The Heatwave

by Kate Riordan

  The felt-tip takes a long time to scrub off. As we sit together in the bathroom, you and I – Greg absent as usual and Élodie God knows where – your skin sore from all the rubbing and the salt in the tears that continue to course down your cheeks, you tell me again and again.

  ‘Élodie said I was Claudette. Élodie said I was Claudette now and Claudette would be me. That I would have to stay in the dark.’

  Back in your room, I pull out the doll and notice what I didn’t before, in the gloom of the wardrobe. Her face is scribbled on with red felt-tip, and stuffed in your shorts pocket is Maurice, his small plush body ripped open to reveal the white stuffing inside, his head lolling where it’s been half torn off. I only realize you’ve followed me in from the bathroom when you begin to wail.

  A couple of weeks later I venture into Élodie’s room to change the bed and find a roll of used film on her bedside table. She still uses the pink camera Greg bought her, the only gift that ever stuck.

  When they’re developed, about half of them turn out to be of Élodie. I have no idea who’s taken them, though I guess it’s a boy, from the way she’s smiling and pouting. She’s always preferred men, and the way men look at her makes me queasy – not only that they do it, but her precocious ease in wielding that power.

  Élodie has been in a hippie phase for months now, not caring that she is years out of date with her embroidered smocks, her hair hanging to her waist, her dirty feet. The look fits her and she’s stuck to it longer than any that preceded it; the chameleon that has found the perfect colours in which to hide. The soft lines and fabric make a clever disguise, just as her physical grace has always masked her iron determination. Sometimes she makes me think of those Manson girls that were all over the news the year she was born: flowers woven in their hair, drifting on the music, sloe eyes opening to reveal the void.

  The other half of the photos are of you, dressed as Claudette the doll. In some you’re posed on the bed with your beloved teddies, the felt tip already marring your little face. Others were taken after she pushed you into the cupboard, like an unwanted toy. Anyone looking at them would know instantly that you were afraid, your pupils dilated, your bottom lip drooping. You’re holding fast to your monkey in all of them, and I wonder when she tore it out of your hand, and whether she destroyed it in front of you. I wonder when she tied the gag tight around your mouth.

  The next day, when Greg returns from his trip, I go to my bedside cabinet where I’ve hidden the photos inside a book, only to find they’re gone. She’s taken them, probably burnt them. And though they might have been the proof I have been subconsciously looking for – the proof that will finally force Greg to admit what we both know – most of me is simply glad they no longer exist.

  1993

  We end up in the salon by mid-afternoon, you and Élodie trying to tune in the old television while I hover, packing and repacking the same box and seemingly getting nowhere. I’ve tried to phone Greg again but there’s still no answer. Though Élodie seems unaffected by the heat, the two of us – unused to such extremes – have been driven inside by it. I want nothing more than to go upstairs, run a cool bath and submerge myself, but I won’t leave you. I close my eyes against the light streaming in through the open doors, voices flickering and receding as you turn the dial, anxiety roiling inside me. It’s a relief when the phone rings at about four.

  ‘Allô,’ says a breezy voice. ‘It’s Martine here, from Century 21. No offer from the Bernards yet, but we’ve had another request for a viewing, from an English couple. I can do this one so it doesn’t matter if you’re going out. Tomorrow at eleven okay?’

  ‘Oh. Yes, I think that’s fine. Thank you. We’ll probably be here, though. Me and … my daughters, I mean.’

  I glance towards Élodie to see if she caught the plural that feels so rusty in my mouth but she’s still facing the television, where a half-tuned news bulletin stretches and fragments. When it briefly settles, a reporter is talking in front of a line of burnt-out cars. A pall of smoke has turned the sky to lead behind him. I squint to read the place name at the bottom of the screen and see, with a lurch, that it’s less than an hour from here. Élodie’s expression, reflected imperfectly in the television as the blizzard of static takes over again, is hard to make out.

  Martine talks on for a few more minutes, her light chatter washing over me. I’m dimly relieved that she doesn’t seem to know or care about Élodie’s return. Perhaps people in the village aren’t aware of it yet. As for the viewing, I wasn’t expecting more interest so soon. It makes me feel agitated – there’s too much going on. I’m not sure I trust myself to say the right thing to these English people who might want La Rêverie. For the first time in a long time, I’m thinking of the English as Other and myself as French. And that wrong-foots me again.

  As evening approaches, the three of us still ensconced in the hot salon, I realize that, even as I’m trying to ensure you’re never alone with her, I’m also avoiding being alone with you. It isn’t very difficult for me to pull this off: you’re like her little shadow already and, unlikely as it seems, given the past, Élodie appears to want to be wherever I am.

  I try Greg yet again, letting it ring out for a good five minutes before giving up. He must be in Normandy and I don’t have the number.

  Élodie insists on cooking that night. I need to go shopping but she says there’s enough for some approximation of a salade niçoise, waving me out of the kitchen when I try to protest. I join you at the table on the terrace. You’ve changed into something floaty but slightly grubby, which must have come out of Élodie’s rucksack because I don’t recognize it. I resist telling you to go and change.

  ‘She lent it to me,’ you say, catching me looking. ‘She said if I wanted, I could keep it.’

  ‘It’s a bit big, isn’t it?’

  That’s true – it keeps slipping off one shoulder – but what I really mean is that it’s too old for you. Too provocative.

  ‘Élodie says it suits me.’

  What can I say to that? I’m beginning to feel as though I have to tread carefully or you’ll choose her. That’s how the dynamic already seems to be shaping up, and she’s only been back twenty-four hours.

  By ten, you can no longer keep your eyes open. Reluctantly you head upstairs, leaving your sister and me alone. Although I’m exhausted, my body thrums as though it’s over-caffeinated. I’m too alert to sleep now. It’s the first time Élodie and I have been alone together since the morning.

  She isn’t going anywhere; playing Patience with a soft old deck of cards on the glass coffee table she learnt to walk around. I can see her tiny fingerprints in the sunlight as though it were yesterday.

  I watch as she goes over to the record player and checks what’s on the turntable before turning it over to side two and dropping the needle. It’s a James Taylor LP I’d put on a couple of nights earlier.

  ‘You didn’t come to see me again,’ Élodie says softly, after ‘Fire and Rain’ has finished. ‘In the centre. I waited for you, every week. But you never did, not after that last time.’

  ‘I – I’m sorry. But don’t you remember? The doctors said it was a bad idea. They said that with … cases like yours, it was better if there was no family contact while they worked on treatment.’

  She smiles ruefully. ‘They told me that, too. I thought they’d made it up. I thought they were avoiding telling me that you didn’t want to see me. Do you think you would have come, if it had been allowed?’

  The guilt rushes in again. ‘Of course. I often rang to see how you were getting on. Didn’t you know?’

  She shakes her head. ‘Look, like I said before, I’m not bringing any of this up to make you feel bad. I understand now. I would understand if you said you hadn’t wanted to see me.’

  She’s sitting cross-legged on the floor, her back against the sofa, her loose hair half covering her face. I’m holding my breath because I think she’s about to admit what she did. She had never done tha
t before, not directly – not even during that last visit. But then she veers off again.

  ‘It was when I got to the ashram that I truly began to understand,’ she says. ‘All the anger – and I had been angry for a long time – just melted away. I was taught about forgiveness, about letting things go. We meditated every morning, and each time that ball of grief and hate was smaller and then one day it had just … gone. I felt the last of it disperse through the pores of my skin. I felt as light as air. There’s no anger in me now, no negative feelings. I’m clean, Maman. I was reborn that day.’

  ‘Ashram?’ I say stupidly. ‘What ashram? You went to India?’

  She laughs. ‘To Spain. Up in the mountains in the north. We called it the ashram because the couple that started it were followers of Osho.’

  ‘So it was a cult?’

  She smiles, beatific and serene. Another one I haven’t seen before. ‘No, not a cult. A community.’

  I study her face again, and though I’m trying to entertain the possibility that Camille could be right – that she’s been changed for the better by the years we’ve been apart, all I can think of is what happened at that commune in Texas a few months ago.

  Your father always liked to think of Élodie as a rebellious soul because the student riots coincided with her conception. Afterwards, though, I could never quite divorce her arrival from those stories that came out of California in ’69. The end of the hippie dream. I always remember those girls. The baby they cut from the womb.

  And so as Élodie talks on about her Spanish community, eyes fever-bright in the lamplight, the part of me that has been on high alert for so long can’t help fearing the inverse: that far from mending her, this place and the centre before it might have helped hone her own peculiar charisma, her skill at manipulation – like a prison can harden a petty thief into a murderer.

  A couple of years ago, I read about an experiment carried out in California (of course) in the 1970s, right at the time when I was struggling so much with something the doctors round here barely had the vocabulary for.

  A group of criminals who had been diagnosed as psychopaths were basically locked up together to see if they could help each other. It sounds like the sort of experiment that someone could only have devised when high, and it wouldn’t surprise me if this was the case, but I could see a perverse kind of logic in it, too. Who could understand the psychopath’s mind better than a fellow psychopath? The long-term outcome, though, was chilling. When they reoffended after release – and they did reoffend – their crimes were more violent and depraved than those who had not taken part in the experiment. They had become better psychopaths.

  I watch Élodie as she rolls a cigarette. I can’t take my eyes off her.

  ‘Do you want one?’

  I shake my head, although I do, badly. ‘You’ll have to open the doors if you’re going to smoke,’ I say, and wonder if I imagine the light in her eyes fading a little. ‘It’s bad for Emma’s chest.’ I hate my spiky tone, when what I really am is nervous.

  She rises obediently and pushes them back as far as they’ll go. The night sidles in, perfumed and heady, still singed from the fires. I see Waco in my mind again: the compound burning with all those people still inside, flames and smoke rolling off the roof, tall as mountains.

  She comes and sits down, closer now, and I resist the urge to reach out to her because I don’t want to get it wrong. My hand hovers in the air.

  ‘I just want you to know that I forgive you, Maman. I wanted to say that. It’s an important step on my journey to self-actualization to speak those words to you, face to face.’

  I draw my hand back. ‘You forgive me?’

  She smiles again. ‘I do. I forgive you.’

  ‘Doesn’t it have to work the other way, too? Don’t I have to forgive you?’

  Something flashes across her face, too quick to interpret. Then she nods. ‘You’re right. I ask your forgiveness too. I’m sorry I wasn’t the daughter you wanted.’

  ‘No, hang on.’ My voice cracks with emotion. ‘That’s not asking forgiveness. If you don’t mean it, you shouldn’t say it.’

  She puts her head on one side. ‘But it’s true. It wasn’t until Emma that you wanted to be a mother, that you felt you were a mother.’

  I shake my head. ‘No, no, that’s not how it was at all. You don’t know. If you had seen me when they put you in my arms for the first time … I wanted so badly to meet you while I was pregnant, and when I did, the feeling was instant. It was a fierce kind of love, like nothing I’d ever got close to before. It is a fierce kind of love. Nothing changes that.’

  She rescues me then, returning to the subject of the ashram: the wildflowers that grew on the mountains even as snow lingered on the peaks; the guitar chords someone taught her to play; the profound peace the place helped her find. I want to believe in it. Part of me does.

  Slowly, fatigue begins to overtake me. It’s so warm in the salon. Her voice too, which has deepened and softened with the years, is having a soporific effect.

  ‘Aren’t you tired?’ I say.

  ‘Not really.’ She smiles sadly. ‘I don’t need much sleep, not since the Institut.’

  ‘Oh, Élodie.’

  She shakes her head. ‘No, I didn’t mean it that way. It’s ancient history, really. It’s just that there was always something happening there at night, something to wake you up. I feel as though I did nothing more than cat-nap during those years.’

  I hang my head. I don’t know what to say. She comes over and takes my hands. The physical contact, like yesterday’s, is a shock.

  ‘Maman, you must understand. I’m grateful to you and Papa for sending me there, not resentful. They helped me. If I hadn’t gone there, and then to the ashram, I wouldn’t be cured.’

  ‘Cured,’ I repeat. ‘I mean, I can see you’re different, of course I can.’ I can hear Morel’s words in my head. She could grow out of it. There was an eighty per cent chance of it. But then he also said there was no cure.

  It occurs to me that the only way I can know is to find out more about her. I gather my last reserves of energy and lean forward. ‘Élodie, what else has happened to you?’

  ‘I told you, I was in Spain and –’

  ‘Not just the ashram. I mean, who have you been with, where were you before Spain, how did you come to be there at all? What has it been like for you all this time, without us – without your family?’ My voice breaks on the last word.

  She turns up her palms. ‘I will tell you everything, Maman, if you really want to know.’

  ‘I do,’ I breathe. ‘I do.’

  So she tells me about her life without us. I listen from the sofa with my eyes closed. After she left the Institut, she went south, hitching rides to the coast.

  ‘I was always so cold in the north. It didn’t feel like France to me. It wasn’t home.’

  She spent almost two years on the Côte d’Azur, working her way east towards Italy and then west again, as far as the Spanish border and then beyond it, to Roses, where Dalí lived.

  ‘Everything was white and blue there. White fishing cottages, white sand in the calas – the little coves. Blue skies every day.’

  ‘You always loved it by the sea.’

  I open my eyes and she’s smiling in the lamplight. ‘You remember.’

  I want to cry. ‘Of course I remember.’

  She worked just enough to live, never staying anywhere long, mostly waitressing. ‘I always got good tips,’ she says, and I smile, the tears receding again.

  ‘I’m not surprised. Élodie?’

  I open my eyes and she’s moved closer, so that we’re in touching distance now. I didn’t hear her move. ‘Tell me where else you went,’ I say. ‘Who you met.’

  She sits back. ‘I went to California once. Someone got me a passport. I went for the whole summer.’

  That makes me sit up. ‘You did? I never got there. I wanted to, once upon a time. What did you see there?’

  ‘
Oh, so much. I met a man. He had a house on stilts, looking out over one of the canyons.’

  Her smile is another I don’t know, sphinx-like. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I met him in the desert, at a festival. He had a Mexican name but he was from LA. I asked him to take me to the Troubadour club. They weren’t playing your music any more. It was all rock bands by then, but I wanted to go. I thought of you.’

  ‘How did you know?’ My voice is thick with emotion.

  She gestures at the records stacked underneath the old player. ‘I told you, I remember everything.’

  ‘What happened to the man?’

  She shrugs. ‘I left LA, went back to Spain. I liked to keep moving. I was always looking for something and not quite finding it. I think, really, I was just trying to get back here.’

  I let that land and settle. The silence stretches out. I still can’t believe she’s here. I’m so tired by now that I can’t see straight. ‘I think I’m going to have to go to bed. I’m sorry.’

  She nods. ‘I’m not tired yet. Do you mind if I stay here for a while, have a last cigarette?’

  ‘No, of course not.’ I go towards her but don’t know what to do when I get there. She looks up expectantly and I stroke her hair, just briefly. Then I leave her smoking on her own. As I reach the stairs, the record turns itself over. It’s the Beach Boys now.

  The song that’s always been hers starts playing as I reach the landing. ‘Good Vibrations’. I sit down heavily on the top step, my hand clutching the banister, and as her cigarette smoke finds me I begin to cry again, harder this time, the sound drowned in the music.

  *

  The night passes without incident. I try your father again in the morning. To my surprise, he picks up on the third ring.

  ‘Greg. At last.’

  I don’t know how to say it now I’ve got him. I glance through the salon doors. Élodie is making you laugh on the terrace where you’ve just finished breakfast.