Human Remains

not want to ruin things. I did not want her to walk away from this without me by her side. I wanted to take her to her house, shut the door behind us and lock it so that we were not interrupted. I wanted to take my time and to explore everything she had to offer – beautiful Eleanor. The girl of my dreams.
    There was an element of nerves to be taken into consideration . Maybe I had dulled the message by my hesitancy. One needs to be so careful with this, so sure of oneself and one’s intentions. To listen, to observe. ‘Home?’ she asked, as though she’d never heard the word before.
    ‘Come with me,’ I said.
    I started to walk back towards the car but she didn’t follow. I think this was the moment I lost her.
    ‘I’m not sure,’ she said, her voice low so I could hardly hear what she was saying. ‘I don’t know where home is. I don’t know what you mean.’
    I knew it was too late. I was agitated, disappointed, and as hard as I tried I wasn’t going to be able to stop that coming out in my body language, my posture, my tone. ‘Go home,’ I said. ‘Go home, shut the door and don’t come out again.’
    ‘Yes,’ she said.
    ‘Fine,’ I said.
    When I drove past her a few moments later she was still standing there. I spent that evening going over everything I’d said to her, everything she’d said in reply. And I made notes and thought about how I would do it next time.
    I didn’t intend to cause her death; after all, my plan had been simply to try to find a girlfriend. So it wasn’t my fault that she killed herself the day after our date. She had given no indication of her intention when we parted; she was quiet, yes, but this was not so very different from her normal demeanour.
    A few weeks later, I saw a news report that Eleanor’s body had been found at her home by a concerned relative. The body had been found at the foot of the stairs in a state of decomposition; nevertheless, it was clear that she had hanged herself from the banister. They suggested it had happened at some point between her leaving her evening class on Thursday, and Saturday. I wondered for a while whether anyone would come and interview me; surely people had seen us talking in the refectory – maybe someone had observed us leaving the campus together, or at the pub. But, although I prepared a benign story about considering taking Italian next term, nobody ever troubled me to hear it.
    Drinking my third whisky the same evening, lips already numb, cheeks warm, I wondered what might have happened if I had gone to Eleanor’s house with her that Thursday night. I wished I had been there when she’d done it, watched her take that final step. Been there as she made that decision. And then I realised with a glow of sudden arousal that I had been there after all – because she’d made the decision that evening, in the pub, when I was with her. At the time, I believed she had listened to my instructions and taken them on board, but that something I’d said had been misinterpreted… when I was telling her she should go home, shut the door and not come out again, she had accepted it. She had not chosen her path at all. I honestly thought that I had taken the pain of the decision away from her. So many tiresome decisions, so much to consider, to think about: and in reality there was only one she needed to make. I thought I had helped her with that. I’d told her to do it – and it was done.
    With the benefit of hindsight, of course, I know now that it is highly unlikely that anything I said to her that night made any difference. But either way, the end result was that she followed a path to quick, savage self-destruction. She was dead even as I drove away from her that night. In the car park, breathing, heart beating, but a corpse all the same. The transformation had already begun.
    By then, however, I had other matters to attend to – I had moved on to Justine.

Annabel
     
     
    I wished they would leave me alone.
    In the morning they would make me get up and dressed and then they would sit me in a chair. Every time I closed my eyes, someone would come along and wake me up.
    At night when they should have left me to sleep I would hear people talking in the corridors, shouts from the others, footsteps walking backwards and forwards.
    Maybe this was how they wanted me, permanently in a state of semi-consciousness.
    They wanted me to talk to them, but I could not. There were no words left. I had no time or patience for