by E. J. Swift
She folds her hands in her lap, very precisely, geometrically, and puts her head on one side. Her face bears an expression of acute concentration.
I listen too, but I cannot hear anything other than the normal ambience of the bar on a quiet night. Dušanka, dragging a crate of Corona to the fridge. Yogi Millis, deep in flirtation with an Italian tourist. Eloise fading the music from Beyoncé to Rihanna.
“Can you hear it?”
I shake my head. I don’t want to hear it, whatever it is. Anyway, it won’t be anything. I’m dealing with a lunatic.
“Try again,” she urges. “Close your eyes.”
I obey without thinking; and once shut, my eyes won’t open.
I hear customers chattering, the clink of glasses. Beyond that, the white noise I have always associated with the speaker system. As I focus in on that sound, I begin to hear multiple notes unfolding within it; layers, dimensions, the foundations of a song slowly writing themselves upon a stave.
Now my eyes open, as though released. I stare at the chronometrist.
“Ahhh—there you go. Now you can hear it, can’t you? It takes practice, and awareness. Eventually you will hear it all the time.”
“How do you know?”
Her hand closes over mine. Her touch is chilled wax. Coldness takes my fingers, spreads to my palm, my forearm, bicep, working up to my shoulder.
“My dear, my dear.” Her eyes search out mine. She is scanning me. I have the sense of an intelligence far beyond my own. My uncanny valley is off the scale. “It’s who you are, as simple as that. Every anomaly has an incumbent. And this one is yours, how marvellous! It is what you might call a symbiotic relationship. Without us, they cannot thrive. And they long to thrive, they really, deeply do. I still visit mine very often, though I can go anywhere I like. You’re one in a million, dear child. Do you see what I mean?”
“I—no?”
She leans forward and sniffs, her nostrils dilating.
“You will. I’d say you’re ripe.”
A spasm runs through my body, and she releases my hand. I hold my numb fingers in my other hand, curling and straightening each in turn. Sensation returns in painful spikes. Ripe? Who says something like that?
The woman’s eyes are mischievous now.
“Now, how do you feel about eighteen seventy-five?”
“Eighteen seventy-five? What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Next time you visit the anom—the keg room, I want you to think very hard about eighteen seventy-five. Very hard indeed, my dear.”
The light dips abruptly. I look up. Dušanka is standing there, hands on hips, blocking the alcove entrance. The party of cocktail drinkers must have departed some time ago. I don’t blame them.
“Are you all right, Hallie?” says Dušanka pointedly.
I open my mouth. Get me out of here, I want to say.
The woman rests her fingers on mine. The chill spreads instantaneously, this time reaching as far as my throat.
“I’m fine,” I say. I can’t feel my tongue.
“Could you bring us some more drinks?” The woman offers more notes. “Please, keep the change.”
Dušanka’s mouth sets in an uncompromising line, but she nods and retreats to the bar. She delivers the drinks without comment. I don’t know if I thank her or not—I no longer know what I am saying. The woman has me mesmerised, trapped in the mesh of her words. I try to tell her that what she is implying did not happen, that I dreamed a ghost even though I don’t believe in ghosts and anyway, you shouldn’t see your own ghost, but she keeps talking. She talks and the evening is sucked away. She speaks of the House of Janus, a bureaucratic, pedantic order; she sighs despairingly over the code of practice, she mourns the alternative histories which might have been. She speaks of transmogrification, of consciousness in the cloud, of anomalies no more than shrivelled husks and anomalies alive as magma. She tells me the tale of basilosaurus who roamed the oceans thirty-five million years ago, perhaps in this very room. She speaks of accelerated mortality. She uses her frozen hands to describe it: death, she says, is the texture of ice cream, cold and delicious. She says she is over eight hundred years old. She’s been waiting for me, she says. And so has it. She leans forward, her smooth, unblemished face very close to mine, and she whispers,
I am so very glad to meet you, Hallie.
Chapter Nine
volcano: noun (pl. volcanos or volcanoes) a mountain or hill, typically conical, having a crater or vent through which lava, rock fragments and hot vapour, are or have been erupted from the earth’s crust // a state or situation which is liable to erupt into anger or violence
I FIND MYSELF on the sofas in the back room, discombobulated and alone. Something prompts me to check my phone. It is half six in the morning.
I hear whistling. Victor comes through the doors.
“What’s your staff drink, Hallie?”
“I’m good,” I say. Victor gives me a stern look.
The others come through one by one, settling on the sofas. Victor returns with the staff drinks, and places two fingers of scotch in front of me.
“Are you still staying with Gabriela?”
“No, Simone’s friend came through on the Lamarck studio.”
“That’s good. It is getting harder and harder to find a place, especially with the low wages. By the way, I did not know you spoke French so well.”
“What?” I laugh, self-mockingly. “I don’t.”
“Don’t be modest. I heard you talking with that funny woman in the green hat. Even your accent was not so terrible—so no excuses in the future, non?”
“But I wasn’t—” I stop before the rest of the sentence can come out. I look at Victor. He seems solid enough, but I feel strangely detached, almost dizzy.
“Actually, your conversation was worth the effort. She left a one-hundred-euro tip.”
In my head, I complete the sentence.
I wasn’t speaking in French.
I don’t want to be around people, but neither do I want to leave the bar alone. What if that woman is waiting for me? What if she’s formed some kind of obsessive attachment? I wait, without joining in the conversation, until the dregs of the night. People stretch, stand, announce imminent departures, carefully avoiding Eloise’s eye for fear of being caught for the final dishwasher run. A silence draws out where everyone realises the music has stopped. Someone asks the time.
I check my watch. “Coming up to eight.”
Gabriela yelps, leaps up and sprints across the empty back bar. Dušanka, ruffled by the abrupt exit, shrugs on her coat and yanks her laces tight. She presents her face to a select number of recipients to kiss and slouches out into the day.
It is left to me and Yogi Millis to load up the dishwasher and wait for its final spin, which we do perched on the work surfaces, having a good bitch about French customers who click their fingers in expectation of service, the curious disappearance of all the mojito sticks and the fact that the bar floor is peeling from its foundations again.
“When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?” I ask.
Yogi Millis considers the question at some length.
“A croc wrestler,” he says finally.
“Crocodiles, really?”
“Maybe not salties.”
“You’ve probably got a longer life expectancy here.”
He nods. “What about you?”
“I wanted to be a volcanologist.”
“People die in volcanos too,” says Yogi Millis, which is irrefutable, though also arguably a case for volcanology.
“You know there’s a super-volcano under Yellowstone that could take out the entire United States if it ever erupted again.”
“No way, mate.”
“What brought you to Paris anyway, Yogi?”
The dishwasher rumbles. Yogi Millis debates his answer. Finally, he concedes that he cannot remember why he came to Paris.
There was a girl.
&n
bsp; There were Jägerbombs and someone’s house, no one Yogi knew or had even met, where the floors sloped unevenly and the walls too and it wasn’t because he had taken pills (though he had) it was just how the house was. Rotting. Sinking. It was New Year’s Eve. This was in Venice.
At the party he had gatecrashed after the midnight crowds in St Mark’s Square—there were bells, chanting, it was mystical—there was a projector on the wall. The projector was relaying a film, flickering images and music on a loop: frost formed on a lake, a dead deer, its eye in close up, reeds waving, a night sky filled with stars. It was cosmic. It was as if Yogi had fallen into the canal outside, and believing himself underwater, suspended in the arms of the ocean, Yogi Millis had a revelation.
He must go to Rome.
That was three years ago.
Yogi Millis could not remember why he had come to Paris.
THE BACK ROOM doors bang open and Gabriela struggles through, dragging a suitcase behind her.
“Front doors are locked,” I yell, before she slams into the glass. Gabriela brakes, about turns, and sweeps back the other way.
“Gabriela, I’m leaving too—wait up.”
I grab my coat and bag and follow her out of the fire doors, puzzled by the suitcase, and by her haste. She hasn’t said anything about going away. Outside, the alleyway is bright with low winter sunshine. I squint, blink, adjust. The wheels of Gabriela’s suitcase rattle along the cobbles. She has a scarf tied to its handle and is hauling it awkwardly behind her.
“Gabriela—wait!”
I catch up with her as she hikes the suitcase onto the pavement, narrowly missing a waiter setting out tables for the brasserie next door. She wheels right.
“No time, no time,” she mutters.
“You want a hand with that?”
Gabriela looks at me. It is a funny, sidelong look, as though she is seeing me for the first time and does not necessarily like what she sees. That look is such a shock it is almost enough to make me walk away, but then she unwinds a second scarf from around her neck, feeds it through the suitcase handle, and gives me the ends. The scarf is made of eyelash wool, and Gabriela has a cotton one through the waistband of her jeans which would have been a more practical solution. But it is what I am given, so I take it, and with it my part in this unidentified mission.
As if the night hasn’t been strange enough already.
We turn left on to the roundabout junction. Gabriela speeds up and the case swivels erratically between us. I mimic her, infected by her urgency although still unwitting as to its source. We begin a haywire dash downhill between pedestrians, bicycles, scooters and cars. I hold my breath as a lorry screeches to a halt less than a metre away, before we arrive on the traffic island.
Ahead are the steps that lead down to the métro, but the way is barred. A sign over the metal gate proclaims:
En raison de travaux de renouvellement, la station de métro Place de Clichy sera fermée le 20 novembre.
Gabriela sucks in a breath. Wordlessly, she veers left, down towards the taxi rank. A couple with three bulky cases and a girl in grey leggings form a queue. Gabriela pushes past.
Leggings girl gives her a filthy look.
“Petites salopes.”
A taxi pulls up; the girl and Gabriela move at the same time. Gabriela is faster. She leaps forward and opens the door.
“C’est la crise!”
“Excusez-nous,” I mutter, hoping to appease the girl.
“Moi, j’ai attendu trente minutes. Trente minutes, salopes! Sors de la!”
Gabriela grabs my hand.
“Hallie, get in the taxi.”
I am bundled into the back of the car with Gabriela and Gabriela’s luggage. Leggings girl puts her face to the window and screams.
“Vous êtes des vraies putes—”
Gabriela winds down the window. “Va te faire foutre!”
The driver glances at us in the mirror, unconcerned by this exchange.
“Où voulez-vous aller?”
“L’Aéroport de Roissy CDG, vite!”
The taxi shoots away from the kerb. I catch a glimpse of the vanquished leggings girl in the wing mirror, her cheeks flushed with rage. The taxi accelerates across Clichy roundabout, hops a red light and takes the second exit, honking any cars that dare to slow us down. Caught in the exhilaration of our flight, it’s a minute before I realise that this is not actually my expedition.
I ask the driver to pull up.
“No, don’t stop,” Gabriela snaps.
“Hang on, I’m not the one going to the airport. He can just drop me at the next red light.”
Gabriela’s fingers grip my wrist. For a second I feel a shadow coldness.
“Ne t’arrête pas!”
“Gabriela—”
“Hallie, we cannot stop.”
Her fingers tighten. In her face I see something more than panic—I see desperation. The airport is the last place I want to go, but neither do I want to leave Gabriela in distress. Nothing fazes her; that’s the essence of who she is, the friend I know and love.
“Why not?” I ask softly.
She shakes her head. “I cannot.”
I slump back against the upholstery. The taxi moves dextrously through the traffic. I watch as Parisian stone slips away. Sandstone, Eocene. Bits of grit and silt swirled in alluvial waters and compressed through time. Now the road is lined with steel and concrete. The buildings grow wider, longer, industrial. We turn down an underpass onto the Périphérique and move into the fast lane.
Gabriela and I say nothing to one another for the remainder of the journey. I watch the scenery, the cars streaking by.
I remember the platform at St Pancras echoing with my footsteps, the Eurostar cutting through open fields as the sky lightened with dawn. The woman next to me on the train asked why I was going to Paris; I said I was an ERASMUS student. I said my name was Persephone, after my grandmother.
I prepared so carefully. Changed bank accounts, deleted my social media, deferred my final year at Aberystwyth. I remember waiting for the cab at the end of the road at four in the morning, a soft mist coating the air. My shoulders twitched, but I didn’t look back. This was always about self-salvage.
And now we’re heading north. Backwards. Trapped in the car, escape denied me for the second time this morning, I begin to feel the panic creeping in. Sweat is gathering in the lines of my palms. Breathe, I tell myself firmly. Just breathe.
Gabriela is bunched up on the other side of the cab, knees drawn to her chest. Her forehead presses into the window. We have been in the car for forty minutes when the Périphérique grinds to a halt. Cars line up end-to-end. We stop behind a Range Rover. Gabriela puts her head in her arms.
“What time is your flight?” I ask. She does not respond. A late November sun is breaking through clouds as it rises. I check my watch. Nine o’clock.
It takes us another forty minutes to reach Charles de Gaulle. The driver pulls into the drop-off point and announces our fare is fifty euro. I look at Gabriela. She palms me a handful of coins and gets out before the driver can lock the doors. Even before counting the money, I can feel the nausea rising, the tingling in my legs.
I empty out my pockets. A pile of one, five and ten cent pieces. I pick out the euros and the two euros and with increasing desperation, the fifty cents. That with a single note—my spoils from the hundred euro tip—gives me seventeen euro. The taxi driver drums his fingers on the steering wheel and revs the engine.
“I’ve got seventeen.” My heart sinks. I count up the ten and twenty cent pieces, and add Gabriela’s earnings. “Make that twenty-four thirty.”
I offer my card. The machine in the car is not working. I say I’ll go to the cashpoint. The driver says I’ll do a runner, like my friend. An unhappy altercation follows. After a few minutes, people begin banging on the window. We are bottlenecking the queue. The driver swears at the window bangers and me. I swear at the driver. My mouth feels strange, not my own, rubbery. I
force my twenty-four euro through the hole in the window divider and the coins shower into the driver’s compartment. Finally he unlocks the door. I cannot translate the parting shot, but I can guess its meaning.
I get out of the car, wheezing by now. Here we go again, Hallie. Here we bloody go. People in the queue are staring. I can feel their eyes boring into me as I cross the pavement, head down, and duck through a set of revolving doors. I can breathe, but there is no air. My vision is tunnelling. There are people everywhere. I blunder through the crowds half-blind, searching for the universal sign for toilets. Arrivals, departures, baggage reclaim: every sign but the one I need. At last I see it, suspended at an angle, an arrow pointing into the ground. A distant part of me knows that it’s not the sign that’s wrong, it’s me. I’m skewed. Distorted in space. My legs are shaking, treacherous; I urge them one step further, and another, and another, ignoring the fact that there is no air, that every molecule of oxygen has been leached from the atmosphere, that I am suffocating in this toxic not-air. I am going to die. Here in the bathrooms. I lock myself in a cubicle and sit with my head between my knees, terrified and trembling and convinced of my imminent death, so very close now.
After a time, the attack passes.
I tear off a wad of toilet tissue and wipe the tears and sweat from my face. It comes back black with mascara. I sit there, waiting for my body to still. I feel drained.
Fucking Gabriela.
Where is she, anyway?
I FIND MY wretched friend on the floor by a magazine unit, the picture of dejection.
“Well?” I demand. “I guess you missed it.”
Gabriela does not look up.
“What the hell were you playing at, leaving me back there with the taxi driver? That fare was fifty euro!”
“That taxi driver was not the problem.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“I had to catch the plane.”
“But you didn’t catch it, did you? You knew you’d missed it, and you left me there anyway, to deal with your mess!”