The Trouble with Alice Read online

  One morning after one of these dinners, Kit had said to Josh, on the way to the gallery in the car, ‘Why do we go out with these young girls, Josh? We know it doesn’t work.’

  Josh laughed. ‘Because we love fucking them,’ he said. It was a typical Josh answer.

  ‘But sometimes…’ Kit began, and then did not finish.

  ‘Yeah, there’s a downside,’ Josh said. ‘They don’t participate. But Alice is great,’ he continued. ‘She’s got opinions; she’s got character.’

  ‘She needs some direction,’ replied Kit, restless, flicking the air-conditioning to ‘off’.

  Josh laughed. ‘You say that, and then she’ll get a career, and you’ll get all jealous and needy. Isn’t that what happens?’

  But that’s not what happened this time. One morning Alice had rung Kit and asked him to come and meet her in Holland Park. Her voice was so hollow he thought she had found him out about something, and he almost didn’t go. But then he had caught sight of her suede boots lying splayed on the bathroom floor, and had thought of her legs in them. He had gone to meet her after all, and she had told him she was pregnant.

  After that his life had ceased to be his own. Baby has rights, Rob had warned him in the pub one evening soon after, and now Kit knew exactly what he meant. Alice had moved in: those boots lived in the cupboard; her hairbrush, clogged with hair, on the hall table; her car in the space in front of the house. ‘Can’t you park on the road?’ Kit said. ‘The car’s practically in the kitchen.’

  ‘I don’t have a permit,’ said Alice, who was eating a yoghurt out of the pot and dangling her legs over the end of the sofa.

  He had got used to some things and not to others. He liked her being there in the evenings, but not in the mornings. He liked the idea of her being there, but when he got home and she was there, he felt a flutter of panic. He began to resent taking her to restaurants when she ate so much and then was sick in the mornings. ‘I’m not that hungry,’ he would say, standing behind her and squeezing her around the waist. ‘You could make something here, couldn’t you?’ He liked clean sheets on the bed, a dry bathmat, and his socks bound in neat pairs in the sock drawer. He did not like the fact that someone knew his habits; that he was predictable, and under observation.

  In the cigarette shop the radio was on very loud, but not quite tuned to a station. The sound roared: static interspersed with shouting. Kit had come in here to avoid snapping at Alice, and now he stood in front of a fridge full of Coke cans and took a few deep breaths. It was not her fault; they were both tired; they needed to eat. He asked for a packet of Marlboro, handed over some notes and ran back across the road to Alice. She looked pitiful, standing alone on the kerb with one hand resting on her tummy.

  ‘Come on, you’re right, let’s go back to the hotel,’ he said, and wrapped his arm around her. But she was furious at having been left alone on the pavement, and refused to collude with him and be more cheerful. She wasn’t hungry, she said, it was too late. She felt sick. She wanted to go to bed. If he was going to smoke could he do it somewhere far away from her.

  Kit said he would smoke in the bar and come to bed in a minute, which he did, after a few beers and some sorrowful thoughts about his situation and his future. When he arrived back at the room she had turned off all the lights and so he woke her as he stumbled about. It was not quite what he had envisaged when he had booked the holiday, he thought to himself as he slid under the sheet next to her, holding his breath because of the beer and tobacco fumes, dreading the gritty sheet at the toe-end of the bed. Alice gave a loud snore. He turned on his side to face away from her, and exhaled a long breath.

  5

  Placing one foot in front of the other (as he had been doing for the last few hours and, as it felt, for most of his life) had become so automatic that when headlights rounded a corner ahead of him and blazed in his face Kit couldn’t think what was happening for a moment and stood stupefied. Then he stepped into the middle of the road, waving his arms like a clockwork toy. He had rehearsed this moment in his head and here it was, he did know what to do, this was what. He supposed he had almost been asleep while walking.

  But still, when the car did pull up in front of him and he knew it was the moment of rescue, his legs turned to putty and he nearly slipped to the ground. He had to place both hands on the bonnet of the car to support himself, and take fluttering breaths, making an ‘O’ of his mouth. He heard the car’s passenger door open and suddenly Karim – Karim! – was beside him, holding his shoulders and saying, ‘Sir, sir, it’s Karim. Sir, sir…’ Now Kit was trembling all over, and couldn’t speak. Another man came and held him on his feet, and Kit’s ears were filled with the sound of the car’s engine and that of another vehicle, a pick-up truck, which waited behind it. Chattering with self-importance, Karim helped Kit into the back seat of the car and sat beside him as they drove back along the road the way Kit had come.

  They swept past the pile of stones and Kit waved his arms at it and tried to tell them to stop the car, but Karim shushed him, ‘Yes, yes, don’t worry’, and made reassuring sounds. And sure enough, after another few miles of gradual descent on the road, they were able to take a right-handed turn off it and bump downhill still further, and then turn right again and start to approach from beneath the place where the car lay.

  In front the dirt was illuminated white by the headlights and small bushes appeared like skeletons before being crushed beneath the wheels. When their route became too steep and twisting, Karim, the driver and Kit abandoned their car and climbed into the pick-up behind, which was driven by an elderly man who stared gloomily ahead as if he were stuck in rush-hour traffic.

  The pick-up bumped along at a walking pace, climbing, twisting, forced to slow to a crawl to negotiate boulders and more substantial bushes. Once or twice Karim and the other fellow climbed out and pushed smaller rocks out of the way so that immovable ones could be got around. For Kit the journey was an agony. He tried to calculate how long it would take but he was so confused by the dark, and by their route, that he gave up. It seemed an untold epoch ago that they had sped past his pile of stones on the road. How many more hours could they take to get back to the place which lay directly below it?

  Karim must have been wondering the same thing since he soon began to bicker with the driver, gesturing in front and rubbing at the windscreen. The truck ground to a halt and stuttered in its place while the three men argued over Kit’s head. Just as Kit was about to scream with frustration, trapped in between them with the gearstick shuddering next to his thigh, the driver executed a nine-point turn and crept backwards for a few hundred yards, and then even more slowly up a narrow path to one side, his wheels astride it.

  After several long minutes more of crawling uphill, all four men clinging on to the dashboard, and the pick-up’s owner shaking his head as rocks went clunk underneath or screeched against the side panels of the truck, the front wheels heaved over a broken lip of dried mud and they emerged in a flat space, about fifteen yards across, and steep-sloped on all sides. It was the Coke can lying on the ground that alerted Kit, and then his heart was set pounding by the black shape, the despised black shape, of the upside-down Mercedes.

  The low-level argument in the car became a torrent of high-pitched chatter. Karim flung open the door and leapt from his seat, triumphant. He ran towards the Mercedes, followed by his friend. The driver of the pick-up and Kit, whose legs seemed to have stopped receiving instructions, sat together for a moment with the engine idling and the passenger door standing open. Kit became aware, for the first time, of the radio playing. He and the lugubrious man beside him watched the other two run forward, illuminated by the headlights, and then Kit noticed that the front door of the Mercedes was no longer propped open as he had left it. The water bottles he had used as door stops lay on the ground beside the vehicle. Kit felt his hair lift from his head in apprehension as he computed this information, and it was with no surprise, therefore, that he watched Karim pull open the car door, poke his head and upper body inside, and then emerge and turn back to face them, mute, but with a question mark in his expression.

  6

  In the morning they had discovered each other in the bed and made love underneath the hotel counterpane, whispering and not quite awake. As was usual, sex had acted like a blessing on their mood and, full of energy, they sprang from shower to breakfast where they sat united, mocking the other guests. They then collected cameras and water bottles from their room and set out to explore Petra before it became too hot. Alice wore a complex web of long-sleeved and long-legged garments in order to keep the sun off, topped by a broad-brimmed cotton hat and sunglasses. ‘Sorry about this,’ she said. ‘I know it’s not very sexy but I don’t want the baby cooking all day like a little baked potato.’

  They walked down the hill through Wadi Musa, hand in hand until they both became too sweaty. Kit declared the place a ‘dump’, and was pleased when Alice agreed. Last night she had been picky and defensive, but today they were in accord. The town seemed to exist, Kit went on, purely for the purpose of serving the charabancs of tourists who came to look at Petra. It had no heart.

  They hurried down the dusty road, past a row of five-star hotels, and into the mayhem of the site complex itself. People were everywhere, standing in the dust in self-conscious groups, looking around with expressions both docile and expectant. Everyone seemed to be waiting for a person of authority to tell them what to do. We are not like you, Kit thought in panic. He held Alice’s hand with a kind of defiance.

  Their satisfaction with each other made them light-headed, batting away children who asked for money, and men who offered their services as guides. Kit had a guidebook; he did not want a guide in person. ‘They’ll only try to tell me about I
ndiana Jones,’ he said. They paid their money and wandered down the path into the canyon. ‘This is called the siq,’ he told her, looking up from the page. Alice was staring up at the slit of blue sky visible between the pink walls.

  ‘Extraordinary,’ she murmured. ‘You could look and look, and never know.’

  ‘Yes, that’s what happened,’ said Kit. ‘There were rumours of an ancient Nabatean city… but no one knew exactly where.’

  But when he looked up again, Alice had wandered on.

  It was strange, but despite the hundreds of people that thronged the entrance, because of the twists and turns of the canyon walls, it became possible to feel as if they were practically alone. Groups of guided tourists were led past them and away around corners, and Kit and Alice would be left in the almost-quiet, almost-cool shade of the chasm. Alice was fascinated by the fig trees that sprang from cracks in the cliff walls. ‘How can they live?’ she said. ‘They’ve nothing to cling to.’

  Kit began to be irritated by what she noticed, and what she ignored. ‘Look, this is a gutter,’ she said at one point, putting a hand into a neat, smooth drain that ran at hip-height alongside their path.

  ‘Yes,’ said Kit, ‘this was the way the water came in. They had a sophisticated drainage system. Or perhaps that was the Romans?’ He frowned and turned the pages of his book.

  Alice was distracted by the horses that clattered up and down, pulling carriages. ‘The poor things. I can’t look.’

  ‘Well then, don’t,’ replied Kit, too hot for sentiment.

  At one point he saw her taking photographs of the ground. He went and stood beside her. ‘So funny,’ she said. ‘The guides must all stop and have their fag break here. Look –’

  Kit looked down at the ground and saw a small heap of cigarette butts tucked into the crevice of an ancient carving.

  He felt a surge of discontent and said, ‘You do find the oddest things interesting.’

  Alice turned the camera towards him and snapped his picture. Then she looked at the portrait on the screen. ‘Sourpuss,’ she said. Kit felt a flash of temper.

  They continued winding through the siq and finally glimpsed the Treasury, Al Khazneh, in front of them. ‘Holy cow,’ said Alice, walking on with her mouth open. ‘That is amazing.’ They rounded the final corner and stood in the open, confronted by the façade. ‘Amazing,’ she said again.

  Kit was bothered by the crowds. ‘Perhaps if we climb up one of these paths. We can get away from some of these people.’

  But Alice wasn’t listening. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘there’s a café, thank God. I can sit down and have a cup of tea.’

  7

  She had wandered into the desert, and Kit could not, when they found her and woke her up, bring himself to ask her why. Now she was being examined by doctors, and he waited with Karim outside the surgery door, the two of them next to each other on scuffed plastic chairs. Sometimes Kit held his head in his hands. Anxious and silent, Karim watched him, or stared at the ceiling. At one point they both went outside and smoked a cigarette, and Kit noticed that daylight had broken the dawn, and the next day had begun.

  When Karim handed Kit the lighter Kit saw that his fingertips were bloodied and the nails torn, from crawling up the side of the valley. Kit remembered how he had not believed Karim would come back, and was ashamed. He looked at his own hands and found similar marks.

  If he had stayed with Alice, he thought, she would not have left the car, and time would have been saved, time when he and the three other men had had to fan out into the darkness, only two of them carrying torches, to try and find her. The blackness had been horrifying to Kit then. They could not use the headlights of the truck because they had come by the one passable route. They would find her on foot or, when it was light, with a helicopter, but Kit was not at all sure she would be alive if they found her in the morning. They had called and shouted, ‘Alice! Alice!’ but nothing had come back except echoes off the rocks and the dense buffet of the wind. At one point Kit had stopped and squatted on his heels in the dirt to weep and beg, rubbing his eyes with his fists, and it was then that the driver of the truck had shouted something, and Karim had called back to him with a whoop in his voice, and Kit had known that Alice had been found.

  There was no seat for them on any flight out of Amman that day, and nor was there a room for them at the Peace Hotel in Wadi Musa where they had stayed before the accident. In the lobby Alice sat on a cane chair and drank one glass of mint tea after another. Kit stood beside her with the hotel’s Malaysian manager, Mr Lim, and tried to decide what they should do. Mr Lim clasped and unclasped his hands. He had worked at this hotel for six months. Before that he had managed one in Kuala Lumpur, owned by the same chain.

  In the end they agreed – or rather, Mr Lim suggested, Kit concurred and Alice nodded – that they continue as planned: drive to the Dead Sea and stay at the hotel into which they were still booked for one remaining night, and then fly out of Amman in the morning. There seemed to be no better idea. Kit thought Alice might not want to do that drive again, but Mr Lim knew another route – longer, but straighter – which avoided the scene of the accident, and so it was decided.

  Kit didn’t want to keep asking her if she was sure she felt all right. He could not quite believe the two doctors, both of whom had said that she and the baby were fine. It was a boy, they knew now, just as she’d always said it was. ‘Tough little chap,’ Kit said with pride, squeezing Alice’s hand. Nobody seemed as worried as he was – he supposed that in a place like this babies survived far worse ordeals. Alice seemed to think that she would know if there were something wrong, and Kit felt unqualified to disagree out loud, at least in present company. She said she was tired and hungry, and wanted a bath. Mr Lim ordered breakfast for her – Kit was fascinated to hear him speak fluent Arabic, as well as English – and she ate pitta with olive oil and halloumi while the two men stood and discussed the journey over her head.

  Bent double with sympathy, Mr Lim shook hands with them both and placed them in the care of his personal driver, who pursed his lips and spoke not a word for the entire journey. Both his hands remained on the steering wheel; his telephone lay untouched in his shirt pocket; he did not adjust the temperature. Kit, seatbelted into the back with Alice, felt grateful for this attention.

  Kit had tried to give Karim some money before they parted but he would not take it. Karim had to go and report the accident to the police, but Mr Lim said the police would not need to see Kit and Alice unless they were pressing charges. ‘Of course not,’ said Kit, loud and clear. ‘It was an accident.’

  He shook hands with Karim and Alice did too. Karim took her hand in both his own and bent his head towards the ground. Kit felt sad and sorry for him, and wondered whether he would lose his job.

  Kit tried several times, at the start of their car journey, to hold on to Alice’s hand, but like a little minnow it kept slipping from his grasp. He looked sideways at her across the back seat of the car. He had thought she’d gone to sleep but she was staring out of the window. He watched her for a moment, willing her to turn and face him, but she did not.

  8

  On the barren, sloping eastern shore of the Dead Sea loomed their hotel, a vast edifice built of yellow stone. It was brand new and looked as if it had been dropped, fully furnished, from the sky. Instead of lying in the landscape, it seemed to sit high on its foundations like a sandcastle, looking as if a wind or a tide might wipe it away. Beneath the building, in the gaze of its hundreds of dark-tinted glass windows, neatly terraced gardens led down to the seashore. Tall palms and gnarled olives looked quite natural, springing from their beds, but Kit realised as he gaped at the view from reception that the trees – every single plant, in fact – must have been imported, and bedded in imported soil. More amazing still was the water which poured, gushed and burst forth in fountains all over the artificial garden. Artful rock formations made it look as if springs erupted from the ground and yet in every direction beyond the walls of the complex there was nothing but sand and salt water.