This One is Ours

by Kate O'Donnell

  Then a silver canister lands not too far away. Tear gas!

  I turn my head, pulling my shirt up and over my face, my eyes already starting to itch, to stream tears, and I press myself into the stone wall.

  I feel the guy disappear from beside me, and hear his boots scuffle across the footpath. I hope he’ll be okay.

  The surge has passed, the crowd is thinning and then there’s the sound of high-pressure hoses. Water cannons. People are screaming and moving out of the way.

  There’s a shout from above. It’s an angry Parisienne, and I can’t tell if she’s angry at me (at us) or angry at the world.

  ‘The world is ending!’ I shout, whether she can hear me or not. ‘Won’t you do something about it?’

  Then Delphine is beside me. Her face is bright red and her whole head wet. Manon is on the other side. They take my hands in theirs and we run.

  The boulevard is filled with upturned cars and paving stones, tear gas and sudden flames of homemade Molotov cocktails. Amid explosions and cries for Macron démission, cries for revolution, we run, our feet stumbling over rocks and iron grates from the street.

  ‘Aren’t you scared?’ I ask Delphine.

  Her eyes are bright. As she turns back towards the wreck and ruin, I can see flames reflected in her irises. ‘What are you doing?’ she screams. ‘We’re here to change the world!’

  ‘Sofie, you need to give me a good reason not to send you home.’ Toby sits across from me in the salon and his face is so serious. It had taken him just a few hours to see the images I’d posted of the protest, and to appear at the Durants’ apartment.

  It’s like all the air has been sucked out of my body. ‘I …’ I begin. I don’t want to go home! ‘I had to take part. I want to have a future,’ I say, and I hate that my voice wobbles.

  Claudette is sitting quietly next to me and Delphine is perched on the arm of the sofa, while Léon stands by the door with his arms crossed. I take his pose as support for me.

  Toby shifts in his seat. ‘You will have a future.’

  ‘You don’t know that.’

  He breathes out fast. ‘Sofie, I get it. I’m scared too. But I’ve got a responsibility for all of you while you’re here.’

  I’m overwhelmed, and it isn’t just about how I don’t want to go home early. It’s this feeling that maybe I don’t want to go home at all.

  ‘I know. And I’m sorry. We have our Arts Plastiques exhibition in one week,’ I plead. ‘And after that it’s really not long until the exchange is over. Please, Toby?’

  He sighs. ‘Will you promise me you’ll stay out of trouble until then?’

  I nod madly. ‘I can do that.’

  ‘There are rules you agreed to,’ he says.

  ‘To be fair, I didn’t really read those rules,’ I say, conspiratorially.

  ‘Lalalala!’ Toby covers his ears.

  Out of the corner of my eye I see Delphine smirk.

  In the end he agrees to pretend he never saw, and I agree to remove the photos and promise to stick to the rules for these last few weeks.

  ‘I hope I haven’t got you in trouble,’ I say to my host parents after Toby has left. Some big tears threaten to break though.

  Léon shakes his head. ‘It will all work out,’ he says.

  ‘We’ve done nothing wrong,’ says Delphine, angrily.

  Claudette makes a gruff ben, non sound. ‘My girl, you did worry us. You could have been hurt.’

  When we’d got back to the apartment after the protest, we had to come clean. Delphine, with her tear-gassed red eyes, looked like she had been crying. But really she was halfway between celebrating and raging.

  The manifestation gets in all the papers, and the coverage is positive towards the greenies and negative towards the casseurs who wreaked havoc once again on the streets.

  Mum and Dad are torn between being super-duper worried, and kind of impressed and curious. Crow wants to know everything. Hana messages: Do I need to come back from Greece and kick your bum? Btw I am so bloody proud of you.

  I feel engaged and also exhausted, but creatively satisfied. Or creatively motivated; like, I feel full of inspiration, even though we’ve been out all day and my knees hurt and my jeans are ripped and I’ve somehow got a cut on my head. A big egg and bruise is already forming, and Léon brings me some painkillers and a tea towel filled with ice.

  I send a selfie to Hana. I threw myself in headfirst.

  It is a moment of humour that is desperately needed.

  However, later that week, my knees are starting to scab and itch, and the adrenaline has worn off. And there was a moment that flashed at me mid-protest, that made me turn around and gaze at the crowd, a moment that is coming to mean something.

  Everyone was middle class.

  There we were, shouting about climate action, poverty, about fairness and tax cuts for the rich – but we ARE the rich. We shout about climate justice, but what about the justice for the people of the Pacific Islands whose homes are being swallowed by our bloated seas (seas full of microplastics)? Taro Island in the Solomon Islands. It’s predicted it will be the first capital city to face relocation as a result of the rise in sea levels.

  And here I am, casually spending five months in another city, on the other side of the world. Taking long-haul flights that add enormous amounts of emissions into the atmosphere.

  I feel Crow’s despair now. I understand how she gets completely buried under the weight of the world. I feel different, but I also feel as though I have worked out a way to remain buoyant (to a degree) and not be dragged down. To enjoy the moment, to fight the small fights.

  To own my anger, to recognise when and where it is useful.

  I look at the maps I have made over the past five months. They all track the path from where I was to where I am now. They twist and they turn with the good times and the hard times.

  Remember, the world is ending.

  Delphine sends me a photo one of her friends had taken during the manif. In it, I’m standing in the middle of the street. For some reason the crowd has parted around me and I’m mid-shout. My hands are in fists by my side. I look wild. Both unlike myself and the most myself I have ever looked.

  I want to upload it to Insta, to that Spectacle machine I still love using in spite of myself. Surely we can use it as a tool for good?

  Is art important? When there are so many more immediate needs: water, food, shelter, a plan to preserve our ecosystem? But can’t art bring change? It can change our emotions. We cry at the cinema; we are compelled to sing our favourite songs. Art is activism.

  I feel energised to create; I am full of inspiration and bursting with feelings, experiences, opinions that just have to get out.

  I want to create art that will make people think. I want my drawings and my paintings and my bizarre new linocut fascinations to mean something, to be something people can connect with.

  Because if I can connect with people through my art and they can connect with me and with each other, then aren’t we creating a community? And if we have a community even five people strong, we are stronger together and we’ll get things done.

  The Society of the Spectacle says that even when people create détournements (hijackings) to try and break out of the Spectacle, the Spectacle co-opts them and absorbs the détournement back into the Spectacle. Just like when teenagers create a new slang expression or a new way of wearing a hat or something, and there’s marketing departments following them around ready to co-opt the word or the look and sell it back to the same teenagers. It is exhausting.

  I feel angry again at Olivier for making a map of a girl for his exhibition, for co-opting me.

  I look over all my maps out at once. My favourite is a world map. I’ve used an actual world map for this one, not a woodcut print. I’ve marked a path from Melbourne to Paris, with all the p
laces Crow thinks about and despairs over: Nauru, Myanmar, Syria, Sudan. I’ve called it As the Crow Flies.

  Véronique has been nudging me in the direction of artists she thinks I’ll connect to – many with collage-illustration, abstraction, loose lines she thinks I can capture. I do like the way Jean-Michel Basquiat puts small illustrations together on canvas or paper to make one big piece. It’s less overwhelming, and I can see how I could do something similar. My pieces are interconnected.

  I look at the posters I made for Crow all those months ago and I am surprised at the level of anger they contain. I almost feel afraid this anger came from me. I could probably try to explain it away as me channelling her anger for this commission.

  But, truth be told, I did feel angry. I do feel angry.

  And now, after everything that has happened, I feel ready to use my anger.

  To use my anger for good.

  BREAK A LEG!

  – Overnight chats with Crow

  The exhibition. We each get to choose four pieces to show, and I finally decide on my pieces the day before. After everything, they are so much more personal than I realised, and I’m happier about each of them than I had expected to be.

  The night before the art show I dream in French. It is the first time I have dreamed in French and when I wake up, I wake up crying even though the dream wasn’t sad.

  I was dreaming about flying. Not in an aeroplane, but like a bird, though I think I was human still. And I flew over Paris. At least I think it was Paris. I flew over the city, then over green fields to an ocean, and then I flew over that as though something was guiding my way. My black feathered wings (because in dreams humans can have crows’ wings) beat confidently. We know where to go.

  We have to be there early to set up, and it’s a particular trip on the metro carrying my pieces under my arm. Our Arts Plastiques class has been allocated its own exhibition space within the École des Beaux-Arts for this occasion. It’s a large white room with only one window at the front and you enter into it from the large courtyard in the middle of the building.

  We hang our art the way we want it to be seen and I’ve chosen not to frame mine. Véronique tuts and ppts a little as I try to explain my rationale:

  ‘It’s like, this one is a map,’ I say. ‘Like a map for walking the road and finding the places you search for.’ Talking about my own art can be tricky at the best of times – but it’s doubly hard in another language. ‘These maps are for all the world—’ I wave my hands around expansively to illustrate ‘the world’. ‘If you put them in a frame, then nobody can touch them, or walk around to find the places you search for. I don’t want to contain them.’

  Véronique does one of those shrug-bof things and moves on to the next student.

  I look up at my work. Without frames they almost bleed into the walls. The edges of the maps aren’t perfectly straight and I’ve folded and unfolded them before putting them up. For extra authenticity.

  Yes, I decided to include my maps in spite of everything. I’ve printed three. A map of Paris, with all the shiny landmarks marked in pristine photographic glory. A second identical map, with the same landmarks as the first, but with additional features in printed linocut. A dot for ‘home’ in Belleville and thick black paths to school, to the metro, to the top of the Belleville hill. A third map, additionally marked in bright pink ink – a love map of all the places Olivier and I walked. Yet another, marked at the points where the camps were destroyed, where the protest route was, the community garden where we gave soup to those who needed soup: places where plans were flourishing in secret.

  I want to make a digital version of these maps too, sometime. I could overlay each version like archaeology in motion, but instead of stripping away the layers of history, I’d be adding them, mapping my path through place and time.

  For my fourth piece, though, I’ve brought the largest of my cardboard collages. On it I’ve stuck our placards and posters from the rally, overlapping like they’re pasted on a wall somewhere. I’ve printed over the top of them – words and shapes for effect. If you look down the bottom there’s a sheet of paper featuring a strange creature. Our exquisite corpse.

  It’s a style still in development. Maybe I should have exhibited one of my pears (they are very pear-ish these days) – but I LIKE this one. I steal a slogan from ’68 as its title: I Have Something To Say But I Don’t Know What.

  I believe art and life are inextricable and there is horror and beauty in everything. And we can have both. We can be both.

  Claudette, Léon and Delphine come along, of course. I feel incredibly nervous about this. I feel such strange, strong feelings towards this family who aren’t my family. They have been here, hovering in the background for almost five months – making sure I didn’t starve and that I came home every night and felt as safe as possible in this adopted city of mine.

  Claudette stands with her hands on her hips and looks at my work. She points to the cardboard piece, shaking her finger approvingly (her bangles clinking together cheerily). ‘I like this. I am happy you’ve taken a risk and created something unconventional. But I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. You are a very interesting young woman.’

  ‘I agree,’ says Léon, and the way he looks at my pieces, nodding his head with a little smile on his face, says more than words.

  I wonder if Léon felt as observed at his vernissage or if this slightly uncomfortable naked feeling goes away. While Léon hasn’t been a mentor in the way Véronique has, I feel like I’ve learned a lot from him about the multitudes of being an artist.

  I watch my host parents walk slowly around the exhibition, greeting people they know and talking low to each other while pointing and gesturing at the artworks.

  I also happen to be watching when Olivier puts his arm around a girl who is wearing a silky slip of a dress and long, delicate silver earrings. She is waifish and beautiful. I feel envious, and then furious at myself.

  ‘What are you going to wear?’ Delphine had asked that morning, leaning against my doorway, looking as nonchalant as only Delphine can look.

  ‘I don’t know. It’s not so important, is it?’ I lied. It was terribly important to me, and I was worried I wouldn’t look the part, that I wouldn’t look good.

  ‘Bah, comme t’es fatigante!’ I had heard Claudette say this very phrase to Delphine like it was an automatic reaction, and I had to laugh hearing it come out of Delphine’s very own mouth. Oh, you’re exhausting!

  We went into Delphine’s room and she wrenched open her wardrobe, which was bursting with things. ‘I took some of these from maman, of course …’

  She dressed me in a simple shift dress with a geometric pattern across the hem. ‘You are going to look like a picture. Stand right in front of his face and be your beautiful self.’

  ‘You realise I broke up with him?’ I asked. ‘It’s the art I’m angry about.’

  She shrugged. Bof. ‘This will help anyway.’

  I’ve never worn this shade of red before, but it’s a colour that says I have something to say.

  I watch Olivier stand next to his pieces. They’re framed in gold frames, if you can believe it, and I want to vomit with the pot-calling-the-kettle-sell-out. He’s achieved what he wanted with mood and style: deep, gloomy oil paints of Romanticism, but featuring young people on their phones and wearing branded clothing. The paintings are very beautiful, which is frustrating for me.

  Then there’s the map series – a face (my face), the palm of a hand (my hand), the sole of a foot (is that my foot?) – painted over with a fine gold line. A dot indicating ‘start here’ and the line spreading out across the image, giving it the feel of Japanese Kintsugi. The triptych is called Connaître (To Know). I’m surprised to see that while the final products are interesting, and certainly technique-wise they’re stunning and envy-inducing, they feel a bit empty.

  Léon sta
nds on one side of me, Véronique on the other.

  ‘It’s interesting enough,’ Léon says. ‘Skillful brushwork.’ I can feel him looking over my head to Véronique.

  From the corner of my eye I see her mouth pout and her shoulders shrug lightly. ‘It’s missing some soul. I suspect he’s trying to capture something he doesn’t fully understand. Theoretically, and in terms of subject.’

  I try not to feel too triumphant.

  Claudette and Léon work the room – speaking to this person and that, laughing and touring the artworks together. I’m happy to stand away from the crowd with Delphine, our backs to the wall and our shoulders touching. She bumps against me gently. ‘It’s good,’ she says, nodding towards my work.

  I bump her back. ‘Thank you.’

  I see us as if in a photo: her in a crisp white t-shirt tucked into black high-waisted trousers, her bony limbs with their sharp angles (not model-thin, like I had thought at first, but marathon-ready, with endurance and strength), and me in a borrowed dress.

  Véronique comes over. ‘Sofie, I am very proud of you.’ She kisses me, mwah mwah. Then, to top it off, Léon buys one of my pieces. I watch him have a conversation with Véronique and soon after a red dot is placed next to the Belleville map.

  My heart!

  Véronique asks me if she can take me for a goodbye visit to a brasserie. ‘May I invite you?’ she asks, and I know these days that ‘to invite’ someone means ‘to shout’ them. I feel a kind of happiness and pride, and a number of other things at once: delight that she cares enough to meet me outside of class, and a mature headiness at the thought of having a friend out of my age group. Crow and her granny have such a great relationship, and it’s always felt unfair that young people and older people aren’t encouraged to socialise.

  People might think Véronique and I are mother and daughter, or aunt and niece, perhaps, as we walk from the Saint-Germain-des-Prés metro stop. No, I’d say, we’re friends.