by Pip Drysdale
And there we have it, ladies and gentlemen, the real reason why he’s here. It’s not about me and wanting to make sure I’m okay with things. He just doesn’t want me telling anyone what happened between us and ruining his divorce settlement.
I pull my hand away. ‘Who am I going to tell?’ I ask like I don’t care.
‘I don’t know,’ he says, and something softens behind his eyes. The edges turn down in the smallest of ways, like he’s sad. He opens his mouth to speak but it takes a moment for any sound to follow. ‘That thing I said on the roof,’ he says. ‘It was true. I liked you. I mean…’ He flinches slightly. ‘I still like you.’ His voice cracks as it hits the air. And my heart blips. If I were hooked up to a heart monitor in a hospital right now there would be bells and sirens going, nurses would be running to my bedside. And that means it’s time to leave.
‘Noah, I’ve got to go,’ I say, standing up and hooking my bag over my shoulder. ‘I’ll see you around.’
And then I head to the door, my pulse banging in my wrists. I walk out into the street. And even though I want to, even though I can feel his eyes on my back, I don’t look back. Not even once.
Because sometimes that’s what you have to do in life: you have to bruise your own heart to ensure it doesn’t break.
Chapitre treize
We’re stuffed into a metro carriage; a sea of navy, beige and black sardines in trainers and shiny office shoes. The air is thick with body heat and damp umbrellas, and smells like cologne, stale cigarettes and wet newspaper. It’s hard to believe that just two months ago, when I came across for my interview, the city was a ghost town; the whole of Paris having emptied out towards the south. I’ve never understood how people can go to the same place year after year. If I took a holiday I’d go to Japan. I’d go in the autumn and see the maple trees changing colour.
The doors beep and close and I grab onto the silver metal pole for stability and close my eyes. A flash of Noah’s hand reaching for mine as we crossed the road. I push it away and think about the maple trees again.
A high-pitched metallic squeal pierces the air and makes me grimace, the carriage jolts and my eyes flick open. All around me people are listening to music with their eyes closed, pretending they’re somewhere else; others try reading books, their necks craned at strange angles and elbows verging into others’ private space; some glance at their reflections in the window, readjusting their fringe or tucking hair behind their ears; some are scrolling through messages on their phones; and then there’s a man by the window. He’s trying to read the newspaper but he doesn’t have the space.
There’s a guy of about seventy in mustard trousers, holding onto the same pole as me for stability. Music pounds from his headphones and I can hear the beat, the voice. Hip-hop. This makes me instantly like him. Because I imagine the numerous marketing minds that defined that music’s demographic core, and not once was mustard guy included. He’s an anomaly just like me; a hip-hop soul in the body of a middle-class grandfather to my philophobe in the city of love.
Moments like this make me feel almost normal.
I’m still looking at him when I hear: ‘Mesdames et messieurs’. I look up and behind me a man with his hair scraped back in a ponytail, wearing a pale linen pair of pants and a shirt smeared with dirt around the cuffs, makes his way through the carriage. He’s shaking a paper cup and telling some story at the top of his lungs. Everyone looks away. I reach into my pocket and when he gets to me I drop a euro into his cup. He smiles and moves on. It’s only as I watch him move to the other side of the carriage that I glance down at his black trainers: a pair of black and white Balenciagas. It’s barely 8.30 am and already I’ve been hustled. But now the train is slowing down; we’re coming to a stop.
The brakes screech. I look out the window: cream tiled walls, a crowd of commuters and five plastic chairs all occupied. I glance up at the wall, it reads Hôtel de Ville.
People stand up and others sit down, someone presses the lever on the door and a crowd floods out onto the platform. There’s usually wi-fi in stations so I reach for my phone to check for messages. There’s one.
Camilla: SOS!
I type back: What’s going on?
Typing bubbles.
Accidentally super-swiped guy on 14th floor! WTF DO I DO?
The doors close and we start to move again and before I can type back the wi-fi is gone and I’m just standing smiling down at my phone. I miss Camilla. I miss meeting for drinks after work and hearing about how her boss had done this or that. I miss the mid-date check-ins where she’d text to tell me what the guy was really like. She still does all that but it’s not the same now that I’m not in London.
I drop my phone into my bag and look back at the man with the newspaper. Is that dandruff on his collar? He’s fiddling around now, getting ready to leave. We’re almost at Saint-Paul, the last stop before mine: Bastille. He closes his paper, grabs his briefcase and stands up. As the train slows down and he moves to stand in line to leave, I glance down at the front page of his newspaper.
It’s folded in half, but I can see the whole top half of the page, the headline and the photograph.
My breath catches in my throat.
Another girl is missing.
She’s young. Pretty.
Just like every other missing girl.
But this time it’s different.
Because this time I know her.
Sabine.
* * *
By the time we arrive at Bastille, my mind is numb. Through the whirr of blood pumping through my brain I hear the doors beep – a foghorn – everyone spills out onto the platform and I’m absorbed into a swamp of commuters. I join the stampede towards the stairs that lead outside and tell myself, I must be wrong, I must be wrong, I must be wrong.
Because it can’t be her, can it?
A woman in black stilettos moves slowly up the stairs, tottering as she holds onto the bannister for safety. I push past her and take my place in the slow-moving line. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. I need to check. I reach for my phone and pull up Safari, but there’s no reception yet. My hairline is damp with sweat and my pulse racing as I reach for my little white billet and push it into the slot, moving through the turnstiles, rushing towards the exit and up the stairs.
I’m met with a light mist of drizzle on my cheeks as I head out into the open and once again pull up Safari. I breathe in petrol fumes and shield my phone screen from the rain with my body as I tap through to Le Parisien. People push past me, muttering annoyance beneath their breath, as I scroll through the latest stories.
And then, there she is.
Staring back at me.
The same photograph I just saw in the newspaper.
Sabine.
The world swirls around me as I try to read the article. It’s in French but I glean the basics: woman’s disappearance… last heard from on Friday night… didn’t arrive… failed to respond to phone calls… reported missing…
How can this be happening?
People are bumping into me, telling me to move out of the way. And so I reach for my umbrella, put it up, and in some sort of trance, I move towards the crosswalk. I’m shivering from cold or shock, but I cross the road with everyone else, and put one foot in front of the other until twelve minutes later I’m standing outside the office, stabbing the keypad with the code.
Bzzzz.
I push open the door and move inside. Time slows as I head towards the elevator and press the up button, then wait for the familiar sound of the lift tumbling down towards me.
There it is.
That blessed, familiar mechanical crunch.
The elevator arrives and I step inside.
My heart is slower now, as though it’s scared to beat. And I’m telling myself shitty things like, She’s only missing not dead. Noah said she wanted more than anything to be an artist, maybe she’s doing it for attention, some sort of messed-up PR stunt…
And just as quickly as I think these t
hings, I feel awful for going there.
Because this is how it happens. This is how victims get blamed.
The elevator doors slide open and I step out into the office. Everything is exactly as it was yesterday when I left: Judy smiles up from her desk as I move past her, printers hum, Claudia talks loudly on speakerphone, Stan is in with Hyacinth with the door closed, Wesley sits grimacing at his screen, Nathalie is in the kitchen and the rest of the office is quietly going about its business.
Nobody pays any attention to me as I move over to my desk, drop my bag on the floor and slowly, calmly, power on my computer.
‘Morning,’ Wesley snipes from his side of the desk.
‘Morning.’ I reply. Deadpan. I stare at my screen, waiting… waiting… waiting.
A flash of white and my computer is on. I pull up the browser and type in Le Parisien.
As I see her face yet again, I let out a deep, controlled exhale.
‘Everything okay?’
‘Fine,’ I say without even looking up.
I need to know what else the article says. I need to know everything. And so I highlight the text, and copy and paste it into Reverso then press ‘translate’. After a few moments the text appears in English. And, as I scan through the words, my vision blurs.
Woman’s Disappearance Goes Viral
Sabine Roux, 22, was last heard from on her way to a party in Montmartre on Friday, 15 October. Miss Roux was a student at Parsons Paris and a small group of classmates began posting notices about her on social media on Monday morning after she didn’t arrive at various sessions throughout the weekend, and failed to respond to phone calls. ‘Her phone has been off since Friday and Sabine just isn’t like that. She always answers her phone. And all she cares about is her work. She wouldn’t just not turn up,’ said the student who contacted Le Parisien. ‘The police won’t listen to us but something is very wrong. We had to do something.’ Within 12 hours there were more than 3000 posts on various platforms asking if anyone had seen her. The police have not issued a comment but an informed source told Le Parisien that Sabine Roux has now been formally reported as missing.
I pull up Instagram immediately, go to her page and click on ‘tagged photographs’. Up come pages of pictures of Sabine – smiling, winking, blowing on a fake hand gun – all with loving messages beneath them. All with the hashtag #sauverSabineRoux.
A wave of nausea rolls through me.
She was last heard from on Friday night.
That was Noah’s party.
I was there.
A flash of Sabine’s phone lens glinting on the rooftop, just before she ran down those stairs. I look up from my computer screen and across to the white door of the bathroom.
Stan storms out of Hyacinth’s office, slamming the door, and my mouth turns sour.
I’m going to be sick.
I stand up as calmly as I can and grab my bag. I avoid Wesley’s eyes but can feel him watching me as I move across the room. I push open the bathroom door, move past the sink and mirror, pull open the cubicle, kneel on the cold tiles, hold back my hair with one hand and, as quietly as I can, vomit into the toilet bowl.
Sabine’s voice echoes in my head: ‘C’est pour ta femme.’
My stomach contracts and bile fills my mouth and I vomit again. I grit my teeth and focus on the sound of my breath and the almost imperceptible hum of conversation coming in from outside.
I need to pull myself together. If someone finds me here there will be questions. Questions I’m not ready for. I reach for the loo roll and blow my nose. And, with the cool floor beneath me, I think of Noah and our conversation about Sabine in the bistro last night.
‘She’s not replying to my calls.’
This must be why. Has he seen the papers? Does he know?
I should call him. I fumble around in my handbag, find my phone, go to my Instagram messages and tap on his most recent message: his phone number.
My breath is quick and my thoughts fractured as I tap on it and listen as the line rings.
Ring.
Ring.
Ring.
‘Hey, you’ve called Noah. Leave a message.’
Beep.
I speak before I really think it through, adrenaline making my words quick and jittery. ‘Hey, Noah, it’s me, I just saw the news about Sabine and Friday night and I—’
But instead of finishing the message, I hang up. Quickly. What was I thinking?
Because it was Noah’s party. If it turns out something has happened to Sabine, the police will question him. They’ll want to know who was there. And right now, nobody knows my real name. Nobody knows I was there. I can walk away and pretend it never happened. Without ever talking to the police. Without risking Hyacinth finding out. Because it’s not like I know anything. It’s not like I can help.
I push myself up and unlock the cubicle door. It swings open with a squeak. I move over to the white ceramic sink and splash my face with cold water. I take a deep breath. I reach for a paper towel from the dispenser above the bin and dab my face dry. Blot my mascara and reach into my bag for my lip gloss. As I trace my lips with vanilla, my mind calms. Because there’s no need to do anything rash right now. It could be a false alarm. She could turn up tomorrow. The press probably wouldn’t even be reporting this if it hadn’t come hot on the heels of the Matilde Beaumont story. I can just ride it out.
You’re fine, Harper. Fine.
Chapitre quatorze
Two blurry days later, it’s a feeling of falling that wakes me up. Or maybe it’s the incessant beeping of my alarm. I’m not sure what I was dreaming about, but as I pull my mask from my eyes, a hologram of Sabine standing in that doorway videoing us is branded on my mind’s eye. I reach for my phone, turn off my alarm, and check the time. It’s 7.20 am and there’s one message from a dating app on the screen. Nee-koh-lah. Hey beautiful, want to catch up tonight? X.
Finally, a question I know the answer to: No.
I groan, pull out my earplugs, and try to stand up but my brain is fuzzy and my tongue is thick; I couldn’t sleep last night so I took another one of Anne’s Ambiens. Now I’m dizzy and late and as I move through to the kitchen, I can smell orange blossom coming from my wrist. Because yesterday I went with Nathalie to try out that perfume mixing place in Le Marais. It was four hours of pure hell: lots of smiling and nodding and pretending to care what oud smelled like while surreptitiously checking my phone while nobody was looking. Then last night was spent at the laundromat, listening to the whirr of my washing spinning around the dryer as I scrolled through pages and pages of social media posts – the whole of Paris seemed keen to claim the missing girl now – and watched and re-watched every video on Sabine’s Vimeo page, looking for god knows what. All I found were stolen snippets from her daily life: a busker counting his money in le Bois de Boulogne; a group of students huddling together and checking for onlookers, at what looked like her art school; Agnès Bisset talking to a tall, willowy potential buyer; and an elderly couple walking hand in hand outside Sacré-Cœur. But nothing to tell me what happened to Sabine.
Now today is Thursday, and she’s still gone.
I flick on the kettle and stare out the window because I know what that means. Sabine has been gone since last Friday, that’s six days, long past the seventy-two hours where the likelihood of finding her alive is high.
I swallow hard and warm my hands on the side of the kettle and my phone buzzes from the countertop: a private number. I stare at it: this happened yesterday too. But nobody calls from an unmarked number unless it’s a telemarketer, so I press the red button and send it to voicemail.
The kettle boils. I make my coffee and take a sip. My tongue recoils. It’s strong. And as my eyes return to the sky outside, I can’t help thinking of what Camilla said when I called her to tell her Sabine was missing last night: Come home.
But I don’t want to go home. Or rather, I do, but I can’t. Because going home would mean going backwards. I’d be back in a medi
ocre job doing something I hate, going to bars that remind me of Harrison, with nothing but paying bills, consuming and dying to look forward to, telling anyone who’ll listen about that one time I got a job in Paris but then left it because of something bad that happened. Something I had no control over. And bad things happen all the time, in every city in the world. I need to stick it out. I won’t forgive myself if I leave now.
I take another sip of coffee waiting for the caffeine to work its magic as I look out the window. My hair is tangled from tossing and turning and I gently pull my fingers through it as I stare blankly at the space where Mr Oiseau usually sits. But he’s not here this morning. And it feels cold and empty without him. My phone pings from the countertop and I glance down at the screen. Did the telemarketer leave a voicemail?
But it’s not a voicemail.
It’s a news notification.
I squint down at the screen, reading and rereading the words. It takes a while for the meaning to settle in my mind. Even Ambien can’t protect me from this.
Woman’s body identified as Sabine Roux.
No.
No. No. No.
I stare down at the words, needing them to morph into something else, anything else. How can this be happening?
Shit.
Shit. Shit. Shit. Now it’s real.
She’s dead.
I clench my eyes shut and hang onto the sink as a deep nausea washes over me. I scrabble to collect my thoughts. Calm down, Harper. But in the darkness all I can see is that headline: Woman’s body identified as Sabine Roux.
My eyes flick open and I grab my phone. Because I need to know everything. Now. Where was she found? What happened to her? A flash: her face slightly purple, lying in a ditch. Who did this to her? I tap on the notification and move through to the article but it’s in French and fuck other languages right now.