Friday 13th May, 1994. I hadn’t made any plans to meet anyone that night, so I just thought I’d chance it and see who I could find. I was lucky, there were a few faces I knew so I stayed out and had some drinks. Then I walked home, up the main road, on my own, got in and went to bed. The very same night in the same town, a girl I didn’t know, who was a year younger than me, went out with friends. Then, towards the end of the night, she parted from them and walked up a different main road. She never made it home because on the way somebody beat her to death in someone else’s front garden.
I found out by my nan telling me down the phone. She said something like, “I hope you’re being careful when you go out, Wallis. They found that girl, didn’t they?” “What girl?” “That girl in Maidstone - got murdered.” At first, it just seemed like something my nan would say. I had, after all, spent many a time in her house reading all the murder magazines that she kept under the settee. But then, within seconds, it wasn’t that at all. Something cut through the haze of chit-chat. Something of ultimate horror had happened to someone who, only in the most minute fractals in the grand scheme of things, was a different person to me.
Just now I googled her name and it means ‘beloved’, or ‘face’, which is poignantly fitting as the next time I went down the pub, this time with my friend Lydia, there were photocopies of her face in little rows along all the wooden beams, with ‘Murder’ written beneath, as if that were her name. Loads of them, like bunting. My make-up and pint felt heavy. I couldn’t stop thinking about the moment when she realised she was being killed, knowing that there won’t be anything after this being killed event has finished. Nothing, ever, not even pondering it. This is the last experience. I thought of her thinking of her bedroom and her family, and knowing they were now mere memories, and shortlived ones at that; realising that studying for her A Levels wasn’t going to get her into University; becoming aware that all those efforts she’d put into asserting her identity weren’t going to take her into adulthood.
We went home. It wasn’t a night for making merry. But, the feeling remained and it contained a strong audio/visualisation of her last sight – it wasn’t the killer I saw, but the navy blue night sky being scribbled on with streaks of yellow light from the streetlamps as the eyes in her head are being controlled by a frenzy stronger than her will, while the sound of cars, strangely at ear level, motor on. All the while, a one foot wall betrays and shrouds all.
Of course, I knew nothing about what this stranger had experienced - the chances are she had her eyes shut, and who knows if there was a moment of realisation or anything? It was a childish reaction I’d had - I imagined something and reacted to that. Nevertheless, the power of the imagination went very far to lament the tragic death of a girl I never knew.
Her name was Cara. Prints of her pre-destroyed face were papered all over Maidstone; a before with an intimated after. Death is personal, as well as universal, and the intimacy of hers was violated not only by someone having a literal hand in it, but by its news being everywhere. I know details of it through things I heard and read. At the time, I was learning about ‘Narcotising
Dysfunction’ in A Level Communication Studies, the theory that we become apathetic to issues owing to over exposure in the mass media. My jelly mind hadn’t yet set at the time of Cara’s death, I was still impervious to this syndrome. I don’t think I’m narcotised now, but for many reasons I no longer put myself so haphazardly into a victim’s shoes.
But there is a danger that I shortcut to having done so once. “Well yes, I know how horrible it all is,” because my imagination of a murder I once knew of was made to feel real because the victim and I were the same age from the same town. No longer feeling, just knowing a memory. A reference.
So I write this, not in memory of the girl with the beloved face - that’s impossible, but in honour of her by resurrecting how it felt to be young, to feel things so personally, to be in touch with fear and vulnerability in their rawest forms, to remind myself why the social and political contexts or surrounding debates that I’m more conscious of now, exist. To feel what it was like when the world was my small town, and the future a promise of something vast. When Thursday May 12th 1994, was an ordinary day that both Cara and I could remember.