by S. L. Grey
“Mm,” she says. She pauses. “I’m cold.”
“Let’s go back. It’ll be fine. I’m not sure that apartment has anything else to throw at us.”
We find the nearest Métro station—my body won’t take walking to the apartment, despite the few euros we’d save—and within fifteen minutes, we’re climbing up the steps at Pigalle. After a few false turns, we find the Trois Oiseaux hotel, hoping to get our luggage back, but the front door is locked and the lobby is dim, lit only by a single desk lamp. There’s nobody behind the counter.
When I ring the bell outside, I can’t hear any responding sound inside. I knock and peer in.
“It’s obviously closed,” Steph says.
“There’s no sign or anything. They should list their times somewhere.”
Steph just tuts and turns and starts walking. I hustle up after her, my joints crying out at the effort. “Let’s just get inside,” she says. Then she mumbles something like, “You can’t always bend the world to your will,” but I’m not sure.
“What’s that?”
She doesn’t repeat herself but just stalks away, me limping to keep up, until she’s led us to the street door of the building. My heart sinks the moment we step over the threshold into that dank courtyard, my phone’s soupy glow so different from the bright cheer down at the Tuileries. I deliberately avoid shining it over the cobbles, and we trudge up those worn stairs we thought we’d never have to see again. There’s a difference about the building; we can feel Mireille’s absence in the silence—we can almost imagine the lack of cigarette smoke and brandy and paint fumes, but that can only be fancy.
Steph turns on the lights the instant I push the front door open, and we’re hit by the smell of last night’s cooking. There’s a tinge of rot to it, but it’s not too bad. At least it smells of something, of life recently lived, rather than the musty void that shrouds the rest of the building.
Without a word Steph shucks off her boots and goes to the bathroom, leaving me to wrestle my way out of my wet jeans and sweater with numb fingers and get into bed. It does feel good—I haven’t been in bed for nearly two days and my body melts in relief.
My eyes are sliding closed when Steph hurries in, rubbing herself vigorously with a towel. “There’s no fucking hot water,” she says.
Another version of me, on a good day, might offer to warm her up some other way, but I can’t bring myself to suggest that right now and know she won’t appreciate it, so I try to make myself useful by getting out of bed and looking at the electrical board at the front door. I don’t know what I’m looking for, but Steph comes up behind me, wrapped in a blanket. “All the switches are up,” she said. “I checked. Let’s just try to sleep. I’m so tired.” So we get into bed and press against each other and again I have the sense that we’re just borrowing each other’s animal warmth, just clinging on to get through the night.
Soon Steph’s snoring in jagged bursts, her breathing shallow and choppy, and I try to go to sleep too, knowing that if we can just fast-forward to the morning we’ll be out of here forever. But despite my exhaustion, or maybe because of it, I can’t settle, repetitive thoughts tracking graven spirals in my mind. I flash through the jumble of images from the police station, the interminable hours of institutional walls and soft voices and strong coffee, of the vast loop of streets we’ve walked and the cold and tiredness and hunger. You’d think that would be enough for my bones and muscles to take solace in the relative comfort of this warm and lumpy bed and relax, but instead they tense as I recall Mireille casting herself off from the windowsill. That image is flushed by a memory of the girl in the museum, her firm, tall body and her fragrant hair. It was Zoë, you fool, someone is saying, and it’s a leering wax-faced actor, smiling endlessly. I must be asleep because now I’m in the building’s low storage cellar, picking through a pile of discarded clothes, now scrabbling through them desperately, throwing them out behind me, onto a bloodstained mattress, each item making someone behind me cry out in pain. Now I turn and try to remove the sheet from over the crying, bleeding girl, desperately ripping at the shroud that won’t come away, no matter how hard I tug, clawing at the sheet because it’s Zoë, the Zoë I know, seven-year-old Zoë, and she’s buried under that pile of dusty cloth, buried at the bottom, her crying muffled and desperate, struggling to breathe. Hack, hack, gasp.
I startle awake and Steph rolls over onto her side and keeps sleeping. I breathe deeply to try to calm my heart, to take in the air that Zoë needs, skin clammy and cold, flushed with adrenaline. As the images recede, one part of the dream remains: the sound of sobbing, a hitching moan interspersed with jags of high-pitched keening. It’s exactly how Zoë would cry when she was at her most exhausted, her most miserable. It’s not just the cat this time, I know it for sure; there are even words mixed into the sobbing, an unintelligible mumbling—this is no sound a cat could make.
I look over to Steph’s back, just to make sure, even though the crying sound is coming from farther away than this bed. The rhythm of her breath inflates and deflates the curve of her side in a slow, regular rhythm. It’s not her.
Mireille is dead. There is nobody else here.
I close my eyes and try to sleep. I’m so bloody tired. I shove a pillow over my head, but the crying seems to follow me under the shield. I hear a word emerge out of the disconsolate mumbling: Daddy.
When Zoë was small, Odette would normally go to her in the night, but sometimes she’d be fast asleep and I’d rouse myself and sometimes I’d manage to comfort her. I’d feel like a hero. Sometimes, when Zoë woke and needed someone to chase away her monsters, she’d call out to me, not Odette. She’d call out to me: Daddy.
It’s not Zoë, you idiot. Zoë’s dead. You killed her.
Daddy.
I need some air. I stumble out of the bedroom, across to the window, and try to raise it, but it’s jammed shut again. I’m this close to smashing the pane when I think better of it and slip on my shoes and coat instead, grab the keys, and go downstairs. Without bothering to use my phone for light, I speed down the pitch-dark stairs, trying to flee my panic, but it’s inside me. Before I know it, I’m in the courtyard standing exactly where Mireille landed, craning up to the patch of sulfuric orange where the sky should be and sucking in lungfuls of air, as if they will clean me out.
It works to some extent, because at least I’m not hearing Zoë’s crying anymore. I gradually become aware of myself. I’m standing in my underwear, sockless shoes, and a coat; my legs are numb with cold, and the narrow cobbled courtyard is familiar, but something’s different. Then I notice it: the dim patch of light pushing through the grimy window in the courtyard.
Someone’s living in there, in the storeroom. It explains the sounds—the talking, the crying. I should just leave it at that, be satisfied that I have someone or something to blame for the night’s disturbances; that will make me sleep easier, won’t it?
I shouldn’t approach the window, go anywhere near that flaking door that looks so much like the final barricade of a slaughterhouse. I should just go back up and keep Steph company through the rest of this shattered night. But fragments of my last dream still hook in my mind: Zoë suffocating, scrabbling for my help under that smothering shroud.
My feet carry me to the window and I peer through; the decision has nothing to do with my mind. The storeroom is lit by the dim orange glow of an ancient light bulb that’s absorbed into the dust-dulled surfaces of the covered furniture.
But there’s nobody in there; no movement, nobody gasping their final breath.
I’m just exhausted, I tell myself as I stop and fill my lungs with air. The hush of the misty rain filtering down over the cobbles intensifies the padded silence in this courtyard, walled away from the constant city, with the sleeping windows of neighboring buildings looming over me, and the freshness revives me. I should just go back to bed; it will all be easier in the morning. I turn back toward the building, short of breath, my heart still hammering erra
tically, and as I do, I’m startled by a clang and a clatter at the far end of the courtyard, as a light flicks on over the entrance to the stairwell.
It strikes me that the light has never worked before, and I wonder if it’s Steph, coming out to find me—it can’t be anybody else—but a small shadow lurches across the wall in front of me, followed by another one. Then a preternatural wailing, but one I recognize this time—that fucking cat. It’s going to give me a bloody heart attack.
I go toward the culvert where I saw it last time and crouch down to peer inside, but I can’t see anything there. I spend more time than I should there, shoving my arm into the pipe and trying to extract the cat. There’s a rotten smell of fish and sewage in the drain, and I try to push away thoughts of Mireille’s congealing blood still lingering there as I draw my arm out, my coat sleeve rucked up to my biceps and my forearm covered with gunk.
I’m pushing myself up again when I hear the light-shod tread of someone behind me. I’m not quite sure how I’m going to explain myself, crouching half-dressed over the mouth of a drainpipe. I turn slowly.
Zoë, seven years old, smiles at me, her hands behind her back. She’s wearing only jeans and a T-shirt, and her long hair is soaked and darkened by the rain.
“What are you doing out here, Zo?” I say, my mind bypassing all that is real. “You must be freezing. Come.” I stand up and take off my coat and offer it to her, but I drop it when she shows me what’s in her hands.
“I have something for you.”
The cat is hissing and growling in her grasp. Zoë has pinned its legs remarkably efficiently in her strong hands, so that it can’t lash out and scratch her. It’s writhing its head around trying to nip her, a low yowl stretching from inside it.
“Put it down, Zo. Let it go.”
“But why, Daddy? I know you hate it. It’s been keeping you awake.”
I step toward her, pleading, ignoring my shivering, my heart trying to beat itself out of my bare chest. “Sweetie, I never taught you to hurt animals. I always told you that was very bad.”
She ignores me. “I hate it too. It makes me choke,” she says as she shifts her grip and moves the cat’s head to her right hand.
“No! Don’t!”
It’s too late. The cat screams as Zoë squeezes and twists. I hear the crackle of its neck as it’s suddenly silent, and Zoë starts pulling handfuls of fur out of it. I hurry over and grab the animal’s body from her hands as its blood sluices from its mouth onto me.
“What have you done?”
It’s Steph’s voice. I look up at her. “It wasn’t me. It was her.” I point toward where Zoë’s standing, but she’s gone.
“Put it down, Mark. Drop it. We’re getting the fuck out of here.”
I manage to stand, dazed. I look at my arms, covered with sludge and blood, then down at my stomach, my legs. “But I have to clean up. Get dressed.”
“You stay here. I’ll bring you a towel and our stuff. Don’t you dare think of going back into that building. We are leaving this fucking place. Right now.”
The tiredness and the cold must get to me then, because I’m hardly aware as Steph has returned and is rubbing me with the Petits’ thin towels and is helping me into my jeans, which are still damp, and forcing me into my coat. She leaves the towels in the courtyard, on top of the cat’s body, as she steers me out onto the sidewalk and closes the door behind me. I’m stumbling through the gray canyon streets, Steph huffing behind me.
I lean against a wall for a moment and open my eyes to see Steph inside a building’s lobby, shouting at a man behind a desk. I know I should be doing more to help, I should be getting involved, but it’s so cold. I grip my collar, and then Steph’s shunting me along up a hill again.
“Hold this, Mark,” Steph’s saying, strapping the daypack onto my back, wrestling our two wheeled suitcases behind her. I shake my head and squeeze my eyes, trying to clear the cobwebs and help her, but I’m so tired. “Can you believe that arsehole? Said he wouldn’t give us back our bags because Serge wasn’t supposed to offer to keep them in the first place. ‘What wiss all the tewwowism at the moment, madame, we should all feel lucky.’ I’m so over this place.”
Somehow, Steph’s wrestled me and our luggage down into the Pigalle Métro station, then off again and through a change at a narrow little overground station. Although it’s still dark, it’s busy around us, working people starting their day. The time on the train’s clock reads 5:52. The walk and then the moment to sit on the train helps to revive me enough to say, “It wasn’t me, Steph.”
She just shakes her head.
“Where are we going?”
“To Gare du Nord to get a train to the airport.”
“But the standby flight’s only at eleven tonight.”
She turns to me and glares. “Does it look to you like I want to spend another minute in this city? What are you suggesting? A spot of sightseeing, maybe go up the Eiffel Tower, a three-star lunch, and then find another fucking piece of roadkill?”
The people in the carriage stare at us. “Shh!” I hiss. “I told you: it wasn’t me. It was—”
“Shut up, Mark. Don’t say another word to me.” She jams her arms across her chest and looks away.
When the train stops at the Gare du Nord, at least I’m together enough to keep the daypack on and wheel my own bag. With a bitter charge of wordlessness between us, we navigate our way from the Métro station through the confusing levels of the terminal to the correct ticket machines. I stop and look around me before I take out my wallet; it’s early on a Friday morning and the station is bustling with people and many of them look threatening, their hoodies and trainers dressing them as archetypal first-world criminals. I feel a little ashamed of myself, but with our colorful luggage and hesitant steps, we stand out for miles as tourists ripe for the scamming.
But it’s all moot since when I take out my wallet, all I find are two euros and thirty-five cents and my impotent credit card. Steph finds another euro and forty in her pocket. We need twenty euros for the train tickets.
“Look,” Steph says, pointing at the rank of turnstiles fronting the entrance to the airport-bound line. “Everyone’s going through the baby carriage gate. They don’t have tickets. We can just tail someone through to the other side. Everyone does it.”
“No way, Steph. It’s illegal to travel without a ticket. I don’t care if everyone does it.”
“What? What’s the alternative?”
I don’t say anything to her; I can’t bring myself to open my mouth, but I just venture out onto the concourse with my hands like a bowl, the universal sign of need. It’s shameful, but if this situation forces me to become a criminal, I’m no worse than them.
Steph doesn’t try to stop me; she merely mutters, “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” then shunts our bags to a railing and sits on one, slumping her chin in her hand. Right now I’d like to disappear into the earth; I wouldn’t be disappointed if one of these passing gangsters or hustlers beat me to a pulp, took all I have, and just ground me into the dust.
It’s a mortifying forty minutes. I don’t know whose embarrassment burns me worse—my own, or Steph’s as she sits by the railing, wishing she were anywhere in the world but here and associated with anyone in the world but me. As I make my absurd, meaningless, principled stand, overgrown kids laugh at me, tourists skitter away from me, and harried workers tell me to fuck myself, before a tall, dark man with a white kepi approaches me with a smile. Behind him, his wife, his son, and his daughter watch patiently. The wife wears a colorful hijab and the daughter is in a long purple one. The son wears a neat suit, a small version of his father, who speaks to me in English. “What do we ask Allah for today, my brother?”
I speak frankly. “My wife and I need sixteen euros twenty-five for train tickets to the airport.”
The man produces a wallet and takes out two fives and a ten and offers them to me. I can see he has little else in there and I think I should refuse,
but that suddenly seems the least honorable thing I could do today.
“Thank you,” I say. “Merci. Let me take your address and pay you back.”
“Non,” he says. “Think of Suleiman and his family in your prayers, d’accord?”
“Thank you,” I say again as I watch the family move off, feeling like a fraud. I’m never going to pray for that man. I don’t believe; I don’t pray. I have absolutely nothing to offer him.
“You happy now?” Steph says as I join her. “Taking money from a man who probably has less than us.”
“Yes, I am actually,” I say.
“Nice, Mark. Very fucking nice.” She stares at me for five full seconds, and I can see the spite boiling in her eyes, and she can’t contain it. “I’m glad you can stand up for yourself and your own sainted morality. But you can’t fucking stand up for your wife and child when they’re being dragged into a bedroom by a gang of armed men.” She whirls away before she can even register the hurt in my face.
Chapter 14
Steph
I started to relax only when the plane began taxiing along the rain-swept runway. Until then, I fully expected the flight attendant to tap me on the shoulder, smile apologetically, and say, “I’m sorry, ma’am, but there’s been a mistake. You and your fucked-up, twitchy husband have to get the hell off the plane.” Then we’d be stuck in that airport for another full day with no money, an unbearable thought after ten hours spent perching on a slippery plastic chair, sipping nasty coffee.
When we reached Charles de Gaulle, I positioned us within sight of the Air France check-in desks, a few yards from an exit. We were hit with a waft of smoke-tinged icy air every time the exit doors slid open, but I didn’t care. Our flight wouldn’t be open for hours, but I was so desperate to get on the plane, I couldn’t relax unless I had the desks in sight.
Mark fell asleep an hour into the ordeal, head lolled back, mouth open, as motionless as a cadaver. Too anxious to doze, I managed to finish the Kate Atkinson novel that had sat at the bottom of my bag all week without retaining a word and tried not to hate the holidaymakers and businesspeople blithely queuing for the check-in machines. I used up the thirty minutes of free wi-fi doing little else but framing an email to my mom, saying that all was well and that I’d be in touch the following day. I didn’t want to jinx anything by letting my folks know we’d changed our flights until I knew for sure that we’d be able to get on the plane. After that I paced, picked at a stale croissant, lugged my case back and forth to the toilets to splash water on my face and change my clothes. (Despite the chilly air blasting through the doors, as the hours dragged on I sweated through two T-shirts.) I was up and hovering by the standby desk the second it opened. We weren’t the only ones hoping to squash onto the plane, but the check-in woman was kind and pretended to believe my family emergency excuse. Perhaps it was Mark who really swung it for us. I’d washed his coat in the ladies’, trying not to gag as dried animal blood and a matted clump of cat hair clotted the sink, but his eyes were bloodshot and haunted. He genuinely looked like he was in mourning.