‘Christ, that’s four, isn’t it? Is she trying to outdo your mother?’
‘My mum thinks she’s mad — can’t understand why she wants any more. Says these days there’s no need. Marie gets the hump on then, as though Mum thinks it was a mistake.’
After a pause Dan said, ‘Was it?’ Fitz shrugged, and they both laughed.
The wine was going to my head, so that when Dan got up to help Martin I was seized with the desire to ask Fitz the questions that really mattered. How much did you miss me? How long did it take to get over me?
I said, ‘I never saw Alex again, you know.’
His head shot up. ‘Never? She never got in touch?’
‘No.’
‘But I thought she—’ He broke off, with a deep frown on his face. ‘I mean, you two were so close, I always assumed she would contact you somehow.’
‘It wouldn’t have been hard to find me, if she’d really wanted to.’
Dan placed a dish of kebabs on the table. ‘Have you tried Googling her name?’
‘No.’ I looked up at him, surprised that I never had, it was so obvious. ‘But, if what she wanted was to be invisible she wouldn’t exactly advertise herself, would she?’
He shrugged. ‘It’s not always in someone’s control. Names get onto the web in all sorts of weird ways.’ He went back to the barbecue. ‘Worth a try.’
‘It’s a common name,’ Fitz said, to me. ‘There could be hundreds of entries.’
‘Yes. Well… I’m not sure. We didn’t part on the best of terms, did we?’
He was about to say something, then stopped, changed his mind. Dan and Martin sat down, passed dishes around, and the conversation moved on. We ate home-made burgers and kebabs, grilled vegetables and salads, watching shadows lengthen as the sun disappeared behind a hawthorn two gardens down. When a sharp breeze started to cool the air we went inside for pudding — flaky strawberry tart with thick cream. Their kitchen was cosy and subdued, and outside the darkening garden glowed with pinpricks of light, along the path and around the edge. Solar lamps, Dan said. Light pollution, said Fitz. All right, all right, Dan sighed, we can’t all be eco-warriors. He got up to fetch whisky, poured a glass each.
‘To our reunion,’ he said. I thought of Alex then; I pictured her outside, watching us, unseen.
It was peaceful in that kitchen, seeing our reflections loom up out of the dark and holding easy conversation. I could have sat there all night, tempted for the first time for years to go on drinking into the small hours, listening to Fitz and Dan’s stories. But I had work in the morning, and an early start. When finally I said I should be going Fitz stood up too, said he’d walk along to the tube with me. Looking back to wave to Dan, I thought I caught a slightly wicked smile on his face as he rested a hand on Martin’s shoulder and watched us walk away.
*
It was both remarkable and unremarkable to be walking along a London street beside Fitz, as though the years had rolled away, as though we’d just got up that morning from the mattress on the floor in Empire Road, on our way to the market, and that afterwards we’d go back home and lie on his bed, listening to Pink Floyd, in his room that smelt of candles and crumbling walls, and sex.
That was if I ignored the skyline ahead, where glass and chrome reared up above Georgian brick and seventies concrete. That and the disturbing fact that we seemed to have run out of conversation, something we would never have done before. We went for some distance without speaking while I searched my mind for a topic that hadn’t been exhausted or that wouldn’t assume an intimacy we no longer had.
When we reached the junction with Islington High Street Fitz said, ‘You haven’t told me much, you know.’
‘I haven’t?’
‘No. You let me and Dan do all the talking. I know Dan can talk for England, but…’ He shrugged. ‘All I know, I mean of your personal life, is that you’re divorced and have one son who’s at university.’
‘So what else do you want to know?’ I teased. ‘You want to know if I’m with anyone?’
He laughed. ‘You can tell me to fuck off.’
‘Oh, no, I wouldn’t do that. Okay. So there is someone, but it’s…difficult. He might be moving. To Ireland.’
‘Right. Right.’ He waited for me to go on but pride stopped me from revealing I was involved with a married man. ‘And what happens if he does?’
‘That’s what I don’t know. He wants me to go. I haven’t decided.’
‘Which part of Ireland?’
‘Near Waterford.’
‘Is that so? Not too far from my family.’
‘Yes, I remember.’
‘You do?’
‘Of course I do. I remember—’ I was going to say everything. ‘I remember you talking about your holidays there, as if it was the land of milk and honey.’
‘Sure. It is gorgeous. You’d love it. But I suppose there are other things to consider.’
He was fishing. ‘Right, your turn,’ I said. ‘You might have talked a lot but it was all football, family and politics. What about you?’
‘What? Oh. Yeah.’ He sounded pointedly vague. ‘Her name’s Kirsty. We met at a party here in London, just over a year ago, but she lives in Cornwall. She’d like me to move down there, but I’m not sure. She lives in this tiny village, miles from anywhere. Well, miles from a cinema, or anything like that. It’d be better if she came up to London, but she’s got two boys, both still in school, so that isn’t going to happen.’
‘Do you have children?’
‘Me? No. I was never with anyone long enough.’
I let that hang. ‘You’d like Cornwall. You loved it on Jenny’s farm.’
‘Yeah, but for ever?’ Behind us a siren started and a police car raced down the street, weaving around cars that slewed into the kerb. Fitz neatly changed the subject. ‘I was wondering,’ he said, ‘did you ever get to drama school? Did you try?’
‘No. I didn’t actually get back to school, after that summer.’
His head turned. ‘You left school?’
‘Uh-huh. I think I went for about three weeks, something like that. But I was in a bit of a state. Couldn’t concentrate. Didn’t see the point of anything.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘This and that. Some work in a record shop first. Then nannying, in Madrid.’ I didn’t tell him why, that I was chasing a sighting of Alex; I didn’t want to sound too hopeless. ‘I stayed away for a few years after that, went to Athens, some of the Greek islands, Paris. I worked in bars and restaurants.’
We turned onto a busy road and stopped at a crossing. Fitz was gazing at me with frank and utter surprise. Then he said, with his old habit of peeling away the layers, ‘So you did your own running away?’
‘I suppose you could say that.’
He went quiet, hands thrust deep into pockets, eyes fixed on the ground. We crossed the road, the tube station now visible, a few hundred yards away. We walked in silence and I was back in the awkwardness I’d felt earlier, unsure what to say and hating that, anxious that the evening shouldn’t finish this way. As if that matters, I told myself. You’re nothing to each other now, just two polite strangers. But then at the entrance Fitz began talking, out of the blue and a bit desperately, as though answerable to an accusation I hadn’t made.
‘One day, you know, after you left, I had this crazy idea about getting on a train to Sheffield and trying to track you down but I had no idea how. All I knew was you lived near a park. And then I thought I might make things worse for you. Your father was so angry I thought he’d go mad if… I just thought I should let you get on with your life.’
It was as if I couldn’t breathe, as if there were something sucking all the air out of me. I couldn’t possibly tell Fitz how much I’d lost the plot after that summer; it would seem too extreme. It did to me, now. ‘You were probably right,’ I said. ‘Either that or we’d have got bored with each other.’
He smiled, shrugged. ‘Young love. It wouldn’t have lasted.’ I thought he sounded relieved, as though he’d got what he needed from me. He stepped back a little.
‘I should go,’ I said, looking at my watch.
‘Sure,’ he said, and I cursed myself for bringing the conversation to an end, but there was also this urgency to run away from a tension that was tearing me up. It was as though I wanted to grasp Fitz and hold him to me but at the same time needed to push him away, put some space between us, so that I could breathe again. Just go, just go, I willed him, and as though I’d pushed a button I watched him lean in to give me a quick hug, and we said things like how good it had been to see each other, and how bizarre this was. There was an awkward pause after that, in the space which would normally be filled with assurances to meet up again. But then as Fitz made to leave he hesitated, touched my arm. ‘Let me know,’ he said, ‘if you do find Alex. If you go looking, that is.’
I nodded, then watched him walk away. Just as I judged he might look back I turned and went into the station.
The journey went by in a blur, the conversation with Fitz replaying itself, fragments of remembered words and phrases against a backdrop of much older memories and images, all on a loop in my head. It was only later, lying in my hotel bed, wide awake on alcohol and a burning curiosity, that I found time to examine something that was niggling me, scratching away at the back of my mind. Actually two things. One was that Fitz had been so shocked about Alex.
She never got in touch?
And his next words,
But
I thought she—
As though he knew something about her that I didn’t.
Then there was all the unsaid. For example, he didn’t say,
I wonder what happened to her.
I drifted off to sleep, a heavy, deep sleep, which was interrupted at seven-thirty in the morning by a text. From Dan.
Could this be Alex?
*
24th July 1977
I’ve come to London with two objectives: I want Alex to explain everything, and then I want her to come home, because without her life isn’t the same. But seeing her with Pete makes it clear that whatever happens Alex and I are never going to be the same again.
My first impression of Pete is how thin and pale he is: a long streak of fair skin, blond hair, and baby-blue eyes in a narrow face. He is older than us, dressed like a hippy, in patched, flared jeans with Jesus sandals and leather thongs around his neck and bony wrists.
‘Hi, Beth,’ he says. His arm slides down from Alex’s waist to the curve of her hips. He may as well hang a sign round his neck saying ‘we are having sex’. I know it’s intentional, setting out the parameters. There’s a moment’s pause while each of the three of us observes the other two.
‘I’ve heard a lot about you. Alex has missed you,’ he continues, in an unexpectedly deep, resonant voice and an accent cut from glass. He holds up crossed fingers. ‘I know how you two were like this.’
As if he knows anything about us.
‘I’ve missed her,’ I manage to say, with my eyes on Alex, not him.
‘I’ll make some tea,’ she says.
She hooks her jacket round the back of a chair and tosses her beret onto a big, square table that overflows with dirty dishes and back copies of
Socialist Worker
. Then she moves over to the cooker, lifts a kettle — the whistling sort — and takes it to the sink. This is an old pot thing, with sit-up-and-beg taps, a wooden draining board and a check curtain on a wire underneath. A window above looks out onto the overgrown garden, lush green framed by peeling paint. As the tap sputters and spurts water, hitting the empty kettle with a metallic ring before water absorbs the sound, I take in the rest of the kitchen.
It’s bare and old-fashioned, four walls with objects hunkered up to them, each in their own little space. The floor is covered with black-and-white squared lino, so that the kitchen seems to resemble a giant chessboard with pieces ranged round four sides instead of two. These are: a filthy and ancient cooker that stands on arched legs and has thick, flat keys to turn on the gas; a low coffee table that crouches next to it, piled with pots and pans; a tall cupboard like my nan’s, with ridged-glass doors and a flap that lets down for a work-surface; a rust-pitted fridge, tilting alarmingly on an uneven floor; the squat, scuffed table and four hard-backed chairs.
‘I’ll make the tea.’ Pete takes the kettle from Alex’s hands. ‘I’m better at it.’
Alex turns to me. ‘He’s obsessed with tea. It’s like a ritual.’ She speaks playfully but sounds a little nervous, it seems to me. ‘It has to be leaves not bags and the teapot has to be warmed and the tea has to brew for exactly five minutes. Then you have to pour it through a strainer thingy and you have to do that just right, lifting the teapot up and down while you pour. Oh, and you must put a little in each cup first then top them up in the same order so everyone gets the same strength tea. Then, if you’re lucky, you might get to drink it.’
I have no way of replying to this; it’s as if she’s talking in a foreign language. Luckily Pete fills the gap, speaking over his shoulder as he strikes a match and lights the gas. ‘You forgot to say milk first, not last. Like you said, I’m better at tea.’
He sounds completely serious.
Alex says, ‘Let’s take your bags up.’
She shows me round downstairs first. A small room next to the kitchen is used for storing almost anything, it seems; wallpaper hangs off the walls, and a grey army blanket covers the window so that it’s hard to make out exactly what the piles of things on the floor might be. The room at the front is filled with an odd assortment of sagging sofas, grubby armchairs and beanbags that leak little pearls of polystyrene. At the windows hang curtains of a sort, what look like cotton bed throws, sugary pink, looped over the rail and bunched to the sides. The fraying carpet is patched with stains and smells of dogs, and damp. As I stand and take this all in my own home seems utterly desirable and very far away.
‘Whose house is this?’ I ask.
‘No one’s,’ Alex replies, perching on the arm of a chair. ‘Well, it was Pete who first laid claim to it, so technically it’s his, I suppose. He gets to say who lives here.’
‘But it must
belong
to someone,’ I insist.
‘Beth, it’s a squat.’ A squat. Something unknown. My guts play loop-the-loop. ‘It’s an empty house that no one’s lived in for years and no one cares about. We’re not doing any harm. It would be full of rats probably if we weren’t here.’ She sees my face stiffen. ‘Stupid, there aren’t rats really.’ Grabbing my arm, she spins me round towards the door. ‘Come on, I’ll show you where you’re going to sleep.’