Alice’s Secret Garden. Rebecca Campbell
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there’s Old Crawley to think about.’
‘Crawley, of course.’
‘Ah yes, good Old Crawley.’
So Alice got the job, despite the fact that none of the panel members ever had a clear idea of who or what Old Crawley might have been.
Alice approached the body that had agreed to fund her research. She half wanted them to say that no, they really couldn’t defer her award, and who did she think she was anyway, even to ask. But in the event they were horribly decent and agreed that her funding was available for any time over the next year, after which she would have to reapply. It made her think of the tutor who’d first suggested that she stay in research. ‘They always like to have a girlie or two on their books,’ she’d said with minimal bitterness. ‘Makes it look like they have a decent equal opps policy.’
So Alice told herself that she could do the job for a year, save some money, have some fun, and then carry on with her research. After all, she was only twenty-four. Mauritius wasn’t going anywhere. And just how many species of snail could go extinct in a mere twelve months?
The plan, had it not been for the intercession of the Dead Boy, might well have worked out. As it was, everything changed when Alice entered her dreamtime.
Why her? Why then? Why the Dead Boy? The questions drifted through her mind but never pressed her to answer, never forced the issue. If someone had taken her face in their hands with gentle pressure and implored her to say what it was about her, Alice Duclos, that had made her vulnerable to this obsession, then she might have tried to say something about her father, something about the rotten, death-filled, loveless cavity where he had been, that marked his loss. She might have said something about the bitter wilderness, the tedium, the endless ache of her life with Kitty. She might have said those things, or she might only have pulled away, her eyes empty.
Whatever it was, Alice’s plans dried and shrivelled and blew away, and she stayed at Enderby’s. It certainly wasn’t that she’d fallen in love with her job; it was more that her life came to a kind of a stop when she saw the Dead Boy; everything became frozen, petrified. She didn’t want change; she most emphatically didn’t want Sheffield. What she wanted was to think about her boy, to imagine his life, to invent a life together with him. Working at Enderby’s was a link to the Dead Boy, because that’s where she was when she found him, but it also left her with the time to live in her imaginary world. She wasn’t stretched or tested. Her colleagues presented no real difficulties or challenges, and she found that she could function perfectly well with only a fraction of her consciousness above the surface, in the waking, office world.
The main problem had been Andrew. At some point during the two months of innocence before things changed, she had gradually become aware that he might like her, although she never fully admitted it to herself. And he was nice. Well, no, not nice, but funny and interesting. They’d even had a sort of a date.
‘I hate parks,’ Andrew said one afternoon. Alice had brought him a mug of tea, as it was her turn. They had a little running joke about how terrible her tea was – too milky, and not brewed for long enough. ‘You’ve got to shqueeze the bag,’ he’d say in a comical version of his northern accent, and she’d pretend to get huffy about his ingratitude.
‘What’s wrong with parks? I don’t think I could survive in London without them. It’s the only way to escape the clamour and rush.’
‘Yeah, well, that’s the cliché, but it’s just a thing that people say without meaning it, or thinking about it at all. Parks are full of weirdos, and people doing t’ai chi, and old codgers with nowhere to go, and dogs, and pigeons with gammy legs, and people snogging as if nobody can see them. The ground’s always wet, and there’re trees and shrubbery and stuff all over the place. When did anyone ever have a decent conversation in the park? No, parks are for losers. There’s that Larkin poem, you know, about turning over your failures by some bed of lobelias.’
Alice was laughing.
‘Have you ever actually been to a park?’
‘Yeah, loads.’
‘Which ones?’
‘You know, just parks. The regent thing. And that other one, the green one. No, not really. I told you, I don’t like them, I prefer to get drunk sitting down in the corner of a pub, not standing up with a can of Special Brew, and a gang of old men with bandaged heads, and piss stains down the front of their trousers.’
‘There’s a beautiful one that I used to go to when I was young. We used to bunk off from PE lessons and sit in the grass and eat ice cream. It saved me, in a way, because I used to live in the country when I was very little, and London was … difficult. I still go there sometimes. I think even you’d like it. It has an aviary, and an enclosure with wallabies, and an old-fashioned bandstand. It’s not really a Special Brew kind of park. More cream tea.’
Now Andrew was laughing, but his eyes had narrowed. He’d suddenly realised that this was the fabled shot-to-nothing, the freebie, the chance to ask Alice out without actually seeming to ask her out. No declaration of intent was needed, no fear of rejection, no embarrassment at all. This could all be passed off as an innocent trip to the park. A mere matter of friendship. But still, how to ask her. Words. What happened to them when you needed them? And anyway, it wasn’t true that there was nothing to lose. What if she didn’t even want to be friends? Wasn’t that worse than not wanting to go out with him? (On balance, he decided that it wasn’t worse, but only by between six and eleven per cent, depending on other variables.)
‘Wallabies,’ he said, after a few moments of computation. ‘You’re winding me up. No? Well, if you say so. I’ve always liked the idea of wallabies. Little kangaroos. Charming fellows. Mmmm. It is, you know, on this plane of existence, isn’t it?’
Alice already had a reputation for being a little dreamy, which Andrew used occasionally to tease her with, staying, he hoped, on the right side of being an arse.
‘Yes, Golders Hill Park. It’s a sort of offshoot of Hampstead Heath. But without the men having sex with each other in the bushes.’
‘Why don’t you show me round it? You know, the wallabies and the cream teas?’
With sublime ease the date was arranged for the next day, Saturday. Andrew’s pleasure at this was dulled after he became aware that the divine and/or profane Ophelia had been listening to the conversation. Although he didn’t have the nerve to look directly at her, he could easily picture the aspect of disdain into which her exquisite features so easily fell. For a moment his mind projected Ophelia’s contemptuous sneer onto Alice’s open and innocent face, where it curled like an obscene wound. The vision made him hate Ophelia, but he would still have given a month’s salary for the chance to pin her down on an unmade bed and …
‘I’ll meet you by the flamingos,’ said Alice.
And it was that lunchtime, Friday 14th April, that she found the Dead Boy.
Andrew couldn’t put his finger on what had changed, but it was clear that things were different as soon as he saw her. He would have noticed the difference if he hadn’t had meetings on the Friday afternoon, and he deliberately spent the time in between appointments away from his desk, just in case Alice should change her mind. After all, that’s what girls did, sometimes, didn’t they?
He’d been watching the flamingos for about ten minutes, thinking what ugly organisms they were, close up, with their birth-defect, upside-downy faces, and trying to work out why they would want to stand on one leg. Something to do with heat conservation? Showing off to lady flamingos? Just because they could? And then Alice appeared, wordlessly. Her eyes wouldn’t meet his, which wasn’t like her at all, and she was dressed in something beyond her usual endearing simplicity in a combination of heavy top and light skirt and idiot-grade, lumpen brown shoes.
‘Alice, hello,’ he said. ‘Lucky you got here. The flamingos were starting to get bored with my conversation. And to be honest even I can only take so much small talk about whatchacallit,