After Ever After Read Online Free Page A

to wear.
    Dora had been with us that night; she’d been waiting in the foyer with her dark glasses on and her mac pulled conspicuously around her body like protective armour. Other departing Starbrite Records people raised eyebrows in her direction as they left, probably wondering if she was one of the over-the-hill (over twenty-one) hopefuls that occasionally hung out in the lobby desperate to give an impromptu concert to a passing executive, receptionist, cleaner – whatever. I just put it down to her eccentricity, the same attitude to life that had made her dye her eyebrows blue when we were fifteen and that had made her dye her naturally honey-blonde hair black two weeks before that night.
    Things had happened to Dora when she was a child, things that meant she ended up in care, things which made her and me the weirdest two kids at school and instant soulmates, protecting each other from the jibes of the lacy-topped socks girls and their permed perfection. We told only each other about the things that had happened to us, and because of that I understood her perfectly. I never questioned her latest tangent in lifestyle, because that was the kind of person Dora was: a ship sailing close to the wind but always coming back safe to the port of our friendship after every near miss.
    All my life I have half pretended that I’m a very intuitive soul, but I don’t remember knowing that by that time Dora was already caught deep in addiction. I think it was partly because it was never like I’d seen it in films, dramatic, horrifying and didactic. She looked well, she held everything together okay, and she earned good money, so I suppose she didn’t need to go robbing old ladies to support her habit, not when heroin was only twenty quid a pop. Can you imagine? I always thought it was so much more expensive than that. Anyway, I tell myself that the change in her was so gradual as to make it almost imperceptible. Honestly, though, there is also the fact that I was too busy waiting to be in love to notice at first. We all drank a lot and we all dabbled sometimes, looking for something else to temporarily occupy that empty space we imagined was allocated for the contentment a relationship would bring.
    Then, after Fergus, I was too busy
being
in love to notice, putting my heart and soul into living the dream I had dreamt about so often. After almost thirty years of waiting for my lightning bolt to strike, the delight of romantic electrocution made me miss all the signs of her addiction, largely because I simply didn’t see her quite so much and when I did I was being part of a couple, a kind of benevolent sister letting her indulge in her latest range of oddness. I simply didn’t know about it until she was admitted to hospital. And I feel bad for that. I let Dora down.
    Dora was always odd, had been from the first time I’d hung out with her at lunch break at Hackney Downs Primary School and she’d pierced her own ears with a safety pin, a cork and a bottle of TCP, the scent of which was still discernible about her person for the rest of the week. Not
so
weird – teenagers do go a bit mad, you might think – but we were only seven. So Dora in shades and a mac on a summer’s evening wasn’t an unusual thing. To let myself off the hook, maybe I wouldn’t have noticed even if I had been on the ball, all present and correct.
    ‘Worried you’ll be spotted by the Feds?’ I asked as we exited the lift into the lobby. ‘Or maybe the Mafia is after you again?’ She peered at me over the rim of her cat’s-eyes glasses and pushed her dyed black fringe out of her eyes.
    ‘You may laugh, but some of us were born to be arrested.’ We did laugh, and Dora strode out into the damp evening air with us, where the last remnants of the summer’s day we’d missed, pinned behind hermetically sealed double glazing, sizzled on the pavements.
    This launch wasn’t your usual kind of affair held in whichever was the latest hippest club or