“You got him expelled when he was six?” Tom said, and he laughed.
“Mortified,” she said. “But when Rose told me, I just saw red.”
“I can’t believe you attacked an eight-year-old.”
“Well, I had to do something. Rose told Kurt to wait till the kid had his back to him and then beat him around the head with his bag.”
“That doesn’t sound like the worst idea.”
“She told him to put a brick in it.”
Tom laughed again. “I’m sorry for laughing, but that’s insane.”
“I have made so many mistakes with Kurt it’s a wonder he’s not a little psycho.”
“You were so young having him,” Tom reminded her.
“Yeah.” She nodded. “And my example was Rose.”
“My God, that’s true. It’s a wonder you’re not a little psycho.”
“It’s possible I am,” she said.
“I’ll bear that in mind.”
Tom’s mind was momentarily distracted from finding Alexandra, and then it was time to head to the club, and his mind wandered away from Jane again, and silence resumed as they walked to the place that held one of Tom’s last hopes.
Michelle met them at the box office. She ushered them inside and was wondering how they wished their search to proceed.
“It’s a big club,” she pointed out, “but I’ve put the flyers on the bulletin board and all the staff have been given her picture.”
They had discussed it earlier.
“I’d like to sit close to the ladies’, if I could?” Tom said.
“And I’ll sit at the bar,” Jane said.
“Look, we’ve got a pretty comprehensive security system,” said Michelle. “Every part of this place is on camera. I could introduce you to Graham—he’s our security guard. I’ve spoken to him and he’s happy for you to join him in his office.”
“That would be amazing,” Tom said.
“Good.” Michelle was only too happy to help.
She brought them to a room where a large man in his fifties sat. In front of him were small TV screens, each one capturing a part of the club. He turned and greeted them, and Michelle went off to get two more chairs while Graham pointed out each camera and where it was positioned.
“Box office, main door, back door, side entrance, hallway, main stairs, bar, bar till—you won’t need to focus on that—stage, audience; that breaks into three here, here, and here,” he said, pointing to three separate TV screens, all of which depicted empty chairs and tables. “That one is the balcony and so is that, and over here is the dressing-room area—obviously we don’t have a camera in the actual dressing rooms, but it’s the dressing-room hallway that leads here to backstage, stage right, and stage left, and that’s it.”
Michelle returned with two chairs. She placed them on either side of Graham.
Then Michelle left them, but before she did she crossed her fingers.
“Thank you,” Tom said. “You’ve no idea.”
She nodded and closed the door behind her.
“What happens if I see her?” Tom asked.
“You run,” Graham said. “Michelle has given me your number so that I can call you if I see her again and guide you through the club on the phone.”
“That’s great,” Tom said. “That’s really unbelievably great. Isn’t that great, Jane?”
Jane nodded and walked over to the counter and made coffee for the three of them as the lads stared at the many screens. First the box office and the main entrance. They watched, and as people flowed through, Graham pointed out that he could zoom in on anyone who sparked Tom’s interest, and while Jane’s back was turned he provided Tom with an example by zooming in on a woman’s large breasts.
They watched face after face as they flowed in through the doors and halls and spread into the various parts of the club. The place filled up quickly, and so each one took turns monitoring a set of cameras. Graham had posted Alexandra’s picture on the wall in front of him for purposes of recognition. The club became louder as the chatter grew and people moved to and from their seats to the toilets and to the bar and servers began serving at the round tables where groups were drinking, laughing, and talking. Jane thought how funny it was to have this perspective, to watch people who were unaware they were being watched. She watched one woman lift and separate her breasts when her partner left to go to the toilet; then Jane followed him down the hall and witnessed him turn to watch a pretty girl walk past him. Another guy waited for his date to go to the bar before he picked his nose, examined it, and flicked it across the room. She pointed at the camera and made a sound suggesting she was appalled. Graham just nodded. “People are disgusting,” he said. She saw so many brunettes, but none of them had the rich glossy hair she remembered her friend having. Every now and then her heart rate would increase because she spotted someone who just might be Alexandra, but Graham would zoom in and her heart rate would slow and Tom would momentarily close his eyes and bow his head for the second or two required to pull himself together.
Jack L and his band emerged from the dressing room two minutes before they were due onstage. Jack was dressed in a black suit and red shirt; he ran his hand through his hair and took a drink from his bottle of water. The bass player slapped him on the back and he grinned at him, that familiar troublemaker grin that Jane recognized. The door of the dressing room stayed open for a second or two before someone inside closed it. The band walked down the hall and out of range only to be picked up on the next camera that focused on backstage. Onstage, the lights rose and danced on the rich velvet curtain. The drummer sat behind his drums, the guitar player picked up his guitar and placed it around his neck, the piano player made herself comfortable, and they started to play while Jack bounced with guitar in hand stage right on a separate screen. Tom watched the crowd as they clapped and cheered, and some people stood and some stamped their feet, and the curtain rose and Jack walked onstage. The crowd went mad, he bowed and grinned, and he raised his hand, the band started up, the show began, and Alexandra was nowhere to be seen.
They continued to scan each and every face while Jack sang and told stories and shared a joke with the guitar player, and time passed so quickly, and then the gig was almost over.
Jack returned to the stage to sing his encore, and just as Graham turned to offer his sympathy to Tom, Jane noticed a woman with short brunette hair and Alexandra’s face emerge from Jack’s dressing room. She pointed and called out to Tom, and he and Graham saw the woman. Tom shot up and Graham zoomed in, and Tom started running and Graham shouted for him to turn left at the box office and he did, but the hallway was empty. Jane ran after Tom. Graham phoned Tom’s number and directed him to the side entrance, and Tom followed his advice and ran through the club, navigating through people who were up on their feet and dancing to “Boys and Girls,” with Jane hot on his heels. He made it outside to an alleyway. The woman had her back to him and was talking to a man with a backstage pass around his neck, and Tom called out to her.
“Alexandra!”
She turned, and for a split second he thought it was her and seeing her took his breath away, and then she walked toward him and the closer she got the less she looked like his wife because the expression on her face was not an expression he’d ever seen before.
“Can I help you?” she said in an English accent.
Tom couldn’t do anything but shake his head. “No,” he said, “you can’t help me.”
And then he was on his knees and weeping uncontrollably.
Jane stood behind him, staring at the woman who looked so much like her friend on camera but in person and close up seemed shockingly different. We’re so stupid. Of course it wasn’t her. It was never going to be her.
The woman was unsure how to react. The man with the laminate moved to stand beside her, and they both found themselves staring at the man who was on his knees and crying.
“Where is she? Where is she? Where is she? Where is she? Where
is she?”
Jane knelt and took his hands, and then she pulled him to her and hugged him close.
“Where is she, Jane?” he whispered. “Where’s my girl?”
“I don’t know,” she said, rubbing his head like she used to rub Kurt’s when he was young enough to be soothed rather than revolted by her touch, “but we will find her.”
Michelle, tipped off by Graham, who was watching the sad scene on-screen, appeared and took the English Alex inside, where she explained the tragic circumstances the crying man had found himself in. The English Alex was dreadfully sorry to hear of the man’s plight and more than a little freaked at the likeness between her and the picture of the missing woman. She explained that she worked for Jack’s UK distribution company and made her excuses as she had somewhere to be and was gone before at last Jane came in with Tom, whose disappointment had turned into mild shock.
Back in his hotel room, Jane insisted that Tom have a strong brandy to calm his nerves.
He was berating himself for having believed it possible to find Alexandra at a gig in London and saying how stupid it was of him to think that his wife would be in Jack L’s dressing room—after all, the Jack camp had been so good about helping him. That woman was not just thinner, she was rail thin, and she was taller, and despite sharing similarities, up close she was nothing like his wife. He had been fooling himself.
His liaison officer, Trish, had said as much the last time she had visited to update him on the investigation surrounding his wife’s disappearance. Their unit had analyzed the CCTV footage that Michelle had passed on and found that it wasn’t a match. He had argued with her that computers were not gods and he knew his wife’s face. She had been patient with him and was always kind, but she was adamant that he needed to let go of the notion of finding his wife in a London club.
“I can’t let go,” he said. “I have to find her.”
His liaison officer had left soon after, and he had promptly blocked out the information she’d just given him because more and more his mind was visiting the dark place and he desperately needed hope.
As he sat, drinking brandy, that conversation came back to haunt him. He apologized to Jane for wasting her time and for breaking down in the alleyway. He assured her he would pay to clean the oil stains from her coat as a result of her sitting on the ground and rocking him like a baby for ten minutes.
She told him he should get some sleep. She kissed his cheek and said they would keep looking.
He held her hand and looked into her eyes and bit his lip. “Tell me something about her.”
So she told him about a time when her best friend, Alexandra, was a little girl, maybe eleven or twelve, and stole an ice cream from the local shop. She spent a second or two choosing the one she wanted, placed it under her coat, and made her way outside, and when the shopkeeper ran outside after her, calling on her to stop, she turned to him, calmly took out the ice cream from inside her coat pocket, and handed it to him. Then she smiled and congratulated him on catching her.
“No flies on you, Mr. Dunne, no flies at all!” Alexandra said.
Mr. Dunne was taken aback, especially when she pointed out that two days earlier while he had been away from the shop and his wife had been behind the counter, she’d stolen a bar of chocolate without any fear of capture. She took the bar of chocolate from her pocket and handed it to him.
“I practically dangled it under her nose,” she said to Mr. Dunne, who was now decidedly confused. “To be fair to her, the shop was busy, but Mr. Dunne, you can never be too careful, shoplifters are everywhere.”
“I’ll mention it to her,” he said, still unsure what was going on.
“You’re welcome,” she said, and she walked down the road.
Mr. Dunne stared from her to the chocolate bar and to his wife, who was busy serving a customer. What the hell just happened?
Alexandra made it around the corner to where Jane was waiting, and as soon as she was sure that Mr. Dunne could no longer see her, she burst into tears. Once she’d recovered sufficiently to walk home, Alexandra promised Jane she would never again engage in a criminal act. But although she had scared the pants off herself and was down a bar of chocolate, the encounter was not a total loss because Alexandra learned something very powerful that day: any lie delivered with confidence and conviction is believable no matter how ridiculous the circumstance. This self-awareness had really worked in their favor when they were caught stealing while on holiday with Alexandra’s parents in Mayo a year later.
“And what about you?” Tom asked. “Did you just wait to see if she’d get away with it before you had a go?”
“Oh no! I’d successfully stolen three Mars bars from a shop two doors down. It was one of those bars that she gave back to Mr. Dunne.”
He laughed a little. “So what did you learn?”
“That the hand is quicker than an old woman’s one good eye.”
When Jane was content that she’d cheered Tom up a little, she bade him good night.
“Thanks,” he said. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
He walked to the door with her and watched her go down the corridor to her room, and she could feel his eyes on her back and she smiled at him when she turned to place her key card in the door. She disappeared into her room, and Tom entered his and opened the minibar again and starting drinking, and when he saw he’d received three calls from Jeanette, he turned his phone to silent.
When Jane’s taxi pulled up to her house, her son opened the front door, walked down the steps, met her at the gate, and took her suitcase from her hand.
“Sorry, Mum,” he said. “I should have helped out with Gran.”
Jane was taken aback and unsure what to say. Instead she just hugged him tight, and when he was in her grasp she took the opportunity to kiss his cheek.
“Mum!” he moaned. As they walked up the steps together he put his arm around her shoulders. “I have something to tell you,” he said.
“I’m listening.”
“Irene’s here.”
“And?”
“She’s needs a place to stay.”
“What’s going on?”
“There’s no food in her house.”
“Okay.”
“Really?”
“Really. Just make sure she lets her mother know.”
“She would if she could reach her.”
“Are you hungry?” Jane said.
“We’re starving.”
“Okay. Give me five minutes and I’ll get busy.”
Irene appeared in the sitting-room doorway.
“Hi, Jane,” she said shyly.
Jane walked over to Irene, hugged her, and kissed her on the forehead. “Welcome.”
Irene brightened. “Thanks, Jane, you rock.”
“Yes, I do,” she said, “and you’re in the spare room.”
“I know, I know, don’t have sex, not here, not there, not anywhere,” Irene said in a voice that mimicked Jane.
Kurt laughed and Jane nodded. “Exactly.”
Jane went to her bedroom and sat on the bed and took a minute to allow the events of the weekend to wash over her, and then she took time to be grateful for her life, as hard as it sometimes was. I’m one of the lucky ones.
8
“Bedsprings”
I looked behind the cooker,
sofa and the sink,
got down on my knees
and looked under the fridge
but I can’t find love.
Jack L, Metropolis Blue
April 2008
Dominic had never been very good at relationships. In his thirty-six years on the planet, his longest relationship had been three years. He’d married Bella six months after he’d ended a disastrous but very passionate affair with a dancer called Heidi. She had been twenty-three and liked to take E or alternatively acid on the weekends. He hadn’t bothered to take E in his teens and twenties with his peers, and so he was damned if he was going to
do it in his thirties. He’d witnessed a guy in college attempt to hack off his own foot with a wooden spoon while screaming that the eagles had landed after a particularly bad acid trip, so that was out. Besides, as a respectable bank manager, the last thing in the world he wanted was to be found in a club in Dublin drunk and bouncing off the walls or screaming bloody murder while attempting to land himself on the moon. Heidi resented that he didn’t share her interests, and he found it difficult to live with someone who was in a bad mood from Sunday morning to Tuesday night. So class A drugs were blamed for the demise of their relationship. They had fought and she had ordered him out of her flat, and he told her he would not be back and she was happy with that, further promising that if she saw him anywhere near her place again she’d call the police. He pointed out that calling the police would obviously be a bad idea, considering she lived with a drug dealer named Seth and spent half her time either going up or coming down. He walked from her flat to his car and drove to Jane’s house, and she made him dinner and provided a shoulder to cry on, because even though Heidi drove him crazy he would miss her. Jane was a great listener. She was always there for him, even though when she’d needed him most he hadn’t been there for her.
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