by Claire King
Although I landed in the soft flower beds I broke my right leg so badly that I still have the scar. The upside was that from then on the shutters remained permanently hooked back against the cottage wall. My parents put bars up and hung a thin pair of curtains the colour of the fat ripe persimmons that shone like baubles on the tree in the garden every winter. By the time I was a teenager the shutters had remained unmoved for so long that a family of bats had nested behind one of them, and occasionally on summer nights a dark little creature would flit into my room, circle for the duration of a held breath and leave.
I put my coffee cup down in the grass and stretched out my legs into the sunlight, traced the jagged line across my shin, pearly pink against the summer-darkened skin. They say you heal more efficiently as a child and the scars are all but invisible later in life, but that scar never faded. It has always been there to remind me. We imagine our memories to be ephemeral, yet in reality they’re as physical as the knitting of bone and the scarring of skin.
The towpath was empty, and still but for the forward movement of the water at the edge of my vision, the canal lucid again after the agitation of the August tourists. It was always the marker that I would soon be busy again after the empty summer months. The spring sun steals the first of my clients, a hopeful balm for weary hearts. It’s hard to be introspective with so much light, when the blue skies are beckoning you to the pavement cafés, the riverbanks and lidos. Then, at the height of summer, Toulouse empties out into the countryside, down to the fresh air of the Pyrenees and the coastal towns of Languedoc-Roussillon, west to the vineyards of Bordeaux or up into the cool gorges of the Auvergne. In place of the locals come tourists who abandon their cars and take to their feet in the city searching out the culture and gastronomy of La Ville Rose, or to barges and boats churning up the green waters of the Garonne and the Canal du Midi. My quiet corner of the canal becomes the backdrop to their holiday, some simply clicking my photo as they glide past, others waving hello, sensing how the water can be a conduit to immediate kinship. I always smile and wave back, it’s the easiest way in the world to share a little happiness.
But this was September and the tourists had already returned to a different reality, taking their memories with them. I sat on the bank, looking out at the space they had left behind, and watching occasional leaves falling like words on deaf ears until my own words brought me back to my senses. It’s not what you think. What did my subconscious know that I didn’t? I opened my notebook and got to work.
What is Amandine feeling? I wrote. Then I sat and stared at the words, thinking back on her visit, what she had said, what she had not, how she had looked me right in the eye, apparently fearless. Regret, perhaps? Scepticism? Loneliness? I tried them all on for size. Feelings still made sense to me back then, I could work with them like clay. But that morning nothing fit. Amandine Rousseau had sat with me for thirty minutes and had left me confused. I needed to see her again, and soon. Until then all I had were questions and cold coffee.
11
A paperback book, a little nest of hand-painted pottery dishes, a seashell, a photo-frame made of fine, sun-bleached driftwood. You paced the room, picking up objects, turning them in your hands and then replacing them. Two faces smiled out at you from the photograph, a man and a woman, as they were in that moment. Or as they seemed. Their smiles now looked fragile in your hand.
I realised you had been staring at the photograph for a long while, perhaps you could hear its echoes, your brow bearing its increasingly familiar furrows. These lines are new. They sit strangely on a face already weathered with sunbeam crow’s feet and the deeply etched valleys of long gone smiles. For now, they pass like ripples on water, the depth of your past defeating the torment of today. But how long will it be before the very essence of you is transformed before my eyes? What was it you saw? Were you remembering, or were you confused? I tried to bring you back gently. ‘It sounds as though you felt something from the day you met her,’ I said.
You looked at me in surprise and put the photograph down. ‘It was impossible not to,’ you said, your hand lingering on the edge of the shelf. ‘She told me she wanted to feel alive. Sometimes we don’t realise what we are wishing for.’
When we talk, these small, perfect truths swim up to the surface no matter how cloudy your memory. I thought of the flow of water in the canal, how eventually it all goes down to the sea. The waves and the tides and the pull of the moon. I raised my eyes to you and tried for a smile through long-spun breaths. You saw me then, saw everything I struggle to conceal. You knew what I needed even if you didn’t know why. Within moments you had pulled me to my feet and wrapped me in your embrace. I became tiny within the magnitude of you. I breathed you in as you lowered your face to mine. ‘Don’t be jealous, Chouette,’ you whispered. ‘I don’t want to hurt you.’
Rather than offer reassurances I said nothing. If I wait it out you often move on. You continued to gaze down at me, your frown deepening. I stiffened under your scrutiny, knowing I had to tread carefully. Your reaction to me wavers from day to day and minute to minute, hingeing on the tiniest details. I adjusted my body language – my face, the set of my hips, the fold of my arms – but whatever else you have lost, you still recognise shifting emotions no matter how hard I try to hide. I used to love the way you could see right through me but I could do without your perception these days. With neither truth nor memory to make sense of what you feel it has become the most volatile part of you. You tightened your grip on my arms and I could see your trust in me wavering.
Baptiste, I’m sorry. I used to say lies were for cowards but this has made liars of us all and I am the worst. If you can’t rely on those you love to be truthful, then who can you trust? With no words to make it better, I tilted my face for a kiss and thank goodness you responded. The roughness of your skin against mine pulled the blood to the surface, away from the hard knots tightening under my heart.
After I became Chouette you didn’t touch me for days. We had been one of those couples that held hands, that always kissed goodnight and good morning, and even years into our relationship, the bedroom was as much for sex as it was for sleeping. But that person was gone, and not only in name. There I was, your little Chouette, in your bed, and you weren’t sure what to do with me. You became shy and uncertain while I ached for your kiss, longed to feel the weight of you upon me, felt hollow without your constant desire.
When, finally, you took me in your arms again, you made love to me as though it were the first time. You gasped at my body as though you had never seen it before, traced it with your fingers as though mapping me out. ‘Is this OK?’ you asked me. ‘Do you like it when I touch you there? Tell me what you want.’ And I became nervous again, unsure if should do the things I knew you craved in case it seemed odd that a new lover could predict you that way. I resisted the temptation, falling instead, into my new role, and getting to know you all over again.
In a way, all of that was novel to us both. The first time around we had never had those delicate, trepidatious moments. The first time we lay together you were so certain of me, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. You had known me already for so long, seemed to have memorised the length and curve of me. You anticipated what I would like, how I wanted to be touched. You took my breath away. When I look back on those times it feels like another world, another me, another you. I ache for who we were, before I became unknown to you, and you to me. Now you keep your eyes closed when we make love and I know why that is. You can’t look at me because you are thinking about her.
Your eyes were closed then as we kissed. ‘I’m not jealous, Baptiste,’ I whispered into the crook of your neck. ‘I know there’s no need.’
Your hands slipped to my shoulders as you stepped back, holding me at arm’s length. I stood my ground, looking back into the plunging darkness of your eyes. You are still so handsome.
‘I should have married you,’ you said at last. Your chest rose and fell heavi
ly, your eyes looked as tired as mine felt.
‘Baptiste …’
But you had already moved on, distracted. Your voice became bright again. ‘Chouette, do you know who you look like?’
My heart jumped. I cursed the needling hope that refuses to die. ‘No, who?’ I said.
I had to drop my eyes from yours as you slid your hand behind my neck, your thumb soft against my cheek, and said, ‘Sophie. You look just like her.’
12
My father is deep in the sunflowers. I am still at a distance, watching his short figure rise and stoop. Even when he is fully upright I can still barely see him, just a flash of his grey cap above the bowed and desiccated flower heads. I am standing at the edge of the field, leaning on the warm skin of his rusting, duck-egg blue Citroën truck beside a large pile of stones, pink-grey against the clear skies. It could be any Sunday of my life from an age where I wasn’t even tall enough to see over the sunflowers, sent running over from the cottage by my mother to bring him back for lunch. But in my mind this scene is from that Indian summer, the warm September with the wind still in waiting.
‘Papa!’ I called. A hand rose up from the flowers.
‘Good morning, son,’ he called back, and then he was gone again.
People we love have patterns and habits that give our lives their unique form. It is what breaks us most when someone dies, the way they will never finish another sentence we start, never sharpen the blade of a knife before carving the meat, never again sit in their favourite chair and sigh just with the simple pleasure of a good day ended. The routine is over and we are reminded that ultimately we are all just the same, all trying to find meaning where there is none. My father looked for his in that field of sunflowers and had for as long as I can remember. It shaped me. I grew up thinking that was what made him happy. Only when I understood more about his past did I realise I was wrong.
My mother retired back in the eighties, the same year I left home for university. That summer my father’s absences became more noticeable than ever and my mother leaned on me for company. Leaving aside the fact that a teenage boy is no company for his retired mother, I worried what would happen in the autumn when I was no longer around. How lonely she would be.
‘Do you think we could persuade him to spend less time out there now you’re at home more?’ I asked, leaning across the kitchen table to where she was kneading dough.
She looked up. ‘No. And we shouldn’t try.’
‘Won’t you be lonely at home?’
‘I will find ways to live with it.’
‘I’m sure if you asked, he would understand,’ I said.
My mother had smiled at me. ‘It’s because I understand that I won’t ask,’ she said.
I was frustrated. What was it she understood about my father that I didn’t? This was a part of his character that evaded me.
‘How can he just abandon you like this?’ I said.
‘No.’ My mother put her small, strong hand over mine. ‘It’s just the opposite.’
‘Then what?’
‘I told you when your father came back he was a changed man. Everybody could see it. Everybody knew something happened while he was gone. But he wouldn’t talk about it, and whatever it was he seemed to have dealt with it in his own way.’ Her hand trembled, specks of flour dusting off on to my skin. ‘But once, just once, I glimpsed his demons, and after that I knew the best I could do was help him keep them locked away.’
Throughout the long years my parents tried to conceive, every time the blood came and my mother suffered the hopelessness of another barren month, my father supported her. He was like a star, she said, calm, unshakeable in his optimism and she in orbit around him. But then one night their suffering collided. They had been skiing at the small resort in the Pyrenees where they went every year. It had been a particularly glorious trip, perfect sunshine all week in deep winter-blue skies and full, thick snow on near-empty slopes. ‘We were like two birds,’ she said, ‘skimming over the mountains.’ But on the last evening of the holiday my mother came out of the restaurant bathroom with red eyes. Nothing was said, but although they had been ravenous neither of them could finish their meal. That night as soon as they closed themselves into the room of their chalet, locking the world away, he took hold of her. But this time he had no solace to offer, only regret. ‘None of this is your fault,’ he told her, ‘it’s mine. I can try and justify the things I have done, I can try and redeem myself, but I should have known there would be consequences. I accept them for myself, but I am so, so sorry that you are being punished too,’ and when he wept into her shoulder the pain was more terrible than any my mother had known. That was the night she decided to stop trying. She had always known the chances were slim, she was already in her forties and all her persistence was doing was destroying the man she loved. That was the end of the matter.
When I was born just a few months later, an orphan boy falling right into the arms of his wife, my father, until then a cheerful agnostic, was convinced that God himself had sent me. It was a message. A second chance. And he set about repaying his lost years, showing his gratitude and devotion in the best way he knew how. He didn’t start attending the village church, not beyond Christmas and Easter, because he didn’t want to have to explain his change of heart to people, so instead, on the foundations of a ruined barn in the middle of a field of sunflowers on the outskirts of the village, he began to build his own.
I looked out over the field towards my father and thought about what Amandine had said, how so many parents want their children to be happy, and yet fail to be happy themselves. I felt the breath knocked out of me at the thought of her and the rising anticipation of seeing her again the following day.
I bent to lift a rock and felt the pull of its weight in my lower back, a strain even for someone half my father’s age. Picking my way through the broad stems to the clearing, the scent of oil was thick in every breath. The seeds were ripe; it wouldn’t be long until the harvest and then the cutting down and the ploughing before the first frosts that would harden the earth and cause my father to stumble and trip over the stony ridges as he made his way to the chapel.
I put the rock down by his feet. ‘Good morning, Papa,’ I said. ‘These are heavy.’ We embraced briefly, and he pulled back to look at me, turning me through ninety degrees first so he didn’t have to squint up into the sun.
‘You look well,’ he said, then bent with a straight back, lifting the rock I had brought and bracing it against his chest. His sleeves were long and rolled up to the elbow, the skin of his forearms slack and liver-spotted although the tendons were taut. He set his legs further apart, rotating the rock through degrees and scowling at it. I winced at the sight, half expecting to hear his vertebrae crack under the weight. My father pushed the rock towards my chest. ‘I appreciate the offer,’ he said. ‘But humour me, please. Take it back.’
‘Really?’
‘Really. Sometimes there are things you just have to do yourself.’
I took it from him and laid it back on the ground at my own feet. Behind my father, the unfinished chapel stood in the clearing, open to the sky, with no roof or rafters although its walls had at last reached a height taller than a man all around. Taller than most men. The rocks tessellated beautifully, layers of large pearly pink stones interspersed with layers of smaller white oval pebbles. The white pebbles also bordered the tall thin windows on each side. Every one had been chosen carefully and every one placed just so. It was impossible to look at them directly. The reflected light from them was blinding.
‘You look like you could use a break,’ I said.
‘No thanks, Baptiste, I don’t have the time to rest. It’s not going to build itself, you know.’
‘How long do you need, I—’
‘How long do I need? A year, maybe two.’ He winked at me.
‘Perhaps just take a moment for a drink, Papa. Some sausage.’ I slipped my bag off my shoulder, but he waved me off.
&nb
sp; ‘Sausage! I bet it’s your mother that’s sent you with sausage. I can’t eat her sausage. It will spoil my lunch. What’s she cooking? Is it beef?’
I smiled. ‘She’s roasting a duck.’
His face creased with delight. ‘Wonderful! How long have I got?’
‘Maman says it’ll be ready in an hour,’ I said. ‘Let me help, Papa.’ I turned back for the road. ‘I’ll bring over more rocks for you.’
He put his hand on my arm. It was rough as sandpaper. I took hold of it in my own hand and turned it over. ‘Papa, you can’t continue like this. Look at you.’ Where the skin was not thickly calloused and yellow it was cracked and infected in places. He shrugged. ‘I’d love some gloves for Christmas.’
I sighed. ‘You know, Papa, you’re too old for this now. I know you’re still strong but you’re eighty-four. Maman says some days you can hardly walk for an hour after you get up in the morning. That your back aches but you refuse to see the doctor because you know exactly what he’ll say.’ A gust of wind blew across the field, stirring the heads of the flowers, blowing my hair into my eyes.
‘Your hair’s getting too long,’ my father said.
‘Papa,’ I said, ‘we really need to talk about this.’ I heard my voice pitch higher in exasperation. I sounded like a child, and indeed when he looked up at me what I saw in his eyes was the patience of a father. I slouched under his gaze.
‘We don’t give God our second best,’ he said quietly.
‘I can understand that,’ I said. ‘But what about Maman? She needs you. You’ve already given up half of your life for this. You were so busy being thankful for me when I was growing up that we hardly got to know each other. I missed you. And Maman must miss you too no matter how much of a brave face she puts on. She deserves more of your time.’