‘Yeah, there’s all of that. Plus, you know, it just gets so fucking lonely a lot of the time. Sitting at the kitchen table, having dinner together, just the two of us. If you don’t put the radio on or something you can hear the clock ticking on the wall.’
Selena’s wide, hazel eyes were full of sympathy: ‘Look, any time you want to come round and have a meal at our place … Just say the word. There’s five of us and it gets pretty loud and, you know, we have a good time. It might take you out of things.’
Returning Selena’s gaze, Alison took a long breath and said, in a tone of voice suddenly nervous and confiding: ‘Look, Selena, we only met a couple of weeks ago, but there’s something I want you to know about me. Something you really have to know, actually.’
Selena was startled by the change in her manner. She waited for some passengers to jostle past them on their way to the exit door, then said: ‘OK. What is it?’
Saying nothing, her eyes still locked into Selena’s, Alison took hold of her friend’s hand with a gentle grip. She lifted it, and now, moving it slowly, unobtrusively, so as not to attract the attention of the other passengers, she laid it on her own left thigh, just above the knee. She squeezed Selena’s hand, so that Selena herself was encouraged — even compelled — to respond by giving Alison’s thigh a reciprocal, questioning squeeze.
Selena’s eyes, not leaving Alison’s for a moment, flickered with surprise. There was a long silence between them: a silence charged with confusion and uncertainty. Selena’s hand did not leave her friend’s thigh: in fact it was still being held in place there. Gradually, her lips widened into a smile; the smile became broader, revealing her teeth; and at last, unable to contain her feelings any longer, she burst into laughter.
‘What the fuck!’ she said, and Alison started laughing as well.
‘What the fucking fuck!’ Selena repeated, and neither of them seemed to mind now that some of the passengers were turning to look at them. ‘Have you got a false leg?’
‘Yes!’ said Alison, barely able to get the word out, as she was by now doubled up with laughter herself. ‘Oh my God, the way you looked just then!’
‘My God, I didn’t know what you were doing! And now this … It’s like … What is it like? What’s it made of? It’s like plastic.’
‘Of course it’s plastic. They don’t make them out of wood any more, you know. I’m not bloody Long John Silver.’
‘But … what happened? How long have you had it?’
The bus staggered its way through Kings Heath and along Swanshurst Lane as Alison told her the story. Passengers came and went, the bus changed drivers at Acocks Green, but the two students were wrapped up in each other, and took no notice.
‘When I was ten,’ said Alison, ‘I kept getting these pains in my leg for no reason. Really bad pains that wouldn’t go away. We moved to Birmingham round about then so I was going in for hundreds of tests at the Queen Elizabeth and in the end they diagnosed me with this very rare thing called Ewing’s sarcoma, which is a really aggressive kind of cancer. I was on chemotherapy for months but in the end that wasn’t enough and they told me they were going to have to cut the whole thing off.’
‘Shit, that’s terrible.’
‘Well, the alternative was kind of worse, wasn’t it? Here I am, after all. Alive and kicking.’
Selena couldn’t work out at first whether this was a joke or not. When Alison’s smile made it clear that it was, she gave a relieved laugh of her own.
‘Do you want to see it?’ Alison asked now. ‘It’s very realistic.’
She rolled the left leg of her jeans almost up to the knee to expose a section of prosthesis which did indeed have the convincing look of flesh and bone.
‘The knee doesn’t look quite so good — I’ll show you that later,’ said Alison, rolling her trouser leg down again, ‘but otherwise it’s all right, isn’t it? They even matched my skin colour. When they’re ready to make the leg they give you a book of samples and you have to flick through all the different skin tones, just like you were choosing a carpet or something.’
‘You’re kidding.’
‘No. I could have had one white leg, if I’d wanted to. How cool would that have been? I could have been a living example of ethnic diversity.’
Alison explained that the cancer had been so aggressive that the surgeons had had to perform a transfemoral amputation, above the knee. This meant that her left leg was lacking all the motor power of the knee joint — one of the strongest joints in the human body — so she could still only take stairs, for instance, step by step, one stair at a time. Nonetheless, on level surfaces, where there were not too many people around to impede her progress and get in her way, she was able to walk with perfect confidence.
‘How long did it take,’ Selena asked, ‘before it started to feel … you know, natural?’
‘Oh, it never feels natural,’ said Alison. ‘Never has, never will. But learning to feel — I don’t know — comfortable with it didn’t take too long. I worked with a physical therapist: in the hospital at first, and then after that she started coming to our house. That went on for a few months. Stressful time for everyone, very stressful. This guy I was telling you about — Steve — my mother’s boyfriend, he was around at this time. In fact that was when he showed his true colours.’
‘Was he not very supportive, you mean?’
‘Not really. He started shagging the physical therapist.’
After a second or two they both started laughing again at that, it sounded so ridiculous. In any case it was easier, for Alison, to laugh about it than to remember the real agony of that time, when all her own hopes had seemed to lie shattered around her, and in the face of Steve’s betrayal her mother turned into a wreck who drank herself to sleep most nights and seemed to age ten years in as many months. She really, really didn’t feel like seeing him again tonight.
‘Hey, look,’ she said to Selena, quietly now, ‘you couldn’t come with me to the pub tonight, could you? Safety in numbers, and all that. Only it’ll be the first time I’ve seen him in about seven years and I could do with having a friend there, to stop me doing something stupid.’
*
Outside The Spread Eagle, Alison laid a warning hand on Selena’s arm and said: ‘She’s white, by the way.’
‘Who?’
‘My mum.’
‘So?’
‘Some people are surprised, that’s all.’
‘I think I can handle it. As long as she doesn’t have two heads or something.’
‘You know what I mean. I just thought you’d probably be expecting …’
‘Alison — stay cool. Everything’s cool. You need to calm down a bit.’
‘I know. OK.’
Alison nodded her head, and took a few deep breaths, composing herself, trying to find her centre of gravity. She held out her hands, palms downwards, and pushed down as if on a pair of invisible parallel bars.
‘Right,’ she said, after a few moments of this. ‘I’m ready.’
They went inside.
Steve seemed to have lost most of his hair since Alison had seen him last, but apart from that, he looked very much the same. He kissed her on the cheek and gave her a big hug and she had little option but to put up with both of these things. When he went to the bar to get their drinks she could not help noticing how her mother’s eyes followed him appraisingly, longingly: and yet she was probably the only person in the pub who would have given this balding, potbellied figure a second glance. Alison did her best not to betray her feelings but inside she was letting out a long, deep sigh of resignation. It was going to happen all over again. Life was all too predictable sometimes.