Page 69 of None of This is True

‘The afternoon?’

‘Well then, let’s not worry until the afternoon,’ says Zoe and Alix nods but then something occurs to her and she pulls out her phone and opens up her banking app. She and Nathan have a joint bank account. They always have done, ever since it became clear that Alix was never going to be a big earner and that Nathan already was. Nathan never looks at it. He never looks at bank statements or restaurant bills or keeps receipts. He spends money on the assumption that he is roughly balancing his outgoings with his income and, for the most part, he is correct.

She scrolls through the pending payments section of her online statement, looking for anything to explain where he might be, but there is nothing. Nothing since a payment to the bar in the West End that Giovanni said they’d left him in, of £25.60. No Uber payments. No hotel charges. Nothing. He has disappeared without a trace.

The afternoon arrives. Dark clouds appear overhead, and the temperature finally drops a degree or two. Zoe and Maxine have stayed longer than planned and there is a weird unsettledness in the air, as if they are in a waiting room expecting an announcement of some kind.

Alix spends an hour in her walk-in wardrobe ransacking the pockets of Nathan’s clothes, looking for more clues to his behaviour, but there’s nothing. Her sisters offer her food, but she can’t eat. She can’t think. She can barely breathe.

The dark clouds gather momentum and then, at just after four o’clock, the rumbling begins, and by four thirty the rain lashes down, the air fills with petrichor and the heat finally drops. They run around closing windows all over the house. Alix calls Giovanni again, but he doesn’t take her call. Her sisters tell her they have to leave in an hour, their children have homework to do, their cats need feeding, it’s a school night, and Alix realises that the moment her sisters leave, she will be trapped in the house, unable to leave without the children, and she quickly changes out of her summer dress and into leggings and trainers and walks as fast as she can towards Giovanni’s house, half a mile away. He’s lying; she knows he’s lying. She needs to see him face to face, to look into his eyes, look into his partner’s eyes, get the truth about what happened last night.

He looks shocked when he sees her at the door. He opens it a crack and then fully open with a sigh of surrender. ‘Still no sign of him?’ he asks meekly.

‘No. Still no sign. And, Gio, please, don’t treat me like an idiot. I know something happened last night. Look.’ She empties her pockets of the things she’d found in her shoe rack. ‘Look,’ she says again. ‘These are Nathan’s. I found them last night. He makes out he’s purer than pure, and then I find girls’ phone numbers scrawled on napkins, bags of cocaine. I mean, seriously, just be honest with me. Was there a girl involved last night? Just tell me!’

And then all the remaining puff goes out of Giovanni, and he invites her in and sits her at his kitchen table, which is covered with the debris of a family lunch, plates and dishes brought in from the sudden rain still with splashes of rainwater on their rims. She sees Giovanni and his partner exchange a look and then he turns to her and says, ‘There was a girl. But seriously, honestly, Alix, it wasn’t anything. And I swear, Nathan has never gone off with a girl before. I don’t know who that Daisy is on the napkin. Maybe someone who wanted a job or office space or something. We talk to randoms all the time when we go out. But he has never, ever gone off with someone. I swear. But last night this woman came and sat with us. Her name was Katelyn. Said she’d been stood up by her mate, was it OK if she hung out with us for a while. And she ended up staying and drinking with us and then we left the pub to go to the bar in Soho and she came with us. But I swear, Alix, there was nothing going on with them. Nathan kept talking about you. Kept saying he was married. How beautiful you were.’

Alix blinks slowly. She glances at her wedding ring and turns it once around her finger before looking up at Giovanni again. ‘And then what happened?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, you said you left Nathan in the bar at midnight. Did she leave too?’

Giovanni drops his gaze to the tabletop. He shakes his head slowly. But then he looks up at her quickly and says, ‘She was saying she was going to get him home. She was saying that Nathan told her he was on a promise and she was going to make sure he got home to … well, you know?’

Alix exhales heavily and lets her head roll backwards. ‘He told a complete stranger about our sex life?’

Giovanni nods again. ‘But, honestly, it was just fun. Just banter. She just seemed like one of the boys, you know. She didn’t seem like she was …’

‘Like she was what?’

‘I don’t know. Like she was going to lead him astray, I guess. It just felt like one of those nights, you know, when Nathan wasn’t going to stop. One of those nights when he was going to get lost to the night, and – honestly? I think we were glad he had someone with him, so that we could, you know, just go home.’

He glances up at her sheepishly. ‘I’m sure he’ll be home soon,’ he says. ‘You know what he’s like. He’s probably home right now. Just walked in through the door.’ He smiles at her, but she doesn’t return it.

‘What did she look like? This Katelyn?’

‘Pretty?’ he says, his voice racked with apology.

‘How old?’

‘Youngish? Maybe late twenties? Early thirties?’

She sighs and rolls her eyes. ‘I wish you’d told me this earlier,’ she says. ‘I wish you hadn’t lied.’

‘I’m sorry, Alix,’ he says, picking at a bit of paper with his fingernails. ‘I’m really sorry.’

Monday, 22 July

Walking the children to school the next morning feels surreal. The air is cool and green, and she has thrown on a jacket over her summer clothes. The streets teem with children in sky blue and navy. Alix stares at them keenly. None of them has a father who went missing this weekend.

Ten minutes after she gets home, she notices she has a missed call from a number she doesn’t recognise. She googles the number and feels a jolt of nervous energy surge all the way through her when she sees that it is the number for a hotel just off Tottenham Court Road, and then a wave of relief passes through her. She pictures Nathan waking up after the biggest bender yet, rubbing his eyes, looking at the time, realising that he’s been out cold for forty-eight hours, looking for his phone, discovering it was out of charge, using the hotel’s landline to call her, and everything falls into place. She calls the number back immediately with slightly shaking hands.

‘Hi!’ she says briskly to the young-sounding woman who answers the phone. ‘I think it’s possible that my husband just called from this number. Nathan Summer? Is he staying there?’

There’s a tiny pert silence and then the young woman says, ‘Oh, hi. Is this Alix Summer?’

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Yes. I, er – how did you know my name?’

---