Throughout my life I’ve had the luxury of forgetting about Alanna several times. In the end, though, she always comes back, like a particularly pretty zombie or a deeply ingrained psychological trauma.
Our shifts haven’t overlapped in a while. Not that I’d realized – I have enough on my plate – though on some level I must’ve been relieved. I have often wondered: did I commit a small crime during childhood that I can’t remember? Have I accumulated so much bad karma that I must be punished with Alanna Hallett appearing at regular intervals throughout my life? She never sat next to me in primary school and, in college, she once told me she’d had enough of my depressing pigeon face and to get the fuck out of her life already. What have I done to deserve this?
I stand in the doorway, watching her slender, spandexed legs strain as she slides all the way forwards on to one elbow and angles her head to evaluate the stability of her construction. I drop my bag on the floor. Alanna is startled. Just like Bambi.
‘Ruth! Jesus!’
‘What’s that?’
‘Wait a second!’ she says. ‘I have big news.’
I stand to the side with my arms crossed, waiting for her to move so that I can finally reach my desk and sink into my chair. I haven’t had a good night’s sleep. I haven’t for days. Not that I want to explain the break-up to her: I don’t think I could handle her compassion. We have history. She might be the only person I have ‘history’ with who’s left in my life, now that Neil’s gone, which is depressing.
In any case, we’ve put the past behind us. These days we don’t bring it up. Although it’s not like she’s given me a chance to forget: she looks exactly the same as she did at twenty, when she slept with him. Neil swears he didn’t find her attractive back then. Of course, it’s a lie. Because he did sleep with Alanna and I do know now that Neil is a liar.
Can you blame him? Who doesn’t love pretty young girls? ‘She’s delicious,’ Melissa said, when she gathered us to meet the new junior nurse. I remember Alanna appearing next to her like a six-year-old emerging from behind her mother’s skirt.
‘Helloooo,’ she said cutely. I couldn’t believe it was her. I thought I was rid of her when she dropped out of college.
Alanna flicks her white-blonde fringe out of her eyes and examines the house of cards again. The pointed tip of her tongue peeks out at the side of her mouth, as she stands on her toes – how tiny she is – and places one last card on top of the pile. The construction is uniformly pink, like the crop top she is wearing. She’ll be bollocked for it by one of the senior nurses in three, two, one …
‘Alanna, that top …’ I begin but I stop mid-sentence.
She doesn’t even turn around. I haven’t seen her for over three weeks and now here she is, fully herself. Alanna, the whole package: big blue eyes, black eyelashes and that killer smile. Alanna always wraps her shapely little legs in tiny leggings. How she finds them is a mystery; she’s only a size six and they’re far too small. She must shop in the kids’ section. Leggings are suitable work bottoms, but the added stretch thins out the fabric until they are practically transparent. Alanna leans in over the Goldfish Bowl counter when a male relative comes to visit, so that if he’s tall enough he can glimpse where her thong slithers up her bum, disappearing under the hem of her smock.
Melissa thinks Alanna is delightful. ‘I love her energy,’ she says. ‘So sprightly!’ She runs the care home like it’s a nativity play.
‘That’s it!’ Alanna opens her arms, showgirly. ‘I could’ve been an architect!’
Yes, I’m thinking, you could have, but for some reason you chose to be a fucking nurse in my care home instead.
‘So what are these?’ I say.
‘I was wondering when you’d ask!’ she says. ‘You’re literally the one person who doesn’t know! But I wanted to tell you myself! Well, have a guess! What do you think!’
Alanna’s sentences all end with an exclamation mark. It makes me feel like a toddler being quizzed by a nursery teacher. Which is another thing she could’ve done, but she chose not to do, so that she could plague my workplace instead. I look at the board and realize we’re both on shift for the bedpans today.
‘You’re getting married!’ I joke.
Turns out she really is.
Last night in my dream I was right here at work, at the care home. There was a birthday party being set up out on the back lawn. The bunting swung in the breeze. I wrote names on plastic cups, so that people could reuse them and none would go to waste. I knew that we only had just enough cups. I handed them to the guests: Mona, Alanna, those girls she hangs out with, Miss Phyllis, Don, Margaret and Comfort from the canteen, Call-Me-Melissa, Mr Chacko, Mrs O’Toole. Even gross Mr Hancock was wheeled out in his chair; he looked small and harmless out on the lawn. I handed him the last cup and he clutched it in his fist, the purple veins trembling.
I was all out of cups and my daughter was nowhere to be seen. I went round the group of gathered guests, increasingly frantic, tapping people on the shoulder and saying, ‘I can’t find my daughter, have you seen my daughter? Please, please, have you seen my daughter?’
‘I wanted to get something a bit snazzy this time because otherwise it’s literally just a layer of polish and what’s the point of getting your nails done at the salon if you can do the same at home? Waste of money if you ask me!’
In the washing room, Alanna enlists me to help her put her latex gloves on. She lathers her hands with the antiseptic lotion. There’s a ladybird sticker on every one of her fingernails, covered in a glossy layer of top coat.
‘You never get used to it!’ she says. ‘This shit stinks!’
Well, yes. Quite literally.
‘Bedpans coming in, hunny,’ I mumble.
She ignores me. She’s right to. What a pathetic attempt at sass. In my head, things always sound better than what comes out. Why try?
Alanna is excited because her boyfriend proposed. I almost feel like breaking into dramatic laughter when she tells me. Of course, this is unlike me: I’m no-drama. I guess we both turned out the way we were meant to. One break-up, one marriage. You win some, you lose some. Life moves on.
Alanna couldn’t wait to tell me, but she didn’t want to ring me while I was off, didn’t want to bother me, and anyway, this is the kind of thing you have to tell someone in person.
‘Am I excited for my old friend Alanna?’ she asks. She says she’s been eagerly waiting for our paths to cross, but I’d been home from work, and then our shifts didn’t match for a couple of weeks: ‘Did I get some rest? Am I feeling better?’
You want to know how I’m doing? Well, I’m not doing that great. Remember our holiday to Rome? That was the last time I was doing this badly. Sure, it’s where Neil and I met – the day I collapsed on the steps of St Peter’s – so I think I was sitting in the tiled waiting room at the Catholic hospital while you fucked him. But I got the boy, didn’t I? The man. Being with him blunted the edges, but I’ve remembered the kind of lucidity that comes from being completely empty. The body becomes more aware, develops sensitive tendrils. Look at us. Look at me now. You did the right thing in getting out early with Neil, Alanna. Why don’t you share some of your wisdom? Do continue.
I say none of this.
She’s still banging on about manicures.
‘Anyway, it’s worth saving up to get them done in gel! Shellac! What a world we live in! It’s double the money but they last double the time!’
She holds out her hands, palms upturned, synthetic talons sticking up like phosphorescent branches. I snap the gloves on her. I pull a fresh pair out of the box for myself. I take my time.
She and this Paul bloke have been together eleven months. I’m supposed to have met him – ‘Damn, girl, we never hang out any more these days’ – she’s sure she’s mentioned him. This is huge news. This is way, way beyond the seven-month mark, which, as I know, is historically the problematic point for Alanna. Remember Michael in college?
I
remember a creepy PhD student who worked part-time as a personal trainer.
Eleven whole months! A real achievement.
Most people suffer from the seven-year-itch: Alanna gets it seven months in. So what? Who am I to express this common-sense judgement that’s clogging up my throat, dooming and despising such beautiful young love?
Eleven whole months of bliss! Already she feels like she’s known him all her life.
Nonsense. Alanna doesn’t understand the notion of duration. Perhaps because the process of aging doesn’t seem to apply to her. When she has a new man, Alanna behaves like a loved-up schoolgirl, believes in the three-day rule of dating.
Jesus, I’m bitter. Alanna is happy. What’s wrong with that? She’s in love. It’s unrelated to my situation. She doesn’t even know Neil and I have broken up. Or does she?
I nearly lost my mind when she first started. I’d been happy at the care home and I couldn’t believe I wasn’t allowed to keep this one good thing. She’d given up nursing, hadn’t she? So how did she wind up in the same place as me when I had worked so hard to get there?
Though she was small, she was so perfectly charming, so pretty, so full of life, that it soon felt like she took up all of the space. There was just so much of her. I had forgotten the way she did this, shifting the axis of attention in any given scenario so that it all revolved around her.
When she joined I relearnt her ways with fresh horror. Whenever Alanna was working with me, I felt cornered. She never had anything interesting to say, but she was always so relentless in saying something, all the time, that I lost my voice. I told myself it was my fault for not knowing how to raise it. I’ve never been a loud person, but in the years after I ‘snatched Neil from her’, her ‘holiday boo’ – this was a joke she once made to loosen the tension – I had found my feet. With her around, I lost my grip, turning inwards to compensate for the fact that I was seething. I couldn’t believe that I was going through this for a third time.
Neil was delighted to discover that Alanna was back in my life. He fell victim to bouts of nostalgia in which he reminisced about his twenties. It didn’t help that she was the last girl he’d slept with before we got together. I couldn’t help but be petty. I said things like, ‘It’s great to see you’re still thinking about her.’ ‘I was thinking of us, silly,’ he said. ‘About us getting together for the first time.’ But he wasn’t. He’d beg me to tell him more about Alanna, pinching my arm sometimes, which irritated me.
What had she been up to all those years? How could she pop back into my life like that? I’d tell Neil, ‘Honestly, she is the kind of nightmare you never want to come across. She’s still the same as you remember. Can you believe that? Total bimbo. She’s useless. She won’t learn. She is honestly a dog of a nurse. I don’t think she’s got the brain capacity.’
It amused him to hear me talking of someone like that. He thought it very out of character. ‘God, you hate this girl so much!’ He’d happily clap his hands, like my hatred wasn’t a thing to be taken seriously, but a cute little birthmark he’d just noticed on my back.
In time I found ways to conceal my outrage. It wasn’t professional so I told myself, ‘Be the bigger person.’ Sometimes repeating that sentence out loud to myself helped. I endeavoured to get to know Alanna better. Which was easy, as it would’ve been impossible to tune out her constant chattering anyway. She told me the story of her life, the years we’d spent apart, like some kind of fairy-tale that had reached its logical ending.
It was really quite ordinary stuff. Someone had offered her a modelling contract just before she started her second year at college and she’d gone for it. That was why she’d dropped out. I’d imagined some kind of tragedy. ‘Hindsight is wisdom,’ she says. ‘I think I was running away from my own destiny.’ The contract had been a bit of a hoax – not a bad one; she just wasn’t making as much as she’d expected. But her confidence took a terrible blow and she became very depressed. She really wasn’t coping. She overcompensated by attending too many castings, photo shoots that led to little more than nothing. It was exhausting. She cheered herself up with kiddy drugs, abusing her ADHD medication, staying up all night, frantically searching the internet for the right opportunity, which – she was sure – was out there for her. It got bad. ‘At one point, I was behaving like a bit of an addict!’ she chirps. Which is unsurprising, since she was; that’s why she was sent to a rehabilitation centre.
At twenty-five she made a full recovery and re-enrolled in college, studying English Literature, just like Neil. She wanted to learn to express herself. She read Ian McEwan’s Atonement – didn’t just watch the film – and something clicked. It was an awakening of sorts. She felt so deeply about it that she wrote her dissertation on it. It was such a moving essay that it got her a job here – one of London’s most exclusive eldercare facilities. She attached it to her application, and of course it struck a chord with Melissa. Just the kind of sentimental tripe she would fall for. Never mind checking if the girl had any actual work experience.
‘This is Alanna’s true vocation,’ said the reference letter.
Things had come full circle for her.
‘You know when something’s just meant to happen,’ she said. She referred to the essay as one of her greatest achievements, occasionally as the ‘turning point’ in her life. Since then, she’d put her whole heart into nursing. She forwent her last summer holiday in order to take up voluntary work in a Brazilian hospital. It was a transformative experience and she’d come back more determined than ever, with her iPhone filled with colourful landscapes and cute parrots. I doubt they gave her any work to do; she probably stood in the way and took selfies. Because Alanna doesn’t have a clue what real work looks like. She says she loves the care home because it makes her forget how fast the world moves and then she doesn’t get tempted by the bad things. Well, that wouldn’t be such a bad thing in itself if she could accomplish some of the basic tasks and make a valuable contribution. But Alanna lacks any kind of practical sense. She is way too excitable.
I smirk and move out of the way.
‘You start washing and I’ll dry,’ I say.
‘You’re the boss, Ruthi!’ she says.
I stand back as she tips the first bedpan into the sink. She is humming a tune. Alanna is getting married soon. She’s happy.
Alanna – for the record – never wanted a husband. She’s a free spirit. Haven’t you seen her peace tattoo? It’s on her ribs, just under the armpit; she’ll lift up her shirt to show you. She got it a while back to celebrate her first year clean. It’s a symbol of freedom. And yet here she is, four years later, acquiring a husband like it’s nothing at all. Easy for some. No wonder: Alanna is disgustingly cute. Alanna is so tiny and sickly sweet, like jelly babies caught between the teeth. When I dream about her I wake up with a furry mouth, like I got drunk on vodka pops the night before.
‘So this guy,’ I say. ‘Is he any good?’
In this dream we are kissing, nothing else, kneeling on a bed half undressed, and our hands are locked together into knots at the sides of our bodies. In my dreams there are no smells, but I remember thinking, upon waking, that her breath must’ve smelled of berries, the way no real girl’s breath smells. In the dream I could feel her smooth stomach, her hairless skin frictionless against my pelvis.
Alanna commands henchwomen. She didn’t have to go looking for them; they just appeared at her side, hired by management as a pair. They’re even more useless than Alanna in terms of actual output. We call them the Lolitas, Las Lolitas sometimes; Mona came up with it. The two of them are near identical, perfectly groomed and prettier than any pet I’ve ever met. Cute pair of toy poodles, the Lolitas – one red, one black: ginger-haired Emmy with the freckles, and Bex with the cat-eye make-up and the jet-black geometrical bangs. This month, they’re both real into yellow. We summon them when we’re trying to seal a deal on a long-term in-patient because, like poodles, they amuse the rich ladies and shake their little
fluffy tails for their husbands. Melissa obviously adores them. They are cute and harmless, although extremely annoying. And, like poodles, they are fiercely protective of their mistress. They look after pocket-sized Alanna with blind dedication.
Like them – more so – she is perfectly ownable, and sure enough, she has found her true master. Her new fiancé works in construction, as a contractor. Easy to remember, she giggles. According to Alanna, this means he signs contracts for buildings to be built and never does any physical work, although he does work out in the gym, she reassures me. She winks. This, she explains, tipped the scales towards marriage, because come on, if a man who decides whether buildings are fit to exist can’t offer stability, then who the hell can? Neil was an accountant. ‘Remember Neil, Alanna?’ I want to say. Well, he liked even numbers and instruction booklets and meeting requirements and corporate health retreats. A sound, honest guy, yet not without his quirks: he was unafraid of looking at the wine card when all his mates were ordering pints. Who could’ve imagined he would behave like he did? This sensitive, clever man who sought the good pleasures in life: a glass of fruity white wine, and pimento olives, and having sex from behind. Alanna already knows that last bit. She saw through it all, years ago. Perhaps Alanna has always been wiser than me – certainly luckier. Perhaps she really has no need to worry that what happened to me could happen to her.
‘I thought stability made you sick to your gut,’ I say.
‘Come on, Ruth,’ she says. ‘That’s just a thing you say when you’re young. I’m a woman now. Like you. I want the same things.’ She gives me a serious look. She is a woman, though she acts like a girl. ‘Do you think I would’ve survived the first month here with all these dying people if I was looking for excitement?’ she says.
The sink gurgles.
I remember this. I was in the Bowl one morning. Alanna and the Lolitas were giggling and whispering. I knew it was about sex. I couldn’t focus on my work. Then I heard Alanna say, ‘Jesus Christ, don’t you hate it when people talk about their relationship with their partner like they’re hooked on life support or something?’ It pissed me off how she phrased it.
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