by Pip Drysdale
I turn my head quick, sharp. It takes a moment for my eyes to focus. For my brain to register.
Sabine.
With her iPhone.
Videoing us.
I flinch. Gasp. Pull back. Noah turns to look.
He squints at her. Frowns. ‘Sabine?’
She lowers the phone, looking down at the screen. Checking her work.
‘Sabine! What the fuck?’ he yells, pulling back from me. I pull my skirt down to cover me.
Her eyes dart from Noah to me then back to Noah. ‘C’est pour ta femme.’ Then she turns around and runs back to the doorway and down the stairs. My ears roar with blood: pour ta femme? You don’t have to be fluent to know that means: for your wife.
I look down to his hands, searching for a wedding band – but no, there’s no ring. Of course there’s no ring. I’m not some rookie. I wouldn’t have missed that.
‘Fuck,’ Noah says under his breath as he struggles to pull up his jeans.
‘I’ll be right back,’ he says, turning back to me. His jaw is clenched and his eyes are so fucking blue and my heart is beating so fast.
And then I watch him jog across the wet rooftop towards the door while I’m left to try to piece things together.
What just happened?
He opens the heavy door to the stairwell and disappears. I can hear his footsteps fading and then bang. The door slams. And I’m alone in the silence, on a rooftop in Paris, amid glistening puddles.
Just me and my memories of Harrison.
All those times where he wouldn’t let me go backstage after the show because he needed ‘time to decompress’.
All the women I’d see leaving when I was finally allowed access.
All the lies I’d tell myself about how happy we were until he finally revealed that we weren’t. All that pain.
Pour ta femme…
No. Married men are not my bag.
Do no harm, and all that.
My underwear is lying on the ground, a flash of white lace in the low light. I pick it up and slide it into my handbag. The air is cold and I’m shivering as I move over to the wall and look out onto the street. I can see Noah and Sabine arguing, moving down the stairs towards the road.
Fuck this.
I fumble around in the bottom of my bag, find my phone and pull up the Uber app. The time flashes back at me: 00.32.
I type my address into the app – 1 Rue du Regard – and head towards the door. Halfway down the stairs, a notification flashes up on my screen: my driver’s name is Khalid, he has five stars and he’s four minutes away.
I rush down the rest of the stairs, tugging my skirt down as I go.
The hallway is empty when I get there, so I rush out the front door unseen and move up the outside stairs slowly. Carefully. I look down towards the bottom of the stairs; Noah and Sabine are right there, but they’re too busy arguing to notice me. I try to make out what they’re saying, but I can’t so instead I focus on my feet, taking care not to slip on the rain-stained cement that glows orange under the streetlights until I’m standing by the tree where my Uber dropped me off earlier. A notification: Your driver is seven minutes away. I check the app – he must have got lost. Too many one-way streets to circumvent. I look left, then right. The street is silent. Nobody is here. And so I lean back against the cool stone of the building behind me and wait.
But seven minutes later Khalid is still not here and it’s starting to drizzle again. I move through to the app to call him when a notification fills my screen: Khalid is arriving soon. I wait for his headlights in the dark. But all I see is a delivery guy on a motorbike and I’m shivering from cold.
I squint down at the app to see where he is, reading the names of the roads. Shit. My pick-up address has been set to the lower part of Rue Chappe. Just past Rue André Barsacq at the bottom of the stairs, not the top. I’m in the wrong place.
I’ll have to walk past where Noah and Sabine are fighting.
Fuck.
But I have no choice. And so I brace myself and stumble down the stairs, but I can’t see them now, they’re gone. The breeze is chilly and it’s starting to rain properly so I rush down towards where the pin has been set; halfway down that lower segment of the road.
I’m almost there when a white car ahead of me pulls out and speeds away. Shit. What if that was him? Khalid. I try to catch the number plate but I can only manage the last part of it: AA.
I stare down at my app, trying to focus on the car type and plate number.
Khalid is: WW 398 SG.
That wasn’t him.
My phone lights up with a notification: Khalid has arrived. He will wait for two minutes before charges begin.
I turn around, searching the street for his car. Left. Right. Looking up towards the stairs and Noah’s apartment. Did I walk right past him?
And then I see the glow of approaching headlights as Khalid drives around the corner.
Chapitre neuf
The sky outside is a bruised purple smudge and big fat raindrops catch the light as they splatter on the skylight. My cheek is still raw from Noah’s stubble, the world is stained blue, the way it always is for me the morning after sex and a small piña-colada-shaped hammer is banging on the space behind my right eye. I’m sitting on the sofa, nestled beneath a beige blanket I found in the cupboard, staring down at my iPhone, just daring it not to recognise me hungover.
And all I can think as my phone unlocks is: I need to fix this.
I move quickly through to Noah’s Instagram profile, tap on his followers and type in: S-a-b…
A flash of white and then there she is.
Right at the top: Sabine Roux.
But as I stare down at her profile picture – flaming red hair, statue-white skin, bare shoulders – I remember her phone lens catching the yellow light of the lanterns and then her voice saying, ‘C’est pour ta femme.’
I want to believe I won’t be recognisable in the footage, that the light was too low or she wasn’t close enough. But the light wasn’t that low, and she wasn’t that far away from us, and I have an iPhone too, so I know how good the low light camera is. That’s why I bought it.
But still. There she is. It’ll be fine.
All I need is an email address, a phone number, some means by which I can contact her and ask her to destroy it. Reason with her.
I tap on her photograph and go to her profile. She has almost two thousand followers. I scan the biography.
Sabine Roux. Video artist. Capturing the moments that make our lives. Video means ‘I see’ in Latin.
Shit.
This is bad-bad-bad. So much worse than I thought. Because the best way to get an artist to do something is to ask them not to.
What if she’s uploaded it already?
I scour the thumbnails, searching for a rooftop, Noah and my silhouette in each frame. But they aren’t there. In fact, she hasn’t uploaded anything at all in fourteen hours. Not since a selfie at the bottom of a set of stairs. The sky is glowing indigo above her and behind her is a street sign: Rue Chappe. I vaguely recognise the surroundings; she’s standing at the bottom of the stairs that lead up to Noah’s building. Right near where Khalid picked me up. That must have been on her way to Noah’s party last night.
The photo before that was taken in some sort of park – there are lots of miniature boats on a body of water behind her and a tonne of trees. The location is set to le Bois de Boulogne. And the caption translates as: So lucky to live here.
There’s a link to a Vimeo page just below her biography. Maybe she uploaded it there. I tap on it. Hold my breath. And wait for it to load.
She has 1314 followers on Vimeo, joined three years ago and has uploaded thirty-eight videos in that time. I grip my jaw as I scan the details beside the most recent upload. It’s from a month ago. It’s entitled: ‘Love Actually’. And it’s had seventy-four views. I press play and sip my coffee as I watch the black screen fade to an image. There’s a bridge with an apricot suns
et reflecting off the Seine behind it. I recognise the buildings in the background; it’s not in frame but the Louvre is right there to the left. Which means this was filmed on Pont des Arts.
The first time I stood on that bridge was with Harrison in the spring of 2014. We scrawled our names with a black sharpie onto a bronzed lock and then attached it to the fence beside hundreds of others just like it. But all those locks, like our love, have been cleared away now; the weight declared a safety hazard. But, from this video, it appears a few rebellious locks remain, catching the light wherever they can be attached, like ours was. I wince at the memory but then my attention is captured by a couple who are now standing square in the centre of the frame.
Because they’re mid-argument.
The woman pushes the man’s chest. The camera draws in closer. She’s crying, wiping away tears with the back of her hand. Yelling something at him but there’s no sound so I don’t know what she’s saying. The man is frowning, and using his hands a lot, like he’s trying to explain. Tourists move around them, pretending not to watch. To notice. While behind them, another couple hold hands and blissfully stare out at the water.
The two moods of love caught in stark contrast.
The arguing man and woman both stand statue-still now, staring at each other while the world parts like a sea and moves around them. Seconds pass. Her eyes cast down. He steps towards her, takes her in his arms and they embrace. And the screen fades to black.
Two words in white font fade in: Love Actually.
I sit, staring at the screen, doing some quick mental arithmetic, adrenaline spinning through my veins. This video was only uploaded a month ago. But it was filmed while there were still green leaves on the trees in the background. We’re mid-October now and all the leaves have long since turned to burnt amber and red and are gathering in gutters.
Which means Sabine takes her time cutting together her films before uploading them. So just because mine hasn’t been uploaded yet doesn’t mean it won’t be.
She could be sitting in her apartment right now, sipping coffee just like I am, working on my video as she dreams up a white font name for the ending, something like: La maîtresse.
Fuck. I need to do something while I still have time.
I reach for my cup and take a sip of lukewarm coffee. My hand still smells of last night’s cigarettes and as I stare up at the rain splattering on the skylight, I think of the Instagram message I woke up to this morning: Hey, I’m so sorry about tonight. Catch up later? x
Noah sent it at 2.33 am, but I was already asleep by then.
I could reply now and ask him what Sabine said. Ask him what happened. Whether he got her to delete the video.
But I don’t want to.
And not just because he didn’t tell me he was married, not just because he got my private bits caught on video, but because he ran off and left me there on that rooftop, and didn’t bother texting for two whole hours.
Besides, it’s his wife, his marriage on the line. If he can get Sabine to destroy it, he will. A message from me won’t change a thing.
My head is thumping and my synapses are compromised. I get up and head through to the kitchen, pouring myself a glass of water. I’m thinking of Anne’s bedroom now, of her ensuite, of her medicine cabinet: maybe she has some sort of strong painkiller in there.
I move through her room, into the bathroom, and open the cabinet. Rows and rows of toiletries and orange bottles of pills stare back at me. I reach for a couple and read the labels. There’s a bottle of Ambien on the top shelf which has – I open the top and peer inside – three left. I take the bottle. There’s a yellow box of Doliprane on the bottom shelf. That’s the French version of paracetamol. I grab that too and head back to the kitchen, popping two of the Doliprane out of the packaging. I drop them onto my tongue and take a sip of water, and it’s as I swallow that relief finds me.
And not from the pills.
Sabine can’t upload it!
Because I’m in France, the land of cheese, wine and next-level privacy laws. If she uploaded a video like this without consent she’d be fined, or go to jail or something…
But what if she sees that as a good thing? As free publicity to get more attention for her work? She didn’t strike me as a people-pleaser.
What a fucking nightmare.
I head back to the sofa and plonk myself down, but as I sit there listening to the rain hit the glass in perfect sync with the throbbing of my head, I’m filled with a dark curiosity.
Who is this woman whose husband I had sex with last night?
Where was she last night? What does she do for a living? How does she wear her hair? What will she do if she sees that footage? Will she leave him? Will she try to fix it?
We never know exactly how we’ll respond to these things until we’re the one in the crosshairs.
My laptop is charging on the Louis Vuitton chest in front of me; I reach for it and fire it up. Pulling up a browser window, I type in Noah X, Paris, wife, husband. I didn’t see anything about a wife last time I googled him, but I wasn’t looking for things like that back then.
I imagine her young, naïve, adoring; maybe with some sort of tattoo to make her feel edgier. Perhaps a belly button ring.
My screen flashes white then up comes a list of links. Most of them are to various art blogs; all of them have the search terms ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ crossed out.
I move through to ‘Images’ and scan down through the thumbnails, looking for something, anything, I might have missed the last time I googled him. But most of the images are of Noah’s old grey geometric work or links to articles I’ve seen before. There’s only one that has him in it, and it’s towards the bottom of the third page. It’s of him and that woman, the one who discovered him. The one I spoke to at his exhibition… wait.
My heart bangs in my chest as I squint down at that little image.
Are they fucking holding hands?
I click on it and wait for it to load. And then there it is, the image in full.
They’re standing at some sort of black-tie event, him in a tuxedo, her in a long crimson dress with a string of diamonds glittering from her neck. It was taken two years ago. And yes, they’re holding hands.
She’s not his agent, she’s his wife.
But wait, there’s more. The caption reads ‘International gallerist Agnès Bisset with husband, Noah X, at the opening of her Paris gallery, Le Voltage’.
The walls move in towards me. This is bad on so many levels.
Because Noah said Sabine used to work at Le Voltage; that’s where they met. So if his wife owns that gallery, it’ll be très easy for Sabine to send her that video of us… they’re probably friends. Is that why she filmed us? Loyalty? But if Sabine and his wife were friends, Noah wouldn’t have been dancing with me like that in front of her. And his wife would have been there too…
So what then? Only one thing makes sense: Noah lied to me; Sabine was not just a model. They had had a relationship and seeing him with me pissed her off. She wanted his wife to know.
And fuck, fuck, fuck.
Because I’m just starting my career as an art and culture writer. The industry is small. And Agnès Bisset is a gallerist; according to that caption, an ‘international’ one. From the fact that her name is listed first, she’s also an important one. That means she’s well connected. And, if the diamonds sparkling from her neck and her flawless skin are anything to go by, she’s wealthy. Wealth means success, and success means clout. But more unsettling than any of that is something else: she’s spoken to me. She’s seen me up close. My cheeks flush hot as I remember her gaze sweeping over my cheap outfit at Noah’s exhibition. If she sees that video she’ll recognise me. I know she will. Which is all fine and good right now, while she doesn’t know who I am, but what about when our paths cross again, which they surely will? Be it in six days, or six months, eventually it’s bound to happen, and when it does, she’ll know it was me, she’ll realise where I
work, and nothing good will happen after that.
The chances of me getting out of this unscathed and unidentified just got significantly smaller.
I reach for my phone, pull up Camilla’s number and press ‘FaceTime’.
Briiinnngg, briiinnggg, briiinngg…
‘Bonjour,’ Camilla says in an accent that’s even worse than mine. I’ve caught her off guard. She’s chewing a piece of toast at her kitchen table, staring into the camera lens. She’s wearing a white She-Ra T-shirt under a turquoise satin kimono, her dark hair is back in a ponytail and her cheeks are shiny like she’s just put on face cream. I can see her flat in the background and I’m filled with a pang for home.
‘Hey,’ I say. My voice comes out dry.
‘Are you okay?’ she asks, tilting her head to the side. ‘You look weird.’
I shake my head in reply. ‘No. I think I really fucked up.’
* * *
Three minutes and a short summary of last night later, Camilla has concurred that, yes, I definitely have fucked up. She’s sipping peppermint tea, her eyes wide as she says: ‘What are you going to do?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say, taking a sip of what is now cold coffee while I stare at my own face in the little screen and adjust the angle so the bags under my eyes aren’t quite so bad.
‘Well, even if that girl does upload it or his wife sees it,’ she says slowly, like she’s thinking as she goes, ‘you’re just some random woman, how will anyone know who you are? And if nobody knows who you are, they can’t tell your boss, can they?’
‘But I’ve spoken to her, the wife,’ I say. ‘If she sees that footage she’ll definitely recognise me. And even though she doesn’t know where I work right now, I’ll bump into her again, I know I will.’
‘Hmm,’ Camilla says. ‘It’s a tricky one.’
‘I’m so fucking stressed.’
‘Okay,’ she says, pausing. ‘Just remember, you’re not the married one. And it’s not like you knew. Sex is hardly illegal. And you’re in France. Doesn’t everyone cheat over there?’
This is why I love Camilla. Even though she’s the romantic one between us, the one who believes in soulmates and marriage and all that, she still has my back regardless.