Are You Alright?

Alyah had asked the question a hundred times that year.

Are you alright?

She asked it on bus stops and landing stairs, outside the youth club and by the bins. She asked it of people who’d been laughing thirty seconds earlier. She asked it of people who looked fine. Especially the ones who looked fine.

She’s twenty-five. Mixed-race British, South London through and through — mother Black-British, father White-British, both of them from round here. She’s independent, calm, and honest in a way that makes some people shift in their seats. She doesn’t excuse behaviour. She also doesn’t pretend it comes from nowhere. She looks closer. That’s who she is on this estate. The person who notices the thing everyone else walks past.

What she doesn’t do is rescue anyone. She asks the question, then she lets it sit. The answer has to be theirs.

So when her cousin Shanice turned up at her door on a Tuesday evening, eyes red and jaw set, Alyah didn’t fill the silence with comfort.

“Are you alright?” she said.

Shanice is nineteen. She’s been seeing a bloke from the next estate who talks over her, who gets funny when she goes out with her mates, who texts where you at until she answers. Alyah has watched it for months. She hasn’t lectured. She’s waited.

“I’m fine,” Shanice said.

Alyah leaned on the doorframe. “No. You’re just good at pretending.”

Shanice’s face crumpled, then hardened, then crumpled again. She came in. She sat on the sofa. She talked for an hour — the texts, the jealousy, the way she’d started shrinking her plans so he wouldn’t kick off. Alyah listened. She didn’t say leave him. She asked what Shanice wanted. She asked what she was afraid of. She asked what happened if nothing changed. The questions landed the way they always do when Alyah asks them: clean, and a bit uncomfortable, and somehow kinder than advice.

By the time Shanice left, she’d blocked the number. She hugged Alyah hard, said thank you for seeing me, and went home lighter.

Alyah closed the door and stood in the quiet flat, and for a second she felt something she didn’t like.

Empty.

Not sad, exactly. More like she’d poured something out and hadn’t noticed the cup was hers.

She went to make tea. The kettle clicked. She scrolled her phone without seeing it. She thought about Marcus, and the way she’d asked him why he always took the long way round, and left him to find his own answer. She thought about Nia, and the birthday message softened three times. She thought about every person she’d looked at clearly this year while somehow standing just out of the light herself.

The next evening she was walking past Samuel’s bench. She hadn’t meant to stop. She never means to stop.

Samuel was there, dark coat, flat cap, hands folded, watching the court. He looked up the way he does — like he’s got all the time in the world and none of it is wasted on you.

“You look tired,” he said.

“I’m alright.”

It came out automatic. Samuel’s mouth did a small thing that might have been a smile.

“That what you tell people?” he said. “Or what you tell yourself?”

Alyah sat down. She hadn’t planned to.

“I ask people if they’re alright,” she said. “All the time. It’s my thing. And then last night Shanice left and I felt — I don’t know. Hollow. Like I only know how to look at other people.”

Samuel nodded slowly. He didn’t rush to fill it. A ball hit the backboard across the green.

“What do you think would happen,” he said at last, “if somebody asked you that question, and you answered it honestly?”

Alyah almost laughed. “I don’t know. I’ve never tried.”

“Try now,” Samuel said. “I’ll ask. Are you alright?”

She opened her mouth to say I’m always alright, and the words stuck.

“No,” she said. Quieter than she meant to. “I’m tired of being the one who sees everything and never gets seen. I’m tired of holding the mirror and never standing in front of it. I’ve got my own stuff. I just… don’t put it down where anyone can trip over it.”

Samuel didn’t look surprised. He never does.

“That sounds lonely,” he said.

“It is.”

“Who knows?”

Alyah thought about it. Marcus knew pieces. Shanice knew the cousin version. Nobody knew the whole thing — the nights she lay awake replaying conversations, the way she checked on everyone and then went home and checked on nobody, including herself.

“Nobody, really.”

Samuel let that sit between them like a cup of tea. Then: “You don’t have to stop looking closer. Looking closer is a gift round here. Just don’t forget you’re one of the people who lives here too.”

Alyah sat on the bench until the floodlight on the court flickered and came back. She took her phone out. She almost put it away again. Then she typed a message to Shanice.

You asked me if I was alright last week and I said fine. I wasn’t. Fancy a walk tomorrow? I might actually talk this time.

She pressed send before she could soften it.