After You'd Gone (42 page)

The next thing she remembered was the tingling feeling that there was someone else with her. Her head jerked upright, expecting to see a pyjama-clad Neil standing there in the dim light. The room was empty. Kirsty felt strange. Her heart was thudding. She had no idea how much time had passed. Jamie was asleep in her arms, the soft diamond of his fontanelle pulsing on the crown of his head.

Alice. Alice was awake. Somewhere. She just knew it. Kirsty hadn't managed to speak to her in weeks. Alice never seemed to be in or answering the phone when she called. Kirsty twisted her head around the room again, just to check her sister wasn't there, by some surreal coincidence, then she got to her feet, hefting the weight of the sleeping Jamie up on to her shoulder.

In the hallway, she crouched, Jamie on her lap, and dialled Alice's number. It rang once, then she heard Alice's voice, tight, strained: 'Hello?'

'Hi. It's me. '

She heard her sister take in breath and then break down m hysterical, gut-wrenching sobs. The tears trickled down Kirsty's face and fell on to Jamie's Babygro as she listened, the receiver clamped to her ear, to Alice's grief, pouring down the phone line, and she said gently, 'Alice, don't. Don't cry. Don't cry. Alice, don't. '

It went on for ten, fifteen minutes, maybe more. Round and round in Kirsty's head, as if fixed on a loop-tape, was the thought: my sister is five hundred miles away, all alone

339

in her house and she is crying to herself in the middle of the night.

'Alice,' Kirsty said at last, 'why don't you phone us when you're feeling like this? I can't bear to think of you crying like this on your own.'

Alice began to speak in jolting, gasping snatches between sobs. 'I just can't do it . . . any more . . . Kirsty . . . It's like something . . . my whole life . . . has come unstuck . . . used to be . . . always was so happy . . . enjoyed life . . . and now nothing is worthwhile . . . Can't find anything . . . to make me feel better . . . Everything is pointless without him . . . I feel dead . . . can't feel anything any more . . . I'd rather be dead . . . Sometimes think I'm just going to lose it . . . Just feel dead inside . . . can't feel anything any more.'

When Kirsty finally replaced the receiver, she went back into the bedroom and lowered Jamie into his cot. Then she slid into bed and, pressing her cheek to the dip of Neil's spine, fell asleep with her arms around him.

The shop has a narrow double door. Only one side opens. Alice has to slide in sideways, her bag catching on the door handle. 'Hello again,' the woman behind the counter says brightly.

Alice parts her lips in a soundless greeting, heading straight for the wide, box-like shelves that are stuffed with balls of wool, one colour to each box. Behind her, the woman carries on her conversation down the telephone: ' . . . and I said to her at the time, if you have another child, that'll be you. I wouldn't take any notice of what he wants. The best thing to do is be content with the one kid, get to a good surgeon, get it all whipped out and get yourself sewn up properly. But you know what she's like . . . '

Alice listens to her breathing to shut out the woman's voice, reads the closely spaced words of a pattern, squeezes the balls of wool between her fingers, brushes their strands against her cheek to check their softness and selects pair after pair of long, lithe, silver needles of varying circumferences and lengths. Then she carries the lot to the till. The woman says into the phone: 'Sorry, got to go. Yes . . . yes . . . I'll call you later. ' She turns to face Alice and rings up her purchases on the till with pink-varnished fingernails like candied petals. 'Your husband's a lucky man, having someone who can knit all these nice clothes for him,' she says, pushing

the things into a plastic bag, making the needles clatter against each other.

Alice twists the thin, platinum band that encompasses the fourth finger on her left hand. 'Yes,' Alice says, and has to clamp shut her mouth to make sure she doesn't say anything else. It frightens her, how close she is to yelling something at this woman's over-made-up, over-cheerful face.

Outside, clutching her new needles to her chest in the middle of the crowded market, Alice has to lean against the wall to recover. She feels light-headed, as if she's run up several flights of stairs.

She can't go back to work now. She just can't. She knows she should call them and tell them she's going home, but she only thinks of this when she's already on the tube to Camden Town. And by then it's too late. She'll make something up when she goes in tomorrow. She'll say she was ill or something.

At home, she lies down on the bed for a while, still in her coat, still clutching the plastic bag and her keys. When the light starts draining from the sky outside, she sits upright, wedging a pillow between the wall and her back and draws everything out of the bag, laying it all out on the bedclothes. She spreads the pattern across her knee and pores over the first ball of wool, searching for its end. Then she begins to knit, the needles pressed cool into the grooves at the base of her palms, their heads clicking together, the skein of wool slipping through her fingertips, being woven, twisted, looped into an ever-growing mesh of complex stitches. The rhythm of it is a marvel to her: in, round, through and off; in, round, through and off. The vocabulary that comes with it is solid, short, unequivocal: purl, plain, cable. When one row is finished, the weighted needle is passed into the other hand and the newly freed one dives into the first, new stitch.

When she first started she'd been crap, of course. Dropped stitches were like an insidious virus, unravelling the work from the middle. These efforts she threw away. But once she'd been doing it a week or two she no longer dropped stitches and soon she could do it without looking. There is something so satisfying in wearing something you have made. As her arms move in the comforting, regular rhythm, she looks down at the interlocking stitcht:'.s that are covering her arms: I made every one of those.

When there is a long, heavy beard of stitches hanging from one needle, she stops. She lays it aside, sits on the edge of the bed, her legs dangling to the floor, and stares unseeingly out of the window. At times - often when she's been in the house for a few days on her own - she flies into a private and bitter rage, like nothing she's experienced since she was a child: what on earth do you do if, at the age of twenty-nine, you've lost the only person you know you can be happy with? Today, though, she's not being bitten at by anger. Today, she just wants him back, she just wants him back and it hurts more than she can ever say.

She sits there, hands tucked under her, her feet swinging, scuffing at the floor. She feels nothing for anyone - apart from him. Of course. Always him. She is welded together; hard, brittle. Nothing and no one touches her. She is immovable as stone and just as cold.

When she'd called her at work that morning, Rachel had said that if she didn't come she'd never speak to her again, so at about eight Alice went round the deserted office switching off the lights and shutting down the computers. She applied some make-up in the loo mirror, spiking her lashes with mascara, painting on a bright red smile, and walked down the five flights

343

of stairs. Before leaving, she tidied the competition leaflets in the stand beside the front door.

It was a warm evening. Neal Street was thronged with people. She walked past them all and past all the neon-lit shops. The bar where Rachel said she'd be was just off Seven Dials, in a basement reached by spiral metal steps. As she descended, she could see Rachel sitting at a table near the back with another woman. They were talking animatedly.

'Alice! You came!' Rachel stood up and gave her a hug. 'This is Camille.' The woman smiled a slow, sympathetic smile and turned her pale milky-blue eyes on Alice. 'Alice, it's so good to meet you,' she said, in a low, confidential sort of voice. 'Rachel's told me all about you. How are you now? Feeling any better yet?'

Alice stopped struggling out of her jacket and looked in surprise at Rachel, who was staring at the table, a slight blush staining her cheeks.

'I'm fine, thank you,' Alice said bluntly. 'How are you?' 'Fine, fine.' Camille smiled radiantly.

Alice felt disembodied; it was incredibly hot and noisy after the balmy air of the street. The people at the bar were shouting and straining for the bartenders' attention. Cigarette smoke rose in blue-edged plumes from each table and everyone's faces looked florid and somehow desperate, as if the crucial thing was to be seen to be having a good time. She looked across the table at Rachel, who was listening to something Camille was saying, and felt as if she knew her as well as she knew this Camille person. Was this really her friend? It seemed like years ago that they'd known each other. Alice stared down at her hands in her lap, gulping at her drink to try to open up her throat. She looked up and focused aga n on the two faces opposite her, attempting to tune into their conversation.

344

'So, where did you go? What was he like?' Rachel was saying. She saw Alice was looking at them and leant towards her, 'Camille's just split up with someone she was with for - how long was it, Camille?'

'A year and a half.'

'A year and a half, and last night she went out with this bloke - her first date since she split up with her ex.'

Alice tried to look interested.

'Well, he took me to this bar in Islington. ' 'Which one?' Rachel asked.

'The one across from the tube station, called Barzantium , something like that.'

'I know it. And? Go on.'

'We had cocktails, talked a bit and he told me all about this theory he has.'

'Which was . . . ?' 'Well, Manuel says-'

'Wait a minute,' Rachel interrupted. 'He's called Manuel?' 'Yeah.'

'What kind of a name is that?'

'His parents are South American or something. Look, do you want to hear his theory or not?'

'Yes, sorry. Go on.'

'Manuel has this theory that if your relationship's ended or whatever you shouldn't, like, go into hibernation - which is what I've been doing a bit, he said. What you should do is start seeing someone else as soon as possible. It's the only way to get over it. '

'Why?'

'He says there's no point m dwelling on all that pain, that what you need is a transition person, a kind of human anaesthetic. '

Rachel snorted. 'A human anaesthetic, my arse. Let me

345

guess, Manuel wasn't by any chance magnanimously offering to be your human anaesthetic, was he?'

'No, no, it wasn't like that. He said people needed something to kick-start them, to sort of get them back out there.'

'Sounds suspiciously like a desperate chat-up line to me," Rachel said, leaning back and swigging her drink. 'What do you think, Al?'

'A human anaesthetic?' Alice repeated, still with this out-of-body sensation.

Camille looked vacant, confused. Rachel was horrified, slamming her drink on to the table, suddenly falling over herself. 'Alice . . . I don't think Camille meant . . . It's different for you . . . I mean . . . Christ, Alice, I'm sorry

. . . I can't believe we were just talking about this in front of you like that . . . It was really stupid, and-'

Alice got up and pulled her jacket off the chair. 'I think I'm going to go.'

As she was crossing Shaftesbury Avenue, she heard feet hitting the pavements behind her, and Rachel caught up with her, grabbed her by the arm. She stopped, but didn't look at her friend.

'Alice. I'm so sorry.'

'It's fine, Rach. It's really fine. Honestly. I just didn't feel like . . . being there any more.'

'Well, I can't say I blame you. I think I win the Crap Friend award.'

'No, you don't,' Alice said. 'Don't talk shit.'

'Well, I'd rather talk shit than human anaesthetics.'

Alice looked at Rachel, and they both burst out laughing. Rachel threw her arms round Alice's ribcage and hugged her hard. 'God, Alice, I can't stand it.'

'Can't stand what?'

'Can't stand that I can't understand what it's really like for you.'

'Well, you do a pretty good job.'

'No,' Rachel shook her head, 'I don't. Not at all. But then there isn't anyone else in the world who can really understand what you're going through.'

Alice hadn't even thought of the answer she came out with before she said it, and it surprised her so much that it kept churning over and over in her head: 'There's his father.'

It wasn't hard to find the address. She'd searched through John's files in the spare room, and discovered at the back of a box an exercise book with a faded red cover. Written in the flyleaf, in a rounded adolescent version of his handwriting, was 'If lost, please return to:' and then the address.