Alice by Heart

by Steven Sater

  “Sure, every doughboy needs his jam,” Angus kindly reminded. “ ‘But armies on their stomachs move, and this one moves on Spam.’ ”

  At which Harold leapt, but all too soon flatlanded, as if on some unyielding trampoline, clapping his battle-scarred hands: “Spam! Spam! What is Spam? Spam is ham that didn’t pass its physical. But me, I’m sound. I’m all sound now, me. This time I’ll pass . . .”

  “You’ve passed, mate.” Angus clapped his back. “It’s past.”

  “I have?!” Harold exalted. Leaping harder, landing longer, than perhaps he ever had. “Sir, yes, sir! Harold Pudding reporting for duty, sir.”

  Doing her best to suppress the growing motion sickness, Mamie steadied her candytuft-teacup, running a bruised finger over its gilt-edged rim.

  “My Royal Albert cup,” she observed. “Marvelous, isn’t it? If only you’d known its saucer as once we did.”

  Prompting that dismissive Dodgy: “Oh yes, yes. After the last thirty-seven nights of chip chip chip.”

  “A world lost bit by bit,” Tabatha chimed in.

  “My Mummy’s coming for me today!” Nigel whined, his weather eye fixed on those unheeding stairs, his inky thumb attacking his ear.

  “Hear, hear,” Harold cheered. Opening his pad, to show-and-tell his freshest sketch, turning his whole body, whereas once he might have turned only his head: “See here, this is my here. Here, and heeeeere!” he cheered, as Alice started past.

  But that former soldier held her with a bare forked hand: “ ‘Thank Gawwwd,’ my Mum said, when my regiment left. ‘Thank Gawwd, Harold’ll be away at the front—and well out of harm’s way in London!’ ”

  Moved by the thought of Harold’s sorry Mum, Alice almost met his sorry look. But no no, she knew, I must shut all that out, must shut perception down. Must narrow the world to what I need to do now. Warily she eluded the soldier’s grasp and took one further step.

  And that diva, Dodgy, sighed an exhausted sigh. Feeling, at age fifteen, he had already lived five hundred lives: “The endless chain of days, you know.”

  “Mad, mad,” murmured Tabbie, “we’ve all gone mad here.”

  And there, as if to prove the point that madness stalks, ubiquitous, that Nurse came marching, on her rounds. Like a veritable ambulance, with that awful red Cross on her chest, parking herself directly in Alice’s path. Offering up her bad-news wares: “Tin tomatoes tonight. And more of you than rations—not a word about it.”

  Stymied, stopped, Alice clung to herself. Like some squirrel monkey, sprung from the zoo, stranded in the night on torched London ground. How, now, she asked herself, how to get past? To him?

  And then, like a package from heaven, some bright thing fell from the air: Clllllllllllllinng! And then, cluuuuuuuummph!

  Who? What? Alice looked above her and about, almost as if searching for something known from a past life. There, in that vaulted chink, she saw a hand, readying a (second?) fat tin can. Tossing it suddenly, sparklingly, down.

  Another: Cllllllllllllllllinng! Followed by clumph. Another something, gone screeching. Screeling. Plopping open. Toward the track.

  “Duck, Freddie!” cried Pudding aloud, while ducking for cover beneath Dodgy’s cot.

  “My nerves, please! Pudding!”

  And now, the rations came tumbling. Tins of tomatoes cracking open, spewing red pulp from their seams all over the platform. And with that, the entire global Red Cross, every First Aid Staffer, every black-hatted ARP instructor, every volunteer at each Relief or Convalescent Center—rose up in arms. Positively glaring at that near-invisible trickster, Tabatha: “You! Such a trial!”

  And Alice? She stood, motionless, amazed at the space opened by that tomato-chaos. The room she now had to move through, to be near him. From the darkness above she caught a glint of Tabbie’s resilient grin. Like some kind of hint from the central mind of the world.

  “Go!” said the grin.

  Taking the hint, Alice went. Trying her best, as she did, to ignore Miss Mamie’s merciless scoffing. Her snickering about that cantankerous tin-can-dropping.

  “All this,” Miss M presumed, “so that woebegone girl can run back to her Alfred? Well, we know who gets that Tabbie’s vote for Orphan of the Year.”

  “Has to save somebody, doesn’t she?” Dodgy sniggered, like Snow White’s Stepmum, consulting his mirror. “That is, since she couldn’t save her pseudo-sister.”

  Let the choughs chatter, Alice thought—she had moved on. Had scooted—quick, quick!—behind that dark-shimmering curtain. With a tug, with a robust ducking-under that sheet, there she was—with him, again.

  CHAPTER VIII:

  —

  ONCE MORE, DOWN THE RABBIT-HOLE

  SUCH a dank, constricted space—behind that quarantine curtain, in the nightsweat Tube-station air—and yet, to her it seemed so grand a room . . .

  Alfred’s face. Every time she looked at it, she’d remember another part of it—how many details, how many contours she’d forgotten—as if she’d never quite taken in this or that. And so, each look brought her again some lost part of him . . .

  And yet, to him, she reasoned, his face must seem so outside himself. Like a mask that still surprised him, a familiar ghost he met in every mirror. Whereas, whatever world he knew in sleep must seem so much more him. So much more where he lived.

  And yet. Through that pallid mask which Illness had set on him, she saw again what most she knew as him. All the wit, the stubborn strength. The resilience. And, for her at least, the marvel of all he first had been—aglow on their common-garden lawn, as the most-miraculous White Rabbit. (But then, don’t we always suffuse our so-desired someone with that supernatural air of all it seemed they were before we actually knew them?)

  A sudden wince-inducing thud thudded beyond. She cast about—no fiendish Nurse lurking about. Urgently she whispered: “Alfred?”

  Not a murmur. Not a flutter from him. “Alfred?”

  Something in him stirred. Though what, exactly? “Alfred, please. It’s me.”

  With those words, his eyelids opened—but at once, quite shut her out. But why? It wasn’t as if she hadn’t woken him before—from one of his afternoon naps. Alfred, please. It’s me. Just me. Or was that just it? Did the sight of her recall too much? she wondered. Did it bring him too much consciousness of where he was, of what he’d become, of all he once had been? Whatever the case, he brusquely turned away. Perturbed. Ashamed? Or was it just that her eyes, looking on his, would still long for too much from him?

  “Forgive me, Alfred. They wouldn’t let me near you.”

  “Perhaps they have good reason,” he contended, some pale light dimming in the blue afternoon of his gaze.

  Reasons aside, she drew nearer.

  “Alice, please! You mustn’t come too close.”

  “That’s the fever talking, not you,” she insisted.

  But his look resisted still. “Listen to me, I’m falling away. The stars are so bright, they hurt my eyes . . .”

  The stars? She paused on the word, unsure. But nodded, nonetheless, reassuring him, touching his shoulder through the bedsheet. “Come, let me read to you. You’ll feel better.”

  “Your Mum must be half-mad from worry.”

  Alice shook her head, quite certain: “She’ll know I’m with you.”

  “Really, you might have left me in that gutter.”

  “Alfred!”

  Those eyes, forever his, become so grave. And still they did not turn away. Merely watched her watching him. The plea within them remaining, unwavering. Slowly, lingeringly, from beneath his thickset pillow, he withdrew a war-scored pocket watch. Through the darkness visible, glimmering. His sole remaining possession—once a birthday gift from Alice.

  “You brought it?”

  “Tick tock,” he intoned, firmly.

  “Tick tock,” mo
re lightly, still warily she replied.

  Over his sloping shoulder, in profound disquiet, his eyes found hers again.

  “Just one more night we’ll be here,” she whispered.

  “And you?” he managed. Then, gently jibed: “All comfy on that platform?”

  Her eyes pooled, saying no. And he relented, a touch. Half a smile spreading over him, in spite of his firmset lips. “But honestly, how is that concrete world treating you?”

  “Quite concrete.”

  He let out half a laugh. That loveliest, seeing-through-everything laugh, only his. A place, like his voice, she could still find shelter in.

  “And all our . . . fellow pilgrims?” he asked. Growing playful once again—as once he so had been—he aped that blue-blood girl’s precise, sparrowlike intonation: “Your Mamie Van Such and Such Eysen?”

  “Your Mamie,” Alice archly replied, matching him.

  As if to spite the nose on his own exhaustion’s face, he put on a bit of Mamie’s posh-exhaustion: “Summon Dotty—darling, do—she’s the only one who even remembers how we take our tea. All the rest have fled or are dead—and so much for steeping our chamomile properly! My Auntie Maybelline says, she’s locked herself up in the Tower of London. Times like these, it is the place to be.”

  With a wink, he slipped a pretend-posh hand beneath his pretend-cotton sheet and withdrew two dark-swirling fig pinwheel biscuits. Pale pale his fingers, offering them: “Aren’t they mahvelous?”

  “Most mahvelous,” Alice posh-said, her smile declining, in spite of the rich, dark fruit interior. “She meant them for you.”

  Once more he extended the smuggled confections. With half a brag: “Sweet as our past.”

  “Well, when you put it that way.” Alice reached—but as she clasped that worn brown-sugar sweet, he cupped his free hand over her hand. Locking it between his. Seeking, it felt like, some world he’d known within her. Some part of himself he could recognize still as himself. Some part of himself still there. Tingling (more than she’d care to admit), Alice looked into his mild mocking eyes.

  “And Angus?” he asked, pretending, Angus-like, to rise from an ashen heap of his outfit and exhale a fictive, blue smoke plume. “Has he been utterly captivating, with his tales of the phosphor-pink sky over Leeds?”

  He’d been listening? “They’re all he has, those tales,” she opined.

  “Tales, sure,” Alfred murmured, “they can be wonderful things.”

  He passed his hand over his lips; something, some further sigh, festering still within him: “But in the end, what are they—tales? Distractions, Alice. Diversions, merely. From seeing what we have to see, from thinking all the terrible things we cannot help but think . . .”

  “Alfred!” she called out—couldn’t stop herself.

  And with that note of alarm, his look shut down. And he folded in on himself, removing himself. A glaze, like over those Tube-station tiles, closing over his eyes, as he rested his head on the blunt war-bolster again. Now what? Say something else? Litter him with more her?

  Dismay settled beside Alice; a dismay so long familiar, so annoyingly near. Meanwhile, that sweaty fig biscuit, merely sitting there in her hand, ever more awkward, like some odd weight, some dumb lump within her she could not explain away.

  “Come, I’ll read to you,” she tried again, plying him. “I can make you well again. I’ll bring you to our world again.”

  “Our world? What world?” he answered, asking—a sorry smile passing over his lips. “Alice, there’s no sky left. Only ash and smoke and ruin.”

  “There’s sky enough in Wonderland.”

  “Alice,” he rasped, the graveled tenor of his voice surprising even him. “I have no time now. Not for this.”

  “You do. You will,” she urged, wanting so badly to rouse him—to awaken too that steadying sense in herself she had only with him. “We’ll feast on our Mad Hatter tea and all our grand, imaginary sweets. Like on all our golden afternoons!”

  His hoarsened voice rasped words, like so much soot: “Where are they now, those afternoons?”

  “Still here,” she said, touching her breast. Then, with a gesture toward that manic, makeshift shelter. “All this, we can make it disappear.” Her eyes welled with unwanted tears, as she held out her crimson volume of Alice’s Adventures, the one he’d given her, the one she’d salvaged from the flames and brought here with her: “Come. You can run there. You can breathe there. You’ll be well again. Then they won’t take you away.”

  “We’ll start reading, I won’t even reach The End.”

  “Of course you will.”

  He shook his head insistently: “I won’t start what I can’t finish.”

  “I know—since forever.”

  She watched him shiver, his pillowcase wrinkling in time with him. And she saw him again—antic, free, and welcoming—as once he’d been. “Even when you were six,” she pushed on, “staying well past dark, ignoring your mother’s and my mother’s calls. Poring over every picture, each comma, impersonating every single moment of our book. You just so had to finish it.”

  “I’ve no time left—you understand?”

  But she would not. “Don’t believe them. You can’t let them take this from us. Not this, too. It’s all we have. It’s Wonderland.”

  “You go there without me now,” he urged.

  “You can’t lose heart.”

  “Oh really?” he asked so plaintively. “After everything else we’ve lost?”

  But with that plaint, a heaving cough racked Alfred’s chest. A rattling chain of phlegm and blood. His fists, his ribs, his cheeks convulsed with vehement breaths; as if he were recoiling from the stigma of his consciousness.

  From just the other side of that quarantine curtain, a wheedling voice could well be heard: “No coughing on me, thank you.” Dodgy, it must be.

  “Have some compassion on these frayed nerves, please.” That mahvelous Mamie, assuredly. From her perch of proper ruin.

  Alice tugged at the stubborn, clinging curtain. Which still disdained to shut. Enough. Her determined hand clasped Alfred’s hand. But before she could even . . .

  “Please,” his voice pleaded. “Don’t try to hold me, too.”

  “But I will—”

  “No. Alice, let me go.”

  No no no. Another tremor, yet more violent, erupted from him—like a blistering string of nononos, fresh black-red blood sprinkling his pillow, with the guttering aftershock of each successive, jerking cough.

  And with each jagged cough, the affrighted Nigel cried out like a damaged toy, cradling himself upon his cot. He and his thumb in shock. “No more, no more! My Mummy’s coming for me today! My Mummy’s coming for me today!”

  “Oh, do you think?” purred Tabatha. Through the half-open curtain Alice could see her, effusing feline irony, as she skeptically took in the motley platform-crew, singling them out, one by one with her barbed tongue: “Just like mine, and yours, and his, and hers . . .”

  And hers? Alice pondered. If only Mum could leave Cathy’s side and come find them, could stay a night down here with Alfred and her, could run her work-roughened fingers through Alice’s hair, whisking out the dust, critiquing the ends . . .

  “Hear that? It’s the end!” Nigel yelped, uncradling and cradling himself. Rocking forward and back.

  “Sprengbombe 250, is it?” the deep-toking Angus posited.

  He listened. They all listened. Only the low hum of the nothing-to-be-done. The anxious hovering hmmm . . . Till the waiting (nothing yet), the listening (nothing still), grew too disconcerting, and there rose from this ill-kept company a reflexive, quick cacophony. A bantering. A banging. A snatching-up of rations.

  Angus, it was, who’d hazily managed to zone in on Alfred’s discarded dinner, and had sidled close as close: “On a hunger strike, is he? I can use that boy�
��s bacon, thank you.”

  Like a dervish, Dodgy whirled about, chiding: “You pig—that’s my pig!”

  “Charming,” added Tabatha dryly. “Rationing out the world he had.”

  At that, Alfred began wheezing—more harshly still. His wasted body, cowling, his bulging chest racked by stertorous breaths.

  Springing straight up, Dodgy tossed his gauntlet at Angus: “Bit of shrapnel says that boy doesn’t last the night.”

  “Bit of bacon says he’s gone before this bite,” wagered Angus, wagging that esteemed bit of bacon against his lips.

  Can you, please? No course left for Alice, none, she thought, but to rise above. To read above. She opened her treasure-book and recited aloud: “Chapter One: ‘Down the Rabbit-Hole.’ Alice was beginning to get—”

  “Alice, no,” Alfred urged. “I’m not listening.”

  But Alice pressed on, knowing him: “—to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank—”

  “Alice!”

  “Once or twice,” she continued, “she had peeped into the book—”

  Startling and abrupt, a gruesome cry slit the narrative mist—and the Underground air: “Alice Spencer!”

  Shhhrrrghkk. With a frenzied, near-maniacal grab, the Red Cross Nurse snatched that tome from Alice’s hand: “Thirty thousand dead up there—and you, with your head in Wonderland. No wonder they are burning books.”

  With that, that savage Red Cross Nurse ripped Alice’s book, shredding rending chucking hurling it—

  “Don’t!” cried Alfred.

  Startled, grateful, Alice looked to him, revived. She cried at that Nurse: “It’s all I have—or had. He gave me that!”

  “Then she can’t take it from you, can she?” Tabatha purred. “No one can.”

  At those words, at that probing look, Alice caught on a breath. No, they can’t.

  Too late. Look, the spine, the binding, breaking—all those gorgeous dusty dog-eared pages, scattering now across the track.