Wish You Were Here

Chapter 1



Alice Archer would be the first to admit that she wasn’t beautiful. Sweet, perhaps. But never beautiful. Beauty was a word far more at home describing somebody like her sister, Stella, with her blonde hair, sharp cheekbones and hourglass figure. Next to her sister, Alice faded away into the background. She was Alice the Gooseberry. Second-fiddle Alice. Alice – sister of Stella. She’d never been Alice in her own right. Not that she was complaining. She’d never really wanted to be the centre of attention. She was far happier just to watch life happen to other people.

So that’s what makes what happened to her so hard to understand.

It all began on a perfectly ordinary day in February. Well, it was an ordinary day for Alice – Valentine’s Day always was. She awoke in her tiny terraced cottage, shivering because the boiler had broken yet again, and got ready for work.

I will not look on the doormat, she told herself as she walked through to the kitchen for breakfast. There won’t be any Valentine’s cards there and I will not let it bother me.

Still, she couldn’t help a sly little spy and, sure enough, the mat lay bare of all declarations of secret admiration and unrequited love.

It’s wasn’t that Alice didn’t get to meet many men because she did. In fact, she was surrounded by men. But it was the kind of men she was surrounded by that was the problem and she couldn’t help thinking about this as she left the house and saw Wilfred the postman ambling up the driveway as if he had all the time in the world and posting his letters was the last thing on his mind. He was in his mid-fifties and had the hairiest face Alice had ever seen, with great thick sideburns giving him a furry quality. He always reminded her of a half-metamorphosed werewolf.

‘Morning, Wilfred,’ Alice said with the brightest smile she could muster on a Monday.

‘Morning, Alice. Just bills today,’ he said. ‘Gas and credit card.’

‘Great,’ she said. She didn’t really mind that Wilfred knew all about her private business. If she was a postman, she’d probably make it her business to know too. It was one of the perks of the job, wasn’t it?

‘No Valentine’s cards for you then?’ he said.

‘Well, I wasn’t really expecting any.’

‘Third year in a row now, isn’t it?’

Alice sighed. Wilfred’s memory was far too sharp sometimes. He stopped on the pavement for a moment, blocking Alice’s way, and she knew she was in trouble.

‘That cough of mine’s back,’ he said.

‘Oh?’ Alice said, knowing all about Wilfred’s cough.

‘Went to the doctor’s again. Complete waste of time.’

‘Oh, dear.’

Wilfred coughed loudly. ‘Hear that?’ he said. ‘That rattle?’

Alice nodded.

‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘Can’t be right.’

Alice didn’t like to point out that Wilfred’s twenty cigarettes a day might not be helping matters because she knew he wouldn’t listen.

‘Oh, well. No rest for the wicked,’ he said, and mooched on. ‘Oh, look,’ he added, ‘a second red bill for Mrs Bates at number twenty-two. And a lingerie catalogue too. Bit old for that, isn’t she?’

Alice rolled her eyes.

Wilfred was usually Alice’s first male encounter of the day. The second one was Bruce at the bus stop and he was standing there in a long dark trench coat, his briefcase in his hand. She nodded to him and he nodded back. That was it, really. Alice had gone to school with Bruce but that was never worth talking about because they’d only ever nodded to each other there too. He was quite good-looking, she supposed, with short fair hair and hazel eyes. He had that mean and moody thing going on which had never really attracted Alice.

She turned the collar up on her winter coat and shivered. The Norfolk village of West Carleton was one of the prettiest places in summer. Surrounded by emerald fields, deep cool woods and more round-towered flint churches than you could shake a vicar at, it was like something out of a fairy tale but, in the depths of winter when the wind howled in from the coast across the great expanses of fields, it was a miserable place to be and Alice would wish that she hadn’t had to sell her car and endure the bone-crippling conditions of February at the bus stop.

A half-hour bus ride took her into the centre of Norwich and to her job in the Human Resources department of a building society. She didn’t enjoy her job but it did have its compensations for somebody who was as inquisitive as she was. Nobody suspected her of being nosy, of course. She was hard-working and quietly-spoken. In other words – completely above suspicion. Alice would often smile at the secrets she was privy to.

‘Ah, Alice. Can you bring me Martin Kasky’s file?’ Alice’s boss, Larry Baxter, asked as soon as she’d walked into the office. He was fifty-four, lived just off the Newmarket Road at the posh end of town, had had three sick days off last year and was a Sagittarius. That was one of the perks of working in Human Resources. Alice had all sorts of useful information at her fingertips.

‘I’ll just do a bit of filing,’ she’d tell her colleagues when she wanted to find something out about a guy. Like last year when Philip Brady asked her out to dinner. He worked in the New Business department, had jet-black hair and was very charming. Before the date, Alice looked him up quickly in between filing jobs. She noticed he was on a very good salary, had had two jobs before taking this one and had nine GCSEs at grade A. What she forgot to look at, though, were his self-certified sick notes. If she had, she would have seen that he’d taken six separate days off for irritable bowel syndrome and that might have prepared her for the night ahead and the number of times Alice was left alone at the restaurant table.

She fetched Martin Kasky’s file and handed it to her boss. He didn’t bother to look up at her as he took it but Alice was used to that.

‘We’re still waiting for his references,’ Larry said. ‘Chase them up with a phone call.’ He handed the file back to Alice without so much as an acknowledging smile or thank you and Alice returned it to its shelf and went to sit – invisibly – at her desk in the corner of the open-plan office.

It was then that Ben Alexander came in. He was the Accounts Manager and Alice didn’t exist in his world although he did make some sort of an effort to acknowledge her.

‘Hello, Anna,’ he said without even looking at her. She didn’t bother to correct his mistake. It wasn’t as though he would ever remember her real name.

As Ben approached her boss’s desk, she watched him from behind her computer. He had dark red hair and slate-grey eyes. He was wearing a navy shirt today which made his eyes seem even brighter than usual and Alice felt her heart do a little dance. She’d had a crush on him for longer than she could remember which was ridiculous because he’d never look at a girl like her. He went out with building society royalty like Pippa Danes who had platinum-blonde hair and catwalk legs. Still, there was no harm in dreaming, was there?

Actually, there was. Alice had lost count of the number of times she’d allowed herself to believe that maybe once – just once – a handsome man would turn round and look at her – really look at her. They’d see beyond the shyness and the plainness. They’d see her.

But Ben didn’t see her even when he stared right at her to hand her a member of staff’s sick note to file.

‘Thanks, Anna,’ he said before leaving the office.

Alice got up and walked through to the ladies’ toilet. She’d just shut the cubicle door when two giggling members of staff came in.

‘Did you see Alice Archer this morning?’ one of them said.

‘No – why?’ the other replied.

‘She was wearing that awful grey cardigan again.’

‘Oh, no! Not the one with the bobbles on the front?’

‘Yes! Classic Alice!’

They both shrieked with laughter.

‘I like that old brown thing she wears with the funny belt.’

‘The one that looks like a bear has died on top of her?’

They shrieked again, flushed toilets, ran some taps and left.

Alice waited a few moments before leaving the safety of her cubicle. She was very attached to her grey cardigan. It was a good practical one with a lot of wear in it yet but she had to admit that it probably wasn’t the most attractive look for a young woman of twenty-eight with its overlong sleeves and baggy middle.

She looked at herself in the mirror above the sink. Her face was pale and her brown hair fell straight down to her shoulders, neat and unremarkable. Her blue eyes were the only feature really worth any notice but she never drew attention to them, choosing to hide them behind large dark-framed glasses when she was in the office and never bothering with the likes of eyeliner or mascara.

She often wondered what she would look like with a makeover. She liked to watch that programme on the television where they take a hopeless case with a terrible haircut and a baggy jumper and turned them into a glamour queen. She would probably qualify for that show, she thought, looking at the bobbly grey cardigan and her sensible, flat shoes.

As she returned to her desk, she couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to be one of those women who knew what clothes to wear and how to have their hair. What was it like to have the ability to turn heads and make a man fall in love with you?

Alice sighed. Once – just once – she’d love to know what it felt like to be beautiful.