Paris Adrift

by EJ Swift

  ELOISE ACCOMPANIES ME to the police station. She stays with me, lighting my cigarettes, translating in her meticulous French as I tell them about the strange woman with her green bowler hat and her gin and tonic, the woman who told me she was a chronometrist, who carried a bird inside her blouse, who left such an extravagant tip. The last question is routine.

  “Where were you at the time of death?”

  I was in the back bar, cleaning chair legs. CCTV cameras show me there all evening.

  There is no footage of the woman coming into the building at all, on any of the cameras. Not on the night she died, and not on the night I met her. She has no fingerprints, no ID or matching DNA. She is the invisible woman.

  “Go home,” says Eloise. “You’ve had a shock. You did well to hold it together. Get some sleep. Come back tomorrow. We’ll keep you upstairs, you don’t have to clean.”

  This, from Eloise, is about the biggest concession anyone could receive. I nod mutely, trying to do what she says I have done; to hold it together.

  I’M AT HOME in my studio when the buzzer sounds. The noise makes me jump. I go to the comm reluctantly. I’m not sure that I want to talk to anyone.

  “Hello?”

  “Hallie, c’est Léon.”

  I step back, surprised.

  “Hello?” he says again.

  “Yes, I’m here.”

  “I heard what happened at Millie’s. Can I come up?”

  “Um, okay?”

  I buzz him through, and look around the studio. It’s a mess. The bed is unmade, empty bottles and dishes are piled up in the sink. I shove my pyjamas under the pillow and pull the duvet straight. There isn’t time for anything else.

  Léon appears with a bottle of Brouilly and an entire roast chicken from the roti on rue des Abbesses.

  “I thought you might need a drink.”

  “Thanks. Come in.” Feeling horribly exposed, I add, “Sorry it’s such a mess, I wasn’t expecting anyone.”

  “You should see my place.” He looks around. “You travel light, don’t you?”

  “I’m not a great one for belongings.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  “To be honest, I wasn’t planning to stay this long.”

  “And there I was thinking you needed a job.”

  “I did. But it was meant to be for like a month, then I was going to Rome.”

  “Clichy got lucky, as they say.”

  “You mentioned Millie’s,” I say pointedly.

  “Guilty.” He lifts the bottle. “You have...?”

  “Oh, here.”

  I hand him a corkscrew. He pops the cork and pours us each a glass. I roll two cigarettes and pass one to Léon. I’m almost out of baccy—again. It’s alarming how quickly I have adjusted to becoming a smoker.

  Léon lights up.

  “Dušanka said it was that strange woman who was in Millie’s the other night.”

  “Did she come to Oz too?”

  “No, but Victor was saying she tipped like crazy.”

  “Yeah.” I sip the wine. It’s good. I take a larger mouthful. At least with Clichy bartenders there’s no danger of being thought an alcoholic. “I think she was mentally ill. She was obsessed with eighteen seventy-five.”

  “That’s... unusual.”

  “Like there was something significant about that year.”

  “The Basilica was built then.”

  “Sacré-Coeur?”

  “Oui. That’s when they laid the first stone. Although it took until nineteen-fourteen to complete.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “I don’t know much more myself. It was shortly after the Siege of Paris, they’re linked somehow. You should ask Mike, he’ll know.”

  “Of course. I saw the tribute to the Communards in Père Lachaise.”

  “Pretty brutal times,” Léon says.

  There’s a pause.

  “Anyway,” he says. “I’m sorry you had to go through that. Finding her.”

  I hesitate. “Have you ever seen a dead person?”

  “A few.”

  “A few?”

  “I worked in a hospital for a bit. In Australia.”

  “Ah.”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s it like? Australia?”

  “It’s the most beautiful place in the world.”

  I wait, and after a while Léon continues.

  “I don’t know. That country is special to me. But when you see the beaches, the colour of the sand and the sea and everything beneath the waves, the sunsets… You watch the sun setting over the sea, and the entire world is reduced to you and this blazing ball of gas, and the water has turned to gold—actually, perhaps then you understand something about yourself and your place in the universe.”

  I stare at him. I can imagine; yes, I can imagine. The desert, the soaring rock, begging exploration. I can see myself standing out there, feet coated in red dust.

  “Go on,” I say.

  He grins. I lose myself for a second in that smile. “What, waxing lyrical?”

  “If you like.”

  Léon talks about snorkelling on the Great Barrier Reef. He talks about adolescent crocodiles in Koorana, their solid, scaly weight. He talks about the Ghan train route through the shimmering outback, surfing and swimming, the menace of sharks, the beauty of coral. I imagine my body suspended on the surface of the ocean. I imagine Léon floating at my side, the gentle rise and fall of waves.

  I realise he’s stopped talking. We stare at each other for a moment in silence. It should be awkward, but it isn’t.

  “I should probably go,” he says at last. “I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”

  “Thanks. For distracting me.”

  “De rien.”

  THE NEXT NIGHT I go back to work. I don’t want to be alone. On Friday night the place is heaving by eleven. It is jungle theme and the staff are feathered and furred for the occasion. Gabriela hugs me tightly. I’ll be here, she says. I’ll be here with you all the way. I have your back. She paints the camouflage on my forehead and cheeks, holding my face steady as you would a child’s, and I think of Lorena. I am too shaky to hold the brush myself. As the queue for the bar deepens I can feel the threat of an attack edging closer. I glance sideways at every customer I serve, wondering if they have heard the story of the mystery corpse, if that is what they are discussing in their shrill, agitated voices.

  Eloise says she’ll keep me upstairs, but inevitably one of the other managers forgets and asks me to change the lines. I don’t think to refuse. The events of the past few days are swilling around my head. The chronometrist in the ice machine, scratches at her breast. The falcon in the rafters. My head is a broken projector spitting out one image after another. They blur and fuse. Gabriela looks morose in a green coat. The chronometrist whispers in my ear but the voice is Gabriela’s: I’d say you’re ripe.

  Going downstairs, the fear takes over; I dive past the ice machine and practically hurl myself around the corner to the keg room. Something pops into my head. 1875, the year of the Basilica. The moment I enter, I feel a shift in the atmosphere. From the heart of the concrete chamber, by the Kronenberg kegs on the second set of taps, a pool of heat emanates. My panic dissolves. I move into the warmth, curious. What is fuelling it? I feel heat, incredible heat. An eruption. I hear a high-pitched noise, stronger than I have ever heard before, and bright with soprano notes of the first melody ever sung.

  Then I lose time and self and everything between.

  Part Four

  The Folies

  Chapter Fourteen

  HER BODY FEELS warm and heavy; her eyelids refuse to lift. She is floating in a bowl of syrup. The liquid heats gently, glooping as a spoon stirs, and the girl, cupped in the curve of it, is swirled about the bowl. She can smell the maple. No, it’s not that, but something culinary. And something else too. Something that makes her sneeze. She does, twice, and her eyes open.

  She is lying on wooden boards
covered in a fine coating of sawdust. In front of her, a ladder leads up to an open trapdoor, yellowish light filtering through the aperture. She is still underground, but everything that was here before—the kegs, the crates, the beer lines—has gone. In their place are wooden barrels banded with metal.

  She climbs groggily to her feet. Hunger. She is so very hungry. She checks the barrels: some are corked and slosh when she moves them. Others contain food: earthy potatoes, apples, dried peas, cured meat, white granules—she dips a finger and licks; this one is salt. The next one is sugar. She takes a handful of rough grains and crunches on them. The rush of sweetness snaps her awake and her stomach gurgles again. She takes an apple and eats that too. The dried pork accompanies it nicely. She eats a lot of it. Instinct prompts her to cram another apple in each pocket.

  Hunger sated, she climbs the ladder to find out where on earth she has arrived, and emerges into a storeroom stacked with more barrels and a large trestle table dappled with flour. There is one exit, through a threadbare curtain overhanging the doorway. From the other side, she can hear the sounds of a bustling tavern, people eating and drinking or ordering food and drink. Someone yells: “Anne-Marie!” and a woman laughs, loud and ribald.

  The curtain twitches; a woman comes through. She is broad and pink-faced. Her hair is squashed under a cap and her girth swells beneath a floury apron.

  “Hello,” says the girl.

  The woman stares. Her cheeks grow redder. Then her lips pull back, revealing a row of unfortunate teeth; one is black and two are missing altogether.

  “Unbelievable!” hisses the woman. She is speaking in French but the girl understands her without effort, and reaching for a response, she finds the words come readily.

  The girl tests a step forward. “I’m sorry, I got stuck in your cellar—”

  “Unbelievable, the insolence of these thieves!” The woman grabs a broom from the corner. “Out!”

  She levels the broom in front of her, the bristling end pointing towards the girl. Alarmed, the girl retreats.

  “But—”

  “Out, thief!”

  The woman and her broom charge. The girl leaps to the right to avoid being speared by bristles, the woman stumbles as her broom meets the wall. The girl whips aside the curtain into the main room. A rumble of excitement greets her appearance—the drinkers have heard the shrieks of wrath. She is aware of their gaze: the patrons, surprised and curious; the eyes of a moustached man behind the bar, narrowed; the eyes of a young woman in a bonnet, shrewd.

  Behind her, the curtain bulges. The woman with the broom is giving chase. She gets tangled in the curtain and the girl wastes no more time. She runs through the tavern, dodging legs too surprised to try and trip her, jumping up and over a table, saying, “Shit! Sorry!” when she steps on a plate—a nice pâté, by the look of it.

  “Get her!”

  At last the woman’s roar provokes movement. Two men move to block the entrance, but the girl is too nimble. She ducks under their arms and out into the street.

  Daylight—

  Cerulean blue sky, what a day—oh, what a day!

  There is a horse pulling a carriage down the road. Inside the carriage is a woman wearing a tall hat beneath a parasol; in front of the woman a liveried driver holds the reins. More carriages, ahead and behind. People walking along the boulevard, also in period costume. The girl looks for cameras, but there are none. Perhaps this is an aerial shot—she looks skywards once again. The sky is empty. Scraped clean, without a wisp of cloud or a tail of fumes. Not a blinking airborne light. Not—

  She hears a shrill neigh just before several hundred kilograms of muscle and bone crash into her and she is knocked flat on her back, the air sucked out of her, as the horse lurches to the left.

  That’s when the disassociation ends. I am the one laid out in the middle of the boulevard, aching and airless and very much awake. Or someone remarkably like me. Have I split in two, like a cell undergoing mitosis? Either way, I am the one who needs to move quickly to avoid being crushed by another set of hooves.

  I roll. Out of the street, into the gutter.

  A woman approaches. Her narrow grey dress nips her waist and descends to her ankles. She stoops, brings her face close to mine and hisses, audibly:

  “Whore! Get off our streets!”

  She bustles away.

  For the first time in quite a long time, I consider what I am wearing. A sleeveless tank top, cargo pants to below the knee spattered with every alcohol under the sun, filthy trainers, and if my memory is not impaired, the remnants of camouflage makeup. Last night was Jungle Night.

  I look back at the door I came through. Millie’s canopy is gone; the boulevard is flat-faced and grey. The road is a current of carts and carriages and top hats and bonnets and pursed lips and averted eyes and people staring right at me and people pretending not to stare.

  There is no sign of the Moulin Rouge.

  I gawp.

  An approaching carriage driver yells a warning. I move just in time and the horse careers past, nostrils flaring. Its coat is sleek, glistening with sweat. I scramble to my feet and dart into the nearest alley; by some mercy it is just where it was in the twenty-first century.

  The twenty-first century. The back of my brain fizzes. I’m the chronometrist. This is a hotspot and I’d say you’re ripe.

  Whatever this is, green bowler woman is in it up to her very dead neck.

  From the cover of the alley I watch, rubbing my spine, as people pass. They are also dead, these people, even if they don’t know it. They are atoms in the ground and in the air—I have breathed them in, trodden upon them, swallowed them—and yet here they are, walking around like real people, as if the twenty-first century never happened.

  I place both palms against the wall, embracing its solidity, its mineral density, trying to stave off the shakiness brought on by that thought.

  “—the time, Anne-Marie is incensed by it.”

  “It’s understandable. Giving out kitchen scraps is one thing, but urchins openly thieving... it’s not as if these are times of plenty, is it?”

  I smell cigar smoke. The voices are male, drifting back from outside the tavern. All at once I have a terrible craving for a cigarette. I slip my hand into my pocket and feel the plastic pouch of Golden Virginia. I’ll just wait until they’ve gone.

  “Not at all. And I am not suggesting that we are an open house, far from it. It’s only that—” The voice lowers. I inch closer to the alley entrance. “Sometimes I look at these children and I can’t help but imagine that their parents were probably Communards, are probably dead, and they have no one left to care for them. It is going to become a problem.”

  “It’s already a problem. Urchins are raiding your wife’s larder, in broad daylight, fearless as rats. Don’t let your kind nature get the better of you, Henri.”

  “That child today—she looked as skinny as a rat. I don’t suppose she had eaten in days.”

  I put my hands to my cheeks. Child? Skinny?

  “She looked insolent. She looked like a regular little thief. And Henri—don’t forget, we have all eaten rats.”

  “Never again. My God!”

  “No. Never again.”

  “Henri!”

  The screech is a woman’s and I recognize it. Henri is being summoned, doubtless by Anne-Marie. Anne-Marie will not be happy to find me lurking nearby.

  Which, assuming the way I got here is the way I’ll get back, is going to cause me difficulties. I close my eyes, letting my consciousness reach out for a sense of it—that strange warmth, the beautiful song. There is nothing. The anomaly (careful, Hallie, you’re using her words now) is silent. The way back is shut, at least for now.

  A young girl exits the gates of a house off the alleyway, carrying a basket of laundry in both arms. I step away from the wall.

  “Excuse me? Sorry to bother you, but what year is this?”

  The girl gives me a queer, frightened look. “It’s... it’
s eighteen seventy-five.”

  Of course it is.

  “Eighteen seventy-five.” I repeat it quietly, as though this is a perfectly reasonable response, and not the outcome of a probable brain tumour or previously unsuspected mental illness.

  “Yes.” She shrinks back.

  “Thank you,” I say. “That is exactly what I needed to know.”

  The girl stops. Her face goes blank. Then her features twist. Her mouth works grotesquely, opening and closing, opening and closing.

  “Hey, are you all right?”

  The girl blinks, twice. When she speaks again, her voice has a different tone.

  “My dear—you made it. What a perfectly—fantastic jump!”

  Coldness. My vision narrows, goes black. In the dark, seconds stretch into minutes, and with each minute I feel my body temperature dropping another degree.

  A pinpoint of light. I grasp for it. Focus on that light until the darkness recedes and I can see again. The girl stands there, watching me with interest.

  “You,” I whisper. “You were dead.”

  “Me? No, no, no, no. Not—me.”

  I remember the frozen hand I pulled from the ice machine and I can feel it against my fingers now.

  “That woman in the freezer, was she even you?”

  “For—a time.”

  “And now she’s dead.”

  “Collateral,” says the chronometrist regretfully. “Most—unfortunate, but time was—ticking. I needed—to shock you into action.”

  “You killed her. Fucking hell, you murdered her.”

  “Would it make you—feel better—if I said she had an incurable brain tumour?”