chapter eleven

forgery

On my return home, there was a letter addressed to Will amongst the scattered pile of junk mail and bills littering the hall. It wasn’t till I saw his name on the envelope that I finally gave up hope of him ever being found alive. I held the envelope up to examine its postmark and realised that Will would never read the letter inside it. For a few moments I mulled over the morality of reading it myself then succumbed to temptation and tore it open. It was from you.

It was written with a red felt tip pen in an intimate style brimming with zest. Its summery air of undiluted idealism and implicit faith in the omnipresence of good, devoid of any inkling of evil, made me despair of my own long-lost innocence. You wrote of a family holiday travelling through the Rockies in a burnt-orange Volkswagen camper van with your mum and dad and your little brother. You gave a detailed account of an action-packed fortnight, written in an unaffected style that conveyed the adventure of your holiday. Your anecdotes at the expense of your parents made me laugh aloud. Your protectiveness towards your brother, though never explicitly stated, shone through each line and made me cry — pathetic, perhaps, and damning evidence of a cloying sentimentality, maybe, but a welcome, albeit belated, release, for it shames me to confess that I’d been unable to produce so much as a single tear throughout the unfolding double-tragedy of Lisa and Will.

I wondered what response to the letter, if any, would be considered appropriate. I cowered from the obligation of informing you about Will’s tragedy. Your innocence seemed far too precious for me to slaughter with the truth. Seeking a way to avoid having to tell you about Will, an ingenious solution occurred to me: I would write to you, but I would assume Will’s identity.

Morbidly excited by this devious scheme of deception (born from cowardice rather than altruism, however much I sought to convince myself that the reverse was true) I rushed to where Will hid his stockpile of your correspondence and passed many, too many, hours poring over it to trace the trajectory of his relationship with you. I soon became absorbed with these letters. I found that they helped me cope with the trauma of my double-tragedy. The insight they gave me into Will’s thoughts, as perceived by way of your replies to them, accentuated my loss; an accentuation that I masochistically relished because my loss had come to define me and the more keenly I felt it, the more readily I could accept that part of me was still alive.

I became obsessed with the idea of being able to read the letters Will had sent you. Aside from the solitary final artefact, I possessed only one side of the story and so could only fantasise about the other, where Will’s thoughts, written in his own fair hand, lay waiting to be discovered in a corresponding stockpile of letters, no doubt tucked out of sight in a corner of your bedroom thousands of miles away in Vancouver Island.

The absence of these letters gnawed at my insides a little more each day. I dreamed about the insights into Will they contained until the importance I attached to them grew to the extent that I began to equate their return to the return of Will himself; a metaphorical resurrection maybe, but the only reason I could think of to postpone my appointment with Will and Lisa.

The lack of any letters from Lisa, and the lack of any prospect of finding any letters from Lisa, made her death final to me. She was dead and gone and, though it grieved me so, her absence was irrevocable. But the fact that Will had never been found, and the thought that one day I might be able to read his correspondence, kept him alive in my imagination. His words had outlived him. They still existed, somewhere; and maybe, somewhere, so did he.

It was some time before I dared attempt to compose a reply to you. When I finally did, I tried to imagine I was Will’s age. As well as the one, vital letter of Will’s to you I had in my possession, I was helped in this regard by reference to the bundles of letters my own pen-pal, Liam, had written to me and so it was that I set sail on a voyage of rediscovery of my own long-forgotten youth.

I was struck by the innocence and naivety I encountered there and wondered whether the tone employed by Will would be similar to that employed by Liam, a notion that only made my hunger to read for myself his correspondence to you more acute. Once innocence had been lost, could it be rediscovered? Could the lessons of experience be unlearned? What a fabulous notion, for, if there was one thing that rereading the letters Liam had written to me as a seven-year-old had shown me, it was that, rather than leading me towards happiness, the knowledge that came with experience had led me astray.

If the recapture of innocence was to be possible, I suspected that the process would at least be as laborious as that entailed in the gaining of experience. In order to short circuit that protracted process, I resigned myself to the challenge of faking innocence for the purpose of assuming Will’s identity for writing to you. I emptied Will’s shelves of school jotters and concentrated on copying his handwriting and prose style.

Finally, after many monotonous evenings devoted to hours of rigorous practice, the day arrived when I felt I was ready to attempt a passable imitation and, after countless botched drafts, a few days later I posted a brief reply to you, which, though it had taken an immense time and effort to compose, contrived to appear spontaneous.

The ensuing weeks dragged by and were endured agonising over whether you would accept my forgery as an original or see through my attempted fraud. A fortnight after I posted the letter, I adopted the habit of waiting for the postman to deliver the post before departing for work, my dread and anticipation compounding each successive morning until, finally, one rain-soaked Wednesday, a reply arrived and, with trembling hands, I tore open the damp envelope to find, with a disproportionate sense of relief, that you had fallen for my fraud.

My next letter only took half as long to compose as the first and the one after that half as long again until my confidence had scaled such heights that the spontaneity of the letters, at least, was genuine. And, though it had never been my intention to prolong this deception, I soon became addicted to the regular receipt of your correspondence. I revelled in my adopted identity, which afforded me the opportunity to imagine what kind of life Will might have lived whilst giving me a second chance to live my own. The correspondence let me escape from my double-tragedy into an irresistible world of rosy optimism. And the longer it continued, the harder it became to bring it to a conclusion. Each time I promised myself that I would sign off, a letter would arrive from you of such innocent intimacy that I realised that the cruelty or brevity necessary to kill it off lay beyond me.

After a long time I felt able to return to work on Original Harm, which I’d neglected, though virtually all my previous motivations for writing it had been rendered redundant. I decided to proceed with it primarily for Will, to atone him, and for myself, to postpone my celestial reunion with Will and Lisa. The routine of editing the paper’s letters page during the day, writing Original Harm in the evening and corresponding with you preoccupied me and kept me alive. Original Harm was an extended love letter to my partner and son, its joint dedicatees. Perhaps that partly explained why I was so sensitive to criticism of it and leapt to its defence when I found it to be the subject of a savage attack by Niamh Toe in the pages of my own paper. I wasn’t defending myself. I was defending the cherished memory of my beloveds, which I felt had been desecrated.

Remembering that review reminded me of the blackmailer’s letter. I popped into a twenty-four-hour garage to pick up a copy of the paper to see if the story had made the front page. It had. The story was illustrated with a photograph of the actual letter. Examining it anew, I was once again struck by the notion that there was something familiar about the handwriting.