Ricochet

by Robyn Neilson

  Nearing midday now, cramped inside our Auriol kitchen, I am hot after the ironing. I cannot be bothered getting dressed, as I’m not going anywhere, and know no one who might come calling. So I stay in my airy silk slip, which verges on sexy, although I steer my mind away from that thought. Too much solitude contrives to make me anxious about Loup’s and my newfound lust. And to question the smorgasbord of sex that quickly satisfies Loup, but leaves me un-sated and abandoned. One day, I find something in his toolbox that serves to satisfy me. At last! Worried by this new indulgence, I later confide in Loup, and he confiscates the very thing that had gratified me. He then became more attentive and we dared to become more candid. And together, we feared less the uninhibited trysts of coupledom. For Loup, this new intimacy is a revelation, a rush. For myself, it is a long-awaited restoration.

  Here now, in the stifle of this small plain room in Provençe, looking back on a former small plain room in Auriol, casting farther to a distant winter sunroom in Gippsland, I feel nothing but gratitude. For the leaving, the desolation, the growing-up, the loss, the coup de foudre. Grateful for the mystery of why Loup feared fathering our child, for the rain, the lightning, the hot sun and the ironing of his shirts.

  I retrieve my pinned-fabrics and recommence the task of hand sewing. Conscious that this is a labour of love: perhaps unconscious that I am stitching love into each hour of solitude. Despite what Loup says, I stay loyal to my bespoke designs. Each is unique. Each has a character of colour, of stitch or weight. Some are reversible, with a wintry weft, of velvet and wool. Others are wispy, almost transparent delicacies of silk and old lace. My embroidery is far from traditional cross-stitch, and probably doesn’t deserve the title. But it has a power to absorb… I immerse myself in a distant memory of Isabelle Huppert in ‘La Dentellière’. Enthralled. Thirty years later, those threads still hold, and I stitch along with the embroiderers, knowing that I will never attain their perfection, but that is not why I stitch.

  Today I am working on a reversible silk and cotton throw. I have reconstructed it out of cut out sections of vintage scarves and dresses; some that I paid dearly for in a local antique brocante, where each piece of French lace smells of opulence and pleasure. The others, which I discovered in a country opportunity shop at home in Victoria, smell of Presbyterian practicality; the faded prints disguising their foreign fetish. I select some motifs from the op-shop cotton dress with a cinched-in waist and a billowing skirt: on a background of olive green, black and white drawings of Paris swirl as I imagine the svelte wearer caught in an updraft over a street vent on Boulevard Saint-Germain. More likely, she is hanging out the washing on her unrefined country’s only claim to fame, a Hills Hoist. On yet another windy day on the Cape. I rummage for a Hermes silk scarf, and with satisfaction I dismantle it’s haute couture with the scissors.

  Cutting into and sewing fabrics back together is an important ritual: an accidental metaphor for patching my old life together with my new foreign life; a search for the sensual within the mundane. Or of pairing two contrary cultures. Chain stitch fascinates me; it flows better than cross-stitch, which of course is implied in its name. Each barren loop poises in the air, waiting to receive the pierce of the needle as it brings home the thread and secures the next link in the chain. Blanket stitch is my bane, but I have come to rely on it, and edge fastidiously each motif of fraying silk, spending hours just on one small piece. At the moment I am edging a heart, with two lovers in a Montmartre café scene and the Sacre Coeur in the background. That’s somewhere Loup and I will never go together… I’m not too disappointed, enjoying as I do to take a map of Paris and then ignore it… getting lost, avoiding the landmarks. For Loup, Paris holds no allure and he does not share my delight in deconstructing the clichés. It is enough for him to be a passenger passing through Charles de Gaulle Aéroport.

  I am concentrating on the blanket-stitching around my heart, cursing as the needle slips over the shimmery silk, when there is a banging on the door. We have a white blind over the glass, so that some light can enter without the street seeing in.

  I don’t want to answer.

  But I am stuck, because to get to the spiral staircase and escape upstairs, I have to shimmy past the door. I can see the outline of two people, men. I am afraid, because I think it might be the pair of irate builders who came here last week whilst I was alone, loudly gesticulating, threatening Loup with vengeance. For what, I could not tell.

  I hastily pull the half-sewn wrap around my bare shoulders. The knocking continues, accompanied this time by a loud voice, insisting,

  ‘Madame, c’est urgente!’

  Pins stick into my shoulders. I fear for my daughters. Of the nightmare I had last month…. something grotesque. I fear for Loup. I am frozen.

  Bang, bang, bang.

  I worry that the glass of the door will break. I worry that the kitchen looks untidy. I pull the wrap more tightly over my chest, and wish that I had gotten dressed. Sharpness pricks at my left breast.

  I open the door.

  ‘Bonjour Madame,’ says the older of the gendarmes with a disarming gentility,

  ‘May we come in please?’

  ‘Ahh…yes, oui, excusez-moi Officers, viens, entrez…’

  ‘Excusez-moi’, I say again, as it seems to be the only thing I can say…I mix up all my French pronouns, tu and vous. I push my fabrics and sewing box aside and offer the uniformed men our only two seats. They remain standing, as if sitting would seem too relaxed. We form an odd trio around my neatly cut out hearts and needles and threads.

  ‘You are the wife of Monsieur Zorn, is that correct Madame?’

  Seeing me slump, the Gendarme quickly adds,

  ‘Non, non, Madame, you need not worry, it is not your husband’,

  ‘Alors, then it’s Pascal?’ I ask too quickly, ashamed.

  ‘Madame, you should sit down’ says the younger one, himself sitting down, so that I mimic him, shivering despite the cramped kitchen, the steamed cotton competing with the pipe smells, the three of us, and the slanting sword of the midday sun down the courtyard wall.

  ‘Oui,yes, it’s concerning your brother-in-law Pascal.’

  ‘Non, non, non!’

  Alarmed by my shivering, the young officer asks if I have anyone who can come and sit with me.

  ‘No they’re all at work,’ my feeble reply.

  Please God don’t let it be true over and over again, before the Gendarme had had a chance to tell me what had happened.

  ‘What has happened to Pascal?’ I cannot find the right French words.

  ‘He kill himself this morning, ce matin.’

  At first I think they mean he tried to kill himself. Again. But then the officer keeps talking. Perhaps as a way to pardon my refusal to comprehend.

  ‘He was a very unhappy man. You know he unhappy Madame?’

  ‘Oui, yes…Jean-Loup knew…oui, we tried to help…. mais Pascal …je ne sais pas…

  Please God don’t let it be True…what should I do, should I call Loup, his sister…? They’re all at work….’

  Teeth chattering. So cold in this hot room.

  ‘Non Madame, better not to tell them at work…nous vous conseillez pas de précipiter …you should not ring them… it is too dangerous… they might have a car accident on way home…. your husband, he works far from here, non?’

  ‘Yes, he sometimes works far away… has a long drive home.’

  ‘Si, and the sister of Pascal, Odette, she also will have too much shock to drive après. You need be brave, you tell family tonight when all are home. You cannot tell this tragedie on telephone. You must all be together.’

  ‘What about Pauline, Pascal’s other sister in Strasbourg, does she know?’

  ‘Non Madame, it is better she hear from Odette. Odette is oldest, n’est ce pas?’

  My mind cannot conceive why Pauline would not know. Her apartment overlooks the family house in Strasbourg. Where Pascal lives.

  ‘You are Australienne, Mad
ame Zorn? Peut-être it is a good idea to call and speak with your maman, that might help?’

  Both officers are visibly troubled, and the older shakes my hand with tenderness when they leave. I cannot remember how I spent the rest of that long afternoon. I know that I did ring and woke my mother. And my brother, who had spent a lot of time with Pascal, rang me and we spoke at length. We had all formed a sudden and deep affection for Pascal. The shock was greater, because he was not ours to love and to understand. Our grieving was secondary.

  I had no idea how I was going to tell Loup.

  I remember staying in my slip until the sun left the courtyard wall, and the kitchen and everything in it was gloom. I fixed my mind upon my sewing in slow motion; repeating my mantra, begging God to reverse everything, please don’t let this be true.

  And then I dressed robotically, walked in a trance to the grocers, and bought the minimum.

  Somewhere along the way I must have decided to proceed as if everything was normal, so when Loup arrived home, worn out from driving in the heat, I kissed him and offered him the ritual iced coffee and bowl of nuts. He saw that I had been sewing, but sensed that all was not right.

  ‘Chéri, we are going to have to drive over to your sister’s soon. You have something to tell her…’

  I break, and Loup knew straight away.

  ‘Pascal?’ he quavered,

  ‘What has happened to Pascal?’’

  Return to Provençe, Summer 2015

  “It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.”

  “A gust of fetidness informed him of the place in which he stood.”

  Victor Hugo, Les Misérables.

  The path, down which Pascal leads, is desolate. Not a featureless path, but features that are alien and degenerative, distracting from the panorama. And I am possessed. Pascal is here, six years after that visit from the gendarmes, inside my head. Without doubt, inside Loup’s head. Colliding with the polystyrene walls of our hut. Often, I talk to Pascal.

  Talk to him out of a selfish need to preserve him… To keep his memory alive…

  Is this what people mean by that phrase?

  I could also have talked to my father inside my head, but that would risk disappointment. On both sides.

  With Pascal, I can be candid. And he is a mystery to unravel. And I have the time, so much time to do the unravelling. Later, back in Australia, I return my Dad’s gaze as he observes me from his framed post on my mother’s sewing table, and realize of course that he too was a mystery. A generous big life and a bigger heart than my own small one could recognize.

  But for Christ sake, I am here living in Provençe en France! Cut the introspection… even at misery hut, life is to be lived in the present, right? Piss off Pascal! Piss off rain! So what if the rain won’t stop, let it rain! Hah, It’s been raining for centuries! Let the putrid poly and ply rot, because while they rot, the wild rosemary and thyme in our paddock will flourish. As will the deer in the forest behind our fence, and the nightingales who sing all night long.

  But now there is a different onslaught of weather. Apart from Pascal, it is as if nothing else exists: just the weather and me. I remember back home we have a saying that it’s small talk to talk about the weather. On the contrary, it seems to me the weather makes us small. Right now, I can think of nothing more potent than the mistral to make us small. Menacing and mad-making, the wind we dread has arrived. We are no longer of any importance. I am no longer upright, but stagger like a tormented tree. I am shocked to find a wind here as vicious as at home on Discovery Bay: our chilling gale from Antarctica, which, if it doesn’t buckle and break you, imparts to you some kind of knowledge, some kind of hard-won communion.

  On the other hand, the mistral, or master wind of Provençe, obliterates the rain and brings sunshine. An excess of sunshine. A 3,000 hours per year overdose of bloody sideways demented heat.

  Another cup of tea will help. On edge, I decant water, which Loup has brought home in a discarded container from a building site; crumbs of couscous, the grainy tiling mix, still float there. I curse because there is just enough water to do the dishes, but not enough for a second cup of tea. After the deluge, the mercury hits record heights. We are told the inferno, fanned by the mistral, will get worse. Ironically, I now panic at the prospect of no water. Standing bent over our sink, a plastic tub that has never known a tap, a drain or a plug, I dry-retch as the baking odour of our partly composted merde flies through the slatted narrow opening, hitting me side on.

  ‘Don’t worry about that Frey,’ Loup had said a few weeks earlier, as we emptied our latrine, transferring our waste to a wide-mouthed trench and I scurried to hide it under leaves and branches and rubble. ‘It’s decomposed enough.’

  ‘Ne t’embete pas avec cela.’ Oh yeah? Try being here today darling, not that you ever are at the sink.

  ‘You’ve only got yourself to blame chérie…remember how you used to insist that I rest when I came home, that your job was the house keeping?’

  I do remember, but that was when we lived in a très jolie stable with a blue door, taps, water, electricity and other helpful devices. During the deluge, as hikers disappeared and a whole village eroded, I had run outside with every possible container, desperate to capture the inundation.

  ‘See Loup, it’s crazy not to catch the rainwater! Why can’t we buy a tank and build a stand? WHY?’

  But I knew why. Loup had no interest in making this hut our home.

  As far as he was concerned, we had invested enough time into someone else’s dream. And besides, Loup got a thrill out of the three-litre a day challenge. That is, three litres per person per day of bought bottled water: for cooking, washing, bathing and drinking. Of course he could find ample water and coffee at work, so he had a head start. At the hut however, three litres didn’t stretch to the third cup of tea, the washing up or personal hygiene. Wet wipes become an obsession, followed by an allergic reaction. So finally, Loup has the idea to collect water from the taps at building sites.

  ‘Freya, you can’t drink the rainwater here, haven’t you heard of acid rain?’ I had to agree. The water I collected was grimy with gunk. But I had lived on rainwater for decades in Australia… that occasionally floated with dead possums. So now we drank tea floating with tiling couscous.

  As the mistral bullies all that untapped rain away, it sweeps me with it into a cracked corner. Pascal sticks to me with the dross of dust and dirt and particles of things I wish I could ignore. The paradox being that Pascal has intervened, and somehow kept me from leaving. I might have been that Danish girl, lost in a blizzard in the Pyrenees.

  ‘You spend too much time inside your own head’, Loup warns. ‘Why don’t you go out Frey? Go to the market, go to the shops…but don’t buy, just look. Il faut changer tes idées.’

  I am stuck, communing with a spirit, going mad. Loup is right, within an hour’s drive are some of Provence’s most celebrated cities, but I have lost the verve for city life. And lost the confidence to drive her fast arteries. It is only France’s nature that interests me. Too late I realize, imprisons me.

  GO Freya, aller aller, run to the hills, and don’t look back!

  Return to those bewitching peaks whose trails I pore over on my maps, deep into the night, too engrossed to rescue the moths as they expire in the candle-wax. Tonight as a beetle dives headlong into my wine, I watch, mesmerised by its frantic laps around my glass until with deliberation, I rescue it. The soggy bug drags its tail along the table for a few minutes; flaps dry its waterlogged wings, and then takes off again. Does it know how close to death it had come? I question my callousness.

  I would be that helpless insect on France’s distant peaks. Having never held an ice pick in my hand, let alone jammed anchors into rock or attached my life to the end of a rope. And vertigo is my enemy. I dare not go there alone, but the layered skirts of forests and brooks and cascades and perilous rocks I desire. Under their secretive canopy, I sense a familiar longing.


  To be that Danish girl.

  Meanwhile I sniff our conjugal waste. Wallow in it, this lone witness to our marriage. I cannot decide if I am ashamed or indignant, that our shit should smell so foul. I think of the blasé liberty of dog pooh plastered along French pavements, floating down drains into canals. Bobbing down canals into the sea. The magical Mediterranean, riddled with e-coli. Closed to bathers after rain. And the shock of human faeces on proud display beside the distant swimming cove, Le Mugel; and once, when I mistook a pristine pebble riverside for paradise, only to find a fresh pile of pooh and toilet paper plonked right there in the middle. It seems ironic that unmitigated merde does not offend the French, the purveyors of chic. And I wonder could I learn something from them.

  Am I the hypocrite?

  When we lived with power and appliances, I bought the audio book of Les Miserables, and it kept me company during winter nights awaiting Loup. This solitary listening became a mystic ritual, as I never grasped all the words. And I did not grasp then what Jean Valjean and Loup and I now share in common. Victor Hugo raised the sewer to view, inverting Paris as ‘the City of light’ into something much more interesting: ‘Paris has another Paris under herself…. which is slime, minus the human form.’ Paris is a long way from our hut, and I cannot make the lofty claim that our merde is my greater conscience, but it is my obsession. It’s a daily preoccupation to find enough vegetal matter to cover our waste. I dream a recurring dream: a nightmare of swimming through a sea of faeces, knowing that my daughters are in that same putrid sea; my frantic arms push past lumps of turds trailing my own waste, I clamp my lips tight against the repugnant wet, but I cannot find my girls. I cannot save them.

  When I am awake, it is almost a relief to have to face it. I like that Loup and I can’t just flush it away or hide it. But I regret that we don’t get savvy; and do what Aurélien our quirky neighbour does, fertilizing his plants with it, making his dope grow stronger. Not that Loup would ever want that. As with water tanks or solar panels, Loup has little enthusiasm for elaborating his last stand. We are too far down. So digging deeper is what we do. Eking out the lime to last, scrounging for pine needles and twigs of aromatic anything, is my job. And when Loup lifts his head up from his tangle of legal letters one 41-degree Sunday, his face contorted,