She folds the big backpack flap over the remaining books, pulls the drawstring tight and hefts the bag onto her bunk. Wait there till later—she pats the area of its shoulders as if it were a person.
If she could, she’d take along the whole pack of books. With these second-hand books in their plastic sleeves, she has taught herself French. Every evening on the formica-top table in the kitchen at home she spread out the English translations side by side with the French originals. She read back and forth, from the French to the English and back again, Zola especially, but also Balzac, Hugo, Dumas. She listened to the heat crackling the corrugated roof and the dry wind stripping bark off the eucalyptus tree beside the house and rattling it down on the metal overhead, and she read.
‘And this is why your father drives a fork-lift and I clear tables?’ her mother grumbled as she wiped the floor around her feet. ‘For you to sit and learn a language no one around here even speaks?’
Lise said nothing back. She had no answer to this question. Once she said that reading these books had changed her world but she saw her mother wince and knew it was unfair and also untrue, because her world hadn’t yet changed—at least not then.
She tries not to remember the thing her mother said in reply, pushing the damp cloth around the table legs.
‘What’s so bad about this world then, that you want to change it? My parents sweated blood to get out to this country, make a new life.’
Lise lets herself out of the hostel by pressing the green buzzer. The morning smells damp and fresh. A cleaner is sloshing sudsy water onto the pavement and sweeping it away with a broom. She sidesteps the water, turns right and right again and sets off, heading north, her refolded map snug in her pocket.
No aim, that is her aim, no special destination, other than to find Zola’s streets, because she read him first and liked him from the start. She wants to say she liked him best but at the time obviously she couldn’t. Now she can say she likes him best because she has read the others.
Zola writes a film. She can imagine everything he describes, the things, the doings, the people. Reading him she can feel the pink heat in Gervaise’s laundry when it’s snowing outside. She can imagine Goujet’s forge shaking as he beats out a perfect bolt. She can see him pounding his mighty passion into its precise and perfect edges.
Zola’s world is as full and cluttered and heavy with things as her own desert world back home is empty, kind of, in the opposite direction.
Reading at the formica kitchen table under the crackling roof, she began to mark up her map and plan this long journey. She wanted to walk in Gervaise’s footsteps as she delivered pressed collars to the doors of her favourite clients. She wanted to trace the route past the chain-makers, cobblers, fishmongers, watchmakers, dye-shops and milliners that Gervaise took every day, peering into their fogged-up windows. The name of every one of those shops—milliners, dye-shops, etcetera—she, Lise, can say in French.
She raised money for the trip by selling her bike and the sewing machine she got for her fourteenth birthday. Six nights a week she worked the late shift at the drive-thru fast-food servo beside the petrol station on the edge of town, the joint where the truckers and the rest of the inter-state traffic stop. She bought French books in the second-hand shop and she learned more French. She studied her maths teacher’s map.
Some nights when the air-conditioning was on too high and the servo was freezing, she took her books outside and read them under the neon of the street lights. Here she could see the road trains coming from miles away, the road through town running south, north like a line of longitude with barely a kink in it.
‘My suggestion,’ said her maths teacher, stroking his tortoiseshell cat that late afternoon she went to say goodbye, ‘Go north of the Sacré-Coeur, just walk. See what you can see.’
See what you can see, she tells herself now, turning into a narrow street, yellow refuse bags in a pile beside a shuttered restaurant, still heading north, slightly west. This route should take her to the next big avenue. The marks on her map point beyond Montmartre, beyond the Gare du Nord, and then further again.
Zola’s Goutte d’Or—it will be there somewhere, she knows, buried in the underlying pattern of the streets, sifted into the cracks between the paving stones and the joins between the buildings. It will be there in the shape of the apartment blocks, how they cut up the sky, and in the arch of the doorways leading into dark courtyards with spiral staircases in the corners, the same corners where Nana practised doing the splits in her dishevelled dress.
The street or perhaps boulevard she is on is long, it’s more like several streets strung together. Intersection follows intersection and pavement follows pavement. Clouds creep in over the sun, and flashes of pale light pass over the slate-blue roofs and the high-up windows.
The rain holds off but it is past two before she gets to the Sacré-Coeur area. There will be almost as much distance again to go. Standing in a doorway, she checks her map and drinks some water. She slides two madeleines out of the crackly plastic wrapping, tries one. It tastes of almost nothing, grease and sweetness. She throws it away and folds a corner of the wrapping around the other one. When she lifts her pack back on she feels the reassuring drag of her books across her shoulder blades.
iii. south…north…
At four o’clock she decides, this is it, close to it, this long narrow street with its far distances now veiled in a light drizzle, the light disappearing. This has to be it. She looks up, left, right. On both sides are enormous concrete apartment blocks stained with the rain. There are no cafés any more, no smell of coffee. There is a slick but ashy feel to the pavements, as if the drizzle had turned granular.
See what you can see, she tells herself again. Don’t expect a thing.
Behind one of these dreary facades, four or five flights up, Gervaise once took her bright tongs and expertly goffered a lace shirt.
Lise turns left down another long street, then left again. She pauses on a corner to put on her raincoat. There are more pedestrians than before—shoppers, perhaps, or commuters, hurrying past head-down in the thickening grey light. She passes key-cutting kiosks, betting shops, tiny convenience stores, KFCs. Many shopfronts are boarded up. The shutters are graffitied in lettering she can’t read. In the darkened doorways huddle human-shaped piles of rags.
Would Gervaise have hurried past these people without a word, Lise wonders, as she is doing now?
She thinks she sees a street sign, Rue des Poissonniers. That really could be it, an axis point, but the drizzle in her eyes makes her blink and squint and the crowd shifts her along. Her collapsed bun is a piece of dank animal on her neck. When she again looks up, she can’t find the sign.
By now her boots are letting in the wet. The boots have no tread and slip-slide across the paving stones. At home it barely ever rains.
She slips into a dollar-stretcher kind of shop, its entrance cheerful with hanging plastic flags. Imagine that. She travelled thousands of miles to get here and takes shelter in the same kind of shop you’d find in the small mall at home.
She can see the small mall now, the shops in their line—the dollar-stretcher, the card and gift shop, the shoe shop, the chemist, and then at the end the post office. At Christmas the flower-bed in front of the post office is hazy-blue with agapanthus.
She is so far from anywhere familiar she forgives herself this dollar-stretcher.
She walks amongst display units piled full of multipack clothes in basic colours, white cotton vests, navy and black tops and leotards, all exactly the same as you get at home. Her raincoat is dripping in her wake. Should she take it off? She checks around to see who has noticed.
She is aware of the man minutes before she actually sees him, lays her eyes on him. Laying eyes on is what her mother says. To Lise it sounds vaguely disgusting. She anyway doesn’t want to lay eyes on this person. Already he is drawing in close, a thin figure, tall, very tall in fact, murmuring something, moving clockwise around this
display unit full of peaked caps machine-embroidered with the names of American baseball teams. Yankees. Red Sox. Angels.
Ff, ff, he seems to be spluttering, hurrying to get the words out. She sees he is as soaked as she is, his shoulders blotched dark with damp.
She walks deeper into the store, beyond the hosiery, beyond the dishcloths and handtowels. The figure, the man, walks faster, too. She sidesteps, circles around a square counter. White cotton socks are on sale, lying in piles, a pack of five for two euros.
He is on the opposite side and she can’t help it, she lays her eyes on him, she looks him full in the face. She shouldn’t have done this. His eye sockets are deep and shadowy and his eyes stare.
A jab of fear goes through her and then a strange jab of longing. For some reason she thinks of diesel, the smell of fuel, engines grinding. She thinks of the big road-trains shifting gear as they heave through her desert town at night, thundering past the drive-thru fast-food, bulleting on south or north through the desert.
She thinks of the tired blue-black eyes of the truckers when they come in for a burger, and the rustling and rattling of the dry wind in the big River Reds when there are no trucks. She thinks of the one traffic light on Main Street shifting green to yellow to red to green, sometimes without a single car passing, even in the daytime.
The man is talking at her. Ff, ff, he says, and then other sounds, with a catch in the throat, but she doesn’t follow them—she doesn’t want to follow.
She can tell he is talking at her, though, because his eyes reach for hers, they lay themselves on her, they insist she looks back. If she moves right he moves left so he is still opposite, still looking at her. She tries to stare to the side of his head but this makes his voice increase in volume. She moves again, and he moves, like in hide-and-seek. She pauses and he pauses, as if she was his reflection, he was her mirror.
His tongue flickers between his teeth like a lizard’s. Ff, ff. Suddenly it’s hard to breathe.
Then he stops dodging. He darts around the unit, fast, but she is as quick as he is.
The security guard is standing to the left of the shop entrance, looking out at the rain. His uniform is black with a silver leopard logo on his breast pocket. She rushes at him, brakes just in front of his feet. She sees he has a small dark beard and dark liquid-brown eyes. Her mother would say soulful—soulful eyes.
To her left she is aware of the tall figure moving out into the street, still talking, ff ff ff. He does not look up. She sees for the first time his stoop, his shoulders hunched inside his wet denim jacket, the thick dark hair curling over the collar. The side of his face as he glances up then down the street is flushed and his neck corded, the skin pulled tight, liverish. It shocks her to see this. Seeing his colour, hearing him talk, she knows he will wait for her. Somewhere outside, he will be waiting.
‘Help me, please, s’il vous plaît, I need help,’ is the first thing she tells the security guard, mostly in English, then when he looks at her hard in French.
He points across the road, but where? She peers. He shrugs and sets out with her. Her feet in their slippery soles slide over the paving stones. They walk three shops down, then across at the lights, and three shops up again. He points to a place where the road surface shines with wetness and lightly touches her elbow.
‘Don’t slip,’ she hears him say, in French. After a pause he adds, in English, ‘Those unhealthy demons, they’re so heavily awake.’
But she must have imagined this. She thought he didn’t speak English. Or maybe he spoke in French. She’s got so good it was as if it were English.
Still touching her elbow the security guard steers her into a yellow space, a teleshop, and everything is suddenly warm, dry, calm. The walls are lined in glass-fronted wooden phone booths, ten or twelve. The counter here on the left is stacked high with shiny tin cans of olive oil. On the yellow-gloss panel behind the counter hang bright framed posters of football teams. Relief goes through her in a wave.
iv. neither left nor right
‘A drink to go with your call?’ the elderly proprietor behind the teleshop counter says in English. With his triangular white beard he points to a tall fridge in the corner.
Lise shakes her head, goes into the second booth. In the first booth the caller is saying ‘si’ and then ‘si’ quietly, at intervals. In her booth is a shelf, a dial phone attached to the wall, a stool. A dark circle halos the door handle.
She rubs her damp hands together to get them dry. Her breathing stays fast and uneven. She tries closing her mouth and taking big breaths through her nose.
She reads the instructions for making long-distance calls and dials the home phone number. As she dials she counts the hours on her fingers, then puts down the receiver. Way too early, thoughtless to disturb them this early.
She waits. It is warm and cosy in the booth. She reads the signage again. French is so much easier to understand printed black-on-white. She fingers the books in the sodden bag on her lap, their corners still pointy, firm. Why she wrapped them in plastic back before she left home. She looks at the bits of themselves other people have left in here, the greasy finger marks on the phone, the initials scribbled on the wooden walls in biro, the whorl of dirt around the door handle. She dials once more. The phone rings. After a while the ring cuts out.
It seems like she got the time wrong. They must have already left for work.
She sees her mother standing at the washing line in her bra and knickers, that soft freckled skin on her stomach. On hot summer mornings her mother does her chores before she puts on her brown-check uniform, to keep it fresh. Though when she, Lise, is home, hanging out the laundry is usually her job.
She thinks of the clothes drying fast and stiff on the clothes line and under the line the patch of artificial grass Dad put in last summer when there was no rain at all. In the early morning the grassy patch is cool to stand on. She thinks it would be nice if the teleshop served hot coffee as well as cold drinks.
She imagines her mother’s voice saying hello and then her name, two syllables, Li-se, not one, as they do here.
‘You would go,’ she hears her mother saying. ‘So what’s the point of phoning now, when you’re halfway across the world?’
The receiver is buzzing in her hand. Lise returns it to the bracket and sits for a while longer, holding her backpack in her lap, feeling the weight of her books. She held her books in her lap exactly like this all those nights in the servo out on the highway, reading without letting the manager see. On slow nights, though, he turned a blind eye. There were so many nights when no trucks stopped and the burger fat congealed on the grill in the kitchen.
She remembers the last heatwave they had, when she stood in the middle of the highway in the darkness, one foot on either side of the white line, the ice-blue evening light floating over the southern horizon like a spaceship. The warm wind off the Arkaroola washed over her body and she lifted her arms over her head and felt the country all around, everywhere, stretching out to the horizon, reaching in right here to the point where she was standing, pressing in on every side. How quiet the land felt that night, yet also seething, full of things she had no names for, has no names for. If she had names she would be able to hold this feeling more snugly in her memory, carry it with her on her journey, round and intact.
‘Ten euros,’ says the proprietor in French. ‘For use of the booth.’
He holds out his hand, the nails bent and yellow. In English he continues, ‘Maybe no connection but a long time.’
She studies the posters of the footballers behind his head and waits for him to change his mind.
He keeps his hand cupped on the counter.
‘Cinq euro,’ she says, and places a five-euro note on the counter.
‘Deux euro!’ The bearded security guard is suddenly back in the shop, shouting.
He throws his arms about, then props himself on the counter. There are French words in what he is shouting but Lise cannot understand him. The pr
oprietor is shouting back. Their two mouths are open at the same time.
The proprietor flicks at the note she just gave him and it floats to the floor, out of sight. The guard puts his fist on the counter. The proprietor pings the till open, takes out a coin. The security guard gives the coin to Lise. Then he grasps her elbow, steers her lightly, and moves behind her out of the shop.
Huh huh, the proprietor drily coughs or maybe laughs, Huh huh.
She and the guard turn left, in the direction she came, towards Paris.
‘I take you back to your hotel?’ the security guard says in English. ‘Make sure?’
She moves her elbow away from his cupped hand.
‘I think I will hail a taxi,’ she says in French. Then catches herself. She has said she hopes for a taxi. J’espère que… Would that be right?
There are no taxis to be seen. They walk on down the street together. Lise tries to think of something else, not this street, not the desperate man with the shadowy eyes, not this second man with the silver-leopard embroidery shining on his breast pocket.
She remembers Coupeau and Gervaise walking out together, in those days after Lantin has left, how they walk and walk, she without a goal in mind, he determined, sweet-talking, wearing down her will. It was summer then, the shadows short, as they are where she lives, always. She remembers Goujet too, with his blond beard, Goujet worshipping Gervaise, impressing her with his craft, here, somewhere, in his blazing forge behind these same wet streets.
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