After You'd Gone (23 page)

'Are you doing your Highers this year?' he asked.

'Yeah. What about you? Are you doing CSYS like Kirsty? ' 'Uh-huh.'

'What will you do then?'

'Don't know yet. My mum wants me to be a doctor, but I want to go to art college. Like my dad.'

'Do it, then. It's vour life, not hers. '

'Yes, I know.' He
^-
sounded miserable. Alice started to feel

a bit sorry for him . He turned to her with a grin. 'You don't like hockey, do you?'

'What?' She stared at him. 'No, I don't. How do you

know?'

'I have double history first thing Friday morning, and you have games. I'm in the history block, here,' he demonstrated with his hand, 'and you're on the playing-field here,' he put his other hand next to it, 'right beside the window.' He grinned again. 'I sit by the window. You always look well pissed off.'

She laughed. 'I am. I hate it.'

'I could tell, ' he said. Then he stopped walking and took her elbow. 'Alice . . . um . . . why don't we stay out here for a bit?'

She shifted uneasily, pushing her hands up farther inside her sleeves. 'I don't know. I should be getting back, I think.' 'You can stay a bit longer.' He put his arms around her tentatively. She felt his body pressing against hers, felt various points meeting with the corresponding points of hers his

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chest against her breasts, his thighs against the length of her own, the gentle bulge of his groin pressing against hers through his trousers and the thin material of her skirt. His arms were whiplash thin, but strong as he held her more and more tightly to him.

She stood still, unsure. He began to speak. 'I really like you, Alice. I've watched you at school and I think you're really

. . . you're really . . . nice. I know you're a bit younger than me and everything, but I think it would be OK, don't you? I mean, what do you think?'

Unease slithered in her stomach. The feathers of her boa crushed between them cracked and pricked her through her clothes.

'I don't know,' Alice said, and wriggled away from him. 'I don't know.' She began walking towards the town again.

He caught her by the arm again. 'Alice, will you kiss me?

Please? Will you?'

She looked at him in wonder. Where did this passion come from? His face was suffused with embarrassment and urgency. She thought he might cry. He bent towards her and she found herself again looking straight into his eyes. An awkward, nameless fear leapt within her and she planted the heel of her palm in the centre of his chest. 'No, ' she said, pushing him away. 'No.'

Then she turned and, drawing her feather boa about her, ran towards the houses at the edge of town and didn't stop running until she got home. As her feet thudded rhythmically on the tarmac pavements and her ragged breath burnt in her chest, she replayed over and over in her head what she thought she'd seen. His eyes - they were the same dark brown as hers, with lighter flecks at their centres. Looking into his eyes gave Alice the sensation that she was looking into her own.

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Dr Mike Colman pushes a fifty-pence piece into the thin slot of the coffee machine and waits. A plastic cup is ejected forcefully into the metal tray and topples on to its side. Scalding brown liquid squirts out of the nozzle, over the fallen cup, down the side of the coffee machine and on to his shoes. 'Oh, for fuck's sake.'
_•

He feels his temper fraying at the edges and takes a deep

breath, inserting another coin into the slot. In the corner a woman flicks violently through magazine after magazine, ignoring her companion, an older woman, who asks over and over again, 'How did you think he looked? I thought he looked better. How did you think he looked?'

Two nights ago, Mike had got back well past midnight, desperately needing sleep, and had met Melanie on the landing, sobbing into the worn neck of her teddy bear. The nanny's door had been resolutely shut and he'd lifted her back into bed. 'Why can't Mummy live with us any more?' she'd demanded between hiccuping sobs. He'd stroked her hair - 'We've talked about this before, Melanie, do you remember? Mummy lives with Steven now and you can visit her whenever you want' - when what he really wanted to do was throw back his head and howl like her. She'd gone back to sleep eventually, her hair tangled and her thumb hanging slackly in her mouth.

But then , of course, he couldn't sleep. Fucking Steven - his so-called best friend.

Mike swills the acrid coffee around his mouth, wincing as he swallows. The older woman has subsided into silence and is staring up at the yellow strip-lights. He hates waiting rooms, especially at night. The tiny mathematics of human life. But nothing, nothing was as bad as the period between three and five a.m., when all visitors and day-workers have gone, most of the patients are asleep, and a terrible, breathing hush descends on the wards and corridors. It's during those hours that most deaths in hospitals occur. Mike hates that shift more than anything.

He makes his way back to Intensive Care through the winding white corridors. He never has to think about which turning to take, or read the signs: his sense of direction is good. There are people who've wored here longer than him who still get lost. Mike's method, not that he would ever tell anyone this, is not to think about it, to let his subconscious take over, to occupy his mind with something else while his body and instinct take control. He has a suspicion that if he stopped and thought about which direction to take he'd forget and fumble and lose his way.

In the room, sitting beside the bed, Mike finds a woman in a red dress with streaked blonde hair. 'Hello,' he says.

She shifts in her seat, swivelling her upper body to face him. 'Hi. I'm Rachel.'

Her shoes are high and black, with painfully narrow toes. A briefcase rests on the floor beside the chair. He can tell from the chafing around her eyes that she's been crying. Mike says nothing; but checks the machines and the drip. He presses his thumb to Alice's inert wrist, counting the number of times her heart sends blood hurtling past his touch. He peels back her eyelids, shines a beam into her pupils, one of which is fixed, dark and wide like a sea anemone, the other small, quivering

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a
f t
e r y o u·
d
g o ne

and black. He can feel Rachel's wide-set green eyes watching his every move.

'How is she?' she asks. Her voice has the volume and directness of someone used to getting answers to all her questions.

'How long have you known her?' Mike enquires.

'Years. We met at university.' She tilts her head to look at the figure on the bed. 'She's my best friend, I suppose.' She stands, walks to the window and looks out into the velvet black. 'We lead very different lives now, but we're still close, I'd say.'

'Did you see her parents today?'

'No,' she says, and he can tell without turning round by the way her voice reverberates off the wall in front of him that she's moved from the window and is somewhere at his back, watching him again. 'I think I must have just missed them. I had to work later than I thought tonight.'

Mike adjusts the breathing tube and the cone of plastic strapped to Alice's face. Its edges have made red welts in her skin.

'So,' Rachel says as she comes round the bed and returns to the chair, 'how is she doing?'

'There's no change. ' 'Is that good or bad?' 'It's neither.'

They both look at Alice. Mike notices for the first time that the cuts to her face are hardening into scabs, that her bruises are turning a dark purple-black. He feels again how strange it is that such a major part of the body's working can break down and yet simple things like the healing of skin can just carry on as normal. There is something oddly calming about watching her maybe it's the rhythm of the ventilator or that she never moves, apart from the artificial

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rise and fall of her torso. He lowers himself on to the side of the bed.

'You know, they say it may have been deliberate. A suicide attempt. '

The ventilator sighs once, twice, Alice's chest rising and falling in sympathy. Mike glances at Rachel.

She seems unsurprised, biting her thumbnail with emphatic nips of her white, rather childishly shaped teeth. 'Yes,' she says simply, after a while. 'It had crossed my mind.' Rachel leans forward and runs a finger down the thin skin of her friend's temple. 'Alice, Alice,' she whispers, 'why did you do it?'

'No, no, not like that at all,' Alice says, in a lowered voice into the receiver, trying unsuccessfully
to
suppress her laughter. The office is quiet today, everyone's back bent over their computer screens, and their ears, Alice imagines, tuned into her conversation.

'Well, what, then?' Rachel is shouting at the other end. She's on her mobile, the connection between them fuzzing, the movement of her walking juddering her voice. The line cuts out for a second then returns: ' . . . in bed, or not?' she is saying.

'Rach,' Alice reminds her, 'I'm in the office.'

Rachel sighs. 'OK. You can tell me later. So what about the deep dark secret? Did you manage to get it out of him or didn't you do that much talking?'

'He's Jewish.'

The sound of hooting and car engines comes down the line, then Rachel's voice, suddenly still, as if she's stopped walking. 'How Jewish?'

'What do you mean, how Jewish? Are there degrees of

it?'

'Of course there are.'

'Well,' Alice doesn't know what to say, 'he's . . . he's . .

er . . . he said he's worried about what his dad will think.'

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'I see.'

'It's weird, isn't it?'

'Not really. It's not as if it's uncommon or anything.' 'Oh.' Alice is surprised. 'Isn't it?'

'For God's sake,' Rachel says, 'I forget this about you sometimes.'

' Forget what?'

'That you've spent most of your life holed up in some Scottish village in the middle of nowhere. Of course it's not uncommon. It happens all the bloody time. Is it just a problem with his dad or is it him as well?'

'Um, I'm not sure.' Alice thinks back. 'Both, I think.' 'Hmm ,' Rachel says. 'Look, I'm going to have to go. I've

got to be in court in two minutes. Just . . . just be careful, that's all. Don't get too involved before you know what's what, OK?'

Alice makes her way from Camden Town tube station with her
A-Z
held in front of her. John's street is a narrow, short one that on the map isn't even long enough to contain its own name, held in the fork between Camden Road and Royal College Street. She wends her way up Camden Road, past the World's End pub on the corner where people have spilled out on to the pavement with their glasses in hand. At the lights outside Sainsbury' s, she crosses the road and buys a bottle of wine from a small Algerian shop with banks of exotic vegetables and cacti outside. The man wraps it for her in a twist of moss-green paper and calls after her to 'have a lovely evening, darling' .

After walking up and down a few times, peering at the houses' numbers in the twilight, she decides his house must be near the far end of the narrow street. It is one of a typical north London Victorian terrace. The front door is blue and there are lights on in every window. At the door she can feel

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the vibration of loud music coming from the house. She rings the bell and he opens the door so quickly that she wonders if he was waiting behind it. He looks dishevelled, his shirt all untucked and his hair standing on end. Then they are locked together and he has wrapped his arms around her so tightly she can hardly draw breath. She doesn't know how long they stay like that; it all seems already so familiar - the smell of him and the way her head fits into the curve of his neck, the way he cups his palm around the nape of her neck when he is kissing her. She pulls back to look at him, running her fingertips over his mouth and cheeks. 'It's so good to see you, ' she says unnecessarily.

He reaches past her and shuts the front door. 'Come on in, he says, pulling her by the hand through the hallway into a big high-ceilinged sitting room. Two rooms have, at one time, been knocked together, forming a sweep of floorboards from a bay window at the front to a back door opening out on to a small garden. The walls are painted a dark paprika red, with one whole side of the room taken up with bookshelves. In the corner is a messy-looking desk with his computer and a fax machine that winks and blinks at intervals. There are two scruffy, comfy sofas at right angles to each other and a table, piled high with magazines, papers and books.