by Isla Gordon
She turned to grin at Jill by her side, who was staring off to the side, distracted. When she realised Alice was looking at her she snapped her attention back to the stage and slapped on a smile.
Alice nudged her. You okay? she signalled to Jill by pointing at her and then giving her a thumbs up, the music being too loud to hear over.
‘Just thirsty,’ Jill mouthed back.
Alice leant close to her ear and said loudly, ‘Shall we go get some more water?’
‘No,’ Jill said, her dry breath on Alice’s cheek. ‘I’ll just need to pee, and we have a good spot.’
They really did have a great spot, and the performances were so good, with the music reaching into Alice’s soul and making her feel happy to be alive. Alice soaked it all in, wanting to remember every second. How all these phenomenal women were throwing dance moves and hitting the high notes in this torridity was commendable. The least Alice could do was sway against some people in the crowd to show her support.
During a break between tracks Alice dived into her bag to find her mini sun lotion stick. Where was it . . . she pulled out her lipstick and a tissue, and noticed Jill beside her mopping her brow. She didn’t look well.
‘Jill?’ she called over the elated screams of the crowd.
Jill’s eyes focused on her. ‘It’s so hot,’ she said, her voice quiet but her lips easy to read.
‘Okay. Okay, I’m going to get you some water.’ Alice craned over the heads of the people in front of her and tried to signal to one of the security guards. He wasn’t seeing her, and she glanced back to Jill who had her forehead in her hands, being jostled by the people around her, slipping away from Alice like a plastic cup on the surface of the ocean. ‘Jill,’ she shouted back. ‘Wait there, just wait one second.’
Alice pushed forward, waving both arms and shouting to get the attention of the security guard. She pushed and she shoved and at the exact moment the security guard spotted her, the band started up again and the crowd lunged forward as one.
‘Excuse me,’ Alice called out, her voice getting lost, as she tried to push her way through the ever-decreasing gaps between the bodies. ‘I just need to get my friend some water, excuse me.’ But nobody was looking at her, all eyes were focused on the stage, and the jungle of people a tangle of limbs and sweat, elbows pushing and phones held high.
She edged closer to the railings, and she could see the security guard holding a bottle of water for her but he was distracted, his mouth clearly telling the crowd to move back. Move back. Alice paused and whirled back to meet Jill’s eye one more time, trying to convey that someone was coming, water was coming, and Jill smiled at her.
The crowd lunged again and Alice felt something give way – the railing at the front – and she stumbled, tumbling, carried with the wave of people. Her leg sliced against something metal and she cried out, knocked to the ground, the lipstick that she’d forgotten she was even still clutching dropping under her hands, her palms dirtying.
Alice stood, wincing in pain, managing to extricate herself before the crush of people swallowed her up, and she looked for Jill. Their eyes met briefly, like a flash of sun on a moving wave, then she was gone.
Alice looked and looked, and she called Jill’s name, but she was all at sea.
Chapter 6
‘I heard there wasn’t nearly enough water for everyone and that’s what caused the panic.’
Whispered conversations dripped into Alice’s consciousness from familiar voices and unfamiliar hospital staff during the twenty-four hours they kept her in after it happened.
‘Where was security, though? They must have seen some warning signs that people were getting all hyped up.’
‘I think it was just an act of God – nobody could have prevented that heatwave and people got desperate and claustrophobic and it was overcrowded.’
Speculating, wondering, gossiping, all cut with abstract phrases and acronyms that somehow related to her body and her health. Alice kept her eyes shut, letting the sleep and drugs wash her away.
‘She was near the front I think, got out quickly and found her way to the first aid tent.’
‘One of the lucky ones.’
‘She keeps asking about a friend?’
It was raining again on the other side of the curtains – just like Britain had hoped for, had expected. This was a typical August day in Britain. Alice awoke to the gentle rhythm of the droplets against the glass. For a second she could make-believe she was in a spa, and this was a sound effects CD, and she was just coming to from a long and drowsy massage. But even with her eyes still closed, her face half-pressed into her pillow, her brain trying to back away from the thoughts she knew were reality, the fact remained.
Jill was gone.
She was dead, and it was Alice’s fault.
When Ed Bright knocked on the door of his daughter’s childhood bedroom a while later, with the trepidation of someone who’d been told by doctors and police professionals several times over the past week since it happened, ‘avoid loud noises’, she was already sitting up. Hunched, and staring at her fingers while they idly traced the floral pattern of her duvet cover, but upright.
‘Hello, my love,’ he soothed. ‘Mind if I come and drink my cup of tea in here? I brought you one.’
It was a sweet turn of phrase, Alice noticed, her dad acting like she was doing him a favour by giving him company while he drank, rather than the other way around.
‘Sure,’ she replied, her voice croaky from days of rasping sobs. She patted the bed and Ed perched, getting up again a moment later to draw back one of the curtains, watching her for signs of this not being okay.
‘Raining again,’ he remarked, settling back down and blowing on his mug of brew.
‘Why do you think I’m crying?’ Alice smiled to show her dad it was a joke. Just a small one.
‘Did you manage to go back to sleep?’
‘Yeah, sorry again for last night. You and Mum must be exhausted.’
‘We’re absolutely fine.’ He patted her shin ever so gently through the duvet.
Alice hadn’t slept through the night for over a week now, ever since the concert. At the beginning her mind was switching off when she slept, fatigued by the rush of events, the information overload, and the tilting of her world. Instead she would come to in middle of the night and when she opened her eyes to the darkness a fear would consume her and she couldn’t stop herself from crying out. When she started to sleep with the light on, the fears, the memories, knew exactly where she was, and they would creep into her dreams instead and find their way to her there. The result: crying out in her sleep instead.
Her parents seemed to take it in turns, like they’d done when she was a baby, to be the ones to get up and comfort their daughter, the feeling being that if two of them fussed around her it would be too overwhelming. Alice’s pattern with her father was becoming that he would come into the room with his iPad and a hot chocolate, sit beside her on the bed and they’d watch old Vicar of Dibley episodes until she drifted back into – for the time being – a peaceful slumber.
‘What are your plans today?’ she asked him, as if it was just a normal day and plans mattered.
‘Oh not much. Your mum wants to make a cake to take around to Jill’s family . . . We thought we’d go for a walk in a bit. Still good to get a bit of fresh air, even in the rain. Would you like to come?’
‘To deliver the cake?’ Alice couldn’t even comprehend going to Jill’s parents’ house. The thought of being there, when their daughter was not, felt like she’d be mocking them.
‘No, no,’ her dad reassured, worried he’d gone and said the wrong thing. He didn’t know how to navigate this. ‘A separate walk. If your leg feels okay?’
Alice shook her head. ‘No thanks, I’ll stay here.’
‘Are you sure? Why don’t you take some painkillers and then see how you feel in a while?’
‘No.’
‘No painkillers?’
She shook her head. She had no right to numb her pain.
After the crush Alice had been considered ‘one of the lucky ones’. Being so close to where the barriers broke she’d managed to release herself from the crowd fairly quickly. But she was disorientated and scared and she kept trying to get back into the throng to find Jill, to give her some water, until someone physically pulled her and dragged her to the first aid tent to stop the bleeding in her leg. She had no idea how long she’d been looking for Jill by that time, but she knew it would never, never feel like enough time. Jill was one of the six unlucky ones.
It hurt Alice to think about the concert itself in too much detail, or to analyse the sequence of events, because one thing was very clear to her: Jill was there because of her. She’d left Jill on her own. She was to blame for Jill’s death.
‘I don’t like to see you hurting, my love,’ Ed said, struggling for the words to show his daughter what he really meant.
Then don’t look at me, she thought, unkindly, but managed to bite her tongue before she said it out loud. He was only trying to help.
Alice shuffled back down into the bed with care, wincing in pain, and pulled the covers up. She closed her eyes though she knew she wouldn’t go back to sleep. ‘I think I’m going to try and nap again,’ she told her dad. ‘Thank you for the tea.’
She heard him leave the room and pull the door to, but not closed, and she wished she could feel better quicker, for her parents’ sake. But how could she pretend to feel okay when she couldn’t even remember what okay felt like?
A day later, maybe two, Alice was pacing her bedroom, enjoying the ache it caused her leg. With each step she allowed the throb to vividly remind her not of the concert – she didn’t allow herself to think of that – but not to forget to think about Jill, even for a second.
She picked up a pen from her windowsill and tapped it against her wound as she walked, an extra little sharp pain, an extra thing to fidget with.
The pen fell from her fingers and she cursed, crouching as best she could with her bad leg out to the side to pick it up. And within a microsecond she was back at the concert.
It was like a tableau she’d stepped into, where the world was frozen but she could see every detail of that second before it happened, painted in front of her in vivid, 4D surround sound. She was crouched to the ground, her hand pressed hard against her dropped lipstick, surrounded by legs and feet in outfits that had been planned and favourite shoes, that now danced as if they were on fire, looking for somewhere to step, looking for gaps to run into. Sweat and the scent of sticky, spilled soda rose from the ground and hovered in the air. Jill was behind her, half turned, a smile on her face and Alice cried because she knew what was coming. And she kept crying because she couldn’t stop it and she wanted to shout out to Jill to move but she was frozen, they all were, frozen in a last moment that should never have happened.
Alice tried and tried to make a sound but all that came out was a strained, inaudible wail that went on and on.
Liz Bright was in the upstairs corridor when she heard the pacing stop, and had crept towards her daughter’s door to listen, to see if it was appropriate to go in. When she heard the sound of her daughter cry out a few moments later her heart broke and she pushed her way in to find Alice crouched in a ball on the floor, her hand reaching statically for a pen, her eyes searching for something Liz couldn’t see.
‘Oh my love.’ Liz rushed to her daughter’s side and stroked her head, grasping her hand, saying her name over and over again. She didn’t know if this was the right thing to do but every instinct told her to do anything to bring Alice back from the place she’d gone to.
Eventually Alice seemed to inhale again, her breaths coming thick and fast, her rapid eye movements becoming slower and her head lowered. The tears came, dropping from her in parallel to her entire body drooping into Liz’s arms. ‘Mum,’ she said. ‘I dropped my lipstick again.’
‘It’s okay, it was just a pen, you’re safe, you’re at home.’
Alice looked around. How could she be in her childhood bedroom when she was just there? ‘It felt real, though. I saw her.’
‘I know, but it’s okay, I promise. I’ve got you.’ And her mum didn’t let go.
Later that same day, Alice ventured downstairs where her mum and dad were sitting at the kitchen table discussing something (probably her) in hushed tones.
Ed jumped up when he saw her. ‘Hello love, how are you feeling?’
She shrugged. ‘Okay.’ She didn’t feel okay, but she couldn’t bear to tell them that a week . . . ten days . . . two weeks (how long had it been?) in and she felt exactly the same. Numb.
‘Mum was telling me about your, um, episode this morning. I think we should ask the doctor to come back over, just for a talk.’
‘I’m fine.’
Ed and Liz exchanged a glance. Ed opened his mouth again but Alice shot in with the question which was the reason she’d come down in the first place.
‘Where is Bear?’
‘Bear?’ her mum asked. ‘One of your old teddy bears? I think they’re all in the wardrobe—’
‘No, Bear, the dog, Jill’s dog. Is he okay?’
‘Oh, the puppy,’ Ed answered. ‘The big puppy. He’s fine. He’s at Jill’s mum and dad’s.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I went over there the other day, just to see how they were,’ Liz said, in an almost apologetic tone. ‘I took some cake.’
‘Oh yes, the cake,’ said Alice. Liz and Ed got to keep a daughter, but at least Jill’s parents had cake. ‘How were they with you?’
‘Fine. Very sad. I didn’t stay long. Do you mind that I went?’
‘No.’ Alice wanted to know more. ‘Did they say anything about me?’
‘They asked how you were. I told them about your leg, and about how you were staying with us for a while.’
‘Are they angry at me?’
‘For not coming over? No, of course not,’ Liz soothed.
‘No, for . . . ’ Alice’s voice cracked but she didn’t have enough tears left in her at the moment. ‘For being alive.’
Ed thumped a fist on the table, his own eyes prickling with tears, which was something Alice had never seen before. She had a flash thought about how if she had died he would have been doing this a lot.
‘Ed . . . ’ said Liz.
‘Alice, don’t you ever say that or think that ever again,’ he cried. ‘I’m sorry, Liz, but I’m so angry that this stupid, stupid accident has . . . has . . . taken everything from so many people, and even the ones still here like our little Alice are having bad dreams and flashbacks and wondering if people wished they were dead.’
‘Dad, I . . . ’
‘I’m sorry, love, I don’t mean to get all worked up, I know it’s not helping. Just please remember how important you are to all of us. Don’t ever think anyone’s angry.’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘Jill’s mum and dad don’t wish anything bad had happened to you – that wouldn’t have saved their little girl.’
‘But I asked her to come to the concert with me. She wouldn’t have been there if it wasn’t for me.’
Liz guided Alice to the table and placed a mug of tea in front of her. ‘You just can’t think like that.’
‘But I do.’
‘I know. I hope one day you won’t.’
One day felt like a really long way away.
Chapter 7
Almost three weeks had passed since it happened, and at dawn Alice was back in her room, sitting up in bed, wondering why the sun had chosen today of all days to shine again. It seemed cruel.
Ed was nursing his cup of tea beside her, making small talk that she wasn’t hearing.
‘I guess I’d better have a shower.’ Alice made a move to get up, lifting the duvet and glimpsing, before quickly looking away, the long, thin wound that would eventually scar, sweeping its way up her left leg. She stood and made it halfway to the door when she just stopped. Her shoulders sank, her head t
ipped and she stood in her pyjamas, hopeless. ‘I don’t want to go, Dad.’
Ed put his mug down on a book that had remained unopened on Alice’s bedside table, and rushed to his daughter’s side, enveloping her in his arms. His poor little girl. This poor, happy little thing going through something so very horrible, and as he kissed her straggled hair he thought, not for the first time, how at least he still got to hold her. It was heartbreaking, but his daughter was intact. He felt awful for even comparing himself to Jill’s parents.
To Alice it was akin to being a small child again, unable to process anything beyond the walls of the past three weeks. And simultaneously it was as if her soul had aged twenty years overnight at having to face mortality. I can’t do it, she repeated to herself. I can’t do it. She can’t be gone.
And then as quickly as they came, the tears retreated for now, like the watering can had just needed emptying again. She was back to empty, and she took a big breath. ‘But I have to go, don’t I?’
Ed stepped back. ‘You don’t have to, my love. You don’t have to do anything. We’ve still got a lot of Vicar of Dibley episodes to watch.’
‘But you think I should?’
‘I think you should. I don’t think it’ll be easy; in fact I think you’ll be in for a pretty lousy day, and I don’t think you’ll feel any better afterwards. But I think my Alice of the Future will be glad she went to her best friend’s funeral.’
A little stabby thought crossed through her: Jill won’t have a future. But he was right. ‘Yeah. Okay. I really need that shower, though.’ She smiled at her dad and left the room.
I don’t have a best friend any more, she thought, as the hot water rushed onto her scalp. I don’t have my Jill. We had plans.
She squeezed her eyes shut, rubbing a facial scrub into her forehead in slow circles. This shower gel is mango scented. Jill and I had those mango mojitos in Vegas. She really liked them; I think she’d have liked this shower gel.
I miss Jill. I wish we could switch places.