I’d spent so much time looking at these streets with Celia, but this was something else entirely. Before, the people had been frozen midstride, the watering can hovering forever above a window box, a woman’s hands held high in paralyzed gesticulation outside a coffee shop. Now everything was moving. It was like someone had pressed Play. People spoke loudly in French, the scent of baking hovered in the air, making my mouth water. The banister was wet against my palm. The world had become real and I was real within it.
28
“Aber es kostet so viel Geld!”
“Was soll’s, wir müßen das erleben. Es ist doch schließlich der Louvre!”
“Nun ja, aber man sagt, daß die Mona Lisa nur so groß wie eine Briefmarke ist!”
“Trotzdem können wir nicht nach Hause fahren, ohne sie gesehen zu haben: man wird uns bestimmt danach fragen.”
I sat on my bunk, trying to ignore the whispered argument going on in the corner of the room. The two German girls had only arrived yesterday, taking over the bunks vacated by the Chilean woman and the British teenager who were here when I’d first arrived.
I was still exhausted, but trying hard not to fall asleep as it was only midday. I’d found if I didn’t come back to the room for a few hours each day my head would start spinning. Still, I was often falling asleep before dark and waking at dawn.
I’d been in Paris for five days by then. While I was waiting for Mel to post a clue online, I’d played tourist. I’d even climbed the Eiffel Tower, the view from the top too magical to comprehend.
* * *
But I’m starting to get off topic, aren’t I? I need to stick to the facts. You won’t want to hear about the wonder I felt of being somewhere so different from home. You won’t want to know about getting lost on the Metro, or eating fresh bread and thick cheese in the mornings, or learning the simplest of French but being too embarrassed to use it. We aren’t going to be trading holiday happy snaps. I’ll only be wasting your time. You want to hear about what matters here, about what happened with Mel.
Coltrane was a small bar only twenty minutes’ walk from the hostel. It looked a lot like other places in the area. Seats out front, large red awnings with the bar’s name in block white letters. Inside, it was crammed with young people. There was a bar near the entrance, backlit so that the glass bottles glowed. On the other side was a long mirror that took up most of the wall. I was sitting right near the back, with a small table all to myself. You couldn’t see me from the entrance, and to the people around me I looked as though I was just sipping my drink, staring at nothing in particular. What do they say about capturing beauty? It’s all about angles.
I was at the perfect angle to see the front half of the bar in the mirror. Mel and the guy she’d met came in and out of view as the people around them moved and parted. He was grinning at her to begin with, one hand stroking her arm while she spoke. The next time I got a look at them, she was still talking and he was sitting back in his chair. I didn’t need to be able to hear them to see that he’d stopped paying her much attention. He was good-looking, in an affected sort of way. He had long hair tied into a bun and an oversize black T-shirt that made his arms look thin and spindly.
I had ordered a red wine and was sipping it slowly. Since they were sitting right near the bar, I wouldn’t be able to go up and get another one without risking Mel seeing me. Part of me wanted that. To push past her with just an excusez-moi. Let her recognize me, fake a coincidence.
Or I could go straight up to her, throw my arms around her. After all, I was only keeping my promise. The promise she’d begged me to make back in school, that I’d come with her here to Paris.
The guy was now twirling the stem of his wineglass between his thumb and forefinger, staring absently into the shallow crimson pool. Then, his gaze lifted and set straight onto me. He smiled and I looked away quickly. I took a sip of my wine, tried to swallow it, though my throat had tightened. Surely, it wasn’t me he was looking at, but his own reflection. Taking a breath, I let my gaze rise, for a moment convinced I’d see them both staring at me through the reflection. But they weren’t. They were kissing on each cheek and he was putting a hand on her lower back. They were leaving. I was going to follow them; that wasn’t even a question. Now that I’d seen Mel I was hungry for her. Hungry to see every piece of her new existence, to understand who she had become. To know if she’d changed.
I forced myself to pause, to give it at least thirty seconds. He’d noticed me; if I tailed them straightaway he might recognize me again and point it out to her. I took a drink from my wine. Someone came to stand in front of my table, blocking the mirror from view.
“Je devais me débarrasser d’elle.”
I’m not sure what I was expecting, a waiter perhaps. But I would never have thought it would be him. Mel’s date. Standing in front of my small table and looking straight at me. No mirror between us. No nothing. He was so much taller than I’d thought.
“Tu es très belle.” He leaned forward so I could hear him over the conversations all around us, and rested his hands on the tabletop. His hands were big, with wide fingernails cut short and a tiny sprinkle of hair above each knuckle.
“Désolé, mais est-ce que tu parles français?” he asked.
My mind wasn’t working quickly enough to begin to understand, so I just shook my head.
“Anglais?”
I knew that word, so I nodded. “English, yes.”
He took that as an invitation, and squeezed in next to me. I shifted away from him. My mind still whirring. He had been there with Mel, a flat image. Now I could feel the hard bone of his knee touching mine; I could smell the slight spiciness of his cologne.
“I thought you were French.” His accent was thick. “You looked like a French girl sitting here alone so confidently.”
“No,” I said.
Up close I could see he had fine stubble on his face, a thin silver ring in his nose.
“You are very beautiful.”
“Um, thanks,” I said, certain suddenly that Mel must have put him up to it somehow. That this was a trick.
“Where are you from?”
“I’m Australian.”
“Australie?” His brow furrowed, then he laughed. “The girl I was just with. She was also Australian.”
“Really?” I asked. “Where did she go?”
“Quelle?”
He was barely listening to me, I noticed. Instead, he was looking at me in that way. His eyes flicking down my body and back to my face. It wasn’t a trick. This guy was trying to pick me up. He wanted to sleep with me.
“The girl you were with.” I spoke slowly and smiled coyly. “Where did she go?”
He shrugged. “Home, I suppose.”
“But not with you?”
“No.” He shot me a boyish grin. “I saw you looking at me again and again. You Australian girls are not very subtle.”
“Is she your girlfriend?”
“Pas du tout, I met her only once before. She is very pretty, but very boring.”
“Really?”
“Oui, she goes on and on about acting, but she is not working. She tries to speak French, but she cannot. I told her to stop, but she continues anyway. It’s very annoying.”
“She’s an actress?”
“No, she is just trying. Anyway, who cares about that girl. I want to know about you. Everything, tell me.”
He reached up to touch my arm, his fingers tracing downward just as he had done to Mel less than twenty minutes ago. It had been so long since I’d been touched, by anyone. I’d begun to think of my skin as hard and stiff. I resisted my urge to flinch, to pull back. To make an excuse. To run. Instead, I held still and let myself feel the fizz of nerves.
* * *
His name was Clem, I soon found out, and within the hour we were making our way to his house, my thi
ck jacket on, the air cold on my cheeks. He wanted me to meet his housemates, he said, since he’d told me so much about them. Plus he had a bottle of wine at home.
I didn’t give a shit about his housemates, or the fact that he was in the middle of putting his demo together, or his opinions on French politics. I wanted to know more about Mel, what she’d told him, how they’d met. But I won’t lie. I was also curious. I’d never gone home with a guy before. I wanted to see what would happen, to know what I would do.
Clem was right. His house was only a few minutes’ walk away. He led me past the propped-up bicycles into a tiny wire elevator. We had to squeeze in to fit together with our big coats on. He looked at me under his lids, like he might want to kiss me in that confined space. I turned my face away.
He opened the door to his apartment to the smell of cooked food. It was small inside, the corridor tight enough so that my shoulders could almost touch both sides. He put his coat on the hook.
“Clem?”
“Salut!” he called, and pulled off his shoes. I did the same, leaving my coat on top of his and my shoes among the many other pairs in various colors and sizes. I felt a little trapped then, without any coat or shoes. I couldn’t just run away if I needed to.
I followed him into the small kitchen.
“C’est Ava,” he said casually.
“Salut,” both the housemates said. They were sitting at the table eating together. They grinned at me over their meals. I tried to smile back, but I was sure I was wearing my fear and awkwardness all over my face. Clem took a bottle of red wine down from the shelf.
“En voulez-vous?” he asked them, but they shook their heads.
He plucked two glass tumblers from the overflowing drying rack. “Ça sent bon. Est-ce que tu m’as laissé?”
One of the housemates scoffed, “En aucune façon.”
I leaned against the sink, wishing I could understand even a word or two of what they were saying, wondering if they were making fun of me.
“We will drink this in my room if that’s okay?” he said. “They don’t want any.”
I shrugged, trying to look relaxed. “Okay.”
I followed him into his bedroom and he closed the door behind us. I was surprised at how big his room was, three times larger than the kitchen. He had a desk with a laptop and some stray papers littering it and a corner of the room set up with what looked like musical equipment. The only place to sit was the bed. He put on music, then poured the wine, overfilling each glass. He put the glass into my hand and sat down heavily next to me.
“Cheers,” he said to me. I smiled at him and took a gulp.
“You like it?”
“Yes, it’s nice.”
“It’s Côte Du Rhône. Do you have French wine at home?”
“A bit.”
“Do you have a boyfriend at home?”
I shook my head, took another gulp.
He put a hand to my face. Again, I fought the urge to run, remembering my shoes on the floor near the door.
“How is someone so beautiful all alone?”
I tightened my hand around the glass to try to stop it from shaking. Clem took my silence as an invitation; his hand slid from my cheek to the back of my skull and he pulled me toward him. My stomach lifted in the same way as when an airplane suddenly drops in altitude. His mouth tasted of the wine. I pulled away to take another sip, emptying the glass. I couldn’t help but think of Evan.
“Here,” Clem said, and took my glass and put it on the bedside table.
He leaned in to kiss me again. I moved my head away and he began kissing my neck instead.
“So where did you meet her?”
“Who?”
He lifted my woollen sweater and T-shirt off over my head at once. He went to kiss me again, but again I moved my cheek away. He continued kissing my neck, squeezing my breast with his hand as he did.
“The girl you were with tonight.”
“Mel? At a party.”
“You liked her at first?”
He stopped what he was doing and looked at me. “It turns you on to talk of her?”
“Yeah,” I said. He liked that.
Pulling me down with him onto the bed, he continued kissing me, his hand stroking up and down my body. And I started feeling something then. Something in my skin when he touched me. I didn’t want to run anymore.
He began reaching behind me, trying to unhook my bra.
“Did you kiss her?” I breathed into his neck.
“Yes, we made love,” he said, pulling off my bra. “Do you want to?”
He brushed a hand over my bare breast, looking from it back up into my eyes, his breathing fast. I’d never done this before. But I wanted to. I wanted to see if I could. I wanted to see if it would reveal the nastiness that was inside me somehow. If I didn’t do it right then, right in that moment, I knew I never would. So I nodded.
29
You won’t really want to hear about my sex life though, will you? You won’t want to hear about the grunts, the sweat, the fumbling fingers as Clem tried to squeeze himself in, not knowing why it was so difficult. It hurt, more than I expected, and as soon as the first shock of pain started to die away enough for me to begin to enjoy it, his body was rippling and he was pulling himself off me.
“T’es si serrée,” he’d groaned.
“What?”
“That was amazing.”
He’d wanted me to stay, but I didn’t. Even though it had been far from amazing, I felt dazzled. Free from my own fear. He hadn’t looked at me any differently afterward. I hadn’t revealed the monster inside me. Nothing bad had happened.
I was happy for the aching pulse between my legs as I walked down the quiet street alone. I was happy for the cold, for my stinging cheeks and ears, happy to hear the sounds of cars far-off, the sounds of French conversations I couldn’t understand. There were fairy lights in the trees around me and they twinkled at me, like a million tiny eyes winking.
I knew I could never be in a relationship. People like me weren’t capable of real love. Plus, no one would be able to love me if they knew who I really was or the things I did. I’d always thought that love and sex went hand in hand, but I realized then that they didn’t have to. There was part of the human experience that I was allowed to be included in after all.
I walked until I reached Mel’s place. The windows were dark. I stood in the middle of the narrow street, looking up at it. This street had a dark hush about it. There were no lights in the trees here, only the blue-orbed streetlights. She was only meters away from me, if only I could see her. Peering over the roof of her house were the tops of a building clad in mesh panels and scaffolding. It wasn’t something I would have usually risked doing. But that night, anything felt possible.
I circled around to the street behind Mel’s. The scaffolding caged a crumbling gray stone building, a few levels higher than the two-story house Mel lived in. It wasn’t hard to climb. Pulling my weight up with my arms, my muscles shook with the effort. Sidling across the metal bars in my boots, elated by my own daring. Sweat building under my thick jacket, I squeezed around to the back. The white roof of Mel’s house opened out in front of me like an ice-skating rink. There were some pigeons nesting in a corner, a chimney sticking up the middle and, to the left, a black square. I hopped onto the roof, treading softly so that my footsteps wouldn’t be heard in the rooms below. The black square was actually not black at all, but a panel of glass. It wasn’t big, less than a meter each way. Crouching next to it, I saw down onto her bed. Mel was lying there, the laptop on her chest illuminating her face a pale blue.
I watched her for a long time, imagining many things. Stomping through the glass and falling onto her bed, smacking her across the face with her laptop. Or perhaps the glass would do enough, its jagged pieces falling over her, cutting her up in
to small pieces.
Eventually she closed her laptop, slid it under her pillow and turned onto her side, eyes closed. Without the light from the screen, I could barely see her in the dark. She was only a dark shape against the white sheets. I stood, bones crackling from immobility, and made my way gingerly back down to the ground.
30
When I got back to the hostel that night, no one was awake. I showered in the empty communal bathroom, then slept deeply for a few hours. I got up with the sun, and returned to Mel’s house. I was cleaned out, refreshed inside and out.
For days, I trailed Mel’s every move. She didn’t go out much, but when she did, she was always alone. She’d sit by herself in cafés, scooping the foam of her coffee into her mouth and then tonguing the spoon. Then she would eat a buttery croissant with her hands and lick her fingers, one at a time. She never went back to the bluestone building where I’d first seen her, and I noticed she’d deleted the post about her audition from Instagram, which I guess meant she didn’t get the part. A couple of times she went to the Pathé-Wepler Cinema, a huge complex that played blockbusters and stank of stale popcorn. She avoided the French films, watching movies in English with French subtitles. I’d sneak into the back row after the trailers were finished and the lights had gone down, and watch the back of her head as she ate popcorn and leaned back in her seat. It made me think of that night we’d watched Cloverfield together on her laptop, weeks after that awful party. I sat in the dark, seething at the memory of it.
Sometimes she’d spend hours just walking. She’d walk and walk and I’d follow, but she never seemed to go anywhere. Just endless loops through the city. Still, after all this time, I didn’t understand her. I didn’t know why she did the things she did, and if I didn’t get her, how was I ever going to pay her back.
Just as I was beginning to despair, just as I was sure Celia’s money would dry up before I found an opportunity, that I would fail at this and have to go home, Mel left the house with makeup on. She walked with purpose. She was finally going somewhere.
The Spite Game Page 15