Looking for Alex (7 page)

Now, trying to remember how last night ended, I realise I have no clear memory of going to bed. I look around me, frowning as I try to picture things, but all I can remember is Fitz setting the glass of water down by the bed. Fitz in my room. Shit. Shifting slightly in the sleeping bag, I put one hand down and explore myself gingerly. I have no experience of what I’ll find if anything happened, just a vague idea that I would feel sore, or tender, or maybe there will be blood. I find nothing.

I’m trying to ignore the fact that I need to pee, not wanting to be the first one up, not wanting to leave the security of this room, but when my bladder feels about to burst I emerge and scoot along to the bathroom in T-shirt and knickers. My head throbs sickeningly and a thin needle of pain keeps shooting into my right eye. I find I can suppress that slightly by pressing two fingers onto the skin just above it; I sit on the toilet like that for ages, and begin to think longingly of a hot bath. When I peer into the tub I see how pitted and stained it is, with a tidemark of grime, and chalky lime-scale where the taps are left dripping. Not exactly inviting, but I could live with it. Should I take a bath though, without asking? Maybe it won’t matter, while everyone is still asleep.

However the taps then fail to give up any hot water so I make do with a cold wash at the sink. Back in my room, easing a pair of jeans over my hips, I hear someone go along to the bathroom; peering round the door, I catch a glimpse of Alex’s robe.

‘Alex!’ I hiss.

She whispers back. ‘What?’

‘I need to talk to you, now!’

Squinting at me through mascara-smeared eyes, Alex nods. Even with her hair all flattened and messy she still looks cute, a tiny thing wrapped in her silky print robe that billows all around her.

‘Okay. But I need a pee. And tea, and food. I’ll be back.’

While she’s gone I fix my hair so that it will look more banshee than hedgehog, with the aid of some backcombing and my mother’s old compact mirror that I stole out of the drawer at home. I put eye-liner and mascara on, feeling naked without them.

Alex reappears in a while, carrying a tray of tea and a plate piled high with toast. We sit on the bed to eat it, me propped up against one wall, Alex on the other, her legs stretched out over mine. It’s how we always sat on my bed at home and there’s a moment of comfortable silence while we munch on toast.

‘This toast is the best ever, Alex. I’m so hungry.’

‘Yeah, hash does that.’ Her voice is still sleepy. ‘Are you okay?’

‘I feel shit. But the food’s helping. You look all right. You’re used to it, I suppose.’

‘Beth…’

‘Alex, look, it doesn’t matter, I don’t care. I just wish you’d tell me what’s going on.’ I stare down at my plate and chase crumbs around it. ‘I mean, home wasn’t that bad, was it?’

She doesn’t answer at first. I hear music start up downstairs; Fitz is awake.

‘Beth, have you ever noticed anything about my parents?’ I look up to find her staring at me, her eyes dark and intent. ‘Like my dad looks nothing like me?’

The image that swims into my mind is of her father stepping out of his car one day, just as I was leaving. Tall, big, heavy-set. Blond hair. Blue-eyed. Everything that Alex is not.

‘You’re joking.’

‘No, I’m not.’

I sit up straight. ‘Your dad’s not your dad?’

‘Hey, mastermind!’

I picture the rest of her family. Her mother, petite like Alex. And her brother, David. Fair, chunky.

‘But…he is David’s dad?’

‘There’s no mistaking that little blood bond, is there?’

‘And—’ I want to be really clear now ‘—your mum’s your mum. I mean, you’re not adopted?’

‘You got it.’

‘So…’

‘So who is my dad? Good question. I’ve never met him.’

‘Never? You don’t know him?’

‘Beth, if I did, and if I thought he was halfway interested in me, I’d have been out of that house a long time before this. All my mother’s ever told me is that he left when I was six months old and she’s no idea where he is.’

‘Christ! Could you find out? Don’t you know his name?’

‘Yes, I know, but I’m not bothered. Why go looking for him now? Greg’s been a shit stepdad, and I guess my dad’s a shit dad. He left us to fend for ourselves, Mum told me, living in a crappy little flat that was always freezing in winter. He never sent us any money.’

‘Bloody hell.’

I stand up, step off the marshmallow mattress and cross over to the window. It looks down onto the garden at the back. From here you can see those on either side. One is bare and functional, with a rough patch of grass littered with children’s toys; the other is completely overgrown. The richness of Fitz’s garden seems even more miraculous.

I whirl round; Alex is fiddling with the tie on her wrap, winding it round and round one finger. ‘Why did you never tell me?’

She looks surprised. ‘Because when I came to your house I could forget it all. Your family is so…normal. I just wanted to be part of it. I didn’t want to spoil things by going on about mine.’

It’s probably the first time ever that I’ve seen my life through someone else’s eyes and now I wish I’d had the imagination to picture Alex’s more clearly.

‘What did you mean, Greg’s been a shit stepdad?’

She shrugs. ‘Greg’s a bully, I’ve told you. You never saw because he made sure not to do it in front of people. He used to get mad at something I’d done — like leaving butter out instead of putting it in the fridge, you know, really bad stuff — then he’d rant and rave and tell me what a useless piece of shit I am.’

‘Jesus, Alex.’

‘And if he wasn’t bullying me he was ignoring me, and then my mum had to choose whether to talk to me and if she did she’d get the silent treatment as well.’

Fitz’s music stops. Somewhere outside a solitary bird sings, echoed by another, further away.

‘What about David?’

‘David can’t put a foot wrong. David’s his and I’m the cuckoo in the nest, aren’t I?’

I walk back over to the bed and flop down next to Alex. I take hold of one of her hands, gripping it tightly. ‘I feel so bad.’

She wrinkles her nose. ‘Why?’

‘That all that was going on and I didn’t know!’

‘How could you have known?’

‘You should have told me, Alex. I can’t believe you didn’t.’

‘Well…I nearly did, once or twice, but it was hard to know where to start.’ She stares at me, thinking. ‘If I’m really honest, I didn’t want you to know. I didn’t want you to see me any different from to anyone else.’

‘Alex,’ I say, ‘you’ve always been different from to everyone else.’

She grins. ‘Fuck off!’ But I can see she knows I mean in a good way. ‘Anyway, one day he hit me when Mum wasn’t around and after that I just had to get out.’

‘So how—?’

I was going to ask about Pete, and how she’d met him, but there’s a knock at the door and his voice outside.

‘Alex?’

She looks at me and I nod. ‘You can come in,’ she calls, slipping her hand out of mine.

He pushes the door open and stands leaning against the frame. He has on the same patched jeans, with a black T-shirt and paisley waistcoat. His hair is greasy, tied back in a ponytail with a rubber-band.

‘We have somewhere to go today. Remember?’

‘Yeah. It’s still early.’

‘We need to go.’

‘Right now?’

His answer is to push himself off the wall and disappear; we hear his footsteps on the stairs. There’s a heavy silence after he’s gone.

‘Sorry, Beth. I gotta go but we’ll be back in a couple of hours.’ She scrambles up from the bed. Her eyes are hidden from mine as she loads our used plates and mugs onto the tray. ‘See you soon. Fitz’ll take care of you.’

I’m left staring at the half-open door, startled by her rapid exit. Is this how it is here, how it will be? Will Alex jump every time Pete clicks his fingers, and will I always be left waiting for scraps of time with her?

I close my eyes and lean my head against the wall, trying not to feel second best but already aware that the balance of our friendship shifted weeks ago, when Alex ran away; some of the old certainties, the old familiarities have gone. For a moment I almost wish that I’ll get found out, that the parental hand of authority will reach out and whisk both of us back to Sheffield, where everything would get sorted out in a comforting, adult way.

But I know that isn’t going to happen.

Chapter Three

16
^th
May 2013

Linda led the sessions today, and as usual I sat back and admired her talent for winning over even hardened cynics, the ones who said in smug tones,
it’s all just re-inventing the wheel, this
, as though you’d never heard anyone say that before. By lunchtime they were not exactly eating out of her hand, but prepared to have a sniff.

After lunch I had something to discuss and went to find her, on a fag break at the back of the building. She stood huddled in a corner with one or two others. Linda was a little younger than me but over the years we’d worked together she’d become a good friend. She was blonde and jolly, with a wide smile, a laugh that cracked out of her and a laid-back manner that was deceptive. She was quite tough in most matters, grew up on the kind of estate where it paid you to be.

Once the business was out of the way I found myself being updated on her complicated two-family life.

‘…. so we’ve got Jessica in the spare room, while she gets over him and finds herself a place of her own. Tom’s due back from his gap year and asked if he can bring two New Zealand girls for a week, just till they travel up to Scotland. I’ve told him he’ll have to give up his room and we’re not having any threesomes in our house. He said I’d got a dirty mind but I said I wasn’t born yesterday. And then I’ve got Liz calling me up every day, either sobbing down the phone or telling me what a bitch her mum is. I mean, I agree with her but I can’t say that, can I?’ Ash fell from her cigarette, scattered across the tarmac in the breeze. ‘When I’ll ever get a bit of peace and quiet God only knows. I haven’t had a proper conversation with Stuart in months. It’s all where’s this, where’s that, what are we having for tea tonight? God, I need a holiday.’ She went quiet for a moment. ‘Beth? Are you okay?’

I realised that I’d been staring fixedly at the ground for some time, thinking about Fitz, thinking about Alex, and Dan’s message, about what to do next if anything. I looked up. ‘Yes. No.’

Linda took my arm and hustled me out of the quad and along to the empty training room; I could see she was excited by the prospect of yet another drama but I hadn’t yet told her anything about the connection with Dan and was curiously resistant to the idea. I palmed her off with Phil. That was, in relation to Ireland. She already knew the rest: how we met at his school, when I was doing some training there; how he and his wife had agreed their marriage was over, but that they’d stay together until their girls were grown; how we met furtively so nothing would get back to them. Linda was sceptical about the whole thing; she said things like, ‘How do you know he’s telling the truth?’, ‘Isn’t that what they all say?’, and so on.

‘Phil wants me to go to Ireland.’ She looked puzzled. ‘I mean to live, not on holiday.’

‘Oh. But I thought—’

‘His old head of department has this graphic design business. He needs another pair of hands and sounded Phil out about joining him. Only problem is he lives somewhere near Waterford. Phil’s been thinking about it for ages, and I think he’s going to do it. He wants me to go with him.’

‘Golly. Well, I guess that demonstrates he’s not just stringing you along.’ She peered at me. ‘What about you?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve told him I don’t know.’

*

We’d gone to the common, to walk his dog. We did this as often as we thought we’d get away with, at weekends, Phil bundling Juno into the car and picking me up near to where I lived. Coming to my house was more risky, although we managed it sometimes, because as luck would have it two of my neighbours knew Sue and Phil; their children were friends with Lauren and Emma. ‘I don’t want to go to Ireland on my own,’ he’d said that day. He’d crouched down to take Juno off the lead and was looking up at me, his keen blue eyes fixed on mine. ‘I want you with me.’

I remember I flinched, a little, and I knew he saw that. Still, he waited for a more considered reaction.

I liked Phil: he was tall and fair and solid, with a face that, despite the lines and creases of age and experience, was somehow uncomplicated. When he smiled it was without reservation, and that was how he lived his life, open to anyone and anything.

‘I love you,’ he said.

‘I know,’ I said, frowning, ‘that’s—’

‘The problem?’ he finished for me. ‘You’re not sure, are you?’

I sighed. Things had suddenly grown serious. We were on the edge of the pitches where a few loosely teamed footballers limbered up in a cold November wind. A couple of runners passed, chatting easily, making their effort look effortless. Kids shouted and laughed in the fenced-off playground, while dads on duty stamped their feet, clutching newspapers with one hand and pushing swings or holding balancing hands with the other. There was no one there we knew and we felt ourselves safe, private in the middle of this big open space. As Juno shot off across the muddy grass Phil drew me close.

‘We could make it work,’ he said. ‘Think about it.’

*

Linda said, ‘Well, I guess you know where you are now. But what do you want?’

‘I don’t know. I thought we were just going to bob along like this, and that one day he’d leave Sue and by then we’d be like an old couple ourselves. I don’t know about Ireland. Not
now
.’

‘No. I can see that.’

‘I suppose I like things as they are.’ I glanced at Linda. ‘Bit selfish really. I’ve got the best of both worlds, and it works. For me, anyway. I don’t want anything so absolute, but then I might lose everything.’

We heard people outside. Linda stood up. ‘They’ll be coming in soon. Let’s have a drink after work next time I’m down.’

‘You don’t need someone else crying on your shoulder,’ I said, but she told me not to be bloody stupid and went to greet the first arrivals.