The last lead I got from The Cop was a suicide. This was well into the Lent term. Even now, it’s the most difficult one to talk about. I should say her name, at least. I owe her that. Caitlyn.
If the woman from Comberton had lost her past, Caitlyn had lost her future. I don’t mean the easy way, the same way as everyone who dies. Even after we realized she wasn’t Deb, I kept asking questions. In the Botanic Garden on Trumpington Road, The Cop and I sat staring side by side at the lake. Cherry blossoms and crocuses lay scattered in the grass like discarded sweet wrappers. The Cop told me Caitlyn was a “brilliant student.” I said they always are, and The Cop nodded softly.
“She was a mathematician in her final year, on course for a First, perhaps even a starred First,” said The Cop. “Usually about fifty Cambridge students try to kill themselves in a given academic year.”
We sat in silence for a minute, as the ducks chattered softly in the background. There had been murmurs since forever that someone needed to do something about the brutality of the place, or at least about all the “Suicide Sunday” jokes, but it was Cambridge and nothing was going to stand in the way of a tradition. What could be done, anyway? It’s not like suicide rates were official policy.
“She left a note,” The Cop added eventually. “Said she had lost her way.”
“Yes.” I thought about it, and nodded. “A map extends in four directions. It looks comprehensive. All the points in the two-dimensional plane. But we are supposed to know—to know without being told, I mean—that there’s an up and a down as well. They’re just not depicted. They can’t be, given how this kind of representation works. But as long as we know about them, we can imagine our own down, build foundations, move around in the mapped area without thinking that’s all there is. Without getting trapped in the flat world. And provided your downward force is balanced just right, you can even take off from the flat surface, still knowing you can land.
“I mean, whatever is happening to us right now, we look at it like it’s a still image. A flat map, a snapshot. But we are supposed to know there’s a past, too: a kind of down from now. Let’s say that’s made of memories. Okay. As long as they don’t bury you, suffocate you, they can be your grounding. The sandbags in your hot-air balloon. They keep you from floating off where the air’s too thin to breathe. So, then, what’s the future made of? Nothing isn’t a good enough answer. I suppose Caitlyn realized that.”
I said all this to The Cop, as we sat together on the damp grass. When I noticed I’d been talking for a long time, I looked round to see what she thought.
But she didn’t say anything.
—
Until that night, The Cop and I had never argued.
I hate arguing. I am very bad at it. When I’m angry there is no breath behind my words, so they end up flat and soft like a muted trumpet. They can’t express feeling. They can’t do anything. I sound more like someone with a bad head cold than someone who is angry. Usually, I just go quiet instead. Conflict-avoidant is a term I only learned later.
That evening, as she stirred a pan of tinned soup on top of the cooker in her little flat on Hills Road, The Cop asked me why I never called her by her name.
“What do you mean?” I asked, although it was completely obvious what she meant. I was just embarrassed, and buying time.
“Why don’t you ever say my name? You always either just start talking, or you say Hey. You never call me Julie.”
“Well, names are strange, don’t you think? I mean, they get attached to us from the outside, by someone else, and they don’t really have anything to do with—”
She interrupted me. “And why do you always have to make it about philosophy? I’m trying to talk about us.”
I hadn’t thought of any of it as being about philosophy. But my embarrassment had heated up now, and was undergoing a kind of molten transmutation in my chest.
I said that if we were talking about “us,” then we ought to know what we meant by that, and it wasn’t changing the subject to ask this kind of question. Then, feeling like I was on a roll, I made a stupid mistake. I asked how come, if we were an “us,” I had never met any of her police friends.
She talked to me about “the boys” sometimes, but I had absolutely no interest in meeting them, and would certainly have declined if such an offer had ever been made. It just felt like something to hit with.
“Are you kidding? You don’t exactly walk in to the station and announce you’re a lesbian. Not if you want to still have a job or a life when you walk out.”
The word lesbian came splashing out of the sentence and all over my face like acid. It was still evaporating painfully when she came back for another pass.
“Anyway, I’ve never met any of your friends.”
I was having trouble getting words out now.
“I don’t…have…I mean, there was only Deb.”
“Right.” She raised her eyebrows. “Deb.”
Then, after a long pause, she said again: “Right.”
It was a chilly evening, but with all the windows closed and the four-panel gas heater glowing its little heart out, it warmed up quickly in The Cop’s flat. Suddenly I was too hot.
“It’s…”
My voice was trying to tamp itself out, close up my throat. Over and over. Shut it down, shut it down, shut it down. But I overruled it. I kept pushing. I forced myself.
“It’s too much…for me. You…keep
