Back in the room, playing in a random fashion with my laptop, I remembered the restaurant Angela Lang had mentioned. I’d thought of going there, but Mazarine had shied away from the expense. I couldn’t get the name exactly, but found it noted in my phone: Obshchina. Typing it into Google, I peered at the screen, scrolled through the pages. There was no restaurant in London called anything like that, but there was something else. I went through Wikipedia, a few more entries, kept reading. I scanned Google images.
When my phone rang, I was looking through Google pictures of spectacular tattoos, landscapes covering whole bodies, backs displaying cities, towers, domes; kneecaps decorated with stars.
Mazarine said, ‘I’m downstairs.’
She was sitting in the foyer, leaning back in the chair, eyes half-closed. Her face was sunburned, her hair was tangled and sweaty, stuck to her forehead.
‘Quite a hill,’ she said.
‘Yeah. In the heat.’
She stood up, dark loops of sweat under her arms.
‘One of my sandals broke on the way.’ She lifted her foot, showed me the damaged sole hanging off. Her toes were dusty, and she had a couple of monster blisters.
My eyes burned. I was looking at her purple suitcase.
‘Let me help you with that,’ I said.
She disappeared into the bathroom and turned on the shower. The plumbing whispered and groaned, there was a distant clanking noise in the pipes. It was an old building, everything chintzy and kitsch, the furniture creaking and dusty.
The broken sandal lay beside her suitcase. I stood in the middle of the room, looking at her belongings, my eyes still prickling and stinging.
I opened the shutters; the sky had a bronze sheen, the city was indistinct in the heat and trembling air; there was no breeze, and a brown mist shrouded the horizon.
The bathroom door opened, she emerged, red-faced, her wet hair combed back. I sat on the bed and watched in silence as she rummaged for an adaptor, plugged in a hairdryer and blasted her hair into blonde disarray. She opened her suitcase, sniffed T-shirts, pulled one over her head.
‘I need a laundromat,’ she said, turning down her mouth, embarrassed.
‘Mazarine,’ I said eventually. My throat was dry, I felt weak with no air conditioner in the room and the heat pressing down on the airless city like a blanket.
She closed the suitcase and sat down beside me. I told her Maya had emailed, and what Sophie Greenaway had said.
‘I wonder. Mikail could have given Aiden the flash drive. You said he’s a software engineer, he would use encryption or whatever it was. It could have been him. Sophie described him as a jihadi.’
She was silent, smoothing her flying hair.
I added, ‘Mind you, the way she said it, I think she was just being careless and prejudiced. As in, calling everyone who’s Muslim a jihadi.’ I put my hand on her arm, wanting her to believe I didn’t share such automatic prejudice. ‘You know what I mean?’
‘Yes.’
‘There’s something else, the word Angela Lang used, Obshchina. I asked her at the time, did she mean a restaurant — half the cafés in Auckland have those ersatz names, you know, Iguacu and Euro and that — and she sort of laughed and said yes. But there’s no Obshchina restaurant in London. The word means “community”. But it’s also a word used for the Chechen Mafia.’
Mazarine lay down on her back, put an arm over her face.
‘I suppose it’s just a coincidence.’
‘Well. I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I met Emin at university, he barely talked about Chechnya, except as a place he’d left behind. But it had a pull on him, it was where he grew up, you know. It created conflict, because he thought about the place and I didn’t want to go near it, not that you could for years, it was so dangerous. Our agreement was he would never take the boys there. I took them to New Zealand so he couldn’t, but then they grew up. After a while, you can’t control what happens.’
I thought about it. ‘I wonder if Maya and Joe would go there.’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t think Joe would. Mikail, yes, he’s been to Grozny, years ago with Emin, and since. I tell you what, international marriages are not easy. You can’t agree where to live, where the kids should live. It’s really hard.’
‘I assume you still have the flash drive, by the way.’
‘Yes, I took it from the health club.’
A long silence. I stared at the ceiling.
‘If it was Mikail’s file, can you ask Emin about it?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘Because you don’t know—’
‘—what we’re getting into,’ she said.
‘Could Angela Lang have sought out Mikail, through Aiden, Maya, Joe?’
‘I don’t know. What about the man called Dominic?’
‘Sophie said he was the kind of person Angela lined up to get the blame.’
‘But for what?’
‘Perhaps he really is dead. Perhaps he did get the blame.’
‘It sounds unreal, like a story, a fiction.’
We were silent, thinking.
‘Sometimes I don’t even know if I’m real. I had that shrink for a while. I asked him, Do you think I exist?’
‘What did he say?’
‘He neither confirmed nor denied.’
Mazarine gave a sideways look, mildly amused.
‘I said to him, Sometimes I hardly know whether the things I’m telling you are real, or whether it’s just a long story. I got very attached to him, he was a great guy, so I tried to string the story out, like the thousand and one nights. I was keeping him from terminating me. I tried to make my story a box set.’
‘Why did you go to a psychotherapist, Frances?’
‘I couldn’t reconcile my perceptions with my family’s. I still can’t. But you have to move on.’
‘So, you don’t see him anymore?’
‘No. But Mazarine, there’s something else. I saw Nick Oppenheimer in London, the man who broke into my house.’
Silence.
She said, ‘Surely not.’
‘It’s true, it was him.’
‘Could you be mistaken?’
‘No.’
‘What about your face problem, the blindness?’
I fidgeted, impatient. ‘That’s about visualising. If I know you well I recognise you. It was him.’
‘That’s … I don’t know.’
‘I tell you what I don’t know. Whether I got together with Nick before or after Maya met Joe.’
‘You don’t?’
‘No. It was around the same time. Maya hated Nick from the beginning, and also she told me she heard him speaking some foreign language that wasn’t his usual — English or Afrikaans.’
‘Now you are telling me a story.’
‘I thought she was making it up because she disliked him.’
‘Perhaps she inherited your talent. Makes a story out of everything. Makes the ordinary seem strange.’
‘But everything is strange. Life is definitely stranger than fiction. Seriously. I’m always editing real things out because they’re too weird to be plausible. Or too sensational.’
Another silence.
She said, ‘Perhaps I’m not real.’
I looked past her, at the room, the faded floral wallpaper, rickety furniture, ornate lamps, Mazarine’s suitcase on the floor, the messy pile of clothes, her poignant sandals. I faced her:
‘Mazarine. Remember I said I didn’t know how it could work, that you could be straight and then fall in love with someone who happened to be a woman.’
She raised her eyebrows, ironic.
‘I see now it can happen.’
Her expression, her eyes, the dark fleck in her iris. Behind her toughness, there was a faltering, a hesitation.
‘So, you believe me,’ she said, shrugging.
‘I have no choice. If it happens, you have to believe.’
‘I see.’
‘It’s a scienti
fic reality. Witnessed. It has to be recorded. In everything. In life, in art.’
‘I see,’ she repeated. Slightly glazed. A hand to her mouth, she touched her lower lip.
Putting my arms around her, in my mind so many things happened, real and unreal, perhaps it was a matter of different selves, one self kissed Mazarine, loved her, had looked past the frame and fallen in love with the essence of her and passion naturally followed, she happened to be a woman and I loved her, another self looked on, detached, would write the story, another registered the heat in the room and the breathless, grimy city outside, and saw the phantom image of Inez the prude flee with a shriek, shrivelling and disappearing like a streak of soot in the hot sky. Meanwhile Mazarine. Eyes, mouth, body, soul.
It was easy to love her, I loved her passionately, I had to believe it since it happened. I had no choice, it had to be recorded.
In bed with Mazarine, there were different selves, but in that moment, I was re-formed, my whole self came together. That’s how it felt. I was touched, connected, everything gathered up inside me, brought together, my face against hers, tangled in her blonde hair.
I slept and woke up in the faded light of the dusty room, naked in bed with Mazarine. Mazarine of the strong hands soft eyes mouth lips breasts thighs. I thought: No drawing a veil. No editing of reality, Inez-style. No airbrushing as per the Judge. No more the way I grew up, so many lies, so many things passed over in silence — all that denial. What I demand, what I fucking insist on, is the truth!
Then I jumped out of bed, pulled on my clothes and looked at her sleeping. The light falling in stripes through the shutters, her face on the pillow. What a secret, to have fallen in love with a woman.
I thought: Don’t worry. This is under control. No one will ever know.
EIGHTEEN
What did we do after that? After a scene so sexual and wanton and astonishing to me that I leapt away from it like a nervous cat, an act that had me tiptoeing around the room tidying and straightening, as edgy as a murderer ridding the room of evidence … Well, after what seemed an age she threw back the sheet and got out of bed, limped naked to the bathroom, all golden skin and messy blonde hair, emerged after another eon, rearranged herself and her belongings, put on a clean skirt and shirt and said, in a matter-of-fact tone, although looking off out the window, faintly shy, that she couldn’t do anything until she’d remedied the situation with her foot.
So we went shopping. Out into the crazy hot city, pushing our way through the crowds, her sandal tied up with a shoelace she’d borrowed from a pair of my trainers, Mazarine limping, her elbow sharply raised to ward off pickpockets, crowds of jostling youths, lines of insistent souvenir-sellers; forging ahead through a crush of Chinese tourists, she reached back and grabbed my hand and towed me. The air so thick and dirty you felt you could reach out your hand and touch it, gather it in.
Further down the hill, away from the crowds, she dragged me into a pharmacy and got the shop assistants running around, bringing special foot plasters, a padded bandage, ointment, Mazarine presenting her foot to a pinched and pretty girl with a skinny frame and bad teeth, who at first resisted and then relented and smiled, thawed by Mazarine’s frankness and perfect French.
With her foot swathed in some kind of therapeutic sock, we set off in search of new sandals.
‘Here,’ I kept saying. ‘What about here?’
She scowled at me. Kept shaking her head, No.
‘Why not?’ I persisted.
She finally muttered, ‘Too expensive.’ An angry red spot on her cheek.
Her bandage worked well and we covered a lot of ground, what with her refusing every shop I suggested. In the end, I made her go into a Zara and try on a pair of sandals that I thought were cheap and she considered flimsy and expensive beyond belief.
She went on frowning and stalling.
‘Right, I’m buying them,’ I said.
I queued to pay while she sat on the bench beside the clothes racks, absentmindedly fiddling with her bracelets. A moment of comedy, I thought: Who am I in this relationship? Mazarine with her blonde hair, her diet advice, her sensible nature, does that make her the girl?
I handed her the bag with the shoes.
She smiled, a greedy look, flirtatious almost, that made me think: Buy her things. She buckled the straps, stood up, checking in the mirror, this way and that.
‘You look gorgeous, Mazarine,’ I said. ‘No, you really do.’
She certainly looked off-duty, compared to the impression she’d given at our first meeting, when I’d arrived at her front door at dawn. Then she’d been smooth, formal, armoured against the world by her professional air, not to mention suspicious and unfriendly. Now her shirt needed an iron, the bandage on her foot was faintly tinged with city dust, and her hair was loose and flying around her face. Her smile cheered me, and then she frowned and looked embarrassed, and then she actually grinned. Honestly, Mazarine’s expressions …
But now she put her hand to her forehead.
‘What?’
‘Dying of hunger,’ she said.
We went to the grimiest and most dingy café she could find, and ordered a couple of ham and gruyère sandwiches. I kept saying, ‘Sure this one’s disgusting enough? Couldn’t we find a greasier spoon?’
‘Oh, go on, this is charming,’ she said.
‘It’s a charming dump.’
Mazarine high-minded, cleaning her glasses on the edge of her shirt. ‘It doesn’t grow on trees, you know.’
I smiled at her, because the way she came out with clichés was so droll, and said, ‘Don’t look, but a ghoul just came out of the kitchen.’
She put her hand on my arm, her cheeks flushed. ‘Shut up,’ she said.
We ate in silence. Through a bead curtain a fridge throbbed and leaked smelly water onto the floor. A dog passed the doorway, in its mouth a takeaway carton.
I showed her the treasured photo of Maya and me by the pool in the Dordogne, Maya aged about one and a half and sitting in a plastic box. I kept it in the side pocket of my bag. She took out her phone and let me look at the screensaver picture of Joe, and I didn’t tell her I’d already seen it while snooping around her things.
She touched her dry lips and said, ‘That photo of Maya, I have to confess I’ve seen it.’
‘How?’
‘I looked in your bag when you stayed with me. When you were in the shower.’
‘Why?’
‘You turned up out of the blue. I wanted to know who you were.’
‘And you rummaged through my stuff?’
‘Sorry.’
‘That’s unbelievable. I’m surprised at you. Shocked.’
We walked, her foot gave her trouble and I suggested an Uber, but she wasn’t having it.
‘Uber is evil,’ she said. ‘They don’t pay tax.’ Then she said, ‘Let’s get the Métro, go to the river. Sorry I looked through your bag. Don’t be annoyed.’
She kissed me on the temple.
The air had got hotter, we made slow progress, but there was nothing to hurry for, we were in limbo since Mazarine’s ex-husband wasn’t back in town until the next day and we had nowhere to go, no plan. We ended up near Notre Dame, walking among the tourists, watched over by armed soldiers.
Vans and buses full of police started driving past, there were sirens, crowds thickening, people running, and finally we came to a demonstration, protestors against proposed labour laws blocking an intersection, squads of cops, good-looking guys scowling under their caps and dressed in full riot gear, rubber vests, padding, shields, high boots. When a woman took a photo of them they shouted at her, threatening. One ran at her, and she smirked and ducked away into the crowd.
‘What arseholes,’ someone said in English, but perhaps their aggressive edginess was understandable, their faces were not covered; who knew where a photo could be shared these days. Perhaps some of them had seen the inside of the Bataclan nightclub after the terror attack, and what would that do to yo
u, seeing the slaughtered bodies of ninety young people?
So many tourists, such dense crowds, and always I was scanning for faces, knowing they would come back to me at night in the space between sleeping and waking; often I saw successions of faces I didn’t recognise, strangers recorded in my brain, yet once they’d surfaced they never reappeared, mug shots taken then discarded. I had an eye out for Nick Oppenheimer and I brooded over him, wondered. Maya said I’d invented him. That was her insult and her insight; it was her way of saying he was a creep and that I’d refused to see it, but what if she’d been on the edge of perceiving something else — that he’d invented himself? Created a version of himself in order to enter our lives. It was too fanciful, and yet.
Truth is so much stranger than fiction that it needs editing out sometimes, lest the story become implausible. (Lest it become one of Mazarine’s lurid thrillers.) This is true: once when I was walking on a steep Auckland street with the dog I tripped over his leash, went into a catastrophic stumble and eventually, unable to right myself, crashed to the ground in front of a woman pushing a child in a stroller. As I lay bleeding on the asphalt, this woman looked expressionlessly at me and went on pushing the buggy. No comment, no questions about my welfare, no surprise, nothing; the wheels slowly squeaking, she passed me and walked on up the hill. And when I sat up I found, crouching right next to me on the pavement, a baby possum, sick but alive, moving, panting, looking at me with round black eyes.
I’d been on my way to see Inez and the Judge, and when I arrived there, bleeding and limping, I told them about the woman, this weird, dead-eyed person who’d witnessed my tumble and simply walked on. The woman’s blankness occupied the whole anecdote, and when it came to the highly unusual fact of a baby possum in broad daylight on the pavement, so close to my fall I’d nearly squashed it, I simply couldn’t bring myself to mention it. It was so weird and random, so striking and at the same time irrelevant, I edited it out.
Sitting on a park bench near the Seine, I told Mazarine this story: this, I said, was what I meant about reality and fiction.
She was silent, then said, ‘You’d have to worry about the child.’
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