Looking for Alex by Marian Dillon

up quickly,’ he says, when I tell him that.
    ‘I suppose you think I lead a very sheltered life.’
    ‘Nothing wrong with that.’ He leaves a pause. ‘How come you didn’t know Pete? Alex met him in Sheffield, didn’t she? I thought you two went everywhere together.’
    ‘So did I. I mean, I know now that Alex was keeping secrets. I feel pretty bad about that, that she couldn’t tell me stuff. She said she didn’t want to think about it when she was with me, that I was her bit of normality. But…’ I shrug ‘…I wish she had.’
    ‘You didn’t pick up anything going on with her?’
    I think back to when it all seemed less complicated.
    ‘She used to tell me about rows with her stepdad — well, dad as I thought then. But who doesn’t have rows with their dad? And she’d say he was a bully but then the next minute she’d be cracking a joke.’ Fitz makes a sound in the back of his throat, a knowing kind of grunt. I stop, turn to face him. ‘Yeah, it’s easy to look back and see she was covering up. But how was I to know that then? When I was with Alex everything was funny; we just laughed all the time.’ I carry on walking. ‘I’ve missed that. I hardly see that side of her, now. She’s always out somewhere with Pete, or getting stoned. She’s different.’
    ‘People change.’
    ‘Or get changed.’
    Fitz picks up the bitterness in my voice.
    ‘It’s not just Pete, though, is it? There’s everything she’s run away from. And now she’s stopped covering it up she’s having to think about it.’
    We walk on in silence for a while.
    ‘I suppose you’re right,’ I admit finally, accepting something in my heart.
    ‘Well, there’s a novelty.’ Fitz laughs, fishes some Polos out of his pocket and offers me one, then links his arm in mine as we head back towards Camden, with Dan swerving about on his bike in front.
    *
    Things begin to feel less strange. I’m getting used to roughing it, even to the temperamental boiler that decides for itself when it will work. I get used to the fact that this is how they all live, and that maybe the police are not going to arrive any moment to batter the door down. I decide I want to stay for the whole two weeks, simply because I can, which starts me thinking about what happens at the end of them. Is there any way I can prise Alex away from Pete, get her to come with me, maybe stay at my house if she can’t go home? It seems impossible, when I can’t talk to her for longer than it takes to have breakfast. I need a day, a whole day, when she might begin to remember what it was like to have fun with me.
    ‘Do you want to come on an open-topped bus with me?’ I say, the morning after my walk with Fitz. I’m lounging against the window. Alex sits cross-legged on the mattress, surrounded by the debris of our breakfast. ‘I’ve hardly spent any money. I could pay for you.’
    Although she always seems to have money, I guess it’s probably Pete’s. She wrinkles her nose.
    ‘It’s a bit bourgeois, a bus tour.’
    She uses that word a lot now. She also imitates Pete’s way of speaking, so that our northern ‘grass’ becomes ‘graaass’, anything she likes is ‘fucking amaaazing’, and her vocabulary of swear words has multiplied.
    ‘Well, okay,’ I say. ‘Let’s just get on the tube and go some places.’
    ‘With all the tourists?’
    ‘All right, so what? I want to be a tourist. Just for one day.’
    She starts fiddling with a hole in her black tights, poking one finger through and extending a ladder that exposes bare flesh. ‘Well, I did some of that with Pete when I first came down. It’s not very exciting, frankly.’ ‘Frankly’ is another word she uses a lot.
    ‘But you did it. I wouldn’t mind the chance to find it not very exciting. Frankly.’
    That’s the moment when things get personal. Somehow it ends with her accusing me of pretending this is all some nice little holiday — that we’ll go back to Sheffield and take up