CAROL MARINELLI - Putting Alice Back Together

Avoid alcohol.

I didn’t know if they worked, I really didn’t, or if it was just knowing I had them that helped—because even before the little yellow pill had dissolved on my tongue, I felt calmer.

I headed back out there, scorching with shame but trying to act as if nothing just happened.

‘Where did you get to?’ Roz asked, but she didn’t wait for my answer. ‘Are you coming out for a cigarette?’

Nicole was enjoying herself. Christopher, having ordered more champagne for the group, was saying goodbye, though he didn’t extend a farewell to me.

‘Have a great night, Nicole.’ He kissed her on the cheek and she smiled back at him.

‘Thanks for coming.’

Only then did he smirk in my direction. ‘It was no trouble at all.’

I stood outside with Roz and I didn’t have a cigarette, I just breathed in the cool night air and tried not to think about what I’d just done.

‘I can’t believe she’s going into work tomorrow…’ Roz was chatting away. ‘She’s flying tomorrow night…’

‘That’s Nic.’ I went into my bag for my cigarettes and I pulled out the appointment card too.

‘I’ll come back to the flat with you after work and we can all—’

‘Actually…’ I hesitated. I didn’t really know how to tell Roz. ‘I’m leaving work a bit early tomorrow, I’ve got an appointment.’ I knew she was curious, that she was waiting for me to explain, but I didn’t and Roz would never push. ‘I’ll be back in time to pick up Nic. You can meet me back at the flat.’

‘That’s fine,’ Roz said. ‘I’ll just meet you at the airport.’

I’d been intending to cancel.

Or just not show up.

I had no intention of examining my past, but I needed a prescription and, I reluctantly admitted, perhaps I should speak to someone—not about it , of course, but about other things.

Maybe this Lisa could help.

Another Alice

I liked the piano. It was my first instrument, the violin my second, but it was the piano I loved.

I hated the lessons, but I sort of understood I had to have them.

Young Mozart I was not—but I could read music.

I just could.

To me, it was easier than learning to read English—a quaver was an eighth of a whole, that dot meant you lengthened the note.

I supposed I had not talent as such but, as my mother would tell everyone she met, her youngest daughter had an ‘ear for music’.

I lived and breathed music—the classics, hymns, anything I heard I wanted to play.

And as a teenager it had been considered nerdy.

Seriously nerdy.

Especially as I’d also sung in the church choir.

Of course I’d got teased at school and hated it when people found out about my other life, but I loved hymns and singing and a couple of times I even played the organ.

Yep—a serious nerd.

There’s nobody musical in my family. Mum’s a nurse, dad’s in sales and marketing, Eleanor is my oldest sister and basically does nothing apart from look good—well, she has to, she’s married to a cosmetic dentist. Then there’s Bonny the middle one, who takes after Mum and is a nurse too. It really took a lot of convincing from my teachers for Mum to realise that she wasn’t being ripped off when the school suggested that if I wanted to pursue a career in music, then I needed some extra private tuition. (I was fifteen then. Dad and Mum had just broken up so it caused a few rows, Dad said he was paying Mum plenty—Mum said… well, plenty.)

So, with things a bit tight, instead of more lessons with my regular music teacher, Mum found various students from a school of music to coach me. I was doing fairly well and looking at a career in teaching. As well as lessons and choir and choir practice, I had to practise my instruments for hours every day—though I didn’t mind practising the piano. In fact, I lived for it. It was the lessons I hated.

Still, as I said, I understood that I had to have them and just put up with them, I suppose…

Till Bonny’s wedding loomed, when everything changed.

As far as I can remember, Eleanor’s wedding just seemed to happen without fuss. I was ten and, along with Bonny, I was a bridesmaid, but I don’t remember the whole world stopping in preparation for Eleanor’s big day—I just remember the church and the party afterwards.

Oh, and the gleaming teeth in the photos.

One minute Eleanor was dating Noel and the next we were in the church, or so it had seemed.

Whereas Bonny’s wedding was the full circus.

Bonny’s life was a full circus, but the wedding and the preparation were the worst.

It was to be a New Year’s Eve wedding—it was the only way Lex’s relatives could all get over for it, and Mum, devastated that her middle child would be moving to Australia as soon as she took her final nursing exams, would do anything to please and appease. And, as much as I love Bonny, boy, did she take full advantage of the situation.

I was seventeen and full of teenage angst and wondering if I’d ever lose my virginity, especially since I’d never even been kissed. I was heavily in love with Gus, my latest music tutor, and I was also very aware that I was behind on piano practice and my exams were just a few months away. Which sounds ages, but it really wasn’t.

Not that any of this mattered to Bonny.

Lex, Bonny’s fiancé, was a sexy six-foot-three Australian who worked for some international pharmaceutical company and was helping to compile statistics both here and in America. They had met at the hospital Bonny worked at, had fallen in love and within three months had got engaged.

Everyone said Bonny was too young to marry, but Lex refused anything less. He didn’t want to live with her—if she was going to take the leap and move to Australia, then it would be as his wife.

He’s a nice guy, Lex.

A really nice guy, and even if Bonny was a bit young, I could understand why she didn’t want to let him go.

I had a crush on him—of course I did—I had a crush on everyone!

Bonny went a touch crazy in the weeks before the wedding: it was colour schemes and flowers and cakes and invitations. The whole house was wedding central. I couldn’t practise my violin or piano for two weeks before the big day. Really, I didn’t mind missing the violin, I could make up the time later, but I don’t think I’d ever been even two days without playing the piano. I didn’t just practise… I played. If I was tired, if I was depressed, if I’d been teased, if I’d had a shit day, I’d play. It didn’t lift me, instead it met me. I could just pour it out and hear how I was feeling.

Sometimes I glimpsed it—this zone, a place, like a gap that I stepped into and filled with a sound that was waiting to be made.

There’s no one else I can talk about it with, except for Gus—he gets it. Gus says that playing is a relief.

He’s right, that’s what it feels like sometimes—relief.

An energy that builds and it has to be let out somewhere.

It’s more than relief—it’s release.

Or it would be if it didn’t upset Bonny.

Everything upset Bonny.

Everything was done to appease her.

Which was why I had been forced to wear pink.

A sort of dusky pink, which was fashionable, my mum insisted—as if she would know. As if a size twenty, middle-aged woman with bad teeth and the beginnings of a moustache would know.

I hated it—I hated it so much, there was no way I was going to wear it. But my threats fell on deaf ears. It was Bonny’s Special Day—and what was a bit of public humiliation to a seventeen-year-old as long as the bride was smiling?

So I wrote reams of pages of ‘I hate Bonny’, ‘I want to kill Bonny’ and ‘I want to gouge out her eyes’ as I lay on my bed the afternoon before the wedding with the beastly pink dress hanging up in plastic on my wardrobe. I had my period and was having visions of flooding in the aisle, and to add to the joy, the hairdresser was here and, as anyone with frizzy red hair would understand, I wasn’t looking forward to that either.