by Tara Moss
She had barely missed him in Brisbane and, for all her attempts to contact him online, Adam remained beyond her reach. According to Tobias, he was not responding to anyone. Mak had to reason with him in person if she was to bring him home.
Onstage the burlesque dancers entered, parading before the curtain with placards which announced the next item in the program.
The Final Kiss.
Mak perked up a touch. She recognised this as the play that had been suggested as the sick inspiration for the acid attack in the alley outside the theatre five years before. It was somewhat surprising to her that the troupe continued to perform that particular play, all things considered, although the piece did have a revered place in the Grand Guignol tradition. Le Baiser dans la Nuit, or The Final Kiss, was considered a Grand Guignol classic, the plot inspired by the infamous acid attacks dubbed ‘crimes passionels’ that took place in Paris in the early 1900s. The combination of shocking violence, sordid affairs and jilted lovers made the acid attacks front-page fodder, perhaps in the same way the Stiletto Murders in Sydney had managed to grab sensational media attention in Australia. The heinous nature of those crimes and the beauty of the female victims, some of whom were models and actresses, fascinated the public. It seemed there would always be an insatiable appetite for beautiful victims cruelly cut down. Schadenfreude. The original version of The Final Kiss, Mak knew from the troupe’s website, had a central character who was a glamorous model, though the plot was more complicated than simply that of victim and perpetrator. The beauty, in fact, was shown to be a beast.
Mak was surprised when the curtain parted to show a female character with her face wrapped in bandages, her long dark hair hanging glamorously down her back as she was attended by a doctor and a nurse in a homely setting, something like a small living room. Normally, this role was played by the male. It seemed this one-act adaptation of the famous Maurice Level play had swapped the roles of Henri and Jeanne.
‘Her attacker had a very cool head. Exceptionally cool,’ the doctor was telling the nurse assistant, as she helped him change the dressings. Thus far, the poor woman patient had said nothing, though her body language made clear her physical discomfort. Audience members strained to one side in an unsuccessful attempt to see the woman’s disfigured face.
His coat…
Mak recognised the doctor character’s white coat as the one she had picked up and put back on the props rack after her strange encounter backstage. The doctor was not played by the dark, nervous man she had seen, but by a stockier, fairer actor who spoke English confidently for the largely tourist audience in a mixed American-French accent.
‘Leave me!’ the woman finally cried, her patience apparently at an end.
The nurse and doctor reacted to her outburst as if it were expected. They finished changing the bandages and slipped out the door without a sound. Slowly, the patient stood and turned to face the front of the stage. The audience collectively held its breath. What they saw was a beautiful woman: a fine, hourglass figure dressed in a silk bias-cut gown, a vision of feminine allure under the stage lights. But above the glistening pearls around the woman’s neck was nothing but white bandages, her face covered like that of an Egyptian mummy. The audience watched her with grim curiosity as she moved slowly across the set. Her presence was electrifying: what, and whom, was under that gauze?
This is her, isn’t it? Bijou.
Mak suspected that under all those bandages was the beautiful actress Bijou. Mak had seen Bijou’s face in the posters outside the theatre and all over the troupe’s website, and in the flesh, onstage, her figure and manner were spectacularly feminine, though of course her face could not be seen. Could this be the woman Adam had fallen for? Not a dancer but an actress. She had been a stage performer for many years and would be much older than Adam. Patrice had been older, but this age gap was much wider. What was she like? Why did she choose to hide her beauty for this performance? Mak supposed that this role-reversal was intended by the troupe to be more impactful for the audience, knowing that not only had the woman been horribly injured, but that a special beauty had been purposefully destroyed. In this adaptation of the play, the beautiful woman had spurned the man by breaking their engagement, and he had brutally disfigured her in retaliation. This had been a more common element in the real-life crimes passionels cases. It seemed to Mak a less ironic choice than the ‘Beauty is the Beast’ theme of the original 1912 play, in which the vicious, beautiful model disfigured her male lover, a theme which would have been a surprising gender reversal in its day. Tonight’s performance, however, brought to mind actual cases in countries like India, where acid attacks still occurred.
There was a knock on the stage door, and the woman moved to answer it.
A man stepped onto the stage. Mak sat up and blinked.
Oh!
It was a handsome young man. He stood in the doorway in a dinner jacket. Mak sat forward, her heart speeding up. She fixed her eyes on him, and blinked again, disbelieving.
Adam.
It was him. Mak felt certain. He had the same wavy blond hair, the same youthful good looks. He had not bothered with disguises or an accent. Adam Hart sounded and looked just like an Australian onstage in Paris, straight out of one of Mrs Hart’s family photographs. Mak felt the urge to run up and snatch him away. There he is! He really had run off to join the circus. Amazing. And he was performing with them. If it were not for the fact that he had been stealing from his mother and worrying her sick, Mak might have felt happy for him. She would have understood if those accounting textbooks had become too much for him, and he’d had to break loose.
But she had to bring him home. Now she had found him, all she had to do was convince him to leave the Paris stage behind to come back to Australia to live with his mother.
This could be a hard sell.
‘Jeanne…’ he cried, bringing his hand to his mouth, reacting to the sight of the beautiful woman wrapped in bandages, his acting highly melodramatic.
‘Come in, darling,’ she enticed through the layers of cotton. The sound of her voice sent a chill through the theatre, at once an alluring purr and a repulsive hiss.
Mak watched the scene unfold, wondering how the dynamic would work. Adam looked so innocent it was hard to imagine him inflicting this damage on his former fiancée. He did not look like a monster. The dialogue continued, the awkward exchange between former lovers, the man, recently acquitted of an irreversible crime, and his victim. The tension tightened expertly, Adam holding his own impressively, the two locked in an unnerving conversation.
Finally, unexpectedly, she grabbed him.
Mak knew what would happen next. The play demanded it.
‘Look at me,’ Bijou urged him. ‘Look at what I have become…’ As she said these words, she unwound the bandages, strip by strip, exposing a face nightmarishly disfigured and eaten away. The audience gasped, as did Adam. ‘Now I’m going to punish you!’
Mak squinted. The pearls. Were those Glenise’s pearls? This is her. This is the woman with great legs. The ‘star’.
Mak watched, riveted. Adam was pinned against the couch, and though clearly stronger than she, his character was so overwhelmed by the vision of horror he had created by his own hand that he sat dumbfounded as she drew a vial from her pocket.
‘We’ll be the perfect lovers…made for each other!’ she screamed at him.
My God.
The vial.
That face sprang back into her mind: the man backstage, the look of naked guilt, the hand closed around something…
Makedde had no time to think or to question her instincts. Before she even realised what she was doing, she was running up the aisle towards the stage. ‘Stop! Stop the play! Someone stop her!’
The actors looked up, startled. Members of the audience cried out in confusion, some yelling for Makedde’s mad progression to the stage to be halted. She hurled herself up onto the elevated proscenium and landed on her knees. A man ran out from be
hind the curtain and tackled her before she got any further. Mak fell hard onto her right elbow, sending pain shooting up her arm, but she managed to reach out and grab Bijou’s ankle with her left hand.
‘No! It is real acid!’ Mak yelled at her, and the vial slipped, having already been opened, ready to be poured on Adam, ready for the climactic moment of violence.
No!
The contents of the vial spilled out on the stage, but instead of coloured water touching the skin harmlessly, the contents splashed Makedde’s hand with a sharp burning.
Acid!
There was confusion; scorching, searing pain. The skin on Makedde’s hand was puckering, blistering in agony. She cried out and grabbed her wrist, standing.
The pain hit with blinding force, and she screamed at the top of her lungs. All around her, the sounds of chaos dispersed for a moment, the theatre audience dropping into stunned silence. With her vision blurred and blood pounding in her temples, Mak looked out across a hundred eyes, each looking back at her, blinking, confused. The full realisation of what had happened came to her. She was onstage. They could not know if it was some strange act meant to shock them.
‘Help me!’ she shouted, beginning to feel woozy. ‘A man swapped the vials! This is no joke…’ Her voice trailed off and she sank to her knees.
CHAPTER 44
Arslan sat in a perfectly motionless panic, his arms and legs folded tightly into the standard position of an enterologist.
Honte…honte…Shame…shame…
From his hidden vantage point in the old stage box, Arslan watched as the gendarmes grilled Bijou about the dramatic incident that had taken place during the performance of The Final Kiss. There had been a shocked audience of witnesses in the theatre, and the French police had been tipped off that Arslan himself had swapped the stage vial of harmless coloured water for one containing real sulphuric acid. The woman who had leaped onstage was a private detective who had seen him make the switch before the show. He still did not know how she had ended up there, backstage that night. How had she known what he would do?
‘Non…c’est terrible!’ Bijou was crying, highly dramatic when emotional. She trembled and wept, one hand to her pale forehead, her distress genuine even though her demeanour inevitably brought to mind her persona of Grand Guignol scream queen.
She knows. My mother knows.
Finally, the Australian boy was gone. He had been questioned by police and then fled France, back to his own mother’s arms in Sydney, and he would not be coming back and getting between Arslan and Bijou and their enduring bond. This was what Arslan had prayed for, though it had not eventuated at all as he had hoped. With Jean-Baptiste, his last real rival for Bijou’s affection five years earlier, the troupe had remained undivided. His mother had been stoic in her resolve that none of them were responsible for the acid attack in the alley after their show, and it must have been a psychotic audience member who had wrought the terrible violence in homage to their play. She had been saddened by the fate of her severely scarred and maimed young lover, and they had soon after separated. But all was changed now. Bijou and the troupe were estranged from him, and from each other. Fractured. The gendarmes were suspicious of Arslan. He was wanted, and would have to remain on the run for who knew how long. Worst of all, his mother was not protecting him this time. She was not trying to dissuade them from making their harsh judgements against him.
She knows.
The two officers questioning Bijou stood in her living room, looming over her diminutive figure while she alternately wept and pouted, perched delicately on her floral, gilt-edged sofa. He could catch glimpses of them, and hear their every word, from his hiding place in Bijou’s bedroom. For her part she was not confirming the gendarmes’ suspicions that Arslan had wanted her to throw acid on her younger lover, disfiguring that beautiful face of his, and tearing him from her forever. But she was not denying it.
‘Where is your son?’ the shorter officer persisted.
Bijou winced. She hated being labelled a mother, and certainly his mother. Few people knew their true relationship.
‘Je ne sais pas. I don’t know,’ she said with conviction. And she was telling the truth. She did not know. As she had never known about his hiding in her bedroom, his watching her, his watching her between the sheets with her other lovers, his eternal watching…
‘Madame, we found sulphuric acid in his apartment,’ the officer explained. ‘His fingerprints were on the vial, along with yours. Can you think of any reason he would want to have this man injured? What was his motivation? Was it professional jealousy?’
Bijou began to cry hysterically, her mascara running.
‘Where is he?’ the other one demanded once more.
‘If you are protecting him we may have to assume that you planned this with him—’
‘I would never hurt Adam! Never! Jamais!’
Arslan peered through his spy-hole at the woman he had always loved, flanked by the police, talking about him as if he was a monster, his love worthless. Never had he felt more alone than at this moment.
‘Not professional jealousy…’ she said, and the police leaned forward. ‘There is no finer contortionist than my darling Arslan.’
He felt his chest swell slightly in the confines of the box.
Je t’aime, Bijou.
His mother turned her back from Arslan’s viewpoint, and he watched her shoulders rise and fall in jerking movements. She was sobbing uncontrollably. Rarely had he seen her lose composure at all, but now she seemed to go to water.
‘No, he loved me. He wanted to hurt him because he loved me!’ she cried.
‘Jealousy?’ one of them said.
She continued to shake, sobbing. Arslan wanted to comfort her. ‘We were lovers. Oh, God help me. God help me…’
He could feel the shock ripple through them. ‘Your…son?’
They know.
She cried even harder.
‘Madame, try to remain calm,’ one of the officers said.
‘Do you have any recent photographs of him?’ the taller officer asked, offering Bijou a tissue.
She dabbed delicately at her eyes, sniffling. ‘Oui. In my photo album. The photograph is perhaps twelve months old.’
She stood up, straightened her dress and walked into her bedroom, right towards Arslan. His eyes grew wide, his heart in his throat. Did she sense he was there? Could she know?
No.
Bijou searched through her stacks of things, oblivious to his presence, and finding her large leather-bound albums of photographs and news clippings piled under a heavy trunk, pulled at the corner of one of the albums with an ineffectual tug.
‘It is here,’ she called, and turned to the officers. ‘Oh can you help me?’ she asked, adopting a look of feminine powerlessness.
‘Of course,’ the taller officer said, and entered the bedroom.
Arslan felt his panic rise, sure that he would be discovered. If they found him they would drag him off to prison.
Arslan could not see what was happening, and he dared not try to change position. There was the sound of books being moved then something heavy being shifted. The man grunted slightly with the effort, and placed the trunk directly on top of Arslan’s box.
Immediately, as the trunk was placed on top of him, Arslan realised what had happened.
Emprisonné!
His fingers flexed. He opened his mouth as if to say something, but remained silent. He could do nothing.
Trapped. I am trapped.
An hour later, and in no danger of immediate discovery, Arslan tried to push his way out of the box as he usually did. But he could not get out. He put his muscles into it, but the thing on top—whatever it was—was too heavy. He tried to shift it with rocking movements, but it barely rocked a millimetre.
He attempted to rock the stage box off its shelf, but he hadn’t enough freedom of movement to build momentum.
Slowly, his extremities were becoming numb.
Arslan brooded silently, trapped within the box, imprisoned by a circumstance of his own making.
Maman.
CHAPTER 45
Makedde waited in Charles de Gaulle airport with Adam Hart on her arm, feeling strangely like a stern schoolteacher. She was determined to watch him board the Air China flight, just to be sure, and after two painful hours of waiting the first boarding call had sounded.
It was 9.45 a.m. and she hadn’t had much sleep. Most of the night had been spent in hospital and with the police.
‘I’m curious about something,’ she said. ‘Why are some of the pages of your diary ripped out?’
The young man hung his head and spoke to the airport tile, looking younger than his nineteen years. ‘I’m so embarrassed. I didn’t think…’ He trailed off, reddening. ‘I guess if anyone did find the diaries, I wanted to protect Bijou.’ His jaw quivered as he spoke her name. Even with all that had happened and all that he had learned—even with the now public knowledge that Bijou had once had an affair with her own son Arslan—Adam still loved her.
Of course he ripped out the pages himself.
His mother had blamed Patrice for his running away, and he wanted to make sure that no one blamed Bijou, or knew where he could be found. It seemed that Adam really had believed in a happy-ever-after with his new lover. It would no doubt take him some time to come to terms with the shocking turn of events.
‘Again, I really am so sorry about your hand,’ Adam told her.
‘It’s okay,’ she managed, but barely meant it. The burn, though only the size of a twenty-cent piece, was exceedingly painful. The damage felt alive somehow, moving in her skin. It covered her left hand from the base of her pinky finger to the edge of her palm, and the skin beneath her bandage tingled and ached like terrible sunburn. According to the doctor, it might never heal properly. She would have a scar to remind her of this case forever.