by EJ Swift
Looking at the monument to the Communards, it occurs to me that if I were to die in Paris, nobody back in England would know. The anonymity of the thought should frighten me, but it doesn’t. I’ve made the break.
Chapter Seven
MIKE AND I have agreed the parameters of our competition. Rules and players are sworn in by a surprisingly adamant Isobel (‘An agreement is an agreement, anglaise ou americaine’). Jägerbombs and Australians score the lowest points, top-shelf cognac and French the highest. It’s Friday night and in addition to the usual crowd we have five coach-loads of Contiki under our roof, a fact which has driven Eloise to play ‘Down Under’ by Men at Work no less than six times in the last two hours and, consequentially, Dušanka to the edge of mutiny.
By midnight I’m drenched in an acrid cocktail of sweat and Jägermeister but am clear of Mike by a full fifteen points. Eloise sends me down to change the Carlsberg. I’m anticipating the sanctuary of a few cool minutes in the keg room, but someone has failed to check the thermostat because the air inside is warm—warm and malty. I wonder if the Australians have noticed they are drinking warm lager. I wrestle with the cap on the offending Carlsberg line, which doesn’t want to loosen. It finally pops off; I must hit myself in the face, because the next thing I know I’m inside a column of red, swirling darkness, rushing up to the surface, and a voice says, “My dear, you made it! How marvellous!” Then I find myself lying on the floor feeling very peculiar indeed.
I get up slowly. The line’s connected—did I replace the keg before I blacked out? I check it once again: all done. I head upstairs and launch myself back into the fray. Angel’s on the bar, evidently pulled in for emergency cover.
“Didn’t know you were working tonight,” I say. Angel gives me an odd look.
“Remember the first rule, my Anglaise,” he says, and walks airily away. I look for Mike, wondering how many points he’s scored while I’ve been downstairs, but I can’t see him. If he went on break, then he’s missing peak orders, and my star is about to ascend. Thank you, Eloise. I’m about to step onto the bar when she appears, a tiny golem blocking my path.
“Oy, new girl! I need a bottle of Get 31 and I need it now.”
“New girl?” I say disbelievingly, but Eloise is already turning to serve someone. She must be even more riled than usual, if she’s reverting to old insults. I push through into the back room, looking for Mike to tell him the competition is temporarily suspended, or at least that the last ten minutes don’t count. Did we agree rules about off-bar time? Then I see him doing the rounds on the floor. We’re more short-staffed than I realized.
Eloise’s bidding it is. I about turn and see, a few metres away, the impossible sight of myself pushing awkwardly through the crowd.
I freeze. For long seconds I remain rooted, my mind blank with shock. Refusing to acknowledge the irrationality of what I’m seeing. Then I relax. I’ve spied a lookalike. A good one, admittedly, perhaps even a distant relation. My breathing resumes. Yes, the Angelopoulos genes have gone walkabout. I always knew my mother had secrets.
I move stealthily behind and start to stalk her. My doppelgänger’s head is darting from side to side, searching for something; she looks flushed and harassed. She looks like me at my most stressed. The doppelgänger is wearing jeans and a T-shirt, whereas I’m in cargos and a spaghetti-strap top, but we have the same face (something has happened to her nose), the same unruly hair, the same mole on the jawline and—I look down—the same purple Doc Martins with a Pikachu sticker on the left heel.
My body heat drops away.
There’s a tingle as the neurones fire in my brain.
I stop thinking, because thinking leads to conclusions, and conclusions without substantive evidence are dangerous. I’m in a dream state, immersed in the subconscious, a place of memories lost and cached, of information absorbed but unaccounted. Not thinking, I go downstairs. The door to the alcohol room is open; inside is Simone, who yesterday was sporting a new weave, but miraculously has braids again, loading bottles of Smirnoff into a crate.
“You got a Get 31 there?” I ask. “Eloise asked for it.”
“Bon oui,” she says. “Eloise asks, we give. My name is Simone, by the way.”
“I’m Hallie.”
“Enchanté.”
She passes me the Get. I wait until her back is turned, then nip into the keg room and place the bottle in a prominent position on top of a keg of Kro. I hear Simone locking up the alcohol room. Her footsteps retreating. I pull my hair out of its tie so that it obscures my face, go upstairs and immediately have to dash into the bathroom as Dušanka stalks past, the top of an Akhmatova paperback sticking out of her back pocket.
My heart begins to race. This is too strange, too impossible. I edge back out, chin down, hair falling over my eyes. Concealing myself behind a group of football enthusiasts, I watch the doppelgänger—the me—from afar. As when listening to a familiar song, I know the chord progression that follows. The me approaches the bar. Eloise yells at her. The me looks like she’s about to cry. Poor me. I empathize (I’ve been there) but I can’t deny she’s creepy as hell. Does my face really make those expressions?
The me goes downstairs first. I sneak after her, but misjudge the last two steps, raising a horrible clatter. I leg it around the corner. I hear a shout—“Hey!”—and dive into the keg room. Where I’m trapped. Cornered. Fuck.
I turn helplessly on the spot, panic rising, pulse accelerating, because she’ll come in here, I know she comes in here, and the last thing in the world I want to do is face her, but then there’s a rush of dark red and a sensation of swimming and a voice says, “Oh, well done, dear, a terrific start,” and I’m on my back.
I SIT UP dizzily. The keg room is cool, my bare shoulders numb and slightly damp from the concrete floor. What a surreal dream. I hook up the new Carlsberg keg, stack the empty by the door and head upstairs. Mike informs me he’s done a Legolas on the Australians and would I like the dregs of a Long Island Iced Tea, for he has made a dozen of them for the Contiki manager while I was taking forever to change the line.
At the end of the night Isobel confirms the scores: I have lost to Mike by forty points. Mike does a victory dance. Over staff drinks I ask Isobel, as casually as you can ask such a question, if she has ever seen a ghost in the building? Isobel says no, although she has felt the presence of her deceased grandmother. Not in this building. Elsewhere. That’s nice, I say. But Isobel’s brow creases. She says no, her grandmother squandered the family inheritance on gambling and mediocrities (Isobel’s word) and left Isobel’s parents destitute in Le Havre.
Silence follows.
“We came to Paris to escape her,” says Isobel at last, and with considerable satisfaction. She steeples her fingers, faces me. “So, Hallie. You have seen a ghost here?”
“Oh,” I say. “I’m a scientist. I don’t believe in ghosts.”
Part Three
Green Bowler Hat
Chapter Eight
I GET BACK from my break at midnight to find a group of Contiki have just left and the place is a debris of empties and unwashed cocktail shakers. I slide in a dishwasher rack, kick the door shut, nudge the green button with my knee and listen to the rumble as the washer starts its cycle. When I turn around, Eloise is standing a foot away, staring at me intently. I jump.
“Jesus, do you have to do that?”
“There’s a woman sitting at the alcove in section two,” says Eloise. “She’s asked for you.”
“For me?”
“She pointed you out.”
My first, panicked thought is that it’s one of the family, that somehow they’ve tracked me down. I glance across to the alcove. There’s a small party settled in there, three guys and two girls, drinking cocktails. The girls are in lipstick and platform heels, and dressed for an occasion. I sag with relief.
“Why do they want me?”
“Not them. Behind the pillar. Japanese woman, green hat. Go on, you’d better serv
e her.”
Eloise makes a shooing motion. It occurs to me that she is acting oddly, it isn’t like Eloise to bend to anyone else’s will. The thought leaves me vaguely unsettled.
I have to squeeze past the group of cocktail drinkers to get behind the pillar. Sure enough, there is a lone woman sitting at the next table.
She’s dressed neatly and rather conservatively, a green bowler hat and a matching, double-breasted jacket over a cream blouse and pencil skirt. Her skin is taut and smooth, her eyes curious, and defined by subtle make-up. I’ve never seen her before in my life. But she asked for me.
The feeling of wrongness amplifies.
“Can I get you a drink?” I ask hesitantly.
The woman tilts her head, listening carefully, and lifts a finger.
“Ahhh. There—she is.”
I notice she is wearing rings on almost every finger, intricate gold bands inset with expensive stones: emeralds and sapphires. She is wearing expensive smelling perfume too, but underneath it a peculiar aroma clings to her, something musky and animal.
“Would you like a drink?” I repeat.
“What—would you recommend?”
Her words come slowly, haltingly, as though her tongue has never had to twist around the sounds before. Just a tourist, Hallie, I tell myself firmly. She’s probably been reading her phrasebook all week, the same as you and your French.
“How about a gin and tonic?”
I want to make this order as straightforward as possible, and get the hell away from her.
“Yes. And—something for you. Will this be—sufficient?”
She extracts a handful of crisp new notes from a Dolce & Gabbana purse, and fans them out before me. I extract twenty euros.
“That’ll do it.”
“Hey, hello there? Can we order too?”
“Sure.” I turn to the American party on the other side, a weary smile pasted on my face in readiness, though I am secretly relieved to be accosted. “What can I get you?”
They squabble over the shots list. Behind me, I hear something keen.
“You got that?” asks the party spokesperson at last. “You want to write it down?”
“One mojito, one Long Island, one cosmo, one caipiroska, pint of Kro, three slippery nipples and two flatliners,” I intone.
“Wow, you’re good. She’s good, isn’t she?”
I pick up the tray from their last round of shots. There’s that sound again—a definite squawk. My neck tingles.
At the bar I relay my orders to Dušanka. Eloise hurries over.
“Well? Do you know her?”
“No, but she’s fucking weird.”
“Is she on drugs?”
“Not that I can tell.”
I decline to add that unless she was shooting up smack, there isn’t much she could be on that half the clientele, not to mention the staff, don’t sample most nights.
“We can’t refuse to serve her.” Eloise looks pointedly around. “If we kicked out every crazy that came through the doors, this place would be a wasteland.”
Eloise returns to the music, and I look back at the alcove. The woman is sitting there, almost motionless. She does not check her phone, or get out her handbag, as most people do when left alone for a few minutes. She is looking around with an air of quiet appreciation you might expect to find in a museum.
Dušanka slams down shot glasses onto a tray and floats a centimetre of Baileys over the sambuca. In the alcove, I am sure I see something move inside the woman’s jacket.
“Slippery nipples,” says Dušanka, making it sound like an offensive crime. Dušanka had come to Paris for Christine de Pizan and Olympe De Gouges. She had pledged to visit the country of origin of every renowned philosopher (and several who would be renowned, if Dušanka had anything to do with it) in order to ascertain whether there was meaning within the cosmos and whether she, Dušanka, had un raison d’être. She had not come to Paris for slippery nipples.
I deliver the tray of cocktails and take green bowler woman her gin and tonic.
“Thank you—my dear,” she says. “And now—to business!”
“Business?”
I glance desperately in Eloise’s direction, but she has her back turned. Green bowler woman seems unperturbed by my discomfort. She pats the seat beside her. I take a reluctant perch and a sip of rum and coke, which Dušanka has made mercifully strong. I see the woman’s jacket bulge again. My stomach turns. She has something in there.
Something alive.
She sees me looking, and her mouth curves in a secretive smile. She pulls back the collar of her blouse. Tucked against her breast I see the narrow head of a falcon. It is swaddled in bandages, pinning its wings to its sides, and cotton wool has been taped around its beak. Looking at that bird, I feel a horrible prickling spread all over my body.
The woman switches her coat back into place, concealing the bird.
“It is so nice—to meet you—properly,” she says, inclining her head confidentially. “You have been here—a couple of months?”
“Y-yes.”
My mouth is dry, sour-tasting.
“Then it is—about time.” She strokes the cape where the falcon is hidden. Where the falcon is captive. I know this without knowing how I know it.
“Excuse me,” I say. I take a gulp of rum to wet my throat. “That bird—have you had it long?”
“My dear. You mustn’t worry. About this bird. A mere experiment—to test my range. I am keeping him close for the time being.”
“But I just saw—”
“Yes. I know. Nothing for you to get your head—in a flap about.” She gives me a wink. Her English is evening out, becoming more fluid with every sentence. “Now. Do you know why I am here?”
I shake my head mutely.
“The world turns at one thousand and thirty-eight miles an hour and we barely blink—in the rush through space. But here you are! Do you know how long I’ve been waiting down there? A long time. A very long time. I was beginning to despair. They said you would come, I had to be patient, they said, but I almost gave up. I admit it. But then you appeared. My salvation! Because, my dear, as you have no doubt worked out given recent events, you’re sitting on something of a hotspot. Temporally, I mean.”
I stare at her. With every second that passes, my unease grows. She’s talking about temporal hotspots. She’s delusional. A fantasist. But it’s more than that.
She isn’t right in her own skin.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I say.
“Oh!” She regards me curiously. Her make-up is immaculate. Robotic, I think, and once the thought has seeded it’s impossible to reject. “My dear, I thought you’d realised. That little episode, with the Get 31? You must have known what was happening, or else why did you complete the time loop?”
“That was a dream,” I say, frightened now. How the hell does she know about the Get? How could anyone know about the Get? “I fainted.”
“You fell,” she says firmly. “Through the dimensional chasm. And that is where I come in—your friendly local incumbent, summoned, as it were, by your excursion into the recent past. If you want a name, and you seem the type that would, I’m the chronometrist.”
She beams at me. I want to get up and walk away, put as much distance between us as possible, but when I try to stand nothing happens. Whatever you do, I think, don't alarm her. She could be dangerous. She could be anything.
“The energy here is incredible,” she is saying excitedly. “They vary, you know, though of course so much of it is dependent on the incumbent themselves. I suppose you could compare my particular expertise—I’m the only one with a frame of reference, after all—to that of a volcanologist.”
Of all the things she has said, Get 31 included, this upsets me the most. It’s as if she has burrowed into the deepest recesses of my brain.
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, the sciences are very similar. The, ah, fields differ, but the activity patte
rns are the same… cold and dormant, and then a sudden flare…”
“Flare?”
“The flares are when we travel, my dear. As you did, the other day.”
“I didn’t—I don’t know what you’re talking about—”
But in my head is the unshakeable image of a girl who looked exactly like me, wearing my boots.
“Then you aren’t listening,” she says, and her tone has sharpened. She taps her breast; I hear a faint, plaintive squawk. “Didn’t I tell you to wake up? Didn’t I tell you it would wake up, now that you’ve arrived? What did you say your name was?”
“It’s Hallie. Are you saying—are you saying that bird—”
“Ah, a glimmer of understanding… Hold that thought, dear.”
I stare at her. Her face goes slack.
“Now, Hallie—”
The voice comes from the region of her chest. I look down. Look back up. The woman stares at me. Her eyes are wide with surprise. She begins to speak very fast in Japanese. I shunt backwards.
“What the fuck is this?”
The woman’s features slump. Her face shifts again. She stops talking, mid-sentence, then resumes in English.
“Just a little experiment of mine, don’t mention it to anyone now, will you? In any case, I’m not convinced by the avian brain. Now. Hallie.”
Once again I try to stand. I manage to lift myself a few inches from the seat, then collapse back. “I need to go,” I say. “They need me on the bar—”
“Hallie. Your colleagues are currently cleaning and sending—where are we, let me think—WhatsApp messages.” Her tone softens again. “My dear girl. Don’t be alarmed. You are in a most fortunate position. Truly, there are people who would kill to be you. Or me, for that matter! But words are insufficient. Let me show you. If you listen carefully, you can hear it. Listen—go on, listen now.”