by EJ Swift
“Hallie, Hallie. Why are you reading this shit?”
“Did you just take that out of my handbag?”
“Of course not,” says Dušanka innocently. “It must have fallen out.”
Dinner is followed by cards and whisky. The air in Bo’s apartment grows close and heady, and we crowd on to the balcony, where the cool night tingles against our faces. We shout at people passing in the street below and they shout back:
“Joyeux Noël!”
Back inside, slumped variously on sofas, beanbags or the floor, Angel passes round a spliff.
“Poussins. What are we going to do about the state of the world?”
“This is the internet generation,” sighs Dušanka. “Sign a petition, Angel, it will appease your conscience for at least a week.”
“I’m serious. There’s a Moulin Vert rally in a fortnight. I will go. You should all come.”
“Moulin Vert?” Victor scratches at his jawline. “That’s not a proper party.”
“Just give them time.”
“Aren’t those guys communists?” asks Mike. “Don’t they want to pull down the Eiffel Tower because it’s like an ode to the patriarchy?”
Dušanka’s eyes light up, ready to respond, but Gabriela places a gently restraining hand on her arm.
“Just come to one,” Angel persists. “Listen to what they have to say. We can joke all night, but Paris is a tinder box. We need people like them, and more than ever since the attacks.”
Everyone falls silent for a moment.
“Where is it?” asks Bo.
“At the Moulin Vert, of course. Right on top of the hill.”
Across the room, I catch Gabriela’s eye. Now she is sending her calming vibes in my direction, but all I can feel is growing panic.
“I’ll come,” she says. “Hallie?”
I glare at her. What the hell?
“We must all of us face our fears,” says Gabriela, cryptically—to everyone in the room except me. I think of the conversation we had just a fortnight ago, in the keg room.
“SO.” GABRIELA RAPS the metal door. The sound is dull and flat. “This is the place?”
I nod. Touch my fingertips to the door.
“Sometimes, it feels kind of warm...”
Not today. Today it is cold.
Ever since what I term in my head as ‘the 1875 incident’, I have avoided changing kegs or bringing up stock. I make excuses to the managers, or I’m quick to volunteer for other tasks. I don’t know what’s lurking in the keg room, and I don’t know how I feel about it. I haven’t seen the chronometrist since she bid me farewell in the alleyway.
Gabriela knows. I told her I was good with secrets, and I wasn’t lying, but one of this magnitude? I can’t keep this to myself. She wants to investigate. For a while I fended off her curiosity, but Gabriela is stubborn, and she knew that it was only a matter of time before I succumbed.
I lift the bar across the keg room door, push it open and step inside.
The rush of cold air brings goose pimples to my arms. Gabriela gives me a nudge to propel me further inside and then steps past, eager to look around.
I force myself to survey the room scientifically. A dank, concrete cavern, just as I saw it on my first day. To my left, crates of lager and alcopops stacked on shelves. Further along, the door to the lift, metal and rusting. To my right, the room opens out to encompass the beer posts, each station comprising five or six opaque tubes hooked up to their kegs. Spares in front, empties by the door. Somewhere in the room there is a leak; a shallow pool of water spreads from one wall. I can hear dripping.
I climb up on a keg and put my ear against the wall. Silence. This is definitely concrete. Mixed by a machine and poured into the ground, stifling the hum of earth and stone and fossil. We’re sealed off down here, I think. Sealed in.
Drip drip. Drip drip.
“What are you doing?” Gabriela’s voice, bright and curious, interrupts my chain of thought.
“Nothing. Just listening. For clues, I suppose.”
I rub my arms. “Can you show me how to change the Guinness again? I always struggle with that.”
Gabriela obliges good-naturedly. I watch as she turns off the gas, gives the cap a wrench and disconnects the line.
“Always remember to close it first. Otherwise the beer will jump at you.”
She drags the empty out the way, and I manoeuvre a full one into its place.
“Now twist it back on.” Gabriela perches on an upturned crate and watches me in turn. “Open the line. Check the little ball in the measure—see that it floats to the top. That is it.”
“Thanks.”
Gabriela stays put.
“Did you see anything?” she asks. “Any... clues?”
“Not really.” I pause.
Gabriela looks at me expectantly.
“You?” I ask.
“No. It is the same keg room.”
“You don’t notice anything different?”
“No.” Gabriela taps her fingers against the keg. “But I believe you.”
I shiver. Recently I have been struggling to sleep. I lie awake with the shutters open and the winter sun bright and strong, listening to the street below, to my neighbours moving about the apartments around me, thinking about 1875. Sometimes I wake and the warmth convinces me there is someone beside me, that Millie is here, that I never left 1875. Did I really travel through time? If my attacks have taught me one thing, it is that I cannot trust the machinations of my brain. Surely it is more likely that I am the victim of a psychological delusion, that I fell into a coma and dreamed it, or more simply, that I made the whole thing up? Yet Gabriela believes me.
“The anomaly can’t be a singularity,” I say. “And it’s not a black hole. I’ve been thinking about multiverses...”
“What if there is not a scientific explanation? What if it’s...” She hesitates.
“What?”
“Magic.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You know, Hallie, sometimes you are too English for your own good.”
“And you’ve read too much Márquez.”
“Actually, I prefer Borges.”
“You really don’t remember the Sacré-Coeur?” I say, for the hundredth time.
For a moment, Gabriela looks thoughtful, even confused. Then her expression clears.
“Only the Moulin Vert,” she agrees. “It has been there for over a century.”
“You know most people would think you’re mad to believe me.”
“I have the open mind. Anyway, it has to be linked to my problem. You travelling, me not travelling—it is all the same source. There is something about Clichy that is causing these events.” Gabriela gives the keg room a final glance. “And this place, it is the key.”
I nod, although I don’t believe the anomaly has anything to do with Gabriela’s failure to get back to Colombia. The chronometrist said there is one incumbent for each anomaly, so how could it affect anyone else? Gabriela could quite easily go home, if she really wanted to. Ultimately, it’s easier for her to believe she is trapped then to face up to the fact that she doesn’t want to leave. But I don’t say any of this. She is indulging me, so I have to indulge her.
“Maybe,” I say. “Maybe so.”
LATER, DRUNKER. WE take turns inventing cocktails. Gabriela juggles ice. Two centuries ago I was juggling fire batons and a boy told me he had seen my future. Isn’t this it? I look at everyone in the room: Gabriela, Angel, Bo, Dušanka, Mike, Victor, Yogi Millis. One person is missing; but I try not to think about Léon. I look at their befuddled, happy faces. Whatever our reasons for coming to Paris, all that matters is that we are here, a family. We are home.
This summer gone in Sussex was a dry, sweltering three months. The water ban turned the weeds yellow and sour whilst indoors, the house festered. Theo and George were back and forth on trips to London, embarking jubilant with schemes and ambitions and returning listless, deflated, their plan
s shot down by some despised capitalist with a spreadsheet. My father had given up entirely on his work and spent all of his evenings with Ray Yellowlees. My mother had begun collecting vermin for a new installation. She was in a cycle of manic production and profound despair, and refused to speak to any of us.
Over those weeks I could feel myself being slowly eroded, worn down until I could barely remember who I was or what I stood for. It was the culmination of a very long process, but I was only recognising that now.
I remember waiting outside the locked bathroom, where Theo had been in the shower for over an hour with the water running and the water suppliers threatening to cut us off, singing.
I’m light as a bird on the wing, free as a butterfly. Letting go of all those things you said on days gone by.
She has a nice voice, my sister, full and confident. At that moment I wanted nothing more than to rip her larynx out of her throat and ensure she never sang again. The shower stopped running, but Theo continued. And now I’m flying high, she sang. And now I’m flying highhhh, oo-oo-oo-oh—
The hairdryer switched on, drowning Theo out. I could feel the panic slithering in, the way it always did. An attack had been looming all day. I wouldn’t escape it. I never could. My chest began to contract as the air around me thinned.
But there was an alternative. Theo had told me what the alternative was: I could leave it all behind. I could slough off this confused, anxious, uncertain creature I had become and leave her on the landing in Sussex.
Start over. Become weightless. Become new.
ANGEL FLINGS THE cocktail shaker over-enthusiastically and the top flies off and out the open window, a parabola of green liquid following in its wake. We dissolve into helpless giggles. Victor opens the cognac and dribbles it into our open mouths, before collapsing into Bo’s lap. Bo starts to sing something in Swedish. Dušanka’s arm is linked through mine. Gabriela is plaiting my hair. We all shout ‘skål’ at precisely the wrong time.
At two in the morning the buzzer goes. Bo answers.
“Ja?” He turns back. “It’s Léon!”
“Léon!” shouts Angel. “That putain de merde. I thought he was in Montpellier.”
“I was, mes petits choux,” says a familiar voice. “I decided to come back early.”
His eyes meet mine over Angel’s shoulder; his mouth kinks in a smile. Something tightens in my chest, pleasantly anticipatory, before he turns away. For the rest of the night we barely speak. But I am aware of his presence in the room, his gestures a counterpoint to mine, impossible to ignore. And through the cycles of conversation and ribald laughter I have—not a premonition, exactly—more of a sense that I should record this moment. I should bottle it and store it safe, because there may come a day when this moment—
But it is just a moment. Like any other through time, it is here, and then it is gone.
Chapter Twenty-Six
THE MILLIE’S THEME for New Year’s Eve is superheroes. Gabriela is Batman and I am the Joker, with a purple waistcoat and lipstick slashed across my face. Crates of Moët are shipped in; the managers compete over who can devise the most eclectic champagne shots. The DJ is so drunk he misses midnight and a countdown goes around forty minutes late. It doesn’t matter, at least not to the New Year revellers: the dance floor is pounding.
Eloise sends me to fetch more Moët. The second I open up the keg room I know it is happening. There’s a rush of amniotic warmth, the siren song floods my ears and I go under.
I surface in another timezone. The kegs are gone and there is a party underway, a wilder and substantially less clothed party than Millie’s in the twenty-first century. One man is down to his underwear and a flapper girl’s headdress. A blonde woman sits half-naked, her breasts jutting between a pair of red braces, smoking a cigar. No one appears to notice my astonishing appearance, but within moments of arriving I have a bottle of absinthe in one hand and a top hat balanced upon my head. The revellers raise their glasses; they holler, they toast:
“A dix-neuf vingt!”
I drink. My head explodes into stars. A whirling green spiral rotates on the backs of my eyelids.
And they’re gone. So fast! I am in the keg room with a crate of Moët at my feet. It is freezing. I hoist the crate and head back up to the bar. My head aches but I feel pumped full of energy, alive and glowing in every cell. I grab Gabriela.
“Nineteen-twenty. Nineteen-twenty!”
“You travelled?”
The room thrums with bass. I have to shout to hear myself.
“They gave me absinthe!”
“Who?”
“I don’t know!”
“Cool!”
Gabriela vaults up on the back bar and reaches down a hand to help me up. A flashback: Millie and I, scrambling over the wall. Millie and I, running. But I’m not there. We stand above the sea of bodies. Lights swivel overhead, illuminating faces, dazed and beatific, arms swaying with the anthemic beat. 1920? On the bar next to me, Angel has removed his trousers and shirt and parades up and down in his boxers. Dušanka hoses him with soda water. The crowd screams. Dušanka hoses the crowd.
Four in the morning. My hearing is fuzzy, my vision peculiar and speckled with green, the bass lodged in my sternum, rattling me senseless. Gabriela croons in my ear.
“Feliz Año Nuevo!”
I inhale absinthe fumes. I can feel myself lifting, up, above the crowd, above the lights. Gabriela shouts it again.
“Feliz Año Nuevo!”
“You’re the best of friends,” I tell her. “The very, very best.”
“And you, my Hallie. The dearest.” She raises my arm. We are champions. “We are going to have a brilliant year.”
In Oz at eight a.m. we find Angel collapsed over the bar, limbs improbably sprawled, head limp and nodding. He is stirring a tumbler of poison green liquid with a glowstick, regarding both the liquid and the rotating stick with equal fascination.
“Didn’t make it home?” I ask. Angel gives me a confused grin. I take up the adjacent bar stool.
“This Léon is a putain de...” Angel descends into incomprehensible French. He attempts to gather up a flotilla of shot glasses and sends them rolling down the bar. I reach over to form a barrier. From the other side of the taps, Léon’s hand appears and scoops up the glasses.
“Merci, chérie.”
He mops up the mess in front of Angel.
“Courage, mon ami. Courage.”
“J’ai besoin de toi,” mutters Angel, and promptly falls off his chair.
“That is one hell of a hangover when he wakes up,” says Léon. “What time is he on?”
“He’s opening the bar at twelve.” Eloise makes no attempt to disguise her annoyance. “What have you done to him?”
“Nothing that hasn’t been done before.”
Bo and Isobel drag Angel into a booth and prop him up. He gives a dizzy smile and passes out.
“How was your new year?” I ask Léon.
“About as good as it can be when you’re holding up a girl’s hair while she vomits into the gutter,” he says. “How about you?”
I feel an illogical stab of jealousy over vomit-girl.
“The DJ missed midnight,” I say.
“He does that every year. It’s a lost cause.”
“Every year? How long have you been in Clichy, anyway?”
“Too long.”
Voices raised, a crash from behind me. I turn and see a man sprawled on the floor, another man standing over him with his fist raised. I think of Luc in 1875, and I freeze. The first man gets to his feet and lunges at his attacker. The bouncer looks over from his post by the door, but before he can move, Léon has vaulted the bar and intercepted the two men. He speaks in rapid French until the first man backs away, hands before him. The bouncer jerks his head: out. The man makes as if to leave, then turns and swings a punch at Léon. I gasp, but next thing I know he’s on the floor and Léon has a knee in his back. The bouncer ambles over, levers the man to his feet, g
rabs both aggressors by their collars and hoists them out into the morning. Everyone cheers.
Léon returns to the bar and pours me a champagne shot as if nothing has happened. I stare at him.
“What was that, karate?”
“Tae kwon do.”
“Are you, like, a black belt or something?”
“I trained.” He looks at me thoughtfully, though as usual it’s impossible to tell what he’s thinking. “It’s important to be able to defend yourself. You never know where you might end up.”
You have no idea, I think.
“Maybe you could teach me.”
“Perhaps.”
“I was thinking—” I hesitate, but inebriation pushes me on. “I was thinking maybe we could go for a drink some time.”
He pauses.
“That might not be a good idea. You know what Clichy is like. People talk.”
“Oh. Right, of course. Sorry.”
The heat rushes to my face. With every second that passes I can feel myself shrivelling with embarrassment. You complete and utter idiot, Hallie.
“Hey.” He pushes the shot glass towards me. “Bonne année.”
“Yeah. You too.”
I stumble away and join Gabriela. It is very late, I realise. The sun is up, casting bright lines across the filthy floor. It must be time to leave. From outside comes the sound of petrol engines, footsteps, the rumble of a city waking up. New month, new year. The footprint of the real world. It comes to me, very strongly, that what we think of as the real world is not; that the hours of night and dreams are more real than the day. I put my arm around Gabriela’s shoulders and we pick up one another’s coats. Gabriela calls: “Bo, Dušanka! On y va! Eloise, you coming?” Eloise shakes her head, indicating Angel. I glance towards the bar, thinking even now Léon might give me some indication, that I might not have got it so wretchedly wrong. But he isn’t looking at us as we lurch into the day.