by Claire King
At first light the telephone rang, my Saturday client calling to cancel his appointment. I should have known then it was a portent of trouble. I offered to reschedule for later in the day. ‘No chance,’ he said. ‘I’m looking out of my window right now and the traffic is already nose to tail all up the street. It’s not moved now for half an hour. There’s no way I can get to you.’
‘Perhaps there’s an accident?’
‘An accident? It’s Operation Escargot. The roads are blocked all around Toulouse,’ he said. ‘No one’s going anywhere today.’
‘Are there still no buses? The metro?’
‘Don’t you read the news? The metro has been out since Wednesday, the buses too. The trains are on strike and taxis are refusing commissions. It’s chaos.’ I suggested that I came in to him by foot. It would take me a while, but I always enjoyed a walk. ‘Even without this foul weather I wouldn’t take the risk,’ he said. ‘It was nasty last night in the centre, completely out of hand. Anyone with any sense is staying home today.’
Sophie, I thought. I had her number now. It was early but I could send her a message.
I remember standing for a while at the window after I had sent the text, looking out at the wind-lashed water and thinking what I would do with the day. And then a shortening of focus to the window itself. The glass was dirty. An irrational sense of panic rose within me. Something about the windows. I had to get away from the windows. I felt sure that something terrible was going to happen if I stayed there. I had to get out. I had a headache. I needed some air.
The wind howled around Candice. As I locked the door I was shoved hard back against the boat by a gust so strong I thought it might lift me off my feet and I could ride it like a carpet. Running was impossible, so I turned and set off along the towpath in the opposite direction to usual, walking against the wind, leaning against the weight of air, every hunched step an effort, my eyes stinging with dust whipped up by the blizzard of dead leaves. The wind scoured my cheeks and the cold scalded my throat. Yet high above, the ashen clouds hung motionless, draining away the light.
It was one of those winter days when the landscape appears pencil-drawn in sepia and grey. Even the catkins were a pallid green, all the life sucked out of them. Only the mimosa hinted at colour, already showing the first signs of yolky yellow on the early fronds of blossom that bowed and shook in the wind. Later, when everything froze, the laden boughs would bow low to the ground and snap under the weight of the snow. Not the other trees; the wind slipped and slid through their branches causing nothing but a shiver. They didn’t resist it; they had known it was coming.
I passed under road bridges blocked by solid rows of cars, the drivers’ frustration blaring. So much noise. I kept going. At some point it became apparent that I was on my way to the city centre and although nerves rose within me I didn’t resist, just kept on apace, pushing against the wind so hard that by the time I arrived in Toulouse I was exhausted.
There was going to be no place to rest. The city streets were more crowded than I had ever seen them and yet the crowd seemed fluid, bursting open and contracting again. With each shift, an energy built. Just like the migrating starlings, new, smaller groups seemed to be joining the main buzz of the flock from all sides, sucked into the swell. I allowed myself to be engulfed in their dark, flapping coats and carried along on a wave of adrenaline, moving in on the centre, streaming effortlessly around obstacles like liquid.
‘Aren’t you cold, brother?’ A tall man patted me on the back. I turned, catching my distorted reflection in his sunglasses.
I shook my head. ‘No, but thanks for asking.’ It felt good to be welcomed, I thought.
As we approached the Place du Capitole you could feel the air thicken and rumble. Before we even turned into the square, past the television vans that crowded the entrance, I knew it wasn’t like before. I was right. It was so solidly packed with bodies that the people already there, maybe ten thousand or more, could barely move. I looked over into the centre of the square where a thicket of placards, unmoving, pushed up from the sea of heads. That was the students. That would be where I would find Sophie, although the question remained what I was going to do when I reached her. Between me and the students was an unbroken row of police. Good, I thought, that’s good, and I began to move forwards, inching into small gaps, excusing myself as I went.
As I reached the periphery of my group, I could see another crowd of people moving in from a side street. These were different again. They walked slowly, a dignified procession, with their heads held defiantly. The men were not wearing hoods, but what looked to be a form of Sunday dress: suits, but with ruffles and frills as colourful as the boats on the towpath. There were women too, the older ones wearing bright headscarves, the younger ones in long colourful skirts, their bare arms glittering with bangles. Amongst the blacks and the blues their colours looked so out of place, like blossom fallen on the streets. I thought of the boy, Pesha, and shivered with grief.
A call went up around me like a ripple. I couldn’t make out the words. Then one of the Roma shouted something back. The crowd thickened and boiled. And then the police were advancing in a hard line, yelling and pushing people out of the way, straight for us.
Where could I go? I would never get through the police to the students now, but the men behind me were becoming hostile. They were pushing forward and, unable to advance, those of us at the front began thinning out around the Roma like oil on water. Then, as though something had snapped, I found myself bustled out into their midst.
I immediately started to apologise, but the man I had stumbled into jostled me angrily, shoving my arm. ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ His face was all shade and suspicion, but for a flash of gold tooth. By his side were two children, a boy and a girl. I was never great at telling ages. They were probably older than the friendly little boy from the towpath but I could see they were still younger than Manon and Gaëlle. What were they doing here?
‘This is no place for your children,’ I exclaimed, thinking of Sabine. ‘You shouldn’t bring your children here.’
A woman beside him, dark hair scraped back off her face, pulled the children into her side. ‘Leave us alone,’ she said. ‘We have a right to be here as much as you.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I—’
‘Having a problem here, brother?’ It was him again, the man in the sunglasses, his voice now suffused with threat.
‘No, no problem,’ I said.
‘Why don’t you go home?’ he said to the couple with the children, now flanked by others, tense.
‘We’ve come here peacefully,’ the man said, shifting in front of his wife. ‘All we want to do is live peacefully. All we want is a chance at a good life. You treat us with contempt, you call our women whores, you call our children thieves—’
‘What would you call someone who steals from us?’
‘Wait, stop, both of you,’ I said. I put out my hands, trying to separate the two men, and then someone cried out, ‘Get your hands off me!’
A roar went up behind me, ahead of me people were turning and running, and then I was moving too. I was a leaf on the canal, swept along with the other flotsam, sometimes rushing forwards then all at once caught in an eddy, spinning back on myself, trying to stay on my feet, sinking and rising again until the screams retreated behind me and ahead of me the crowd began to thin out. I could see daylight through the mass of bodies. I gained impulsion, pushing through to the safety of the slim void ahead. Five deep, four deep, three … and then my shins slammed sharply against the edge of something solid and painful.
I tumbled forwards on to the marble bench, disoriented for a moment, then got shakily to my knees, then to my feet. The bench wasn’t high, but high enough that I could climb up out of the feverish smell of the crowd and raise my arms, untangling myself and stretching up to the magnificent desolation of the scowling sky. Sometimes the sky is all we’ve got.
When I had caught my breath and felt my heart beginning to
calm, I took stock of what was happening around me. Behind me I was aware of a rhythmic banging, like drums, and in front of me something strange was happening. The crowd was moving away from me, opening up a space between us. Backing away, not turning away. In the distance, sirens wailed.
My telephone buzzed in my pocket. Without my glasses I had to hold it at arm’s length. A text from Sophie, a beacon in the darkness. Got your message. Where are you? As I started to thumb out a reply, squinting at the screen, out of nowhere I saw the first stone arcing towards me. It had a perfect, slow trajectory, like the olive stones Etienne and I would throw into the water. I liked watching the way the small ripples would spread wide and then disappear as the stones sank to the bed of the canal.
The stone flew over my head, just missing me. I looked out at the crowd, still all facing me. Shouting insults, some waving their arms. What was it? The drumming sound grew louder. My mouth tasted of olives. Bitter black olives as though I had just eaten them. As though I could taste the memory. Marjoram and thyme.
After the first stone came a murmur, then a storm, flying out of the crowd in my direction. I suppose I overthink things, and while I was still trying to work out what was happening the first blow came across my left shoulder. Instinctively I put my hands out to shield my head and felt the crack of the bones in my fingers. Oh God, my piano. I crouched down, pushing my hands under my armpits and turning to jump off the bench. Then I saw them, the wall of riot police advancing, their shields held up against the volley of stones. I ran towards them as the third stone cracked into my back, winding me.
There was a roaring in my skull, a pounding of blood. I reeled forwards, somehow remaining on my feet. Black boots marched across the broken cobbles towards me. I turned again, trying to suck in a breath, but there was nothing. I could feel myself getting light-headed. The next blow came across the backs of my knees, not a stone but a truncheon, and as I went down, something struck my forehead. Afterwards, I’m not sure. A kick in the kidneys. I curled tight, pulling my head underneath me as wild cries went up and the high black boots and blue trousers mingled with sneakers and legs, most passing thankfully around me but many stumbling over me as the dreams arrived.
When the storm had passed and the flock had dispersed, I felt myself pulled up by hands, lifted roughly into a sitting position. There was so much blood in my eyes I could barely see them, two young men, white-faced and shocked. They put me back down again quickly. ‘Don’t touch him! You could get done for that. What if he’s got a broken neck?’
‘Shit.’
The hot spread of blood. The hard pillow. The cool smell of city flagstones.
‘Call an ambulance.’
33
The bed was narrow and too short. When my arms failed to find a place to tuck away under the small thin pillow and draped down the sides they brushed against cold tubular steel. People in green came in and raised the back, laid it flat again. I sat straight and reclined at their will, all the while covered in a thin bobbled blanket the colour of rust. Between me and the old man in the next bed with the bruised face and his leg in plaster was a night stand on which he or his family had already laid out his affairs. A puzzle book, a loupe, a tin of lozenges. There was a fox’s face on the tin.
The chair in the corner was covered in padded plastic and smelled of disinfectant. The window wouldn’t open, which filled me with alarm. Only by pretending it wasn’t there at all could I ease the claustrophobia. It brought back my childhood, my room back home, the shutters I hated, leaning too far out of the window to pin them back. Bats in my room.
I tell you these superficial details because they are what my mind has deemed important about that place. Beyond that, beyond the smells and the fox and the useless window, nothing is clear in my mind. They gave me a lot of painkillers, allowing me to drift in and out of hazy consciousness, and in the weeks that followed I dreamed about that hospital so much that dreamscapes blurred into memories that found more purchase than reality. Walls moved. My roommate was sometimes there and sometimes not. Sometimes his face had changed entirely. Doors led into my parents’ cottage or down to the sea and one night I dreamed that the door to the hospital opened out beside a glorious bottle-green canal as wide as a river. I followed it for kilometres, gliding above it as though swimming through air. Then, after what seemed like an endless stretch of long, straight water, the canal curved around a hillside and disappeared from sight. As I rounded the corner, the canal ended abruptly, petering out into a barren piece of land like the tail of a worm.
In another dream Amandine was there, sitting by my side. I was happy to see her, but embarrassed. She was looking me up and down. She seemed so concerned about me but all I could think of was how strange it was to see her in the hospital. ‘How could I not come?’ she said, although her face was pained and wary. She motioned to my chest. ‘Show me.’ I shook my head, but she reached forward anyway and untied the hospital gown, gently slipping it forwards off my arms to reveal the black plum and yellow stains on my skin. ‘What were you doing?’ she said. ‘I don’t understand.’ I trembled under her touch, aching for her to take me in her arms, willing my subconscious to make it happen.
Doctors with clipboards came and went, trips to radiology with cheerful orderlies who wheeled me in and out of elevators, up and down endless corridors. Then there was a pinch-faced man who arrived wearing a suit and tie under his white coat, a small cluster of young doctors trailing in his wake like ducklings. He was less interested in my fractures than how I came to get them. He had an awful lot of questions. ‘Tell me again why you went to the Capitole,’ he said.
I thought about it, but the answer lurked behind whitewashed windows. They had told me the concussion should have cleared by now, but the memory wouldn’t come back to me and my eyes ached with the effort of remembering.
‘Still nothing?’ he said. I told him about how the people looked like birds, migrating starlings that shifted and swooped. He took notes. ‘And do you remember how you got into the city centre in the first place?’
‘I walked,’ I told him. At least I had remembered that. And I told him about the wind, and how the trees had known it was coming. How I had been so cold in its path because I had forgotten to wear a coat. At this the young ones with him shuffled and murmured excitedly.
‘In January?’ the pinch-faced man said, writing on his clipboard. ‘Would you describe yourself as absent-minded?’
‘No.’
‘And what’s this, then?’ I followed his gaze down to my left forearm. ‘Do you frequently write reminders to yourself like that?’
I put on my glasses with my least painful hand and read the faded characters inked on to my forearm: ten numbers finishing with a tiny but perfect little kingfisher. Numbers from every bar tab I’d had in the last five years, the six that looked more like a gamma, the one that looked like a mountain.
‘A friend wrote that, not me,’ I said. It was comforting to run my fingertip over the traces of Sophie’s pen strokes. And then it hit me. Blue ink on skin. Just like the woman on the train. Not a phone number for her but a single word. Toulouse.
With sudden clarity, I knew what the doctor was going to say and why.
34
Etienne’s voice stirred me. ‘If you’re not going to answer your phone maybe you should turn it off.’
I was slumped on the couch, winded by fatigue but flooded with the relief of being home, one bare foot on the cool leather, the other flat on the reassuring wooden floor. My eyes were heavy and my throat felt parched.
‘I didn’t hear you come in.’
‘I’ve knocked a few times and I did try to call …’
‘Sorry, I’m done in.’
He nodded, handing me a glass of water as though I had asked for it. I drank deeply, closing my eyes to enjoy the blissful feeling of hydration spreading under my skin. When I opened them again, Etienne had pulled the piano stool over and was sitting beside me. ‘I expect it’ll take you a while to recove
r. You took quite a battering. What on earth were you doing?’
I shrugged.
‘Well I’d steer clear of Sabine for a while if I were you, you’re in for a piece of her mind.’ Etienne motioned towards the phone where it vibrated on the chest, the little red numbers of messages and missed calls now in double figures. ‘Your parents, I suppose?’
‘I shouldn’t think so.’
‘Your girlfriend?’
‘No, it’s Sophie, the girl from the bar.’
Etienne looked confused, then surprised, and finally as though he had had a revelation. ‘The one who took you to the student demonstration?’
‘That one, yes.’
‘So she’s behind all this. Is there something between you? She’s not the client you were telling me about?’
‘No, nothing to do with that. Sophie’s just a friend,’ I said with a sigh.
‘Probably just as well since she’s young enough to be your daughter,’ he said. ‘A man has to retain some dignity in middle age. But she is the reason you were in Toulouse?’
It would make perfect sense but I couldn’t say for sure. Yet something about the flashing messages told me Etienne would be proved right. I thought back to the last time I saw her. We had talked for the first time in weeks. She had worn a scarf around her throat. Purple. She had said she was going to the protests and I had urged her not to. It had been cold and there had been tarragon in the stew. My stomach rumbled at the thought. I was famished.
Etienne smiled thinly. ‘I’ll make you supper. What have you got in?’ But of course there was nothing. Perhaps some jam and butter in the fridge. ‘Do you want to go over to Jordi’s?’ he suggested. ‘I’m sure I could persuade René to come, it would do us good to get out.’ But the idea overwhelmed me. I could barely sit without wincing. I shook my head dismally.
‘Well, maybe they’ll do a take-out. I’ll call them.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘Or I could just send a text?’