by Claire King
‘Put this away, then,’ she said.
I took the violin gently, and returned it to its case. When I had put it back down on the floor I let all my fingers rest back on the piano keyboard. The tension drained from me. It felt like coming in from a storm. I played her seven notes one last time. ‘You know, Amandine,’ I said, ‘I am going to find out what makes you happy. We’re going to find your resolution.’
Amandine tilted her head slightly and tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. She was about to say something, then the clock chimed and we both looked up, startled. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I have a client coming in fifteen minutes.’ It was a lie.
Amandine nodded, picking up her shoes and carrying them up into the wheelhouse. ‘You know, if I didn’t know you were a therapist I would never have guessed. You just don’t seem …’
‘Don’t seem what?’
‘Never mind,’ she said, pulling on her coat. ‘But let’s do something different next week. What about lunch?’
It wasn’t a bad idea. A change of scene might help us both. ‘Why not,’ I said. ‘I know a nice quiet place in Toulouse. Can you make it to the city centre for midday?’
Amandine looked pleased. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s a date.’
15
I came around the corner of the towpath and stopped dead. You were standing naked on the deck, silhouetted against an evening sky fading to violet and pink. You appeared perfectly yourself, tall and relaxed with your back to the towpath and your face turned downstream to where martins swooped over the water picking off insects that hovered above the surface, the fresh evening air blowing your hair around your neck. Yet I knew that you could not be yourself at that moment. Perhaps you were unsure who you were, or where, or why. A crack of conflict split my heart. When I moved forwards again you turned. ‘Chouette!’ you said, throwing your arms open in delight. I smiled and relaxed. You didn’t look like a man who had forgotten who he was, you looked like a boy who had remembered.
‘Aren’t you cold?’ I asked.
‘Cold?’ The question perplexed you, and you laughed. ‘It’s not cold. Come on up.’
I joined you on the deck, barefoot but pulling my coat tight around me. ‘Yes,’ you nodded, ‘the wind is coming. Don’t worry, it’ll blow straight through us, but you have to take your leaves off.’ You pushed the jacket off my shoulders and lay it over a chair, then teased my blouse from my waistband, your fingers gently twisting the buttons. I raised my arms above my head.
Soon I was trembling with cold. ‘Come here,’ you said, folding me into an embrace. You were surprisingly warm. I wrapped my arms around your back and lay my cheek against your chest, looking out over the fields and feeling the beat of life flowing through you. I ached to treasure that moment, tried to let go and inhabit it with all my heart, but I couldn’t. There was still daylight and we were standing naked on the deck of a houseboat. Even if your neighbours had already made it home we could expect the usual flurry of evening joggers on the towpath, and any minute now the pleasure barges would appear along the canal.
Almost every evening from spring to autumn they cruised past Candice, venturing just a little further downstream and then turning full circle before the lock and heading back up to Toulouse. I thought of them as safari boats, the tourists on board peering curiously into our windows, thirsty for a glimpse of our homes and our lives. You used to like it when they caught your eye and waved, but more and more often these days, they looked at us through the lenses of their cameras and their phones. When they did you laughed and called them the paparazzi, but I could see how it set you on edge. I had always wondered what they did with all those photos, photos that must have looked so beautiful but told such thin stories. If we didn’t go inside soon though, the photographs they took tonight would have some real flavour. The noise of a motor droned into earshot followed by a wash of panic over my skin.
As a girl, so I’ve been told, I would shed my clothes at every opportunity. There are no photographs of this phenomenon as my mother was somewhat prudish, but she insists it was so. Apparently our disagreement on this matter incited most of my tantrums as a toddler, not just at home but also in parks, at school and at other people’s houses, and the arguments continued far beyond that age. She said it took puberty for me to find the appropriate level of decorum. Only then did I learn to dress myself up with all the things that pleased her, and which came eventually to seem not just important but necessary. It started with clothes and haircuts, then diplomas and jobs, the right friends, the right boyfriends, the appropriate points of view. I could only go so far and I never got it quite right for either of us. What would my mother say if she were to see me like this now, a grown woman naked in public, embracing a naked man?
I cast my eyes to the only way down to the inside of the boat: the ladder on the canal side leading to the narrow footway around Candice’s edge. Perhaps there was just enough time to retain my dignity. Then I looked back up at your face. Calm. Happy. And I remembered for the first time in years how little any of it matters. How little any of it says about who we are. How little it takes to strip us back to nothing.
I turned my body towards the water, your hand cradling my hip, my arm around your waist. I felt the cool air skim across my skin and I waited for them to come.
16
The fire blazed in the bar, the fresh, damp logs crackling like autumn leaves. As I squeezed through the crush of people a couple bristled past me, arguing. Since the counter was already more crowded than I had seen it in weeks I slipped quickly into the table by the hearth where they had left their drinks unfinished. When Sophie appeared at my side she leaned down to give me a quick peck on the cheek, sloshed some red wine into a clean glass and took my order quickly. ‘Better make yourself comfortable,’ she said, whisking up what the arguing couple had left behind. ‘Jordi’s swamped.’
‘Right.’ Usually I was more than happy with time to stew in my own thoughts but recently they’d been so tangled that the more I tried and failed to unravel them, the more irritated I became. I needed a break from myself. I’d been hoping for company. Without Sophie to distract me I turned instead to observing the crowd of faces in the bar. Some looked familiar, others I was sure I had never seen before. Jordi’s was one of two bars that served the apartment blocks nearby and came to life in the summer months when he spread tables out on the pavement for those wanting to pause and enjoy the warm evenings on their way home. Since the nights had drawn in we had been back to just the regulars, but that night the weather had washed people in from their walk back from the metro, for fireside drinks that might well turn into dinner if they were tempted by the meaty smells coming from the kitchen. A weary-looking man wearing a felt hat wet with rain stood alone by the door, holding a pastis and staring up at the television. Two older men played dice at the table beyond the fire. A young couple on bar stools, their knees turned towards each other and interlocked, bent over their clasped hands, their drinks almost untouched on the bar beside them. One small room, full of other worlds.
Sophie returned eventually with a round tray weighed down by an array of dishes and began pushing aside the cruet and the bread basket to make room on the table. She swiped my fingers away as I tried to help. ‘Leave it to me,’ she said, deftly tessellating the seasonings for my steak tartare. The colours and scents were acid bright: the sour green and white of finely chopped cornichons and white onion, an egg yolk cracked into a shot glass, a small heap of vermillion spices, hot sauces, a steaming bowl of fine-cut frites. ‘There’s your man-food,’ she said. ‘Enjoy.’
I gave her leg a gentle poke with my elbow. ‘So sexist. I’d have expected better of you.’
Sophie rolled her eyes and shoved my shoulder. ‘Knock it off. Anyone would think you were my father.’
‘Oh, and ageist too. Is this how Jordi teaches you to treat his customers?’ I smiled up at her. ‘Or is it your idea of flirting?’
‘Baptiste, pack it in, I’m busy.’ She ref
illed my glass and scribbled on my tab. When she lifted her hand my kingfisher was there, cocking his head and looking at me askance.
As she turned away the fire billowed abruptly. I looked to the door to see a group of young men hustle in on a rush of chill air, broad rugby-playing types jostling and joking. Before they had even closed the door behind them their eyes had scanned the room and settled on Sophie. One of them raised a hand. An urge to reach an arm around Sophie’s waist and pull her closer rushed through me. What had got into me lately? Sophie had seen them too. ‘Later,’ she sang, and sidled over to greet them with kisses and smiles. I watched as she joined their huddle, slipping between them as they bent to kiss her cheeks. One of the men, not the tallest but the heaviest, was leaning too close and when she returned behind the bar to serve them drinks I saw her draw something on his place mat. I turned back to my dinner with an inexplicable pang of annoyance and devoted myself to the ceremony of mixing the steak tartar: seasoning the meat, folding in the pickles and spice, making the perfect mix of meat and vinegar, balancing the richness of the yolk with the heat of Tabasco. When it was perfect, I looked back up into the room. Sophie was busy, the men at the bar laughing amongst themselves. I began to eat slowly, letting my mind drift to other things.
‘You’re picking at your food.’ The whispered words were right by my ear. I snapped out of my reverie to find Sophie leaning over my shoulder. I had almost finished and the bar had emptied out. ‘Which means there’s something – or someone – on your mind,’ she said. ‘So who is it?’
I always kept client business strictly confidential and Sophie knew that. Occasionally I would tell her anonymous stories of clients long past, but I was careful with details and I didn’t make a habit of it. ‘I was just taking the time to enjoy my dinner, that’s all.’ I glanced off into the fire, but she stepped around the table, peering into my face and gave a triumphant smile.
‘You’re lying.’ Sophie slid into the chair opposite me. Her legs stretched out under the table, pushing against my own as she searched for free space. She let them rest there, and gave a sly smile. From the corner of my eye I could see one of the rugby-men watching her, the one who had been leaning over the bar. She followed my eye over to where he was standing, helped herself to one of my chips and made a show of eating it with great relish. When she turned her face back to mine it lit up in delight. ‘And you’re blushing, Baptiste.’
‘It’s the fire.’
‘Come on. Why does nobody tell me anything? What’s the word from your floating temple of happiness? Who’s been lying on your couch?’
I thought of Amandine, and felt the floor sway slightly beneath my feet. I laid down my fork. ‘I can’t say, sorry.’
‘I’ve never seen you like this.’ She rested a small hand delicately on my knee under the table and scrutinised my face. ‘Baptiste, are you in love with somebody?’ Her voice softened to a whisper. ‘Anyone I know?’
I looked at her bright teasing eyes and felt suddenly confused and defensive. ‘Absolutely not. What kind of question is that?’
She leaned across the table conspiratorially. I kept my eyes on hers and away from the low scoop of her neckline. ‘Perhaps you can’t spot an opportunity when it’s right in front of your eyes.’
‘You’re probably right,’ I said, ‘although not all opportunities should be taken.’
‘Love isn’t going to come and bite you in the arse, you know.’
‘I could say the same to you. Although I suspect you’d find a willing volunteer amongst that nice group of boys,’ I said.
‘Probably.’ She shrugged. ‘Look, all I’m saying is maybe you spend too much time intellectualising about making others happy and never thinking about yourself.’
‘I love my job,’ I said emphatically. ‘That’s who I am, Sophie.’
She could see she’d gone too far. ‘You’re right,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry. And I think it’s great that you spend your life trying to make people happier, it’s one of the things that makes you so different. But there’s more to you than what you do. There’s more to life than work. Aside from your job, who are you?’
I pointed to the kingfisher. ‘You know who I am,’ I said, ‘and I count myself lucky that I do too. Many people never find out who they are, and it wasn’t always the case for me either.’
Sophie straightened up, pushing a dark strand of hair back off her face. ‘Oh? So who were you before?’
I was born on a train. That’s another story, but it might explain why I never learned to drive a car. Which in turn means I regularly travel by rail, and one thing I’ve learned about trains is that no matter how set you are on your destination, it only takes one set of points to switch and you are veering off in an entirely new direction.
I was going to be an engineer. It was what my father had always told me I would be. It had seemed so obvious to him that I took it as a given. I asked myself a lot of questions about where I came from, but never thought to question where I was going. I would become the man my father had imagined I would be, I would have a good career and make my parents proud. I studied hard, won a place to study engineering in Toulouse, and my life would surely have continued on that track had I not dared to challenge Professor Arrouet.
The professor was notorious amongst my peers. They said he had been brilliant in his day, but now he was known only as a rite of passage for second-year students. He was easy to spot. He was the one for whom crowds of students would part as he strode through the corridors and campus grounds, lost in his own thoughts, muttering to himself. His lectures were dense and delivered at breakneck speed. He refused to repeat himself, his patience was brittle and beware the student who dared to ask a question, it could mark you out for the rest of the year. Students quickly learned to enter his tutorials with a thoroughly researched essay and all the facts at their fingertips. I had been warned. But I still hadn’t been prepared for that first one-to-one meeting with him, sitting in his dusty chamber, face to face across a scuffed wooden desk piled at either side with papers and books.
Although I was reading from my essay, my eyes were fixed on his pencil as he waved it round in tight circles as I spoke, urging me to move on, to speak faster and get it over with, my words accompanied by the perpetual tap of his foot. If that wasn’t enough, my concentration was also tested by the way he constantly looked from his notebook to his watch and back again. Never at me. I had never been treated in such a way, and found it incomprehensible. Finally I couldn’t help myself any longer. ‘Professor,’ I said, ‘is what I’m saying wrong, or am I just speaking too slowly for you?’
The professor stopped what he was doing and regarded me darkly. ‘If you are going to be insolent, Molino, you can leave.’
‘I don’t mean to be disrespectful,’ I said ‘but I am here to learn.’
The professor jabbed his pencil at my essay, snapping the sharp point off and splintering the wood. He glared at me from beneath dark, profuse brows. ‘Molino, what you have written will probably get you through your exams, but there is nothing to mark it out from every other student I see these days. You have summarised other people’s thinking in a satisfactory manner and nothing more. Nothing in this tells me you can think critically. There is, as usual, nothing extraordinary about this work. Just because I am obliged to listen to every one of you tell me the same thing, year in, year out, does not mean I’m obliged to pretend it is anything but dull.’ He leaned across his desk. ‘One day you will graduate, get on with your life and forget all this completely. I, on the other hand, am condemned to repeat the damn thing eternally. Time is frittered away as I live the same moment over and over with only the face changed. Molino, Badot, Thibaudeau … for twenty-five years the same thing over and over.’
I looked back at the professor. ‘Then why do it?’ I said.
The tapping foot stopped. For a moment there was a chill silence between us. ‘Because,’ he growled, ‘that’s my job.’
I wasn’t even twenty year
s old then. When you’re that young you’re certain that your own life is yours to direct. The idea of doing a job you hate for a quarter of a century seems ridiculous. Yet he was a fiercely intelligent man. I was bursting with questions. Why would he accept that situation? What would he rather be doing? What was stopping him? We said no more for seconds, minutes perhaps, as I stared at the professor and the professor scowled out of the window as though he had seen armies coming across the campus.
‘Twenty-five years,’ he said again, turning to face me. I felt myself somewhere between a child and an adult, intimidated by his status and yet firm in my own convictions.
‘What would you rather be doing instead?’
The professor laid his hands flat on the bare expanse of his desk and stared me hard in the eye.
‘Impertinent boy. What interest is that to you?’
I had to ask myself the same question. ‘I don’t really know why I’m here either,’ I said. ‘I never wanted to be an engineer. I’m more interested in people than things.’ The points had switched. My life was about to take a new direction and there was no going back. My father would be so disappointed.
But the professor had softened. ‘Too much to tell and no time to list it all,’ he said. ‘So much to learn, so much to see. What I don’t want to do is to give this tutorial one more time. I don’t want to go home one more evening to spend a thin hour watching my children bicker with each other followed by an evening trying to read while my wife watches television. As if we had time for television. As if we had half the time we need to live before we die.’
He took a pencil sharpener from his drawer and began twisting his pencil around in it in sharp, staccato movements, the curls of shavings spiralling into the wastepaper basket. A bead of sweat rolled over one eyebrow and down into his lashes. The professor wiped his eyes and checked his watch once more, saw our half-hour tutorial was done and sprang to his feet. Wrapping a scarf around his neck in an unwieldy tangle he threw open the door. On the chair in the hall sat round-faced Bertrand Pigal, who began to rise, but the professor rushed past him. Almost as an afterthought he shouted back, ‘Pigal! Go away and have a unique thought for once.’