After You'd Gone

by Maggie O'Farrell

  ‘Got it?’

  She seizes the rope’s waxed head in her mittened hand. ‘Yes.’

  The branches shake as her father swings down. He lays a hand briefly on Alice’s shoulder then bends to pick up the tyre. She is fascinated by the meandering rivulets that wander through its tread and the weft underneath its heavy black rubber. ‘That’s what holds it together,’ the man at the shop had told her. The sudden scraped bald patch in the middle of the meanders makes her shudder but she doesn’t quite know why. Her father winds the orange rope around the tyre and makes a thick, twisted knot.

  ‘Can I have a go now?’ Her hands grip the tyre.

  ‘No. I have to test it with my weight first.’

  Alice watches as her father jounces on the tyre, testing to see if it is safe enough for her. She looks up to see the branch shake in sympathy and looks quickly back at her father. What if he were to fall? But he is getting off and lifting her on, her bones as small, white and bendable as birds’.

  Alice and John sit in a cafe in a village in the Lake District. It’s early autumn. She holds up a sugar cube between finger and thumb, the light behind it making its crystals the massed cells of an intricate organism under a microscope.

  ‘Did you know,’ says John, ‘that someone did a chemical analysis of sugar cubes in cafe sugar bowls and that they found strong traces of blood, semen, faeces and urine?’

  She keeps her face serious. ‘I didn’t know that, no.’

  He holds her deadpan gaze until the edges of his mouth are tugged downwards. Alice gets hiccups and he shows her how to cure them by drinking out of the opposite side of a glass. Beyond them, through the window, a plane draws a sheer white line on the sky.

  She looks at John’s hands, breaking up a bread roll, and suddenly knows she loves him. She looks away, out of the window, and sees for the first time the white line made by the plane. It has by this time drifted into woolliness. She thinks about pointing it out to John, but doesn’t.

  Alice’s sixth summer was hot and dry. Their house had a large garden with the kitchen window looking out over the patio and garden so whenever Alice and her sisters were playing outside they could look up and see their mother watching over them.

  The freakish heat dried up the reservoirs, previously unheard-of in Scotland, and she went with her father to a pump at the end of the street to collect water in round white vats. The water drummed into their empty bottoms. Half-way between the house and the end of the garden was the vegetable patch where peas, potatoes and beetroot pushed their way up from thick, dark soil. On a particularly bright day that summer, Alice stripped off her clothes, scooped up clods of that earth and smeared it in vivid tiger stripes all over her body.

  She scared the pious, nervous children next door by roaring at them through the hedge until her mother rapped on the window-pane and shouted at her to stop that at once. She retreated into the undergrowth to collect twigs and leaves to construct a wigwam-shaped lair. Her younger sister stood outside the lair and whinged to be let in. Alice said, only if you are a tiger. Beth looked at the soil and then at her clothes and then at their mother’s face in the kitchen window. Alice sat in the moist dark with her stripes, growling and gazing at the triangle of sky visible through the top of the lair.

  ‘You thought you were a little African boy, didn’t you?’

  She sits in the bath, her hair plastered into dripping spikes, and her grandmother soaps her back and front. The skin of her grandmother’s hands feels roughened. The water is grey-brown, full of the garden’s soil, lifted off her skin. In the next room she can hear the thrum of her father’s voice, talking on the telephone.

  ‘Don’t cover yourself in soil again, will you, Alice?’

  Her skin looks lighter under the water. Is this what skin looks like when it’s dead?

  ‘Alice? Promise me you won’t do it again.’

  She nods her head, spraying water over the ceramic sides of the yellow bath.

  Her grandmother towels her back. ‘Wee angel wings,’ she says, patting Alice’s shoulder-blades dry. ‘Everyone was an angel once, and this is where our wings would have been.’ She twists her head around to see the jutting isosceles triangle of bone flex and retract beneath her skin, as if preparing for celestial flight.

  Across the cafe table, John looks at Alice who is looking out of the window. Today she has pulled the weight of her hair away from her face, giving her the appearance of a Spanish nina or a flamenco dancer. He imagines her that morning brushing the shining mass of her hair before clipping it at the back of her head. He reaches over the empty coffee mugs and cups the large knot of hair in his palm. She turns her eyes on him in surprise.

  ‘I just wanted to know what it felt like.’

  She touches it herself before saying, ‘I often think about getting it all cut off.’

  ‘Don’t,’ John says quickly, ‘don’t ever cut it off.’ The aureoles of her eyes widen in surprise. ‘It might contain all your strength,’ he jokes feebly. He wants to free it from its silver clasp and bury his face in it. He wants to inhale its smell to the bottom of his lungs. He has caught its scent before. The first time he met her, she was standing in the doorway of his office with a book in her hand, and her hair swung at her waist so cleanly that he fancied it almost made a bell-like note. He wants to edge along its byways and curves in the dark and wake up in its strands.

  ‘Do you want another coffee?’ she says, and as she turns to look for the waitress he sees the shorter hairs springing from the nape of her neck.

  Sometime after that coffee, John stretched his arms across the table and pressed her head between his hands. ‘Alice Raikes,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to kiss you.’

  ‘You’re going to have to?’ she said levelly, although her heart was hammering in her ribcage. ‘Do you think now would be a good time to do it, then?’

  He made a great show of pretending to think about it, rolling his eyes, creasing his forehead. ‘I think now is probably OK.’

  Then he kissed her, very gently at first. They kissed for a long time, their fingers entwining. After a while, he pulled back and said, ‘I think if we don’t go soon, we may be asked to leave. I doubt they’d appreciate us making love on the table.’ He was holding on to her hand so tightly that her knucklebones were beginning to hurt. She floundered with her other hand for her bag under the table, but encountered only his legs. He wedged her hand between his knees.

  She began to laugh. ‘John! Let go!’ She struggled to release both her hands but his grip only tightened. He was smiling at her, a puzzled look on his face.

  ‘If you don’t let me go we can’t leave or make love,’ she reasoned.

  He released her immediately. ‘You are absolutely right.’ He fished her bag off the floor himself and hurried her into her coat. As they walked out of the door, he pressed her to his side, breathing into her hair.

  The curtains in the sitting room of their house were of a heavy dark mauve damask, insulated on the outermost side with a thin membrane of yellowing sponge. As a child, Alice took against these curtains. She found it incredibly satisfying to peel away great swatches of the sponge, leaving the mauve material threadbare with light shining through it. One Hallowe’en, after they had scooped out the soft moss of a pumpkin’s innards and scored square eyes and a jagged mouth into its skin, Beth and Alice were left reverently gazing at its flicking, demonic glow. Kirsty had eaten too much of the pumpkin scrapings and was being administered to somewhere else in the house. She couldn’t say whether she actually planned to burn the curtains but she somehow found herself standing beside them, holding a lit match in a thin-fingered grip, training its curling flame to the curtain’s edge. They caught fire with astonishing speed; the damask fizzled away as the flames tore upwards. Beth began to scream, great tongues of flame were licking across the ceiling. Alice jumped up and down in delight and exhilaration, clapping her hands and shouting. Then her mother burst into the room and dragged her away. She
shut the door on them and the three of them stood wide-eyed and frozen in the hallway.

  Ann runs down the stairs two at a time. Beth’s screams are getting louder. They are real screams, full of terror. The sitting room is filled with smoke and the curtains are on fire. Beth hurls herself sobbing at Ann’s knees and grips both her legs tightly. Ann is for a moment immobilised and it is then that she sees Alice. She is gazing at the flames, rapt, her whole body contorted and twisted with delight. In her right hand is a spent match. Ann lurches forward and seizes her daughter by the shoulder. Alice struggles in her grasp like a hooked fish. Ann is shocked by her sudden strength. They tussle, Alice spitting and snarling until Ann manages to grip both her hands and drags her kicking to the door. She shuts all three of her children in the hall and then runs to the kitchen for water.

  John has fallen into a deep sleep. The rhythm of his breathing is that of a deep-sea diver. His head is resting on Alice’s sternum. She sniffs his hair. A slight woody smell like freshly sharpened pencils. Some kind of shampoo. Lemon? She inhales again. A vague overlay of the cigarette smoke of the cafe. She places her hand on his ribcage and feels the swell and fall of his lungs. The whispering tick, tick of her own blood sounds against her eardrums.

  She eases herself out from underneath him and hugs her knees to her chest. She is tempted to wake him up. She wants to talk. His skin is tanned a light golden brown all over, except for his groin which is a pale, vulnerable white. She cups her hand over his penis, curled against his leg. It twitches in response. She laughs and covers his body with her own, burying her nose and mouth in the curve of his neck. ‘John? Are you awake?’

  The fire was put out by my mother dousing it with water. The black sooty streaks were to scar the ceiling for years. Although my parents often talked about redecorating the room, the fire was never mentioned, never discussed. Not once did they ask me what had prompted me to set fire to the curtains.

  Ann scrabbles on her bedside table for her cigarettes. As she strikes the lighter, she glances over at Ben to see if he has been disturbed. He is sleeping with a slightly surprised look on his face. She draws on her cigarette and feels the bitter smoke filling her lungs. A dream about the boarding-school she was sent to has woken her and now she can’t sleep. She is again seven, standing in uncomfortable lace-up shoes at the door of the school, watching her parents’ car recede down the gravelled driveway, too shocked even to cry. The nun standing next to her extracts the small suitcase from her fingers. ‘There we are now,’ she says.

  Ann doesn’t know who she means by ‘we’: she has never felt more alone in her life. I can never forgive you for this, Ann thinks, and in that moment her love for her parents sours irreversibly to something that will come close to hate.

  She spends the next eleven years at the boarding-school, where the nuns teach her how to eat fruit correctly at a dinner table. Twenty-seven girls line up with twenty-seven apples and twenty-seven fruit knives to watch Sister Matthews deftly pare the tight apple’s surface into a snaking coil of green that falls to the waiting plate. They line up again outside in the yard where the nuns have a perfect half of an old car to learn how to get out of a car without showing your slip. When Ann gets in she is unnerved by the gaping hole to her right; the car’s body ends just short of the seat she is sitting on and beyond is the damp and misty expanse of Dartmoor. Sister Clare raps on the window. ‘Come on, Ann. Don’t take all day about it.’ Ann glances at herself in the rear-view mirror. Her way isn’t rebellion, but inner defiance. She hoists herself from the seat gracefully, her skirt falling at the desired angle into the correct folds.

  ‘Good, Ann. Girls? Did you see Ann?’

  Ann stops before she reaches the back of the queue. ‘Sister Clare? What happens if you are sitting in the driving seat? Is it the same method?’

  Sister Clare is nonplussed. What a question to ask. She thinks for a moment, then brightens. ‘Don’t worry about that. Your husband will be driving you.’

  The nuns hand out heavy books, and the girls balance them on their heads. Anyone wearing their hair up is scolded. They must parade across the gym in a figure-of-eight. Ann hates this more than anything else; she resents the restricting symmetry, of ending up where she began. Nevertheless, she volunteers to go first and executes a perfect turn. The nuns applaud and so do the other girls, though less enthusiastically. She removes the book and while the other girls are performing, Ann opens it and begins to read. The book is full of diagrams and cross-sections of plants. Ann follows with her fingertip the path of water through the plant up from the spread of roots, through the stems, to the petals. She reads on and learns about how plants fertilise. She is heartened by the gentle brushing of pollen against stamens and hopes that it is like that for men and women and not like the whispers that go around the dormitory. She has spent hours poring over a forbidden copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and found herself none the wiser. Was it not all about flowering and seeds anyway?

  To the complete surprise of her parents, the nuns, the school and Ann herself, she did well in her final exams and gained a place at Edinburgh University to read biology. Edinburgh suited Ann; she liked the tall, dignified buildings of grey stone, the short days that sank into street-lamped evenings at five o’clock, and the dual personality of the city’s main street, which on one side had glittering shops and on the other the green sweep of Princes Street Gardens. She liked the small flat she shared with two other girls, which overlooked the Meadows; it was at the top of a tenement block with a cold, windy central staircase leading up to it and an equally cold sitting room where they sat and drank pots of tea in the evenings.

  University life did not suit her. Every day just seemed to uncover more and more things she didn’t know. She found lectures bewildering and tutorials humiliating; she was one of the few women in her year for biology and the men either patronised her or ignored her. They found her reserved and old-fashioned, preferring the company of the more liberated nursing students. She was too bored and too proud to ask for help from any of the academics. On the day she got her results, Ben Raikes asked her to marry him.

  She’d known him for exactly six months. Two days after they first met he’d told her he was in love with her; it had been a surprising and, as she would later find out, uncharacteristically impulsive admission. She didn’t know how to answer him, so didn’t. He hadn’t seemed to mind, just smiling at her as they stood together in the square outside St Giles’s Cathedral. He started taking her to dances — she’d never been before — holding her firmly with his hand in the small of her back, his jawline against her hair. He was inclined to improvise on the dance steps taught to her so rigorously by the nuns. It made her laugh. He had limpid blue-green eyes and a nice smile. Once, when he had called on her at the flat, he had brought her flowers - yellow roses, the petals curved and pleated together into tight yellow mouths. After he had gone, she’d snipped off the ends of the stalks underwater and placed them in a jam-jar on her desk. Whenever she entered the room, their yellow-yolk brightness pulled her eyes to them.

  He asked her to marry him on the Meadows. As she was saying yes, she was aware that she was doing so only because she could not face going to live with her parents. Since meeting Ben Raikes, she had realised that there was some vital part of her that seemed absent, that she could never be wholly activated by love. He held her hand and kissed her and said his mother would be pleased. She fingered the imprint of his kiss as they walked back. The ring he gave her cast a shoal of light-flashes on to the ceiling when she lay awake at night.

  The telephone rang shrilly. From some depth of sleep, Ben felt Ann sliding from the bed. Later he will try to convince himself that he tensed, listening out for what was being said. But he’ll know that he sank into sleep again because he’ll remember waking with Ann’s palm on his chest, her fingers touching his throat. His eyelids pulled up like portcullises. He couldn’t see her face, the gloom smudging her features, but words reached him as individual sounds, devoid as
yet of meaning: ‘Accident,’ Ann was saying to him, over and over, ‘accident’, and ‘Alice’. Alice is his daughter. Accident.

  ‘Wake up, Ben, we have to get up. Alice is in a coma. Ben, wake up.’

  Is this my voice I can hear? It is as if I’m living in a radio, floating up and down on airwaves, each with their different voices — some I recognise and some I don’t. I can’t choose the bandwidth.

  This place feels clean. The smell of antiseptic crackles in my nostrils. Some voices I can distinguish as outside myself, those that sound farther off, as if through water. And then there are those within — all kinds of spectres.

  Why isn’t life better designed so it warns you when terrible things are about to happen?

  I saw something. Something awful. What would he have said?

  Ann cups Alice’s chin in her hand and scrutinises her face. Alice, unused to this treatment, looks up at her mother, attentive.

  ‘Where did you learn that song?’

  Alice had been singing while she searched the garden for flowers for a miniature garden that she was creating in an old shoebox.

  ‘Um. I don’t know. I think I heard it on the radio,’ she improvises, nervous. Is she going to get told off?

  Her mother continues staring. ‘It’s a song on a cassette that

  I only bought yesterday. There is no other way you could have heard it.’

  Ann appears to be talking to herself now. Alice fidgets, impatient to get on with her tiny garden. She wants to steal some cocktail sticks for a runner-bean row.

  ‘I have a feeling, Alice, that you are very musical. My father was a great musician and you must have inherited it.’

  An unusual, effervescent feeling is creeping into Alice. Her mother is smiling at her admiringly. Alice flings her arms around her middle and hugs her.

  ‘We’ll have to get you some lessons and nurture that talent of yours. You mustn’t let it go to waste. Do you know, my father could name any note that he heard? He had perfect pitch and played with many orchestras all around the world.’