by R. J. Morgan
“Nothing. I was just sad.”
Robin’s face hardly moved. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. “What were you sad about?”
“I don’t know. I just am sad all the time.”
“Yeah,” Robin said, “you look it. They don’t ship you off to the Meadows for being sad though, Jake.”
I shifted in my seat. “What’s going to happen to you?”
“I’m fine.” She looked out of the window. “I can look after myself.”
For a brief second her real expression travelled across her face. She was terrified, but not of the journey, of something deep and immovable. I’d seen so much despair in the hospital, I could tell what had happened to people just by looking at them, but I couldn’t read her. We were miles away from home.What if something happened? What if we were robbed, or threatened, or lost our passports? What if we were caught and thrown in a jail where no one would explain what was happening?
I dragged at the air between us. I wanted her in my hands, my arms, and straight back to St Pancras and straight back to Waterloo and straight back to Wimbledon. Eurostar, Northern line, Overland, home. Two hours tops.
“Robin, let’s get back on the train to London. Before anything happens.”
She looked at me. “Balls,” she said. “This is it, Toto. We’re in Paris!”
We approached the border patrol, looking behind us as if to check our parents were still there. I sailed up to a window manned by a fat guard with a bushy moustache and a forehead as smooth as milk. He flicked through my passport then snapped the passport closed and waved me through. “Can I have a stamp, please? S’il vous plaît?” I said in a high voice, giving another glance behind me as if I was waiting for my mother. The man smiled and stamped my passport. Some people still like you even though you’re a skinny teenager.
In the Gare du Nord, globes on beautiful golden stems glide over your head as you walk. “Look at those beautiful lamps!” I said, staring upwards.
“Allow it,” Robin said, kissing her teeth.
I ignored her. “They look like…”
“Faith,” she said.
I had to run every few steps just to keep up with her as she propelled us through the station and out on to the street. Here she stopped and looked athe map, tilting it away from the winter sun. “We need Rue Auguste … er… by the Colonne … do … July something? They like their months, innit.”
I laughed.
“What’s funny?”
“You,” I said, “you’re funny.”
She looked comfortable now, amid the chaos of rushing pedestrians and five-lane traffic. She seemed fine with being shoved, having to alter her path, her senses drowned by the city. Her face was fast. Her thoughts seemed to move every muscle within it. Her eyes shifted as if reading something only she could see; as if chasing thoughts, unable to catch them. She walked at an exhausting pace. I trailed her like a spaniel, and knew that in another life, with a different set of information, she would be someone great, a genius.
She hailed a taxi that sped up as it approached her. “Bloody taxis,” she said.
I held out my pumpkin hand. A second taxi stopped and we climbed in.
Beautiful, pale buildings towered stacked on one another like wedding cakes. I put my thumbnail to my teeth. The size of the place was overwhelming. What we were doing was idiotic. We were like those berks on the news, who wander abroad without knowing any of the local laws or customs, and the embassy has to go and save them. They end up on the front page of the Sun with a headline like “Young Dumbs” or “Teen Idle”. Or worse, we’d be robbed and stranded here, and I’ve have to stow away to England and live off rain water, and my mother would have to come and collect me from some refugee camp and she’d finally have that brain haemorrhage.
As the taxi stopped in traffic, we watched people walking past. The best were the ones in business suits. The women had artistry about them. “The women here walk so well in their heels,” I said.
“Walk well in ’eels, is it, Meryl?” Robin laughed.
The neurons in my stomach got there before my brain did: Walk well in eels, is it, Meryl? I concentrated on my bloodless fingernails to push away thoughts of Isaac.
“And what’s with the scarves?”
Scarves. Good. Concentrate on the scarves.
She was right. Almost every woman without a map was wearing a silk scarf. “They must have a system,” I said. “Something tribal.”
We got out of the taxi near the Louvre. On a panel outside there was an exhibition poster featuring a painting of a bare-breasted woman absently tweaking the nipple of another bare-breasted woman.
“Oop,” Robin said, “tits.”
Inside the courtyard, she stared curl-lipped at the glass pyramid sitting next to the palatial gallery. “What’s that supposed to be?”
“Who knows,” I said.
“Tacky as Christmas,” Robin said.
“I like it. It’s galactic. It contrasts.”
“Yeah, it contrasts with the palace because it’s shit.”
I laughed as we climbed the stairs to the entrance.
The security guards were spot-checking bags. “Bonjour,” I said as I handed mine over. “Je suis u—”
“Do you have your passport with you?”
“Je voudrais un—”
“You would like a walking guide?”
“Non, merci, je suis—”
“You would like to be directed to the Mona Lisa?”
“No, we’re Egyptologists here to see the … artefacts … from the … pyramids for our doctorates about … pharaohs.” I paused for breath. “Yeah, we just want to see the Mona Lisa.”
The guard scrunched his face with disgust and Robin and I laughed. We couldn’t stop laughing. We were bent double with giggles.
“What is the matter?” the guard said.
“Ce n’est-ce rien, merci,” Robin said, and then she spoke in a patter of fluent French that wiped the smug look off his face.
“You speak French?”
“And?”
We walked up the stairs and into the grand foyer. Robin crossed the sea of clicking marble towards a headless winged statue. We looked up at her in silence, then we wandered over to the Venus de Milo with her missing arms and confident lean. Robin shook her head. “They wanna finish these.” I laughed.
She stopped in front of a statue of a woman plunging a knife into her naked chest. Despite being solid stone, the women looked soft and vulnerable. Robin looked at her for a long time. She finally woke up to herself when I touched her elbow. “I feel sorry for them,” she said, “stuck here with their tits out.”
“Yeah,” I said, suddenly uncomfortable. I couldn’t offer anything to the conversation the statues were trying to have with us. The man next to us was talking to his wife in rapid Russian. What did he have to say? What were you supposed to think? As we bumbled through the gallery, watching people talking quietly to each other, I felt smaller and more stupid than I had ever felt in my life.
Robin busied herself with the map. “This way,” she said. She led us out of the gallery and past the Renaissance without a second glance. “Here it is.”
I was shocked. Usually when you follow someone with a map you have to back up, wander in circles and have at least three arguments, until finally you ask someone else to direct you. Robin had taken us straight there. The Mona Lisa was perched in the middle of a white wall in front of us.
She was so small. I thought she’d be like the Raphael paintings they have at the National that are so awesome and domineering you cower in front of them. But the Mona Lisa was like a little postage stamp, all on her own on a wash of white.
“Is that it?” Robin said.
I shrugged.
“I don’t get it.”
“Neither do I.”
; “Does that mean we’re thick?”
“Who knows,” I said. “A painting made me cry once, so I must know something.”
“Self-portrait, was it?”
“Ha ha,” I said. Great comeback.
“So why is it so famous then?” Robin said. “Why are we looking at it?”
“Who knows?”
“Who’s in charge of stuff like this? Like, what’s good or what?”
“I don’t know.”
“She’s laughing at us.” Robin pointed to the painting.
“Why does she have to be in that box? It looks like she’s suffocating.”
“Someone must have tried to nick her,” Robin sighed. “At least she hasn’t got her tits out.”
Tourists jostled behind us. Everyone wanted their moment with Mona. I walked away, thinking of visiting galleries with Isaac’s mum and dad. Rabbi Kaufman would point out interesting things for us to look at and we’d comment earnestly. He would beam at how fascinating and intelligent we were and assure us that we would do and discover great things in our lives, and Isaac and I would hop off to talk about stink bombs and farting, certain we were geniuses.
There’s a Mr Reacher sketch we filmed at the National Gallery. Mr Reacher is dragging a pupil past all the paintings, wagging his finger at each one until he gets to Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, and he goes: “Crap, crap, crap, crap, crap … sunflowers. Write that down.” If you keep watching you see a guard storming towards us going, “Oi!” and Isaac screaming as he does his lock-kneed sprint towards the door. I’m holding the camera and you can hear that I am laughing so much I can’t run.
“What are you thinking about?” Robin asked softly as we walked out of the Mona Lisa’s room and into the corridor. “Isaac?”
I nodded. I didn’t tell her that it was all I ever think about. It’s the only thing worth thinking about. There was being friends with him, then there was being friends with no one, then there was nothing.
In the taxi I worried about how faint I felt and that Robin might try to make me eat something. What if she wanted to go to a café? In France they put butter on their butter. A bony fingertip scraped along the wall of my stomach.
Robin was looking out of the window at the parping progress of a man on a scooter, unable to negotiate the stuttering traffic because of the enormous box balanced on his lap. The box was wrapped in red paper and sported a badly tied bow. He looked miserable and resigned to the traffic, as if he had expected it to turn against him.
“They’re post bands,” Robin said.
I turned.
“The red rubber bands you and Isaac saw all over London. They’re post bands. They use them at the sorting office. Postmen just chuck them on the pavement, all day every day. They’re normal rubber bands.”
I thought of Isaac diving to the pavement and springing up with sudden excitement, another rubber band between his fingers. “Ah ha!” he would declare. “Our next clue!”
“Oh,” I said.
We climbed out of the taxi and straight into the path of a tramp. Robin slapped her hands to her pockets. The tramp began mumbling wildly, his face a jumble of billowing grey hair and creeping skin, his nose engorged with red wine. He threw up his arms, his sleeves filthy with caked-on dirt. In a split second, Robin became a terrifying gangster. I had scarcely seen anyone so angry. She screamed at him in French and jabbed him so hard in the chest with her gunned fingers, he buckled over and heaved as if to vomit. His hands fell open and out dropped Robin’s wallet. She picked it up. “Do one or I’ll break your face,” she said.
The tramp hurried off, holding his chest where she had hit him. “Minging bastard,” she said, wiping her fingers on the wall. “Pickpocketing a kid. Tosser. He’d get shanked for that.” She crouched to the ground to calm herself down, her legs perfectly bent. She kept muttering about what would happen to him if she saw him again.
“Bloody foreigners,” I said, and Robin laughed.
My chest was tight. It wasn’t the tramp, it was the severe crease between Robin’s eyes. I put my pumpkin hand flat over my chest and realized, with a panic that aggravated my lungs, that I hadn’t brought my inhaler.
“Posh ’ere, ain’t it? White muggers.” Robin delved into her bag to check everything was still there. “We’ll get murdered by a count in a minute.”
She walked ahead as the world swung downwards. I saw her feet hurry back. “Shit,” I heard through water, “what’s wrong with you?”
“As … asthma,” I said.
My ribs pressed against my chest. My face became hard, baulking against suffocation, trying to suck air into my lungs. A pain spiked up my legs and I realized I was on my knees.
“You are the opposite of Jamaica,” I heard Robin yell as her feet flew away.
The sky rushed towards me. My ears became my heartbeat. My face was a slab of pain. I thought of Mum and Dad laughing in the kitchen. I’m so small I’m looking up at them. I thought of Isaac in the playground, his skinny frame and funny walk, stepping between me and a boy whose pudgy hands are pushing me. I thought of us watching Dave Chappelle together, taking turns to recite the bus joke. I thought of us chasing after Gordon Ramsay on Shaftesbury Avenue, begging him for a picture, handing him a camera, and him laughing and calling us cheeky little buggers. I thought of falling to the floor laughing after we had been sent out of class. I thought of Dad buying me a toy I didn’t want. I didn’t want the tank; I wanted the buggy. I saw a man in a white coat yelling at me. I saw something the colour of water, my old face reaching down to pick me up, my hand reaching out to grab my nose, and laughing, laughing until something small and plastic was shoved into my mouth, and acrid air snaked down my throat.
“You have to run after, innit, ’cos I nicked this.”
Robin’s voice. I looked up. She blocked the sun. Her skin looked like the inside of a petal. She was shaking the vile inhaler. She pulled my eyelid open. She didn’t shake or falter as she bent to one knee and put a hand flat to my back. The crease had left her forehead. She took the grey vial of steroids out of the inhaler and put the empty plastic tube in my mouth. She covered the air hole with the palm of her hand. “Breathe,” she said, and I breathed into her palm, taking in the small pocket of air the case allowed. Every time I took a breath she moved her hand to refill the tube. She kept her hand to my back and we started breathing in time with each other, her hand moving with the deflation of my lungs.
“You haven’t got asthma,” Robin said quietly. “If you did, you’d be out of it. Even I can’t run that fast.”
“What is it then?”
“Panic attacks. First-world problems… Come on, let’s get you … a sherry, is it? Some Valium or what? You’re like a housewife from the Fifties.” She draped me over her shoulder and walking felt like flying. “God, you are light as sin, bruv. Swear down, you need some chicken nuggets. Like Gollum on Atkins. Christ. You’re just bones.”
We walked the wide streets and my head cleared. Women in colourful scarves tumbled past us. It was nice to be walking, but I grew worried about getting lost and I bundled us into another taxi.
“Can you afford this?” Robin said.
I nodded. I thought of those nights spent starving and freezing, determined not to spend the money my mother left me each time she was away working. I wondered why I wasn’t bothered to see the money tot up on the meter. I put my head between my legs, testing my newfound ability to breathe.
“You all right?”
“Yeah,” I said, rubbing the top of my arm. “Sorry.”
“Ain’t your fault you’re some sort of tart, is it?”
I laughed at the casual way she said this, and after a while she started giggling too. In London I had used my inhaler all the time, but I realized that I hadn’t needed it since I met Robin.
“There it is!” Robin said with delight.
I looked
up and the iconic tower peeked through the rooftops in the distance. Robin clutched my arm, beaming. In the mirror, the taxi driver was smiling. “Bienvenus à la tour Eiffel!” He gave a benevolent chuckle.
We got out of the taxi and raced to the tower and stood underneath it. With the spire above us, we were suddenly dizzy on the ground. We waited in line to climb to the top. On the first level we paid for two junior tickets. I wondered if I would be able to get to the top. I get jittery standing on a chair, and climbing the stairs in my house makes me want to cry.
As we climbed, the air became sharp and harder to breathe. The higher we climbed, the more often Robin turned to check I was still there. “Don’t faint off here now,” she said, pointing to the ground. “You’d be absolutely peaches.”
We reached the viewing platform and looked over the edge at the delicate whiteness of Paris. Buildings like stickle bricks and trees the size of peas were arranged into triangles, laid out around the palace on the other side of the river like the triangles in a packet of Dairylea. The neatness of it was strangely comforting. The wedding-cake buildings and wide, blustering roads made perfect sense now. It reminded me of being young and reaching the top of the London Eye and Rabbi Kaufman saying, “Well, it looks like London.” Mrs Kaufman laughed, and Isaac and I laughed at her laughter. I smiled, realizing he must have expected a view such as this, of a city transformed into an idea, and it made me homesick, though not for where I lived now, but for how much I used to love London.
“Are you crying?”
“No,” I said. I wiped my face to make sure.
We drew our hoods up against the cold. “What’s the palace called?” Robin asked, pointing towards the river to the Trocadéro, which from this height looked like a giant corkscrew.
“That’s le grand bakery, where they make all the baguettes.”
Robin smiled. “And in the small bit?”
“That’s where they make the buns.”
She laughed.
“Doesn’t it look like a giant box of Dairylea?” I said.
“Yeah!” Robin said delightedly. “I like the triangles.”