Arvon Shortlisted entry- Alice by Louise Taylor

Five years old and Alice runs from school with the toggles on her too-big red duffle coat wrongly fastened and a mitten on elastic raking through the leaves. The handles of a tightly tied plastic bag, heavy with damp fabric - this morning’s pants and tights - are biting into the fingers of one hand but the other hand, held high above her head, is waving a piece of black paper that flaps and bends around a mass of cotton wool, glitter and pipe cleaners. Alice’s sister looks down her nose a little when she sees it, fearing a challenge for one of the artwork spots on the fridge, but their mother beams, sweeps Alice up into a hug and says, ‘Sweetheart! How wonderful! And you did this all by yourself!’

            Six years old, her tongue wedged into the gap where a front tooth used to be, Alice wobbles and weaves on her sister’s old bike - now personalised for Alice with a shiny white straw basket, a multi-coloured ribbon wound through the spokes of the front wheel and three red streamers hanging limply from the top of a bendy pole behind the seat. Alice’s father grips the bike’s frame, one hand at the front of the seat, the other at the back. Within his encircling arms, Alice is safe enough to be brave. His voice urges her to pedal, pedal, now Ali, pedal! Her left knee bumps hard up against his left forearm but he seems scarcely to notice; he is running now and his voice is louder. And then he is gone, falling behind her like a sweet wrapper tossed from the window of a car on the motorway, and Alice is off, with suddenly cold air reddening her cheeks, stinging tears from her eyes and holding a smile fast down over her face. She can hear her three red streamers lacerating the air in loud triumph behind her and knows, although cannot see and will not dare to look down, that the ribbon wound through the front wheel spokes is now a glorious melting pot of colour. She hopes her mother has remembered to switch on the video camera.

            Nine years old, and Alice is arranging swimming trophies on the sideboard. The most recent has been in her possession for less than a day. She rubs her thumb over the little metal plaque engraved with her name, reliving her victory, Braille-fashion. She thinks she might try to persuade her mother to buy her a new swimming costume: a purple Speedo one. She has seen one in the sports shop in town and she is sure it is just right for Alice the junior freestyle champion.    

            Not yet eleven years old and Alice has passed the exam for the grammar school. Her father opens the letter and Alice sees her result in his eyes even before he smiles. They call out to her mother, and the three of them plan how to break the news to Alice’s sister, who failed the same exam three years earlier.

            Alice is fourteen. She has a best friend called Caroline. Alice and Caroline walk to and from school together; they trawl the shops at the weekend, learning how to stretch five pounds to cover the cost of a new outfit for a disco both would deny they are apprehensive about attending; they sneak small glasses of Lambrusco from a half-empty bottle a parent has left on a kitchen table; they play tennis in the summer and go to the cinema in the winter. And they talk, talk, talk. Alice’s parents make pointed jokes about installing a separate phone line just for Alice. Alice smiles and tosses her hair - dark brown pre-Raphaelite curls that Caroline covets. Alice professes to want Caroline’s straight blonde bob but secretly she loves her own hair best. There is no-one in school with hair as long, as thick, as well-managed, as nice as hers. Alice’s mother spends good money at a very good hairdresser on Alice’s hair. Nonetheless, Alice loves Caroline and Caroline, of course, loves Alice. There are boys, too, and both girls tot up admirers but decline any offers that are not double dates. They practise their future signatures on the covers of their school exercise books and judge potential boyfriends partly on the strength, or otherwise, of their surnames.

            Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen and Alice takes some exams early and others with her peers. At prize-givings, she stands more often than she sits, and the headmistress uses the word stellar to describe her results. Clutching a piece of paper from the exam board, she makes the local paper, then the nationals, and even the TV news: one of those deliciously, deliriously happy teenage girls  – skin so scrubbed and fresh it seems haloed  - who make producers rub their hands with glee and middle-aged viewers sigh and smile as they remember that they, too, were once a little like that.

            And then, parental car piled high with clothes, stereo, duvet, books, TV and more clothes, Alice is driven off to her new life, to the university that wanted her as much as she wanted it. She waves goodbye to Caroline, who is going elsewhere, and also to a boyfriend whose surname would, she feels, have been a lovely match with Alice if only he had aspirations to match hers.

            At twenty-two, after twelve months of temples, beach parties, jungle treks, fruit picking and beer drinking, Alice the Exhibitioner and First Class graduate returns from her round-the-world trip. Her bank balance is empty and her credit card has been cut off, but Alice has a job to go to. It is the sort of job that makes even her fifty year old parents juggle feelings of pride and envy.

            On the evening of her quarter century, Alice and her friends gather for cocktails in Covent Garden. They assess their lives: the jobs tried out, the promotions and plaudits achieved; the boyfriends and girlfriends gained, lost and discarded; hideous house shares and first steps taken onto the property ladder. Later, lubricated by Cosmopolitans and Red Russians, each person’s words leaping and sliding over those of their friends’, they outline their futures: they are still young enough for nothing to seem out of reach.

            At the top of the Eiffel Tower, when she is just thirty-two, Alice is surprised by a proposal. Because she loves him, she says yes, though she knows that, contrary to her teenage self, she will disappoint him by refusing to take his surname and insisting that any children have both parents’ names.

            Alice takes her time getting around to the children. At thirty-five and pregnant, she is slightly bemused to be described as an elderly primagravida. Elderly? Alice has never felt more alive and so very far from death. 

            Alice’s sister, mother to three, catches sight of one of the laminated copies of the birth plan that Alice has made for the hospital staff. She bites her lip, tries not laugh, fails, says, ‘You know, all that matters is that you and the baby come out of this healthy and in one piece.’

            Alice frowns, tells her sister (one caesarean section, two ventouse deliveries and an awful lot of shouting and stitches) that she is being too negative. Alice has read the books and been to the classes. She will not need pain relief because the contractions will surge around her like storm-stirred waves still in thrall to the moon. She will imagine herself – Alice, just Alice – sitting alone under a darkened sky on a rock in the middle of all those waves, waiting for her baby to wash up on the shore.

             Lying on a hospital bed, two days into labour, the storm’s force is not yet spent. Alice snarls at a figure in blue scrubs who asks Alice’s husband how Mum is getting on. The figure does not register the snarl but merely says, ‘Let’s see if we can feel this baby’s head, there’s a love. Just drop your knees.’

            Shaking its head, the figure surfaces. A mouthful of teeth and the concerned whites of a pair of eyes pass across Alice’s face. ‘Yep, the head’s descended all right but this lip of cervix just isn’t budging. What about the trace?’

            Afterwards, Alice is almost grateful that she cannot recall the stirrups, the cutting, the doctor bracing herself against the bed and puuuulllling with a pair of forceps that Alice’s husband jokily, stupidly, likened to barbeque tongs. Oh, she knows it happened all right but the only thing her brain honestly remembers is the light that kept her at bay in front its blinding yellow eye while, somewhere else, the doctor and an army of midwives cheered on the baby.

            Two days old and the baby is home. Cuddled into its car seat like a joey in its pouch, it is sleepily perfect. Alice walks like the hero of a spaghetti western and can sit only when she wedges herself onto a child’s inflatable rubber ring. She has not slept for four days and wants to wash her hair.

            The first visitors arrive. Alice had planned to welcome them with champagne and homemade cupcakes. Instead, she is crying in the bedroom, applying cabbage leaves to her breasts. Before she emerges, wrapped tightly in her husband’s dressing gown, she runs her fingers through her still unwashed hair and wonders if anyone will comment on the rubber ring.

            She need not have worried. No-one looks at Alice. Like fairy godmothers bearing gifts, they crowd around and coo over the blotchy-faced cherub, squeaking softly in its sleep. Alice busies herself making tea and exclaiming over the gifts.

            What a good baby! the visitors all say as, finally, they leave. They are not there in the witching hour when it awakens and rosy good humour turns into red-faced, screaming outrage.  Alice and her husband lower the lights, turn on the subtitles on the television and tread a path between kitchen extractor fan and radios tuned to white noise, with an occasional blast from a hairdryer.  Eventually, the cries soften until the baby sounds like a tired owl. Weeping a little herself now, Alice lowers her almost-sleeping child into its basket and slumps into exhausted immobility on the sofa.

            Cards arrive for the new parents, congratulating them on their arrival of their baby; midwives and health visitors come to weigh it and assess its skin colour for any incipient jaundice; vaccination appointments are made and kept; old ladies admire it in shops; and the teenage girl in the downstairs flat wants to know when she can babysit. Alice runs out of mascara, doesn’t buy any more and then stops wearing make-up at all. She doesn’t care that she wears only jogging bottoms and old t-shirts but does catch herself wondering if she could get thin enough to slip away between the bars of the grille in the pavement outside. She can barely bring herself to eat the takeaways her husband orders in the evenings or the sandwiches he leaves on a plate in the fridge each morning.

            In the middle of the night she lies rigidly awake while her husband and child sleep beside her. She listens to the chug-chug-chug of a taxi idling at the kerb outside, hears its heavy door slam and the metallic ching of money hitting the pavement. Shit! says a voice. Then, laughter, pumped with the adrenaline of a good night out. Further away, she hears the screech of a train, feels her heart leap with re-discovered lightness as she wonders if, somehow, she can get aboard. Its destination isn’t important; surely the Alice of old will be waiting wherever the train terminates.

            Another taxi draws up outside. Alice rises from the bed and starts hunting for shoes and purse.