Chapter 5
ALICE
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Oh. God.
I unstick my tongue from the roof of my mouth, my head pounding. It takes me a moment to orientate myself: small lounge, white walls, grey carpet, boxes. No Ryan. No job.
At least I’m not on a random bus though. That’s something.
I peel my stiff neck from the sofa arm, eyeing the bottle of brandy on top of a box that once contained high-end wine.
It was a bottle I had bought Ryan for his birthday.
When I’d found it inside one of the boxes, hunting for a duvet, it had been like a deliberate knife to the heart.
And so, I had opened it. And… swigged straight from the bottle while researching Michael.
Jesus.
I look around the room. It’s like a scene from the low-budget police procedural. Boxes are half unpacked, the contents trailing out like entrails, and on the wall—
Bang.
Bang.
Bang.
The sound is aggressive. More insistent this time.
‘Alice! You in there?’
Oh crap. I pull myself upright, the room swimming.
I’m trying not to look at the pages of images I’d printed off in my bitter brandy-fuelled haze after Josie had left last night, and which I’d Blu-Tacked to the wall.
I have a vague memory of searching for my printer, emptying boxes to find some paper, and— Where did I even find Blu-Tack?
Shit. Now I remember that I hadn’t. I’d used chewing gum.
Perfect. I’m sure that will be a delight to remove from the newly painted walls.
I trip over my laptop, the movement jolting it into action. I squint down at the eighties playlist that I must have selected on Spotify.
‘Alice!’ Spencer’s voice comes from behind the door. There’s a frantic edge to it and I wonder how long it took me to come around.
‘Coming!’ I run a hand through my tangled hair, fingers snagging on a rough piece of gum. Wonderful.
I open the door a crack, the harsh morning light searing my retinas.
‘Spence, what are you doing here?’ My voice is like gravel.
‘You asked me to come and help you put up your bedroom furniture.’
Did I?
‘Right…’ I glance back at the crime scene behind me. The tinny speakers now playing ‘Angel’ by Madonna. ‘Actually, I’m not feeling great. Could we do it tomorrow?’
‘No shit. I can smell the cause of not feeling well from here.’
I run my hands through my hair, forgetting the knot of chewing gum.
‘Is that gum?’ he asks, leaning forwards and nudging the door further open.
‘Yep. Long story.’ I take a breath; too hungover to explain.
He steps in, his feet stopping mid-progress as he takes in the room. ‘Jesus.’
‘It’s… not what you think.’
‘I have no idea what I think.’ He moves towards the wall, hands already fingering the black and white print out of Pete’s chippy.
Liquid floods my mouth. ‘Sorry, I’m going to be—’
I rush from the room, only just managing to open the downstairs loo before evacuating the contents of my stomach into the toilet bowl.
Once flushed, I sit there, head on the toilet seat as I try to piece together last night.
There was dancing, I’m sure. And possibly a phone call?
A fresh round of nausea occupies me for the next ten minutes.
When I return to the room, Spence has placed some of the insides of the boxes into neat piles and has cleared the debris from the floor.
He hands me a glass of water, which I take gratefully.
‘Who’s Michael?’ He nods to the wall where it seems I’ve stuck a mural of faces, a few lines of barely holding on to the wall, masking tape-connected photos that really don’t need connecting, one of which is Kit Harrington and, Jesus, is that Sean Bean?
‘It’s a long story…’ I panic, looking around for the letter, my head pounding.
‘There was a letter…’ Did I imagine it or dream it all?
But then my eyes land on the yellow paper, folded beside a pile of tissues next to a photo of me and Ryan.
Not all dancing and sleuthing then. My eyes are stinging, evidence that I hit the maudlin stage of being brandy drunk.
I shuffle onto the sofa and curl up. ‘Coffee?’ I ask hopefully. Spencer returns with a cup and two paracetamols in his palm.
‘Thanks.’ I knock back the pills as he sits down, eyeing the room then me.
‘I don’t suppose I rang you last night, did I?’
He shakes his head. ‘Nope. You sent me a text to ask if I could help you with the furniture. Why?’
I grimace. ‘I think I might have drunk-dialled Ryan.’
With shaking hands, I reach for my phone, swiping the screen but the battery is dead. Probably a good thing. I’m not sure I can take reading any messages I might have sent last night.
He raises an eyebrow. ‘Want to tell me what’s going on?’
I lean back and close my eyes before giving him the highlights. Or lowlights, depending on your take, and then excuse myself for a shower.
I wash my hair, before remembering the gum stuck fast at the corner of my right temple, so when I return to the lounge, my hair – while clean – is in an even worse state than before.
Spence is standing before my wall of shame. He pushes his glasses up and leans closer. ‘So I’m guessing this is your… mood board?’ He nods to the picture of half the cast of Game of Thrones, the front cover of Wuthering Heights, and a mug shot of Jacob Elordi. Jesus.
‘I… It’s just research.’
I try to drag a brush through my hair, but it halts at the ball of hair.
Spence steps forward. ‘Let me see if I can…’ His fingers reach for my hair as he tries to pull some strands away.
‘Ouch! Can you give Josie a call? My phone’s dead and I need her to cut this out.’ In another life, Josie was a hairdresser.
I was thinking of getting a fringe anyway.
Not long after, with my wall of shame still glaring into the room, I’m sitting in the kitchen. Spencer had pulled out the chairs stacked up in the corner. The table is too large and is currently leaning against the wall.
‘Keep still.’ Josie huffs her glossy auburn hair away, as her scissors snip.
I still don’t know who I called last night; my phone is vehemently charging next to the kettle. Finally, the clump is removed and she’s crouching in front of me, levelling the edges of my new fringe.
Spence’s phone rings and he excuses himself.
‘That’ll be the mystery girlfriend,’ Josie says, glancing towards the door.
‘You think?’ I crane my neck, but all I can see is his head dipped towards the phone, scruffy light-brown hair falling over his glasses.
‘Yep.’ She steps back, examining her handiwork and passing me a mirror. ‘There you go. Not bad, if I do say so myself.’
I take in my new look. It’s a bit Dakota Johnson. It looks nice, or rather it would if I didn’t have a sheen of sweat across my skin, and my eyes didn’t look like piss holes in the snow.
‘Thanks. Everything OK?’ I ask, looking up at Spence who holds a small smile in the corner of his mouth as he looks down at the phone in his hand. Josie busies herself putting away her scissors, but I haven’t missed the way the lines around her eyes have tightened.
‘Georgia OK?’ I ask him.
‘Huh? Yeah. She’s staying for dinner at a friend’s. I’ll pick her up later.’
‘So, what do you think?’ I frame my face with my hands, but he’s distracted, his hand still holding the phone.
‘Hello?’
‘Sorry. Yeah. Looks good.’ He slips his phone away. ‘Shall we get started on the furniture?’
What I want is to go to bed. Except my bed isn’t built and is propped up, along with my wardrobes and bedside cabinets, in an upstairs room that I’ve only walked into once. I need to rebuild my furniture – my life too.
It takes us a few hours, a few curses, copious cups of coffee, and discarded screws, but by the end of the day I have a room that resembles a bedroom, with an empty bookcase waiting to be filled.
Josie has already left.
Spence has returned from the chippy down the road, not forgetting to buy me a few sachets of salad cream – my condiment of choice since I was a kid – given that my cupboards are bare.
I shift on the sofa so we’re facing each other, plates balanced on our laps, my radio playing in the background.
I look around the stark room; I’ll have to get a TV at some point.
‘Titanium’ starts playing as I dip a chip into the salad cream. ‘God, this song reminds me of prom… Feels like a lifetime ago,’ I say through a mouthful. ‘Do you remember Jared?’
‘The lovesick poet?’
I nudge Spence with my foot.
‘He wasn’t a lovesick poet.’
‘No, he was a pretentious arse who had you swooning after him like he was Darcy, but without the decent prose.’
I think back to our last year at school. Jared was the new kid, and I had fallen head over heels for him, as did half the year eleven girls. He was mysterious. Aloof. Damaged. And I wanted nothing more than to fix him.
Spencer takes a swig of his lemonade. ‘Who, I might add, you ditched me for.’
‘Oh shush, we’d only agreed to go together so we didn’t look like complete losers. And I didn’t ditch you. I spent most of the night with you. And, if I recall, you didn’t do so bad yourself that night.’
‘Hmmm, well, that’s up for debate…’ he trails off and I know he’s thinking about Heather, about the way he stood by her when she got pregnant that night, and how she’d left Georgia with him, just a few months old, telling him she ‘couldn’t be a mother right now’.
‘But,’ he continues, ‘I suppose if you hadn’t got together with Mr Pretentious Arsehole, I would have spent the rest of the night with you, getting drunk on cheap cider and dancing to ‘Mr Brightside’, rather than hooking up with Heather, and then I wouldn’t have George.
’ He examines a chip then drops it into his mouth. ‘Huh, maybe I should thank him?’
‘Thank him? I don’t bloody think so. I found out he wasn’t actually writing poetry for me, he was using lyrics from Bob Dylan songs and handing them out with his broken guy routine to at least five of us.’
‘Sounds about right.’
I change the subject. ‘It’s mad that you’re a teacher. Who’d have thought that was what you’d end up doing.’
‘It’s alright.’
‘And you’re happy? With the way things turned out?’
He leans down, putting his plate on the floor. ‘What, teaching a bunch of sixteen-year-olds about Hamlet?’
Although he sounds flippant, he worked so hard to qualify.
Getting a degree with a toddler wasn’t easy for him.
His parents helped a lot, back then. They moved to Cyprus a few years ago.
Living the retirement dream as Spence puts it, all beer at noon, walks on the beach, and a ground-level apartment next to a pool.
I did what I could when I was home – took Georgia to the park, looked after her while he studied. But all of that graft is down to Spence. Luckily the school that offered him a job had a breakfast and after-school club which Georgia loved.
‘And you do have the added bonus of being the hot teacher with all the swim mums swooning after you…’
He shakes his head. Eyes clouded with thought for a moment. ‘And my irritating best friend has moved back home, so that’s something.’
‘It is. I missed you.’ No matter how happy I was in London, and how successful I became, I always missed not having Spence close by.
I had friends there, but they knew that version of me, they didn’t know the version of me that would sneak out and stay over at his house so I could escape Mum and Dad’s arguments, which were held late into the night behind closed doors.
They didn’t know the girl who was always in her sister’s hand-me-downs, that cried when her shoes were rubbing the backs of her heels.
But Spence did. Spencer knows me like no other person on this planet.
‘I missed you too.’ His phone vibrates and he frowns. ‘Hey, pudding, what’s up?’
Then, after a moment, ‘Are you sure that’s what they said?’
I put my glass down and lean forwards.
‘Maybe they were talking about someone else?’
I can hear Georgia’s voice, urgent, hushed, desperate from the other end of the phone.
‘OK, OK. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.’
He hangs up and looks at me. ‘She overheard the other girls talking about her when she went to the loo. I need to fetch her.’
‘Do you want me to come?’
‘No… she’ll be embarrassed. You’re kind of her hero.’
He grabs his car keys and I follow him to the door. ‘Hope she’s OK. Is there anything I can do? I can pop over tomorrow, take her out? We haven’t had any girl time for a while.’
Spence hesitates and looks down to his keys. ‘Yeah. She’d like that. Year eight girls can be brutal.’ He rushes his hands through his thick hair, just a hint of the curls left from when he was younger. ‘What would have helped you, you know, when you were thirteen, and kids were being kids?’
‘Honestly?’
He nods, waiting for a pearl of wisdom.
‘You.’
He gives me a quick hug. ‘Get some sleep, eh? And stay away from the brandy.’
I nod, close the door behind him and clear the detritus away. I bin the chip paper, my eyes drawn to my phone, staring at me from the corner of the room.
Taking a deep breath, I swipe the screen and click on my WhatsApp messages.
There’s my message to Spence, asking him to come and help me with the furniture. But other than that, there are no other texts. I take a deep breath and click on recent calls. Nothing there either. Oh, thank God. I didn’t drunk-dial Ryan and…
No.
I have a flash of memory. I was dancing to Kate Bush, pausing occasionally for another swig of brandy. I see my fingers tapping on my laptop, red chipped nails, not researching, not cutting and pasting the various cast members of Game of Thrones, but writing.
An email.
Oh Christ. What have I done?