Looking for Alex (18 page)
When Fitz comes up I say what can we do, we have to do something, and he says we can’t do anything, there’s no proof that he hit her. We just keep an eye on her, he says. We watch them like hawks. But I don’t feel like watching them right then. Worried as I am, I don’t trust myself to be in the same room as Pete. Fitz goes to get us some food and brings it upstairs and that’s where we stay, for the rest of the day. We lie on the bed listening to music until, exhausted by all the travelling and sea air, we fall asleep.
Somewhere in the early hours of the morning I hear movement downstairs. I nudge Fitz hard and he wakes with a start.
‘There’s someone in the house.’
Fitz sits up, listening intently, then goes to the bedroom door and pulls it open a little. ‘It’s Pete and Alex.’
We hear the sound of bolts being drawn on the back door. I get up quickly, pull one of Fitz’s shirts on and run downstairs, just in time to see them shouldering backpacks, about to leave.
‘Where are you going?’
Pete sighs heavily. ‘You don’t need to know.’
‘Alex?’
She looks at me, tilting her chin defiantly, her cheek red and shiny under the bare light bulb. ‘It’s only for a few days. I’ll be back at the end of the week, Beth.’
‘But that’s when I’m going! We’ve only got these few days before I have to go home.’
She looks at me, then at Pete, as though weighing us against each other.
‘Why now?’ That’s Fitz, who has come in behind me.
‘A break,’ Pete says. ‘Let things settle down. And I need to see a friend. Come on, Alex.’
He puts one hand under her elbow and guides her towards the door. Beside me Fitz takes my hand and squeezes it. I’m not sure if it’s to shut me up or give me courage to speak. Alex throws me a quick, slight smile.
‘I’ll be back before you go, Beth.’
‘Okay,’ I say, and lean against Fitz, who puts his arm round my waist. ‘See you.’ She hesitates then, halted I think by the sudden nonchalance in my voice. Tired of being made to care, I look steadily into her puzzled eyes. ‘See you then.’
Before she can say anything else Pete opens the door and propels her out of the house. We watch their shadowy figures move down the garden and through the gate at the back, which drags and scrapes on the ground as it closes behind them.
‘Well, that’s that, then,’ I say, and I don’t even know what I mean by it.
24
th
August 1977
‘Look.’ Fitz points to the road sign. ‘Not far now.’
I peer through the rain-streaked windscreen and see,
Croeso i Gymru
.
Welcome to Wales.
The lorry driver changes down at the bottom of a steep hill and the engine whines in response. He’s driven from Plymouth that morning, on his way to Milford Haven, and picked us up just outside Bristol. He’s a Brummy.
‘Bloody mad if you ask me, all these Welsh road signs. Must have cost a fortune to replace them all. Who’s paying? That’s what I’d like to know. What’s wrong with plain English?’
‘Maybe because this is Wales?’ Fitz says, and the driver glances at him, not sure where Fitz’s sympathies lie.
‘I guess your road signs are all in Irish, are they?’
Fitz grins. ‘No, they do use English in Camden.’
The driver laughs out loud. ‘Ha-ha, very funny. I meant, where your family come from. You’ve got the Irish in your voice, haven’t you?’
‘Yeah, you’re right. And, yes, in Ireland they do have road signs written in Gaelic — it’s not been British now for over fifty years, after all.’
‘What do they call it now, Ayer?’
‘Eire, that’s right.’
‘What does that mean, then?’
‘Um, it means Ireland.’
Fitz has his arm around my shoulders and I can feel him shaking with silent laughter. I dig one finger into his ribs, warning him not to get too clever, not wanting to get thrown out in the rain. We are perched high up in the cab, our fourth lift on this journey. The first was in a furniture van, making a delivery to Reading; after that there was a black Mercedes and before this a Ford Cortina.
I’m getting used to hitching now, to standing on the roadside just in front of Fitz and holding up a soggy cardboard sign, just as I’m getting used to the randomness of where we find ourselves dropped off and who we’ll be picked up by. We never have to wait too long in the rain; people are kind. They either feel sorry for us or just want the company. We were treated to coffee and sandwiches by Mr Cortina, at Gordano services — although for this had to suffer seventy-five miles of the minute differences between Cortinas Mk 1 and 2. That was after listening to impressive stories from the young couple in the Merc, who were terribly well connected and name-dropped every five minutes. When we got out of their car we were hysterical and kept saying things to each other like,
Darling, isn’t Mick Jagger just the sweetest guy?
and
Of course, Prince Charles is much better looking than in the photos!
The sign for Wales rushes by and I have the sudden thought,
This is unknown territory.
Up to now if I’ve thought about my parents finding out where I was and how I’d justify any of it, I’ve had excuses prepared.
I stayed with Alex to make sure she was safe
, or
I knew if I told anyone she’d run off again
. Not that either of those would be acceptable. But they would, I hoped, be understood. However this is entirely different.
It takes another hour to reach Swansea, where we part company with the lorry driver. We’ve dried out in his warm cab and now it has stopped raining. The air is fresh and still, with that metallic tang of summer rain. It’s five o’clock in the evening, the clouds are lifting and there’s a glimmer of sun in the sky. Fitz reaches into his backpack for another piece of cardboard and a felt-tip pen. He writes,
Newcastle Emlyn
.
‘When we get there Michael will drive in and pick us up,’ he says. ‘If we’re lucky we’ll do it in one.’
And we do. A little Mini Cooper stops, with a couple of lads in the front. They take us all the way to Newcastle Emlyn on their way to Cardigan, so we buy them a pint in the pub as thanks. I sit with them while Fitz goes off to find a phone-box. They’re students, at Liverpool University, who’ve been camping on the Gower and are on their way home for a week or two before term starts. They ask about me, and when I tell them I’m still at school, trying to choose between acting and university, it sounds like someone else’s life. I seem so far away from all that. They start to ask more, about me and Fitz, but I don’t want to say any more so I jump up and find a five pence to put in the jukebox, choose Fleetwood Mac.
Fitz comes back in. ‘Michael’s coming over. He said half an hour.’
New people to meet. I begin to feel anxious.
‘You’ll get on well with Michael and Jenny,’ Fitz said this morning, when he was persuading me to leave the house. I’d heard about them before; until last year they lived at the squat, but then Jenny’s father died, leaving her a fair amount of money. They went to Wales in a camper van, looking for somewhere to live, and eventually found a derelict smallholding that they are now renovating.
‘They want to be self-sufficient, if they can,’ Fitz told me, and I thought of
The Good Life
, and Felicity Kendall sliding around a muddy back garden, looking glamorously scruffy in dungarees. Fitz laughed when I told him that, and said that being glamorous isn’t high on Jenny’s list of priorities. She’s dead ordinary, he said, and he must have made them sound okay because I agreed to go. I’m surprised to think that it’s only this morning we left London, that only yesterday we were in Brighton.
‘We’ll come back when things have calmed down,’ Fitz said.
But it’s this transition, from looking after Alex to living in Wales with Fitz’s friends, that I know would be unforgivable in my parents’ eyes. Even as I stared at the mess we found this morning, and later, when Fitz said, ‘Let’s get out of here for a few days,’ I imagined my mother’s incredulous voice saying, ‘But why didn’t you just come home?’
The two lads refuse a second drink, saying they have a party to go to later. Fitz and I sit holding hands, not speaking much, watched by an old boy with rheumy eyes and a wheezy cough, until an ancient bottle-green camper van rolls up noisily outside the pub. It’s held together by dirt and rust and has faded, flowery curtains at the window. The driver leaps out, Michael, a stocky man in combat trousers and a mud-coloured T-shirt, with short black hair. He and Fitz shake hands, and Michael says it’s good to see him and he’s glad we’ve come, and then something I don’t catch, before turning to me. His face has that baggy, lived-in look, and his eyes give the impression that they’ve seen most things.
‘Nice to meet you,’ he says, and that’s all.
Fitz fills Michael in as we drive to the house, from the day that Alex arrived to the smashed window and bolted doors. And about this morning’s break-in.
*
I woke early and lay in bed for a while as Fitz slept on, worrying about whether Alex would come back before I went home and if she didn’t when I would see her again. I was thinking about yesterday, the dark bruise on her cheek, and what that meant. I thought about her stepfather and the reasons she’d left home. Was it different to be hit by the person you chose to be with, rather than someone who didn’t want you around? Did it make it better, or worse? And was she actually choosing to be with Pete now or just stuck with him because she could see no other option?
Fitz stirred, and asked what was going on in my head to make me wriggle around so much.
‘Wriggly thoughts,’ I said. ‘Go back to sleep.’
But he couldn’t. We were up by nine-thirty and went to Spar to get milk and bread for breakfast. It was a nice morning and I said we should go out somewhere later.
‘Dan might turn up,’ Fitz said. ‘Pete said he was looking for us yesterday. He wants me to fix something on his bike.’
‘Again? What does he do to it?’
As we turned down the alley at the back of the house we saw him, loitering outside the back gate, spinning the pedals on his bike with one foot.
‘Speak of the devil,’ Fitz said. Dan heard our voices and pedalled up towards us. We could see straight away there was something wrong; his usual cheeky grin was replaced by a look of scared excitement. He skidded to a halt in front of us.
‘What’s up?’ Fitz asked.
‘It’s all messed up!’
‘What? What’s messed up?’
Dan hooked one thumb over his shoulder. ‘The house. The door’s bashed in and it’s all messed up inside.’
Fitz shoved the bag of shopping into my hands and ran. I had the fleeting thought that I’d never seen him move so fast and then I followed, trying to run but slowed down by the bag swinging against my legs, bottles of milk and bread and eggs. Behind me Dan did a U-turn and whizzed back down.
Of course it was impossible to have the bolts drawn while you were out. We would have had to ask Celia to come and do them after us and there was this unwritten rule that you didn’t go up to Celia’s room. It must have been easy for them to smash the flimsy padlock. When I got there Fitz was inside, wandering around, staring at the damage. I had the bizarre thought that there were degrees of mess, that up to then I would have said the kitchen was a mess. This was something else. Everything that could be turned over, turned out or turned upside down, was. The contents were scattered everywhere: pots and pans from the little table, now on its side, plates and cups smashed, the rubbish bag emptied, and food from the fridge — not that there was much — stamped on and trodden into the floorboards. It was Celia’s yoghurts mainly, lying on their sides, the plastic cartons split and spilling thick pools of colour.
‘Shall I go and ring 999?’ Dan asked, hopefully. He was peering in through the door, still straddling his bike. ‘There’s a phone-box down the road.’
‘No, Dan, don’t do anything. Just…look, you’d better go back home. It’s best if you just go home.’
‘But—’
‘No buts. I don’t want you here right now, got it?’ Fitz was shaken and spoke roughly, the soft Irish in his voice suddenly harsher.
‘It’s all right, Dan,’ I said. ‘It’s nothing to worry about. It’s a joke, that’s all.’ I don’t know who I thought I was kidding but it seemed better to pretend I wasn’t in a state of quiet panic. ‘We’ll sort it out. You go home and we’ll see you another day.’
‘I want to help.’
‘No.’ Fitz turned on him. ‘You go home. Now.’
‘Okay, okay.’ His face went sulky at being turned away from a real live Scooby-Doo moment. ‘I only want to help.’ He turned his bike round and scooted it down the garden. Fitz shouted after him.
‘And not a word to Auntie Rose or Uncle Jack? Got that? Not a word.’
Dan put two fingers up and Fitz said, ‘Where’d he learn that?’
I said, ‘He’s at school, isn’t he?’
I dumped the shopping and slumped onto the one chair that wasn’t tipped up on the floor.
‘Who’s done this? Who the hell’s done this?’
‘Hey, Beth, don’t be scared. They won’t come back.’
‘I’m not scared,’ I lied. ‘But everything’s spoilt now. Everything.’
There was silence for a moment.
‘Do you want to go home?’
‘No!’ I wailed. ‘I don’t want to go home. I want to be with you and I want Alex to come back and I want things to be how they were when I first came down.’ I was exhausted, and past being rational.
‘I told you someone ought to take Alex home, didn’t I?’ It was Celia, in the doorway to the hall. She came forward. She was wearing her baggy green jumper, the one that hid her emaciated body but made her head look skeletal.
‘Did you see them?’ Fitz asked.
‘Oh, yes.’ Her voice was brittle with contempt. ‘Two of them. Stupid sods. I told them he’d gone but they thought I was lying.’
‘Are you okay?’ I was amazed by her calmness.
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘They weren’t looking for me, were they? They were after drugs, or money, or both. Anything Pete might have hidden when he pissed off. They didn’t find anything, of course.’
‘You knew Pete had gone?’
‘Sure. I heard him and Alex creeping out. It’s what he always does anyway.’
