Alice and the Fly (11 page)

Then I ran. My feet were numb and ached in the cold but I just kept on running. I must have kept running for nearly an hour. There weren’t many cars about and for a while I ran right along the middle of the carriageway, but then the school traffic started and I carried on along the pavement. I ignored the pain of my breathing, the stitch in my side. I ran the bus route, all the way down the Social De-cline. All the way out to the Pitt. I needed to see you. I knew that once I did, everything would be OK.

By the time I reached the church it was starting to snow. I leant against the wall, breathing deeply.

The sign said:

FORGIVE AS THE LORD FORGAVE YOU

I passed the Rat and Dog and turned, heading down towards the park. I crossed over to your estate.

And then I stopped. Scraps was there. He was standing in the middle of the road, sniffing at a pigeon that was spread across the tarmac. He stared at me for a second, recognition in his eyes. He bounded over.

I knelt to him. We were both panting. He sniffed at my pocket, licked my hands. I told him I didn’t have any salmon, sorry. I asked what he was doing out in the street.

Then I looked up and saw you, standing at the corner. I stepped back from Scraps. He woofed at me.

‘There you are,’ you said. You were talking to Scraps. He trotted over and you took hold of his collar and rubbed his head and told me you were sorry, glancing sideways through your red curling hair. You weren’t wearing your sunglasses.

In my head I said, ‘Say something, say something, say something,’ but I didn’t say anything.

Then you walked away. I thought maybe that was it. I was too scared to speak but inside I was aching for you to say something else, anything else.

You’d nearly reached the corner again when you stopped and turned to me.

You said, ‘You’re in my school, aren’t you?’ and I nodded and you smiled and said, ‘I’ve seen you on the bus. You live round here?’

I nodded again. It’s not lying, really, it was just nodding.

You asked my name and I told you.

You said, ‘I’m Alice.’

I tried my best to think of what to say next but my mind wasn’t processing anything. The snow was getting thick. It gathered in your hair.

‘Well, see you around.’ You walked to the corner, holding Scraps by his collar. Scraps looked back over his shoulder a few seconds before turning back to you. I just stood there, watching through the snow.

At the corner you turned back one last time. You said, ‘By the way, you shouldn’t stand there.’

I swallowed.

‘On three grids,’ you said.

I looked down. You were right – I was standing on a set of three grids. I stepped off onto regular plain pavement.

‘It’s unlucky.’

So Mum and my father and Ken Hampton and Ursula Hampton are sitting at the dining-room table with knives and forks and big white plates of blackened salmon and mango rice and chipotle-whatever-it’s-called and they’re smiling and there are trumpets sounding softly from over in the lounge and nobody’s talking because everybody’s politely waiting to see who’ll be the first to take that first bite of delicious-looking salmon and Mum thinks but isn’t sure that one of the Hamptons should be the first to take a bite because after all they’re the guests but Ursula Hampton is sure that Mum should be the first to take a bite and ‘lead the meal’ because after all she’s the host and the only sounds are the long swooping trumpet-notes as they glide from Mum’s subwoofer in the lounge, past the vases of glittering black twigs and tall glass candlesticks supporting thick purple red-grape-scented candles to harmonise over the heads of the four diners, who still sit and still smile and still wait for someone to start eating and in the end it’s Ken Hampton who takes the initiative and under the polite-smiling gaze of the other three diners cuts a small slice of salmon and spreads it with mango rice and chipotle-whatever-it’s-called until his fork is loaded with an even mixture of the textures and flavours compiled on his steaming plate, nodding in turn to each of the diners before raising his fork to his lips, however as he does so there’s this small but audible clink, Ken’s fork stopping dead before his face, Ken’s red and bushy eyebrows crawling into a frown upon his forehead and as a third trumpet joins the two soft trumpets playing a slightly louder, slightly sadder note it becomes clear that although Ken’s smiling lips have parted, his white wall of smiling teeth beneath have not and no matter how much Ken strains against the locked hinges of his jaw he cannot seem to part his teeth, cannot allow the blackened salmon and mango rice access to his mouth, cannot experience that smoky Mexican chipotle flavour, cannot do anything in fact but let the forkful of food slip back to his plate, splattering amongst his rice and splashing mango sauce up onto his salmon-pink shirt and by now several more trumpets have joined the increasingly sad trumpet music, this time playing even lower and more sustained notes, thick and deep like subtle but relentless foghorns and the focus of the diners has shifted to Ursula who’s attempting to take some of the limelight off Ken by slicing into her own plate of blackened salmon and mango rice and chipotle-whatever-it’s-called, delicately arranging a mixture of fish and rice on her fork before lifting it to her still-smiling lips, but as Ursula attempts to take a bite she too is met by a small but audible clink and she too finds her teeth unopenable and she too strains against her jaw-locked mouth but cannot get a single ounce of Mum’s delicious-looking blackened salmon past her gleaming white teeth and so she too finds her forkful of salmon splashing back into the mango sauce, speckling the tablecloth with a scattering of sauce spots and so as the trumpet music squeals ever louder from the subwoofer speakers in the lounge the focus of the four smiling diners turns to Mum who, even through her beaming smile, is clearly so appalled and embarrassed at her disaster-of-a-dinner-party that she has no choice but to take control, to ‘lead the meal’, to politely smilingly dig into her own plate of blackened salmon, mango rice, chipotle-whatever-it’s-called and show them how it’s done but as Mum obligingly slices into the food on her plate it becomes pretty obvious before she even raises her fork that her chances of success are likely to be similar to Ken and Ursula’s, that Mum is more than likely also going to suffer the inevitable clink, the inevitable jaw-lock, the inevitable slip-of-food-from-fork, yet still Mum persists, still raising her fork, still parting her lips, still trying her best to jab that fork through her still-sealed teeth and by now several more trumpets have joined the increasingly loud trumpet music, squealing chaotically and distorting harshly and far surpassing the appropriate volume for background music and my father is also trying to join in and eat some salmon and so now all four diners are attempting to open their jaws, to break past their smiles, to eat the food that Mum has spent so long preparing but no matter how much they fork, how desperate their eyes look, how many drips of sweat fleck the plates before them, they can’t seem to manage to stop smiling long enough to get a single forkful of salmon into the warm wetness of their mouths and the trumpets are wailing now, sustaining unmatching notes for far longer than any trumpeter could possibly blow and the diners are practically stabbing the cutlery into their faces, my father resorting to holding his fork towards him like a samurai when they stab themselves in old movies and he’s thrusting with all his might at his mouth and Ursula Hampton’s hair has slipped down over her eyes and she is hack-hack-hacking away at her face until eventually she misses her teeth and hacks off a hunk of the side of her cheek and Mum is now trying to pry open her jaw with her stainless steel knife and Ursula’s blood is staining the tablecloth and the jazz is building into a sort of swarming buzzing freestyle-jazz frenzy and as Ken Hampton finally breaks through his two front teeth two long curling black legs begin to wriggle out through the gap and

It’s official: Christmas is coming. Mum’s decorations arrived this morning. We have two new artificial Christmas trees. Mum buys new trees every year. She says she can tell when a tree’s spent eleven months in the loft.

Mum’s down in the dining room, singing ‘Suspicious Minds’. She got the call from the Hamptons yesterday: she and my father are invited to the New Year’s bash. Mum’s been singing Elvis non-stop all morning. Every so often she comes up to show me a new bauble or strip of tinsel or the various twinkle-settings of her White-Gold Icicle fairy lights. My father hasn’t been home since Tuesday.

I feel better today but Mum won’t let me out of bed. She says she wants me strong for work. She doesn’t want to let Ken Hampton down. I doubt Ken Hampton would care if I wasn’t strong for work (I’ve never even seen him set foot in the butcher’s) but it’s not bad spending a few days in bed. I haven’t had to get dressed or eat at the dinner table. I haven’t had to wade out through the snow to school. All I do is lie here, watching film after film from my Retro Hollywood video collection. This morning I watched
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
. I snuck a box of Waitrose Maple Triple Nut Muesli up to my room and crunched my way through two hours of 1940s-New-York-related bliss. That final scene gets me every time: Holly and Fred and the little wet cat in the rain. Audrey Hepburn clutching the collar of George Peppard’s coat. I think you’re prettier than Audrey Hepburn.

Mum’s spent the last few days looking for my window-key. She wants to air my room before the sick-smell contaminates the rest of the house. She says a house should smell like nothing but fresh air. It was fresh air made me sick in the first place. On Monday, after you spoke to me, I spent hours out in the cold. I was out in the Pitt all alone and I needed some time to think.

I thought about going to Nan’s old house, on Kirk Lane, but sometimes my father goes there with his secretaries and in the end I decided against it. I walked to the church instead. I sat on the wall outside. I wrote in my journal. I watched the snow transform the Pitt around me, cars and walls and bins and cans and bottles becoming shapes, carpeted in white.

At one point a gang of kids emerged from the houses up the road, their upturned faces amber in the street lights. They set about building a snowman – some rolling the snow while others ran home to collect the facial fruits. They constructed it out on the corner, a mountain of a thing with two cooking apples for eyes. It was only when they’d finished that I realised the snow was covering me, gathering in my hair and the fur of my parka. I was becoming a snowman myself. I stood and shook off and one of the kids pointed and screamed and turned and ran and the others followed, disappearing into the everwhitening Pitt.

I waded back to Skipdale. The snow was up to my knees. It twirled around me like leaves in a breeze. The cars on the dual carriageway were rolling along the same speed I was wading. I don’t know what time it was when I arrived home. As I stepped into the hallway I heard mumbling voices, clinking cutlery, slow jazz. I heard the correctly pronounced ‘ha-ha’s in Ursula Hampton’s laughter. I heard the door slip shut behind me. I heard the slow jazz end and the talking cease and then silence, real silence.

I swallowed and stepped into view. There they were: Ursula, Ken, my father, all perched in the candlelight with wide eyes and smiles and plates of blackened salmon. Mum had her back to me. She kept her head down. I was glad in a way because even if she’d turned I don’t think I’d have been able to look her in the eye. The slow jazz started up again – a trumpet wailing.

Ken Hampton said my name. He said it as if it were a question, raising his eyebrows, closing the gap between them and his thick black hair. He was wearing a pink shirt, the three undone buttons causing it to clash with the fuzzy layer of orange on his chest. He said he didn’t know I was joining them this evening and my father immediately said that I wasn’t, that he thought I was at a friend’s, why wasn’t I at a friend’s? My father’s voice was loudening. This was a bad sign. He kept glancing at Mum, chewing the inside of his cheek.

‘Beautiful night,’ Ursula said. I nodded. I was still shivering from the wade back. The bottoms of my trousers were caked in snow. The smell of salmon churned my stomach. It dawned on me that my current symptoms – nausea, shivering, tight-locked jaw – were the same ones I get as a result of seeing one of
Them
. It further dawned on me that I had in fact seen one of
Them
, only a few hours earlier, creeping down the back of Goose’s fleece and that I hadn’t yet experienced any of the usual effects. I waited a few seconds, breathing deeply, staring at the floor, unsure whether to continue upstairs to my room.

Somebody spoke. At first the words didn’t register and I glanced from face to face, waiting for whoever it was to repeat what they’d said. We’d entered into a conversation now and I knew I’d have to wait there, under the Hamptons’ gaze. Wait until they deemed it fit to let me go, until they gave me the opportunity to run up to my pretty-much-impenetrable bedroom, to close my door and position my brown and green striped draught-excluder snake and crawl into my bed, safe and warm and alone.

It must have been Ken who’d spoken because he repeated his question. He asked how I was finding things at the butcher’s. In my head I told him I hated it. I told him I didn’t even need his money, that it was just building up in a video-case in my room. I told him, ‘Shove your job up your ass.’ The whole time I was in my head telling him these things there was slow jazz and smiling faces. Ursula sipped her champagne. My legs were trembling. I wasn’t saying anything. I was just standing there not saying anything. Mum raised her hand to her forehead.

Then Ursula asked me how school was. I nodded an ‘OK’ and tried to smile but I couldn’t tell if they even noticed my smile because they were all already smiling, even my father, who never smiles.

‘He’s doing very well at English, aren’t you, Greg?’ my father said.

Ursula Hampton repeated the word ‘English’ and asked if I wanted to be an English teacher when I grew up and I nodded again, like it was appropriate to just stand there and nod at everything they said, which, by the look on Ursula’s face, it wasn’t. Ken also nodded for a few seconds, his brow creasing into three distinct lines like the claw of some wild animal, whilst he thought of something else to say. He asked what I thought of the new couch. Ursula shot him a frown. She turned back to me and smiled.