by Jo Mazelis
Thus, muffled against all sound and worn out, she slept through all the early morning commotion of the rattling shutters being lifted, of the chairs being set out in the cafés, of wailing sirens and all the rest of the hullabaloo. She did not wake until almost twelve o’clock. Something she had not done for years which in itself made her suspect enchantment.
It was at the hairdressers, when she turned up for her appointment at three o’clock that afternoon that she heard of the young girl’s murder. Everyone was talking about it and making the connection with the previous murder.
Michelle sat quietly in her chair as Julianne painted the bluish-white dye onto the roots of her hair and talked to the other customers and stylists. Michelle tended to be silent amongst large groups of people preferring the intimacy of a one-on-one conversation. She was unable to relax and talk with the same ease as the women around her, but consoled herself with the idea that she learned much more by listening.
Now she discovered that the body of a young girl who had been brutally murdered had been found early that morning. Michelle was also shocked to realise that another murdered woman – a prostitute – had been a regular at this very salon, or at least she had been until perhaps two, maybe three years ago when she started to go rapidly downhill and no longer troubled to groom herself very much.
‘Well, I’m not going out after dark on my own,’ Julianne said. ‘Neither is Sophie.’
‘How old is Sophie now?’ the woman in the chair next to Michelle said, looking at Julianne in the large mirror that faced them.
‘Fifteen and thinks she knows it all.’
‘Oh you mustn’t let her out of your sight, not until he’s caught.’
Julianne expertly inserted the metal tip of the steel comb she was wielding under a strand of Michelle’s hair and flicked it over, before proceeding to paint more dye along the new parting.
‘Do they think it’s the same man? I mean is it a serial killer?’ Julianne said.
‘Oh, they won’t say, will they? That’s why we have to protect ourselves,’ the other hair stylist said, then as if to show her strength in this regard – her unassailable resolve – she picked up a large silver hairdryer with a long nozzle like a gun and switched it on, making such a noise that it stopped the conversation until she’d dried her customer’s hair.
When the hairdryer was switched off and it was quiet again, Michelle suddenly found herself speaking. She watched herself in the mirror as she did so, and it therefore seemed that it was her reflection that had made the decision to talk and had put the words she said in her mouth. ‘I think I saw something,’ she said.
Because of the sudden silence after the drone of the hairdryer, because it was the strangely timid Michelle Brandieu who had spoken and because of the words themselves, all eyes turned to the older woman and there was a moment of wordless surprise before all of the women began to talk at once.
‘What?’
‘Oh, my God!’
‘What did you see?’
‘You must tell the police!’
The babble of voices came at Michelle like so many shooting stars as she sat – a bright sun – at their centre.
‘What was it, Madame Brandieu?’
‘Do you want to use the phone? I could find the number for the local station.’
Michelle began to feel uncomfortable as the focus of so much attention. Besides which her hair was nowhere near finished and the white roots of her dyed black hair made her self-conscious about her age and dignity.
‘I will contact the police as soon as I leave here,’ she said, gazing resolutely at her reflection. ‘I do not think I should say any more, it may affect the investigation.’
Her formal words, spoken so primly, produced a sour atmosphere in the salon. The other women caught one another’s eyes, imparting sharp signals of frustration and annoyance.
As soon as Michelle left the remaining women began to talk about what she had said.
‘I wish she had told us what she saw.’
‘It was wrong of her not to tell us, we need to know – to protect ourselves, our daughters.’
Julianne pursed her lips and lifted a strand of her own long blonde hair in her left hand, studying it for signs of split ends. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said, ‘when the old sow said she saw something, she might mean, you know, she saw it in the stars or the cards. Or dreamt it. Otherwise wouldn’t she go straight to the cops?’
There was a silence as they absorbed this.
Then one woman spoke up, her voice quivering with indignation, ‘Well, I still think she could have told us what she saw, whatever it was, however she saw it,’ and all of them nodded in agreement.
Lexicon
Marilyn had woken up with words tumbling around her head as if she had been dreaming poetry. She kept a notebook next to the bed in which she recorded dreams, ideas, or as now, word sequences.
‘Late in the evening we cut through the graveyard,
laughing at nothing and stumbling over roots,
bones, branches, columbine.’
Columbine. Columbine, just a flower. Mentioned by Shakespeare. But now no longer simply a flower. Impossible to use the word without the other association obliterating its simple meaning. But nonetheless it was duly recorded.
Scott stirred beside her, so she turned to look at him.
Love, she thought, and wrote that down underneath the other words.
The house was quiet. Aaron must still be asleep. On waking he usually began the day with a sort of howl of protest. Where did that come from, that attention-demanding noise? Was it some terrible knowledge of himself as a creature locked forever in a mind deprived of true human communication? Or was it like the cry of a baby? An instinctual animal response on waking to find himself alone? No one would ever know. Not his mother, father or brother, nor Marilyn herself. All they knew was that the nerve-shattering sound must be attended to, that it wrenched one from sleep and sent one colliding towards the noise, soothing and shushing, until eventually, he shut up.
How different it must be when the cry is that of a baby, when the sleep-broken nights are rewarded with the looks and sounds of love, when the light of recognition begins to burn in the child’s eyes, when it smiles and gurgles and finally begins to speak.
Soon, if everything went okay, she would know exactly how it felt to be a mother.
She picked up her wrist watch and put it on before looking at the time. Almost nine o’clock. An alarmingly late hour for Aaron to still be asleep. It passed through her mind fleetingly that he was dead, and this idea inspired hardly any sorrow in her, which in its turn sickened her.
She reminded herself that thoughts are only thoughts; the brain an engine of conscious and unconscious needs, desires and wishes, tempered by a moral code that grew as much from nature as nurture.
She leaned over and kissed Scott, he responded by murmuring and making a vague blind kissing moue at the pillow.
‘Scott,’ she said in a low voice that was not quite a whisper, ‘wake up. It’s nine o’clock.’
He grunted then snuggled closer.
‘Scott! Aaron’s not awake.’
‘Good,’ he murmured. ‘Come here.’
‘Scott.’ She nudged him. ‘Go and check on Aaron!’
Groaning, he sat up and she watched as he lingered on the edge of the bed rubbing his head as if he was brushing leaves from it. Then he stood and pulled on a pair of cream-coloured chinos and trudged out of the bedroom calling ‘Aaron? Hey, Aaron? S’morning, Aaron.’
It was soothing to hear his voice as it travelled away from her. She found herself thinking of his voice as an arrow projected towards their shared future, as if he had gone out of the room to find their baby. She laid her palm over her stomach, it was still almost flat, the skin taut, and yet she sensed that under her hand, under the wall of muscle, deep within her, a new life was growing.
In seven more days they’d be packing their belongings into the hire car and setti
ng off for Paris and from there onto the plane that would take them home. Scott and Aaron’s parents would be at Ottawa Airport to meet them. They’d part company on the concourse, Aaron going home with his parents, while she and Scott, with sighs of guilty and exhausted relief, would go gratefully to their old car, their old life, their beautiful, unfettered freedom. And maybe, as they’d done before, they’d celebrate their release by going to an expensive French restaurant and ordering all that food they had been unable to have in France, and they’d pretend they were in Paris and Scott would suggest they have champagne and she’d say no and then she’d tell him about the baby.
She heard Scott running heavy-footed down the stairs, the squeak of his hand on the varnished banister and the sound of doors opening and closing downstairs. Then someone, it must have been Scott, criss-crossing the passageway. No more voices, just this frightening flurry of urgent movement.
Marilyn hurried out of bed and was pulling on her dressing gown when the footsteps pounded up the stairs again. Scott was at the bedroom door, wild-eyed and breathless.
‘He’s not here! I can’t find him.’
‘He must be here.’
‘I can’t find him.’
‘But he can’t get out, unless…’
‘I think I might have forgotten to lock the front door.’
‘Oh, God.’
Together they searched the house calling Aaron’s name over and over. They looked in wardrobes, under beds. Minutes ticked by. They checked the front door; it was unlocked and the key had been left in it. They looked hopefully out of the front windows thinking they might see Aaron standing resolutely at one of his favoured places on the street outside, but there was no sign of him. Then they hurriedly dressed and went in search of him.
Afterwards they considered that they should have headed in different directions, or that one of them should have stayed in the house in case he returned, but they were not quite thinking straight. Not then. It was only later that they came to this opinion, even though it was useless by then to think that if they’d been more analytical they’d have found him sooner.
At first they only walked the streets, turning this way and that, scanning the length of the side roads as they came to them. Without saying as much, both expected to find Aaron fixed to some spot, locked into the strange stillness that overcame him when he went out ‘to play’. But they also worried (though again neither of them spoke their fears aloud) that someone had found Aaron and done something to him. Their imaginations separately concocted a similar array of demons; men who might abuse or rape him, or youths who might taunt, torment and beat him. Others who might misunderstand his strange behaviour, who might accuse him of watching children in a playground, or women who thought he was stalking them. The possibilities were endless and awful.
After much fruitless searching they began to stop people in the street and ask if they had seen a tall, blond, young American man. They said American as it seemed to simplify the matter, and without wishing to split hairs, Canada was part of the North American continent. Scott said, ‘We’ve lost my brother, he is ill; he may appear strange or frightened.’ But people shook their heads or shrugged.
One suggested they should call the police. Another, a postman, took their cell-phone number and promised to ring if he saw him.
While they were doing this, they began to hear at first one, then two, then three distant sirens.
At first the noise did not register with either Scott or Marilyn. They were merely a part of the soundscape of a small town or big city, as unremarkable as a lorry’s air brakes, or car horns, or the rattling of a metal grille, or human noises; a cough, a shout, a sneeze, or music, angry rap spat out in fever-pitch French, blasting from a sleek black car with the windows down. Nothing to do with them, nothing to do with this urgent searching.
Then Scott stopped walking abruptly, caught Marilyn by the wrist and stopped her too. They gazed at one another as the last of the sirens licked at their ears, poured themselves through their ear canals, vibrated at high pitch on their ear drums where, instantly, intricate nerves sent the message of the sounds to their brains, and finally they understood the implications of the noise and what it might mean for Aaron.
‘Oh, Christ!’ Scott said.
Marilyn shook her head. ‘No. Oh God, no. It can’t be.’
Both momentarily pictured themselves arriving back at Ottawa, Scott’s mother and father standing at the arrivals gate, their faces scrubbed-looking, beaming smiles of welcome, their eyes searching at first cheerfully, then confusedly, then desperately for their baby boy.
And Scott saying, ‘Mum, Dad…’
He’d keep a tight hold of Marilyn’s hand as he said it. His palm would grow sweaty. He would hold her hand like a slick knot of bone and flesh; hold it so tightly it would hurt. But that wouldn’t matter because at least it would arrest his own hand’s palsied trembling.
Then Scott, his voice breaking, creaking and ragged would say, ‘We lost him. Mum, Dad, I’m so sorry.’
Those were the exact words ‘we lost him’. The phrase was precise, correct, having a double meaning and in this instance the two meanings collided. ‘We lost him’ as in we could not find him, and ‘we lost him’ as in he died.
Neither Scott nor Marilyn spoke for a moment; they just stared at one another as the siren faded away. Then Scott’s cell phone rang.
Later, remembering that moment, Marilyn would recall a line from a poem by Sylvia Plath, ‘the dead bell, the dead bell, somebody’s done for.’ Once it had been church bells that sounded the clamour of celebration and the call to worship. At other times they signalled warning. Now the sounding bells are everywhere; clanging, wailing, shrieking, electronically bleeping, ringing, challenging one another for precedence. Scott’s phone was ringing and it took a moment for him to register what the sound was. Fearfully he pulled it from his pocket. Who would be ringing him here and now? His parents? He damn well hoped not.
‘Hello?’
A stranger’s voice spoke to him.
‘Monsieur, it is the postman. We spoke a few minutes ago on the street?’
‘Yes, yes. I’m sorry, I’d forgotten.’
‘I think I may have found him…’
Dreamer
Joseph had woken in his hotel room with the phone call from the previous night in his mind in almost complete detail. He had been expecting the call, had been reassured by his teachers that, with his attendance record and exam results he was sure to be accepted at his choice of college and was certain to receive funding.
There had been moments when he’d accepted this possibility, but even more moments when he pushed the idea of such happiness away. ‘Hope makes us vulnerable; it weakens us when we must remain strong and resolute.’ He had read words to that effect long ago in a story in his own language. Or perhaps it had been something from Greek myth or even an American movie.
Whichever it was it seemed it no longer mattered. No need to caution his imagination any more, no need to picture himself working the land from sunrise to sunset and only then to barely scrape a living. However, as Joseph’s father worked at a bank and his mother was a schoolteacher, he asked himself why he imagined he could fall so low. Perhaps this had to do with how high he could dream. That, and a deep sense of his identity and history. African nations, no matter their long histories; the patterns of colonisation, independence and seemingly bright futures, could erupt into turmoil overnight. The same could befall European nations, or any country in the world for that matter, and yet somehow, in Joseph’s view, Africa felt more vulnerable.
Not that Joseph was really drawn to politics; instead his chosen profession of medicine demanded that he see neither skin colour, nor borders, nor religion, nor tribe, but only sick and injured people who needed his help.
His plan was three-fold; graduate from Medical School in London, then go (almost certainly) to America to further expand his practice and accumulate a decent amount of money, then lastly return home to
Africa and set up his own clinic in the small town where he grew up.
And yes, noble and self-sacrificing as these aims were, he also saw in the swirling snows of the glass globe of his dreams, a beautiful wife who was as intelligent and dedicated to her career as he was to his. He imagined her with a high proud forehead, sculpted cheekbones, gleaming, deep-set eyes and skin the colour of a betel nut. And he saw the children they would have, and his children’s children, and himself fifty or sixty years hence, his black hair transformed to a dignified smoky grey, sitting on the porch of their house overlooking the fields he owned, and in whose rich earth he nurtured grain and vegetables, flowers, horses, grandchildren. The orange sun setting, his work done.
While he lay in bed allowing the full tide of his dreams to wash over him, it occurred to him that they still might yet be dreams and so after checking the time and calculating the hour back home, he rang his mother just to be certain.
‘Mamma? Was I dreaming?’ he asked, and she laughed.
‘No, you weren’t dreaming, and by tonight half the town will know. Your uncle is writing about it for the newspaper. I gave him your graduation picture.’
‘Oh, I’m so happy; I don’t know what to do with myself.’
‘Read a book.’
‘I should, but, oh, I feel like running, dancing, singing.’
‘Read a book, Joseph.’
‘Ah, Mamma, you’re the best. Love you.’
They said their goodbyes and Joseph picked up the anatomy book he’d brought with him.
Learning never ceased. It only stopped when a person made it stop. Joseph would never stop. Never rest. In order to be a doctor his knowledge of the human body must be perfect. The human body was a country to be explored, mapped out, every bone and blood vessel and organ memorised by rote.
For purely arbitrary reasons, Joseph opens the book to those pages devoted to the workings of the throat and mouth. The book is not the kind of in-depth one a young medical student would consult, but one designed for the serious younger reader or lay person. He studies the full-colour diagram – mouthing the words which describe the parts; pharynx, oesophagus, tongue, epiglottis, hyoid bone, glottis, thyroid cartilage, vocal chords, trachea.