Putting Alice Back Together

by Carol Marinelli

  I’d always avoided envelopes but I was desperate for this one—and then here it was, the big white envelope with my official confirmation. It was the first envelope Roz had let me open in months, and I stared at the offer and I was so proud and humbled and scared and I didn’t know what to do.

  ‘Let’s tell Bonny!’ Roz said.

  ‘I’ll ring her.’

  ‘No. Let’s go over tonight—ring her and tell her that we’ll pop over.’

  I didn’t think too much about it, Roz and Bonny had become sort of friends and Lizzie sometimes babysat the kids. It wasn’t till I walked in and saw the cake and balloons and my nephews dancing around in little hats all excited that I realised this was a party.

  For me.

  Bonny gave me a hug but then she was busy dealing with the monkeys. Lex said he was very proud too—and then we rang Mum, who cried, and Eleanor, who was out, and life couldn’t get any nicer. It got more complicated instead.

  Lex called Bonny down and she was so pale and almost shaky that for a moment I thought they were going to say they were breaking up.

  ‘We’ve got something for you,’ Bonny started, but then her voice was wobbly and she turned to Lex. ‘You tell her.’

  ‘We’re proud of you, Alice,’ Lex said. ‘It almost killed us not to help you out, but you had to do it yourself.’

  ‘You’ve helped me out enough.’

  ‘But you did it.’ Lex smiled. ‘You’ve dug yourself out of that hole, and you deserve a bit of a break.’ He handed me an envelope and I opened it and there was a plane ticket. Ten days in London and I was flying out with Roz.

  ‘I’ve booked the pub over the road for the wedding,’ Roz said. ‘You can share my room, so long as you don’t mind…’

  ‘You can see Mum and Eleanor and the kids.’ Bonny smiled, but her eyes were glassy, and I was quite sure she and Lex had had a row about this, and I got it then. I fully got what Lisa had been trying to tell me that day.

  Because I repeated her words to myself, not quite verbatim but enough that I finally understood.

  Stuck in that house, worrying about you, doing everything she can to help you, doing everything she can to keep you from leaving.

  ‘You just make sure you come back,’ Bonny said when it was time for us to leave. She hugged me tightly, told me she was proud of me, but I could feel her shoulders shaking and I wanted to fix her, I wanted to comfort her, I wanted to tell her I would stay the same and never ever change—but that had come close to killing me.

  I beamed at Roz when we were home.

  I did a little dance with my ticket in hand and told her I was delighted.

  Had a little tinkle on the piano and sang ‘Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner…’

  And then I crawled into bed and I curled up into a ball. For the first time in weeks I wanted a Kalma.

  But I didn’t have one.

  And I didn’t have a drink either.

  I curled up in bed and told myself what Lisa said to say when I got scared.

  That this too will pass.

  And it would. In a few short weeks I’d see Hugh again, and then I’d be back to restart my life.

  I’d dealt with it all—the banks and the taxman, my hair, work, the mental stuff. I’d mapped out a future… a real future… but the hardest part was going to be facing Hugh.

  Seeing again what I’d lost.

  This too will pass.

  Except I didn’t want it to.

  I didn’t want closure because then it would really be over.

  Sixty-Eight

  ‘What’s an MR?’

  Roz, who was cleaning up before we headed off, and who had read every bill, every demand, every receipt had, while cleaning, found my pyramid and order to the universe.

  Did she fold it up and put it back under its little pyramid? Did she do the polite thing and pretend not to notice?

  No, she stood and read and tried to decipher for a while, and then she had the nerve to ask me how to break my secret code.

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘“Sexy. Rich. Professional. Doctor. Lawyer. Good looking. Fantastic dress sense. MR. Brunette, raven or blond…’“ She started to laugh. ‘What is it? A shopping list?’

  ‘Leave it, Roz.’

  She started really laughing. Then she saw my face and tried not to, and when I walked off she followed me into my bedroom. I sat on the sofa with my head in my hands. She didn’t have to try not to laugh, she was serious now. She sat down beside me and I took the list and stared at it.

  ‘He was it.’

  ‘There’ll be others.’

  ‘I don’t want others.’ Or maybe I did. ‘You know…’ I wasn’t crying, just shaky, and there was a flare of anger too. ‘He went—he knew the state I was in and he just…’ I balled the list in my fist and then I flicked those tiny Russian dolls off my bedside table as easily as he had discarded me. ‘Not a phone call, nothing; he didn’t care how he’d left me.’

  And I felt Roz still.

  I felt the silence and looked over at her, at lovely Roz, who stopped lying the day she came out; I looked at her little pink face and the worry in her eyes and I realised I was missing something.

  ‘He emailed me.’

  ‘When?’

  She couldn’t look at me, so she covered her face with her hands and pressed her fingers into her eyes. ‘A few times,’ she said. ‘Quite a few times.’

  ‘Saying what?’ I begged. ‘Fucking show me!’ I demanded.

  She was all sort of nervous and shaky as she logged in.

  I was beside myself, desperate, demented; I was peering through a foggy window and finally there would be answers—finally I would be able to see.

  But there was nothing.

  Or a little, and it revealed nothing.

  You may not know this sender. Mark as safe | Mark as junk

  From: Hugh Watson (hughdrwho@hotmail.com)

  To: andersonrosalind@hotmail.com

  Subject: Re: personal

  Hi Roz

  I hope you don’t mind me emailing you, especially as I am asking you not to tell Alice that I have.

  I was wondering if you could let me know how she is. I was concerned…

  I won’t go on, but that was pretty much it, and Roz hadn’t replied at first, but then he sent another one, saying he was very concerned this time.

  From: Roz Anderson (andersonrosalind@hotmail.com)

  To: hughdrwho@hotmail.com

  Subject: Re: personal

  Hi Hugh,

  I’m going to be honest: I’d prefer that you didn’t email. It puts me in an awkward…

  There were lots of them and I’ll spare you all the details and let you race through them as I did. I just read them like the Bionic Woman (my mum had every episode on video and when we were little she watched them over and over), trying to get to what I did not know.

  He was very concerned, he said again.

  He’d been concerned for a while before the row.

  I was no longer his concern, Roz had replied to him. He had made that perfectly clear.

  Go, Roz!

  Should he email Alice to ask, perhaps? Hugh had suggested.

  It was then that Roz had told him that I was doing okay and perhaps it would be better not to contact me.

  He appreciated her response and he told her some more.

  He’d been increasingly concerned (okay, we get the picture).

  He had tried to ignore, on many occasions, and to give me the benefit of the doubt. When I’d wanted to go back to the hotel that day his phone had broken it had hit him—I was like the patients on the ward waiting for drug time. He had seen my agitation and he had tried to ignore it, to justify it.

  But he couldn’t apparently.

  He was aware he had overstepped the mark in his assassination of me (okay, he didn’t use that word, but I think that was what he meant) and he would appreciate knowing how I was doing.

  I was getting there, Roz had tol
d him—it was stressing her, and she felt very conflicted, and, really, she would rather not give updates. Alice was doing fine. He could stop worrying now.

  And he had.

  There was no more correspondence.

  Sixty-Nine

  I can never decide how I should display them.

  All apart.

  All together.

  I scrabbled on the floor and found them, worried I’d lost the teeny-tiny one, but I found her in the join between the carpet and the wall.

  I put them all back on my bedside table but I was worried about losing the little one again, so I slotted them inside each other. They were safer together while I was away.

  They belonged together.

  Nesting inside each other.

  And then I went for my appointment with Lisa.

  I hadn’t even realised I was lost when I had met her and, when I had realised I had wandered around in circles for what felt like for ever. But with a lot of guidance, an eventual humongous effort from me and loads of help from my friends, suddenly things were becoming clearer. Suddenly I was on the edge, looking in at the centre, and I was able to see what my father’s leaving had done.

  I could see how his treatment of women had affected not just his wife but his children.

  All of it I could see.

  That when my hair was straight and I was thin I felt sleek and groomed and in control.

  I could see the personality I had been born with and how it struggled with a sometimes cruel world.

  All of it I could see now, but Lisa and I differed on one vital point—well, it was vital for me.

  I obsessed about men—any male attention and I glowed. With Gus, with my dad when he had taken us out, with the best man at Bonny’s wedding and the many, many that had followed on from there. Hugh had been the last, Lisa pointed out, so I was still stuck: I still hadn’t learnt how to move on.

  She read all the emails I had printed out.

  I had pored over them and she read them in a minute at best, then folded them up and handed the little package that contained my heart back to me.

  ‘You went out for a few weeks—Hugh admitted from the start that he wasn’t sure if it was over with Gemma.’

  ‘He ended it with her before he slept with me.’

  ‘Even if that’s true,’ she said carefully, ‘clearly he didn’t end it well enough because Gemma got on a plane.’

  ‘She was upset,’ I argued. ‘If I’d passed on the message—’

  ‘Alice,’ she interrupted, ‘this isn’t about a message being passed on. This is about how you were falling apart. Hugh couldn’t have made it clearer when he left that it wasn’t anything to do with Gemma flying over. He was building up to leaving anyway.’

  I hated that the most.

  ‘And you’ve heard from Nicole that he’s back with Gemma? That they’re planning a wedding?’

  Correction—I hated that bit the most.

  ‘I know it’s over…’ I hadn’t cried over Hugh and still I didn’t, still I couldn’t. There was a piece of me that couldn’t even let myself mourn him, because it was such a black place; I didn’t think I could go there yet and carry on. But I stood on the edge of that circle and stared at it for a moment, stared at me and Hugh and what for a little while we had been—the glimpse of what a relationship could be—and I didn’t think I could ever get there again.

  ‘You will,’ Lisa said. ‘When you’re ready.’

  ‘But not with Hugh?’

  ‘What do you want me to say here, Alice?’

  Not the truth, my eyes pleaded, so I bargained instead. ‘Do you believe in love? I mean, love can be real, even if it only lasts a few weeks…’

  ‘Alice.’ She stepped in then. My hour was nearly up and she wasn’t going into the red for Hugh. ‘Real love doesn’t end after a few weeks.’

  The snake-shaped sweet I was holding in my hands and playing with snapped then. It just snapped and so too did the last bit of hope I had for Hugh and me.

  ‘Your future is waiting for you.’ I gritted my teeth. She was daytime TV and a trip round the garden centre looking at the water features all in one.

  A book of clichés but with very big tits.

  She was also right.

  She wished me well for my trip away, booked me in an appointment for the day after I got back (after ten days with my family I would no doubt need it), and she even gave me a copy of the Serenity Prayer, to read, she said, when things got a bit too much.

  I just prayed I didn’t have an accident on the way home from my appointment and some well-meaning paramedics found it in my purse and assumed I had issues.

  Which I did, of course.

  It just wasn’t all that I was.

  So Hugh and I were over and it was right and healthy, and of course I had to move on, but not even the sweet snake in my mouth as I paid my bill and then walked to the tram could take away that last taste of bitterness.

  It tasted bitter because I was bitter, bitter and angry with myself, because I had lost him. Sort of Bonny’s Lex and the straight version of Dan all rolled into the perfect guy for me.

  He had been that good.

  Seventy

  We were an odd little crowd at the airport.

  Bonny said she had a migraine, but I knew the dark glasses were there so I didn’t see that she was crying, yet the tears kept trickling out.

  ‘You go and have a ball,’ Lex said, and hugged me goodbye.

  ‘I’ll get there one day! Give Nicole my love.’ Dan grinned and he cuddled me. I was against his chest and I could hear the thud, thud of his heart, and I loved him—just not in that way. I gave Matthew a hug too.

  I kind of liked him now.

  Maybe.

  Okay, yes. I liked him. (BTW, you’d certainly have no trouble spotting it with him. He’s too ordered, like Nicole actually, but I now realised Dan needed a bit of sensible order because, for a while there, he walked on the wild side too.)

  ‘Come back.’ I closed my eyes as Bonny held me tighter.

  ‘Of course I’ll be back. It’s just ten days, Bonny.’

  And then it was my turn to walk through the doors and I knew how my sister was feeling as she watched me leave.

  You have my absolute permission to shoot me if I ever describe myself as jaunty, but I was shiny and ready, as my time came to go through the doors.

  I can’t even remember what music the customs officers were playing. You’d have to ask Bonny.

  I was going back.

  I was moving forward, by going back.

  I was ready.

  Seventy-One

  My paranoia as to people thinking I’m gay when out with Roz has been slightly merited.

  I mean, had I been trying to pull on this trip home, it would have proven difficult.

  Roz was finding her own style now—lots of linen trousers and blouses and flat shoes.

  She smelt great. She even wore make-up, but it was still—well, kind of obvious.

  I accepted the quizzical frowns when she cuddled me because I started bawling at Singapore Airport because Hugh had once said he liked it, and when I had a little panic on the descent to Heathrow and she held my hand, I didn’t care that two horrible teenagers nudged each other and giggled.

  I guess they thought I was the girly one.

  Mum had known I was bringing a friend and the second she opened the door I could tell she was petrified of Roz, but Roz was so used to that, that she soon put Mum at ease. I left Roz chatting away with her in the kitchen as I roamed about the house, checking out the changes.

  It was the day before Christmas Eve and we were too excited to sleep so we took the tube to Oxford Street. Even Mum came along, and Roz took a hundred photos and we bought last-minute presents and enjoyed the mayhem, and then it was back home and Mum refused Roz’s offer to help with dinner, but gave me a wide-eyed look and nodded her head towards the kitchen.

  I had been summoned.

  I was in my old room, she expla
ined. Roz was in Bonny’s till Christmas night, when she’d have to have the sofa because Eleanor, Noel and the kids would be staying. Mum would sleep on a camp bed in the back room, so Eleanor and Noel would have hers and the kids would be in Bonny’s, which had once been Bonny’s and mine. Eleanor always had her own room—it’s really too confusing to explain.

  ‘That’s fine,’ I said patiently, because Mum always gets in a lather about room arrangements.

  ‘Why don’t I put the camp bed in your room tonight?’ Mum said. ‘I could set it up now.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, it would save us all moving our things around. You and Roz can share. I can set up Bonny’s old room for the kids.’ (I will spare you all the logistics of the conversation—I’m sure you’ve had one similar.)

  ‘Just leave it as it is,’ I said, turning to go.

  ‘It would make things easier,’ Mum said.

  I don’t know why, but though I’d matured a great deal over the past months, a few hours back home and I was seventeen again.

  ‘I don’t want to share!’ I whined. I didn’t. No matter how much I hated having the flat to myself, I loved having my own room—and it was the same here. Roz chats till she’s unconscious and then she snores and then she gets up at some ungodly hour like seven. I’d put up with it for the wedding ‘cos I couldn’t afford otherwise, but I didn’t want to share my bedroom.

  I almost stamped my foot.

  It was like being in a time warp, really.

  ‘I’m trying to make this easy on all of us,’ Mum said.

  ‘Why can’t you just leave it as it is—?’

  ‘Alice!’ she interrupted. ‘It might take a bit of getting used to, but Roz seems lovely. You’re the happiest I’ve seen you in a long time.’ She doesn’t…? a little voice said. She doesn’t actually think…? ‘Now, I’ll put the camp bed in your room. I’m not going to come in and say goodnight, so what your arrangements are behind closed doors…’ Yes, she bloody well does!

  ‘Mum,’ I said, ‘Roz and I—well, we’re not…’

  ‘Alice, I’m not blind,’ Mum said.

  ‘Roz is,’ I said, ‘but I’m not.’