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 stitches 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 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 again on the two faces opposite her, attempting to tune into their conversation.
‘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 in 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 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.
In her lunch-hour, Alice had gone into a stationery shop and bought a special new pad of writing-paper. It was thick blue cartridge paper with raised ridges. If you held it up to the light, the secret stamp of the manufacturer would be illuminated. This was real, grown-up writing-paper. For serious letters. When you opened the cover, the first page was a striped one with thick black lines to guide your pen in straight, neat rows.
Alice slid the guiding lines under the first blue sheet and squared it up. Then she filled her fountain pen, dipping the gold nib into the thick black liquid, squeezing the dropper and releasing it. She wiped the nib on her trousers — they were black anyway, so what did it matter.
In the top right-hand corner, she wrote her address. The pen nib scratched against the grain of the paper. Under it she wrote the date, and leant back to look at her work. Was the address the first thing you read when you got a letter you weren’t expecting? She doubted it. If it were Alice getting this letter, she’d shuffle quickly through the pages to the end and examine the signature. Maybe she didn’t need the address after all.
Alice tore off the sheet, half crumpled it, then supersti-tiously put it into the drawer next to her. She didn’t want anything to fuck this up.
‘Dear,’ she wrote, then stopped. What should she call him? She had no idea. ‘Daniel’ was too casual, too intimate, but did ‘Mr Friedmann’ make her sound like an Inland Revenue inspector? She gripped her pen tighter. She could leave it until last, fill it in when she’d finished.
‘I wanted to write to you’, she began. ‘Wanted’. Sounded too past tense. She still wanted to, after all, which was why she was writing. Alice peeled off that page, tossed it in the drawer after the first one, and sat there, staring at the new blank page.
What exactly did she want to say? All she knew was that, since that evening with Rachel, every minute of every day she’d been thinking about writing this letter, wanting to get in touch. But she couldn’t say that to him. Maybe she should write down the reasons first, in rough, and then write the letter.
Alice pressed her nib to the page. Ink leaked out into a tiny, circular stain, before her pen glided quickly across the ice-blue expanse. ‘Because I want to talk to you.’ Then: ‘Because I’m angry with you.’ ‘Because I loved your son.’ Half-way through shaping the letters to ‘Because John is dead now, he’s dead,’ she told herself to stop, that she promised herself she wouldn’t do this, that she wouldn’t get like this while she was trying to write to his father. And when she felt the tears coming, running down her face and down her neck, soaking her jumper, she was so cross with herself that she rubbed at them roughly with her sleeves. Then she saw that tears had splatted on to the paper, making it buckle, blurring the ink into a watery mess. She tore off the page, sobbing now, and discovered that the page underneath had absorbed the water, and the one underneath that, and the one underneath that. Alice ripped off sheet after sheet, shoving them into the drawer, until she found a flat, clean one, and she put her pen to it and tried to calm herself and think of more reasons, tried to start again because she knew that if she didn’t get a grip on herself now, in a few minutes’ time it would be too late. But she found that all she could write, over and over, was his name and after a while she had to give up and just let herself cry and cry, her head resting on her arms, her body curled round his desk.
It’s strange to think of my body lying somewhere. I think about it and how it looks. I think about how I know every mark, every pore, the creases of my palm, the scars from childhood, the small, pigmentless chickenpox circles and the tattoo on my shoulder-blade. I think about the day I had it done — a swelteringly humid day in Bangkok where I woke on the mattress I was sleeping on in a cockroach-ridden hotel. The bedsheet was tangled around my damp limbs, the roar of the traffic from the road, nineteen floors below, already audible, and 1 thought, I’m going to get a tattoo today. I went out into the burning air, pushing my sunglasses on, sweat already crawling down the groove of my back like slow insects, the mixture of pollution and heat fizzling in my lungs. I walked through the streets, past people eating in noodle bars on the pavements, past rows of vegetable stalls in narrow, shaded streets, under racks and racks of washing drying on bamboo poles outside people’s windows, through lanes of roaring traffic, past people selling fake designer watches, through a park where old men in black trousers and white vests did the slow, mesmeric movements of tai ch’i or played each other at chess, past shops selling tiles and taps to a small tattoo parlour
I’d seen a few days before. It was grimy from the outside and the photos of people with reddened skin, proudly displaying their new markings nearly changed my mind. Inside, I pulled my T-shirt down from my shoulder. ‘Here,’ I said.
The man spanned my shoulder-blade with his hand, his dry fingers whispering against my skin. ‘But a Chinese dragon,’ he said, ‘maybe not suitable for you.’
I turned to face him. ‘It’s what I want.’
He shrugged and swabbed my back with antiseptic. In the corner, a radio blared out the chiming, syrupy chords of Cantopop. He hummed along as he inked out the dragon. I watched him fill the tattoo gun with bottle-green ink. ‘Are you sure?’ he asked, the gun poised, buzzing, above my shoulder.
‘I’m sure.’
It didn’t hurt, or rather it was a strange kind of pain, like the way ice can burn. When it was finished I twisted and turned with my back to the mirror, looking over my shoulder. It was green, with golden eyes, a red tail and red tendrils coming from its mouth.
‘I love it. Thank you,’ I said, smiling, ‘thank you,’ and I plunged back into the roar, the heat, the bustle of the street, a secret dragon on my shoulder.
Ben gets up first. Ann can hear him and Beth having breakfast downstairs — plates and cutlery clashing together, the modulated murmur of their conversation. Ann knows she should get up and go down as well, but that kitchen is so small. She cannot bear the idea of the three of them banging into each other while boiling kettles, looking in Alice’s cupboards for teabags, working out how the toaster works, opening and slamming the fridge, searching for margarine. There is something about eating the food Alice bought for herself that makes Ann queasy.
Ann sits up and leans her back against the wall. She hasn’t slept well. The bed smells unmistakably of Alice, and Ann spent a lot of the night staring down at the peaks and troughs made by her and her husband’s body in the duvet, trying to remember which side of the bed Alice slept on.
Ben has half opened the curtains. Ann can see out to the houses opposite. They seem incredibly close, their windows a stone’s throw from where Ann is lying. How does Alice stand it, being that overlooked? She must feel constantly watched.
Ann looks about the room and is disconcerted to realise that from where she is lying, in the centre of Alice and John’s huge bed, she can see herself and most of the bed in the mirror opposite. She turns her head and sees that the wardrobe mirror throws back a side angle of the bed; and a cheval mirror on the right-hand side of the room completes this 180-degree view. Ann is puzzled and is wondering why anyone would want to see themselves asleep when the reason for this arrangement hits her. Blood leaps to the surface of her cheeks and she is faced with th
ree replicas of herself, blushing in her nightie, her hand covering her mouth. She gets up quickly.
In the bathroom, she tries not to look at that repulsive lizardy thing in the tank. Ann had been hoping it might have died since she was last here. But it’s still there, as always, hanging in its water, feet splayed, staring at her with tiny, stupid-looking eyes. Its skin is the translucent pinkish-white Ann associates with illness, and she is disgusted to find that you can see its internal organs and blood vessels just under the surface. She thinks about having a bath, but the thought of that thing watching her throughout rather puts her off.
Ben calls up to say that he and Beth want to go to the hospital, and does she want to come with them. Ann shouts down that they are not to worry about her, that she doesn’t want to hold them up, that she’ll catch a taxi later.
After they’ve gone, Ann revels in the stillness, the solitude. She’s never been able to cope with being with people twenty-four hours a day. On the floor in the bedroom is Alice’s little backpack. Ann sits on a chair and pulls it open, looks inside: pens, sunglasses, a flyer for a reading by some novelist at the South Bank, Alice’s Filofax, a personal attack alarm with the word ‘Galahad’ embossed in silver, a small plastic sheep (Ann peers at this in surprise, holding it up by one of its back legs. It has horns and lurid pink udders. She finds it distasteful, and puts it down quickly), a monthly tube pass issued at Camden Town station that expires next week (the headshot of Alice makes her flinch), a lipsalve (worn down on one side), foil-wrapped paracetamols. Ann lays all these things out at her feet and stares at them, as if playing that memory game where someone will remove one object and she’ll-have to say which one. Then she picks up the Filofax and opens it. Not much is written in it. On 24 April, Ann learns that her daughter had a staff meeting at 3 p.m. On 27 May, Alice and Rachel went to see the 7.30 p.m. showing of something called Time of the Gypsies at the Riverside Cinema. Nothing is written in for last weekend. In November, Alice has drawn a line through a weekend and written ‘Norfolk?’ As Ann reaches the back, a pair of rail tickets fall out: to Edinburgh, via any reasonable route. One outward, one return. Standard class. Adult one, child nil.