After You'd Gone (43 page)

In her lunch-hour, Alice had gone into a stationery shop and bought a special new pad of writing-paper. It was thick blue cartridge paper with raised ridges. If you held it up to the light, the secret stamp of the manufacturer would be illuminated. This was real, grown-up writing-paper. For serious letters. When you opened the cover, the first page was a striped one with thick black lines to guide your pen in straight, neat rows.

Alice slid the guiding lines under the first blue sheet and squared it up. Then she filled her fountain pen, dipping the gold nib into the thick black liquid, squeezing the dropper and releasing it. She wiped the nib on her trousers - they were black anyway, so what did it matter.

In the top right-hand corner, she wrote her address. The pen nib scratched against the grain of the paper. Under it she wrote the date, and leant back to look at her work. Was the address the first thing you read when you got a letter you weren't expecting? She doubted it. If it were Alice getting

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this letter, she'd shuffle quickly through the pages to the end and examine the signature. Maybe she didn't need the address after all.

Alice tore off the sheet, half crumpled it, then supersti tiously put it into the drawer next to her. She didn't want anything to fuck this up.

'Dear,' she wrote, then stopped. What should she call him? She had no idea. 'Daniel' was too casual, too intimate, but did 'Mr Friedmann' make her sound like an Inland Revenue inspector? She gripped her pen tighter. She could leave it until last, fill it in when she'd finished.

'I wanted to write to you', she began. 'Wanted'. Sounded too past tense. She still wanted to, after all, which was why she was writing. Alice peeled off that page, tossed it in the drawer after the first one, and sat there, staring at the new blank page.

What exactly did she want to say? All she knew was that, since that evening with Rachel, every minute of every day she'd been thinking about writing this letter, wanting to get in touch. But she couldn't say that to him. Maybe she should write down the reasons first, in rough, and then write the letter.

Alice pressed her nib to the page. Ink leaked out into a tiny, circular stain, before her pen glided quickly across the ice-blue expanse. 'Because I want to talk to you.' Then: 'Because I'm angry with you.' 'Because I loved your son.' Half-way through shaping the letters to 'Because John is dead now, he's dead,' she told herself to stop, that she promised herself she wouldn't do this, that she wouldn't get like this while she was trying to write to his father. And when she felt the tears coming, running down her face and down her neck, soaking her jumper, she was so cross with herself that she rubbed at them roughly with her sleeves. Then she saw that tears had splatted on to the paper, making it buckle, blurring the ink into a watery mess. She

tore off the page, sobbing now, and discovered that the page underneath had absorbed the water, and the one underneath that, and the one underneath that. Alice ripped off sheet after sheet, shoving them into the drawer, until she found a flat, clean one, and she put her pen to it and tried to calm herself and think of more reaons, tried to start again because she knew that if she didn't get a grip on herself now, in a few minutes' time it would be too late. But she found that all she could write, over and over, was his name and after a while she had to give up and just let herself cry and cry, her head resting on her arms, her body curled round his desk.

It's strange to think of my body lying somewhere. I think about it and how it looks. I think about how I know every mark, every pore, the creases of my palm, the scars from childhood, the small, pigmentless chickenpox circles and the tattoo on my shoulder-blade. I think about the day I had it done a swelteringly humid day in Bangkok where I woke on the mattress I was sleeping on in a cockroach-ridden hotel. The bedsheet was tangled around my damp limbs, the roar of the traffic from the road, nineteen floors below, already audible, and I thought, I'm going to get a tattoo today. I went out into the burning air, pushing my sunglasses on, sweat already crawling down the groove of my back like slow insects, the mixture of pollution and heat fizzling in my lungs. I walked through the streets, past people eating in noodle bars on the pavements, past rows of vegetable stall in narrow, shaded streets, under racks and racks of washing drying on bamboo poles outside people's windows, through lanes of roaring traffic, past people selling fake designer watches, through a park where old men in black trousers and white vests did the slow, mesmeric movements of tai ch'i or played each other at chess, past shops selling tiles and taps to a small tattoo parlour

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I'd seen a few days before. It was grimy from the outside and the photos of people with reddened skin, proudly displaying their new markings nearly changed my mind. Inside, I pulled my T-shirt down from my shoulder. 'Here,' I said.

The man spanned my shoulder-blade with his hand, his dry fingers whispering against my skin. 'But a Chinese dragon,' he said , 'maybe not suitable for you.'

I turned to face him. 'It's what I want.'

He shrugged and swabbed my back with antiseptic. In the corner, a radio blared out the chiming, syrupy chords of Cantopop. He hummed along as he inked out the dragon. I watched him 'fill the tattoo gun with bottle-green ink. 'Are you sure?' he asked, the gun poised, buzzing, above my shoulder.

'I'm sure.'

It didn't hurt, or rather it was a strange kind of pain, like the way ice can burn. When it was finished I twisted and turned with my back to the mirror, looking over my shoulder. It was green, with golden eyes, a red tail and red tendrils coming from its mouth.

'I love it. Thank you,' I said, smiling, 'thank you,' and I

plunged back into the roar, the heat, the bustle of the street, a secret dragon on my shoulder.

Ben gets up first. Ann can hear him and Beth having breakfast downstairs - plates and cutlery clashing together, the modu lated murmur of their conversation. Ann knows she should get up and go down as well, but that kitchen is so small. She cannot bear the idea of the three of them banging into each other while boiling kettles, looking in Alice's cupboards for teabags, working out how the toaster works, opening and slamming the fridge, searching for margarine. There is something about eating the food Alice bought for herself that makes Ann queasy.

Ann sits up and leans her back against the wall. She hasn't slept well. The bed smells unmistakably of Alice, and Ann spent a lot of the night staring down at the peaks and troughs made by her and her husband's body in the duvet, trying to remember which side of the bed Alice slept on.

Ben has half opened the curtains. Ann can see out to the houses opposite. They seem incredibly close, their windows a stone's throw from where Ann is lying. How does Alice stand it, being that overlooked? She must feel constantly watched.

Ann looks about the room and is disconcerted to realise that from where she is lying, in the centre of Alice and John's huge bed, she can see herself and most of the bed in the mirror opposite. She turns her head and sees that the wardrobe mirror

throws back a side angle of the bed; and a cheval mirror on the right-hand side of the room completes this 180-degree view. Ann is puzzled and is. wondering why anyone would want to see themselves asleep when the reason for this arrangement hits her. Blood leaps to the surface of her cheeks and she is faced with three replicas of herself, blushing in her nightie, her hand covering her mouth. She gets up quickly.

In the bathroom, she tries not to look at that repulsive lizardy thing in the tank. Ann had been hoping it might have died since she was last here. But it's still there, as always, hanging in its water, feet splayed, staring at her with tiny, stupid-looking eyes. Its skin is the translucent pinkish-white Ann associates with illness, and she is disgusted to find that you can see its internal organs and blood vessels just under the surface. She thinks about having a bath, but the thought of that thing watching her throughout rather puts her off.

Ben calls up to say that he and Beth want to go to the hospital, and does she want to come with them. Ann shouts down that they are not to worry about her, that she doesn't want to hold them up, that she'll catch a taxi later.

After they've gone, Ann revels in the stillness, the solitude. She's never been able to cope with being with people twenty four hours a day. On the floor in the bedroom is Alice's little backpack. Ann sits on a chair and pulls it open, looks inside: pens, sunglasses, a flyer for a reading by some novelist at the South Bank, Alice's Filofax, a personal attack alarm with the word 'Galahad' embossed in silver, a small plastic sheep (Ann peers at this in surprise, holding it up by one of its back legs. It has horns and lurid pink udders. She finds it distasteful, and puts it down quickly), a monthly tube pass issued at Camden Town station that expires next week (the headshot of Alice makes her flinch), a lipsalve (worn down on one side), foil-wrapped paracetamols. Ann lays all these things out at her

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feet and stares at them, as if playing that memory game where someone will remove one object and she'll .have to say which one. Then she picks up the Filofax and opens it. Not much is written in it. On 24 April, Ann learns that her daughter had a staff meeting at 3 p.m. On 27 May, Alice and Rachel went to see the 7.30 p.m. showing of something called
Time

ef
the Gypsies
at the Riverside Cinema. Nothing is written in for

last weekend. In November, Alice has drawn a line through a weekend and written 'Norfolk?' As Ann reaches the back, a pair of rail tickets fall out: to Edinburgh, via any reasonable route. One outward, one return. Standard class. Adult one, child nil .

Ann shoves everything back into the rucksack and stands up. Without registering to herself what she is about to do, Ann opens Alice's wardrobe. Clothes are racked along the rail evenly - Alice's on one side, John's on the other. Ann touches them with her hand. Metal coat-hangers clack together. John's shirts are lined up, two or three to a hanger, his trousers and jeans folded over each other on the spar beneath. Alice's side - which takes up over two-thirds of the rail - is more elaborate, a mix of velvets, silk, embroidery, sparkly cardigans, lace dresses. At the bottom, shoes are mixed up - a trainer nestles between a pair of black sandals; a ridiculously high strappy shoe rests on top of a heavy, mud-rubbed boot. At the point where Alice's clothes meet John's, a red slip dress hangs next to a blue cotton shirt, slightly crumpled. It makes Ann cry, their clothes hanging

together like this, it makes her cry a lot. And she's not sure who she's crying for: for her daughter, yes, the thought of whose death makes her feel like a glove pulled inside out on itself; for John who should never ever have died when Alice loved him so; and a part of her cries for herself, whose clothes would never hang like this with anyone's.

H 3

The sitting-room door opened slowly and Alice crept in, clutching a pillow to her chest. It was late morning, but she hadn't yet opened the curtains so the room was in half-light. The ringing of the phone stopped abruptly as the answering-machine clicked on: 'Alice? It's Rachel. I know you're there so pick up the phone.'

Alice didn't move but stared, unfocused, at the ceiling. 'Come on, Alice, pick up . . . OK. So, this is the . . . what?

. sixteenth or seventeeth message I've left for you. Is your machine working? Have we fallen out without me noticing? Are you still alive?'

Alice heard her friend pause and sigh. The tape hissed gently. 'Right. Have it your way. I'll call again later.'

It was only after she had hung up and the tape had finished its little ritual of winding and rewinding that Alice backed out of the room and closed the door behind her.

Rachel bangs on the door again with the hardest bones of her knuckles.

'Who is it?' Alice's voice comes from behind the door.

'It's me. Open the door, for fuck's sake.'

There is a pause then she hears the flicking, clicking slide of a lock being drawn back. The door swings open. The two

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women stare at each other, Rachel with her hand on her hip, her mouth pursed. Rachel is puzzled, but can't quite say why. Alice looks different - well, even. Her eyes look brighter and she has more colour in her cheeks.

'So?' Rachel enquires. 'So what?'

'So, what's going on?'

'Nothing.' Alice looks at her defiantly. 'What do you mean?'

'You don't call me, you ignore my messages. Alice, it's been almost three weeks since I last saw you.'

'Has it?' she says vaguely, her eyes following a car going down the road.

Rachel sighs, seeing this is going to get them nowhere. 'Can I come in, then?'

'Um.' A shadow of panic passes over Alice's face, then she relaxes her grip on the door jamb. 'I suppose so, yes.'

'Thanks,' Rachel mutters, as she steps into the hall.