Chapter 34
Alice slept in fits and bursts that night. Vanessa’s rented apartment had a spare box room with a sofa bed, which she and Bear took, and David and Marco took a sofa each in the living room. She slept with the window open, which meant the tip of her nose, sticking out above the duvet, was icy but Bear was happy, as opposed to shuffling and panting and trying to get out of the door all night.
She spent a long time thinking about her journey over the past few months, and at two a.m. she was following an internet rabbit hole, reading about a thing called the change curve, based on a 1960s method of describing the emotional stages of grief, developed by a Swiss-American psychiatrist. She’d certainly been through the shock, anger, maybe a little denial. There was a chance she was on her way out, struggling up the hill towards the light, challenging herself and accepting what had happened, but did she actually feel like that, or was she just fooling herself into thinking she could be normal?
She didn’t let herself see what the last stage was supposed to be. She didn’t want to know yet what the last page of her supposed story was.
‘I was awake a lot of last night,’ Alice told David in the car on the way home. He and Marco had switched on the way back, and though it was always the plan, Alice suspected that Marco thought she might need some space.
David was slumped in the seat, staying very still, his eyes half closed but not asleep. He was the vision of a hangover.
‘Are you feeling okay?’ David asked, as if worried she’d ask him to take over in the driver’s seat.
‘Oh, I’m fine to drive. I’m actually glad to have set off early today, it’s going to be nice to get home and maybe go back to bed for a bit.’ She glanced at him. ‘Not that you can do that, sorry.’
‘I think I will have just enough time to make a big rosti breakfast when we get back; that will fix me.’
They continued the drive in silence for a while, no music today, the only sound being Bear’s snoring from the back seat. Overhead, blobby clouds dotted the aqua morning sky like plump snowmen who’d floated away. The large lakes beside the highway, Lakes Lucerne and Brienz, had been sprinkled with glitter made of sunshine.
‘It’s Christmas in just over a week,’ she said after a while, as much to herself as to David.
‘A week, huh?’
‘Yep. This time next week, it’ll be Christmas Eve tomorrow, and I’ll be flying home.’
‘Are you looking forward to it?’
‘Yes and no. I’m looking forward to seeing my parents – yesterday helped actually, I’m feeling a lot more Christmas spirit thanks to all those singers.’
‘And all that Glühwein.’
‘Yeah, you must have alotof Christmas spirit in you right now!’
David cracked a smile and reached for a can of Coke he’d bought before they set off.
‘Vanessa seems to be really happy in her new job, doesn’t she?’ Alice asked. How cruel she was to bring up Vanessa when he was hungover and trapped in her car, she thought, but didn’t let it stop her.
David’s eyes opened a little wider. ‘For sure, it sounds like she really enjoys it.’
‘She’s working at Christmas, but coming home for a couple of days at New Year, is that right?’
‘I think she said this.’
‘Hmm. Hey, just out of interest, is mistletoe a thing in Switzerland?’
David looked at her, a smirk creeping onto his face. She kept her eyes on the road, impassive and innocent.
‘Why, do you want to hang some between you and Marco?’ he countered.
Touché.
David yawned and reached an arm back to stroke Bear. ‘So you think I should go for it with Vanessa, do you?’
‘She hasn’t said anything to me, and I may have known her a long time but I probably don’t know her nearly as well as you do,but, I mean . . . ’
‘She doesn’t seem repulsed by me?’
Alice laughed. ‘Well, you have to start somewhere. I don’t know, I’m nobody to give romantic advice, I’ve been happily single for years and I’m too much of a mess to do anything about my own love life at the moment, but part of what I was thinking about last night was not letting things pass you by. If you want something, or someone, you should probably go for it because who knows what’s around the corner.’
