Putting Alice Back Together Page 2

  ‘Christ!’ Christopher soon showed his bastard colours. ‘Who the hell is that?’

  ‘Roz,’ I answered tartly. ‘She’s a friend of ours, she works with me at the paper, she’s studying accounting…’ My voice trailed off, because he wasn’t actually interested in Roz.

  His reaction was a familiar one—he’d dismissed her instantly.

  Before she’d even walked through the door.

  She was in cargo pants and a sloppy T-shirt and sandals that were about to snap from lugging her bulk around and she’d put on more weight. Her divorce had just come through, all her old friends and even her daughter had turned against her, and though she insisted that she was happy that her marriage was over, every day she seemed to go under a little bit more. She was really letting herself go.

  Dan didn’t like her. He said she brought me down and he couldn’t stand the way that she looked. Yes, elegant and chic weren’t two words that sprang to mind when Roz was around, but I wished people would take a bit of time to get to know her. Roz was the kindest person I knew, she’d do anything for me, for anyone.

  She’s just lovely.

  ‘I can’t imagine her as an accountant.’ Christopher made some caustic comment about her not fitting in and I bristled as Nic’s face coloured up, not in anger at Christopher but in embarrassment at her friend.

  ‘No,’ I agreed with him, ‘because she’s not boring enough.’ Out of the corner of my eye I could see Nic tense, and I remembered then that Christopher was a financial lawyer, but instead of offending him I’d made him laugh. I didn’t see the acne scars any more, or the lines around his eyes. His eyes were blue and he was smiling at me and I found myself smiling back.

  ‘There’s drinks here.’ I dragged my eyes away and I called to Roz because I knew she hated going to the bar. I moved along on the sofa to make room for her.

  ‘I’m Christopher.’ He introduced himself and poured her a drink and he was being really nice to her, but somehow I knew it was for me. I knew, because he apologised that he couldn’t hear what Roz was saying and came over to our side of the table and squeezed in between us.

  There was a frisson of excitement that flooded my veins, an awareness, and even though he was talking to Roz, and I was entertaining the table, I knew he felt it too.

  I knew because I could feel the press of his thigh on mine.

  An hour ago I’d have stabbed him in the leg with my keys.

  I didn’t press back. I pretended not to notice.

  But I didn’t move my leg away either.

  I was half listening as they spoke about their children. He had a sixteen-year-old too, it turned out, and a twenty-year-old.

  He must be ancient.

  I mean, Roz had Lizzie really young and she’s thirty-four.

  The table was becoming rowdy and everyone was chatting away, me included, but my head was like an abacus, trying to work out his age. As he dropped his phone, I expected the brief brush of his hand on my calf and he delivered.

  It was my turn to have the nervous tic—I tried to catch Nicole’s eyes to get her to come to the toilets and tell me how best to handle this. I mean, there’s being nice and being nice—what the hell was I supposed to do?

  ‘I won’t be long.’

  I excused myself—I had to side shuffle along the sofa to get out and I was acutely aware of my bottom passing his face. They must all have thought I had a bladder the size of a thimble, but I just wanted to escape. I walked calmly to the toilets even though my heart was hammering. I wanted to be away from him.

  He must have been mid-forties.

  Nicole had missed my frantic signals because she didn’t follow me in. I waited a few minutes then I started to walk back out to the party, deciding that I would wedge myself in beside Nicole.

  ‘Alice.’

  I heard his voice from the disabled toilet.

  I turned. And, to my shame, I went in.

  I’ll spare you the details.

  I’m trying to spare myself from the details too.

  It didn’t take long.

  He went back and I stayed there for a moment or two.

  I tried not to look at myself in the mirror as I put on my lip-gloss and sorted out my hair.

  I could not have hated myself more. I wasn’t even pissed—I’d had two glasses.

  How did I get here?

  How had my life got to this point?

  Why was I like this?

  I wanted to hit rewind. I wanted to go back and start the night all over again.

  How did he know? I mean, of all the women out there…

  I wanted to go home. I wanted to go out through the rear of the restaurant. I wanted to hide, to curl up on the disgusting floor—anything rather than go back out—but instead I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Or tried to.

  I couldn’t get the air in.

  I scrabbled in my bag but I couldn’t find them. There was an appointment card for 4.30 tomorrow, which I tossed back, and searched some more, then felt the relief as my fingers closed on a thin white box. It was a short-lived relief because there was only one left and after that there would be none.

  Alice Lydia Jameson

  Diazepam 5 mg.

  One tablet twice daily as needed.

  Avoid alcohol.

  I didn’t know if they worked, I really didn’t, or if it was just knowing I had them that helped—because even before the little yellow pill had dissolved on my tongue, I felt calmer.

  I headed back out there, scorching with shame but trying to act as if nothing just happened.

  ‘Where did you get to?’ Roz asked, but she didn’t wait for my answer. ‘Are you coming out for a cigarette?’

  Nicole was enjoying herself. Christopher, having ordered more champagne for the group, was saying goodbye, though he didn’t extend a farewell to me.

  ‘Have a great night, Nicole.’ He kissed her on the cheek and she smiled back at him.

  ‘Thanks for coming.’

  Only then did he smirk in my direction. ‘It was no trouble at all.’

  I stood outside with Roz and I didn’t have a cigarette, I just breathed in the cool night air and tried not to think about what I’d just done.

  ‘I can’t believe she’s going into work tomorrow…’ Roz was chatting away. ‘She’s flying tomorrow night…’

  ‘That’s Nic.’ I went into my bag for my cigarettes and I pulled out the appointment card too.

  ‘I’ll come back to the flat with you after work and we can all—’

  ‘Actually…’ I hesitated. I didn’t really know how to tell Roz. ‘I’m leaving work a bit early tomorrow, I’ve got an appointment.’ I knew she was curious, that she was waiting for me to explain, but I didn’t and Roz would never push. ‘I’ll be back in time to pick up Nic. You can meet me back at the flat.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ Roz said. ‘I’ll just meet you at the airport.’

  I’d been intending to cancel.

  Or just not show up.

  I had no intention of examining my past, but I needed a prescription and, I reluctantly admitted, perhaps I should speak to someone—not about it, of course, but about other things.

  Maybe this Lisa could help.

  Three

  Another Alice

  I liked the piano. It was my first instrument, the violin my second, but it was the piano I loved.

  I hated the lessons, but I sort of understood I had to have them.

  Young Mozart I was not—but I could read music.

  I just could.

  To me, it was easier than learning to read English—a quaver was an eighth of a whole, that dot meant you lengthened the note.

  I supposed I had not talent as such but, as my mother would tell everyone she met, her youngest daughter had an ‘ear for music’.

  I lived and breathed music—the classics, hymns, anything I heard I wanted to play.

  And as a teenager it had been considered nerdy.

  Seriously nerdy.

 
; Especially as I’d also sung in the church choir.

  Of course I’d got teased at school and hated it when people found out about my other life, but I loved hymns and singing and a couple of times I even played the organ.

  Yep—a serious nerd.

  There’s nobody musical in my family. Mum’s a nurse, dad’s in sales and marketing, Eleanor is my oldest sister and basically does nothing apart from look good—well, she has to, she’s married to a cosmetic dentist. Then there’s Bonny the middle one, who takes after Mum and is a nurse too. It really took a lot of convincing from my teachers for Mum to realise that she wasn’t being ripped off when the school suggested that if I wanted to pursue a career in music, then I needed some extra private tuition. (I was fifteen then. Dad and Mum had just broken up so it caused a few rows, Dad said he was paying Mum plenty—Mum said… well, plenty.)

  So, with things a bit tight, instead of more lessons with my regular music teacher, Mum found various students from a school of music to coach me. I was doing fairly well and looking at a career in teaching. As well as lessons and choir and choir practice, I had to practise my instruments for hours every day—though I didn’t mind practising the piano. In fact, I lived for it. It was the lessons I hated.

  Still, as I said, I understood that I had to have them and just put up with them, I suppose…

  Till Bonny’s wedding loomed, when everything changed.

  As far as I can remember, Eleanor’s wedding just seemed to happen without fuss. I was ten and, along with Bonny, I was a bridesmaid, but I don’t remember the whole world stopping in preparation for Eleanor’s big day—I just remember the church and the party afterwards.

  Oh, and the gleaming teeth in the photos.

  One minute Eleanor was dating Noel and the next we were in the church, or so it had seemed.

  Whereas Bonny’s wedding was the full circus.

  Bonny’s life was a full circus, but the wedding and the preparation were the worst.

  It was to be a New Year’s Eve wedding—it was the only way Lex’s relatives could all get over for it, and Mum, devastated that her middle child would be moving to Australia as soon as she took her final nursing exams, would do anything to please and appease. And, as much as I love Bonny, boy, did she take full advantage of the situation.

  I was seventeen and full of teenage angst and wondering if I’d ever lose my virginity, especially since I’d never even been kissed. I was heavily in love with Gus, my latest music tutor, and I was also very aware that I was behind on piano practice and my exams were just a few months away. Which sounds ages, but it really wasn’t.

  Not that any of this mattered to Bonny.

  Lex, Bonny’s fiancé, was a sexy six-foot-three Australian who worked for some international pharmaceutical company and was helping to compile statistics both here and in America. They had met at the hospital Bonny worked at, had fallen in love and within three months had got engaged.

  Everyone said Bonny was too young to marry, but Lex refused anything less. He didn’t want to live with her—if she was going to take the leap and move to Australia, then it would be as his wife.

  He’s a nice guy, Lex.

  A really nice guy, and even if Bonny was a bit young, I could understand why she didn’t want to let him go.

  I had a crush on him—of course I did—I had a crush on everyone!

  Bonny went a touch crazy in the weeks before the wedding: it was colour schemes and flowers and cakes and invitations. The whole house was wedding central. I couldn’t practise my violin or piano for two weeks before the big day. Really, I didn’t mind missing the violin, I could make up the time later, but I don’t think I’d ever been even two days without playing the piano. I didn’t just practise… I played. If I was tired, if I was depressed, if I’d been teased, if I’d had a shit day, I’d play. It didn’t lift me, instead it met me. I could just pour it out and hear how I was feeling.

  Sometimes I glimpsed it—this zone, a place, like a gap that I stepped into and filled with a sound that was waiting to be made.

  There’s no one else I can talk about it with, except for Gus—he gets it. Gus says that playing is a relief.

  He’s right, that’s what it feels like sometimes—relief.

  An energy that builds and it has to be let out somewhere.

  It’s more than relief—it’s release.

  Or it would be if it didn’t upset Bonny.

  Everything upset Bonny.

  Everything was done to appease her.

  Which was why I had been forced to wear pink.

  A sort of dusky pink, which was fashionable, my mum insisted—as if she would know. As if a size twenty, middle-aged woman with bad teeth and the beginnings of a moustache would know.

  I hated it—I hated it so much, there was no way I was going to wear it. But my threats fell on deaf ears. It was Bonny’s Special Day—and what was a bit of public humiliation to a seventeen-year-old as long as the bride was smiling?

  So I wrote reams of pages of ‘I hate Bonny’, ‘I want to kill Bonny’ and ‘I want to gouge out her eyes’ as I lay on my bed the afternoon before the wedding with the beastly pink dress hanging up in plastic on my wardrobe. I had my period and was having visions of flooding in the aisle, and to add to the joy, the hairdresser was here and, as anyone with frizzy red hair would understand, I wasn’t looking forward to that either.

  I lay down and imagined that it was me getting married and not Bonny.

  That sexy Lex only had eyes for me.

  Then I felt bad—I mean, I might hate her but she is my sister—so I moved my fantasy over to Gus instead.

  Except he was already married…

  Apparently you couldn’t wash your hair on the day of the wedding, because the spectacular style Bonny had finally chosen after several screaming trips wouldn’t stay up on newly washed hair. So she was being blow-dried while I washed my hair and then the hairdresser would dry it with a diffuser and put in loads of product and then pin it up tomorrow. We’d had a practice a couple of weeks before and it had looked suitably disgusting but, again, I’d been told to shut up and not complain because it was Bonny’s Special Day.

  So I washed my hair and I sat sulking in the kitchen as Bonny’s hair was being blow-dried, and then Eleanor’s was blow-dried too. Mum wasn’t having hers put up, so she was getting ‘done’ tomorrow, and as I moved to the stool, perhaps seeing my expression when the hairdresser took out her scissors, Mum tried to appease me. She couldn’t give a shag that I hated hairdressers and hated, hated, hated getting it trimmed—no, she just didn’t want me making a scene and upsetting Bonny.

  ‘It’s just a little trim,’ Mum warned, clucking around and trying to pour cold water on the cauldron of hate we were all sitting in before it exploded. ‘Oh, I didn’t tell you, I rang Gus and you can have an extra piano lesson,’ Mum said to my scowling face. ‘He’s working over the holiday break and he can fit you in on Monday.’

  Now, that did appease me.

  You see, Gus wasn’t like the usual, scurf-ridden, vegan tutors that Mum had found for me in the past. He was as sexy as hell, with brown dead-straight hair, no hint of dandruff and dark brown eyes that roamed over me for a little bit too long sometimes. He smelt fantastic too. Sometimes when he was leaning over me, or sitting beside while I played, I was scared to breathe because the scent of him made me want to turn around and just lick him! Like Lex, he was from Australia (they must make sexy men there—I was thinking of a gap year there to sample the delights). Gus spoke to me, instead of down to me. He spoke about real things, about his life, about me. Once when his moody bitch of a wife walked in on our lesson and reminded him that he’d gone over the hour, it came as a surprise to realise that we had. Instead of playing, for those last fifteen minutes we’d been talking and laughing and I felt a slight flurry in my stomach, because I knew that when I left there would be a row.

  He started to tell me more and more about his problems with Celeste and I lapped every word up
and then wrote it in my diary each night—analysing it, going over and over it, looking for clues, wishing I’d answered differently, wondering if I was mad to think that a man as sexy as Gus might somehow fancy me… but I felt that he did. He told me that he had intended that the sexy Celeste, who—and Gus and I giggled when he told me—played the cello, would be a fling. Well, she was now almost six months pregnant, his visa was about to expire, and he and Celeste would be going back to Melbourne once the baby was born—but for now he was broke and miserable and completely trapped. The sexy cello player he had dated was massive with child and the only thing, Gus had told me bitterly, that was between her legs these days was her head as she puked her way through pregnancy—not her cello, and certainly not him.

  I loved Gus—he wasn’t like a teacher. And even though I knew Mum was paying him to be one, for that hour, once a week, I was more than his pupil. I was the sole focus of his attention—and I craved it.

  He was so funny and sexy, and I couldn’t stand the thought of him going back to Melbourne, or even understand why the hell he put up with Celeste and her moods.

  She was a bitch. She didn’t say hi to me, didn’t look up and say goodbye when the lesson was over. Occasionally she’d pop her head in and say something to Gus and look over me as if I were some pimply teenager, which of course I was. She thought she was so fucking gorgeous, wearing tight dresses and showing off her belly and massive boobs, but I knew how Gus bitched about her.

  Actually, at our lesson yesterday he’d told me a joke. He knew I was as fed up with Bonny’s wedding as he had been with his and as I packed up my music sheets and loaded my bag and headed for the door, he called me back.

  ‘Hey, Alice.’ He smiled up at me from the piano stool. ‘Why does a bride smile on her wedding day?’