The Afterlife of Alice Watkins 1 Read online

  The Afterlife of Alice Watkins

  Book One

  Matilda Scotney

  Copyright © 2018 by Matilda Scotney

  All rights reserved. No parts of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. Short passages of text may be used for the purposes of a book review or for discussion in a book club.

  This is a work of fiction. Any similarity between the characters and situations within the pages and places or persons, living or dead, is unintentional and coincidental.

  Matilda Scotney has asserted her moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  The Afterlife of Alice Watkins - Book One

  ISBN: 978-0-6483191-1-5

  Design and formatting by Beehive Book Design - www.beehivebookdesign.com

  Contents

  Also by Matilda Scotney

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Matilda Scotney

  The Afterlife of Alice Watkins: Book Two

  The Soul Monger (August 2018)

  Curious Star (due 2019)

  www.matildascotneybooks.com

  For Wyn Howard.

  A truly great lady.

  Prologue

  It isn’t so hard to begin this story because I was there at the beginning. I just didn’t know it. Mum and I arrived to collect Grandma to go to the beauty salon and day spa as a treat for her birthday. Grandma didn’t answer the door, so mum used her door key while I waited in the car. When I heard mum scream; I ran inside to see what was wrong.

  I still remember the terror, not being able to move, my hand lifted to my mouth. Grandma was sitting in her favourite chair, lips as blue as the blue rinse she always put through her white hair, her hands curled in her lap. Her eyes closed.

  Mum was yelling at me to get the paramedics as she pulled Grandma to the floor to try to revive her. Mum knew little about first aid and I was fumbling with the telephone, trying to answer the emergency service operator’s questions.

  “Is she breathing?” “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Is there a pulse?” “I don’t know.”

  I whispered each reply as I watched mum pumping Grandma’s chest and attempting to breathe air into her and weeping at the same time. I heard the operator say the ambulance would be there soon, but I could only stand in horror, clutching the phone up to my ear. It was starting then—Grandma’s story. She was already there.

  Alice was our grandmother. The mother of adult children and the widow of an ordinary man. Uncomplicated, predictable, commonplace and unexceptional. I mean no criticism, she was a lovely person and I adored her, but she was indeed ordinary. To be honest, she was uneducated, never had prospects, married young and was uncomfortable with everybody she perceived to be better than her, you know, people like shopgirls and garbage collectors and people who cleaned houses. Grandma was ill at ease with those folks and she didn’t—couldn’t hide it.

  And she believed anything anyone told her. For example, her mother insisted shaving made hairs grow back stronger and thicker and the young Alice listened to what she was told, never doubting her mother’s skewed logic.

  “If God had wanted you to shave, he would have made you hairless.”-Alice’s mother.

  So, Grandma, for all her adult life spurned razors and sported hairy armpits, even when her little grandson in recent years told her about her chin hairs, she was terrified to shave, preferring instead to keep the hairs she had in preference to getting longer, thicker ones.

  She believed all the ads on TV as well, because to her, they were like biblical truths and often, she would budget to buy this or that brand of soap powder, so her whites would be whiter!

  Grandad used to tease her about a time when she read that putting a rice pudding in the oven with the Sunday roast would economise on gas. She did it for ages until someone asked why she always threw the pudding out (no-one in their house ate rice pudding). She was convinced it did something to the gas oven to make it run better (and cheaper). Gullible, Grandad maintained. And he was right, she was.

  Grandma was a teenager in the liberal sixties, but she hadn’t been liberal herself. Liberal or any of its counterparts never got a foothold in her mother’s house so she never made friends and the mother carefully nurtured in her daughter, zero ambition and few social skills.

  “Girls whose hormones are triggered by kissing and dirty words are not nice girls.”-Alice’s mother.

  Ted, her mother’s handyman kissed Alice when no-one was looking, no hormones got triggered so Grandma supposed she was “nice.” In truth, she had no idea what a “triggered hormone” might even feel like. Ted was her first and only boyfriend and when she was 17, she married him.

  Grandma, since the age of 30, had the same hairstyle as her mother and over the years, as the mousy tones of her hair grew to a salty white, chose a blue rinse, the same as her mother. She even held her teacup like her mother, laid out the house the same way and often caught herself dishing out old wives’ tales for advice, just like her mother. And she still didn’t understand why the rice pudding story made people laugh.

  As the years rolled by, she became all that her mother had insisted and without considering it, supposed it would be that way with her own daughter when she got old. Generations of hairy armpits and blue rinses, but her daughter, (my mother), Michelle, rebelled and shaved her armpits. And her legs and somewhere else that shocked Grandma!

  But now Grandma had sprouted chin hairs, her wee grandson, Toby pointed them out in a loud voice, “Grandma, you got a beard!”

  She got up to look at herself in the mirror, pushing the small, accusing body with the probing fingers from her lap to see for herself how much more she was becoming her mother. She wasn’t sure she wanted them removed but Michelle had other ideas. Grandma didn’t have original thoughts, never really needing them because everyone else had done her thinking for her; her mum, her husband and then after he died, Michelle, her eldest child, made the decisions, and Michelle had now decreed her mother needed these particular hairs dealt with even if the underarm ones were to stay put.

  Grandma didn’t understand the goings on of beauty salons or day spas, only knew Michelle liked them and that they did ‘things,’ but she was suspicious and anxious about what those ‘things’ might be, despite her daughter seeming to thoroughly enjoy the experience. Michelle, at 41 years of age, had been going to the beautician all her adult life.

  As Grandma’s 65th birthday approached, a visit to the salon and d
ay spa had been organised, where our hairy grandma would lose her chin hairs and have her first facial and massage.

  “Facial?” she said, her eyes wide with the enormity of it all. “Where they peel your skin off?”

  She had read about facials in a magazine and hadn’t grasped the concept and now, with the expectation of having one herself, suffered no small measure of anxiety, but Grandma would not dare challenge her daughter and in the end, tried to accept my reassurances.

  After the salon, Mum decided, Grandma would be off to the hairdressers to update her hairstyle and get some foils. ‘Foils’ baffled Grandma, but Michelle had organised it with no thought of asking if all this beauty therapy was welcome. Grandma told me privately that she always thought her blue rinse smart and stylish and that she would miss it. I tried to tell my mum, but she ignored me because she wanted Grandma to have all these things done, insisting she would love the results.

  So, that was my grandma. I’ve told you something of her, so you might understand how her extraordinary experiences changed her and shaped the woman she became. What comes next is her own remarkable story, entrusted to me so many years ago, and though we were close, I wasn’t part of what happened, or part of where she went, only that she asked me to write it down for her. “Like a novel,” she said. “No-one will believe it anyway,” were her exact words.

  It’s her story until it’s finished and as you will see, “finished” means something that had a beginning, a middle and a conclusion. You can decide for yourself where the unremarkable, homely, getting-on-in-years, Alice Watkins’s story started, middled and ended. Or even if it has not yet begun.

  Eliza Campbell (Alice’s granddaughter)

  Sydney NSW – 19th August 2103

  Chapter One

  Alice Watkins seldom bothered with the mirror, but that morning, she screwed up her face to check out the wrinkles that had been her constant companions for many years. She’d lived behind this face for almost 65 years, a face, that at one time, had been smooth and unlined. Now, deep creases etched both sides of her nose and mouth, but their presence didn’t trouble her. The wrinkles were welcome to make their home in her face because, after all, that’s what happens when you get old and such things must be accepted.

  She thrust up her chin, inspecting the hairs that were due to be waxed off that day and ran an arthritic finger over her neck and jaw, the bristly sensation reminding her of the stubble on her late husband’s face when he hadn’t shaved.

  Alice Watkins suffered not a skerrick of vanity, but Toby thought facial hair on his grandma so hilarious, she wondered if others found them entertaining, perhaps people at the shop were snickering and pointing at the bearded lady, so she kept her head down since Toby drew her attention to them, knowing all the while, no-one would bother paying her any mind.

  “Why would anyone be watching you, Alice Watkins? What’s so special about you?”-Alice’s mother.

  Alice’s 65th birthday was on Saturday and a special family dinner arranged to mark the occasion. Michelle decided it was too much to pack into one day and arranged for the three of them, herself, Eliza and Alice to visit the day spa a few days before.

  Alice didn’t know what went on in a day spa, but Michelle waved away her concerns, explaining that the ladies there would wax off Alice’s chin hairs, put hot stones on her back, give her an “all over massage” and do “stuff” to her face to relax the wrinkles. It would be a wonderful experience, Michelle promised, but it didn’t sound wonderful to Alice, even though she didn’t dare argue and only hoped the day spa ladies wouldn’t make her take off her bra and knickers.

  On that day, the pre-birthday, chin hair gone day, blue rinse gone day, Alice lingered at the hall mirror, not wanting to forget what it looked like to grow old gracefully as her mother’s God intended, fearing she might not recognise the new image that would be looking back at her when she arrived home.

  So, what if she came back all fresh and tarted up? Who would see it? Who would care? Alice didn’t, but if it gave Michelle pleasure to take her to this place, she would go obediently and not complain.

  Turning away, she checked her watch, there were still a few minutes before Michelle and Eliza were due to arrive so she eased herself into the somewhat saggy-seated, worse-for-wear old chair facing the window and folded her hands in her lap, letting her mind wander, and straining her ears a smidgeon to hear if Michelle’s far-too-large four-wheel drive had turned up the street. She thought about the new baby Michelle was due to have in a month and marvelled, not for the first time, how she managed to fit that enormous baby bump behind the steering wheel at all.

  Michelle had to drop the other children off at school first, but Eliza had finished for the year now exams were over. Eliza was 16, and Alice loved that she was going with them, even though she couldn’t imagine what Eliza might need at a day spa, as beautiful as a model; clever, happy and the apple of her grandma’s eye, she would easily get a job in an insurance firm or a department store that one! Alice’s heart filled with pride at the thought of her granddaughter’s future success.

  Sammy, the big tabby cat with one tooth jumped on Alice's lap. It was only 8.30am, but the day had already warmed and through the open window, she could hear the city waking up in the distance. Sammy’s fat tummy was cosy and rumbly; he wouldn’t recognise her when she got home, so she tickled his ears and watched the rogue branch of the frangipani tree tapping against the window. What on earth possessed her to plant the blasted thing so close to the house? She must cut it back again before it broke the window pane—it had only been a few weeks since she last went out to it with her secateurs.

  Alice felt warm and sleepy, it would be so easy to close her eyes and doze. The day spa might be nice, she thought, trying to reconcile herself to going and hoping that keeping her bra and knickers on wouldn’t be an issue. Eliza said they had gowns, but that knowledge hadn’t been enough to reassure her.

  If her mother had still been alive, she’d have pursed her lips and told Ted and Ted would have said the day spa was, “a bloody waste of money,” and Alice wouldn’t have gone. But now, she could do as she pleased, no mother, no Ted. If she wanted, she could take the chin hairs off with a razor, even pull them out by the roots—but then they might grow back thicker, darker, stronger, despite Michelle assuring her that was an old wives’ tale and that waxing made them finer and less noticeable when they regrew, but the idea of defying her deceased mother and husband still caused her considerable anxiety.

  And so, Alice’s small, simple life and thoughts sat with her in the chair with Sammy. The rhythmic tapping of the branch lulled her, and she thought she heard Michelle’s car pull into the driveway, but her eyelids felt heavy and it wasn’t easy to stir herself to get up to answer the door. And why suddenly, was it night?

  Chapter Two

  Alice tried to open her eyes, but her eyelids were too heavy. From somewhere around her, an unfamiliar scent wafted into her nostrils, and she heard an irritating knocking sound at the door. Odd? Michelle had a key. Why not just let herself in? Alice’s legs had gone to sleep, the pins and needles so intense, she tried to hoist herself into a position to get her blood flowing and to push Sammy off her lap. But he wasn’t there. Alice supposed he jumped off while she slept, preferring to sit in his special spot on the floor where the sun came through the window.

  She made to sit up, certain now she was awake, but her body wouldn’t co-operate, either way, she was conscious of being in an odd place, somewhere between sleeping and waking. Her vision, good for someone of nearly 65 and only a bit hazy when watching TV, was more clouded as she attempted to focus but she couldn’t tell if her eyes were open or closed, it all seemed so bright and she couldn’t make out any forms through the brightness.

  Alice’s legs lay straight out in front of her, just like in bed, and as the sensation returned, she could feel the soft touch of a light blanket on her feet. Strange, she’d been sitting in a chair, with Sammy, waiting for Michelle and E
liza. Now, she was in a bed, under a blanket and unable to move.

  Years of no excitement and not a single adrenalin rush took their toll. Alice just lay dazed, paralysed and confused, hoping someone would come and tell her how she came to be here. There was always someone who knew best, but where on earth was she? Not in her chair that much was certain, so there was nothing to do but wait and as she waited, she ticked off her most recent memories, playing them around and around in her head. Michelle and Eliza, chin hairs, day spa; the branch on the tree. She made a mental checklist to try to tick off each one. Tick. Tick. But the memories wouldn’t hold still long enough for her to arrange them into any sort of order.

  Alice delved further back to try to capture the events and put them into a proper sequence. She’d been standing in front of the hall mirror, then she sat in the chair where she must have dozed off with Sammy while waiting for Michelle and Eliza. The same scenario played out over and over, with little details being added and subtracted, and now and then, she tried to see through the fog, each time giving up because she could only make out vague shapes and colours. A sudden, terrifying thought came to her about Ted, how he’d felt when he had his stroke.