Mesmerised

by Michelle Shine

  I break into a run.

  When I return, Blanche is looking for me by the front door.

  ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘For a run, I needed to get some air.’

  I look down at myself. My shirt is hanging outside my trousers and my tie is askew. I can feel clammy perspiration sticking my hair to my brow.

  ‘You really should find the remedy for “acts strange at parties”. I suppose you’re going to ask if we can leave now.’

  She is right. I was just about to say ‘Can we go?’ But I change my mind instantly, and spend the rest of the evening trying to catch the attention of Georges as he ever so expertly avoids me.

  Later. In bed. Naked. Skin to skin. Floating. Blanche sleeps, back towards me. I move a lock of hair and kiss her shoulder.

  ‘I love you,’ I whisper.

  She moans. I think over the events of this year: Edouard Manet treating Victorine like his girlfriend and marrying Suzanne; meeting Blanche at the protest; Bella Laffaire; The Salon des Refusés; myriad patients; my political situation; Charcot’s voice – I’ve been advised you’re going away. I pull my body away from Blanche, slowly, gently, so as not to waken her. She moans again. I put one foot on the floor. She throws her body backwards, towards me, awake.

  ‘Paul,’ she says sleepily, watching me. ‘Come back to bed.’

  I don’t blow out the candle. I lie on my back. She’s in my arms. Her hair tickles my nose when I breathe. There is tension all over me as she sucks one of my nipples and plays with the other.

  I need to get back home. I need to start writing everything that has happened to me concerning the Faculty, the hospital and Bella Laffaire. I need to send this account to the journalist whose daughter was cured of cholera by homeopathy, along with my copy of the clinical report.

  ‘Blanche,’ I say to deter her.

  ‘What?’

  She lifts her head and looks at me with smoky eyes.

  ‘Nothing,’ I say.

  She smiles.

  I watch her kiss my chest. Feel her mouth on my belly. Feel the tension only where it’s meant to be.

  As soon as she is asleep, I leave her for the early hours on dark winter streets where Paris is like a magician looking over his shoulder checking-up on who sees how the tricks are performed.

  Voilà!

  Deep in the night, watching Paris with a sense that Paris also watches me. The heart of darkness, the truth scrabbling out from underground, rats that the journals convince are not real in Napoleon’s sparkling world. They exist. I hear them. They squeak, grind and hiss and run over my feet, press their fat bodies under my trouser hem like a quick caress in passing. I smell the sewers in their coats. Their red eyes meet mine. We share the same landscape. We are prey, haunted to seek out the solace of this nowhere time.

  The drunk at my feet rolls over into the gutter. An empty beer bottle follows him. His corpse-like pose represents the perfect example of a prize trick gone wrong. The tarts on their way home from hotels and the customers who would not pay for the whole night pass me by as if I am invisible or sidle up to me with their musk overpowered by cheap perfume.

  ‘Come on, try it.’ A particularly jaded one nudges me. ‘You never know, you might like it,’ she says, as if selling ice-cream.

  Voilà.

  The night itself is stiff in its near-frozen temperature. Hausmann’s roofs are like the hats that conjure doves. Paris’s body is ribbed with bridges, the Seine an icy vein. One solitary hansom jerks through the streets. A low-flying bat lands on the nose of the horse. If you painted that, they’d call it a fantasy, and yet I witness the phenomenal reality. The carriage passes, its passenger a solitary man dressed as a woman, who pulls his scarf across his face like a veil. His exposed eyes are laughing at me. Cutting winds, like the waves from a swordfight, lower my attention to the ground and blow me home.

  Voilà.

  The strange stillness I have come to associate with 78, rue du Faubourg St Denis is disturbed. Comforting sounds of mortality seep through its walls once more. I place my key in the lock. A baby cries. A door slams. A voice shouts, ‘Can’t you fucking shut that baby up?’ On entering, ‘No, I fucking can’t’, together with the percussion of continued banging on a wall. A dimmed oil lamp shakes on the ceiling and the crystals chime to the pounding of feet. I drag mine upstairs and mistrust what I see. There is light seeping from my apartment. I rub my eyes. It must be an illusion. The brightness must be coming from somewhere else and yet I can’t quite convince myself that there’s a moonstruck window in the roof that I have never noticed before. I slow my pace, afraid, stand still for a moment considering whether ghosts have taken over or men in white coats have come to take me away, but no, I push the door open fully.

  Et voilà.

  Mesmerised

  Indeterminate dates

  ‘The attacks of which I have been the object have broken the spring of life in me.’

  Edouard Manet

  He represents safekeeping in our community and therefore I should, but don’t, feel satisfaction at his presence. In fact, I feel quite the opposite and especially so because he is sitting behind my desk. He has even bought himself a cigar to mark the occasion. I am surprised he hasn’t planted a flag. I just stand there at the entrance watching him.

  ‘I knew you’d be out when I came,’ he says. ‘Yes, don’t think I don’t see you cavorting with women and getting drunk in the cafés. I’ve been on night duty half my life.’ He takes a long draw of tobacco and looks at its source with appreciation. I watch the curls of smoke form a cumulus. He nods. ‘I know you Gachet. I know you better than you know yourself. I know the subversive company you keep. I know the strange receptacles I find in your rubbish and I know what you are plotting.’

  He leans back in the chair, looks around and points his cigar at the Manet. ‘Degenerate art goes well with quack medicine, does it?’ he asks.

  ‘Why don’t you come to the point?’ I answer the question with a question, an Aurum characteristic – gold – a remedy for depression and suicidal tendencies. I remind myself that doing a thing once does not in itself infer the need for any medication.

  Fornier sits forward. ‘The point is that I’m arresting you for the murder of Philip Breton.’

  I go and sit on the sofa by the fireplace, stunned. Fornier, whose waist has expanded to fill the whole of my office chair, hauls himself out of the seat. He comes and stands beside me, blowing acrid smoke at me like a form of punishment.

  ‘Aren’t you going to say something, a man like you, so devious and clever?’

  Elbows on my knees, I clasp my hands. I sense that he wants me to look up at him. I fix firmly on the floor.

  ‘Well, you’d better get up then,’ he prods, throwing his cigar into the grate.

  I think I should run but as soon as I rise from the chair, Fornier is upon me, turning me to face away from him, pinning me up against the wall, knocking the Dejeuner sideways, pulling my upper arms to bring my hands behind my back. My cheek is squashed next to the painting, cold metal twisting the skin at my wrists.

  ‘Start walking,’ he commands, extinguishing the light, shutting the door.

  By the stairs, I almost trip, unable to steady myself. My heart rate accelerates and I can feel the blood rushing to my face. I manage to gain my composure and remain still for a few seconds in the dark, knowing that if I don’t move soon I will probably get pushed.

  ‘Go on, I’m going to enjoy this,’ Fornier says, with a shove.

  I go slowly, concentrating hard on my feet in relation to the stairs and jamming my body into the banisters for support. I hear the gruff strike of a match behind me. Fornier sweeps down to my side and grabs my elbow. I get into a rhythm with my feet.

  The cold air outside is sobering. An infantile moon is shy tonight. The street is ghostly, empty but for the sense of presence that lurks in shadows thrown by streetlamps.

  ‘How long ago? And where did you find Monsieur Breton’s body?
’ I ask. My voice gets entangled with an owl’s warning note. Fornier propels me along the road.

  ‘Don’t ask questions. We have proof that it’s you.’

  ‘This is ludicrous. You can’t have proof. There is no proof. I didn’t do it.’

  ‘Tell that to your fellow inmates. I have it on good word that you won’t be having your say in a court of law.’ Fornier chuckles.

  Outcasts from society hear this I am sure, from their homes in doorways and alleyways and peeping out of secret passageways that lead to vaults underground. They keep me company, even though they hide.

  ‘The truth will come out,’ I say.

  ‘You give me the creeps,’ he replies. ‘A man like you needs to be put away.’

  Being taken in the early hours I am spared a real audience of people standing shoulder-to-shoulder, spitting and gossiping, as they line the road. There are no witnesses to my disappearance, credible or otherwise, which is obviously the reason they have chosen to arrest me at night.

  ‘You might call yourself a policeman, but despite your petty self-righteousness, you stoop low, Fornier, very low.’

  He swings me round and hits me in the mouth. I almost topple like a drunk but manage to catch myself as the stars on this clear night jump into my eyes. A corner of my lip widens painfully. I get a sense of the fragility of my gaping flesh and wish to protect it. I taste iron. Blood coats my chin. A swelling grows like an island in a red sea. Inspector Fornier pushes me on.

  I’m in a cell, on the floor. My lip has dried to a crust. There is dust in my mouth and a wound that could turn septic. I’m craving water, thirsty for my own saliva. Grit sticks to the walls of my windpipe. I swallow, but the irritant persists. Coughing. Unable to clear the airway. Coughing. My eyes bulge. Coughing. My bruised cheek bangs against a surface that’s as rough as a barber’s itch. I stop coughing. My arms are tied behind me in a single clipped wing. An aural snap. The crackle of a flare. The glow of a match. Beside me, an old boot with holes nudges my naked wrist. Brown leather, bleached and softened by wear, no laces. A pale ankle caked in grime. The light goes out.

  ‘They put you here when they want to forget you exist,’ says a gravelly voice, surprisingly female.

  I don’t answer; can’t answer. The back of my tongue sticks to my palette.

  ‘Are you dumb? Have they pulled out your tongue? Hum, I’ve seen them do that before.’

  I hear the flap-flap as the boot moves away. Quite unbelievably, I fall asleep, wakening to a grey triangle of light on the floor.

  ‘I’ve been watching you all night. Gave me something to do,’ my cellmate says.

  The damp is palpable. Black walls glisten with moisture and are decorated with moss. I hear the drip, drip of water into a cask. Ironically, parched is an understatement. I can’t even swallow. ‘Water,’ I try to say but only a low, hoarse moan comes out.

  She moves across the cell in her calico skirt that has no petticoat, and is holey like mouse-nibbled cheese. There is something wrong with one of her hips. She stands before the cask and beside her a small pool on the floor generates a stench of ammonia, with fetid water darkening the ground. She takes a ladle full of liquid from the barrel and seesaws over to me.

  ‘Just lick your lips,’ she says, pouring the contents over my head. ‘You’ll die if you gulp it, and vomit violently from a few sips.’

  She waits a few moments, standing in the light.

  ‘Let’s get you up now,’ she says.

  Her legs are splayed over me. She has her hands in my armpits. She pulls but I am not moving. She lowers her grasp to my waist and pulls harder. There is a crackle in her heavy breathing. ‘Aaargh,’ she yells. My back arches towards her. I bend my knees. I am on all fours now and my hands push into the floor so I can lift up my head.

  ‘Well,’ she says, pointing. ‘You’ll be more comfortable over there where there’s a load of straw.’

  You could say there is loads of straw in haystacks on the fields in Auvers in late summer. But this is hardly more than the amount of straw on the floor in Edouard‘s studio, a few wisps covered in a slimy, black substance.

  ‘Thank you,’ I manage to say, crawling towards it anyway.

  ‘You’re welcome, I like to help others,’ she says.

  Propped up against the wall with wet seeping through my skin, we sit on the straw facing each other. Our breakfast is some thin gruel smelling of old cheese and a strong broth of sour herbs.

  ‘Drink it,’ my cellmate advises when I screw up my face. ‘Eat and drink, you’ll need the strength. What they give you is safe.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I’ve been here a while. I’ve seen quite a lot of them, men like you. They come and go, sometimes overnight.’

  ‘What happens to them?’

  ‘Some die from the contaminated water. Some get out I suppose, else are tortured to death. I don’t like to think about it.’

  ‘And you, what about you? Why are you here and how have you survived?’

  Shadows from the bars across the windows fall across her face. Heavily lined as if she is very old but her eyes are clear and fiery and her smile belongs to someone much younger.

  ‘You certainly ask a lot of questions.’

  ‘I’m trained to.’

  ‘What are you trained in?’

  ‘Medicine.’

  ‘Well, I haven’t survived because of that,’ she spits into the middle distance, carefully avoiding our tatters of straw. ‘My own mother knew more than the doctors will ever know.’

  ‘Paul Gachet,’ I say, offering my hand.

  She grabs it. ‘Rose Martin. Protesting. I’m here for protesting. They think I don’t know what they’re up to, what goes on, but I know. I’ve got eyes. They can’t fool me. I’ve outsmarted them a number of times and they don’t like it.’ She rubs her thighs with her hands as if polishing her palms. ‘I was taught to read and I’ve read enough to know. I’m a political prisoner, that’s what I am. They can’t try me because I’ve done nothing wrong, but it doesn’t stop them from using their might. They want to keep me quiet so they lock me inside.’

  ‘I see. Look Rose,’ I say, feeling my bladder swell into that bearing down feeling, ‘Where can I, you know, urinate?’ I’m crossing my legs tightly.

  ‘In the barrel,’ Rose says. ‘And count yourself lucky that I didn’t let you drink from it.’

  Once there, I look over my shoulder.

  ‘Are you going to watch me?’ I say.

  ‘Yep,’ she chuckles. ‘It’s the only entertainment I get.’

  A musty offensive odour is coming from my hair. I’ve been trying to get away from it all morning.

  ‘You got nits?’ Rose asks. ‘They make you jumpy.’

  ‘Yes, and they can also make you peevish.’ I touch my lip. It’s sore and swollen but definitely healing.

  ‘Now that I come to think about it, that’s true, Jean had nits and he was always irritable – Jean being the boy next door when we were small. She scrubbed his flesh till it was raw and weeping, that woman who claimed to be his mum. So, I shouted across the road to her, “My mum thinks you’re making it worse”. She looked at me funny and ran inside like I was going to fly and hit her. I lied. My mum would never have passed judgement. She used to say, “poor woman, God hasn’t granted her an awful lot of sense but she’s doing the best she can”. It was the doctors who advised the baths.’

  ‘Do you get nits living here?’

  ‘Nah, what would they want me for, I’m covered in filth.’

  She scratches her head. ‘Am I irritable?’ she asks.

  Rose sharpens a pebble on the floor. She says it will come in useful but doesn’t say what for. The grating sound breaks up hours of silence. I sit inside a shadow with my arms around my knees, watching a fly crawl up the wall, wondering if it will fly away before reaching the arched ceiling. I’m practicing the preliminaries to meditation. It’s lethal for me to think, and in spite of my earnest efforts, tears r
oll down my face. I sniff and wipe my cheeks with my dirty hand.

  ‘What keeps you sane in here?’ I ask.

  ‘I’m safer here then I’ve ever been. No one tells me what not to think.’

  The fly disappears inside a crack. The grating sound starts to aggravate.

  ‘Can’t you stop doing that?’ I ask, my voice more aggressive than I mean it to be.

  ‘No, I need to finish. This is going to be an indispensable tool.’

  ‘But can you stop doing it anyway? The noise is playing on my nerves.’

  She carries on.

  Whereas before all my joints were stiff with aching, I get up from the floor with pliant limbs and march over to Rose. In one sweep I tear the stone away from her hand and aim it across the cell. It bounces off the wall and lands in the barrel with a plop.

  ‘You’re angry,’ she says.

  I have my hands on my hips and pant. ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I am very angry.’

  ‘I was angry too, but I’ve been here a long time.’

  ‘You make it sound like an epiphany.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘An inspiration, an illumination, the god-damn awakening!’

  Rose is quiet. She scrabbles on the floor for another stone.

  ‘Well?’ I scream at her.

  She looks up at me and says, ‘In a way it is.’

  I don’t like to be this person, too many raw moments are pregnant with self-pity. If it would do any good I would attack the door, screaming, ‘Fuck you, you bastards, this is not fair.’

  ‘This is not fair,’ I say, calmly.

  ‘I know.’

  Much later, with the onset of darkness without a moon, I ask, ‘How come you had a match when I first arrived?’

  ‘The guard who brings dinner dropped it one time.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Anything else you want to ask?’

  ‘Yes, actually, yes. Why aren’t you angry anymore?’