‘Who came off worst?’
He shrugs. ‘There were two of them.’
As he moves to sit down at the battered kitchen table I notice he’s limping and that it hurts to bend his knee; he keeps his leg stuck out to the side. Alex takes the chair next to him, Fitz and I sit opposite.
‘So, what happened?’ Fitz asks.
‘This arsehole decided I was short-changing him, said I’d brought less than I’d agreed for the price. He wanted to screw another hundred grams out of me and wouldn’t let us out.’
‘Where were you?’
Pete shrugs. ‘Does it matter? Some shitty little flat in Ealing.’
Fitz looks him over, at his face, and the grazes on his knuckles. ‘Looks like you didn’t give it him.’
Pete tries to smile, winces, then dabs at his lip, which is swelling up to match his cheek. ‘You could say there was a minor altercation. Then this big gorilla storms in from another room and pins me down. I was done over, as they say..Had no choice but to agree to their terms. Bang goes today’s profit.’ He suddenly spots empty beer cans by the sink and nods towards them. ‘Any more of that?’
I go over to the wobbly fridge and fetch us all a can. Pete rips the tab off his and flicks it across the table, then takes a large swallow, grimacing again as he has to open his mouth wider than it wants to go. I look across at Alex; she’s picking at the sticky price tag. I’ve never seen her this quiet.
‘What were their terms?’ I ask.
Pete begins to speak but Alex cuts across him. ‘They made me stay there while Pete went to score some more. That was the last drop of the day so we didn’t have any left.’
I sit in stunned disbelief as Alex takes a swig of beer. Even Fitz is shocked.
‘You left her there,’ he says, ‘in a flat with two thugs?’
‘I didn’t have much choice, did I?’
‘And they weren’t exactly thugs,’ Alex says dismissively, as though every day she gets taken hostage in a drugs deal. ‘I mean, they didn’t do anything to me. I just sat and watched their telly.’
Her face has recovered some of its colour but I’m not fooled by her nonchalance; I’ve seen that ‘so what?’ look on her face at school, when she’s squaring up to a teacher and knows there’ll be hell to pay later.
Fitz is frowning, puzzled. ‘Why not just give you what they thought it was worth and kick you out?’
‘Because…’ Pete speaks very slowly, as if to a child ‘…they had deals to make of their own. They’d made promises — they couldn’t turn up without the goods.’
I bang my can down so hard that beer slops out. ‘I can’t believe you left Alex there, alone!’ Fitz catches hold of my arm but I shake him off. ‘How dare you do that?’
Pete’s eyes widen with surprise. ‘There’s no need to get upset, Beth—’
‘There’s every sodding need! I can’t believe what you did!’
‘Nothing happened to her, did it?’ He shrugs. ‘Nothing was going to happen.’
‘How could you know that?’
‘Because I am not a hysterical teenager and I know what I’m doing.’
‘Like putting Alex in danger?’
I shoot a glance at Alex but she’s ignoring me. Pete puts one hand on her knee.
‘You’re so melodramatic, Beth,’ he says softly. ‘Alex was never “in danger”, she was just a guarantee that I’d come back.’
‘What’s the difference? And what if—?’
‘He wasn’t going to leave me there, Beth.’
There’s a slight tremble in Alex’s voice. I sit back, breathing hard, rigid in my chair.
‘As for what’s good for Alex,’ Pete says, raising his voice, ‘I think you’re forgetting how crap her life was before this.’
‘Shut up!’ Alex screams. ‘Shut the fuck up, both of you!’ She leaps up from the table, knocking her chair backwards on the ground. I think she will run out of the room but suddenly she crumples before our eyes, both hands over her face, tears leaking out from under them. I’m shocked, unprepared for how quickly she’s gone from careless to crisis, but Pete remains totally calm. He looks at me for a long moment, then stands and folds her in his arms, stroking her hair and her back as he murmurs quiet, soothing words, telling her everything is going to be all right. Fitz and I watch open-mouthed. It’s unmistakable how Alex responds, subsiding into him, burrowing her head into his shoulder as though she can hide from the world there; all my assumptions about their relationship are suddenly thrown into the air.
When finally they move apart they go straight upstairs without another word. I’m stunned, left staring at the tipped-up chair. ‘She’ll hate me now.’
Fitz shrugs. ‘You said what she wouldn’t dare.’
‘I was right, wasn’t I?’
‘Sure,’ he agrees. ‘But it’s complicated. Pete can be a bastard but maybe here is where Alex needs to be right now, maybe for her he serves a purpose. Things are not always as simple as they seem.’
I love that about Fitz, the way he takes a tangle of things and seems to straighten them out. Not that he has any answers, just that you can see them more clearly. I guess it was what I loved about Alex, too. Now, she’s the tangle.
‘Let’s go to bed,’ I sigh, then take Fitz’s hand and lead him upstairs.
*
17
th
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.
‘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.’