‘That’s not a bad idea,’ he said reluctantly. ‘I could invite him over here. He could meet you then.’
She shook her head. ‘I think you should get your relationship with him sorted first. I think meeting me may be a bit much for a first go. It’d be easier meeting him on neutral territory — a restaurant or cafe.’
‘Yes. OK. You’re right.’ He sat down at his desk decisively and pulled a card out of his drawer. ‘Dear Dad,’ he said, his pen poised, ‘thanks for the mirror. My girlfriend and I had a really good shag in all the wrapping.’
‘I’m sure telling him that will really help matters.’
‘Only kidding.’
He finished it and went out immediately to post it. He returned with an outsized picture hook and a new drill bit, bought from the grumpy hardware man across the road. He was whistling as he levered the mirror up off the floor, sending a rhombus of white light wheeling across the ceiling. He hung it in the hallway behind the front door. Alice watched anxiously as he heaved it on to the hook, balancing on two chairs, his legs straddling the gap.
What can I say about the time we spent in each other’s lives? That we were happy. That we were barely apart. That, fleetingly, I would get that vertiginous, towering feeling of knowing another person so well that you could actually see what it would be like to be them. That I never felt incomplete before 1 met him but with him I felt finished, whole. What else? We lived in his house in Camden Town. I made him tidier, I painted the staircase blue, he eased my temper by laughing at me when I was in a rage. He cured my insomnia by reading to me in the middle of the night when he was half asleep. What else, what else? We flew a kite in Regent’s Park and on a beach in the Isle of Wight with the Needles puncturing the horizon. We peered together down a vast telescope at a curved sliver of Venus, lit up by the sun, from an observatory on a hill in Prague. We sat on a beach in Sri Lanka during an electric storm, watching great Hammer-horror forks of lightning crack open the horizon, while phosphorescence glinted on the shoreline like cats’ eyes. We made love on every available surface in the house, in numerous capital cities, in a cramped berth of a train going through Poland with the provotznik rattling the door handle, in a windmill in Norfolk, on a chilly Scottish golf course, in a darkroom and once in an Underground lift.
We got married three years after we first met. I didn’t want to, not really. I agreed only because of pure attrition. John got it into his head that we should get married: he asked me and I said no, why should we, what’s the point? Being the obtuse person he was, he then made a point of asking me to marry him at every available opportunity, often several times a day. ‘Alice, what do you want for dinner and will you marry me?’ he would say, or, ‘What are you up to tomorrow? Why don’t wre get married?’, or, whispered, ‘Alice, it’s your sister on the phone and by the way will you marry me, please?’ This went on for months, I think. In the end I just said yes, all right, why not?
What else is there to say? That I loved him more than I ever thought it was possible to love anyone. That his father never spoke to him again.
That day, news of the bombing just seemed to seep through London like an urban form of osmosis. Even before newspapers could rush out stories on the explosion, rumours were spreading from person to person. I was at work. It was a Friday afternoon in winter. The sky was already darkening when Susannah returned from the Italian sandwich shop around the corner, shivering with the cold, struggling through the door with her hands full of steaming paper cups. ‘I just heard,’ she said breathlessly, her eyes wide. ‘A bomb’s gone off.’
I was at my desk, talking to Anthony. We stared at her.
‘Where?’ Anthony asked.
She set the coffees down on a desk and began unbuttoning her coat, not looking at me. ‘Well . . .it might be a rumour. They weren’t exactly sure.’
‘Where did they say it was?’ I said.
‘This person didn’t really know.’
‘Susannah! Tell me! Is it Camden?’
‘No. They said in east London somewhere.’
I remember staring at the buttons on her coat. They were a darker red than the material they were sewn into. If you had a paint the same red as the coat and mixed it with the slightest dab of black — no more than enough just to cover the tip of your brush — you would end up with the button colour.
I seized the phone. My fingers flew over the familiar pattern of the numbers. ‘It’s ringing.’
It rang for what seemed like a long time, until a woman’s voice answered. ‘John’s phone.’
‘Hi. Is John there?’
‘No. He’s out of the office. He’s doing an interview I think. ’
I laughed with relief. ‘Of course, I forgot. Sorry. It’s Alice here. We heard there might have been a bomb or something down your way.’
‘God, news travels fast. There was a huge explosion about an hour ago maybe. I nearly jumped out of my skin. It was over the other side of the Docklands. It’s absolute mayhem. Half a building’s collapsed. The news desk is going mental.’
‘I bet it is. Well, I’m glad you’re all OK. Could you tell John I rang when he gets in?’
‘Sure.’
I hung up. ‘It’s OK! He’s at an interview.’
‘Thank God for that.’ Susannah slumped into a chair. ‘So it’s true, then?’
‘Yes. In the Docklands apparently.’
‘Bloody hell. Was anyone killed?’
‘She didn’t say.’
There was a silence between us for a moment. Then a phone rang and Susannah picked it up and began a conversation about writers’ bursaries.
Later that night I watched the news with the cat curled on my lap. The camera panned up the sides of the devastated building, covered by now in green tarpaulin. Men in yellow hats and reflective jackets bobbed among the fallen beams in the ruins.
‘No one has, as yet, claimed responsibility,’ the reporter’s voice intoned. ‘Twenty-seven people are in hospital tonight, but miraculously there were no fatalities in today’s bombing.’ Lucifer quivered and stretched in his sleep. It was nine-thirty. John still wasn’t back. Life without him was such a ridiculous impossibility that I refused to let doubt make any impression in my mind at all. He was late. He was late. He was very late.
You slide back the aluminium bolt on the toilet door and step out. The fluorescent tubes of light overhead make the whole interior of the room gleam like an operating theatre: a lethally shiny floor, rows of melamine cubicles, steel wash-basins, metres and metres of blue mirror, white porcelain walls, which throw back a splintered, monochromatic blur of your reflection. At the basins, you dip ypur hands into the scorching, oxygenated water, glancing behind you in the mirror. Two teenage girls, one dressed in a thick red fake-fur jacket, walk the length of the mirror’s frame, banging back cubicle doors to find two next to each other.
‘Here’s one,’ the taller one says.
'Hold on, hold on,’ says the other, adjusting the back of her left shoe by hooking her index finger into the rim of leather.
The soap from the dispenser is pink, with a pearlised sheen. Your hands will give off a cloying, sweetish smell after this. You rinse them. Strings of bubbles disappear down the steel eye of the plughole. The teenagers are having a shouted discussion about a dress. ‘Flouncy!’ one of them shrieks. The one in the red fur jacket, you think. ‘Flouncy’ is a horrible word. Makes you think of bunny rabbits or flowery pelmets. You turn to the hand-dryer, pushing the chrome button. The ends of your hair are lifted in the overheated stream. A middle-aged woman, laden with shopping-bags, breathing asthmatically, arrives at the wash-basins. You step closer to the dryer — why? To let her past? To allow her more room? Did the woman brush against you?
The front of the dryer has a small, square mirror stuck to it. It is smudged with fingerprints. You allow the depth of your eye’s focus to zone in on these fingerprints for a second, maybe two, then you allow it to relax into the tiny mirror’s distance. You must, at that mom
ent, have shifted your weight from one foot to the other, because you are suddenly convinced that you’ve seen, flitting from one side of the minuscule square to the other, your mother. You blink, then lean forward because you are surprised. Your mother is here to see you as well? Kirsty must have phoned her to tell her you were coming. It is like peering through the viewfinder of a camera with a very powerful lens, trying to locate your subject. You catch a flash of fading blonde hair, but you have moved too far one way and have to duck the other way. There it is again — that flash of white-yellow, but this time mixed up with some dark-haired man who must be walking past. Then you stand rigid, staring at the reflection, which you now have perfectly framed in front of you. One of the teenage girls has raised herself up on the side of the cubicle, her elbows hooked over the edge and is talking down to her friend. The woman at the basins wheezes, her mouth open, her lungs labouring. Somewhere overhead a defective light-strip buzzes.
You turn, first your body, then your neck and head, then your eyes. You don’t want to see this, you really don’t. Behind you, you already know without looking, is a full-length one-way mirror. People washing their hands can look out on to the station concourse through the sickly brown glass. Beyond it, wading through tannin-coloured air, people stare up at the departures board, pick timetables out of display stands, drag luggage on little wheels, or sit around on rows of chairs, yawning. Right next to it, leaning against what they thought was just a full-length mirror, are your mother and a man.
You take a step towards them, then another. You are half a metre, perhaps less, away from them. You could press your fingers against the glass at the point where your mother’s temple is resting. Or where his shoulder is leaning.
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 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.’
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 up
right.
‘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, undeterred .
part | three
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 cheekbones 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 distance, she can hear the drone of slowly moving traffic on Camden Road.
After You'd Gone Page 25
