Looking For Alex

‘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.’