At dinner, in a tiny restaurant above a second-hand bookstore, with sash windows overlooking the busy street below, Alice told us she was moving to South America.
It had been months since we’d all been together and Alice had chosen the most charming place. Abstract paintings hung salon style covered the walls around us, while candles flickered on a marble mantlepiece and scented the room with neroli and sage. The wait staff were impossibly chic in their black tuxedo trousers and striped Breton shirts. They moved around the room, passing and circling each other like étoiles roaming the halls of the Paris Opera Ballet.
We were a stylish group ourselves with Alice often our sartorial flag-waving leader, however the Alice who sat before us at dinner was different. Her clothes were plain and nondescript, she was unusually make-up free, her wild green eyes missing their slick of black eyeliner, and her hair which she’d always worn long, dark curls tumbling around her face and over her shoulders, was tamed into a short bob and tucked neatly behind her ears. Alice seemed nervous too and kept checking her phone throughout the meal, as though she was waiting for someone to text her that it was ok to make her announcement, which she did just as dessert was served.
Bowls of pastel coloured gelato were placed in front of us as she spoke, in a strange robotic voice like she was reading from a script. Alice always talked like this when she was trying to convince herself that a decision she’d made or a path she was on was right for her. Maya and Mimi her twin stepsisters were convinced and grinned like cheshire cats while the rest of us, the more cynical diners at the table rolled our eyes as we’d heard it all before. We loved Alice but she had a habit of making New Years resolutions and promises to friends she would never keep. Unrealised career changes, unfinished language courses and unfulfilled plans to live and work in a foreign city were her forte. I glanced at Veronica and Sylvie who were dressed in their signature white shirts, denim jeans and navy blazers and their hair tied up into the highest of pony tails. They weren’t related but looked more like twins than Maya and Mimi, and liked to dress the same or finish each other’s sentences to keep people guessing for their own amusement. They whispered something to Austin and Joel sitting next to them, giggled then leaned across the table towards me and whispered “she’ll never go”, reminding me they had only just forgiven Alice for backing out of the apartment they were supposed to rent in Paris last summer.
Alice noticed the eye rolls and giggles and assured us she knew what we were thinking however this time was different as she’d already given notice at work, started packing up her house and in six weeks someone would be waiting for her when she landed at Sao Paolo Airport. That someone she told us, was Amado.
Alice and Amado met in bar three months ago. It was the same day a minor earthquake rocked the city and a famous actor made the front page of the tabloids for crashing his Range Rover through the windows of a sushi restaurant. Alice was sipping a gin and tonic, waiting for her brother who was running fifteen minutes late. Amado, handsome, tanned, and dressed un-seasonly for winter in a white linen suit and black t-shirt was in the middle of a deep conversation with a woman Alice would learn was his ex-wife Camille. They asked Alice to join them, and when her brother called to say he wasn’t coming treated her to dinner at Camille’s favourite French restaurant across the road. Alice was both charmed and envious of her new friends. They appeared to be wealthy, spoke multiple languages and had travelled to more countries in the past five months than Alice had travelled to in her lifetime. At the end of the evening as a storm set in and they finished their bottle of red Gamay wine, Amado and Camille persuaded our Alice to follow them to South America.
Later when I left the tiny restaurant and walked home to my event tinier apartment, I couldn’t stop thinking of Alice, Amado and Camille. The tree-lined streets of my neighbourhood seemed eerie that night, the full moon cast spooky shadows and conjured all sorts of strange thoughts as to what their union might be. It started to rain so I quickened my step then I ran, as fast as my uncomfortable heels would let me, until I reached my apartment building on Ledbury Road. It was late so I entered quietly, taking care not to wake the small boy and his mother who lived in the apartment across from me. The overhead light in the hallway flicked off, then on, and then off again, and made a loud “pop” sound like one of those old camera flash bulbs from the 1930’s. As I stood there alone in the darkness, my hair and my clothes soaked through from the rain, it hit me. Alice had joined a cult.
Six weeks later Alice is in South America. There is no Amado or Camille waiting for her at Sao Paolo airport, instead their faces are splashed across the front page of every newspaper, magazine cover and television screen. Alice knows enough Portuguese to understand the headlines. One of those unfinished language courses had finally come in handy.
Image: ZANZAN Tita sunglasses
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