After You'd Gone Read Free Page A

sugar cube between finger and thumb, the light behind it making its crystals the massed cells of an intricate organism under a microscope.
'Did you know,' says John, 'that someone did a chemical analysis of sugar cubes in cafe sugar bowls and that they found strong traces of blood, semen, faeces and urine?'
She keeps her face serious. 'I didn't know that, no.'
He holds her deadpan gaze until the edges of his mouth are tugged downwards. Alice gets hiccups and he shows her how to cure them by drinking out of the opposite side of a glass. Beyond them, through the window, a plane draws a sheer white line on the sky.
She looks at John's hands, breaking up a bread roll, and suddenly knows she loves him. She looks away, out of the window, and sees for the first time the white line made by the plane. It has by this time drifted into woolliness. She thinks about pointing it out to John, but doesn't.
     
Alice's sixth summer was hot and dry. Their house had a large garden with the kitchen window looking out over the patio and garden so whenever Alice and her sisters were playing outside they could look up and see their mother watching over them.
     
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The freakish heat dried up the reservoirs, previously unheard of in Scotland, and she went with her father to a pump at the end of the street to collect water in round white vats. The water drummed into their empty bottoms. Half-way between the house and the end of the garden was the vegetable patch where peas, potatoes and beetroot pushed their way up from thick, dark soil. On a particularly bright day that summer, Alice stripped off her clothes, scooped up clods of that earth and smeared it in vivid tiger stripes all over her body.
She scared the pious, nervous children next door by roaring at them through the hedge until her mother rapped on the window-pane and shouted at her to stop that at once. She retreated into the undergrowth to collect twigs and leaves to construct a wigwam-shaped lair. Her younger sister stood outside the lair and whinged to be let in. Alice said, only if you are a tiger. Beth looked at the soil and then at her clothes and then at their mother's face in the kitchen window. Alice sat in the moist dark with her stripes, growling and gazing at the triangle of sky visible through the top of the lair.
     
'You thought you were a little African boy, didn't you?'
She sits in the bath, her hair plastered into dripping spikes, and her grandmother soaps her back and front. The skin of her grandmother's hands feels roughened. The water is grey-brown, full of the garden's soil, lifted off her skin. In the next room she can hear the thrum of her father's voice, talking on the telephone.
'Don't cover yourself in soil again, will you, Alice?'
Her skin looks lighter under the water. Is this what skin looks like when it's dead?
'Alice? Promise me you won't do it again.'
She nods her head, spraying water over the ceramic sides of the yellow bath.
     
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Her grandmother towels her back. 'Wee angel wings,' she says, patting Alice's shoulder-blades dry. 'Everyone was an angel once, and this is where our wings would have been.'
She twists her head around to see the jutting isosceles triangle of bone flex and retract beneath her skin, as if preparing for celestial flight.
     
Across the cafe table, John looks at Alice who is looking out of the window. Today she has pulled the weight of her hair away from her face, giving her the appearance of a Spanish nina or a flamenco dancer. He imagines her that morning brushing the shining mass of her hair before clipping it at the back of her head. He reaches over the empty coffee mugs and cups the large knot of hair in his palm. She turns her eyes on him in surprise.
'I just wanted to know what it felt like.'
She touches it herself before saying, 'I often think about getting it all cut off.'
'Don't,' John says quickly, 'don't ever cut it off.' The aureoles of her eyes widen in surprise. 'It might contain all your strength,' he jokes