alexandra, gone Read online

  “That’s understandable. What age is Alexandra?”

  “She’s thirty-six. She has chestnut-brown hair, shoulder length. She was wearing black trousers and a black blouse with a bow on it. She had a black fitted jacket on. She’s very attractive, the kind of person you’d remember if you’d seen her.” Caller becomes emotional.

  “And she went missing on …”

  “Thursday, the twenty-first of June this year.”

  “And did she have any mental issues, Tom?”

  “No, Joe. She was a very happy, well-adjusted, normal woman. She was normal, Joe, ordinary.”

  “Okay, okay.”Joe sighs.“I’m going to ask the obvious, Tom, so forgive me. Is there any chance she took herself into the water?”

  “No. No. She wasn’t suicidal, and the coast guard searched it and the police divers, and there were plenty of people on the beach that day and no one saw her.”

  “Okay, I had to ask. I’m sorry for your trouble, Tom. I hope that maybe someone listening remembers something.”

  “And, Joe?”

  “Yes, Tom?”

  “I’ll be at Dalkey train station handing out flyers later this evening and I’ll be doing the same at a Jack Lukeman gig on Dame Street next Friday.”

  “Why there, Tom?”

  “She was a big fan, Joe. She never missed a show.” Caller becomes emotional.

  “And he’s very popular; lots of people from all counties will be there.”

  “It’s as good a place as any to get the word out, Joe.”

  “God love you, Tom. I sympathize. Good luck to you. We’ll put Alexandra’s details on the website, and if you could send in a photo we’ll post it.”

  “I will, and thanks for taking the call.”

  “And if anyone has information on Alexandra Kavanagh, who went missing on the twenty-first of June 2007, would they contact Clontarf Garda Station, and the inspector in charge of the investigation is Des Martin. Right, we’ll be back after these ads.”

  Tom put down the phone and turned to Breda, his mother-in-law. She was sitting at the kitchen table, looking frail and small. She smiled at him through tears.

  “You did very well, love,” she said.

  “You should have left this phone number,” Eamonn said while pacing. Eamonn was Alexandra’s older brother, and he and Tom had never really been close. Alexandra’s disappearance had served to widen the divide between them. “And you should have said that she was upset about not getting pregnant.”

  “Nothing to do with anything,” Tom said. “She was fine, happy.”

  “You just didn’t want to see it!” Eamonn shouted. “It was tearing her apart and you didn’t see it!”

  “Take that back, Eamonn,” Tom said, walking toward Eamonn.

  Eamonn in his mind was begging Tom to punch him. Take a swing, I dare you!

  Breda called out to the two boys, “Stop it, both of you!”

  Alexandra’s father stood up from his chair outside on the patio. He put his cigarette out and came inside.

  “Go home now,” he said to Eamonn and Tom. “Go home before you both say and do things you’ll regret.”

  Eamonn and Tom both nodded and apologized. Breda was crying again. She looked at Tom, who had aged ten years in ten weeks. His black hair was almost entirely gray; his once-sparkly blue eyes were tired and circled by shadowed skin. He had been so persnickety about the way he looked that Alexandra’s family, especially Eamonn, had often joked about her marrying a metrosexual. His suits were always the best, dry-cleaned after one wearing and fitting precisely. His hair was professionally cut, and his face was perfectly clean. Off-site, Tom didn’t look like a builder; he looked like a banker. He was wealthy, and although he wasn’t extravagant, he left those around him in no doubt about his standing. Breda noticed his suit was now too big, his hair was a mess, and he hadn’t shaved in weeks. He was a shadow of the man he used to be, as she was a shadow of the woman and mother she once was. She recognized his suffering, as it mirrored her own, and she wanted her son, whose anger was more intense than his pain, to stop hurting her already mortally wounded son-in-law. She promised herself she would talk to Eamonn when she found the strength to deal with his quarrelsome nature.

  When Tom was leaving, she hugged him, and he could feel every bone in her back. She whispered into his ear, “She’s still with us, I can feel it. God will take care of her—she’s not alone because God is there beside her.”

  Tom nodded. “Try and eat, Breda.”

  Tom sat in his car for a minute or two and was still there when Eamonn came out of the house. Eamonn walked over to the car window and knocked on it. Tom rolled it down.

  “I don’t care what the police say,” Eamonn said. “I don’t care what my mother says. It’s your fault. I blame you.” He turned and walked to his own car and drove away, leaving Tom sitting in Alexandra’s parents’ driveway crying like a baby.

  Oh God, please, please, where is she? Bring her home to me, please, please, bring her home! I’m so sorry for everything I’ve done. Forgive me and bring her home.

  Alexandra had then been missing nine weeks and two days.

  2

  “Fear Is the Key”

  All the shapes in the dark are playing with your heart,

  fear is always near.

  It’ll never set you free, it’ll never let you be,

  once you let it in all the fun begins,

  ‘cos fear is all you’ll breathe.

  Jack L & the Black Romantics, Wax

  October 2007

  The night was damp and overcast. Jane had thought twice about whether she actually wanted to go out. It had been a long and tiring day, but she had promised her younger sister, Elle, and Elle did not handle disappointment well. The gig had been due to start at nine. It was just after ten. They had missed the supporting act, and Jack Lukeman would already be onstage. The venue didn’t have a car park, and because of a lack of inner-city knowledge and a pathological fear of driving the wrong way up one-way streets, Jane had parked the car miles away. They were already late and so were forced to run from the car park to the venue, and just as they turned the first corner the rain came tumbling down. Neither sister had an umbrella. Elle had a hood, but as she ran it insisted on falling back off her head. She held it tight around her face and continued to run, with Jane doing her best to keep up in heels and praying she wouldn’t break an ankle.

  At the door they fumbled for their tickets and, once they had presented them to the bouncer with the build of a silverback gorilla and the manner of a brick, he waved them through.

  “Move,” he said.

  “Charming,” Elle said, and Jane widened her eyes and tightened her mouth, which signaled to Elle to shut up.

  They passed a disheveled man who was considerably drier than they were. He was standing behind the box office and between the lifts and the stairs. He handed them each a flyer with a picture of a woman on it.

  “If you see her, there’s a number you can contact me at,” he said.

  Neither of them looked at the flyer because they could hear Jack singing “Don’t Fall in Love.” Elle spotted the lift. “We’re in the gods, let’s get the lift.”

  “I hate the lift.”

  “We’re missing the show.” Elle pouted.

  Jane sighed, and Elle knew that she had gotten her way. She pressed the button for the lift just as the silverback charmer looked at his watch and started to close the main doors. A woman in a full-length plastic see-through raincoat that was pulled tight around her face and knotted with a toggle under her chin pushed her ticket against the window and her foot in the doorway. The bouncer considered whether to let her in or to attempt to amputate her foot for a second or two before he opened it, took her ticket, and allowed her to enter.

  Elle smiled as the walking condom approached her. Well, that’s one way of keeping dry. The human condom ignored the leaflet man’s attempt to hand her a flyer and stood behind Jane, who was busy mentally prepa
ring to encase herself in a small space. Don’t freak out. It will all be over in seconds. The silverback charmer bolted the front door. The leaflet man packed away his remaining leaflets into a briefcase and stood behind Elle, waiting for the lift. The red light appeared over the doors and they heard a ding. Elle was first in, followed by the human condom and the leaflet man. Jane was frozen, but only for a second. When she realized that her sister and the two strange strangers were staring at her, she made her legs move toward them to avoid embarrassment. The doors closed, and Jane breathed in and out slowly and surely. Ten seconds and it will be over. Count back to one. Ten …nine …

  Elle could hear Jack singing clearly: “Don’t fall in love with the girls around here, you give them your heart they soon disappear.” She sang along quietly: “They come from country towns and live on Crescent Street and all that they share are the secrets they keep.”

  Jane counted in her head: …five …four …

  Elle became slightly louder as the song was reaching its conclusion, “La, la, la, la, la, la, la!”

  The human condom and the leaflet man stared forward, ignoring the tone-deaf girl who was compromising their enjoyment of the song by obscuring Jack L with her off-key wailing. Jane continued to breathe and count: …three …two …

  The lights went off. The lift ground to a stop with such a jolt that all four passengers automatically braced themselves. Jane stopped counting, Elle stopped wailing, and outside the music stopped playing. Only Jack L continued to sing. He finished the last line of the song without mike or music. The crowd cheered and roared, and Elle found herself staring from her sister, whose legs had gone from under her and who was suddenly sitting on the floor, to the human condom hanging on to the rail, to the leaflet man who seemed to be holding on to his briefcase for dear life. Outside the crowd was still roaring, and it was all so strange, and she liked it.

  “What’s going on?” she asked with a grin spreading across her face. “Do you think it’s a fire?”

  Jane’s breathing was becoming shallower and faster, and so she was in no position to respond. The leaflet man shook his head before telling her that if there was a fire, the alarm would ring. The human condom undid her toggle and pulled her see-through raincoat from her head to reveal short black hair streaked with gray and sprinkled with white.

  “It’s a power cut,” she said, “probably the damn weather. I knew I shouldn’t come out tonight, but I just wouldn’t listen to myself.” She took off her coat and rolled it up and put it into her oversized bag and sat on the floor next to Jane, who was trying her best not to hyperventilate. “Is she okay?” the leaflet man asked Elle, referring to Jane.

  “She’s got a thing about lifts,” Elle said. “Hang in there, Janey.” She squatted and brushed her sister’s wet blond hair from her face. “It won’t be long now.”

  For some reason the human condom found it necessary to correct her. “Actually, it could be hours.”

  Jane grabbed Elle’s hand and squeezed it hard.

  Elle looked at the human condom and shook her head. “Not cool, Condom. Not cool at all.”

  The human condom and the leaflet man stared at her quizzically, and both wondered if they had heard her correctly, but their musings were interrupted by a man using a loudspeaker to address the audience.

  Jane looked around the lift, wide-eyed. “What’s happening out there?” she asked breathlessly.

  “Shush,” the condom said, placing her finger to her lips.

  Onstage, Jack L and his band stood back, allowing the manager of the venue to fix his handheld microphone before making a second attempt to speak to the crowd without the loud screeching he’d nearly deafened himself with on his first attempt. The crowd was mumbling and shuffling and waiting for him to get off stage. Jack began to bounce behind him, and the audience laughed. The manager was taking too long to get the mike working, and Jack was in performance mode. He bounded across the stage like a puppy and threw his arm around the manager, who was now red-faced and fumbling. The man was scared. He was scared because Jack was well known for being as unpredictable as he was energetic and as mischievous as he was hypnotic. He prayed he wouldn’t be the butt of one of the singer’s jokes and sighed with relief when he got the mike working well enough so that it screeched only intermittently.

  He explained that the entire street was experiencing a blackout. He wasn’t aware how long the problem would last, and he apologized because for some reason the backup generator wasn’t working as it should.

  Back in the lift, the human condom’s ear was to the door.

  “What?” Elle said.

  “As I said, it’s a blackout.”

  “So what now?” Elle asked.

  “Shush,” she said, “and I’ll tell you.”

  Onstage, the manager assured the audience he had someone working on it and that if the generator didn’t kick in within the next ten minutes they could have their money back, but they booed him and that was when Jack took the mike from him. Jack was fired up and ready to play, and electricity was not something he was short of. He paced the stage like a caged panther before placing the mike to his mouth.

  “I’m not ready to leave,” he said, and the crowd roared its approval.

  Jack would often be described as anything from sexy to forbidding, one commentator even going so far as to describe him as the result of a struggle between a vampire and a wolfman. That night his mood and demeanor could only be described as a hybrid of Jack Nicholson’s malevolent Joker and Johnny Depp’s playful pirate.

  Jack bounded toward the side of the stage. In the blink of an eye he had scaled the wall and was hanging out of the balcony.

  “So are we going to do this?” he shouted. The audience screamed to signal it was. His dark arched eyebrows rose, his big wide grin appeared, and he jumped back onto the stage from the considerable height. “Let’s do it, then!” he said, and the crowd roared. He handed the mike to the manager, who was still standing on the stage and staring at the wall the singer had seemingly walked up, his mouth slightly agape. Jack patted him on the back. The manager walked offstage, thinking that he was going to have to put a sign up in the dressing rooms asking artists not to walk on the walls, while ruminating as to how the man had managed it.

  Jack pushed his hand through his shock of thick black hair, then turned to his guitar player and unplugged his guitar, and the crowd roared. The roadie handed the guitarist an acoustic guitar, and he fixed it around his neck. Jack looked toward the drummer, who took out his brushes and held them high.

  The crowd roared again.

  In the lift, the four captives wondered what was going on.

  “He’s not going to play, is he?” Jane said between deep breaths.

  “I think he is,” Elle said.

  Onstage, Jack nodded and leaned into the guitar player and said something unheard. The guitar player picked out the familiar chords to “Move On,” and Jack opened his mouth and his haunting, mythical voice emerged as clearly as though it was still amplified, and in that second he silenced the crowd.

  And as soon as he began to sing, inside the lift his voice resonated as though he was in there with them.

  “Ah Jesus, I love this song!” the condom said, punching the lift door. She slumped to the floor, leaving leaflet man as the only one still standing.

  Makes no difference who you are, love will find you, yeah,

  Opera or movie star, love will find your path.

  All the money in the world won’t save you from that.

  All the beauty in the world you can’t just cover your tracks …

  The audience joined in for the chorus:

  And if you move on it will keep up

  And if you jump town you know you’ll be found.

  “Should we make some noise?” Elle asked after a minute or two of the group sitting in silence save for Jane’s panting and Jack’s singing.

  “The bouncer will realize we’re in the lift,” the leaflet man said, hoping tha
t the bouncer was slightly more conscientious than his earlier encounter with him had suggested.

  “The silverback?” Elle snorted. “Fat chance.”

  “She’s right,” the condom said. “He was probably too busy picking fleas out of his ass to notice us getting in.”

  Elle laughed, clearly entertained by the condom’s crudity and her ability to pick up on and run with the primate theme. Leaflet man looked at the doors and decided to try to force them apart. He couldn’t get his fingers between them, though, and when he’d established that none of the women carried a crowbar or anything remotely like a crowbar in her handbag, he started to bang on the doors instead, which shook the lift, and that in turn made Jane pant harder, shake, and cry.

  “Breathe, Janey,” Elle said. “You’re all right, everything is fine.”

  Jane wasn’t fine. She was experiencing chest pain and fighting the urge to run through the wall.

  “If you don’t stop shaking the lift, that woman is going to have a full-on panic attack if she’s not already having one,” the condom said to the leaflet man.

  He turned and looked at Jane’s ghastly face. He stopped shaking the lift and sat down.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Jane tried to smile at him but she couldn’t breathe, never mind smile.

  “Does anyone have a paper bag?” Elle asked.

  The condom said no immediately, but leaflet man checked his briefcase.

  “No,” he said, “but try this.” He took out a large poster and fashioned it into a sort of paper bag. He handed it to Elle, who placed it around Jane’s nose and mouth and once again instructed her to breathe. It didn’t work. Jane pulled the poster away from her mouth and held it tightly against her chest, then lay down on the floor, cursing herself for wearing white linen, which was now rain-soaked and filthy.

  Oh my God, I’m going to catch a flesh-eating disease from this floor. Oh sweet God, whatever happens, let my face be last to go. I don’t want my child saying good-bye to an open wound. Good-bye, Kurt, Mum loves you. Good-bye, Dominic, you’re a selfish bastard, a waster, and an ass. God, I love you. Why can’t you love me? Good-bye, Mother, you are a bitch in your heart but I don’t hate you so that’s something. Good-bye, Elle, focus on your career and stop doing stupid things and you’ll be fine without me.