by E. J. Swift
“Although,” he adds. “Eloise might be pissed off when she finds out I’ve monopolised one of her staff.”
“Fuck Eloise,” I say. “Fuck everyone. I just want to be with you.”
Léon rolls over, looks at me straight on. That millisecond of eye contact is all that is needed. We reach for each other.
I never knew desire could be like this. It’s reflex. It’s beyond conscious thought. It’s desperation. I want to be closer than skin, closer to Léon than it is possible to be to another human being, unless we were to transition to a different state altogether, to become gas or energy. I’m beyond tiredness or hunger, beyond soreness or thirst. I need only Léon. When the rush fades, inertia sets us apart, side by side with sweat cooling our limbs, and here in these brief moments some logic returns. I must eat. I must sleep. And then I see his body, lean and muscular beside mine, his eyes running over my skin, preempting the touch that will follow, the touch that will bring me back to the living, and I know I will pursue that transcendence again, at any cost.
For the past forty-eight hours the only time either of us has got up has been to go to the shower or the fridge. I can’t imagine how I’m going to survive the next shift at Millie’s.
When we venture out hand in hand to catch the boulangerie before it closes, it’s twilight. The world looks like a different place. Passersby are no longer just people on the street, they are people who are outside us, electrons to our nucleus. Léon buys baguettes, cheese, cigarettes, wine (Brouilly, of course), passing over notes and coins, never letting go of my fingers with his other hand. As though I am something cherished. I watch the vendors for signs they have observed our transfiguration; surely it must show? We go back to Léon’s apartment, drop our purchases on the floor, and barely has the door closed than we reach for one another again.
“I WANT TO know about England,” says Léon. “I never hear you talk about England.”
“It’s not the most exciting part of my life.”
“It’s most of your life.”
“Yeah. Sad, isn’t it? Life begins at Clichy. Or something.”
“Where did you grow up?”
“In Sussex. About an hour and a half from London. Very rural.”
He lights a cigarette, takes a drag and passes it to me.
“Did you like it?”
“Not exactly. My parents were pretty self-absorbed. They were both artists.”
“What kind of artists?”
I shift onto one elbow.
“Mum’s sculptures and installations. Dad’s more traditional painting, I guess. He doesn’t work so much any more.”
They had made a deal, my parents. For two years, one of them would be the practising artist, and the other would teach, and bring in a stable income. Then they would switch places. Here my father made his first fatal error—he let my mother go first. Two years went by and she was on the cusp of a breakthrough. It was a matter of months, she said. Another year and the situation was mysteriously the same. Six years on, my birth was marked by nocturnal rows and their first separation, as my father acknowledged the by-now-unavoidable truth: that it would always be just a few more months.
Throughout my childhood he continued to teach. He was a good teacher, or could have been, if his heart was in it. What was in it mostly was his resentment. His practice was squeezed into the twilight hours, the evenings and nights, the tired parts of his life. A part of me admired him for neither abandoning us entirely nor taking us away, and a part of me despised him for giving in to her. He loved her too much, even knowing he was made lesser by it. She didn’t deserve it.
“They were hard to live with,” I say.
“You talk about them in the past tense.”
“Oh, they’re alive.” I sigh. “I’ll tell you a story about my mother. We were in the gift shop at London Zoo. I must have been, I don’t know, about five. Theo and George—my sister and brother—they’d chosen their toys, we were all allowed one. Dad paid, of course. One of them had a platypus and the other had a crocodile, I think it was. I chose the seal. It had a sort of squashed face, it looked like it needed a good home. And she wouldn’t let me have it because some other kids had seals as well. ‘Hallie,’ she said. ‘Those kids over there, with the seals—they’re the herd. Don’t be a sheep. You know there is nothing more tragic in life than to be a sheep.’ That’s what she said. I remember it so clearly.” I take a long drag, blow smoke towards the ceiling. “She always wanted me to be more than I was.”
“Is that why you left?”
“Maybe.”
I pass the cigarette back. For the first time in a long time, I think of the Polaroid. Of volcano day. Perhaps the more pressing secrets of my timefaring ventures have made it easier to revisit the deep past, but I’m not quite there yet. There are layers, I think. Some of them we’re never willing to reveal.
“Where did you grow up?” I ask.
“Toulouse, until I was about ten.”
“And then?”
“My parents liked to travel. We moved around a lot. We were here in Paris, for a time. I suppose I learned to blend in anywhere.”
“Like an octopus.”
“I think I prefer a chameleon. Not as terrifying.”
“You can talk, you went to Australia. They’ve got all the worst stuff there.”
Léon taps my stomach.
“Did I tell you about the huntsman spider in the bath?”
“No, and I don’t want to know! What made you go out there, anyway?”
“I had some problems as a teenager… I kind of lost my way, actually.” His face turns inward, eclipsed by memories. Is that how I appeared to him, a moment ago? I run my fingers over the short fuzz of his hair. Watch as he pulls himself back to the present. “I wanted to get as far away from France as possible,” he says. “Start over. You know what I mean?”
“Yeah,” I say quietly. “I get that.”
I don’t need to dig deeper. In this moment I feel closer to Léon than I have been to anyone. We were drawn together, I think. We’ve both had to find the strength to reinvent ourselves. It takes something, to do that.
“I’m glad you came back,” I say.
He takes my hand, wrapping my fingers around his. “You don’t have to be anything but what you are, ma chérie. Remember that.”
“Those thoughts are harder to remember.”
“Hallie?”
“What?”
“I am so happy to have found you.”
LÉON IS THE last thought in my head when sleep claims me at night. He is the first thing I think of when I wake up on my futon, sneezing at the floor level dust. I think about Léon while I’m brushing my teeth. I think about the way he speaks, the ever-so-slightly sarcastic drawl. I think of the way he looks at me, as though I’m someone to be proud of. I think of him while I pull on my clothes—only one T-shirt left, I’m due a trip to the laundrette—and exit the studio and skip down the road to the Chinese traiteur. I think of Léon whilst I wolf down microwaved sweet and sour prawns with a pair of plastic chopsticks. I think about Léon smoking a cigarette in bed, and wearing his shirt, and the feel of it, and the smell of it, and the fact that it’s still in my apartment hanging over the balcony shutters, talisman of a new life. I leave the Chinese after a record eight minutes and run the rest of the way down rue Lepic. I think of Léon. I swing right and wave at the crêpe man on the corner. I think of Léon. I run past the queue for the Moulin Rouge and waltz into the bar, thinking of Léon, and Angel stares at me as though I am mad.
Which I may well be.
Down in the vestiaire I change into my work clothes, throw my T-shirt into my locker, and I think of Léon.
I emerge to find Dušanka scrutinizing me. Her grey eyes dissect my face.
“Chapped lips, stubble rash, and craters under the eyes,” she comments, as if to the air. “What has little Hallie been up to?”
“Oh, shut up,” I snap. “I don’t care what you think.”
Du�
�anka shrugs. “Mere observation, my petit chou.”
“And I’m not a pastry.”
It is unwise to offer such ammunition. “Poussin, then,” says Dušanka sweetly. “And don’t feel bad—we’ve all slept with a Clichy bartender. You’ll grow out of it.”
My shoulders are rigid, my face hot with anger, as we go on the bar. With her radar for trouble, Eloise picks up the tension immediately.
“Hey, hey, what’s going on?”
“Hallie’s in love,” calls Dušanka.
“Bullshit!”
I start quartering lemons, hurling them segment by segment into the speed rack. Dušanka leans over and raps my knuckles with a mojito stick.
“You know the lions in the zoo, they eat up little lambs. They devour them for a snack before breakfast. And the lambs, they are so foolish, they never see the lion that is hidden in the grass.”
“Ladies, enough! Dušanka, section four with Yogi. Hallie, join Gabriela in section one. Get cleaning under the work surfaces, it’s filthy down there.”
I slice a final lemon and join Gabriela, still seething. Angel, having finished his shift, is sat on the other side of the bar with a quadruple Jack Daniels and a copy of Le Monde. He points to the spread.
“Isn’t that the Moulin Vert woman you saw?”
I glance at the newspaper.
“Yeah. That’s her. Aide Lefort.”
“It’s a good profile. A good haircut, too. I will go to the next rally. If it weren’t for that putain Léon and his diabolical cocktails—”
“I’m going to become a vegetarian,” interrupts Gabriela. Angel looks pained.
“That is excessive, ma poule.”
Gabriela fills a bucket with hot water and soap. “You were the one who said we needed to change things. Meat farming is a huge contributor to climate change. Lefort says it, right there. Hallie, what are you going to do?”
I look up from scrubbing at the floor. “What?”
“Did you read the tips in the leaflet?”
“Not yet.”
“You were too busy, I expect.” Gabriela’s tone sharpens. “The last two days you have ignored my messages.”
“And mine,” calls Angel from above. “And I sent her the cast list for Transfusion season four. That hot young thing from the stripper film is signed up, but even his presence is not enough to raise it from the Z-list.”
“Sorry, I was with—”
“I know who you were with.” Gabriela’s voice is low and furious. “The whole of Clichy knows who you were with. This is a big mess. You should not have got involved.”
“Because you say so?”
“Because I am your friend.”
“Then stop acting like you’re my mother.”
“Right now I feel like your mother!”
“Why can’t you just be happy for me?”
“It is not that he will treat you badly. Maybe yes, maybe no. I don’t know. It is Clichy that will hurt you.” Gabriela joins me on the floor, sloshing water everywhere. “Everybody leaves, everyone except me. I have to stay. I have to be punished. Still you are this naïve new girl, still you don’t know Clichy.”
Her words sting.
“Bloody hell, Gabriela. Aren’t I allowed to have some fun? I’ve got enough weird shit going on in my life.”
“And we were meant to be investigating it,” she snaps.
“My problem has nothing to do with your problem.”
She glares at me.
“You don’t know that. If something can make you travel back—”
I glance pointedly upwards.
“Angel,” I hiss.
She turns her back on me, muttering in Spanish. A part of me feels guilty—about the messages, about the leaflet—but nothing she can say will change my mind about Léon. Gabriela has taken me far, as far as she can lead me. From day to day, I barely think about back home. My panic attacks have all but abated. I’m well. But Léon is about more than leaving home. Léon is the final immersion. Léon is drowning in honey, and its sweet intoxication consumes me night and day. I am happy to be consumed. I am ready.
WHEN MY BREAK arrives I go outside to smoke. I need some air. In the alleyway, an elderly woman in a green-patterned kaftan reaches up to stroke the cat on the wall. It’s Eloise’s cat, by the looks of it, a large ginger tom whose territory ranges between Millie’s and the local cemetery under the bridge, and who is known by all at Millie’s as Satan. It was this cat, Eloise told me one night, who had inadvertently brought her to Paris. Sick of tourists assuming she was a pot-smoking liberal who supported prostitution, Eloise abandoned the canals of Amsterdam (she missed their symmetry, their linear nature that spoke of a calmer, a gentler era) to cat-sit for a friend in Paris. The friend was backpacking for a year, and had an exquisite flat. The only snag in this arrangement was that the cat had turned out to be a demon. Yes, possessed. Eloise was certain of that. After a failed exorcism, Eloise had taken the executive decision to set it free, and allow its tortured soul to roam the land of the dead in peace.
Satan yowls. The old woman straightens. A turban covers her hair and her eyes are magnified behind thick spectacles, but I’d know her anywhere.
Coldness creeps through my limbs.
“Oh, my dear, hello,” she says. “I was just—in the neighbourhood. Thought I’d drop by and see—how you are progressing.”
“Progressing with what?”
“Your investigations—of course.”
“Who said I’m investigating anything?”
“So hostile!”
I inhale too sharply and break into hacking coughs.
“Mint?” says the woman sympathetically, digging around in a bag. “Oh, I don’t have any, I’m afraid. And there I was thinking I looked like the kind of person who would have a mint. You never can judge.”
“Look, I did what you asked. You said you would leave me alone.”
The old woman looks aggrieved. Behind the glasses her eyelids blink slowly.
“Have I hurt you? Have I hurt your friends? Have you ever considered my predicament? I get lonely, you know. It’s all very well talking to strangers, but they don’t understand the situation. Not like you do.”
“I understand fuck all,” I say. “What do you want?”
“Nothing. Nothing! I was only going to suggest you might want to pay a visit to the catacombs. You, of all people, ought to see the home of the dead.”
“What’s in the catacombs?” I ask suspiciously.
“Bones, dear. A lot of bones. Take a look, it might appeal to your geological sensibilities.”
“I don’t think—”
The old woman’s face goes slack. Reanimates. She stares at me. A crease appears between the thin hairs of her eyebrows.
“Do I know you?”
I drop my cigarette and grind it out.
“No.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m no one.”
I leave the alleyway, the old woman watching me suspiciously. On the boulevard’s central aisle, a team in green windmill T-shirts have set up a food stand and are distributing steaming portions of vegetarian curry to homeless people, and possibly some students. I watch for a moment, torn by conflicting emotions. The slogan on the back of their T-shirts reads:
Change the world. It needs it.
Chapter Thirty
AT DENFERT-ROCHEREAU I queue for ninety minutes in the heat, idly listening to the chatter of the party in front of me, one of whom appears to be a self-appointed tour guide. The worst kind, I think, and wonder again why I felt compelled to come here.
I pay my entry fee at the little green hut and follow the procession of tourists down a narrow spiral stairwell. It is a strange sensation, to leave the known world behind. For the first few steps the outside light still filters down, but gradually its influence wanes, and there is only the low yellow glow from the wall-mounted bulbs. At the bottom of the stairwell we pass through a brief exhibition, and then into a low, sloping sto
ne passageway. There’s only one direction to take: deeper underground.
Footsteps echo, reverberations increasingly long and meandering. The tourists thin out. The passageway goes on with no indication of where it will end. The party ahead of me is hushed now. There is no noise except for our shoes on the stone, and water guzzling in a hidden aqueduct. Claustrophobia folds around me, along with a warped sense of freedom. Panic and exhilaration. Nothing up there in the lighted world can touch me; I’ve escaped. But to where? And what?
The party in front, perhaps feeling the same weight of the earth overhead, are hurrying, but I want to look at everything, not just the bones. I want to see what Paris is made of underground. I slow down until they turn a corner and I’m on my own. Now I can look at the rock in peace.
I run my hands over the walls. The fossils are tight, intricate curlicues, rough to touch. They have bumps and dimples where tiny spines or ridged shells once floated in an ocean millennia ago. This, I think, is the greatest form of survival. To leave an impression that will be felt and witnessed in another stratum of time. Little extinct things, your lifespan will be longer and more enduring than ours, unless we too, the dead and buried, are left undisturbed long enough to imprint our skeletons on the rock. Our bones to be mined by explorers of future millennia, new species, even life forms from other planets. I touch the fossil again, the rough cool sandstone, remind myself that I am alive. I am still real.
I hear voices catching up behind me, and move on.
After fifteen minutes or so of walking, I reach the entrance to the ossuary. The self-appointed tour guide is already there, dictating to her group.
“Here you can read the sign over the door. Arrête! C’est ici l’empire de la mort. Stop! This is the empire of death. Many of the bones were brought from the public cemetery in Les Halles. The workers transported the bones through the city in huge carts in the middle of the night, it was a gigantic operation.”
“How many people are down here?”
The guide draws herself up impressively.