And she’s gone, not giving me the chance to tell her about meeting Celia and Dan, and leaving behind the scent of patchouli.
*
26
th
July 1977
The days begin to fall into a pattern. Alex brings tea and toast along to my room and we sit and talk for a while, but as soon as Pete gets up the two of them go off for several hours. One day I ask her where they go, what they’re doing. She says Pete works for someone, fetching and delivering is how she puts it, and that he likes her along for company.
‘Fetching and delivering what?’ I ask.
‘Oh, just stuff. Helping people out.’
‘Alex, you’re not—’
‘Beth, don’t worry so much,’ Alex snaps, then, seeing me flinch slightly, says, ‘It’s fine, everything’s just fine.’
I want her to say, ‘Come with us, then you’ll see it’s all okay,’ and Fitz will be proved wrong. But when she doesn’t I bite my lip.
‘Go home if you don’t like it,’ I imagine her saying.
Most days, once she and Pete have gone, I read books that I find lying around, or wander up to the corner shop to buy milk and bread, chocolate and magazines. It’s good to get out because the house is so quiet. Celia spends most of her time in the attic, and I often wonder what she finds to do up there. And Fitz sleeps in, having worked late, then stays in his room until mid-afternoon playing one album after another. As the songs he plays increase in energy that’s when you know he’s about to emerge. When he does he usually isn’t ready to communicate in any way for a while — I stop taking it personally when I see that he’s the same with everyone. I start to think of him as like the old TV at home that needs to warm up before you get a picture. Several mugs of tea and some food do the trick for Fitz, with the stereo turned up loud. Every now and then he interrupts the strangely comfortable silence between us with an instruction to, ‘Listen to this track, Beth, it’s fucking amazing,’ or, waving an album at me, ‘Have you heard this band? I’ll play it for you.’ Finally he’ll be ready for his shift at the hotel, always leaving at the last moment.
‘Won’t you be late?’ I ask more than once as the minutes tick by.
‘No, no, it’s fine,’ he says.
Alex and Pete usually reappear around seven and we three will eat, usually something that I’ve cooked, with food bought by whoever happened to think of it. I dredge up what little knowledge I have from helping at home, or from domestic science at school. Cooking’s never been my strong point but I manage not to poison anyone and I see it as my contribution. Celia never eats with us; she lives on Ryvita, cottage cheese and yoghurt as far as I can make out.
I spend the evenings watching Alex and Pete get stoned. I dabble, but never plunge in like that first evening, when I felt like shit the next day. I’ll have a few drags, sometimes more, but then stop. I’m always aware that Pete’s watching me, sometimes catching a mocking smile on his face when I shake my head at the joint he holds out. It would be so easy then to give in, to say yes and get as stoned as them, to stop feeling like Alice at the tea party, but some stubborn bit of me doesn’t want to give him the satisfaction. Once, when both our bedroom doors are open, I hear him tell Alex that all I need is a few joints and someone to screw, and then I’d liven up a bit. I listen hard for Alex’s reply but she shushes him and whispers something I don’t catch. I will myself to go along and challenge him — ‘what makes you think you know what I need?’ — but I know I’ll only look ridiculous. I tell myself he’s a prick and knows nothing about me, but some of what he says hits home. He’s sniffed out the tiny bit of insecurity in me: that Alex has discovered sex and that I’m jealous.
Pete’s saving grace is that he usually becomes more likeable as the night wears on, as he gets more stoned. I don’t know if it’s because the cheap red wine and weed rubs the edges off, or if it just seems that way because I’ve also had some; a combination of the two, I suppose. At any rate hash brings out his sense of humour and I sometimes catch myself laughing at one of his random jokes. So he is human, I think, and then imagine him having the same thought.
Fitz mostly comes in after we’ve all gone to bed. He plays music into the small hours and I drift off to sleep on it.
Sometimes I think how odd it is that I’m in the middle of London and hardly see any of it. Alex takes me out a couple of times, to the Doc Martens shop, where we try on as many boots as we dare without buying anything, and Camden Market, which is amazing, and where I want to buy everything. In the end I get some lacy gloves that go right up to the elbow, a henna tattoo on my right shoulder and some more ear piercings. Alex says that I look very louche, which sounds cool even though I’m not quite sure what it means. I pretend I do. That same day she shows me the stall where she got her leather jacket but I’m not prepared to pay the twenty pounds they cost. Fingering the soft leather, I say, ‘You spent this much?’
‘No,’ she says quickly. ‘Mine was cheaper, in a sale.’
She’d told me how she cashed in a savings account before leaving Sheffield, but I reckon Pete bought the leather jacket.
These are brief trips, fitted into her time with Pete. I don’t know if it even occurs to her or the others that I might want to go anywhere, see more of London.
Then on the Sunday Fitz tells me that he’s got the dayoff.
‘Could we go somewhere? Do something?’ I say impulsively.
He looks up from scooping cereal out of a bowl. ‘Like what? Where?’
I say I’ve always wanted to see Carnaby Street and the Kings Road. He looks half interested but just as we’re about to agree on this Dan shows up on his bike. He flings it down by the open back door and stands there with his arms folded. ‘I’m bored. Can we go somewhere, Fitz?’
Fitz laughs, and looks at me. I shrug, defeated. Dan would be even more bored at the shops.
‘Camden Lock?’ Fitz suggests. ‘We could walk along the canal, as far as Little Venice. It’s cool.’
I’ve never heard of Little Venice. It sounds improbably exotic. ‘Sure.’
*
Dan rides ahead of us on his bike, doing scary manoeuvres that have me convinced he’ll end up in the water, but Fitz doesn’t look too worried. He says he knows what he’s doing.
I love the towpath walk, alongside houseboats and painted barges with their faint air of glamour, which extends even to the people on board — brewing tea or sipping wine or fiddling about with ropes and engines. Although I’m disappointed when we get to Little Venice, which I think is a bit of an anticlimax.
‘Is this it?’ I say, staring at the canal basin.
‘What did you expect?’ Fitz jokes. ‘Gondolas?’
‘No, of course not.’ I try to sound convincing. ‘Don’t be silly.’
‘If we had money,’ he says, ‘we could go up to where the trendy shops and cafés are, and sit and have coffee at a table on the pavement.’
‘That sounds nice,’ I say wistfully.
‘But we don’t. And we have Dan on a bike doing Scooby-Doo impressions.’ He catches my arm and turns me round. ‘So let’s go back and make a pot of tea.’
We talk about ourselves that day, comparing families, schools, neighbourhoods, until we’ve exhausted all the questions it feels okay to ask and we each have some idea of our different lives. Fitz is only three years older than me but listening to him talk it seems like more.
‘When you leave home at sixteen you grow up quickly,’ he says, when I tell him that.
‘I suppose you think I lead a very sheltered life.’
‘Nothing wrong with that.’ He leaves a pause. ‘How come you didn’t know Pete? Alex met him in Sheffield, didn’t she? I thought you two went everywhere together.’
‘So did I. I mean, I know now that Alex was keeping secrets. I feel pretty bad about that, that she couldn’t tell me stuff. She said she didn’t want to think about it when she was with me, that I was her bit of normality. But…’ I shrug ‘…I wish she had.’
‘You didn’t pick up anything going on with her?’
I think back to when it all seemed less complicated.
‘She used to tell me about rows with her stepdad — well, dad as I thought then. But who doesn’t have rows with their dad? And she’d say he was a bully but then the next minute she’d be cracking a joke.’ Fitz makes a sound in the back of his throat, a knowing kind of grunt. I stop, turn to face him. ‘Yeah, it’s easy to look back and see she was covering up. But how was I to know that then? When I was with Alex everything was funny; we just laughed all the time.’ I carry on walking. ‘I’ve missed that. I hardly see that side of her, now. She’s always out somewhere with Pete, or getting stoned. She’s different.’
‘People change.’
‘Or get changed.’
Fitz picks up the bitterness in my voice.
‘It’s not just Pete, though, is it? There’s everything she’s run away from. And now she’s stopped covering it up she’s having to think about it.’
We walk on in silence for a while.
‘I suppose you’re right,’ I admit finally, accepting something in my heart.
‘Well, there’s a novelty.’ Fitz laughs, fishes some Polos out of his pocket and offers me one, then links his arm in mine as we head back towards Camden, with Dan swerving about on his bike in front.
*
Things begin to feel less strange. I’m getting used to roughing it, even to the temperamental boiler that decides for itself when it will work. I get used to the fact that this is how they all live, and that maybe the police are not going to arrive any moment to batter the door down. I decide I want to stay for the whole two weeks, simply because I can, which starts me thinking about what happens at the end of them. Is there any way I can prise Alex away from Pete, get her to come with me, maybe stay at my house if she can’t go home? It seems impossible, when I can’t talk to her for longer than it takes to have breakfast. I need a day, a whole day, when she might begin to remember what it was like to have fun with me.
‘Do you want to come on an open-topped bus with me?’ I say, the morning after my walk with Fitz. I’m lounging against the window. Alex sits cross-legged on the mattress, surrounded by the debris of our breakfast. ‘I’ve hardly spent any money. I could pay for you.’
Although she always seems to have money, I guess it’s probably Pete’s. She wrinkles her nose.
‘It’s a bit bourgeois, a bus tour.’
She uses that word a lot now. She also imitates Pete’s way of speaking, so that our northern ‘grass’ becomes ‘graaass’, anything she likes is ‘fucking amaaazing’, and her vocabulary of swear words has multiplied.
‘Well, okay,’ I say. ‘Let’s just get on the tube and go some places.’
‘With all the tourists?’
‘All right, so what? I want to be a tourist. Just for one day.’
She starts fiddling with a hole in her black tights, poking one finger through and extending a ladder that exposes bare flesh. ‘Well, I did some of that with Pete when I first came down. It’s not very exciting, frankly.’ ‘Frankly’ is another word she uses a lot.
‘But you did it. I wouldn’t mind the chance to find it not very exciting. Frankly.’
That’s the moment when things get personal. Somehow it ends with her accusing me of pretending this is all some nice little holiday — that we’ll go back to Sheffield and take up where we left off, playing at being punks in my back bedroom.
‘Well, I don’t know what you are going to do,’ I counter. ‘Are you going to stay here? What about your A-levels? What about your mother?’ By now it is clear that Alex’s stepfather has made her life a misery. Her mother’s crimes are less obvious and I feel some sympathy because it seems to me that she’s been bullied too. Alex paints a picture of a house run to a strict regime whose only purpose seems to be to have things Greg’s way, and her mother’s scurrying busyness is nothing but a constant effort to keep it like that, to keep him from yelling and shouting. ‘Do you plan to leave her in limbo, not knowing where the hell you are or whether you’re safe?’
‘I don’t care,’ she says. ‘I don’t care what she thinks. I can lead my own life and fuck them. I am not having her come down here bleating on about how things are going to change. I’ve had that for the last ten years and it just isn’t going to happen.’
‘An anonymous postcard won’t tell her where you are, will it?’
‘And what am I supposed to say?’
‘“I’m alive”?’
Her eyes flicker. ‘She knows I’m alive. I told her I’d go, plenty of times. She knows exactly what I’ve done and why.’ Alex gives me an oblique look. ‘Why do you care about my mother so much, Beth? She hardly ever spoke to you.’
‘I don’t know. I suppose I can just imagine what she might be going through. If it was my—’
‘Well, she isn’t your mother, she’s mine, and if she cared about me at all she’d have stood up to that bastard and told him to fuck off and leave me alone!’
Her voice has risen and a film of tears glitters in her eyes; suddenly I guess something.
‘It wasn’t the first time, was it?’
She looks startled. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You said it was the first time he’d hit you but he’d done it before — am I right?’
Her eyes skitter around the room and then come back to mine. ‘Yeah. It started when I was fourteen, when I wouldn’t do what he said any more.’
We stare at each other.
‘Alex!’
The shout from Pete fractures the silence and we both jump. Alex scrambles to her feet and gathers up mugs and plates. I put my hand on her arm. ‘Wait. Don’t go yet.’
She looks down at my hand and frowns.
‘Where do you go each day, you and Pete?’
‘I’ve told you — he’s working.’
‘I think he sells drugs.’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘Oh, come on, Alex, I know he’s a dealer. It doesn’t take much to work it out.’
‘Well, you’ve worked it out so there you go. And it doesn’t take much to work out that you don’t like him.’
‘What about you?’ I ask. ‘Are you involved in all that?’
‘That’s right.’
The voice comes from the doorway. Pete brushes strands of hair out of his eyes, with long, feline fingers.
‘Nice young girls like Alex don’t sell drugs, do they? Or so the fuzz think.’
I fold my arms tight and hope that the pounding in my chest isn’t visible in my face. It helps that at times Pete is almost a caricature, a leftover freak from the summer of love; it helps if I see him as ridiculous, with his words like ‘fuzz’, and ‘wow’, his habit of saying ‘far out’ whenever Alex says something remotely interesting.