'The Encyclical'
Prologue
Simon stared at the screen for a moment, willing a title, inspiration even, onto the page in front of him. The page itself was a placeholder; a representation of something yet to be formed, and a mark of absence. It existed to remind him of the potential he was wasting, seven years of education, a childhood spent reading, two more years studying English Literature at university, and seventeen gigabytes of hard disk space on the laptop sat in front of him. The library was warm and still. People sought refuge from the brightness of the day outside, from the harsh dazzling realities of exams and the outside world by sheltering inside, building a wall of textbooks and revision notes around them, adding to their defences as the day went on with mineral water bottle turrets. Screwed up sheets of A4 were boulders ready to rain down on invaders who attempted to breach the panicked, paranoid siege. Further books lined the walls, to add to the walls as the moment for action approached, and the students desperately attempting to fend off the inevitable. They were categorised and indexed, marked out by size and weight and relative need; the medical students, for instance, against whom the sallies of the forces camped outside were most pernicious, most frequent and most concerted, had their own veritable quarry all to themselves. For them also, the consequences of defences broken, of walls smashed or gates opened from inside, were the most severe. The humanities students, for example, could whether a breach, fight a rear-guard action, prevaricate for a year or two, and stave off the forces gathered outside for a little longer. For the Medics however, one mine, one treachery, even the one examination arriving through the privies with stealth and catching them unawares, spelt disaster. The citadel would be ransacked, and the dreams and aspirations it sheltered instantly and irrecoverably put to death.
Only a single book sat next to Simon however. Wyndham Lewis, ‘The Apes of God’. The topic of his dissertation and the excuse (for he felt he needed one) for sitting in an obscure corner of the library steeling himself to write. He felt like an impostor, as uninvited in the library as a bookworm. Others came here to pluck books from shelves, stockpile them against a harsh summer term of exams, digesting them throughout the year. He however was there, he thought, to add to the sum total of knowledge; to create rather to devour. While his writings would acquire no class mark, he still felt as he sat there that they would hold a physical presence in that library. After all, sitting there typing away, was he not taking as much room as the first twelve volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary? Could he really ever entertain the notion that what he was to write would ever hold as much significance as ‘A – Bouzouki’ to ‘Posie – Quelt’? That was where the feeling of unwelcomeness stemmed from; the thought that if he wrote something poor or formulaic he would be wasting the precious resources of the library; eating into the limited resources of space, time and energy which could on e day be reserved for some more significant, accomplished work. And that was only if he even felt the courage to begin, because not writing, telling himself each day that he had something to contribute, toying over ideas for characters and dialogue in his head and storing them away in his little black mole skein for an indefinite future novel, that was the coward’s way out; an ontological death as pronounced as jumping off one of the stacks with a length of lighting flex tied around his neck to dangle (jerking madly) between ‘832 German lit: medieval-17th C’ and ‘834 German literature: 19th C’. And all the while, from 827 Eliot, Joyce and Forster would look on bemused.
Far better then to challenge himself, for all artists, he thought, must suffer. So he had resolved that he and his degree would suffer together, and that was why he was sat in the library on April 14th (three weeks two days and counting till the exams, his calendar would exclaim each morning, except of course the numbers kept dwindling) trying to write rather than trying to revise. And if he really wanted to challenge himself, then he was going to attempt something he had never tried before. No half-formed ideas, no plot or character archetypes, and no ideas stolen from the world around him. All he had allowed himself, he mused, was 2.5 GHz of processing power, roughly twenty thousand books worth of inspiration, and whatever talent for writing he believed he had. And still nothing. One of those faculties was failing him, but the lilting guitar melodies from his headphones told him that neither technology nor the creativity of others were what was at fault.
He reached for the book next to him, spinning it with a finger till it righted itself, then skimmed his finger down the side facing away from him, down the pulpy mass of pages, till he stopped at random on one and opened it. He was looking for one word to spur him on, one word from which he would force his mind to start to construct a flimsy narrative structure, on the stout foundation of the words (not shoulders) of a giant. He expected to stick a pickaxe into that word and strike a fountain that would flow from it into his head, and that he could then channel it through the aqua-ducts of synapses, fingers and keys onto the screen in front of him. He was preparing himself to place a wealth of expectation on that word, imagining a veritable, rich seam from which a short story would tumble with the barest of scrapes with a trowel or an archaeologist’s toothbrush.
He should have realised that the sentences of another are not flaky sediment that can be brushed away to reveal fossilised ideas beneath which can be plundered beneath, but as carefully constructed a wall as those his fellow students were constructing further down the aisle. He shouldn’t have expected so much.
The word was ‘the’. He swept his finger to the word next to it, taking that one to into his scope. ‘The Encyclical’ then.
Explicit prohemium primi libri.
The Argument
Juliet checked her email compulsively. Each message, she reasoned, could bring urgent news; changes to her examinations perhaps, notifications of possibly life-destroying administrative errors, or notices of congratulation awarding her bursaries she admittedly had never even bothered applying for. Perhaps even the Nobel prize, ten years earlier than even she had dreamed of (since that was when she planned to begin her research in epidemiology). Just because the messages she received the most frequently were those offering the chance to ‘Remain harder longer’, or to ‘$ubmerge her in JizZ’ didn’t mean she could ignore the subsequent batch. After all, she was training to be a doctor. She had responsibilities. And what were the countless testimonials in favour of generic Viagra and horny goat weed but particularly evangelical forms of pharmaceutical advertising? Doctors were always receiving branded pens, desk toys, and even wads of non-consecutively numbered twenty pound notes. Things were no different for medical students, she reasoned, except the incentives were smaller to match the prestige of the practioner. She was, to most of the medical establishment, dirt; fit only to work soul-sapping hours and to lick the boots of superiors and supervisors. She should be flattered that jdixon@gmail (doubtless an industry insider) was eager to contact her with such exciting prospects.
As regularly as she pointed her internet browser email-wards then, and as self-indulgently extravagant her expectations of what waited her there became, she was not expecting the encyclical. ‘Class of 2003’ the subject line read. She had indeed left school in 2003, from the high school in Kidderminster. Seeing this, her eyes scrolled back up the page as she turned the mouse-wheel, curious to see who the message was from. But whilst the address line literally ached with individuals, some whom she recognised from their invariably initial derived designations, many she did not. ‘SalmonGrey’ for instance could be, well, anybody. It only took a moment of stupidity and a blank mind to doom someone to an email address that was as ridiculous as the person who chose it had thought it familiar. The muses do not hand out inspiration equally, and sometimes the person searching for it has to turn instead to posters, books, song lyrics, or even as it appeared here, to tins of emulsion in a study presumably awaiting redecoration.
It was an anonymous message then. Though that could be the fault of anything, from the Internet Service Provider to her Browser, but she deduced that this must be suspicious. Anonymous messages were, she believed, the preserve of ‘phishers’, ‘data miners’ and the numerous other virtual terrorists that the PC magazine she had bought with the laptop had threatened. Having decided to be dubious, her eyes scanned down the screen to the message itself.
The Message
Dear All
I hope you are all doing well, and that you are without exception happy and successful. I really do. Regardless of whether you knew me at school, or if we studiously ignored each other over the tables at the canteen or in the hall. Regardless of whether we only talked when boredom or an awkward seating plan brought us together, or even if you actively hated me behind my back or to my face. I’m saying this because I wanted to free myself from any bad karma, because something made me realise recently that no matter how unhappy your time at school, or how little you might like the people around you, they have an effect upon you. And despite the fact that you might never consider it, you do on them to.
There is no easy way to tell you all this. I am certainly no the best person to do so, and I never thought for a moment that something like this might happen. But that (that I never considered it, I mean) is why I think you all should know. Rachel Taylor… I’m not sure if any of you remember her. She was always a quiet girl at school. Quiet enough to appear anti-social. I didn’t even become aware of her till I started my final year, where she and I were two of five in Mr. Fletcher’s set studying Chemistry. To be honest, I didn’t even recognise her from around school. There was something unassuming about her. She didn’t stand out at all, even as a geek, though I assumed she was the first time I met her. I later learned she had transferred later on, joining halfway through from some other school where she hadn’t been happy. I think her parents had decided that she would fit in better a St. Mary’s but I’m not sure she did. She moved form three times in her first term, she told me, which might be why nobody really noticed her. I really hope this has jogged some people’s memories.
Anyway, we were lab partners, and though I thought she was beneath me, we worked well together. She seemed to know what she was doing, and always listened hard to the teacher. I let her do a lot of the work, but I wasn’t… I don’t think I was using her. I think I gave her something back too, because as we worked she used to ask me questions, about what I’d done at the weekend, where I’d been last night. She seemed to be particularly interested in who was going out with who, so I used to tell her all the gossip from around school. She used to tutt at what I told her, but I think secretly she used to love hearing second-hand about the things the more popular kids were doing. And she would never talk to the class or ask questions. If we ever had to do a presentation or we needed to clarify something with Fletcher, she used to make me do it. In the end I think he decided that it was her, not me, who was the dead weight. When the exams came we revised together in the library in town for a few hours, and she lent me her notes. She’d made, like, twelve sheets of notes on each topic. All underlined in coloured pens, with little flash cards and everything. It was thanks to her I passed Chemistry that year, especially after Mike dumped me the week before; sorry to drag that up if you ever get this message Mike, but I think this is important too, because I told Rachel all about it.
Imagine my surprise then when I arrived at my university orientation day and Rachel was there too! I’d thought I was the only person from St. Mary’s going, but Rachel was sat at the back of the hall. I was excited about making friends, and trying my best to appear cool, and I didn’t even notice her till she got up to leave. I think she must have thought I’d ignored her, because she avoided talking to me after that. To tell the truth though, I’d never even considered that she might be there. She didn’t fit into my impression of what life would be like at Uni, and maybe I blocked her out. I never really saw her after that, after one time when she dodged me on the way into a lecture. I didn’t see her at dinner, or in the library, and she certainly wasn’t in the bar. I kind of assumed she’d found her own group of friends and spent all her time with them. And to be honest I didn’t look for her. I later learned that I was wrong. The girl who lived next door told me that Rachel ate all her meals in her room. I don’t think Rachel had any friends there at all not real friends. Maybe she had people she sat next to in the library or in lectures, but… I think Rachel was terribly alone at University, and that she couldn’t take it.
As I said, I’m not the best person to say this, but I think you all deserve to know. Rachel, she committed suicide in our third term. She slit her wrists and died in the bath, on the ground floor of one of our accommodation blocks late one Friday night. Worse, nobody really thought to look for her over the weekend. It was the cleaner who found her on the Monday. This would have been about the 16th June, a few days before she went home. I think the staff assumed at first that it was exam stress, but Rachel didn’t have any exams that year. Later they told me she’d been cutting herself.
I did have exams that year, but when they were over I took the time to visit Rachel’s grave. I hadn’t really expected to meet anybody there; I kind of assumed Rachel would have been as alone in death as she was in life, but the first time I went there were fresh flowers under her tombstone. I hadn’t remembered to bring anything, so I went back a few later with and lit a candle for Rachel like my dad taught me in the church when I was a little girl. When I went to leave someone tapped me on the shoulder and asked me who I was. It was Rachel’s brother, Allen Taylor. I think you will all remember him. He was two years above us at the boy’s school; went out with Sophie when she was head girl. I never made the connection between the two of them though. He asked why was there. When I told him, he asked if me and Rachel had been close at Uni. He gave me a business card with a contact number and an email address, and asked me if I had any photos of Rachel could I please bring them to him. He was back living with them, after her death, and was sure they would be happy for anything that reminded them of her. They had so little, he said. Rachel was a quiet girl, never drew attention to herself and dodged cameras, and now they realised they had nothing to show them what kind of woman she had grown into.
God help me, but I couldn’t go. I couldn’t bear to talk to them and have them ask me questions about Rachel and have to lie back to them, because each time I did would have made me think that there was something else I could have done for her. I know that must have hurt them really badly, but I had nothing for them; no pictures, no anecdotes, nothing. I couldn’t have pretended to them that daughter lead a normal life, and I couldn’t lie and tell them that it had been a happy one. So I’m sending this message to you all, not just because I think that everyone should remember Rachel, but because some of you out there must have been closed to her at school than I was. She must have had other friends. How can one person go through more than seven years of education without being close to anyone? Someone out there must have been close to her. Whoever you, please reply to this address, and send me whatever you have. We can arrange to meet if you’d like. I’d like to know what Rachel was really like, what the people who knew her though of her. Otherwise, please send me any pictures or anything else you have. I’m trying to put together a photo album we can give her parents, as a gift from the people who knew and remember Rachel. Please, there must be someone out there who can help. I mean, no girl can live her life without affecting the people around her in some small way, can she? There’s no way that I was Rachel’s best friend, or that she could have been so invisible to everybody. Is there?
Please don’t hesitate to contact me. I miss you all, and again wish you all the best. Our school days really were the happiest, weren’t they?
Love
Jennifer Blake x x x x x x
The Resolution
Juliet looked at the message with puzzlement. She didn’t recognise the name Rachel Taylor, nor Allen Taylor. The head girl in her year hadn’t been called Sophie. In fact, there hadn’t been just the one; Claire, the teacher’s favourite had been unceremoniously stripped of her position after a video circulated of her performing fellatio on the Rugby captain from the boy’s grammar down the road. Her rival Katherine had taken the position for the remaining term and a half of school. She’d done Chemistry A-level too, but had never had a Mr. Fletcher, and didn’t know one. She certainly didn’t know a Jennifer Blake, and from the sound of the message the girl had been one of the more popular people in her year. None of this was true then, she thought.
Then, scrolling through the email again she saw where the confusion had arisen. Jennifer talked kept mentioning a St. Mary’s. This was a message to the class of 2003, but not her class of 2003. Juliet’s school, the high school to everyone in her home town, had been just that; Kidderminster High. This was a message from another girl at another school. Reading the address line a second time, she realised this was why there was no sender, and why she recognised so few of the email addresses it had been sent to. The message had been forwarded to her; forwarded once or perhaps several times. Re-reading, she realised the message could have come from anywhere. St. Mary’s was as generic a name as any for a secondary school, and the references to a university were similarly vague. This tragedy could have been begun in any school in the country, and unfolded at any university. Indeed, it was only because it was written in English that Juliet assumed it had happened in Britain. The exams mentioned in the message were neither A-levels, nor SATs. This encyclical could have begun life in any English-speaking country in the world.
Somebody had read Jennifer’s message and not been able to help. But in the hope that somewhere this Rachel had had a friend they had forwarded the message on. Someone who had recognised the sadness of Rachel’s plight. Someone who had noticed the note of anguish in Jennifer’s message, the unspoken plea; ‘please don’t let it be my responsibility to look after the lost and the neglected and the forgotten, but dear god please tell me that someone will.’ In doing do, that person had created a shrine to Rachel. They had set rolling a little rocky ball of repressed emotion that turned grew larger each time the message was forwarded, until it hit like an avalanche of grief. Thanks to the person who had forwarded that message, perhaps even to everyone in their contacts list, Rachel was known to more people in death than she ever was in death.
And without really knowing what she was doing, Juliet found herself doing the same.
Tune of the moment: Cool for Cats - Squeeze
Simon stared at the screen for a moment, willing a title, inspiration even, onto the page in front of him. The page itself was a placeholder; a representation of something yet to be formed, and a mark of absence. It existed to remind him of the potential he was wasting, seven years of education, a childhood spent reading, two more years studying English Literature at university, and seventeen gigabytes of hard disk space on the laptop sat in front of him. The library was warm and still. People sought refuge from the brightness of the day outside, from the harsh dazzling realities of exams and the outside world by sheltering inside, building a wall of textbooks and revision notes around them, adding to their defences as the day went on with mineral water bottle turrets. Screwed up sheets of A4 were boulders ready to rain down on invaders who attempted to breach the panicked, paranoid siege. Further books lined the walls, to add to the walls as the moment for action approached, and the students desperately attempting to fend off the inevitable. They were categorised and indexed, marked out by size and weight and relative need; the medical students, for instance, against whom the sallies of the forces camped outside were most pernicious, most frequent and most concerted, had their own veritable quarry all to themselves. For them also, the consequences of defences broken, of walls smashed or gates opened from inside, were the most severe. The humanities students, for example, could whether a breach, fight a rear-guard action, prevaricate for a year or two, and stave off the forces gathered outside for a little longer. For the Medics however, one mine, one treachery, even the one examination arriving through the privies with stealth and catching them unawares, spelt disaster. The citadel would be ransacked, and the dreams and aspirations it sheltered instantly and irrecoverably put to death.
Only a single book sat next to Simon however. Wyndham Lewis, ‘The Apes of God’. The topic of his dissertation and the excuse (for he felt he needed one) for sitting in an obscure corner of the library steeling himself to write. He felt like an impostor, as uninvited in the library as a bookworm. Others came here to pluck books from shelves, stockpile them against a harsh summer term of exams, digesting them throughout the year. He however was there, he thought, to add to the sum total of knowledge; to create rather to devour. While his writings would acquire no class mark, he still felt as he sat there that they would hold a physical presence in that library. After all, sitting there typing away, was he not taking as much room as the first twelve volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary? Could he really ever entertain the notion that what he was to write would ever hold as much significance as ‘A – Bouzouki’ to ‘Posie – Quelt’? That was where the feeling of unwelcomeness stemmed from; the thought that if he wrote something poor or formulaic he would be wasting the precious resources of the library; eating into the limited resources of space, time and energy which could on e day be reserved for some more significant, accomplished work. And that was only if he even felt the courage to begin, because not writing, telling himself each day that he had something to contribute, toying over ideas for characters and dialogue in his head and storing them away in his little black mole skein for an indefinite future novel, that was the coward’s way out; an ontological death as pronounced as jumping off one of the stacks with a length of lighting flex tied around his neck to dangle (jerking madly) between ‘832 German lit: medieval-17th C’ and ‘834 German literature: 19th C’. And all the while, from 827 Eliot, Joyce and Forster would look on bemused.
Far better then to challenge himself, for all artists, he thought, must suffer. So he had resolved that he and his degree would suffer together, and that was why he was sat in the library on April 14th (three weeks two days and counting till the exams, his calendar would exclaim each morning, except of course the numbers kept dwindling) trying to write rather than trying to revise. And if he really wanted to challenge himself, then he was going to attempt something he had never tried before. No half-formed ideas, no plot or character archetypes, and no ideas stolen from the world around him. All he had allowed himself, he mused, was 2.5 GHz of processing power, roughly twenty thousand books worth of inspiration, and whatever talent for writing he believed he had. And still nothing. One of those faculties was failing him, but the lilting guitar melodies from his headphones told him that neither technology nor the creativity of others were what was at fault.
He reached for the book next to him, spinning it with a finger till it righted itself, then skimmed his finger down the side facing away from him, down the pulpy mass of pages, till he stopped at random on one and opened it. He was looking for one word to spur him on, one word from which he would force his mind to start to construct a flimsy narrative structure, on the stout foundation of the words (not shoulders) of a giant. He expected to stick a pickaxe into that word and strike a fountain that would flow from it into his head, and that he could then channel it through the aqua-ducts of synapses, fingers and keys onto the screen in front of him. He was preparing himself to place a wealth of expectation on that word, imagining a veritable, rich seam from which a short story would tumble with the barest of scrapes with a trowel or an archaeologist’s toothbrush.
He should have realised that the sentences of another are not flaky sediment that can be brushed away to reveal fossilised ideas beneath which can be plundered beneath, but as carefully constructed a wall as those his fellow students were constructing further down the aisle. He shouldn’t have expected so much.
The word was ‘the’. He swept his finger to the word next to it, taking that one to into his scope. ‘The Encyclical’ then.
Explicit prohemium primi libri.
The Argument
Juliet checked her email compulsively. Each message, she reasoned, could bring urgent news; changes to her examinations perhaps, notifications of possibly life-destroying administrative errors, or notices of congratulation awarding her bursaries she admittedly had never even bothered applying for. Perhaps even the Nobel prize, ten years earlier than even she had dreamed of (since that was when she planned to begin her research in epidemiology). Just because the messages she received the most frequently were those offering the chance to ‘Remain harder longer’, or to ‘$ubmerge her in JizZ’ didn’t mean she could ignore the subsequent batch. After all, she was training to be a doctor. She had responsibilities. And what were the countless testimonials in favour of generic Viagra and horny goat weed but particularly evangelical forms of pharmaceutical advertising? Doctors were always receiving branded pens, desk toys, and even wads of non-consecutively numbered twenty pound notes. Things were no different for medical students, she reasoned, except the incentives were smaller to match the prestige of the practioner. She was, to most of the medical establishment, dirt; fit only to work soul-sapping hours and to lick the boots of superiors and supervisors. She should be flattered that jdixon@gmail (doubtless an industry insider) was eager to contact her with such exciting prospects.
As regularly as she pointed her internet browser email-wards then, and as self-indulgently extravagant her expectations of what waited her there became, she was not expecting the encyclical. ‘Class of 2003’ the subject line read. She had indeed left school in 2003, from the high school in Kidderminster. Seeing this, her eyes scrolled back up the page as she turned the mouse-wheel, curious to see who the message was from. But whilst the address line literally ached with individuals, some whom she recognised from their invariably initial derived designations, many she did not. ‘SalmonGrey’ for instance could be, well, anybody. It only took a moment of stupidity and a blank mind to doom someone to an email address that was as ridiculous as the person who chose it had thought it familiar. The muses do not hand out inspiration equally, and sometimes the person searching for it has to turn instead to posters, books, song lyrics, or even as it appeared here, to tins of emulsion in a study presumably awaiting redecoration.
It was an anonymous message then. Though that could be the fault of anything, from the Internet Service Provider to her Browser, but she deduced that this must be suspicious. Anonymous messages were, she believed, the preserve of ‘phishers’, ‘data miners’ and the numerous other virtual terrorists that the PC magazine she had bought with the laptop had threatened. Having decided to be dubious, her eyes scanned down the screen to the message itself.
The Message
Dear All
I hope you are all doing well, and that you are without exception happy and successful. I really do. Regardless of whether you knew me at school, or if we studiously ignored each other over the tables at the canteen or in the hall. Regardless of whether we only talked when boredom or an awkward seating plan brought us together, or even if you actively hated me behind my back or to my face. I’m saying this because I wanted to free myself from any bad karma, because something made me realise recently that no matter how unhappy your time at school, or how little you might like the people around you, they have an effect upon you. And despite the fact that you might never consider it, you do on them to.
There is no easy way to tell you all this. I am certainly no the best person to do so, and I never thought for a moment that something like this might happen. But that (that I never considered it, I mean) is why I think you all should know. Rachel Taylor… I’m not sure if any of you remember her. She was always a quiet girl at school. Quiet enough to appear anti-social. I didn’t even become aware of her till I started my final year, where she and I were two of five in Mr. Fletcher’s set studying Chemistry. To be honest, I didn’t even recognise her from around school. There was something unassuming about her. She didn’t stand out at all, even as a geek, though I assumed she was the first time I met her. I later learned she had transferred later on, joining halfway through from some other school where she hadn’t been happy. I think her parents had decided that she would fit in better a St. Mary’s but I’m not sure she did. She moved form three times in her first term, she told me, which might be why nobody really noticed her. I really hope this has jogged some people’s memories.
Anyway, we were lab partners, and though I thought she was beneath me, we worked well together. She seemed to know what she was doing, and always listened hard to the teacher. I let her do a lot of the work, but I wasn’t… I don’t think I was using her. I think I gave her something back too, because as we worked she used to ask me questions, about what I’d done at the weekend, where I’d been last night. She seemed to be particularly interested in who was going out with who, so I used to tell her all the gossip from around school. She used to tutt at what I told her, but I think secretly she used to love hearing second-hand about the things the more popular kids were doing. And she would never talk to the class or ask questions. If we ever had to do a presentation or we needed to clarify something with Fletcher, she used to make me do it. In the end I think he decided that it was her, not me, who was the dead weight. When the exams came we revised together in the library in town for a few hours, and she lent me her notes. She’d made, like, twelve sheets of notes on each topic. All underlined in coloured pens, with little flash cards and everything. It was thanks to her I passed Chemistry that year, especially after Mike dumped me the week before; sorry to drag that up if you ever get this message Mike, but I think this is important too, because I told Rachel all about it.
Imagine my surprise then when I arrived at my university orientation day and Rachel was there too! I’d thought I was the only person from St. Mary’s going, but Rachel was sat at the back of the hall. I was excited about making friends, and trying my best to appear cool, and I didn’t even notice her till she got up to leave. I think she must have thought I’d ignored her, because she avoided talking to me after that. To tell the truth though, I’d never even considered that she might be there. She didn’t fit into my impression of what life would be like at Uni, and maybe I blocked her out. I never really saw her after that, after one time when she dodged me on the way into a lecture. I didn’t see her at dinner, or in the library, and she certainly wasn’t in the bar. I kind of assumed she’d found her own group of friends and spent all her time with them. And to be honest I didn’t look for her. I later learned that I was wrong. The girl who lived next door told me that Rachel ate all her meals in her room. I don’t think Rachel had any friends there at all not real friends. Maybe she had people she sat next to in the library or in lectures, but… I think Rachel was terribly alone at University, and that she couldn’t take it.
As I said, I’m not the best person to say this, but I think you all deserve to know. Rachel, she committed suicide in our third term. She slit her wrists and died in the bath, on the ground floor of one of our accommodation blocks late one Friday night. Worse, nobody really thought to look for her over the weekend. It was the cleaner who found her on the Monday. This would have been about the 16th June, a few days before she went home. I think the staff assumed at first that it was exam stress, but Rachel didn’t have any exams that year. Later they told me she’d been cutting herself.
I did have exams that year, but when they were over I took the time to visit Rachel’s grave. I hadn’t really expected to meet anybody there; I kind of assumed Rachel would have been as alone in death as she was in life, but the first time I went there were fresh flowers under her tombstone. I hadn’t remembered to bring anything, so I went back a few later with and lit a candle for Rachel like my dad taught me in the church when I was a little girl. When I went to leave someone tapped me on the shoulder and asked me who I was. It was Rachel’s brother, Allen Taylor. I think you will all remember him. He was two years above us at the boy’s school; went out with Sophie when she was head girl. I never made the connection between the two of them though. He asked why was there. When I told him, he asked if me and Rachel had been close at Uni. He gave me a business card with a contact number and an email address, and asked me if I had any photos of Rachel could I please bring them to him. He was back living with them, after her death, and was sure they would be happy for anything that reminded them of her. They had so little, he said. Rachel was a quiet girl, never drew attention to herself and dodged cameras, and now they realised they had nothing to show them what kind of woman she had grown into.
God help me, but I couldn’t go. I couldn’t bear to talk to them and have them ask me questions about Rachel and have to lie back to them, because each time I did would have made me think that there was something else I could have done for her. I know that must have hurt them really badly, but I had nothing for them; no pictures, no anecdotes, nothing. I couldn’t have pretended to them that daughter lead a normal life, and I couldn’t lie and tell them that it had been a happy one. So I’m sending this message to you all, not just because I think that everyone should remember Rachel, but because some of you out there must have been closed to her at school than I was. She must have had other friends. How can one person go through more than seven years of education without being close to anyone? Someone out there must have been close to her. Whoever you, please reply to this address, and send me whatever you have. We can arrange to meet if you’d like. I’d like to know what Rachel was really like, what the people who knew her though of her. Otherwise, please send me any pictures or anything else you have. I’m trying to put together a photo album we can give her parents, as a gift from the people who knew and remember Rachel. Please, there must be someone out there who can help. I mean, no girl can live her life without affecting the people around her in some small way, can she? There’s no way that I was Rachel’s best friend, or that she could have been so invisible to everybody. Is there?
Please don’t hesitate to contact me. I miss you all, and again wish you all the best. Our school days really were the happiest, weren’t they?
Love
Jennifer Blake x x x x x x
The Resolution
Juliet looked at the message with puzzlement. She didn’t recognise the name Rachel Taylor, nor Allen Taylor. The head girl in her year hadn’t been called Sophie. In fact, there hadn’t been just the one; Claire, the teacher’s favourite had been unceremoniously stripped of her position after a video circulated of her performing fellatio on the Rugby captain from the boy’s grammar down the road. Her rival Katherine had taken the position for the remaining term and a half of school. She’d done Chemistry A-level too, but had never had a Mr. Fletcher, and didn’t know one. She certainly didn’t know a Jennifer Blake, and from the sound of the message the girl had been one of the more popular people in her year. None of this was true then, she thought.
Then, scrolling through the email again she saw where the confusion had arisen. Jennifer talked kept mentioning a St. Mary’s. This was a message to the class of 2003, but not her class of 2003. Juliet’s school, the high school to everyone in her home town, had been just that; Kidderminster High. This was a message from another girl at another school. Reading the address line a second time, she realised this was why there was no sender, and why she recognised so few of the email addresses it had been sent to. The message had been forwarded to her; forwarded once or perhaps several times. Re-reading, she realised the message could have come from anywhere. St. Mary’s was as generic a name as any for a secondary school, and the references to a university were similarly vague. This tragedy could have been begun in any school in the country, and unfolded at any university. Indeed, it was only because it was written in English that Juliet assumed it had happened in Britain. The exams mentioned in the message were neither A-levels, nor SATs. This encyclical could have begun life in any English-speaking country in the world.
Somebody had read Jennifer’s message and not been able to help. But in the hope that somewhere this Rachel had had a friend they had forwarded the message on. Someone who had recognised the sadness of Rachel’s plight. Someone who had noticed the note of anguish in Jennifer’s message, the unspoken plea; ‘please don’t let it be my responsibility to look after the lost and the neglected and the forgotten, but dear god please tell me that someone will.’ In doing do, that person had created a shrine to Rachel. They had set rolling a little rocky ball of repressed emotion that turned grew larger each time the message was forwarded, until it hit like an avalanche of grief. Thanks to the person who had forwarded that message, perhaps even to everyone in their contacts list, Rachel was known to more people in death than she ever was in death.
And without really knowing what she was doing, Juliet found herself doing the same.
Tune of the moment: Cool for Cats - Squeeze
Jac
Labels: fiction