After You'd Gone

by Maggie O'Farrell

  Alice rises towards the surface of sleep. The phone is ringing. How long has it been ringing for? It is strangely quiet and she realises that the main road that runs past their front door, whose roar she hears unconsciously all day, is silent and empty. She can picture it — the miles of deserted tarmac, leached of colour by the overhead orange street-lights. The phone rings and rings and rings. She strains to hear if her housemates are stirring to answrer it.

  As soon as she was conscious of the first ring — maybe even before — she knew it was Mario. Who else would phone in the middle of the night and for so long?

  It is the first term of Alice’s second year at university. She has moved out of the grey university corridors into a house with her friend Rachel and two other girls. The house is small, with no central heating, a rickety narrow staircase, and no kitchen, just a Baby Belling in the comer of the sitting room. They like it, though. It smacks of freedom and independence, giving them a hint of life beyond exams and parents and rules. Their friends still living in university rooms come round and sit in the mismatched armchairs and watch as Alice or one of the others brings a saucepan of pasta to the boil on the tiny white box of a cooker.

  In a sudden surge of decisiveness (she’s been avoiding his calls for weeks and the others have become adept at lying to him about her whereabouts) she rips back the blankets and jumps up from her bed — a mattress on the floor. The cold hits her and she feels as if she’s entered a wind tunnel. She runs down the stairs on her bare tiptoes and snatches up the receiver. There is a silence. She doesn’t speak.

  ‘Alice?’

  ‘Mario, do you know what time it is here?’

  There is a fault on the line. The wires have crossed like chromosomes and Alice can hear her own voice echoing back, disconcertingly close to her own ear.

  ‘Shit, honey, I know, I just had to call. Did 1 wake you?’

  ‘Of course you bloody well woke me. What do you want?’

  ‘You know what I want.’

  ‘Mario, I’ve told you before. It’s over. You’ve got to stop ringing me.’

  Her voice sounds thin and frayed relayed back to her. She shakes the receiver in frustration.

  ‘I know you don’t mean that. We can sort this out, I know we can. It is difficult when we’re so far apart, I realise that. I want you to come to the States over Christmas. I’ll pay. We just need to see each other and talk.’

  Alice stares at the boisterously patterned carpet at her feet and conjugates possibilities — I don’t love you, I won’t love you, I never loved you.

  ‘No.’

  ‘What do you mean “no”? Alice, I can’t live without you. I love you. I love you so much.’

  He is crying now. The sobs and gulps coming through the phone sound somehow obscene to her. She feels interested in the fact that his crying has no effect on her whatsoever. What happened with Mario seems so far away it’s like something she read or heard about — it wasn’t her. She can barely even remember what he looks like. She can’t conjure much about him at all — the intimidating size of his presence when he was near her, yes, but not much else; not his smell, or the feel of his weight or his hands, or anything.

  His crying is reaching a crescendo of which, as an actor, Mario ought to be proud. She is perched on the arm of a chair, shivering in her thin pyjamas. She wishes she’d put socks on before she came down.

  ‘Mario. This has got to stop. I mean it. It’s over between us. You have to face up to that and get on with your life.’

  ‘I can’t!’ He is shouting now, getting into the swing of things., ‘I need you!’

  She sighs angrily. ‘No, you don’t. Forget it, Mario, it’s over. Just leave me alone. I never want to talk to you again. I’m really tired and really cold and I’m going back to bed now.’

  ‘This can’t happen. I won’t let it. I won’t let you say it’s over.’

  ‘Mario . . . just . . . just fuck off.’

  There is a stunned silence from America.

  ‘Fuck off? Did you just tell me to fuck off?’

  ‘Yes, I did, and I’ll tell you again. Fuck off.’ Alice slams the phone down.

  John looks up at the sound of a rap at the glass door of his office. Standing in the doorway is a young woman with long dark hair swinging gently down her back. She’s holding a book pressed to her chest.

  ‘Hi. I’m looking for John Friedmann.’

  ‘That’s me.’ John stands. ‘You’re Alice? Come on in.’ She crosses the room and instead of sitting in the chair he indicates for her, goes to the window. He is a bit stunned: he was expecting an earthy-looking, earnest, blue-stocking type with specs and shapeless flowing clothes, and is a little disconcerted by the appearance of this tall, striking woman in a short skirt, knee-high boots and black and green striped tights.

  ‘What an amazing view.’

  ‘It is, isn’t it? It’s the only compensation for working out in this godforsaken place.’ John is also discomfited by her vague familiarity: he feels certain that he’s seen her somewhere before but can’t place her. It puts him at a disadvantage, somehow. The rather aggressive banter they had over the phone seems impossible now. ‘There was the most incredible rainbow yesterday — it must have been just after I’d spoken to you on the phone - arching all the way over east London.’ He cuts a swathe through the air, describing its curve. ‘It lasted for ages. You see quite a few from up here. It must be the height or something.’

  ‘So there’s a pot of gold in Leytonstone somewhere.’ She turns her eyes on him.

  Is that a flirtatious look? No. She seems to be assessing him. Her eyes are dark, like her hair, with flecks of amber around the pupils. John forces himself to look away, and strides manfully towards his desk. What on earth is the matter with him? The minute some attractive woman walks into his office he goes to pieces. ‘You don’t look like someone who works at the Literature Trust.’ He hopes she’ll laugh. She doesn’t.

  ‘And what are people who work at the Literature Trust supposed to look like, according to you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He ducks out, angering her further.

  ‘Yes, you do. You think we’re all dusty academic types with glasses. Why not say it, if that’s wrhat you mean?’

  ‘No! Not at all.’ He busies himself in saving the work displayed on his computer screen. She sits down opposite him. ‘Anyway,’ he says feebly, ‘you have just as many sweeping opinions on journalists, it seems. You think we’re all just writing different versions of the same preconceptions.’

  She puts her head on one side and narrows her eyes. Beautiful eyes. Lovely neck. For God’s sake, get a grip on yourself.

  ‘I’m prepared to be convinced otherwise. That’s the difference between us.’

  Her words hang in the air. The computer’s hard drive hums. They stare at each other. John thinks he has never liked the word ‘us’ better in his life and has a speedy headrush-fantasy where an omniscient camera lens zooms out above them and it seems that Canary Wharf, and indeed the whole of London, is empty apart from this room where they are sitting opposite each other. This leads to him trying to remember a quote from a John Donne poem. Something about love making one little room an everywhere, or was it an anywhere?

  She is looking at him with faint alarm. Has he been staring at her? He searches wildly for something to say and in a moment of heaven-sent inspiration, catches sight of the book she was carrying when she came in. She’s put it on the desk in front of her and has her hand over part of the cover. He can still make out the title. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

  ‘That sounds a bit of a heavy book.’

  She smiles for the first time. ‘It is, I suppose. I’d never say I have a favourite book, but this is one I have read over and over again. I wanted to look at something in it so I brought it with me to read on the tube.’ She hands it to him. It has a gloomy painting of an evil-looking boy as its cover.

  ‘What’s it about?’

&nbs
p; ‘It’s hard to say. You’d have to read it, really. It’s the most terrifying book I’ve ever read. A boy gets followed and tormented by a protean devil called Gilmartin. It’s *set in Scotland and Gilmartin pursues him all over these bleak, barren landscapes. You’re never quite sure whether the devil is real or just a projection or externalisation of his own evil side.’ She shivers and then smiles again.

  ‘Oh,’ he says, a little bemused. He gropes for a suitable and non-vacuous response, coming up with: ‘You’re Scottish, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes. I only discovered it when I went to university, though. We had this reading room in the main library with a vast, domed ceiling. You were forbidden to talk and got shouted at if you breathed too loudly. It was always full of rows and rows of serious academics with obscure, out-of-print tomes propped up in front of them. I was reading this one day, in late afternoon when it was just getting dark outside. I’d just reached a particularly scary bit — where they are digging up this ancient body that’s still intact — when I felt a hand grip my shoulder from behind. I screamed really loudly and the noise echoed and bounced around the huge ceiling. People were horrified. It was only a friend asking me if I wanted to go for a cup of tea. I frightened the life out of him too.’

  It has clicked for John - that description of the reading room. ‘I was there too!’ he shouts.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The library ... I mean, the university ... I mean, I was at university with you!

  She is immediately suspicious. ‘Were you?’

  ‘When did you leave?’

  ‘Um . . . five years ago. No, four.’

  ‘I knew it! I knew it!’ He feels like getting up and dancing around the room. ‘I knew I’d seen you somewhere before! I graduated six years ago, which must have been . . .’

  ‘My first year, or the end of it,’ she finishes for him and, scanning his face, says bluntly, ‘I don’t remember you at all.’ ‘No, well, I don’t really remember you. Not properly. You just look vaguely familiar. I probably saw you around the library or something, although I don’t think I heard you scream.’

  ‘You’re not going to put that in your article, are you?’ She looks genuinely worried.

  ‘No. It will go no further — famous last words of a journalist.’

  There is a pause. John leans back in his chair, lacing his hands behind his head.

  Alice looks about her. ‘So . . .’ she says eventually, ‘Are we going to do it here?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The interview.’

  ‘Of course, of course. The interview. I thought we might go up to the canteen. Is that OK with you?’

  She nods, getting up.

  The strangest thing about this is that a thought can go on and on circling your mind, that you can’t stop obsessing over it, that there are no brakes to apply to things you no longer want to think about. In normal life, you distract yourself — pick up a newspaper, go out for a walk, turn on the television, phone somebody up. You can throw your mind a sop, trick yourself into thinking you’re all right, that the thing that’s been haunting you is resolved. It won’t work for long, of course — an hour, two hours if you’re lucky — because nobody’s that stupid and because these things always come back to you when you’re once more idle and distractionless. In the small, dark hours of the night, when you’re being rocked into blank-mindedness on a bus.

  The problem with being like this is that you are constant prey to these exhausting cycles of thought. Just now, I am getting no rest from how terrible it is that he doesn’t know.

  He who knows me better than anyone else has no idea of this. No inkling. We think we know everything there possibly is to know about each other. And then suddenly I discover this massive thing that alters the whole path of my life.

  It’s like those kitsch religious cards you can buy in Catholic countries; the ones with a ridged, plastic finish that just look strange and lurid and three-dimensional until you tilt them and discover another picture behind the first. You can make it look as if Mary is bringing her hands up to pray, or Jesus is blessing you, or that the angels are crying. To me it feels as if everything has been tilted to reveal this whole other picture which has existed, just out of sight, all along.

  I keep trying — over and over, because I can’t switch it off, can’t fool myself into numbness with meaningless activities — to imagine what he would say; how he might have reacted if I had come back to a house with him in it, and said, ‘John, I saw the most terrible thing today. You won’t believe what I saw, let me tell you what 1 saw.’

  ‘Hold still, Alice,’ Ann scolds, gripping Alice’s shin between her knees. Her mother has placed her up on the kitchen counter. She’s trodden on a bee and got stung in the soft, blue part of her foot. Yet again. ‘How many times have we told you not to go barefoot in the garden? How many?’

  Alice shrugs, sobbing. It’s the shock more than the pain, really. Although the pain is quite astonishing, shooting up way beyond her knee, making her foot swell up so that the ankle bones disappear into the flesh like raisins into cake mix.

  Alice would really prefer Elspeth to be doing this, but she’s not sure where she is. As soon as it happened, she’d started screaming, Kirsty had run into the house shouting, ‘Mummeeeeeeee, Alice has stepped on another beeeeeeeeeee!’ and Ann had come rushing into the garden, scooped her up and deposited her here in the kitchen.

  ‘Put your foot in the water.’ Ann had filled the basin next to Alice with cold water. Alice, for a reason unfathomable both to her and to Ann, refuses. ‘Put it in, Alice.’

  ‘Where’s Granny?’ she manages to say between sobs. She sees her mother’s face fall slightly, twitch downwards. Then Ann rights herself, seizes Alice’s ankle and forces her foot into the water. Alice lets out a piercing shriek and thrashes her foot about. Both of them get soaked. They grapple and

  Ann manages to pin both of Alice’s arms to her sides. When Alice is fully immobilised, Ann says, through gritted teeth, ‘If you don’t put your foot in the water, the swelling won’t go down. If the swelling doesn’t go down, we can’t get the sting out. If we can’t get the sting out, it won’t stop hurting. Why do you never do as I ask?’ Alice struggles again in her mother’s arms. Ann squeezes her all the tighter and leans all her weight on the child’s body. ‘You won’t be told, will you? You’re just like your bloody father.’

  The words, barely audible, are vicious and fly from Ann’s mouth like hornets. Even aged eight, Alice is surprised. She looks out of the window at her father’s silhouette, bending over, digging holes in the flower border down the side of the house. He is trailed by the diminutive figure of her younger sister, who drops bulbs into the holes from a brown paper bag held in their father’s hands. ‘Good girl,’ he is saying to Beth, ‘that’s very good.’ Alice feels a heat emanating from her mother’s face, clamped to hers because of their fight, and she turns to see her mother pressing her teeth down into her lip, a rush of sudden blood staining her pale cheeks.

  Ann lets go of her, but she sits still, not crying now, letting her mother search her footsole for the sting. Alice is aware something has happened, but she doesn’t know what exactly. Is her mother upset because she asked for Elspeth? She wants to ask her mother this but can’t think of the right words to say it. Ann is silent, her head bent, her hands gentle now. Alice gets a funny, liquid feeling under her ribs. She wants to say she’s sorry, she’s sorry for being naughty, she’s sorry for asking for Granny. She would like her mother to press her hands to her hot, clammy face.

  Ann straightens up triumphantly. ‘There!’

  She lifts Alice down and holds out the sting for her to see. They peer at it together. It is tiny, spear-shaped, brown and brittle. It clings to the whorls and ridges of her mother’s finger. Alice is amazed that something so small could cause that amount of pain. ‘Can I have it? Can I have it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Please!’

  ‘What on earth do you want it for?�
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  Alice can’t think of a reason, but she knows she wants it. She wants to hold it, to look at it for a long time. She hangs off her mother’s arm. ‘Please! Please can I have it?’

  Uncharacteristically, Ann relents and, bending down, transfers it from her finger to Alice’s. She then goes from the room and Alice hears her walk quickly upstairs and close her bedroom door. But Alice isn’t thinking about this at the time, she is holding the bee-sting in the crook of her middle finger, where she carries it for the rest of the day.

  Afterwards, he walked with her to the lift. It seemed to take a long time for it to come and Alice couldn’t think of anything to say to him.

  ‘You don’t have to wait with me. I’m sure I can find my way out.’

  ‘No, no. I don’t mind.’

  An overweight man in a loosened tie breezed through the lobby and said, ‘All right, John?’ and, casting his eyes appraisingly over Alice, winked at him. She pretended she hadn’t noticed. John was furious, she could tell. A vein pulsed in his temple.

  ‘Have you got a lot to do this afternoon?’ .she asked him, to break the silence.

  ‘Yes, as usual.’

  ‘When did you become a journalist?’

  ‘Straight after university. I did an MA at City University and then had various smallish jobs. I’ve been here for a year now.’

  The lift arrived with a computerised ding.

  ‘Well, thanks for lunch. When’s the article due out?’ ‘Next Thursday, I think. I could phone you to let you know, if you want.’

  She went into the lift. ‘Oh, don’t worry about that. You’ve probably got enough to do.’

  ‘No, it’s not a problem . . . Alice!’ He thrust his foot between the closing doors, which crashed open again. ‘Shit . . . that hurt.’

  ‘Are you OK?’

  He massaged his foot, leaning on one of the lift doors to stop them closing. ‘Just about. It’s not funny, you know, I could have lost a foot and it would have been your fault.’

  ‘I hardly think so. Anyway, it would have been an industrial accident, wouldn’t it? You’d have got millions in compensation.’