not,’ I said. ‘Putting aside the question of whether I were willing -’
‘Are you, in principle?’ she interposed.
‘Putting that aside, it would be incredibly insulting to Professor Butterworth if I were hauled out of retirement to take over one of his research students. He would never agree to it. And the University would never wear it. It’s just not on, I’m afraid.’
I was glad to have this well-founded reason for declining her request, because otherwise I might have been a little bit tempted by it. The idea of getting involved in some research again, applying my knowledge and expertise to this rather bizarre but undoubtedly interesting topic, and meeting this obviously intelligent and articulate and, let us be honest, very personable young woman on a regular basis to discuss it, was not unattractive. But experience has taught me that postgraduate supervision can be a complex and worrying business: you easily find yourself becoming somehow responsible for the student’s achievement, self-esteem, destiny, and it goes on for years. It was a good thing that I didn’t even have to weigh up the pros and cons in this case before saying no.
‘Oh. I’m very disappointed,’ she said disconsolately.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I drained a cup of tea that had gone cold, and glanced at my watch. ‘Perhaps I should be going.’
‘Oh, no, please don’t go,’ she said. ‘Have some more tea.’ She refilled my cup.
‘Tell me a bit more about your research,’ I said. ‘Where do you get your raw data from?’
‘Oh, there are anthologies. And the Internet is useful. I’ll show you.’ She got up and took down a large lever-arch file from the shelves. ‘This is my corpus to date. It’s all on my hard disk, of course, but I keep this as a kind of scrap book to browse through occasionally. ’
The file was heavy on my knees, and metaphorically heavy with human suffering. I leafed through photocopies of suicide notes, some from printed sources, some reproductions of typed and handwritten originals. I can only remember a few of the sentences and phrases which Alex had marked and annotated in a minuscule, almost illegible script. ‘I’m tired of life so I’ve killed myself. This shitty family just takes advantage of you’ . . . ‘The gas is making a noise, it’s hissing fear into me’ . . . ‘I don’t have any choice in the matter. To make everything better I have to die’ . . . ‘The man lying beside me is just an unfortunate coincidence . . .’ This last was by a woman who had evidently picked up an unlucky stranger and had sex with him before turning on the gas while he was asleep. I looked up to find Alex regarding me intently.
‘Interesting reading, isn’t it?’ she said.
‘Fascinating - but uncomfortable. Don’t you get depressed working with this material day after day?’
She shrugged. ‘Do pathologists get depressed doing post-mortems day after day?’
‘I suppose you’ve done some statistical searches on your data?’
‘Yeah - know what the most commonly recurring non-grammatical word is?’
‘Kill? Die?’
‘Love.’
‘Hmm. And the collocations?’
‘Oh, no surprises there: names, pronouns, some negatives. I love you, Mom. I love you Dad, I love you Jack, you never really loved me, Mum and Dad never loved me, nobody loves me . . .’
I read a few more of the letters - it’s customary to refer to suicide ‘notes’, but many of them were full-length letters - and commented that there seemed to be often some ambiguity about the addressee. ‘Ostensibly they’re addressed to a relative or partner, but sometimes they contain information well known to both parties, so it’s as if they’re also addressed to the world at large.’
‘Right, and sometimes they’ll throw in something addressed to God as well. As if they want to cover all the bases with their last words,’ she said. ‘You obviously have a feel for this topic. Are you sure you won’t supervise me?’
‘Quite sure,’ I said. ‘How far are you into the project?’
‘Well, I started it in the States some time ago, and dropped out. I registered here in the spring and started over.’
‘I don’t recall seeing you on campus.’
‘No, but I’ve seen you. Somebody pointed you out to me in the Library. That’s how I recognised you at the ARC reception.’
‘Ah,’ I said. I had thought that conversation was a chance encounter, but evidently not.
‘I don’t go into the University much, except to the Library. I prefer to work at home. And I have to do other kinds of