by Joe Heap
She stands there for a moment, hoping – a thunderclap answers her hope. Goosebumps rise on her arms and thighs. Kate looks around the room and decides to drag the big armchair over to the window. She grabs a blanket from the sofa and sits, wrapped up, watching the rain fall through the beams of the streetlamps. The window is sheltered enough that she isn’t getting wet, though occasionally the wind will blow a few drops inside.
The thunder gets closer, then further away, then closer again, as though it’s prowling up and down the streets of Acton. Kate counts the seconds between the lightning and the thunder, though sometimes there is no flash. Far off there is a long, grumbling peal like the sound of a landslide.
Her excitement fades, but the sound of the rain is soothing. She doesn’t want it to stop – she wants to be washed away by the sound of it. The sound is so all-embracing that she doesn’t hear Nova approaching until she is right by the chair.
‘Hey, there,’ she mumbles, running a hand through her hair. ‘Room for two?’
‘Just about. Come on – I need your warmth.’
Nova climbs into the chair and Kate wraps the blanket around her. Kate puts one arm around her neck and draws her close.
‘Did I wake you?’
‘No – I just rolled over and you weren’t there. Do you like the rain?’
‘Mm,’ Kate says, thinking. ‘It’s the closest you get to nature, living in the city.’
Nova doesn’t say anything, just nuzzles closer. Her breath is warm on her neck. They listen to the rain for a long time. The air grows cold.
‘Hey, Kate?’ Nova is barely audible over the rain
‘Yeah?’
‘Will you be my girlfriend?’
Kate looks out into the darkness, and for a moment the street and all the houses are illuminated by a blue flash.
‘Yes.’
‘Good … that’s good.’
They sit for a while longer, until Kate is sure that Nova is asleep. Her feet are poking out from under the blanket and she’s getting cold. She gets up and closes the doors. Nova is snoring in the chair. Kate puts her arms under her and lifts, surprised by how light Nova is. How light her girlfriend is. She carries her back to bed and gets in beside her, feeling the warmth grow in the space between their bodies.
Twenty-Six
March
‘I CAN’T BELIEVE I’M GOING to see the sea! See the sea!’ Nova is bouncing on the bed in her stripy bumblebee socks.
‘Ugh, take it down a notch, babe. It’s early.’
‘I’ll get you a coffee, ma petite amie.’
They could get the Eurostar to Paris, but Nova begged to take the ferry. So they get a lunchtime train to Dover, eating homemade sandwiches and planning their long weekend. By the time they reach the coast, it’s late afternoon. The rain has cleared and the sky is brightening. The landscape around them is a slick, dark green, like something that has recently emerged from underwater.
‘What’s that, over there?’ Nova points forward.
‘What? You’ll have to be more specific.’
‘That … field? It’s very dark … and flat.’
‘That’s the sea! You spotted it first – that means you get five pence.’
‘Oh. It’s very flat, isn’t it? I imagined it being more … lumpy. Big waves, that sort of thing.’
‘Well, it is. But we’re still quite far away – it just looks flat from where we are.’
‘Riiiight …’ Nova sounds unconvinced.
‘Didn’t you see it when you were in Venice?’
‘It was too foggy. Besides, I was just starting to learn back then. Everything was blurry. I didn’t have you to teach me.’
They walk on, wheeling their noisy luggage, closer and closer to the sea.
‘We have a little extra time before the ferry, if you want to go and have a proper look,’ Kate says.
‘Can we?’
‘Yeah, I think I can see a way down.’
‘Okay – lay on, Macduff.’
They reach the front and Kate leads them down some concrete steps, carrying both bags so Nova can focus on not tripping. The sea isn’t more than thirty metres of sandy beach away.
‘Can I get closer?’ Nova asks.
‘Come on, follow me.’ She takes Nova by the hand and leads her to the tide line.
‘All this sand! I feel like I’m in a sandbox.’
Kate doesn’t know what to say. She just wants to let Nova experience this on her own terms. She has seen the ocean on TV, but this is different.
‘It’s very noisy, isn’t it?’ Nova says after a while, looking out to sea.
She is sensing a new degree of depth. Her stereoscopy has developed since that first night in Kate’s fort, and she has gone from seeing things across the room to the length of the street. But the length of the street is the greatest depth on offer in London. Oxford had more in the way of scenery, but Nova has never seen as far as she is seeing now, the sea stretching
out –
out –
ooooout to a flat horizon.
She’s used to water being transparent, or silvery in a puddle, or dull green, stained with pondweed. She doesn’t understand how the water in front of her is related to those kinds of water. This water is solid grey. It doesn’t look like the colour of a liquid at all. It looks like a hard, grey-blue mineral that is somehow sloshing around. The sea looks nothing like she imagined it. But what had she imagined? Already her old ideas are fading away, like a dream on waking.
‘What do you think?’ Kate asks. Nova thinks about this for a second.
‘I think it’s kind of scary. It makes me feel small.’
Kate nods. ‘Can’t disagree with you there. Come on, we better get going.’
They spend a long time in the queue for the ferry, and the air smells of car exhaust. Both of them are sleepy, but Nova is still excited. On the train she had read all their tourist guides for Paris. Her reading is still slow, but there are lots of pictures to enjoy.
‘We can go up the Eiffel Tower! Or go to the Pompidou Centre. We could see the Mona Lisa!’ She dissolves into laughter, as though this is a particularly good joke. ‘Can you imagine that? I could actually see the Mona Lisa.’
Kate smiles, feeling her girlfriend’s excitement bubbling through her veins like a drug.
‘I can’t believe we’re going on holiday … I can’t believe we’re going on a ship! A ship on the ocean … crazy.’ Nova smiles to herself, then yawns.
Finally, they are on the lower deck, walking past the ranks of parked cars. The air is thick with fumes. Kate leads Nova to the stairs.
‘It keeps moving!’ Nova says.
‘Just watch where you’re going, okay? I don’t want to have to take you to the doctor.’
‘All right, aaaaall right …’
They emerge on the upper deck and start to explore, through the cloying whiff of the duty-free shop, an expanse of café, and a darkened arcade where racing games, shooting games and dancing games all flicker and flash and blare music.
‘I can’t believe there’s so much on this boat! It’s like a whole village.’
They buy paper parcels of chips, saturate them with ketchup and vinegar, and find a table. It’s next to a window so they can look out. Nova does so from time to time, then looks back in again, focusing on her food or her hands. She doesn’t know what to make of the sea yet. She’s heard a lot about it, but she thinks it might be an acquired taste.
When they’ve eaten, they go outside. Nova looks out to sea for a while, watching the previously stable horizon rise and fall. She turns back to Kate, who is staring down at the ribbons of white foam that twist and curl away from the hull of the ship.
‘Are you okay?’
‘Yeah, I’m fine,’ Kate nods.
‘I mean … do you feel better, for being away?’
Kate blinks a few times, quickly. A vision of her bedside drawer appears to her. At the back are two wads of envelopes, tightly bound with rubber ba
nds, like creatures that might snap or bite. Fifty-six empty letters. She doesn’t know why she still hasn’t mentioned them to anyone. At first it was because she didn’t want to worry over nothing. But they just kept arriving, every other day. Now the letters feel like a cancer that she’s waited too long to do anything about.
She clears her throat. ‘Not yet. But I think I will, when we stop for the night.’
Nova stands on tiptoes and kisses her cheek.
‘Cheers!’
‘Santé, I think you mean.’
The light in the room makes Nova’s head swim. There are so many glass mirrors. And it isn’t just the mirrors – all the glasses are cut-crystal, all the cutlery is polished, and the lights in the room blaze from chandeliers. Everything is bright, in a way that Nova doesn’t find unpleasant, but which makes it difficult to concentrate on the meal.
She tries to concentrate on Kate instead. All the light makes her look luminous, as though she’s glowing from inside. Her expression is far from angelic, though. Nova has learned how to recognize frustration. On Kate, this is a coming together of the eyebrows; three asymmetrical, vertical lines on her forehead; a thinning of the lips as she purses them together and – Nova’s favourite – a slight wrinkling of the nose.
She is trying to get a snail out of its shell.
‘Come … out … you little … bugger!’ She fiddles around inside the shell with the provided utensil – a thin, barbed fork. Nova decides not to comment and picks up her own snail and her own fork. She carefully finds the opening and the snail comes out in one.
‘How did you do that?’
‘I don’t know, I just did it.’
‘Ugh. I think I have a faulty snail.’ Kate goes back to scrabbling, this time inside another one of the snails on her plate. Nova inspects the thing on the end of her fork – dark grey, shrivelled like a raisin, and covered in something green that she can only assume is garlic sauce.
‘Don’t look at it like that, just eat it!’ Kate sounds disgusted. The thing in front of Nova is no more disgusting to her than any other food. All food looks spectacularly yukky. The crisp flakes of her breakfast cereal have the rough, uneven texture of gravel. The internal layers of lasagne look exactly like human flesh, cut into strips. Still, it’s important find out what food looks like, for future reference.
Nova pops the snail in her mouth and chews.
Kate watches her. ‘How is it? I’ve finally got one.’
‘It’s not bad … It mostly tastes like garlic butter. And chicken.’
‘Ha. All right, here goes nothing.’
She chews in silence for a minute, then reaches for a glass of water.
‘Man, that’s one funky tasting chicken. Why did I let you convince me to order this stuff?’
‘We’re in Paris! You have to do all the stupid, stereotypical things that people do when they come to Paris!’
‘Fine, but I’m looking forward to the next bit a lot more.’
The absinthe tasting is just a few blocks away. Kate has eaten four courses, including the snails, but still feels hungry. They go into the bar and Nova explains everything to the owner in perfect French. He ushers them both to the bar with a hand on their backs, seating them by a tall, clear-glass tower. It has little taps coming out either side. He says something complicated in French to Nova, seeming to think that Kate will also understand, then leaves them.
‘I love seeing you do that.’
‘Do what?’
‘Talk to people in another language. You’re just so … natural.’
‘Flatterer.’ Nova grins. A barmaid arrives with two tall, elaborate glasses, with a little clear liquid in the bottom. There is a strong smell of aniseed and fennel. The barmaid starts chatting amiably with Nova, who explains that this is their first time.
The barmaid narrates what she’s doing, putting a flat, slotted spoon on each of their glasses, on top of which she places a sugar cube. Both glasses are positioned under the taps of the water tower, and now the taps are turned, so that liquid drip drip drips onto each of the sugar cubes, dissolving them and running down into the clear liquid. As the water hits it, the absinthe changes colour.
‘See how it’s changing?’ Nova says, peering into the bottom of her glass with childlike wonder. Kate watches as, drop by drop, it turns from clear green to milky white. Nova is excited by changes like this – the moment the toast turns golden, the moment Kate’s cheeks turn pink. They sit, holding hands, watching the sugar disappear.
They listen to the bustle around them, the dozens of conversations being held in French and other languages. Nova is half following a couple of the conversations without being aware of it. Kate just lets herself drift into the sound, enjoying the rise and fall of people’s voices and the sense that, at last, she is somewhere far from home.
By the time the sugar cubes have fully dissolved, each glass is about half full of cloudy liquid. The barmaid returns and turns off each of the taps. She says something in French, which Kate takes to be cheers, and they clink their glasses and sip.
‘Wow.’
‘Yeah … you feel that?’
‘Like your eyeballs have gone prickly?’
‘I was going to say that the back of my head has fallen off.’
‘Drink slowly. Maybe just one of these, yeah?’
They do not have ‘just one’. The barmaid tells them they can’t leave until they’ve tried it bohemian style, which involves lighting the sugar cube before adding the water. They watch the dancing, blue flames and breathe in whiffs of burned caramel.
RULE OF SEEING NO.294
Flames look like bright bugs which have landed on the thing they are devouring, fluttering incandescent wings. Do not brush them off.
By the time they leave the bar, they’re running late to get to the Eiffel Tower.
‘You never told me you were an ice skater!’
‘Because I wasn’t. I thought I was, at the time …’
‘You were in competitions!’ Nova grins, imagining this.
‘I took it very seriously, but I was never going to be professional.’
‘How come?’
‘Well, look at me! I didn’t know that I was going to end up as tall as this.’
‘Aw, poor bean sprout … Did you get to wear a sparkly outfit?’
‘Oh, hundreds of diamante bits!’
Nova pulls them to a stop. They stand for a long moment, Nova’s face turned up to Kate’s. She speaks in a conspiratorial whisper.
‘I want to kiss you.’
‘You want to … here?’ Kate hesitates. They’ve never kissed in public before. It’s not something Kate insisted on, just that Nova seemed to know it might be a big step for her.
‘We don’t have to, if you’re not comfortable,’ Nova says.
Kate’s heart is a tectonic plate, the fault lines rubbing together, moments before an earthquake. She leans down and kisses Nova – and Paris shakes, but does not fall.
‘You taste of caramel,’ Nova mumbles into Kate’s lips.
‘Really? You taste like a distillery.’
Nova cackles and pulls them on through the night. They follow a map that Kate has drawn on, until they reach the square where the Eiffel Tower stands. Nova cranes her neck up, taking in the array of lights disappearing into the sky. It looks like nothing is connecting the lights – as though the lights are all that’s there.
‘Come on then!’ Kate pulls her on, ‘We don’t want to miss it!’
They look out over the city. Around them, the tower glows. A tower of light, not steel. Below them the streets glow, though not as brightly. Paris is full of low mist, creeping through the streets between its high tenements. They look like canals full of clouds.
‘My head is spinning,’ Kate says.
‘That’s the absinthe.’
Nova hugs Kate close, grabbing the lapel of her coat and pulling it into her, sheltering herself against the wind.
‘This is nice.’
�
��It is.’ As they speak, the lights of the tower start to flicker, shimmering over the structure like the lights on a deep-sea creature. They look up, into the darkness. When it’s over, they look back down, into each other’s eyes.
‘Whoa, head rush,’ says Nova.
‘I love you,’ says Kate, at the same moment.
Nova freezes, then bursts out laughing.
‘Oh, my God!’
‘Hey! What? What did I do?’
Nova buries herself in Kate’s scarf, convulsed with giggles. ‘You did not just tell me that you love me on the Eiffel Tower?’
Kate feels herself blushing intensely. ‘Well, it just felt like the right moment.’
Nova stops laughing and looks at her. She’s still grinning and pulls Kate close again.
‘I love you too.’
They wake up late the next morning, in the small hotel bed. They are on the fourth floor, but can still feel Ligne of the Paris Metro rumbling under them. Nova gets up while Kate is in the shower and gets her boots on to go out. They haven’t paid for a breakfast, and she’s hungry.
Before she leaves, she spots the open sketchpad on Kate’s side of the bed. A drawing done in biro. Kate had bought the pad on the ferry and done the drawing when they arrived, without prompting – the view from their window. It was a scatter of angled roofs, air-conditioning units and wonky aerials, all done quickly and seemingly without much thought. Nova had watched her work, feeling that it was a magic trick, turning 3D into 2D. She had never seen Kate draw before, only colour in other people’s drawings. Today she will scan the giftshops of the museums they visit for some watercolour paints.
Nova descends through the hotel and steps out onto the street, feeling nervous at the number of people, the hustle and bustle. Even if she understands the language of this foreign country, she isn’t fluent in the universal language of bodies moving around her, of cars and scooters and cyclists coming and going.
She successfully crosses the road and finds the spot that she remembers – a kiosk, set into the wall, where a man is selling loaves of bread, pastries and cheap coffee. She buys two coffees and a bag of croissants, while the man chats to her about the weather. She crosses the road, back to the hotel entrance.