Marian Dillon - Looking For Alex

‘I’ve heard a lot about you. Alex has missed you,’ he continues, in an unexpectedly deep, resonant voice and an accent cut from glass. He holds up crossed fingers. ‘I know how you two were like this.’

As if he knows anything about us.

‘I’ve missed her,’ I manage to say, with my eyes on Alex, not him.

‘I’ll make some tea,’ she says.

She hooks her jacket round the back of a chair and tosses her beret onto a big, square table that overflows with dirty dishes and back copies of Socialist Worker . Then she moves over to the cooker, lifts a kettle — the whistling sort — and takes it to the sink. This is an old pot thing, with sit-up-and-beg taps, a wooden draining board and a check curtain on a wire underneath. A window above looks out onto the overgrown garden, lush green framed by peeling paint. As the tap sputters and spurts water, hitting the empty kettle with a metallic ring before water absorbs the sound, I take in the rest of the kitchen.

It’s bare and old-fashioned, four walls with objects hunkered up to them, each in their own little space. The floor is covered with black-and-white squared lino, so that the kitchen seems to resemble a giant chessboard with pieces ranged round four sides instead of two. These are: a filthy and ancient cooker that stands on arched legs and has thick, flat keys to turn on the gas; a low coffee table that crouches next to it, piled with pots and pans; a tall cupboard like my nan’s, with ridged-glass doors and a flap that lets down for a work-surface; a rust-pitted fridge, tilting alarmingly on an uneven floor; the squat, scuffed table and four hard-backed chairs.

‘I’ll make the tea.’ Pete takes the kettle from Alex’s hands. ‘I’m better at it.’

Alex turns to me. ‘He’s obsessed with tea. It’s like a ritual.’ She speaks playfully but sounds a little nervous, it seems to me. ‘It has to be leaves not bags and the teapot has to be warmed and the tea has to brew for exactly five minutes. Then you have to pour it through a strainer thingy and you have to do that just right, lifting the teapot up and down while you pour. Oh, and you must put a little in each cup first then top them up in the same order so everyone gets the same strength tea. Then, if you’re lucky, you might get to drink it.’

I have no way of replying to this; it’s as if she’s talking in a foreign language. Luckily Pete fills the gap, speaking over his shoulder as he strikes a match and lights the gas. ‘You forgot to say milk first, not last. Like you said, I’m better at tea.’

He sounds completely serious.

Alex says, ‘Let’s take your bags up.’

She shows me round downstairs first. A small room next to the kitchen is used for storing almost anything, it seems; wallpaper hangs off the walls, and a grey army blanket covers the window so that it’s hard to make out exactly what the piles of things on the floor might be. The room at the front is filled with an odd assortment of sagging sofas, grubby armchairs and beanbags that leak little pearls of polystyrene. At the windows hang curtains of a sort, what look like cotton bed throws, sugary pink, looped over the rail and bunched to the sides. The fraying carpet is patched with stains and smells of dogs, and damp. As I stand and take this all in my own home seems utterly desirable and very far away.

‘Whose house is this?’ I ask.

‘No one’s,’ Alex replies, perching on the arm of a chair. ‘Well, it was Pete who first laid claim to it, so technically it’s his, I suppose. He gets to say who lives here.’

‘But it must belong to someone,’ I insist.

‘Beth, it’s a squat.’ A squat. Something unknown. My guts play loop-the-loop. ‘It’s an empty house that no one’s lived in for years and no one cares about. We’re not doing any harm. It would be full of rats probably if we weren’t here.’ She sees my face stiffen. ‘Stupid, there aren’t rats really.’ Grabbing my arm, she spins me round towards the door. ‘Come on, I’ll show you where you’re going to sleep.’

Upstairs the smell of damp gives way to something sweeter, the scent I’d caught on her when we hugged, a musky perfume maybe?

‘This is where I sleep,’ Alex says, and throws open the door to a room with a double mattress, covered with two zipped-together sleeping bags and scattered with assorted clothes. On the bed a pair of Alex’s pants lies tangled up with some black Y-fronts. Neither of us says anything, me trying desperately not to appear shocked and uncool in front of this strange person that was my Alex. She whisks me off along the landing and points out a heavy green curtain that drapes onto the bottom step of another staircase. ‘Celia sleeps in the attic. She doesn’t like people going in her room when she’s out. Well, not at all really. Here, this is the bathroom.’

I peer in at bare boards clogged with dust, a rusty claw-foot bath and a toilet with no seat. There’s a rank, fusty smell in the room. Alex walks over to the sash window and pulls down the top half.

‘I keep telling them to leave this open.’ She wrinkles her nose. ‘It’s the drains.’

I suppress my need for the toilet, decide to come back later.

‘You’re going to sleep here.’ She flings open the next door along. ‘Oh.’ A young guy is kneeling on the floor by the window, flicking through a stack of LPs. ‘Fitz! I thought you were out,’ Alex says, a little thrown. ‘It was so quiet.’ She turns to me. ‘Fitz can’t exist without music.’ To him she says, ‘This is my friend, Beth.’

Fitz peers up at me above a pair of shades that perch on the end of his nose. ‘Hi, Beth,’ he says, and goes back to his search.

Alex wanders over to a mattress on the floor, plonks herself down. There’s another jumble of records there and she begins to sort through them. I put my bag down on the floor but remain resolutely standing. The room is small and stark: more floorboards, one hessian rug, a mattress on the floor, two blue milk-crates with clothes neatly folded into them, and the stereo. This takes up some space, with its smoked-glass deck, an amp that looks like the control desk of a plane, and giant speakers. The walls have been partly stripped and have become a mosaic of two or three different patterns. They give off a distinctive smell, an earthy scent of crumbling plaster, torn paper and dried paste. In one corner stands a little army of candles melted onto saucers.

‘Where’s that one you were playing yesterday?’ Alex asks.

‘Which one was that?’ He has a soft, Irish accent.

‘You know, the one about a storm.’

‘You mean The Doors?’

‘Yeah. I loved that. Go on, play it, Fitz.’

I’m not entirely focusing on this exchange, too busy trying to contain a rising, cold anxiety. What did Alex mean, you’re going to sleep here ? Does she expect me to roll out my sleeping bag on a complete stranger’s floor?

I watch Fitz as he selects a record and places it lovingly on the turntable, with a careful wipe of his sleeve. He is dressed all in black but somehow I get the impression he always wears black and it’s nothing to do with how everyone else is dressing right now. His body is lean and wiry and I think he can’t be very tall, although it’s hard to say when I haven’t yet seen him standing. He has short hair that curls a little wildly; it shines coppery in the sun as he leans over the turntable, positioning the stylus above the last track. I can see all the bumps along his spine, under stretched cotton. The stylus lands scratchily onto plastic and he rocks back on his heels. He takes off his shades and now I can see his face more clearly, although with the sun behind him his eyes are in shadow. He has a thin, bird-like nose that has taken a hit at some point; it’s skewed to the left. You wouldn’t have said he was handsome but there’s something that draws me to watch him, covertly, as he stands and goes to the window.