Chapter 30
After the first days, Tom knew he was staying in New York for longer than two weeks.
He would find a job, a place to live and wait for Teddy to reappear or for Alice to tell him where Teddy was.
He was staying so he could go to meet his mother, give her Jenny’s ring and complete the task he’d been set; but he wanted to stay for the summer, perhaps even into autumn.
Something was happening, not just in the East Village, where something was always happening, whether it was a Be-in, a Sit-in, a Love-in, some new band of Warhol’s at the Dom further along St Mark’s Place, a fight on Astor Place or a fire in the Lithuanian deli down the way.
There was something in the air, on the streets.
It was electric, febrile, the heat already there even though it was only now just April.
They were saying the scene was over in San Francisco, that the Haight-Ashbury dream was dead, that the war was never going to end, that society was going to burn.
It was scary, but it was exciting. He wasn’t just going to go back to England to live with Uncle Henry, stick his head in the sand again.
So he stayed, partly to work out what to do next, partly for the experience, but also, finally, he wanted to stay for Alice. He couldn’t stop thinking about her.
The only trouble was he never saw her: she was at work, or out with Merlin or her friends. Sometimes he thought she was avoiding him, but Tom told himself not to be vain, or crazy – why would a girl like her want to avoid him?
One afternoon, lying on the sofa in the basement, as the sounds upstairs of someone, he thought Merlin and Alice, having sex grew louder and louder, Tom decided to go out for a walk.
He’d get the latest Village Voice for the job ads, and visit Gem Spa, where he’d treat himself to an egg cream, his favourite New York drink.
He had a new pair of black, thick-framed glasses now, which had taken almost the last of his savings. On the busy pavement on Third Avenue, waiting for the lights to change, he was scanning the ads in the Voice when someone bumped into him.
‘Oh!’ he said in surprise. It was Alice.
She wore a long orange-and-coral Victorian dress trimmed with lace and with a high collar.
Lots of her clothes were old, and she wore them with cardigans and sturdy brown boots, not going barefoot like a lot of people in the Bowery and the East Village.
Her hair was tied up in a knot. She was hugging a brown-paper bag to her chest, looking down at the ground, and as she looked up in apology his heart swelled as she smiled when she saw it was him.
‘Hey!’ she said, laughing. ‘I’m so sorry. I was miles away. Where have you been?’
He showed her the newspaper and the drink and she nodded, and smiled, and the lights changed. WALK, WALK , WALK .
They crossed the road and stood on the corner of Third and St Mark’s Place.
It was a lovely afternoon, warm, fresh, with a light, scented breeze.
For once, the manic activity on the streets had abated, the theatre of East Village life that was always open, whenever you went out.
‘I was going for a walk,’ said Tom. ‘Will you come with me?’
‘Ah,’ said Alice. ‘I promised Merlin I’d get him these.
’ She held up the brown bag. ‘The Polish bakery over on Cooper Square sells broken cookies and stale bread. They’re a good price too.
If you eat it right away the bread’s still pretty fresh.
Merlin hasn’t been out today; he’s working on a plan for a new protest movement where we invade theatres and galleries holding signs and singing songs of peace.
It’s very powerful. He’s writing it all down. I said I’d bring him some food.’
‘It’s such a lovely day. Just a few blocks,’ said Tom.
She looked up at the warm, blue sky, and down at the paper bag. Oh, screw it,’ she said. ‘Merlin never brings me lunch when I’m working.’
‘It’s almost five,’ Tom pointed out.
‘You’re so bourgeois, Tom,’ she said, eyes twinkling. ‘Who cares what time lunch is.’
‘Where shall we go?’ he said, unbelievably happy that he had her to himself, even if just for a short while.
They started walking down the wide avenue, right where Third merged with the Bowery. ‘Let’s go to Sara Roosevelt Park,’ she said. ‘It’s long and thin and kinda crazy but there are kids there, paddling, and playing games. I walk there sometimes and sit and watch them all. The families, you know.’
‘Does it make you miss home?’ he said, but knew instantly that was the wrong thing to say.
‘Me?’ She walked a little faster. ‘I don’t ever miss home.’
‘Oh, okay.’ He nodded as though to indicate she didn’t have to say any more, but she was striding ahead of him now.
‘That’s the one thing I tell myself when it’s cold or we don’t have any money for food or Merlin and I fight about whether to go to California.
I say: Alice Jansen, you’re okay. You’re here.
You’re not back there.’ She stopped abruptly, wrapping her arms round the bag of broken cookies and resting her chin on it.
‘Anyway, let’s not talk about me. You’ve been here nearly two weeks, Tom Raven, and I don’t know the first thing about you, other than that you sure do need to wear glasses. ’
He nodded. ‘Go on, then, ask me what you want.’
‘Okay,’ she said, kicking a pile of syringes out of the way, and they carried on walking down the Bowery, in the sunshine.
There was a man playing the bongos by the fire station, and a friendly dog on a string without any discernible owner that trotted alongside them for a while.
Alice said hi to both of them. Both of them seemed to know her.
‘Hey, Alice,’ an old guy in a white coat and trousers said, raising his hand as they crossed another road. ‘Come in later, I’ll see what I can find for you!’
‘Thanks, Morty,’ Alice called. ‘You’re a doll.’
‘Who’s that?’
‘Oh, a sweet guy. He works at the J he knows I like it.’
‘That’s nice of him.’
‘I know. Aren’t people nice, though?’ she said. ‘So much more so than I realized they were. No one back home was … Anyway. It’s delicious. When I’ve sold another poster, I’ll take you there for lunch.’
‘It’s a date,’ he said, watching as she held up the traffic, moving them across the road with a nod and a smile to the driver, who waved at her, almost in gratitude for holding him up. ‘I’ll buy a poster tomorrow.’
She laughed, and they walked on.
‘So when did you move to London?’
‘In 1955. I was nine.’
‘Did you like London?’
‘Not at first. I do now. It’s – everything. Like here. Music, food, ideas, art. I really hadn’t seen much of anything in that way before I moved there. We had nothing, my dad and I.’ He was silent for a moment. ‘I don’t think about it very much. But really we had nothing.’
‘So it was just you two? Where’s your mom?’
He hesitated. ‘She died when I was a baby.’
‘Ah. I’m sorry that happened.’
‘That’s okay, thank you.’
‘Haven’t you been back? To Scotland?’
‘Nope.’
‘That must be kinda weird.’
‘It is, I suppose. I missed it at first. I made up my mind not to think about it. Just to get on with it.’
‘Is that why your American accent’s so good?
’ she said. They were sitting on a bench in Sara D.
Roosevelt, a long narrow park south of East Houston.
Some kids were playing with an American football; some were hitting balls with a baseball bat into a net, and toddlers everywhere ran up and down the narrow paths and over the little rocky outcrops, screaming with delight.
‘Why would that make my accent good?’
They had picked up take-out coffees. Alice was eating a broken cookie.
She dunked it in her coffee, then dropped a few crumbs on the ground for an expectant sparrow, and said thoughtfully, ‘Because you had a Scottish accent, didn’t you?
So you must have learned an English accent when you got to London, and I’ve heard you talking to people like you’re an American too.
You just get on with it, like you said.’
‘Oh,’ he said, floored by her insight. ‘Maybe.’
She shrugged. ‘It’s useful.’
‘Sure. But it also means I don’t really know …’ He paused, because it sounded so dramatic. ‘I don’t really know who I am.’
‘We shouldn’t know yet, should we?’ She took a drink of coffee. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Do you mind? Does it bother you?’
She considered this. ‘I think it does, yes. Yes. I think I went to sleep, when my –’ She closed her eyes briefly. ‘A few years ago. And I’m still asleep. And, lately, I’m thinking about waking up. You know, right before you open your eyes, you’re aware it’s coming.’
‘Wow,’ said Tom.
‘Do you ever feel like that?’
‘No,’ said Tom. ‘I feel like I’m removed from everything. That I’m on the sidelines, an observer. I’m not in the action. And I don’t like that about myself.’
‘Why do you think you’re like that?’
He’d noticed before that she asked more questions than she answered.
She was interested in everyone and everything.
Ginger, Merlin, Merlin’s sleazy friends, the boy down the road whose dad beat him, Morty from the deli, the hippies who slept in Cooper Square – she didn’t try to tell anyone what to do, or give her opinion. She listened.
‘My accident, with my eye, it changed lots of things,’ said Tom.
‘It brought my dad down to see me. It made me think about what I wanted. I want so much from life, don’t you, Alice?
Only I don’t know how or when. And I feel …
I feel, yes, on the sidelines, a lot of the time.
Like I have to hold back, like I’m not sure who I am.
’ He took a deep breath. ‘I think it’s because of my parents,’ he said eventually. ‘That’s why I’m here.’
‘Oh,’ she said, and she frowned. ‘Your mom, dying, it must have been so hard. Do you remember her?’