Moonlight

Twenty

Athena drove Alice home. From time to time, she would give the passenger a quick glance.

'Are you sure you'll be ok?'

'Has this ever happened to you?'

Athena nodded.

'Then, I'll be fine – just like you.'

The driver shook her head: we're different, you and I, she seemed to say, but she wasn't so sure anymore. And neither was Alice. They were two sides of the same coin: they had been used up until they had taken charge, and until they had surrounded themselves with people who understood them and accepted them.

It was the middle of the day. People were going about their business. The sky was a bright, metallic shade of grey. It was a typical day of early Autumn: everything was in its place, and yet Alice felt uneasy driving through these streets, as if she was seeing them with new eyes. She was noticing little things: the enthusiasm of a young clerk waving goodbye to a customer who was walking out of a fashion boutique, carrying heavy bags; the hard stare of two men pouring bitumen into a hole in the pavement; people waiting for the bus.

Alice noticed how the smile vanished from the clerk's face: she despised her customers. Alice must have walked into shops like that a thousand times, and every time she had been welcome with the same smile, which had probably vanished the moment she had turned her back.

She noticed the men fixing the road, the sweat on their forehead, the way their backs arched and their cheeks swelled under the strain. They had the determination of heroes slaying a dragon, and the ease of people who did this every day.

She wondered about the people disappearing into the bus, sharing a few minutes of their lives, and then going their own way, never to meet again.

Alice spied Athena's face as she pulled up to her building. Athena had guessed Alice had money, but this was much more than she had imagined. Athena new that Alice was going back to her life, never to return, never to share the same condition and the same kind of life. So now, the moment they had shared was gone, and they would go their own separate ways.

Alice climbed the stairs, clinging to the handrail. She stopped now and then to catch her breath, which a few broken ribs made painful.

The house was silent. Nobody was in.

I'm home, she texted Tom.

She stood in the doorway for a minute. Everything seemed an exaggeration, a caricature of what it was supposed to be: the distant, stuccoed high ceiling; the gilded sofas; the intricate patterns of the timber floor. There was a smell of potpourri emanating from a silver bowl on a shelf, and the furniture gave off a foreign smell of polishing wax. This is how you arranged a room to illustrate the life of the nobility to a group of tourists, then you cordoned it all off and walked away. Nobody was supposed to touch anything in this postcard.

Who lived here? What mannequin, what poor imitation of a human being lived in this doll's house?

I live here, Alice realised.

People probably envied her. They envied her existence so far removed from the struggles of real life.

I envy your bruises, Alice thought with a wry smile appearing on her lips.

Her first instinct was to hide in her bedroom: nobody should see the blackened eyes, the swollen cheeks. Somehow, she had always thought these things were indecent. But no! Everybody should see: everybody should know life.

She sat on a sofa and waited, with her back straight, like a patient in a doctor's waiting room, as if the bruises she carried were uninvited guests in this house, and she had to introduce them politely to the rest of the inhabitants.