Afterwards by Rachel Seiffert Read Free Book Online Page A

and got a screwdriver out. Started on things she didn’t know how to finish sometimes, but Joseph liked that too. The way she’d stood looking at the wires coming out of the wall that time, with the switch in her hand. She’d been stuck, but she found her own way out: unscrewed the switch in the living room too, and worked out the wiring from there.
    – Mum met him through a girl she knew from school, went to uni the year before her.
    The tyre came away, and Alice said they lived in the same squat, this girl and Alice’s dad, and Alice’s mum was living with a family then, friends of her parents, in a different part of town.
    – She was only seventeen, young to be studying. The idea was that my grandparents’ friends would look out for her. Didn’t do a very good job.
    Alice laughed and stood up to get her bike pump out of her bag.
    – I think the squat was just that bit more exciting, and the area. They’d done the house up really well, she said. It was a big place, and it wasn’t only students who lived there, but older people too, locals. One was a stonemason, I remember Mum telling me he did these Celtic knots all around the front door. Everything was put together out of bits they’d found or been given, but everything worked. I think my Dad spent more time on the house than in lectures. They turned the back room into a big kitchen, for everyone to sit in, and he helped the stonemason lay all the floorboards in there.
    She smiled about that and then she said they weren’t together long, her mum and dad. Stopped seeing each other even before her mum found out about Alice, and her dad panicked when she told him. Her mum never thought about staying with him, just wanted to go home.
    – She says he didn’t want to be with her either. She’s probably right. After I was born she sent him a letter. To say I was a girl and what I was called, and he never wrote back.
    Alice shrugged and Joseph waited for her to go on, watching her while she held the inner tube under the water, looking for the leak. Her fingers were dripping when she pulled the tube out, so he grabbed a tea towel from the back of the kitchen door for her.
    – It’ll get filthy.
    – Doesn’t matter.
    He didn’t want to go off looking for a rag and hold up the conversation. Looked like it was hard enough for her to say all this without interruptions. Alice dried her hands and then the tube and chose a patch from the kit. Still nothing.
    – He never got in touch? Your Dad.
    She shook her head. She didn’t look at him, just at what she was doing.
    – He never got curious enough. That’s how it seemed to me anyway. I spent years going on about it with my Mum. She wanted to keep me, and she said it was her decision, pretty much. Took it out of his hands. But then,he let that happen, didn’t he? Never made contact. So I thought he didn’t want anything to do with me.
    Alice spread glue onto the patch, frowning concentration, then she put it to one side and looked up at him.
    – It was probably just a relief. For my Dad, I mean. He was nineteen and he wasn’t in love. No one was pushing him or asking him to take responsibility. I don’t know.
    – You can’t blame him for turning his back?
    Alice looked up at him, like that was a harsh way to put it, but then she smiled. Self-conscious.
    – Yeah well, maybe. If it wasn’t me he was turning his back on.
    She picked up the tyre again and Joseph thought about his own mum and dad, both of them teenage parents. But they’d wanted to be: got engaged, saved up, so it didn’t compare. Still, listening to Alice, it was hard not to think of his dad and what he did for them. Years of night shifts, and he’d wanted to be a cabinet maker, like his grandad was, only the apprenticeship was a long one and you couldn’t keep kids on apprenticeship money. That’s what he’d said when Joseph asked him about it. Like it was something you didn’t have to think about, just obvious: no point moaning, just