March
Nine Days Gone
I liked Marc’s parents, but we were never close. His mum in particular, I felt, always held me at arm’s length. Their presence was a relief for Marc, though. The second day of dredging had turned up nothing, but DI Jones and Nicola were reluctant to allow Marc to see this as a positive. Today they were tracing my possible routes from campus to the river with sniffer dogs. His mum was advising him to look at the facts, prepare for the worst. Marc walked out of the room, unable to hear another person’s advice that he give up on me. Still, it was better to have people around. His dad didn’t say much, but proved adept at entertaining the girls. They leapt on his lap, squealing as his arthritic hands tickled their tummies.
I guess their presence must have reminded Marc of my family too, because while the girls watched TV with Nana and Grandpa, my husband finally picked up the phone and dialed my mum’s number. What was he expecting from that conversation? He hadn’t spoken to the woman since our wedding day. When she contacted me to say she was ill, he’d offered like the perfect husband he was to come with me. I only had to look at his face, though, to know his anger hadn’t abated. I guess mine hadn’t either. But, despite everything, when your mother tells you she’s losing her memory, the child inside you takes over. Marc said he understood, though I know it was hard for him to watch me go to her.
“Hello?” A muffled voice answered after six rings.
“I’d like to speak to Mrs. Carlisle.”
A pause. A throat cleared. “Wh-who’s speaking, please?”
“Her son-in-law, Marc.”
Another pause. “Marc. I’m Caitlin, Mrs. Carlisle’s carer.” The line was bad; she sounded far away. “I’m sorry, but I’m afraid Mrs. Carlisle is not well enough to speak on the phone. Is there something I can help with?”
“I need to speak to her. It’s about her daughter.”
“I’m sorry, I can try to pass on a message, but—”
“Look, if you could just put me on with her—”
“I don’t know how much you know about your mother-in-law’s health, Marc, but phone conversations in particular make her very agitated. She’s in no state to be disturbed by bad news.”
“Bad news? Her daughter is missing! That’s more than just a bit of fucking bad news!” He hadn’t meant to shout.
“I know,” Caitlin said. “I’m so sorry, Marc.”
He tried to soften his tone. “Look, my wife is missing and they’ve found—” He swallowed. “It was on the news. I think her mother has a right to know, however agitated it might make her.”
The woman on the other end was quiet for a moment, then in a whisper: “The police already called. I don’t know what else I can do for you, Marc.”
Marc pinched the bridge of his nose. “Will you just, will you promise to talk to her? To help her understand?”
Caitlin was quiet.
“Please?” Marc said.
“I’ll try,” said Caitlin.
Marc hung up wondering if he’d done the right thing. She did have a right to know, didn’t she? I’d told him she barely recognized me anymore, called me all sorts of names. Sometimes I’d arrive home from those trips and forget to answer my own for a day or so. But deep down no one can forget their family, can they?
He left the girls with his parents and drove across town to join the search. Nicola spotted him as he climbed out of the car and extracted herself from a flurry of frenzied activity. He watched with interest and horror as uniformed officers tramped the pavements with dogs, pointing them at hedges and ditches, hunting through bins.
“You don’t need to be here,” Nicola said.
“I want to help.”
“This is a police investigation, Marc. Anything we find has to be preserved. We can’t have you here.”
My husband looked into her face. He wondered if DI Jones would have been so polite in telling him to leave. “There must be something I can do,” he said. “I need to help find Alex.”
Nicola sighed. “We’ve made up some flyers,” she said. “You can hand them out, but you need to stay out of the way.”
Marc nodded.
“Do you have some friends you can call? Why don’t you go into town, pass them out at the train station, supermarkets, anywhere busy.”
“Will it help?” Marc said.
Nicola hesitated. “The statistics show that public appeals work. We don’t know what we’re looking for yet, Marc, but if anyone out there has information we need them to come forward.”
“Should we be doing more?” he asked.
“If you want to widen the appeal,” Nicola said, glancing back at DI Jones and the officers behind her, “I can help you arrange putting Alex’s information on things like milk cartons and coffee cups.”
“Yes, let’s do it.”
“It could be pricey,” Nicola said.
As if that was a concern. If it brought me back, my husband would have paid anything. He told Nicola to go ahead with it, then followed her to her car to collect a stack of flyers. He called Patrick and Fran, met them by Boots to begin handing them out. The day exhausted him, but at least it was activity. If the police were looking not for me, but only for evidence and someone to blame, then the real search was down to Marc.
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.