by Natasha Bell
“Are you all right, Mr. Southwood?” DI Jones said, narrowing his eyes.
Marc nodded, lowering his hand. “It’s actually Dr.,” he said.
DI Jones held his gaze for a moment. “My mistake.”
They went through my date of birth, height, weight and ethnic background. DI Jones asked if we practiced a religion and if my parents lived nearby. Marc told him I’d gone to a Catholic school, my father died a decade ago and my mother lived in the South West but was suffering from late-stage dementia.
DI Jones nodded. “Is it possible your wife may have gone to visit her mother?”
Marc shook his head. “Not without telling me. They don’t have a good relationship. Al goes down a few times a year, but finds it really distressing. And her mum doesn’t react well to changes in routine, so she’d never just turn up.”
“We’ll need to make inquiries in any case,” said DI Jones. He shifted his weight. “Now, do you have any recent photographs I could take away?”
Marc realized he disliked DI Jones but still, strangely, wanted to please him. He fetched his laptop from his bag in the hall.
“We’d also like any items only Alexandra will have touched—her hairbrush, toothbrush and any clothes she’s worn recently. And we’ll need the details of her bank accounts and mobile phone contract, plus her driver’s license and passport.”
While DI Jones clicked through photographs of our family, Marc climbed the stairs to collect the requested items, using gloves as instructed. Our home felt like a crime scene. He pulled a bag from the top of the wardrobe and began packing my things. He rooted through the washing basket, even scooping up my underwear. He put my makeup and hairbrush in my sponge bag and headed down to the office. He grabbed some papers from the top of my desk and peeled off the last Post-it I’d stuck to his keyboard—a lopsided penned heart containing the word “Mouthwash”—and put them all in the bag. He pulled our filing drawer out on its runners and fished for my bank statements and the driver’s license I never used. He flicked to the file labeled passports, but found it empty. He reached his hand into the bottom of the drawer to see if they’d fallen between the folders, then hurriedly shuffled through all of the surrounding files. Confused, he turned back to my desk and hastily hunted under books and hard drives, checked my messy stationery drawers and behind my monitor. “Fucking hell, Al,” he hissed, panic rising in his chest.
Downstairs, he handed DI Jones the bag and watched as he checked each item against tick boxes on his form. “Do you have her passport?” he said eventually.
“It’s not in the usual place,” Marc said.
DI Jones looked at him with a blank expression.
“Mine’s not either, though,” Marc said hurriedly. “Or the girls’. I mean, they’ll be somewhere. Do you have kids? You know what it’s like.” He waved his hand, gesturing to our less than tidy house.
DI Jones didn’t look around. Marc’s face felt hot beneath his gaze.
“I think Al was planning something for the summer,” Marc said. “Maybe she was booking it as a surprise. She’s probably just put them somewhere. They’ll turn up.”
“Please let us know as soon as they do,” DI Jones said finally, then glanced down to write something beside one of the tick boxes.
“They’re in the house,” Marc said. “I know they are. It’s not like—” He cut himself off. What did DI Jones think? That I’d gone on holiday without telling him? Did some women do that?
DI Jones stood up and thanked Marc for his time. Marc followed him to the door. DI Jones said he’d be in touch. He asked Marc to be careful moving any of my things, to try to preserve everything as I’d left it until they returned. Marc said he’d try, but children lived here. Yes, of course, DI Jones understood, just do his best. My husband was told not to worry for the dozenth time that day. Then he was alone again, which was somehow preferable. It was two o’clock. Twenty-one hours since I was last seen.
* * *
The man who keeps me here is as tall as Marc, but a little stooped and much scrawnier than I remember my husband. His hair is growing thin. He looks like he’s been sick. He’s not conventionally attractive in this wasted form, but he’s also not the dead-eyed, anxious type you’d see cast in this role in a film. He’s not the sort of man you’d imagine did this kind of thing.
He visits every day, almost on the dot of three. I wonder about his punctuality, about his life outside these walls. Do people notice anything strange about him out in the real world? Would I notice anything if we met in the gym, at a bar or outside a library?
This room is stark and bare, like a gallery without an audience. It gives him a gravitas he does not deserve. He’s a pathetic man trying to control the mind of a woman. But in here he feels like a god. I’m his object and he gets to animate or break me as his mood dictates.
Still, I wait for three o’clock. My heart rate speeds up as I imagine him unlocking the doors. I wait to hear his key in the lock, to see him step through the frame and transform this wretched space. I wonder sometimes what would happen if he didn’t come. Would I be relieved? Or would I have to face the truth that there is something even worse than his presence?
“We don’t have long,” he says. “I can’t keep you here forever.”
1998
FRIDAY, AUGUST 28
I sat on a plastic chair across from Marc in the empty student café and tried to burble my way through his shyness. I was doing an MFA in Chicago. I told him it was one of those big-deal art schools and I’d had to work really hard to get in. It was true, I was proud to be studying there, but maybe I was also trying to impress. Marc didn’t say much, but I watched his expression change as he listened. I kept glancing at the server behind the counter, the geese beyond the window, and playing with the sugar packets on the table. Marc’s steady gaze made me itch. I babbled on and on about my course, working myself up. I was young and ambitious and passionate about the silly pieces I was making. Maybe everyone cringes remembering themselves at that age.
“Why Chicago?” Marc said when I finally paused to take a sip of tea.
I didn’t have an answer for him. I already held a BA and an MA from Cambridge. Marc laughed, told me I’d said that as if I was talking about a couple of party dresses I’d purchased on a whim but no longer felt like wearing. I laughed too. It was funny—this guy was funny—but, also, he’d kind of just seen right through me. It made my palms tingle. I smiled and kept talking, worried if I stopped I’d have to ask myself what I was doing.
I described my dad’s rage when I left the teaching job I hated to “go paint pictures for forty thousand dollars a year.” Marc grinned at my impression, but he didn’t laugh like my friends in Chicago. He had this crease between his eyebrows. He was trying to figure me out. I’d spent so long cultivating this “crazy Brit” persona out there, being loud and plummy, always trying to shock and amuse, that I’d forgotten what it was like to be taken seriously. I continued my story, telling it as I always did, willing him to quit trying to connect and just enjoy laughing at me, accept me as the frivolous thing I was.
“What did your mum think?” Marc asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, wondering how much of my mess I should land this poor stranger with. “I haven’t spoken to her since I was twelve.”
“Christ, I’m so sorry.” Marc looked stricken. “I didn’t mean to pry.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “It’s just the way it is. She’s an alcoholic and a cheat. It was better after she left, honestly.”
He frowned.
“Seriously, don’t worry. Everyone’s parents fuck them up, don’t they? It’s a wonder anyone wants kids.” I shook my head and returned to my topic. I told Marc I’d won a scholarship to pay for half of my course and I’d made up my mind, so told my dad to sod off. I’d moved to a new city in a new country where nobody knew me to take sculpture,
performance, installation and video classes. Marc’s frown softened and I thought my plan was working. He said it sounded crazy and bohemian, nothing like his sheltered Welsh upbringing and the cozy life he’d found in academia.
“Don’t you want to travel?” I said. “See the world?”
Marc hesitated. “Maybe,” he said. “I’m curious about the world, of course, but I guess I also feel nothing’s quite real or enjoyable without a sense of home.”
The way he said the word “home” made me ache. I had an urge to ask him about what it meant to him, to listen to his Dylan Thomas lilt. But I couldn’t get drawn in. Not today. Instead, I shrugged and told him the only moment I’d questioned myself was on my second day in Chicago when I’d stood outside a Walmart in the middle of some dodgy suburb waiting for a taxi that never came and realized nobody in the city or even the country would notice if anything happened to me.
Marc didn’t laugh. He looked more concerned than amused. I didn’t know what to do, so I kept talking. I told him I was home for the summer. My course lasted two years and I’d just finished the first. I told him my second would be spent in the studio, creating work for the end-of-year showcase that everyone hoped would secure them a gallery show or a grant. Marc looked genuinely interested in what I was saying. Grad school was amazing, but I’d grown used to everyone walking around in their own bubble of research and obsession. If you found someone whose interests overlapped with yours, you could have a satisfying moment of connection, but only until one of you strayed too far into specifics and the other’s eyes glazed over, brain too full to cram in anything not directly relevant to their own research.
We sat in that café for half the afternoon, drinking cup after cup of stale campus tea.
“I have a tutoring appointment,” Marc said and I felt my mood plunge. “I should have left already.”
“Are you busy later?” I said, then blushed. What was it about this gentle boy?
We met a few hours later, freshly scrubbed and dolled up for dinner in town. I wore the velvet dress I’d found for a dollar on my first trip to the Wicker Park thrift stores and the beat-up Barbarella boots I was in love with that year. Marc had this crumpled shirt on that wasn’t quite long enough for his tall torso. We drank cheap red wine, which stained our teeth, and I overheard our waitress call us “sweet.” I ordered chicken, he ordered pork, but Marc insisted we swap after I said I liked his better.
Marc asked me question after question as if he was genuinely interested in the answers, as if he was trying to learn me. He quizzed me about my likes and dislikes, my school and my family. “God, you must be so bored,” I said at one point.
“I’m really not,” he said and I had the sensation that his gaze could peel my dress from my skin.
I sipped more wine and crossed my legs beneath the table. “I’ve been thinking about my mum again recently,” I found myself saying. “She moved to the south coast after the divorce. My dad and I stayed in the same house, but the only contact she ever made was one poxy card.”
“That’s awful,” Marc said.
I didn’t know why I was telling him this. I hadn’t discussed my mum with anyone for years. But I realized I liked the concern on Marc’s face. His pity was as intoxicating as his fascination. Whatever creature this man saw, that’s what I wanted to be.
“What about you?” I said. “What’s your family like?”
“Fairly boring,” he said. “Only child, parents still together, clinging to a belief in the happily ever after.”
I laughed. “A regular prince charming looking for his princess, huh?”
Marc blushed.
“Did you ever think it was weird,” I said, “that all the princes were the same—completely interchangeable from one fairy tale to the next? Even though the women were totally helpless, waiting to be saved by marriage, at least they had personalities.”
“That’s true of so much art and literature,” Marc said. “Men have had power and control and opportunity, but all along their fascination has been with women. We’re simple creatures really, obsessed with trying to figure you out.”
I rolled my eyes and asked him about his thesis. He told me he was writing about time and the quest for knowledge in Romantic poetry. Later I’d ask properly and read bits of his dissertation, but that night I heard the word “quest” and thought of knights on horseback and long, phallic jousting lances. Marc told me he’d got stuck on the treadmill of academia, beginning his PhD what felt like decades ago but changing topic two years in and only recently feeling like he was reaching the home stretch. I told him about my dalliance with serious study and my dad’s desire for me to teach warring with my need to create. Marc nodded and said that it was the first time he’d admitted it in years but, though essays and criticism more than satisfied his analytical soul, in his heart of hearts, he wanted to write a novel.
This delighted me. “I had a feeling you were creative,” I said. “You should definitely do it.” Then I blathered some more about how expensive my course was and the trouble I was having getting a part-time job because of my visa restrictions.
“It’s fucked up, you know?” I said through a mouthful of pork. “I go to this burrito place and I’ve been talking to the owner. He’s second generation, but he tells me about his family and friends, about how if you’re an illegal immigrant there are all these ways of securing American identities, but it’s this big joke because you do it so you can get a Social Security number so you can work, and that number means you start paying taxes, contributing to the State. But if the State finds out, you get locked up or kicked out of the country you’ve been paying money to. I want to expose it in my final project. You know, show the reality of the ridiculous notion of America being this big melting pot welcoming the tired and hungry masses—”
I cut myself off. Marc was staring at me, his eyes glued to my face, but I got the sense he hadn’t heard a word I’d said. I smiled and he smiled back, his features transforming into something quite adorable. He nodded and mumbled his agreement, said he could see how unfair it was, that he’d never considered it before, but yes, I should shed light on it, do everything I could, what a noble thing, what a powerful project and, God, I had pretty eyes.
I laughed and felt my body temperature rise.
Twenty-four Hours Gone
The bell rang and Marc bounded across the carpet to the door. He hesitated. He could make out a woman through the colored glass, her features mottled by the design. Dare he hope?
“Fran,” he said, clocking our friend’s dyed bob and tailored jacket. At her side stood Charlotte, Lizzie, and Fran and Ollie’s daughter, Emma.
“Oh God, what time is it?” Marc said, pulling up his sleeve: 4:02. “Girls, I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Fran said. “I told them we’d arranged for me to bring them home today. It was a good excuse to get sweets, wasn’t it, kids?”
“Thank you,” Marc said. “What do you say, girls?”
“Thank you, Fran,” Charlotte and Lizzie chimed, their mouths full. They brushed past him, dragging Emma, seemingly unfazed by their abandonment at school. He heard Charlotte cry, “We are the knights who say Niiiiiiiiiiiiiii,” as they ran up the stairs.
“Really, thank you,” Marc said. “Um, do you want a cup of tea?”
“I’ll make it,” Fran said, placing her hand on Marc’s shoulder. “I take it Al’s still not turned up?”
The backs of Marc’s eyes prickled as he shook his head. “I spoke to the police; they’ve taken a photo and her fingerprints.”
“Oh Marc,” Fran said, wrapping her arms around him. “I’m sure she’s okay. I’m sure there’s just some misunderstanding.”
Fran extricated herself to close the front door and led Marc through the house to one of the breakfast stools. My husband watched in silence as our friend bumped around our kitchen filling the ket
tle and locating tea bags. He wondered what Ollie was doing. It was him we normally saw at pickup time and arranged to share lifts with. As the full-time parent, Ollie got teased sometimes for their reversed gender roles, but both he and Fran seemed happy. Fran worked long hours as a GP and would’ve had to have left early to pick up Emma today. Marc wondered if she’d had to cancel appointments, what had prompted the change in their routine, if she was annoyed.
It was cruel to others, but Marc and I always felt lucky. We knew we weren’t like everyone else. Sure, we did the same things: I was on the committees and Marc worked late a lot of the time, but we always came back to each other. He kissed the nape of my neck every night before falling asleep. I placed my hand on his back whenever we were speaking to other people. At parties, we had an awareness of where the other was, like an elastic band tied us together. I’d always find him at the end of the night and whisper that I’d like to be taken home, that these people were interesting, I supposed, but they just made me think how lucky I was to have the most interesting one to myself. In fourteen years we’d had only one real fight.
Even though that day Marc felt our elastic band had been stretched perhaps to its absolute limit, looking at Fran making tea, he had the utterly ungenerous thought that Ollie, if he were in Marc’s position, would not miss Fran as much as he missed me.
“What have you told the girls?” Fran said, handing him a cup of tea.
“Nothing,” Marc said, only then fully realizing he’d have to think of something.
