The Paris Affair

by Pip Drysdale

  ‘Yes,’ she says slowly, her smile strained.

  I give it a moment then check the time on my phone.

  ‘Well, I should be going,’ I say, with a small fake smile.

  And then I head to the door. It’s only as I step outside I realise I’m holding my breath and my shoulders are around my ears.

  The door clicks closed behind me and I start to walk down the road. I pass the alleyway once more and glance down it.

  And just above the back door, right where Noah and I were talking, is a CCTV camera.

  Chapitre dix-neuf

  Madame Roux returns with the flowers I brought her – yellow chrysanthemums – in a big white vase and puts them down on the large cream doily in the middle of the coffee table. Chrysanthemums. In France, those are the flowers you buy for people when somebody dies. At least, that’s what the flower seller told me when I bought them on the way here this morning, but I’m not sure that’s entirely true. Mme Roux didn’t seem particularly thrilled when she saw them. But then I handed her that business card, introduced myself as Lors Carron from Le Voltage and told her why I was here. Her eyes softened after that. She let me inside.

  She sits down and pours the coffee. A big silver pot and two tiny cups.

  It’s always strange to see where someone lives. It tells you so much about them. Often things you’d never guess from meeting them. Like Sabine with her bright red hair and enfant terrible demeanour seems misplaced in the leafy suburbia of Boulogne-Billancourt among the floral throw pillows and doilies. Yet that’s where she lived. Right now, I’m sitting on the sofa she would have sat on many times: a light green and pink paisley. A shiver runs down my spine as though Sabine’s ghost is here, right now, watching me lie to her mother.

  The feeling is compounded by the fact Mme Roux looks just like her daughter: though her hair is grey and perfectly coiffed, not red and messy, and her movements are slower. It’s as though she’s weighed down or constricted by a heavy gauze of grief that has wrapped itself around her. A gauze that is bound to only tighten over time.

  ‘Sabine was so excited about this exhibition,’ she says, pushing my little cup towards me.

  That’s what I told her at the door: that we, at Le Voltage, were putting on Sabine’s exhibition. That I needed some information for the flyers. Yes, I’m basically Satan’s little helper, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. Because I don’t know how she feels about journalists and I couldn’t risk her not talking to me. So this was all I could think of. How else am I meant to do Sabine justice in my article?

  ‘I wish I’d met Sabine,’ I say. ‘I only started working there after she had already left. Can you tell me about her?’ I probe. Anything I can add to the eight hundred flimsy words I penned last night will do at this point. Because I can’t even include the truth about what happened on that rooftop; to do so would open Pandora’s box right up. Me being Pandora. And so instead I built on the lie I told Hyacinth and cited ‘creative differences’ as the fuel that sparked the argument between Noah and Sabine and had them leave the party together.

  Mme Roux tries to smile at my question, but her eyes grow pink with tears and she looks down, clenching her jaw as if trying not to cry. ‘She was brave,’ she says in a small voice, nodding at her cup.

  I glance up at the walls behind her: there are three large framed photographs I recognise from Sabine’s Instagram page. Black-and-white prints of the same woman covering her eyes, her ears and her mouth: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.

  ‘She was such a talent,’ I say gently and my stomach shrinks. This is a lot harder than I expected.

  ‘With Sabine, everything was about her work,’ Mme Roux says. ‘Most girls are all about boys. Not Sabine. She fell in love with the camera…’ Her eyes cast down.

  Then she sets down her coffee cup, it clinks as it hits the saucer, and she gets up and heads off down the passageway somewhere. I look around the room: there’s a big grandfather clock ticking away in the corner. The sort that looks like a little bird might pop out on the hour and say ‘cuckoo’. A bookshelf filled with old books, the kind you know are old because the spines are all shades of navy, brown and burgundy with metallic type. There are silver frames with photographs, mainly of a little girl with dark blonde hair who I assume is Sabine.

  Then there are footsteps and she’s back. ‘Here.’ She hands me something black and square. ‘Her work. For the exhibition.’ Then she gives me a connecting cable too.

  I don’t want to take it, it feels wrong, but how can I refuse? If I tell her I’m lying now, she’ll lose all faith in humanity.

  I smile, drop it into my handbag and take a sip of my coffee.

  She’s sipping her coffee too but her hand trembles and the coffee spills out onto the saucer. ‘Pardon,’ she says, her cheeks flush.

  That’s it. I’m out. Enough is enough. Because even if Mme Roux knew all about the lie I’d just spun, she couldn’t hate me any more than I hate myself right now.

  ‘Of course,’ I say. But my voice comes out strangled. ‘I should get back anyway.’

  ‘When do you think it will be?’ she asks as we stand.

  I look at her. My mind taking a split second to comprehend what she’s asking.

  ‘The showing?’ she prompts.

  ‘Oh, I need to look at the schedule and go through the work,’ I say, ‘but I’d like to get it in for late next month.’

  She smiles and nods, and then she walks me to her perfectly suburban door, and lets me out onto her perfectly suburban street, and I leave. But as I watch her face disappear behind the closing door, I know deep within my marrow that some scars never heal. And so, as I head down towards the metro station, I focus on anything I can to shake the memory of Mme Roux loose.

  My phone pings from my bag.

  It’s an email ping.

  I reach for it and check the time: 9.38. Shit. My article is due in just under an hour and a half. And so I’m hurrying down the road as I move through to my inbox.

  And there it is, right at the top.

  Sender: Stan Dixon.

  Subject: Better luck next time, princess.

  My pulse slams against my wrists as I click on the attached link.

  It takes me through to an article in a rival publication. The title translates as ‘The Night Sabine Roux Went Missing: A first person account’.

  A mix of shock and disappointment pulses through me as I read all about how Sabine and Noah X left arguing. How could this have happened? Nobody else saw them leave, did they? A flash of that empty hallway…

  It’s around two hundred words in that my suspicion first ignites. But by the end, by the time I’ve read ‘creative differences’, we have a small, semi-contained fire on our hands. Yes, these eight hundred words I am reading are my words, simply reinterpreted, re-penned, embellished. But how?

  Images flicker on the cinema screen of my mind: the blue-white glow of my laptop screen late last night as I emailed myself my work in progress; the office; my work computer; and then: ParisObserver123.

  The generic password.

  Someone broke into my email.

  Someone leaked my first-person account.

  And I think we all know who that someone is.

  I hate him. I hate him. I hate him.

  Ping.

  Another email flies into my inbox.

  This one is from Hyacinth. I can hear her voice in my head as I read it.

  Harper. I need you back in the office. Now.

  Chapitre vingt

  By the time I get up the ninety-six stairs that lead to my front door I feel as though I’m one hundred and seven, everything hurts and I want to cry.

  The feeling scares me because I’m not what one might call ‘a crier’.

  I can’t thank my mother for much, I’m afraid, but my ability to weather storms and self-soothe is one tool she did inadvertently endow me with. You can’t have everybody simultaneously falling apart in a household, someone has to be the st
rong one.

  I turn the key in the lock, push open the door and drop my bag on the kitchen counter as the door slams behind me. I grab two of the mini bottles of Scotch from next to the kettle and head through to the bathroom. Emotional pain is like any other pain: it requires anaesthesia.

  Taps: on.

  But all I can hear against the sound of water running is Hyacinth’s brittle voice as Stan and I stood in her office: ‘Harper, it’s too late now. Stan, we’ll run with your Femicide piece instead.’ And his face, pathologically smug.

  Shame pulses through me as I twist off the cap of one of the bottles and down it.

  Hyacinth gave me a chance. A proper chance. And I blew it.

  I should have just written what she asked. I would have been finished by 3 pm yesterday instead of heading off to Le Voltage. It would have been sitting in Hyacinth’s inbox before Stan had a chance to break into my emails.

  And I know that makes me sound ultra-paranoid but that’s what happened.

  Yes, I should have changed my password. I’ve changed it now, of course I’ve changed it now. And I’m so highly strung about it I’m not even going to tell you what it is. But I should have done it before. That was careless.

  But as obvious as Stan’s actions were to me, as I stood in Hyacinth’s office, I had a choice to make. I could tell her the truth and risk looking like a hysterical woman trying to shift the blame instead of taking responsibility for her own stuff-ups. The sort of woman who keeps flimsy passwords and inserts lies about ‘creative differences’ into her article to avoid personal embarrassment.

  Or I could swallow my rage.

  Vow to never let it happen again. Apologise. And go back to my desk before it got any worse.

  I chose the latter.

  And then sat there all afternoon, paralysed by fury, a deep gnawing in my solar plexus as I stared blankly at my screen until the clock hit 5.30 pm and I could come home.

  I strip off my clothes and leave them in a small sad pile beside the bath, choose a Spotify playlist, then step into the water. I let it submerge me, like that might cleanse away everything I’m feeling right now. But there’s a deep, inky-black ache inside me. It’s Friday today. One week since Sabine went missing. Thirty-six hours since I told Luneau what happened that night. And yet, a quick Google search while I waited on the metro platform revealed Noah hasn’t been arrested yet. That means they haven’t found Sabine’s phone; they haven’t seen the video that had him run after her.

  There’s a storm brewing inside of me and I need to get it out. And so I dry off my hands, pick up my phone and navigate to Harrison’s band page. There it is, right at the top, their most popular song. The song he wrote for me: ‘When She Sleeps’.

  Play.

  And then, as the acoustic guitar echoes off the tiles in that way he’d describe as tinny, I sit back against the cool porcelain of the bath, close my eyes, and remember the night he first played it to me – it was in the living room of our apartment, it was raining outside, and it was just before things turned around for him. In hindsight, I’m pretty sure it was his way of warning me. Hot tears stream down my cheeks.

  Her eyes they burn, burn, burn me, She can see straight through me, So it’s only when she sleeps, I’m the man she used to see.

  It’s still as derivative as shit. But it still makes me cry, even after all this time. I sniff back tears, close my eyes and sink deeper into the water, letting the warmth embrace me. It’s just today. Tomorrow will be better. I’ll get up, maybe go to yoga, maybe swipe through an app and find a date. There’s a whole world out there. A whole life ahead of me. But then why does it ache like this? The song finishes but the tears keep coming, and I just lie still with my eyes closed, waiting for the song to start up again.

  But then, from somewhere in the darkness, comes a different sound. The beep of my phone.

  My eyes flick open and I reach for it, squinting down at the screen.

  Camilla.

  I wipe the tears away with the back of my hand as I read and reread her message.

  But it makes no sense at all.

  Surprise! I’m outside! Which one is your flat? Xxx

  Chapitre vingt et un

  I wake up to Lana Del Rey, the smell of coffee and a sour mouthful of hair.

  A moment of confusion, some misfiring synapses, and then I remember: Camilla. I never knew I could be so grateful for an app like Find My Friends until I saw her there last night, on the street outside, with her little suitcase. I pull off my eye mask – it’s bright, too bright for autumn – and roll over, pull out the one earplug still lodged in my ear and reach for my phone.

  It’s just after 8.30 am.

  And I should just let it go, but I can’t help it. I scroll through to The Paris Observer website and there, on the landing page, is Stan’s article. Disappointment ripples through me.

  I hate him.

  I sit up. My feet hit the floorboards. I take a deep breath and then I drag my heavy limbs through to the kitchen. Camilla is by the sink, pouring coffee from a cafetière and biting into an apple.

  ‘Morning,’ she says. ‘Want some?’

  ‘Yeah, thanks,’ I say. And then I wander over to the sofa bed we set up for her and sit down, hugging my knees to my chest.

  She looks at me with narrowed eyes.

  ‘You haven’t been looking at his story, have you?’ she asks. We agreed last night over a bottle of wine that I wouldn’t look at Stan’s piece. We’d pretend it never happened. But then, I agree to lots of stupid things when tipsy.

  That was just before she told me all about Mr Fourteenth Floor and her screening call with Vogue, and about how everything was falling into place because her sun was conjunct something or other. I didn’t argue that point like I normally would, didn’t point out that it wasn’t the sun who sent Vogue her resume. It was just so great to have her here.

  ‘Maybe,’ I say.

  ‘Well, don’t.’ She brings my coffee over to me. ‘Anyway, I have something that will cheer you up.’

  I take a sip and watch as she reaches into her open suitcase and pulls out a pair of fluffy handcuffs, throwing them at me. They land on my lap.

  I start to laugh. ‘You found them?’ I say, picking them up.

  I stayed with Camilla for the week before I left for Paris, having given up my room in the flatshare.

  ‘They were behind the laundry basket. God knows how they got there.’

  She takes her coffee and sits down next to me and puts her hand on my arm. ‘It’ll be okay, you know,’ she says.

  And usually I’d make some quip about ‘How do you know, is Mercury about to go direct or something?’ But this morning I just smile and nod. Lana gets super sad and so Camilla reaches for her phone and changes it to something upbeat. But as she looks down at the screen her face breaks into a grin.

  ‘What?’ I ask.

  ‘Nothing,’ she says, putting down her phone.

  ‘What?’ I repeat, with emphasis.

  ‘He texted me.’

  ‘Mr Fourteenth Floor?’ I ask.

  ‘Yeah.’ Her cheeks flush pink. ‘It’s nothing. Just: Have fun in Paris!’

  I take a sip of my coffee. ‘Well, maybe that guy on Etsy was right after all,’ I say. ‘Though I’d still keep an eye on my credit score if I were you.’

  She laughs and I laugh, but my eyes are heavy. We are silent for a few moments and then her forehead crinkles and she says, ‘I’m worried about you, Harps.’

  ‘Why? Because I’m still attracted to narcissistic creative types after all this time?’ I ask, stroking the fur on the handcuffs.

  ‘You know what I mean.’ She sips on her coffee, watching me. ‘But do you have a picture of him?’

  ‘Sure,’ I say, feeling my insides get a little colder. ‘Just google Noah X husband, Paris.’

  And as Camilla scrolls through her phone, I reach for my bag on the floor by the sofa and riffle through it for a paperclip.

  ‘I don’t see
anything,’ she says.

  ‘Third page. It’s the picture right at the bottom. A man and a woman. Tux.’

  As I wait for her to find it, I lengthen out the paperclip so it’s a long piece of wire. I insert one end into the handcuff lock, bending it backwards so it kinks. Now I have a small ‘L’ shape at the bottom. I insert that under the lock pin like a tiny finger and lift it up. The upper teeth release and it clicks open. Still got it.

  I wrote about this once: ‘What to do if your Tinder date leaves you stranded’. It won me over three hundred likes.

  ‘Is this it?’ Camilla asks, turning her phone to face me.

  ‘Yep,’ I say, clicking shut the handcuffs again and putting them down next to me.

  ‘But he’s so hot,’ she says.

  ‘So was Patrick Bateman in American Psycho,’ I say.

  ‘Wait, is that his wife?’

  I nod and take a big sip of coffee.

  She’s frowning at the screen. ‘God, he just really doesn’t look like a killer, does he?’ She looks up at me.

  ‘Nope,’ I say. ‘But people always want killers to be monsters. Nobody wants it to be the hot guy. But sometimes it is.’

  She sighs, puts her phone down and looks up at me. ‘Right. Enough of this. We have plans today, go shower.’

  ‘What sort of plans?’ I ask, eyes narrowed as I take another sip of coffee.

  ‘I’m not telling. Just go shower.’

  * * *

  Fifteen minutes later I’m heading out of the steam of the shower, my hair in a towel as I head to my room to change. Camilla is still sitting on the sofa bed, scrolling through her phone.

  I can see straight into my neighbour’s window but she’s not there today. So I drop my towel, pull on my underwear and an oversized cream jumper, then a black pair of jeans. I pull my hair back into a loose pony and put on a pair of dangly earrings.

  Then I head back through to the living room. Camilla is exactly where I left her.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I ask.

  She looks up at me and I know immediately: something has happened. I head over to her. ‘What are you looking at?’ I ask, my pulse thumping like it already knows something I don’t yet.