Looking For Alex

They were supposed to be best friends…

It’s the summer of 1977, Beth and Alex did everything together. Until the day seventeen year old Alex ran away from home. A missing persons report has been filed, but Beth knows that there must be more to Alex’s disappearance. So she follows Alex, to punk-era London, determined to bring her best friend back home.

But the Alex she finds living in a Camden squat isn’t the same Alex. And memories of those weeks in London haunt her to this day: falling for Fitz, her first love; tasting a new kind of freedom, and the fateful day that her parents finally tracked them down and took her away.

Alex knew then that Beth had betrayed her trust, and disappeared once more, severing their friendship for good. And now, years later, it’s time for forgotten secrets to be shared once and for all. Because after all this time, Beth’s never given up on finding Alex…

Looking for Alex

Marian Dillon

Copyright

HQ

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2013

Copyright © Marian Iseard 2013

Marian Iseard asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

E-book Edition © June 2013 ISBN: 9781472055323

Version date: 2018-09-20

MARIAN DILLON

Originally from Northampton, Marian moved to Sheffield as a student and has lived there ever since, enjoying life up north. She has published several stories for children and young people.

This novel, Looking for Alex, had been a story in her head for a long time, and was written as a major part of her studies for an MA in Creative Writing. She’s thrilled to have finally completed it and to see it go out into the world. She is now looking forward to spending more time turning other half-formed ideas into novels.

Aside from all this she has worked in teaching and now as a counsellor. She is married, with two grown-up sons, who have had to put up with her disappearing into the study for hours on end!

Thanks to Linda Lee, Kate, Louise, Louis and Sarah for all their help and encouragement

For my family

Contents

Cover

Blurb

Title Page

Copyright

Author Bio

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Endpages

About the Publisher

Chapter One

13^>th May 2013

There had been moments like this before. It might be a single word that did it, random words, like disappeared, squalid, bruised. It could be a smell, of bonfires say, or sandalwood. Sometimes it was a song: Suzanne, maybe, or London Calling. The pull that I felt at these times — low in my gut, a complicated yearning — was always transitory, pushed back down or brushed aside. I’d done with reliving all that.

But this time there was no avoiding that trawl into the past; a stranger waited as I gaped like a fish, stunned by his question.

‘Are you the Beth that was a friend of Alex?’

He took a few steps into the room, a tall, loose-limbed man with big glasses and untidy hair. ‘Beth Steele. Right?’

I nodded, dumbly. It didn’t take much working out — Beth Steele Training being plastered all over the material I was sorting into piles — but clearly he knew not just my name, but me. How?

‘You won’t remember me. I would have been about ten. You were older…sixteen, seventeen?’

He stood quite still, smiling, waiting to see if I’d place him. I searched his features for some clue but there was an empty space where a name should have been. He took off his glasses.

‘Is that better?’

Slowly I shook my head. Although, as I took in the narrow, deep-set eyes and a mouth with laughter lines at each end, like a pair of speech brackets, there was now a dim flutter of recognition. Ten years old. The boy who’d lived above the corner shop? The milkman’s son, who’d helped on the rounds in holidays? I began to notice details: a scattering of freckles, a small scar on one cheekbone, the faint smile that seemed to be gently mocking my confusion. The shape of his mouth was somehow familiar, but finally it was the scar that dredged up a distant memory. I saw a falling bike, flailing arms and spinning wheels, a trickle of blood.