‘Sorry about the smell,’ he said once she was settled.
‘It’s okay. Can hardly notice it. Cabbage?’
‘Sprout actually. Lost one last Christmas in the back somewhere. Just dematerialised.’
Something about the car, and Andrew’s comically bad driving, put Alice at ease. Oddly comforted by the erratic choking of the engine, and the miscellaneous rattles and whistles coming from unseen corners of the interior, she stopped thinking about the Dead Boy, in either a good way or a bad way, and not thinking about the Dead Boy was something she hadn’t done for a long time.
Why hadn’t she taken the lift up to the fourth floor of the block of flats in Hackney, rung the bell, spoken to the family of her boy? Her memory of the trip was of watching herself as if in a film, from the outside. She saw herself standing in the busy street, looking up to where she thought the flat must be, the address clutched in her hand as it had been throughout the long and unfamiliar journey, by tube and bus. The block was one of the thirties, rather than sixties, kind: almost elegant in red brick and white plaster. But its poverty was palpable. Perhaps it had been the stench from the lift well that had put her off. No. She couldn’t blame that. The truth was that she feared what she might find, and even more she feared what she might lose.
And just standing there gave her a deep sensual fulfilment. This was the closest she had come since that day, the first day of her new life. Here the Boy had lived for those nine years before they came together. She felt his presence resonate through the walls and the earth and the air, like the huge silence after the death of a symphony. And standing there bathing in the glory of his resonance, Alice realised that one phase of her … madness … infatuation, was coming to an end. She felt a calm descend, a peace, a new clarity. The drug had been metabolised, had become part of her. It was certainly not that it had become less important: no, it had entered her more deeply; but that left her superficially more able to cope with the surface of things. Yes, she knew that he would always now be there, but the unimportant parts of herself had been set free, her waking, conscious, living side. The side that had to sit in traffic with Andrew Heathley on a dull October morning.
There was a certain amount of hassle, as there always is, in getting out of London. Andrew thrust a flaking A-Z onto Alice’s lap, and between them they managed to find every traffic cone in South-west London, but by the time they blundered onto the M3 they were laughing together in a way they hadn’t done since before The Disaster in the Park, since before the Dead Boy. Andrew had a packet of jelly babies in the glove compartment, and Alice found herself greedily devouring them.
‘Did I ever tell you about my friend Leo?’ asked Andrew.
‘I can’t remember. Maybe.’ So much of the past few months had passed through her consciousness without leaving a trace.
‘Well, he has this theory,’ he paused as they both winced over a gear change that sounded like the very gates of hell opening up right there in the car between them, ‘about jelly babies. To be honest, he has a theory about everything, but his jelly baby theory is quite good. You know how everyone likes the black ones best?’
Alice was about to say that she actually found that she preferred the red ones, but that would ruin the tale. ‘Yes.’
‘Well, have you ever wondered why they don’t just make them all black?’
‘No, I haven’t ever wondered that. But if it’s true that people prefer them, it’s surprising,’ Alice replied, trying to help out.
‘The thing is that apparently that’s just what they tried back in the seventies: all-black bags of jelly babies. And guess what?’
‘Nobody wanted them.’
‘Of course, nobody wanted them. And why’s that?’
‘Um … because people like variety?’
‘No, not that. At least not only that. This is the Leo bit. It’s because of structuralism.’
‘Oh, that’s nice,’ said Alice, unable to repress a reasonably naughty look.
‘Yeah, okay, just listen. You see according to structuralist linguistics, everything only has a meaning in relation to everything else in the system. The word bus only means bus because it doesn’t mean car, motorbike, elephant, whatever. There’s no natural link between the word bus and the thing bus. It’s just the way that language functions. You with me?’
‘I think so.’
‘So, with jelly babies, black ones only become nice in relation to the others, the yellows, oranges, greens and blues …’
‘I don’t think they have blue ones. Not in jelly babies.’
‘Yellows, oranges and greens, then, if you must.’
‘Sorry.’
‘… that are not nice, or not as nice. In isolation, there is nothing nice about the black ones. Put another way, on their own, without the signifying system of the whole jelly baby family, the black ones cannot mean nice. So, to enjoy, to understand the niceness of the black ones, you need the not niceness of the others. Okay, you can laugh now and call me whatever kind of arse you want. But remember, it’s not me but Leo who came out with all that bollocks.’
Alice had taken pleasure in the jelly baby tale and she wished that she could have made some more witty or clever contributions. She hated just sitting there and saying ‘oh’ and ‘ah’ and ‘really’ like the awe-struck wedding guest listening to the Ancient Mariner. The trouble was that although she felt more relaxed, less alienated than she had for many months, Alice had fallen out of the habit of conversation. At work, even with Andrew, she confined herself to mainly factual matters, relaying points of information, technical details, clear instructions. Apart, that is, from the occasional lapse into the ‘death is life’ kind of epiphany that so unnerved the office. Outside work she now hardly ever saw her old friends. She hadn’t even spoken to Odette for several weeks, not since the phone call when she had passed on the address of the Dead Boy. She’d meant to tell Odette about her failure, when so close, to contact the family, and of how the experience had helped a little in reconciling her to the world. She put it off because she felt that she had let Odette down in some way. They’d never met to talk tactics for Odette’s trip to Venice, or discuss how things were going with the preppy boyfriend. Had she gone already? She thought she must have done. When she finally got the courage up to telephone her, Odette’s work extension just went dead, and she hadn’t followed it up with a call to her flat. Thinking about it now, Alice felt a heavy pang of guilt and she made a firm mental note to call as soon as she was back from Somerset.
But even if she had seen Odette, sitting in quiet harmony with an old girlfriend was a very different thing to spending a three- or four-hour journey with a bright, prickly, funny, sensitive man like Andrew. And she found that she wanted to make him like her, wanted him to enjoy the journey. She stopped short of asking herself if perhaps this meant that she was waking from her dream of the Dead Boy; stopped because she knew that she didn’t really want to wake from the dream. But, for the journey at least, she would be awake.
Of course, questions. You asked questions. That would make her appear interesting without actually having to be interesting.
‘You never told me what your PhD was about.’
They had hit the countryside, or rather some larger areas of green between the sprawl. It was one of those days when there aren’t any clouds, but nor is there any sun, just a blanketing paleness.
‘Christ, I can hardly remember. Ah, yes, ahem, full title, The Sublime Machine, colon, all-important colon, have to have a colon, Conceptions of Masculine Beauty 1750–1850.’
‘Oh.’
‘Yeah, I know, it’s a killer, isn’t