by Natasha Bell
“Watch out!” shouted a pedestrian I’d just cut off on the zebra crossing, pulling my focus back to the road. I checked behind me, lifted my right arm, and pulled across the traffic toward campus. I locked my bike in the usual place and hurried to my class.
It was almost three by the time I managed to extricate myself from students and departmental meetings, and then only for half an hour. I hurried through the colleges to the tiny campus supermarket, praying they’d have what I needed. Having to ask the pimply student to retrieve the test from behind the counter was mortifying and I wondered why nobody had thought to put dispensers next to the tampons and pheromones and condoms in all university loos. I was tight on time, but keen for as much privacy as possible, so I took the lift up to the fifth floor of the library and headed for the toilet behind the stacks.
I peed and waited, gingerly holding the plastic stick in a wad of toilet roll. I counted backward again, trying—and praying—to remember if I’d bled over freshers’ week and just somehow forgotten. I thought about the strip of pills hidden in the bottom of my makeup bag and wondered if I could possibly have forgotten, if there was a day I might have taken one late. How could I have been so careless? Marc had been going on about Lizzie needing a playmate for months. I’d argued it was too soon, there was too much going on, we needed to focus on work and ourselves for a bit, but Marc had made those puppy dog eyes and somehow we’d agreed to “wait and see” and “let nature take its course.” I hadn’t told him I’d been renewing my contraceptive prescription and thinking we should leave it at least another year, maybe more. Marc and I were both only children, I argued to myself—was it really so bad? I loved Lizzie to pieces, but I’d just got my life back. Things were starting to happen. These past few weeks I’d remembered I was more than just a pair of tits and a soothing voice, more than just a mother.
I stopped waving the stick and looked down at the two blue lines.
June
Fourteen Weeks Gone
Marc read Amelia’s letters before he went to sleep each evening. She wrote frequently, often repetitively, meditating on the same themes and projects, moaning again and again about our distance and divergent lives. Marc remembered my excitement upon receiving the letters. Now and again I’d told him fragments of their contents and he’d tried to understand my enthusiasm for my friend’s weird-sounding creations, but he was never curious before. Now, like my essay, they offered a window to a lost world. They were something tangible he could clutch in his hands. Proof that I existed.
Sometimes Marc grew bored, other times Amelia’s words kept him awake. He was devastated to discover how reluctant I’d been to have a second child. We’d talked about it, of course, but I hadn’t raised my objections enough. I wonder if he lay in our bed trying to remember the times we fucked that autumn, him thinking we might be creating something, me knowing I’d made it an impossibility. Only I hadn’t. I’d missed a day and that was all it took. Marc remembered the evening I came home with the wiped down stick in my handbag and told him our three would become four. He remembered popping champagne and making love to me that night, the happiest and most virile a man could be.
He thought about my tattoo as well, wondered why I’d never told him it was covering something, wondered what exactly was beneath. I’d talked about my mother’s emotional and psychological abuse, about finding her in pools of her own vomit and being screamed at for hours through my bedroom door, but I’d never said she was violent. Clearly I’d told Amelia more than I’d told him. I’d shared my most painful secrets not with my husband, but with a woman across an ocean. It must have hurt him to realize this. Reading her letters chronologically, Amelia struck Marc as a tragic character. He doubted she’d let anyone say that without swearing at them, but as far as he could tell she was serially single and occupied only by her work and herself. She barely talked about family and never mentioned friends. Marc thought her crass and critical, a man-hating misanthrope. What had I written back? Words he’d never know. He hated the idea of Amelia knowing about our life, of me sharing my thoughts and feelings with this stranger.
Sometime at the beginning of June, he reached 2005, the year Charlotte was born. It wasn’t a great year, he remembered. My mother had started to deteriorate rapidly and I had to keep traveling down to see her, leaving him and the girls with a fridge stocked with expressed milk. It was around then that I got pneumonia too. I returned from one of my trips to see my mum and just collapsed. Marc rushed me to hospital, panicked and terrified, but I got my strength back within a couple of weeks. Those memories seemed impossibly far away by the time he read about Amelia’s strange ideas and installations.
* * *
A few days later he opened the paper to find James Gandolfini had died. He scanned the article, learning the actor was in Italy with his family. After a day of sightseeing in Rome, his son discovered him collapsed on the bathroom floor of his hotel room. He’d had a heart attack and died sometime later in hospital. Despite the freshness of Amelia’s sneers at celebrity culture and despite knowing nothing about James Gandolfini beyond the roles he played, Marc felt sad. More than that. Reading quotes from politicians and producers, directors and other actors, all paying tribute to the “ferocious actor,” “gentle soul” and “genuinely funny man,” Marc’s eyes began to fill with tears.
“You’re ridiculous,” he told himself and wiped his nose on his sleeve. He was ridiculous. He could only have seen James Gandolfini in a handful of roles, most memorably of course as Tony Soprano, which yes, he’d enjoyed as much as I had, but that didn’t mean he had any link to the man himself. The death of the real actor had nothing to do with the character he played, however good the series. Before reading it in the paper that day, he might even have struggled to name the man. Yet, the sadness he felt was real. It stayed with him as he read the rest of the paper, lingered throughout the day. In the shower and again while waiting for the kettle to boil, he was struck afresh by the horror of a child finding his father unconscious. He thought about Charlotte and Lizzie, about being their only parent, their sole guardian. He made himself a salad for lunch, wasted twenty minutes reading an old Independent article about the best exercise for a healthy heart, then consciously walked fast enough to work up a sweat and feel his heart rate rise on the way to pick them up.
Char met him at the gate first, a grin on her face but mud scuffed from ankle to knee of her trousers.
“What on earth happened?” Marc said in dismay. It was a Tuesday, he’d only just washed her uniform.
“She scored the winning goal,” Lizzie said as she walked up, a touch of pride in her voice.
“That’s great, sweetie, but you’ll have to wear your skirt tomorrow.”
“No way,” said Charlotte.
Thrown by her uncharacteristic stubbornness, Marc faltered, but eventually murmured less than authoritatively, “I can try to wash your trousers tonight, but I don’t know if they’ll be dry by tomorrow.”
Char crossed her arms and stared at him.
They walked home in almost silence. When they got through the door, Char dumped her bag in the hallway and raced up the stairs to her room. A few minutes later she descended in a pair of tracksuit bottoms and handed Marc her folded school trousers, before silently returning to her room.
“Is there something wrong with Char?” Marc asked her sister.
Lizzie shrugged. “She likes playing football with the boys, I guess she can’t do that in a skirt. Did I tell you she got in trouble last week for kicking an older boy in the shin and making him cry?”
“No, you didn’t,” Marc said.
Lizzie smiled, apparently rather pleased with her tough little sister.
Marc spent the evening scrutinizing Char. Was she becoming a tomboy? Did it matter if she was? He couldn’t tell anymore what normal parental concerns felt like. He found himself on hyper alert, looking out for the smallest changes i
n our children, wondering if they were natural or a result of my disappearance. Was Char attention seeking? With me gone and him her only parent, was she trying to emulate her dad, not her mum? Or was he reading too much into too little? It felt impossible to tell when to worry. They seemed to have accepted the situation. They talked about me and sometimes they grew sad, but Marc was careful not to let them give up hope. He’d started a book of things we could do once I got back. Lizzie had sat in silence as he explained the concept, but Char had dutifully filled a page with a list of games and holidays and outings.
Maybe they clung to him more than he saw their peers doing to their parents. Lizzie, usually so calm and collected, had refused to go on the Year 6 camping trip and when he’d coaxed the reason from her she’d said she didn’t want to leave in case anything happened while she was away. He’d asked what could possibly happen and she’d looked at him like he was stupid and said, “You might disappear.”
He tried to knock on her door when he thought she might be feeling down, but he was turned away as often as he was allowed in. When he did cross the threshold, he sat nervously beside her, holding our daughter as she sobbed and feeling that perhaps she wished he wouldn’t. He was not enough; that was the simple fact of it. It was what Lizzie was thinking and what caused her to cry, but our little girl was far too sensitive to tell him, so she pretended he comforted her even as he contributed to her sadness. Such moments of helpless intimacy with Lizzie were perhaps the hardest of this time, trumping the leg-kicking tantrums of Charlotte when she refused to comprehend the situation and wiping the floor with any discomfort he felt before TV crews and inquisitive police officers. They were his lowest hours, hammered even lower by the mortification a man feels when failing his family.
After what had happened with Fran and the awkwardness of our interwoven friendships, the only person Marc spoke to about his fears was Paula. They’d grown close since his return to work. At first he thought she was knocking on his door just to check up on him, a strange sense of benevolent duty badgering her conscience. But over sandwiches and coffees he began to realize they had a rapport. He started to see what had made us friends. We weren’t obvious companions: a frivolous, bicycling, Dada-loving lecturer and a stern, seriously academic, suit-wearing feminist. Paula smiled infrequently, more inclined to analyze the grammatical ambiguities of his rhetoric than to latch on to a punch line. But beneath the wrinkled frown and severely cut bob he discovered a kind, straight-talking and intimidatingly intelligent woman. While those he’d known for years tiptoed around his feelings and whispered behind his back, he found in her a frank and refreshingly unsympathetic new friend. “You’re doing fine,” she told him repeatedly. “The girls are lucky to have you.”
Apart from the obvious comforts of support, Marc also enjoyed talking to someone again. With all the drama and heartache of missing me as a wife and mother, he’d forgotten the simpler fact of missing intelligent conversation, intellectual companionship. Paula’s bangles clattered on her arm when she got excited about a PhD proposal for next year and she fingered the collar of her jacket as they grew heated on the topic of the impact of the Industrial Revolution on art and literature. I would yawn, he thought, if I could hear some of their conversations—proper stuffy academic geekiness, the kind I worked so hard to persuade my students wasn’t the only option.
They talked about me too, about the stagnating search and the impossibility of accepting the blindingly obvious. Marc hadn’t told DI Jones about finding my passport and the box of files, but he shared his progress with Amelia’s letters with Paula. He phoned her one night after completing one. It was late and he thought he’d probably wake her, but he knew he’d get no sleep unless he could discuss Amelia’s words.
“She betrayed her friend,” he said into the receiver.
“Marc? What time is it?”
“Sorry, I needed to talk to someone.”
Paula sighed. “What’s up?”
“Well, sorry, maybe it’s not that big a deal. Go back to sleep, we can discuss it tomorrow.”
“No,” she replied. “You’ve woken me up now, you’d better go on.”
“I just finished one of Amelia’s letters and she describes this piece that won her some award,” he said. “But I’m struggling to see how it’s art or even ethical. I know it doesn’t really matter if I understand it and Alex would probably laugh at me for not getting it, but something in my brain won’t let it go.”
“What’s the piece?” Paula said.
“She used a friend of hers—her agent, I think, but it sounds like they were close too. The woman had just broken up with her fiancé and was clearly in a bad place, but Amelia decided to use her as art. She paid a psychology student to befriend her friend and document their relationship as if they were therapy sessions. All without the agent knowing. She got talking to this woman in a coffee shop and poured her heart out to her because they were apparently going through similar things. She thought they’d become close, but all the while the therapist was writing Amelia nightly reports on her friend’s ‘condition.’ And then Amelia set up all the documents and some photographs of the friend and the therapist in a gallery, all alongside photocopies of the checks she wrote the therapist to prove it had been a monetary transaction rather than a human connection. And without telling the agent what she was seeing, she sent her tickets to the opening and had someone film her reactions to discovering the betrayal and then put that in the gallery the next day.”
“How did the agent react?” Paula said, displaying none of the outrage bubbling in him.
“Amelia says she flipped out. She seems kind of surprised, like she expected her to find it funny or something, but the woman burst into tears and is no longer returning her calls. Here, let me read it.” He scanned down the page on his lap and read Amelia’s words into the receiver: “ ‘Obviously a huge part of the piece was observing her response after everyone else in the gallery had read the therapy reports. She was mad. Which made the piece really successful, but sort of upset me. A lot. I’m a bad friend, Al. But a good artist, I think. I guess that’s something.’ ”
Paula laughed.
“She sounds sorry to some extent, doesn’t she?” Marc said. “But not enough to regret it. And later she admits that the filmed reaction is what made the piece so compelling and probably what won her the award.”
“It poses some interesting questions,” Paula said.
“But imagine seeing details of your broken relationship on a gallery wall—intimate things you told someone in confidence, someone you thought liked you but you then find out was being paid to be your friend. It’s cruel.”
“Yes,” Paula said hesitantly. “But no one said art has to be nice. Artists do cruel things to prove a point all the time.”
“But I don’t see any point in this, it’s just mean.”
“I don’t know, I’d have to know more about the piece, but maybe it’s a comment on capitalism, or therapy, or women’s relationships, or trust. Or perhaps she’s simply pushing the boundaries of art in general, proving the very point you’ve just picked up on: that art is cruel and artists can’t be trusted not to use anything you offer them, even yourself, for their work.”
“But how could Alex be friends with someone like that?”
“Come on, Marc, you know Alex liked work that provoked a reaction. I don’t know if she’d have approved of Amelia’s methods, but I imagine she’d have been interested in the piece. You know about Guillermo Vargas starving a dog in an art gallery, right?”
“Wasn’t that a hoax?”
“It didn’t matter, the point was that people thought a dog was being starved to death for art and got so outraged that they started a petition to complain, but not a single person tried to free or feed the dog in the actual gallery.”
“So you’re saying while they thought it terrible and cruel, they still accepted
it as art?”
“Yes, it was art,” Paula replied. “As, I suppose, was Amelia betraying her friend. A stray dog starving in the street in Nicaragua is just life, but Vargas’s dog dying in a gallery was elevated to something more and thus thrust into the minds of people around the globe. I suppose, equally, friends fall out all the time over large and small things and it’s nothing special, but Amelia has elevated the destruction of one of her friendships into art, turning the simple point of whether the agent forgives her or not into a much more complex act of aesthetics. She’s turned the people in her life into unwitting performers, objects to be scrutinized.”
“How is that okay, though?” Marc said.
“Maybe it’s not,” Paula said, stifling a yawn. “It’s for the public and critics to decide. But that’s an interesting thing too, because as far as I’m aware no artist to date has done anything quite despicable enough to provoke a unanimous outcry. I imagine at some point someone will push the boundaries that bit too far and someone will have to turn around and say: ‘Enough! This is no longer art.’ But as soon as they say that, I suppose it will go down in the history books as the ultimate piece of art.”
“So there are no limits?” Marc said, thinking about Pip’s questions about morality and art. Had I told her about Amelia, described this piece? “What about as a human being? Art can’t just trump pain and feelings and empathy. Alex would never have accepted that. How could she be friends with this woman?”