by EJ Swift
“They ate elephants, you know,” Fleur is saying. “From the zoo. Castor and Pollux, they were called, and in the siege them rich folk on Haussmann chopped ’em up and ate ’em, every last scrap, along with the kangaroos. I wonder who got the trunk and the ears? Imagine that in front of you, a bit of elephant ear.”
“Dog gigot with baby rats,” says one of the circle. “I’ll never forget it.”
“I caught rats when I was a child.”
“The squeaking, I can’t hear the squeaking without a shiver down my spine...”
“Why didn’t you go back to London, Fleur?”
“I was too well known in London,” says Fleur mysteriously, to a round of hoots and whistles.
“Are you from London as well, Gabriel?” asks one of the admirers.
“From near London,” I say.
More hoots and whistles. I smile fuzzily.
It is past midnight when the performers from the Folies spill through the door, some still in their costumes, glitter stuck to their cheeks.
“A display!” shout the admirers. “Give us a display!”
“A round of your fire breathing malarkey!” shouts Fleur.
I wake up to watch the fire breathers. They upend the batons, bringing the fire close to their lips, and blow. Jets of flame spout from their mouths. I turn to Fleur, who is mesmerised by the absinthe and the spectacle before us.
“You were going to introduce me,” I remind her.
She catches the eye of one of the jugglers, a slim young man with dark curls and gold-flecked eyes.
“This is my friend, Gabriel.” Fleur produces her luxury smile. “She wants to learn some tricks. This is Fabian.”
The juggler regards me solemnly.
“What do you want to learn?”
“Fire batons,” I reply. “A skill, something I can perform.”
Then the juggler does a strange thing. He places his fingertips at my temples and leans close, close enough that our foreheads and noses almost touch. He closes his eyes. I mirror him.
The world behind my eyelids explodes. I see fireworks. The fireworks become humanoid figures on their hands and knees, all clambering across the black backdrop of the sky, or space, or some other bleak landscape I cannot identify. Sparks strike at the figures. They cower. Where am I, where is this? I have no weight, no body, no physical matter at all. Fire all around, a Catherine wheel with eight green arms, revolving faster and faster until it blurs into a single green star. Then it vanishes, and everything is cold and dark and infinitely alone.
My eyes open. I am in the tavern. Around me laughter, the clinking of tankards. My heart is racing. The juggler’s gaze meets mine, and for a moment I think he is as afraid as I am.
“Yes,” he says. “You can learn. Come with me.”
We extract ourselves from the circle and go out into the cold night. The juggler hands me a baton and shows me how to line my mouth with spirit and hold it there without swallowing, how to set the baton alight so that its flame will burn steadily, how to blow plumes of fire into the air. I burn the inside of my cheek, singe my eyelashes. Late night pedestrians pause to watch: the drunken gentlemen leaning upon their canes, the prostitutes with their smudged rouge and dirty petticoats, the man with his ladder who douses the gas lamps, the ballet dancers trudging home to massage their aching feet.
Now the juggler takes up two burning batons, and twirls them around and about his body. I’ve seen poi artists in the park with the same, effortless grace. He hands over the batons, instructs me in a figure-of-eight pattern. The rushing noise of the fire is frightening, disorientating, as it passes my ear.
“Close your eyes,” instructs Fabian. “Listen to the flames.”
I screw my eyelids tight, sensing the pathway of the fire, the heat of it tracking through the air.
“Good,” says the juggler. “Very good. Tomorrow, we go back to the basics. You have much to learn.”
“I might not be here for very long.”
He does not reply.
“What did you see, when I saw those lights, those visions?” I ask.
Afraid of the answer, I wait whilst Fabian collects up the batons. He spits a mouthful of spirit on the cobbles.
“I saw your future,” he says.
“I don’t believe my future is preordained.”
Fabian says, “You have already made it.”
Chapter Nineteen
IT IS LATE into the night when Fleur hurries us home, a new alertness in her face.
“I’m so tired,” I say. “I can’t walk as fast as you.”
“You can’t walk slow at night,” she says. Again I sense that whisper of fear about her, and I force myself to keep up, ignoring the soreness in my soles and toes.
Fleur lives in a garret at the top of an apartment block in Bastille. As we climb the six flights of stairs she shudders a little, and tells me that some nights when you hear the wind howling it’s not the wind at all, but the ghosts of prisoners who starved or were tortured to death in the old fortress, screaming for mercy.
“Folks say,” she adds, “if you listen carefully enough, you can hear exactly how they died, like they was sobbing direct to your ears. And it were never pleasant.”
I think of Gabriela and me, sat on the gravestones in Père Lachaise. They wouldn’t mind. Back in the twenty-first century, will people be wondering where I’ve gone? Will anyone be out there, looking for me? Gabriela, Angel? What about Léon, who came by specifically to make sure I was okay?
A rickety set of steps leads up the final flight to the garret. Fleur lights a candle, revealing a cold, mean little room, the floorboards warped and the plaster peeling. The furnishings are a narrow bed, and a dresser with a mirror set on top of it. Fleur’s belongings are scattered over the floor, petticoats and pieces of costume jewellery and pamphlets, a pair of stockings draped over the end of the bed.
“Don’t mind me knickers,” says Fleur.
I perch on the bed. Fleur sits on an embroidered cushion in front of the dresser.
“Valleroy gave it me,” she says, poking the cushion. “He got my initials done in pink. It’s watered silk.”
“He doesn’t come here?”
“Oh, no. He has a place.”
She twists a length of black hair around her hand. When she pulls, the head of hair comes away for the second time this evening. Beneath it her real hair is cropped and copper. She sets this second wig over the mirror and the blonde one on top of it. I have to laugh.
“What’s got you?”
“Look at the pair of us,” I say. Fleur grins.
“Funny thing is, my real name’s not Fleur at all. It’s Millie.”
“Millie?”
“That’s my name.”
“You’re Millie!”
“Why, what have you heard?”
“You’re Millie!” I repeat.
“What I said, isn’t it? Millicent from the Wharfs. You know London at all?”
“Bits of it.”
I stare at her, tiredness and hunger forgotten, enraptured. My attention does not bother Millie; I suppose she is used to it. She dampens a cloth in a pail of water, flicking away the spider spinning a web across the handle, and wipes the cloth over her face. Gradually, the rouge and alabaster powder disappear, replaced by freckles and a mole on her left cheek. Without the cosmetics, she looks ten years younger.
“I haven’t been back for a time. Might have all changed. Doubt it.”
“Where I’m from, there’s a bar—a tavern called Millie’s.”
“Well, what do you know? Maybe when I’ve got myself a proper patron with a cold heartless wife he can’t stand and plenty of riches, and he buys me a nice little apartment instead of this hovel, I’ll get him to buy me a tavern as well. That’d be a hoot, wouldn’t it?”
My head reels with implications.
“A hoot,” I agree.
Millie flips through the Folies programme, lingering over advertisements for corsets and suspenders
. Also for sale are remedies for various bodily afflictions—which I read with a horrified fascination—alongside the services of clairvoyants, hypnotists, cartomancers, palm-readers: everything, in short, that might soothe the troubled soul.
“Look at them stockings!” sighs Millie, whose desires appear to be firmly rooted in the material world. “Proper silk. You know how hard it is to keep your legs nice in the winter, cold gets up your nightgown and makes your skin red raw. With a pair of stockings like that, you can keep a man sweet for months. Last time I had proper stockings, I got a diamond pin.”
I look at the overflowing jewellery box on the dresser, but there is nothing obviously diamond or pin-shaped.
“Sold it and drank the money,” says Millie solemnly. “I’ll tell you the tale if you like, though it’s a sorry one.”
“Go on.” I ease off my shoes, massaging the arches of my feet and wincing at the blisters. Somehow through the evening I have managed to keep hold of my original clothes and my DMs. I retrieve the Pikachu sticker, smooth out the wrinkles and return it to the heel of the left boot. Something about the small action is reassuring.
“Well,” begins Millie. “It was the gin was my downfall. God only knows it’s the Devil, and when I say God knows, I mean that’s all He knows. You may have noticed I’m not much of a Christian. I don’t apologise for it, I think a girl needs higher protection than the Lord if you don’t mind me saying so. Look at that church they’re building on the hill, sacred this and sacred that, and who’s paying for it? Poor folks, that’s who.
“Although if I ever went under the knife I might change me mind. About God, I mean. It’s not the blade, it’s the chloroform. I’ve seen cats lying stiff as boards outside them places they practise it, their little feet stuck up in the air like they were saying, I never made it to the rooftops in the eighteenth and there’s birds living that wouldn’t have seen the light of day if they’d only met my needle paw. And now I won’t see the light of day. Gives me a turn, it does. Anyway, it only happened once so far and that’s when I had to sell the diamond, pawned it that is, but I knew I’d never get it back. I have instincts. I drank a tankard of gin and a measure of something a fellow girl of mine got from an old witch who’s known to be reputable, and I sat in a tub full of steaming water, made my legs go pink as a slab of ham, sat there for two hours by which time the water had gone cold and I was out cold. Nothing happened that night. I woke up in a tub full of freezing water with my head like it was hit with a shovel and first thing I thought was, damn thing’s still in there. I howled loud as a kitten.
“But then, what do you know, a week later I had my milliner chasing me for the bill on account of a fancy hat purchase, and I got angry and I’m afraid I said some things he didn’t like and we screamed at one another like a regular pair of pigeons, and when I left I was still angry and hit the gin again and at the end of the night there was a brawl in the tavern and I got punched in the stomach by a baker, and you never did see a baker with scrawny arms. It hurt like buggery. I was sitting on the floor blubbing and blubbing, and everyone thought it was the pain and it was, of course, but it was relief too, because I knew what had happened straight away, I could feel the blood trickling down my drawers, and I thought either I’ll die or I’ll get rid of the damn thing but either way I won’t have to worry about childbirth, and that’s something. I didn’t die, as you see before you. Though it was a nasty business, and I had to burn my favourite petticoats.
“After that, I had a time of feeling the world was not my friend, and every morning I woke up in a terrible dreariness wondering if I should just put myself out of my misery. You find, once you get to thinking on it in a serious fashion, there’s no end of ways to kill yourself. Your last act in the world might as well use a little imagination. I knew a girl who killed herself by walking under an elephant in a circus ring. That’s a true story. I’d think thoughts like that while I was sat in the tavern with the gin firing up my belly. Had me in the gutter in a month, did the gin. Lucky I’ve got a strong constitution, or that might have killed me too. But it didn’t, as you see before you. And though I spent all the money from the diamond pin, one day I walked past a puddle and I caught a glimpse of my face and I said to myself, ‘Millie my girl, you may look like you’ve been in the earth for a month with the worms having a guzzle, but there’s good bones under that skin, and I remember when you had a spark in your eye and you weren’t pulling a Mrs Clagg on life. You still know how to turn a few tricks.’ And that’s when I decided to join the demimondaine, and make my way in the world. As you see before you.”
I wait, expectant, but nothing more is forthcoming.
“You’ve had an exciting life,” I say.
“You could say that.” Millie yawns. “I’m sleepy now. Takes it out of you, telling your life story. That’s not the whole story, of course, there are other bits. You’ll have to tell me yours some other time.”
Millie curls up on the wall side of the mattress, leaving a space for me.
“What’s out there?” I ask. “On the streets? You were nervous, before.”
“Shouldn’t talk about that,” says Millie.
“But I need to know. I’m not from Paris, remember?”
“There’s a murderer,” she says abruptly. “After women. They can’t catch him. He wears a rat pelt for every woman he’s killed, and there’s twenty pelts or more, they say. He hunts at night. That’s why we don’t walk slow.”
“That’s horrific.”
Millie does not answer directly, but after a moment she asks, “Did you see anything, with Fabian?”
“What do you mean?”
“That head thing. I saw he did it to you.”
I remember the crawling figures, the green-armed wheel. The sensation of unaccountable terror.
“No,” I say slowly. “I didn’t see anything.”
“For the best,” she says. “He’s got the Sight. He’s seen some things. Get the candle, will you?”
Millie is asleep within seconds. With her shorn head and freckled skin, she looks vulnerable, barely out of adolescence. I watch her breathing slow, the steady rise and fall of her chest, and I know why Millie has brought me home. She’s lonely. Her gentrified lovers can give her jewels and clothes; they can put a roof over her head. But they cannot give her a meeting of minds, or the straightforward warmth of a hug. They cannot give her a family.
I recognise that loneliness. Until Paris, I’d known it all my life.
The candle gutters and shadows skit across the wall. I blow out the flame, and the room tumbles into darkness. I shiver, at once aware of the biting cold. Of the other thing. All day I have tried to put it from my mind, but now the day is gone and Millie is asleep and there is nothing to place between me and reality. Was the chronometrist telling the truth? How long will I be stuck in 1875? And is there any guarantee that the anomaly will return me to the twenty-first century, or might the next time be some time else again—the Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the Sun King’s reign? What if I keep going back in time forever and ever, what if my last breath will be taken at the bottom of the ocean, in the Eocene?
I nudge open the shutters, suddenly desperate for a view, however unfamiliar. But there is nothing to see. The street lamps have been doused and the sky is dark with cloud. My hands before my face are invisible. Only the murmurs of a city at night offer reassurance that I am still alive: small creatures scrabbling in the roof, footsteps, a restless soul pacing.
There are other, darker possibilities. I could be dead in twenty-first century Paris. This might be a parallel dimension, or I’m a copy of the original Hallie, a replicant, a consciousness, doomed to languish in this century until her death. This might be a quantum world, where with every decision I take another me is born.
I close the shutter and feel my way back to the mattress. It is scratchy and full of lumps, but better than the floor. Or the streets, where—if Millie is to be believed—a murderer is walking, dressed in the furs of rat
s. I have been lucky, if you call it luck. Coincidence, perhaps. Inevitability.
I put an arm around Millie, covering her like the wing of an albatross, remembering Theo’s hug through the duvet, my mother’s screams fading as Dad dragged her downstairs, the ache in my jaw, the mucus in my nose and throat. For a time I tried to bury that memory, then I retrieved it, kept it fresh, a constant reminder. It became seminal. A thing I could not escape even if I wanted to.
“I’ll look after you,” I whisper to Millie. “I’ve got your back.”
Her breathing is even; she gurgles. I hug her tight. The two of us feed off one another’s warmth. It’s good, so far away from home, to hold another heart so close to your own. Sometimes, it’s the only thing you can do.
Chapter Twenty
MILLIE CAME TO Paris because it was not London.
Millie was a child of the Thames. Her oldest memory is of the river, the stench of it, and the glint of the water, at once alluring and repugnant. Her father worked in the shipyard and her mother at the granary in Canary Wharf, or did until she became sick, and died shortly thereafter. Of cholera, says Millie, matter-of-factly. Millie was eight. Millie’s father said everything happened for a reason and no one could know God’s plan, which was the first shaking at the foundations of Millie’s faith, because as far as Millie was concerned, if God’s plan was remotely pragmatic, then He would have struck down Mrs Clagg who lived next door. Mrs Clagg, renowned for hitting both the bottle and her children on frequent occasions, before emerging drunk into the street, wailing her misfortunes, was surely a deserving recipient of death, unlike Millie’s mother Alyce, who did none of these things and was by comparison a very paragon of virtue.