The Ribbons Are for Fearlessness

by Catrina Davies

  He smiled. He actually smiled. “She was just like that.”

  I was silent. Did I tell him I was scared of everything? That when I knocked on the door of the bus my heart was thumping so much I could hardly breathe? Did I tell him that when my van got stuck on the way up to Les Torches I was seriously considering hurling myself off the edge of the mountain and putting myself out of my misery once and for all?

  “What happened?” I muttered, instead.

  “We were skiing on La Mas. Hungover. She was caught in an avalanche. I went to get help. There was a blizzard. I couldn’t get back to her. She died alone. We found her body the next day.”

  I thought about Andrew. I tried to imagine if he’d been my lover instead of my friend. Børge got up and went to the door. He opened it and leaned on the frame.

  “I should never have left her,” his voice cracked slightly. “That’s the thing I can’t get over. She should have died in my arms.”

  “You would have died, too.”

  “Maybe I should have.”

  “It’s not your fault,” I said.

  He came and sat down again. It was cold. I got up to close the door. The moon was rising, yellow like an awful sun. I stared at the terrible beauty of the cold empty night. I could just make out the edges of the mountains under cloudy layers of stars. There were no lights anywhere. I wanted to go to him, hug him, anything. I wanted to make it better. But I knew I couldn’t. This was life. This was the way it was.

  “I thought I was ready,” he said.

  “Ready for what?”

  My mouth was dry. I noticed the way his mouth turned down at the corners. I shivered.

  “Are you cold?” he asked.

  “A bit.”

  He got up and went to his rucksack and pulled out the red coat.

  “You might as well wear it.”

  It was like being safe in bed under a thick duvet.

  “Shall we eat?” I said, finally, after a long silence.

  The pasta had congealed into a single solid lump.

  “Dinner’s kind of fucked,” I said, poking it.

  I brought it over to the table. We looked at it.

  “I’m not hungry anyway.”

  “Neither am I.”

  “I knew someone who died,” I said. “The whole busking thing was his idea. That’s why I did it. I felt like I owed it him to do something with my life. Because I still had one and he didn’t.”

  “It was the opposite for me. I wanted to be dead.”

  “Do you think that’s what she would want?”

  “No, I guess not. Maybe. I don’t know.” He shook his head.

  “You said you were running away.”

  “That, too. Both.”

  Børge was looking at me like I was some kind of lifeline. I had to keep talking.

  “Life is complicated. Not like books, with heroes and villains and one simple reason for doing things. It’s more like a big, scary wave, like that one that got me at Unstad. You have to try to ride it, because otherwise you’ll die, and sometimes it’s easy, but other times there’s all these long, dark sections, and sometimes you don’t make it, and sometimes you think you’re not going to make it but you do, and sometimes it just closes out and it’s not your fault.”

  Børge was sort of half-smiling.

  “Keep going.”

  “And every time you think you’ve nailed it and you know how to do it something else comes along, something you never expected, to throw it all up in the air again. There’s no finishing line.”

  Finally I understood.

  “So you ended up at Unstad because of this guy who died.”

  “No. I ended up at Unstad because of Hanna.”

  “Who’s Hanna?”

  “The girl who gave me that book. She wrapped me up in light.”

  “She what?”

  “She wrapped me up in light.” I grinned. I knew how it sounded. I knew nobody would ever believe me. “Honestly. It was the best feeling ever.”

  “Better than sex?”

  My eye caught his by accident and I found I couldn’t tear it away. I could hear myself gabbling on, but it sounded like somebody else.

  “She taught me not to look backward and wish things were different and she said I had to live my life like it was the best book I ever read.”

  Børge’s slate-blue eyes looked different when he smiled. Much less cold.

  “You and your books. Like that crazy one you lent me.”

  “Do you get it?”

  “No. But I like it anyway.”

  “Me too. Sometimes when I close my eyes and think about it really hard it kind of makes sense. There’s all this stuff out there, all swirling around together and instead of enjoying it for what it is, we make up words for things that don’t exist and then call them good or bad.”

  If only I could shut up. Børge evidently felt the same. He leaned forward and put a finger to his lips.

  “Sssh.”

  “Sorry.”

  We gazed at each other across the table.

  “Why did you come here?” he said at last.

  “I keep telling you. I wanted the coat.”

  “Is that the only reason?”

  There was a long silence. I found myself thinking about the time I caught Jack’s eye across a candle in his shed. I knew then that something important was going to happen. And something important had happened. If it hadn’t been for Jack, I would never have gone to Norway. I would never have met Hanna. I would never have come to these mountains. I hadn’t had what I wanted from Jack, the happy ending I’d read about and watched in films. But maybe all this was better. Maybe what I got was better than what I wanted.

  The truth was like a door that suddenly opened in my head.

  And in that moment of clarity, before the door closed again, I knew that whatever I was doing up there in those mountains with Børge had some purpose, too, and I didn’t even have to worry about what this purpose was, I just had to play my part, and I also knew that whatever came out of this thing with Børge, it wouldn’t be anything like what I expected. Børge’s eyes were blue, like Jack’s. It was hard to remember Jack’s eyes, actually, now that I was looking at Børge’s.

  That was the truth. Only I couldn’t possibly put it into words, so instead of answering I leaned over the table and kissed him. We kissed for ages. We kissed until I couldn’t stand up and Børge had to scoop me up and carry me over to the fireplace, where he laid me on the floor and we carried on kissing.

  33

  I must have fallen asleep, because when I woke the fire had almost gone out. I sat up.

  I slowly remembered everything that had happened the previous night. The things Børge had told me. The way his girlfriend died. The way he had scooped me up and carried me to the fire like a baby. I realized he wasn’t there. The door was slightly open. I kicked myself out of my sleeping bag and reached for the red coat, which was hanging off one of the chairs by the table. Børge’s bag was still there, leaning up against my cello. I pulled on my boots. The night was outrageously cold. The air felt solid. The snow was hard under my feet. Nothing moved. There was a big, bright moon that hung like a disco ball, throwing stars everywhere. Layers of stars. I saw him standing on the bridge, leaning over the rickety wooden railings, staring at the icy river.

  I began to walk toward the bridge, but before I got there I stopped. He hadn’t seen me.

  It was not my business to be there. I turned and began to walk back to the cottage, hurrying, not wanting to be seen. That’s probably why I slipped. I slipped on some ice. I heard something go crack. It was so cold I almost didn’t feel any pain, but I must have made a noise, because Børge was running toward me, slapping my face, telling me it didn’t look good.

  He insisted we go back to Les Torches immediately. He made a sling out of a spare pair of boxer shorts and wrapped me in the red coat, doing up the zip around my arms as if he was dressing a dummy. He picked up the cello and marched me outside.


  “You might go into shock. You need to be warm and dry.”

  “It’s fine,” I tried to say, and sat down in the snow. Waves of nausea kept bubbling up. Tears fell hopelessly out of my eyes. Bugger, bugger, bugger.

  “Get up,” Børge snapped.

  Gone was the person I had been kissing. Back was the angry young man I had met at Unstad.

  “I’m tired. I wanna resht for a bit.”

  I was slurring my words.

  “Frigging get up. Unless you want to die out here.”

  Part Four:

  The Ribbons Are for Fearlessness

  34

  Pierre confirmed what we both already knew. My right arm, my bowing arm, was broken. Badly broken. I had to get to a hospital. In France you pay for hospital treatment and then claim the money back. If you have a valid E111. Which, it turned out, I didn’t. I’d said in the post office in England that I didn’t know exactly how long I’d be away, but that it would be about three months. They told me to make up a date and then Tipp-Ex it out later if I needed to. When I managed to explain what Tipp-Ex was, Pierre looked horrified. This was France, he said, you didn’t put Tipp-Ex on official documents, even if you knew what Tipp-Ex was. He rubbed his chin. Hospital treatment would be expensive. There was one other option, he said, but we’d have to leave immediately.

  Pierre gave me some morphine.

  I woke up on the Rue Saint-Pierre in Marseille, opposite the Hôpital de la Timone.

  “How did we get here?”

  “We drove.”

  “How did you get the van out of the snow?”

  “We dig it. Børge help me. We work all night. Then we use his chains.” Pierre showed me the chains, which were lying in the footwell.

  “Where is he? Is he okay?”

  Pierre looked sad. “Not really, but I think you have helped.”

  It was too much to get my head around, even if it hadn’t been full of morphine. I gave up and slid back into unconsciousness.

  The nurses were surprised to see Pierre. He wasn’t due back from holiday for another week. They clearly liked him, though. He gave them a big bar of chocolate and they helped him smuggle me in and out of X-ray. After the X-ray he marched me down a dozen corridors, stopping to hold the negatives up against a window, tut and shake his head. He marched me past a huge queue of the injured and desperately bored, his white coat billowing authoritatively, and through a pair of double doors that slammed shut behind us. The bone specialist, who’d been up all night like us, was drinking a cup of tea. It wasn’t a simple break. I was lucky not to need an operation.

  Back in the van I looked helplessly at Pierre.

  “Two months. I can’t even drive.” Let alone busk, I thought. All I wanted to do was sleep.

  “It’s okay,” Pierre said. “I know somewhere you can go. My uncle has a big house on a lake called Salagou. He will like you. You have le feu.”

  “What’s that?” I slurred.

  “Fire.”

  My head slid slowly down the inside of the window. I closed my eyes. After all that, I had left without the coat.

  Salagou was a man-made lake a few hundred kilometers north-west of Marseille. Pierre’s uncle lived in an old, stone house. Unkempt vines trailed over rotting wooden frames and the big paved terrace that looked out over the lake could have done with sweeping. The house was called La Soleiade, which Pierre told me meant “place of sunshine,” and the sun was warm already, in spite of it being a few days shy of February. It was hard to believe I was in the same continent as Les Torches, let alone the same country. Gone were the cold, stark mountains and in their place was a weird desert of scorched red earth and huge canyons. I was struck with a kind of homesickness, a gray sense of loss that made me want to sit down on the ground and put my head between my knees and weep. Instead, I let Pierre park my van under one of the rotting wooden frames and hustle me inside.

  Pierre’s uncle was a short man with a ruddy face and Pierre’s kind eyes. His name was Francis Philippe. Francis Philippe had worked for many years selling antiques. Everything he had not managed to sell he had stored at La Soleiade, presumably awaiting the time when it would be reduced to ashes by some apocalyptic volcano several billion years hence. Every room was overflowing with a mixture of junk, books, inappropriate furniture (beds in the kitchen, wardrobes in the lounge) and defunct electrical equipment.

  My homesickness increased as the two of them showed me around. Not that I knew what I was longing for exactly. I thought about Broadsands, and Ben, and Jack, like picking a scab and trying to make it hurt. But oddly enough it didn’t hurt, or at least not like it had. I thought about Børge. I hoped he wasn’t blaming himself for my accident. I hoped I’d see him again one day. But that wasn’t it, either. I knew deep down that Børge wasn’t ready yet, that I’d only have got tangled up in his pain if I’d stuck around.

  We came to a bedroom. It had a large double bed, a couple of antique cots, an incongruous desk that looked like it might have come from IKEA, if they’d had IKEA in the 1930s, a washbasin, and a porcelain chamber pot. Pierre and Francis Philippe left me and went downstairs. I lay on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. There were spiders in all the corners, hanging off ancient, dusty webs. Pierre had been so kind. I was so lucky. I was safe and warm and dry. I turned on my side to face the wall. I remembered all those times lying on the bed in the van and counting out my stacks of coins. I thought about the tunnel in Bergen and the bench of elderly people in Mo i Rana and the strange German shopping centers that let you play for twenty minutes at a time and all those endless drives across alien countries, and washing in rivers and service stations, and how desperately I had wanted it to be over and to be safe and how desperately I missed it now that it was.

  It was thinking about my cello that did it. My cello had been with me from the very beginning, had been my friend, my companion, my survival, seen me through the darkest times. And now, just when I needed it most, when it was the only thing I could think of that would make me feel better, I couldn’t play it. My fingers itched with frustration. I sat up suddenly. In fact, where was my cello?

  Pierre and Francis Philippe were sitting in the kitchen, drinking tumblers of red wine. I burst in, gabbling incoherently, tears streaking my face. It was a few minutes before Pierre was able to understand what I was going on about. He led me outside and opened the van. The cello was stashed safely in the cupboard, right where it should have been. I leaned against Pierre, unable to stand up. He put his arm around me.

  “It’s okay, ma chérie. Børge bring it back.”

  As if he could read my mind, Pierre pulled it out and opened the case. I started crying again. Because wrapped around the cello, tied carefully around the neck as if to keep it warm, was the Patagonia coat.

  35

  In the end I slept in the van under the rotting wooden frame. Francis Philippe made a fuss, and had me borrow the porcelain chamber pot, but I think he liked it really, this display of feu. He liked the fact that I was a gypsy. I just wanted to go home, and I finally knew that the van was home, more than anywhere else had ever been. In the morning Pierre arrived.

  “I come to say good-bye.”

  “You’re going?”

  “I have to collect my car,” he said. “And then I have to go to work.”

  “I ruined your holiday. I’m so sorry. And thank you. You’ve been so kind. I don’t know what I would have done without you.”

  He blushed slightly. “It’s nothing.”

  “Will you see Børge?”

  “Yes. I expect.”

  “Will you thank him, for the coat?”

  “Of course.”

  “And tell him I’m not coming back.”

  Pierre took my hand and held it gently. “I tell him already.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He say maybe he see you one day.”

  What Francis Philippe liked to do most was wander the shores of the lake searching for edible plants. I’d wat
ch him go and watch him come back from an old wooden rocking chair on the big, paved terrace. I had very little energy that first week at La Soleiade. All I could do was sit and stare at the water, watching birds carefully dragging bits of grass and moss out onto the surface to make small island nests for themselves. Even though it was warm during the day, I wore the red coat constantly, snuggling down into it. I slept a lot, something Francis Philippe encouraged, and ate strange food that he said would make me strong, containing things he found on the shores of the lake. Wild herbs and a stringy vegetable that he said was wild spinach. Wild leeks and wild mushrooms. Francis Philippe made his own bread, which was invariably so stale he had to chip away at it with a meat cleaver. The nearest shops were many miles away, and his car was so old he preferred not to drive it. Instead, Pierre brought supplies from Marseille when he came to visit on his days off.

  Considering that our communication was limited by the little we knew of each other’s language, Francis Philippe and I got along very well. After my need to sleep had worn off, I tried to earn my keep by doing things around the house. I found an old CD player and stack of dusty CDs. Among them was an old John Coltrane album and I fell in love with a track called “In a Sentimental Mood.” It was a long, slow piece of jazz, not smooth at all but full of air, like a meditation. It seemed to be neither sad nor happy, neither major nor minor. It wasn’t going anywhere, either. It just meandered along like a river, and every time I listened to it everything felt like it was going to be okay. I listened to it over and over while I swept the terrace and cleaned out the fridge. I would have hoovered the cobwebs, but there was no hoover, so I had to make do with an ancient antique feather duster, holding it awkwardly in my left hand, trying not to catch spiders in my hair.

  The first week passed slowly, achingly slowly. At the end of it Pierre came with fresh bread and smelly cheese and an old bicycle he had borrowed from one of the nurses. Pierre strapped my cast to my chest with an old bandage, found a rusting old bike of Francis Philippe’s, turned it upside down, mended what seemed like a thousand punctures, oiled the brakes, loosened up the chain, and took me on a long ride around the lake. To cheer me up, he said.