Memories of Kirsty

To Whom It May Concern:

It is the first anniversary of Kirsty’s death. The satin pillowslip is damp with tears and its coldness makes my cheek tingle. I sit up in bed and hug the duvet to my chest, thinking about a conversation we had last summer.

We had been walking through the woods and decided to stop for a rest. Kirsty sat on a tree stump and tilted her head up to talk to me. “I like the smell of the pine needles,” she said. “You know, Anna, that I have this scar on the crook of my arm.” She pushed up the sleeve of her sweater and showed me her arm.

“I’ve noticed,” I said. It had always been there and I’d never asked about it. Her voice had an imploring quality, as though she wanted me to press her for more details about its origin. I said nothing.

“Needles are quite sharp,” she said.

We’d been together for six months at that time. It was the longest I’d been in a relationship and I loved her very much. We had met on an evening course, beginners’ Russian, and started meeting outside of classes to do our homework together. Kirsty was a talented linguist and she instinctively understood the syntax and grammar of Russian. She was peculiarly intelligent, although her reckless pride often inhibited her achievements. She had been partially responsible for the distribution of seditious pamphlets at university: the tutors offered her the opportunity to confess but she was too stubborn: she got expelled without graduating. I didn’t know her then, but I guess she was still young enough to believe in dreams, to believe that her personal ideals could be realized. And she kept learning more languages.

By contrast I’m very much the autodidact. I left school at sixteen a confused, quiet schoolgirl. There were issues in my life more significant than education and I’d almost like to envy those who can pass from school to college to university unhindered by life. I say I’d like to, but I don’t think I’m truly capable of envy; it always seems a very privileged emotion, restricted to those who already have a lot and decide they want more. So I never envied Kirsty, even when I felt her refusal to stand down on an issue was privileged arrogance.

I say that I was confused. I suppose I’m the type of person who needs to be with someone to feel content, and at that time I’d spent most of my life alone. It was Fate, I believed, that had brought Kirsty and myself together: it wasn’t to be Fate’s final say on the matter.

“Needles are quite sharp,” she said, turning one between her forefinger and thumb, digging the spiked ends deep into the skin of her fingertips. I assumed she was still referring to the pine needles. Dropping the definite article was becoming common to her speech; influenced by her learning Russian, which doesn’t use articles. I thought I understood her ways.

I thought nothing of the scar after that. We had an enjoyable day rambling through the pinewood, talking and laughing together. Even with hindsight I couldn’t have foreseen what was to happen.

“Church is just up here,” she said.

I nodded. Neither of us believed in God but small out-of-the-way churches are pleasant places to wander into. There was, on reflection, something odd in her manner that afternoon, almost as if she knew. But how could she? Normally she’d turn her head to me whenever she talked, turn it to her right (she always walked on the left, it’s one of those odd little patterns that relationships fall into).

As I say, she’d normally turn her head when speaking but inside of the church it was oddly different. She had this distant, glazed look in her eyes and she kept rubbing her index finger along the ridge of her nose. “Do you ever think about dying?” she asked, her voice failing, breaking-up like a poor radio reception.

I decided not to answer. If only… but hindsight is a bastard at times, it makes me feel guilty for my actions. If only this, if only that. We found a curious pub on our way home. Kirsty had a salt beef and gherkin ciabatta and I chose the ploughman’s. I remember thinking that salt beef and gherkin seemed a very masculine choice. It’s odd the little details that you remember. When I was at school I always used to think, “I wonder if I’ll remember this moment when I’m in Year so and so…” I do recall some such moments, listening to Berlioz’s ‘Symphonie fantastique’ in assembly on the first day of a new term, or hiding in the girls’ toilets because Mr Harris had told me off for leaving my homework at home in such a way as to doubt I’d done it when I had, I had, I had… I always thought I’d grow up and marry a rich bloke then, I didn’t think much of the way a shiver ran through me when I passed the girl in the year above me in the corridor or the way I dreamed about her all the time!
. I wonder whatever became of her: perhaps she got the rich bloke, I certainly didn’t.

It was a few years after school that I met Kirsty with whom I left the salt beef and gherkin ciabatta a few moments ago in this note:

We decided that we shouldn’t drive home after drinking and found an old, shabby little guesthouse with uneven floors and a tarnished Victorian dresser. The two people who ran it seemed inseparable, even at their old age – we were still young enough to think of fifty something as ‘old’ – and I thought, “Kirsty and me will be like that one day.” It was a small room and had a sofa bed instead of a real bed. Kirsty joked afterwards that she expected there might be a bed folded up into the wall somewhere; we never did find it! The owner apologised that the room wasn’t quite ready for guests and we said not to worry, we’d unfold the bed.

After an hour trying to open out the bed we gave up and slept closely together on the sofa. I didn’t mind although Kirsty had a few foul-mouthed imprecations about us having to pay the full price for no bed. Come morning I was on the floor.

I turned to her wakening body and lifted myself onto my elbow. I looked into her eyes and smiled, smoothing a strand of hair from my face. She apologised for me having had to sleep on the floor and climbed down and we laughed and made love as we had the night before. That was the last time we had sex together. I loved the way her breasts were turned away from each other like shamed faces.

Having to talk of her in the past tense is painful.

Everyone in love must think what they have is perfect, but it’s also fragile. I didn’t want anything to change. Sometimes I still think it is perfect in those forgotten moments between waking and sleeping when I’m free to dream. But then I miss her voice calling from the shower or the warmth of her body beside me.

We were happy and innocent and sometimes silly. The thought of ever being apart from her was alien to me. We were meant to be together: breast to breast: nipple to nipple: everything seemed so right. The smell of our commingling sweat upon our bodies…the juncture between our kissing lips… our bodies seemed perfectly matched in every way. Kirsty and Anna. Kirsty, like cursed; Anna, neat, tidy, a palindrome. Kirsty. Cursed.

“Needles are quite sharp,” she had said. It was only when the police interviewed me that this sentence returned to my mind. They’d found her body down by the river, under the bridge, and rested against the abutment two days later. I had to identify her at the mortuary. The mortuary was cold and sparse. The policeman turned down the white sheet from her face and I cried. “I’m sorry,” he said and, “Is it her, just nod,” he said and I cried.

I wanted to see her arm. Intravenous blood poisoning, they said, but I knew they meant an overdose. Had she been using heroin for long, they asked, and I wanted to see her arm. “Did you not know?” they asked and again I cried. Her arm was black and purple and blue and it made me feel sick. The policeman pulled me away sharply.

“What was your relationship with her?” he asked, and this and that, but I wasn’t listening to his questions. They’d ask me again a few days later. We were lovers and No, and Yes I understood that I’d have to have tests because she’d tested positive for hepatitis C.

I shuttered myself away for a few months, going out only when absolutely necessary for sustenance. I listened politely to the counsellor when she came around but I don’t know what she was saying. Ultimately words are futile, no one listens; I hadn’t listened to Kirsty’s cry for help and now I wasn’t listening to the help being offered.

Kirsty was forever in my thoughts. Looking at her photo still makes me feel gently giddy, as if I’ve just stepped from a children’s roundabout.

And now I’m here, a year on, crying, dying. Who knows? Who cares? I can’t come to terms with the loss. I haven’t tried: I don’t intend to. I miss the intimate atmosphere of our love and it hurts. Nothing means anything to me any more. I don’t understand how her life could be taken so carelessly. I think of Kirsty. Maybe she wasn’t so intelligent after all; or maybe she was just stubborn. I don’t hold it against her; dislike is another emotion I’m incapable of. But I guess I’ve learned something about myself from all this and that is how I’m still in need of a relationship if I’m to feel content and I’m not up to it, any more.

Jackson Pollock once said, “The more I read the darker things become.” Well for me it’s thinking… I think and I think and everything keeps getting a shade darker. Black isn’t a proper colour, it is said, and so, so… so what? I leave this note because I want to exit from life quietly and I don’t want questions asked; I want people to try to understand. I don’t expect anyone to really understand and so I ask for his or her forgiveness.

I recall Kirsty's last words, that simple phrase: Needles are quite sharp; I suppose these are my last words. Don’t question too much, just live and be happy, for me if for no one else. There shouldn’t be any complications since I don’t leave anyone or anything behind, the bills are all paid and the phone is off the hook. Time will forget me soon enough.

Anna, xx