Free Looking for Alex by Marian Dillon Page B

the house is. She keeps turning left and right, then back on herself, saying each time,
oh, yeah, this way
, or,
I know now
. I don’t say anything, not wanting to draw a prickly comment back, but I become more and more sure we won’t find it. At one point she stands and frowns at a house, a mid-terrace that looks like all the others.
    ‘This looks like it. But there was an alley at the side, and a gate that wasn’t locked, and you could look through the window and see the drawings on the wall.’ She squints round at me. ‘They were right weird. We were trying to work out what they meant but then this woman banged on an upstairs window and we ran for it.’
    ‘But, Alex,’ I say, ‘if there was an alley at the side this can’t be it. Can it?’
    ‘It looked like this,’ is all she says.
    It’s getting dark and I’m beginning to feel chilled; the damp is seeping through my thin jeans and my legs are shivering.
    ‘Let’s go home,’ I say.
    She pulls a face and points to the street on our left. ‘Just let’s try down here.’
    ‘Do you know the way back?’ I ask, suddenly aware that I don’t.
    ‘Of course.’
    We go the way she wants but halfway along the street we come to a halt, startled by a sudden thin wail that seems to drop down from the sky. We look up to see an open window a few doors away, and when the noise comes again I realise that it’s a baby crying. It’s a bleak sound; if a baby could be said to despair then this one does. I have no experience of babies but somehow I know it’s the cry of a child that doesn’t expect to be comforted. I glance at Alex and see her face has gone white, her eyes are like two black buttons and her mouth is pressed tight. It’s unusual, for Alex to have no jokey comment at hand, something to make light of a heavy feeling.
    She walks faster as we near the house. ‘Come on,’ she says, and I don’t need persuading. But as we pass the house the front door opens and there’s a shout.
    ‘Hey, you girls!’
    We spin round to see a woman on the steps. She wears a summer skirt and a long, saggy cardigan, which she wraps round herself with folded arms. Her legs are bare and her face looks pinched with cold.
    ‘Can you ’elp me?’
    Startled, we look at one another. How? The woman comes down the steps towards us, and all the time the baby is crying. She tells us that the child is ill and she needs to get her to hospital. She says it’s too far; she can’t walk; she has to fetch her husband home.
    Alex says, ‘Where is he?’
    She jerks her head down the street. ‘Down t’club. Playin’ cards.’ She asks if we’ll come into the house and mind the baby while she goes for him and I look at Alex and she’s shaking her head.
    ‘Can’t,’ she says. ‘We have to get home. We’ll be late.’
    I speak up. ‘We could, just for a minute,’ I say, and Alex’s head springs round. She mouths,
what?
Turning to the woman, she says, ‘Can’t you ask a neighbour?’
    ‘Not anyone round ’ere.’ That’s all she says. She looks at us solidly, as though she doesn’t doubt that we will help. Maybe it’s because of that that I try to persuade Alex, no longer than ten minutes, I say, just while the woman runs down to the club. She’s reluctant still, and as I put my hand on her arm to draw her towards the house I see, quite suddenly, how it is to be her. For a moment I am Alex and she is Beth, the sensible, cautious one. I know we should not go into a strange house but I want to anyway, and the more she resists, the more I insist; her pull is my push.
    So we go, following the woman upstairs, our shoes clattering on bare wood. She takes us into a tiny bedroom that contains little but the cot and the grizzling child, who is kneeling up at the bars. She tells us to watch her and she’ll be back as soon as she can. She says nothing to the child, no words of reassurance, a little girl in a grubby pink babygro whose age I try to guess — somewhere between one and