After You'd Gone (35 page)

John loomed into her vision above her, blurred by the plastic she was looking through. 'Where?' He lay down on top of her. There was a ricochet of bubbles bursting beneath them.

She giggled. 'Here,' she said, indicating her eye.

He kissed her through the rustling plastic, pinning her to the floor. She struggled, laughing and breathless. 'John, don't. I'll suffocate.'

He ripped away the sheets, diving down towards her, and then began pulling off her clothes.

'No, wait. I want to see what the parcel is.'

'We can do that later,' he said, standing up to pull off his trousers.

She peeled off her T-shirt. 'We should at least close the

curtains. '

'Why?' he asked, lying down on top of her again. 'Who's going to be in our garden on a Saturday morning?'

'There might be some more removal men with more mystery packages for us.'

'Well, that's their look-out. If we want to have sex in the

privacy of our own living room, that's our business.'

After they'd got dressed again, they pulled more and more layers off the package. A shiny surface began to emerge and John went to sit down on the sofa to watch Alice remove the final few sheets. It was a huge, gilt-edged mirror, decorated with ornate Gothic curlicues and fat, floating cherubs holding swathes of material over their genitalia. She stood back, amazed. 'My God. It's hideous.' She darted forward again and touched a smiling, golden cherub with her fingertip. 'Who would send us such a thing?'

He was staring at it, his head propped up on curled fists. 'It used to hang in my parents' bedroom. It's a family heirloom, brought over from Poland before the war.'

Alice crossed the room and clutched his arm. 'Your father's sent it?'

'It must be him . . . unless it was my uncle . . . No . . . it's definitely from him. That's very weird.'

She shook his arm again, perplexed by his sudden depres sion. 'But it's a good thing, isn't it, John? I mean, he's sent it to both of us.' She waved the delivery note in front of his face, which had her name next to his. 'Doesn't it mean he's kind of . . . well . . . accepted it?'

He got up and began pacing about. The bubble-wrap, beginning to take over the whole room, swirled about in the movement of air caused by his violent strides. 'I don't know, Alice. I don't know what he means by it.'

'Maybe you should call him.'

He stopped pacing and rubbed his hand over his head, thinking. 'Mmm. Maybe. I'm not sure I could. What would I say? I'm so angry with him for all this shit. '

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'But you want to make things up with him, don't you? You know you do. Isn't it time to put all the shit, as you call it, behind you and swallow your pride? He's probably as frightened of speaking to you as you are of speaking to him.' 'Maybe you're right. But I don't know if I could handle a phone conversation with him yet. I mean, it's been almost a year.' 'Well, write him a card or something and ask him to meet you. '

'That's not a bad idea,' he said reluctantly. 'I could invite him over here. He could meet you then.'

She shook her head. 'I think you should get your relation ship with him sorted first. I think meeting me may be a bit much for a first go. It'd be easier meeting him on neutral territory - a restaurant or cafe.'

'Yes. OK . You're right.' He sat down at his desk decisively and pulled a card out of his drawer. 'Dear Dad,' he said, his pen poised, 'thanks for the mirror. My girlfriend and I had a really good shag in all the wrapping.'

'I'm sure telling him that will really help matters. ' 'Only kidding.'

He finished it and went out immediately to post it. He

returned with an outsized picture hook and a new drill bit, bought from the grumpy hardware man across the road. He was whistling as he levered the mirror up off the floor, sending a rhombus of white light wheeling across the ceiling. He hung it in the hallway behind the front door. Alice watched anxiously as he heaved it on to the hook, balancing on two chairs, his legs straddling the gap.

What can I say about the time we spent in each other's lives? That we were happy. That we were barely apart. That, fleetingly, I would get that vertiginous, towering feeling of knowing another person so well that you could actually see

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what it would be like to be them. That I never felt incomplete before I met him but with him I felt finished, whole. What else? We lived in his house in Camden Town. I made him tidier, I painted the staircase blue, he eased my temper by laughing at me when I was in a rage. He cured my insomnia by reading to me in the middle of the night when he was half asleep. What else, what else? We flew a kite in Regent's Park and on a beach in the Isle of Wight with the Needles puncturing the horizon. We peered together down a vast telescope at a curved sliver of Venus, lit up by the sun, from an observatory on a hill in Prague. We sat on a beach in Sri Lanka during an electric storm, watching great Hammer-horror forks of lightning crack open the horizon, while phosphorescence glinted on the shoreline like cats' eyes. We made love on every available surface in the house, in numerous capital cities, in a cramped berth of a train going through Poland with the
provotznik
rattling the door handle, in a windmill in Norfolk, on a chilly Scottish golf course, in a darkroom and once in an Underground lift.

We got married three years after we first met. I didn't want to, not really. I agreed only because of pure attrition. John got it into his head that we should get married: he asked me and I said no, why should we, what's the point? Being the obtuse person he was, he then made a point of asking me to marry him at every available opportunity, often several times a day. 'Alice, what do you want for dinner and will you marry me?' he would say, or, 'What are you up to tomorrow? Why don't we get married?', or, whispered, 'Alice, it's your sister on the phone and by the way will you marry me, please?' This went on for months, I think. In the end I just said yes, all right, why not?

What else is there to say? That I loved him more than I ever thought it was possible to love anyone. That his father never spoke to him again.

2 8 1

That day, news of the bombing just seemed to seep through London like an urban form of osmosis. Even before news papers .could rush out stories on the explosion, rumours were spreading from person to person. I was at work. It was a Friday afternoon in winter. The sky was already darkening when Susannah returned from the Italian sandwich shop around the corner, shivering with the cold, struggling through the door with her hands full of steaming paper cups. 'I just heard,' she said breathlessly, her eyes wide. 'A bomb's gone off. '

I was at my desk, talking to Anthony. We stared at her.

'Where?' Anthony asked.

She set the coffees down on a desk and began unbuttoning

her coat, not looking at me. 'Well . . . it might be a rumour. They weren't exactly sure.'

'Where did they say it was?' I said. 'This person didn't really know.' 'Susannah! Tell me! Is it Camden?'

'No. They said in east London somewhere.'

I remember staring at the buttons on her coat. They were a darker red than the material they were sewn into. If you had a paint the same red as the coat and mixed it with the slightest dab of black - no more than enough just to cover the tip of your brush - you would end up with the button colour.

I seized the phone. My fingers flew over the familiar pattern of the numbers. 'It's ringing. '

It rang for what seemed like a long time, until a woman's voice answered. 'John's phone.'

'Hi. Is John there?'

'No. He's out of the office. He's doing an interview I think. '

I laughed with relief. 'Of course, I forgot. Sorry. It's Alice

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here. We heard there might have been a bomb or something down your way.'

'God, news travels fast. There was a huge explosion about

an hour ago maybe. I nearly jumped out of my skin. It was over the other side of the Docklands. It's absolute mayhem. Half a building's collapsed. The news desk is going mental.'

'I bet it is. Well, I'm g1-d you're all OK. Could you tell John I rang when he gets in?'

'Sure.'

I hung up. 'It's OK! He's at an interview.'

'Thank God for that.' Susannah slumped into a chair. 'So it's true, then?'

'Yes. In the Docklands apparently.' 'Bloody hell. Was anyone killed?' 'She didn't say.'

There was a silence between us for a moment. Then a phone rang and Susannah picked it up and began a conversation about writers' bursaries.

Later that night I watched the news with the cat curled on my lap. The camera panned up the sides of the devastated building, covered by now in green tarpaulin. Men in yellow hats and reflective jackets bobbed among the fallen beams in the ruins.

'No one has, as yet, claimed responsibility,' the reporter's voice intoned. 'Twenty-seven people are in hospital tonight, but miraculously there were no fatalities in today's bombing.' Lucifer quivered and stretched in his sleep. It was nine thirty. John still wasn't back. Life without him was such a ridiculous impossibility that I refused to let doubt make any impression in my mind at all. He was late. He was late. He was very late.

You slide back the aluminium bolt on the toilet door and step out. The fluorescent tubes of light overhead make the whole interior of the room gleam like an operating theatre: a lethally shiny floor, rows of melamine cubicles, steel wash-basins, metres and metres of blue mirror, white porcelain walls, which throw back a splintered, monochromatic blur of your reflection. At the basins, you dip yur hands into the scorching, oxygenated water, glancing behind you in the mirror. Two teenage girls, one dressed in a thick red fake-fur jacket, walk the length of the mirror's frame, banging back cubicle doors to find two next to each other.

'Here's one,' the taller one says.

'Hold on, hold on,' says the other, adjusting the back of her left shoe by hooking her index finger into the rim of leather.

The soap from the dispenser is pink, with a pearlised sheen. Your hands will give off a cloying, sweetish smell after this. You rinse them. Strings of bubbles disappear down the steel eye of the plughole. The teenagers are having a shouted discussion about a dress. 'Flouncy!' one of them shrieks. The one in the red fur jacket, you think. 'Flouncy' is a horrible word. Makes you think of bunny rabbits or flowery pelmets. You turn to the hand-dryer, pushing the chrome button. The ends of your hair are lifted in the overheated stream. A middle-aged woman, laden with shopping-bags, breathing asthmatically, arrives at the wash-basins. You step closer to the dryer -why? To let her past? To allow her more room? Did the woman brush against you?

The front of the dryer has a small, square mirror stuck to it. It is smudged with fingerprints. You allow the depth of your eye's focus to zone in on these fingerprints for a second, maybe two, then you allow it to relax into the tiny mirror's distance. You must, at that moment, have shifted your weight from one foot to the other, because you are suddenly convinced that

you've seen, flitting from one side of the minuscule square to the other, your mother. You blink, then lean forward because you are surprised. Your mother is here to see you as well? Kirsty must have phoned her to tell her you were coming. It is like peering through the viewfinder of a camera with a very powerful lens, trying to locate your subject. You catch a flash of fading blonde hair, but you have moved too far one way and have to duck the other way. There it is again - that flash of white-yellow, but this time mixed up with some dark-haired man who must be walking past. Then you stand rigid, staring at the reflection, which you now have perfectly framed in front of you. One of the teenage girls has raised herself up on the side of the cubicle, her elbows hooked over the edge and is talking down to her friend. The woman at the basins wheezes, her mouth open, her lungs labouring. Somewhere overhead a defective light-strip buzzes.

You turn, first your body, then your neck and head, then your eyes. You don't want to see this, you really don't. Behind you, you already know without looking, is a full-length one-way mirror. People washing their hands can look out on to the station concourse through the sickly brown glass. Beyond it, wading through tannin-coloured air, people stare up at the departures board, pick timetables out of display stands, drag luggage on little wheels, or sit around on rows of chairs, yawning. Right next to it, leaning against what they thought was just a full-length mirror, are your mother and a man.

You take a step towards them, then another. You are half a metre, perhaps less, away from them. You could press your fingers against the glass at the point where your mother's temple is resting. Or where his shoulder is leaning.