In the kitchen, he poured orange juice into a glass. Through the window he saw Aoife on the swing, her long legs dangling, the toes of her white Converses scuffing the dust. She was nothing like her father; Bob’s genes had lost that particular skirmish. Instead, she was slim and dark and pretty, how he imagined Fiona must have been at that age. He watched her for a moment, then poured a second glass of juice and went out to the garden, taking the vodka and the glasses with him. The expression on her face bordered on a sneer, but she brightened when she saw the bottle. The day had remained fine, but there was something ominous in the stillness of the clouds, as if now that they had stopped moving, they might suddenly drop to earth. Aoife hopped off the swing. “This way,” she said, indicating a gap in the hedge. “They don’t like it when I drink.”
“They don’t like it when I drink, either,” he said.
When she laughed it was her mother’s laugh, uncouth with a hint of scorn, and her legs, when she settled herself beside him in the grass behind the hedge, were her mother’s legs, long and tanned and small boned. She giggled as he poured the vodka, and when she turned to smile at him, he noticed her eyes were slightly glazed. They were sitting in a wilderness of long grass and weeds, a narrow strip of no-man’s-land between the backs of the houses and a walled public green. Dog daisies and poppies grew wild and riotous, spilling petals and seeds onto the ground. He felt the jut of her hip as she edged closer to him, and as her long hair brushed against his arm, he caught a scent of vanilla and something else, something young and girlish, like apples or berries. He drank some vodka and looked up at the sky. The clouds seemed grayer and darker and were no longer still, but moved erratically, bulging against their casing of sky. It was as if something behind them was trying to break through, pushing them forward in a thick, billowing mass, so that they blew not like clouds, but smoke. As he watched, he saw in their depths quick and sudden flashes of silver. It might have been a final rallying of sun, but it reminded him of the light glinting on the metal guns of Bob Miller’s model Sopwith Camel. And as he touched a hand to her cheek, he knew the sound he heard in the distance was not the hum of lawnmowers, but the drone of low-flying aircraft.
All About Alice
August was heavy with dying bluebottles. They gathered in velvety blue droves on the windowpanes and beat their gauzy wings against the glass. They squatted black and languid along the sills. Alice slouched low in an armchair in the kitchen, watching her father’s curious ballet. The bottoms of his trousers, rolled high above his ankles, unfurled a little further with every stumbling jeté. His newspaper carved frantic circles in the air as he struck at the flies.
“Feckers,” he shouted. “Hoors.”
Maddened, the bluebottles looped like Spitfires. They ricocheted off the lampshades and pinged off the cabinets that held Alice’s Irish dancing medals. One came to rest, dark and glittering, on the television. Thwack! and a fly dropped to the floor. Alice stared out the window as the kitchen rang with the crunch of bluebottle on linoleum.
Outside in the yard, Sunday had stilled the galvanized roof of the bathroom extension, taking away the rattle of passing lorries and leaving instead a dusting of early leaves that settled along the ridges. A stray plastic bag fluttered in the bushes inside the gate. Alice’s father flopped into his chair, flushed and triumphant. He brushed a translucent wing from the front of the sports section and turned the page.
“More tea, Daddy?” Alice made no attempt to reach for the teapot. Her father never had more tea. On the table beside him, his pills were lined up in dazzling technicolor. Alice glanced at the clock. Half past ten. At four o’clock her father would catch a bus to West Cork to holiday for a week with his cousin, Olive. His suitcase had been standing in the hall for the past three days. Alice, too, had been marking time, counting the days, giddy at the prospect of having the house to herself. She was forty-five.
—
ON MONDAY MORNING, IN her first act of delinquency since her father’s departure, Alice hung flypaper from the ceiling. Her father hated flypaper. Soon there was a dead bluebottle twisting overhead as Alice drank her tea. After breakfast, she took the dishes to the sink, leaving them to soak in a pan of scummy water. On a shelf above the sink was a photograph of a reproachful-looking woman in her mid- to late sixties, hair pulled back in a tightly wound bun. Her eyes, like Alice’s eyes, were gray flecked with green. A man had once told Alice that her eyes were the color of a storm at sea, but the eyes that stared out from the photograph were sunken and passive. Poor Mammy.
Alice took a mug of tea out to the good sitting room. She examined her reflection in the mirror. Her time away had brought lines and shadows that deepened with every passing year. She sat on the sofa, its floral print faded from dust and sunlight, and thought about what she might do. A whole week stretched in front of her: a Wild West of freedom, waiting for the charge of Alice’s wagon. There came to her then a memory, a fragment of a morning from many years ago: Barcelona with sun angling through a chink of white curtain, the crumbs of yellow madeleines scattered across her plate at breakfast. And afterward the city, vast and glorious, shimmering in front of her.
Alice felt hope stir in her stomach, felt it slosh gently with the tea. She wanted to leave her life like a balloon leaves a fairground. To slip from life’s sweaty hand and float away. She looked at her watch. She thought of her father walking the beach with Olive, stepping on bubbles of black seaweed, hearing them pop. Time was ticking. She went over to the window, looked out at the straggle of gray buildings along Main Street, and wondered again what she should do with the day until at last it came to her. She would make a batch of queen cakes and take them down to Marian’s.
—
“IT’S NOT ALL ROMANCE, you know, Alice. You’re thinking, there’s Marian with her perfect house and her perfect husband and a brand-new Fiesta outside the door. Well, I’ll be straight with you, Alice, since you’ve asked: It’s not all moonlight and roses.”
Alice was fairly sure she hadn’t asked. Marian had answered the door with the new baby over her shoulder and the toddler around her ankles. Now she was moving in a slow waltz over the kitchen tiles, a tea towel under her foot, mopping up baby-sick. With every turn, the baby dripped more vomit over her shoulder.
Through the patio doors to the garden, Alice could see sunlight dancing off the silver cover of the barbecue and warming the varnished oak decking. It highlighted the tasteful creams and taupes of the patio furniture and lingered among the late-summer flowers that bloomed in terra-cotta pots. Since Marian had married Eugene it was all “barbecues” and “suppers” and stainless steel patio heaters. Alice smoothed down her new sequined top and waited for Marian to admire it. But today Marian was missing her cues, fluffing her lines. She was more preoccupied than usual with the dribbled demands of the children.
“Issy good boy? Issy? Yessy issy!” Marian was hunched over the baby on the sofa, changing his nappy. “Toe-toes, toe-toes,” she said, putting the baby’s pink, dimpled foot to her lips, pretending to eat it. The baby wriggled in delight, gurgled, and Marian nibbled at his toes and laughed back at him. Alice boiled the kettle and searched the cupboard for a clean plate for the queen cakes. She began to arrange them in neat circles.