“I’m supposed to meet my supervisor; do you want to walk with me?” she offered.
“Okay,” I said, though I didn’t want to. I felt floaty, and didn’t have it in me to resist.
Liv did all the talking, about random stuff. She had lots of Anglophilic facts to share. I didn’t have to say anything. “Did you know that Cambridge was founded by Oxford scholars fleeing the aftermath of a murder?” She said this like she was talking about people we knew.
I stopped walking. This was news.
“Really?” I asked.
“One of the students killed a townsperson in an archery accident. But the locals called it murder. There were riots, and the University shut down. Some of the students didn’t want to wait it out, so they came here. Not really that interesting. Nothing salacious or gory.” She laughed to be unserious about it.
“Of course they had to leave,” I said.
“Well, I guess.”
“Of course they had to leave,” I repeated. I felt like I was walking backward.
“Hey!” she said, and the sound of it stretched out in the middle, like it was thinned and elongated by a rolling pin. I think I was swaying. It was hard to tell. It might have been the world. The world did spin, didn’t it? Perhaps I was just perceiving it for the first time. Perhaps everyone else was in denial.
The doctor shone a flashlight in one of my eyes, then the other. He took my blood pressure. My body did everything right. He pronounced me physically well and advised me to relax. Liv called a taxi to take us back to my room. She stayed with me and wouldn’t go, even when I demanded it. She made me lie still and brought me water to help me down some paracetamol.
“Have you seen Nick?” she asked. This was the first time someone asked that. Later it would be asked over and over again.
“No,” I said, meaning not today or yesterday. I didn’t want to talk about when I had seen him last.
“He’ll want to help me pamper you. I’ll send him over to sit with you while I’m at supervision.” College tutors meet their assigned undergrads every week to monitor progress. Liv grabbed my phone off the nightstand.
“No!” I protested in a sharp bark.
“Look, no one’s accusing you of being a baby, we’re just looking out for you like friends do. Stop being so stubborn.”
I knew I had to get it together. I couldn’t keep making a big deal out of things. So a man kissed me. So I had a mother. So what? These things happen; the world turns. You can’t dwell on it or you’ll just get dizzy. Liv left Nick a silly message in a Cockney accent, just to make me smile. It finally got a laugh out of me and Liv looked satisfied.
“Okay,” I said to myself, having no idea what I would say to him when he came. I knew he would come, to be kind, but I didn’t know what he would want from me anymore. Liv left me with a bottle of water and an energy bar. I propped myself up and read.
Nick didn’t come. Maybe his cellphone was off. Maybe he was in a lecture. I wasn’t worried; actually I was relieved to be alone. I slept. By the time I woke up on Friday, he was officially considered gone.
A policeman came to Peterhouse.
I was with my supervisor, Allison. I’d already been told that Nick was missing. Allison said we could reschedule, but I didn’t want to. I needed to hold on to whatever hadn’t disappeared.
We were talking about evolution, which is just a charged word for change. Things change. I know some people back home who don’t believe in it, but I hope every day that it’s really true.
A man knocked and entered without waiting for the invitation. “I’d like to ask you a few questions, Miss Bailey.”
This was different. See? Find what’s changed. The accent was different. It helped to be in another country. This was not the same. It was not happening again.
He asked Allison to wait outside and took her place across the table from me. I gathered up the papers that were spread there, and reached to close an open book. He splayed his whole hand across both pages. He read the chapter title upside down. It was “Mating Systems.” As soon as he backed off to get out a small notebook I slammed the textbook shut.
“Do you know Nicholas Frey?” he asked.
“Yes.” He wrote that down, just the one word.
“And what is the nature of your relationship?”
“We’re friends.” The policeman nodded and wrote Friends. He put a dot after it, like it was a whole sentence, and looked back up at me.
“We’ve been alerted that he failed to appear for a meeting yesterday morning, then missed an appointment with his supervisor. He hasn’t been to the house where he rents a room since Wednesday. When was the last time you saw him?”
“Uh-three days ago. Four? It was Tuesday. Today’s Friday. I saw him Tuesday.”
He wrote that down. He wasn’t hiding his notes from me. I was clearly meant to see my own words transcribed. “I see,” he said. “May I ask what you were doing, what was his mood, and so on?”
“I-we-went to the Sedgwick. That’s the geology museum. He seemed normal.”
“Normal?”
“Just Nick.”
“Ah. Did he have any plans?”
My face heated up, but the policeman was still talking. “Was he going out with friends, heading out of town?”
“It’s nearly the end of term. He wouldn’t go out of town now.”
“No,” the policeman agreed. He wrote down: End of term. Then asked, “Is there any reason you can suggest why he might have chosen to leave so suddenly?”
“You think he left on purpose?” Surely Nick was too stable to run away over a mere embarrassment. For all he knew I’d had stomach flu and it was nothing personal. This wasn’t my fault.
He leaned in, fascinated. “You don’t? What do you think happened?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you don’t think he left willingly.”
“He wouldn’t do that.” He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t let anyone down; he wouldn’t make anyone worry. The policeman folded his notepad and put it back into his pocket.
“You’ve been described to us as his girlfriend…”
“By whom?” I was indignant. I was on the offensive now.
“Various sources. It isn’t true?”
“No,” I said.
“Maybe he wanted it to be true?”
“No.” It was a lie, but it didn’t feel like a lie.
“Anything on his mind lately? Troubles with his work…?”
“Nothing that I know of.”
“All right,” he said, punctuating his words by clicking his pen closed.
“Are you worried about him?” he asked, as if it were a personal question.
I swallowed. “Yes.” If the police were involved, I was pretty sure we all needed to worry.
He waited, but I didn’t say anything else.
“All right,” he finished at last. “Thank you for your time, Miss Bailey. May I give you my card? I’d like you to ring me if you think of anything else. I’ll come by again.”
I’d hidden my hands inside my sleeves. Two fingers peeped out to take the card.
“He’s not really missing,” I called out to the policeman’s back. He turned around and stared hard at me. I realized what I’d said was ridiculous. “I mean,” I added in a whisper, “that this isn’t happening. Okay?”
The policeman nodded slowly. Allison stepped in. I think she’d listened through the door. “We have a lot of work to do,” she announced.
She watched out the window to see the policeman leave. She waited for him to pass the Porters’ Lodge before turning back to me. “Polly, you look awful,” she said, surprised. Then, to make everything better: “I’ll make you a cup of tea.”
I burst out laughing. Now I know where my mother got it from. It’s not a personal tic, it’s just English.
“The police came to talk to me,” I told Liv. We faced each other cross-legged on my bed, in my room at the top of St. Peter’s Terrace. The ceiling was all jagged from the slant of the roof and the protruding window. “Well,” I amended. “One policeman. Singular.”