Rebecca Campbell - Alice’s Secret Garden

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, plankton.’

There was a profoundly disconcerting pause before Alice said, ‘I’m sorry.’ Andrew couldn’t think what she was apologising for, but it seemed a strange sort of greeting. The park was, as Alice had said, very pretty. There really were wallabies, or one at least, accompanied by what Alice said without looking was a capybara, a big brown thing like a guinea pig on steroids. There was a bandstand with a large sign warning people to stay away. Although it was a chilly April morning, the sun shone in its weak-willed way, and it ought to have been fun.

But for Alice.

Andrew became increasingly frantic in his attempts to break through her … her what exactly? Reserve? No, she’d never been reserved, and that wasn’t it now. Veneer? God no. A cloud. For some reason Andrew remembered the derivation of ‘glamour’ which was originally a Scots word for an enveloping, obscuring cloud or mist, conjured up by a spell. So that was it: here in her mad-auntie clothes, Alice had acquired a glamour. Having a word for it didn’t help. His capering produced one brief smile, one moment of flickering recognition in her eyes. They were walking slowly around the aviary when Andrew was confronted by a tastelessly plumed, gangly bird, about a yard high, with a frill of what looked like 1960s eye make-up around its head.

‘What’s that one called?’ he asked.