‘You promised you wouldn’t get me into trouble,’ Nicolas said. His eyes wandered to a spot on the top of my forehead and he licked his upper lip.
‘And I didn’t,’ I said. A carriage passed, and I stepped into the road to cross to the other side. On the opposite corner, a man stood watering a horse. Passing very closely to the animal, I tried to use it as a barrier to cut Nicolas off, but he managed a clumsy, drunken spin and kept pace with me.
‘I’m deep into the shit with the Compagnons.’
‘That has nothing to do with me.’
It was a beautiful day, cold, with a scorched-blue sky, and the dark-grey shadows cast by the bare winter branches on the limestone looked as if they’d been sketched on. The streets were busy and crowded. Nicolas bumped into a cafe table, upsetting a cup of coffee, and the clink of the china cup on the table was loud and unending. Nicolas proffered a sloppy apology to the man who was sitting there with his newspaper and pipe.
‘I’ve been betrayed,’ Nicolas said, regaining his balance. ‘They know I stole.’
I ignored him, and stopped to let pass a group of men in work overalls. Nicolas took my elbow. It wasn’t rough; it didn’t hurt, but he wasn’t going to let go until I listened to him. He pulled me into a recessed doorway.
‘I’m going to lose everything,’ he said, ‘and I have nowhere to go. This was my last chance.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that. However, I kept my word. I don’t even know where to find the Compagnon house and I’ve said nothing to those men. You must have told someone else. Perhaps you were too drunk to remember.’ I looked out towards the road just as a passing horse stopped to urinate, its piss potent and billowing steam in the cold air.
He stared into my face, trying to focus, and his hot breath reeked. Stubble grew in uneven patches on his pimpled jaw. ‘You’re like one of those girls on the postcards that the paper vendors sell.’
‘What are you talking about?’ I shifted my basket from one elbow to the other, looked from his face to the street and back to his face again. I could taste the smell of horse piss.
Nicolas laughed then. Not a mirthful, belly sound – more of a jab from the back of the throat. He kept his eyes on my face and reached for something in his back pocket, a rectangular piece of card, softened and creased many times over. He unfolded the card and made it smooth by rubbing it with an open palm against his chest, then turned it over to reveal the image. Two naked, creamy women in heeled shoes, one on a bed, the other crouched over her. I pushed the card away.
‘I saw you kiss that lady,’ he said. ‘When I came to finish the handles. I saw you.’
‘You saw nothing,’ I said.
‘I was there, I saw you in the doorway. You and a lady with a purple ribbon on her hat.’
‘You don’t know what you saw.’
‘They’re going to kick me out,’ he said, leaning back against the stone wall of the doorway. ‘I’ve got nothing.’
‘I can’t help you.’
‘What do you think would happen if your sweet Madame knew what kind of girl you really were?’
‘She would never believe you.’
Nicolas took a step towards me, suddenly very sober. ‘Would make a good story though, wouldn’t it? Perfect fodder for that concierge or the girl who takes the laundry. Truth or rumour, makes no difference to them.’
‘What do you want from me? Do you want me to go and speak to the men at your house? Tell them there was never a theft?’
Nicolas held up the postcard again and leaned even closer to me. With his thumb and forefinger, he pulled gently on the lobe of my ear.
‘Never,’ I said, and pushed him by the chest. He laughed at me as I walked away.
* * *
But it wasn’t going to be as easy as walking away from a drunk boy. I lived the next few days in terror. I watched Monsieur Muller, who was as sour as always but whose attitude towards me remained unchanged, and I watched Audette, who was busy and friendly and disinterested. Everywhere I went, to purchase bread or vegetables or wine, I was like an animal stalked. I had no appetite and, instead of sleeping at night, I composed horror stories that grew worse as morning drew closer: Nicolas confronting Axelle at her place of work, or even more awful, where she lived; Madame sending me home, shamed, back to Tante Huguette, to being told my presence was a burden.
Not knowing what was going to happen, or when, was far worse than anything he could have done to me.
So. It was a relief when, on a Saturday morning, I found an envelope addressed to me on the floor of the vestibule. It had been pushed under the door. Inside, the postcard of the two women. This time, I looked at it. The one on the bed, she had an arm bent behind her head, exposing a thatch of dark hair in the pit of the arm. The other woman who leaned above, as if about to mount the one lying down, was tied at the upper thighs and hips with some kind of wooden phallus, which dangled from her crotch like a puppet. The woman on her back lay with neck arched, legs open, other arm loosely around the shoulders of her dominant mistress, whose face was concealed. On the back of the card, scrawled in blunt pencil, the name of a cheap Montmartre hotel, a date and hour.
I exhaled for what seemed the first time in days.
27
Nora
Toronto, 1989
At six in the morning, Nora pulled herself out of bed and, on legs still dumb with sleep, walked down the windowless hallway. She stopped at Anouk’s bedroom, door mostly closed, put her ear to the crack in the doorway and listened to Anouk’s breathing. Smooth and clear. She smiled, carried on to the bathroom.
Nora had moved into this apartment a year and a half before, only a few weeks after the night of the hospital. The night of the buck. And it was so good to be home. Mel had helped her to find this place, on the ground floor of a four-plex on Queen Street, a few minutes from the beach. It was small and creaked with imperfections. The window in the bathroom was painted shut and some of the tiles in the kitchen were coming up. The storm windows in the living room, at the front of the apartment, looked like they hadn’t been removed in years and were coated with dust and grime. The oven took an age to warm up and there was very little pressure in the shower.
But then. She had access to the backyard, and also the front porch, where she spent most evenings when the weather was warm; a bottle of Labatt’s and a book, or the radio, or the mayhem and spray of a hot Toronto thunderstorm. Also, Mel lived right around the corner, that was good, and the streetcar stopped just in front of the house. Handy.
Nora sat on the toilet in the airless bathroom and rolled her neck, eyes closed. Waking up slowly, sweetly. July that year had been hot, but August was hotter. It was humid and stifling. Toronto heat moved in cycles, building upon itself until the lake pushed a storm across the city, only to begin the cycle again. They were in a heatwave now. It had been strangling the city since the middle of July and Toronto was thirsty. Leaves sagged from the trees and the grass in the parks had crisped to a yellow-brown. Flowers in hanging baskets drooped like mourners and people moved languidly, sweating after their morning showers.
Toronto’s civic staff had been threatening to strike all summer. The talk that monopolized the waiting room in the dental office was all about rats and raccoons and squirrels. Three summers before, so Nora learned at work, the civic staff were on strike for two months, and the urban wildlife feasted and procreated on the garbage that piled up into banks that lined the streets. Weeds and grass grew thigh-high in the parks, and the gutters swam with plastic and greasy paper and empty cans. Rats everywhere. The city looked post-apocalyptic.
Nora pulled toilet paper from the roll. Still sleep-numb, she stared at the wall, painted a glossy cream. A water stain in the sink. A hardened knob of toothpaste in the bottom corner of the mirror.
Did she still think about the river? Did she think about the tall firs bending and lowing in a high wind,
the fire and crackle of autumn? Did she miss walking barefoot over soft pine needles, toes wet with dew, before Red and Anouk woke up? The rough-hiss of June bugs, the warbler, the chickadee whistling comeplaywithme. Red and Anouk never knew that sometimes she did this, didn’t matter what the weather was doing, that sometimes she went outside, very early mornings, to listen.
Did she think about Red? Of course she did.
In the kitchen, Nora set the coffee maker and dropped two pieces of bread in the toaster. She waited, looking out of the window to the backyard, grass spangled with tall weeds and in need of a cut. A scatter of newspapers wrinkling and thickening in the grass under her abandoned deck chair. She took her breakfast out to the front porch and sat with a copy of yesterday’s local paper, turned to the column about the girl swimmer. Fourteen years old and was going to attempt to swim over fifty kilometres across Lake Ontario, starting from Niagara in the south-west and finishing in Toronto, not far from where Nora lived.
Anouk. Of the water; of the river. Her daughter who was about as different from Nora as a person could have been (though not in looks, no. Same legs too long for the rest of the body, same swan-like neck, same autumn hair). Her daughter loved nothing more than a good story. She was fascinated by this girl and what she was going to attempt.
* * *
Anouk. Did not come willingly to the city; pleaded with Nora to come north for the summer instead. Child of the river. A feral thing with sandy toes, cedar sap knotting her unbrushed hair, splinters in the flesh of her palms. Maybe in her pocket a paper-light chipmunk skull, shell fragments from a robin’s egg or a couple of acorns. She was a child who could tell the difference between the calls of the swift and of the sapsucker. She was not afraid of spiders.
A streetcar, the first of the morning, passed without stopping. Empty. Across the street and up a few doors, the Korean man who owned the corner store came out of the store in a bright white T-shirt tucked neatly into high-waisted jeans. He carried a tray stacked with containers of raspberries, his brown arms lean and strong. When he saw Nora, he waved and jogged across the street with a palm full of berries.
‘Thank you,’ she said, meeting him on her porch steps.
‘Nah,’ he said, his attention on the street as he crossed back again to his work.
The raspberries, wine-red, so sweet the taste caught in the back of Nora’s throat. Anouk. Had been going off every morning on her bike to swim in the Olympic pool. The exercise was good for her lungs but Nora worried about the humidity. And her skin was getting sun-pink – she wasn’t being careful. But Nora only had her for two months and she wasn’t going to spend it nagging.
Another streetcar wheeled up and stopped and swayed in its tracks, brakes exhaling, bell duh-ding. One person got off, and there was the electric whine as the streetcar powered up and moved on. Nora read about the swimmer. Today’s article, a round-up of what she had been eating to keep her calories high, to maintain a layer of fat for warmth in the cold water. For breakfast every morning, pancakes and four eggs. Doughnuts for snacks, homogenized milk on her cereal. The column quoted the girl as saying that, while she didn’t think other kids would believe her, sometimes she didn’t want the doughnuts. Or the cake. There wasn’t much fun in it when it had to be consumed in doses, like medicine.
Anouk, too, had to be convinced to eat more fatty foods, to keep the calories up because her body, her pancreas, was unable to process nutrients, to take the good stuff.
Anouk had been a long-limbed, skinny baby, always fractious with hunger. Couldn’t be fed by the breast because enzymes had to be added to the milk.
Here was a scene: Anouk at the breakfast table, three years old. In front of her, the bowl of maple syrup with her dose of Creon. A red plastic spoon gripped in one tiny, angry hand, and here she was flicking the maple syrup across the table, round eyes fixed on Nora and combative, and here was Nora sitting on the kitchen floor, hair in her eyes, angry enough to want to strike the child, hard, but reasoned enough not to. Two bowls on the floor, flipped over. Nora engaged in a battle that she knew, the harder fought, the harder lost. The kitchen walls, the cupboards, dripping with maple syrup. Like some manic gingerbread house. Anouk hadn’t eaten anything for three days.
Another scene: Anouk, six years old, perched on the edge of a hard chair in the office of her dietician. Cartoon posters on the wall of fruits and grains and fish, and a toy box of plastic foods. Plastic fried egg. Plastic chicken leg. Plastic bundle of green beans.
‘Can you tell me about your poo?’ the dietician asked.
Anouk, who’d been through this before, squirmed and looked at Nora. Anouk hated this.
‘Go on,’ Nora said, not wanting to speak for her daughter.
‘What’s the consistency?’ said the dietician. ‘Does it look hard or soft?’
‘Soft.’
‘And how does it smell?’
Anouk took a deep breath. Nora wanted to take her out of this room. ‘It smells like poo?’ Anouk suggested.
The dietician wrote something down. Smiled at Anouk. ‘Is it oily? Are you getting caught out at all?’
What she was asking was: have you shit your pants recently? The answer was yes. Anouk got caught out a lot, another perk of the condition. Nora answered this one for her.
Last scene: Late September 1977, early evening. Nora in a chair by the river. Anouk was one week old, swaddled, sleeping. Across the lake, one rogue alder, bright fire-red amongst evergreens and other trees only just beginning to turn. The sky was settling into a lilac dusk, and the river, this night, was swift and speckled with wood and leaves and other debris after a day of rain. Nora gazed at the puckered face of the stranger she held in her arms. This, a day or two before Anouk was diagnosed. This was the baby who first touched her in the womb, that moth-wing quiver, soft as powder, that. There but not there. This baby could have been healthy. Lived without medication. Swum across a body of water so vast you couldn’t see the opposite shore, couldn’t even see where you were swimming to. This baby could have lived to an old, old age.
28
L’Inconnue
Paris, 1898
The hotel nicolas chose in Montmartre was tucked into the end of a tiny cul-de-sac, midway up a steep and garbage-strewn lane where several of the cobbles were loose and moss-covered and rotting like bad teeth. This was a place that would have been damp even in a drought. The concierge at the hotel took me for a whore, and there was nothing I could say to this so I said nothing. In the room, the walls were papered yellow and peeling. The sheets, grey and stiff, and the smell, sour and lingering and shameful.
When Nicolas lay on top of me, I thought of Axelle, and how it felt when we kissed, when her soft mouth moved against mine. Her lips. Our kiss ebbed and flowed and, when Axelle slipped her fingers into parts of my body, and I into hers, we absorbed one another.
This act with Nicolas was repellent. His rough face, his darting tongue. Penetration was a demolition. With hammer and chisel he tore away at my walls, filling the air with the dust of me.
After the first time, Nicolas wasn’t satisfied and so I was summoned again and again, half a dozen times at least, always under threat of exposure. Each time, I would leave the apartment with a stack of newspapers to sell, my alibi, and then there I would be, unresponsive beneath this boy-man who was scrawny and sweat-damp and quaking, with a body practically hairless and clammy skin that smelled of cold ham. His penis was like a blind, infant bird.
My body remained in the bed, but I. I sailed out of the window and over the slate rooftops of Paris, where the long buildings looked from above like an armada of ships adrift. I passed over Sacré-Coeur and the glass houses of La Villette where strawberries and cucumbers and cabbages grew in winter, warmed by beds of horse manure. I continued east, beyond the fortification wall, where horses cantered in the cropped and frosty winter fields and crystal ponds mirrored the sun in fractured li
ght. Stands of leafless trees cast their skeleton shadows on the ground, bones scattered, and I.
And I. Smoke billowed from village chimneys and I flew right through it, cleansed.
Eventually, I would find the river again. Find it and follow it back into the city. The clanking, clopping, chuffing, dancing, steaming, caterwauling city. I wheeled and tumbled, spat, swore, leapt from chimney pot to chimney pot. I hovered by a balcony where a little girl sat, plucking white petals off a daisy, reciting the prophetic verse: Il m’aime un peu, beaucoup, passionnément, à la folie, pas du tout. The daisy head was scalped bald and the girl dispassionately flicked the limp, unadorned flower over the balcony railing, as it appeared the object of her desire loved her not at all. The naked, dead-body flower turned slowly as it fell to the maelstrom below, where it was caught in the hooves of a passing horse and stamped into the shit.
* * *
The last time we were together in that hotel, Nicolas cried, pressing his beak into my neck, claiming his tortured love. He was going away. The Compagnons had decided to give him another chance, and were sending him to Marseille. I almost felt sorry for him, his cheeks grisly with spots. Trembling, he promised that when his tour was complete, he would come back to Paris and marry me. I remained silent and kept my face to the wall, while he sloppily pecked at my ear. And when we parted that day, I walked home through the streets of Montmartre, elevated above the city, thinking I would never have to see him again. Thinking, like an idiot, that Axelle might love me if I told her what I’d done for us.
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