by Jo Mazelis
Jean does not want to think about that. He is angry with Louis. He understands that Louis has five daughters, that the eldest is now fourteen and becoming a beautiful young woman. He understands his fears, but that dead woman was a prostitute. Yes, her life is no less valuable, but that was the risk she took, wasn’t it? It went with the territory.
Thinking about this and unwilling to look at Louis, whose eyes seem to accuse him of some failure of courage or will, Jean turned his gaze towards the window at the front of the bar. The glass seemed even more fragile somehow, unable to quite hold at bay the blackness of the night. As he looked a figure ran past at speed, moving from right to left. A flash of scarlet from head to toe, white stripes marking out the pumping arms and legs, like diagrams designed to illustrate the workings of human locomotion.
It was the polite young African man who’d been in the bar a few days that week. The one who smiled so readily and so happily that you’d swear he’d never known a moment of pain or suffering his whole life. Jean did not have a clue as to why the young man was racing along the street outside his bar. He was dressed to go running, that was for sure, in his expensive track suit and flashy white and silver trainers. But Jean knew there were thousands, or more likely millions, of young people the world over who dressed like this, only to slouch on street corners and trudge to the employment exchange to draw their state benefit. At least one of them was getting some use out of the ergonomically built shoes, the carefully designed cloth which absorbed sweat and let your skin breathe and protected you from dangerous levels of ultra violet light.
But there again, Jean thought, who runs at night? And he remembered the fascist tendencies of a small minority of the town’s disenfranchised kids and the dripping silver swastika spray-painted on the railway bridge near the school. A swastika after what France had suffered during the war!
He kept his eyes on the window, imagining a mob of skinheads appearing, streaking across the night from right to left, a pack of filthy hounds in pursuit, hungry for any blood they deemed less pure than their own.
Jean kept a revolver hidden under the bar, loaded and ready. He imagined himself grabbing it, running out into the night. One warning shot should stop them, and if not? Well then he’d give the scum just what they deserved.
He frowned and tensed his muscles. He was no coward. But no one else ran past the window. A minute passed, then strolling peacefully by, with not a care in the world, went one of the waitresses from the café up the road. A skinny slightly bow-legged guy who was not much taller than her walked by her side with his hand around her waist measuring the dip and swell of her body. They stopped right in front of his window and began to kiss one another. Jean looked away.
‘I am sorry,’ Louis said. ‘You do not see the world as I see it. With a father’s eyes.’
Jean grunted and merely nodded. No point getting tangled up in the argument again. No point reminding Louis that he too was a father.
He looked out of the window again. The waitress and her lover had gone.
He felt tired suddenly, and wished with all his heart that he was young again.
‘Another beer?’ he asked Louis.
‘On the house?’
‘Yeah, on the house,’ Jean replied, and shrugged as if to show he didn’t care either way.
Finders Keepers
Suzette and Florian could hardly keep their hands off one another. They walked towards Suzette’s apartment in stops and starts. They were eager to get there, but somehow had to stop every few yards to kiss.
Florian’s kisses were every bit as good and tender as she remembered. And his eyes when he looked at her showed, she was certain, not only lust but something more, or at least the beginning of something more.
Suzette had wasted too many good years on that no good cop, Bertrand. She should have known he’d never leave his wife. All those lies about not even sleeping with her anymore, and the last Suzette had heard of him, his wife was pregnant again with their fourth child.
She had thought she was satisfied with the slow and secretive crumbs of happiness she’d got when she was with Bertrand. But they were nothing; as insubstantial as a communion wafer that melts on your tongue. It was either a morsel of rice paper or the body of Christ depending on your belief. When she had believed Bertrand’s words about love, about the new start they would make, about his divorce and his stories of the endless cold nights he spent sleeping on the sofa, she had seen their few brief moments together as a taste of what was to come. Now she saw things differently and thought ruefully of how she had been lied to. Fooled and used, distracted from what should have been the proper course of her life, namely to fall in love with a man nearer her own age, to get married and start a family of her own.
And now here was Florian – a man from the wrong side of the tracks, who had (or so she’d heard) a shady past – gazing at her with such honesty, who could kiss her in the middle of the street or openly hold her hand or squeeze her waist without looking over his shoulder, without an ounce of fear or guilt or regret.
They walked at a fast pace, their strides matching one another’s, their arms entangled. Stopped. Kissed. Walked. Stopped again.
It reminded Suzette of when she was thirteen or fourteen and had first discovered boys and along with boys her own first feelings of desire. How it felt in the pit of her stomach, flip-flopping. So much of the kissing and groping was conducted outdoors. In alleyways, under bridges, in graveyards, sitting on benches near the tennis courts, lying in fields near her house. The endless, endless kissing. The cool hands snaking clumsily over her back, over her ribs, her belly. Herself allowing just so much. Never going so far as taking any clothes off, but things got disarrayed, unclipped, tugged, unzipped, twisted. Poor boys, she thought, remembering how satisfying it had been to feel the hard press of them against her and how she would never ever touch them no matter how they begged and cajoled.
Kissing Florian on the street was like that. It was even better than that first night they’d got together.
They walked again. Stopped and kissed. Breathless.
‘Let’s go up there,’ she said and pointed to a narrow alleyway between a restaurant and a general store. The ground there was cobbled; a narrow drain ran down its centre like a vein. But as the two of them looked and were tempted, a rotund man in chef’s whites came out and threw a bucket of foamy greyish water onto the ground sending up a cloud of steam.
Suzette giggled. ‘Oop-la. Not such a good idea eh?’
‘You crazy girl,’ Florian said, and kissed her again.
They were only a few streets away from Suzette’s place. It normally only took her ten or fifteen minutes at most, but this walk had taken much longer, not that she was complaining.
As they passed the Café de Trois, Suzette noticed something draped over the geranium tubs outside. It was a white cardigan with small shell buttons. Very pretty. Someone had placed it on the plant as if it were a gift for whoever happened to be passing.
‘How strange,’ Suzette said, picking it up. It felt good in her hands, soft and natural. She, who had spent most of her young life in nasty squeaky, staticky acrylic sweaters, thought she knew fine wool when she saw it, knew for certain when she touched it.
The cardigan wasn’t damp or dirty and when she sniffed at it suspiciously, she only detected a lingering scent of something like Yves St Laurent’s Babydoll perfume. One of her favourite scents, but she could never afford it.
‘For me,’ she said and held it against herself so that Florian could see how pretty she would look in it.
‘For you,’ he said, confirming not only what she’d said, but also his perfectly matched moral system. Neither had any qualms about taking the cardigan. The orbit of a star had made a happy alignment that night, bringing Florian and Suzette together, and giving Suzette this beautiful gift. If he could find a general store open this late, Florian would buy a scratch card, his luck was obviously in.
Storytelling
As he walked back to the house, Scott was still preoccupied by thoughts of Aaron; of the future and (much as he tried to bat it away) the past.
He hadn’t told Marilyn what the social services had said about the choices concerning Aaron; the threat of a residential home, or the suggestion that either Aaron come to live with them, or that he and Marilyn move in with his parents and brother.
Marilyn worked as a part-time sub-editor for a tiny and increasingly embattled independent publishing company. The work at times frustrated her as she would have liked to be more involved with some of the decision making, but she was loyal and ambitious and determined to stick it out and make her mark.
‘I’ll give it another six months, then I’ll tell him that I want a promotion. I won’t insist on a pay rise, that’s not the point, but I just don’t think he is getting the best from me. He’s overlooking the fact that I have ideas and talent and, oh, just so much more to give.’
Scott had responded soothingly, although for himself he could not understand why anyone would ask for more responsibility without the reward of higher wages. Especially when her sub-editor’s salary was not much more than that of a hat-check girl or waitress. Less if you figured in tips.
But then Marilyn was different. She wrote poetry and strange little stories, some of which had been published here and there in what to him were obscure magazines that you never saw on sale anywhere. Except at those quirky independent bookshops she loved so much. Ramshackle places on beaten-down streets that usually sold dream-catchers and elaborate handcrafted jewellery and pottery alongside the books, and which had bulletin boards advertising book groups and classes in creative writing and shamanism, and had an in-house tarot reader.
Every time one of these independents went under Marilyn was as upset as if a beloved and eccentric aunt had died.
He did not understand that part of her life, but loved her for it all the same, and listened thoughtfully when she read one of her new poems to him and always tried to latch onto some particular phrase or description in order to make a positive comment about it.
She could trace almost every part of her life through her writing. It was all there, her childhood; memories of kindergarten, breaking her arm when she was seven and fell off her bike, falling in love the first time with a boy named Simon, her underage drinking, the way a black squirrel looked when she watched it fly and scamper through a leafless tree and how that had frightened her. The fright, she explained when he asked about it, was existentialist, she compared it to Munch’s painting of ‘The Scream’. The analogy didn’t help him much and some people might have found it inflated, pretentious, but he loved her so he put his cynicism aside. And he and his love for her and hers for him, their words, their lovemaking, all of it entered the pantheon of her life and experiences, was memorialised and fixed, and given a permanence in her writing that he sometimes found unnerving.
Perhaps, were it not for this confessional habit of hers, he might have confessed to her that strange dream or memory that persistently haunted him. The one that would not leave him, and found him forever standing malevolently and guiltily over his younger brother’s cot, his boyhood pillow in his hands, the Lone Ranger on his prancing horse about to gallop off to right wrongs and undo evil. What kind of story or poem would Marilyn have created out of that?
It was just as well he’d never told her. Just as he would not mention his bitter exchange with the strange young English woman.
Sleeping dogs are best left sleeping.
But sooner or later he would have to discuss what had been said about Aaron. About his future, their future.
As he neared the house, he saw that a light was still on in the front room though the hall was in darkness. He entered quietly, closing the front door carefully behind him and calling out in a soft voice, ‘Mar? Mar. It’s me.’
She did not answer. He could hear the sound of the TV and see a slit of pale yellow light under the door to the living room. He walked softly over and opened it. The TV screen glowed bright green and men raced over it like so many ants. A football match. He knew immediately that she must have fallen asleep on the couch, and sure enough, when he peered over its back, there she was curled up with the woollen throw half covering her body. Her lips were partly opened, and the sound of her breathing barely perceptible. She never snored, though at times she spoke in her sleep, giving vent to strange phrases and anxieties. Once he had heard her say in a dismayed voice ‘but the fish won’t drink lemonade’. In the morning he’d told her about it and recently, just a few days before they’d left for France, she’d heard that her poem, ‘The Fish Won’t Drink Lemonade’, had been accepted for publication in an anthology of poems for children.
He gazed at her, wondering whether to wake her so that she could get to bed and go to sleep again, or whether to leave her in peace. Gently he rearranged the throw so that it covered her shoulders, then he switched off the TV but even the sudden silence didn’t cause her to stir. He was not yet ready for bed himself and so he went through to the kitchen, poured himself a whisky, then sat drinking it at the table while he idly flicked through a collection of leaflets about places of interest in the region that the Clement family had left for them.
And while he did not think that Aaron would tolerate, let alone appreciate the medieval architecture and elaborate stone carvings on the many cathedrals, nor the war cemeteries, nor the interesting history of Joan of Arc and her battles with the English, he none the less read about them and imagined that at some future time he and Marilyn would come here again, unencumbered by duty and able to just be regular tourists. Unnoticed, ordinary, free.
He did not see what time it was and when Marilyn appeared blinking groggily at the doorway to the kitchen, with her hair awry and the throw over her shoulders, neither did she.
‘Come on,’ he said, and rose from his chair leaving the half-full glass on the table, and with his arms around her, the two of them went upstairs to bed.
Like Alice
Lucy was feeling angry at her lack of ability to handle even the simplest of situations. No wonder during the first few days of the holiday she had stuck to the safe routine of a day exploring followed by dinner at La Coquille Bleue under the watchful gaze of Madame Gallo and the beautiful blue-eyed dog.
She did not fully understand why she had followed the Canadian man. It had been stupid and embarrassing, but thank God, she would never, with luck, see him again.
And the old guy in the bar? Why had she flinched so obviously when he touched her arm? He had only meant to be kind. And the young African who had tried to strike up a conversation? She had a sense that she’d had an unpleasant expression on her face when he addressed her, that she had gaped at him, bug-eyed. But then what was she meant to do with all that information about cousins in Paris and aunts who were doctors in Camden Town. What was she meant to say, I went to Camden Lock market once? I have a doctor?
Her reaction to these men was to some extent due to her years in London. People there do not make contact with strangers so readily. Everyone has their guard up, a cold eye waiting for the fool who tries to chat on the bus. It was not like Glasgow, or the small town where she grew up.
And with her stupid bleached blonde hair and cotton dress, she probably looked more like bloody Alice in Wonderland than Catherine Deneuve or Brigit Bardot.
No more adventures. No more chasing after white rabbits, Canadian or otherwise. And no more diving into drink after drink as if they were the secret gateway to the sodding rabbit hole. Things went badly wrong for Alice every time she found something labelled ‘Eat me’ or ‘Drink me’. Not that Alice got drunk, but there was certainly a hallucinatory quality to much of Lewis Carroll’s famous work. Maybe in the morning everything that happened tonight would seem like a dream.
And Lucy was drunk. Not so drunk as to not even know that she was drunk, but enough to feel disorientated and confused about which way to walk.
She had hurried out of the bar and automatically turn
ed left. She had sensed the men gazing after her, as puzzled by her abrupt departure as they had been by her arrival, and so, because she didn’t want to appear lost or confused, she had hurried up the road so that she could no longer be seen from the window.
It was surprisingly dark out on the street, nearly all of the other bars and restaurants had closed for the night, so no light spilled invitingly from their interiors, and where earlier there’d been multi-coloured fairy lights strung up and lit on the awnings these were now switched off. And the pavements were not thronged with people ambling pleasantly about, and none of the outside tables at any of the cafés were occupied. No hubbub of voices filled the air, no music poured out from open doors. No one flew by on a bike, there were hardly any cars. And no taxis either.
Lucy stopped walking abruptly and thought about going back to the bar to ask for help. Her bag slipped from her shoulder, it wasn’t really the sort of bag you put over your shoulder, but swinging it in one hand seemed to risk having it snatched. And she knew that she was the sort of idiot who, in the event some guy on a motorbike grabbed her bag (she’d heard that this had happened in Rome. Or was it Paris?) would hang on instead of letting go, and would thus be dragged along in the bike’s wake and end up battered and torn as well as robbed.
She pulled her bag onto her shoulder and kept one hand on it, then realising that the longer she stood still the more she looked like she was either lost or a hooker, she continued on in the same direction and did not notice when her cardigan slipped from her shoulders. She only noticed that she shivered suddenly. ‘Someone walking on your grave’ people said if they detected such a shudder. Goosebumps sprang into life on her arms and neck and legs, tingling and unpleasant.
Just walk, she told herself. Nothing is going to happen.
She sensed something behind her. She was suddenly aware of someone running swiftly towards her. She did not so much hear footsteps exactly, but something alerted her, a movement in the air or some sort of sixth sense. It was far off but as it got a little nearer she faintly heard soft, fast footfalls, a swift rhythmic rustle of cloth. She did not turn around to look, but picked up her pace, tightened her grip on her bag and kept her head high, her back straight.