by EJ Swift
“I might have taken the plane,” says Gabriela quietly. “I might. What does it matter anyway? It is only money.”
“What does it—it matters to me! You have no idea what I had to put up with at home. Every day it was some shit like this, bailiffs, debt collectors—that wasn’t even my taxi, I wanted to get out—”
“You have no idea! You do not understand how it is, my home hundreds of miles away and every time a fuck-up, you understand nothing—”
Gabriela gives the case a vicious kick. It shunts into the magazine rack and sends it toppling to the floor with a crash. Magazines and newspapers cascade out over the floor.
“I was not meant to stay in this country,” says Gabriela furiously.
The cashier comes running out.
“Que se passe t-il ici?”
I glance around. Not only have we gathered a small audience, airport security are now moving in our direction. It strikes me very forcibly that Gabriela is Colombian.
“Christ,” I mutter. “Gabriela, help me pick this thing up. If you’re not careful you’ll end up in questioning with the immigration people.”
Gabriela sniffs. “Let them try. They can try and deport me!”
“For god’s sake, you’ll get arrested.”
“Deport me!”
Gabriela has evidently lost it, but we can both see that the two approaching security guards are viewing her suspiciously, and this time it is a quieter protest. I replace the last magazine on the rack and steer her away to the nearest brasserie.
“And you’d better hope my bank card works.”
We order overpriced café crèmes from a sad-eyed waitress. The visibility of misery other than her own seems to raise Gabriela’s spirits somewhat. She lets out a long sigh and pulls her hair into a band. The tannoy calls a final check-in to Rome. Overhead, I hear the drone of a departing plane.
“Maybe you could change your ticket?” I suggest.
“There is no point.” She bites her lip. “I left too late. I did it again.”
“What do you mean?”
“I am not a bad daughter, Hallie. I do not mean to be a bad daughter.”
“Of course not.”
“It is not that I do not wish to go back. But every time I make plans, something happens. This is the thing about Clichy. People come, and they stay. It is like they get stuck here. It is like there is something here that will not let them go.”
Chapter Ten
GABRIELA CAME TO Paris because she had decided at age fourteen to join the Surrealists. A dead movement, yes, but that did not deter Gabriela, who had subjective views on death. For a long time it had seemed to her that life could not be explained by words and mathematics, although the mechanics of society appeared to demand that it should. Words and mathematics did not explain the Sol de Lluvia, or the appearance of a young red frog at Gabriela’s window in the aftermath of a meteorological event. They did not explain the transformation of Gabriela’s sister, Ana Lucia, from a happy, outgoing child to a woman of so many phobias that she was no longer able to leave the house, believing the very air outside to be poisonous with radiation.
Gabriela found consolation in the work of Frida Kahlo, and from Kahlo to Picasso, Magritte, and of course Dalí, whose melting clocks spoke more purely to Gabriela’s perception of time than anything she had yet encountered. A burgeoning photographer, Gabriela’s work was inevitably and deliciously influenced by these masters, and in the aperture of the lens she found her rationale for a chaotic world. The next step was clear: she must retrace the steps of those who had gone before. She must go to Paris. Even Kahlo had gone to Paris, although her opinion of it had not been high. Unfortunately, Gabriela was not a famous artist liable to be invited to exhibit abroad, and she needed a visa to enter the country. Further study beckoned.
Everything was in place when Ana Lucia announced the news. She was pregnant.
There was never a question of Gabriela abandoning her sister. She watched her niece, Lorena, grow from a mewling kitten into a sunny-tempered child with a talent for dance that could bring strangers in the streets to tears. It was Gabriela who took Lorena to her ballet classes and waited outside the studio, listening to the strident chords of the piano and the footfalls of girls landing grand jetés and pas des chats. Gabriela attended the competitions (Lorena had a wall of gold medals), filled in the application forms, massaged alcohol into toes blistered by pointe work, banged shoes against the stairs until their backs broke.
She didn’t mind at first. The truth was, Lorena was special. Anyone could see that. But as the years went on Gabriela had a lurking feeling, a sense in her heart that was becoming more and more robust. Parents of other dancing progenies assumed Lorena was her child, but they were mistaken. Gabriela was living a borrowed life, one that at any point might be reclaimed, should Ana Lucia recover. When she watched Lorena perform an arabesque, the child’s little face ablaze with joy, everything made sense. But when she went back to her apartment, with the prints of Dalí and Kahlo and Magritte on the walls and her own fledging photographic efforts pinned between them, Gabriela knew she had forsaken her own ambitions for someone else’s without having been consulted.
Before she knew it, Lorena would be a teenager, bound for a ballet boarding school—perhaps even an international school. Whether her sister recovered or not, Lorena would be gone, and Gabriela would remain in Bogotá, with nothing to show for the last decade but a certain dexterity in breaking in pointe shoes.
She was my sister’s daughter, said Gabriela. But she was mine too. And I had already lost her.
It is hard to explain the feeling when you discover your life has been stolen, even when it is by the people you love the most.
Gabriela regrouped. She submitted her portfolio to a number of institutions and was accepted on to a masters programme. She promised Lorena she would visit the Paris Opera House and bring back a pair of Parisian ballet shoes in her size. By the time I’m back, she told her niece jokingly, you’ll be a prima ballerina.
On her last day in Bogotá, the city experienced the phenomenon known as Sol de Lluvia, intense sunshine followed by intense rain. The heat was biblical. The city was silent; people retreated indoors, animals took refuge in the shade, even the traffic had paused. As she walked uphill, the air seemed to shimmer, and Gabriela could feel the heat of the road through her soles. She imagined Lorena crossing the street in a succession of fouette turns, and winced at the thought of the tarmac burning against that delicate satin. But Lorena was in class, with air-conditioning.
Within the short distance uphill, the sky had clouded. The rain hit hard and fast, and Gabriela was drenched. She took shelter in a doorway and watched the drops striking against the pavement. When it finally ceased, she looked up. Among the parting clouds she saw, quite perfectly, the image of Dalí’s melting clock, and in that moment she knew she had made the only possible decision.
Chapter Eleven
“AND SO,” CONCLUDES Gabriela, “I took the flight to Europe, travelling in the footsteps of all the artists I admire most in the world. You see, Hallie, sometimes something happens that is a game-changer. And when it does, you have a choice. You can ignore it and pretend it never happened, or you can follow it, and see where it will take you. I enrolled at my school. I went to the Opera House, and my god, it is beautiful. I took many photographs. I bought the ballet shoes. But I have not kept my promise.”
Gabriela hesitates. She glances around. Surrounding us are the just-arrived and the about-to-depart. The sad-eyed waitress leans against the bar and slips first one foot out of her heeled shoe, then the other.
“And this is the strange thing. Every time I try to leave, something happens. You might laugh, but it is the truth. I try to book a plane, there are no more tickets. The flight is cancelled. The taxi is delayed.” Gabriela reaches forward and clasps both my hands in hers. “You tell me, Hallie. How do I explain to them, to my mother and my sister and my niece who are thousands of miles away, how do I
explain that I have not abandoned them?”
“I—I don’t know.”
“You wonder why I push you to call your family. You think I don’t guess that it is complicated. All families are complicated. That does not mean you give up on them.”
“Our situations are totally different, Gabriela.”
We sit back, assessing one another. I wonder if I believe Gabriela, and I wonder if she cares whether I do or not. What is belief, anyway? To be certain about a truth you cannot or have not yet proved. The green bowler woman believes she is a chronometrist. The chronometrist. Gabriela believes she is stuck in Clichy. Coincidence, or something more? Were my sensory perceptions deluding me when I thought I saw myself, or am I denying evidence?
On the runway, a plane builds up speed and launches into the sky. While I can see it, I know the plane is real. In a moment it will be gone. The emissions tail lingers, a brief stripe against the sky, before that too dissipates into the stratosphere, and soon enough there is nothing to show the plane was ever there.
Chapter Twelve
IN MY TINY studio, fifteen minutes’ walk from Millie’s, I put on some music, pour a glass of wine, and lie back on the not-quite-comfortable futon. My empty suitcase is propped against the wall. I can almost see, glowing through its plastic shell, the small token of my English SIM card.
I imagine the landline in Sussex ringing right now. I imagine my mother, after about thirty rings, running from her studio shouting, “Busy, busy, busy!” and snatching up the receiver.
“Ioanna Angelopoulos, what is it?” she says in her worst Eurovision-style accent. She deploys this indiscriminately to deter visitors, salespeople and the could-have-been friends of her offspring, despite having lived in the UK all her life and our closest link to Greece being Grandpa Dimitris, fifty miles away in sheltered accommodation and still in mourning for Granny Persephone.
“Hello, mother, it’s me.”
“Which one?” she says, because she claims she has never been able to tell the difference between my voice and Theodora’s.
“Hallie.”
There is a long, tense silence. Then an intake of breath.
“Hallie?” Her voice is uncertain. On the brink of tears. “Is it really you?”
“Yes, it’s me. Why, did you actually miss me?”
“Where the hell have you been?” she yells. No trace of an accent now. “Have you any idea how worried we’ve been? Running off in the middle of the night, not even a text message or a bloody fridge magnet note? Have you any idea?”
There is a discordant clash as she hits the piano keys with her free palm. The cat-who-does-not-belong-to-us rises in outrage and hops through the open window into the night.
“What about my letter?” I say.
“Letter? There was no letter, Hallie. There was no fucking letter.” Her anger is fading. Relief rolls in, overwhelming. She feels exhausted. “We kept calling, but it said your number was out of service. Theo and George said I shouldn’t worry, you’d turn up in a few months. But you don’t do things like that, Hal. I’ve been lying awake, night after night, imagining you dead or hacked to bits in a ditch.”
Her voice breaks. I hear it as though I’m standing next to her. I feel the same tightness in my throat. Tears pricking the backs of my eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper.
“It’s all right. It’s all right, you stupid goose. We love you. You know we do. Just come home.”
My mother slams down the receiver. She sits, bewildered, on the piano stool. The tear that has been threatening all through our conversation trickles down her cheek and a streak of clay on her chin. Then she leaps up, yelling my father’s name.
“Busy!” he yells back.
“It was Hallie!”
A moment of silence. Then a crash of footsteps as he runs downstairs from his studio. Oils on his face and his hair. My parents stare at each other. They are remembering volcano day. They are realizing their own culpability in everything that went wrong. It devastates them.
I OPEN UP the suitcase, retrieve the English SIM card, and switch it with my French one. I turn the phone back on and wait. Nothing.
I will never make that call, although I’ve imagined a hundred variations of it. Gabriela is wrong. You might not give up on family, but sometimes they give up on you. Sometimes that happened a long time ago. The SIM card, I realize, is holding me back. I extract it from the phone, reach across to the window and pull open the shutters. For a few seconds, I hold the SIM aloft between finger and thumb. Such a tiny thing.
I lob it as hard as I can out into the night.
Next I take out the polaroid. The picture contains four figures: my mother, my brother George and my sister Theodora, and me, aged two and a half. We’re clustered together. My mother is crouched, one hand resting on my shoulder, the other pointing to something outside of the frame. Theo is holding an ice cream which is dribbling down its cone, George is standing on one shoe lace. So far, so average. What is extraordinary about the photograph is me. It’s my expression: happiness, even glee. It’s evidence of a previous era; one accessible only through artefacts, the way the Eocene immortalised its lifeforms as fossils. I have no memory of what we were looking at, or of the photograph being taken.
I pause by the window, the polaroid trapped between my fingers. Then I stuff it back into the suitcase.
My sleep is fitful. I have strange dreams about my mother’s sculptures. I dream of sea creatures forged from lava. Fossils set in Paris stone wriggle out of the shapes they once were and are reborn as caterpillars. A falcon is perched on the steps of the Basilica, offering guided tours. I try to hide, but its beady eye sees me and somehow through the dream I know that the bird, the little falcon, is here in the room with me, waiting.
Chapter Thirteen
I STAGGER PRECARIOUSLY backwards with a sofa chair in my arms. It falls to the floor with a crash. One of the overhead lights flickers.
“Fucking boys,” I mutter.
Millie’s is so quiet tonight that Eloise has set me the unenviable task of cleaning all of the table and chair legs in the back room. The chairs and tables are stacked on the stage, and whoever stacked them was clearly male—or Dušanka—because they are almost impossible to get down. The sound system is off, the room silent except for me. I keep thinking about that night. Green bowler woman, the airport, the panic attack. Like an idiot, I thought they’d stopped. I thought I was finally free of them. And then Gabriela’s story. I’m almost relieved she isn’t working tonight—I need some time to regain my equilibrium.
Eloise’s head pops around the doors to the front bar, releasing with it a cloud of eighties anthem.
“Hey Hallie! We need ice.”
I hold up my cleaning products, unimpressed.
“Now,” says Eloise.
The head disappears, and I emit a long sigh to no one. As it fades, I hear something else—a scuffling, up in the roof. No, not a scuffling; a fluttering. The rush of feathers. My heart jumps. I refuse the temptation to look up and instead cross the empty dance floor and head downstairs to the ice machine.
The scoop is missing, which means it’s buried under several loads of ice.
“Fucking boys,” I say again.
I dig about in the ice cubes, searching for the plastic scoop. My skin starts to turn numb. I burrow deeper. Why the hell can’t people leave the scoop out? At last I touch something firm and I yank.
What comes out of the ice is not the scoop but a human hand. Its fingers are curled and smooth; a mannequin’s hand, lightly frosted and horribly realistic.
I yelp and let the hand go.
“What the fuck kind of joke is this?” I yell, but nobody replies. They are all upstairs, cavorting with Eloise to ‘Ziggy Stardust.’ “For fuck’s sake.”
I reach back into the ice machine, intending to pull the hand out and toss it into the boys’ vestiaire for whatever joker put it there to stumble across later tonight. I seize hold of the fingers. A coldne
ss runs through me that has nothing to do with the ice. A familiar, paralysing coldness. I look closer. The hand is female, the fingernails painted with green nail polish. I want to drop it, but I can’t, so I tug, expecting the hand to spring free of the ice. It comes up and a wrist follows it, then a forearm, covered in a silk sleeve.
“Funny,” I mutter, but my voice comes out pinched and reedy. Now I can see the hump of a shoulder—yes, there’s a shoulder—and, pushed back at an unnatural angle, the shape of something round, a roundness that with hideous inevitability is going to be the crown of a head. I try again to let go of those fingers, to shout for help, but my throat is a dry husk. My tongue waggles and nothing comes out. The arm is almost entirely free now, and I can see it—her—emerging, the neck, the collar of a cream blouse, the face rising from beneath the ice. My heart is pounding in my chest with my rising panic and I know what it’s going to look like before it appears.
She comes free. A black shell of hair, features set in rigor mortis, eyes open wide, frozen irises staring up at me.
I look at the collar of her blouse, its top two buttons undone. Her eyes watch me. And because I have to know, in spite of every part of me screaming to leave, get out of here, get away from her, I reach into the ice machine and prise away one corner of her blouse. The material is stiff and resistant with frost.
The bird is gone. In the hollow of her neck, above the collar bone, I see a scribbling of red scratch marks. The sort of marks that might be made by the claws of a small falcon desperate to escape.
There’s a sudden rattling, a disturbance in the ice. I scream and push the head away from me. Staggering back, I trip over something, fall on my arse, crawl frantically backwards. The hand is sticking out of the hatch. Any second now those fingers are going to wriggle and stretch. She’ll rise, claw her way out of the ice machine, lurch towards me, shedding slivers of frost. Rattling, again. It’s not her resuscitating, it’s a new load of ice shunting into the machine. But I must still be screaming, because suddenly there are people, Eloise and Dušanka and others following I do not recognise, people from the bar come to stare and exclaim. Dušanka grips my shoulders. She is half-hugging, half-shaking me. People say oh my god. People take out their phones.