‘You must be proud, she is so witty, had us in stitches…’
Alice waited for the reason for her call, horrified that this stranger thought she knew her daughter better than Alice did.
‘… I know it will be hard while she is away, is there anyone who could stay with you? It will be lovely for the girls, Chrissie’s French will help us all! I can ask for things but once they start rattling back, I’m…Chrissie doesn’t know I’m calling, Rachael – my daughter, had her number. I wanted to put my pennyworth…’ Later Alice informed Chris, no, she could not go to France. How could Alice manage for a week by herself? Suppose she fell, suppose she ran out of food?
Suppose.
Chris had said she didn’t mind if she stayed at home and Alice convinced herself that Chris hadn’t wanted to go. That she had been happy to use her mother’s condition as an excuse. But still this was an uncomfortable memory.
This made Alice return to the photograph. Two years ago when she was sixteen, Chris had presented to her mother a framed picture of herself for her birthday. Alice had taken lots of photos of Chris as a little girl. She had lovingly slotted the prints between their mounting corners in a set of albums that made up a brand new history for her daughter. They supplanted the past Alice had been forced to abandon. But none of her photographs so accurately captured her daughter as this one.
Chris was doing a thumbs-up sign. Her hand was partially hiding her face so that the gesture, declaring that everything was all right, dominated the frame. It had been snapped by Emma, Chris’s best friend, while on a sailing holiday that this time Alice had agreed to. Chris had posed on the prow of a yacht like a conquering hero, and behind her there was only the sea and the sky. The photograph comforted Alice and she picked it up whenever she was upset or anxious. Chris’s laughing smile, the wisps of hair blown out from her face by the sea breeze and the way she looked through, and not directly at the lens, expressed her spirit. Chris was buoyant in the face of adversity. Alice kept her reflections to herself, although she would often tell Chris that the picture was the best present anyone had ever given her.
Late afternoon was Alice’s favourite time. She relished the anticipation of Chris’s arrival. It was like the start of school holidays. This feeling formed a link to a long lost childhood and she tried to snatch at the fading image of a little girl busily helping her Dad clean shoes on a back step, lining up each shoe to make a straight line of toes.
The little girl was always on her own. The fuzzy figure who was her Dad had gone, perhaps into the house, giving his princess time to make everything right for his inspection.
Alice carefully lifted up the black postman shoes with the metal toe-caps. She folded her rag neatly like her Dad did, and dabbed a corner into the tin of polish.
‘Don’t press too hard, you don’t need much.’
The shoe was too heavy to hold in one hand, so she wedged it between her legs as she pummelled the heel with her cloth. After a few minutes she hadn’t made much difference. She began to panic. Breathe in. Breathe out.
‘You just put me out of a job!’ He was leaning in the kitchen doorway, slurping a mug of tea her Mum had made.
‘How long have you been there?’
‘Long enough. Keep going.’ He bent and kissed the top of her head and laughed from deep inside. He smelled of aftershave. No, he smelled of apples and tobacco.
Alice couldn’t think what he smelled of. She had only a fragment from which to build her story, which was fading through lack of telling.
Chris would be moody and probably slope off to her bedroom, but still Alice counted down to the sound of her key in the door.
When Alice watched Chris march briskly across the quadrangle each morning, a young confident woman now, she wanted to open the window and call her back.
‘Don’t leave me! Take me with you.’
The words lost power before she could form them, and she let the stranger stride off under the archway to the busy street.
Alice took refuge in blurry memories of a small child skipping or spinning in ballet pumps. No matter what, the innocent schoolgirl who was always top of the class was still safe inside her.
Chris was now twenty minutes late. Alice patted her chest. Chris must have gone off with her friends without telling her. Alice wanted Chris to have friends and in one of her better states she would see her at the centre of a gaggle of girls chatting and giggling, with no responsibilities. But they had an agreement that Chris phoned if she was going to be late. Alice had spent a fortune on Chris’s mobile phone.
Alice hated that Chris was so laden down with cares and she longed to protect the little girl who even in summer was pale, her bag full of books, her head full of revision and dreams of a degree at university that would lead to a career in forensic science. Alice would have preferred that Chris wanted to be an artist and paint live creatures rather than take apart dead ones. On bad days Alice felt dissected herself as she tried to ward off the strident, deriding child who daily sucked the life out of her mother, leaving her like a discarded beetle case, turning and shifting listlessly in the draught under the door. On her bad days, Alice’s sorry images of herself were never mundane.
‘By the time I was your age…’
‘Were you ever my age? Your story changes every day. One minute you talk about horse riding, the next you say you were scared of them. Which is it today?’
‘There was a girl I knew when I was young. She could ride the way you and I walk. I get mixed up between dreams and reality, that’s all. I’m not well. It’s natural.’
Alice had hoped having a child meant always having someone who would stick up for you and love you come what may. The way Alice had loved her mother. It seemed a minute since Chris was born and she had held her, appalled by the lump of screaming flesh. Then Chris had stopped breathing and a flock of doctors and nurses snatched her away and left Alice alone. When she saw her next, under plastic like a takeaway sandwich, she was overwhelmed by the intensity of her love. This love could exhaust her with its strength and she had known then it would never release her.
Here she was now!
Alice started to tug the lace aside to wave then just in time remembered Chris would pretend not to see her. Instead she twitched the material like the fugitive she was and shrank back into her armchair.
As she watched her daughter return home in the afternoons from school, Alice would know that what she most dreaded had already become reality: Chris had moved on from her. Yet the sight of her nearly grownup daughter living a life in which she could be herself, free of a painful past, always filled Alice with joy.
She believed that this justified everything.
Thirteen
Over time the Old Kent Road had become no more than a stretch of the busy A2, lined with boarded up shops, forgotten patches of scrubland, supermarket car parks, generic takeaways and fly-by-night outlets flogging tired and tawdry goods. The flyover was a brief escape for drivers from the barren road beneath it, which was fogged with choking fumes and overshadowed by high-rise flats whose rows of doors opened on to balconies meant to copy the communal streets they had replaced. Young municipal trees with their spindle trunks encased in protective mesh were planted along the kerbside. Most of the saplings had been twisted and broken, while others had simply died. Many of their cages were crammed to the top with litter; the colourful columns making a pithy statement about inner-city decay.