by Claire King
‘Where’s your office?’ he asked.
‘Seventh floor,’ I said, pointing up at the ravaged apartments.
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Yes, I can see the problem. How is it up there?’
‘It’s a wreck. No windows and no likelihood of getting any until spring,’ I told him. ‘Not that I ever shut them anyway, but it’s no place to invite my clients. I can figure something out, though. I’m going to have to, or my business will be done for.’
‘I take it that’s your home too?’
I thought of the train ride back, the sense of displacement that had nothing to do with the physical damage to the building. ‘Well, it’s where I live. I’m not sure I’ve really found my home yet, if you know what I mean.’
He smiled. ‘I do,’ he said. He looked me over and then looked back up at the rows of dark cavities where windows had been, all the while nodding to himself. Something was shifting inside him. ‘Have you ever bumped into someone by chance,’ he said, ‘and suddenly everything becomes clear. When you’ve been avoiding something, and now you know what you need to do?’
I thought of the professor. ‘Yes, I have.’
‘Well, now I have too. Who’d have thought it? I’m so pleased to have met you.’
A new client, I thought, a silver lining to a dark cloud. No need to go looking for jobs after all. ‘If you don’t mind the unorthodox environment we could start this week,’ I suggested. ‘My diary is pretty clear.’
He shook his head. ‘Thank you, but you’ve already helped me enough. I know exactly what I need to do.’ My spirits fell. ‘But on the other hand,’ he said, ‘maybe I can help you. It transpires I shall soon be going away for a long time, who knows how long. I don’t really want to rent my place out, but I could do with someone to stay there and keep an eye on things.’ He smiled at me. ‘It would be a bit of a change from this place, but I have the feeling you wouldn’t mind that too much. What would you say to house-sitting a boat?’
20
Oscar went to Scotland, only returning for his first visit last year. Yvette told me later that he had always preferred the coast, often taking long trips on Candice, and it didn’t surprise them when he finally moved to live by the sea. It did surprise them that he chose Scotland, or rather, Scotland chose him. He had intended to travel for a while apparently and took very little with him, but quickly fell in love with one of the Scottish islands, set up a pottery and married a wood-turner.
Yvette says he was a lot like you, and for a while she called you Oscar by mistake, even though you were twenty years younger than him. When she talks about him there is something more to her words than the words themselves, and I sometimes wonder if she wasn’t a little bit in love with him herself, if it wasn’t just his job as a lawyer he had to leave in the past.
Whatever my speculations, Oscar stayed in touch with Yvette and Marcel and they still plan to visit him one day, although no matter how much Oscar and Miriam tried to persuade him that they enjoy plenty of sunny days, Marcel is still worried about travelling all that way to be rained on.
When Oscar and Miriam did visit, apparently a spur-of-the-moment decision, they arrived by taxi and had to walk past Candice to get down to the Rouge-Gorge. Oscar couldn’t resist dropping by to surprise you.
The first I knew of it was the clang of the cowbell, and the wavering note in your voice as you called down to me from the wheelhouse. ‘Chouette?’ When I came upstairs you were standing just the other side of the glass door, looking through at the two strangers standing there with their suitcases, smiling. I was as surprised as you, and assumed they were lost. It was possible they were looking for one of the other boats downstream that sometimes took paying passengers on weekend cruises.
When I opened the door, Oscar stepped towards you, effusive. ‘It’s me, Oscar. I suppose you don’t recognise me after all these years.’ Once he said his name I realised it would have been impossible not to recognise him; he was the most striking-looking man I think I’ve ever seen. He had the air of a benevolent wizard, tall and graceful, with long grey hair and chocolate-coloured eyes set deep in lines like starbursts. He reached both hands up to place them on your cheeks, like a father would a long-lost son. You flinched, and Oscar pulled away in surprise. No one had thought to warn him.
‘Not his face,’ I told him. ‘He’s sensitive since … well, it’s a long story. You’d better come in and sit down.’
21
A white mist skimmed the surface of the canal. Ducks swam in and out of it like ghostly flotillas. I made my way upstream under fallen clouds, tramping through leaves and the damp gravel on the towpath, north and west up into Toulouse. Most boats already had smoking chimneys, the salt-oak smell pitted against the sweetness of the hedgerows, redolent of the time of year. After over fifteen years by its side, I knew the scents of that path intimately. Each season has its own flavour. Winter is the sharp smell of snow, bright as glass, and soups that simmer so long that everything around takes on their warmth. Summer is the smoke-tang of charring meat. Spring smells yellow-green, a fresh salad of scents that rise and fall like a wind-blown veil. My favourite, autumn, smells of wet earth, red wine and burning wood.
I knew the sights just as well: the pattern of the boats I would pass, strung together like beads, red, green and blue. The lines of every curve of grass, every swell of hedgerow. I knew where I should place my feet carefully because the path was old and had crumbled away, and where I could lengthen my pace and raise my eyes to the scenery. I knew where the water in the canal picked up speed and where it slowed, the parts of the banks where branches leaning into the water caused eddies and where the light fell in such a way that on a damp morning you might see rainbows just above the water. I knew how a full moon looked on the water in both winter and in summer. I knew where the smells of the wild garlic would accost me as I rounded a corner, and how the acacia blossom would feel, falling on my skin in May round by the lock; the places where you could take shelter from the weather and where you would take its full force. I could tell you the words on every milestone and canal marker, and often where filaments of spider silk would be stretched across the path, catching your face. I was connected to that small corner of the planet like no other. As I walked I let daydreams flicker in and out of life, and reflected again on the discussion I’d had with Etienne and Marcel. I began to wonder, if circumstance ever forced me to move, could I come to love another place the same way? It would be like asking a man who has been in love with his wife for years if he could love another. How can you imagine any alternative when you are saturated with the way her body fits into yours, the smell of her neck, the way she always sits in the same chair?
As I approached Toulouse the wind picked up, spreading the clouds like butter and allowing hesitant sunbeams to push through. Buildings rose on either side of me to meet the dappling skies. By the time I reached Riquet’s statue at the top of the broad avenue that led down into the city centre there was a spreading patch of blue above his head. As I turned, leaving his canal behind I found myself in a rising tide of people flowing down the wide pavements. By the time I’d passed the entrance to the metro I was submerged in the weight of bodies and their low-level clamour. I unwound the scarf that earlier had felt snug but now felt suffocating. Not far to go, I told myself, nearly there.
Sophie had asked me to meet her by the carousel in the Place St Georges. I began to wonder if I would ever find her in the crowd, but most people seemed to be heading further into the city centre and once I arrived in the square itself there were only a few bored-looking students with placards and a handful of police keeping them off the grassed areas and away from the carousel where parents looked on, edgy and ambivalent as their children turned circles under the golden canopy. I remembered what Sabine had said. ‘It’s no place for children.’ Cool hands closed over my eyes.
‘Sophie!’
‘How did you guess?’ She removed her fingers and I turned and looked down into her face, wind-blown
and bright. Away from the bar she was transformed. It wasn’t in her clothes or her hair, but in the way she held herself. She took up more space, like a carousel horse come to life. She embraced me on tiptoes, planting a kiss on each cheek, then stepped back a pace, holding me at arm’s length.
‘It’s good to see you. You look different outside of the bar.’
‘I was just thinking the same thing.’
Sophie looked pleased. ‘Right, come on then, everyone else is over near the Capitole.’
‘Some kind of a date this is.’
‘Knock it off, or I’ll tell my mother.’
‘I’m sure she’d tell you the same thing.’
‘OK, whatever.’ She took my hand and began to lead me along, winding through people and down side streets. ‘Hurry up. There’s such a great turnout, if we’re not quick we’ll never find them.’
I took one pace for every two of hers. ‘So you’ve brought me here to persuade me that we need to do more to get young people into work, and get old people to retire as soon as possible, is that right?’
Sophie had to raise her voice to be heard, shouting up at me as she walked. ‘You know what, I don’t really care if you think we’re right or wrong. I just want you to have an opinion. I want you to realise that this matters. We have to burst that bubble you’ve made for yourself so you remember what passion feels like.’ We broke through into the vast Place du Capitole. ‘It matters to me,’ she shouted breathlessly, ‘and it matters to all these people. Look at them all.’ Hundreds, maybe thousands of people were filling the square, now so closely packed that they no longer looked like individuals but a single mass. There was a fluidity to their movement as they shifted slowly in and out of any available space.
I saw a flock of migrating starlings late one autumn down near the Spanish border, in a city where the rise and fall of mountains abruptly turns to waves. Every year in November all the starlings in France gather there. They blacken the skies and defecate on the streets, on the parked cars and on the people of the city. Every wire strung across the sky is covered with them like iron filings. Red rooftops blacken. Not a flock but a swarm. City officials shoot at them, but they won’t disperse. They stick together, rising up in a clattering wave, up into the clouds, turning and swelling, billowing out and then settling down again, half a kilometre further along. They leave only when they’re ready, when something finally tells them it’s time to take flight. I watched those starlings for hours, mesmerised, trying to work out what made them lift, what made them turn, what made them settle, what made it all work.
‘These people care about their future,’ Sophie said, tugging me into their midst. ‘They care enough to do something about it.’
I held back. ‘Is protesting really doing something about it?’
‘When people come to you because they are unhappy, is that doing something about it?’
I smiled. She was sharp. ‘They don’t know what the answer is yet.’
‘Maybe we don’t either, exactly. But we know it’s time for change.’ Sophie pulled me again, down into the crowd. ‘And maybe you could help?’
‘Me?’
‘If unhappiness bothers you in one person, how can you not feel moved by so much discontent all in one place?’
I looked at the buzzing, jostling men and women around us. Now I was in amongst them they looked like individuals again. Mostly young, laughing and joking on the surface but with a hard energy rising up somewhere in their midst. I thought again of the starlings. Every bird an individual until it joins the flock. ‘Do these people even know why they are here, Sophie? In my experience most people haven’t a clue why they’re unhappy. We latch on to the first explanation someone offers.’
‘Baptiste, some of these people are struggling to eat.’
‘And some of them clearly are not.’ I pointed out a group of students all talking or texting or taking selfies on their phones. ‘Why are they here?’
‘Solidarity? Because they know that they could be next. Baptiste,’ she urged, tightening her grip on my hand and looking up at me, ‘you’re the kingfisher, remember? Do your thing. This is the society you live in, these people are the future. You can’t just ignore it.’
‘There’s a reason the kingfisher fishes in a quiet corner of the canal, Sophie,’ I said, ‘and not in the ocean.’
Eyes flickered over us and then away again as we inched through the throng until Sophie finally caught sight of her friends by a dais in the centre of the square. I didn’t recognise either of the girls, but I knew two of the men from the bar, the dragon and one of his friends. The dragon turned to watch as we got closer, keeping his eyes fixed on our approach, flickering between Sophie and me. I saw him say something that made the others turn too, and as I fell under their regard I immediately felt old and out of place. I let Sophie’s hand drop, but she slipped her arm through mine and pulled in close enough that I could feel the heat of her against me as we drew into their small circle.
‘This is Baptiste,’ she said with a smile, ‘from the bar.’
‘We’ve heard so much about you,’ said the dragon. Was I being sensitive, or was there scorn in his voice? I held out a hand. He considered it with a scowl. Anger came off him like lightning looking for a place to earth. So Etienne was right, a storm was brewing. ‘You know, if you’re here to complain about your pension,’ he said, ‘you’ll not find a lot of sympathy. Sophie’s brought you to the wrong demo.’
The others sniggered. Sophie clicked her tongue against her teeth and rolled her eyes at him. ‘Didier,’ she warned.
‘I’m just kidding,’ he said, taking my hand and shaking it hard, ‘but my point remains. Sophie will be the first to admit that she didn’t go to university to end up serving you drinks every night in a crappy bar in the suburbs.’
‘At least I have a job.’
‘That pays pin money, Sophie. That you’re forced to do because our degrees mean nothing. That you’ll probably have to do until you’re eighty if you want a decent pension. There’s not enough work for all of us. Something has to give, and it’s either our generation or’ – he looked at me pointedly – ‘yours.’
My generation? Just how old did they think I was? Sophie stepped in, trying to broker peace. ‘He’s just generalising. He doesn’t mean you specifically.’
‘I mean the establishment,’ Didier said, ‘the people who make these policies that only help themselves. And who run a government that claims they have no money to help us yet still welcomes in people like you.’
We were being jostled closer together. ‘People like me?’
‘Immigrants. It might be hard for you to swallow but the French people have to help themselves before we can help everyone else who wants to live here.’ He folded his arms. ‘No offence.’
For a moment I was taken aback. What had Sophie shared with him about me, about my mother? Then I realised it was more likely he was just making his own assumptions based on my appearance. ‘No offence to you either,’ I said, ‘but if life’s not giving you what you think you deserve, do you plan to actually do anything about it or just spend your time blaming other people?’ It was snappy, but Didier had started off aggressive and the weight of people around me was making me agitated.
Didier bristled. I could see now why Sophie had drawn him as a dragon. ‘Oh, that’s right, make it my problem. You have a job, so you’re just fine. No need to worry about anyone else.’ He squared up to me. He was well built but still shorter than me by a good few inches. I squared back, the air between us crackling.
‘With all due respect, Didier, you know nothing about me, you know nothing about my life.’
‘And you know nothing about ours.’
I saw Didier look over at Sophie then, rolling his eyes, but she refused to take his side. ‘Pack it in, the pair of you,’ she said. ‘Put your dicks away. How can we achieve anything if we’re fighting amongst ourselves?’
‘I don’t know what you were thinking of, bringing him he
re,’ Didier said. ‘He’s got no intention of listening to any of us.’ It wasn’t true though. Sophie’s instinct had been right. There was something exciting, if a little overwhelming, about being there in that moment. I wanted to talk to every one of those students, to ask them what they were really doing there, what they were looking for and where they were going. Were they going along with things, as I had once, heading down a track they hadn’t really thought through, waiting for the points to switch?
‘It’s not that I’m not interested,’ I said.
‘Good. Here we go then.’ Didier pushed a loudhailer against my chest and propelled me backwards, up the steps of the dais.
‘Didier, that’s enough.’ Sophie tightened her fingers around my arm, but Didier had put his body between us and she was forced to release me, pulling an apologetic face as she did. I looked at her in confusion. Faces had turned to stare, the loud conversations around me fading to an expectant rumble. The timber was hard and unforgiving under my feet.
A young woman met my eye. ‘Hi,’ I said.
‘Hi.’ She continued to stare. ‘Are you going to say something or are you just going to stand there?’
‘What? No, I—’
Didier stepped in. ‘He’s here to tell us to stop complaining,’ he shouted. Heads lifted like a dog’s hackles, all eyes suddenly on me. I looked out at them. So many young faces, already dissatisfied, already disenchanted, already fuelled by a sense of entitlement.
‘Who are you?’ someone called.
‘What do you study?’ shouted another, to a ripple of nervous laughter.
‘I’m just here to listen,’ I said quietly, putting down the loudhailer at my feet. ‘Apparently my generation don’t listen. So I’m here, I’m listening now. That’s all.’