After You'd Gone

by Maggie O'Farrell

  She lets herself in, awkwardly clutching her bag in one hand and struggling with the lock and handle with the other. Dropping the bag to the floor, she stands with her back against the door for a while, still holding her keys. Then she moves through the flat, putting on a CD, drawing the curtains, filling the kettle. Her room is full of evidence of her hurried packing on Friday afternoon — clothes strewn all over the bed, books in sliding heaps on the floor. She feels strange looking at all this. Was it really only two days ago that she’d thrown those things there? It feels like another age, that the whole flat belongs to a different person. She flops on to the bed. She can unpack in the morning. In the flat below, rhythmic music starts up and muffled voices are raised above it. She lies on her stomach, propping her chin up on her hands. John’s note is curled in her palm. She smooths it flat on the duvet. A train rattles through the night, making the house shudder. Somewhere across the city he is swinging his car into his street.

  ‘I’ve seen your type before,’ the man said, as he approached Ann.

  Ann brought her cigarette to her lips and inhaled. The man was vaguely familiar to her, and it wasn’t impossible that she could have seen him in and around the town, but it was probably only because there were hundreds of men in this town who looked like him — thinning ginger hair, the beginnings of a paunch straining at his shirt buttons, a suede-panelled cardigan, fawn slacks. Ann breathed out the smoke, watching as the man’s eyes began to water. He had a rim of beer froth stuck to the ends of his thick, ginger moustache.

  ‘Have you?’ she said.

  ‘You’re English, aren’t you? Oh, yes.’ He answered himself, so Ann didn’t bother to make any response. ‘I know your type.’

  ‘Really? And what’s that?’

  Ann had been standing alone in the front room of a large brick house on the eastern edge of North Berwick. All around her youngish married couples like her and Ben talked and ate and drank and flirted with each other. It was the party of someone Ben had been at school with. He was now a dentist, Ben told her, as they walked up the driveway. Ann had been standing by the fireplace, having slipped away from Ben ages ago when an earnest-looking man with a Labrador-dog tie started asking him what car he was thinking of buying this year. And now this man had appeared from the kitchen, bearing — ominously — two glasses of beer.

  ‘Petite,’ the man said, ‘blue eyes. Blonde.’ He gave the word a revving up like a motorbike.

  ‘Married,’ Ann added, holding up her hand to show him the gold band encircling her finger.

  ‘Aha!’ he said, focusing on it with difficulty. ‘A challenge!

  I like that! Lemme see.’ He slammed his beers down on the mantelpiece and got hold of her hand, stroking it flat on his own. ‘Now, you might not think it, but I am a very respected palm-reader.’

  ‘Is that so?’ Ann drew on her cigarette once more.

  ‘Oh, yes, oh, yes. You’re very passionate, very responsive. But there’s something that life isn’t quite giving you, something that leaves you with a deep but hidden dissatisfaction.’

  Ann pulled at her hand, but the man had her wrist in a

  tight, sweaty-fingered grip.

  ‘What’s this?’ he asked, running the tip of his finger along a jagged, colourless scar that bisected her palm, making her fingers jitter compulsively. ‘Nasty cut that must have been. How did that happen, then? Husband did it, did he?’

  Ann removed her cigarette from her lips. ‘Let go of my

  hand,’ she spat the words out one by one, very clearly, ‘you ugly little troll.’

  The man let her wrist slither from his grip, astonished. Ann flicked the butt into the fire grate and walked away through people whom she knew were looking at her, but she didn’t care.

  She wanted Ben. Where was he? It felt like hours since she’d left him with the boring man. In the hallway, she saw the woman whose house it was, standing next to an arrangement of hideous blue dried flowers whispering with another woman Ann didn’t know. ‘Have you seen my husband?’ Ann asked.

  ‘Ben? He was in the dining room, I think, last time I saw him. Bit worse for wear, I’d say. But, then, as I’m always telling my Peter, if you can’t let your hair down once in a while, what can you do?’

  ‘Yes.’ Ann plucked at the hem of her blouse. ‘In here, did

  you say?’

  ‘Right through there, on your left. Can’t miss it.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Ann pushed her way down the corridor, through various people lining the walls with drinks and cigarettes in their hands. Women’s bodies were softer; they moved to let her pass. Men’s didn’t yield but inquisitively held their ground, remaining rigid to her as she tried to slide past them. I am thirty-one years old, Ann thought, my three little girls are asleep in their beds, what am I doing here?

  In the dining room, a woman in too-tight trousers was sitting on the smoked-glass-topped table fondling a tabby cat. Two men were standing in front of her.

  ‘The thing about the Edinburgh schools,’ one of them was saying, ‘is, of course, that you are guaranteed that your child will be mixing with others of alpha-type intelligence.’

  ‘You just don’t get that guarantee with the High School,’ the woman said.

  ‘You just don’t,’ the second man agreed.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Ann said, stepping towards them, ‘you haven’t seen Ben, have you?’

  ‘Ben who?’ asked the woman. The cat circled her hips, tail in the air, displaying the neat circle of its anus.

  ‘Ben Raikes.’

  ‘Ooooooh,’ the woman exclaimed, and held out her hand. You re Ann, aren’t you? I can’t believe we haven’t met before.

  I’m Gilly. This is Scot and this is my husband Brian.’ They all shook hands. ‘My Victoria’s in the same year as your Kirsty.’ ‘Right.’

  ‘We were just having that old state school—private school debate. Where do you and Ben stand on that?’

  ‘Er, well, Kirsty’s only seven and Alice has only just started at the primary, so—’

  ‘Wee Alice! I know that one! Seen her coming out the school with Kirsty. Gorgeous — the both of them. Alice is awfully dark, is she not?’

  ‘No,’ Ann started backing away, ‘I mean, yes. Yes, she is. Well, I must find Ben. Nice to meet you all.’

  They watched her go, faintly surprised.

  Ann made it back to the doorway of the front room and stood on tiptoe to see if Ben had appeared in there. The troll-man was now playing drinking games with another, taller man. Just as she was about to step out into the hallway again, a sandy-haired man with smooth, tight-fitting skin seized her by the waist. ‘We need to start the boogying.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why don’t we get the ball rolling? You and I?’

  ‘No. Please.’

  ‘Oh, come, come, give it a whirl, eh? We’re only young once. ’

  Ann pulled herself away from him, the side of her handbag striking a radiator, which gave out a long, low note like a cello. Ann pushed her way into the hall. She wanted Ben so badly she thought she might cry. She knew' that he was somewhere in this house, but she couldn’t get to him. Standing under the stairwell, she felt an urge to wail his name at the top of her voice and shout, I’m here, please come to me.

  Seeing the troll-man lurch out of the door, Ann sprinted up the deeply carpeted flight of stairs and locked herself into the bathroom. She lowered the lid and sat down, her handbag dangling on to the floor, her thumb moving rhythmically over and over the ridge of her scar. The woman of the house had decorated her bathroom in green paint. Tiles adorned with three-dimensional seahorses, conches and starfish lined the walls. Ann was astonished to see that a diaphragm, dusted and ready for use, lay in its case on the side of the bath. She stood, saw her face in the mirror, and wondered if she was about to throw up. Then she realised that it was just that her skin was catching the reflection of the nausea-green paint on the walls.

  Ann heard someone on the stairs. ‘It
’s a day’s drive to Dover, straight down the Al,’ a woman’s voice was saying, ‘then the night ferry, then it’s about two days’ drive to the Alps. Or so Dennis tells me.’

  ‘Well, I hope it’s not too hard going, what with the kid's and all.’

  Ben. It was Ben’s voice. Without a doubt. Ann sprang to the door and pulled it open. The corridor and stairs were bare.

  ‘Ben?’ Ann went down a few stairs and saw the sea of party faces filling the hallway. She turned and rushed back up. ‘Ben! Ben!’

  Where in God’s name was he? He couldn’t have got far — she knew that.

  ‘Ben? Where are you? Ben!’

  Then she heard his voice, somewhere, surprised: ‘That’s my wife.’ She cocked her head on one side, trying to ascertain where it came from. ‘Ann?’ she heard him call. Upstairs somewhere. Definitely upstairs.

  ‘Yes!’ She scrambled up the stairs, two at a time. ‘Ben! I’m here! I’m here!’

  She pulled open the first door she came to, but it was dark, a cupboard of some sort, smelling strongly of teak and varnish.

  She heard herself expelling a small noise like the beginning of tears, and she slammed the door shut. Then he was behind her, his hand on her arm. ‘Hello there,’ he was saying, ‘were you calling?’

  ‘Ben.’ She pressed her face into his shoulder, relief closing her throat so she couldn’t say anything more. He tried to move back from her so that he could see into her face but she wouldn’t let him go. He was laughing, embarrassed and pleased.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Where were you? You’d gone ... I didn’t know where you were.’

  ‘What do you mean? I was here all the time.’

  Ann rubbed her forehead against the nap of his jacket, pushed her mouth up to his neck. ‘Can we go home?’ she whispered into his ear. ‘Please.’

  She felt him turn his head to see if anyone could see them, and she pressed herself closer. ‘Let’s go home,’ she whispered again, ‘let’s go now.’

  He was still trying to see into her face, but she buried her head further into his shoulder. ‘If that’s ... if that’s what you want.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘I’ll get our coats.’ He tried to move away, but Ann still wouldn’t let him.

  ‘I’ll come with you.’

  ‘OK.’ He encircled her waist with his arm, supporting her as if she was injured. ‘Let’s go, then.’

  Ann curls her feet around the top rung of the stool. These stools have been built for tall men; Ann finds them dizzying and frightening. Once on them, she cannot easily get off, and the slightest inequality in the lengths of their legs means they can tip alarmingly, making her clutch at the rim of the wooden bench.

  She is sitting in the university laboratory. Its silence calms her. It’s different from that of the library, where the air is leaden with concentration and crammed with typed, black words. Here people talk, but in low tones. The conversations are never flippant, but always about work and test results and apparatus. Nobody talks longer than they have to, or asks you any personal questions. It’s insulated, safe: you know that everyone comes here to do their experiments, and then they leave.

  In front of Ann on the bench lie a scalpel, a dissection board made from dark, hardened wood and a bundle of plant stems, the petals of the flowerheads broken and crushed. She is, she knows, supposed to be conducting an experiment with the xylem vessels, cutting the stems open, staining them with a dark blue dye and placing them on sharp-edged slides under a microscope.

  When the tutor announced last week that they had to do this experiment, Ann sat with her pen poised above her notebook. All through the lecture the people around her had filled page after page with notes and diagrams. But Ann hadn’t been able to separate the flow of sounds coming from the tutor’s mouth into coherent words. She has no idea why she has to fill the xylem vessels with blue dye, or study them under a microscope, or even what she’s supposed to be looking for when she does.

  Ann shakes the wisps of hair off her face, straightens her back, holds her knees together and picks up the scalpel. She can do this, she can, she really can. She presses the tip of the blade into the base of the stem, its tight, turgid breadth splitting easily, oozing succulent whitish juice. With barely any pressure, she slits the stem into two exact halves. Lilac petals fall, scattering the bench top, and she places them next to each other on the dissection board. Ann breathes again. She can do this. She can do this. She is doing this.

  She picks up the next stem and holds it between thumb and forefinger in her left hand. Sun is slicing into the lab through the high-up windows. Because the windows are so widely spaced, the benches are alternately illuminated by this white, midday light: one bench in shade, the next in sunlight. Ann’s is in a bright, almost biblical shaft, with all the apparatus around her given black, clearly outlined shadows. She can see her own elbows on the bench, hands raised, ankles crossed under the stool, and she can’t believe that she casts such a distinct image because she feels so insubstantial, so matter-less, so lacking in any kind of density or form or shape.

  She turns back to her hands and watches with something like interest as the scalpel she is holding presses into the skin of her left palm. Her fingers holding the stem spring open, but the scalpel presses harder. A glittering red bloom appears from her hand and flows in a fast stream over the mound of her thumb and down her wrist. There is no pain. But she can hear that clean sound like a blade through grass as the scalpel travels across her palm, bifurcating her lifeline. Her fingers curl back into themselves. She lets the scalpel drop. Her sleeve feels wet all the way up to her elbow.

  It’s as if her lens on the world has been twisted into a new focus: everyone looks very close to her all of a sudden. She can hear the whisperings of two men at the other side of the room, discussing the amount of ethanol contained in a pipette, which one of them is holding up to the window above her head. They don’t look at her. At the front of the lab the stick insects in their perforated glass box rustle, scratch and rub their thin, articulated legs against each other as they transport themselves around their closed-in, simulated world of heat and leaves; dust motes whirl in the shafts of light; a Bunsen burner three benches away roars like a waterfall.

  Ann slides off the stool until her feet touch the ground. The dissection board has drunk up the blood that has fallen on to it like a thirsty plant. Ann finds that distasteful, and all she knows is that she wants to get away from it, that blood-filled slab of wood, and get away from here. The beam of her vision moves around the room like a searchlight: basins with high-arched taps, orange rubber tubing running from gas taps to burners, which make the room behind them swim with heat, the two men who are now bending over their elaborate construction of glass piping, a fair-haired man sitting at a microscope, slowly wheeling the lens up towards his eye, a woman shaking something in a test tube, another man taking off his jacket and placing it squarely on a peg, the shelves with the jars and jars of formaldehyde-soaked lizards, rubbery piglets and shut-eyed foetuses.

  Ann walks down the centre pathway towards the door. She passes the woman with the test tube, who doesn’t look up. As she approaches the man peering down the microscope, she must have shaken her head or flicked back her hair again because one of her hairpins falls out of her carefully constructed chignon. It must have been loosening itself for hours from the position in which Ann shoved it that morning, the forces of gravity tugging away, and in that instant it drops to the tiled floor, making a twang like a highly pitched tuning fork. It is a strange noise for the laboratory — a minuscule note of intimacy among all those sounds of boiling and cutting and condensing and growing. Ann hears it and puts her good hand up to her hair, feeling a strand of it falling down to her shoulder. The microscope man hears it, and it makes him glance up from his slide. His eyes rest on Ann for a microsecond and he is reflexively looking back down the tunnel of light to his vision of cells seething in iodine when he leaps up from his stool. ‘Ch
rist Almighty.’

  He seizes Ann by her uninjured arm and, producing a low chair from somewhere, guides her on to it. Ann is relieved. The crown of her head is feeling hot, her leg muscles tired of holding her upright.

  ‘Where is it that you’re cut?’ he asks, in a low, very calm voice, bending over her. ‘Can you show me?’

  Ann tries to open her fingers, but suddenly hot arrows of pain shoot up to her shoulder. She gasps, shocked, tears start into her eyes and spill down her cheeks. The man holds her hand over a basin and runs the tap over it. Blood is sluiced away from it, swinging into the white curves of the porcelain and away down the plughole. Under the wrater, they both see a red gash, running diagonally across her palm. The man examines it, frowning. ‘Fine,’ he says, ‘you’re doing fine.’

  Then he crouches and starts removing one of his shoes. The other people in the lab have stopped their activities and gathered round the little drama. And they all watch, puzzled, as the fair-haired man struggles with the knots in his lace. Ann’s arm is stretched out limply on the bench top as if it no longer belongs to her. He rips the lace from his shoe and, holding Ann’s arm above her head, his face tense with concentration, wraps it around her wrist and tugs it tight.

  Ann winces. ‘That’s too tight,’ she says, crying again, ‘it hurts.’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry. But you’ve cut through the blood vessels,’ he explains, in the same soft and patient voice, ‘and I think most of the tendons, so we have to stop the blood-flow to your hand.’ He reaches into his pocket, drawing out a white handkerchief, and, before Ann can draw back in surprise, he is pressing it, folded, to her wet cheeks. ‘There,’ he says. Then he turns to the people staring at them. ‘I’m going to phone for an ambulance. Can one of you stand here holding her arm up like this until I get back?’

  When the ambulance comes, he steps into it with her. He is called Ben, he tells her, Ben Raikes, and is doing his Ph.D. He loves Edinburgh, especially the Botanical Gardens, and is not from the city but a small town on the sea, east of here. He wants to know her name, where she’s from, if she’s travelled much in Scotland, how she likes biology, how her hand is, how did she come to cut it that deeply anyway, does it still hurt her, is there anything he can do. But Ann is feeling strange now. How did she come to be here in the back of an ambulance with a garrulous Scottish man who has her blood on his shirt and, in his pocket, her tears on his handkerchief? She feels as if her life has been somehow diverted: where would she be now if she hadn’t cut her hand, or if her hairpin hadn’t fallen out, or if it hadn’t fallen out as she happened to be walking past Ben Raikes, making him look up? This is all so unexpected and she doesn’t like that, doesn’t like the fact that this man has taken care of her like this, that her hand is cut and messed and throbbing, and that she wants him to please, please take hold of her hand again in his gentle fingers, like he did back there when her blood was seeping out of her veins.