‘Carry on about love,’ Pip says. It comes out quietly.
‘Wrapped in clingfilm. I think it was ham and lettuce.’ She knocks on the window and motions to Arthur for another drink.
‘I don’t think it’s true what you said about love,’ Pip says. ‘Sometimes I think you fall in love because you can’t talk about it.’
‘Is it OK to say “black man”? It’s not racist is it?’ She looks at the clock through the window again. ‘Fuck. I really have to go back to work soon.’
‘It’s OK,’ Pip says. ‘Finish your drink. I have to go anyway.’
They go back into the bar and Pip takes his time to arrange his things: bag, jacket, sunglasses. He checks for his phone, twice maybe. He feels, somewhere at the back of his chest, as if he has lost something.
He shakes hands with the tattooed barman, says ‘Thanks, man,’ and goes to kiss Sofi goodbye. ‘A la française,’ he says, accent still firmly British. Their faces do not touch.
‘You should come back again some time,’ she says, mostly because she knows he will not. ‘Come back and bring your girl.’
‘She’s not my girl any more.’ He swings his backpack onto one shoulder.
‘Was it you?’ Sofi asks.
‘What?’
‘What I was trying to say before. There’s always one person who doesn’t love enough.’
Pip does not say anything.
‘Don’t you think that’s true?’ she says. She looks at Pip’s shoes. He’s wearing Converse. The white rubber toecap makes them look too big. ‘See you soon,’ she says, and he does not believe her.
Pip notices, as he walks down the stairs to the door, that the bar is no longer playing music. The silence feels like people watching him. He pushes the heavy door open, and walks out onto the street. The concrete paving stones look different in the heat.
Then, ‘Pip—’
Sofi calls after him. Part of her still doesn’t understand why he had come. All this way. It opened too many things up again. ‘Did you ever hear from her?’
Pip is standing in the middle of the road. He stops with his back to Sofi, then turns around. She’s standing on the step of the bar, the arches of her feet balanced on the right angle. A moped drives between them. He shakes his head.
‘You never have?’ she says.
He shakes his head again.
‘I thought about it all the time,’ she says. ‘I promise you I did. It’s just I can’t any more.’
He nods. ‘Call me,’ she says. He sees her brace herself. She tries to smile, ‘If you like.’
He nods again and holds a hand up in goodbye. For a second they stay like that, and then he walks away, ignoring car horns, walks away slowly, right down the very middle of the road.
The Chaperone, the Children
The path is steeper than a ski slope, an angle that tugs at ankles. My shoes don’t have the right kind of soles so I take them off. I’ve brought strawberries, I can’t afford to fall.
It might be the steepest path in Paris, it’s certainly the steepest park. You’ve said you’re somewhere near the top. I think you often make it hard to get to you. And it’s so hot; with no shoes, the stone nearly burns.
The Buttes-Chaumont is a grass amphitheatre and eyes feed on passers-by once picnics are over. I look down to dodge pebbles and glass, then back up at the audience. Rows of gay men, mown hair and shiny chests, circles of girls, rosé, suncream, a pregnant woman, head on husband, smoking.
But I am only looking for you. I don’t want to be squinting when you see me, I don’t want to fall with these strawberries. I want to see you first, choose how I walk towards you, when to smile.
You catch me before I catch you, though; you half get up, shoulders off the grass, lie back down, wave. You are not alone. I knew that, but I thought there would be lots of us, not just one other person.
We’re not sure how close we have to be before we shout hello, or another opening line. I’ve prepared a few, but sound doesn’t carry in the park, there are too many other voices and noises and wind. So we wait until I’ve nearly sat down. You go first. ‘Hey Jude.’ You tell me I’ve arrived for the first drops of rain.
No, I want to say, I just brought strawberries. It’s you who brought the rain. I look at the boy next to you. I kiss him first because it might make you jealous. A third person can be so difficult.
I sit down, maybe too close, but the picnic blanket’s small. And anyway, it’s not a blanket, it’s a Carrefour bag you’ve ripped along the side seams. You’ve budged over a bit, but I’m just sitting on a handle really. ‘Sweet spot,’ I say, but I can feel stones through the plastic. I feel hotter than I should. I want to make you laugh, you laugh so loudly. ‘Just go straight to normal’ never works, it’s always a bit strange for the first minute or two. I think we’re both trying too hard. I know that I am. We normally warm up so well that each time we meet, we expect to go straight to heat but it’s not like that.
You ask me what I did last night, then I ask you. We have two days to fill in. We do it in sketches, taking it in turns to draw lines, all of it unchronological, because that’s how people talk. The other person, your friend, whoever he is, doesn’t say much. He texts, he can’t decide whether to keep his cap on, he comments on the rain. You turn to me and it’s us who talk.
We say nice things to each other and put each other down in equal measure. You think I think you’re old, you think I think you’re not serious. You think I hate all Americans in Paris. Not true. Actually, I’ve always thought Chicago’s a good place to come from. That lake is like a sea. I say you have a tiny insect on your eyebrow, but it flies away before I get to brush it off.
We look at each other for just too long until one of us says ‘What?’ It’s me this time, but it’s happened before. We’re trying to look into each other’s minds, but the ‘what?’, whoever asks, neither of us answers. What? Nothing. No, really, what? Nothing. I want a cigarette because everyone else on the hill is drinking bottles of beer. I steal one from our chaperone, but it’s a Gauloises bleu. ‘The statement cigarette,’ you say, ‘straight to the lung. You won’t like it.’
We haven’t been alone since it happened. Not really, really alone. We’ve sat next to each other at canal-side gatherings, gone by ourselves to the bar when others were dancing, you held my hand to pull me down a corridor, pushed me against the wall and kissed me, briefly, but it was outside your front door and it was open. Never really alone. Ten minutes in McDonald’s doesn’t count. We spent it queuing and I couldn’t stop laughing because of the haircuts, and because you are an adult and still you wanted chicken nuggets. You said it was an American thing. You got a Happy Meal, you told me you were still a kid inside and fed me a chip with your thumb and index. That wasn’t the time to say the ‘what?’ we want to ask and get an answer.
Now we’re in a park, on a steep hill. You came with a chaperone and I came with strawberries. As you say, I also came with the rain. It’s funny; the drops are fat (on skin, they leave a splash the size of a ⇔2 coin), but the sky is blue. We wonder where the blue will blow. We lick our fingers to find out. We hold them out to each other. They stay wet. No wind.
Everything is in limbo. Half the hill cup their palms to the sky, as if counting how many raindrops they catch will tell them whether they have to leave. Most groups are making signs of moving. Picnic blankets are held ready to be turned into makeshift umbrellas and mothers check if there’s enough paté in the packet to make it worth taking home. Still, there is a good chance the rain might never really come. If the drops are fat, they are also few and far between. The other half of the hill is sticking tight. They will ride out the storm in Speedos and sundresses. I say something about the ‘Club Tropicana’ video, and speak-sing the only line I know.
There should be a rainbow somewhere but we can’t see it yet. You doodle on the plastic bag with your finger and test the water: ‘Maybe we should just go now,’ you say, ‘or it will rain, and everyone will run, an
d…’ You stop at ‘and’. I don’t want to go, I just got here. I want to risk it. I want to stay with you. I don’t mind the rain, these dots of cool, it’s refreshing.
‘The strawberries,’ I say. I hold them out like a reason. They’re from a place where strawberries are in season and the fruit is heavy. ‘We’ve still got the strawberries. We could go and wait under the willow.’
You ask the other person what a willow is in French. ‘Comme ça?’ he says, taking out an earphone, and pointing. ‘Un saule pleureur.’ A weeping willow, the same.
It’s unspoken, but this sameness is taken as a sign and a yes and so we get up to go. We stand up easily, because our feet are already so much lower than our heads. You get to the willow first, and hold it open like a bead curtain. It’s cooler under here. We’ve gone from grass to ground, the earth is dry as ash, worn-out brown with scuffed, twine-like roots. You say it’s lovely here and I agree. You lay down the Carrefour bag, and this time the other person gets the handle.
We settle. I dust my hands off on your shorts (the chaperone is on the phone) and reach for a strawberry. A few feet away, there are two young men, a wooden chopping board between them. A Swiss army knife levitates halfway into a saucisson sec, and a quarter of camembert overflows its edges onto the wood. They are drinking a pale red wine and raise their glasses to us – a stained glass window to say welcome. They are both in soft shirts and one is wearing a country cap. I say I like his hat and he says ‘Merci’, and then, ‘Thank you’. He’s heard we’re speaking English.
I tell them they are perfect. ‘The breadboard, the hat, the wine. Just two of you.’ (You put your finger on one of my back dimples, then.) ‘It’s like a Marcel Pagnol novel.’
He laughs, tips his hat and asks if we’d like some cheese. He says it’s spring camembert, that the milk is different, and so the cheese is special, sweeter, pours. He pulls the sword from the stone and cuts us two slices. Really, he says, we should eat it with honey, and maybe hazelnuts.
The man is right, the cheese is special. I shuffle down so my head is on the plastic bag and look through the fronds at the people outside our willow. A black man and a white woman, the wrong age for each other, rubbing noses, play-kissing. Two old men sitting on a bench, sharing Le Monde. Then us, under the willow. My head is against your thigh, you put your hand down and stroke my hair, and for a second, I shut my eyes.
I would stay like that for hours, but I open my eyes because something in the park changes. The air thickens, quickens – there is suddenly a different feeling.
A group of children has poured over the concrete crown of the slope and start to run, no, charge down through the picnics. Their shoes land heavily on unopened boxes of biscuits, they knock over plastic cups of wine and lemonade. They do not see barriers in bodies or blankets. They do not see barriers. And nobody can stop them, because they are quick, because they are small, because, for some, unplaceable reason, it is as if they exist on a plane that’s not quite ours. There must be fifteen of them.
One running boy stops beside a family of three. He is perhaps the smallest of the gang. His arms are bone, his belly convex. A child slightly older pulls him on; the mother of the family holds her own son tighter.
‘Are they alone?’ you ask me, American accent suddenly stronger. ‘Where’s the adult?’
People are shouting because their babies’ fingers have been trodden on. Other people stand to see what’s happening. The chaperone peers out of the willow, fag dripping from his lip. ‘Mais putain, ils sont feraux,’ he says to us.
At first we watch the children like a play, from cheap seats at the back, but soon we realize that our willow is where gravity will take them.
There is one bigger boy who seems to be the leader. Still, he cannot be a teenager yet, he can’t be older than twelve; his hips are hand-sized. But his skin looks scuffed – the type of dry and dusty that normally comes from working with bricks. Even in this heat, he is wearing two jumpers. The cuffs are dirty, and he’s hooked a thumb through one of them.
The boy looks like he has recently grown, as if he still hasn’t mastered the new length of his legs. And when he gets to the bottom of the hill, he comes into our willow, parting the wicker walls, and walks straight towards the men with the picnic.
They have their backs to him. The wild boy with the double jumper treads plainly, flatly, hard, on the spring camembert and grabs the cap off one of their heads.
The man jerks his head around to face the boy. He sees the hat in his hand, the stamped-on cheese, and the man grabs the knife next to it.
The hat is hostage. The audience is captive. The Buttes Chaumont goes silent. The slope takes an in-breath as one.
But the knife seems to mean nothing to the boy. He holds the stolen cap in his fist and kicks a dark cloud of dust onto their picnic. Even standing still, there is something odd about his legs. I wonder if he has been drinking. The skin on his face is different colours. You reach for my hand, and you hold it.
The man and the boy stand opposite each other, four feet apart. Sun and rain, they face each other.
‘TU N’EST QU’UN ENFANT!’ the man shouts. You can see his face burn from here. The knife in his hand has a short blade, and is shaking slightly. ‘ELLE EST OU, TA MAMAN?’
They both hold for five more seconds. And all of this time, you hold my hand.
Then the child stamps his left leg forward as if he is about to charge.
He doesn’t, though. He laughs, a laugh which doesn’t come from his head or chest. Then he drops the hat, and runs.
The other children, all of whom had stopped to watch, follow their twelve-year-old leader. The tension is broken, the park bursts into applause. The children run on, run down, run to the gates, and disappear.
The words sauvages and animaux roll up and down the hill now. Tziganes. Roms. Did you see them? The children? They were children. They can’t have been more than ten. No, ten years old. There were more than ten, they were everywhere. ‘Il faudrait tous les enfermer,’ are words said too.
For a while, we look to see if they’ll come back. We also look to the sky. We still don’t know if it will really rain. People are leaving, perhaps because of the undecided sky, perhaps because of the children.
But the sun holds and soon the normal sounds of the park come back. You’d let go of my hand as soon as your friend sat back down.
Adrenalin is making my blood feel thicker or thinner, one of the two; it has the same effect as the cigarette. I ask the man with the picnic if he’s OK.
He tries to use his knife to cut a slice of saucisson. His hand is shaking even harder now. The man he’s with takes the knife from him, cuts him a piece, feeds it to him and touches his face as he chews it. The cap is reached for, and pulled back into their picnic. They have an unopened goat’s cheese and the man rolls it back and forth, from one hand to the other.
What is this day? I say something about the Brothers Grimm, and the tale where wheels of cheese are rolled down a mountain. You ask why I see everything through books and films and music. I want to say that it only happens when I’m with you. When I’m with people that I like.
We try to write a poem but the only paper we have is a pastel-coloured perfume advert ripped from a magazine, and rhymes don’t come, so we talk about when we were young, and the best and worst things we’ve ever done. I tell you a story about the time I drove a speedboat, you tell me about doing work experience at your dad’s shoe-heel business. You ask strange questions, like what side of my mouth I chew on. You say that you’re interested in the small things. You notice that the chaperone is not listening and you change your mind and say ‘all things’.
At the end of the afternoon, we say goodbye to the men from another time, and leave the willow, strawberry leaves scattered where we were sitting.
You tell me not to pick them up. ‘They look like crowns when they dry. I like our mess.’ And so I look at you, and I look at you, and see all the times this has happened before, and
you look back, and then it’s your turn. ‘What?’
Nothing. To leave, we walk slowly, even though it’s downhill. Your shoes are on, mine are off, but raindrops have dried on the stone and cooled it down. Midges collect in the last staffs of sunlight, and the bins are built up with old picnics gathered up into plastic bags.
Out of the park and on the real road, the side by Botzaris, I hold your arm so I can put my shoes on. We kiss goodbye on the cheeks, and lightly because of the other person and because we think we’ll see each other later. We make half-plans, you have half a finger on my wrist and write on it in half-moons. We are half-alone, and then –
‘Girls,’ the chaperone says through his cigarette. He taps his watch. ‘Il faut qu’on aille là,’ and you let go.
‘Hey, Jude?’ You say as you walk away. ‘Don’t make it sad. You got stuff to do till we meet?’
‘I’ve got a thousand missed calls,’ I tell you.
‘See you,’ you say. I turn around to see if you look back, but if you did, I missed that too.
In the end, we do not see each other again that night. Instead, we drink too much in different bars with different people. Perhaps I knew that as soon as I walked away from you. The chaperone, the children. Nothing ever happens as you think it will.
After we left each other, the air lay heavy as a blanket. I decided to think that it wouldn’t rain, so that it might. All it needed was a chance.
Métro
They are going to take the métro. Pip suggested they meet at KFC.
‘Mais non,’ Clémence had said (she was glad this was on the phone and he couldn’t see her). ‘Kentucky, non. C’est pas correcte, ça.’
Instead, she’d said, the fruit shop, the one where the pigeon flew out from the pineapples.
‘The night we made the ratatouille?’
The Last Kings of Sark Page 15