Alice's Secret Garden

by Rebecca Campbell

  The timing of the visit was fortuitous: Leo was scheduled to be released that afternoon. Alice and Andrew went down to the grim little canteen to wait for them.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Andrew, ‘the people down here look sicker than the ones up in bed.’

  It was true. The bleak, vinyl-coated world of the hospital canteen was home to as ragged and desperate a collection of souls as Alice had ever seen. Mainly pensioners, their faces folded in on themselves, eyes dull as old ivory. Each seemed to carry a halo of pain and misery. One man, in particular, held a grisly fascination for Alice. He was neat and dapper in his dress, wearing a check suit with a clean blue shirt and a golf-club tie. His hair was white and smartly cut. But something terrible had happened to his face. He was ordinary, no, not ordinary, handsome, from the eyes down to the jaw, but then everything changed. In place of a lower jaw, the man had an expanse of pink, buttocky flesh, its shape and texture completely alien to the rest of the face. It was boneless, formless; nightmarish and comic at the same time. Alice speculated on what might have happened. The best she could come up with was cancer affecting the lower jaw. An amputation. A grafting of flesh from some other part of the body.

  She thought of her father, and was ashamed of the revulsion she felt for the old man with his destroyed face. She thought she remembered her father saying something about the only thing that stopped science from being barbaric was love. Without love, the cold eye of the scientist could only destroy. Had he said it in a dream, or was it only something she had imagined, the kind of words she wanted him to think?

  ‘This coffee tastes of fish,’ said Andrew.

  Alice was still pale from seeing Leo. ‘It must hurt,’ she said.

  ‘Well, it’s an affront to the taste buds, but I wouldn’t say … oh, you mean Leo. Yes. Hurt like fuck almighty. Pain’s a funny thing.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, when you’re in the middle of it, it’s all that you are. The way you live in your mouth when your teeth are bad. I remember as a kid I had a perforated eardrum, and for a week I had a pain so sickening, if someone had said look, here’s a tablet, take it and you’ll be dead and the pain will go, I’d have bitten their hand off. And after it had gone, I mean minutes after, not just now, years after, there was nothing of it left, just the words I used to describe it. You see, you can’t have a memory of a pain, because a memory means calling something back, experiencing it again, and that would mean having the pain all over again. Sorry, I’m raving.’

  ‘It’s okay; hardly anyone’s staring.’

  Encouraged, Andrew went on: ‘It’s one of the reasons I’ve always been obsessed with phantom limbs, you know, when a fellow has his leg cut off, say in a saw mill, or blown off by a landmine, or …’

  ‘Yes, I get the picture.’

  ‘And afterwards, when it’s been sewn up, they still feel the bit below the stump, still often feel the pain. Their toes might still hurt, even though they’re in a landfill in Newcastle, and the bloke’s in bed in Manchester.’

  ‘I’ve heard of it. Sounds horrid.’

  Andrew looked at her. He rearranged his features from frivolous to profound. Alice knew that something was coming.

  ‘Emotional … pain, anguish, is a bit like the phantom limb thing. Because it exists as pure thought, unmediated by the body, you can summon it back, assuming it ever goes. Fully back, so it’s not the memory of a pain, but the pain itself. The thing that hurt you is there like the ghost of the leg you lost. Sorry, is this coming out as comic? I don’t think it was meant to be.’

  ‘No. I know exactly what you mean.’

  The Dead Boy was her phantom limb, the thing there but not there, an imaginary cause of real pain. His meaning couldn’t have been more plain.

  ‘Do you think the fish here tastes of coffee? Maybe that’s why everyone looks so ill.’

  ‘The people with phantom limbs … does it go away after a while? Is there a way of making it go away?’

  Andrew looked at Alice, who was staring down into a plastic cup of grey hot chocolate, with a scum on the top the colour of old chewing gum. The harsh strip-lighting emphasised the light and the dark in her face, and made her look … vulnerable, was it? Yes, like a face peering out of an old photograph, a match girl or a Victorian child prostitute.

  Andrew couldn’t remember what happened to the ghost limbs, but he knew what he had to say. ‘You have to teach the mind that they’re not real. The more you look at the place where the leg isn’t, the more your mind comes to accept it. It learns that the body is different now, has a new shape. Stare long enough at the phantom, and it disappears.’

  Did Andrew really believe that? It went against one of his most dearly held principles; that the best way to deal with a problem was to ignore it until it went away. If that failed, then you could always try running. He’d dubbed this option ‘Acapulco’, when he and his friend Marc Dibnah decided that they should flee there to escape the Biology mock ‘A’ level they were dreading. But it now seemed to him that Alice had some dragons to slay, and running away from a dragon was liable to lead to a burnt arse, at the very least.

  ‘Here they come,’ said Alice, looking up.

  They drove back to the Docklands in high spirits. Leo kept them amused with stories about the other patients, interspersed with withering attacks on the Merdemobile, which, by some miracle, he had never before experienced in the flesh.

  ‘Smells like a fucking aardvark farted in here, died from the stench, and then slowly decayed down to a stew in the back. You should trade up to a chemical toilet. And what is this fabric? It’s like the fuzz off a camel’s cunt … You know, even when it was new this was the car they gave to the sales rep that couldn’t meet his quota of surgical supports? If I was a pigeon I’d feel demeaned if I shat on this car. And what’s this back here? Pickled onion flavour Monster Munch? Jesus, man, even when I was a kid I knew they were bad mojo. I’m telling you, you’re a no-snog zone for a week after a bag of those. But then if this car’s your passion wagon then that’s not really an issue, is it? I mean what kind of girl’s gonna let you within sniffing range if you turn up in this to take her to The Marriage of Figaro?’

  Andrew let his friend get away with it. He sensed that the stream of invective was the product both of the joy Leo felt on being alive and of the pent-up frustration of a week in hospital-issue pyjamas. And then, he mused, if the Audubon sale went well, there was always the prospect of Crumlish’s old job, and the ten thousand pounds a year salary hike that went with it, and that would mean a new car, perhaps something snazzy like a 1987 Ford Fiesta … yeah, that’d shut them up, shut them up good.

  ‘You’re quiet, Alice,’ said Odette.

  ‘Am I? Well, it seemed that Leo was doing a whole carful of talking.’

  But that wasn’t why Alice was quiet. She was quiet because she was thinking about her phantom limb.

  The two weeks that followed were exciting ones for Andrew and, externally at least, dull ones for Alice, as she kept things ticking over on the non-Audubon side. The top management, from Parry Brooksbank on up, kept popping down to see the ‘Audubon team’, which usually meant Clerihew and Ophelia, with Andrew kept on the periphery. Although on the outside things were dull, things were happening inside Alice. She’d known since the visit to the hospital canteen what she would do, but she had to wait until some pre-ordained sequence of internal movement, an almost mechanical falling into place had occurred. Lynden’s telephone call was only the last of these events, the final piece of the clockwork mechanism.

  She hadn’t spoken to him since the weekend, but when she picked up the phone she knew as soon as she heard the hesitation that it must be Lynden.

  ‘Alice, I … I had to talk to you.’

  ‘Edward. I thought I made it clear …’ No, she thought, ‘made it clear’ was too pompous, too unkind. ‘I don’t think this is a good idea, for either of us.’

  ‘Please. All I want is the chance to explain. If you’ll
just listen … maybe you can understand. Maybe even forgive me. I can’t bear the thought of losing you without a struggle.’

  ‘You never had me.’

  Lynden abandoned the tone of pleading: ‘Don’t twist my words,’ he said, commandingly. But then, with an effort that Alice could feel, he controlled himself again. There was desperation now in his voice. ‘Look, I’m coming up for the sale next week. Let me see you alone for just a few minutes. You must let me: to know all is to forgive all.’

  ‘I’ve already forgiven you. No, I mean there’s nothing really to forgive. I don’t really care about you sleeping with Grace. I find it baffling, I admit, but not hurtful. Why should I?’

  ‘I don’t believe you. You do find it hurtful, that’s why you left, that’s why you won’t speak to me. And I know it hurts you because it hurts me. And the reason it hurts me is because … because I love you.’

  Alice froze. The telephone very nearly dropped from her hand. And then came a rush of ideas, images, impressions. She saw his savage face melting into something younger and softer. Her fury evaporated, replaced by sadness, by sympathy, by hope. A whole new life paraded before her: a life of elegance and ease, and even excitement in the great Cave of Ice. But then she saw Grace waiting in the shadows, shadows she made herself in that house without shadows.

  ‘But, Edward … this isn’t the … time. What about Grace? Tell me about Grace?’

  ‘I must tell you face to face. Let me see you before the sale next week. Please. I … beg you.’

  Alice paused for a moment. The images in her mind still possessed her, and continued to change. Lynden’s face softened yet more, became youthful, and altered in other more subtle ways. As she spoke the transformation became complete:

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’ll see you,’ and the face of Lynden became wholly and completely the face of the Dead Boy.

  SEVENTEEN

  The Hand that Rocked the Cradle

  This time Alice hadn’t paused for a moment before the block. It may have helped that it was so bitterly cold, and the rain was taking on the dense, heavy quality of sleet. Alice didn’t possess a single waterproof garment and already the chill rain had soaked through her cheap overcoat and was working hard at the frayed cardigan within. It was with something close to relief that she plunged into the pissy stench of the stairwell (the lift wasn’t working) and wound her way up to the fourth floor. The walls of the stairway were gashed with red paint, and crude murals: phalluses reared at her like serpents; someone had laboriously etched ‘we no where you live’ into the concrete with a fine blade. Alice came out into the murk and wet of the day and walked carefully along the row of flats. Some had neatly painted doors and clean curtains, others were crudely boarded; some had great steel plates keeping out the unwanted. A dog barked desperately in one of the flats, but more, Alice thought, with a yearning to escape than a desire to kill.

  As she pressed the bell of number 427, she still didn’t know what she was going to say. But she did know that she wasn’t going to lie.

  She had telephoned the woman on the Friday evening (‘don’t dare spend all night on that phone, young lady,’ yelled Kitty, ‘there’s a call coming through to me from very far away; very far away indeed’), saying that she wanted to talk about Matija. How strange the name had sounded in her own ears: she had only ever thought of him as the Dead Boy, never as Matija Abdic, the name on a slip of paper passed to her by Odette. Usually the very name of the beloved takes on an enchantment, becomes filled with magical power. But no matter how hard she stared at the letters, or spoke them aloud to herself, Alice couldn’t alchemise Matija: it was too harsh, too jagged. It could never truly be the name of the person she had seen. And so he would always be, to her, the Dead Boy. The woman she spoke to sounded reserved, but not unfriendly. Did she think that she was an ex-girlfriend? Or some official? It was agreed, painlessly, that Alice should come to the flat at four o’clock on the Saturday afternoon.

  She expected the door to be opened an inch, held by chains, by fear perhaps, then closed again in her face. Instead, after a startlingly short wait, it was thrown back, and a thin, proud, fierce-looking woman of perhaps seventy years stood before her.

  ‘And you are Alice who phoned,’ she said, not a question but a statement, made in heavily accented but otherwise clear English. Alice liked her immediately. She had not the refugee’s cowering fear, but seemed indomitable. She could see only dimly the Dead Boy’s beauty in her severe features, but in this woman she knew his erect posture, his self-possession. ‘You are cold and wet. England, England, England: always cold and wet.’ Leading Alice through the kitchen she added, ‘You will see that my English is quite good, because in former times it was my subject I taught at school.’

  Ten minutes later they were sitting in the small living room, drinking tea. The woman sat as rigidly as she stood, with a china teacup perched on her knee. The furniture in the room was cheap, and Alice feared that she might drop through the bottom of the low, wide chair she occupied. But everything was clean and tidy, almost obsessively so. There were pictures everywhere: blurred snapshots of children on the beach; rigidly posed adults in Sunday best. And yes, there in the corner, a photograph of him: a boy of twelve or thirteen, his beauty still embryonic. He stood, as thin as a wraith, in a pair of tiny, stripey swimming trunks. His black hair sat comically on his head, like a drunk’s hat. Alice found herself smiling, but then had to look away before the tears came.

  ‘Tell me please, Alice – am I correct to remember Alice is your name?’ said the woman. ‘Yes, yes, what is your interest in my grandson?’

  Grandson. Of course. This woman was far too old to be the Dead Boy’s mother. What could have happened to the mother?

  ‘I am so sorry to disturb you, Mrs Abdic, but … I appreciate this sounds strange, but I feel that I know your grandson very well.’

  ‘He did not have any friends. He was a lonely boy. He never mentioned any Alice to me. But I am an old lady and he might not have talked to me of these things.’

  ‘I should explain that I did not meet Matija. Or I mean that I met him only once. On the day that he … was killed.’

  ‘This is becoming a mystery.’

  Yes, a mystery. It had always been a mystery. Alice closed her eyes for a moment, summoning the nerve and resilience, as well as the words, to continue.

  ‘You’re going to think I’m mad, but I saw your grandson just a moment before the car hit him.’ The moment came to her again, vivid in the tidy living room of the old woman. The whole seven seconds of their affair. The first look; the glance towards the approaching car, the return; the smile; the terrifying, comic explosion of arms and legs, almost as if some huge demon were trying to burst out from within his body; the thud, like a drum beating, which seemed to follow the impact by an age; the softer noise as the body, already a thing and not a human being, just so much fleshy rubbish, fell to earth behind the car. ‘And in that moment, he looked at me, and from that moment everything changed for me. I felt that we had exchanged something, that we had communicated in some way. I’m sorry this is very inarticulate …’

  The woman smiled. ‘That is fine. The language of the heart is something different to the language in the mouth.’ It sounded to Alice like a proverb translated. ‘And I know that my Matija had a special look. He learned it a long time ago, when he was too young to have seen the things that he had seen.’

  ‘Those must have been terrible times.’

  ‘There were bad times for us. His mother, you know, was killed. And his father. It was why he had only me, and I had only him. And doing what he did, at his age, could only make you special. Special in the eyes. But you did not finish what you were saying.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Alice felt suddenly trivial and small. Compared to the horrors that her Dead Boy and this woman had lived through, her own experiences seemed insubstantial, weightless, banal. ‘Well,’ she continued, trying to find a way to express herself that acknowledged the relative
insignificance of what she had undergone, and yet gave true weight to its impact on her, ‘since then, I’ve been … I can only say possessed by your grandson. I can’t … do anything … Be anything. And it’s very hard. For me.’

  ‘And what is it you want from me?’ The woman’s tone was neutral. There was no trace of wariness, but nor was there a sense that she was prepared to give Alice the magic word, the secret potion or spell that would set her free.

  ‘I thought that by knowing, by understanding, who he was, I might be able … to see clearly again.’

  ‘To see clearly again. How oddly you sometimes express yourself.’ She paused and looked towards, but not through, the window. ‘But,’ she said finally, ‘I can tell you the story of my Matija.’

  The story ran, at least to begin with, backwards. Difficult times in London; trouble at school; a sensitive boy bullied. Neighbours who ignored them, or sneered, or banged on the door in the night and put vile things through the letterbox. And then back to the war and escaping after the killings.

  The woman’s tone was matter-of-fact, clear, objective. Her slight awkwardness suggested both that she had not told the story before and that she was keen to tell it, and to get it right. But when it came to the description of what had happened in their town, the things that had made Matija special in the eyes, her words took on an intensity and passion that could only come through pure feeling: rage, anguish, horror.

  But the woman’s words were not the words that she remembered. She did not, in fact, remember any words at all. What she remembered were images, some moving, some still, and to those she supplied her own commentary.

  EIGHTEEN

  The Dead Boy

  The idea had come from Sarajevo. Its logic was pure; its psychology sound. Executed with courage, tenacity and will, it would never fail. It was the simple perfection of the scheme that attracted: the way that each step followed inevitably on from the next, like a scientific proof. If only socialism had been as clear, as true, as sure.