The Trouble with Alice Read online

  Uniformed staff with glassy smiles slid across the shining lobby floor carrying loaded trays and piles of folded towels. There seemed to be no other guests. ‘Where is everybody?’ Kit asked the concierge. He was told that there was a conference taking place at the hotel, and all its guests were on a day trip to Aqaba. They would be back later for dinner in ‘Refresh’, the hotel’s buffet restaurant.

  Kit and Alice were taken by golf buggy to their room which was in a sand-coloured villa, separate from the main building. It was air-conditioned to a numbing chill and Kit, irritated, asked the bellhop to help him change the temperature. ‘I don’t know why you people think it’s a luxury to sit in a fucking fridge,’ he snapped when Alice was out of earshot, knowing the boy could say nothing in response. Then, ashamed of himself, he searched in his pockets for a tip. As he handed it over he felt weary and homesick.

  Alice had opened the balcony doors, inviting a flood of warm, damp air into the room. She had stepped outside and Kit joined her there. Together they watched a huge yellow sun struggle through thick grey air towards the western horizon, an outline of white bare hills above the sea. He supposed that was Israel. A skein of white birds traced a scribble across the sky, high above them, flying east. Beneath their balcony the hotel garden was deserted. It felt as if there had been an emergency evacuation.

  The clotted atmosphere and the ingenious fakery of the place gave Kit a feeling of immeasurable dread. It felt like a place designed by a non-human species, where experiments were carried out on captured humans made docile by their surroundings. It was luxury – ‘five star’ as Karim had kept repeating proudly – but not to Kit. His skin crept with anxiety, and he longed to go home. He sought Alice’s hand with his and rubbed her palm with his thumb as she liked him to do, but Alice was unresponsive and the dread clutched him ever tighter. The sea below lay still and unruffled, its surface unreflecting, a dull pigeon grey.

  ‘What should we do?’ he asked.

  ‘Swim,’ said Alice. ‘We should swim. In the sea. That’s what people come here for. And we don’t have long before the sun sets.’

  They dug their swimming clothes out of their luggage and wandered through the gardens towards the water. Golden sand had been laid along the shore and furnished with sun loungers, folded towels and colourful umbrellas, whipped by a coarse wind. A smiling man stepped forward to accommodate them; there was no one else there.

  Kit ordered drinks which he knew would never be brought. He stood looking at the water with no enthusiasm. Scenting a possible reprieve, he turned to Alice. ‘Are you sure you should?’ he asked. ‘Swim, I mean?’

  ‘Yes, why not?’ she said in surprise. ‘It’s only salt water. And I don’t have to swim – I’ll float. I can’t wait.’ She looked at him, shading her eyes. ‘Don’t you want to?’

  ‘Yes, of course I do.’

  They inched down to the water together, and Kit helped Alice down some concrete steps, encrusted with a milky layer of salt deposit, and into the water. ‘Oh!’ she said in surprise. ‘It’s freezing! I thought it would be hot. How funny.’

  ‘It’s not freezing,’ mimicked Kit. ‘It’s not even cold.’

  ‘It feels cold to me,’ said Alice, her tone mild.

  The smiling man appeared behind them and said, ‘You must be careful – no splashing.’ He pretended to rub his eyes with his fists. ‘Very painful.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Kit, ‘I hadn’t thought about that.’ He dipped his hand into the water and tasted it. ‘It’s like a gargle.’

  Alice was tiptoeing forward over the stones and Kit followed her. He was disappointed. He had wanted the water to taste, look or feel different – be somehow more dense – but it seemed no different from the ordinary sea. But then, as he walked further in, he felt the water uproot him. He found himself floating on his back, and so was Alice, and neither of them knew quite how. Alice’s face – surprised – smiled at his expression, which he supposed was the same. The spell that had held him in a frown all day was broken. He exhaled. The previous day and night receded.

  But the wind came, ruffling the water from the west, and little waves came with it. Kit started to be anxious about splashing his eyes. He floated for a few minutes and then the novelty wore off. He stood up and looked towards the artificial beach. The hotel was a strange kind of oasis, decked in yellow and green, and the rest of the shore stretching away on either side was barren, a mess of brown stones. Kit felt chilled. Alice had been right: it was cold. Taking great care not to make a splash, he lay back in the water again and paddled himself back to the concrete steps. He climbed out of the water and on to the sand where the smiling man handed him a towel.

  ‘Are you all right in there?’ Kit called to Alice.

  ‘Heaven,’ she said, and she did look comfortable, floating on her back with her head out of the water and her eyes shut.

  Back in the room Kit stood under the shower for a long time, feet apart, hands placed on either wall of the shower, head bent and water streaming off his chin. Then he scrubbed every part of his body with the complimentary loofah and Dead Sea Salt Scrub he found on the wire rack. He covered himself in a lather, washed his hair and rubbed his scalp with his fingertips. He tipped his head on one side, then the other, and let the water thunder into each ear. He got out of the shower and shaved, examining every part of his face as if he hadn’t seen it for a long time. He combed his hair, brushed his teeth, wrapped a towel around his waist and came back out of the bathroom feeling very hungry.

  He could see Alice, sitting in a wooden armchair on the balcony, her form indistinct in a white hotel dressing gown. He watched her for a moment. He could see her lips moving and her hands stroking her belly. She was talking to the baby.

  Joining her, he interrupted, saying, ‘Come on, you should eat, shouldn’t you? Let’s get dinner out of the way and then we can go to bed. You must be exhausted.’

  ‘I am,’ said Alice. ‘Help me up, would you?’ She stretched up her arms and he took her hands and helped her to stand. Upright, she smiled at him and, still holding his hands, leaned forward and turned her face to rest on his chest. He wrapped his arms around her and felt hers go round his waist.

  It’s going to be all right, he thought. Thank God. It was the first time he had held her since the accident. Other people had handled her – the driver of the pick-up, the doctor, Karim – but not him. ‘Should we talk about what happened?’ he asked.

  ‘Ugh,’ she said, her voice muffled, ‘Not tonight. Let’s wait; be quiet together. It’s all so…’ she tailed off.

  ‘I can’t wait to wake up to another day.’

  ‘I know exactly what you mean.’

  They kissed, and then dressed, in perfect mutual understanding. Kit’s relief was immense, and as they made their way to the restaurant he felt less cautious of her. The accident had been lodged between them all day like a bolster, but now they were clasped together again.

  Outside the room it was dark. Hand in hand, they made their way along winding paths, overhung by palm fronds, to the main hotel building. As they walked past other villas they heard showers running, voices, televisions, music. Kit felt reassured – there were other people here! Doing normal things! – and he smiled at another couple, also hand in hand, who stood to one side to let him and Alice pass.

  In the hotel lobby they took the lift to the top floor and stepped between its doors into the restaurant: a large, circular room, a section of which opened out on to a terrace. They sat at a table and both looked out towards the sea. Below them the fronds of the imported palms were stirred by the wind. There were no lights beyond the hotel compound – nothing on the water, nor on the opposite shore. The darkness gave Kit a rumble of fear, and he felt confidence and comfort desert him once again.

  Inside, the restaurant had been painted with a mural that reminded Kit of a children’s television programme: bright rainbow colours and a mural of whales, fishes and crustaceans. Music of the spangled, Indian-sounding kind beloved by hotel restaurants all over the world was being piped through speakers both inside and out. A Philippine waitress took their drinks order and then gestured towards the buffet, advising them to help themselves. Having just sat down and had their napkins spread on their knees, they got to their feet and stumbled towards the food.

  A sort of madness overtook Kit at the buffet. He supposed he was too tired to make sensible choices. He hovered at the various food stations, using tongs to place one thing or another on his plate, handling each piece of food with great care, as if it were made of glass. The muzak seemed to swell in his ears, an orchestrated version of a pop anthem played here by a thousand violins, all reaching a mighty crescendo as he stood examining a tray of chicken drumsticks basted in a cold white mayonnaise.

  He could see Alice laughing with the chefs at the hot-food station. A chicken kebab was being turned for her on a barbecue. Kit flushed with jealousy: he was alone; anxiety squeezed his head; he was swamped by self-pity. He looked down at his plate and saw a spoonful of pasta salad, a boiled potato and some chopped egg. He was useless. He had not rescued Alice; he had made things worse. He had abandoned her; he had lost her. He wanted to hurl his plate into the sky, egg and potato notwithstanding, and then to vault off the terrace after it.

  When he woke in the night his head swam with confusion and he felt as if he were surfacing from deep under water. It was very cold – the air-conditioning must have sprung to life again. The sheets had all gone from the bed. It was dark. Where was Alice? He could hear water, pouring, somewhere, but could not think what was going on. He reached for a light switch and pressed a button on the panel at random. At once the room was ablaze – he had lit all the lights with one touch – as if it were on stage. He stared around him and shrank in horror on the bed, all his senses clanging at once in terrified alarm.

  There was blood everywhere. He, and the bed, and the bedclothes on the floor, were soaked in it and all the way to the bathroom there were smudges and footprints. ‘Oh my God, oh my God. Alice!’ Kit said, not in a shout but in a whisper, jumping up, tripping, stubbing his toe on the coffee table, stumbling, rushing into the bathroom, skidding on the wet floor.

  She was sitting in the corner of the shower with her knees drawn up, her head against the wall and her eyes shut. Wet hair was plastered against her head and water rained down around her. But flooding out of the shower where she had not shut the door came a red tide, blood and water mixed, all over the floor, sopping into the towels and circling down the drain, and Kit saw that blood was pouring out of her as if she were a vase, carelessly knocked over on a table.

  Part Two

  1

  Shrinking from the cold of the early morning, Alice stood on Wormwood Scrubs, her gloved hands deep in her coat pockets, her hat pulled down to her eyebrows and her chin buried in her scarf. The wind was making her eyes water. She put her back to it and waited with hunched shoulders for her dog to catch her up. Wormwood Scrubs, as bleak and gloomy a place as its name suggests, had not yet noticed the coming of the spring, or indeed of the day: it was as dark and cheerless as at the dawn of a Siberian winter.

  A grass plateau, muddied in places, was laid out in front of her and pierced by football and rugby goalposts which stood stark against the white-bound sky. The northern fringe, where the common was bordered by a brown plait of railway lines, contained an avenue of young, elegant trees, none of which seemed to contain the energy or the optimism to bring themselves into leaf. On its southern side the green plain was walled in by gloomy blocks and towers: the hospital and the prison. Here and there in the grass were dotted clumps of dank-looking shrubs, the dark soil beneath them shingled with beer cans, bottles and fistfuls of toilet paper.

  Isolation; desolation; bleakness; abandonment – it was no wonder she felt so at home here. She had tried to walk in Kensington Gardens, but it seemed always to be full of children, whichever route or time of day she chose. Babies pushed in buggies came rolling towards her, and she had so little time to prepare herself. What could she do, turn away? No, she had to continue, with her eyes averted, as if she had a phobia. Sometimes she went there at the very end of the day, wandering in the gloom until the gates were locked, but children seemed to leave their mark – like handprints on a glass window, or warm breath on a cold morning – and she was haunted.

  Here on the Scrubs she could walk the perimeter and not encounter a soul. She had used to come later in the morning but then she ran the risk of being approached by other walkers, women in waxed mackintosh coats and wellington boots who had dropped their children off at school and now strode across the windswept turf with proprietary airs. Since Alice now woke up in what Kit called ‘the middle of the fucking night’, she might as well be here as wide-eyed in bed, staring at the ceiling, waiting for the street lights to switch off.

  Bones, the elderly and fastidious yellow dog that accompanied her, was as antisocial as she was. If they met another dog walking with its owner, she would greet it with the physical picture of Alice’s feelings: a kind of frozen horror. She would raise her ears, and then one foot, and stand quite still. If the dog bustled towards her, she would remain motionless, stiff with antipathy. Most other dogs would be defeated by her force of will alone and would drift off-course and glance at her sideways from a safe distance, sniffing a tuft of grass. Sometimes they still tried to address her and she tiptoed round them, looking disgusted. Alice felt she and Bones had a mutual understanding.

  Alice waited. Bones sniffed at a clump of long grass and then, taking two steps forward with her usual ceremony, squatted over it while looking off into the distance. Turning back into the wind, Alice bent her head and walked on.

  At the furthest reach of the common she found a place where someone had lit a bonfire the night before. A porridge of ash and dirt lay in place of the grass, and beer cans had been thrown into the embers. Tramps, Alice thought, not kids. Kids left the burned carcasses of scooters, and empty bottles of ready-mixed cocktails. Tramps made neat fires – camp fires – and sat around them with cans of beer. She stared at the ground and felt hollow with gloom. I am so much better off than so many people, she thought. Why can’t I feel it? After a few moments she looked up and turned back towards home, the wind cutting across her jaw like a cold blade. Placing one foot before the other with purpose, but without interest, she made her way back to her car.

  Sitting with the engine on and the heater turned up, trying to get warm, she thought of the day before her. She would not go home – to Kit’s house – right away. He would be up, and in the kitchen. She would go there later when he had left for work.

  The purpose of her day was now twofold. First, to get as far through it as possible without being seen – by Kit or by anyone else who knew her. She could escape Kit by getting up before him and staying out until he had gone to the studio. She had used to have a job, of course, but not any more. A week after their return from Jordan, when she had thought things were going to go back to normal, she had gone to work. A week later she had stopped going, and Kit had made no comment.

  After her walk on the Scrubs she would go to a café with a newspaper and drink a cup of tea. She would stay there for forty minutes or so and then she would walk to the other end of the Portobello Road and repeat the process in another café. If, on the street, she saw anyone she knew, she would duck behind a bit of street furniture until they were gone. If someone stopped her to say hello, she would pretend she had to be somewhere else and rush away from them, glancing at her watch and making gestures of apology.

  After the second café she would go home, quite tired by now, and lie on the sofa with Bones draped over her like a blanket. She might turn the pages of a magazine, or switch on the television. She did not like to watch films any more because they could not hold her concentration.

  The second goal she tried to meet each day was to eat as close to nothing as possible. This had become a new and consuming occupation, taking up almost as much time and energy as a job of work.

  Recently she had started to be woken in the night by hunger pangs (she knew what these were now: her insides gripping and ungripping themselves, making strange, rebellious noises), or because she was soaked in sweat and chilled to the bone. She and Kit no longer shared a bed – or a bedroom – so there was no one to disturb when she got up, peeled off her sodden clothes, put on dry ones and got back in the other side to avoid the soaked pillow and sheets.

  Before she fell back to sleep she was sometimes afraid of her body, the pleading noises it made and the other unnerving developments: her skin prickling as if she might shed it; worm-like currents coursing up and down her legs; the clicking of her joints when she turned over in bed and the cold ache at the base of her spine.

  But she knew something now that had never occurred to her before Jordan – that her body was not her friend, and that these were all its tricks. It was untrustworthy, deceitful and greedy. She had to stay alert, to keep a watchful eye on it. It was trying to frighten her into submission, even polluting her brain when she slept and dreamed of food.