Ricochet

by Robyn Neilson

  ‘Bonjour Madame Dufour, Monsieur Zorn, mes sincère condoléances,’ says the Detective.

  Extending a hand first to Loup and then to Odette, his own fatigued face reflecting theirs. He invites them to his office and another, colder place, which is for their eyes only.

  I return to my post in the sun by the car. Again, time passes. Am I neglectful, I wonder in the simple act of waiting? Reminded of home, I look up to the gentle green canopy of Elms, and am startled by a Tortured Elm with its tightly wound trunk, protective and defiant in its clasp. Suddenly homesick, I take refuge in the form of a letter:

  Dear Elms, thank you for your shade and endurance; please do not let your cousin trees die in Melbourne; please keep them safe from that dreaded disease. Please watch over my girls and baby grandson and most of all please, please help Loup and Odette. Look, right now, there they are! Extend your spring bright emerald, move closer your strong wise trunk so that they have you to hold onto and collapse against. I cannot do it alone.

  Odette is at the top of the stairs, Loup behind her. I express-post my plea to the Melbourne Elms, believing that they will cocoon Odette and Loup and root out all evil with their filigreed light. After all, people do write to them. Believe they hear.

  I scurry to the stairs, which sweep with cruel irony as if towards a stage. Odette is curved over, carrying something baggy and ragged. Loup is of stone; his limbs conveying his heavy body down each step without him. He does not see me, although we look directly at each other. I dare not approach Odette, yet I dare not leave her alone. Her weeping is trapped somewhere deep inside her collapsing chest. Not like that animal howling that still haunts the birds and plants in her garden, that warm night three days ago, when Loup and I drove to her home to tell her. And we sat outside on the low stonewall, and I retreated into the garden to give privacy to the siblings lament. Their peine rousing every buried anguish in every living thing around them.

  The weight of my belle-soeur’s arm is cupped in mine, her wasting waist held by my other. We hobble, a damaged three-legged creature. In her arms she cradles a backpack. Yours, Pascal. It has a spattering of holes blown through it. The detective kept the black sack that you had tied over your head, but the meticulous evidence of what you did to yourself is something he would gladly part with. He gave your letter, (the wilting paper itself like the minutiae of you) to your sister, and with it, your eternal anger and wretched undoing to your little brother.

  Why oh why would you do that to them Pascal?

  Lá Célestine, Été 2015.

  "Here I am, where I ought to be."

  Karen Blixen, Out of Africa.

  Six years on. If I pay attention, the hut will show me a way forward. Away from this perilous emptiness you have left Pascal. And my own guilt for leaving those I love. When I was a child, I had an invisible friend called Sally. She and I would fill our days with secret adventures. My grandson Ollie’s invisible friend is called Benjamin. You will be my invisible friend Pascal. I will not allow you to haunt. Instead, you are an angel, and you will protect Loup. This must be so. The alternative is madness. I will not repeat the chucking of knives into council bins for fear of self-harm. Or worse.

  There is romance to be had for the land of France, and years ago during my first visit to see if Loup and I might galvanize our love into a permanent thing, I declared that I was in love with his country. At that time we did not endure, but now, I am a greedy lover for his country. Or a needy child. Memorising every vein of Loup’s land; devouring every aroma. Even our merde: I can learn to love this too. Waiting each long day for my husband is keeping me from this other lover. My longing grows desperate, needing the touch of this superior body.

  Enter my friends: my maps, and conduits of my adoration. I scour their worn sheath for the timid black and white trails, the shy but seductive Departmentals; D900A, D17 and D421T, I am obsessed by their secrecy. These minor chemins are the creases in the body of old France. Her furrows and folds, ridges and ripples of carapace and flesh; they re-tell her hard-won stories to any traveller who cares to go slow there. Roads that resemble their original life as donkey tracks; single rutted lanes which must now accommodate opposing lanes of traffic, where reversing into a ditch or scraping along a prickly hedge or stone wall is a common courtesy to allow the oncoming drivers to continue their approach.

  The first time I drove these blind alleys seemed suicidal. One false move and you end up in a head-on with a Citroën, or with your backend suspended over a gorge. There is no time for indecision. You must reverse as the approaching driver continues. Memorise any patches of extra dirt somewhere back along the precarious track, to where you might retreat. There is no awkwardness allowed. You must act and look confident. Sang-froid, laisser-faire. You stare your oncoming driver in the eye, as he will not slow down for you: hold that gaze whilst coolly reversing onto that memorised patch of gravel. Don’t wince, don’t wave, above all don’t smile or simper ‘Désolée’! These days, I don’t need to honk as I approach a blind bend. Loup never has. Just another one of those sensual segues in which the French excel. An enchaînement; a Latin tango in cars.

  The parts I love best on my maps are the open spaces; the way they undress, divesting themselves of clutter. The chemins disrobe, retreating back in time to broken lines, like the delicate dressmaking patterns of my mother. And then the tissue dissipates into ghostly grey and startling white. The void. Where the map re-asserts itself as paper. Recreating itself, released. Above the tree line: cols, passes, prés, têtes, crêtes, alpine lacs, glaciers, and the traces of blue trickling down into broader ribbons, the vital thread connecting everything.

  Today is Sunday. The day I wait for. I have run out of patience for the registered letters, which devour all of Loup’s attention. Thank Christ, so has he.

  ‘Freya, you are right. On y va! Anyway, I can’t think in this putain heat. Fuck it’s hot!’

  ‘So chéri, now you so you see what it’s like for me here during the week…?’

  Escape! Loup let’s me navigate. Tracing the wiry veins on the map. The road bleeds out under the sky; a merciless sky, impervious to the scalding it radiates.

  ‘Loup, how do you say bitumen in French?’

  ‘Well, it can either be the obvious bitume, or enrobé.’

  ‘You mean like cloaked or wrapped up?’

  Another French marriage of aesthetic and function, each little stone that once lay undressed, now coated with care in bitumen, like a delicate Rocher chocolate, each side melting slightly to join its greater conglomerate.

  Two hours later, our map leads to a fairy-tale world of steep-sided gorges, where icy water spills and spurts from under rusty boulders. As we clamber higher with numb feet, we slip and slide on the bottom, wading upstream upon a bed of clay. Scooping up handfuls of velvet mud, Loup and I paint each other dark umber, giggling as we smear the clay all over our bodies.

  ‘Your eyes are the same colour as the water’ says Loup, mischief darting out of his own.

  ‘And yours are of a black god’, in awe of my man’s silken new skin. If it weren’t for the passing tall fathers with pony tails and white-haired kids squealing in Dutch, my black deity and I would have slid together nicely. After dunking ourselves under the icy spring, we each shine like innocents. Cleansed.

  But behind us, shadows of the giant boulders descend, bringing a chill to the air. Monday looms. We are stupefied by the imperative to re-enter the real world. Upon our return down the gorge, old people sit on aluminium chairs in the rushing water. They smile openly at us, unaware of Loup’s turmoil, as we are of what might be theirs. I remember to thank my lover, mother, France.

  On the way home to lure Loup out of his gloom, I pester him to teach me the gender of French words: to find a trick or a pattern to this confounding grammatical necessity.

  ‘So, chéri, how do you know the sex of a word? When you’re growing up, do you just know, or is it something you’re taught at school?’

  ‘It’s
easy, you just have to remember that everything that is great or good, le, is male, and everything that is small or bad, la, is female. Simple!’

  ‘Génial, another one of your bloody chauvinist views.’

  ‘Ok, the proof: le soleil, la pluie, sun vs rain.

  L’océan, la mer, the ocean vs the sea.

  Le bonheur, la merde, happiness vs shit.

  La maladie, le bien-être, sickness vs wellness.

  Le genie, la stupidité, genius vs stupidity…and so it continues. That’s just the way it is Frey!’

  ‘Rubbish! What about la merveille, la beauté, there’s plenty of noble feminine nouns… you can’t go higher than la Vie, la Terre! Life and the earth, see, they’re female… there’s even a sexy poetic synergy, like le ciel and la montagne, the sky and the mountain… Le tonnerre and la foudre, thunder and lightning… la faim and le désir, hunger and desire.’

  ‘Mon Dieu Frey, that’s getting too fancy, you’ll never remember anything that way!’

  He reaches across and grabs me on the breast. ‘Feminine or masculine?’ I ask,

  ‘Le sein, masculine’ and, his hand groping further down, ‘le vagin’.

  ‘Fuck! So you guys own even our sexuality… what about the uterus and clitoris, are they at least feminine?’

  ‘Nope, le: l’utérus and le clitoris!’

  ‘Bloody French…you won’t be coming near my private parts’, as I lunge for his groin; ‘penis?’

  ‘LE pénis!’ Loup exclaims, triumphant.

  ‘But you girls have the best word, ‘pipe’. You can offer me une bonne pipe whenever you like chérie! Remember the joke about the best pipes come from the wood of Boulogne?’

  ‘Arrg, you’re disgusting!’

  Hard to believe, that Loup who claimed if he hadn’t met me he’d be a monk, knew vulgar jokes. As it turns out, he knows enough to fill our long car ride home. This one is, ‘Where in France are the best pipes made?’ Answer, ‘In The Wood of Boulogne’.

  The Bois de Boulogne being a wooded forest on the outskirts of Pairs, frequented by prostitutes. A pipe in French has a double meaning as a blowjob: une pipe.

  ‘Christ, damn your French arrogance… you not only claim ownership of our own body-parts, but you condescend to give a blowjob the female gender!’

  ‘Yep, French grammar doesn’t favour women… it’s une catastrophe, une tragédie… Darling, it would be un rêve if you would make me une petite gâterie….’

  ‘Ok Loup enough, Tais-toi! Quit now, before we have un accident!’

  Tonight, returned to the hut, Loup is asleep with Morphée, grinding his teeth in anticipation of tomorrow’s fight, whilst I unfold again my maps, my bedfellows. I circle our surprise find, and see that I’ve already drawn another circle where we have previously camped on a plateau, and discover that we were once just on the other side of todays gorge. As if we are becoming intimate with this body of France… nestling into her rises and curves, suckling from her streams.

  I connect the dotted trails that wait to be walked upon her. The forests with trees unfamiliar, the smell of frozen then unfrozen soil, of yellow lichen or sun-dried pine needles under the crunch of my boots. Are you already there Pascal? Do you feel roots, veins of earth and weight of rock and lightness of air? Are you the fire feeding the fire deep inside the belly of the earth? Are you the worm turning under the trip of my feet? Or are you the tiny bubble surfacing on the wide still water, silent?

  I want to bring you with us, Pascal. The old recognisable you. You, Loup, me and the dog and your lady friend. Exploring the trails as we did once before, along that broad river back home. Where, upon awaking lazily in our honeymooners tent, we found you already submerged in the tannin depths, my husky paddling her way out towards you. Trusting in you like no one before. You seemed to be both present and prescient in every perfect second of our camping trip. You clowned around the campfire, chuckling with your little brother as if everything were exactly as it should be. Safe in the arms of the Glenelg River before its languid current couples with the Southern Ocean. There, you were as far from your hoard as you could be. But everything wasn’t exactly as it should be, and neither were you. And our shame is that we did not notice.

  So, with the new discovery of an old mountain brook, the impossible longing returns, Pascal. To resurrect that other perfect creation from the forest-green L’ill of your hometown, where as young brothers, you had fished. To resurrect that silvery Gardon, as it struggled to stay wet, but withered in your boyish hands. Then that haunting longing to resurrect you, Pascal. But if you are an angel now? Should I leave you in peace?

  So that you can do your own reckoning, with the mossy-toed, doe-eyed, one-winged angel? Loup complains that I’m a ball-breaker, annoying casse-couilles, so perhaps I should leave you alone now, in my map some place, soaring above the maze. I cannot grab you and put you back. Cannot put things right again.

  Anyway it is not my place to do so.

  Belvédère de la Sainte-Victoire, from Éloise to Irène.

  “If you’re trapped in the dream of the Other, you’re fucked.”

  Gilles Deleuze.

  Our Sunday road trip has given me confidence. I will drive again: take the knowledge in my fingertips absorbed from the maps. I make a start with my walking expeditions along the canal. Skirmishing between the traffic and the detritus of the industrial estate, to the boulangerie, the épicerieor the pharmacie. Or to visit Éloise, the vivacious teacher who stopped beside me in her black Mercedes convertible, and asked me if I’d like a lift, as I struggled home with the shopping one broiling afternoon. I gladly accepted, but asked her to drop me off whilst we were still on the bitumen, still in normal-land. Her coupé would not have liked the potholes and dirt. And Loup would have not liked that I brought someone home. Éloise lives on the right side of the canal, where houses are lavish and have swimming pools, and she asks me if I’d like to tutor her children in English. I jump at the opportunity, and hope to cultivate a friendship. But Éloise can’t stick to a plan… she forgets that we have set a time, and then rings and requests out of the blue if I could come right now, ‘Please, right now, toute de suite.’

  The magnitude of hurt I feel at being cancelled or forgotten is ridiculous. I envy Éloise for being busy with her children. For being productive and aspiring and so goddamned cultured. Guilty that my kids were never ferried between horse riding and choir and ballet and I am being a bitch, une salope, because Éloise is lovely towards me; she just forgets to treat my time as important, or to pay me. And although I do not want to trade places, I envy her for being the other.

  Loup is angry when he finds out that I have spoken about him, uncovering his so-called anonymity, and is further insulted when Éloise latches onto what he considers the most diminutive of his skills: a tile-layer. We are both amused that she regards our predicament as quaint; her word: ‘originale’. It gives Loup some satisfaction to have her imagine our life far from its reality. And that she would never be able to locate us.

  This stinking afternoon, I’ve been cancelled in favour of swimming. Regardless, I force myself to leave the hut. Thinking of the snails that I once kept as pets, feeding them tender rose petals, carefully placing them back in their jar each night, until I came to school one morning to find that my teacher had tossed out their miniature garden and stomped all over my snail family. Now as I lope along the track I find myself weeping, nonsensically. With angst for being cancelled, for being without friends or purpose, and in sorrow for my snail family when I was five.

  In their honour, I absorb each contour into my sluggish foot. Suspecting that like them, torpor and irrelevance will get me killed, I avoid the rapid trajectory. And regret the loss of this speed-savvy: its demise signalling my lack of savoir-faire. One doesn’t require the major arteries for the Laundromat and two supermarkets. The minor veins will do. Time has no measure. Apart from Loup’s leaving and returning. I now relate more to the elderly lady at the Laundromat; she with just one g
ood arm, with whom I chat, as she assiduously folds her washing from the dryer. I offer to carry her laundry basket to her car. This gentle encounter makes me regret the distance from my former octogenarian friends. And the one I adored, who has gone.

  Madame Bergère, who rescued me from venturing too far down your path Pascal, during the in-between years, as we grappled with the truth that you were not coming back. Each January, if I were back in Melbourne, I would ring Irène on her birthday, as it coincided with the Australian Open, and we would feign swooning over Roger. I figured that Irène was a real catch when she was young and unlike me, a fine tennis-player.

  Irène’s life partner, whom she never married nor lived with, (the zest of their long romance?) was from a family of White Russians who had escaped to France with talented credentials, but bolshie ideals. Sacha would tease the conservative Irène with exaggerated communism; his pale blue eyes alight with playful derision. I remember a photo of their younger selves, in the mountains: he a bronze Adonis, and she a petite, charmante coquette. Their chemistry barely contained by the frame. Sacha and Irène became our only friends, although we did not see them often. But when we did, each occasion was flavoured with their irrepressible joie de vie. One of my most memorable dinners was when they invited their best friends, Rosa and Henri, and the inspiring widow, Agostina, who were all close to ninety, and we all sat outside under Irène’s plane tree, candles alight, herbes de Provençe decorated the table; lots of frommage de chevre, pizza, salad, Irène’s special garlic dressing, washed down with Marsanne de Cassis, Rosa’s hand-made chocolate and Tina’s excellent smoked almonds. There I was privy to a level of modest, witty, and heartfelt conversation such that I had never experienced in France. These were indeed old souls with quivering fists.