Other Alice Read Free Page A

snowed under.’
    ‘She’s always snowed under,’ I said sulkily.
    I sank into my usual seat. I’d been looking forward to this evening. Mum had been working much later recently. She was the manager of a rights team for a big publisher, which meant that
she sold books to lots of different countries. It was over a week since we’d last eaten a meal with her. In fact, it had been more than a week since I’d had a chance to say much to her
at all, during mornings of uniforms being ironed and bowls of cereal being gulped down in the rush to get ready for school. We hardly saw my dad, either. He worked away on an oil rig and sometimes
he was gone for months. Since Alice had left school in May, she’d taken over a lot of the cooking and household chores. She wasn’t just my sister, she was like a second mother.
    ‘It won’t be for ever,’ Alice said. ‘Things will calm down after this book fair.’
    She ladled stew and dumplings on to our plates and I wolfed mine down, but Alice only picked at hers. By the time the subject changed to the Summoning and the Likenesses I’d seen on the
way home, Alice had put her spoon down and abandoned her stew. She listened, her eyes clouding at the mention of the old man and his little-boy doll, and I wondered if she’d ever write down
the story of him using the Likeness to speak to himself as a child. She often based characters on people from real life, if there was something about them that interested her.
    ‘Are you making one this year?’ I asked.
    ‘A Likeness?’ said Alice. She gave a vague shake of her head. ‘I’ve got other things to be getting on with.’
    I was half relieved, half disappointed. Relieved because if Alice wasn’t making one then I wouldn’t feel I had to to, either. And disappointed because Alice always chose interesting
people, like her favourite authors – or even characters from their books. One year, her teacher had made a project of it, and Alice been told off in front of the whole class for making a
Likeness of someone who wasn’t a real person. Alice had replied, ‘They’re real to me.’
    I loved her for that.
    Later, we ate rice pudding in front of the fire. Shortly before nine o’clock, Alice went outside to get more coal, and I shivered as fingers of icy air crawled in through the back door and
found their way to my neck. Alice stirred up the embers with the poker and heaped on more coal, then settled in the armchair.
    I put down my maths homework and yawned. Alice wasn’t as strict about bedtime as Mum, mainly because half the time she didn’t realise what hour it was herself.
    I stretched out on the rug next to Twitch and watched my sister. She sat with a notebook open on her knees, legs curled underneath her and her long fingers wrapped round her favourite pen. Her
hand was still and she was staring into the fire, though I guessed she wasn’t really seeing the flames. I knew better than to ask what she was thinking about. Being interrupted while
daydreaming was one of the few things that made my normally mild-mannered sister lose her temper. Daydreaming, she said, was how she made up her stories – and interruptions meant lost
ideas.
    Judging by the way she was nibbling her top lip, this story wasn’t going well. Once or twice, she began to write, but then ripped out the pages and threw them into the fire. Then,
suddenly, she lifted her pen and began to scribble quickly, lines and lines, without pause. As she did so, she began humming the strange little melody again, the one I’d heard when she was
making dinner. Now and again, she crossed words out, but continued until she must have filled an entire page. Finally, she stopped, looking over her words with a slight smile. So I was surprised
when she tore out the page and screwed it into a ball. Then, like the ones before it, she aimed it at the fire. It hit the back, just below the chimney opening, but somehow bounced out and landed
somewhere on the hearth. Alice