After You'd Gone (3 page)

Beth and Kirsty exchanged quick looks.

'But . . . Alice . . . what's happened?' cried Beth. 'What's wrong, what's wrong? Please don't go. You can't go l,ike this.'

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'Have to,' Alice muttered again, and walked off to find the next London train.

Kirsty and Beth gathered up the children, their bags and

the baby clutter, and hurried after her. There was a train just about to depart, Alice found, so she ran to the platform, her sisters following behind her, calling her name over and over.

On the platform, she hugged both of them. ' Bye,' she whispered. 'Sorry.'

Beth burst into tears. 'I don't understand,' she wailed. 'Tell

us what the matter is. Why are you going?' 'Sorry,' she said again.

Getting on the train, Alice felt suddenly malcoordinated. The gap between the train step and the platform edge down to the tracks seemed to yawn wide into a huge, uncrossable crevasse. Her body didn't seem to be getting the right spatial information from her brain: she reached for the handle to pull herself across the crevasse, but missed, swayed and lurched backwards into a man standing behind her.

'Steady,' he said, and took her elbow to help her on.

Beth and Kirsty crowded into the window when she sat down. Kirsty was crying too now, and they waved frantically as the train moved off, running beside her for as long as they could before it picked up speed and their strides flagged. Alice could not wave back, she could not look at them and see their four blonde heads running beside the train, captured by the frame of the window as if on a reel of flickering Super-8.

Her heart was jumping in her chest so hard as she travelled that the edges of her vision pulsed in giddy sympathy. Rain screed back along the window. She avoided the eye of the reflection whizzing along beside her in another, reversed, tilted ghost carriage that skimmed over the fields as they hurtled towards London.

The air in the house felt icy when she got back. She fiddled

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with the boiler and thermostat, reading aloud to herself the incomprehensible instructions, peering at the diagrams bristling with arrows and dials. The radiators coughed and gulped, digesting the first heat of the year. In the bathroom, she stuck her fingers into the compost of the plants. It felt damp.

She was just about to go back downstairs, she thought, when she just sat down where she was -on the top step. She looked at John's watch again and was astonished to see it was only five in the afternoon. She checked it three times: 17.02. That definitely meant five o'clock. Her trip to Edinburgh seemed unreal now. Had she really gone all that way and then come back? Had she rally seen what she thought she saw? She didn't know. She clenched her hands around her ankles and let her head fall on to her knees.

When she raised it again, the rain had stopped. There was a peculiar stillness about the house and it seemed to have got dark very suddenly. Her knuckle and finger joints ached, and as she flexed them they made sharp, cracking sounds that echoed round the stairwell. She hauled herself up by the banister and went slowly down the stairs, leaning her weight against the wall.

In the sitting room she stood at the window. The street

lights had gone on. Over the road a television flickered behind net curtains. The roof of her mouth felt swollen and bruised, as if she'd been sucking boiled sweets. Lucifer, appearing from somewhere, leapt noiselessly on to the window-sill and began rubbing his head against her folded arms. She smoothed the velvet of his throat with her fingertips, feeling the rumble of his purr.

She snapped on a light and the cat's pupils narrowed, like

the closing of a fan. He jumped to the floor and circled her ankles, mewing loudly. She watched him as he prowled the

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room, casting sideways looks at her, swishing his long black tail. In the overhead light it was possible to see the ghost of a tabby in the monochrome sheen of his fur. Some recess of her mind told her: he's hungry. The cat needs feeding. Feed the cat, Alice.

She went through to the kitchen. The cat raced ahead of her through the door and began leaping at the fridge. There was nothing in the cupboard where she kept his food but a tired-looking cardboard box of cat biscuits and the brown rust-rings of tins long since eaten. She tipped out the box. Three biscuits fell on to the lino. After sniffing at them for a time, Lucifer crunched them delicately.

'Have I been neglecting you?' She stroked him. 'I'll go out and buy some catfood.'

Lucifer followed at her heels, aghast that she seemed to have changed her mind and wasn't going to feed him after all. At the front door, she got her keys and wallet from her bag. The cat slipped out of the door with her and sat on the doorstep.

'Back in a minute,' she murmured and clicked the gate shut behind her.

Maybe it was something to do with·the rhythm of her steps hitting the tarmac or maybe it was being out among crowds of people again rather than in the cool, hermetic interior of the house, but as she walked down Camden Road to the supermarket it all started coming back to her. She could see herself in that white melamine cubicle, walls inscribed with skewered hearts and legends of love. She could see herself washing her hands again at the stainless-steel basin, sprayed with silver beads of water. She tried to stop herself thinking about this. Tried to fill her mind with other things, think about Lucifer, about what else she could buy in the supermarket. She had leant on the gleaming soap dispenser; lurid pink soap had

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coiled into her wet palm, lathering into oiled bubbles under the water. Behind her in the cubicles, two teenage girls had been discussing a dress one of them was going to buy that day. 'Do you not think it makes me look a bit kind of flouncy?' one had shouted. 'Flouncy? Well, now you come to mention it.' 'Fuck off, fuck off!' What had happened then? What had occurred a few moments later was so disorientating, it was hard to order things in her head . . . Did she need anything else? Milk, maybe? Or bread? . . . Alice had turned then towards the hand-dryer and pressed the chrome button, passing her hands over each other. It had one of those little mirrors stuck to the front. She has never really known why they do that. You' re supposed to be able to dry your hair if you turn the nozzle around, or something, but she's never found the need tp dry her hair in a public toilet . . . What should she do when she got back? Maybe she could read something. She could buy a paper. How long is it since she read a paper anyway? . . . The whole place had seemed reflective - the shining porcelain tiles, the steel basins, the mirror above them, and the mirror on the hand-dryer . . . Maybe she should call Rachel. She couldn't remember when she last spoke to her. Rachel was probably cross with her . . . The girls' voices had been bouncing off the walls. One of them had raised herself up on to the top of the cubicle and was looking down on her friend. Alice had, for some reason - why? why did she do that? - stepped closer to the hand-dryer, and the new angle made something behind her appear in the tiny square mirror . . . Perhaps Rachel wasn't talking to her. That would be strange. They'd never fallen out before. Perhaps she would get a basket at the shop, or a trolley, yes, a trolley would be good. She could fill it with everything she needed. Then she wouldn't have to go again for a while. But how would she carry it all home? . . . Still with her hands under the hot jet of air, she had stared at the mirror and then,

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ever so slowly, so slowly that it seemed to have taken minutes, turned towards them.

Alice was by now standing at the pedestrian crossing. The green figure, legs parted in a purposeful stride, was illuminated on the traffic-light opposite. Over the road, she could see the supermarket; figures cruising through the neon-lit aisles. It seemed to her that her life was narrowing down to a vanishing point. People flowed around her, crossing the road, moving on. But she stayed still.

Someone nudged her in the back and she was pushed towards the edge of the pavement. The green figure was blinking on and off. Final stragglers were dashing across the road before the lights changed. The stationary red figure appeared and there was a moment of suspended calm before the waiting line of cars gunned their engines. As they powered past her, hurling fumes up into her face, their solidity seemed enviable to her - edgeless, slick constructions of steel, glass and chrome. The soles of Alice's shoes peeled away from the tarmac, and she stepped off the kerb.

II

pa rt on e

The only bit Alice can see of her father is the soles of his shoes.
They are a faded brown, striated with the grit and terrain of the pavements he has walked. She is allowed to run along the pavement outside their house to meet him coming home from work in the evening. In the summertime she sometimes runs in her nightie, its pale folds catching around her knees. But now it's winter - November, maybe. The soles of the shoes are curved around the branch of a tree at the bottom of their garden. She tips back her head as far as it will go. The foliage rustles and thrashes. Her father's voice swears. She feels a shout welling like tears in her throat, then the coarse orange rope lowers itself, slightly coiled like a cobra from the branches.

'Got it?'

She seizes the rope's waxed head in her mittened hand. 'Yes.'

The branches shake as her father swings down. He lays a hand briefly on Alice's shoulder then bends to pick up the tyre. She is fascinated by the meandering rivulets that wander through its tread and the weft underneath its heavy black rubber. 'That's what holds it together,' the man at the shop had told her. The sudden scraped bald patch in the middle of the meanders makes her shudder but she doesn't quite know

why. Her father winds the orange rope around the tyre and makes a thick, twisted knot.

'Can I have a go now?' Her hands grip the tyre. 'No. I have to test it with my weight first.'

Alice watches as her father jounces on the tyre, testing to see if it is safe enough for her. She looks up to see the branch shake in sympathy and looks quickly back at her father. What if he were to fall? But he is getting off and lifting her on, her bones as small, white and bendable as birds'.

Alice and John sit in a cafe in a village in the Lake District. It's early autumn. She holds up a sugar cube between finger and thumb, the light behind it making its crystals the massed cells of an intricate organism under a microscope.

'Did you know,' says John, 'that someone did a chemical analysis of sugar cubes in cafe sugar bowls and that they found strong traces of blood, semen, faeces and urine?'

She keeps her face serious. 'I didn't know that, no.'

He holds her deadpan gaze until the edges of his mouth are tugged downwards. Alice gets hiccups and he shows her how to cure them by drinking out of the opposite side of a glass. Beyond them, through the window, a plane draws a sheer white line on the sky.

She looks at John's hands, breaking up a bread roll, and suddenly knows she loves him. She looks away, out of the window, and sees for the first time the white line made by the plane. It has by this time drifted into woolliness. She thinks about pointing it out to John, but doesn't.

Alice's sixth summer was hot and dry. Their house had a large garden with the kitchen window looking out over the patio and garden so whenever Alice and her sisters were playing outside they could look up and see their mother watching over them.

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The freakish heat dried up the reservoirs, previously unheard of in Scotland, and she went with her father to a pump at the end of the street to collect water in round white vats. The water drummed into their empty bottoms. Half-way between the house and the end of the garden was the vegetable patch where peas, potatoes and beetroot pushed their way up from thick, dark soil. On a particularly bright day that summer, Alice stripped off her clothes, scooped up clods of that earth and smeared it in vivid tiger stripes all over her body.

She scared the pious, nervous children next door by roaring at them through the hedge until her mother rapped on the window-pane and shouted at her to stop that at once. She retreated into the undergrowth to collect twigs and leaves to construct a wigwam-shaped lair. Her younger sister stood outside the lair and whinged to be let in. Alice said, only if you are a tiger. Beth looked at the soil and then at her clothes and then at their mother's face in the kitchen window. Alice sat in the moist dark with her stripes, growling and gazing at the triangle of sky visible through the top of the lair.