Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

May 1977
The evening I heard about Alex I crept along to my parents’ bedroom, parted the nets and peered out into the dusk of a June evening, down towards the crossroads where Shelley Avenue meets with Milton Street, the way that she always came. I fiddled with the wind-up jewellery-box on my mother’s dressing table while I watched and waited. Each time I looked up I thought, ‘This time she’ll be there.’ Coming round the corner, past the newsagents, across the road and up to my front door. The bell would ring and there she’d be, hair all spiky red, a grin on her face and as often as not a new single in her hand, pristine in its clean, un-creased wrapper. It was 1977 and punk was big.

‘Just bought it. Wanna listen?’ she’d say. Like always – bringing something with her. It might be a record, new clothes or make-up to try out, maybe the latest Jackie which we’d kind of outgrown but still bought to laugh like hyenas at the letters page. She would hold these things up in her hands like they were a pass to get her through the door, as though she wasn’t enough on her own. We’d swoop upstairs to my bedroom and play The Clash, The Jam and the Sex Pistols on the clunky, cheap little stereo that my sister’s student boyfriend had built for me, often causing my dad to shout upstairs, ‘Turn that bloody row off!’

A lot of our time was spent refining our novice punk look. Gone were last year’s flares and tank-tops, big-sleeved blouses and groomed, bobbed hair; in were crotch-tight, need-to-be-sewn-into jeans, old, ripped T-shirts scrawled with bands’ names and stuck with safety-pins, and shorn, darkly-hennaed hair whose spikes we sculpted with an ancient pot of brylcreem out the bathroom. We painted black eyeliner and juicy-berry lips onto corpse-like faces until finally, posing in front of the mirror, we could pretend to ourselves we looked like Siouxsie and the Banshees.

Alex had a cute heart-shaped face with luscious lips that managed to both belie and accentuate the bad girl look, and her lean body was purpose built for figure hugging jeans and tiny skirts with fishnets. I was more rounded, a little fleshy – I secretly regretted the passing of the wrap-round cheesecloth and loose smocks that my older sister Karen had looked so gorgeous in. I also sometimes pined for the long hair that I’d sacrificed one Saturday in Sheffield, at Debenhams’ hair salon, an impulse cut with Alex at my side, holding my hand and telling me it was symbolic of a new, radical me. I doubted that, and really just wanted to look like her. Lately Alex had begun to dress punk all the time – we were first-year sixth-formers then, no uniform required – for her it was becoming less an experiment, more a persona. Me, I would never have got out the house in one of my more extreme punk moments, my parents made me tone it all down. I had to dress one way for school and another for weekends. When Alex came round I could sense my mother’s slight reservations about her metamorphosis. She cast sideways glances at the metal rings that ran like a train track up each ear, and then at Alex’s giant Doc Martens, which sprouted, bulbous, from her skinny legs. She did like Alex though – she was funny and knowing, and made Mum laugh.

We hardly ever went round to Alex’s but I didn’t mind that. Her house was always so gloomy, even in the summer, full of shadows and silence, one of a group of large mansions on the other side of the park. They were expensive properties. Alex’s house, though, was like a tramp in a Miss World line-up; a sagging, weathered thing propped up on either side by painted loveliness. It had an eternity of crumbling steps up to its front door (they felt eternal if you were dragging a loaded satchel) and the cold kitchen never yielded anything worth making the effort to climb them. Alex would gamely offer jam sandwiches and a cup of tea, but she knew that that didn’t compare with our little Rombouts filter coffees and a dip into the tartan tin in our pantry – stuffed with Club biscuits and Tunnocks teacakes and those little Milky Ways you could get before anyone thought of miniaturizing chocolate bars. Everyone in my family had a sweet tooth.

Alex’s parents were okay, but distant. I hardly ever saw her father; he never seemed to be around much, I think he was a lawyer. He was a big, fair, almost-fat-but-not-quite bloke – Alex’s brother David took after him. Her mother was the opposite – a bit insubstantial, small and slight with perfect bones but mousy hair. She was almost always home but still somehow absent – she never seemed to look at me directly. I would glimpse her flitting from one room to another, preoccupied, never stopping to talk. ‘Hello, er… Zoe,’ was all she’d say, even after she’d known me for four years. Not like my mum, who brought us biscuits and Tizer, and would ask Alex how are things and how’s school and how’s this, that and the other. I guess we found that annoying sometimes, like when it interrupted a good bitching session about the girls at school, or a consideration of who we’d most like to lose our virginity to. But my seventeen-year-old self had some appreciation of how it was done in the spirit of kindness and a show of interest. And that same self had a further dim apprehension that things were not so wonderful in the house by the park.

So the evening I heard about Alex, I stood staring out the window, a horrible sense of disquiet growing within me. She wasn’t at home, and she wasn’t at mine. Alex didn’t have a whole bunch of other friends, and she’d finished with slimeball Ryan Leeks more than a month ago. I knew that if she was missing something was wrong.

Mrs Day had first rung around quarter to ten. I pounced on the phone as a reprieve from listing, ‘Reasons for the Founding of the Iron & Steel Industry in South Yorkshire’.

‘Hello, Zoe. Is Alex there?’ she asked me in that laconic way she had, a cross between lack of interest and annoyance that she’d had to ring. It was a Thursday and Alex often pitched up at mine to watch Top of the Pops without having told anyone she was going out.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I thought she must be ill.’

‘What do you mean, why should she be ill?’ she asked, a little snappily, which I thought was a curious question.

‘Erm… well, when she wasn’t at school I thought –’

‘Wasn’t at school? How do you mean wasn’t at school?’

‘Well… she just wasn’t.’

‘What, all day?’

‘Yes. I mean, no. I mean, I never saw her all day.’

‘But she wasn’t home either.’

When she said that it felt like the earth had just tilted sideways but all I could manage to say was ‘Oh,’ which Mrs Day seemed to take as an expression of complicity.

‘Are you sure you haven’t seen her, Zoe?’

‘Of course, I’d tell you if I had.’

‘Well, if she turns up you tell her to ring me straight away,’ she said, in a tone of voice I’d never before heard from her but which I recognized as concern, and then she put the phone down.

That was when I began my vigil at the window, tiptoeing to and fro so as not to alert my parents. They were watching The Sweeney and had it turned up loud so fortunately hadn’t heard my end of the phone conversation. I didn’t want to give them more ammunition for their growing suspicions that Alex was becoming a ‘bad influence’.

At ten-thirty the phone rang again, and I ran downstairs to pick up before anyone else could.

‘Zoe, there isn’t anything you’re not telling me?’ Mrs Day demanded, just as my mother came through with empty mugs and the biscuit tin. She hovered, rinsing out the mugs and listening in more and more intently as she began to pick up the content.

‘No. Nothing. Honestly.’

‘Has she talked to you about going anywhere she shouldn’t? Do you have any idea where she might be?’

‘No. She hasn’t said anything.’

‘Would she have told anyone else?’

‘Doubt it. She always tells me stuff first.’

‘Right,’ she said. ‘Right.’

She asked if I had other friends’ phone numbers so I gave her Gemma Logan’s and Alice Newton’s, even though I knew that Alex never went round to theirs. She regarded them as lightweight.

‘Well if she’s not there then I’m phoning the police,’ Mrs Day said. ‘From what you say she’s been missing all day.’

Missing. I remembered when our cat went missing, and how it never came back. I thought of the hours I spent crying over that cat. I couldn’t quite equate that with Alex. I was sure it was all some sort of mistake and she was going to get done big time when she did get home.

I had to relay all of this to my mother, and watched as her eyes narrowed and her mouth took on a knowing ‘I’ve been waiting for something like this to happen’ twist. She didn’t look unduly disturbed though.

‘I expect she bunked off school and now she’s hanging around with some lad and forgotten the time,’ was her verdict.

Her very failure to sound more worried was reassuring – in spite of the fact that Alex never bunks off school and there was no successor to Ryan Leeks.

‘Anyway,’ she said, a little more kindly, ‘you can’t do anything, Zoe. Get to bed. You can ring first thing in the morning.’

I waited a while, expecting Alex to call any minute and say something like, ‘I can’t believe my mum rang you! I told her where I was going last night and she never bloody listens!’

Only thing was, when I tried to fill in the bit about where she might have gone, there was a void.

Finally I went up to bed, knowing I wouldn’t sleep. I had this growing sense of unease in me, a sort of queasiness, although in the absence of anything concrete to worry about I think my main fear was that I might have just got Alex into trouble. I didn’t have a clue what she was up to but I did wonder if I should have bluffed it out. But then I reasoned, how could she expect me to cover for her if I didn’t know what was happening? There was a little tug of annoyance inside me then, at being kept in the dark, and the memory of that spurt of anger shamed me afterwards, when next day the police arrived and Alex going missing was no longer a game.