The Liberation of Alice Love - Abby McDonald [26]
Her father nodded, but it didn’t seem like her words had any impact. “Ebb and flow, Alice.”
Alice tried not to slam the plates down and give Jasmine any more material for her mosaic. He always did this. Any problem, every success—it was all just ebb and flow. Ebb and fucking flow.
“Have you seen Flora?” he asked, oblivious to her annoyance. “Jas was saying she’d love to spend more time with you.”
“Mmm-hmm,” Alice murmured noncommittally, flipping bacon onto the plates and adding a squelch of ketchup from the almost-empty bottle. Another thing to add to the shopping list. “I went to her party, just the other week—remember?”
“Ah, that’s it.” He nodded as she set his food down in front of him. “I saw the photos. Lovely.”
“You couldn’t make it?” Alice asked, a little arch. He didn’t wait or make room for her before starting to eat, so she pulled up a chair herself, clearing a stack of old newspapers she still needed to take to the recycling station.
Her father looked puzzled for a moment. “No…What was it? Oh yes,” he brightened. “I was waiting for a delivery. Those old models—did you see them? Mint condition, perfect working order. Such a find.” He beamed, a smudge of ketchup on his chin, and Alice couldn’t help but feel a tug of affection.
“You’ll have to show me,” she told him, getting up to find him a napkin. He hadn’t always been this scattered. While her mother had seemed to find parenting an unwelcome distraction, her father had filled the gaps: propping Alice on his knee as he jotted notes in those journals, watching over her as she laboriously practiced her handwriting, and reading to her every night (even if it was from A History of Slavic Warfare rather than her favorite ballet stories). It was only after Natasha left that he began inching away from reality, year by year, until by the time she was eighteen, she was the only one in that house with any grasp of what it took to function—stack the bills on his desk by due date, and make sure they weren’t out of laundry detergent, and forge signatures on her class-trip forms.
Yes, he had earned his absence, Alice reminded herself, watching as he hummed under his breath and scanned the nearest (three-day-old) newspaper, oblivious to the dirty plate he’d discarded and the stack of unread post. And she couldn’t say the same about her other parent, wherever she was.
***
Alice’s cleaning frenzy had extended through the living room, front hall, and up the back stairs by the time she got the call from Rodney at the bank asking her to come in and look at CCTV footage. She barely paused to strip off her rubber gloves before dashing to catch the next train, her nerves growing as the countryside sped by, until by the time she pushed through the familiar smudged glass doors, she was breathless with anticipation. Finally, she would put a face to the crime.
“Hi, Rodney.” Alice managed a smile for him, but instead of the camaraderie they’d struck up, he seemed stiff.
“Ms. Love, how are you?” Rodney was in the same off-white shirt he’d been wearing last time. She could tell it was the same because of the scribble of ink still creeping across the front pocket.
“Fine, thanks.” Did this formality mean it was bad news?
He ushered her into the small room and tried to turn his computer screen so she could see it across the desk. “Now, this is footage from our Islington branch. We have a transaction on your current account that day that you’ve disputed, at around two-thirty p.m.”
“I would have been at work,” Alice said quickly. Rodney nodded in his noncommittal way, cuing up the footage.
The clip began to play, in a jerky, stop-motion stream: