Fine

by Michelle Wright

  ‘Go away!’ he says, but not with anger, more like he’s feeling sorry for himself.

  Through the gap there’s light and shadows; that’s all I can see, but there’s a smell of gone-off food, and something sharp, like piss. I go back out onto the porch and take some photos of the bugs. I wait a while with the dogs looking on and then I head back home.

  * * *

  I’m riding my bike back from school the next Monday when I see smoke rising thick from the bottom of the slope. When I’m halfway down I see that the stationmaster’s house is part aflame. I ride down like a madman and when I pull up my bike skids out from under me. Through a window I see Jacko still inside. The smoke is so thick that he holds his fists up near his face and paws away in front of him, like a tired boxer keeping his guard up, trying to land a punch. He falls against the front door and I have to push with all my weight to shove it open and drag him out. By that time there’s a car that’s turned up and then a fire truck comes with its siren on and lights flashing red. An ambulance comes a few minutes later and takes me with Jacko to the hospital. The doctors treat his burnt arms. They’re pretty bad. His skin is black and red where it’s gone and it smells like barbecued ribs. Aunt Jeannie cries when she sees him and asks him to please come home, but he won’t be talked around no matter what.

  * * *

  Two days later when I come by the house to see how Jacko’s going, the bugs have moved inside. On the wooden kitchen floor I step on them with my school shoes. Their bodies sound like popcorn when they’re squashed. On the table, next to an empty plate, bugs feed on crumbs from a chunk of stale bread. That’s all the food I see. The cupboard doors are open and there’s nothing at all inside. I take a photo of the rolled-up edges of the contact paper on the shelves. It looks like tiny scrolls with tiny messages inside, waiting to be read.

  There’s no more dogs around and the house feels even quieter than before. The lounge and hall are black from the fire and some of the ceiling’s gone. There’s a door like a bridge across the burnt-through floorboards. Jacko’s lying on the bed. There’s no sheets or anything. Just the bare mattress and a flat-as-a-pancake pillow. He’s wearing only boxer shorts and the room is full of bugs. There’s a blanket nailed up over the window, so it’s dark in there for the middle of the afternoon, but I see them all the same. They’re thick in the corners and walk in messy lines on the ceiling. Some are swept off by big drifts of air that lift the blanket now and then, and they fall onto the bed. The mattress is patterned with yellow flowers and the bugs must think they’re real because they crawl along the stems and the faded cotton petals. Through the bandage on Jacko’s arm I see a seep of blood-stained pus, and some of the bugs are crawling towards the smell. His eyes are closed, but I know from his breathing that he’s not asleep. I take a photo of his skin-tight face and he opens his eyes just for a second, then closes them again. I’ve got a pack of chips in my bag, so leave it on the bed and tell him I’ll come back sometime soon.

  When I get home I take out my photos of Jacko when we were kids and those from later on and pin them up along the wall like photographs of the missing. I look close at them, one by one, trying to see what he was feeling when I took them, or what he’s maybe feeling now. I don’t know who to tell about the bugs and food and how his bandages might need changing. I won’t tell Aunt Jeannie. It would cause her too much grief. Probably Jacko would have said if he wanted outside help. I think it’s probably best not to intrude where you’re not wanted. Sometimes, like when I’m out looking for something weird to photograph, I think that there’s nothing you can do but keep your distance and wait for things to happen.

  Blow

  On 25 February 1964, at the precise moment that Sonny Liston spat out his mouthguard in Miami Beach, Florida, and said, ‘That’s it,’ thereby losing his world championship title to the young Cassius Clay, Cyril Fonseca landed face down and unconscious on the canvas of a ring in Bangkok, Thailand, breaking his nose for the third time and failing to become the inaugural Asian Amateur Boxing Middleweight champion.

  By the time the referee had counted him out, his fiancée, the most beautiful woman he’d ever known, had risen from her ringside seat, glared at the splatters of blood on the lap of the yellow silk skirt she’d picked up that afternoon from a tailor off Suriwongse Road, and was walking, head held still, towards the stadium exit.

  And by the time Cyril regained consciousness in the emergency department of the local hospital, she had pawned her ruby-and-diamond engagement ring in Chinatown, and was hailing a taxi back to the Atlanta Hotel to collect her belongings.

  * * *

  Fourteen broken noses later, never having recaptured the form of that championship bout, Cyril announced his retirement from boxing, returned to his ancestral home by the Chilaw Lagoon on the western coast of Ceylon, and built a stall by the side of the Peliyagoda to Puttalam road to begin a new career as a king coconut seller.

  Over the years, the road was widened and then paved and became known as the PP Highway. The number of motorcars grew as the number of bullock carts diminished. Cyril’s belly expanded past the front of his sarong and his smooth black hair turned wiry grey.

  But Cyril’s stall remained unchanged. He harboured no ambitions of expansion. He never thought of varying his offerings with sweet seeni kesel bananas, or firm green mangoes, or ‘bullock’s heart’ custard apples.

  For thirty-eight years, Cyril sat at his stall, rising slowly from his chair whenever a customer pulled over, choosing the coolest king coconut from the shade beneath the corrugated-metal roof, slicing the top with one blow of his machete and opening a square hole with the point. If the customer lingered in the shade to drink the juice, he might tell them about his boxing career and show them his second-place medal. He’d fetch the blotched black-and-white photo of himself as a young man and they’d remark how handsome he’d been. He’d touch his nose and ask them to guess how many times it had been broken.

  When the customer had finished drinking, Cyril would place the empty coconut in a woven coir sling attached to the trunk of a palm tree. He’d disappear into the shadows and emerge with one ancient boxing glove. He’d push his massive right hand into the glove and spit on the cracked, faded leather.

  ‘I am the greatest!’ he’d say, laughing, his feet dancing heavily in the sandy soil. Then he’d line the coconut up and split it open with one frightful blow.

  ‘Doesn’t it hurt?’ they’d ask.

  ‘Yes,’ he’d whisper.

  Summertime

  Brigitte left the windows of the apartment open overnight after the heat they had yesterday, and when she answers the phone and the woman starts talking, there’s an ambulance going past in the street so she has to shout, ‘Hello? Hello?’ This makes her sound old and hard of hearing, and the thought of that bothers Brigitte.

  The woman on the phone says her name, but right at the start of her explanation, before Brigitte is paying attention, so she finds herself not remembering if it starts with an n or an m.

  ‘Your husband owes me money,’ the woman says straight up. ‘Five hundred euros for his last two visits and I need to ask him when he can pay me. Normally I wouldn’t call a client at home.’

  ‘No, of course not,’ Brigitte replies. ‘Can I ask what you mean by visits?’

  ‘Services,’ the woman explains. ‘Intimate services.’ She clears her throat. ‘Listen, I don’t want to go into details and I’m sorry I got you instead of him, but he’s not answering his mobile and Jean-Michel’s the only client whose home number I’ve got.’

  ‘I understand,’ says Brigitte.

  ‘I don’t mind giving him credit because he’s not like my other clients,’ says the woman. ‘I’ve been seeing him regularly for quite a while and we have a bit of a special relationship, but I really need the money this week, so that’s why I’m calling.’

  ‘He’s not … he’s away,’ says Brigitte. ‘At a pharmacists’ convention.’

  ‘Tell him to call m
e when he gets back,’ says the woman.

  ‘Alright,’ says Brigitte. ‘Does he have—’

  ‘Yes, he does,’ she says.

  Brigitte finds herself apologising to the woman, Nathalie or Martine, or something like that, and saying, ‘Yes, of course. I understand,’ After she puts the receiver down, she pulls at the skin of her throat and feels how soft and loose it has become since the last time she remembers touching it. She goes into the kitchen to get a glass of water and sits down on the just-mopped floor. Of course, it might have been some type of prank, she thinks, or perhaps an attempt at blackmail. And there’s always the possibility she’s imagined the whole thing. She’s had an episode or two when she’d been sure of something at first, but then realised it must all have been in her head. Jean-Michel’s been worried about her for months and he’s been giving her some tablets to help her nerves, but she’s been saying, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  She remembers a girl she was at university with all those years ago who talked a lot about losing her mind. It wasn’t insanity she was worried about. She accepted that as inevitable. What worried her was that she wouldn’t realise it had started happening. Everyone else knowing, but her not realising. At the time, Brigitte had found it odd for a girl so young to be preoccupied with madness, although she thinks she remembers her mentioning that her mother had gone that way. The phone call is starting to seem less real already and she’s wondering if it was in fact a crazy trick that her mind was playing on her, something she’d seen on TV and imagined had happened to her. She knows she’ll have to tell Jean-Michel, though she’s not sure how she’ll bring it up, and she doesn’t want to think it through just yet.

  She needs to get out of the apartment. To get away from this new thing filling it up and pushing everything against the walls. She goes to her bedroom and finishes sorting the clothes she’d been packing into a bag to give to the Somalian refugees camped in the square behind that church, she can’t remember its name now, but she can picture it and she knows the way there.

  It’s far enough to take the Métro, but she decides to walk while the morning is still mild and the streets are uncrowded. It’s easier to be alone on foot, to breathe in time with her footsteps and shut out unhelpful thoughts. She’s always liked to wake early in this city that sleeps in late. When Jean-Michel is away, she walks the streets at dawn when the heat has had time to settle overnight and sink back underground. The summer’s lasting late this year. The end of September now and it’s hotter than July.

  By the time she reaches the square the sun is above the trees, and the blue tarpaulins and red dome tents of the temporary camp open and close with the movements of mothers feeding babies and water boiling and children running circles on the gravel. There seems to be no one in charge to collect the donated clothes and toys and food, no one from a charity like she’d expected, or maybe it’s too early still.

  She approaches a woman sitting on a printed cloth spread on the ground, with a baby on her lap and sad cheeks and a dark red scarf around her face. Brigitte crouches down in front of her and places the bag she’s brought on the ground. She says, ‘Here are some clothes for you or for someone else who needs them.’ The woman doesn’t smile, just nods and then lifts the baby up onto her shoulder. When Brigitte stands back up, her head is light and she has to stay still and breathe in the air full of dust and kerosene fires before she can walk away.

  She heads back the way she came, but then turns off towards the street with the second-hand bookshop and the Jewish bakery. She buys a slice of baked cheesecake and eats it on a stool by the counter while an old woman in a striped apron moves up and down filling the trays with buns. Before she leaves, she buys an onion bread and pastrami sandwich and puts it in her handbag.

  On the steps leading up to the street from the Métro station a man is always seated. A homeless man, maybe fifty, maybe sixty, not much older than she is, in any case, not particularly dirty, but undoubtedly in need, with falling-apart clothes and a cardboard sign—J’ai faim. Even tourists with one year of high school French can understand, and those with no French at all can see the hunger in his lips and the silent movements of his Adam’s apple.

  Brigitte sees him every week when she comes back from her volunteer tutoring and after the first few times she said, ‘Bonjour,’ and he replied, ‘Bonjour, ma petite dame.’ The following week she bought him half a roast chicken, hot from the shop near the Métro, and she went back down the steps to give it to him. He said, ‘Merci,’ but didn’t make a fuss, as though it were a commercial transaction, her chicken for his gratitude. The next time she gave him a packet of Jean-Michel’s cream biscuits brought from home and the next a bag of nectarines.

  This morning he’s not there when she walks down the steps to find him, and when she comes back up onto the street, she sees him on a bench beneath a poplar tree in the square not far from the station. She approaches him and he looks up from the newspaper he’s reading. He shows no sign of recognising her. She holds out the sandwich.

  He smiles and says, ‘No thanks, my little lady. I’m not working today.’

  She stands, still holding out her hand, and says, ‘Sorry,’ and turns to leave.

  ‘If you’re lost,’ he calls out, ‘turn left at the dog.’ At least, that’s what it sounds like to Brigitte. She turns her head and nods but has no idea what he’s talking about.

  She walks away from the direction of home and heads towards the Seine. She’s scared of bumping into a neighbour or acquaintance and having to make conversation, even though in Paris, she knows, you never meet anyone you’ve met before. In the Métro and walking in the streets, you cross paths with thousands of people, hundreds of thousands really, and if you’re the type to look up at their faces, like she usually is, you never see a face you’ve seen before. When she thinks about it now, it’s almost like being invisible, or like walking in a crowd of ghosts. She walks like that for an hour this morning and then, squeezing along a narrow footpath, she accidentally bumps against a shoulder and it feels like she’s been woken from a sleepwalk and is suddenly somewhere new. And then she realises that she is still here in Paris and not some other place. But realising that she is here in Paris doesn’t touch her with the light-filled awe of tourists when they realise they are here in Paris. What she feels is more like when she’s flying, in the seconds before her plane touches down, a momentary hanging in the air inches above the tarmac and then a heavy jolt that is just a bit more violent than what she was expecting.

  She crosses the road to the Tuileries Garden and skirts the shade of the linden trees. The ferris wheel of the funfair turns, and the calls to come and try her luck sound more promising than they are. In a booth in the shadow of the ghost train sits a pretty young girl with olive skin and aqua hair, selling bags of caramel peanuts. Brigitte stands and observes the girl, her chin resting on her palm in front of an electric fan, watching the crowds walk past, moving only her eyes. Young couples falling into each other, stopping to kiss for no reason at all. Knots of young children tripping over their own feet or one another’s. The only words the young girl speaks are ‘Deux euros, s’il vous plaît,’ and ‘Merci’. Any other questions she meets with a shrug of her shoulders. Brigitte walks up to the booth and asks for a bag of peanuts even though she hates their sugary shells. She smiles as she holds out the coins and sees that the girl has a scar on her cheek, running from the corner of her eye to the corner of her lip. From the back of the booth, a dark-haired man in a singlet stirs and tosses a fresh batch of nuts in a large copper pan. The heat and sweetness drift towards the girl and Brigitte imagines the back of her neck coated with caramel-flavoured sweat.

  By mid-afternoon it’s turned into a hot summer day. The air is so close that birds sit on the ground and pant like dogs and even the Seine lies still in its bed. The stench of the sewers and the spoor of homeless people seep up through the streets and curl out from shaded doorways. On a bench on the riverbank there’s a man sittin
g and he’s removed his shirt. He’s reclining really, his arms spread along the back of the bench, taking up all the room. He’s not a young man or particularly slim, with white hairs across his chest and shoulders. He reminds Brigitte of Picasso in his later years, unashamed of his ageing body, proud of what virility is left. The silhouettes of the elm tree leaves behind the bench fall across his bare chest and abdomen, like a work of art in charcoal. Brigitte wishes she had a camera with her to take a photograph, but she promises herself to remember it instead.

  She continues her walk away from the river, through the shop-lined streets on the Right Bank. Her feet are swelling in their closed-in shoes so she crosses the shimmer of the cobblestones in front of the Pompidou Centre and enters its cool interior. A group of young children on a holiday program hold on to a yellow rope attached at either end to young men in red t-shirts. They walk like a chain gang to the far side of the vast hall and collapse in a ragged circle on the floor to eat their afternoon snacks. Brigitte watches them talking together and cutting across each other’s words, never finishing sentences, but understanding all the same. She buys a ticket and takes the escalator to the modern art collection. She goes to see the paper cut-outs by Matisse and sits in front of them and slips off her shoes. She rubs her ankles hard, trying to push the swelling out, thinking of Matisse in his wheelchair, in pain, yet still creating. She wonders if his cut-out leaves were inspired by shadows he’d seen falling on Picasso’s chest.