Alice thought she saw Janey sitting ahead of her on the plane from New York. For a moment the impression was so strong that Alice almost called out, even though she knew it couldn’t have been her sister. The woman had the same hair as Janey; that was all. When they were very small Alice had looked at their hair – Janey’s long and blonde and floating; Alice’s a thick, dark block – and decided that her sister must have been adopted, and for days afterwards Janey had hidden every time the doorbell rang, convinced that her real parents were coming to take her away.
She put down her book, got up and walked along the aisle to the toilet, and then turned at the last moment to look back at the woman. It was not her sister. She was surprised, after all the years, that the feeling of disappointment was so swift, so visceral. Alice remembered how for some time after Janey had gone their mother and father had come to seem a little ghostlike, how sometimes she’d found herself flinching from their searching glances, their endless whispering and their sticky eagernesses. One Saturday she watched her father walking to the postbox and noticed the way his huge hands hung down, the empty palms turned backwards as if waiting for someone to run up and take hold of them. At the time Alice thought this was meaningful. Later, when she found a small photo-graph taken on a family holiday in Cornwall, from the time before her sister was gone, she realized instead that her father had always walked that way.
Returning to her row of seats, Alice climbed over the legs of the middle-aged American woman sitting by the aisle and leaned to watch the towering clouds forming beyond the small windows, each one, white tinged with lavender and pink, like a beautiful idea that hovered teasingly just out of reach. The American began talking – about the psychiatry conference she was flying to Munich to attend, about her two brothers and her nieces, about her Blue Persian that had gone into a cattery in Denver while she was away. Despite the journey, the crushed and stuffy cabin, the American’s hair bore all the markings of the salon she must have visited before the flight, with the blonde tints carefully woven between the grey, the scissor marks still visible, almost. The woman glanced at Alice, at her uncombed hair, bare face and bitten nails. Only men, the American said, could be so casual when they were no longer young. Alice, who was thirty-four but often told she looked younger (excepting the lines around her eyes when she smiled), couldn’t decide whether she was being commended or admonished.
‘And what is it you do?’ the American said.
‘I’m a journalist. I write for, it’s an arts and culture magazine, Meta. And other places, some of the broadsheets . . .’
‘Meta? I think I’ve heard of that. What did you say your name was?’
‘Alice Robinson.’
The American frowned. ‘No . . .’
Alice made a fuggedaboutit gesture. For some years now her writing in Meta had been considered ‘influential’ in the art world, and her reviews in the national papers regularly sent the public out to one or another exhibition, but she never particularly expected her name to be recognized outside of those places.
She leaned back and when she looked again through the window the clouds had parted to reveal the sea; the big, heavy silvered weight of it, and here and there the white tops of the waves like the bottoms of clouds that had drifted down to float and bob on the surface. She looked out at the empty, empty water and longed to see something: a boat, a piece of bright drifting plastic. The sea had always looked the same everywhere for ever; the water she looked at now might never have been touched by humans, and all at once this seemed terrible to her.
The cabin jolted suddenly, rattling the ice cubes in the plastic cups, and the pilot’s muffled voice came over the intercom. Turbulence. Alice and the American fastened their seat belts. The plane shook again and towards the rear of the cabin someone shrieked once, a guilty, choked-off sound. The American gripped the armrests until the skin around her fingernails whitened. The balding man sitting across the aisle glanced around suspiciously as though his neighbours might be somehow better informed, privy to some advance knowledge. Alice shut her eyes and thought about New York and the man with the drooping brown hair that reminded her of a singer she liked.
After the last private view she’d ended up by herself searching for somewhere new to drink and had followed two girls in matching berets to a large bar that looked like a youth club, with sweeping graffiti on the walls and rows of pool tables. She’d fallen into conversation with the man, the only other person alone and too old to be there, and they’d sipped bottles of weak beer while they played pool. Every time he smoothed down his hair – before he drank, before he played a shot – she saw the gold of the ring on his wedding finger. He had a car and they drove for hours through the half-sleeping city and he took her down through the Bronx to where they could see across the blackness of the water to Hart Island, where the unclaimed dead were buried in rows by convicts, fourteen to a trench. It was cold and they sat inside the car with the engine running. ‘The Isle of the Dead,’ said Alice. He took a mint out of his pocket and looked at her blankly. ‘It’s a painting by Arnold Böcklin. You can see it at the Met.’ He shook his head. When they kissed it was like being a teenager again with nowhere to go, and his arm was an unknown weight across her shoulders. This, she thought, is how made-for-television police dramas begin. She liked his hair. Later, after he’d dropped her off near her friend Sophie’s apartment, where she was staying, she bought a hot dog from an all-night store and the steam from the food mingled with the steam from her mouth and rose like a screen in front of her face.