After You'd Gone Read Free

something. She could buy a paper. How long is it since she read a paper anyway? . . . The whole place had seemed reflective - the shining porcelain tiles, the steel basins, the mirror above them, and the mirror on the hand-dryer . . . Maybe she should call Rachel. She couldn't remember when she last spoke to her. Rachel was probably cross with her . . . The girls' voices had been bouncing off the walls. One of them had raised herself up on to the top of the cubicle and was looking down on her friend. Alice had, for some reason - why? why did she do that? - stepped closer to the hand-dryer, and the new angle made something behind her appear in the tiny square mirror . . . Perhaps Rachel wasn't talking to her. That would be strange. They'd never fallen out before. Perhaps she would get a basket at the shop, or a trolley, yes, a trolley would be good. She could fill it with everything she needed. Then she wouldn't have to go again for a while. But how would she carry it all home? . . . Still with her hands under the hot jet of air, she had stared at the mirror and then,
     
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ever so slowly, so slowly that it seemed to have taken minutes, turned towards them.
Alice was by now standing at the pedestrian crossing. The green figure, legs parted in a purposeful stride, was illuminated on the traffic-light opposite. Over the road, she could see the supermarket; figures cruising through the neon-lit aisles. It seemed to her that her life was narrowing down to a vanishing point. People flowed around her, crossing the road, moving on. But she stayed still.
Someone nudged her in the back and she was pushed towards the edge of the pavement. The green figure was blinking on and off. Final stragglers were dashing across the road before the lights changed. The stationary red figure appeared and there was a moment of suspended calm before the waiting line of cars gunned their engines. As they powered past her, hurling fumes up into her face, their solidity seemed enviable to her - edgeless, slick constructions of steel, glass and chrome. The soles of Alice's shoes peeled away from the tarmac, and she stepped off the kerb.
     
II
     

pa rt on e
     
     

The only bit Alice can see of her father is the soles of his shoes. They are a faded brown, striated with the grit and terrain of the pavements he has walked. She is allowed to run along the pavement outside their house to meet him coming home from work in the evening. In the summertime she sometimes runs in her nightie, its pale folds catching around her knees. But now it's winter - November, maybe. The soles of the shoes are curved around the branch of a tree at the bottom of their garden. She tips back her head as far as it will go. The foliage rustles and thrashes. Her father's voice swears. She feels a shout welling like tears in her throat, then the coarse orange rope lowers itself, slightly coiled like a cobra from the branches.
'Got it?'
She seizes the rope's waxed head in her mittened hand. 'Yes.'
The branches shake as her father swings down. He lays a hand briefly on Alice's shoulder then bends to pick up the tyre. She is fascinated by the meandering rivulets that wander through its tread and the weft underneath its heavy black rubber. 'That's what holds it together,' the man at the shop had told her. The sudden scraped bald patch in the middle of the meanders makes her shudder but she doesn't quite know
why. Her father winds the orange rope around the tyre and makes a thick, twisted knot.
'Can I have a go now?' Her hands grip the tyre. 'No. I have to test it with my weight first.'
Alice watches as her father jounces on the tyre, testing to see if it is safe enough for her. She looks up to see the branch shake in sympathy and looks quickly back at her father. What if he were to fall? But he is getting off and lifting her on, her bones as small, white and bendable as birds'.
     
Alice and John sit in a cafe in a village in the Lake District. It's early autumn. She holds up a