Alice in Wonderland (An Icelandic Love Story) - An Example of My Work
Miniature pieces of fuzzy snow fluttered
gracefully onto Alice standing isolated on the sooty beach. Her hands were stuffed into her coat pockets
and she looked at the creamy coloured skies.
Alice was smiling. I’d never seen
her smile quite like this before, it was a look that said she was uninhibited,
free and wild. As I cradled the two
tumblers holding throat warming whiskey, I was stunned to the spot, admiring
her reverie. Watching the swirling gusts
of snow begin to encircle Alice, my thoughts wandered to the trauma of the last
week and I began to appreciate just how hard I’d worked to get to this moment.
Arriving
on the island a few days ago, the holiday was very nearly over before we’d even
left the airport arrivals hall. I remembered the look of horror on her face
when I’d taken her to the bike hire counter.
‘You’re kidding,’ she’d said, as if
waiting for the joke to follow.
When the joke had not been forthcoming,
Alice had crossed her arms in defiance.
I felt her emerald green eyes bore into me.
‘No darling,’ I’d responded, in my most
soothing and sympathetic voice possible.
‘This is the surprise. This is
the holiday. I thought we’d travel round
the south of Iceland and see the sights.
It’ll be an adventure…’
‘But I thought we’d at least have a
car!’ she’d cried, fiddling angrily with one of her pearl drop earrings. ‘Eric, it’s Iceland for Christ’s sake! How
are we supposed to ride on snow?’
‘Please Al, just do it my way, for at
least a week. I promise we can go back
if you hate it. And I’ll even take most
of your bags for you if you like.’
She’d been dumbfounded, that’s for
sure. I pulled out a pair of walking
boots I’d hidden from her when packing my rucksack before the flight. She still looked at me with disbelief. I pushed them as close as I dared, intruding
into the void she had created between us.
They touched the top of her shiny high heeled leather shoes, forcing her
to take a step backwards.
‘You have got a lot to answer for.’
‘Not a good time then to reveal the
cycling shorts?’
Alice had raised her arms and uttered a
mock dramatic cry in frustration, not caring what others in the airport thought
of her. That was the problem with Alice,
she pretended she didn’t really care what others thought of her, but I secretly
knew she did.
Ever since I’d met her in one of those
showy ‘exclusive’ London nightclubs, I grew to realise that Alice was obsessed
with her appearance and the way people perceived her. Her naturally blonde hair was long with artificial
yellowy extensions to her waist. Her
black painted fingernails were not real. Even her mascara clumped eyelashes
were glued to bronzed eyelids.
But underneath that glamorous exterior,
I have fallen in love with a girl. I’ve
seen this girl on some occasions; plodding thoughtfully on a piano to
Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2. I
know I’ve seen the real Alice curled up beside a lamp on an evening absorbed in
a book. Waking up beside her every
morning I meet the girl I love for the briefest of moments before she rushes
into the bathroom to hide herself away again.
And despite all the well-meaning advice
I had received from friends advising me not to bring her here, I’d ignored
them, and taken her to Iceland, away from a crazy whirring life to something
extraordinary.
On the afternoon of the second day, I
was feeling slightly more optimistic.
Apart from the obvious fact that she was still with me (and hadn’t taken
a flight back home), she had rediscovered her love of cycling along Road
1. In addition to this, she’d exchanged her
Louis Vuitton handbag for a backpack, warm woolly hat and a pair of mittens.
‘Where are we going?’ she’d asked in the
morning whilst I waited for her to finish drying her hair.
‘Gullfoss,’ I’d replied, trying hard to
resist the temptation to check the time.
Roller brush in hand, she’d nodded and
turned back to the mirror.
It had been easy to spot Gullfoss in the
distance with its spray arched high in the air.
The moisture swamped us and rock puddles rose under our feet.
Alice shook her head vigorously. ‘No,
I’ll get soaked!’
‘Where’s your sense of adventure?’ I’d
laughed, grabbing her hand and pulling her closer.
I remember her snuggling into the crook
of my arm and feeling her shiver. We
inched closer to the edge.
‘Look!’ Alice pointed to a second
waterfall which dropped to an even lower depth than the one above it. It sat hidden by the frothy swathes of water
being belched out from the underbelly of the waterfall.
We’d stayed until our fingers had grown
icy before retreating to a café on site.
‘My hair…’ Alice had moaned, looking at
the soggy lumps saturating her coat.
Looking at her then, I did seriously
start to doubt whether my decision to bring Alice to Iceland had been the right
one. Spindly streaks of clammy mascara dripped off the bottom of her chin and
she didn’t look happy.
‘I’ll get you cleaned up,’ I’d coaxed,
leading her into the café. Alice ignored
me then and departed to the bathroom on site. I confess that I had half
expected to hear shrieks coming from behind the bathroom door when she saw
herself in the mirror.
I waited and watched the steam disappear
from Alice’s coffee as it went cold.
Eventually she emerged.
‘You look beautiful,’ I’d told her
truthfully. Alice had just sniffed. The
waterfall had stripped her face of all its makeup – but I could now see the
green colour of her eyes without all the usual globs of black gunk and in an
odd sort of way, I found it alluring.
When I peered closer, I noticed her eyes glaze over and she averted my
concerned look.
‘You ok?’
She nodded in response. ‘Just the makeup
making my eyes water.’
We’d left then, without Alice wanting
another coffee. What if I had pushed her
too far? I wanted to say to her that we could go home, but I didn’t want us to
give up on our adventure so early on.
As the day progressed, we cycled onto
Road 32 toward the foreboding lava fields in the south of the country. Entering Road 26, I announced our arrival for
dinner.
‘Where are we eating?’ asked Alice,
‘There’s nothing here!’
An infinitesimal amount of black pumice
stone etched into the surrounding landscape.
The sun ahead had started to fall and a prolonged sunset of a varying
multitude of colours was slowly etching a way forward for the brief two hour
respite by the night sky.
Pulling out a picnic blanket, I said, ‘I
thought we’d eat here.’
We hid from the wind behind a large
outcrop of rock. Flopping onto the
softened ground, I helped Alice stretch out her tired limbs and removed her
heavy duty walking boots, together with obligatory mounds of volcanic ash which
seemed to invade every crevice.
Pointing upwards, I showed her the
towering mountain overlooking us, encased at the top with slicks of snow.
‘That’s Hekla, one of the most famous
volcanoes in the world,’ I’d told her, watching her gaze upwards from its
shadow. ‘Old folklore states that the souls of the condemned travel through
that crater on their way to hell.’
‘You really know how to charm a girl
don’t you?’
I’d momentarily stopped opening the
bottle of wine and given her a smile.
‘So I presume that the volcano is
inactive now,’ she’d asked, placing the plastic wine glass into a pebbly well
she had formed into a cup holder.
My lack of response signalled her
answer. Seeing her surprise, I’d raised
my arms up in defence, ‘Nearly all of Iceland’s volcanoes are active!’
‘So, if that thing explodes, we’re done
for?’
I couldn’t decide whether she was
pretending to be scared or not so I decided to try and placate her.
‘There’s absolutely nowhere else I’d
rather be in the world right now than right here with you.’
Despite her best intentions, I noted a
small smile. It gave me hope.
Returning to our bikes, I pulled out our
tent for the night, expecting an ominous response. Surprisingly, she had tilted
her head back on the rock and laughed.
‘Too much?’ I’d joked, popping up the
tent on the pumice floor.
‘Too much,’ she’d agreed, groaning at
the uninviting empty tent.
The next day we continued our heavy trek
along Road 1. As the hours wearied on,
Alice had managed a “whoop” of excitement when we arrived at our wooden cabin
for the night. She rushed into the
bathroom and emerged after an hour.
‘Your hair!’ I’d cried, reaching out to
touch it. Alice had cut away all the
dead extensions, leaving a shoulder length imperfect bob of differing blonde
colours. I felt proud walking her to dinner that night; I was with a girl who
commanded everyone’s attention, not because of her artificial looks but because
of her increasing confidence.
The next morning when she had woken up,
I’d grabbed the sheet surrounding her naked body before she could escape our
warm slumber toward the bathroom.
‘Stay,’ I’d commanded. She had paused
for a brief moment. Pulling a sheet from
the bed, she wrapped it round her slender figure and headed for the bathroom
with an apologetic look.
I wasn’t sure if I’d lost her then. It was the lowest point of my time with
her. I went for a walk whilst waiting
for her to get ready. Striding through
heather I listened to the cadence of the flowers shoring up against my
legs.
Lost in thought, I remembered the first
time I’d seen Alice in concert; waiting in anticipation with hundreds of
adoring eyes for her to start playing the grand piano quivering beneath her
fingertips. People weren’t there to see
her; they were there to hear her. And
when the haunting sound of Glasgow Theme started to echo around the concert
hall, the Alice I knew came alive; she became a luminescent being enamoured
with passion. I clapped furiously with the crowd during the ovation, then
watched speechless as like a fragile lily she wilted before her fans, sinking
back to her stool, preparing to play again.
For one brief moment, she was there, but then the spark was gone. I hoped just not forever.
The stories I’d heard about Jökulsárlón, a mythical, transcendent
“other-worldly” landscape only touched upon its actual pure magnificence. On our arrival, my excitement was temporarily
interrupted when unexpectedly Alice had thrown down her bike in great haste and
proceeded to run towards the sea. I’d
barely enough time to gather the two tumblers of whiskey before following
her. Walking along the beach, I scraped
some of the pale milky blue ice from the nearest iceberg and placed it into the
glasses.
I saw her wandering around the icy
nature-carved statues stranded on the blackened sands. She touched them delicately, as if they were
precious jewels, yet knowing that with each passing moment the sea was coming
in to reclaim their treasure.
Pausing every so often, she touched the colours, the turquoise, the opal-greys, the charcoal-blacks.
___
Author note: When I got back from my journey around Iceland in the Summer of 2012, I sat at my computer and wrote this. It is one of my favourite pieces of work, and one of my most popular. For other extracts of my work, please see below:
A Second Chance At Life: A Christmas Story
Author update - you can now purchase my debut novel 'Where Were You When the World Ended?' from the Amazon Kindle store.
I watched her hold out the palm of her hand allowing globules of aged old fresh water drip onto her skin. Reaching out, she dared to touch the magical fairy-like dusting of opal ice knowing it was coming to the end of its life. And as she did so, she jolted as the touch of a snowflake come to rest on the top of her hand.
And as if transformed, there she
is. There is my Alice.
The snow is starting to fall. Alice is gazing upwards with her hands
stuffed into her coat pockets.
Snowflakes are landing all over her face, hair, clothes, as if she is an
iceberg being taken away from life and into the sea. I can hear amidst the pounding waves and see
within the crescendo of colours the sound of Alice playing my favourite piece –
Vladimir’s Blues.
Alice is smiling. I’ve never seen her smile quite like this
before, it is a look that says she is uninhibited, free and wild.
Stopping, Alice notices my stare. Snowflakes, like miniature glowing Chinese
lanterns fleck throughout her shortened hair and she appears ethereal.
‘Is that thousand year old ice for me to
try?’
I nod. My mouth is so dry I can hardly
speak.
Looking down at her tumbler, shimmery
ice is crushed into dark golden whisky.
In amongst the frozen icicles, a diamond ring sits dwarfed by its
surrounding Icelandic grandeur.
Handing Alice her glass, I see her
smile. And it sparkles.
Author update - you can now purchase my debut novel 'Where Were You When the World Ended?' from the Amazon Kindle store.
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