Other Alice (3 page)

‘Are you making one this year?’ I asked.

‘A Likeness?’ said Alice. She gave a vague shake of her head. ‘I’ve got other things to be getting on with.’

I was half relieved, half disappointed. Relieved because if Alice wasn’t making one then I wouldn’t feel I had to to, either. And disappointed because Alice always chose interesting
people, like her favourite authors – or even characters from their books. One year, her teacher had made a project of it, and Alice been told off in front of the whole class for making a
Likeness of someone who wasn’t a real person. Alice had replied, ‘They’re real to me.’

I loved her for that.

Later, we ate rice pudding in front of the fire. Shortly before nine o’clock, Alice went outside to get more coal, and I shivered as fingers of icy air crawled in through the back door and
found their way to my neck. Alice stirred up the embers with the poker and heaped on more coal, then settled in the armchair.

I put down my maths homework and yawned. Alice wasn’t as strict about bedtime as Mum, mainly because half the time she didn’t realise what hour it was herself.

I stretched out on the rug next to Twitch and watched my sister. She sat with a notebook open on her knees, legs curled underneath her and her long fingers wrapped round her favourite pen. Her
hand was still and she was staring into the fire, though I guessed she wasn’t really seeing the flames. I knew better than to ask what she was thinking about. Being interrupted while
daydreaming was one of the few things that made my normally mild-mannered sister lose her temper. Daydreaming, she said, was how she made up her stories – and interruptions meant lost
ideas.

Judging by the way she was nibbling her top lip, this story wasn’t going well. Once or twice, she began to write, but then ripped out the pages and threw them into the fire. Then,
suddenly, she lifted her pen and began to scribble quickly, lines and lines, without pause. As she did so, she began humming the strange little melody again, the one I’d heard when she was
making dinner. Now and again, she crossed words out, but continued until she must have filled an entire page. Finally, she stopped, looking over her words with a slight smile. So I was surprised
when she tore out the page and screwed it into a ball. Then, like the ones before it, she aimed it at the fire. It hit the back, just below the chimney opening, but somehow bounced out and landed
somewhere on the hearth. Alice leaned forward to pick it up, but a sound distracted her.

She glanced up. The nine o’clock news had just started on the TV. She snapped her notebook shut. ‘I hadn’t realised it was that late. Go and have a bath. You should be in bed
by now.’ She got up, propping the fireguard in place, and went into the kitchen to put the kettle on. Her mood had changed – she seemed worried again.

Instead of going upstairs, I followed Alice to the kitchen, hovering in the doorway. The coldness of the kitchen tiles seeped through my socks. Alice was barefoot, but it didn’t seem to
bother her, or perhaps she just didn’t notice. She had a tea bag in her hand, but made no attempt to put it in a cup, seemingly lost in thought.

‘Everything OK?’ I asked. ‘You hardly ate any dinner.’

‘I wasn’t very hungry,’ said Alice. ‘Food never tastes as good when you’ve cooked it yourself.’

‘What were you writing about?’ I asked, shifting from one foot to the other to stop my toes from cramping.

‘Just this story,’ Alice said softly.

‘Can you read it to me?’

She shook her head. ‘It’s not ready yet. It wouldn’t make much sense to anyone but me.’

‘What’s it about?’

‘It’s a secret.’ Alice finally put the tea bag into a cup. ‘It’s been in my head for months. But now I’m . . . well, stuck. I can’t
figure out where it goes next, or how it ends.’ She sighed, her next words a mutter. ‘Maybe it’s not even supposed to.’

‘Then you’ll have to give it one of your silly endings,’ I said. ‘Every story has to have an ending, right?’

‘Right.’ She smiled faintly. ‘But a silly one wouldn’t be right for this. This story’s different . . .’

I eyed the notebook poking out of her pocket. ‘What else are you working on? Any detective stories?’

‘Only this story,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing else.’

‘Not even a little one?’

‘Not a bean.’

‘Beans aren’t to be sniffed at, you know,’ I said. ‘Just look at what happened with Jack and the beanstalk.’

‘True,’ Alice said. ‘But I’m all out of beans – magic ones, baked ones, or otherwise.’ She lifted her hand to her forehead and massaged it. ‘This
story . . . it’s taking everything. All of me.’

Something about the look in her eyes then was different. She’d struggled with stories before, but tonight she really meant it. There was only one other time when I’d seen her like
this.

Last summer. No one except her knew what that story had been about, and she swore no one ever would. She’d destroyed the entire thing without finishing it. But, before she had done that,
she’d told me something that had scared me a great deal, because I’d seen that Alice herself was terrified.

The kettle came to the boil. She poured the steaming water into her cup, staring into it.

‘If only it were as easy to brew a story.’

‘You’ll figure it out,’ I said. ‘You always do.’

‘Not always.’

Our eyes met in an uneasy silence. I guessed then that she, too, was thinking of last summer. Of the unfinished story . . . and of the things she had told me.

Alice went back into the living room. I followed and we sat side by side in front of the fire, saying nothing. She took a few sips of her tea before setting it on the hearth and gazing into the
fire. I could tell she was thinking, brooding about storylines and characters. She didn’t pick up her cup again and I didn’t remind her. I’d known all along that it would go cold
before she remembered to drink it.

The same way I also knew that, whatever this story was about, it was going to lead to trouble.

I
WOKE IN THE NIGHT
, shivering. The bedcovers had slipped off and, as I pulled them back over me, the comic I’d been
reading when I’d fallen asleep slid out and fell to the carpet. I turned over, noticing a soft glow through the bedroom door. The landing light was off, but yellow light filtered down from
the attic room.

I listened. At first, I heard nothing, then came a faint rustle of paper. Alice was still up.

I got out of bed and crept on to the landing. In the ceiling, a square hatch lay open and a fold-out ladder hung down from the attic. I placed a hand on each side and began to climb, the ladder
creaking lightly under my weight.

I poked my head up into Alice’s room. She was hunched over her desk with her notes in front of her, wearing her fluffy dressing gown, slippers and a pair of blue fingerless gloves. She was
humming that same little tune again, over and over, hardly pausing for breath. I said her name softly, but she jumped anyway.

‘Midge.’ She turned and rubbed her eyes. ‘Why aren’t you asleep?’

‘I was. I’m not sure what woke me up.’ I pulled myself through the hatch and sat on my knees on the thick rug. ‘What’s that tune you keep humming? Did you make it
up?’

‘No, well . . . yes. Sort of.’

‘Sort of?’

‘One of my characters made it up. It’s his tune, not mine.’

I didn’t say anything. I was used to answers like this from Alice. Most of the time I loved them, but sometimes, like tonight, they worried me.

‘What time is it?’ she asked.

I shrugged. ‘Why are you still up?’

‘I can’t sleep.’

‘You look like you need to.’

‘It’s chilly up here.’ Alice blew into her hands. ‘Come on.’ She got up and went to her bed, still clutching her notebook. We both got in, her at the head and me at
the foot, as usual.

‘You forgot,’ I said.

‘Forgot what?’

‘To ask a riddle.’

There was a game Alice and I played when we went into each other’s rooms. To be allowed in you had to answer a riddle. We spent hours making them up and solving them, so I’d got
pretty good at them.

‘Well, you’re up here now so there’s not much point.’

‘Ask me one anyway.’

Alice sighed. ‘All right, here’s one: I’ve an endless vocabulary, I’m known for being sharp and disliked when blunt. Yet I’ll never speak a word. What am
I?’

‘Ooh. That’s a tricky one. A dictionary? No, that can’t be it. Hmm . . . Let me think.’ I snuggled down under the blankets, even tucking my nose in.

Cold air swirled round the tips of my ears. It was a lot cooler up in the attic. There was no proper heating like in the rest of the house, only a couple of plug-in oil radiators that just about
took the chill off. But Alice never complained; she loved her attic room. If it were possible, I loved it even more.

You can tell a lot about a person from their room.

Alice always said that writers are hoarders like magpies – hoarders of ideas. If Alice were a magpie, then her room was her nest. Stuffed with odds and ends that, to an ordinary person,
might seem as worthless as a wooden bead. But Alice had the power to string a row of wooden beads together and transform them into jewels.

Above her desk was what she called her ‘inspiration wall’. Here she pinned all sorts of bits and bobs: newspaper stories, postcards, photographs. Things that someday might hatch into
a story. Notebooks were arranged in neat piles or were spread across her desk – depending on how well her work was going, the messier, the better. She wrote her stories by hand before typing
them on to a laptop that had pride of place on the desk. Next to it was an old Woodstock typewriter that Dad had found at a car boot sale for just a few pounds. It probably weighed more than the
desk, and the ‘A’ key was missing, but Alice thought it was the best gift ever.

In the corner was a smaller table with a kettle, cups and an open carton of long-life milk. Used tea bags sat wetly on a saucer, but it looked homely, not messy. There was no tap up here, but
Alice could fill the kettle in the bathroom on the landing below, rather than having to go all the way down to the kitchen.

Books lined the walls, the gaps inbetween them stuffed with unusual trinkets: an old key, a framed postcard of a stag, a jewelled frog with a hidden mechanism that opened its mouth to reveal a
place for treasure, or secrets. Alice had always liked knick-knacks, and many of her stories had been inspired by some object or other. Even the quilt was a patchwork of fairy tales: a glass
slipper, a spinning wheel, a clock striking midnight. Tales Alice had told me when I was small, the tales almost everyone knew.

The only clear space was the floor. Alice was under strict instructions from Mum that nothing,
nothing
, was to be left on it. Ever. Not a book or even a biscuit. The rule had been put in
place just a few weeks after Alice had first moved into the attic room. She had tripped on a cold cup of tea next to the bed, sending it through the hatch and almost falling through it herself. Mum
had threatened to lock the attic and make her share a room with me again if ever this rule were broken.

I heard Alice write something in her notebook, then sigh and scribble it out again.

‘You should go to sleep,’ I said, my voice muffled under the covers. I’d warmed up now and my eyelids felt heavy.

‘You should take your own advice,’ came her moody reply. ‘In your own bed.’

‘It’s cold down there.’

‘It’s colder up here.’

‘I’m comfortable now,’ I murmured. I knew she wouldn’t really make me go to my own room. I often sneaked up here when I couldn’t sleep, or if I’d woken after
a bad dream.

I peered over the covers. Alice had flopped back on the pillow with her arm half across her face. Only her mouth was visible. In her hand, she still clutched the notebook.

‘Go to sleep,’ I repeated.

‘Not until I’ve figured this bit out.’

‘Maybe the answer will come in the morning.’

‘I’ve been telling myself that for a week now.’

I felt an odd little twist in my stomach. ‘Stop it,’ I whispered.

‘What?’

‘You know what. What happened before, when you thought that . . . What happened last time when you got like this.’

‘Nothing happened.’

‘Don’t lie.’

‘All writers lie.’ Her voice was sing-song. ‘It’s what we do.’

‘That’s not what I mean and you know it.’

She laughed, but there was nothing funny about it.

‘You were ill!’ I said fiercely. I sat up, wide awake now. ‘And you’ll get that way again if you carry on like this.’

‘I won’t. And anyway it was just the flu.’

‘No, that’s what you told Mum and Dad,’ I argued. Alice’s arm was still over her face and her lips were set in a stubborn line. ‘But I knew different. And if you
make yourself ill again I won’t cover for you this time. I’ll tell them the truth, and then Mum will make you share with me again. You won’t be able to sit up here writing all day
and night.’

Alice lifted her arm and glared at me. ‘You wouldn’t.’

‘I would.’

She pursed her lips and threw her arm back over her face, but not before I saw her eyes glistening.