Exhibit Alexandra

by Natasha Bell

  * * *

  That evening, Lizzie helped her nana run a bath for Charlotte, claiming she was suddenly too old to share. Marc tried to remember if it was just two Mondays ago that I’d sat on the toilet seat and read them both the final chapters of The Hobbit while they soaked together. How could our daughter have grown up in a week and a half? His mother patted him on the shoulder and told him it was natural for Lizzie to want to play mum. Was it also natural, he wondered, that he hadn’t seen her cry? That she hadn’t come to him? Charlotte screamed and beat her fists against his chest, and that at the time felt like the most terrible thing in the world. But it was nothing compared to watching our eldest trying to cope alone.

  Feeling helpless, he descended to the silent living room and sat on the sofa with Paula’s borrowed book. I wonder what he expected to find in it, what links he was beginning to make. He turned to a page at random. A stark black-and-white photograph confronted him: a simply dressed woman with a severe expression held a bow and leant backward. Opposite her, a similarly dressed man held his weight against the bow’s string, pointing an arrow at her chest. “Ulay / Abramović, Rest Energy, 1980.” He flicked to the text and read that the artists held this provocatively balanced pose for four minutes. Skimming back a few pages, he learned the two were lovers, drawn to one another because of identical hair accessories and a shared birthday. He smiled, thinking I must have enjoyed that detail, and read on. Each in possession of solo careers before their meeting, they thrust both their personal and professional lives passionately together. Abramović left her husband and job to explore Europe with Ulay. “I could not even breathe from love,” Marc read, the corners of his mouth twitching in recognition.

  His romantic identification gave way to a dirty unease as he read about their collaborative works: breathing one breath back and forth for nineteen minutes; running at one another to slam their naked bodies together over and over until she fell and he sliced his feet on shards of glass; competing to entice a four-foot-long python to choose between them; sitting immobile and staring at one another for a gallery’s entire opening hours, then repeating the performance ninety times, each losing weight and developing serious medical complications. For their final piece, he read, the pair separated, marking the event by walking the Great Wall of China in opposite directions, bidding their final good-byes as they met in the middle. Initially conceived in a more romantic light, the performance was supposed to see the lovers walk to one another and marry in the middle. But in the time it took to plan the event, both parties had affairs and, so Marc read, the final straw for Abramović came in discovering Ulay had a fifteen-year-old son he had neither mentioned nor met.

  Marc stopped reading for a moment, trying and failing to imagine someone keeping a secret like that.

  In a passing comment, the book’s author noted Abramović terminated a pregnancy in 1976, claiming, “I’m a full blood artist and it’s not possible for me to share my emotions for being an artist with a child.” His distaste mounting, my husband flicked through images of her solo work, much of it involving cutting, knives and blood staining white backgrounds. At the top of a page he found:

  To read Abramović’s use of pain as masochism is to grossly oversimplify the process in which she uses it as a means of achieving an alternative level of consciousness: one in which she can transcend mundane physical suffering and thus master it.

  Marc turned the pages indifferently, landing on an image of Ulay colliding with a wall. He sighed, thinking himself pathetic for imagining he might find me between the pages of a book about such inconsequential acts. It was years since the day he’d teased me about wanting to be the next Marina Abramović or Tracey Emin. We’d built an entire life over those silly dreams; even I must have struggled to find meaning in the strange gestures of Ulay and Abramović now we had a family, a house, a world of our own.

  He placed the open book on the coffee table and pushed himself from the sofa, intending to see how his parents were getting on with the girls. As he did, he couldn’t help reading the caption beneath the image:

  Interruption in Space saw the artists running at each other with a meter-thick wall between them. After forty-five minutes, Abramović became convinced Ulay had stopped and left the scene. Unaware, Ulay continued running at the wall alone.

  * * *

  Marc thought little of this climbing the stairs, composing a smile for our girls or dredging funny voices from his aching chest to animate a bedtime story. But, later, awake in the dark, he remembered the image and those words and wondered if he too was running at a wall alone.

  * * *

  I remember one of the joys of going away for a few days used to be reclaiming ownership of my own space. I loved that in a hotel I could wake up and find everything exactly where I’d left it. I thought for years I was one of life’s messy people, that I could never live in a pristine home. I even judged our friends who did. Fran and Ollie’s house was always soullessly immaculate, Emma’s room the only sign of life. I thought heaps of clothes in the corner and empty loo roll tubes hanging around the bathroom for days, last night’s washing-up on the counter and little piles on the stairs of things waiting to be taken up were signs of vitality, of creative minds and contented individuals. But I had this realization once, staying on my own for a few days, that it took absolutely no effort to hang my clothes up as I took them off. And that if I did I’d wake up and the room would be neat. I realized I left my clothes on the floor because Marc did. That I forgot to recycle the loo roll and left the washing-up because he and the girls did too. That I wasn’t bothered by these things because they weren’t. And that, when I had a few stolen days alone, I could be a completely different type of person.

  Now, though, I’d give anything to wake up to Marc’s socks on this concrete floor. To Charlotte’s toys and Lizzie’s homework abandoned by my narrow bed. To see their shampoos and shower gels by the cold sink, their hairs coiled around the blackened plug hole.

  I wait as long as I can before opening my eyes each morning. Even in the deadened silence and with the scratch of this thin blanket against my skin, I can sometimes pretend I’m waking in our bed. That it’s a weekend or a holiday and Marc is still asleep beside me. In a moment I’ll hear the girls thundering up the stairs and they’ll throw themselves on us. I’ll feel their bodies, hot and solid in my arms, hear my husband’s sleepy protests. I’ll run them a bath full of bubbles. Lizzie will take ten minutes to get in, dipping her feet in and out, then finally, inch by inch, sink her skin into the water. Char will already be lounging, one foot hooked over the side, waiting for me to begin The Fellowship of the Ring.

  I cry, of course, when I do finally open my eyes and see only the corners and edges of this confined existence. I know without looking that there’s a tray with two anemic slices of toast, an apple and a glass of water. It’s three steps to the door, five to the sink, seven from one wall to the other. Some days I try to think positively. I jog between the walls, counting into the thousands. Sit-ups on the floor even though the concrete hurts my back. Other days I hardly move. I lie with my face to the wall, wondering about the cyanide concentration in apple seeds, if I’d ever be able to save enough.

  2000

  SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 2

  In one week I’d be buttoning myself into the ivory dress waiting in Fran’s spare bedroom. I’d have my hair pinned and my eyebrows plucked, Marc’s grandmother’s necklace clipped around my throat and my dad’s hopefully clean blue hanky hidden at the last minute in my purse. This morning, however, I was sweating beneath our duvet, last night’s makeup crusted around my eyes, wondering what sort of idiot I’d been not to bring a glass of water to bed with me last night.

  My friends had wrapped a feather boa around my neck and marched me from pub to pub, insisting I drink everything they put in front of me. My head throbbed and I had that horrible sick feeling of knowing I’d done something bad. I cr
ept through my sodden memory trying to piece together snippets of conversation. I’d definitely talked too long to the guy at the bar, touched his arm too often, but was that why I felt like this? Had I said something I shouldn’t have to Philippa? Where was my handbag? I couldn’t remember getting home.

  Marc pushed the bedroom door open with his elbow and picked his way across the clothes-scattered floor, carrying a tray. He set it down on the chest of drawers and I gently elbowed myself up on the pillows.

  “How are you feeling?” he said, handing me a cup of tea and a strip of acetaminophen.

  “Like I never want to drink again,” I said, popping two tablets from the foil. Marc smiled and placed a glass of orange juice and a plate with two slices of toast on the bedside table. “And like I don’t deserve you.”

  He leant down and kissed me on the temple. “You were very sweet when you got in.”

  I groaned. “Please don’t tell me what I was like.”

  He laughed.

  “Really,” I said, suddenly close to tears, “I don’t deserve you. Why on earth would you want to marry me?”

  Marc sat on top of the covers. “Because you’re the best person I know.”

  I shook my head, winced. “But what if you don’t really know me? What if I have this—this, I don’t know, darkness?”

  Marc laughed.

  “I’m serious. I shouldn’t drink, should I? I know what it’s done to my mum. And then I get into this state—”

  “You’re not your mother,” Marc said, frowning now.

  “What if I am? What if I’m not who you think I am? What if I break your heart?”

  “You won’t,” he said. He reached to stroke my hair. “I know this is just the hangover, but it scares me when you talk like this. You’re brilliant and kind and creative and beautiful.”

  “I’m not any of those things.”

  Marc smiled, that patient, confident smile. “You are. And it doesn’t matter if you don’t see it, because I do.”

  In a week I’d be dressing tables with ribbon-wrapped vases, draping bunting and laying place settings. I thought, not for the first time recently, about the faded album I knew still lived in my dad’s attic, of my parents’ smiling faces, the flowers and the veil, the happiness locked in negatives long lost. In a week I’d be standing before this man and promising him my world. “What if you’re wrong?” I said.

  Marc locked his eyes so intently to mine that I almost laughed. “I’m not,” he said. “I see you, Alex. I love you.”

  I swallowed, a part of me wanting to break eye contact, to run away to the shower and get on with my day, to tell myself everything was fine.

  Marc held my eye. “I know who you are. So maybe it’s my job to be here to remind you when you forget.”

  I looked into his calm, insistent face. I’d talked too much last night, wittered on far too freely, but I didn’t think I’d said anything too terrible to Philippa. I’d text her later to make sure we were okay. I shouldn’t put myself in this position, though. I needed to be more careful. It was dangerous to lose control.

  Marc stroked my leg beneath the duvet. “You’re just feeling low. Eat some toast, go back to sleep. I’ll check on you in a bit.”

  Thursday

  Fourteen Days Gone

  Twice as many reporters sit in front of the microphones at the second press conference. You can hear the clicks of their cameras and see the flickers of the flashes while DI Jones speaks about the reclassification of my case to a murder investigation. When Marc’s turn comes, he sets his jaw and says he doesn’t believe I’m dead, that he still hopes to find me and restore our family. DI Jones and Nicola stand beside him, their faces serious. I wonder what they were thinking in that moment, how Marc’s unwavering faith made him seem to them. Was he just a husband clinging to the smallest hope, or did they read more into the steadiness of his voice, the stubbornness of his words?

  “Someone out there must know where she is,” he finishes, staring directly at the lens behind the rows of journalists. “Someone saw her or spoke to her or took her. I don’t care what you did, I just want her back.”

  The journalists’ questions swim leisurely to his end of the room. They think them probing, perhaps, seeking a reaction, but my husband has absented himself this time. He’s left behind the pathetic bereaved husband the cameras want him to be, the desperate two-dimensional face pleading empty words from television sets. Instead, he stands on a pebbly beach, their questions lapping icily at his naked toes but telling nothing of the black ocean before him. I am in that ocean, deep-sea diving in an air bubble of mystery, waiting for him to rescue me. All he sees, though, are these reporters, baby waves tossing tiny pebbles and asking if he shouldn’t be preparing himself and our children for the worst. He answers as best he can, feeling numb. They need to keep finding a new angle and he knows it helps him, helps us, if they do because it’ll keep my face in the papers, but to my husband the story hasn’t changed. His wife has disappeared and he needs her to come home. You can see, though, on the video that he’s beginning to understand the game. He already feels wiser, jaded by his recent experiences and less naïve in front of their stinging jellyfish tails.

  * * *

  I can’t imagine his parents staying long, especially in the face of his dogged hope. The contradiction of it would have driven Ruth potty. “I’m sorry, sweetheart,” she would have said. “We don’t want to abandon you, but we’re not sure what to do.” They’d have offered to come back if he wanted, of course, or to take the girls for a while, even, but their minds would have been racing toward Frank’s appointments, Ruth’s church commitments. What an inconvenience having a missing daughter-in-law and a son who refused to accept she was gone must have been for them.

  “Have you thought about what you’ll do next?” Ruth asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, the police think she’s—”

  “Don’t,” Marc pleaded. “They haven’t found a body. There was nothing in the river. She’s still out there, I know she is.”

  “Sweetheart, you must admit,” his mother carried on and the child in him wanted to stick his fingers in his ears. “With her things where they were, and now they’ve let that boy go, the only logical explanations are that—”

  “She’s not dead,” Marc said. “I know she’s not.”

  “Well then,” his mother said with a sigh. “Alexandra’s always been impulsive, we know that.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Marc said.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s just strange, isn’t it? What was she doing by the river anyway?”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Nothing,” Ruth said. They held each other’s gaze for a moment.

  “This is bullshit!” Marc shouted. “I can’t believe you. You want this to be Alex’s fault, don’t you? She’s been fucking taken, for Christ’s sake! She has to have been. She’s somewhere out there in real trouble and you’re sitting there saying she—” Marc turned away as his voice cracked. He leant over the sink, breathing through his mouth.

  “Sweetheart—”

  “It drives you insane, doesn’t it?” Marc interrupted, turning back to face her. “That we’re actually happy together. That we love each other. Christ, if you think that, why don’t you just fuck off right now? What the hell are you doing here anyway?”

  “Don’t speak to your mother that way,” his father said.

  “We came to help,” Ruth said, wiping a finger beneath each eye.

  The shock of being told off by his father for the first time in decades knocked Marc’s anger from him. He took a deep breath and attempted a calm tone. “I’m sorry, Mum. I didn’t mean that. But I just need to think she’s out there, I need her to come home.”

  “We know it’s hard, son,” his father said. “We’re only tryin
g to make you think practically.”

  “I know, Dad, I do, but you just, you can’t possibly understand.”

  They really couldn’t. Marc felt he knew what he was getting into from the beginning, but his mum especially always had trouble understanding me. She threw her arms up the year I decided not to celebrate Christmas, and he told me she was genuinely hurt when I said her generation couldn’t understand modern feminism. He’d spent the past decade defending my actions, but even he was aware that they sometimes collected collateral damage. Fran and I didn’t speak for a year after I took Emma to get her ears pierced. “It wasn’t a big deal,” I insisted. Eight was old enough, I thought, for a child to make up her own mind. But Fran hit the roof, said she and Ollie had expressly forbidden it and I had undermined their parental authority, that it was the worst kind of insult. I think I actually told Fran to chill out, which didn’t go down well. It wasn’t until the following Easter, when Ollie insisted and Marc spent an hour convincing me to go, that we buried the hatchet beneath a three-course dinner and some mutual territory shifts. Marc was very tactful, trying to support me, but generally staying out of it. He thought I should apologize, but told me it wasn’t his place to insist and agreed that Fran had overreacted.

  It was harder for him to remain neutral more recently when I helped Patrick’s daughter with her art project. For a while Pip would turn up every Saturday to work secretly away on her GCSE coursework in our garage. Patrick was delighted. Pip was going through a “difficult” stage, he said, having been thrown out by her mum. My interest in her was really a positive influence, he thought. That’s not what he said when he saw her work in the showcase, though. How could I encourage her to do that? he asked. “It’s self-expression,” I replied calmly as the stupid head teacher and the idiot art director flapped around Pip’s work trying to avert the attention of the younger members of the audience. “She’s violated herself,” wailed Susan, prudishly horrified to see her new step-daughter’s sixteen-year-old form splashed across canvases slashed by knives, smeared with menstrual blood and scrawled with angst. “This is not appropriate,” muttered the head, while I stood back, amused and proud of the havoc Pip and I had wrought.