by Claire King
With every one of these moments I feel myself change a little, the firing of neurons, the chemical pathways, the memory-makers making me someone different. The shifting DNA of our life together. You shared it with me for a while, but your memories were never identical to mine even at their birth and they’ve been diverging ever since.
Your brow was furrowed. ‘What were we talking about?’ you said.
‘Candice, the sea, your stories …’
‘Oh,’ you said. ‘The water is so vague about these things.’ You looked out over the decks to the canal curving away, to the towpath, the tall trees and the high wall that hides the world beyond, screwing up your eyes as if searching your mind for something you’re sure used to be there, like a mis-shelved book. ‘So are we on holiday?’
‘We’re on Candice,’ I said again. I knew I didn’t have much time to help you find yourself again before you became frightened. I had to find a hook. ‘I’ll never forget that story you told me about how you came to be here,’ I said, ‘after that day in September, when you lived in the Mirail.’
You looked at me anxiously. I flicked through the notebook, it was in there somewhere. ‘Your windows were broken,’ I said, rifling through the pages. ‘Yes. Here it is.’ There is the sketch, an old man in a park, holding a dog and staring into the sky.
‘Oh, yes,’ you said, reaching a finger out to touch the drawing. ‘They flew planes into buildings. My apartment exploded. I never went back.’
19
I always sat by the windows in that place, craving the light and the open space beyond the apartment. It was stuffy by the smeared glass of the east window where I bent over the table studying my notes, but it was too early to open the windows yet. The south-side balcony would have been cooler, but it looked out over the ring road, shuddering with traffic and giving me vertigo. On days when I had no clients I kept the windows thrown open whatever the weather. I would rather wear my coat indoors than breathe the stench of disinfectant from the stairwell. It got everywhere, seeping under the closed door and giving me headaches. But that day the chill autumn mornings had already set in and I needed the place warm enough for my client’s session. I would open the window just as he arrived, a balancing act of comfort and fresh air.
In the end that’s not what happened. When the shrilling telephone disturbed my thoughts I considered not answering it, but capitulated after a few rings. When my client told me he wanted to cancel his appointment I tried to change his mind, but failed. When I felt the throbbing in my temples from the combination of heat, bleach and disappointment, I thought of opening the windows wide and sitting there until I felt well enough to play the piano, but decided instead to take a walk. When, later, I returned to the flat and found the shards of shattered glass flung across the room so hard that two fragments had embedded themselves in the side of the piano, I could see the ghost of myself still sitting by the gaping window where I had been sitting all morning, where I would still have been sitting, had I not …
The shards of glass looked surreal, piercing the wood of the old upright, the one from my parents’ cottage that had belonged originally to my grandmother and which my parents had passed on to me ten years before as a housewarming present when I was finally earning enough to move out and pay a meagre rent of my own. It was impossible not to imagine the trajectory of that glass as it sliced across the small room from one side to the other. Impossible not to picture the alternative, myself thrown back in the blast, the shards that had lodged in the piano lodging instead in my flesh, my blood on the parquet, a young man gasping for his last breath. The more I thought about it the stronger the images became until they seemed more like a dream, an old film or a hazy memory. I am not normally that macabre, but a brush with mortality can bring it out in us all. I still half remember that death that never happened.
The east window looked out over the small scrap of park seven floors below, just a playground and a few shrubs, and beyond to a cluster of shops, a bakery and a tobacconist. A woman was pushing a baby in a pram round the gravel path that circled the park fence and an old man was walking a small dog, which was squatting right by the swings. I stared out at them, hoping the man would pick up his dog’s mess and considering what to do with my morning, now an empty page. Any thrill of liberation was tempered by the setback. The inertia of a missed appointment often turned into a lost client, which closed the door on the chance of a referral. I was just setting out. I needed every client and every appointment I could get if I was to pay the rent and make this work.
I took my time setting things straight. I dried the plate and bowl that had been sitting on the draining board. I paid a bill. Before leaving the apartment I took a breath deep enough to get me most of the way down the seven foul-smelling flights of stairs at a jog. It would be the last time I had to do that.
As I skirted the park around to the pharmacy there was a roar overhead, the kind that vibrates you in your skin. A chill rush of adrenaline drenched me, my body snapping into a half crouch as my eyes shot to the sky. We were all jumpy that week. It was only a few days after the planes in New York, the burning city, and there were plenty of reasons to attack Toulouse. The airport, the satellite industries; what made us proud also made us vulnerable and we all had our eyes up every time a plane came over.
The rumble grew louder as I scanned the sky for a clue. North, east, south, and there it was. A plane rising into clear blue skies, twin trails of condensation blossoming in its wake. Just another plane taking off from Blagnac. I allowed myself a small, relieved laugh and wondered when this fearfulness would retreat. The young woman with the pram looked over at me and smiled weakly, a shared acknowledgement that we were wearing our humanity close to the surface. For an instant before the adrenaline subsided I felt the urge to embrace her, to offer something beyond an awkward smile, but I knew she would take it the wrong way. She looked away from me to another child, a boy scrambling up the ladder on to the paint-peeling slide. He was young, distracted, unconcerned by the noise of planes overhead. The image freezes there.
Everything goes white and the air is sucked away. As I fight to fill my lungs there are explosions. Three, maybe five. It is all so fast, so surprising.
The green neon cross of the pharmacy comes back into focus first. Then the park. The boy is at the bottom of the slide screaming. The old man is lying on the floor. His dog has fled under a hedge and the long lead is a jagged scar on the playground floor.
For a moment we were held together by our incomprehension. Then the woman pulled her baby out of the pram, clutching it tight against her chest, her hand covering its tiny head. She was looking up and spinning, trying to figure out where the danger was so she could put her body between that and her baby. Behind her a mushroom cloud bloomed and billowed and then it began to rain glass.
I put an arm up to cover my head and the other over my mouth. The air filled with something noxious and hot – sulphur, ammonia, chlorine, maybe, burning my eyes and throat. I ran to the old man first. He was trembling, terrified. I thought his heart might go. ‘My dog! Peanut!’ Peanut. What kind of name is that for a dog? It still sticks in my mind. The woman had gathered her children, the pram abandoned, scouring the surroundings for safety. I wanted to help her, but I had no idea where safety was. Sirens begin to wail in the distance. Were the buildings around us going to crumble and fall like those on television? We had to move.
The five of us lurched out of the shadow of the apartment blocks towards the shelter of the parade of shops, keeping our backs to the cloud. The baby was screaming, her brother was weeping, and the old man clutched the wriggling dog to his chest. ‘It’s going to be all right,’ he said to anyone who would listen. ‘Everything will be all right.’ But for many people everything was not all right. The explosion had been catastrophic. In the blink of an eye, thousands became homeless.
On the long train journey out of the city we stood crammed into the stifling carriages like refugees, rebreathing our exhalations, all th
e windows closed against the toxic air. By that time you could no longer smoke on the trains, but the shabby velour upholstery still leeched a nauseating odour of stale tobacco. I thought at least a glimpse of the fields would settle my stomach, but the view out was blocked with bodies. Instead I looked down the carriage over the mumble of shocked men and women, reliving the explosion and its aftermath, caught up in the “what ifs” and the “whys”.
The Christmas tree was already up when I arrived at the cottage, the lights twinkling in the window as my mother rushed out to greet me at the front gate as though I had risen from the dead. I hadn’t been able to call to let them know I was coming. My father stayed back, framed in the doorway and scratching his head as he wondered out loud who the tallest person in the village might be. He was right, I would need to borrow some clothes; no one on the TV had any idea when it would be safe to go back. I ended up sitting around the house in overalls from the local mechanic until we were given the all clear to go home a few days later.
I say home. That apartment had never really felt like home, and after this, how could it ever? The landlord had already warned me that there wasn’t a window left in the block and although people had started patching them up with plastic or wood, making sure that the elderly and those with children took priority, supplies were almost exhausted. Until the glass could be replaced even those with a temporary fix were unsure how they could make it through the winter. If it had just been our blocks, which were closest to the fertiliser factory where the explosion happened, it might have been all right, but the blast radius had been kilometres wide. Most of the city’s windows were shattered. The waiting list for a glazier already stretched into months.
On that train journey back into Toulouse, still feeling philosophical and raw, I settled myself into the idea of a cold winter and, at least for the foreseeable future, a regular job. Thankfully people were returning in a trickle and I was able to stare out of the scratched window and retreat into the depths of my spirits. Pulling out of the small station of my parents’ village we cut immediately through acres of ripe sunflowers, their heads withered towards the earth as though they had forgotten where the light comes from or were too tired to remember. No matter how glorious and invincible those fields of flowers look in summer, by autumn it’s always a battlefield. I was glad when we emerged from the sunflowers and the land opened out into gentle swells of ploughed fields, the sparrow-brown earth peppered with short golden straws, and wood smoke blowing across the horizon as though a steam train had recently passed. The vines, too, were already harvested, the grapes gone and their blood-stained leaves settling in drifts against the gnarled stems, waiting for the October winds to invite them to dance. Beyond the fields the blue-grey shadows of the mountains rose slowly from the dark of the land, becoming a faint haze where the sky met them in rosy-white, before falling away into itself, vivid blue above.
The emptiness was hypnotic and calming. There were few signs of human life, all the villages and towns along the route set well back from the tracks. There were occasional little stone barns standing in the middle of the fields, each orange roof peppered with holes to a greater or lesser extent, sometimes with entire walls collapsing through their own windows. Every now and then the odd field of scrub was occupied by a lone house, a couple of grazing horses and a handful of ravens. As we passed by I could see that most of the shutters were closed, keeping the houses dark and airless. I imagined tiled floors inside, dark wooden tables, dressers and wardrobes, all crouched in the shadows like a mausoleum. I felt suffocated just looking. It made me want to fling open the shutters and let the people breathe.
Somewhere along the line we stopped at a station which looked all but deserted. The platform was crumbling and a forest of weeds pushed through the rocks of the track ballast. I knew that place well. Every time I passed through it I would feel a surge of sentimentality. Somewhere along the next stretch of track, I knew, was the place where I was born. Where my mother died. That day as we set off again, the rattle and sway of the carriages provoking the familiar lurch in my belly, it was accompanied by a deep irrational panic. I pressed my forehead against the cooling glass, believing that if I could ride that train through those fields for ever I would.
The residents met in the town hall to fix what could be fixed. We organised ourselves into a kind of cooperative, some of us cleaning up, some making repairs, some running a soup kitchen and still others watching those children who were too young for school. The women complained that it was too crowded in the town hall, but there was nowhere else safe to let the children play. I would have given anything right then to stay out of those apartments so I volunteered to start by cleaning up the playground, but by the time I had crossed to the park the trembling had set in. I steadied myself on the fence as I closed my eyes and took a moment to breathe and to calm myself.
I felt a hand on my arm. ‘Are you OK, son?’ I found myself looking into the soft brown eyes of a man almost as tall as me. He was standing on the other side of the fence, his grey hair sticking up at all angles, his mouth hidden below his riotous moustache.
I nodded. ‘I’m fine, thanks. Just a flashback I suppose. I was out here when the explosion happened.’
‘Thank goodness you weren’t hurt’ – his eyes scanned me quickly just to check that was the case – ‘but it must have been traumatic for you.’
‘Lucky escape,’ I said.
He looked at me appraisingly. ‘Oscar,’ he said, removing his hand and holding it out.
‘Baptiste.’ I took his hand and instantly felt better for his company. ‘I came down to get this place cleaned up, the kids are driving the parents mad cooped up in there, but it looks like you’ve already made a start.’
‘Great minds think alike. I got sick of watching the news and feeling bad for you all so I decided to come and be of practical use. I hope you don’t mind?’
So that was why I didn’t recognise him, although in that place you could pass your neighbour on the street and never realise. ‘No, on the contrary. Thank you.’
We worked together in companionable silence, sweeping shards and splinters from the slide, raking them from the surrounding soil, pulling out the poisoned shrubs. ‘You know,’ Oscar said to me after a while, ‘it’s years since I’ve been in a playground. The one where I grew up used to be my absolute favourite place to spend time. It can’t have been much, a lot like this one I suppose, but to me then it seemed vast and extraordinary. So many other worlds there to explore.’ He had one of those smiles on his face, the kind when you are recalling a memory so perfect you feel its pleasure all over again. I thought of my childhood in the village. There had been no playground there, except the swings by the hateful duck pond which I avoided at all costs.
‘What kind of worlds?’ I asked.
‘Oh, a climbing frame like this could be a rocket, a pirate ship, a fortress or a submarine, or each one in turn. And a boy could time travel on these swings.’
It was true, I could see it. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that slide could take you to the centre of the earth.’
‘Or the bottom of the sea.’ He smiled at me, a rueful smile. ‘It’s such a pity, the way we lose it,’ he said.
‘Lose what?’
‘Our imagination.’ He was brushing the rope climber with a toothbrush, painstakingly examining each strand, working from top to bottom and running his own thick-skinned fingers around the strands he had covered to ensure not even the tiniest chip of glass remained. He paused to examine his fingertips. ‘Terrible business, this. They’re still saying it was an accident, but what with the timing and all … well, what do you think?’
‘Hang on,’ I said, ‘we don’t really lose our imaginations, do we? As we get older we might not imagine our bicycles flying any longer, or dragons guarding the bathroom door, but we can still lose ourselves in stories and we can still imagine the future.’
He shrugged. ‘You’re still young,’ he said. ‘Maybe you can. But not me. Not any more.�
�
The familiar thrill of excitement raced through me. Here was a puzzle to be solved. I looked at him harder. He wasn’t that old, fifty at a stretch. He had an air of resignation about him, but beyond that he seemed uncomplicated, clear as water. ‘What do you do for a living?’
‘I’m a lawyer,’ he said, avoiding my eye and running his hand through his crazy hair. ‘And no, it’s not what you’re thinking. I’m really just here to help, so do me a favour and don’t tell anyone.’
‘I wasn’t thinking anything.’
‘Really? Most people do make certain judgements, I’m afraid.’
‘That can’t be easy.’
‘Oh well,’ he said, ‘it was a terrible career choice, but that’s what comes of choosing a career when we’re so young. I was an argumentative child and everyone told me I’d make a brilliant lawyer. It seemed like an exciting, well-paid profession and I do have a certain aptitude for it. But law school trained facts and logic in and my creativity out. Can you imagine never enjoying a novel or a film properly again because you can’t suspend your disbelief long enough to enjoy the story? Can you imagine every case you work on resulting in at least one unhappy person?’
‘Getting what you think you want doesn’t always make you happy.’
‘No, son,’ he said. ‘That’s true.’
‘Perhaps it’s time for a change?’
‘Well, I’m trying not to grow old and cynical, no one likes a grumpy old man, but no matter what I do, I don’t think I’ll ever be happy again like I was when I was a boy.’ He put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Don’t be a lawyer. You’re not, are you?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘In fact …’ After what he had said it seemed opportunistic to suggest he made an appointment, but I still had the rent to pay after all and I really thought I could get somewhere with him. I explained what I did, and told him that despite a minor issue with my office, I’d love him to come and see me. Payment only on satisfaction.