Never got used to living in awe of Alice

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Feb 16, 2008 

The city where I went to university was built on tobacco and slave trade wealth. Vast, lavish and crumbling, it teetered on the edge of a gorge, its curlicued terraces spilling down towards the river and the docks.

Though some insisted that street names such as Whiteladies Road and Black Boy Hill had nothing to do with the slave trade, still just their very existence constantly brought Bristol's queasy and terrifying history to mind. Some days the angles of the buildings didn't look quite right. Other days I'd walk down the street in bright sunshine and be sure I heard voices.

I still don't quite know why so many of those beautiful 18th-century terraces were student houses but they were. And one night I went to a party in what was possibly the coolest in the entire city - a monstrous, end of terrace crammed with bicycles and boys and with a view straight out over the twinkling gorge - and I thought: "This is it. This is where I want to live." A few months later, having become friendly with the girl upstairs, I moved in.

My ground-floor room was long and thin and at the bitter end of the wide, draughty hallway where bicycles were propped and muddy circulars lay an inch thick on the tiled floor. It had tall, double doors that opened on to a stone balcony and when I lay on my puny little mattress on the floor - the decorative 18th-century ceiling miles above my head - the wind whistled under both doors and past my ears.

A rugby player, who was OK but never said a word to me, had the bigger room next door. And next to that was the kitchen - a vast, warm mess of a room where someone was always making tea or toast or rolling a joint. No one ever washed up. On the big old pine table, among the open jars of peanut butter and marmite, the bread crumbs and torn up bits of Rizla were simply added to, rather than wiped away.

Upstairs were two more bedrooms with two more people in them - one of them the glamorous girl who was my friend. Then you went up another flight of stairs and there were three more smaller bedrooms containing three more people. Down in the basement were two post graduates who we didn't see much of. They were old enough not to need to hang out with us but young enough not to bother to complain about all the parties, which was good.

In terms of where to live in the city, I really thought I'd arrived. But the room turned out to be strange. The day I moved in a boy I'd never seen in my life before - a ferociously attractive boy in a big dark overcoat - rang the door bell. As if it explained everything, he sat in my room and, keeping his coat on as the wind rattled through, he drank a mug of Lapsang Souchong and told me he used to know Alice.

"Who's Alice?"

He seemed to hesitate. "You don't know about Alice?"

I told him I didn't. Why would I? Who was she? He bent his head and traced his finger round the grimy top of his mug.

"Alice left. She's not here any more - at the university I mean. She was very ill. She almost died from a heroin overdose. She was my girlfriend. This was her room."

This was her room. I remember the boy sitting there and telling me this but I have no idea what happened next. I'm sure I would have asked him where Alice was now and if she was OK. But if I did I have no memory of the answer. But after he left - and always, in fact for ever, after that - Alice was there in that room with me, somehow getting between me and that new, cool life that I'd hoped would start with my moving into the house.

Certainly none of its other inhabitants had ever heard of Alice and, once he'd drunk his tea and gone, I never saw the boy again. And then one night I was pulled out of sleep by the sound of someone knocking at my window and, when I opened my eyes, a pale girl's face was looking in at me. Too frightened to scream, I crept into the kitchen where the rugby-playing boy found me shaking. He insisted I sleep on the sofa in his room, which I gratefully did. But why did it never once occur to us either to find out what the girl wanted or else call the police?

Years and years later, passing through the city with my husband and three children on our way back to London from Wales, I made us do a detour and swing round through Clifton to see the house. It was easy to find. We drove right up to the very end of the street and got out.

I think I'd fully expected it to be done up - either converted into expensive flats or else a lavish residence for one wealthy family. But I was amazed to see that it was still clearly a student house - scruffy and dilapidated and completely unchanged. I looked through the kitchen window and saw a table covered in crumbs. The same crumbs. And, peering through the letter box, I saw, as I knew I would, bicycles propped, circulars on the floor. And a tall door to a room that still, all these years later, seemed not to be mine at all but Alice's.