LITMIR.BIZ

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catching layers of dust in its descent to the rug, the track of his thoughtful pacing evident where parts had been worn threadbare.

      She still remembered the trepidation she felt as a child, knocking on the polished wood and waiting for permission to enter. It was her father’s private domain, where he spent the majority of his time when not at school. But it held no clue as to the man he was, contained no remnants from his past. Alice had learnt to accept this, that her father was not a sentimental man. This was not to say he did not provide for her, indeed he gave her the very best of everything. But what she longed for, now more than ever, was to know something about him, about the man he used to be before.

      Before. It all came down to before. Before he died. Before the diagnosis of an inoperable brain tumour. Before the move from a beloved home in County Durham. Before his wife died giving birth to their only child.

      At first Alice found nothing more than folders full of receipts and utility bills, shelves full of books and a filing cabinet detailing the academic grades of every child in the school for the past sixteen years. Her own name sat between two others, just letters typed on a page.

      Then she came across the box, stuffed at the back of the bottom drawer under a pile of periodicals. A small shoebox that had once contained a pair of her school plimsolls. Tucked inside were souvenirs of her childhood, each wrapped up in tissue paper. A baby tooth, a lock of hair. A tiny pair of pink, patent shoes, the thin laces still tied in a bow. Alice’s stomach constricted at the affection her father had struggled to show whilst alive.

      At the bottom of the box was a plain, white envelope. The paper was soft with a hole on one corner and the glue had never been licked. Slipping her fingers inside Alice pulled out a photograph of a woman holding a young child, a girl. The woman’s hair was tied back in a chignon, lilac-grey eyes smiling at the camera. It was her mother.

      Looking again at the photograph Alice took in the way her mother’s thumb rested on the child’s cheek, fingers curled protectively around her head. The girl was gazing up at her mother with one chubby hand grasping a pearl necklace nestled in the V at the base of her neck. Alice noticed that the child was wearing a red smock coat and pink patent shoes – the same shoes that now sat in a box atop her father’s desk. The child in the photograph was her. It was Alice.

      Bile flooded her throat and stars appeared at the edge of her vision as she leant against the desk.

      Her mother had died in childbirth. So who was the woman in this photograph? In all the photographs her father had ever shown her? Was it her mother, or someone else? But they had the same almond-shaped eyes, the same pronounced Cupid’s bow and full bottom lip. If this really was her mother, what did that mean?

      Flipping the photograph over she was met by her father’s neat, black script.

      ‘Paris, 1997.’

      So Alice would have been at least one, perhaps closer to two years old when the picture was taken. Was her mother alive? Or had she died at a later date? But then why would her father lie to her? Why say she was dead? Why on earth would he pretend that Alice had never known her mother, never laid eyes on her face? Then out of the depths of her mind came a darker, guilty question. Why did Alice not remember her?

      She remembered what he had told her. Springtime in Paris, two students overladen with books as they rushed to escape a sudden downpour. A young woman tripping over her own feet, her father stopping to collect the papers she had dropped. Raindrops suspended on the edge of long, dark lashes as he removed black-rimmed glasses.

      Her smile, the way it tugged at the very centre of his heart, and he knew in that moment he was lost to her.

      She used to cuddle that memory, one of so few her father was willing to share. The perfection of it enchanted her, carried her through lonely nights and empty days of longing.

      But if she wasn’t dead, where was she? Was anything he had ever told her true, or just stories designed to placate a child’s endless questions?

      Alice ran her eye along the shelves, reaching high for the first in a long line of albums stood in chronological order. She flipped over the pages, searching the photographs for anything she might have missed.

      Her parents stood outside a church, squinting into the sunlight: her father’s face barely containing his unequivocal happiness, her mother holding a small bouquet of peonies.

      Her father stood underneath the legs of the Eiffel Tower, arms spread wide and cigarette dangling from his lips.

      The silhouette of her mother looking out of an open window at the rooftops of Paris, one hand cradling the stretch of fabric pulled tight over a swollen stomach.

      She knew each and every one off by heart – the images melted into her mind through fingertips that would brush over the glossy surfaces, hoping that one iota of her mother would somehow come back to her.

      Then the album’s memories changed to pictures of her as a baby. Swaddled in her father’s arms, his weary face and awe-struck eyes turned to the camera. Strapped in a high chair with the remains of a meal smeared over her face, in her hair, on the wall behind. Another of her sat in the middle of brightly coloured building blocks, arms reaching out for the photographer, a jagged line held together by Steri-Strips on the side of her skull, peeping out from amongst tufts of blonde hair.

      Like a little bulldozer, her father would say, barrelling straight through things instead of going around. Alice wound her fingers through her hair, seeking out the tiny thread of scar tissue, only one of several that decorated her skin like milky tattoos, a permanent reminder of childhood accidents.

      Putting the album to one side she began to pull other files from the shelves, tearing out records of a lifetime spent together but nothing bringing her any closer to the truth. Tax returns, medical records and her father’s employment contract see-sawed through the air to land in a haphazard circle on the floor around where she stood.

      She thought back to Barnard Castle, to the gothic architecture and a grumpy tomcat that would run into the kitchen at the first sign of rain. Was there anyone who remembered their arrival from Paris? She could picture the hazy outline of faces: a woman with furious ginger hair and glasses strung on plastic beads around her neck. A man who carried with him the scent of burnt toast and the constant expression of one who had woken only to forget where he was supposed to be.

      But nothing about Paris. Nothing about her mother.

      What was the point of rifling through his belongings looking for answers that he was unable to give?

      She sank to the floor, clutching the photograph to her chest. There was no one to ask. Her father, like her, had been an only child – his parents long since dead and buried. He never spoke of her mother or her family so Alice had no clue, not one bloody clue as to what had really happened.

      ***

      The photograph lay in the pages of the guidebook in front of her, one full of questions. She opened the guide book, easing apart the pages and feeling the creak along the spine. A map of Paris lay before her, the river at its centre like a serpent that curved through the streets, twists and turns reminiscent of the Thames in London.

      She remembered a trip she and her father had made to the town of Donaueschingen in the Black Forest, where the source of the Danube rose in turquoise bubbles after a journey through strata of chalk and gravel. The tradition was to throw a coin over your shoulder and make a wish. Alice had complied, the whispered desire passing over lips, a repetition of every time she blew out the candles on her birthday cake.

       Bring my mother back to me.

      After a lunch of schnitzel and kartoffelsalat her father had wiped the froth of beer from his moustache and drawn a map of Europe on a paper napkin, a ragged line representing the river Danube as it passed through Vienna, Budapest and out to the Black Sea.

      ‘Where does it come from?’ she asked through mouthfuls of Schwarzwald Kirsch Kuchen, cherry juice sticking to her tongue in the same way as the unfamiliar words had when she ordered her dessert.

      ‘From

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