Looking for Alex

by Marian Dillon

  ‘Let’s go to bed,’ I sigh, then take Fitz’s hand and lead him upstairs.

  *

  17th May 2013

  By the time I got on the train back to Sheffield, at the end of that first week, there’d been no reply to my email. It niggled away at me, this absence, and I kept trying to make it tell me something: that it was or wasn’t Alex. But there were too many possibilities.

  I tried to put myself in the place of whoever I’d sent my message to. Either I’d received an email from someone I’d never heard of, or I knew very well who the sender was. In the first scenario I might reply, out of courtesy, or I might ignore it, assuming it was some scam. In the second, I might be tempted to reveal myself — secure in my adult life and not afraid to lift the lid off the past — or maybe I would stay hidden and hope they’d go away. Whichever way I looked at it, nothing told me much at all. It was like trying to prove the non-existence of God.

  The train was slow, held up somewhere near the outskirts of Derby by a cow on the line.

  ‘Silly moo,’ someone said, and laughter rippled down the coach.

  As I looked out of the window at the dry soil and its haze of green shoots, thoughts of Alex and Fitz washed through my brain, the past all mixed up with the present, letting loose all the guilt and regret about how things ended. I didn’t want to relive all that, not when I was unlikely to get any answers or be left in any better place than before. But it seemed that I couldn’t leave it alone.

  *

  When I saw Phil the next day I had to haul all these thoughts to the back of my mind, stow them away. He picked me up in the usual place,, and we drove to the common with Juno in the back of the car. We tired her out with a brisk walk and then sat on a bench, looking across to the suburbs we’d just driven from, with Juno laid out by the side of us. Phil pulled me close; we kissed, and I leant against him. His body was solid, familiar, and I felt myself begin to relax for the first time for days.

  ‘I’ve missed you,’ he said. ‘I’m sick of living like this, Beth. I want to be with you properly. I can’t be doing with all this cloak and dagger stuff.’

  ‘But this is what you’ve chosen,’ I said. ‘I don’t know why, it’s not doing anyone any favours, but you chose it, you and Sue.’

  ‘Yes, well, I can’t do it any more.’

  He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out an A5 envelope, containing some photos and a leaflet.

  ‘Here.’ He thrust them into my hand. The photos were of an old farmhouse, a large, stuccoed property, washed in pale blue, each window framed in a darker shade. There was a huge garden, outbuildings, a converted barn. Then there were images taken inside an office, filled with computers, printers, copiers. Others showed a polished kitchen, a large, comfortable lounge, a brick patio, fields at the back, horses.

  ‘Joe’s place,’ Phil said, unnecessarily. ‘His wife has stables.’ He pointed to the office. ‘Nice, isn’t it? Calm, quiet. Beats the art room at Firsdale.’

  ‘And the rest?’ I asked, waving the photos of the house. ‘Is this to tempt me? This lifestyle could be yours?’

  Phil grinned. ‘Something like that.’

  I flicked through the leaflet. It was glossy, well put together, made the business appear professional, thriving, a good advert for itself.

  ‘It all looks great,’ I said. ‘Can’t fault their design skills.’

  Phil took everything back and stuffed it into the envelope, tucked it into his jacket pocket.

  ‘Never mind all that. It’s just detail. I want to know what you think, what you want. Could you do it — move to Ireland with me?’

  I hesitated. Phil pursed his lips and pressed the finger of one hand against them, as though trying to stop himself saying more.

  ‘Look, I don’t know. I have to think of Sean. What will it be like for him if I just swan off, and he’s got no home in Sheffield any more?’

  ‘He’s got Tim.’

  ‘I mean, no home with me.’

  ‘He’d have some great holidays.’

  ‘Sean wouldn’t see it like that. He’d think it was life in the sticks. Not to mention he doesn’t even know about us yet. And what about my work? All the contacts I’ve built up, they’re over here, not in Ireland. And there’s my mother, she’s not getting any younger—’

  ‘What if Sean loved the idea? What if your mother said, go, don’t think of me?’ I snorted, at the idea of my mother giving her blessing to my running off to Ireland with a married man. ‘What if you could find work over there? Take all other parameters out of the equation, Beth, and tell me what you think.’

  ‘That’s impossible!’

  ‘No, it’s not.’

  I breathed in hard.

  ‘If,’ I said, ‘if there was nothing that stood in the way, I still can’t say whether Ireland is where I’d want to be.’

  Phil frowned. ‘So us being together isn’t enough.’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’ Did I? ‘There are alternatives, aren’t there? You could go and work with Joe for a while, get some experience under your belt and come back to Sheffield, find some work back here.’

  He shrugged, and I thought, what he wants is to escape from Sheffield, from friends who’ve known him as Phil and Sue. Then he told me that he’d already spoken to his head teacher, who agreed to him leaving at the end of term, using it as an opportunity to save money and promote another, younger teacher. ‘That’s how indispensable I am,’ Phil joked. He said he’d been looking into the finance side of things and he was sure he could make it work, that Joe had a holiday let in the grounds that he could rent cheaply for a while. He said that Sue was looking more and more unhappy, that he thought the girls could sense something wrong, and that he was becoming convinced he should bring everything out into the open.

  ‘Does that include me?’ I asked.

  He gave me a shrewd look. ‘Depends. On you. On what’s happening.’

  ‘The girls will be shattered — you know that, don’t you? Think about it. First you tell them you’re leaving their mum. Then you say you’re buggering off to Ireland — and not only that but with another woman. It’s too much.’

  He stared at me hopefully. ‘Does that mean you will come?’

  ‘No! I don’t know! I’m just saying—’

  ‘I know what you’re saying, and I do know they’ll be devastated. I’m not completely stupid or insensitive. I’ll see them as much as I can. It’s a two-hour flight, that’s all.’ He stopped. ‘Beth, I need to be sure what you want,’ he said. ‘If I know you’re with me I can take all the crap.’

  Okay, I said to myself, he’s laid himself bare. ‘Phil, I need you to be sure for yourself. I want you to be able to do this anyway, because I don’t know that I can go to Ireland, just like that. Maybe we have to settle for a different way of being together.’

  ‘Long distance, you mean.’

  ‘I suppose so, for a while.’

  ‘That’s not what I want. I didn’t think it was what you wanted.’

  ‘I didn’t think you were going to move to Ireland.’

  Phil turned away from me, began to untie Juno from the bench. ‘So we’re agreed on one thing, then,’ he said, his voice rough, unguarded.

  ‘What’s that?’

  He got to his feet. ‘We each want something different.’

  *

  I was back in London on Sunday evening, sitting bored in my hotel room and contemplating drinking alone in the hotel bar, when Fitz texted.

  Have you done anything about Alex?

  Sent her a message but not heard back, I replied. Then, on impulse, can we talk? I meant on the phone but he must have thought I was inviting him out.

  I’m knackered, been out all day, he sent. Then, want to come round?

  He phoned to give me brief directions. As I went to close down my laptop I saw that I had one unread email. It was from Alex Day; I read it swiftly. One hour later I knocked on the door to Fitz’s basement flat in Finsbury Park.

&nbs
p; ‘Hi, Beth, come on in.’

  I followed him through a narrow hallway into a long living room that stretched the length of the house. The flat was small but uncluttered so there was a feeling of space. I thought of his room in Empire Road, where everything got stowed neatly in boxes and milk-crates. The walls here were plain, neutral, with colour only in the fabrics and paintings. At the back there were French windows and where I stood a stove burned, lit against the sudden chill of evening.

  ‘I was just settling in,’ Fitz said. ‘Been all round London today.’ He caught my eye. ‘Kirsty was up for the weekend,’ he said. ‘Her kids are with their dad.’

  ‘Right.’ I smiled brightly, unsure how to respond to all that.

  ‘Here, sit down.’ There was a chair on either side of the stove, both littered with review sections and magazines. He cleared these then crossed to the table and picked up an open bottle of red wine. ‘Want some?’

  While he fetched a clean glass I wandered down to the French windows, which gave out onto a tiny garden, smaller even than Dan’s. I saw why Fitz would want an allotment. Outside the skies had turned leaden.

  ‘I like this room,’ I called to Fitz. ‘You have a nice flat.’

  ‘Thanks. I’ve done a lot to it in the last three years.’ He came back with the glass, poured us both some wine and sat down opposite me. ‘Before that I was renting, but then the couple wanted to sell and I got it for a good price. Still crippling, but for London not bad.’

  I drank some wine, and we were quiet. I was dwelling on the email from Alex, not quite ready to offer it up. Fitz asked if I’d had a good weekend. I said it was routine, that I’d washed and ironed, visited my mother, done some work. I missed out seeing Phil for just one hour in the park because that would surely involve some sort of explanation, but he noticed the absence.

  ‘What about your bloke? Is he planning to take the job in Ireland?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Can’t make up his mind?’

  I shook my head. ‘No.’ I realised the futility of pretence. ‘He’s married.’

  Fitz did a double take, sucked in his breath. ‘So the shit is about to hit the fan?’

  ‘Yes. Maybe. Although it’s not as bad as it sounds.’

  I explained Phil’s arrangement with Sue, and that probably the worst thing for her would be his going so far away rather than going at all.

  ‘Don’t bank on it,’ Fitz said. ‘Agreeing to do something and having it done to you are very different things.’ I raised my eyebrows but he didn’t bite, just asked me more questions. However, I didn’t want to think about Phil right then, or to discuss it, to lay it neatly at Fitz’s feet: this is how it is. Sensing my reluctance, he left it alone. Outside a few spatters of rain hit the window.

  ‘You wanted to talk about something?’ he reminded me.

  I pulled my gaze back from the stove’s glow. ‘About Alex.’

  ‘I guessed that.’

  We exchanged looks, each of us with our own idea of Alex. I was trying to recall the things Fitz had said that at the time had seemed odd, but now that I was here, face to face, it was hard to remember what they were. What did he know that I didn’t?

  ‘Alex Day replied to my email,’ I said. Fitz sat up. ‘Not to the first one, but I sent another and this time I mentioned you.’ Now he looked at me warily. ‘That’s when she replied.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘Sorry. I don’t know a Beth Steele.’

  He frowned. ‘So what makes you think it is her?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly.’ This was true. It was just a notion that had fluttered up inside me the instant I’d read it. ‘But if it isn’t, and she’s bothered enough to reply, wouldn’t she be curious? At least ask something, find out who I am? And if she’s not curious because she knows precisely who I am, then—’

  ‘And if you’re right,’ he interrupted, ‘and it’s her? It looks like she doesn’t want you to know that.’

  ‘No.’ I watched him twizzling his glass by its stem, his eyes narrowed. ‘You saw her, didn’t you, Fitz? After I left London. You know something about her that I don’t.’

  He looked up at me and I could see in his face, in the slight hesitation before he answered, in the way his hand reached for the back of his neck, that I was right.

  ‘It wasn’t like you mean.’

  I stared at him. ‘But, I don’t know how I mean.’

  Fitz shifted in his seat, wriggling like a fish on a hook. ‘It wasn’t straight away. This was years after… I bumped into her on the tube.’ A piece of wood settled in the stove and as I watched the shower of sparks fly up it dawned on me exactly what Fitz was about to tell me. The shock of it thudded into my stomach. I sat very still, looking at him in disbelief. He was staring into the flames but then gave a huge, deep sigh, as if it was time now to get this thing out of the way. ‘We did sort of…get together.’

  Something crucial seemed to get rubbed out, cancelled, by that one simple statement, by the idea that I shared Fitz with Alex. In one moment everything changed.

  ‘Jesus, Fitz, you…’

  ‘I know, I know.’

  ‘How long for?’

  ‘A few weeks, no more. It was just… I suppose we were both lonely. But it didn’t work. It would never have worked.’

  I pushed some hair back off my face, then folded my hands in my lap, staring down at them. I noticed a jagged nail that needed filing.

  ‘So you bumped into her on the tube and you got together.’ My voice sounded flat, unreal. ‘Which, apart from anything else, means you do know where she went that night, and lots of things about her that I don’t. And you weren’t going to tell me?’

  ‘Beth, this has been on my mind since last week. I couldn’t decide… I didn’t know whether to say anything. I was thinking that you’d get the wrong idea, start imagining it was some big thing, which it wasn’t. But then I kept telling myself that it’s all such a long time ago anyway, so…’

  ‘So what difference does it make now?’

  He swallowed hard. ‘Something like that. But this evening, when you said you wanted to talk things through, I knew you’d sussed something out.’

  But not this much.

  ‘And then,’ I said coldly, ‘you thought if Beth does track Alex down she’ll find out anyway and that would look bad on you?’

  He looked away. ‘Maybe. Yes.’ He was frowning into his glass and I started to fiddle with a ring that Phil bought me, an engraved silver band. ‘I was going through this whole scenario in my head — you and Alex having some sort of reunion, catching up, talking about the past, and then Alex says, by the way, me and Fitz, we had a little fling…you know? And how bad you’d feel that I hadn’t told you myself, that you’d be hurt, or angry. But then I wasn’t sure how serious you are about trying to find her, and maybe you didn’t need to know about something that was nothing, and then maybe it wouldn’t mean anything to you anyway… I dunno.’ He looked up at me. ‘So, are you?’

  ‘What, hurt, angry or serious?’

  He spread his hands. ‘Any, or all three.’

  ‘I don’t know, not yet.’ At several years’ distance the acute envy burning into me seemed undignified. I thought, what’s the grown-up thing to say? ‘I suppose what happened in your life after me is none of my business, is it?’ He threw me a look that was somewhere between relief and surprise. I’m playing this wrong, I thought. He’ll assume it means nothing. But there was nothing I could do differently, not without exposing the stupid, jealous teenage me inside, kicking and spitting. ‘It’s kind of unexpected.’

  ‘It was a mistake. One of those mistakes you want to go back and undo.’

  ‘And Alex?’ I asked. ‘Would she say that?’

  He winced. ‘She said it at the time.’

  Some consolation, then. Fitz stood up and fetched the bottle of wine.

  ‘At Dan’s,’ I said slowly, watching him pour some more, ‘didn’t you wonder if I already knew about
this? You seemed to think she would have got in touch with me.’

  ‘Of course. Did you not see how nervous I was?’

  I shook my head. ‘A little, no more than me. What did you think I’d do, slap you?’

  ‘No, but I thought you might politely freeze me out and I’d be left looking like a fool in front of Dan.’

  Suddenly my neck was aching; I pulled my shoulders back, massaged them a little. ‘Well, are you going to put me out of my misery and tell me all the things I don’t know? Like where she went that night?’

  ‘Okay.’ But he paused, ran one finger round the rim of his glass. ‘Beth, it was nothing, you know? Just a little bit of desperation on both sides.’ I nodded, still massaging my neck, and waited for him to go on, although a tiny part of my mind was focused now on why Fitz had felt desperate. ‘All right. She and Pete crashed on the floor of some dope-head friend of his. It was meant to be for a couple of nights but they ended up living there for months. Then Pete started getting more and more stoned, him and this guy smoking heavily every night. Alex said he was scoring for himself as much as to sell. She got a job in a café, to keep some money coming in. The next thing she knew, she came home and found him shooting up. She packed her bags and left.’

  I pictured Alex’s one bag, her backpack, with Anarchy in the UK painted on in Tippex, and I heard her voice: I’m not madly in love with Pete and I don’t suppose he is with me.

  ‘Where did she go?’

  He spread his hands wide, pulling a face. ‘All over the place, metaphorically speaking, but she never actually left London. I was living in a tiny flat in Battersea when we met, she was dossing with friends, wherever. She had to leave one place and she asked if she could move in for a while. It was the same with jobs — she went through them like a dose of salts, from one to the next, whatever she could get.’

  I sat quiet for a minute, and still, while these new pieces of information wormed their way slowly, painfully into my brain. ‘What did she say about me?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘You said she was going to contact me. The other day, you said that. Why would she?’