by Sarah Butler
If Kal was here he would look at me and laugh. You look like a drowned rat, he’d say, and put his arm around my shoulders, pulling me towards him. I walk down the hill, away from the view. Underneath the trees, the ground is a rich, muddy brown. The water drops in irregular heartbeats.
I take my phone out of my bag – don’t – find Kal’s number and press call. He answers after one ring.
‘Alice?’ He sounds wary.
‘Are you busy?’
‘No, no. Give me a minute.’ I hear a shuffling. Paper? Clothes? I imagine him ducking out of a room. ‘Alice, how are you? I didn’t think you’d—’
‘I wanted it to be you,’ I say.
‘What?’
‘The things. The gifts. On the doorstep.’
‘Alice, are you all right?’
‘I knew they weren’t from you,’ I say. ‘But I wanted them to be. I wanted it to be you.’ My voice catches and I stop and swallow hard.
‘Alice, are you OK?’
I hold the phone against my ear and stare at the grassy slope in front of me. ‘I’m on the Heath.’
‘It’s hardly the weather for it.’
‘Someone came to look round the house today.’
‘That’s tough.’
‘I wish—’ I press my foot into a patch of mud. It curls up around the soles of my trainers.
‘Yes?’
‘Nothing. You’re with someone else, aren’t you?’
‘Alice, I don’t—’
‘Do your parents approve this time?’
‘You aren’t being fair.’
I hate him. I hate her. I hate the way my heart feels squeezed into too small a space. ‘Look, I’m going to—’ I can’t hang up.
‘Do you want to meet? Talk?’
We will sit across a table, in a pub or a cafe. He won’t touch me.
‘Alice?’
I want to tell him he’s a bastard, but that’s hardly fair. I want to tell him it felt like the only option left to me – to finish it; leave.
‘We’re getting the kitchen redone,’ I say. ‘Dad’s kitchen. It feels wrong.’
‘Why don’t we go to Dino’s?’
We used to go there when we couldn’t be bothered to cook. Checked tablecloths. Stone-effect walls. The air thick with garlic.
‘I can do tomorrow. Seven?’ he says.
He will order pizza Fiorentina. I will have spaghetti vongole. We’ll share a green salad and a portion of garlic bread. There will be a red candle in a wine bottle already caked with wax. They’ll be playing schmaltzy Italian music.
‘It doesn’t feel like we’re done, Alice.’
‘We’ve been here already.’
‘I know we have, but you phoned me, Alice.’
‘Don’t keep saying Alice, you sound like the fucking estate agent.’
I hear him take a breath. ‘Fine. I have stuff to do. Good luck with your travelling, or whatever you’re up to next.’
‘Seven’s good.’ I tip my head back so I can feel the rain on my cheeks. He says nothing, but stays on the line. ‘Will I see you there?’ I ask.
‘Fine.’ He’s sulking.
‘Fine,’ I say. I wait for him to hang up.
* * *
When I get back to the house, there is nothing on the wall. There’s been nothing there for a week. Whoever it was has stopped. I miss them, which is ridiculous.
Inside, two more letters lie in the hallway. I leave them where they are, head upstairs and run myself a bath. The hot water warms my bones, turns my limbs woozy and tired. When I’m done, I wrap myself in the dressing gown that used to be my father’s – I haven’t thrown everything away either – and make myself a hot chocolate, in the red mug with the chip out of the handle. The kitchen feels quiet and sad, like it knows its days are numbered. I take my drink all the way up to the attic. I lie on the floor and stare at the skylight, waiting for the stars to come out.
Ten things I thought I’d do with my life
1) Run an art gallery.
2) Be a painter.
3) Get married.
4) Have children.
5) I’ve always wanted to go to the Arctic, just for the emptiness of it.
6) Be a better son.
7) When I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut. I was fourteen when I saw those pictures from the surface of the moon.
8) I wanted to be an architect for a while.
9) Change someone else’s life for the better.
10) Avoid turning out like my father.
I think your mother loved me because I could up sticks and go, any time I wanted to – or at least that’s how she saw it. You’re so young, you’re so free, she’d say. Make the most of it, she’d say, and I’d nod and say of course I will, of course I will. I wonder what she’d think of me now. Still free, in her book, but older, with a buggered heart, too tired and too frightened to ring your doorbell.
But I am not one to give up. I don’t want you to think I’m a quitter. I don’t want you to think I’m a coward. I’ve been thinking – walking and thinking, and I have come up with a plan.
I am making a place for you. Nothing too fancy. I’ll be done in a week. It means I’m back collecting, and that helps calm me a little, keeps my heart from playing up. I know which colours I need. I know what I want to say.
Yesterday I walked north, where the streets are wide and quiet and edged with polished cars. I passed a house with silver balloons in the window. I could see right through to the garden, where children ran about. A group of adults clustered around a long pinewood table, with mugs of tea in their hands. I thought about Anton and his letter. I imagined his daughter tracing the inked flowers with her finger and wishing he had given her an address to reply to. I imagined him in Dagenham, spreading cement onto bricks, building houses and thinking of her.
On a low garden wall I found a pale-blue ring with a white daisy suspended, somehow, in the plastic.
Underneath a bench, at the edge of a triangle of grass, I found a seedpod with a silvery sheen. It reminded me of the mother-of-pearl shells my parents had hanging in the porch. When the wind blew hard they would rattle against the glass.
On a windowsill, next to a pink flowering fuchsia in a thick terracotta pot, I found a navy-blue triangle of plastic.
In the space where a parking meter met the not-quite-circular hole cut for it in the pavement slab, I found a button covered with stained white silk.
By a car tyre, I found a gold star with dog-eared points – one of those stickers teachers lick and attach to children’s work, to say well done.
I reached the main road, and everything changed – a roar of hurtling traffic, a hodgepodge of buildings with little to say to each other. The sixth woman I approached to ask for change said, ‘I’ll buy you a cup of tea,’ which meant she thought I was someone who scored crack to take away the emptiness of it all. I followed her into a cafe with brash green menus, and she bought me tea, watched as I emptied in four packets of sugar. She was too thin, her hair pulled into a tight ponytail. She wore a red coat with big plastic buttons. Earrings shaped like cherries hung as low as the coat’s collar. I would have liked to sit with her and drink my tea, but the cup was a cardboard one and she was already holding the door open.
On my way back to the Heath I saw a fire engine pumping great jets of water into a burning office block. The flames kept licking at the bricks, and the air smelt of smouldering metal and burnt plastic. A couple of years ago I slept for a while in a burnt-out warehouse, in Wapping. There were blackened rectangles where windows should have been and the rooms were velvet grey, everything covered in a layer of soft ash. It seeped into my skin until my hands looked like a bird’s-eye view of a delta, a map of inky rivers. Living there made me cough like an old man, but it was dry and I stayed until the bulldozers came.
* * *
The place I’ve chosen isn’t far from your house – just a short walk across the Heath. It’s five or six feet long, maybe a couple wide, hi
dden in amongst the rhododendrons. Not exactly a palace, but it’s quiet and dry. A man could live here. I clear the ground of leaves and sticks, smooth it flat with the palms of my hands. I empty the plastic bag: a spill of colour. I take the ball of cotton from my pocket and then I pick out the colours, one by one, and tie them to the branches. Alice. Daughter. Love. Sorry. Father. Each piece hangs into the centre of the space, rocking gently from side to side as if there’s a breeze. I take a twist of gold foil, loop thread around its centre and tie it up. I choose a scrap of magenta-pink cardboard and use a nail to make a small hole, thread another piece of cotton through that. I feel better now I’ve started.
Years ago, before my father died, I rented a tiny room in a dirty house. It was like a cell, with cold white walls and a narrow bed. I started to collect colours – bits and pieces I found on the streets, or in the storeroom of the supermarket I was working in at the time. I glued them straight onto the walls. It was against every rule there was, but then the landlord never checked, and I left without a forwarding address. I remember a girl who liked it, who trailed her fingers across its textures. The next morning I woke up and she’d gone, but later that day a hand pushed an envelope under my door and inside was a magpie’s feather, a hundred shades of black; a red pencil stub; and a ridged cockle shell, like the ones you pick up as a kid, trailing after your parents along an endless stretch of sand. I glued them carefully in place, imagined her searching them out the next time I saw her, except she never came back.
* * *
I have given myself a week. My hair is starting to grow a little. I don’t have a mirror, but I’m hoping I’ve lost the shorn look. My cheeks, though, are covered in stubble. I don’t have a razor and I can’t go back to the shelter: not that one, at least. I could tell them you weren’t in, that you’d gone away for a while, but I’ve never been much good at lying.
When I have finished this place it will be beautiful – like nothing you’ve ever seen. I can picture you, cross-legged in the centre, looking up at the colours, nodding and smiling, because at last you understand.
Ten places I’ve had sex
1) A hotel room in Irkutsk, with a dirty carpet and a shower that dripped all night.
2) A youth hostel in Singapore. We wedged our rucksacks under the door handle.
3) Cartegena, Columbia. He was younger than me.
4) Boston, Massachusetts. I suspect he was married.
5) A tent by Lake Windermere – I was seventeen. Afterwards we lay and listened to the rain.
6) That time in Greece, on the balcony.
7) On the roof of Kal’s flat, overlooking London. I miss the way he’d stroke my hair.
8) In the toilet of a bar in Chiswick, but I’d rather not remember.
9) In the back of a taxi, somewhere in Newcastle. I had drunk way too much.
10) Never here, now I think about it, never in this house.
Cee arrives in her gym kit – silver running shoes, a tan-coloured tracksuit blotched with rain. We pile the bags of Dad’s stuff into her car. They look like some kind of overgrown fungi clinging to the seats. The traffic heaves and jerks, fringed with people crouched under umbrellas, sheltering in doorways. The car smells of sweet plastic.
Seven o’clock at Dino’s. I could stand him up.
‘Do you like being a mother?’ I ask Cee as she turns onto the Holloway Road. She drives with frustrating care.
She angles her head to one side, like she’s stretching a muscle in her neck. ‘Yes. I love it,’ she says, straightening herself up again.
I look across at her. She’s wearing pale shimmery eyeshadow and brown mascara.
‘I don’t think you’ve ever really felt love, until you’ve had a child,’ she says. ‘Is it this turn?’
‘The next one, just by the pub.’ I point.
‘When Martin was born it was—’ A flush rises in her cheeks. ‘I’d have killed for him, or thrown myself in front of a truck. I still would, for any of them.’
‘Just here.’ We sit and listen to the tick of the indicator. ‘Doesn’t it feel a bit wrong?’ I say.
‘I suppose we’re programmed that way. It makes sense if you think about it.’ We turn into a side street, between tottering new blocks of flats with coloured balconies like children’s toys.
‘I mean taking his stuff to the dump.’
‘It’s a recycling centre. What else would we do with it?’
We follow the signs: left at the roundabout, up a concrete ramp, under a yellow-and-black height restriction. What I want is the kind of rubbish dump you see on television – in Hollywood films, or documentaries about the Third World. I want a pile of rubbish that stretches as far as I can see. I want a cloud-wracked sky and solitary figures stooping to pick out anything of worth. I want wheeling, cawing birds, and the threat of rats. I want it to stink. Instead, I get out of the car into the dim light of a concreted space, like a floor of a multi-storey car park. Six huge skips stand in a line. Metal steps lead to a platform at the side of each. At the far end are smaller bins – for printer cartridges, computers, clothes, shoes. A man wearing a luminous yellow jacket surveys us from a small green Portakabin. Cee and I watch a couple in their early twenties ferry flattened cardboard boxes. The man lobs the cardboard from the concrete floor. The woman runs up and down the steps, holds her arms above the skip and lets go. Four Jamaican men pull a sofa – big enough for all of them – out of a hire van. Their voices rise and dip in the dead space. They loved that sofa. It hurts to see it go, but it’s time to move on.
Cee opens the boot and we empty it in silence. There are bags of paper, white corners straining at the black plastic: bills long since paid, receipts for things long since broken, ancient copies of medical journals. Cee and Tilly insisted on sorting out Dad’s study, and kept the door closed while they were working. I protested, of course. I can be as stubborn as Cee when I want to be, but the sight of Tilly, all red-faced, with tears in her eyes, stopped me from pushing it. I shrugged and made out I didn’t care, but when they’d left, each carrying a plastic bag of paper folders, I opened the door and went inside.
His study has the same dark-red carpet as the one that draws a line up the stairs and then spreads to reach the walls of the landing. There is a corner desk by the curtainless window, with a gold desk light – its hood curved and ridged like a shell. The walls are covered in woodchip, painted off-white years ago. There’s a print of a landscape to the left of the desk: something ugly and Dutch, the trees squat and grey, the sky stuffed full of clouds. The room holds the faint smell of his cigarette smoke. I could count the number of times I have been in there on one hand.
I pulled open the filing cabinet drawers one by one. I had tried to do this when I was thirteen or fourteen, and found them locked. Locked doors meant secrets. I had searched and searched for a key, a kind of fury rising through me, but found nothing. This time the drawers opened with a metallic grumble. The top one was still filled with thin green folders, my father’s narrow black handwriting on tiny plastic-covered labels. Girls’ School Reports. Girls’ Music Certificates. Girls’ Newspaper Pieces. I pulled out a yellowed newspaper cutting. Hampstead Girl Runs to Victory – a picture of Cee in her sports kit, holding up a medal on a thick striped ribbon. I dropped it back into place, and picked out a school report: ‘It is difficult to know if Alice abandons things – projects, trains of thought, essays – because she is bored, or because she lacks the confidence to see things through to their conclusion.’ Mrs Ward. She smelt of Sugar Puffs. Her front teeth were crooked. I put the report back and slammed the drawer shut. The next drawer was also full of green folders, but they were empty and the labels had been removed from their plastic holders.
* * *
The shoe bank has a metal drawer, like a bank deposit box. The names of the charities that will benefit are painted down one side in cheery green letters. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I say inside my head, as I listen to the bags of his shoes drop on top of bags of other people’
s shoes. He used to cover the kitchen table with newspaper on Sunday afternoon and line up his shoes. He’d put the polish on with a soft yellow duster, scrub and shine with a fat wooden-handled brush. Can you see your face in them, Alice? he’d ask. I’d hold them up to my nose and sniff the sharp, chemical scent. Not yet, a bit more, I’d say. A hard taskmaster, he’d call me. Whenever he left the house, even after he’d retired, he’d wear ironed trousers and shoes that shone. I don’t think he ever owned a pair of trainers. The lot of them will end up, laces tied together, in charity shops that smell of old carpets, their chipboard shelves crammed with single plates, saucerless cups, ugly cut-glass vases, porcelain animals, dejected-looking dolls.
* * *
‘Do you think Dad felt like that?’ I ask Cee on the way back.
She frowns.
‘Like you said about Martin. Do you think he’d have – you know, died for us?’
A kid on a bike sways in and out of the traffic. He wears a grey tracksuit, holds a mobile phone to his ear. I used to feel like that – invincible.
‘I’m sure he did,’ Cee says. ‘He wasn’t the kind of person to show it. But it doesn’t mean—’
‘I always felt he wished they’d stuck with just the two of you.’
‘Oh, Alice.’ There’s something in her tone of voice that makes my stomach dip. I look at her. She knows I’m looking, but she stares straight ahead.
‘What does that mean?’ I say.
Her jaw tenses. ‘That’s an awful thing to think. He loved you.’
‘You told me they fought when I was born.’
‘I did not. When on earth did I say that?’
I shrug. ‘Years ago. I must have been six, seven maybe.’
‘Well, that hardly counts, does it?’
‘I don’t see why not.’
‘Kids say stuff. We were just kids.’
‘You’d have been fifteen, and anyway, Tilly says kids see more than she does, sometimes.’