After You'd Gone

by Maggie O'Farrell

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hi,’ said Alice, squinting because her eyes were adjusted to the cone of glare from her Anglepoise lamp, not the dark of the rest of her bedroom.

  ‘How’s it going?’ Ann asked, coming forward and peering over Alice’s shoulder at her work.

  She swivelled round in her seat, trying to face her mother. ‘Uh. OK.’

  ‘Is that an essay? What’s it on?’

  ‘Robert Browning.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘He’s a poet.’

  ‘Yes. I know.’

  Ann started picking up scattered clothes from the floor. Alice screwed the lid back on to her pen. She didn’t want the ink drying up.

  ‘How was school today?’

  ‘All right.’ Alice put her pen down on the desk and tucked her hands underneath her.

  ‘What time do you want your tea?’

  ‘Um. Don’t mind. Any time.’

  Alice started twirling her hair around her index finger, her mind still on her essay plan. Ann sat on the edge of the bed, crossing her legs. Alice watched as Ann started folding the clothes she’d picked up and tossing them on to the duvet beside her.

  ‘Who is this boy who keeps phoning up, then?’ Ann said brightly, as if it had just occurred to her to ask.

  Alice stopped twirling her hair. ‘What boy?’

  ‘Oh, come on, Alice,’ Ann said, irritation creeping into her voice for the first time, ‘I’m talking about the boy who phones up here for you every night. Every single night.’ She forced a smile, got her voice under control again. ‘I just wondered who he was. That’s all.’

  Alice turned back to her work, shaking her hair loose so that it fell over her face. She stared at the page in front of her with the unfinished sentence, pretending to be thinking hard about it. Her pulse had speeded up so quickly she felt dizzy. Or maybe she was just hungry.

  ‘It’s him, isn’t it?’ Ann said.

  Alice slammed down her hand on to the page, letting out an explosive sigh. ‘Who?’ she said, without looking round.

  ‘Who? You know perfectly well who I mean. It’s that — that Andrew Innerdale boy, isn’t it?’

  Alice didn’t answer, still staring at her essay, her back hunched over the desk, fury swelling in her cranium.

  ‘It is him, isn’t it? I know it’s him, Alice. I thought everything with him was . . . What’s going on between you? Are you — are you seeing him, Alice? Are you? Are you going out with him?’

  ‘No!’ Alice screamed, her voice bouncing back at her off the wall to which her calendar was pinned. ‘I’m not!’

  ‘Then why does he phone up here all the time?’

  Alice jumped up from her seat. She felt trapped: this was her room and her mother was in it. ‘I don’t know! Ask him, not me!’

  ‘I just hope you’re not giving him the wrong idea.’

  ‘What the hell do you mean by that? How dare you? I’m trying to work here, Mum, I’m trying to write an essay. Why don’t you just get out? Leave me alone.’

  Ann was standing now as well. ‘You must be giving him the wrong signals, Alice. Are you sure you’re not encouraging him? Men don’t phone like that without . . . provocation.’ Alice picked up the nearest thing to hand — her dictionary — and flung it at the wall. As soon as it left her hand, onion-skin pages fluttering in flight, she felt bad. It hit the wall with a dull clunk, and fell to the floor, pages crushed in concertina folds. Alice wanted to tell her mother about how he followed her to and from school, about the notes he left in her bag, about how he just appeared when she was walking through town or on the beach or to her friend’s house, and about how all this was beginning to frighten her, that she didn’t know how to handle it, that she didn’t know what to do.

  Ann was bending to pick up the dictionary when the phone began to ring downstairs. It rang three or four times. ‘That’ll be him again, won’t it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  The phone rang and rang. Was no one else in tonight? Alice didn’t want to talk to him. It was the last thing she wanted, but she didn’t want to be in this room any longer. She pushed past her mother and ran downstairs. Let it not be him, please, let it not be him. Ann followed her, taking the stairs two at a time.

  ‘What is going on?’ Ann demanded. ‘Are you going out with him?’

  ‘No!’ Alice shouted. ‘I told you! Go away! Leave me alone!’

  They stood, facing each other over the ringing phone. ‘Then why does he keep phoning? You must be leading him on. You must be.’

  ‘I’m not! I’m really not! Go away!’ Close to tears, Alice picked up the phone. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Alice? Hi. It’s Andrew.’

  Later I heard my father downstairs, his voice gentle, modulated: ‘Ann, she’s a young girl. What possible harm could—’

  ‘Shut up!’ my mother screeched. ‘Shut up! You know nothing about this! Nothing!’

  Alice lies on her back on Kirsty’s bed, her head tipped back, watching her sister. Kirsty stands at the window with a hand mirror and a pair of tweezers, plucking her eyebrows in the blue-edged December sunlight. She is leaning all her weight on one leg, the swell of her stomach silhouetted against the net curtain. ‘I’ve never understood why you do that,’ says Alice. ‘What?’

  ‘Pluck your eyebrows.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, you pull out all your eyebrows, hair by hair, walk round with swollen eyes for a day and then you just draw them back on again.’

  ‘I don’t pull them all out. Only some.’

  ‘Still. It’s a weird thing to do, don’t you think?’

  ‘Not all of us are blessed with naturally dark, arched eyebrows like you.’

  Alice brings up her fingertip to feel her own eyebrows.

  She smooths them first one way, then pushes her fingertip back against the natural lie of the hairs, feeling them stand up and bristle under her touch. ‘What’s it like?’ she asks suddenly.

  ‘What? Plucking my eyebrow's?’

  ‘No,’ says Alice, turning over on to her front, ‘that.’ She points at Kirsty’s belly.

  Kirsty puts her head on one side and shifts her weight on to her other foot, thinking. ‘It’s like . . . it’s like soap bubbles.’

  ‘Soap bubbles?’

  ‘Yes. You know how if you run a jet of water into soap bubbles, they froth and divide and multiply before your eyes. It’s like that. All these cells are frothing and multiplying right in here. It’s . . . quite amazing. That’s the only way I can describe it.’

  ‘Are you nervous?’

  ‘I was. Incredibly. But I think when you get to this stage all your complacency hormones have kicked in and you don’t give a shit about anything any more. I don’t care now that I look like the side of the house or that I can only wear tents, or that my bottom is so huge that some days I’m convinced I’m carrying another baby in there as well, or that I’ve got stretch-marks on my stomach. It’s nice, really . . . knowing that all that matters is this.’ She straightens her dress over her stomach.

  ‘Can I feel?’

  Kirsty smiles. ‘Of course. I don’t know if you’ll be able to feel much. I think it’s sleeping at the moment.’ She comes over to the bed and lowers herself, bending only at the knees, next to Alice. Alice puts the palm of her hand against the swell beneath Kirsty’s dress. ‘It feels so hard,’ she exclaims.

  ‘Of course it does. There’s a whole person curled up in there.’

  They wait, cocking their heads, as if listening out for a sound. Minutes pass.

  ‘Can’t feel anything,’ whispers Alice eventually.

  ‘Just wait,’ Kirsty whispers back.

  Alice begins to giggle. ‘Why are we whisp—’

  ‘Shush!’ Kirsty interrupts. Alice feels a fluttering, a slight, rapid popping movement beneath her hand. ‘There! Did you feel it?’

  Alice laughs incredulously. ‘Wow,’ she says, ‘wow,’ and leans closer. ‘Hello!’ she shouts. ‘This
is your aunt Alice speaking. I’m looking foward to meeting you!’

  Kirsty makes tea in the kitchen that she and Neil painted a pale apricot. Beyond the back door are the criss-crossing fences of tenement gardens. Frozen rows of washing cling to lines strung from tall wrought-iron poles.

  ‘So,’ says Kirsty, placing a mug of tea in front of Alice and fixing her with a steady blue-eyed gaze, ‘are you going to tell me why you’re here?’

  Alice flips a teaspoon against her thigh and looks out at the grey Edinburgh sky. Steam curls up from the mug’s rim and disappears into the apricot of the walls. ‘I don’t know where to start.’

  ‘Is it John?’

  Alice nods. Kirsty’s face creases in concern and she grips Alice’s hand in hers. ‘Oh, Al, what’s happened? I thought you were so in love when I saw you at the funeral. You both had a kind of Ready Brek glow around you ... I don’t know what it was . . . I’ve never seen you look at anyone like that before.’

  I know.’ She shakes her head. ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do.’

  Neil finished work later than usual that night. Rather than risking the cold walk across the Meadows to their flat, he caught a bus from the Mound. As soon as he’d opened the outer door, he knew something was up. Instead of finding Kirsty sitting serenely on the sofa or lying in bed, the front of the flat was completely dark. Loud ambient music was blaring from the kitchen. Over it, he could hear a female voice — Kirsty? Beth? — shrieking, ‘I don’t care. I just don’t care. Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,’ followed by hysterical (female) laughter. Neil put down his briefcase, advanced up the hallway and came round the kitchen door.

  Kirsty was sitting at the table with her head propped up

  on her elbows. Opposite her was Beth, still in her duffel coat,

  sitting on Alice’s knee. There were two empty wine bottles on the table.

  ‘Neeeeeeeeil!’ they shrieked in deafening unison on seeing him. Neil’s instinct drove him to clamp his hands over his ears.

  ‘Do you know what?’ said Alice, when the noise had died down, to no one in particular. ‘You should never kneel for peace.’

  ‘What are you talking about, Alice?’ Beth asked.

  ‘And do you know what else?’ she continued. ‘You should always look before you leap. Always.’

  ‘Alice,’ said Kirsty, ‘shut up.’

  Neil looked round at them all in amazement. ‘What on earth is going on? It’s like a coven of witches or something. And,’ he said, turning to Alice, ‘I won’t even ask what you’re doing here.’

  ‘No,’ Alice said, ‘I wouldn’t if I were you.’ She shook Beth’s arm. ‘Beth, could you get off? I think I’m losing all sensation in my legs.’ Beth got up and offered Neil a drink. ‘That’ll be the next thing,’ Alice muttered to herself, ‘I’ll get gangrene and have to have my legs amputated. Before we know it, I’ll be in a wheelchair for the rest of my life. I wonder what old Bollockbrain Friedmann would have to say about that. A cripple as well as a Kenwood.’

  ‘What’s she on about?’ Neil asked Kirsty.

  ‘It’s Jewish rhyming slang, Neil,’ Alice said, with a severe frown. ‘Kenwood mixer — shiksa.’

  ‘It’s John,’ Kirsty explained.

  ‘Ah, I see,’ he said, not really seeing at all.

  The next day, Kirsty has a hospital appointment and Beth, who’d ended up staying the night next to Alice on Kirsty’s sofa-bed, has to go to an early lecture on endocrinology. Alice walks arm in arm with Kirsty over the Meadows to the maternity hospital.

  ‘Alice, you are going to go and see Mum, aren’t you?’ Kirsty says.

  She sighs. T don’t know if I can take the Spanish Inquisition just now.’

  ‘Don’t be so hard on her.’

  ‘I’m not. And I’ll have to put up with her “Well, I told you sos” and the passion-versus-judgement speech.’

  ‘Just go. You can always come back to me if it gets too much for you to bear.’ Kirsty raises herself on tiptoe and kisses her on the cheek. The two sisters hug. ‘When are you going to hear from him?’

  ‘Not until Saturday. We’re not allowed to call each other. It’s the rules.’

  ‘Whose rules?’

  ‘Mine. ’

  Kirsty shakes her head. ‘I don’t know, Alice. Do you never think that you sometimes make life hard for yourself?’

  ‘Well, something had to happen, Kirsty. He wouldn’t have made any decision if I hadn’t forced him to. He’d have just let things drift, getting more and more unhappy.’

  ‘I have to go,’ Kirsty says, looking at her watch. ‘Don’t go back to London without seeing me again.’

  Alice watches her crossing the hospital forecourt, her diminutive figure weaving in and out of the cars. Only when she’s seen her obscured by the double glass doors does she shoulder her rucksack again and turn to go.

  Alice sometimes worries that she might lose her grip on life. Like the fear that your hand might suddenly veer out of control when you are writing your signature for the millionth time on a credit-card slip, she can occasionally see how easily something in her could break and she’d be left spinning in a limbo of panic and disorder. To put off her appearance in North Berwick, she goes to the Chamber Street Museum, and wanders around the cases of dusty, taxidermed animals with marble eyes. She is mapping out John’s day in her head: he’ll be eating breakfast now in the kitchen on his own; he’ll be leaving the house, walking down Camden Road; he’ll be on the tube; he’ll have arrived at work. Every step she takes around the museum is tracing one of his. At the huge whale skeleton hanging from the ceiling, she stops and leans on the balustrade, staring at the repeated arches of its ribs. She feels his presence so intensely that she wouldn’t have been at all surprised to turn and see him standing next to her. How did this happen? How did she fall so in love with him that she feels her very sanity is threatened by the possibility of their parting? He might decide we have to finish, she keeps telling herself, and the weight of that thought seems to make her clumsy: as if she’s become mysteriously lighter on one side, she stumbles when walking up the polished steps and navigating doorways proves difficult. She imagines all the little purplish bruises rising into the white of her skin like the heads of seals breaking the surface of the sea off North Berwick beach. At one point, she finds herself staring at a Grecian pot with the twists and coils of a jellyfish painted on it; she presses her palms together convulsively and whispers, ‘Please, oh, please.’

  Crossly, she bangs out of the museum doors and stands on the pavement. People sidestep her and she realises she must look very fierce and very mad. How could she have been so weak as to let this happen — to become this dependent on another person? She had always vowed to herself that she would never let her happiness depend on another. How can this have happened? She stomps down Chambers Street. He’ll be in the office. She walks past a phone box, glowering at it, and then turns and walks past it again, just to test herself.

  In the afternoon, when she has done everything she can think of to occupy her in Edinburgh, she walks down the slope into Waverley Station and catches the train to North Berwick.

  ‘So what made you decide you needed a holiday?’ her mother asks, as she serves her some mashed potato.

  ‘Um, nothing really. I just felt like a break,’ Alice mumbles, ignoring the look that passes between her parents.

  ‘It’s a bit sudden, isn’t it?’ Ann persists. ‘Didn’t work mind?’

  ‘No, not really.’

  ‘How is work going?’ Ben asks.

  ‘Fine. Yeah, good.’

  ‘And how’s John?’ asks Ann.

  ‘Er,’ she finds with horror that she is very close to tears, ‘he’s OK.’ She looks down at her vegetables and spears a floret of broccoli determinedly. You are not going to cry, you are not going to cry. Everything’s fine.

  ‘Is he going to be joining you? It would be nice to see him again. I feel like we hardly met him properly at the funeral. You seem
ed in such a rush to get back to London,’ Ann says, looking at Alice closely.

  ‘Mmm,’ she says, swirling the broccoli around her plate. ‘He’s ... er ... he’s very busy with work and stuff. You know.’

  Her mother is looking at her with an unnerving mixture of suspicion and concern.

  ‘Well, that’s a shame,’ says Ben. ‘You must bring him up another time. Show him round.’

  ‘I will.’ Alice tosses her hair off her face. ‘So how are things here anyway? You’ve moved into Granny’s room, I notice.’ ‘Yes, we have,’ says Ann, with a little glow of pleasure. ‘It’s so wonderful to wake up to that view. I’m thinking of doing a bit of redecorating — maybe the living room and the kitchen. And the hall and landing as well. How are you finding it, living with John?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Is it a nice house?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So he’s been living there for how many years?’

  ‘Four.’

  ‘Do you think you’ll make many changes to it?’

  ‘No. It’s all . . . it’s all fine.’

  ‘And is everything,’ Ann pauses, selecting her words, ‘fine between the two of you?’

  Alice bows her head over her plate again. ‘Yes,’ she says almost inaudibly.

  ‘Well, that’s good. Lucky, really. It was all so sudden, wasn’t it, Ben? I mean, you’d hardly known him — what was it? — two months before you moved in. But things are OK?’ Her parents watch a tear roll down the curve of Alice’s cheek, followed by another and another and another. Alice puts down her fork and lays her head on her arms and starts to sob. Ann tries to lift her hair out of the mashed potato and Ben goes to stand behind her chair, patting her shoulders awkwardly.

  Alice is surprised to wake the next morning in her old bedroom. Then she remembers that several times in the night she woke with the jolting sensation of being about to fall into a drop; she’d been turning over, seeking the bulk of John’s body, but finding instead the edge of the narrow, single bed and the threat of the floor beneath it.

  The room is strange. Her mother has kept it like some odd museum piece, exactly how Alice had it when she was a teenager. Around the room are political posters for nuclear disarmament, anti-apartheid, anti-vivisection and the banning of fox-hunting. Robert Smith, Morrissey and, somewhat incongruously, Albert Camus look down at her from the walls. In the cupboard, Alice knows, will be clothes she hasn’t worn for six or seven years. Strings of hippie jewellery hang over the dressing-table knobs; around the edges of its mirror are photos of Alice and various schoolfriends at parties, on the beach, in the sixth-form common room, behind the cricket pavilion. Alice stretches out from where she’s lying and pulls at one of the poster’s corners; the Sellotape, yellowed and brittle, gives way and Albert Camus comes floating to the floor. She gets up, stepping over him, and pulls on a dressing-gown that no longer closes over her chest.