After You'd Gone (36 page)

He is feeding her raspberries. In his hand, he holds a clear plastic tray of deep red-pink clusters. He eases the tip of his little finger into their soft, mossy innards and holds them out

for her, one by one. She closes her mouth around them, you see her jaws work, her throat constrict, then his finger emerges, naked.

You recognised him straight away - North Berwick isn't, after all, a big place. But the thought that hurtles downwards through your mind takes a few seconds or so. You look at him, your eyes skim over his stature, his brow, his hair, his hands. It isn't so much a thought, more a conviction. Or a fact. That man is your father. There isn't the smallest splinter of doubt in your mind. As soon as you allow the thought, you know it as a truth. You are looking at your father. Your real father. The realisation seems to drop from a great height and refract like chromatography into a thousand unexpected rings of colour.

You are looking at him and then at her, and sweat is prickling under your hair and between your shoulder-blades, then you are slamming your way out of the toilets, through the barrier, across the marbled concourse. They mustn't see you, they mustn't see you. The balls of your feet and the joints of your knees hurt as you stride away, not looking back to where you know they are standing.

And as you walk, it seems to you that with every step someone is falling away from you. Ben. Kirsty. Beth. Annie. Jamie . . . You stop short. You stand still in the middle of the domed airiness of Waverley Station, looking about your feet like a person on a rapidly disappearing piece of sand. Then you take another step. Elspeth.

Through the cafe window, you can see your sisters. Kirsty

is telling Beth some story, her hands curving and pointing. You walk through the cafe, navigating tables and chairs.

'I have to go now,' you say to them, and their faces turn to look at you.

The doorbell rings very early. It wakes Alice, and for a moment

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she is utterly disorientated. The ceiling above her is not the bedroom ceiling. A weak, greyish sunlight is illuminating the room. She finds she is crumpled in an awkward position on the sofa. She sits up and flexes her stiff neck. The doorbell rings again. Early Saturday-morning TV is chattering at a low volume in the corner; a red-haired man is hitting a woman in dungarees over the head with an inflatable hammer. The audience is laughing. Lucifer is sitting on the window-sill behind the net curtain. He looks slightly fuzzy, his edges blurred by the net. It occurs to her afterwards that he would have seen the police before she did.

She is startled by their size. The man seems to fill the room. The first thing he does is pick up the remote control and turn off the TV. The woman stands in front of him. She smells of cigarettes and overheated, crowded rooms. Her nails are bitten down and varnished.

'Please sit down.'

Alice wants to laugh at this cliche, but she sits and so do they. The man's radio, clipped to his shoulder, crackles and shouts. He and the woman exchange a look and he switches it off, looking ashamed. Alice stands up again.

'I'm sorry to tell you, Mrs Friedmann, that John is dead.' As she says this, the policewoman gets up, comes over to her side and takes Alice's hand in hers. A gentle downward pressure is applied. She wants me to sit down, Alice thinks. She sits. Familiar things suddenly look very strange. Her boots lie on the carpet where she took them off last night, the long leather tongue of one curled into the other. She stares at the table lamp on John's desk, as if seeing it for the first time. It has a long, beaded fringe around it and its shade is a tiny bit skewed.

'We found his body in the wreckage this morning.' Her hand is stroking Alice's. 'He was in a newsagent's buying a paper.'

'That's stupid. They get all the papers at his office,' Alice says. 'He'll have forgotten to pick one up on his way out. He's always doing that.'

'Right. I see.'

Alice starts jiggling her leg convulsively. 'Nimming', her mother calls it. 'It's Raikes.'

'Pardon?' The policewoman leans closer to her.

'It's Raikes,' Alice says, more clearly - maybe a little too clearly? She doesn't want to be rude. 'You called me Mrs Friedmann. I didn't change my name when we got married.'

'Oh.' The woman nods gravely. 'Sorry, Mrs Raikes. '

Alice shakes her head. 'No. Ms Raikes. But you can call me Alice.'

'OK, Alice.'

The man clears his throat. Alice starts. She'd forgotten about him. 'Is there anyone we can call for you, Alice?'

Alice stares at him blankly. 'Call?' 'Yes. Your family, a friend maybe?' 'My family live in Scotland.'

'I see. What about John's family? Maybe you'd like to be with them.'

Alice laughs - a short, mirthless bark that leaves her throat feeling raw and scraped. 'No.'

The woman struggles to keep the shock from her face. Alice attempts to formulate an explanation. 'I've never". .

I've never met his father.'

The woman, having mastered her features, nods sooth ingly.

Alice turns to look her full in the face for the first time.

'He's dead?'

'Yes.'

'Are you sure?' 'Yes. I'm sorry.'

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Rachel appears some time that day, and later Ben and Ann tiptoe into the bedroom where Alice is curled, prawn-like, on the bed. Ann drops darkened circles of tears on to the duvet cover beside Alice's dry, white face, calls her 'baby' and tries to get her to eat spoonfuls of soup that Ben brings up on a tray.

At some point Alice finds herself in the bathroom. It's the first time she's been alone all day. She leans her forehead against the cool silver of the mirror and looks straight into her own eyes. She feels disgruntled and weary, out of sorts somehow: the house is crowded and she wishes everyone would leave. With a kind of percolating horror, she suddenly becomes aware that what she is waiting for is for John to come back, as he usually would at this time of night. Her hands are resting on the basin. She looks down and sees his shaving brush on the shelf. Its bristles are still slightly damp from when he used it yesterday morning.

They are in the kitchen, sitting round the table. Rachel is saying, 'I saw him last week, it was last Saturday, he stood there at the cooker and made us dinner,' when Ann springs upright.

'What's that?'

A long, thin, keening sound scissors the air. It tapers off and then starts up with new strength, broadening into a sharp, animal scream.

'It's Alice.'

Ann rushes through the door, overturning her chair in her haste. They hear her pound up the stairs and then a loud hammering at the bathroom door starts. 'Alice! Let me in! Open the door! Please, Alice!'

And over it all that barely human cry floats out, un deterred.

p art th ree

Once again. Alice is struck by the fickleness. the blank. impassive
callousness of mirrors. As she is passing from the sitting room into the hall, she catches sight of her reflection, as white-faced and large-eyed as a frightened ghost. It stops her short and she stands in front of the mirror, gazing at herself. Her eyes seem unnaturally bright and the skin around them bruised-looking and sunken. She has lost so much weight that her cheek bones protrude sharply, giving her a worn, skeletal look. The golden-skinned carved cherubs on the frame mince and smile around her.

John must have seen himself a thousand times in this mirror

-going out of the front door in the morning, on his way upstairs like she was just now. It must have an image of him locked away somewhere in its depths. Why, then, when what she wants more than anything else in the world is a glimpse of him, does it refuse to give her anything but her own, blank face? In more gloomy moments, she allows herself to imagine that he is standing just behind it, his face pressed up close to the surface, watching her passing beneath him, missing him, grieving for him , and no matter how hard he bangs on the glass, he cannot make her hear him.

She turns away and climbs the stairs. It's a hot, airless day and it feels as though it may thunder later. In the M a g gi e O ' F a r r ell

distance, she can hear the drone of slowly moving traffic on Camden Road.

Upstairs, Lucifer is asleep on the bed in a tight ball, his tail curled over his face. Alice runs her hand over the warmth of his fur and he makes a sleepy, unintelligible sound to acknowledge her.

She takes two deep, shuddering breaths, feeling the familiar, sickening waves of grief begin to roll ayer her. The first tears fall on the cat's fur before she curls up on the bed next to him. He opens his green eyes a crack and watches as she sobs, fingers pressed into her mouth. The bed shakes. From under her pillow, Alice pulls a T-shirt of John's, which still smells of him, and she crushes it to her face.

An English teacher at school once said to her, 'Alice, one thing I hope you never find out is that a broken heart hurts physically. ' Nothing she has ever experienced has prepared her for the pain of this. Most of the time her heart feels as though it's waterlogged and her ribcage, her arms, her back, her temples, her legs all ache in a dull, persistent way: but at times like this the incredulity and the appalling irreversibility of what has happened cripple her with a pain so bad she often doesn't speak for days.

Later, she gets up and moves about the room, performing

small tasks to look after herself: she dries her tears and throws the used tissues into the bin with a wet, sodden thud; she gets a drink of water, takes a paracetamol, lights her oil burner and straightens the duvet cover, tucking John's T-shirt carefully back under the pillow. She runs a bath and cries a little more when she is lying in the steam. The weekends are the worst: long clods of time on her own. His death has rendered everything else unimportant, so whatever she tries to fill her time with - books, films, seeing people - seems irrelevant and trivial.

She dries herself slowly with a thick towel. Her skin feels dry and parched, as if all the tears she's cried in the last four months have made it arid, dried it out. In her dressing-gown she goes downstairs and makes a sandwich. She eats it standing up, still not having the strength to eat at the table alone, forcing herself to swallow the lumps of bread that taste like ash. The house is utterly silent apart from the noise of her own half-hearted chewing. She wants to die.

Ben stood alone outside the ticket office, peering at his watch, on average, every three minutes. He didn't look at the red digital clock on the board, not entirely trust ing it - his own watch was accurate, he knew that. He wound it every day. It was the first thing he did in the morning. They'd missed two trains now and he didn't want to miss this one, didn't want to spend another night in this city. He wanted to be at home again, wanted to have his daughter at home with them, sleeping upstairs in her old room, away from this place. What he wanted most of all, of course, he reminded himself, was for this never to have happened.

He saw Ann hurrying across the station and he stood straighter, extending his arm, waving. 'Ann! Over here!'

His lips felt cracked and he licked them. She didn't smile as she moved towards him. He searched her face, curious despite himself about what it must be like to have to identify a body. Ann had insisted that she did it - Alice was in no fit state, she'd told him, in a brief, whispered consultation they'd had in Alice's hallway that morning. Rachel had offered, but Ann said no, she was doing it. Rachel hadn't argued, and neither had Ben. What was it like, he wanted to ask. Was it definitely, definitely him? There'd been no mistake? Why had it taken so

long and what did it . . . what did he . . . what in God's name did it look like?

Ann reached his elbow and seemed to be ignoring him, looking about her, twisting round and looking over her shoulder. 'Where's Alice?' she demanded. A muscle just below her eye kept twitching, making her eye jerk. Ben watched it, fascinated. 'How was it?' he asked, resting his hand on her arm. Was it awful, he wanted to say. I'm sorry if it was awful. She shook him off. 'Where is Alice?' she repeated.