We have long waits for lifts and twice I have to ask the drivers to stop so I can get some fresh air. It’s only on the final leg of the journey, in a smooth Rover 2000, that I begin to recover. Then I’m suddenly starving, and when we get out of the car in Hampstead I buy a sandwich that I eat ravenously. We catch a bus to Camden, another slow journey through London rush hour. I sit very quietly, nervous now at the thought of going back.
‘Are you hoping they’re not there?’ Fitz asks, and I catch hold of his hand, glad that I didn’t have to say it.
‘It would make life easier,’ I say. ‘In fact if they stayed away all week it would make life a lot easier.’
But then I’d never get to hear what Alex was going to tell me.
Nearing the house, I see that there’s a figure outside, sitting on the low wall at the front, smoking a cigarette. I slow down; there’s a certain familiarity I can’t place. Fitz tugs on my arm.
‘Wait,’ I say.
The woman turns her head and then I see clearly who it is, and freeze. When she recognises me she stands up, facing us. She looks as thin and drawn as before but there’s something firm about the set of her shoulders.
‘It’s Alex’s mother,’ I mutter. ‘Don’t say anything.’
Mrs Day throws her cigarette down and grinds it out with her foot. ‘Hello, Beth. I thought I might find you here.’
My mind’s doing cartwheels, trying to work out how she’s found us. For a moment it seems I must have conjured her up out of the miasma of thoughts I had on the journey; I’d imagined speaking to her, confessing everything, and now here she was. Or maybe I really have spoken to her? Not just thought about it but did it, maybe in a drunken stupor last night? No. Ridiculous. Jenny? After we left, her concern overcame her reluctance to interfere? But she would have rung the police; sShe had no way of contacting Mrs Day; it would be the police turning up at the door.
‘Your mother said you were on holiday.’
‘Th-that’s right,’ I stammer. ‘I’m staying with a friend, at her aunt’s house. And…this is a friend of hers. We’ve just been out for a walk.’
She smiles thinly. ‘A long walk, then? All the way from Minehead.’
I feel the blood drain from my face. I try to swallow but my mouth is dry, as if it’s full of ash.
‘So you’re keeping secrets, Beth. And I think you’re keeping other secrets too.’
I carry on bluffing, desperate to hold off the inevitable. ‘My parents know where I am.’
‘Oh, really? Well, I think you know where Alex is.’
‘Alex?’ I do my best to look and sound surprised, to not crumble and sink into an apologetic heap. ‘What makes you think I know where Alex is?’
Fitz grips my hand; I think he’s a little scared too. Mrs Day, who has always seemed so vague, is suddenly very real and powerful.
‘Because I think you came to London to meet her here. And I think she’s living in that house, number twenty-two. The one that looks like a rubbish tip, that no one’s answering the door to.’
I lick my lips. I can either keep lying, or give into fate and accept whatever comes after. But I never get the chance to choose because right then, with perfect timing, Dan comes round the corner on his bike. Only he’s going too fast and skids on the turn; his front tyre hits the kerb and throws him sideways. He teeters and flails about, trying to get one foot down before the rest of his body, then crashes spectacularly onto the ground. All three of us wince, imagining the pain as bare arms and legs scrape the rough tarmac. There’s a moment of silent shock, then Dan begins to wail and Fitz and I rush to help, carefully disentangling him from his bike and sitting him down on the kerb. Blood trickles down one side of his face from a deep cut, where a piece of gravel must have dug into his cheekbone.
Mrs Day stands back as we sort Dan out, and doesn’t take over in the way that adults usually do.
It takes a while for Dan to stop sobbing but when he gets to the sniffing and snivelling stage I suddenly realise what’s coming next. We’ll have to take him into the house to clean him up. Alex’s mother will follow us in, and any pretence of me staying with a friend’s aunt will be blown away. Then, having found me lying about one thing, her mother will surely know I’m lying about others. But maybe Alex and Pete are still away and somehow I can carry this off? Then at the back of all this there’s a persistent voice, like a drumbeat.
Do you think it’s time someone knows where she is?
I watch Fitz gently help his cousin to his feet. Calming down now, Dan seems to remember something. He reaches into his shorts pocket and brings out two crumpled packets of seeds, which he holds out to Fitz.
‘Dad said you could have these. I came round this morning but you weren’t here.’ He peers up at Fitz, wiping blood off his face. ‘Alex is back. She said you’d all been to Wales.’
There. In the end it hadn’t come from my mouth.
*
We go round the back. Dan is wincing and limping dramatically, with Fitz wheeling the bike and Mrs Day silently but determinedly following. I hear a small exclamation in her throat as we open the gate and she sees the wildly colourful garden, but she doesn’t say anything. Fitz produces the key to the padlock and unlocks it as she waits, lips set in a firm line. The bolts will be across, I think, but when Fitz pushes against the door it gives way. It flashes across my mind that either everyone is out, or that somehow Pete has sorted things, maybe found someone to lend him money.
Mrs Day lingers in the open doorway, taking in the state of the kitchen. For a moment I imagine it through her eyes, more squalid than I’d remembered.
‘Who’s she?’ Dan says, seeming to notice her for the first time.
‘Where is she, then?’ Mrs Day asks, fiddling with the strap of her handbag.
‘Here, sit down. Fitz will make you some tea,’ I say, thinking on my feet. ‘Dan, you come to the bathroom with me. I’ll clean you up.’
I hope that Fitz will somehow keep Mrs Day occupied, so that if Alex is in I can at least warn her, but she crosses the kitchen quickly and pushes past me into the hall. I follow, helplessly watching as she opens doors and inspects both downstairs rooms, seeing the growing disgust on her face as she realises that her assessment of the house was more accurate than she could have known. I’d got so used to the way everything was either grimy, broken or absent that I’d stopped noticing.
‘Upstairs, then, is she? Hiding?’ The next thing she’s on the stairs. It’s curious how even on the bare wooden steps she still seems to move soundlessly, just as I’ve always known her, flitting from one place to another like a moth.
‘Beth, leave her to it…’
I don’t listen to Fitz and go up the stairs after her. But now she doesn’t have to open any more doors because there’s Alex, outside her and Pete’s room, arms folded, waiting. Her eyes are cold and her mouth set in an unforgiving line; she glances at me with the same stony eyes. She’s in her dressing gown, and her hair is messy, tangled.
‘I heard you,’ she says. ‘You’re not coming in here.’ Her mother halts and leans back against the wall. ‘And don’t even think about asking me to come home, or promise that things are going to change and all that crap, because I stopped believing you years ago.’
Even with all I know I find it hard to take the depth of hatred in her voice. Mrs Day’s face ripples with hurt.
‘Who’s in there?’ she asks, nodding towards the bedroom.
‘That’s none of your business.’
‘I need to know, Alex,’ she says, standing up straight from the wall and trying to look as if she still has some parental authority. ‘I have a right to know who you’re with.’
‘No, you don’t have any rights now. I’m seventeen. Legally I can do whatever I like.’
‘Well, your father will—’
This is when Alex flies forward and grabs her mother by both shoulders and shakes her. I yelp at her to stop as Mrs Day stumbles, afraid she’ll fall backwards onto me and we’ll both tumble down the stairs.
‘He’s not my father!’ Alex screams into her face.
Mrs Day wrenches herself free, visibly trembling. ‘Alex, listen—’
‘No,
you
listen,’ Alex rages, ‘because you never do, you never have—’
‘That’s not—’
‘Yes, it is, it is true, so don’t say it isn’t. You’ve always taken his side and…’ she glances away ‘…you never stood up for me.’
Mrs Day swallows, looks round at me. ‘Alex, we can talk about this at home.’
The whole house is listening in. Fitz started up the stairs when Alex grabbed Mrs Day, and now hovers a few steps below. Dan stands open-mouthed at the foot of them. I’m certain that Pete and Celia, invisible both of them, are listening too.
‘It’s too late now.’ Alex tilts her chin at her mother. ‘I don’t want to talk about it now.’
‘So you’re not even going to give me a chance?’
Alex shakes her head, mouth pursed, a small red button. Mrs Day turns to me.
‘You should have told me about this.’
I don’t know why she says it that way, or what she means by ‘this’. Maybe she means that I hadn’t prepared her as we walked up to the house; maybe she means I should have told her everything when I met her in the street in Sheffield. But that little word, ‘this’, is heard by Alex and interpreted as I told her mother something. She looks at me with shocked hurt in her eyes.
‘You cow,’ she says bitterly.
‘Alex, it wasn’t me, I didn’t say anything.’ I turn to her mother and plead, ‘Tell her it wasn’t me!’
But my words are lost because Alex has begun yelling and screaming at her mother to go, get out. She tells her she isn’t coming home, she won’t go back to school, she has her own life down here and no one is going to spoil it. Mrs Day argues and pleads that things can be worked out, that she’s throwing her life away, that she’s naïve to think she can survive in London on her own.
‘Well, I’ve done a pretty good job up to now,’ Alex replies, and then, at the top of her voice, she screams, ‘Just go!’
Mrs Day blanches. She turns and pushes past me, running swiftly down the stairs, past Fitz, who squeezes himself against the wall, past goggle-eyed Dan, and out.
Alex starts on me then. I try to stand my ground but she won’t believe me. Angry, vicious words fly between us. That’s when Fitz orders Dan, who this time doesn’t need telling twice, to go home. And it’s when Pete finally comes out from the bedroom. He puts his arm possessively around Alex’s shoulders and tells me I should back off now.
‘Me? Me back off?’ I yell, all my latent fear of him turning to fury. ‘I’ve done nothing. Alex has got it all wrong.’
He shrugs. ‘It doesn’t look that way, Beth.’
Fitz cuts in. ‘Nice timing, Pete. You come out now to have a go at Beth. Where were you when Alex’s mother was spitting blood?’
‘I don’t think Alex needed me to defend her corner. She seemed to be doing well enough on her own,’ Pete says. ‘And you know you should never interfere in family rows. You just end up being hated by everyone.’
‘Is that the voice of experience?’
Pete’s eyes narrow. ‘Let’s just say families and me don’t mix.’
‘Oh, leave it, both of you, all of you.’
Alex flounces off into her room. I hesitate and almost follow but Fitz gets hold of my arm and pulls me along to ours. As soon as the door is shut I fling myself on the bed and bury my head in the pillow. I want to disappear from the world. It isn’t just Alex, or her mother’s appearance, or the unfairness of being blamed. It isn’t just the knowledge that Alex’s mother will reveal all my lies. It’s because I know I have to go home now. There’s no more putting it off. No more extra days. No more lies. I have to go and face my parents, and Mrs Day, and DS Burton, and give my version of events. And whatever happens now I’ll be facing it entirely alone.
After a while Fitz sits me up and makes me talk to him, and I can see by the expression on his face that he’s come to the same conclusion.
‘I don’t want to go,’ I say. ‘I’m scared I won’t see you again.’
‘You have to go home, and you will see me again.’ Fitz sits cross-legged beside me on the bed. He takes one of my hands, smoothing it with his, rubbing his thumb into the hollow of mine.
‘My parents will hate me.’
‘They won’t. They won’t hate you. Don’t worry.’
We lie wide awake into the night, exploring all possibilities of how Alex’s mother could have got this address. The most obvious is that Jenny somehow told her but neither of us wants to believe that. At two in the morning, suddenly hungry, we scavenge in cupboards and the fridge for whatever we can find, ending up with spaghetti and hard, grated cheese. There’s no sign of, no movement from Alex and Pete.
Finally we lie down and make love. I run my hands over his body and breathe in the smell of his skin, telling my hands to remember the shape of him, my brain the scent of him. The imprint of both will have to see me through.
*
At six in the morning we wake with a start at the sound of hammering on the door. The second I hear it I know it’s them. Of course they won’t wait for me to get on a coach and make the slow journey home, or risk me running off somewhere else myself. They’ll have heard enough from Alex’s mother to make them jump in the car at first light.
‘It’s my parents, I’m sure,’ I say. ‘You stay here. They’ll be—’
Fitz grabs my hand. ‘Wait. What if it’s not them?’
We pull on some clothes, not saying a word. My heart thuds as violently as the hammering on the door and I wonder if Fitz is right. We switch the landing light on and go along past Alex and Pete’s door; they don’t stir but I think they must be listening. Downstairs, in the grey morning light, I see my parents’ anxious faces peering through the window, my mum’s hand cupped over her eyes as she does when she’s facing the sun.
‘Beth! Open this door at once!’ my father roars.
He rattles it and I call, ‘Okay, okay, wait.’
The moment he hears the lock go my father pushes on the door and strides in, all six feet of him. His thick, tawny hair gives him another inch and he towers over Fitz, looking down on him with fury in his normally placid eyes. My mother comes alongside him and clutches his arm, staring at me as though I’m a strange girl she doesn’t know, and at Fitz as though he might leap across the room and attack her. Words seem to fail her.