After You'd Gone

by Maggie O'Farrell

  He makes his way back to Intensive Care through the winding white corridors. He never has to think about which turning to take, or read the signs: his sense of direction is good. There are people who’ve worked here longer than him who still get lost. Mike’s method, not that he would ever tell anyone this, is not to think about it, to let his subconscious take over, to occupy his mind with something else while his body and instinct take control. He has a suspicion that if he stopped and thought about which direction to take he’d forget and fumble and lose his way.

  In the room, sitting beside the bed, Mike finds a woman in a red dress with streaked blonde hair. ‘Hello,’ he says.

  She shifts in her seat, swivelling her upper body to face him. ‘Hi. I’m Rachel.’

  Her shoes are high and black, with painfully narrow toes. A briefcase rests on the floor beside the chair. He can tell from the chafing around her eyes that she’s been crying. Mike says nothing, but checks the machines and the drip. He presses his thumb to Alice’s inert wrist, counting the number of times her heart sends blood hurtling past his touch. He peels back her eyelids, shines a beam into her pupils, one of which is fixed, dark and wide like a sea anemone, the other small, quivering and black. He can feel Rachel’s wide-set green eyes watching his every move.

  ‘How is she?’ she asks. Her voice has the volume and directness of someone used to getting answers to all her questions.

  ‘How long have you known her?’ Mike enquires.

  ‘Years. We met at university.’ She tilts her head to look at the figure on the bed. ‘She’s my best friend, I suppose.’ She stands, walks to the window and looks out into the velvet black. ‘We lead very different lives now, but we’re still close, I’d say.’

  ‘Did you see her parents today?’

  ‘No,’ she says, and he can tell without turning round by the way her voice reverberates off the wall in front of him that she’s moved from the window and is somewhere at his back, watching him again. ‘I think I must have just missed them. I had to work later than I thought tonight.’

  Mike adjusts the breathing tube and the cone of plastic strapped to Alice’s face. Its edges have made red welts in her skin.

  ‘So,’ Rachel says as she comes round the bed and returns to the chair, ‘how is she doing?’

  ‘There’s no change.’

  ‘Is that good or bad?’

  ‘It’s neither.’

  They both look at Alice. Mike notices for the first time that the cuts to her face are hardening into scabs, that her bruises are turning a dark purple-black. He feels again how strange it is that such a major part of the body’s working can break down and yet simple things like the healing of skin can just carry on as normal. There is something oddly-calming about watching her - maybe it’s the rhythm of the ventilator or that she never moves, apart from the artificial rise and fall of her torso. He lowers himself on to the side of the bed.

  ‘You know, they say it may have been deliberate. A suicide attempt.’

  The ventilator sighs once, twice, Alice’s chest rising and falling in sympathy. Mike glances at Rachel.

  She seems unsurprised, biting her thumbnail with emphatic nips of her white, rather childishly shaped teeth. ‘Yes,’ she says simply, after a while. ‘It had crossed my mind.’ Rachel leans forward and runs a finger down the thin skin of her friend’s temple. ‘Alice, Alice,’ she whispers, ‘why did you do it?’

  ‘No, no, not like that at all,’ Alice says, in a lowered voice into the receiver, trying unsuccessfully to suppress her laughter. The office is quiet today, everyone’s back bent over their computer screens, and their ears, Alice imagines, tuned into her conversation.

  ‘Well, what, then?’ Rachel is shouting at the other end. She’s on her mobile, the connection between them fuzzing, the movement of her walking juddering her voice. The line cuts out for a second then returns: ‘. . .in bed, or not?’ she is saying.

  ‘Rach,’ Alice reminds her, ‘I’m in the office.’

  Rachel sighs. ‘OK. You can tell me later. So what about the deep dark secret? Did you manage to get it out of him or didn’t you do that much talking?’

  ‘He’s Jewish.’

  The sound of hooting and car engines comes down the line, then Rachel’s voice, suddenly still, as if she’s stopped walking. ‘How Jewish?’

  ‘What do you mean, how Jewish? Are there degrees of

  it?’

  ‘Of course there are.’

  ‘Well,’ Alice doesn’t know what to say, ‘he’s . . . he’s . . . er . . . he said he’s worried about what his dad will think.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘It’s weird, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not really. It’s not as if it’s uncommon or anything.’

  ‘Oh.’ Alice is surprised. ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ Rachel says, ‘I forget this about you sometimes.’

  ‘Forget what?’

  ‘That you’ve spent most of your life holed up in some Scottish village in the middle of nowhere. Of course it’s not uncommon. It happens all the bloody time. Is it just a problem with his dad or is it him as well?’

  ‘Um, I’m not sure.’ Alice thinks back. ‘Both, I think.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Rachel says. ‘Look, I’m going to have to go. I’ve got to be in court in two minutes. Just . . . just be careful, that’s all. Don’t get too involved before you know what’s what, OK?’

  Alice makes her way from Camden Town tube station with her A-Z held in front of her. John’s street is a narrow, short one that on the map isn’t even long enough to contain its own name, held in the fork between Camden Road and Royal College Street. She wends her way up Camden Road, past the World’s End pub on the corner where people have spilled out on to the pavement with their glasses in hand. At the lights outside Sainsbury’s, she crosses the road and buys a bottle of wine from a small Algerian shop with banks of exotic vegetables and cacti outside. The man wraps it for her in a twist of moss-green paper and calls after her to ‘have a lovely evening, darling’.

  After walking up and down a few times, peering at the houses’ numbers in the twilight, she decides his house must be near the far end of the narrow street. It is one of a typical north London Victorian terrace. The front door is blue and there are lights on in every window. At the door she can feel the vibration of loud music coming from the house. She rings the bell and he opens the door so quickly that she wonders if he was waiting behind it. He looks dishevelled, his shirt all untucked and his hair standing on end. Then they are locked together and he has wrapped his arms around her so tightly she can hardly draw breath. She doesn’t know how long they stay like that; it all seems already so familiar — the smell of him and the way her head fits into the curve of his neck, the way he cups his palm around the nape of her neck when he is kissing her. She pulls back to look at him, running her fingertips over his mouth and cheeks. ‘It’s so good to see you,’ she says unnecessarily.

  He reaches past her and shuts the front door. ‘Come on in, he says, pulling her by the hand through the hallway into a big high-ceilinged sitting room. Two rooms have, at one time, been knocked together, forming a sweep of floorboards from a bay window at the front to a back door opening out on to a small garden. The walls are painted a dark paprika red, with one whole side of the room taken up with bookshelves. In the corner is a messy-looking desk with his computer and a fax machine that winks and blinks at intervals. There are two scruffy, comfy sofas at right angles to each other and a table, piled high with magazines, papers and books.

  John is standing behind her, his arms around her waist. ‘Well?’ he murmurs into her hair.

  ‘Well what?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘John, it’s so beautiful. What an amazing house.’

  ‘I’m very lucky. I bought it with the money my mother left me. I often think I ought to get a housemate, or get a friend to move into the spare room or something, but I’ve got used to the luxury of living alone. I w
ouldn’t ever want to live anywhere else. I love it. I live in this room mostly. The rest of the house is pretty bare. I never seem to have the time to do anything to it.’

  She walks across the room to the bookshelves, runs her hand along the spines of the books lined up and turns around to face the room. ‘I like it,’ she says decisively.

  ‘Come and see the rest.’

  She follows him out into the hall and watches his thigh muscles moving inside his jeans as he climbs the stairs. At the top he turns to see her smiling to herself. ‘What are you grinning about?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she says, trying to straighten her face but starting to laugh.

  ‘What is it?’ He seizes her and presses her up against the landing wall. ‘You’d better tell me.’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ she gasps, giggling. ‘I was just thinking about . . . about the weekend . . . you know.’

  ‘What part of the weekend, in particular, would that be, then?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ She curves her hands around his buttocks and pulls him towards her. ‘This part maybe.’

  They kiss. She feels a sudden, stabbing desire for him. She wants him; she wants him so much it gives her a physical, prickling, longing ache. She wants him here, right here on this darkened landing with only the light from the sitting room downstairs, and she wants him now. He is unbuttoning her shirt, bending his head to kiss her throat and chest. She fumbles with the buttons to his shirt, but this desire has made her clumsy and they refuse to slide through the material. She tugs at them desperately. ‘Bugger,’ she says.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ His voice sounds thick and muffled. ‘Can’t get your shirt undone.’

  He steps back briefly, grips the back of the collar with both hands, shrugs it over his head and flings it to the floor. She holds out her arms for him. She loves the feel of his smooth, warm skin, the hard springiness of his torso. She runs her hands up his back and along his arms, pressing her mouth to his neck and shoulder. Then she stops. Something is not quite right, there is something uneasy, a niggling something registering somewhere in her consciouness. She attempts to sort her fuddled mind into a coherent thought. Smell. She has begun to smell something ominous.

  ‘John?’

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘I can smell something burning.’

  He raises his head and sniffs the air like a bloodhound. ‘Shit.’

  He hurtles down the stairs two at a time and disappears. Alice leans against the wall, her breath shuddering in her chest, heartbeat chasing heartbeat. I’m in love, she thinks, I love this man, I love him. She explores this feeling, cautiously, like someone walking on a newly healed limb for the first time, finding out its limitations, wary of any signs of weakness. Is she frightened? No. Excited? Yes — incredibly. She wants to gobble up time, to rush through days and weeks and years with him, so they can do everything right now. But, at the same time, she wants to freeze it: she knows enough about love to be aware of its double bind - that there’s no love without pain, that you can’t ever love someone without that tinge of dread at how it might end.

  She tugs at the hem of her skirt and rebuttons her blouse, feeling at the same time for the light switch along the wall. It must be here somewhere. She feels almost nervous at going downstairs again in case, just in case, she sees a casual indifference in his eyes — but in her heart she knows she won’t. She thinks he loves her or, at least, could love her, and as she pushes her palm in wide sweeps over the wall, she wonders absently how long it will be before she tells him she loves him. Her fingers find the switch and she turns on the light.

  For a second she is blinded and she stands blinking in the strong, yellow electric light. There’s no shade on the bulb. She is standing, she sees, on a small bare-boarded landing. There are three doors off it, all slightly ajar. She pushes one open and turns on the light. It is John’s bedroom: surprisingly spartan, with a double futon with a blue cover, a bedside light, and a tower of books next to the bed. There’s nothing on the walls, some clothes scattered about. The bay window looks over the street. She fights a compulsion to scrutinise everything in minute detail — to open drawers, flick through books — to glean any information about this man who has walked into her life but she feels voyeuristic; John doesn’t know she’s in here, after all.

  The next room is obviously where he keeps all his junk. It’s smaller, at the back of the house and crammed with stuff — two bicycles in different stages of disrepair, an old computer disgorging a tangle of coloured leads, a large chest of drawers, a wardrobe, shelves full of files, heaps of clothes, paper, magazines, newspapers. The third room is the bathroom, painted a rich dark blue. The bath is huge and turquoise. By the loo is another pile of books — some poetry, a complete works of Ibsen and The Journalist’s Handbook. There is a constant gurgling, bubbling sound that she assumes is the pipes until she turns to go and sees a large tank behind the door. A pump spurts out water in a steady trickle and the tank glows with a fluorescent tube light: illuminated in it are not fish but a strange motionless creature.

  Alice approaches the tank. It’s like a lizard but all white, and hangs suspended in the water, regarding her with tiny black eyes set back in the sides of its head. She has never seen anything like it: around its head is a spray of fragile, delicately fronded pink gills, which pulsate slightly. Its feet fascinate her: they are like dolls’ hands — dainty and pale with tiny meticulous fingers. It looks inexpressibly melancholy. What strikes her most of all is its stillness: it doesn’t move even when she bends right down next to it. She wonders how it stays afloat in mid-tank without appearing to move its legs or thick tail. Surely it should sink to the gravelled bottom? As she watches, it moves painstakingly slowly to the edge of the tank, its muscular tail flicking it through the water; when it reaches the side of the tank, its nose bumps the glass and it sinks a few inches in the water, then stops, gazing at her soulfully. She presses her fingertips against the glass. ‘What are you doing in there?’ she whispers.

  It gazes at her with its mournful pinprick eyes. She straightens up and turns to go downstairs.

  In the kitchen, John is standing shirtless at the cooker, vigorously stirring something in a pan. ‘Hello,’ he says, as she enters, ‘it’s not completely ruined, don’t worry.’ He leans over and kisses her. ‘Have you been having a look round?’

  ‘John, what’s that thing?’

  ‘What thing?’

  ‘That thing in the tank upstairs.’

  ‘Oh,’ he laughs, ‘it’s an axolotl.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘An axolotl. They originate from South America. One of my cousins breeds them. It’s amazing, isn’t it?’

  ‘But is it a reptile or an amphibian or what?’

  ‘They’re the larval form of salamanders. If I let him get used to being out of water, he’d become a salamander. They’re the only larval form in existence that can breed.’

  ‘So he’s stuck in constant adolescence?’ She shudders. ‘What a horrific thought. That’s so cruel. You should let him grow up into a fully fledged salamander and put him out of his misery. ’

  ‘Didn’t you like being an adolescent?’

  ‘No! I hated it. I couldn’t wait to grow up and leave home.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah. I was an awful teenager — horrible to live with and horrible to look at.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘It’s true. I wore black all the time, did nasty things to my hair and didn’t talk to my parents properly for five years.’ ‘Have you got any photos?’

  ‘None that I’d show you. Anyway, don’t avoid the issue: you’re trapping that poor creature in that terrible no man’s land. ’

  ‘Not really. It’s more like he’s permanently in his twenties — he can breed, he can have relationships, he can lead a happy, normal axolotl life. He never grows old, which is a pretty good deal, I think. The Dorian Grays of the amphibian world.’

  ‘He doesn’t look very happ
y.’

  ‘Not at the moment, but wait and see. He’s nocturnal. He’s sleeping just now. In a few hours he’ll have woken up and will be zipping round his tank, churning up the gravel. Just wait and see.’ John opens the oven door and ducks down to look in. ‘Not long now,’ he says, and slams it shut.

  ‘Aren’t you cold?’ she asks, and puts her arms around him from behind, resting her head between his shoulder-blades.

  ‘No,’ he says, and Alice hears and feels his voice resonating through his chest. ‘I feel fine.’

  ‘There’s a good smell.’

  ‘Are you hungry?’

  She nods.

  I loved being in love with John. Love is easy and strange. I would ponder it on rattling tube trains, on crowded buses, at work - what was it about him that produced this effect in me? I could never decide definitively and had lists of both generalisations and detailed particulars: I loved his generosity, his ability to laugh at himself, his determination, the way he could unequivocally apply himself to any task, his impulsiveness, and howr he could find humour in any situation. But yet, I also loved the way he rubbed his hair in a circular motion when he was tired, how his upper lip would stick out when he was cross, that he couldn’t go to sleep unless he had a glass of water by the bed, and that he was constantly surprised by how much food he could eat.

  I really loved watching him shave. My father, ever since I could remember, had used an electric shaver and so the whole ritual of a wet shave fascinated me: the badger-haired brush given to him by his father, the little pool of water in the sink, the razor to which he would give a quick, flicking shake before applying it to his face. I would sit on the side of the bath watching him work a lather from the brush and his palm, then slather it into a beard-shaped mass on his face. Then the rasp of the silver razor against his stubble and the bizarre faces he pulled to hold his skin taut. Sometimes I would stand behind him and imitate these faces, until one day he laughed so much he cut himself. 1 loved the way that before his face would be sharp and prickled, leaving red welts on my face and body, and then afterwards it would be so smooth I could run my lips along it. The severed stubble clustered like iron filings around the sink after the water had drained away.