After You'd Gone (13 page)

She smiles for the first time. 'It is, I suppose. I'd never say I have a favourite book, but this is one I have read over and over again. I wanted to look at something in it so I brought it with me to read on the tube.' She hands it to him. It has a gloomy painting of an evil-looking boy as its cover.

'What's it about?'

'It's hard to say. You'd have to read it, really. It's the most terrifying book I've ever read. A boy gets followed and tormented by a protean devil called Gilmartin. It's •set in Scotland and Gilmartin pursues him all over these bleak, barren landscapes. You're never quite sure whether the devil is real or just a projection or externalisation of his own evil side.' She shivers and then smiles again.

'Oh,' he says, a little bemused. He gropes for a suitable and non-vacuous response, coming up with: 'You're Scottish, aren't you?'

'Yes. I only discovered it when I went to university, though. We had this reading room in the main library with a vast, domed ceiling. You were forbidden to talk and got

shouted at if you breathed too loudly. It was always full of rows and rows of serious academics with obscure, out-of-print tomes propped up in front of them. I was reading this one day, in late afternoon when it was just getting dark outside. I'd just reached a particularly scary bit - where they are digging up this ancient body that's still intact - when I felt a hand grip my shoulder from behind. I screamed really loudly and the noise echoed and bounced around the huge ceiling. People were horrified. It was only a friend asking me if I wanted to go for a cup of tea. I frightened the life out of him too. '

It has clicked for John - that description of the reading room. 'I was there too!' he shouts.

'Where?'

'The library . . . I mean, the university . . . I mean, I was at university with you!

She is immediately suspicious. 'Were you?' 'When did you leave?'

'Um . . . five years ago. No, four.'

'I knew it! I knew it!' He feels like getting up and dancing around the room. 'I knew I'd seen you somewhere before! I graduated six years ago, which must have been . . .'

'My first year, or the end of it,' she finishes for him and, scanning his face, says bluntly, 'I don't remember you at all.' 'No, well, I don't really remember you. Not properly.

You just look vaguely familiar. I probably saw you around the library or something, although I don't think I heard you scream.'

'You're not going to put that in your article, are you?' She looks genuinely worried.

'No. It will go no further - famous last words of a journalist.'

There is a pause. John leans back in his chair, lacing his hands behind his head.

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Alice looks about her. 'So . . .' she says eventually, 'Are we going to do it here?'

'What?'

'The interview. '

'Of course, of course. The interview. I thought we might go up to the canteen. Is that OK with you?'

She nods, getting up.

The strangest thing about this is that a thought can go on and on circling your mind, that you can't stop obsessing over it, that there are no brakes to apply to things you no longer want to think about. In normal life, you distract yourself - pick up a newspaper, go out for a walk, turn on the television, phone somebody up. You can throw your mind a sop, trick yourself into thinking you're all right, that the thing that's been haunting you is resolved. It won't work for long, of course - an hour, two hours if you're lucky - because nobody's that stupid and because these things always come back to you when you're once more idle and distractionless. In the small, dark hours of the night, when you're being rocked into blank-mindedness on a bus.

The problem with being like this is that you are constant prey to these exhausting cycles of thought. Just now, I am getting no rest from how terrible it is that he doesn't know.

He who knows me better than anyone else has no idea of this. No inkling. We think we know everything there possibly is to know about each other. And then suddenly I discover this massive thing that alters the whole path of my life.

It's like those kitsch religious cards you can buy in Catholic countries; the ones with a ridged, plastic finish that just look strange and lurid and three-dimensional until you tilt them and discover another picture behind the first. You can make it look as if Mary is bringing her hands up to pray, or Jesus is blessing

you, or that the angels are crying. To me it feels as if everything has been tilted to reveal this whole other picture which has existed, just out of sight, all along.

I keep trying - over and over, because I can't switch it off, can't fool myself into numbness with meaningless activities - to imagine what he would say; how he might have reacted if I had come back to a house with him in it, and said, 'John, I saw the most terrible thing today. You won't believe what I saw, let me tell you what I saw.'

'Hold still, Alice,' Ann scolds, gripping Alice's shin between her knees. Her mother has placed her up on the kitchen counter. She's trodden on a bee and got stung in the soft, blue part of her foot. Yet again. 'How many times have we told you not to go barefoot in the garden? How many?'

Alice shrugs, sobbing. It's the shock more than the pain, really. Although the pain is quite astonishing, shooting up way beyond her knee, making her foot swell up so that the ankle bones disappear into the flesh like raisins into cake mix.

Alice would really prefer Elspeth to be doing this, but she's not sure where she is. As soon as it happened, she'd started screaming, Kirsty had run into the house shouting, 'Mummeeeeeeee, Alice has stepped on another beeeeeeeeeee!' and Ann had come rushing into the garden, scooped her up and deposited her here in the kitchen.

'Put your foot in the water.' Ann had filled the basin next to Alice with cold water. Alice, for a reason unfathomable both to her and to Ann, refuses. 'Put it in, Alice.'

'Where's Granny?' she manages to say between sobs. She sees her mother 's face fall slightly, twitch downwards. Then Ann rights herself, seizes Alice's ankle and forces her foot into the water. Alice lets out a piercing shriek and thrashes her foot about. Both of them get soaked. They grapple and

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Ann manages to pin both of Alice's arms to her sides. When Alice is fully immobilised, Ann says, through gritted teeth, 'If you don't put your foot in the water, the swelling won't go down. If the swelling doesn't go down, we can't get the sting out. If we can't get the sting out, it won't stop hurting. Why do you never do as I ask?' Alice struggles again in her mother's arms. Ann squeezes her all the tighter and leans all her weight on the child's body. 'You won't be told, will you? You're just like your bloody father.'

The words, barely audible, are vicious and fly from Ann's mouth like hornets. Even aged eight, Alice is surprised. She looks out of the window at her father's silhouette, bending over, digging holes in the flower border down the side of the house. He is trailed by the diminutive figure of her younger sister, who drops bulbs into the holes from a brown paper bag held in their father's hands. 'Good girl,' he is saying to Beth, 'that's very good.' Alice feels a heat emanating from her mother's face, clamped to hers because of their fight, and she turns to see her mother pressing her teeth down into her lip, a rush of sudden blood staining her pale cheeks.

Ann lets go of her, but she sits still, not crying now, letting her mother search her footsole for the sting. Alice is aware something has happened, but she doesn't know what exactly. Is her mother upset· because she asked for Elspeth? She wants to ask her mother this but can't think of the right words to say it. Ann is silent, her head bent, her hands gentle now. Alice gets a funny, liquid feeling under her ribs. She wants to say she's sorry, she's sorry for being naughty, she's sorry for asking for Granny. She would like her mother to press her hands to her hot, clammy face.

Ann straightens up triumphantly. 'There!'

She lifts Alice down and holds out the sting for her to see. They peer at it together. It is tiny, spear-shaped, brown and

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brittle. It clings to the whorls and ridges of her mother's finger. Alice is amazed that something so small could cause that amount of pain. 'Can I have it? Can I have it?'

'No.'

'Please!'

'What on earth do you want it for?'

Alice can't think of a reason, but she knows she wants it. She wants to hold it, to look at it for a long time. She hangs off her mother's arm. 'Please! Please can I have it?'

Uncharacteristically, Ann relents and, bending down, trans fers it from her finger to Alice's. She then goes from the room and Alice hears her walk quickly upstairs and close her bedroom door. But Alice isn't thinking about this at the time, she is holding the bee-sting in the crook of her middle finger, where she carries it for the rest of the day.

Afterwards, he walked with her to the lift. It seemed to take a long time for it to come and Alice couldn't think of anything to say to him.

'You don't have to wait with me. I'm sure I can find my way out.'

'No, no. I don't mind. '

An overweight man in a loosened tie breezed through the lobby and said, 'All right, John?' and, casting his eyes appraisingly over Alice, winked at him. She pretended she hadn't noticed. John was furious, she could tell. A vein pulsed in his temple.

'Have you got a lot to do this afternoon?' .she asked him, to break the silence.

'Yes, as usual.'

'When did you become a journalist?'

'Straight after university. I did an MA at City University and then had various smallish jobs. I've been here for a year now.'

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The lift arrived with a computerised ding.

'Well, thanks for lunch. When's the article due out?' 'Next Thursday, I think. I could phone you to let you know, if you want.'

She went into the lift. 'Oh, don't worry about that. You've probably got enough to do.'

'No, it's not a problem . . . Alice!' He thrust his foot between the closing doors, which crashed open again. 'Shit . that hurt. ' 'Are you OK?'

He massaged his foot, leaning on one of the lift doors to stop them closing. 'Just about. It's not funny, you know, I could have lost a foot and it would have been your fault.'

'Ihardly think so. Anyway, it would have been an industrial accident, wouldn't it? You'd have got millions in compensa tion.'

At that moment a grim-faced woman walked into the lift. 'I was wondering if . . . whether you would like to . . .'

he faltered, as the woman fidgeted pointedly with her watch. '. . . Er . . . Iwondered if Icould borrow that book.'

She was taken aback. 'Well, yes. Do you really want

to?'

'I'd love to.'

She reached into her bag and handed it to him. He took it

and stepped back. 'I'll give it back to you.'

Alice was about to say that there was no need but the doors closed.

Rachel had just returned from an early lecture and was knocking on Alice's door. 'Alice? Are you awake? Are you dressed?'

Alice was sitting in bed with a book propped up on her knees. The curtains were open and the mid-morning sunlight

formed triangles of light on the carpet. 'Yes, come in. How was the lecture?'

Rachel appeared in the doorway still in her coat and scarf, clutching a parcel. 'Boring, actually. Guess what came for you in the post.'

'What?'

'It's from New York.'

Alice put her hands over her eyes. 'I don't want it! Take it away!'

Rachel sat down on the bed and tossed the parcel into

Alice's lap. 'Open it, go on. It could be something nice, something expensive.'

Alice turned it over in her hands. There was no return address but the handwriting was unmistakably Mario's. It was an ordinary brown padded envelope and what was in it was light, bulky and squashable, giving easily to the pressure of her fingers. What was it? Clothes?

'You open it,' she said, pushing it into Rachel's hands. 'No. It's addressed to you. You open it.'

Alice peeled back the SeHotape on one end of the envelope and held it upside down, shaking whatever it was into her hand. What came out was so shocking that things registered in reverse order in her mind. I:Iair. A lot of hair. Black hair. Curly, tangled hair. Familiar hair. Hair cut in one hack from someone's head. Hair she'd felt between her fingers before. Mario's hair.

Both girls shrieked loudly and leapt from the bed. From the other side of the room they clutched each other, Alice frantically shaking loose strands from her fingers, and looked at it, nestling in a black clump on the bedclothes, like some overgrown rodent.

'Jesus Christ, the man's a psycho,' Rachel muttered.

Alice jumped up and down, rubbing her hands on her

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pyjamas, 'Uuuuurrrgggh! Yuk, yuk, yuk! It's horrible. God, what a thing to do.' Having it in her hands, feeling again its ravelled spirals and curves, brought back with a slamming force the time she had slept with him. It was as if he was there in the room with them, not thousands of miles away across an icy Atlantic. She looked about despairingly. 'What do we do with it?'

'We throw it away.'

'I can't. I'm not touching it again.'

Rachel picked up Alice's waste-paper basket and marched over to the bed, brandishing it before her. She swept the hair into it and carried it downstairs. Alice heard her emptying it into the wheelie-bin at the front of the house.

'Thank you, Rachel,' she called. 'Any time.'

But for weeks, Alice would find stray strands hooked into a teacup, coiled around the soap or clinging to her tongue, making her spit and hiss.

John prowled around the lobby, banging himself on the head with the book.

'You fucking coward, you fucking, fucking coward.' This was the last thing he needed.

When Alice got back to the office later on that afternoon, Susannah was beaming at her across the room.

'What's up with you, Cheshire Cat?' Alice said, as she sat down at her desk.

'You've had a call,' Susannah said, and was then distracted

by something on her computer. 'Who from?'

'That man,' Susannah said absently, peering closely at her screen.

John Friedmann, Alice thought irrationally, and was immedi ately cross with herself. She started flicking through her card indexes. 'Which man?' she said, as if she didn't really care.

'That man. Whatshisname. You know.'

Alice stopped flicking. 'Suze, do you think you could be a little more specific?'

'Sorry.' Susannah turned to face her, concentrating on her now. 'That man from the organisation in Paris.'

'Oh.' Alice fought a feeling of intense disappointment. 'That man.' This was ridiculous. She couldn't be getting all hung up over that journalist. Could she?

'Isn't he the one you've been trying to get through to all week?' Susannah was looking at her, puzzled by her unenthusiastic response.

'Yes. Yes, he is.'

Alice, for something to do, opened her diary.

'But he's called you back. This is good news, isn't it?' Susannah persisted, 'I mean, it probably means he wants to do the project with you, doesn't it?'

'I hope so. I'll call him back in a minute.'

There was a pause. Alice, feeling that Susannah was still looking at her, kept her head bent over her diary, filling in needless appointments.

'How was the interview, by the way?'

'Oh . . . fine . . . all right . . . yeah, great. Well . . . it was . . . fine, actually.'

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At the sound of the bell jangling on its wire, Elspeth comes out of the back room of the Oxfam shop to see her afternoon replacement already taking off her coat at the till: a largish, florid-faced woman in a turquoise plastic mac.

'You're early today,' Elspeth remarks.

'Yes,' the woman tells her, 'it's good to get out the house early on a day like today.'

Elspeth feels uneasy about this woman. Always has. She wears those glasses that react to the light. In today's bright sunshine, you can't see her eyes at all. Can't trust someone who won't show you their eyes. And she always brings her dog into the shop. It's a nice enough dog, but it smells. Puts folk off.

Outside the shop, Elspeth hesitates. She needs to go to the supermarket to buy something for the girls' tea when they come home from school, but she does have this extra half-hour to spare that she hadn't bargained for. On an impulse, she turns away from the direction of home and walks towards the end of the High Street, saying hello to various people on the way. She turns right at the chip shop down Quality Street and crosses over to the Lodge Grounds.

She doesn't come here often, but it's one of her favourite places in the town. She likes the way its cultivated prettiness is caught midway between the wide, flat sweep of the beaches

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and the gorse-covered cragginess of the Law. Even though it's a weekday, people with buggies and prams are wandering up and down the uneven, winding concrete paths, looking at the plants or just enjoying the sun. Passing the aviary, she shudders. Elspeth has never seen the attraction of caged birds.

At the brow of the hill, she sees a small gaggle of teenagers in the red and black uniform of the High School. A quick scan of the group assures her that neither Kirsty nor Alice is among them. It was last year that she came face to face with a shame-faced Kirsty and two of her friends down by the harbour at eleven o'clock on a Wednesday morning. Elspeth had promised to say nothing if Kirsty gave her her word that it wouldn't happen again.

Elspeth, still feeling a little like a child let out of school early herself, sits down on a green bench with the crazy golf course behind her and the town and the sea in front of her. It was at about this spot that she and her then fiance Robert had been walking when they met a man to whom Robert introduced her as Gordon Raikes. Elspeth knew of the Raikes family, their large house on Marmion Road and their golf-club factory on the outskirts of the town, but she had never met their youngest son, Gordon. He'd been away at school and then at St Andrews University, Robert told her, as she and Gordon looked dumbly at each other. As she always told him later, she might as well have taken off Robert's engagement ring there and then. She and Robert had walked away together and as they went round a corner to go down the slope, Elspeth had turned and seen him, still standing there beside the privet hedge, looking after them. It must have been here. There were no concrete paths then, of course, only dust-soil ones that turned to churned mud in the rain.

She'd met him again a week later on the blustery High Street, both with their mothers, both weighed down with