Free What She Left: Enhanced Edition by T. R. Richmond

taking me out for dinner: a country-house hotel in the New Forest. They do some great Italian reds and the venison is spectacular. We go there every year, sit at the same table. I like tradition.
     
No one calls me Jem these days.
     
Yours,
Jem
     

Blog post by Megan Parker,
8 February 2012, 21.30 p.m.
     
     
This might be a massive mistake, but sometimes you’ve got to go with your heart. ‘Publish and be damned,’ that’s what Alice used to say.
She was one of the decent journalists, one who tried to make a difference. She didn’t do stories about the Kardashians or Katy Perry’s new dog or print pictures of celebrities with sweat rings under their arms or stumbling out of nightclubs and was as appalled by the phone-hacking stuff as the rest of us. But she could spend weeks going after someone who’d swindled an old lady out of her savings or a dodgy builder who’d done a bunk halfway through an extension, leaving a family in the lurch. So I’m going to take a leaf out of her book. Besides, it’s not as if it can make the situation any worse.
‘Sometimes you get an answer without knowing what the question was,’ Alice said once. ‘You’ve simply got to put it out there.’
I found it in a box of items her mum gave me that she couldn’t bear to sort through. It was mundane stuff – old copies of
Cosmo
, a load of H&M receipts, a printed JustGiving page for a sponsored run Alice was planning, a ‘save the date’ card for a wedding in the autumn, plus some work stuff – but buried among it was a sheet of A4 paper with a Post-it stuck on it which said in Alice’s handwriting:
Received on 21 December 2011
.
I’ve sat here for two hours grappling with whether to make this blog post live.
Publish and be damned.
     
REMEMBER ME LITTLE MISS LOCK UP THE CRIMINALS? MADE YOU FEEL GOOD DID IT? GETTING PEOPLE ARRESTED SO WE CAN ALL SLEEP AT NIGHT. GOING ROUND CALLING MEN MONSTERS. WELL YOU OUGHT TO BE CAREFUL ORYOU’LL GET YOUR OWN MONSTER. HOW’D YOU LIKE THAT? A CHRISTMAS MONSTER? YOU AFRAID OF MONSTERS? WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE YOU STUCK UP BITCH ? YOU AND YOUR CAMPAIGN YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT ME. YOU DON’T SCARE ME. DO I SCARE YOU? HOW DO YOU SLEEP? TOO MUCH GOOD BEHAVIOUR, TIME FOR BAD. PREFER OLDER WOMEN BUT YOU’LL DO. FROM A FREEMAN
     
Comment left on the above blog post:
     
You’re as much of a WHORE as your friend. How do YOU sleep at night Megan Parker?
A FREEMAN
     

Q & A with Alice Salmon in autumn 2005 issue of Southampton University student magazine,
Voice
     
    Q: Why did you choose your course?
A: A teacher once told me that school can make us fall in love with an author, but uni helps us understand
why
we’re in a relationship with them. I wanted to find out how a virtual recluse like Emily Brontë could have so much to say, so young. It wasn’t as if she’d travelled or even had the Internet. All that wisdom, cultivated in a tiny corner of a windswept Yorkshire Moor. Actually, I’ll have to remember that line, I rather like it:
cultivated in a tiny corner of a windswept Yorkshire Moor
!
    Q: Are you dating?
A: No, but I’m open to offers. Not that I have time for men!
    Q: Glass half full or glass half empty?
A: Half full, definitely. But I’ll have a top-up if you’re buying. A mojito please.
    Q: Favourite place?
A: Southampton. Specifically, Flames on Wednesday nights. Otherwise, anywhere that involves hiking boots.
    Q: Who inspires you?
A: The people in New Orleans for rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina. I watched a clip of a lady getting winched out of a flooded house and having to leave her dog behind – she put food down knowing she was leaving the poor thing to die. OK, it’s not a person, but I was in floods of tears.
    Q: Politics?
A: Plenty but it’s mostly inconsistent and contradictory. Student loans suck, though!
    Q: What are you going to do when you grow up?
A: Am never going to so can’t answer that! Seriously, would like to say secure world peace, abolish poverty