The Life I Left Behind

by Colette McBeth

  WHAT CAN YOU achieve in seven minutes? You could boil the kettle and make a cup of tea, although if you wanted to do it properly, in a pot and let it brew, you’d barely have enough time to take a sip. You could go to the loo, but again, depending on the nature of your visit, you might be stretching it. You could run a mile, if you were one of those professional fit types in Richmond Park training for a marathon or a triathlon. But a man of sixty-seven with a minor heart complaint and a chest that whistled like a harmonica when he moved at pace wasn’t going to get very far in seven minutes. Besides, the operator had told him to stay where he was and wait for the police to arrive. So that was what he did. Jim Tierney stood guard over my dead, semi-naked body.

  Maybe if he had run away, even just a few hundred metres, put distance between himself and his discovery, he might have found life easier in the weeks that ensued. He wouldn’t have had time to commit every aspect of the scene before him, the strange, gothic beauty of it, to memory. His subconscious would not have had those images to reproduce in lurid, chemical-fuelled dreams. The blond hair, damp from moisture, curled in rat’s tails, the dark mottling of my skin. Eyes half open, half closed, as if I was sleeping and could be revived. My left hand, open to the sky, cradling a gold chain.

  By the time the sirens streamed through the air and the footsteps approached Jim, he felt like they had no place here, these intruders. He was my protector now, a sentry standing guard over me, waiting for someone to breathe life back into my airways and jump-start my stalled heart.

  ‘We’ll take over now,’ the DS said gently so as not to startle him.

  In those initial days Jim struggled with the lack of name. It was too impersonal to call me a body; such an empty word. He couldn’t bring himself to say it. Have a bit of respect, he wanted to tell the young police officer; so, Mr Tierney, what time did you find the body? The word suggested something that was unconnected to anything or anyone. A separate entity. Whereas Jim knew the threads of my life would have been woven into the fabric of my mother’s, my father’s, my friends’. Nobody existed alone. He had a daughter so he knew this. The word was an insult to the life that had gone before, the fiery love my family would have felt for me. He would have killed for his daughter Emma. Her death would have killed him. And when he thought of me he couldn’t get the image of her out of his mind. What he would have given to emerge from the police station and hold her tight in his arms, sink his face into her red curls and feel the beat of her heart. But since she had pissed off to Seattle, he had to settle for a phone call and a cuddle from his wife and the dog.

  So Jim had a way of coping, if you could call it coping. He referred to me as ‘my girl’ until he learnt my name was Eve, after which he referred to me as ‘my Eve’. In the weeks after my discovery he hoovered up every detail he could find about me and pumped them through my dead body to bring me back to life. His wife Joan thought it distasteful, this obsession, though she was careful not to mention her concern to him. When you’ve lived with someone for forty-four years you learn when to keep your mouth shut. If she had raised the subject Jim would have told her straight: he needed to see me as a person, to connect me to a loving family. At the very least he owed me this. And when he was satisfied I had one, he sent my mother a letter using the police as an intermediary. Amongst other things he told her:

  I am still trying to make sense of it as I’m sure you must be. Please know that she will never be just a victim to me. I am a father too, you see, so when I think of her I try to understand what she was like as a person. I’m sure she was a fine daughter. I didn’t want to leave her there but after I found her she was not alone, the police came quickly. In truth I don’t think I ever will leave her. I don’t think she will leave me.

  He deliberated over telling her I looked peaceful before deciding against it. Jim was a man who favoured the truth at all times, even when lying would have been kinder.

  My fictional death, the one I often conjured up in childhood, was like an extension of life, only draped in an invisible cloak. I thought I would move around the same world, touch objects, lift a jug of milk and drop it to the floor, smash, just to get a reaction. I would be all-seeing, all-knowing. I would haunt Rebecca Smart for calling me a bitch every day of Year Nine, and at night (because time would still be defined) I would slip into my own bed and wait for my mum to kiss me. There would be benefits to dying, I figured, like finding my dad in heaven listening to Dire Straits and playing his air guitar.

  My real death was nothing like that. There was the pain that accompanied it and there was this, the thing it had transmuted into. This pain had teeth and venomous glands. It fed off everything I saw and everything I knew had ended. When I thought of a kiss it told me there would be no more coming my way. Not a single one. Ever. It reminded me of all the hugs I had ducked as a kid, the times I squirmed away from displays of affection, and then it whipped me with the knowledge that I couldn’t go back and retrieve them. It showed me an image of my mum, so clear I could almost smell her hairspray and her Miss Dior perfume, only to laugh at me because I couldn’t hold her at the very time she needed me most, in those moments when every atom of her being craved me. And occasionally it mentioned the word tomorrow, just to taunt me with the certainty I used to attach to it. Then it left me begging for just one moment more to say all those words that didn’t seem important when tomorrow still existed.

  You might think it’s a privilege to watch life carry on when you are gone. Trust me, it is a penance. And one, I noticed, not everyone had to suffer. Some people who died after me passed straight through without the briefest look back whereas I found myself stuck in this limbo. It’s not easy to explain how this made me feel – try thinking of the frustration when you see a diner arrive after you only to get served first, and multiply it by a trillion. That might come close. I kept asking the question: why me? Why the fuck do I have to go through this? Can’t I move on and find my dad, wherever he is, because he’s not here? But if God was out there, I got the sense he wasn’t amenable to answering my questions. I wondered if I should soften my tone, edit out the swearing. I thought maybe I had done something really bad in life and I was paying the price.

  Not long after I died (days, weeks – I couldn’t say), I was submerged in a particularly dark moment, filled with indignation about my lot, when a girl who was already here when I arrived tried to explain.

  ‘You’re here because you’re not done.’

  ‘What is that supposed to mean?’ I asked.

  ‘It means there’s something you’ve got to do.’

  ‘And how do I know what that is?’

  ‘You just do, apparently,’ she said.

  I thanked her because it was the polite thing to do but a few specifics wouldn’t have gone amiss. This summed up my new world; nebulous and short on detail. If there was a job to do, ideally I would have got on with it then moved on. That was my way. But no, that wasn’t how it worked in this place. They laughed at my impatience. ‘It’s not like the world you’ve left,’ said an older guy called Jonas. His voice had a dreamy, ethereal quality to it which made me suspect he’d been here a while. ‘You can’t push it, Eve. It will happen when it happens.’

  Some of the time we talked about the lives we’d had. There was a game we played, listing our regrets and the things we were grateful for. Mostly it wasn’t the profound stuff you might expect. People started out saying things like I’d have allowed myself to be happier, but when you pinned them down, you found it was the mundane preoccupations they would change. I wouldn’t, for instance, have agonised for weeks over which shade of white to paint the walls in my flat. White is white, people. Remember this next time you’re in B&Q and you’ll thank me. I would have had more sex, been less abstemious, more open to the idea of a one-night stand or a shag on a first date. No one, according to my unscientific straw poll, wishes they’d had less fun, with the exception of a young Danish man who had so much of the wrong kind of chemical fun it killed him.
/>   My biggest regrets were tied to the work I’d been doing in the six months before I was killed. I would be sure to make it more conclusive, tie up the loose ends. And yes, right at the top of my list I would have liked to tell everyone who killed me. But the thing you need to understand about death is that it’s sneaky, it doesn’t give you time to prepare, it springs up unannounced. Everyone thinks they’ll get a warning. And maybe you will, if you’re lucky. But talking to people here I can say that mostly this isn’t the case. You are there and then you are not. It’s that brutal.

  On my last morning I threw on an old T-shirt, ate half a bowl of crunchy nut cornflakes and left my flat in Shepherd’s Bush around nine, bursting with purpose. The morning was a glorious, sun-drenched affair, the sort that has you falling in love with life all over again. It even made Shepherd’s Bush look inviting, which was as close to a miracle as you ever got this side of London.

  I drove the five miles out to Richmond Park and found a space as near to Ham Gate as I could. It was still a ten-minute walk at my pace, at least fifteen minutes for your average strolling person. I was happy for it. The sky sat low, blue and clear apart from a few wispy clouds. To my right I could make out a herd of deer camouflaged in the brown summer grass. I worked up a sweat as I walked, acknowledging passers-by with a smile and a ‘Morning’, the way I always did. If you don’t do this already it’s something I’d urge you to try. Even in London, a town not known for the friendliness of its inhabitants, you’d be amazed how many people return these greetings with a wave or a smile of their own, and you know, happiness breeds happiness. When I reached the gate, I slipped out of the park and on to the stretch of common land that abuts the perimeter wall. Then I went in search of a distinctive pink flower in the very place my body was found eight days later.

  I was grateful for that walk, for the stunning mental picture it granted me of my last morning. But it came at the cost of a proper coffee, a shower and a decent breakfast. Had I known what was coming, that my remaining life could be counted in hours and minutes and not years and decades, I would have treated myself to smoked salmon or eggs Benedict and a glass of champagne, a mug of coffee too. At the very least I would have made a sandwich with the bacon in the fridge that was skirting close to its sell-by date. I would most certainly have showered and lathered myself in the posh oil I thought too posh for daily use. But as I said, there was no advance warning system. No dark portent in the clouds above my flat, no tinkling music that filled me with dread. It was warm. The sun trickled through me. I was buzzing with life.

  I can’t say this with any precision, but at a rough guess it was fifteen hours later that my life ended. Which just goes to show how rapidly your luck can change. What did I expect from those last few minutes? A montage of my best bits, like the ones they show on The X Factor when the contestants are being booted out? No, it wasn’t the life I had lived that flashed before me, but the one I was going to have. The life I had taken for granted, in which my ambitions were acted out. Always tomorrow. I had all the time in the world until suddenly I didn’t have any time left at all.

  In the end my regret boiled down to one last living thought:

  I didn’t have the chance to warn her.

  Chapter Four

  DI Rutter

  DETECTIVE INSPECTOR VICTORIA Rutter would have preferred it if the discovery of the body had been made the following day, a day when she was actually on duty and not about to take her two children aged nine and seven to see Despicable Me 2 at the cinema. This was a treat promised in compensation for the cancellation of a Legoland visit at the end of August. Now she had two cancellations to make up for. Sometimes she hated dog walkers and their discoveries.

  Her knowledge of the patch of common that lies adjacent to Richmond Park is limited to scenes of crime photographs from years back, but the park itself she knows well. It’s where they come sledging in the winter, a minute’s buzz downhill, then another ten to climb to the top again. Soggy gloves, cold red fingers but still the kids insist one more time. In a few more years, she thinks, they won’t want to do anything with her, not sledging or the cinema. And here she is on a Sunday.

  She sucks in air through her teeth. No matter how many times she sees one, the sight of a dead body always gets her.

  A uniformed officer spots her and makes his way over. He explains that the body was found by a dog walker early this morning. ‘Think it might have been here a few days or more, judging by the look of it.’

  She turns again to study it, get the basics clear in her head: white, age at a guess late twenties though it’s hard to tell, no obvious signs of flesh wounds. She notes the position in which it was found, placed as opposed to dumped, she deduces.

  She stares at the body. Black knickers and a Nike Just Do It T-shirt, the irony of which is not lost on her.

  ‘So who are you then?’ she asks. She likes talking to the victims. Sometimes she gets more sense from them than from her team. She’s learnt to do it quietly, though, when no one is within earshot. Once when she was a detective constable her inspector overheard her at a murder scene. ‘Not answering, are they?’ he laughed. She didn’t tell him that they often did.

  She waits, gathers her thoughts. This is the easy part, this small window of time when a body is just a body without a name or family to grieve for it. She’s seen colleagues fazed by the enormity of the task ahead, or get frustrated down the line when the investigation isn’t opening any doors. They want it all too easy. In her experience things are rarely easy. Easy makes her nervous.

  She likes doors that don’t open. If she’s honest, it’s where she gets her kicks, the reason she’s out in Richmond Park when she could be eating sweet salted popcorn with her kids and watching Despicable Me 2.

  ‘DI Rutter?’

  A man in a white suit introduces himself as Dr James Dukas, a Home Office pathologist.

  ‘Any idea how she died?’ she asks.

  ‘It’s likely she was strangled. This was in her hand when we found her. Probably placed there.’

  He passes her a plastic evidence bag. She takes it from him and holds it up in the light so she can examine its contents.

  ‘It’s a gold chain.’

  ‘I can see that,’ she says.

  Back at the station, briefing the inquiry team, she casts her eyes around the room to take stock. How many of them were here six years ago? DS Cook certainly was. He’s been around the station longer than she’s been in the force. He reminds her of one of the Superking cigarettes he smokes. Thin, pale and yellow at the tips. Then there’s DS Ravindra and DC Rollings. The rest she will excuse for not knowing. But not those three. You don’t forget a detail like that.

  They’re all listening, seated, standing, perched on desks. She shows them the video of the scene, recounts what she knows, which isn’t much. After assigning one officer to search through the missing persons database, she asks another to get the CCTV on the perimeter roads around Richmond Park. She waits for a groan, smiles inwardly when she doesn’t get one. He must be learning. No one needs to tell her it’s a shitty job; she’s done it plenty of times herself. Scouring endless hours of poor-quality footage until your eyes go blurry. Once she watched twenty-three hours of it when a man’s body had been found dumped in a bin in Leyton. She couldn’t focus by the end, has the glasses to prove it. But she found the killer’s car and they got a conviction. Nothing is ever easy.

  When she’s done, she takes a swig of Coke from the can beside her and brings up a slide on the projector.

  ‘This item of jewellery was found in her hand.’

  She turns to study it but this is purely for show. She knew what it looked like even before Dr Dukas described it to her. Tapping her pen against the side of the projector, she waits for a reaction.

  ‘Isn’t that the same one as …’

  She exhales. ‘Thank you, DS Ravindra. Let’s bring him in for questioning.’

  Chapter Five

  Melody

  THE N
EWS REPORT could only have lasted a minute, maybe less, but it has embedded itself in Melody’s mind. She’s drunk too much red wine. There’s a looseness in her head, a lack of self-control. She’s too woozy to marshal her thoughts with the usual rigour.

  As a rule she doesn’t watch the news. There was a time when she couldn’t pull herself away from the natural disasters, the armed robberies, the plane crashes. Every day there was a fresh tragedy that warranted her attention. Sam humoured her, passing it off as a phase, an indulgence she would soon tire of, until one day he came home to find her watching a news report about the invasion of the harlequin ladybird. Seeing her puffy eyes, the dirty tears streaking her face, he took the remote control from her hand and switched the TV on to standby. Not that it mattered. She had watched it countless times by then already, committed all the relevant facts to memory. She could recite them now, if required, with the same confidence that she used to reel off the names of Henry VIII’s wives and their fates: divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.

  The harlequin ladybird arrived in Britain in the summer of 2004 and shares an ecological niche with the native two-spot ladybird, whose numbers have fallen by thirty per cent since its arrival. It is advancing at one hundred kilometres a year.

  She pictured the scene taking place all over Britain: the two-spot being squeezed out, consumed by its voracious alien cousin. Hiding away until it disappeared completely. This she found unbearably sad. But when she tried to explain it to Sam, it sounded ridiculous. She could see that it sounded ridiculous from the look on his face. He spent all day fixing broken people in the hospital, real emergencies next to which the plight of the ladybirds seemed insignificant.

  ‘This has to stop, Mel.’

  She wished it could stop, all of it. She wished she could make it stop: the famines, the child neglect, global warming; and while she was at it, she wished she could save the native ladybird.