"Stories start in different ways," explains Mchael Marshall Smith. "Sometimes you begin with the beginning, and sometimes it's the end that comes to you first. Others present their middle to you, the underlying idea, and leave you to work out the best way in. 'Dear Alison' was one of these, and I can remember the small event which finally gave me the impetus to start writing it. It was looking out of the window in the house in Kentish Town we were living in, and seeing a small, quiet eddy of leaves in the pavement below. One of the great things about computers is the covert records they keep, and I see by looking at the original file of the story that the day it was started was October 25th. That feels about right: an autumnal day for a melancholy tale.
"This is a slightly different (and later) version of the story to the one previously published. When I was putting together my collection WHAT YOU MAKE IT, there were originally going to be many more stories in it – until we realized that it would produce a book about three inches thick. 'Dear Alison' was one of the ones I regretfully removed, but by then I'd done a little editing and cutting on it. In the time-honoured fashion, that means this version is very slightly longer."
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IT IS FRIDAY, the 25th of October, and beginning to turn cold. I'll put the heating on before I go.
I'm leaving in about half an hour. I've been building up to it all day, kept telling myself that I'd leave any minute now and spend the day waiting in the airport. But I always knew that I'd wait until this time, until the light was going. London is at its best in the Autumn, and four o'clock is the Autumn time. Four o'clock is when Autumn is.
An eddy of leaves is turning hectically in the street outside my study window, flecks of green and brown lively against the tarmac. Earlier the sky was clear and blue, bright white clouds periodically changing the light which fell into the room; but now that light is fading, painting everything with a layer of grey dust. Smaller, drier leaves are falling on the other side of the street, collecting in a drift around the metal fence in front of Number 12.
I'll remember this sight. I remember most things. Everything goes in, and stays there, not tarnishing but bright like freshly-cut glass. An attic of experience to remind me what it is I've lost. The years will soften with their own dust, but dust is never that hard to brush away.
I'll post the keys back through the door, so you'll know there is no need to look for me. And a spare set's always useful. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with this letter. I could print it out and put it somewhere, or take it with me and post it later. Or perhaps I should just leave it on the computer, hidden deep in a sub-folder, leaving it to chance whether it will ever be discovered. But if I do that then one of the children will find it first, and it's you I should be explaining this to, not Richard or Maddy; you to whom the primary apology is due.
I can't explain in person, because there wouldn't be any point. Either you wouldn't believe me, or you would: neither would change the facts or make them any better. In your heart of hearts, buried too firmly to ever reach conscious thought, you may already have begun to suspect. You've given no sign, but we've stopped communicating on those subtler levels and I can't really tell what you think any more. Telling you what you in some sense already know would just make you reject it, and me. And where would we go from there?
My desk is tidy. All of my outstanding work has been completed. All the bills are paid.
I'm going to walk. Not all the way—just our part. Down to Oxford Street.
I'll cross the road in front of our house, then turn down that alley you've always been scared of (I can never remember what it's called; but I do remember an evening when you forgot your fear long enough for it to be rather interesting). Then off down Kentish Town Road, past the Woolworths and the Vulture's Perch pub, the mediocre sandwich bars and that shop the size of a football pitch which is filled only with spectacles. I remember ranting against the waste of space when you and I first met, and you finding it funny. I suppose the joke's grown old.
It's not an especially lovely area, and Falkland Road is hardly Bel Air. But we've lived here fifteen years, and we've always liked it, haven't we? At least until the last couple of years, when it all started to curdle; when I realized what was going to happen. Before that Kentish Town suited us well enough. We liked Café Renoir, where you could get a reasonable breakfast when the staff weren't feeling too cool to serve it to you. The Assembly House pub, with its wall-to-wall Victorian mirrors and a comprehensive selection of Irish folk on the jukebox. The corner store, where they always know what we want before we ask for it. All of that.
It was our place.
I couldn't talk to you about it when it started, because of how it happened. Even if it had come about some other way, I would probably have kept silent: by the time I realized what it meant there wasn't much I could do. I hope I'm right in thinking it's only the last two years which have been strained, that you were happy until then. I've covered my tracks as well as I could, kept it hidden. So many little lies, all of them unsaid.
It was actually ten years ago, when we had only been in this house a few years and the children were still young and ours. I'm sure you remember John and Suzy's party—the one just after they'd moved into the new house? Or maybe not: it was just one of many, after all, and perhaps it is only my mind in which it retains a peculiar luminosity.
You'd just started working at Elders & Peterson, and weren't very keen on going out. You wanted a weekend with a clear head, to tidy up the house, do some shopping, to hang out without a hangover. But we decided we ought to go, and I promised I wouldn't get too drunk, and you gave me that sweet, affectionate smile which said you believed I'd try but that you'd still move the aspirin to beside the bed. We engaged our dippy babysitter, spruced ourselves up and went out hand in hand, feeling for once as if we were in our twenties again. I think we even splashed out on a cab.
Nice house, in its way, though we both thought it was rather big for just the two of them. John was just getting successful around then, and the size of the property looked like some kind of a statement. We arrived early, having agreed we wouldn't stay too late, and stood talking in the kitchen with Suzy as she chopped vegetables for the dips. She was wearing the Whistles dress that you both owned, and you and I winked secretly to each other: after much deliberation you were wearing something different. The brown Jigsaw suit, with earrings from Monsoon that looked like little leaves. Do you still have those earrings somewhere? I suppose you must, though I haven't seen you wearing them in a while. I looked for them this morning, thinking that you wouldn't miss them and I might take them with me. But they're buried somewhere.
By ten the house was full and I was pretty drunk, talking hard and loud with John and Howard in the living room. I glanced around to check you were having a good enough time, and saw you leaning back against a table, a plastic cup of red wine hovering around your lips. You were listening to Jan bang on about something—her rubbish ex-boyfriend, probably. With your other hand you were fumbling in your bag for your cigarettes, wanting one pretty soon but trying not to let Jan see you weren't giving her familiar tale of woe your full attention. You are wonderful like that. Always doing the right thing, and in the right way. Always eager to be good, and not just so that people would admire you. Just because.
You finally found your packet, and offered it to Jan, and she took a cigarette and lit it without even pausing for breath, a particular skill of hers. As you raised your zippo to light your own you caught me looking at you. You gave a tiny wink, to let me know you'd seen me, and an infinitesimal roll of the eyes—but not enough to derail Jan. Your hand crept up to tuck your hair behind your ear—you'd just had it cut, and only I knew you weren't sure about the shorter style. In that moment I loved you so much, felt both lucky and charmed.
And then, just behind you, she walked into the room, and everything went wrong.
REMEMBER AUNTIE'S KITCHEN, that West Indian cafe between Kentish Town and Camden? Whenever we passed it we'd peer inside at the cheerful checked tablecloths and say to each other that we must try it some day. We never did. We were always on the way somewhere else, usually to Camden market to munch on noodles and browse at furniture we couldn't afford, and it never made sense to stop. I don't even know if it's still there any more. After we started going everywhere by car we stopped noticing things like that. I'll check tonight, on the way down into town, but either way it's too late. We should have done everything, while we had the chance. You never know how much things may change.
Then, over the crossroads and down past the site where the big Sainsbury's used to be. I remember the first time we shopped there together—Christ, must be twenty-five years ago—both of us discovering what the other liked to eat, giggling over the frozen goods, and getting home to discover that despite spending forty pounds we hadn't really bought a single proper meal. It's become a nest of bijou little shops now, of course, but we never really took to them: we'd liked the way things were when we started seeing each other, and there's a limit to how many little ceramic pots anyone can buy.
By a coincidence I ate my first new meal just round the back of Sainsbury's, a week after the party. It was gone midnight, and I knew you'd be wondering where I was, but I was desperate. Four days of the chills, of half-delirious hungers. Of feeling nauseous every time I looked at food, yet knowing I needed something. A young girl in her early twenties, staggering slightly, having reeled out of the Electric Ballroom still baked on e. I know that because I could taste it in her blood. She noticed me in the empty street, and giggled, and I suddenly knew what I needed. She didn't run away as I walked towards her.
I only took a little.
You and I went to Kentish Town library one morning, quite soon after we'd got the first flat together. You were interested in finding out a little more about the area, and found a couple of books by the Camden Historical Society. We discovered that no-one was very interested in Kentish Town, despite the fact it's actually older than Camden, and were grumpy about that, because we liked where we lived. But we found out some interesting snippets—like the fact that the area in front of Camden Town tube station, the part that juts out into the crossroads, had once housed a tiny jail and a stocks. Today the derelicts and drunks still collect there, as if there is something in that patch of ground that draws society's misfits and miscreants even now.
I'll cross that area on my way down, avoiding one of those tramps –
who I think recognizes something in me, and may be one of us—and head off down Camden Road towards Mornington Crescent.
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