Looking for Alex (23 page)

‘It’s my fault,’ he said instantly, and we all stared at him blankly.

‘What do you mean?’ Jenny asked.

‘On the phone the other night, he was weirdly chatty. He asked what we were up to and I said that I was going off on a two-day fishing trip. He knew I wouldn’t be around. He wouldn’t have dared pull that stunt if I had.’

I remembered Pete saying what a shame Michael wasn’t there, and the look that Alex had thrown him.

‘He might have come anyway,’ Fitz said. ‘You can’t say it’s your fault.’

Jenny leant forward, with her hands flat on the table. ‘Look, why don’t you two stay here until the end of the week? Beth could go straight back to Sheffield from here, get a coach from Cardigan.’

Fitz shook his head. ‘I have to sign on. I can’t risk losing my dole. I’m utterly skint.’ He looked at me. ‘You stay if you want, Beth. I really understand if you don’t want to be around Pete now. But I can’t.’

I reached for his hand and laced my fingers through his. ‘And I’ve left a bag and some clothes in London,’ I said. ‘I have to go back.’

‘Okay.’ Jenny shrugged her shoulders. ‘That settles that, then.’

So tomorrow we’ll be hitching back. I watch people dancing, laughing, while that thought sits like a lump of concrete in my stomach. I drink one glass of wine after another and eat very little. There’s a song they keep playing — someone must have decided it’s their theme tune.
Do Anything You Wanna Do
it’s called. It gets into my head, keeps going round and round whenever there’s a gap in the music.

We finish the bottle and I send Fitz off to find another.

‘You are going to have such a bad hangover,’ he warns me.

‘I know. And I don’t care.’

While he’s gone Jenny comes over. ‘Are you okay?’

‘Fine.’

‘You don’t look fine.’She sits down, puts her fingers on my chin, tracing the very faint bruise where Pete’s fist caught me. It seemed like nothing at the time but was tender the day after.

‘Does this still hurt?’

‘No. It looks worse than it is.’

She frowns. ‘I’m worried about you.’

‘Don’t be. This time next week I’ll be back in Sheffield and everything will seem like a dream.’

Jenny wraps one arm around my shoulders. ‘Beth, I hope it works out for you and Fitz, but if it doesn’t, there will be someone else.’ I stare stubbornly straight ahead. I’m sure Jenny means to be comforting but it’s not what I want to hear. ‘About Alex,’ she goes on, hesitantly. ‘Michael and I, we…look, do you think it’s time someone knows where she is?’

‘I can’t do that!’ I shift around on the blanket to face her. ‘That would really mess things up between us.’

‘Aren’t they already?’

‘But that would be…’ I search around for the right expression and come up with one of my mother’s. ‘It would be the final nail in the coffin.’

‘So what’s more important? Your friendship, or Alex’s safety?’

I groan. ‘Jenny, don’t ask me to go back on a promise.’

‘But when did you make that promise? You didn’t know then what you know now, or you may not have made it.’

‘But it won’t make any difference. If she got dragged home she’d run off again, maybe somewhere worse. At least this way I know where she is and Fitz can keep an eye on her.’

We see Fitz coming back towards us. As he skirts the bonfire, his face half lit, half shadow, he stops to say something to Michael, sees me watching, and smiles. It turns my heart upside down.

‘A good excuse for you to keep in touch with him,’ Jenny says kindly.

‘Yes.’

But as I watch her go back to Michael I’m hoping I won’t need an excuse, that somehow I can fuse this life here with the one at home so that Fitz and I will merge from one into the other, intact. I leap up and grab Fitz’s arm, spin him round, drag him over to the dancers. He has the bottle of wine in his other hand and I take it from him, swig some back, choke, laugh.

‘Come on, dance!’ I order him, and we do, for hours. I drink more and more, until my head starts to swim as I whirl and sway to the music. A few times Fitz catches me when I stumble, and once he tries to get me to leave, but I won’t go, I just carry on dancing. Somehow it gets into my head that if I don’t stop I won’t have to go home, I’ll just dance on and on. But finally I must give in because then I’m half walking, half carried back to the farmhouse, tripping up the stairs and collapsing onto the bed. Fitz brings water and pulls the covers over me. The last thing I remember is Jenny placing a bowl by the side of the bed and bending to kiss my cheek, and then I get confused and think it must be my mother.

‘Sleep, Beth,’ she says. ‘You’ll be fine.’

*

20
^th
June 2013

How quickly we get used to extraordinary events. Back in nineteen seventy-seven it took about two weeks for Alex’s disappearance to become a fact of life, something that had happened and couldn’t be undone. It became simply the way things were. Now I’d got used to the idea that Fitz had resurfaced in my life, used to the fact that I could call him up and ask him to meet me, to the point that I even felt irritated when once again he was late. Watching him bound up the steps of Hammersmith station, breathless and apologetic, I had to remind myself it was remarkable that we were here at all.

‘So sorry, we had a school trip today. We got back late.’

‘Where’d you go?’

‘Museum of London. I’ve been there so many times now I could be a tour guide.’ He looked around, getting his bearings. ‘This way.’

We’d been in touch by email during the time I’d been back in Sheffield. I’d sent him the YouTube link for Midnight Blue, and the one for the pub where they’d be playing. In his reply Fitz had said he knew the pub, had been to see a band there before. Two weeks later, when I’d still heard nothing from Alex, I’d decided I would go to the gig, and had asked Fitz if he would go with me.

He’d phoned me the next day, questioning taking Alex by surprise. I’d said I hadn’t come this far to give up now. What was the worst that could happen? I’d asked him. Alex would be hostile, or ignore me, or both. Then Fitz had said it might not be a good idea, him being there.

‘Well, I don’t want to go on my own. Who else would I take?’

‘Someone neutral?’

‘But then I’d have to keep explaining things. And I don’t have a whole host of other people to choose from. I don’t live in London, remember?’

He’d hesitated. ‘Obviously I am curious. And I guess it wouldn’t be the same, to hear about it second-hand.’

‘That’s a yes, then.’

‘Must be.’

The pub was down by the river, a ten-minute walk from the tube. It was a warm evening so I slung my jacket over my arm; Fitz had his hooked over one shoulder. Crossing the road, I caught our reflections in a shop window and thought that we looked for all the world like an old married couple.

Fitz asked me how things were back home.

‘I’ve said no to Ireland,’ I said. ‘Of course, Phil’s not happy and now he’s having doubts about going, but he’s committed really. So we’ve gone from one sort of difficult relationship to another. And now I feel like I’ve let him down, that he’s risked everything and I’ve done nothing.’

We parted momentarily to let a glued-together couple through.

‘It didn’t sound so clear-cut to me,’ Fitz said. ‘Wasn’t his marriage finished anyway? It would have had to happen some time.’

‘Keep talking,’ I said. ‘You’re making me feel better already.’

Perversely this seemed to shut him up, until eventually I asked what he was thinking.

‘I’m thinking nothing seems to have worked out easy for either of us. And here we are tonight, chasing the past, which was complicated enough. Here, this way.’

We rounded the corner to see a boy on a skateboard flying down a ramp towards us. Fitz grabbed my arm and pulled me towards him and as our shoulders collided I stumbled on some cobbles. He put one hand briefly in the small of my back to steady me.

‘Watch yourselves!’ he shouted at the boy and his friends, and got an unnaturally polite ‘Sos mate!’ in response.

‘Ah, so middle-class these days, the skaters,’ he said, laughing.

I said, ‘Jenny and Michael had a simple life, didn’t they? At least, I thought so at the time. Do you still see them?’

‘I keep in touch, but, no, I haven’t seen them for a long time. They’re still on the farm, got three children now.’ He said that he was godfather to the first, Lottie, and that she’d got her own children now, and I said how impossible that seemed. ‘I don’t know that their life was really that simple though. They had some big money problems, both had to get proper jobs. But they still grow things and sell them at market. I think they’re happy.’

‘I’d like to see Jenny again,’ I said. ‘She was so kind to us.’

‘She didn’t grass on Alex, you know,’ Fitz said abruptly. ‘I asked her once. She said she did consider ringing the police, but she was ill just after we left and all she could think about was not losing the baby.’

‘Poor Jenny,’ I said. ‘What a responsibility we all were.’

Fitz glanced at me keenly, as if weighing up his next question. ‘Did you ever talk to Alex’s mother?’ he said. ‘About how she found her?’

We’d reached the pub, a respectably shabby place with a long list of beers. It was a Thursday night, busy, smokers hanging around outside. I sat down at one of the tables to take a lump of grit out of my shoe, catching the faint whiff of cannabis in the air, and at the same moment
Heart of Gold
drifted out of an open window, the plaintive sound of Neil Young’s voice. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rise and for a moment sat absolutely still, gazing at the ground, my foot half in, half out of the shoe, wondering if Fitz remembered how much he used to play this song, how much I loved it.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I never spoke to her. She didn’t want to see me. I told the police everything and I guess she got all her information from them.’

‘So…you never found out?’

‘Fitz—’ I looked up from fastening my strap ‘—you don’t think it was me, do you?’

‘No, no, of course not. I just wondered, you know, if you’d ever seen her since.’

I shook my head. ‘No. My mother did, years ago now, somewhere in town. They chatted for a while but Mrs Day didn’t want to talk about Alex. She obviously hadn’t heard from her.’ I stood up. ‘Come on.’

We went into the pub. Ordering the drinks, I asked the Aussie barman what time Midnight Blue would be on.

‘Ah, they’re on second.’ He placed my white wine on the bar and topped up Fitz’s pint. ‘After the guy with the guitar, can’t remember his name. Then it’s Shamen at the end. They’re a bit heavy, though,’ he added, looking up from the pump. ‘Shamen, I mean.’

‘He thinks we’re too old for anything raucous,’ Fitz huffed, leading us through to a long narrow room with a low stage at one end. ‘I was listening to “heavy” before he was a twinkle in his father’s Foster’s.’

The room was already packed and a little steamy; this, and the thought that soon I was going to see Alex walk onto that stage, was making me jittery. I headed for the last empty table at the back of the room.

Soon after the lights went down and the ‘guy with the guitar’ ambled on and began his set. His name turned out to be Guy. Fitz grinned.

‘Not too hard to remember,’ he said.

His songs were listenable, in a James Taylor-ish sort of way, but really I wasn’t that interested and just wanted him to finish. When at last he went off to lukewarm applause, with a few louder cheers from one table near the front, the house lights came on and Fitz got up.

‘I’m going for a smoke,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll get the drinks.’

I said I didn’t know he still smoked and he said, ‘I don’t. Only under pressure.’

Left to myself I got more and more impatient and started to envy Fitz his cigarette; if I hadn’t thought we’d lose our table I’d have joined him, which would have been a first for a long time.
Come on, Alex, come on
. I started spinning a beer mat on the table, counting how many times it landed picture side up, willing Fitz to come back with my wine. When I next glanced at the stage she was there. Alex. She carried a glass of water, which she set down, and a guitar, which she rested on a stand. There was no mistaking her.

Although her face was less elfin, rounded with age and a little more weight, those deep, dark eyes were the same as she surveyed the audience. I thought she must see me but somehow her gaze missed, slid right over this corner. Unobserved I took in the rest of her: hair that was dyed vibrant red, cut in a smooth bob; black jeans and a tight scarlet top; stilettos; a good figure, still. The whole package made her seem at least ten years younger than she was. She looked stunning. I felt my breath catch in my throat. Watching her flash a smile at the crowd, I wanted to stand up and shout, ‘Here, Alex! Over here!’

One by one the other members of the band took their places on the stage and as the lights went down I turned to see where Fitz had got to, imagining him transfixed, staring up at the stage, a glass in each hand. He wasn’t there.

They went straight into a gutsy song, a bit bluesy, a bit folky, all about being a miner’s girl. Alex’s voice was clear and strong, surprisingly so; I didn’t remember such clarity from school days. I watched her now, hypnotised, my only distraction being Fitz’s disappearing act. We’d come all this way to see her and he was missing it.

After the first song Alex talked to the audience and I caught my breath, listening to the high timbre of her voice, the flat northern vowels instantly familiar; for a moment I was back in the classroom, listening to her tell a spicy story to a hushed huddle of girls. Her eyes were scanning the room as she spoke; this time they found me. There was the briefest of pauses in what she was saying, just a longer breath between two sentences that no one else would have noticed, but I knew she’d registered me. I panicked then that it would throw her, put her off her stride, but she carried on smoothly.

The songs were good; some covers and some their own. Occasionally Alex played guitar — another new skill — but mostly she just sang, hugging the microphone with both hands and completely focused on her delivery. Soon she had the audience with her and at the end they managed two encores. Finally, preparing to go off for the last time, Alex beamed round the room, raising her hands to applaud the audience. She avoided my eyes, although I held my own hands high, clapping hard.