Other Alice Read Free

shirt and football strip of his favourite
player. Then there were the mad: a grey felt dog called Fenchurch who’d been missing for more than a year; the bad: Jack the Ripper made by Mr Sherwood, the history teacher, who spent his
spare time working on theories to try and unmask the killer’s identity.
    I reached the white painted gate of a cottage set back from the road. Next to the front door was a small figure of straw. This was one of the sad: the same little figure made every year by the
old man who lived in the cottage.
    It was a boy, with fair hair and glasses. Every year it wore the same clothes, and the same little pair of old-fashioned spectacles, but every year its features were a little wonkier, as the old
man’s eyesight grew worse.
    No one really talked to the man, so people didn’t know who the boy was. Some said that it was his son who had been taken away by the man’s wife and never seen again; others said that
the boy had died, and once I’d heard a horrid story that it was a little boy unknown to the man whom he had knocked down and killed in his car by accident. So many stories and none of them
happy . . . except one.
    Alice said she thought the story went like this: the man was a time traveller and wanted to use the Likeness to speak to himself as a little boy, asking him questions about things that he had
long forgotten about. To Alice, everything was a story and hers was the one I wanted to believe.
    I moved on past, pulling leaves from the hedge, trying to decide whether to make a Likeness or not. Alice usually did, but she was the creative one, not me.
    By the time I reached Cuckoo Lane, the street where we lived, the sky was dark and a thin slice of moon dangled above the little shop on the corner. Our house was number 35, a short way down. It
was an old house, which looked tiny from the front, but was surprisingly large inside, stretching back much longer than it was wide. When I went in, the house was warm and the smell of something
delicious was wafting from the kitchen.
    I hung my keys on the hook in the hallway and went through to the living room, where a fire had been lit in the grate. A basket of logs and a bucket of coal sat on the hearth, and our cat,
Twitch, was sprawled out asleep in front of it, her black coat gleaming in the firelight. I held my cold fingers up to the heat. I could hear a little tune being hummed in the kitchen. I followed
it and found Alice leaning over the cooker, stirring a large pot.
    ‘What’s for tea?’ I asked, my tummy rumbling as I sniffed deeply. The humming stopped and Alice turned to me with a smile.
    ‘It’s stew.’ She covered the pot and put plates in the oven to warm. ‘Stop sniffing it; you’ll steal all the flavour.’
    I grinned. Alice was always saying silly things like that, mostly to amuse me – and herself – but also, I think, because she couldn’t help it. She saw magic in everything: a
trail of drips from a teacup were elf footprints; garden statues were people and animals that had been enchanted and turned to stone. Storytelling was in her blood; blood that we shared, though
Alice’s was a little different. She didn’t have the same father as me. Hers had left her and our mum when Alice was just three years old. She had seen him only a handful of times in the
thirteen years that had passed since then.
    I watched as she set the table, noticing a plaster on Alice’s finger. ‘What happened?’ I asked, nodding to it.
    ‘Hmm? Oh. My finger decided it wanted to be a carrot and got in the way of the knife.’
    ‘You’re so daft,’ I said, giggling. Then I stopped as I saw that she had only laid the table for two.
    ‘I thought Mum was here for tea tonight?’ My voice came out all whiney.
    Alice laid cutlery on the table and began to slice some bread.
    ‘She was supposed to be, but she called to say she had to work late.’
    ‘Again?’
    ‘Someone’s off sick and Mum has that book fair coming up. She’s