‘Yes, I know, but I’m not bothered. Why go looking for him now? Greg’s been a shit stepdad, and I guess my dad’s a shit dad. He left us to fend for ourselves, Mum told me, living in a crappy little flat that was always freezing in winter. He never sent us any money.’
‘Bloody hell.’
I stand up, step off the marshmallow mattress and cross over to the window. It looks down onto the garden at the back. From here you can see those on either side. One is bare and functional, with a rough patch of grass littered with children’s toys; the other is completely overgrown. The richness of Fitz’s garden seems even more miraculous.
I whirl round; Alex is fiddling with the tie on her wrap, winding it round and round one finger. ‘Why did you never tell me?’
She looks surprised. ‘Because when I came to your house I could forget it all. Your family is so…normal. I just wanted to be part of it. I didn’t want to spoil things by going on about mine.’
It’s probably the first time ever that I’ve seen my life through someone else’s eyes and now I wish I’d had the imagination to picture Alex’s more clearly.
‘What did you mean, Greg’s been a shit stepdad?’
She shrugs. ‘Greg’s a bully, I’ve told you. You never saw because he made sure not to do it in front of people. He used to get mad at something I’d done — like leaving butter out instead of putting it in the fridge, you know, really bad stuff — then he’d rant and rave and tell me what a useless piece of shit I am.’
‘Jesus, Alex.’
‘And if he wasn’t bullying me he was ignoring me, and then my mum had to choose whether to talk to me and if she did she’d get the silent treatment as well.’
Fitz’s music stops. Somewhere outside a solitary bird sings, echoed by another, further away.
‘What about David?’
‘David can’t put a foot wrong. David’s his and I’m the cuckoo in the nest, aren’t I?’
I walk back over to the bed and flop down next to Alex. I take hold of one of her hands, gripping it tightly. ‘I feel so bad.’
She wrinkles her nose. ‘Why?’
‘That all that was going on and I didn’t know!’
‘How could you have known?’
‘You should have told me, Alex. I can’t believe you didn’t.’
‘Well…I nearly did, once or twice, but it was hard to know where to start.’ She stares at me, thinking. ‘If I’m really honest, I didn’t want you to know. I didn’t want you to see me any different from to anyone else.’
‘Alex,’ I say, ‘you’ve always been different from to everyone else.’
She grins. ‘Fuck off!’ But I can see she knows I mean in a good way. ‘Anyway, one day he hit me when Mum wasn’t around and after that I just had to get out.’
‘So how—?’
I was going to ask about Pete, and how she’d met him, but there’s a knock at the door and his voice outside.
‘Alex?’
She looks at me and I nod. ‘You can come in,’ she calls, slipping her hand out of mine.
He pushes the door open and stands leaning against the frame. He has on the same patched jeans, with a black T-shirt and paisley waistcoat. His hair is greasy, tied back in a ponytail with a rubber-band.
‘We have somewhere to go today. Remember?’
‘Yeah. It’s still early.’
‘We need to go.’
‘Right now?’
His answer is to push himself off the wall and disappear; we hear his footsteps on the stairs. There’s a heavy silence after he’s gone.
‘Sorry, Beth. I gotta go but we’ll be back in a couple of hours.’ She scrambles up from the bed. Her eyes are hidden from mine as she loads our used plates and mugs onto the tray. ‘See you soon. Fitz’ll take care of you.’
I’m left staring at the half-open door, startled by her rapid exit. Is this how it is here, how it will be? Will Alex jump every time Pete clicks his fingers, and will I always be left waiting for scraps of time with her?
I close my eyes and lean my head against the wall, trying not to feel second best but already aware that the balance of our friendship shifted weeks ago, when Alex ran away; some of the old certainties, the old familiarities have gone. For a moment I almost wish that I’ll get found out, that the parental hand of authority will reach out and whisk both of us back to Sheffield, where everything would get sorted out in a comforting, adult way.
But I know that isn’t going to happen.
16th May 2013
Linda led the sessions today, and as usual I sat back and admired her talent for winning over even hardened cynics, the ones who said in smug tones, it’s all just re-inventing the wheel, this, as though you’d never heard anyone say that before. By lunchtime they were not exactly eating out of her hand, but prepared to have a sniff.
After lunch I had something to discuss and went to find her, on a fag break at the back of the building. She stood huddled in a corner with one or two others. Linda was a little younger than me but over the years we’d worked together she’d become a good friend. She was blonde and jolly, with a wide smile, a laugh that cracked out of her and a laid-back manner that was deceptive. She was quite tough in most matters, grew up on the kind of estate where it paid you to be.
Once the business was out of the way I found myself being updated on her complicated two-family life.
‘…. so we’ve got Jessica in the spare room, while she gets over him and finds herself a place of her own. Tom’s due back from his gap year and asked if he can bring two New Zealand girls for a week, just till they travel up to Scotland. I’ve told him he’ll have to give up his room and we’re not having any threesomes in our house. He said I’d got a dirty mind but I said I wasn’t born yesterday. And then I’ve got Liz calling me up every day, either sobbing down the phone or telling me what a bitch her mum is. I mean, I agree with her but I can’t say that, can I?’ Ash fell from her cigarette, scattered across the tarmac in the breeze. ‘When I’ll ever get a bit of peace and quiet God only knows. I haven’t had a proper conversation with Stuart in months. It’s all where’s this, where’s that, what are we having for tea tonight? God, I need a holiday.’ She went quiet for a moment. ‘Beth? Are you okay?’
I realised that I’d been staring fixedly at the ground for some time, thinking about Fitz, thinking about Alex, and Dan’s message, about what to do next if anything. I looked up. ‘Yes. No.’
Linda took my arm and hustled me out of the quad and along to the empty training room; I could see she was excited by the prospect of yet another drama but I hadn’t yet told her anything about the connection with Dan and was curiously resistant to the idea. I palmed her off with Phil. That was, in relation to Ireland. She already knew the rest: how we met at his school, when I was doing some training there; how he and his wife had agreed their marriage was over, but that they’d stay together until their girls were grown; how we met furtively so nothing would get back to them. Linda was sceptical about the whole thing; she said things like, ‘How do you know he’s telling the truth?’, ‘Isn’t that what they all say?’, and so on.
‘Phil wants me to go to Ireland.’ She looked puzzled. ‘I mean to live, not on holiday.’
‘Oh. But I thought—’
‘His