Tony smiled and she watched him glide his way easily to the bar where he made himself heard, waving a five-pound note between two fingers as if he was talking a hidden language. He brought their drinks back to the table and put them down, straddling his stool confidently.
‘D’you want one?’ he asked, proffering a packet of cigarettes. Alice shook her head as he lit one expertly, sucking deeply on the end. He smiled and extended his hand. ‘Tony Marks.’
Alice blushed and giggled. ‘Alice Cartwright.’
‘Well, Alice Cartwright, what were you doing when I so rudely stepped on your foot?’
‘Oh, just going home.’
He laughed. ‘Just going home? From where, to where?’
She felt the flush on her face deepen and suspected her nervous rash was blooming on her neck. ‘I’m at Cartertown College, doing a secretarial course. I live about an hour from here.’
‘So you want to be a secretary?’
No one had ever asked Alice this many questions and she wasn’t sure if her head was spinning from them or the gin. ‘No, not really.’
‘Why are you doing a secretarial course then?’
His voice had an accent which Alice couldn’t place and she wanted to ask him about it, but didn’t know if that would be rude. ‘It’s complicated.’
‘Do you know what you do want to do?’
‘I’ve just been in a play at the village hall.’
‘Does that mean you want to be an actress then?’ His voice had a hint of amusement in it.
‘I don’t know.’
‘You’re certainly pretty enough. Has anyone ever told you that you look like Cindy Crawford?’ Alice shook her head. Tony looked at her a minute and then said, ‘You do know who Cindy Crawford is, don’t you?’
‘She’s a model, isn’t she?’
‘Not just a model, a supermodel. It’s a big compliment.’
‘Oh, OK.’
‘Don’t you read any of those women’s mags?’
‘No.’
He drained his beer and Alice suspected she was boring him. But his tone was more relieved when he said, ‘I thought you were all addicted to Cosmo or whatever it’s called. How about music then, who are you into?’
Alice felt herself sinking, it was no good. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t think …’
But Tony laughed again. ‘Films?’
She blushed and shook her head, smiling despite her embarrassment.
‘Shit, it’s like you’ve been airlifted in from a different century. Where do you live?’
‘Druith. It’s a village in the middle of nowhere, really. We don’t have a cinema or anything like that.’
‘But you have been to the pictures before, right?’
‘Oh yes.’ Alice didn’t think it would help matters to reveal that the one and only time she had been was to see Bugsy Malone with her father the year before he died. Of course she watched films on the telly, but she mainly loved the musicals with Marilyn Monroe and Doris Day and she knew she probably shouldn’t admit to that either.
‘Would you like to go again?’
‘Yes.’ Alice couldn’t be sure if he was asking or teasing.
‘How about I take your number then and maybe we could go at the weekend?’
Alice wrote her number on the receipt Tony found in his jeans pocket but knew he couldn’t possibly ring her house. ‘How about we arrange to meet now, instead of you calling,’ she said, stumbling over her words.
He laughed again. ‘But we don’t know the times.’
‘Well, we could just meet and then …’ she trailed off. She was on such shaky ground it was impossible for her to continue.
‘Don’t you want me to call your house? Have you got a boyfriend or something?’ But Tony said it so confidently Alice knew that he didn’t see the mythical boyfriend as a threat.
‘Oh no, it’s just I’m not there much.’
He didn’t look convinced, but let her off. ‘OK, let’s say we’ll meet outside the multiplex at six and if we’re early we can go for a drink.’
Alice knew her smile gave too much away, but she didn’t know what else to do. ‘Great.’ She stood up. ‘Anyway, thanks but I should be getting home now.’
Tony stood up as well. ‘Really? I can’t tempt you with another?’
‘Oh, well, thanks, no. I live with my mother, she worries and, well, so.’
‘Let me walk you to the bus at least.’
They left the pub together and the day was still bright and hot which seemed at odds with Alice’s mood. As they walked Tony talked about how in his opinion town planners should be shot. How they’d torn down everything that had any soul in towns like Cartertown and replaced it with concrete monoliths which made the residents feel depressed. Alice nodded and murmured, hoping that Tony couldn’t tell she had no idea what he was talking about. She didn’t even know what a monolith was. By the time they arrived at the stop Alice’s bus was pulling up. She turned to Tony, unsure of how to say goodbye.
‘Nice to meet you, Alice Cartwright,’ he said. ‘I look forward to Saturday at six, when we know not what we might see or where we shall go.’ There was a smile playing round his lips and Alice was filled with fear that he wouldn’t turn up. She wanted to say something to ensure that he did, but she didn’t know what that might be. Tony bent forward and pulled her towards him with a strong hand round her waist, pressing his mouth against hers, mashing her lips in a way she thought only existed in films, or on darkened stages. ‘You’d better run,’ he said, pointing at her bus. And so she did as she was told.
All the way home Alice was filled with the delicious thought that her mother was wrong. Clarice saw the world as a place of threat and violence and manners and rules. It was obvious now to Alice that she had simply never been in love and was quite possibly wrong about everything. Often when she had been younger she had fantasised that her real mother had died in childbirth and her lovely, kind father had remarried out of some sense of duty to her, his daughter. After he had died she thought this probably wasn’t true, but – in a real sense – it might as well have been. Her father had become a mystical saint in death as is so often the way, and she felt sure he would have shown her the right way through the world, but left alone with Clarice what hope had there been for her? Tony, she thought, might be her one and only chance to escape a life that could very easily end up with her throwing herself off Conniton Hill in a few years’ time. It was vital to her future that she got it right.
As it turned out Alice didn’t need to do much more than be herself to impress Tony, which was one of the biggest revelations of her life. Being with Tony was like standing on stage, a leap in the dark in which she didn’t even have to know the right lines. They drank in pubs, watched films, even ate a Chinese meal, and she made him laugh and he told her she was beautiful. But undeniably their time was snatched. Alice still hadn’t told Clarice; all her excursions with Tony were hidden behind a fictitious group of friends she’d made at college who all lived in nice houses with parents who asked the right questions. Tony was very understanding and seemed to accept that Clarice was difficult without getting annoyed by it. Finally though he came up with a plan: why not tell her that Alice’s course had been extended by a week. He would take the same week off work from the record shop where he worked while he waited to be discovered as the musical