Alice and the Fly

by James Rice

TM: It took me all night to read through them. Not to mention the stuff transcribed from the walls.

  RH: The walls? It was that bad, huh? I mean, I read the stuff in the papers. About the house. I didn’t know how much to believe …

  TM: Let’s just stick to the journal. You didn’t know he was using it?

  RH: No. But, well, I’m glad he did. That he found some use for it. I was seeing him regularly by the time I gave him that. He came voluntarily, so he obviously wasn’t opposed to the idea of sitting with me. The idea of help. It was speaking he had a problem with. I think he was embarrassed, you know, about the lisp? I thought that if he wouldn’t talk to me, maybe he’d talk to himself, you know? Write to himself. You know what I mean? It’s a fairly common technique.

  TM: Common?

  RH: Yes.

  TM: To whom?

  RH: Well, psychiatrists.

  TM: Right.

  RH: Writing as a sort of therapy.

  TM: Yes, I get the concept.

  RH: Obviously it worked on some level. I mean, it clearly sparked something inside him.

  TM: Do you have any prior training in this field?

  RH: Psychiatry?

  TM: Are you qualified in any way?

  RH: I studied psychology.

  TM: Where?

  RH: Sixth-form.

  TM: So, like, A-level?

  RH: Look, to be honest I’ve had just about enough of these interviews recently, OK?

  TM: I believe this to be your first with me.

  RH: I’m talking about my fiancé.

  TM: That’s a separate case.

  RH: Still.

  TM: I’d like to stick with Greg if possible.

  RH: I’m getting a little tired of the accusatory tone.

  TM: I’m not accusing you of anything. I’d like to be clear on that. It’s just that you’re mentioned frequently in the journal and I need to work out whether what’s written there is accurate or not.

  RH: Accurate?

  TM: I need you to shed some light on a few things.

  RH: Well …

  TM: Several of these extracts have been disputed.

  RH: Really?

  TM: I just want to clear a few things up.

  RH: Fine. Let’s clear this up first, then: the whole time I was meeting with Greg there was never any indication he was violent. If there had been, I would have told someone. I would have asked to speak to his parents, his doctor, whoever. As far as I was concerned he was just a mixed-up teenager who needed a friend. Someone to talk to. And that’s what I was trying to be. A friend.

  TM: And Greg saw you as a friend?

  RH: I hope so.

  TM: Do you think he ever thought of you as more than a friend?

  RH: More?

  TM: Do you think Greg may have found you sexually attractive?

  RH: What’s that got to do with anything?

  TM: It’s a straightforward question.

  RH: I couldn’t really say. He was never one to announce his sexuality. Not like others in his class. I thought he might be gay, actually, at one point …

  TM: You never picked up on anything? Any … feelings?

  RH: Well, I noticed him looking at my chest a couple of times. But all teenage boys do that. They’re fascinated by that stuff. You know, stuff they don’t have. I’m aware that I’m young and therefore attractive, by teacher standards.

  TM: He alludes to your breasts at one point, in the journal.

  RH: Oh?

  TM: He describes how he can see your bra. Due to the wet nature of your blouse.

  RH: Well, OK, but I’m not sure that’s important. I mean, I fancied my teacher once. I remember what it’s like. It doesn’t mean anything.

  TM: So you did nothing to encourage this behaviour?

  RH: Excuse me? You’re telling me that’s not accusatory? ‘Encourage’? No, I encouraged nothing of the sort.

  TM: But you admit to the possibility that Greg could have been attracted to you? Could have been repressing some sort of sexual urge?

  RH: I don’t know. It could have been a part of it. I didn’t get that … erm … vibe, myself. But as I’ve said, I didn’t get much of anything, other than silence. It could have been a part of it, yes, I suppose.

  TM: Did he ever mention Alice to you?

  RH: Not to me, no.

  TM: How about her father?

  [RH shakes head.]

  TM: Could you answer? For the tape, please.

  RH: No.

  TM: How about his sister? Did he ever talk about a place called Finners Island? About the troubles with his family?

  RH: I know it’s not very helpful, but he didn’t really speak, like, at all. We’d just sit together. That was the relationship we had. I’d try and help him and he’d just sit there.

  TM: Right.

  RH: Sometimes he’d nod. Or he’d answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’, but apart from that …

  TM: OK.

  RH: I mean, can you understand how infuriating it was? I tried to help him, I really did. And when he stopped coming, you know, near the end, when he started avoiding me, it was a real slap in the face. Like, we were just on the brink of making real progress and he decided to pull the plug. It was ungrateful, is what it was.

  TM: I can imagine.

  RH: And it’s hard not to blame yourself. I mean, you read about stuff like this all the time, but to be a part of it … To know him. To have played some part in his life. I just wish I could have helped, you know?

  TM: It’s not your fault.

  RH: I know, but still. I just wish he would have listened.

  TM: Right.

  RH: I just wish all of this could have been avoided.

  26/11

  Mum cut my hair last night. She used to be a full-time hairdresser, back in the Pitt. She worked at a salon called Ahmed’s Boutique, just round the corner from Kirk Lane. It’s shut now, boarded up, like most Pitt places. We pass it every night on the bus but by then you’re always asleep.

  Now Mum does part-time, mobile hairdressing instead. It started with Mrs Jenkins next door. Mum doesn’t really like Mrs Jenkins because she’s old and smells like pee and sometimes spends days at a time in the loft. She does like Mrs Jenkins’ old-lady-conversational-streak though because a few years ago Mrs Jenkins recommended Mum’s hairdressing skills to Karen Mosley in church and then Karen Mosley recommended Mum’s hairdressing skills to Sandra Peterson and Sandra Peterson recommended Mum’s hairdressing skills to Sally Anderson and Sally Anderson’s gym buddies with Ursula Hampton and so now Mum’s going round to Ursula Hampton’s every week, styling Ursula Hampton’s hair in all kinds of fabulous curls and inviting Ursula and Ken around for meals and over the last couple of years Ken has invested heavily in my father’s clinic and this year they may even get an invite to the Hamptons’ famous New Year’s bash, which makes Mum truly, truly happy. Mum has friends, not customers. Hairdressing’s a hobby and she enjoys it. It’s not like we need the money. (These are the first things she tells Karen or Sandra or Sally or Ursula or any other friends whose hair she cuts.)

  She cuts her friends’ hair in the kitchen. Sometimes I sit on the stairs so I can listen to them. It’s amazing how much they can talk, how they can keep thinking up things to say. As soon as they perch on that stool in the kitchen their words fill the house, echoing through the open-plan downstairs. Sally Anderson likes to talk about Karen Mosley and Karen Mosley likes to talk about Ursula Hampton and Ursula Hampton likes to talk about Sally Anderson. They talk about how such-and-such’s new carpet is awful and how such-and-such has the worst dress sense and how such-and-such’s nephew is getting a sex change in the summer and wants to be called Rennet and they never should have let him have that Barbie when he was a child. Her friends must know Mum talks about them with her other friends but that doesn’t stop them talking about each other. It’s like Mum has some kind of hold over them. Maybe it’s the scissors. If Mum does get an invite to the Hamptons’ New Year’s bash then the Mosl
eys and the Petersons and the Andersons are all going to be there. I don’t know what they’ll all talk about.

  I never know what to say when Mum cuts my hair. Last night she asked how school was. I told her it was OK. She asked how my after-school lessons were going. I’ve never told Mum I have after-school lessons. A few weeks ago I mentioned the meetings with Miss Hayes and since then she’s assumed that’s where I’ve been going every night. I didn’t want to lie so instead I changed the subject. I told her I’ve been doing well with my An Inspector Calls essays, that I got an A- for one of them. She said, ‘Very good,’ and nodded. Then she asked what subject my An Inspector Calls essays are for and I told her English and she said, ‘English?’ and I said, ‘Yes,’ and she nodded again, smiling at me in the mirror. She asked if I want to do something English-related when I leave school, like become an English teacher or something. I said I didn’t know.

  Then Mum stopped talking so she could concentrate on my hair. My hair is Mum’s greatest challenge. Its default setting is Scruffy Bowl. Mum says she tries her best to make me look good, with the haircuts and the clothes she buys me, but somehow I always manage to look a disgrace. She says I have a ‘Natural Trampness’. I closed my eyes, felt Mum’s nails navigate my scalp. Listened to the hum of the fridge, the rain on the window. The whispering snips of the scissors.

  Right now I’m sitting on the bus. Even with last night’s haircut my hair’s still quite long, and long hair’s kind of nerve-racking out in the Pitt. I know your dad’s got a ponytail but he’s a big bloke, he can get away with it. I’m just a kid and Pitt kids don’t have long hair. There’s two slouched at the back of the bus right now, heads shaved to the bone. Just enough hair to scratch your fist on. Every time I look up they’re staring at me.

  Now, this is a bit embarrassing, but I did some looking in the mirror this morning. Just a quick look, while I was getting washed. My new hair’s about the same length as Ian’s – just long enough to nibble my fringe. I stroked it down over my face the way he does, a kind of moody artistic way, like a rock star. It could never look exactly like Ian’s but it was a start. (Ian scrubs his hair with shampoo, then doesn’t wash it out, so it’s always a bit crunchy and straggly looking. He likes it when he’s walking down the street and it starts to rain and his head starts foaming.)

  I had to fix my hair back to its scruffy bowl before school, so nobody would notice it’d been cut. I tried to rearrange it as I waited with the ducks but the canal isn’t very reflective so I couldn’t be sure whether I looked like a rock star or not. I always keep my hood up and head down on the bus, so nobody usually sees my hair, but tonight I’d planned a lean-back-with-my-fringe-over-my-face pose. I’d planned to give you a bit of a smoky-eyed glance, too, but it’s hard to do anything when you step on board, my head fills with static. Did you notice? You looked over but only in that glance-around way that people assess their situation. Those vinyl-black glasses don’t give much away. I think you gave the Pitt kids at the back quite a stare. Does the fact that your dad has long hair make it more or less likely for you to like it? I wish I knew psychology.

  You kept your head down the rest of the journey. The Pitt kids kept playing that thud-thud music (although it was more like a tap-tap through their phone speakers). They kept staring at me, I could feel it. I wanted to turn around and tell them to shut up. You were trying to sleep.

  Today the church sign said:

  JESUS

  LUVS

  U

  (EVEN WEN NO 1 ELSE WILL)

  You pressed the STOP bell and we pulled up round the back of the Rat and Dog. You rubbed your eyes and stepped off without even a glance back at me and my hair. You just left me here with these Pitt kids and nothing to do but write and writing on the bus is making me sick.

  I wish I could have gone with you.

  27/11

  Today was one of my bad days. One of my neck-rubbing collar-brushing goose-pimpling web-tickling shaking kind of days. One of those days when every time I close my eyes – every time I even blink – I see Them, hundreds of Them, massing in my head. At lunch I couldn’t sit still. I kept jumping up every time my hair brushed my neck and the scraping of my chair kept waking Miss Eleanor and she kept shushing me with that big librarian finger of hers. In the end I had to go down to the toilets and sit in a cubicle in my balled-up position and stare at the wall. I had to picture your face. I knew that, if I saw you, everything would be OK.

  And it was. For the whole bus ride I sat and stared at your red curls and didn’t think about Them. I didn’t even think about the fact that I wasn’t thinking about Them. But then you got up to leave and it ached me to see you, clutching the rail, rocking from side to side as we slowed outside the Rat and Dog, knowing that any second you would step off the bus and disappear into the darkness and I would have to wait all weekend to see you again. I found myself sliding to the edge of my seat, I found myself clutching my bag to my chest, and as Man With Ear Hair and Woman Who Sneezes both stood and blocked you and I could only see a tiny patch of your hair in the driver’s mirror, I found myself standing and joining the queue. It felt like the first time I’d ever used my legs.

  We shuffled along the aisle of the bus, past the fat and frowning face of the driver (a face that said, ‘This is not Green Avenue, this is not your usual stop’) and down the steps to the pavement. For a second we stood, watching the bus pull away. You lit a cigarette, cupping your lighter to protect the flame, a yellow flash that soon flickered and faded in the darkness. I wondered how you could see with your sunglasses on.

  The crowd dispersed. Man With Ear Hair and Woman Who Sneezes disappeared up the side of the Rat and Dog. My breath was steaming and my feet were numb but I still felt that warmth inside to know you were there, to hear the click of your heels as you hurried up the street. I waited till you were a black and red figure, too far away to hear my footsteps, before I began to follow.

  Once my father had a bump in his company Audi and he had to drive Mum’s BMW over to the garage to collect it and I remember Mum muttering the whole journey about a ‘two-second stopping distance’ between vehicles. The two of them sharing polite gritted-toothed words about what a ‘two-second stopping distance’ actually was – the disagreement, we found out eventually, caused by my father’s use of ‘and’ to separate seconds differing from Mum’s ‘Mississippi’. I tried to use a similar distance-method for our walk, maintaining a twenty-second stopping distance (using Mississippis), which I think is an appropriate translation from car to foot.

  It was hard maintaining the twenty-second stopping distance, though, because you kept turning corners and disappearing from view and I kept having to hurry to the corner and wait, lingering in the scent of your cigarette, watching you gain enough distance before I could start walking again. A couple of times you stopped and I stopped too, begging you not to turn around, because if you turned you would see me and I might scare you. I pleaded with you to keep on walking, to just let me follow, let me watch the swaying curls of your hair. Both times you did.

  It was strange, walking through the Pitt again. It seems different now. Most of it’s unchanged, really – St Peter’s still looks the same (except for those tall green fences around it) and Crossgrove Park still has the swings and that rusted old climbing frame. Maybe it seems different because it’s winter and it’s dark or because it’s even scruffier and even more overgrown with even more misspelt graffiti, or maybe it’s because I know that Nan’s not there any more, not really, not the Nan I knew. We walked all the way down Brook Road and through the park to the estates. I didn’t see or hear a single other person, just you and your heels, echoing up each empty street. It was as if we were the only two people in the whole Pitt.

  And then you disappeared. This time where I couldn’t follow: up your driveway. I crossed the road and quickened my pace but by the time I reached your house your peeling red door had slammed shut. I remembered where I was, out in the furthest reaches of the bus route. I r
emembered the gangs of Pitt kids I’d seen from the window, pitching stones at the cars on the carriageway. I could hear laughter, somewhere, a couple of streets away. I didn’t even know if I’d remember the way back.

  But then I noticed something: a thin thread of smoke, rising from the end of your path. Your cigarette butt, lying there, smouldering. It gave me the same feeling of dread I get when I see a snail in the middle of the road. A cigarette that had been sitting in a packet in your pocket all day, that had travelled the bus with us, that had been to your lips and felt your suck and burnt down for you – it was just lying there, dying on the cold pavement. I glanced around but the street was deserted. I picked it up, held it in my pocket.

  I ran back to the bus stop. I didn’t try to remember the way, I just remembered, instinctively. It was only seven minutes till the next bus so I sat and listened to my breathing, the butt burning into the palm of my hand. I didn’t dare remove it from my pocket, didn’t dare examine it in case, in the yellow light of the bus stop, I realised it was just a cigarette butt, and threw it away.

  Later, when my sister was thudding away in her room and Mum had taken up her nap-position in the lounge, I crept out into the garden and sat on the edge of one of Mum’s plant pots and took the butt from my pocket. It was smaller than I remembered, smaller than it felt. The tip of the filter was crumpled pink from your lipstick. I smelt it, thinking it would smell of something other than cigarettes.

  I held it in my lips. I clicked the trigger of Mum’s crème brûlée blowtorch (the only light I’d been able to find). Its flame was blue and extremely hot and it was hard to light the butt without singeing my nostrils. I breathed deep, sucking the heat into my chest. I don’t know what I was expecting – something smooth, maybe. Cigarette smoke always looks so silky but it felt more like gravel clawing down my throat. I coughed and dropped the butt into the flower bed.

  It was hard to find in the darkness. Mum’s blowtorch doesn’t give much light. It was only as I crouched there, searching, that I noticed the burn on the palm of my hand, the weeping pink hole the cigarette had left when I grasped it.