‘If I wanted to be a journalist I’d have got a job on a newspaper. I’m not writing your article for you. The approach is up to you. I’m just here to respond to your questions — predictable or otherwise.’
There is an appalled silence, both from the other end of the phone and from the office. She realises that everyone is staring at her, horrified, and she turns away from them to face the wall. ‘Right. Right. I see. That’s how it is, is it?’
‘Yes,’ says Alice recklessly. ‘If you can’t be bothered to do your research, then you don’t get your interview.’
There is another pause. She hears him exhale. ‘I see, I see . . .’ He tails off. She waits. ‘Um ... in that case, I’ll . . . I’ll call you back. OK?’
‘OK.’ She hangs up.
‘Well,’ says Susannah, rifling through her in-tray on her desk on the other side of the room, ‘he’ll think twice about calling us again. What was he like?’
‘A complete wanker.’
Today Alice had that familiar, tight, bulging knot of crossness in her stomach. If she tried to unravel it, it would crack and splinter her fingernails. She didn’t like herself.
What she couldn’t fathom — and wouldn’t ever be able to, as she would find out — was the fickleness of people: how people can like you one day, but the next, because of something as random as telling the teacher how you were growing cress on a wet tissue on your window-sill, you were no longer in favour.
There was a thick haar rolling in from the sea. It hung heavy over the town and had even reached up the hill to the school. The yard was cold, hung with mizzling rain. The Law, right next to the school, looked huge and dark, its top hidden. Alice tried hard not to look over at where her friend — her former friend — Emma was playing skipping with four or five other girls. The rope was getting wetter all the time; it slapped the damp concrete and at each apex of its turn sent off a spray that soaked the skippers’ hair. Emma was jumping up and down in perfect rhythm with the turning rope, her knee socks edging lower. ‘You can’t play with us,’ she’d said, her voice made nasal with scorn that Alice had even asked. She was now singing along with the others: ‘Greeeeeen gravel, greeeeeen gravel, growing up so high, why did the sweetheart that I loved, why did he have to die?’
Alice looked around for Kirsty and Beth. They were usually easy to spot, the bright white-gold of their hair gleaming among the other children’s. There was Kirsty, leaning against the playground wall, talking with two of her friends. Beth was over at the sandpit bossily admonishing a small, frightened girl who had dared to throw a handful of wet sand into the air.
In Alice’s pocket, wrapped carefully in hard, shiny, pallid paper was the head of a fish. She shuddered at the thought of the juices from the raw, wet amputation seeping slowly into a dark patch on her duffel coat. If she squeezed its cheeks, the mouth opened. Its tongue was narrow, grey and grizzled. But its eyes — its eyes! — perfectly round, luminous silver orbs. They swivelled in their sockets. She tested her own eyes — did they swivel? To her left was the shadowing bulk of the school, to the right the shelter wall; ahead were figures squiggled carelessly on the rainy playground by a wide-nibbed pen. She wished her eyes were silver.
She pulled down her hood over her eyes and mouth until the neck of the coat hung on the crown of her head and the hood bagged out loosely beneath her face. The school, the shelter and the figures were all gone. She heard their noise as if through water — far off and distorted. It was just her and the fish now, alone in the liquid dark.
Five minutes later the phone rings again.
‘I was wrong! I was wrong!’ Susannah shouts and waves the receiver at Alice. ‘It’s John the Journalist!’
Alice groans and picks up the phone. ‘Hello? Is that John? Don’t tell me — you’ve found out all you need to know about literature and the Literature Trust in five minutes.
I’m impressed. Are you always such a fast worker?’ Alice is suddenly conscious of the unintended double entendre and feels an unaccustomed blush fire her face. She’s fervently thankful he can’t see her.
‘I have a proposition for you, Alice . . .’ He is laughing.
Bastard. ‘. . . fast worker or not.’
‘What is it?’
‘I’ll do my homework on the Literature Trust if you’ll do an interview in person.’
Alice is silent for a moment, then says, ‘Where?’
‘At the Literature Trust offices. Where else did you have in mind?’
Alice feels her face heat up again. Damn him. ‘This place is in a real state. I wouldn’t dream of letting a hack like you in here. We’ve got boxes and dust everywhere. Look, I’ve got to be in the Docklands tomorrow anyway. I could come to your offices. You’re in Canary Wharf, aren’t you?’
‘That’s right. Well, that’s fine with me. When’s a good time?’
‘I’m quite busy at the moment. How about lunchtime? Then we could eat and talk at the same time.’
‘I was always told that was bad manners.’
‘Well, I don’t mind about bad manners.’
‘Really?’
For God’s sake, she tells herself, this is getting ridiculous, hang up at once.
‘Right,’ she almost snarls, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow at one,’ and hangs up without waiting for an answer.
Ann and Ben take a taxi from the station. It’s an uneven journey, the taxi travelling swiftly at first, tarmac rumbling beneath them; then they hit a traffic jam where they sit for what feels like ages, the engine churning over, the back of the cab filling with sour fumes, the red meter flicking. Ann sits bolt upright, the tendons in her neck visible beneath her skin, staring out of the windscreen as if intending to make the road blockage disappear by telekinesis. Ben shifts in the leather seat. His clothes have wrinkled under him during the train journey. He hardly ever comes to London and always forgets how brash he finds it. He cranes his neck out of the window to see the obstruction, and the whitish, level light of the street makes his eyes smart. The sun — much warmer here than in Scotland — seems harshly bright, picking out people’s outlines, making the colours in their clothes shout. He feels the heavy air around his head churn and a cyclist whizzes past, his face obscured by a pollution mask and mirrored visor, the tread of his wheels crunching as he weaves in and out of the stationary cars. Ben brings his head back into the cab and winds up the window. He will never understand why Alice left Scotland to come here.
They could have taken the tube. Maybe it would have been quicker. But the tube to both him and Ann is a fearsome thing: a horrible machine into which you get sucked, dragged down by crowds and escalators, spat out on to blackened platforms where trains arrive and leave with alarming speed, and all you have to find your way is a map of tangled, coloured wires and strange-sounding names. In his breast pocket is the address of the hospital and the name of the doctor. They dictated it to him down the phone that morning. He puts his hand to the pocket, listening out for the crack of paper to reassure himself, and as he does so, the taxi eases its way into a moving lane of traffic.
They begin speeding through streets, almost without stopping. Ben gets the sensation they are heading uphill. Fragments of shouts, conversations, music, car horns are snatched from the air and whirled into the cab. And the view is changing — large Edwardian houses with railings, trees with gleaming cars parked outside have replaced the ramshackle streets around King’s Cross. Ben has no idea where they are. His knowledge of London is limited to two trig-points — the station and Alice’s house in Camden Town. He’s been to Alice’s office in the centre of the city, and to the National Gallery, which must have been close by because they walked there after she finished work one Friday. Once, maybe even on the same visit, she’d taken them to a park in north London where people were swimming about in a brackish, algae-ridden lake. Alice swam: he has a distinct memory of her dark head, sleek as a seal’s, bobbing up some distance away from where he was sitting on the bank. He has never lost that father’s
instinct when any of his daughters swim, to check that when they dive down they come up again. John swam too that day, Ben now remembers, taking running dives off a slippery wooden duckboard. Was that park anywhere near here? Ben cannot grasp how these locations — disparate in both geography and time — fit together.
The hospital is large and grey, crouched on a hill. Even before they get out of the taxi, when Ben is still counting change into the man’s hand, he can hear the muted roar of its workings — air-conditioning, electrical generators, incinerators. Going up the steps, they hold hands like they did when they were first engaged. Ben is holding a roll of newspaper unnaturally high against his chest. In it, the heads of some late-flowering yellow roses nod to the rhythm of his walk.
Inside, the artificial light casts everyone in a greenish pallor. It is not like the hospitals he’s been in before — slightly shabby places with curling floor tiles and fading wall paint. This one is new and modern, and reminds Ben of an airport. Ann speaks to the receptionist, bending over to make her voice heard through the hole in the Perspex screen. A nurse with the flat London vowels Ben finds hard to understand leads them down a corridor, and then they are in a strange, echoey, sub-lit labyrinth. They take a left, then another left, then a right and then Ben loses count, following instead the rubber ridges of the nurse’s shoe soles, which squeak on the pink lino. Pink like the insides of things. They pass heavy wooden doors on silent hinges, rows of people seated on plastic chairs, a canteen, lifts, staircases, a glass walkway, beyond which is a tiled pond circled by two orange goldfish, racks of folded-up wheelchairs, a noisy corridor filled with people and shouting, a ward with bright cartoon characters painted on the walls where blank-faced children sit cross-legged on beds, a young man holding a paper cup underneath a water dispenser, sending balloons of bubbles up into the inverted bottle. Then they pass though a pair of swing doors. There is silence here, and a room with a large window on one side, framing trees and cars and sky. Alice is there on a bed. The initial thought that jumps into Ben’s mind is that he’d forgotten how tall she is. Her body seems so long and thin as to take up the whole length of the bed.
He walks round and lays the newspaper cone of roses on the bedside table. He looks up to thank the nurse for bringing them here, but she seems to have gone. Ann is biting her lip, which Ben knows means she’s trying not to cry. Their eyes meet across the bed. Both of them are afraid to touch her, Ben realises. He reaches quickly for one of Alice’s hands. It is limp, yet warm, the fingers loose and bendable, entirely without resistance or energy. If he let it go it would just drop back to the bed. Ben runs a fingertip around the white dent at the base of her fourth finger. She has stepmother jags around her nails, which are cut neatly into white crescents. How long is it since he held his daughter’s hand?
He places it back beside her hip, curling the fingers into her palm, and moves around the bed towards Ann, puts his arm around her shoulder and kisses her hair. Alice’s hair is gone; shaved so close to her head that the white of her scalp shows through.
‘Do you remember when she returned from Thailand with that tattoo?’ Ben says. ‘We were so angry.’
Ann gives a coughing laugh through her tears. ‘She didn’t care, though.’
There is a thin, transparent tube running into Alice’s mouth, held on to her face by a strip of elastic. The ventilator machine sighs profoundly at regular intervals. Another, thinner tube runs from a clear bag held high on a stand into Alice’s arm. Ben leans over her. Her lips are pale and bloodless. Bruising shadows most of the left side of her face and one of her eye sockets, and there is a scraped graze on her cheekbone. He notices that tiny violet veins run in branches over her eyelids. Beneath them, her eyes are still, as if mesmerised by an image printed on the inside of her lids.
Almost in unison, Ben and Ann reach for a chair and they take opposite sides of the bed, their elbows on the mattress. The bed is an odd height and Ben feels like a child at a high table.
‘Hello Alice. It’s us,’ he says, feeling a little self-conscious, like he does when he talks to very small, very shy children. ‘Your mother and I have come to see you.’
Ann strokes her cheek. ‘I’m almost afraid to touch her in case I set one of these machines off,’ she whispers. ‘Do you think she knows we’re here?’
Ben isn’t sure what he thinks yet, but he nods decisively for his wife’s sake. Then they both look back at their daughter. It occurs to Ben that they have expended so much thought on the logistics of the journey and getting themselves to the hospital that neither of them have really thought about what they would do when they got here.
Ann fills the sink. The water flashes and throws icy darts of light up to the ceiling. It is a clear, bright, crisp afternoon — the best weather for North Berwick. She might go down to the beach later on where the wind will be freezing and scalpel-sharp. From the window, the island of Craigleith is defined clearly against the navy-blue sea. The sea is Ann’s weathervane; she can see it from practically wherever she is in the house. Its colour and texture change by the hour and can be anything from a forbidding airforce blue on stormy days to a deep green on cloudless August days. She doesn’t hold with forecasts, although she does find a certain rhythmic calm in listening to the shipping forecasts. Years ago Ben, thinking she would be interested, bought her a map of all the places — Faroes, Fairisle, Northutshire, Fisher, Forties, Cromarty. He hadn’t understood that she didn’t care where they were — and why on earth would she, for heaven’s sake? — that it was precisely because it was meaningless to her that she enjoyed it. Ann sighs. She had pinned up the map so as not to hurt his feelings, of course. Then one of the girls had torn it when flouncing out of the back door in a teenage tantrum — probably Alice. In fact, it was definitely Alice. Ann had been secretly glad that she could take it down, folding it into itself so that the northern Hebrides gently kissed the Isle of Wight, jagged coastlines rubbing up against each other in the rubbish bin.
A sudden crash from the room above makes her jump. She looks up at the ceiling, listening out for Elspeth’s footsteps. The moment stretches, her hand in the cooling water in the sink. Nothing.
‘Elspeth?’ Her voice sounds strident, still unmistakably English after all these years. ‘Elspeth! Are you there?’
Ann wipes her hands on a flowered dish-towel and goes through the sitting room, up the stairs. The door to Elspeth’s room is shut. Elspeth has kept on living in the front bedroom. Ann feels periodically irked by this; the room she and Ben have had since they were married is smaller and faces Marmion Road. If you leant out of the side window then you could admittedly see a square patch of sea but it was nothing like the the long line of horizon, broken only by the jutting rocks of Craigleith, Fidra and the Lamb, that dominated the whole of one side of Elspeth’s room. ‘My view’, as Elspeth rather unnecessarily referred to it.
Ann taps at the door with her nails. ‘Elspeth? Are you all right?’ Her voice quavers a little. She presses down the handle.
Elspeth is lying stretched out on the carpet, one hand flung above her head. Her body forms a perfect parallel to the line of the horizon which, Ann notes, is beginning to darken. Ann lets go of the door handle, which springs back with a loud ping, walks over and stands above Elspeth. Her face is grey, twisted. The position her body has fallen in is an oddly seductive, starlet pose; one arm above her head, the other draped over her chest, her legs drawn up. Ann bends over at the waist. There is no sign of any breathing at all.
She straightens up and tiptoes back across the room.
Half-way, she wonders why she’s tiptoeing. She leaves the door open deliberately and goes back down the stairs.
In the kitchen she empties muddied potatoes from a brown paper sack into the sink. They fall against each other in the water and the soil dissolves slowly, sinking into a gritty sediment at the bottom. When a pile of wet peelings has developed at her side, she realises that she won’t be needing as many potatoes as she’d thought she would, but do
esn’t stop peeling.
Later she hears Ben come in and shout, ‘Hello!’ He treads upstairs and she hears the lavatory flush, the water rushing though the house, him going into their bedroom. She’s never realised before how heavily he walks. She waits, listening, her hands resting on the draining-board. There is a short silence. She picks at a loose jag in her thumbnail, reaches for an emery board, but puts it back. Then Ben shouts her name three times, ‘Ann, Ann, Ann!’ and she waits, turning her head to the doorway, arranging her face into an expression of wide-eyed concern.
I’d never been to Canary Wharf before. I’d seen the tower, of course. It’s difficult to miss its flashing pyramidical top in the smoggy London skyline. But despite having always disliked it, I did feel a little awestruck when I stood beside it and tilted my head back to see its sheer height soaring into the sky.
At the security desk I filled in a form saying where I was from, why I was here and who I was seeing. I have gone over in my head so often that moment where I first wrote his name, where the muscles and tendons in my fingers, hands, arm and shoulder conspired to form the curves, spikes, strokes and dashes that spelt out the name ‘John Friedmann’. Did I feel anything?
I don’t believe in fate. I don’t believe in cushioning your insecurities with a system of belief that tells you, ‘Don’t worry. This may be your life but you’re not in control. There is something or someone looking out for you — it’s already organised.’ It’s all chance and choice, which is far more frightening.
I’d like to think that as the lift swooped up the floors I sensed that something important was about to take place, that my life was about to split away from my expectation of it. But, of course, I didn’t. Who ever does? Life’s cruel like that — it gives you no clues.