Natasha Bush

Natasha Bush is a writer and projectionist. She's published a memoir with HarperCollins and short stories in The Wrong Quarterly, Eternal Remedy, Brand, Ducts, The Wanderlust Review and The Independent. She’s currently rewriting All the Paper Planes Fall Down and beginning to work on a new novel.
Contact: nrtbush [at] gmail [dot] com

All the Paper Planes Fall Down

 

1

Marc sat on the bottom stair and tried not to think the worst. The voice continued: “The vast majority of people return safe and well within the first 48 hours, Mr Southwood. There’s no need to panic.” There was a pause. Marc knew he should take comfort from this. Sit tight and wait for his wife to return with a perfectly reasonable explanation. 

The officer said goodnight and the line clicked dead. As if that had solved the problem. As if Marc should have felt better. As if his overactive imagination had fashioned frightening foes easily slain by common sense.

Six hours down, 42 to go.

I wish I could put myself there with him. I’d wrap my arms and then my legs around his body, cling to him like a koala until we lost balance and tumbled to the hallway floor. Tell him with my touch the one thing he needed to know that night: I’m here. Right here.

He stood up and replaced the receiver, severing his fingertip connection to the phone call and his one active plan to do something. The hairs on his arms stood on end as he shivered to a silent beat of something’s wrong, something’s wrong, something’s wrong. 

Perhaps he shouldn’t have phoned the police. He stood statue still, hoping to quiet the siren squealing inside him. After all, I was a grown woman. Perhaps it was over the top to report me missing. It’s not as if I had a curfew.

But I was a mother. My children were home and I was not. It’s so unlike her. Marc had said that to the officer a moment ago. It’d felt like a whine; that childish word laughably impotent in the face of explaining the absolute abnormality of a woman who had always come home, day after day, year after year, not walking through our front door that night. 

I should have been home by the time he brought the girls back from swimming. We were meant to order a takeaway. We would have sat with our chow mein, chattering about open days and council cuts.

He tried my phone again. Off as usual. “My little Luddite,” he’d called me when offered some android gizmo for my birthday and I said I was perfectly happy with the £30 handset I had. “I like pressing buttons,” I’d replied. He should have pestered me more.

“It’s Thursday, for God’s sake!” Marc said aloud and paced to the window to peer onto the street. I wouldn’t miss Thursday Takeaway without a reason. 

He raised his hand, scratched his left temple. 

He’d tried to explain to the officer. Was Jones his name? It was nothing to him, he supposed. Officer Jones thought we’d had a fight. People disappeared all the time. 

I didn’t, though.

***

I’d spent the day at work. Marc had rung Paula to check. She said we’d walked out of the building together. I’d wished her a good weekend because she had Friday off to attend some family wedding.  She’d told me she’d try, though she hated the things, and we’d parted with a wave. 

Whole hours had elapsed since that exchange. It was 11pm. It was dark.

Such things bothered my husband. It didn’t matter I’d lived alone before we met. It didn’t matter I’d spent more than a year wandering the streets of Chicago, an optimistic student wearing an armour of Pabst Best against the gangs and gun crime statistics. It didn’t matter that I’d once parachuted from a plane, and that I accidentally hit a black slope the first time I strapped skis to my feet, that I’d backpacked around India and stayed in roach-infested hostels in Harlem. My husband saw me as something fragile. He walked me home and met me from trains. He’d wanted to protect me. 

Should he search the streets? Was that what one was supposed to do? Maybe he could ask a neighbour to watch the girls. But where would he go? Did people normally look in pubs and bars? 

Marc clung to the idea that we were normal that night. We’d never aspired to be normal before. We’d felt unique. Special. But abnormal things didn’t happen to normal people. So we were normal that night. And, in keeping with normality, where everyday anxieties outweigh even the most horrendous fears, my husband continued to care how others perceived us. Behind his concern for me bubbled a multitude of mundane worries: had Officer Jones thought him daft? Had Paula decided he was overbearing? Had he made a fool of himself?

Anyway, he decided, it wouldn’t be like me to be lounging in a bar. Bus shelters? Restaurants? Late-night libraries? This was York in real life, not London in some dramatic episode we were watching on a boxset binge. This was a picturesque tourist city where the most the police usually had to deal with was fishing stolen bikes out of polluted rivers. Besides, it was race day and I abhorred town when the cobbled streets and listed bars filled with stumbling gamblers in their glad rags. 

***

He walked into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. Al would laugh, he thought. If she were here. 

I’d have been more likely to roll my eyes, or stick my hands on my hips and give him that “seriously?” look. But maybe that’s me being defensive. Maybe back then I’d have been amused by my unfailingly British husband. I suppose it’s hard to tell from this distance.

At least Lizzie and Charlotte slept. He’d told them I had to work late. He hated lying to them, I know, but what could he have told a seven and a nine year old? “I don’t know where your mother is, children, and I’m trying not to imagine her dead in a ditch, so eat your noodles and we’ll find a bedtime story.”

I wasn’t dead in a ditch. 

He couldn’t think like that. 

Those things didn’t happen. 

Not here. 

Not to us.

***

There would be a perfectly rational explanation for my not coming home and we’d both laugh about it tomorrow. I’d shriek, he thought, when I found out he’d called the police. It’d get pedalled out at dinner parties: the time he lost his head because I fell asleep on a friend’s sofa. Our guests would hoot with laughter and he’d blush good-naturedly, happy as ever to play the bashful fool to my leading lady. I can still picture a future that looks like that.

But he’d rung our friends. Nobody had seen me since the party. “Oh God, fabulous night, our turn next. Tell Alex I haven’t remembered the name of that film, but I will.”

Of course, Susan, as soon as I determine she has a pulse, that’ll be the first thing out of my mouth.

It wasn’t Susan’s fault. He shouldn’t have snapped. But trust her to play the optimist, to utterly downplay even the most ridiculous of dramas. He made a note to apologise once this was over. 

Over. 

Despite his panic, he was still thinking in terms of resolution. The very worst things in life, our most fearful nightmares, they don’t happen all at once. They creep up, lodge themselves gradually in our brains, worming their way in so that once they become a reality they are already somewhat familiar. If my husband could have known the extent of horror still to come he wouldn’t have survived that night. 

As it was, he held hope like a pebble in his palm. 

The kettle finished boiling, but he no longer wanted tea. He wanted his wife to come home and come to bed. He yawned. He’d had to get up early to finish marking. He hadn’t been able to face it last night and the girls had wanted to play board games. I remember I’d sulked because he and Charlotte had formed an alliance, giggling mischievously as they swapped farmers for builders and negotiated defence strategies based on promised hugs and extra marshmallows on hot chocolates. I’d pushed my bottom lip out and batted my eyelashes as if blinking away tears, watching my family. I remember noticing the new gap in Char’s teeth when she grinned, the scab Lizzie kept scratching on her shin, the hole in the heel of Marc’s sock, the hitch of the curtain where it’d been drawn hastily over the chair, the slight annoying angle of the Paul Nash print on the wall. Of course the girls hadn’t wanted to go to bed, but I’d persuaded them as I had a thousand times. Then I came back down in Marc’s favourite silk and did the same to him.

He crept upstairs to check on the girls now. Charlotte was sprawled face-down across her bed, the Pixar cover kicked to the floor and a brown bear—I’m forgetting the names now, was this Puddles?—hovering precariously near the edge, ready to topple. Marc stepped quietly inside the room, picked the duvet from the carpet and laid it over our daughter’s body. He moved Puddles to a safer spot by Char’s pillow and touched her dark tangle of hair, just to feel the softness, before retreating to the landing. He stepped along to Lizzie’s room, cracked open the door and peered into the nightlight-less dark. Our tightly balled eldest breathed evenly on the top bunk. Her face was turned to him and he opened the door further so the light fell on her features. He watched her eyelids flicker with sleep, her lips move silently. She looked like me. I don’t know if she still does. She has Marc’s fair colouring and everyone always said Char was my double, Lizzie his—as if our genes had been neatly split, offering us one daughter each—but I could always see myself in Lizzie too. In the roundness of her face and the line of her lips.

Marc rubbed his eyes with a clenched fist. He was crying.

He closed the door to Lizzie’s room and descended the stairs. What was he supposed to do? He sat down and stood up. Paced from lamp-lit living room to shoe-cluttered hallway, on to Szechuan-smelling kitchen. Tried my mobile once more. He’d called the hospital an hour ago and I hadn’t been admitted. Was it time to ring again? He switched on the TV, but heard it through a tunnel. The only sound he wanted to hear was my key in the lock.

2

I should come clean about something before I go any further. A lot of what I’m writing almost definitely never happened. I wasn’t there, obviously. I was missing. Gone. So I can’t know Marc put the kettle on, then never poured a cup of tea. I can’t tell what thoughts went through his mind the night I never came home.

But I don’t know how to tell this story without imagining certain details. And I do know my husband. He’s a knowable type of man. Just as I’ve been described as flighty, impulsive, utterly unknowable, Marc is a good, honest man whom one can rely on to do and think certain things. He’s a man who never deserved to go through everything he has.

So I hope you’ll forgive me. I don’t wish to deceive. I’m allowed to hear the tapes. It’s unclear if this is an act of kindness or a form of punishment. Either way, I’ve done my research. The knowable facts are known to me. I’ve heard the recording of Marc’s phone call to Officer Jones, for instance. And I’ve seen the credit card statement showing his takeaway purchase at Monkey King. I’ve sat them in every chair in our house, imagined every combination of crockery they might have used, seen Charlotte animating her chopsticks and Lizzie picking out the onions until I can bear it no more. 

This document has been encouraged, too. I’m told it would be healthy to imagine what has occurred beyond these four walls. Is he fucking with me, I wonder? Does he hope to turn me crazy? I can imagine him enjoying that. Or does he truly believe it might help me come to terms with my situation? The situation he is responsible for.

There’s little else to do here, though, so whatever his motives, I oblige. I write this account of partial truths and things I wish were fictions. I walk my way through Marc’s life since my disappearance. And it probably is therapeutic. If I could climb inside this story and stay there, I would.

Some things I know first-hand. That my husband was wearing a creased, lightly striped, off white shirt with one too many buttons left undone that day. He has two that are similar, but this was the one with brown stripes. I watched him button it, contemplating the stripe of dark hairs trailing from his navel to his belt. I’d tried to keep him in bed, but his mind was on the day ahead. An ironing board lived between the wardrobe and the wall, but as normal Marc failed to notice his crumpled attire. I didn’t offer. 

He also wore dark blue jeans and brown loafers, though I imagine he switched those for slippers when he arrived home. His hair was freshly washed that morning, so would still have smelled of raspberry shampoo, but it hung slightly too long after yet another week had passed without his getting around to booking an appointment. If things had continued as normal, I’d have marched him to the barbers on Saturday morning and demanded they buzz it far shorter than he liked, arguing this way he could leave it the extra weeks without my nagging. It was only half a joke. He would roll his eyes but acquiesce and later I’d run my hand through his stunted locks and kiss him on the mouth, freshly amazed by how attractive I found him after a little grooming.

This story I’m telling is more than a collection of basic facts, though. It’s more than the “real-life” shockers you read in the papers and the tell-all exposés of glossy magazines. I have no reason to paint a better or worse picture than what really happened. I’ve already lost everything. I live within four walls. I’ve been tied up and forced to take pills without packaging. I’m visited by one man who claims to care for my wellbeing but is really the person keeping me here. I have no hope of salvation. I have only this. So despite my ignorance of events I cannot possibly have witnessed, the story recorded here is more honest than the police reports and newspaper articles. If it is not an actual truth, it is very much a human one. 

3

Marc would have taken the girls to school. He’d have worried if it was the right thing to do.

“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 Maths book?” I hear Charlotte holler from upstairs.

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

With half-hearted reprimands he’d have bundled them out, Lizzie missing a glove and Charlotte moaning that her teacher was going to kill her. My husband 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 grey morning light. They walked together along the terraced streets towards their school. Lizzie chatted about looking forward to netball club starting again. Charlotte told him she needed new PE shorts. He nodded and mumbled replies, worrying about being away from the phone. He peered into every car that passed, unsure why but driven by a superstitious thought that if he missed one it’d contain me. They stopped to wait for the lights. Charlotte saw a classmate on the opposite side and tried to step forward. Marc yanked her back, fear bringing his surroundings into focus. He shouted at our daughter. Her eyes filled with tears.

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

The lights finally changed and they crossed the road. Reaching the curb, our girls shrugged him off to run through the wide gateway toward the chattering uniforms at the bottom of the steps. He 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 closed the door behind the last child and he and the other parents turned from the gate, ready to get on with their days. He nodded to a couple of mums he recognised 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, this is Officer Karen Rush speaking. How can I help?” The buzz of an office in the background, phones ringing and instructions being given. 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, um, well she hasn’t come home.” This must have been the only thought he’d had in 12 hours, but the words still tasted strange upon his tongue. You can hear his hesitation, 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 calmly. “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 is “out of character behaviour” 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 behaviour—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 adds. “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 nothing. The day before he’d been a competent, functioning male: a moderately well dressed, happily married man 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 realised 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 really trusted that I loved his sensitivity, his lack of clichéd masculinity. I deserved a man, he thought as he sat there in our living room, the phone in his hand and my magazine still upon the table. A real one who could stride out into the world and return with me beautiful and swooning in his beefed-up arms.

***

“Mr Southwood?” 

The officer was a few inches shorter than Marc, maybe 6'1". Clean-shaven. Short, dark hair. Younger too. Thirty-ish? No ring.

Marc reached to shake his hand, wondered if that was appropriate. Should he have told him it was Dr Southwood?

“I’m Detective Inspector Jones.” The officer clasped Marc’s palm, official and confident. “We spoke last night. May I come in?”

Marc led DI Jones to our 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? 

My husband offered him tea, felt relieved when he refused. He was impatient. He wanted results.

“Right, Mr Southwood.” DI Jones opened a folder and uncapped the biro 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 his code of practice recommended filing a missing person report up to 72 hours after the last known sighting, but as this was “out-of-character behaviour” for me 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 interrupted. “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 was about to discard with slumber before turning to find me on the other side of the mattress and wrapping his arms around my hot, live limbs. He felt some sceptical part of himself removed from his body, hovering invisibly in the top corner of the room, looking down on his pathetic, hopeful self, mocking his own sincerity.

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

“What if someone’s taken her?” my husband blurted, his detached self’s mirth eclipsed by his actual self’s panic.

A slow exhale through teeth, then: “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’s no dream. He cleared his throat, attempted to speak as DI Jones’s equal: “How do we file this report?”