by Jo Mazelis
‘And where did you go?’
The question was put so pleasantly, in such a tone of innocent enquiry, that for a moment it seemed to Scott that he and the older man had just struck up a conversation in a bar.
‘Oh, to a couple of cafés on the waterfront. I’ve got to know a few people there. We’ve been coming for so many years.’
‘Ah, so you met up with friends – lady friends I suppose?’ A wink here from the detective. An unsettling and surely unusual signal from this quiet but hawkish man.
‘No. Not in the way you’re implying. My friends are both men and women. And besides all that, what has this to do with the car, with what happened this morning?’
‘We’re just trying to get a picture of the background to this morning,’ the woman cooed as if all of it were perfectly natural and reasonable.
‘But I don’t see…’
‘This matter will be cleared up with more haste if you would just allow us to do things our way, sir. A little cooperation is all we ask.’
Scott nodded, defeated.
‘So you met your old friends. Did you meet anyone new?’
Scott searched his memory of the night before last. There had been Suzette, the waitress, and that guy Florian. Also Therese, but she’d left early, and the bar owner and some regulars he was only on nodding terms with. But there had also been the English tourist, the bottle blonde.
‘Uh, not really. Oh, there was an English girl, we chatted for a while.’
‘An English girl? Oh, that must have been nice – to talk in your native tongue?’
‘Canada has two languages – English and French.’
‘Ah, but earlier you apologised for your difficulty with French. To confuse unhappy for unwell is not easy for someone who is fluent in French, is it?’
‘Look, I didn’t need to talk to her or whatever it is you’re implying. She came on to me. I guess she was lonely or whatever.’
‘Or unhappy?’ the woman officer said.
‘Or unwell?’ the man added.
They made quite a double act; the two of them in their funereal black with their quick-fire word games and grim irony all of which they mixed in with moments of beguiling friendliness.
Scott glared at them. He didn’t know what their game was, but he’d had enough.
‘You seem angry, sir,’ the woman said, and tilted her head a little at the neck in a spirit of sympathetic enquiry. ‘Would you like a drink, a coffee perhaps?’
Scott took a deep breath, nodded.
The plain-clothed man and woman left the room and he was left with the young policeman again and his shiny pink-faced supercilious silence.
The Quickening
She had never been left alone with Aaron at this time of day before. Her duties had always been nocturnal, taking over sole guardianship only when her husband’s younger brother was safely in the land of Nod, usually assisted by a mild sedative.
Aaron tended to pick up on people’s bad moods and other emotionally tense situations. It distressed him, which would in turn distress those who were trying to cope with him and so a vicious and self-perpetuating cycle was formed.
Physically Marilyn could not do anything to control Aaron. Her only way of dealing with any situation was to sedate him.
She had watched unbelieving as the police car drove off with Scott in the back seat. She did not understand why the man in the Renault had blocked their driveway that morning. It had seemed calculated, and then Scott had got so angry. It was almost as if the Renault driver knew Scott. As if their paths had crossed before and there was a score to settle. There was something in the air, she thought, something he was hiding from her. It had been so unlike Scott to forget to lock the door and remove the key the night before last. He must have been distracted. And then to be so desperate to return to Canada immediately, no matter the cost. Almost as if he was running away from something. But what? An affair? With the Renault driver’s wife? Or his daughter? Or sister? Or (terrible thought, but it had to be considered) with the man in the Renault himself?
Aaron was standing in the open archway that led into the kitchen, shifting his weight from one foot to the other and rocking from side to side in a stiff movement as if he were a mechanical tin soldier. His head was tilted back at the neck and his eyes were fixed on the white painted cornice.
Looking at him, Marilyn suddenly felt a cold wave of immense and seemingly endless loneliness.
If she had been entirely alone, she might have gone for a walk. She would stroll or even march through the streets. She could explore, daydream, find words in rhythmic patterns that matched each footfall.
But, she reminded herself, Scott would be back soon. It was all a terrible mistake.
Without thinking about it too much she filled a tumbler with water, opened the plastic bottle that contained Aaron’s medicine, slid one onto the palm of her hand and went to him.
He snatched the pill greedily and threw it into his mouth. She saw the hard lump of his Adam’s apple leap as he swallowed the dry white pill.
‘Water,’ she said making her tone deliberately firm.
Shaking his head to mean ‘no’, he nonetheless took the glass and swallowed all of it.
In twenty minutes he would begin to feel tired; she might succeed in getting him upstairs and into bed, but there was no way she could wrestle him into his pyjamas. Not that it mattered.
She checked her watch, just fifteen minutes had passed since Scott had gone and in another forty or so minutes their flight would begin its juddering acceleration along the runway before (and it was always, always a miracle to Marilyn) rising into the air and staying up there as it flew over fields and rivers and houses and seas until it landed in Toronto.
Twelve hours from now she and Scott should have been falling exhausted into their own double bed. Aaron would be back home with his parents. It would be over.
Out of the corner of her eye she noticed that the pace of Aaron’s rocking had slowed and its arc had narrowed. Now he was not so much shifting his weight from foot to foot as just swaying his upper body.
Marilyn knew that she was also prone to rocking movements; she had a tendency to do it while she was writing poetry, and Scott had teased her about it numerous times. But she was almost completely unaware of it. As unaware as a sleeper is of their snores. As unaware as a pregnant woman is of the life growing within her. Until there is movement – a quickening – and as yet there had been none.
In the midst of this fearful loneliness, a question came into Marilyn’s mind. The question was couched in a tone of wonderful simplicity and rationalisation. Why had she not told Scott that she was pregnant?
Superstition and some weird almost pagan sort of magical thinking. As if somehow by not speaking of it; by essentially sealing the news of it inside her mouth, she kept the baby safe. To speak of the growing foetus was to tempt fate.
She half remembered something she had read of superstitions among a certain African tribe. It was to do with the need to always claim that your child was the ugliest and most unappealing of babies, lest bragging about their beauty attracted the spite of gods and devils.
But why had she not told him?
And why was he so blind to the truth about her changing body?
Only once had he ever mentioned darkly that Aaron’s problems might be due to a dysfunctional genetic code. Dormant for generations, then springing into life because Aaron’s parents each carried the complementary distorting chromosomes. Scott had been lucky, but that did not mean he didn’t carry the gene.
That was all he said, then before she had a chance to ask questions, he had rapidly changed the subject. And as this had happened fairly early on in the relationship she was afraid that talk of Scott’s possible reproductive future was not a topic she should raise; talk of babies could scare a man off. And it was not only that; dwelling too much on Aaron’s problems might seem insensitive and cruel, and Scott often seemed so weighed down by Aaron, so burdened by a sha
red responsibility and guilt, that she did not talk about it, but waited for the time when he felt able to unburden himself. That time had not come, so a silence hovered between them, shielding and distorting their wishes, desires and fears.
But there again he had agreed when she said she was going to stop taking the pill. This had been in January, a few days after New Year. They had been lying in bed together early one morning; both of them were feeling particularly affectionate. He had said he was glad he’d found her, that he loved her optimism, her spirit, her seriousness and passion for poetry. He loved her wild red hair, her sexy ass, the way she smiled. She had paid him back in kind, telling him how he made her feel safe; that because he was so tall and she was so small it was as if they were different breeds of human, something like dogs and so she was a King Charles spaniel and he was an Afghan hound.
‘Hound?’ he’d said. ‘No, you’re wrong. I’m a wolf and I’m gonna eat you up. But first I’m going to see how ticklish you are…’
And he’d tickled her until tears were pouring down her face and after they grew quiet and lay staring at one another.
Then she’d said that she was going to stop taking the pill.
He nodded and murmured that it was a good idea.
Their conversation had not then gone on to consider other means of contraception, nor the realities and practicalities of being parents. Instead they had begun, for the second time that morning, to make love.
Now, as she remembered this, she realised that deep down she remained uncertain as to what Scott’s meaning had been, what his wishes were. There had been stories in the news around that time linking the pill to cancer; perhaps that was what he’d been thinking of. But she had immediately stopped taking the pill, and they had made love as before, without condoms, without a diaphragm, or sponge or spermicide.
And so here was the source of the silence. The beginnings of her secret. Maybe she was delaying telling him not from fear of tempting fate; not because she wanted to protect him from possible disappointment if she lost it, but so that it would be too far advanced to be stopped.
Aaron was now standing perfectly still. Marilyn stepped toward him. ‘Time for bed, Aaron.’
Immediately he commenced the energetic pace of his side-to-side rocking. She backed away again.
He had never really frightened her before, but now she found her heart was racing and her knees felt weak and rubbery. She could not cope. It was all too much.
She tipped another of Aaron’s pills onto her palm and offered it to him. Once more he snatched it up and threw it into his mouth hardly breaking the rhythm of his sideways swaying to do so.
Marilyn switched the kettle on, then she got her notebook from her purse, sat at the kitchen table and began to write. It was a way of escaping, of retreating from the present. Aaron rocked. He did it diligently, painstakingly, as if he were not swaying from side to side on the spot, but travelling in earnest along a lengthy and unforgiving road. As if at the journey’s end he’d get his reward.
Part Four
TWILIGHT
The French call dusk – “Entre chien et loup” (between the dog and the wolf).
While I thought that I was learning to live, I have been learning how to die.
Leonardo da Vinci
Out of the Corner of your Eye
Two figures lay on the bed under a single limp white sheet. Except for the man’s arm flung possessively around the woman’s shoulders, their bodies sprawled away from one another while their heads lolled together as if each depended on the other’s oxygen in order to breathe. The blinds were drawn but the afternoon light cut through at its edges sending forth bright shafts that illuminated certain objects. A bottle of amber-coloured perfume glowed as if lit from within. Opening her eyes, Suzette gazed at it, surprised by its sudden beauty.
Happiness can happen. It is possible even in this dying world. If happiness comes you should grab it with two hands, wrap your legs around it too, get rope and bind yourself to it.
This happiness which possessed her had a human form; a body and free will and a name – Florian.
It startled her to think that this feeling of happiness was somehow to do with love. It could not be love, it was far too soon. Lust then. Lust or passion which could, with time, develop into love. She began to consider these as algebraic sums; lust plus time equals love, lust plus sex plus talking multiplied by habit minus fear and distrust equals love.
Her sister, five years older than Suzette, had at the age of fourteen begun to waste hours in their shared room, lolling on her bed and filling out quizzes in Cosmopolitan magazine. Does he really love you? Are you his type of woman? How sexy are you?
Suzette, at nine, hated the stupid magazine because her sister no longer wanted to play with her, and she still hated it. She preferred Paris Match. But maybe this was why her sister had been happily married for the last twelve years (though the man she married had numerous affairs) while Suzette had only experienced three affairs with other women’s husbands and quite a few one-night stands and brief relationships, but nothing lasting and nothing that was purely her own.
As a child nearly everything she got was secondhand; her clothes, many of her toys, her books and even comics – all hand-me-downs. There was no element of choice, everything had been selected to her sister’s taste, so the clothes were inevitably pastel-coloured and had motifs of cute animals; kittens, puppies, baby elephants, or fussy bows and frills and flowers. And the toys were baby dolls, scaled-down ironing boards, irons and vacuum cleaners and nurses’ sets.
Suzette had been told she must be grateful for what she was given and she should be ashamed for complaining because there were girls her age in the orphanages and the slums who had nothing.
Florian had fallen asleep with his arm across her chest, his hand loosely cupping her right shoulder. She was trapped and could not move without disturbing him. Suzette had never before felt herself to be so happily imprisoned.
Making sense of all these feelings was impossible.
Suzette closed her eyes, lay there (Florian’s arm was heavy on the bones of her shoulder, sweat moistly gathered where their skin met) dreaming, thinking, feigning sleep for no audience except God (whom she hoped understood and forgave this mortal sin).
She did not hear any footfalls on the stairs, no shuffling of feet in the hallway outside her flat and, if she had, nothing would have changed. Only the neighbours passing by, only the sounds of an innocent day.
The knock at the door was a surprise.
Two knocks, the sort made delicately with fisted knuckles on the door panels. The echoing sound of living bone on dry wood.
One. Two.
Suzette tried to lift Florian’s arm with her right hand, but he held her even tighter.
Two knocks sounded at the door again.
Suzette wriggled free by twisting herself down and under his arm.
She wriggled into her black slip, went to the door and opened it a little so that her partially dressed body and the room beyond were hidden behind it. She expected to see Madame Sardou from the flat downstairs, or possibly someone from the bar with a message for her to come into work earlier or later or not at all. It crossed her mind that it could be her mother paying a surprise visit and she would have to pretend that she was ill and not let her mother in. Not that her mother ever paid Suzette surprise visits. Her mother expected certain courtesies when she paid a call: Suzette should be demurely dressed, the flat cleaned and furniture polished, shop flowers arranged in clean vases should be set about the room, the pot-pourri should be fresh and not dusty. Her mother liked English tea served in cups and saucers with cream provided in a matching jug. Such affectations. None of which had existed until Suzette’s father had died and her mother briefly dated a retired English stockbroker who had bought a timber framed Normandy farmhouse which he was renovating. He loved everything French, or so he said, which did not stop Suzette’s mother from adopting these weird English tics. When he left
her mother for a much younger woman the affectations seemed to increase in direct relationship to her self pity – as if she had lost him by not being English enough.
But it was not her mother at the door, or anyone from the bar, nor Madame Sardou. It was a man dressed in jeans, with a green polo shirt tucked in the waistband and dark patches of sweat under his armpits.
‘Florian?’ he said, trying to peer beyond Suzette and into the room. ‘I’m looking for Florian.’
In an automatic gesture, Suzette turned in the direction the man was looking.
‘Florian?’ she said.
Then suddenly she was brushed aside as the man pushed open the door and strode into the room.
Florian was awake and struggling to sit up.
Two more men followed quickly on the first man’s heels.
Then one of them spoke, his voice harsh and threatening, ‘Florian Lebrun, I am arresting you on suspicion of murder.’
The voice was like one that comes out of a dream, or from a television set just at the point when, bored, you looked away from the screen, so she was uncertain which of the three had said it.
Florian looked bewildered, frightened, he was now sitting on the edge of the bed with his feet on the floor, the sheet covering his groin.
‘No,’ Suzette said and the sound of her voice surprised her; such a broken wail.
‘Get up!’ the man ordered.
‘No,’ Suzette said in her new strangely dramatic voice and she began to walk in Florian’s direction. She took two steps and then one of the other men roughly grabbed her from behind and held her so that her arms were pinned against her body. She was aware of her vulnerability; the slip she was wearing barely covered her. Her mind skittered over the terrible things that might happen. The irreversible things – Irreversible like that film with the nine-minute rape scene – that film she wished she’d never seen.
Florian was now standing up; naked, exposed.
‘I’ve done nothing,’ he was saying. ‘I’m clean!’