deepening, and something in the crease of his eyes settled it. ‘I work in IT.’ He held out his hand. ‘Dan Walker.’
‘Christ!’
He laughed out loud as I stared rudely now, trying to picture the boy I knew, conjuring up a snapshot image of a cheeky face, long-fringed hair, and a Scooby-Doo T-shirt, a boy in shorts permanently straddling a red Chopper bike.
‘I saw your name on the training schedule,’ he said. ‘Thought I’d come and see if it was the Beth I used to know.’ The speech brackets expanded as he grinned. ‘You look a bit different now.’
My eyes slid away from his, staring down the years at my seventeen-year-old self. I saw Alex and me in front of my old dressing-table mirror, posing in crotch-tight jeans and ripped T-shirts, painting purple lips onto corpse-like faces and coaxing hennaed hair into spikes with an ancient pot of Brylcreem.
‘The blonde hair threw me a bit.’ Dan’s words brought me back. ‘But your face is the same.’
‘Right, if you don’t look too closely.’
‘And your voice. Your voice hasn’t changed.’
‘Well, yours is a bit deeper,’ I joked. ‘I would never have known it was you.’
‘I did have the advantage,’ he said. ‘Back then you only knew me as Dan, I guess, but I knew your full name, Beth Steele. That hasn’t changed.’
Oh, but it did. It became Beth Williams for a while, although I’d never grown used to it. I liked having Steele back in my name, liked the way it gave an edge to the softness of Beth.
‘Fancy you remembering,’ I said.
He grinned. ‘Could be something to do with Fitz once having written it all over a steamed-up window.’
The memory flooded in. It had rained all day without stopping and when Fitz cooked one of his curries the kitchen became a warm little den of steam. He wrote my name in large letters from one side of the window to the other, and it stayed there while we ate until Dan had climbed up onto the draining board and wiped it with his sleeve.
‘Is it going all right?’ Dan asked, with a nod at the circle of chairs, and I said yes, so far, while images of those weeks in London flickered through my mind like an old reel of film. ‘Are you going for coffee? I’ll walk along with you.’
By the time we got there I’d made the connection. ‘You were Fitz’s cousin.’
‘Still am.’
‘Do you—?’
‘See him? Yes. Now and then.’
From inside the hospitality room came the buzz of voices, reminding me that I should be in there, mingling with the group I’m here to train. The HR director looked over, caught my eye, held one hand up to draw me in.
‘I’d love to talk to you,’ I said to Dan, ‘about all that.’
‘Well, let’s go for a drink after work. We can catch up properly.’
‘That would be great.’
Dan glanced at the crowd in the room, then back at me, his eyes bright with curiosity.
‘Fitz never told me very much. Your friend….wasn’t she in some kind of trouble? Run away from home or something?’
‘That’s right.’
‘What happened to her? Was she okay?’
‘I don’t know. She sort of…disappeared.’
‘What, totally?’
‘Yes. I’ve never seen her since.’
‘Good grief.’
I saw his eyes widen, and was touched by the fact that we must have all meant something to him, even though he was just a boy.
‘Now I’m curious,’ he said. ‘Catch you later.’
*
If ever I told anyone the story, of how Alex ran away from home, they would always say, but you must have known, she must have talked about it, you must have known something. And I would think back to those times, looking for clues I might have picked up, convinced I should have. Full of guilt that I hadn’t. But Alex was very good at concealment, and the fact is that I only ever found her entertaining, interesting, and always, always, fun.
We’d been friends since we were eight years old, since the day she moved into my school. She’d scooped me up and rescued me from sitting on the sidelines, where I’d found myself after my best friend had moved away. On the surface we were an unlikely combination — Alex all fiery and quick to quarrel, and me hating rows of any kind — but somehow we hit it off, became best of friends. We operated like oil and water: when Alex sparked up trouble I’d smooth things over; in return she gave my life a nice sheen. Later, at Storrs High, Alex began to push the boundaries more and more, earning a reputation with the teachers. These days she’d be called ‘challenging’, and maybe someone would try talking to her and find that there was hurt behind the bravado. Back then she was just labelled a trouble-maker. Our science teacher, a blunt man, put it succinctly one day when he rudely told her to stop being so bloody-minded. I sometimes worried that she’d get tired of me pulling her back from the edge, that she’d move on to a different crowd, but somehow I retained my status: best friends with the girl who would say what others only thought and was generally regarded as cool.
It was Alex who got me on stage, insisting that we join the drama club after finding out that Ian Wragg was in it. ‘You’d be really good, Beth,’ she said, with her listen-to-me face on. ‘You read so well in English.’ So we did, and I took to acting like a duck to water, amazed at first that I could do it, and then, as I was given bigger parts, by the highs to be got from being someone else. I loved it, and began to think of a career in theatre. Meanwhile Alex got off with Ian Wragg but went off drama after a row with Mrs Bull. People used to say she’d got thrown out; I always defended her and said she’d chosen to leave. There was truth in both versions.
My friendship with Alex led to battles with my parents. As we got older there were times we stayed out too late, when they didn’t know where I was; times I came home from parties reeking of fags and drink; late-night trips to the bathroom to throw up. My parents began to encourage my other friends, but it didn’t work because it was Alex I liked best. We did everything together.
Until the day she left home without me.
*
I could see Dan below, waiting as the glass lift sank smoothly down to the foyer. Outside we were met by a wave of heat. It was the middle of May, unexpectedly warm, and London was basking in twenty-four degrees, a few more than it would be back in Sheffield.
‘I know a nice pub garden,’ Dan said. ‘It’s not too far.’
‘Sounds perfect.’
We turned onto Marylebone High Street, sidestepping a twin buggy with wide-eyed occupants. Dan quizzed me about my company, seven years old this month and doing well, despite these scary times for winning bids. I told him how I won this NHS contract on the back of some work in other London boroughs. It’s a two-week block of training and workshops, and I’d decided to stay over on the week-nights, returning for the middle weekend.
‘Just you?’ Dan asked.
‘No, there’s my colleague, Linda. She’ll travel from Sheffield on a daily basis. She’s juggling some work we have there.’
Dan took my arm briefly to steer me across the road. ‘This is so weird,’ he said. ‘I remember that summer very well. Mainly that I was quite jealous of this girl who suddenly took up so much of my cousin’s time.’
I laughed, told him that the feeling was often mutual. ‘You used to turn up out of the blue and ask Fitz to mend your bike, do you remember?’
‘That old thing, yes.