and remained herself up to the end, whereas her dad, Jonathan, had effectively lost his identity. When I thought of Jonathan I had the image of a tin of Quality Street, like the ones we used to get at Christmas, but inside was just full of empty wrappers. I didn’t say that to Tess, though; I just said that it must have been very hard watching helplessly as her father’s memories leaked away, until he had forgotten he even had a daughter.

  Tess nodded.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘He basically died years ago.’

  And then, stubbing out her cigarette in a little shell ashtray by her bed, she said, ‘I’m glad I’m not going to get old.’

  Gradually, the spreadsheets were filling up. There was now a pleasing rhythm to my work: at night we would have our conversations, then the following day I would transcribe the tapes, catalogue the facts and make a note of any extraneous but useful details that had emerged, such as unusual words she used or aspects of her character Tess inadvertently revealed.

  The more information I harvested, the more my confidence grew, but there remained an area of concern: phone calls. Despite the reassurances of Adrian and Tess to the contrary, it seemed likely that there would be times in the future when a call from Tess would be desirable, even if not strictly necessary; festive occasions, for instance, or in the event of an accident.

  Then, one day, as I listened to our taped recordings, something occurred to me. There seemed to be no reason why we shouldn’t record generic messages, which I could then play down the phone, onto the recipient’s answerphone, at times when I knew they would not be able to pick up.

  I put the idea to Tess that evening, and she agreed. ‘No time like the present!’ I said. It took a while, and I had to keep asking her to repeat because her tone wasn’t right, but eventually we had several different recordings. One was for the occasion of a birthday, one for Christmas, and then there were three general ones, variations on ‘Hello, it’s me, sorry to miss you’. For her friends, Tess’s tone was slangy – ‘Hey, babe’ – while those for her family were more formal. I got Tess to make me a list of when her closest family and friends were likely to let their phones go to voicemail; her mother, for instance, went to her book group every Wednesday evening – what she called her ‘me time’ – whilst those friends with children would be busy collecting them from school during the mid-afternoon.

  I also decided that we should take photos of Tess for me to later superimpose on scenes of wherever it was she was going, to post on Facebook. One evening I asked her to show me the clothes in her wardrobe, and she positioned the laptop on the side of the bed and pulled them out, one by one, holding them up against her. Once we had agreed on certain outfits, suitable for different seasons and weather conditions, she put them on, not bothering to move away from the camera, so I saw her strip down to her knickers.

  As she got changed, I examined her body. It was so different to mine. Her lack of flesh meant I could see parts of her skeleton I had never seen on myself: the knobbles on her spine and her ribcage as she bent down, her hip bones as she lifted her arms to pull on a top. It was as if she only had a fine sheet draped over her frame, whereas mine was buried under a duvet.

  Once dressed, I directed her how to use the self-timer on her camera to take photos of herself wearing various outfits against a blank wall in her room, in a variety of poses. She then emailed them over for me to check.

  Tess seemed to enjoy the session, happily rummaging through her stuff, holding things up for my opinion, exclaiming with delight as she chanced upon a favourite jacket she thought she’d lost. I don’t have any interest in clothes and didn’t know what she was talking about most of the time – vintage Ossie, my old Dries top – but I quite enjoyed it, too. It pleased me to see her happy. I remember thinking about that photo on Facebook of her and her friends getting ready to go out, when she was my age, and wondering whether what I was experiencing with Tess was something similar to that. ‘Girly fun.’ I felt close to Tess, then, and it was a nice feeling.

  Not long after, however, something happened that jolted our relationship back to the professional, and made me feel that I hardly knew her at all. One morning, as usual, I logged onto her Facebook account, and saw that she had sent out party invites to her entire friends list. She must have done it sometime after we had Skyped the previous evening.

  Tess’s Farewell Fiesta, the invite read. Join me for a glass or five before I set sail for pastures new. The date was the following Friday, and the venue a pub in Bethnal Green. Already, eighteen people had accepted the invite, and her wall was filled with messages from bemused friends: Wait, you’re leaving? Where? When? What’s all this? Why didn’t I know about this?

  I immediately emailed Tess asking why she hadn’t consulted me before such a major move, but she didn’t reply all day, and I had to wait for that evening’s Skype session to hear her explanation.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ she said, with an infuriatingly breezy manner, ‘I thought I should have a bit of a send-off.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  She shr
ugged, looking off-camera.

  ‘It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. Anyway, you know now, don’t you?’

  ‘But you can’t have a leaving party yet! We haven’t worked out where you’re going, or when or …’ I heard my voice rise, and paused to calm down. ‘What are you going to tell everybody?’

  ‘Oh, I’ll think of something,’ she said, turning back to me with a touch of irritation in her voice. ‘I’ll say I’m moving abroad. Stop being such a fusspot.’

  ‘I’ll think of something, you mean,’ I replied, almost under my breath, but Tess gave the camera a quick, narrow-eyed glance and I knew she had heard.

  ‘Oh, and I’ve told everyone I’m leaving in a month,’ she added, and smiled sweetly.

  As you can imagine, this rather took me aback. No dates for ‘checkout’ had been discussed up until now, and I had foreseen the information-gathering process continuing for at least another two months. I had seen no evidence on email or Facebook to support this new claim from Tess, and it crossed my mind that she had just thought up the deadline on the spot in order to fluster me. But, whatever the case, once she had said it she refused to budge, insisting we had to wrap everything up within four weeks.

  ‘In that case,’ I said, ‘we need to start planning your future.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Your new life,’ I said, doing my utmost to remain measured. ‘Where you want to live, what you want to do, everything. We’ve got to work it all out.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ she said, with an impatient sigh. ‘I’m not going to be there, am I?’

  This was true, of course, and by that point I probably did have enough knowledge of her to make an informed decision about the kind of place she might go and the job she might take, and so on. But I felt both annoyed and hurt by her offhand manner.

  ‘I mean, that’s what you’re here for, isn’t it?’ she added, to rub salt into the wound.

  I brought the conversation to an end on quite bad terms, but I soon rallied. I had to be professional; I was here to do a job. I sat down and tried to be rational and think of good places for Tess to go. It took quite a bit of Internet research before I found the answer.