by Sarah Butler
‘Well, I don’t think— Look, they fought, it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. I was probably just being spiteful.’
We drive in silence. When we’re parked outside the house, Cee switches off the engine and turns to me. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. Which is such a remarkable thing for her to say that I can’t think of a response.
* * *
We drink tea, sitting at the kitchen table, dunk in ginger biscuits until our fingers meet the surface and then eat them quick, before they collapse. It is hours until seven o’clock, but I want her to go. I need to concentrate.
‘Tilly’s asked us over tonight,’ Cee says. ‘She wants to cook for us. And Toby.’ She curls her lip at Toby’s name.
‘I’m going out.’ To my dismay, I blush.
Cee narrows her eyes. ‘Who with?’
‘How are Tilly and Toby?’ I say.
‘Why she throws her life away on a man she can never have—’ Cee starts, and then meets my eye. Instead of shutting up, she draws back her shoulders and says, ‘It’s self-destructive, that kind of behaviour. It’s like she doesn’t really want all the things she says she wants.’
‘She loves him,’ I say.
Cee shakes her head. ‘I sometimes wonder if you two grew up in a different family to me.’
I take another biscuit and snap it in half. Maybe Kal’s changed his mind. Maybe he’s decided I am worth it.
‘So you’re not coming?’ Cee says.
‘I can’t.’
‘Alice, have you decided—’
I fold my arms, and lift my eyebrows.
‘I mean, once the house is—’ She almost shudders. She is not completely without feeling. ‘You’ll go back to China?’
‘Mongolia.’
‘Will you?’
I shrug. She looks at me and I glare back. ‘Maybe I’ll settle down and get a job,’ I say.
Cee laughs and I want to punch her. She picks up our teacups and takes them to the sink.
‘What’s all this, Alice?’ she asks.
Shit.
‘I never knew you were green-fingered.’
She is leaning over the sink towards the seed tray that sits on the windowsill, on the newspaper that’s turned yellow and dry, next to the gifts. I can’t get there fast enough. My heart flips up near my mouth. There in the dark chocolate rectangle of soil are five, no, seven, eight tiny green shoots. They are the height of a baby’s fingernail. Each one splits into two green lines. They are growing. I shoulder her away and touch one of the seedlings with my little finger.
Hello. Welcome.
Cee is too close. I can hear her breathing.
‘What are they, then?’ she asks.
‘I don’t know.’ My voice cracks. I swallow hard. ‘They’re all different,’ I say. ‘I found them in the shed.’
I don’t know which seeds have grown and which haven’t, and I realise that, short of digging them up, I never will know. If I dig them up now I’ll kill them. Once they’re bigger, once they can survive being uprooted and examined, the seed cases will be long gone.
‘It was a stupid thing to do,’ I say. ‘I’ve spent all week in this bloody house.’
‘You’ve done a great job, Alice.’
‘I feel like I’m erasing him.’
She puts her hand on my shoulder and rubs – like I’m a kid. I find it comforting, despite myself.
* * *
I wear my mother’s dress and shoes, paint my eyelids turquoise to match. I put my hair up, pull down a lock on each side to soften my face. We’re only going to Dino’s. It’s too much. But then, if he has changed his mind, I would like to be dressed for the occasion.
The shoes have heels. She must have liked it too – feeling taller than she really was. I arrive ten minutes early, even though I was trying to be late. I take one of the small, square tables along the stone-effect wall, and order a gin and tonic. By the time Kal arrives, I’ve drunk most of it. The gin makes me feel lighter, more fragile.
I stand. He leans across the table and kisses me on each cheek. I feel the soft scratch of his beard, and breathe in the smell of his aftershave.
‘Looks like I need to catch up,’ he says, gesturing to my glass. He calls the waiter over and orders a bottle of red wine.
I watch him drape his jacket over the back of his chair, take his mobile and wallet out of his pocket and arrange them on the tabletop. I finish my drink in one mouthful. He settles down and looks at me. I am not going to speak first.
‘You look beautiful,’ he says.
I rub at my jaw and drop my gaze. I should have worn jeans. He is wearing jeans, and a blue checked shirt I bought for him years ago, though I suspect he didn’t think about that when he put it on.
‘How are you?’ he says.
I shrug.
‘You’re sorting out the house?’
I nod.
‘That must be hard.’ His mobile buzzes on the table, a gagged sound. He glances towards it but doesn’t pick it up.
‘It’s not like I ever felt that much at home there,’ I say.
‘Even so.’
‘And your flat? You’re still there?’
He gives me a look, and I wonder for a moment if he’s seen me, sitting in the gardens, watching. I’ve only been a few times, four at the most. Maybe five. But he smiles and says, ‘Yes. Same as ever. Julie’s dog died last month, so things are a bit more peaceful.’ Julie lives next door. Her dog used to howl every time she went out.
‘Poor Julie,’ I say.
‘Clouds and silver linings.’
I shouldn’t have come.
The waiter brings the wine over and Kal jokes with him about vineyards and soil types. He swills the wine around his glass, sips and nods approvingly. The waiter fills my glass.
‘You’re ready to order?’ he says.
As I predicted: pizza Fiorentina, spaghetti vongole, salad, garlic bread.
I watch Kal take a drink. It always angered me. Booze, fine; sex before marriage, fine; bacon for breakfast, fine – as long as no one who mattered found out.
‘So tell me everything,’ he says.
I love you. I hate you. I miss you. I don’t know who I am any more. ‘I went to Russia, then across to Mongolia,’ I say.
He purses his lips and nods. ‘How was the train?’ We had talked about doing it together.
‘Good. Long.’ I lift my glass to my mouth and drink too quickly. I am not concentrating. Wine spills down my face and onto the dress. I dab at it with my napkin. Kal hands me the salt and I tip it onto the silk, rub it in. I press a napkin against my mouth and concentrate on not crying.
‘Dry-cleaners,’ Kal says, nodding. ‘They’ll sort it out.’
‘It was my mum’s.’ My voice wavers.
‘Alice.’ He takes my hand and I let him. ‘I miss you, Alice.’
I look at our hands on the table. His skin is cool, dry, familiar.
‘I know we talked about it,’ he says. ‘I know it was too hard for you. I know what you said.’
‘I meant it.’
‘I know.’
I wait for him to say he’s changed his mind, but he doesn’t speak. ‘Are you with someone else?’
He lets go of my hand and leans back in his chair. He picks up his fork, and spins it round and round. ‘Not really,’ he says.
I laugh then, and he looks at me as though I’ve offended him.
‘What about you?’ he says.
I slept with a man in Irkutsk, in a hotel room with bevelled mirrors along the length of one wall, and a grey velveteen bedcover. I lit a cigarette afterwards. He said he had asthma and it was a non-smoking room, so I wrapped the bedcover around me and stood on the tiny balcony and smoked my cigarette there. The room looked out over a drab, traffic-clogged road. The noise reminded me of London.
My spaghetti arrives. The clams look tiny and shrivelled in their shells.
‘How’s work?’ I say.
He nods. ‘Good.’ He cuts a piece of pizza and lifts it t
o his mouth, the mozzarella stretching into thin strings. ‘Great. I’m still at St Thomas’s. Had a few things published recently.’
I’ve always wondered what he’s like at work. I imagine he is more decisive, more precise than he is at home.
He offers me some pizza. I stop myself from saying yes.
‘How are the Terms and Conditions?’ he says.
I smile, I can’t help it. ‘Same as usual,’ I say. ‘Tilly’s still with Toby. Cee’s still a control freak.’
‘You’re hard on her.’
‘She’s hard on me.’
‘How long are you home for?’
‘I’m not sure I am home.’
‘In London, then?’
I shrug. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Alice, you look miserable.’
‘My dad died. Remember that?’ I pick up a clam shell. It is ridged brown on the outside, bruised purple inside. It breaks in two when I bend it back on itself. ‘I’m going to go to Delhi, I think. Next week. Tilly and Cee can finish sorting the house. It’s pretty much done anyway.’
‘I could come with you.’
‘You have a job.’
‘I get leave. We could try again, Alice.’
‘We can barely hold a conversation. And you’re seeing someone.’
‘It’s nothing—’
‘Are you allowed to marry this one?’
‘I don’t want to get married, Alice. I thought you didn’t want to get married either.’
‘I don’t.’
‘Then I don’t understand what all this is about.’
I can feel the tears crowding at the backs of my eyes. I knead my lips together. ‘You know what it’s about,’ I whisper.
‘But we were good together, weren’t we?’ He reaches across the table and puts his hand over mine. I don’t pull away.
‘I couldn’t answer the phone in our flat,’ I say.
He sighs. ‘Everyone uses mobiles now anyway.’
‘That’s not the point. The point is I couldn’t. The point is I couldn’t marry you if I wanted to. I couldn’t have your kids.’
‘I thought you didn’t want kids.’ He lifts his hand away. I can still feel the heat of it on my skin.
I prise a clam out of its shell. It tastes of garlic and sea-water.
‘Why can’t we go back to how it was?’ he says.
‘I’m nearly thirty, Kal.’
‘So? We talked about all this. No marriage. No kids. Just you and me, living. It worked. It was fun.’
We never talked about it. Not about what mattered.
‘I still love you, Alice.’
‘Don’t.’
‘It’s true.’ He raises his voice.
Imagine it. Back in his flat. Scrambled eggs on toast for Sunday brunch. Cold beer in the fridge. My days and weeks shaped by his work rota. Saving up and heading off to somewhere new every six months or so; coming back to tell him my adventures. He’s right. I don’t want to get married. Or have children. I’ve always known that. And even if I did, there’s no one to do it with. And never will be, as long as you waste your time with him, Cee would say. It would be a step backwards. It would be a disaster.
I give up on my spaghetti, lean back in my chair and fold my arms. ‘I’ll come back if you tell your parents about us,’ I say.
He has his mouth full of pizza. When he’s done with it, he puts down his knife and fork, either side of his plate. ‘You know how it is, Alice,’ he says.
We would walk to the river on his days off, buy takeaway coffees and go down to the beach if the tide was out. We would hunt for treasures – a stone shaped like a heart, a silver washer big enough to wear as a ring. We would wake up together. Fall asleep together.
‘Then no,’ I say.
He lifts his eyes in frustration. ‘I don’t understand you.’
‘No, you don’t.’ I can’t spend the rest of my life living on the sidelines. I can’t explain it to him.
‘We were together three years, Alice. We were good. We had something. I never tried to change you. I never tried to stop you going off on your trips.’
I shouldn’t have called him. This is no easier the second time around.
‘If you can’t even do that for me, Kal.’
I watch his eyes darken. He says nothing for a long time. When he finally speaks, he does so slowly and quietly. ‘Do you think it’s such a small thing? To lose your family, Alice?’ I wince. He carries on. ‘All of them, Alice? Would you do that for me? Break their hearts? Never see them again?’
I stare at him. I love his eyes – his thick curled eyelashes. I love the curve of his chin, and the shape of his ears. I finger the turquoise silk at my left wrist. The hem is hand sewn. I have ruined her dress. I think about Dad and the three of us, sitting in the box at the ballet, eating ice-creams out of cardboard tubs, comparing notes on the story so far.
‘You’re right,’ I say.
He frowns.
‘You’re right,’ I say again. I haven’t really thought about it before, not properly. ‘I wouldn’t do it,’ I say. Even Cee. Fuck, I wouldn’t even give up Cee for him.
He nods. He breaks off a piece of pizza crust and crunches it between his teeth. ‘We were fine, just the two of us,’ he says, when he’s finished. ‘We worked round it, didn’t we?’
I half smile. ‘We were fine,’ I say. ‘But we’re done.’
He licks his lips. ‘We don’t have to be.’
‘I’m sorry I brought all this up again.’
He’s leaning towards me. ‘We can give it some more time. Meet up. See where we are.’
‘I’ll be in Delhi.’
‘Can I come out and see you?’ He holds my gaze. My chest hurts. All of me hurts.
‘I should go,’ I say. I take a twenty-pound note from my purse. He shakes his head and so I tuck it under my wine glass. As I walk past him his hand moves and I think he’ll touch me, but he presses his fingers to his lips instead, and I walk out into the night.
Ten things I’d say about London
1) People drop more things than you’d imagine.
2) It’s better when the sun shines.
3) It’s both bigger and smaller than you’d think.
4) There is kindness.
5) Get as close as you can to Battersea Power Station, and listen for the starlings in the old cranes by the waterfront.
6) There’s a clock in a tree at the edge of London Fields.
7) There’s a tank, painted black and white, on the corner of Mandela Road and Page’s Walk.
8) There’s a mural of a man reading a book by a broken tree, on the corner of Noel Street and Poland Street, not far from Oxford Circus.
9) Often the places that look the least inviting have the most to offer – there’s a forest behind the tower blocks of the Heygate estate.
10) It’s not a place you can ever really know.
I am careful each time I approach our place. People notice repetition, you might be surprised by that, in a city like this, but it’s true. I push back the leaves when I’m sure no one is looking and I bring more colours to make it beautiful.
Step in; welcome. You will lift your eyes to the ceiling and smile. Surprising? Isn’t it? Let me talk you through it. Each letter has a colour, you see. You have that too? I always knew you would. But perhaps they’re not the same colours as mine? Anyway, let me show you. Here is your name. This pale icy blue for the A; gold for the L; a bright magenta pink for the I; navy blue for the C; and a dark charcoal grey for the E. You’re nodding. You understand. Of course you do. Alice. Daughter. Love. Sorry. Father.
I was worried about having something for you, I’ll say, and you’ll smile and look a little sad, and say I shouldn’t have worried – what else could you want but this? You always knew, you’ll say, or you always suspected. You’ve been waiting, you’ll say, all this time.
* * *
I go to the house every day, and each time I leave feeling panicked and hurried. The living-room wa
lls are white and the furniture is back in place. The bin bags filled with bits of tree have gone. You are preparing to leave, but there’s still work for me to do. I need it to be perfect. I wonder if you are someone who can wait for things, or if you’re more like your mother. She was a whirlwind. She’d pick you up and spin you round and then leave you, breathless and disorientated.
We lasted just over a year. I’ve always blamed Malcolm for ruining it, but maybe we were finished even before all that. I remember an afternoon in Bloomsbury. She sat at the window – the net curtain bunched in one hand, her forehead against the glass – and stayed there so long I thought she’d fallen asleep. When she finally stirred, I asked what was wrong, and she turned to me with tears on her cheeks.
‘I can’t bear all this secrecy,’ she said. ‘All this hiding away.’
I looked at her and thought I’d be happy to spend the rest of my life with her in that tiny flat.
‘I feel so claustrophobic, like I can’t breathe,’ she said.
There wasn’t much I could say. I tried. I rubbed her shoulders and kissed her neck. I tried to lure her into a fantasy about running off to Italy, or Scotland, or Australia, but she pulled away from me. ‘I’ve got kids, Daniel, and a husband.’
‘I know, I know.’
‘You have no idea.’
Later, I bought wine and tiny madeleine cakes, and we sat cross-legged on the bed drinking from Marina’s long-stemmed wine glasses. She told me she used to want to be a ballerina, that she would get up before everyone else and practise in her parents’ dining room: arabesque, glissade, pas de chat – the words come back to me now. Show me, I said. She laughed and claimed she could barely remember the steps, but she slid off the bed and I watched her glide around the room, her eyes distant and a smile caught on her lips.
‘I’d like time to stop,’ I said. ‘Right now.’
She looked at me and raised her eyebrows. ‘If you stopped time, you wouldn’t live at all,’ she said.
Most of my life, since her, has been slower than you can imagine. It’s slowest on the streets, but it matters less there – what day it is, which hour comes next; I sold my watch years ago.
Time was slow when I worked too. I remember those nights driving my cab going on forever. My last job was five years ago: a cash-in-hand number, security for some warehouse over in Bow. They found me asleep on duty and fired me. I am too old and too worn out for employment, it seems, and there came a point when I realised I didn’t have all the time in the world, and decided it was more important to search for you.