A House for Alice by Diana Evans

Author:Diana Evans [Evans, Diana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2023-09-12T00:00:00+00:00

She got a job in an Italian café in Dorking town centre as a waitress and cycled there on her bike. She had four shifts a week of walking about taking orders, delivering orders, clearing away empty plates, she liked how active the work was. She would much rather do this than sit at a desk all day typing, and Ria during their text conversations agreed that working in an office was brutal. Do you get free food? she asked. Yh, Avril replied, greasy tho. She hardly ate any of it because all she could think about was the slime swilling around the spaghetti, the butter soaking in the garlic bread, the oil at loose in the meat. Resisting it made her feel powerful, that she didn’t have to surrender to it. Stephanie was not aware of her distaste. As far as she knew this is what Avril was having for dinner at the end of her shifts instead of eating at home—delicious calzones, fresh Bolognese.

Lots of kids take a gap year during their education, Stephanie did her best to reassure herself. Not everyone wants to hurtle on to the next thing straight away. Some need to take a step back and think about what the next step is. She was sure Avril would discover it soon, she told herself and the mothers of ex-classmates she ran into in the street or at the adventure playground with Harvey. All part of her resolve to be more open, understanding and laid back, so that she wouldn’t lose her again.

What a feeling it was, riding through the evening as light as a bird. How charged and translucent Avril felt pushing her bike up the driveway after a shift and drinking a long glass of water or even pineapple juice if she felt deserving, if she had done enough walking about, and then going to bed. In the morning she could eat a proper breakfast because she would be doing more cycling and had started going to the gym twice a week as well because she could afford a membership. She liked being so independent. Once, when she was at school, a girl had come up to her and said, “You’re quite overweight, aren’t you.” She hadn’t known what overweight meant yet and had thought it meant she’d been waiting too long. Now she knew what it meant. That was why she didn’t like looking in the mirror sometimes, especially after eating one of her mother’s insistent dinners, the pasta, the carbohydrate. “Avril, are you eating properly?”

She came into the furniture shop one afternoon on her day off while Damian was serving a customer. He was disturbed by how thin she was getting. She was wearing a pair of narrow jeans with one of Jerry’s tops. There were patches of shade around her eyes and she made clumsy, angular shapes when she moved. When she sat down on a flame-red fabric suite, the colour billowed outwards from her like a desert. “This one’s nice,” she said.

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