After the Carnage

by Tara June Winch

  She walked across the room to lean against an available doorframe, looking back at the kitchen just as the other woman held the bottle of wine toward her and smiled. She went back to the kitchen and the music began to resonate through the apartment. The other woman poured the wine into the woman’s glass and then her own. The other woman angled her body toward the balcony and said:

  ‘Wanna come smoke with me outside?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘You’re with the singer guy, right?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Oh cool, he’s good, he’s like playing in everyone’s band.’

  ‘Yeah, he just got back from another tour.’

  ‘That’s hard, right? I found it hard.’

  ‘Sometimes, I mean we’re both working in music, I’m always subbing in the city though, but I know how it goes.’

  ‘The distance?’

  ‘Yeah, exactly. What do you do?’

  ‘I’m a food blogger, but not traditional recipe shit, it’s kind of conceptual recipes that are all built from salvaged food, like the leftovers you have from an original dish.’

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m trying to work out a book deal at the moment, I want to call it Salvage: Food for the Encumbered. Do you like it?’

  ‘Sure, although most people want to pretend to be unencumbered, but what do I know.’

  ‘I get that. I really do, but I think the way we are now, us people, we want to feel as if we’re shoe-stringing it even if we are above board, like we always want to stay in touch with how difficult it was before, or if it wasn’t difficult we want to imagine it to be so. We all want to have a little struggling thing to hold on to. If we just want to go vegan because we want to lose ten pounds, we can’t, we have to have a story – animal rights, the environment or like my parents could never afford meat growing up so … or the banks are motherfuckers so we have to resort to being resourceful, I kind of think it’s the rich person’s fetish.’

  ‘Like why everyone here is wearing thrift, but they actually paid a bunch for it at vintage boutiques.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  ‘I get it, I think.’

  ‘Anyway, what do you play?’

  ‘French horn.’

  ‘Sweet.’

  ‘Yeah, but in Paris it’s just called horn.’

  ‘Ha.’

  ‘Yep.’

  The two women clinked their glasses together and agreed to go and listen to the music at the other end of the apartment. They entered together, to the left of the band playing.

  The woman could see the man kept staring at some girl. For a moment he’d given her that doe-eyed fuck-me face, the one he used to make with the O mouth. He looked at her as if she were the Turkish delight they’d brought to the party, as if she were the offered plate. The woman thought she might have imagined it. She knew she hadn’t imagined it. She reached out and touched the elbow of the other woman.

  ‘I’m just going to the bathroom. I’ll be back.’

  The other woman squinted her eyes and nodded and smiled, as the music washed over the room.

  The woman walked past the bathroom entrance and onto the terrace and propped her elbows on the balcony rails, leaning against them, near the whirring of the pig. She looked up at the now dark sky, tinged orange, and then out to the other terrace windows. In one of the large terrace windows a woman was there, her back visible. Then a man appeared, and they were both facing away from the window. The man grabbed the woman’s neck hard, he shook her side to side, and then he did something that seemed strange, and turned and looked out the window.

  He met the woman’s gaze, from the window to the balcony, and then just stood, looking, with his hand tight on the neck as if from the distance the act was not so violent at all.

  The Proust Running Group of Paris

  Avant-garde posturing – his wife liked those types of books, which further cemented Proust’s general disdain for her. Her brightly coloured, cleverly designed jackets lay around the house, clashing with the wooden handcrafted furniture and the threadbare gold velvet vintage sofas. He preferred the blank, chalky-papered Gallimard editions and the reprinted classics with the near original cover art, with their blacks, deep greens, dark blues – those books never Ikea-ed the apartment. Divorce was simply the next chronological image they had of themselves, since the marriage had failed on account of their disagreement of everything. They had tried to reason with the notion of love, love forever and all that, but Proust said there wasn’t such a thing as love, just the smells of each other, just the desire to smell each other and that desire had now gone. For Proust, it had been because of the drugs; drugs ruin the nose. In the end his wife admitted, in addition to everything else, that she was also in disagreement with his odour.

  At first, after his wife moved out and took her books, and the papers arrived, were signed and filed, Proust felt quite contented. It was a comfort to him when things failed. Born into a windfall, he’d carried the guilt of easy money. In the face of life’s misfortune, he’d imagined others relying on his silver spoon as a mere gagging utensil. After the initial feeling subsided, he then spent weeks lamenting the loss of his marriage in the stark, early days of sobriety. He’d felt as if there became little point to living then; he’d wanted his wife to stay in a way that he wanted the drug habit to stay: a reminder, a dislodgement of sanity which gave them something to discuss, plan around, argue about – even if it had been the very thing killing the existence of them.

  Proust was not that huge a fan of Proust. He’d enjoyed In Search of Lost Time during his formative years, but hadn’t absorbed it into his bloodstream. He chose Proust as his forum handle after six months of divorce because he needed to get out of, as he saw it, the Proustian stupor he’d been in – idling for seven years with a romantic 1940s Parisian Jazz Musician’s Heroin Habit, which in reality had been more of a 1970s Berlin Affliction – he’d been in a no-man’s-land type of squalor.

  It was August when he finally created a profile in English on www.sobercafe.com and began the forum connections with expats that he likened to conversations between the living, the lying and the dead. He figured he was on the lying spectrum but hoped to graduate to either living or dead.

  After some months, on another Friday evening of sobriety, and during a fit of despair over his proximity to the death spectrum, Proust started the running group. He typed out the New Forum Topic: Running Group? He’d thought of the idea on the Wednesday as a way to make comrades, but had saved implementing the idea for Friday evening, since he’d quickly noticed that on Friday nights members would answer to anything, they couldn’t be alone coming off drugs on the weekend – particularly Friday, when in every other city on earth people were expected to be letting loose.

  Barcry was the first to join the thread. Barcry was a four-month-sober alcoholic who’d drink everything in a two-mile vicinity, until all last orders were called, and then he would arrive home and open his children’s Holy Communion non-alcoholic wine – in the faint hope that the stuff had fermented in the previous decade.

  Butterfly81 also joined the thread; she had taken heroin on a whim at a dermatologist’s party in the seventh arrondissement two years before. At the party she’d gone into another room to get a break from all the squawking women getting injected with botox and plasma and snorting cocaine. The room she went into seemed much more chilled; she stayed in the room for two days in the midst of a first-timer’s crash. Now, Butterfly81 was two months clear, holding up on methadone.

  WishICould was a feverish heroin addict who, after joining the website in an attempt to pique his sobriety, had almost upped his intake in the process. He was like a dieter who signed on to programs, mailing lists, gyms, without ever in fact changing, but nonetheless expecting the scale to react accordingly.

  BeginAgain was a former choirboy Catholic who enjoyed spreading bla
sphemy over internet comment sections. He was also a heavy bourbon and cola drinker, and the caffeine and alcohol rages he’d get into made his ability to spread hate on the internet swift and unrelenting.

  Ultramarathoner had managed to run on five occasions the previous year. He’d been alternating his drug of choice – opiates – between and during grand delusions of long-distance running stardom. He’d registered for three expensive ultra-marathon events during his addiction and showed up to none of the race days.

  After posting the thread, Proust had gone downstairs onto the side of his courtyard that wasn’t communal. He had flung his neighbour’s dog’s shit at his neighbour’s terrace and returned to the full-blown, almost coherent conversation.

  Barcry: I’d be interested in a running group

  Butterfly81: I used to run track in school! I’m on methadone and have gained 20 pounds on jelly worms and éclairs, I’m very keen to join! Why does meth make you crave sugar???

  Ultramarathoner: YES!

  WishICould: I would like to come along if it’s okay?

  BeginAgain: Whereabouts in Paris are you thinking of running? I prefer to be out of crowds but would think about joining.

  As soon as Proust read all those strangers requiring his leadership and direction he almost deleted the whole thread right away, and thought he’d post again in the morning that there must have been a site glitch, or – an excuse that was more likely to float – that he’d suffered a relapse and it had been his Addict Voice speaking. He’d say Sorry (sad face) and it’d be over quick smart. But, then again, to Proust, they all seemed so pathetic, just as he knew he was too, and so he set a date and time and place to everyone’s internal horror. Talking about, rather than doing, what they planned to do sat much more comfortably.

  *

  The next afternoon at the Opéra entrance to the Bastille Métro station, only Barcry, Butterfly81 and Ultramarathoner turned up. Proust reckoned four was as good a group as he could have hoped for, or managed. He shook the others’ hands while making purposefully intimidating eye contact, as a father might do meeting the wayward friends of his daughters.

  ‘So, my thinking is we just call each other by our handle names – it’s too much to remember both, plus for privacy or whatever. Yes?’

  The others agreed.

  ‘Let’s walk down this old railway line first, it’s about five kilometres to the outside of Paris and then we can turn and come back. I read that there are water taps along the way.’

  ‘Can we run if we like?’

  ‘Sure, err – what’s your name, sir?’

  ‘Ultramarathoner.’

  ‘Of course, knock yourself out. Just a few rules I thought of on the way here’ – Proust took out a spiral notepad from the pocket of his tracksuit pants – ‘Don’t run beside each other. No talking and maybe we can meet at a cafe afterward – that one?’ He pointed to the assembled chairs outside L’Armory Brasserie across the street.

  They all agreed again, nodding.

  ‘Let’s go warm up,’ Ultramarathoner said as he began jumping on the spot, his sneakers making a new-plastic squeak against the bitumen as he did. He added ruefully, ‘You know? I tried to start a running group on sobercafe a bunch of times and none of you showed any interest!’ Ultramarathoner stopped jogging in place and put his hands on his hips, waiting for the lost explanation.

  ‘Well, your prayers have been answered, Ultramarathoner!’ Proust slapped him on the back, as convivially as he could manage.

  Proust took a survey of his new compatriots as they all jogged slowly to the cement staircase that led to the greenbelt. He thought that they really looked like a group of ravaged addicts or a group of very committed runners, since the gaunt look was embodied by both parties. He was glad to have thought of the running group; proud, in fact.

  Ultramarathoner ran ahead, knowing the hidden entrance to the track. Proust watched him flick his legs up behind himself and arch his back as he ran. It was a strange technique, he thought, like a swimmer flailing but thinking he was gliding across the surface. Barcry jogged lightly, Butterfly81 too – and gently punched the air with her half-gloved fists. Proust ran just as badly as all of them, and imagined this might be the first and last day of the running group. As they hit the beginning of the track, Ultramarathoner was almost a kilometre in front, his fluorescent garb giving him away. Barcry stopped for water from a shallow fountain and Proust ran at a gentle pace, paying particular attention to breathe at a regular rate. He could hear the scuff of Butterfly81’s running shoes behind him, and her struggling breath and hacking smoker’s cough. She kept her pace, though, as they passed the residue of autumn leaves, the naked trees, the frostbitten and dormant plots of what would be tulips in six months from now. The air was crisp but not unpleasant, and after twenty minutes at an even, almost walking jog, Proust was feeling quite joyful and calm. The ache of being clean subsided. Most days he felt as if his body were a house. An intricate doll’s house, with stairs rising and descending, and fitted with windows that neither opened nor closed. In the doll’s house there were taps, plumbing for the little bathroom in the attic, and all day and night the taps ran and ran and flooded the house, sometimes tripping wires and busting fuses and starting little spot fires. At the beginning of getting clean it hadn’t been like this, the house was completely obliterated, war drones surveyed the airspace above it, men were on the work site jackhammering concrete, revving chainsaws. He was living a calmer dilemma now, a manageable sort of inner real-estate problem.

  Butterfly81 was still keeping pace behind Proust when they both turned a short corner to the expanse of green, neat grass growing off either side of the path, the clear view of sky. It was beautiful, Proust thought.

  ‘I feel weird.’ Butterfly81 was crashing from her sugar addiction, which had recently superseded the methadone.

  ‘Let’s grab some coffee with the others.’ Proust found a breathless Barcry, and led him and Butterfly81 down the staircase off the path onto the street below to the meeting point. L’Armory already had large heaters set up outside and an ensemble of afternoon smokers.

  ‘Ultramarathoner knows we’re meeting at this place,’ Proust assured the others, before turning to Barcry. ‘So, why the name Barcry?’

  ‘It’s like Barfly, but I cry a lot, so Barcry. It’s a problem, I guess.’

  ‘No, I think it’s very humane, very honest.’ Proust didn’t mind at all that his flaw was so obvious; he quite liked it in fact.

  ‘And Butterfly?’ he asked, feeling as though he were seating his guests.

  ‘Rebirth,’ she explained, ‘and just my year of birth. It’s actually my password for everything.’

  ‘Prowst?’

  ‘It’s pronounced Proust, you don’t know Proust? Marcel Proust?’

  A resounding no came from the New Zealander and the Brit.

  ‘Oh, you would have – he’s France’s Shakespeare! He wrote actually in a way that is not unlike heroin – you done heroin, Barcry?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Well, like taking a perfectly warm bath when you’re drunk and thinking about the purity of childhood – you done that?’

  ‘Sure.’

  The teas and espresso arrived and the waitress handed a pair of scissors to Butterfly81. Proust carried on talking about Proust.

  ‘He wrote a great deal about memory, about the past, that past that remains unharmed by having to become an adult.’

  Butterfly81 lifted up the side of her windcheater, baring her waist, and cut the large tag away, dropping her weapon back on the table. ‘Best feeling I’ve ever experienced in my life!’ she said.

  ‘You know what feeling I really like, it’s a feeling and a sound together – it’s the combination!’ Proust said, sitting on the edge of his wicker chair.

  ‘What?’

  ‘After eating a fresh baguette at the table
, or one of the standard baguettes with the hard crusts, and making a mess, a real mess all over the floor. Then the vacuum humming, then sweeping across the crumbs and the feeling, the sound of crumbs rushing up into the vacuum arm!’

  ‘That is a good feeling!’ Butterfly81 was happy to remember, and agree with, what Proust had said.

  ‘So as an aside from that, in one of Proust’s most significant scenes in one of his novels, he has this similar joy of a feeling, of the senses. It’s of him eating a madeleine, and I think it’s mint tea he’s drinking at the same time. Anyway, he eats this combination of flavours as an adult and is returned to his childhood; he returns to his past immediately.’

  ‘I’ve had that!’ Barcry said enthusiastically. ‘With hotdog meat, which reminds me of my brother when we were kids, discovering American food, we were twelve, maybe thirteen years old. I guess we were changing.’

  ‘Yes, food does it, smells, sounds. I think addicts like us are very perceptive, very sensitive to those things.’

  ‘Don’t call me an addict,’ Butterfly81 said, annoyed suddenly.

  Proust lowered his voice a little and asked, ‘What is the lilac word for it then, dear?’

  ‘I don’t know, sensitive types?’

  ‘Okay, I’ll call us the sensitive types. I guess it’s quite true, hey Barcry?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘I have something, a reminder of the past,’ Butterfly81 said, looking squarely at them both.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s everything, it’s the smell of grass and rain, at the same time as the noise coming through our childhood house to tell it to close the doors, breeze and coolness, and quiet and calm, and then it’s the sound of people rushing to get clothes off the line, to close the car windows, to call in the dog, to put bikes away. And I can feel and remember like I’m in the middle of it all – maybe I was a baby? All I know is I don’t move, and then the house closes up and everything is warm and I can smell potatoes in one of those special pots on the stove.’