Au Pair

by Fiona McGregor

  I let out my anger on the métro. Coming down the aisle was a pimply, smacked out boy begging from the passengers.

  – I’m broke, I glared at him.

  – Je t’emmerde! he hissed, giving me a whiff of red-wine vomit and cigarettes.

  I thought of the Durebex eating their crusty cod as I changed to the overland métro. All daylight had gone while I was underground. It had started to rain. In their warm kitchen the Durebex would be bickering with one another, yelling at Laurent, yelling at Nadenne for ruining the fish. If it were my father, Nadenne would be complimented. My father liked his meat well done. He liked anything with a crust, and the crust of anything. Crusty old man.

  I looked out the window at the decrepit buildings rolling by. There was the crack of an alley, then a row of warehouses. A whole floor lit up. The blue blur of a television, someone closing their shutters. A boulevard opened beneath the métro, closed, and we coasted along at the level of chambres de bonnes. I wished there were an apartment for me in one of those buildings. They all looked so empty.

  Neons broke up the dark facades –

  – another

  boulevard opened, and closed, everything in a fine mist of rain.

  In Sydney it would be violent, sudden rain. The lawn would be damp with it, the garden drenched in sunlight, and Dad would be in the backyard putting kindling on the barbecue, half a forty-four gallon drum, blackened and rusty, propped on a steel trestle.

  About a year ago Nora and I were sharing a joint in her car, watching barbecue smoke billow from the garden. Wisteria sagged over the paling fence between us and Dad. Nora hadn’t turned off the ignition and Fela Cuti was playing.

  – Send me some music, Siobhan. You won’t believe the record shops in Brixton! Fan-fucken-tastic!

  But I’d ended up in Paris – more to the point, I’d never reached London, the final destination on my ticket – and Nora didn’t know what to ask for now.

  We could hear Mum shouting for us.

  – I’m not helping, said Nora. It’s my birthday.

  – Neither am I, I said. It’s my going-away.

  We both knew Paul was in there, watching a video of the footy finals. We ducked as David’s red Ford Laser came down the street. Busy David, always the last to arrive.

  Nora and I squashed down near the gear stick. David’s footsteps approached. Alone, uninhibited, he slagged in the gutter near the back wheel. Nora gagged.

  – Oh, GROSS!

  – Shhh!

  I sucked the end of the joint, burning my lips. Near my right eye was an empty condom packet. Nora’s hair smelt of keratin shampoo. Only yesterday, in the middle of Punch and Judy with Laurent, I had found one of her hairs on the jumper she gave me before I left. Long and twisted, gold-red, it had lost its smell.

  David’s footsteps receded. The gate creaked open, then shut. Nora sat up laughing, her singlet askew, then bit her lip.

  – How mean. I just didn’t feel like giving him any of this. Bet he won’t have a present for me anyhow.

  – Did Tom send you anything?

  Nora tapped the foil of heads lying open on the dashboard. It wobbled dangerously.

  – Careful, I said, they’ll drop out.

  – Speaking of dropouts, said Nora, Tom’s leaving his job again.

  Why did she refer to Tom as a dropout? Ironic as her tone was, this irritated me. Tom was the brother above Nora, the youngest boy, our favourite brother. He taught music in high schools. A different school, in a different city, almost every year. He came to Sydney as rarely as possible. Where was he now? Was it Whyalla?

  – Speaking of dropouts, I said back to my sister, your tit’s dropping out of your singlet. Dad’ll freak.

  Smoke belched over the fence. Dad would have just put on a steak for David. Steak for the boys, fish for the girls.

  – Where there’s smoke there’s fire, Nora said ominously, watching it, then reached into the back of the car for a T-shirt.

  I was pressed against the doors as more people piled on at La Chapelle. Whyalla, Wangaratta, Wagga Wagga, the names of Australian towns I’d never visited drifted through my mind like exotic music. The carriage filled with the smell of wet clothes and the merguez sausages being eaten by two Arabs next to me. I rubbed the window to see rain falling more heavily now. Peak-hour traffic appeared below us. Red lights, tail-lights; yellow lights, headlights; streaming up and down Boulevard de la Chapelle. The carriage was bright with cloths worn by African women and the high voices of their children.

  My mother used the cloth David had sent her from Uganda as a tablecloth. On slabs of crimson and orange were printed sea-green blackboards with the alphabet in indigo, over and over. Every Sunday of the weeks I spent at home before leaving the country, we sat with this cloth beneath our food and I would stare at the configurations of letters, making up words, making up conversation with my parents.

  My parents’ house is big. Sandstone and brick, mould smearing up the shadowed side in winter, it gets painted about once a decade. Magnolia, my mother calls the colour. My father says bone, and I call it off-white. The land slopes and there are three storeys at the back, facing the sea. Along the sea side on the second storey runs a wooden verandah, part of which was enclosed to form another bedroom when I was born.

  The room behind the verandah was once a ballroom, but we never danced in it. We played Twister at one end, next to the television that was out of bounds during the week, and at the other, as the years passed, we sat on calico couches with friends. The ballroom was thus divided to become the playroom, and the sunroom.

  The house is in bushland, opposite the city. We all moved out of it as soon as we could, to the other side of the harbour, and other sides of the world.

  At Belleville the carriage emptied and I found a seat. My shoes were wet, my feet were cold. The thought of my stark room in the twentieth wasn’t very comforting. I always had a book with me when I caught the métro, but it usually stayed in my bag unread.

  At the other end of the carriage a busker with an accordion began a mournful rendition of ‘Le Port d’Amsterdam’. The squeeze box of families: open it was the Durebex, just the three of them, spanning seventy-seven years. Closed it was the Elliotts, seven children Mum squeezed out in twelve years; out we came in quick succession, pop pop pop …

  My mother always laid the table under the jacaranda tree. It felt precarious to me, in sandals, treading around that table on the jacaranda flowers gone slimy.

  Nora wanted her fish wrapped in a banana leaf. Dad rolled his eyes.

  – Why can’t we just do it the old way?

  – Dad, don’t put Worcestershire sauce on my fish! Mum was telling David he had better get rid of those two cartons of books in the sunroom, or she would chuck them out. David looked sidelong at Paul.

  – Hey Paul, if you pay half the cost of shipping them to me in Beirut, I’ll forget about the ones you borrowed.

  – Don’t ship your books! Dad interjected.

  He took off his terry-towelling hat and wiped his forehead with it. The top of his head was mottled and shiny with heat, like the sausages he was about to burn. Mum hovered at his shoulder.

  – Michael, will you let me do it? Please!

  But this was Dad’s annual cooking feat, and he was not to be interrupted. His hands went limp and he looked up to heaven.

  – Joan, why don’t you just pour yourself a nice glass of wine and go and sit under that tree.

  Paul flicked a fish eye at David.

  – I borrowed?

  – What a waste, Dad went on, puffing out his paunch indignantly. You’d pay a fortune to ship two cartons of books.

  – It’s not a waste, Dad, I said. Books matter.

  Paul laughed.

  – Yair, ask your innocent little sisters about the books, David.

  – Get stuffed, Paul.

  – Watch your language, Nora! Dad twitched the barbecue fork.

  Nora would never have dared say that if we were inside
, eating at the dining-room table. We’d be sent out of the room if we said so much as god, let alone get stuffed. But outside there wasn’t really anywhere to send a swearer, except perhaps the compost heap.

  Dad stood there watching the meat fry, seesawing the fork up and down the fingers of his left hand like a drummer between riffs. My gloved fingers wriggled with this memory, and the other times in my childhood when he used to do tricks for us with chopsticks, kindling, pens. Dad wrote with his left hand too, and his left hand wielded the scalpel in the operating room. Everything else about him was very much Right.

  – I hope you children have written to Caroline, said Mum.

  In silence we helped ourselves to food from the warped wooden table. Mum pushed the potato salad in my direction.

  – Siobhan?

  – No thanks.

  – Have you written? she said sternly.

  – Um, no. How old’s she turning?

  – Oh, thirty-two. I don’t see why I always have to—

  – I thought Paul was thirty-two, Nora smirked.

  – I’m thirty!

  There was a hair in my mouthful of salad, strangling my tongue. I pulled it out: three inches of grey. My mother’s hair? Or one of my fathers, from the crown? I wondered what I’d eaten that had contained it. I wiped it on the bull grass.

  – I didn’t even know it was her birthday, I said.

  – Well, why did you ask how old she was turning then? said Paul.

  Mum folded her napkin.

  – You could have at least written a card. Paul works harder than any of you, and he found the time.

  I hadn’t written a card to Caroline this year either. That was okay – she never wrote to me. We hardly knew one another. Sometimes this struck me as absurd. How could you not know your own sister, in a family that had passed its entire childhood together in the same house? How could you feel a stranger to the people you had grown up with, the people who had known you all your life? Was it only me that felt this way, because I had missed out on all their earlier years? Or did we all feel like this, and did the degrees vary according to our ages? Sometimes I didn’t believe myself; sometimes I knew I was right because I’d never felt any other way.

  My family had always been there, like the skin on my back that I’d never got a proper look at.

  I wondered, as I got off the métro, if they’d bothered with the barbecue this year. Paul was the only one left.

  I pictured my father on the lawn, methodically feeding sticks to the barbecue. His surgeon’s hands, their lines etched white from so much washing in antiseptic, would be placing those sticks one by one in exactly the right place, his fingers searing in the flames.

  Style

  In a cashmere sweater the colour of morning clouds, Mme Durebex stood over me as I wrote out verbs for Laurent. I pulled in my chin to avoid smelling her breath. She had brought me up to the kitchen to check what I was doing before I left for the evening, and Laurent was down in his bedroom writing out his vocab. Watching me write, Mme Durebex wore an expression of confusion and horror that was becoming very familiar to me.

  – You must write clearly, Shona, she enunciated, as though I, too, were learning the verbs. Her bracelets rattled.

  – Not as if for an adult. Write in big, clear letters.

  I wrote:

  – What’s that? she said sharply.

  – French write very differently.

  – Oh, I’d better do it.

  She took the pen and wrote:

  Too baroque, I thought to myself.

  But from that day, to make myself understood, I began to change my handwriting. My ‘y’s and ‘g’s looped more and more extravagantly, till they overlapped their lines. My vowels developed frills; I began to cross my sevens and punctuate phone numbers. Gradually I cultivated the fussy elegance of French handwriting.

  If handwriting dresses what comes from our minds, the clothes on my body were already changing. At our first meeting, Mme Durebex’ sagacious Parisian appraisal would have revealed just another girl in the casual chic worn by most people my age: oversized 501s, thick-soled shoes, baseball jacket of dark wool. My last op-shop skirt from Sydney had worn out, my psychedelic shirts had been replaced by one of denim and one of corduroy. I had sold my fringed suede jacket to a backpacker in Barcelona.

  In Sydney I’d looked louder, I’d sounded more vulgar. I’d looked and sounded like most people I knew there. The same sort of people probably lived here, but they were hidden from me. My Sydney was loud; Paris more crowded, more conservative. I felt too powerless in Paris, too isolated, to assert my personality through clothes. The mere fact of being an Australian in Paris was an alternative lifestyle. I was finding freedom in anonymity.

  Mme Durebex disappeared, saying she was getting something for me, and I finished writing the verbs in my version of the French way.

  Suddenly, a screech from Laurent shot up the stairs:

  – Maman! Shona wants me to tear a page from my book! Maman!

  I looked up in surprise.

  – He wrote his vocab in the wrong section, I tried to explain to Mme Durebex, who had returned to the kitchen with a large sausage bag.

  The clunk of a key in the front door extinguished Laurent’s screeching. I heard the slow tramp tramp of the father coming up the stairs. I felt him pass on the landing, but did not turn.

  Mme Durebex hefted the sausage bag onto the kitchen table.

  – Voilà, Shona, she beamed. I made up a bag of clothes for you.

  Out came a shirt and skirt. I turned up my nose.

  – I never wear brown.

  She burrowed deeper into the bag. I accepted a white blouse. There was a tailored camel-coloured jacket that might be warm. I took it, wondering if I would ever feel comfortable in it. I had a rush of guilt at all I was refusing and thanked Mme Durebex profusely.

  Perplexed, she looked from the sports shirt in her hands back to me.

  – Don’t you like Lacoste? You can wear it under a jumper. Very well. C’est pas la peine.

  Laurent started to scream again. Mme Durebex pushed the clothes back into the bag with an apologetic, Oh, that’s hideous.

  Her embarrassment soothed mine. Mme Durebex had all the presumptions of a rich person but none of the aplomb with which to carry them.

  – I’ll give them to Nadenne’s wife, she said.

  She clacked down the stairs to the bedroom. Laurent was making sure I could hear everything.

  – But she wants me to tear my book!

  – Shona knows what she’s doing. If she says that, she’s right.

  Did I really look like some waif in rags? The camel jacket made me feel like a middle-aged woman. I imagined what Matthew would say: You look so North Shore.

  But that guy was appreciating me. He’d run up the platform to get into the same carriage as me. We wobbled opposite one another on the fold-out seats next to the doors. I tilted my head to the glass so I could check my appearance, give him a view of the best angle, watch the lights curve in the tunnel ahead, and watch his reflection.

  His dark eyes wandered the carriage and came back to rest on me. He sat with his legs loosely apart and I could make out every bone in his knees through the worn fabric of his jeans. He wore a thigh-length leather jacket just like the one Matthew used to wear, and a gold hoop in one ear.

  Too cautious, I watched his reflection while he looked directly at me. I bet Matthew was with someone else now. Incapable of being alone, I thought contemptuously. But where was my affair? Paris must be très romantic, Nora had written. What about all those cute French boys?

  This one caught my eye on him in the window. I rearranged the camel jacket across my lap and pulled my hair back, trying to ignore those moist eyelids and long lashes. He took off his jacket and imitated me, grinning. Wide, lazy mouth.

  I got off at Gambetta, though I could have taken the métro two stops further. Paris is not romantic, I had written back to Nora, for an old cynic like me. Just another b
ig city, beautiful, and full of lonely people.

  The net curtain behind the concierge’s door twitched as I limped through the entrance. A poodle’s face pressed against the glass in imitation of its mistress above. I took off my shoes and socks as soon as I got into my room. They were Matthew’s socks. He had lots of pairs, all the same thick undyed wool. I dabbed the blister on my heel with tea-tree oil and put a pot of water on to boil.

  I watched evening activity move into the building opposite. There was a woman at a stove; two storeys above, the Vietnamese family were already eating their dinner. A window opened and a bag of food was deposited on the ledge outside – the same environmentally sound cooling system I used. Somebody was taking off their clothes. Below, the car park was gradually filling and a mist had covered the distant view, leaving only a band of lights, moving slowly – the périphérique.

  Matthew’s socks, drooped over the stepladder, were still warm when I put them back on. Summer and winter he wore these with walking boots and green King Gees, stiff with plaster. His T-shirts were so thin you could see the curve of his shoulder blades when he took a corner. He drove a ute with a floor covering of soyburger cartons, chisels, apple cores and damp towels. I hoisted myself in beside him and sat with my feet on the dashboard. The seat was always gritty with sand.

  When I first met him he was living with the girl called Shona. He said he’d never really loved her, but he didn’t move out of there for another three months.

  Matthew seemed rugged to me in those days. He was almost as old as my brother David, but he didn’t care about a mortgage and success. His hair was longish and unkempt, almost black, though it was a lot lighter when he washed it. His bottom lip was always cracked. He had a scathing and romantic view of the world, and he didn’t notice my flawed iris till we’d been sleeping together for six months. He didn’t like shaving, so I had permanent gravel rash. It’s your dry skin I’ve inherited, Mum, I would say at breakfast.

  There is nothing as exciting as illicit romance. Illicit anything got me excited, as long as somebody else instigated it. I got wet just kissing him in the kitchen before his girlfriend came home.