They were supposed to be best friends…

It’s the summer of 1977, Beth and Alex did everything together. Until the day seventeen year old Alex ran away from home. A missing persons report has been filed, but Beth knows that there must be more to Alex’s disappearance. So she follows Alex, to punk-era London, determined to bring her best friend back home.

But the Alex she finds living in a Camden squat isn’t the same Alex. And memories of those weeks in London haunt her to this day: falling for Fitz, her first love; tasting a new kind of freedom, and the fateful day that her parents finally tracked them down and took her away.

Alex knew then that Beth had betrayed her trust, and disappeared once more, severing their friendship for good. And now, years later, it’s time for forgotten secrets to be shared once and for all. Because after all this time, Beth’s never given up on finding Alex…

Looking for Alex

Marian Dillon

Copyright

HQ

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2013

Copyright © Marian Iseard 2013

Marian Iseard asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

E-book Edition © June 2013 ISBN: 9781472055323

Version date: 2018-09-20

MARIAN DILLON

Originally from Northampton, Marian moved to Sheffield as a student and has lived there ever since, enjoying life up north. She has published several stories for children and young people.

This novel, Looking for Alex, had been a story in her head for a long time, and was written as a major part of her studies for an MA in Creative Writing. She’s thrilled to have finally completed it and to see it go out into the world. She is now looking forward to spending more time turning other half-formed ideas into novels.

Aside from all this she has worked in teaching and now as a counsellor. She is married, with two grown-up sons, who have had to put up with her disappearing into the study for hours on end!

Thanks to Linda Lee, Kate, Louise, Louis and Sarah for all their help and encouragement

For my family

Contents

Cover

Blurb

Title Page

Copyright

Author Bio

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Endpages

About the Publisher

Chapter One

13th May 2013

There had been moments like this before. It might be a single word that did it, random words, like disappeared, squalid, bruised. It could be a smell, of bonfires say, or sandalwood. Sometimes it was a song: Suzanne, maybe, or London Calling. The pull that I felt at these times — low in my gut, a complicated yearning — was always transitory, pushed back down or brushed aside. I’d done with reliving all that.

But this time there was no avoiding that trawl into the past; a stranger waited as I gaped like a fish, stunned by his question.

‘Are you the Beth that was a friend of Alex?’

He took a few steps into the room, a tall, loose-limbed man with big glasses and untidy hair. ‘Beth Steele. Right?’

I nodded, dumbly. It didn’t take much working out — Beth Steele Training being plastered all over the material I was sorting into piles — but clearly he knew not just my name, but me. How?

‘You won’t remember me. I would have been about ten. You were older…sixteen, seventeen?’

He stood quite still, smiling, waiting to see if I’d place him. I searched his features for some clue but there was an empty space where a name should have been. He took off his glasses.

‘Is that better?’

Slowly I shook my head. Although, as I took in the narrow, deep-set eyes and a mouth with laughter lines at each end, like a pair of speech brackets, there was now a dim flutter of recognition. Ten years old. The boy who’d lived above the corner shop? The milkman’s son, who’d helped on the rounds in holidays? I began to notice details: a scattering of freckles, a small scar on one cheekbone, the faint smile that seemed to be gently mocking my confusion. The shape of his mouth was somehow familiar, but finally it was the scar that dredged up a distant memory. I saw a falling bike, flailing arms and spinning wheels, a trickle of blood.

‘Not…Dan? Was that you?’

‘Depends — which Dan you mean.’

‘The house in Camden? ‘77?’

‘So it is me you’re thinking of,’ he said, his smile deepening, and something in the crease of his eyes settled it. ‘I work in IT.’ He held out his hand. ‘Dan Walker.’

‘Christ!’

He laughed out loud as I stared rudely now, trying to picture the boy I knew, conjuring up a snapshot image of a cheeky face, long-fringed hair, and a Scooby-Doo T-shirt, a boy in shorts permanently straddling a red Chopper bike.

‘I saw your name on the training schedule,’ he said. ‘Thought I’d come and see if it was the Beth I used to know.’ The speech brackets expanded as he grinned. ‘You look a bit different now.’

My eyes slid away from his, staring down the years at my seventeen-year-old self. I saw Alex and me in front of my old dressing-table mirror, posing in crotch-tight jeans and ripped T-shirts, painting purple lips onto corpse-like faces and coaxing hennaed hair into spikes with an ancient pot of Brylcreem.

‘The blonde hair threw me a bit.’ Dan’s words brought me back. ‘But your face is the same.’

‘Right, if you don’t look too closely.’

‘And your voice. Your voice hasn’t changed.’

‘Well, yours is a bit deeper,’ I joked. ‘I would never have known it was you.’

‘I did have the advantage,’ he said. ‘Back then you only knew me as Dan, I guess, but I knew your full name, Beth Steele. That hasn’t changed.’

Oh, but it did. It became Beth Williams for a while, although I’d never grown used to it. I liked having Steele back in my name, liked the way it gave an edge to the softness of Beth.

‘Fancy you remembering,’ I said.

He grinned. ‘Could be something to do with Fitz once having written it all over a steamed-up window.’

The memory flooded in. It had rained all day without stopping and when Fitz cooked one of his curries the kitchen became a warm little den of steam. He wrote my name in large letters from one side of the window to the other, and it stayed there while we ate until Dan had climbed up onto the draining board and wiped it with his sleeve.

‘Is it going all right?’ Dan asked, with a nod at the circle of chairs, and I said yes, so far, while images of those weeks in London flickered through my mind like an old reel of film. ‘Are you going for coffee? I’ll walk along with you.’

By the time we got there I’d made the connection. ‘You were Fitz’s cousin.’

‘Still am.’

‘Do you—?’

‘See him? Yes. Now and then.’

From inside the hospitality room came the buzz of voices, reminding me that I should be in there, mingling with the group I’m here to train. The HR director looked over, caught my eye, held one hand up to draw me in.

‘I’d love to talk to you,’ I said to Dan, ‘about all that.’

‘Well, let’s go for a drink after work. We can catch up properly.’

‘That would be great.’

Dan glanced at the crowd in the room, then back at me, his eyes bright with curiosity.

‘Fitz never told me very much. Your friend….wasn’t she in some kind of trouble? Run away from home or something?’

‘That’s right.’

‘What happened to her? Was she okay?’

‘I don’t know. She sort of…disappeared.’

‘What, totally?’

‘Yes. I’ve never seen her since.’

‘Good grief.’

I saw his eyes widen, and was touched by the fact that we must have all meant something to him, even though he was just a boy.

‘Now I’m curious,’ he said. ‘Catch you later.’

*

If ever I told anyone the story, of how Alex ran away from home, they would always say, but you must have known, she must have talked about it, you must have known something. And I would think back to those times, looking for clues I might have picked up, convinced I should have. Full of guilt that I hadn’t. But Alex was very good at concealment, and the fact is that I only ever found her entertaining, interesting, and always, always, fun.

We’d been friends since we were eight years old, since the day she moved into my school. She’d scooped me up and rescued me from sitting on the sidelines, where I’d found myself after my best friend had moved away. On the surface we were an unlikely combination — Alex all fiery and quick to quarrel, and me hating rows of any kind — but somehow we hit it off, became best of friends. We operated like oil and water: when Alex sparked up trouble I’d smooth things over; in return she gave my life a nice sheen. Later, at Storrs High, Alex began to push the boundaries more and more, earning a reputation with the teachers. These days she’d be called ‘challenging’, and maybe someone would try talking to her and find that there was hurt behind the bravado. Back then she was just labelled a trouble-maker. Our science teacher, a blunt man, put it succinctly one day when he rudely told her to stop being so bloody-minded. I sometimes worried that she’d get tired of me pulling her back from the edge, that she’d move on to a different crowd, but somehow I retained my status: best friends with the girl who would say what others only thought and was generally regarded as cool.

It was Alex who got me on stage, insisting that we join the drama club after finding out that Ian Wragg was in it. ‘You’d be really good, Beth,’ she said, with her listen-to-me face on. ‘You read so well in English.’ So we did, and I took to acting like a duck to water, amazed at first that I could do it, and then, as I was given bigger parts, by the highs to be got from being someone else. I loved it, and began to think of a career in theatre. Meanwhile Alex got off with Ian Wragg but went off drama after a row with Mrs Bull. People used to say she’d got thrown out; I always defended her and said she’d chosen to leave. There was truth in both versions.

My friendship with Alex led to battles with my parents. As we got older there were times we stayed out too late, when they didn’t know where I was; times I came home from parties reeking of fags and drink; late-night trips to the bathroom to throw up. My parents began to encourage my other friends, but it didn’t work because it was Alex I liked best. We did everything together.

Until the day she left home without me.

*

I could see Dan below, waiting as the glass lift sank smoothly down to the foyer. Outside we were met by a wave of heat. It was the middle of May, unexpectedly warm, and London was basking in twenty-four degrees, a few more than it would be back in Sheffield.

‘I know a nice pub garden,’ Dan said. ‘It’s not too far.’

‘Sounds perfect.’

We turned onto Marylebone High Street, sidestepping a twin buggy with wide-eyed occupants. Dan quizzed me about my company, seven years old this month and doing well, despite these scary times for winning bids. I told him how I won this NHS contract on the back of some work in other London boroughs. It’s a two-week block of training and workshops, and I’d decided to stay over on the week-nights, returning for the middle weekend.

‘Just you?’ Dan asked.

‘No, there’s my colleague, Linda. She’ll travel from Sheffield on a daily basis. She’s juggling some work we have there.’

Dan took my arm briefly to steer me across the road. ‘This is so weird,’ he said. ‘I remember that summer very well. Mainly that I was quite jealous of this girl who suddenly took up so much of my cousin’s time.’

I laughed, told him that the feeling was often mutual. ‘You used to turn up out of the blue and ask Fitz to mend your bike, do you remember?’

‘That old thing, yes. I went everywhere on it, till it fell apart.’

Suddenly I realised I’d started searching for Alex’s face again. Once it was a habitual response any time I was in London, to scan the crowds, straining to catch a glimpse of her — on Oxford Street, in Hyde Park, on the tube, in shops — convinced she would still be here somewhere. And Fitz, of course Fitz. But then the years passed and the two of them became ghosts somewhere in the back of my mind. I’d had no expectation of seeing either of them again, and thinking of Alex only ever brought up old anxieties, which today Dan had stirred, all those ‘what ifs’.

The King’s Head looked unpromising from the front — an ugly red-brick building that sat squashed between two large office blocks — but the garden was a delight, full of colour and scent, and surprisingly peaceful. We found ourselves a table. As Dan went off to get the drinks my phone rang.

‘Hi, Phil.’

‘Hi. Had a good day?’

‘Yes, fine, no problems.’

‘Where are you? Back at the hotel? Sounds noisy.’

‘I’m in a pub garden.’

‘Imagine that,’ he said dryly. ‘Who with?’

I don’t know why I lied. Something to do with not having the energy to start explaining things.

‘Just someone from HR.’

‘Right. The Sylvia woman?’

‘Yes. We’re talking over a few things before I go back to the hotel. How’s your day been?’

‘Well, you know, same old same old. Actually, pretty bad. I had double 9KF today.’

‘Oh, that’s bad.’

‘Then we had a staff meeting about some crap initiative that’s being rolled out so now we’ve all got to rush round inventing hundreds of aims and objectives.’

I made a sympathetic noise, somewhere between ‘poor you’ and ‘bastards’, imagining him sitting in his Ford Focus in the school car park, the car all warm and stuffy in the sun.

‘I wish you were here,’ he said.

‘Well, even if I was you wouldn’t be able to see me, would you? Haven’t you got all sorts of things to take the girls to this week?’

‘I know. But I still wish you were here.’

‘I’ll see you on Saturday?’

‘Should be okay.’ I saw Dan walking towards me, pint in one hand and a large white wine in the other, its glass clouded with condensation. ‘Beth…have you thought any more about Ireland?’

‘I…look, Phil, sorry, it’s difficult to talk now. Could you call back later? I mean, can you?’

‘Okay.’ He was put out. ‘I’ll try, but I can’t promise.’ Dan sat down. ‘I think it’s Sue’s turn to pick the kids up from dance so maybe while she’s out.’ It seemed to me then that Phil were was shouting, his words clear and damning, leaping out of the phone. Dan pointedly studied his beer, intent on not being intent on my conversation. ‘If I can’t manage it I’ll ring tomorrow. She’s got yoga. Or maybe on your lunch—what time do you break?’

‘Around one-thirty.’

‘Okay. I’ll ring you when I can.’ He paused, then added, ‘Love you.’

‘I have to go, Phil, I’ll speak to you later.’ Ringing off, I stowed the phone in my bag and took a large gulp of wine. Only after that did I look up at Dan, who had an apologetic half-smile on his face but said nothing. ‘Sorry,’ I said, feeling exposed, feeling heartless.

Dan waved one hand dismissively. ‘No worries.’

We sat quietly for a moment, until Dan leant forward, hands cupping his pint, furrows of concentration on his brow. ‘The last time I saw you was that day I fell off my bike and Alex’s mother was there and there was a lot of crying and shouting going on. You were trying to calm them down but no one was listening. And then…’

‘And then her mother walked out and Alex turned on me.’

‘Yes. And Fitz told me to make myself scarce — “piss off home, Dan” I think his exact words were. I have no idea what happened next. And then I didn’t see Fitz for a while so my knowledge of where he went after that is a bit patchy.’

‘He went away?’

‘Yeah, to Wales. He knew people there.’

So he went back.

‘He had to leave the squat anyway — the police came and threw everyone out. He dossed on people’s floors and then went to live in Wales and I didn’t see him for about three years.’

‘How long after?’ I heard my voice, calm and level, trying not to betray how this new information had got hold of me like a fist, slowly squeezing the air out of me. Dan looked puzzled.

‘After what?’

‘After that day, the day Alex’s mother was there, how long till they got thrown out?’

‘Oh, about a week, I think.’ One week. Seven days, maybe ten. The fist squeezed tighter. ‘He stayed with us a couple of nights. I even gave up my bed for him.’ Dan’s grin was wide and infectious. I was remembering how he hero-worshipped his cousin and thinking; Fitz never got my letter. That was why he never replied, to the address I gave him, belonging to the one friend I could trust. On good days I’d let myself believe he didn’t want to risk making things worse for me; the rest of the time, which was most of the time, I’d told myself he just hadn’t cared as much as I did.

I had a sudden vision of Fitz as I first saw him, the day I arrived in London, peering up from rifling through his stack of vinyl, annoyed at being disturbed. The image was gone almost as soon as it came, so that when I tried to bring it back all I could summon was a blurred impression of mirror shades, a thin face, and wiry curls.

‘What happened after Wales?’ I asked.

‘Oh, various things. He travelled, he stopped travelling. He married, he stopped being married. He moved back to London and got a job. Works in a school now, as a teaching assistant. He did the last time I saw him anyway.’

‘When was that?’

‘Last November. At my father’s funeral.’

‘I’m sorry.’

He acknowledged this with a nod. ‘And you?’ he asked. ‘When did you last see him?’

‘Me? Oh, the next morning my parents pitched up and dragged me home. I never saw Fitz after that — there was no way.’

Dan took a drink. He set it down, glanced at me and said, ‘Is that, no way, or just, there wasn’t any way?’

I wiped moisture slowly off the side of the glass.

‘I was in Sheffield, he was in London — or so I thought. And my father would have killed him.’

‘Right. I see your point.’ There was a brief pause. ‘Fitz’s love-life was always complicated. Either that or non-existent. Like now. I mean, he couldn’t just meet someone from the next borough. He has to choose a woman who lives in Cornwall.’

Before I could ask any more he got a text, opened it and replied in a matter of seconds, then raked his hands through straw-coloured hair and smiled. I saw his mouth was like Fitz’s, how it curved up more at one side. Our glasses were nearly empty and I knew if I had another I’d feel very slightly drunk, but we’d hardly started on the past. Quickly I calculated that tomorrow would be an easier day for me as I’d be joined by Linda, who would do most of the delivery. On the other hand, I wouldn’t want to turn up with a hangover. Then again, why go back to an empty hotel room when I could talk nostalgia with Dan?

‘Another drink?’ I asked. Dan looked at his watch. ‘Do you have to go?’

‘No. My partner’s out tonight. He’s got some work thing on.’ He saw me digest this new piece of information about him. ‘Not that we live in each other’s pockets. So…yes, to another drink. And then, if you want to eat I know a good Italian near here.’

‘Done,’ I said, and headed for the bar. At the entrance I glanced over to where Dan sat, his back turned, and a thrill coiled through me, a tingling current of energy that ended somewhere in my shoulders as a tight, cold shiver.

Dan, and Fitz, here in London, all this time.

*

11th July 1977

‘You see, Beth, my problem is I’m finding it hard to see this as anything unusual. A little protest is my guess.’ Burton fixes his bleary eyes on mine as my fifth-form tutor used to when he thought I’d got something to hide. I swallow, blink. ‘Do you know what I mean, Beth?’

I look over at my headteacher. Mr Cue is leaning against the window, his bum perched on the sill, hands in pockets. He raises his eyebrows until they form a question mark.

‘I’m not sure,’ I answer, grudgingly. ‘I suppose you mean girls run away from home all the time.’

‘Exactly, exactly, Beth.’

My instinctive dislike of the policeman deepens. ‘Does that mean you don’t have to try and find them? What if someone’s got Alex? What if she’s being hurt?’

The DS gets up from his blue plastic chair that sits facing mine and begins pacing about Mr Cue’s study. It’s the first time I’ve ever been in there on my own — that is without a friend beside me. I notice now how bare it is. Apart from Mr Cue’s heavy wooden desk and chair there’s a set of glass-fronted shelves, full of books and folders, some low cupboards, a small table, and two plastic chairs for parents. We pupils are not usually invited to sit.

DS Burton stops and turns to look at me. ‘The way I’m looking at it, Beth, is like this. Your friend Alex, so I gather, is rather difficult.’ He makes the word difficult sound like an offence. ‘She misses lessons and when she is here she dresses in a way that will get her noticed in the wrong way — all that punk stuff.’

His eyes travel over me, from head to toe. I fold my arms, suddenly self-conscious of my fledgling punk look: black skin-tight jeans under a Stranglers T-shirt, and oversized Doc Martens that sprout, bulbous, from my legs. The T-shirt is cinched with a wide black belt, accentuating my suddenly blossoming breasts; I notice how DS Burton’s eyes linger. With red cropped hair and thick black eyeliner I’m teetering on the edge of what the school consider acceptable. I glance at Mr Cue, who is now looking at me through narrowed eyes. There’s no uniform in the sixth form but there is a limit past which we are not expected to go, and I’m pretty close to that limit. Alex always strays over it provocatively. She wears tiny, tight skirts and fishnet stockings, clingy tops, extreme shoes and multiple earrings that run like a train track up each ear.

‘She’s got a bit of a lip on her, yes?’ Burton looks over at Mr Cue, who confirms this with a nod. ‘Her parents tell me she’s become more and more of a handful at home and the other day you told me she’s taken to hanging out at The Wellington Arms late at night. On her own. Bit of a dive, isn’t it?’

‘I didn’t say that. I said she told me she went there once. She’d had a row at home.’

DS Burton looks at me intently. There’s silence in the room, broken only by the sound of balls on racquets from the tennis courts. The air is warm, liquid.

‘Well, all my information tells me that Alex is a bit of a rebel. Are you getting me? It’s almost like, why wouldn’t she run away?’

I stare down at my hands, neatly folded in my lap. They look demure but the palms are warm and sweaty. ‘That’s ridiculous,’ I hear myself say, surprised by my own daring.

‘Oh, is it? Well, tell me, then, Beth, why did Alex get on a bus to London exactly two weeks ago today?’

My head shoots up so fast I feel a sharp pain jab the back of my neck. DS Burton looks faintly gratified at the reaction from both myself and Mr Cue, who pushes sharply away from the window and says, ‘What?’

Out of the corner of my eye I see the woman constable who’s taking notes throw me a sympathetic look. Burton sits down in Mr Cue’s chair and leans over the desk.

‘So you’re telling us the truth, then, Beth. You don’t know any more than we do.’

I can’t speak, can’t form any thoughts that seem to make sense.

‘You know that for certain?’ Mr Cue asks and Burton sticks his chin out, runs one finger round his collar.

‘We found out early this morning. One of the drivers saw the article in The Star and came forward, remembered seeing her on his bus. I kept it back, for obvious reasons, and Beth here has just told me what I wanted to know. So, what we now have is a young girl who’s left home of her own free will and without telling anyone where she’s going.’ He glances at me, sees my face, and maybe my despair. He coughs, and his voice changes, morphs into a ‘giving bad news’ version of itself. ‘It does mean, I’m afraid, that there’s not much else we can do. Alex is seventeen, so legally old enough to live by herself, and she’s not done anything under duress. We have to assume that she’s chosen to leave home. She’ll stay on the missing persons list but…’ he shrugs ‘…that’s all.’

His words jangle uselessly in my head — own free will, she’s chosen to leave home — and the cold chill in my stomach is almost as bad as when I believed something terrible had happened to her.

*

For the next few days, I walk around in a daze, telling myself I should be happy, that now I can stop imagining Alex being dragged into a car and unspeakable things happening to her, that there was no random attack, no sudden blow from a hammer. But although I do feel relief — who wouldn’t? — those sickening thoughts seem to have got swapped for ones that are somehow, in an insidious way, worse. I veer between disbelief and shocked hurt, until all I can think is: how could she do this and not tell me?

My parents, although concerned at how desolate I am, have their own take on things. I see it in their faces and hear it in whispered words. We might have expected something like this; typical of Alex. I even sense a slight relief, once they know she’s not been raped or murdered, that now she’s out of the way I can get on with my studies, get my grades and go to university.

Only I’m not so sure that’s what I want to do.

Two letters arrive for me, both big, fat envelopes. One is a prospectus from Leeds University. The other is a brochure from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, in London. I’ve been expecting the first — my parents are encouraging me to apply there — but not the second, and it causes a row with my mother.

‘I thought we agreed that you’d go to university, get your language degree, and then do your acting afterwards.’ She’s ironing, her flushed face bobbing up and down.

‘We didn’t agree,’ I say. ‘It’s just what you and Dad think I should do.’ I’m staring at the cover of the brochure, at students in white masks and black cloaks, wondering why this has been posted to me. ‘I haven’t decided yet.’

‘You need something solid behind you, Beth, so that—’

‘Yes, I know, for when I end up as yet another failed actor.’

‘Actress,’ she corrects, always the keeper of correct grammar, and clunks the iron down on its stand as she tugs my dad’s shirt into position.

‘Actor. Actress is patronising.’

She tightens her lips and says nothing more. Watching the iron sweep from left to right, I sense that she’s holding back because of my distress about Alex but I’m too cross with her to be grateful.

‘And anyway, I didn’t even send for this.’ Not yet, although I had intended to. ‘I don’t know why it’s come.’

My mother parks the iron and comes over to pick up the Leeds prospectus. ‘Oh, this looks very good, Beth.’

I flick the pages of the Guildhall brochure, seeing a montage of student life there — rehearsals, dance lessons, mime, productions — and a faint flutter of excitement, like the wings of a moth, begins to stir the gloom that has settled on me. Then something catches my eye, a loose piece of paper. I turn back to find it, a piece of Basildon Bond notepaper Sellotaped in near the end. I recognise Alex’s handwriting and the shock jolts through my entire body, nearly emerging as a sharp squeal. Quickly I snap the pages shut.

‘Let me see,’ my mother says, looking up.

‘No.’ I can think of no good reason why she shouldn’t. ‘You’ll only find something wrong with it.’

‘Don’t be silly, Beth.’ My mother sighs. ‘Look, acting is so hard to get into. It makes sense to get a degree first.’

‘No, it doesn’t. It makes sense to do something that I’ll actually enjoy doing and if that doesn’t work out I’ll think again. It makes sense to try for what I really want.’ My voice is gathering pitch until finally I shout, ‘Just stop going on about it!’ I turn my back on her hurt face and walk out of the room, clutching the brochure tightly to my chest.

Up in my room I sit down on the bed, breathing heavily and listening out for my mother’s footsteps on the stairs. Guilt and anger tumble over each other as I wait for her to follow me and carry the argument on. She doesn’t though, and after a while I hear the renewed clunking of the iron. Hurriedly I thumb through the brochure to find Alex’s short note. Reading it, I think I stop breathing for a few seconds; there’s a sharp tightness in my chest and the soft exhalation of breath when finally I release it.

‘I’m okay. Don’t tell. I’ll ring. 4 o’clock Friday. If you’re not alone say wrong number. I’ll try again Monday.’

Four o’clock Friday. A time that I’m always in the house on my own, which Alex knows. Today is Thursday. I lie down on the bed, staring up at The Stranglers on my wall where David Cassidy used to be. Excitement bubbles up inside, because Alex is back, back in my life, and it’s no longer just me and everyone else. A wide grin of delight splits my face.

Don’t tell. Of course not. How could I?

*

Her voice sounds far away, a small, tinny thing at the end of a wire.

‘Where are you?’ I demand. ‘Are you in London?’

‘Who said that?’

‘The bus driver remembered you.’

‘Oh, him. He kept asking stupid questions.’

‘Is that where you are now?’

There’s a long silence, then, ‘Uh-huh.’

‘Where? Whereabouts? Are you sleeping rough?’

‘No.’

‘Well, where, then?’

‘I can’t say, can I?’

‘But what the hell are you doing? And if you’re not sleeping rough who the hell are you with? I don’t get it, Alex. Why have you done this?’

‘Beth, don’t get mad. I can’t cope with you being mad at me.’

‘Well, what did you expect? “Hi, Alex, how nice to hear from you” — after three sodding weeks? Do you know what it’s been like for me? Do you have any idea how worried everyone is?’

‘Not everyone.’

‘What?’

‘Not everyone will be worried.’

‘Of course they will. Whatever’s gone on they’ll be worried.’

I hear the pips go and then the sharp clang of a coin slammed into the box.

‘Listen, I haven’t got much money. Don’t let’s argue, Beth. I just wanted to talk.’

‘Give me your number.’

‘What? No.’

‘Give me your number — I’ll call you back.’

‘They could trace it.’

I hesitate. ‘Not if I don’t tell anyone.’

‘They’d see it on the bill, all long-distance calls. That’s what…what someone told me.’

‘Who? What someone?’

‘Never mind.’

‘Alex — this is crazy!’ I shout, enraged by all the mystery and my exclusion from it. ‘You should come back and sort things out here. It’s not safe down there on your own.’

‘Who said I’m on my own?’

‘Well, it’s not safe for you to be shacked up with people you don’t know either.’

‘I do know them and they’re okay. And who’s to say I’m safe at home? You don’t know, Beth, you don’t know but I’m telling you there’s no fucking way I’m going home.’ The pips go again. This time no more coins are shoved in and there’s just time for Alex to say, ‘I’ll ring again from another box. Don’t tell anyone, Beth. Promise?’

I sigh. ‘Of course.’

So I keep quiet, ignoring police instructions and putting up with the guilt of knowing that her parents must be, to use my mother’s expression, ‘beside themselves’. I don’t know what else to do, but then I live in fear of her never ringing again and think that if she did turn up dead it would be all my fault. When she phones again the following week I tell her I think it’s not right and that I don’t see why she can’t at least let her parents know she’s safe.

‘You don’t have to tell them where you are,’ I reason. ‘Just a letter, or a postcard, to let them know you’re okay.’

‘No. They can go to hell.’

‘Alex!’

‘Come on, Beth…don’t pretend you like my parents.’

I think of her father, his ice-blond hair and cold eyes; of her mother, small and slight, the way she folds herself into the background. Neither of them ever seem to notice me.

‘I—’

‘Beth, don’t.’

There’s silence for a while; outside I hear the soft drone of a distant lawn mower. ‘Alex…what’s been going on?’

She sucks in her breath. ‘Too much and not enough.’

This strange answer gets to me. ‘Listen,’ I say, ‘why don’t I come down?’

‘What?’

‘I just want to see you. I need to know you’re safe.’

‘How can you? You can’t just take off.’

‘You did.’

‘Yes, but… I don’t know.’ Suddenly she laughs. ‘Okay! Yeah. Why not? That’d be cool. Just get on a bus and come and stay. Hey, it would be amazing.’ I listen, fascinated, to this new Alex, the way she says, hey, and amazing, with its drawn-out middle syllable. ‘You could make up some story, say you’re going on holiday with someone. Hilary will back you up.’

I close my eyes to think better. My parents are going on holiday soon, leaving my older sister Karen in charge. Karen is obsessed with her new boyfriend. She’ll appreciate having the house to herself, won’t ask too many questions.

‘I’m coming down,’ I say to Alex. ‘Ring next week and I’ll have it all worked out.’

*

24th July 1977

The first Sunday of the summer holidays.

I get up early and make my way to Pond Street bus station, where I board a bus to London under a slate-grey sky. I’m carrying a duffle bag, a holdall full of clothes, and a rolled-up sleeping bag tied with an old belt. On the inside I’m carrying a bundle of nerves.

I stare out of the window, half expecting to see DS Burton run up to the bus and haul me off, demanding to know where I’m going. I’m thinking of his last words to me as I’d left the head teacher’s study.

‘You will let us know,’ he said, in his gravelly, forty-a-day voice, ‘if you hear from Alex?’

I nodded. It was easy to say yes, then, when I still knew nothing.

The driver revs up and pulls out of Pond Street onto the Parkway roundabout, heading for the MI, and what’s been almost a game up to now suddenly becomes a reality that lurches into my stomach. I shut the Cosmopolitan I bought — making a mental note to read the ‘100 Tips for a Hot Sex Life’ at a later date, even though a sex life is something I have yet to acquire — but still the queasiness increases with every mile, until bile rises in my throat. A few times I think I’ll have to ask the driver to stop and let me throw up by the side of the road, but somehow, by remembering my father’s mantra — ‘keep your eyes on the horizon’ — I manage. I gaze at fields and factories and pylons, and think about Alex, imagining her on this same journey, how completely alone she must have felt.

But then when I picture her at home I know that alone could just as well describe her there.

It’s a long time since I’ve been to Alex’s house, but it always seemed full of shadows and silence. Set back from the park and surrounded by pine trees, it had a sort of chill, even in the summer. It never felt like a family home, more a collection of rooms where people led their separate lives; I don’t think I ever saw her family all together in one room. Her father was hardly ever there, always at work, or Masonic meetings, or rugby. Her younger brother David, who’s a small, chunky version of his father, plays every sport he can and I would mostly see him running in and out on his way to or from one of them. Alex’s mother was almost always home but still somehow absent; she never seemed to look at me directly. I would glimpse her flitting from one room to another, always busy, never stopping to talk. ‘Hello, er…Beth,’ is all she’d say, even though she’d known me for years. Not like my mother, who brings us biscuits, and Tizer, and asks Alex how’s this, that and the other.

When I first met Alex I accepted her family life in the way that you do, at that age. Then as I got older I did begin to question the lack of communication, the lack of warmth towards each other, but as it never seemed to bother Alex I didn’t let it bother me. Later still, I stopped going there, as Alex was always at ours.

*

When we reach the sprawling suburbs of London my armpits begin to prickle with nervous sweat. For distraction there’s only Radio 1 and the conversation the girl next to me is having with her friends in front. They’re all students, going to some party in London. They sound excited and I wish I were like them, on a coach with a friend, having a laugh. I wish Alex were here but then think that’s stupid, because I’ll be with her soon. Then slowly it begins to dawn on me that I’m not just anxious about the unknown but about the known, about seeing Alex again. Nothing about Alex is obvious any more.

It doesn’t help when she isn’t there to meet me.

I wait at the barrier of Platform 11, Victoria Coach Station, watching the last of the passengers disembark and pick up their luggage. Ten minutes go by and I try not to panic by telling myself that if Alex never turns up I’ll just get on another bus and go home. The burly coach driver notices me as he secures the bus to go for his break, Daily Mirror tucked under one arm and jacket slung over his shoulder. For a few seconds I see what he sees, reflected in the glass of the sliding bus door: a curvy girl in tight black jeans and pumps, skinny white T-shirt, leopard-skin belt, and my old school blazer with a Clash badge on one lapel and Siouxsie in studs on the back. I’ve tried to reproduce Siouxsie’s hair from a photo in NME — backcombed high with a little feathery fringe. The detail of my painstakingly drawn eye make-up is lost in the sheen of glass but the general effect is there — dark wings that wrap round my eyes like a pair of shades.

I surprised myself this morning, when I looked in my parents’ full-length mirror and saw what I could achieve when they weren’t around. You’re dressed to impress, girl, I told myself, grinning at my reflection. And then there was a heart-thumping moment as my gaze switched to the bedroom behind me. I stood quite still, taking it all in: little pots of cream and powder on the drawers; dressing gowns hung side by side on the back of the door; the faint scent of Youth Dew, my mother’s favourite perfume; the quiet ticking of the bedside clock. The room seemed to cling to me and its safe familiarity induced a rush of doubt that set my chest pounding. My eyes switched back to the girl in the mirror. What are you doing?

The driver interrupts my view, coming to stand right in front of me. Sweat trickles down his face and he wipes it away with his sleeve.

‘All right, sweetheart?’ he asks. ‘Someone not turned up?’

‘She’ll be here any minute,’ I say. ‘She’s always late.’

He shrugs. ‘Okay. Need any help the office is over there.’

He sets off across the concourse, unfurling his paper as he walks. A small queue is beginning to form for the next departure and my stomach knots itself a little more. Then I hear a soft whistle from behind and there’s Alex, lolling by a concrete pillar, grinning.

‘You’re bloody late!’ I cry, relief putting an edge on my voice.

‘No, I’m not… I’ve been here for ages. Just making sure.’

I drag my bags over. ‘Sure of what?’

‘That no one was with you.’

‘What? Do you think I’d do that?’

‘No — but I didn’t know if anything had gone wrong, did I? Suppose your parents had found out? You wouldn’t exactly be able to let me know, would you?’

We pause for breath, then Alex moves forwards and we hug the life out of each other, squealing and giggling. She smells of cigarettes and shampoo and something else I don’t recognise. She feels thin, but I’m not sure if that’s new; we’ve never really hugged that much. Stepping back, I look her up and down, noting small changes. She’s wearing her God Save the Queen T-shirt, a red tartan skirt and her Doc Martens, all of which I’ve seen before. But her hair is different — not spiky now, but a wild, tangled halo, on top of which sits a beret that matches the skirt. And although it’s warm she wears a leather jacket that’s crawling with zips and badges. That’s new.

‘Where d’you get this?’ I ask, tweaking it.

‘Camden Market. We’ll get you one. You’re gonna love it here, Beth. It’s so cool, there’s so much second-hand stuff and it’s dirt cheap.’ She nudges me. ‘Come on, we’re getting the tube.’

I let her lead the way, marvelling at her total ease in this huge city — that after a few weeks she knows where she’s going, what she’s doing and how everything works. As I follow her certain things begin to surface from a distant memory of my last visit, when I was just ten years old: the underground’s singular scent of warm dust and hot metal, the jostle of people on the street and the massive buildings that dwarf them, a feeling of ant-like insignificance and yet of being at the centre of the universe. The idea of having to negotiate all this on my own would be scary, but Alex shows no such fear. At times I’m almost running to keep up with her, along crowded pavements that buzz with alien accents and languages, trying not to gawp at the unfamiliar: groups of Japanese tourists with monstrous cameras slung round their necks, or Arabs in full sail, the women’s eyes peeping out from black shrouds, trailing their men like a brood of ducklings.

‘Poor things,’ I say. ‘Imagine living your life in a tent.’

‘I wouldn’t feel too sorry for them,’ Alex throws back at me. ‘They’re filthy rich and they own half of London. They’re part of the established order.’

‘The what?’

‘You know. You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. They’re all in it together.’

‘They?’

Alex gives me an amused smile and I feel strangely anxious.

‘The rich. Capitalists. The property owners.’

I can’t remember her being too bothered by this before; our punk sensibilities had only stretched as far as despising songs by David Soul, or Abba, and scorning anything to do with the Silver Jubilee.

‘I don’t suppose the women have much say in anything. And I still wouldn’t want to be treated like I’m owned, like I’m someone’s property.’

We turn into the underground and the conversation gets lost as Alex shows me how to work the ticket machine.

On the tube she keeps up a torrent of questions, wanting to know everything that’s happened after she went. I feed her answers, knowing the questions I need to ask will wait. If it all seems a little narcissistic — What does everyone think of me? What did they say at school? What do people think has happened? — I let that go. She never once mentions her parents. Finally, as we emerge from Camden Town station into weak sunlight she seems to remember that I’m not just an extension of her.

‘Where do your mum and dad think you are?’ she asks.

‘At home.’

‘Huh?’

‘They went to Jersey for two weeks yesterday. After they’d gone I told Karen I was going camping.’ Alex turns her head, stares at me, nearly bumps into someone. We giggle, and I feel suddenly warm, proud of myself, pleased by the glow of admiration in Alex’s eyes. ‘I said if Mum and Dad ring tell them I’m with Hilary and Rachel. They like Hilary and Rachel.’ I realise how that sounds. ‘I mean, they think they’re sensible.’

Alex snorts with laughter. ‘Well, that’s because they are! Thank God for you, Beth.’ She tucks her arm into mine, and I pray that she won’t guess how far my liking for a little excitement is being pushed.

‘So how long have you got?’

I hesitate. ‘I told Karen one week.’ I don’t say that I’ve taken two weeks off from my Woolworths holiday job. If I decide to stay longer I’ll tell her then. ‘Karen’s supposed to be looking out for me, but I think she’s glad to get me out the way.’

‘She still with that Richard guy?’

‘Yeah.’

My head spins as I catch sight of a huge crowd of punks, moving along the road in a swarm of leather and tartan and chains, holding up traffic as they swagger across a busy street, their progress marked by crests of hair. I catch the eye of one of them and there’s a flicker of acknowledgment of my membership of the club, not so much a nod as a tiny tilt of the chin. Compared to them I’m on the margins, but, still, I like that he noticed me.

‘It’s punk city round here,’ Alex says. ‘I love it.’

A crowd of backpackers separate us for a few seconds.

‘Alex, who are you living with?’

‘Beth, look there. That’s the Post Office Tower.’ She grabs my arm, pointing up to where it sits in a gap between buildings. ‘The one with the revolving restaurant — it spins round while you eat.’ She pulls a face. ‘Think I’d be sick. And, Beth, see the Doc Martens shop? The Sex Pistols go there.’ She drags me over and peers in, as though we’ll see Sid Vicious lacing up his boots, winking at us through the window. The shop is full, alive with leather and chains and rainbow hair. ‘We’ll go in one day. Have a look round.’

‘Are you staying near here?’

‘Not far. Come on, let’s go. Give me your bag. I’ll carry it for a bit.’

We tear ourselves away from the window. After walking for another ten minutes we take a left and a right, past a warehouse and some lock-ups, finally turning onto a sorry-for-itself terraced street. Empire Road. The houses are big, four storeys high, with steps down to the basement and more steps up to the wide front doors. I guess they once housed wealthy families, with maids and servants. Now each house has a long strip of buzzers with the names to one side. There are one or two exceptions but mostly the paintwork is peeling, the masonry crumbling, and the tiny scabby gardens are dotted with litter and dog shit. Above our heads reggae spills out and two people argue loudly.

The excitement of being in London gradually recedes, replaced by a quiet dread that feels like a lead weight in my belly. I’m torn between an urgent need for a toilet, desperate to reach somewhere — anywhere — quickly, and a strong desire to turn back and head for home.

‘We’re just down here,’ Alex says. ‘Number twenty-two. The green house.’

I look down the street and see a house that’s distinguishable, not by the colour of the door, but by the bricks themselves, painted a sludgy, olive green.

‘We go round the back.’

I follow her, hesitantly, round the corner of the street and down a back alley that smells of cat pee. On each side are wooden gates that lead into the gardens. Alex pushes against one of them until it gives way reluctantly, scraping the ground, then steps aside to let me go first. I look through and stop, hear myself catch breath. Behind me Alex laughs.

‘Surprised?’

I’m looking at the most perfect garden. Perfect not because it’s orderly, but because it’s bursting with colour, rippling with light and shade. Everything is gloriously wild and overgrown — shrubs, plants, lawn — so that the narrow path snaking through the middle of it all is only just visible. The walls on both sides have tiny ferns sprouting from between the bricks and lean drunkenly in places. To the right of the gate is an apple tree with hard green fruit the size of conkers, and beyond that a large buddleia. I know its name because Karen and I bought one for Mum a few birthdays ago. I recognise its sweet, honeyish smell and pointy flower-heads, the way it hums with insects and quivers with butterflies. In front of them is a small vegetable patch, sprouting rows of baby leaves like rabbits’ ears.

‘Like it?’ Alex’s voice swells with pride.

‘Like it?’ I say. ‘It’s fantastic!’

‘Fitz looks after it mainly — he plants all the vegetables. Celia sometimes helps, but she’s been ill.’ She tugs on my arm. ‘Come on.’

We thread our way down the path, straggly shoots from the nearest plants snagging our ankles as we pass. The back door lets us into a gloomy kitchen. Alex crosses to the hallway and shouts, ‘We’re here!’ She looks back at me. ‘I should tell you, me and Pete, we’re, like, together.’

There’s defiance in the set of her mouth. I just have time to wonder what that’s about and why she’s waited until now to tell me before a man appears at the kitchen door, in jeans and a ban the bomb T-shirt. He snakes one brown, scrawny arm around Alex and pulls her towards him.

Chapter Two

15th May 2013

‘Come round for dinner,’ Dan had said to me as he walked with me to the tube that first evening. ‘I’ll get Fitz round too. It’ll be good fun.’

Which wasn’t quite the word to describe how I felt now.

The journey here had spun me into a trance of recollections: love in a dusty bedroom; punks on the streets of London; a wild, perfect garden; space and the cold sea in Wales. And a house smashed open and turned upside down. I explored them gingerly, like hunting through a cobwebby loft where spiders lurked. Don’t look in that box. Mind that dark corner.

When I stepped out onto Islington High Street and suddenly Fitz was just ten minutes away an underlying anxiety surfaced, crawled onto my skin. I worried that the older me would disappoint Fitz. I worried that he would disappoint me. I feared being treated like one of the complicated women Dan had alluded to, greeted with an undercurrent of embarrassment, shuffled off with relief.

And underneath all of that was the fear of finding Fitz like a stranger, that we’d have nothing to say to each other.

Dan lived in a Georgian terrace, a tiny Play School house, with squared windows on the ground floor, arched ones on the first, and a postbox-red front door. It looked inviting, the sort of house that would curl up around you, but at the door I hesitated, summoning the courage to ring the doorbell and enter the surreal moment when I would see Fitz, the man who inhabited my dreams for many years after he so briefly inhabited my life.

Finally, anticipation overcoming nerves, I put my finger on the smooth, brass button and pressed.

‘Beth, hi! Come in, come in.’

Dan drew me into the house, introducing me to Martin along the way, a slightly plump, teddy-bearish sort of man. We went through to a kitchen-diner at the back, where French windows led out to a small London garden, paved and gravelled and scattered with pot-plants. The barbecue was lit.

‘Fitz just rang,’ Dan called from the kitchen, fetching white wine from the fridge. ‘He’s going to be late.’

‘Oh.’

‘Something about something he had to do before tomorrow.’

Martin smiled sympathetically, which left me wondering if that was a ‘wouldn’t you know it, he’s always late’ sort of smile, or if it was more sinister, as in, ‘he didn’t really want to come’. Dan handed me a glass of wine and said to make myself at home. On the table there were smoky pistachios and plump green olives to nibble. I picked at them absently, gulped back wine, answered questions, fretted about Fitz. Fifteen minutes passed, then thirty, and Martin said he thought he should start cooking while the coals were hot.

‘We can keep things warm in the oven,’ Dan agreed. ‘He’ll be here soon.’

Humiliation crept through me; I covered it with smiles and seamless conversation. When the doorbell finally rang Martin was flipping burgers, his forehead glowing with sweat, and Dan busy ferrying trays of hot food to the oven.

‘Can you get it, Beth?’

I walked through the hallway, darkening now and cool, and pulled open the heavy door.

‘Hello, Fitz.’

‘Beth.’ He had one hand stuffed into his jeans pocket; the other held a bottle of wine; I saw his eyes taking me in, re-learning my features like a map. I brushed back my hair, smoothed down my dress, sucked in my stomach. Fitz shook his head. ‘Wow. Look at you.’

He’d lost none of his Irish accent, and I could see that Dan was right; I was looking at the same old Fitz. He might have put on a little weight but it would be measured in pounds, not stones. There were the requisite lines around the eyes and mouth, a slight jowly look settling onto his face, hair colour fading, but the essential ingredients were the same.

The only photos I’d ever had of Fitz were some we took in a booth at Victoria station, a strip of four grainy black and white prints, us crouched close, my cheek pressed to his, that slightly mad look that you got when you were trying not to laugh. We’d cut them in half and kept two each. I’d had mine for years but they finally got lost in some clear-out or other. Then I had to keep his face in my imperfect memory. Here was the older version of it. The thin nose that leant to the left, the twist to the lips when he smiled, eyes that creased like Dan’s, the tilt of his head as he stood and looked at me, hair not grey but with that salt and pepper look.

Fitz came up the steps, apologising for being late, said there’d been some school report he’d forgotten to do. He stood still in the hallway beside me, looking uncertain now, and the space between us crackled with tension. I was remembering the last time I’d seen him, in the kitchen of Empire Road with my father glowering at us both. Then, we hadn’t been able to say goodbye properly; now we hardly know knew how to say hello, frozen into this smiling moment.

‘You look good,’ I said.

‘You stole my line.’ He grinned. ‘Actually you look amazing. How many years is it?’

I shrugged, although I knew precisely. ‘Too many. But thanks.’

‘Okay, enough of the compliments.’ He was looking at me keenly now, as though peering through layers of time. ‘How are you?’ It wasn’t a throwaway line but there was no time to give the answer it required.

‘Fine, thanks. Yes. And you?’

He said yes, good, and I noticed how one hand strayed up to the back of his neck as he contemplated what came next, that old gesture.

‘It’s great to see you.’ He stepped forward then and lightly kissed my cheek, one hand grazing the small of my back.

Then Dan called from the kitchen, ‘Get the fuck down here, Fitz, before this food is incinerated,’ and we laughed, relieved.

Over more wine and spare ribs that Martin heaped onto a plate in front of us, we exchanged information. I discovered that Fitz lived in Finsbury Park, in a flat that was small, cheap, and comfortable; that he had an allotment and still loves cooking, and had once thought about opening a restaurant; that instead he’d found work as a learning mentor in a behaviour-support unit, and had got used to being sworn at by angry, sad kids; that when it wasn’t filthy weather he cycled to work. He didn’t mention the woman in Cornwall. I asked was he still into music and he told me he’d never got rid of a single piece of vinyl, that his collection lined three walls of one room.

‘You’ll be like one of those nerds who has to reinforce the floor soon,’ Dan said. ‘And then you’ll start making lists, like the guy in High Fidelity.’

‘John Cusack,’ I said. ‘I love that film. I’ve seen it three times.’

‘That guy is Fitz to a T.’

‘Well, it would be, if I was twenty years younger and had a stunning girlfriend like…what was her name?’

‘It’s Danish, unpronounceable,’ Dan said.

I was trying to picture the two of them from before, and got an image of Fitz mending Dan’s bike in the yard, patiently answering a hundred and one questions from the young cousin who worshipped him.

‘How’s your mum?’ Fitz asked him.

‘Oh, fine, you know, still worrying about us all, but when she stops, that’s when we’ll start to worry about her.’

‘She’ll be missing your dad.’

‘Yeah, cat and dog and all that but they loved each other really.’

Dan poured some more wine in both our glasses.

‘How’s your tribe?’ he asked Fitz.

‘All okay, as far as I know. Marie’s pregnant again.’

‘Christ, that’s four, isn’t it? Is she trying to outdo your mother?’

‘My mum thinks she’s mad — can’t understand why she wants any more. Says these days there’s no need. Marie gets the hump on then, as though Mum thinks it was a mistake.’

After a pause Dan said, ‘Was it?’ Fitz shrugged, and they both laughed.

The wine was going to my head, so that when Dan got up to help Martin I was seized with the desire to ask Fitz the questions that really mattered. How much did you miss me? How long did it take to get over me?

I said, ‘I never saw Alex again, you know.’

His head shot up. ‘Never? She never got in touch?’

‘No.’

‘But I thought she—’ He broke off, with a deep frown on his face. ‘I mean, you two were so close, I always assumed she would contact you somehow.’

‘It wouldn’t have been hard to find me, if she’d really wanted to.’

Dan placed a dish of kebabs on the table. ‘Have you tried Googling her name?’

‘No.’ I looked up at him, surprised that I never had, it was so obvious. ‘But, if what she wanted was to be invisible she wouldn’t exactly advertise herself, would she?’

He shrugged. ‘It’s not always in someone’s control. Names get onto the web in all sorts of weird ways.’ He went back to the barbecue. ‘Worth a try.’

‘It’s a common name,’ Fitz said, to me. ‘There could be hundreds of entries.’

‘Yes. Well… I’m not sure. We didn’t part on the best of terms, did we?’

He was about to say something, then stopped, changed his mind. Dan and Martin sat down, passed dishes around, and the conversation moved on. We ate home-made burgers and kebabs, grilled vegetables and salads, watching shadows lengthen as the sun disappeared behind a hawthorn two gardens down. When a sharp breeze started to cool the air we went inside for pudding — flaky strawberry tart with thick cream. Their kitchen was cosy and subdued, and outside the darkening garden glowed with pinpricks of light, along the path and around the edge. Solar lamps, Dan said. Light pollution, said Fitz. All right, all right, Dan sighed, we can’t all be eco-warriors. He got up to fetch whisky, poured a glass each.

‘To our reunion,’ he said. I thought of Alex then; I pictured her outside, watching us, unseen.

It was peaceful in that kitchen, seeing our reflections loom up out of the dark and holding easy conversation. I could have sat there all night, tempted for the first time for years to go on drinking into the small hours, listening to Fitz and Dan’s stories. But I had work in the morning, and an early start. When finally I said I should be going Fitz stood up too, said he’d walk along to the tube with me. Looking back to wave to Dan, I thought I caught a slightly wicked smile on his face as he rested a hand on Martin’s shoulder and watched us walk away.

*

It was both remarkable and unremarkable to be walking along a London street beside Fitz, as though the years had rolled away, as though we’d just got up that morning from the mattress on the floor in Empire Road, on our way to the market, and that afterwards we’d go back home and lie on his bed, listening to Pink Floyd, in his room that smelt of candles and crumbling walls, and sex.

That was if I ignored the skyline ahead, where glass and chrome reared up above Georgian brick and seventies concrete. That and the disturbing fact that we seemed to have run out of conversation, something we would never have done before. We went for some distance without speaking while I searched my mind for a topic that hadn’t been exhausted or that wouldn’t assume an intimacy we no longer had.

When we reached the junction with Islington High Street Fitz said, ‘You haven’t told me much, you know.’

‘I haven’t?’

‘No. You let me and Dan do all the talking. I know Dan can talk for England, but…’ He shrugged. ‘All I know, I mean of your personal life, is that you’re divorced and have one son who’s at university.’

‘So what else do you want to know?’ I teased. ‘You want to know if I’m with anyone?’

He laughed. ‘You can tell me to fuck off.’

‘Oh, no, I wouldn’t do that. Okay. So there is someone, but it’s…difficult. He might be moving. To Ireland.’

‘Right. Right.’ He waited for me to go on but pride stopped me from revealing I was involved with a married man. ‘And what happens if he does?’

‘That’s what I don’t know. He wants me to go. I haven’t decided.’

‘Which part of Ireland?’

‘Near Waterford.’

‘Is that so? Not too far from my family.’

‘Yes, I remember.’

‘You do?’

‘Of course I do. I remember—’ I was going to say everything. ‘I remember you talking about your holidays there, as if it was the land of milk and honey.’

‘Sure. It is gorgeous. You’d love it. But I suppose there are other things to consider.’

He was fishing. ‘Right, your turn,’ I said. ‘You might have talked a lot but it was all football, family and politics. What about you?’

‘What? Oh. Yeah.’ He sounded pointedly vague. ‘Her name’s Kirsty. We met at a party here in London, just over a year ago, but she lives in Cornwall. She’d like me to move down there, but I’m not sure. She lives in this tiny village, miles from anywhere. Well, miles from a cinema, or anything like that. It’d be better if she came up to London, but she’s got two boys, both still in school, so that isn’t going to happen.’

‘Do you have children?’

‘Me? No. I was never with anyone long enough.’

I let that hang. ‘You’d like Cornwall. You loved it on Jenny’s farm.’

‘Yeah, but for ever?’ Behind us a siren started and a police car raced down the street, weaving around cars that slewed into the kerb. Fitz neatly changed the subject. ‘I was wondering,’ he said, ‘did you ever get to drama school? Did you try?’

‘No. I didn’t actually get back to school, after that summer.’

His head turned. ‘You left school?’

‘Uh-huh. I think I went for about three weeks, something like that. But I was in a bit of a state. Couldn’t concentrate. Didn’t see the point of anything.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘This and that. Some work in a record shop first. Then nannying, in Madrid.’ I didn’t tell him why, that I was chasing a sighting of Alex; I didn’t want to sound too hopeless. ‘I stayed away for a few years after that, went to Athens, some of the Greek islands, Paris. I worked in bars and restaurants.’

We turned onto a busy road and stopped at a crossing. Fitz was gazing at me with frank and utter surprise. Then he said, with his old habit of peeling away the layers, ‘So you did your own running away?’

‘I suppose you could say that.’

He went quiet, hands thrust deep into pockets, eyes fixed on the ground. We crossed the road, the tube station now visible, a few hundred yards away. We walked in silence and I was back in the awkwardness I’d felt earlier, unsure what to say and hating that, anxious that the evening shouldn’t finish this way. As if that matters, I told myself. You’re nothing to each other now, just two polite strangers. But then at the entrance Fitz began talking, out of the blue and a bit desperately, as though answerable to an accusation I hadn’t made.

‘One day, you know, after you left, I had this crazy idea about getting on a train to Sheffield and trying to track you down but I had no idea how. All I knew was you lived near a park. And then I thought I might make things worse for you. Your father was so angry I thought he’d go mad if… I just thought I should let you get on with your life.’

It was as if I couldn’t breathe, as if there were something sucking all the air out of me. I couldn’t possibly tell Fitz how much I’d lost the plot after that summer; it would seem too extreme. It did to me, now. ‘You were probably right,’ I said. ‘Either that or we’d have got bored with each other.’

He smiled, shrugged. ‘Young love. It wouldn’t have lasted.’ I thought he sounded relieved, as though he’d got what he needed from me. He stepped back a little.

‘I should go,’ I said, looking at my watch.

‘Sure,’ he said, and I cursed myself for bringing the conversation to an end, but there was also this urgency to run away from a tension that was tearing me up. It was as though I wanted to grasp Fitz and hold him to me but at the same time needed to push him away, put some space between us, so that I could breathe again. Just go, just go, I willed him, and as though I’d pushed a button I watched him lean in to give me a quick hug, and we said things like how good it had been to see each other, and how bizarre this was. There was an awkward pause after that, in the space which would normally be filled with assurances to meet up again. But then as Fitz made to leave he hesitated, touched my arm. ‘Let me know,’ he said, ‘if you do find Alex. If you go looking, that is.’

I nodded, then watched him walk away. Just as I judged he might look back I turned and went into the station.

The journey went by in a blur, the conversation with Fitz replaying itself, fragments of remembered words and phrases against a backdrop of much older memories and images, all on a loop in my head. It was only later, lying in my hotel bed, wide awake on alcohol and a burning curiosity, that I found time to examine something that was niggling me, scratching away at the back of my mind. Actually two things. One was that Fitz had been so shocked about Alex. She never got in touch? And his next words, But I thought she— As though he knew something about her that I didn’t.

Then there was all the unsaid. For example, he didn’t say, I wonder what happened to her.

I drifted off to sleep, a heavy, deep sleep, which was interrupted at seven-thirty in the morning by a text. From Dan.

Could this be Alex?

*

24th July 1977

I’ve come to London with two objectives: I want Alex to explain everything, and then I want her to come home, because without her life isn’t the same. But seeing her with Pete makes it clear that whatever happens Alex and I are never going to be the same again.

My first impression of Pete is how thin and pale he is: a long streak of fair skin, blond hair, and baby-blue eyes in a narrow face. He is older than us, dressed like a hippy, in patched, flared jeans with Jesus sandals and leather thongs around his neck and bony wrists.

‘Hi, Beth,’ he says. His arm slides down from Alex’s waist to the curve of her hips. He may as well hang a sign round his neck saying ‘we are having sex’. I know it’s intentional, setting out the parameters. There’s a moment’s pause while each of the three of us observes the other two.

‘I’ve heard a lot about you. Alex has missed you,’ he continues, in an unexpectedly deep, resonant voice and an accent cut from glass. He holds up crossed fingers. ‘I know how you two were like this.’

As if he knows anything about us.

‘I’ve missed her,’ I manage to say, with my eyes on Alex, not him.

‘I’ll make some tea,’ she says.

She hooks her jacket round the back of a chair and tosses her beret onto a big, square table that overflows with dirty dishes and back copies of Socialist Worker. Then she moves over to the cooker, lifts a kettle — the whistling sort — and takes it to the sink. This is an old pot thing, with sit-up-and-beg taps, a wooden draining board and a check curtain on a wire underneath. A window above looks out onto the overgrown garden, lush green framed by peeling paint. As the tap sputters and spurts water, hitting the empty kettle with a metallic ring before water absorbs the sound, I take in the rest of the kitchen.

It’s bare and old-fashioned, four walls with objects hunkered up to them, each in their own little space. The floor is covered with black-and-white squared lino, so that the kitchen seems to resemble a giant chessboard with pieces ranged round four sides instead of two. These are: a filthy and ancient cooker that stands on arched legs and has thick, flat keys to turn on the gas; a low coffee table that crouches next to it, piled with pots and pans; a tall cupboard like my nan’s, with ridged-glass doors and a flap that lets down for a work-surface; a rust-pitted fridge, tilting alarmingly on an uneven floor; the squat, scuffed table and four hard-backed chairs.

‘I’ll make the tea.’ Pete takes the kettle from Alex’s hands. ‘I’m better at it.’

Alex turns to me. ‘He’s obsessed with tea. It’s like a ritual.’ She speaks playfully but sounds a little nervous, it seems to me. ‘It has to be leaves not bags and the teapot has to be warmed and the tea has to brew for exactly five minutes. Then you have to pour it through a strainer thingy and you have to do that just right, lifting the teapot up and down while you pour. Oh, and you must put a little in each cup first then top them up in the same order so everyone gets the same strength tea. Then, if you’re lucky, you might get to drink it.’

I have no way of replying to this; it’s as if she’s talking in a foreign language. Luckily Pete fills the gap, speaking over his shoulder as he strikes a match and lights the gas. ‘You forgot to say milk first, not last. Like you said, I’m better at tea.’

He sounds completely serious.

Alex says, ‘Let’s take your bags up.’

She shows me round downstairs first. A small room next to the kitchen is used for storing almost anything, it seems; wallpaper hangs off the walls, and a grey army blanket covers the window so that it’s hard to make out exactly what the piles of things on the floor might be. The room at the front is filled with an odd assortment of sagging sofas, grubby armchairs and beanbags that leak little pearls of polystyrene. At the windows hang curtains of a sort, what look like cotton bed throws, sugary pink, looped over the rail and bunched to the sides. The fraying carpet is patched with stains and smells of dogs, and damp. As I stand and take this all in my own home seems utterly desirable and very far away.

‘Whose house is this?’ I ask.

‘No one’s,’ Alex replies, perching on the arm of a chair. ‘Well, it was Pete who first laid claim to it, so technically it’s his, I suppose. He gets to say who lives here.’

‘But it must belong to someone,’ I insist.

‘Beth, it’s a squat.’ A squat. Something unknown. My guts play loop-the-loop. ‘It’s an empty house that no one’s lived in for years and no one cares about. We’re not doing any harm. It would be full of rats probably if we weren’t here.’ She sees my face stiffen. ‘Stupid, there aren’t rats really.’ Grabbing my arm, she spins me round towards the door. ‘Come on, I’ll show you where you’re going to sleep.’

Upstairs the smell of damp gives way to something sweeter, the scent I’d caught on her when we hugged, a musky perfume maybe?

‘This is where I sleep,’ Alex says, and throws open the door to a room with a double mattress, covered with two zipped-together sleeping bags and scattered with assorted clothes. On the bed a pair of Alex’s pants lies tangled up with some black Y-fronts. Neither of us says anything, me trying desperately not to appear shocked and uncool in front of this strange person that was my Alex. She whisks me off along the landing and points out a heavy green curtain that drapes onto the bottom step of another staircase. ‘Celia sleeps in the attic. She doesn’t like people going in her room when she’s out. Well, not at all really. Here, this is the bathroom.’

I peer in at bare boards clogged with dust, a rusty claw-foot bath and a toilet with no seat. There’s a rank, fusty smell in the room. Alex walks over to the sash window and pulls down the top half.

‘I keep telling them to leave this open.’ She wrinkles her nose. ‘It’s the drains.’

I suppress my need for the toilet, decide to come back later.

‘You’re going to sleep here.’ She flings open the next door along. ‘Oh.’ A young guy is kneeling on the floor by the window, flicking through a stack of LPs. ‘Fitz! I thought you were out,’ Alex says, a little thrown. ‘It was so quiet.’ She turns to me. ‘Fitz can’t exist without music.’ To him she says, ‘This is my friend, Beth.’

Fitz peers up at me above a pair of shades that perch on the end of his nose. ‘Hi, Beth,’ he says, and goes back to his search.

Alex wanders over to a mattress on the floor, plonks herself down. There’s another jumble of records there and she begins to sort through them. I put my bag down on the floor but remain resolutely standing. The room is small and stark: more floorboards, one hessian rug, a mattress on the floor, two blue milk-crates with clothes neatly folded into them, and the stereo. This takes up some space, with its smoked-glass deck, an amp that looks like the control desk of a plane, and giant speakers. The walls have been partly stripped and have become a mosaic of two or three different patterns. They give off a distinctive smell, an earthy scent of crumbling plaster, torn paper and dried paste. In one corner stands a little army of candles melted onto saucers.

‘Where’s that one you were playing yesterday?’ Alex asks.

‘Which one was that?’ He has a soft, Irish accent.

‘You know, the one about a storm.’

‘You mean The Doors?’

‘Yeah. I loved that. Go on, play it, Fitz.’

I’m not entirely focusing on this exchange, too busy trying to contain a rising, cold anxiety. What did Alex mean, you’re going to sleep here? Does she expect me to roll out my sleeping bag on a complete stranger’s floor?

I watch Fitz as he selects a record and places it lovingly on the turntable, with a careful wipe of his sleeve. He is dressed all in black but somehow I get the impression he always wears black and it’s nothing to do with how everyone else is dressing right now. His body is lean and wiry and I think he can’t be very tall, although it’s hard to say when I haven’t yet seen him standing. He has short hair that curls a little wildly; it shines coppery in the sun as he leans over the turntable, positioning the stylus above the last track. I can see all the bumps along his spine, under stretched cotton. The stylus lands scratchily onto plastic and he rocks back on his heels. He takes off his shades and now I can see his face more clearly, although with the sun behind him his eyes are in shadow. He has a thin, bird-like nose that has taken a hit at some point; it’s skewed to the left. You wouldn’t have said he was handsome but there’s something that draws me to watch him, covertly, as he stands and goes to the window.

Crackling settles into a rhythmic hiss and it takes a second to realise that the sound of the stylus on plastic has become the shush of rain falling on tarmac, which in turn gives way to a soft crash of thunder. The music that follows — drum and bass stepping out together, then the cool, rippling descent of keyboard — churns something up inside me, a sense of ‘something’s about to happen and I don’t know what it is but I can’t stop it now’. Thunder rolls and the song slides into the room. It seems oddly exciting and calming at the same time.

Pete brings the tea up on a tray and sets it down on the floor. The tray is all nicely set out, with teapot, milk jug, sugar-bowl and a plastic strainer in a dish. There are four proper cups and saucers, which he begins pairing up, and an old biscuit tin next to them. It’s all quite unreal — a little fancy tea party in this half-derelict house.

‘Don’t mind me,’ Fitz says, watching Pete lay things out. The way he speaks, there’s an edge to it. I feel somehow responsible — that it’s because of me his room is being invaded. Pete ignores him, leaning forward to take the lid off the tin. I see little cakes inside.

‘It’s a bit early, isn’t it, Pete?’ Alex says. She sounds nervous again but I can’t see why.

‘In honour of Beth,’ he replies, beginning the business of pouring milk then tea into each cup. Wispy strands of hair hide his face; he loops it back behind his ears.

‘Not for Beth, not yet,’ she says, and it’s as if they’re talking in code.

‘Who are you to speak for Beth?’ he says and she frowns, as though he’s caught her out.

I glance over at Fitz. He’s standing by the window with his eyes closed and appears to be listening intently to the last bars of the song. Sunlight slants over his shoulder but the room is filled with the fading sound of rain and thunder. Anxiety catches in my throat.

Pete finishes pouring the tea and hands everyone a cup. Then he holds out the tin of cakes, offering me one first. They are fairy cakes in paper cases and as I lean over to look I breathe in a sweet, smoky aroma. Now I think I can place it.

‘Um, Beth—’ Alex begins, but then Fitz cuts her off.

‘I wouldn’t, Beth. They’re hash cakes.’

I look up. He stares right back. Pete tuts.

‘Hey, Fitz, don’t spoil the fun. Go on, Beth. I baked them myself.’

‘Pete, Beth’s never even smoked weed.’ Alex sounds defensive. ‘Don’t make her.’

I’m suddenly annoyed with Alex, that she’s let me walk into this with no warning. I’m torn between not wanting to seem boring or naïve, and the risk of feeling even more out of control.

‘That’s not true, Alex. I’ve had dope before.’

‘Where? You mean at Bestie’s party? Like two drags?’

‘Beth, if you want some I’ll roll a joint later.’ Fitz comes and sits on the floor with us and I see now that his eyes are green, cat’s eyes. ‘And then afterwards you can go to bed and sleep it off. The way Pete bakes cakes there’s no way of knowing how much is in each one. It’s unpredictable.’

‘But it’s much more fun,’ Pete drawls, unwrapping one of the cakes. He takes a large bite, then picks another out of the tin and tosses it over to Alex. She catches it and lets it lie in her lap.

‘I’ll have it later,’ she says, and her attempt at compromise makes Pete smile.

‘Well, you’ll have some catching up to do,’ he says, stuffing the last of the cake into his mouth.

Alex shrugs, peels the cake’s wrapper, and eats it.

The afternoon wears on into early evening. Its rambling conversation — from how to cook Bolognaise sauce to is there any such thing as ‘free love’ since someone always ends up paying — is punctuated only by more pots of tea and the flipping of LPs on the turntable. I take little part in it, still shy, but Fitz, who does not have one of the cakes, becomes quite animated and seems to forget his earlier irritation. At some point my need for the bathroom overcomes my caution. While I’m in there I hear footsteps going up the attic stairs; if it’s Celia she obviously doesn’t want to join the party. Pete eats another cake and as he grows more stoned he drops the faintly mocking superiority and becomes kinder to Alex. They lie side by side on Fitz’s bed, hands entwined, like a medieval stone knight and his lady.

Fitz and I seem unable to find anything to say to each other then and the growing silence between us unnerves me. We listen to the whole of Dark Side of the Moon without speaking at all. Fitz lies on the floor and I sit very quietly, not moving, knees drawn up to my chin and my hands clasped around them. I have no idea what’s going to happen next and feel further apart from Alex than ever.

At about seven Alex and Pete go off to their own room. ‘Back in a bit,’ says Alex, vaguely.

Fitz looks over at me then, his head on one side, considering. ‘Don’t look so worried,’ he says.

‘I’m not,’ I lie as panic creeps icily through me. ‘It’s just all weird. I want to talk to Alex and I can’t get near her.’

‘She won’t go home, you know.’

I ignore that and brave the question that’s bothering me. ‘Why did Alex say I was sleeping in here?’

‘Because I’m going to sleep downstairs.’ There’s no way of telling whether he minds.

‘I could go downstairs,’ I say. ‘You don’t have to give up your room.’

‘Don’t worry. I’m used to sleeping in odd places. You might get spooked down there on your own.’

There’s some truth in that.

‘Are you hungry?’ Fitz asks, and I realise that breakfast at home is the last meal I had. My stomach growls in response and we both grin.

‘Starving.’

‘Come on, Beth. Let’s go eat.’

I follow him down to the kitchen, hugely cheered at the thought of food — and a room to which I can later escape.

*

25th July 1977

Somewhere outside music jangles: Greensleeves. Mr Whippy music. Is this Sunday? Turning onto my back, I stare up blearily, trying to make sense of the strange angles and shapes of the room, none of which add up to my bedroom. Then I see my bag in the corner, slung down next to a pile of LPs, and my eyes snap open. This isn’t home. I’m in London. I’m in a squat with a bunch of strangers.

The house is eerily silent. Sunshine filters weakly through the thin cotton sheet over the window, casting pale shadows, but it could be any time of the day to me, not knowing east from west in this house. I lift one arm to peer at my watch, which tells me two things: that it’s past midday, and that my head is going to hurt like hell when I raise it properly off the pillow. Well, not pillow — grubby, thread-pulled cushion. I try to swallow and find that my tongue is stuck like sandpaper to the roof of my mouth, which makes me long for ice-cold water; this nudges a vague memory of someone saying, ‘Here, you’ll be needing this.’ Fitz. I turn my head towards the side of the bed, see a pint glass of water and sit up to drink it down in one go. Tepid, not ice-cold, but bliss. I slump back in the sleeping bag and close my eyes, waiting for the banging in my skull to subside and letting all yesterday’s events filter through my mind.

Things come back to me in a jumble of images: Alex squealing excitedly at the bus station; Fitz peering up from his stack of albums; the fantastic garden glimpsed through a ramshackle wooden door; Pete, smiling lazily at me, his arm around Alex. And then the bizarre tea party in this room, where I’d felt like Alice in Wonderland, huge and misplaced. After that there’d been helping Fitz make some food before Alex and Pete came down.

I peeled and chopped vegetables for him to scoop into a big pan, to be made into curry. As he cooked so he talked, in his London-Irish lilt. And as he talked he seemed to warm to me, open up a bit. I found out he was the eldest of six children and that his proper name was John Fitzallen. He was born in Waterford but his family came to England when he was five. They live in a crowded flat in a tower block in Bethnal Green and on turning sixteen he was turned out.

‘Not literally, not quite, but it’s what was expected. The place was bursting at the seams and there were too many arguments.’ He’d got a job in a hotel kitchen and a room that went with it. Two years later he was one of a few staff laid off. ‘I was on the streets,’ he said. ‘Didn’t have enough money for a deposit on a room and couldn’t claim dole ‘cos I didn’t have an address. The old benefit trap. Spent a few weeks sleeping rough, the odd night in a hostel. It wasn’t nice.’

I liked the effortless way he moved between cooker, cupboard and table, watched him sprinkle spices out of recycled jam-jars, judging it all by eye. Sometimes, thinking about something I’d asked, he’d stand still, one hand rubbing the back of his neck as he searched for what he wanted to say.

‘Couldn’t you have gone back home?’

‘Nah. My space had been filled — there were no beds left. I didn’t ever tell them. I just…well, I just didn’t. I was lucky though — someone told me about this place, took me along to meet Pete and I’ve been here ever since. It’s okay, a good squat. Pete keeps a tight rein on it, won’t let just anyone doss here.’

‘But what do you do for money? I mean, how do you buy food?’

‘I’ve got some work now, hotel down the road, twenty hours a week, more if I want.’

‘And Pete? Does he work?’

Fitz looked round from stirring the curry. ‘You don’t ask questions like that.’

There was no time to say any more, because right then Pete and Alex came down. Alex was wrapped in a vintage, print dressing gown, the sort you could buy cheap in Oxfam. With her wild hair and dark lips she looked vampish, like a silent-movie star. Someone produced a bottle of Hirondelle and I gulped the first glass down quickly; Pete gave me more. A second bottle was drunk with the curry, which tasted fantastic and exotic; up to then my experience of Indian food had been a Beef Vesta, which was like one of my mother’s stews with sultanas and too much pepper.

After eating we went into the room at the front and sat round on cushions and beanbags. Fitz brought down his stereo and some albums, and when that was all set up he rolled a joint and passed it round. I took a couple of drags and Alex giggled, threw one comradely arm round my shoulders. At first I felt nothing. Second time round I had some more, and slowly my head began to unravel; thoughts lost their shape, all crowded somewhere just out of reach. I felt blissfully connected to Alex and the others yet strangely far away from them. That part of me, the observer, was only faintly shocked now at how proficiently Alex rolled a second joint. No one spoke much, we just listened to music and smoked and drank more wine and then some of Pete’s tea. Fitz sat slightly apart, retreating into himself, listening to one record after another with his eyes closed, mostly stuff I’d never heard before, a jumble of soul and rock and punk. Eventually I stopped trying to think about anything and gave into drifting on a tide of music and dope.

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

16th 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.

*

The little blue circle spun round and round on my laptop, searching for the website that Dan had found. I kicked off my shoes and stretched out on the hotel bed, leaning back against the plump pillows. My feet ached and I needed to shower, but not before I’d followed up the link he’d texted. There’d been no time for even a peep during the day.

When the page finally loaded I found I was looking at the website of a complementary medicine service, Castle Therapy Centre. It was in Norwich. Curious, I clicked on the ‘find a therapist’ tab and there the name was. Alex Day, Psychotherapist and Counsellor.

My aim is to help my clients to discover their potential, to help them to realise it, and to move forward into living the lives they want to live.

There was an account of how she worked, and qualifications gained. And although there was no photo, there was a brief biography. It told me that Alex Day had been born in the north, but later had moved to London. She’d lived most of her life there, doing many and varied jobs — some were listed — but then retrained as a therapist. Ten years ago she’d moved to Norwich. There was other stuff, but those were the bones of it. Lastly there was an email address and mobile phone number.

My first reaction was this couldn’t be her, she wouldn’t do that, put herself on the web for anyone to find her. Or would she? What if after all these years underground she felt the need to surface? What if she wanted someone to find her? I looked again, and one part jumped out: I have a strong desire to help other people reach resolution and fulfilment.

I reached for my phone and texted Dan.

It’s possible. Good work! Did you tell Fitz?

Yes, he replied at once. And then, here’s his number.

I stared at it. I can ring this, I thought, and talk to Fitz, which seemed even stranger than having seen him: a direct line to his voice, to his thoughts, any time I wanted. My hand hovered over the keys, wavering, wondering if Fitz would know Dan had given me his number. Let me know if you do find Alex, he’d said, but he hadn’t offered his number himself. Maybe that had been just a throwaway line, a way of leaving without having to go through the pretence that we might meet again.

I texted, what do you think of Dan’s find? Then after that, he gave me your number, hope that’s ok

Half an hour later, when I was showered and dressed and just thinking that he wouldn’t reply, my phone buzzed, did a little dance on the silky bed cover: interesting. That was all. I threw my phone down and went back to the website, browsing the entries for other therapists, all of whom had photos that ranged from cheerful smiles to enigmatic stares. I was thinking, There has to be a reason why Alex Day hasn’t put her photo on. I looked again at the bio, trying to get a feel for this person. Waitressing and modelling were included as previous jobs, and I tried to picture my Alex serving hotel meals in a tight black skirt, or pouting sexily in mail-order lingerie. By closing my eyes briefly I could see her, petite and pretty, with an elfin face and hennaed hair, and coal-black eyes.

I reached for my phone once more and glared at Fitz’s text. Is that all you have to say? Aren’t you curious too? Or do you know things that I don’t? Then the phone vibrated in my hand and started to ring.

‘Hi, Fitz.’

‘Hi. How was your day?’

‘Mmm…it wasn’t the best. I was tired after last night, training a bunch of managers who didn’t want to be there. How about you?’

‘Well, I’ve been told to fuck off a few times and kicked in the shins, so not too dissimilar, I suppose.’

I laughed. ‘Just a bit more direct.’

‘Yeah, right. Where are you?’

‘Sitting in my hotel room, summoning the energy to go out and get some dinner.’

I heard the rattle of cutlery in a drawer and then a spoon in a pan, stirring. ‘I’ve been tired too,’ he said. ‘Late nights, mid-week, just can’t do them now.’ There was a slight pause, maybe while he peered into whatever he was cooking, lifting the spoon to his lips, tasting it. ‘It was good to see you. Who’d have thought?’

‘Unbelievable.’

‘Well,’ he said, after another silence, and this time I pictured him doing a small shake of the head, deciding not to say what had been in his mind, ‘I looked at the website. It’s hard to say if it’s Alex, obviously, without a photo. Like I said, it must be a common name.’

‘I suppose so. I could try to find out some more, maybe. Or I could just phone, say who I am and ask to speak to her? I don’t know. What do you think?’

‘Depends.’

‘On…?’

‘Well, if it is her, wouldn’t you want to give her some warning? To just phone out of the blue, it backs her into a corner. And then—’

‘Go on.’

‘Nothing.’

‘No, say it.’

‘I’m wondering how much you actually want to see Alex. Last night you didn’t seem so sure.’

‘No. I’m not. But it’s tempting too. If it is her. Straighten things out somehow.’ My face in the mirror reflected my doubts. ‘I’m not even sure why that’s important, now.’

‘Let sleeping dogs lie?’

‘You think I should?’

‘I don’t know. I’m just going with your thoughts.’ I remembered how good Fitz used to be at offering insight that made everything seem so clear. Not as Linda does, when I talk to her about Phil, not by listing pros and cons, but by going straight to the heart of the matter. ‘This is your call,’ he was saying now, when what I wanted was direction. ‘But you’d have to be prepared for anything. Anything. Like it or not.’

There was the sound of a spoon tapping the side of a pan. I wished I could see inside Fitz’s head. ‘What are you cooking?’

‘Chilli. A wicked hot one.’

‘You still make them like that? Once you made one so hot we had to stick our tongues in saucers of milk — do you remember?’

He laughed, said yes, he remembered.

‘Fitz, don’t ask me to rationalise this, but I just think it is Alex. I’ve got a feeling.’

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