When Alice took her own life her mother, Caroline, sought out the answers to many questions. Her Name Is Alice is an unflinching and important read with a rallying call to action
26 May 2022
Bad news, the first sign of difference, a marriage put to the test
Twenty-one years later, I am sitting in my living room, hearing my daughter is dead.
The policeman is kind. He attempts to soften an unsoftenable blow. His sister-in-law killed herself the previous year, he says, so he has some understanding of how we are feeling. This is well-intentioned, but I dismiss him. I’ve just been told that a body has been found on the undercliff path between Brighton and Rottingdean. There’s reason to believe it’s Alice. I do not know myself how I’m feeling, so how can he? I’m thinking, here we are, this is it, this is what it is like, this thing I have been quietly expecting all my mothering life, it has arrived. I feel quite composed, as if what’s happening isn’t happening to me. I don’t seem to mind that much. I well up a little, as if I’m listening to a radio drama, experiencing some fictional loss.
There is a moment when the policeman has to check Alice’s gender, just to clarify. She is trans, I say. He nods in understanding and continues his duties as he should, never misgendering her, mindful that she is our child and she is dead. Though at this stage he is repeatedly at pains to say he – the police – are not certain it’s Alice, there’s reason to believe it could be her, but it isn’t confirmed. There have been mistakes in the past, it seems, but I have no doubt. The policeman talks but I’m not really listening. I just say, It’s Alice, it’s Alice, I know it’s her. Over and over.
He’s explaining how they’ve traced us from a mobile phone found at the scene. I don’t really care for the police procedural part of how they’ve come to be here, in my living room, telling me my child is probably (definitely) dead. He goes on. Can he show us a photo of a distinctive jacket found at the scene? Yes, that’s hers. Can we describe a tattoo on her upper arm. Yes, again. Could we clarify: left or right? We’re not sure, it was fairly new. We’ve only seen it once. There is a tattoo on her torso, too; no, we don’t know about that.
For me these checks feel pointless. I’m convinced that it’s my daughter who’s been found, by a passerby, around 5.30 a.m. on that clear late May morning. Poor chap, minding his own business, on his way to work in Brighton. Alice has ruined his day. I’m certain and oddly detached.
Peter’s in bits, sobbing uncontrollably, making wounded animal noises, groaning and moaning: no, no, no. He’s sat on the far end of the sofa, as far away from me and the policeman as possible, as if putting distance between us somehow separates him from the fact of Alice’s death. I sit on an armchair and remain composed. If this is what bereavement looks like, it turns out I’m rather good at it. This time, anyway. It doesn’t feel that bad; in this moment, I have it nailed. How odd that the poets and the playwrights have it all wrong, I think.
And then somehow, we’re together and hugging and Peter is asking, begging, Please don’t turn me into the man in your story. I won’t, I won’t, I reply. But it has already crossed my mind, that weeping and snotty as he is, he’s rather like Bob. Bob is the fictional husband in a short story I wrote about fifteen years previously for an Open University creative writing course, back in the brief period when I’d thought I might turn my hand to writing and never did. A story that began with a policeman knocking at the door – a remarkably prescient story as it now turns out. And in that story the husband and wife split up after the death of their daughter. A process that begins when Bob reaches for his wife’s hand and she, repulsed by the pudgy, wet, raw-sausage sliminess of his grip, pulls away. I hold on to Peter, repeat that he isn’t Bob, but his snot-smeared cheek rubbing against mine does not reassure me.
The policeman wants a picture of Alice, so we’ll be spared having to make a formal identification of her body. In these times of social media, with cameras on almost every phone, you’d think we would be able to lay our hands on a picture of her with the utmost ease, but we can’t. Alice has been camera-shy over the past few years. Not many photos have been taken, and those that were have never been printed off – a task for a rainy day with some spare time, a day that’s never come. So, we sit, separately again now, and scroll through thousands of photos in unsorted albums and WhatsApp threads. We swipe and curse, swipe and apologise, swipe and joke: I have this one of her sister, where they look very alike – you can have that, I quip. Of course, it will not do. I can feel my heart quickening, a restlessness pulsating through my body, as I scroll and scroll. Alice is gone and I don’t have a single picture. I’m a bad mother. Not a single picture as she is now, not one. And then I find one and I feel relief that I’m not such a bad mother, after all. And it’s perfect, the picture. She looks so beautiful and happy and she’s back with me, though it’s just a picture, which I show to the policeman on my phone. She’s wearing the jacket – that would seal it. Yes, the policeman says, this one will do. I feel almost pleased, that the photo is suitable. Until, abruptly, I don’t.
I don’t suppose it takes much more than an hour, this visit that veers my life off on yet another tangent, and then he’s gone, and we’re on our own and must make plans. The real and very practical business of bereavement is about to begin. People have to be told. Kate and Harvey need to know. There is not a moment to lose. They must not find out any other way.
This is an extract from Her Name Is Alice, My Daughter, Her Transition And Why We Must Remember Her by Caroline Litman which is available in hardback from HarperCollins.
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