Afterwards by Rachel Seiffert Read Free Book Online

he keyed in the wrong code when he got there, set the alarm off in the house he was plastering. He was working with Tony, who didn’t want to wait for the police: his parents were West Indian, and the last time this happened they didn’t believe he was a carpenter and took him in to get his fingerprints. Tony jogged down to the pub on the corner and Joseph went to find him after the police had been and the alarm was reset. Stan arrived a bit later and Joseph ended up staying in the pub with them until after closing. Didn’t have his mobile on him, but from where he was sitting, Joseph could see the payphone at the end of the bar. Thought about calling Alice to let her know where he was, but he never made it up there. Hewent to see Eve and Arthur on the Thursday, and was glad when his sister didn’t ask about her: she was good like that.
    Joseph went home early that evening. Passed the end of Alice’s road and thought how he didn’t really understand what was going on, because he’d been into it, right from the beginning. Hadn’t felt like that in ages, but he liked her. The sandy red hair growing back in under her arms, that she apologised for, laughing, but that sent him searching, unbuttoning, with her lifting and shifting and helping him find the same shade curling over the top of her knickers. He remembered her wandering halfnaked around his flat one morning before work, looking for her socks. Not thinking he might be watching, still half asleep maybe, her face all squashed from the pillows, she looked great. But it took getting used to, being with someone again. All the time spent and all that talking. Tired him out, made him want to shut his mouth and keep it shut for a while.
    – I’ve never told anyone that before.
    That’s what she’d said. The second time they talked about her dad. After she told him it had been hard sometimes, not knowing him, or what he was like.
    – Not when I was little. I never missed having a dad then, not really. I knew my family set-up was a bit odd and everything, when I was at school. But I remember another girl in my class whose parents had split up and one boy who lived at his gran’s too. Mum says kids have such complicated families now. She has to draw little trees to keep track of them for parents’ evenings.
    It was a few days after that dinner with her flatmates. Alice had got a puncture on the way over to his place after work. They cooked together, and while it was in the oven, she carried her bike up the stairs and turned it upside down to mend it in the hallway, so she wouldn’t have to get up early for the bus in the morning. Alice was kneeling on the floorboards, working the bolts loose when she started talking, and it took Joseph a few seconds to catch up somehow: thinking backwards through what they’d been saying since she arrived that evening. He’d asked Alice before, about her dad, but not today, and it hadn’t seemed like she’d wanted to say much about him, either. Joseph filled the washing-up bowl for her and found an adjustable spanner, and then he waited.
    – I started to lie sometimes, when I was at college. If friends asked about my parents, I’d say they were divorced and I didn’t see my Dad. Seemed like an easier explanation. Plenty of other people in the same situation.
    Alice looked up at Joseph, standing in the kitchen doorway, and then down again. She stopped after that, talking and working, and so Joseph crouched down. Thought that might make it easier for her: make her feel more listened to than watched, because he did want to hear about it.
    Alice stayed quiet for a while, working the tyre irons around her front wheel, her palms turning grey with dirt. Joseph liked the way she always had oil smears on her legs, from her bicycle chain, and that she mended things herself: punctures and brake cables, and the dodgy light switch that gave Martha shocks. She never made a fuss or waited for someone else to sort it, just turnedoff the mains