Black Vodka Read Free Page B

probably writing a lecture somewhere and it is midnight and the philosopher’s beautiful wife is on the phone and she is saying to her husband, so kiss yourself good night tonight and I will kiss myself good night and you stroke your own hair tonight and I will stroke my own arm tonight. Alice does not really understand why they are all laughing so much. She feels lonely and out of the loop, whatever the loop is, and anyway she’s not that sure the loop is a good place to be.
    ‘Are you ok, Alice?’ Alex prods her arm with his long fingers. ‘By the way,’ he says, ‘I really like your blue dress.’ He asks her when she is returning to the UK. She tells him she is leaving later that evening. ‘Uh huh,’ he says. ‘Then tonight you will kiss yourself good night. And I will kiss myself good night.’ He tells her he’s going for a walk in the woods to stretch his legs before the drive back to Prague. The woods are just across the road from the pub. Alice asks if he minds if she joins him? She wants to see autumn leaves.
    The sky has clouded by the time they cross the road to where the entrance to the woods begins. When they get there, Alice doesn’t want to walk with him after all. She has changed her mind. He says, ‘Well, anyway, I’m really happy to meet you.’ He waves his hands around a bit and suddenly grabs the ends of her blond hair with his fingertips. She wants to ask him where on the map his country is but it sounds insulting and ignorant and she doesn’t think she can ask a question like that. He lets go of her hair and he says, ‘I really like so much your blue dress and red tights. If I stop working in my stupid job, one day I will buy you a pair of shoes.’ And then he walks into the woods.
    The season is turning and she wants to go home to England. A bird scrambles in the upper branches of a tree. She watches the bird and she thinks about Adrijana and Jasna swimming in the deep, cold lake. They have been hurt in ways she has not been hurt. They have left all the seasons in their country behind them.
    When she looks at her watch she wonders if Alex might have got lost. Has something happened to him in the wood? She thinks something is about to happen. This is how she felt at the baggage reclaim. A feeling of dread in her stomach when she knew her bag had gone missing. Strange thoughts occur to her now as she waits for him. She wonders if there are people hiding in the woods because they have lost their country and their home and their children and their sister and cousin and she thinks Alex might have lost his brother and father because of something he said earlier. She thinks about the form she had to fill in at the airport and the official who looked bored when she listed all the things she had lost.
    The material of her blue dress is rubbing against her skin as she paces up and down the road on the edge of the woods. A wind suddenly blows in and then she sees him.
    He is walking towards her. There are small leaves in his hair as he stands too close and tells her his name is not Alex. Not exactly. It is Aleksandar. He tells her he saw a deer in the woods with small antlers and how he used to have an Italian coffee-making machine in his kitchen in his country which he liked a lot, the coffee machine he means, not the country, and he is sorry to have missed the Rolling Stones film last night in the park because then he would have been near her a little bit longer. Aleksandar squeezes his lips and lowers his eyes. He offers to charge up her mobile phone for her before she leaves for London. He folds his arms across his chest and leans back on his heels as if to get a better view of her and then he tells her it’s nice to watch her laughing at him while the wind blows her hair about.

Vienna
    ‘Before I forget,’ Magret’s voice is low and vague, ‘I want to test my new microwave.’
    He nods, as if he is a secretary taking notes from an inscrutable Executive Director who wears purple