Looking for Alex by Marian Dillon Page A

where we left off, playing at being punks in my back bedroom.
    ‘Well, I don’t know what you are going to do,’ I counter. ‘Are you going to stay here? What about your A-levels? What about your mother?’ By now it is clear that Alex’s stepfather has made her life a misery. Her mother’s crimes are less obvious and I feel some sympathy because it seems to me that she’s been bullied too. Alex paints a picture of a house run to a strict regime whose only purpose seems to be to have things Greg’s way, and her mother’s scurrying busyness is nothing but a constant effort to keep it like that, to keep him from yelling and shouting. ‘Do you plan to leave her in limbo, not knowing where the hell you are or whether you’re safe?’
    ‘I don’t care,’ she says. ‘I don’t care what she thinks. I can lead my own life and fuck them. I am not having her come down here bleating on about how things are going to change. I’ve had that for the last ten years and it just isn’t going to happen.’
    ‘An anonymous postcard won’t tell her where you are, will it?’
    ‘And what am I supposed to say?’
    ‘“I’m alive”?’
    Her eyes flicker. ‘She knows I’m alive. I told her I’d go, plenty of times. She knows exactly what I’ve done and why.’ Alex gives me an oblique look. ‘Why do you care about my mother so much, Beth? She hardly ever spoke to you.’
    ‘I don’t know. I suppose I can just imagine what she might be going through. If it was my—’
    ‘Well, she isn’t your mother, she’s mine, and if she cared about me at all she’d have stood up to that bastard and told him to fuck off and leave me alone!’
    Her voice has risen and a film of tears glitters in her eyes; suddenly I guess something.
    ‘It wasn’t the first time, was it?’
    She looks startled. ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘You said it was the first time he’d hit you but he’d done it before — am I right?’
    Her eyes skitter around the room and then come back to mine. ‘Yeah. It started when I was fourteen, when I wouldn’t do what he said any more.’
    We stare at each other.
    ‘Alex!’
    The shout from Pete fractures the silence and we both jump. Alex scrambles to her feet and gathers up mugs and plates. I put my hand on her arm. ‘Wait. Don’t go yet.’
    She looks down at my hand and frowns.
    ‘Where do you go each day, you and Pete?’
    ‘I’ve told you — he’s working.’
    ‘I think he sells drugs.’
    ‘What makes you think that?’
    ‘Oh, come on, Alex, I know he’s a dealer. It doesn’t take much to work it out.’
    ‘Well, you’ve worked it out so there you go. And it doesn’t take much to work out that you don’t like him.’
    ‘What about you?’ I ask. ‘Are you involved in all that?’
    ‘That’s right.’
    The voice comes from the doorway. Pete brushes strands of hair out of his eyes, with long, feline fingers.
    ‘Nice young girls like Alex don’t sell drugs, do they? Or so the fuzz think.’
    I fold my arms tight and hope that the pounding in my chest isn’t visible in my face. It helps that at times Pete is almost a caricature, a leftover freak from the summer of love; it helps if I see him as ridiculous, with his words like ‘fuzz’, and ‘wow’, his habit of saying ‘far out’ whenever Alex says something remotely interesting.
    ‘Well, they obviously do,’ I say, ‘when someone makes them.’
    ‘So, Alex, do I
make
you?’
    ‘No.’ Alex edges towards him, looking back at me. When she speaks there’s a sort of pleading under the bravado. ‘I help Pete out, it’s nothing much, so that I can live here and not sponge off the others. That’s all. It’s not for ever. All right?’
    I shrug, say nothing, and Alex slips out of the room.
    ‘A bit out of your depth?’ Contempt oozes from Pete’s voice. ‘You could go home. Alex is okay here. You shouldn’t worry about her so much.’
    ‘Shouldn’t I?’
    ‘Nothing bad is going to happen.’
    ‘I’m glad you’re