Free Alice and the Fly by James Rice Page B

probably because of the biscuits.
    It closed its eyes, let its tongue loll onto the shed floor. Its ribs rose and fell in time with my own.
    I closed my eyes.
    You locked the shed. You crunched across the lawn, back to the house. I waited till I heard the kitchen door, then climbed to my feet.
    You had stopped in the doorway. You were staring over at the shed, right at me. I hunched down. You mustn’t have seen me because a second later you turned and disappeared inside, locking the door behind you.
    I can still see you now, that image of you I glimpsed for just a second. Your red hair parted, your eye all swollen and black.

05/12
    This morning I watched your father through the blinds of the back fridge. He hacked at the hunks of meat on his block. He sipped tea and read the paper. He joked with Phil, holding his hat in the air with that big hand of his, too high for Phil to reach. Always with that laugh: ‘Heh-heh-heh.’
    I only realised how long I’d been standing there when Phil stepped in and asked me to go the bookies. I was shivering but he thought I was nodding so he just placed the money in my hand and gave me a thumbs up.
    It was 09:55. I had to sit on the step and wait till 10:00 for the bookies to open. The square was empty. There were two pigeons hopping around the car park. One of them was missing a leg. The other was missing an eye. They picked at a carton of chips. When the man from the bookies opened the door they scrambled into flight, landing the other side of the square. Pigeons never fly very far.
    When I got back to Hampton’s your father was in the kitchen. He was enormous in my tiny kitchen, his head right up near the ceiling, where the steam gathers. He smiled down at me. I smiled back. I was numb and empty and smiling back seemed almost natural. He asked me to make him and Phil a tea. Phil shouted back that he wanted a coffee. Your father said cheers and called me ‘mate’.
    In Hampton’s we use T-Rex Bleach. It’s ‘The wild way to clean’. The bottle has T - R E X written across it in jungle-style font, a teeth-marked chunk missing from the T as if an actual T-rex has taken a bite. Bleach is something I’ve got used to, working as a cleaner. It stings my nostrils and makes my fingers peel and sometimes at night I can still taste it, burning the back of my throat, but it’s the only way to shift real grime – the kind of grime that’s hard and black and no longer resembles what it used to be.
    I put half a teaspoon of T-Rex Bleach in your father’s tea. Mum uses bleach to keep her mugs white and I know from experience that it’s only after a few sips the burning taste is noticeable and you realise you should have washed the cup more. I’m guessing T-Rex Bleach is stronger than the spray Mum uses. It says I N D U S T R I A L across it. The lid is childproof, with a black and yellow X on it. I can’t help but wonder why, if they didn’t want children to play with it, they put a T-rex on the front of the bottle.
    Your father was over at the mincer, one hand shovelling hunks of steak down the funnel, the other covering the plate where the mince worms out. It’s important to cover the mince as it worms out or else it can pop and splatter the walls. I placed his tea on the block. I waited for him to notice me, so I could point to the mug. Eventually he did and I pointed and he nodded and pushed the big red STOP button and lifted the mug with his enormous mince-covered hand and slurped in the newfound silence. He coughed. He slurped again. Then he sat the mug back on the block and the whirr of the mincer started up again. He didn’t look up so I went back to my kitchen.
    In An Inspector Calls there’s a character called Eva Smith who kills herself by drinking bleach. I think you’d have to drink a lot of bleach to kill yourself. If you brewed a tea bag in bleach and added milk and sugar and heated it in the microwave till it was steaming and gulped it down, that might kill you. I