After You'd Gone (2 page)

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To my mother

for not being like Alice's

A C K N OW L E D G E M E NTS

My thanks to: Alexandra Pringle, Victoria Hobbs, Geraldine Cooke, Kate Jones, Barbara Trapido, Elspeth Barker, William Sutcliffe, Flora Gathorne-Hardy, Saul Venit, Ruth Metzstein, Georgie Bevan, Jo Aitchison, Ellis Woodman, John Hole, Morag and Esther McRae

Whatever has happened, happens always

A N D R E W G R E I G

The past falls open anywhere

MI C H A E L D O N A G H Y

p rologu e

The day she would try to kill herself. she realised winter was coming

again. She had been lying on her side, her knees drawn up; she'd sighed, and the heat of her breath had vaporised in the cold air of the bedroom. She pushed the air out of her lungs again, watching. Then she did it again, and again. Then she wrenched back the covers and got up. Alice hated winter.

It must have been around 5 a.m.; she didn't need to look at her clock, she could tell from the glow behind the curtains. She'd been awake most of the night. The weak dawn light cast the walls, bed and floor in greyish-blue granite, and her shadow as she crossed the floor was a grainy, unfocused smudge.

In the bathroom, she twisted the tap and drank straight from it, bending over and pushing her mouth into the pressurised, icy flow, gasping with the shock of the cold. Wiping her face on the back of her hand, she filled the toothmug and watered the plants on the bath edge. It had been so long since she'd cared for them that the parched soil didn't absorb the water, and it collected on the surface in accusing, mercuried drops.

Alice dressed quickly, putting on whatever clothes she found discarded on the floor. She stood at the window, looking down into the street for a moment, then went downstairs, slinging her bag over her shoulder, closing the

3

front door behind her. Then she just walked, head bent, coat pulled around her.

She walked through the streets. She passed shops with drawn-down, padlocked shutters, street-cleaning lorries scrub bing the kerbs with great circular black brushes, a group of bus drivers smoking and chatting on a corner, their hands curled around polystyrene cups of steaming tea. They stared as she passed, but she saw none of this. She saw nothing but her feet moving beneath her, disappearing and reappearing from under her with a rhythmic regularity.

It was almost fully light when she realised she'd reached King's Cross. Taxis were swinging in and out of its forecourt, people milled through its doors. She wandered inside, with a vague idea of buying a cup of coffee, perhaps, or something to eat. But when she entered the white-lit building, she became mesmerised by the vast expanse of the departures board. Numbers and letters flicker-flacked over each other; city names and times were being arranged and rearranged in letters caught on hidden electronic rollers. She read the names to herself - Cambridge, Darlington, Newcastle. I could go to any of these places. If I wanted to. Alice felt up her sleeve for the bulk of her watch. It was too big for her, really, its face wider than her wrist, but she'd pierced the scuffed strap with extra holes. She glanced at it, then automatically lowered her arm again before realising that she hadn't in fact taken in what she'd seen. She raised the watch to her face again, concentrating this time. She even pressed the little button at the side that illuminated the tiny grey screen - where constantly shifting liquid crystal displayed the time, date, altitude, air pressure and temperature - in a bright peacock-blue light. She had never worn a digital watch before this. It had been one of John's. His watch told her it was 6.20 a.m. And that it was a Saturday.

Alice turned her face up again to the departures board.

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Glasgow, Peterborough, York, Aberdeen, Edinburgh. Alice blinked. Read it again: Edinburgh. She could go home. See her family. If she wanted to. She looked to the top of the column to see the train's time - 6.30 a.m. Did she want to? Then she was walking fast towards the ticket office and signing her name in cramped, cold-handed writing. 'The Scottish Pullman to Edinburgh' the sign said as she got on, and she almost smiled. She slept on the train, her head resting against the thrum ming window, and she was almost surprised to see her sisters waiting at the end of the platform in Edinburgh. But then she remembered calling Kirsty from the train. Kirsty had her baby in a sling and Beth, Alice's younger sister, had Annie, Kirsty's daughter, by the hand. They were straining up on tiptoe to find her and when they caught sight of her, they waved. Kirsty hitched Annie on to her hip and they ran towards her. Then she was hugging both of them at once and although she knew their boisterousness masked concern and she really wanted to show them she was all right, she was fine, the feel of both her sisters' hands pressing into her spine meant that she had to turn her head away and pick up Annie and pretend to be

burying her face in the child's neck.

They hustled her to the station cafe, divested her of her bag and placed in front of her a coffee adorned with white froth and a sprinkling of chocolate. Beth had done an exam the day before and she related the questions she'd been asked and how the invigilator had smelt. Kirsty, trailing nappies, feeding bottles, jigsaws, Plasticine, held the baby, Jamie, in the crook of her arm while expertly harnessing Annie into a pair of reins. Alice rested her chin in her hands, listened to Beth and watched Annie cover a piece of newspaper with green crayon. The vibrations of Annie's strenuous efforts travelled across the table and up the twin violin-bow bones of Alice's forearms to reverberate in her cranium.

5

She got up and went out of the caf
e
to find the toilet, leaving Kirsty and Beth discussing what to do that day. She crossed the waiting room and pushed through the steel turnstile into the station Superloo. She couldn't have been absent from

the caf
e
table where her sisters and niece and nephew were

sitting for more than four minutes, but during that time she saw something so odd and unexpected and sickening that it was as if she'd glanced in the mirror to discover that her face was not the one she thought she had. Alice looked, and it seemed to her that what she saw undercut everything she had left. And everything that had gone before. She looked again, and then again. She was sure, but didn't want to be.

She bolted out of her loo, shoving her way through the turnstile. In the middle of the concourse, she stopped still for a moment. What would she say to her sisters? Can't think about this now, she told herself, just can't; and she slammed down on top of it something heavy and wide and flat, sealing up the edges, tight as a clam.

She was walking fast back through the cafe, reaching down beside her chair for her bag.

'Where are you going?' Kirsty asked. 'I have to go,' Alice said.

Kirsty stared at her. Beth stood up. 'Go?' Beth repeated. 'Go where?' 'Back to London.'

'What?' Beth sprang forward and seized hold of the coat Alice was pulling on. 'But you can't. You've only just got here.'

'Have to go.'