Exhibit Alexandra

by Natasha Bell

  “Uh, excuse me.”

  “Just a minute,” I said without looking. The voice had been hesitant, unsure, as if apologizing for needing me to shift out of its way. I was squatting in the doorway, I suppose, holding the automatics open as I adjusted my aperture.

  “I just need to get by,” came the voice again, a little peevish this time, no?

  “Hold on.” I’d taken half a dozen photos already, but I knew none of them were quite right. Then the stupid pigeon finally settled and I pressed my finger down. My camera clicked and the daft bird fluttered off. “Got it!” I straightened up, snapped the cap on to my lens and turned around. “Sorry about that. I mean, thanks for waiting.”

  He was tall, easily over six foot, sandy hair and blue eyes. Sort of cute, in a geeky, academic way. I thought he might be a professor, flashed him my little girl smile.

  “No problem,” he replied, smiling back. “I’m Marc by the way.”

  Oh. I hadn’t expected that. Before I’d really thought about it, I’d ping-ponged back, “Well hello, Marc-By-The-Way,” and stuck out my tongue. “I’m Alex-By-The-Way.”

  His cheeks colored and I felt bad. I glanced around for something to distract us, finally noticed the pile of books he was carting out of the library. “Whoops, those look heavy,” I said. “I really am sorry.”

  “It’s nothing,” he said, but judging by the under-developed biceps poking out from the sleeves of his T-shirt, he was lying.

  “Kant, Rousseau and Hegel,” I said, reading the first three spines. “You really know how to spend your summer.”

  “Um, yes,” he said, shifting his weight. “I guess it’s not the most exciting first impression.”

  I laughed and shook my head. “No, it’s fine, but careful you don’t get lost in that fog of masculinity. I might need to prescribe some serious feminist theory as an antidote.”

  Marc smiled and blushed again. “Are you a student?” he said.

  “Sort of,” I said with a shrug. “Not here. And not in the lugging books out of the library kind of way.”

  Marc frowned. His eyes flicked from mine to focus on something in the distance over my right shoulder. There was a pause, but neither of us made as if to move. Whatever he’d been hurrying out of the library for seemed to have been forgotten.

  “Sorry if this is a little odd,” he said finally, looking back at me. “But do you fancy a cup of tea? Maybe you can tell me what I should be reading instead.”

  I examined him properly now, guessed he wasn’t a professor at all. He was too old to be a regular student, though. Where had this question come from? Was he the sort to try his luck at any opportune moment? Or was he really the geeky library boy he appeared? Did he actually want me to tell him to read de Beauvoir and Arendt, or had he just this second stepped out of his comfort zone and offered himself up to me of all people? His cheeks were turning from red to purple and an image flickered before me of this man-boy as a peg ready to be thwacked back into place by a child’s toy mallet. I, of course, was the mallet-wielding child. This man, I thought, had probably been the type of kid who held out his toys and sweets and pocket money for the bully to take his pick, hoping only for a new best friend. I’m not proud of it, but I was a bitch to kids like that.

  I stifled a shame-filled laugh and found myself saying, “Why not? I guess I owe you for helping me get a good shot.”

  I watched the skin around his blue eyes crinkle as he smiled in relief. I imagined running my tongue along the stubble on his jaw, burying my nose in the creases of his skin. I cleared my throat, glanced back toward the library, then again at his pile of books. “Can I take a couple of those?”

  Friday

  Fourteen Hours Gone

  Marc would have worried whether it was the right thing to do, but he took the girls to school.

  “Why isn’t Mummy making breakfast?” Lizzie must have whined in the morning. “You put too much milk in and the cereal goes all soggy.”

  “Mummy had to leave early today, sweetie.” Another lie. “Here, do your own milk.”

  “Where’s my math book?” I hear Charlotte holler from upstairs.

  “Where you left it!” Lizzie would have shouted back.

  With halfhearted reprimands he’d have bundled them out the door, Lizzie missing a glove and Charlotte moaning that her teacher was going to kill her. My husband would have winced at that word tumbling from her milk-toothed mouth; an involuntary image of me sliced and diced, bloodied and sullied flashing beneath his lids as he blinked in the gray morning light.

  They’d have walked together along the terraced streets toward their school. Lizzie might have chatted about looking forward to netball club starting again. Charlotte may have told him she needed new PE shorts. Marc would have nodded and mumbled replies, worrying about being away from the phone. He’d have peered into every car that passed, driven by an absurd superstitious thought that if he missed one it’d contain me. They’d have stopped to wait for the lights. Charlotte would have seen a classmate on the opposite side and tried to step forward. Marc would have yanked her back, fear bringing his surroundings into focus. He’d have shouted at our daughter, his natural inclination toward overprotection shooting into overdrive on this strange morning. Charlotte’s eyes would have filled with tears.

  “Dad, there wasn’t even anything coming,” Lizzie would have groaned, as much in embarrassment as defense of her sister.

  The lights would finally have changed and they would have crossed the road. Reaching the curb, our girls would have shrugged him off, run through the wide gateway toward the chattering uniforms at the bottom of the steps. He’d have waited a moment to see them inside, wanting them to turn back and wave, to smile at their dad, remind him he wasn’t alone. A classroom assistant would have closed the door behind the last child and he and the other parents would have turned from the gate, ready to get on with their days. He’d have nodded to a couple of mums he recognized and waited once more for the lights, wishing he could follow them to their meetings and yoga classes, offices and book clubs.

  * * *

  “You’re through to North Yorkshire Police. How can I help?” The buzz of an office in the background, phones ringing and instructions being given. The recording is poor, but you can tell my husband feels comforted. They’ll do something, he’s thinking; they’ll help.

  “Um, hello. I, uh, called last night because my wife has, well, she hasn’t come home.” This must have been the only thought he’d had in fourteen hours, but the words still tasted strange on his tongue. You can hear his hesitation in the recording, sense how surreal he finds all this. “They said they’d call me this morning, but I just, I thought maybe it might have been forgotten, and I’m really very worried. I can’t get hold of her and—”

  “Okay, sir,” the well-trained voice responds. “Can I take your name?”

  He gives it to her and she locates the log of his previous call. She asks if he’s received any news and they go over the nothing he knows once more. He grows frustrated when she asks if this behavior is “out of character” for me, if we’ve had a fight, if I’ve done this before. You can hear him taking a breath on the line, thinking before he speaks. That second of silence says far more than his words. Of course it’s fucking out of character—I’d hardly be phoning the police if it wasn’t, would I? Eventually she asks for our address and says she’ll dispatch someone to take more information. They’ll be with him at midday. He’s told to stay by the phone and to think of as many details as he can concerning my last movements.

  “Please try not to worry,” the woman says. “We’ll do our best to find your wife.”

  The recording ends. I imagine she hung up rather than him. I imagine he sat with the receiver in his hand, the dial tone drowning the chatter in his brain. He couldn’t work out what came next. He was meant to wait by the phone, but he couldn’t just do not
hing. The day before he’d been a competent, functioning man: a moderately well-dressed, happily married male rebelling only mildly at middle age; comfortable in his career; delighted with his daughters. Today, he was a weak bundle of tissue and bone unable to achieve the one thing he desired. A man used to instructing students and staff, juggling timetables and negotiating with publishers, he now found himself at the mercy of officials and red tape. His fists clenched as he realized all he could do was hope some boys in blue could accomplish what he couldn’t. He looked down at his shirt and jeans with the disgust of a man who has chosen books over brawn, an intellectual who feels inadequate passing building sites and squealing fire engines. He never trusted that I loved his sensitivity, his lack of clichéd masculinity. I deserved a man, he thought as he sat in our living room, the phone still in his hand, my magazine on the table. A real one who could stride out into the world and return with me beautiful and swooning in his muscular arms.

  * * *

  Detective Inspector Jones arrived just before midday. He was a few inches shorter than Marc, maybe six foot one. Clean-shaven. Short, dark hair. Younger too. Thirty-ish perhaps. No ring.

  “Mr. Southwood?” he said, holding out his hand. Marc reached to shake it, wondered if he should tell him it was Dr. Southwood.

  Marc led him to the living room, noticed how he appraised the décor. Was he judging us, making professional assumptions about our wealth and class, lifestyle and statistical likelihood of disappearing, or did he have a genuine interest in interior design?

  “Right, Mr. Southwood,” DI Jones said, opening a folder and uncapping the pen with which he made the notes I’ve read. “I understand your wife has not been seen since she left work yesterday, is that correct?”

  My husband nodded. DI Jones began by explaining that his code of practice recommended filing a missing person report up to seventy-two hours after the last known sighting, but given the circumstances they were bringing the report forward. Marc, no doubt, raised his eyebrows and DI Jones hurried to continue, “That shouldn’t cause you concern. We’ve no reason to believe anything’s happened to Alexandra at this point, we just want to be cautious.”

  “Something has happened to her, though,” Marc said. “Otherwise she would have come home.”

  I imagine DI Jones swallowing, continuing cautiously. “Well, yes, but in all likelihood there’s a simple explanation and we’ll be able to close the case by this time tomorrow.”

  “You think so?” If Marc had a tail, he’d have wagged it. A part of him still didn’t believe this was happening, thought it must be a dream, a nightmare he could wake from and find my hot, live limbs on the other side of the mattress. He felt some skeptical part of himself detach from his body, hovering invisibly in the top corner of the room, looking down on and mocking his pathetic, hopeful sincerity.

  “I can’t make promises, but statistically speaking the odds are that Alexandra will return before the weekend’s out,” DI Jones said.

  “What if someone’s taken her?” my husband blurted, succumbing to that sincerity.

  A slow exhale through teeth. “I know abductions by strangers have a high media profile, Mr. Southwood, and I know you’re very worried, but such incidents are rare and the circumstances in which most missing persons disappear are not suspicious. All I can do is urge you to keep calm and concentrate your efforts on remembering details.”

  Marc nodded and set his mouth in an apologetic line, trying to process the words and assemble his scattered brain. This may be a nightmare, he reminded himself, but it was no dream. He cleared his throat, attempted to speak as DI Jones’s equal. “How do we file this report?”

  DI Jones’s questions required yes–no answers to begin with. Easy, black-and-white details. Still, I imagine Marc staring at the corner of our living room, studying the intricate frieze dissecting Almond White from Soft Stone, and wondering who to be in this situation. He felt a need to assert his personality, to define himself as an individual rather than a statistic. He wanted to tell DI Jones that he loved books but had tinkered with cars through his twenties; that his favorite dish was lamb dhansak and he used my shampoo only because it smelled nicer. He wanted to tell him about Lizzie’s poetry prize and how he and Charlotte had been quoting Monty Python at each other since he introduced her to it last month; that we’d had a nits scare last weekend and he was worried the gutter by the back door needed unblocking. But what if all that was wrong? What if there was a type of man supposed to greet DI Jones at the door of a routine missing person case? What if he didn’t fit the bill?

  DI Jones asked if I’d been involved in any altercations or disagreements in the past few weeks, if Marc had noticed anything out of the ordinary.

  Marc shook his head. “Alex likes people to like her,” he said. “She’d have told me if anything happened. She worries if the postman doesn’t return her ‘good morning.’ ”

  “Do you have any reason to believe Alexandra is likely to cause self-harm or attempt suicide?” DI Jones asked.

  “Christ, no,” Marc said. “What sort of question is that? She’s happy, we’re happy. We have two children.”

  He was reminded that the more questions they got through, the more thorough the investigation could be. Marc murmured an apology.

  He was asked how much I drank, if I took drugs. Marc almost smiled. “She hasn’t had a drink since our wedding day. She’d never do drugs.”

  DI Jones looked up. “She doesn’t drink at all?”

  Marc shook his head. “Her mother was an alcoholic.” He watched DI Jones write something down and wondered if he shouldn’t have said that. “Alex has never had a problem,” he added. “She just saw what it did to her mother, to her family. She said nothing was worth that.”

  “Okay,” said DI Jones. “And is there any medication she might need?”

  “She’s on the Pill,” Marc said, heat rising to his cheeks. We’d been married nearly thirteen years, but my delicate husband was still embarrassed to imply we sometimes fucked. “That’s it.”

  DI Jones has scrawled details here. He must have asked if Marc would mind checking whether my pills were still in the house. Marc sped up two flights of stairs to check the bedside table. When he returned to the living room, DI Jones was standing, inspecting a bookcase littered with dusty photos, nail scissors and pebbles stolen from forgotten beaches. He took my neatly labeled medication, glancing only briefly at the rows of punched-out days interrupted by today’s unswallowed Friday, and asked who had seen me last. Marc told him about Paula and left the room again to find my address book—a last helpful vestige of Luddite life, even he might have to admit.

  DI Jones was back in the chair. He waited for Marc to sit down. “Now, I need you to be as detailed as possible, because everything and anything might be relevant. Could you describe the last time you saw your wife and how she seemed?”

  Marc told him he’d seen me the previous morning, that I’d seemed fine. He talked about getting the girls ready for school, chatting about a potential holiday, saying good-bye before I cycled on to campus. “It was a normal day,” he said.

  “Can you remember what Alexandra was wearing?”

  Marc thought I’d had on jeans and a black and white jumper.

  “And did she have a coat?”

  “A blue duffel, with a hood. Lizzie and Charlotte have almost identical ones. They thought it would be fun and silly to match.”

  “Thank you,” DI Jones said, not even glancing up from his notepad. Marc knew at that moment he wouldn’t tell the police about me packing Lizzie’s teddy bear when we went to Paris without her and cartwheeling around Clifford’s Tower without an ounce of alcohol in my system, about the love notes I wrote inside paper airplanes then sent soaring to his desk, and my impulsive demands to be surprised, entertained and adored. Everything might be relevant, he said, but many of the things Marc loved most about
me felt worryingly fragile, as if merely mentioning them aloud might destroy their magic. The man before him might decide I was odd, unpredictable even. He wouldn’t have understood that Marc knew me, that we shared a whole private world.

  “Does she have any distinguishing marks: scars, tattoos, piercings?” DI Jones asked.

  “She has her ears pierced,” my husband said. “And a tattoo on her left shoulder blade. A wilting sunflower, like the Van Gogh painting. She got it at uni.” Marc thought of my tattoo, of straddling my legs to massage my back, of pressing his lips to my skin. Then an image surfaced of the cling-film shrouded Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks, some anonymous hand turning her over to reveal my wilting sunflower. Marc raised his hand to his mouth, a breath caught on the back of his tongue. We’d rewatched it last year, one episode an evening, late, after the girls had gone to bed, tangling our fingers together and smiling at the nostalgia of the ancient series.

  “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.