Andrew Meehan was born in Dublin.
One Star Awake is his first novel.
One Star Awake
One Star Awake
Andrew Meehan
ONE STAR AWAKE
First published in 2017 by
New Island Books
16 Priory Hall Office Park
Stillorgan
County Dublin
Republic of Ireland
www.newisland.ie
Copyright © Andrew Meehan, 2017
The Author asserts his moral rights in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright and Related Rights Act, 2000.
Print ISBN: 978-1-84840-627-8
Epub ISBN: 978-1-84840-628-5
Mobi ISBN: 978-1-84840-629-2
All rights reserved. The material in this publication is protected by copyright law. Except as may be permitted by law, no part of the material may be reproduced (including by storage in a retrieval system) or transmitted in any form or by any means; adapted; rented or lent without the written permission of the copyright owner.
British Library Cataloguing Data.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
New Island received financial assistance from The Arts Council (An Chomhairle Ealaíon), 70 Merrion Square, Dublin 2, Ireland.
New Island Books is a member of Publishing Ireland.
This is a work of fiction. The characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance with any real person is coincidental and unintended.
For Áine Prendergast
‘And then she turned homeward with one star awake,
Like the swan in the evening moves over the lake’
—Padraic Colum
Map of Paris
It began with my sweet tooth—although it wasn’t my idea to walk all the way across town for an éclair. There were hundreds of places closer to home but I had been asked by my boyfriend to meet him at Bertrand Rose and that’s what I was going to do. For as long as I could remember I had valued the opinions of others more than my own. The walk from my place beside Buttes Chaumont in the nineteenth to the pâtisserie in the eleventh would take an hour. After that there would be another half an hour on foot before I got to my job at the restaurant. A walk of ninety minutes on an April morning should not have been considered a hardship but Parisians, so I was told, were not so intrepid. But I was not a Parisian and my life, then, did not consist of very much.
It was a good job that I liked to walk, since I was unable for the hubbub of the métro and would not have dreamed of paying for a taxi even if I was able to find one at this hour of the morning. Rue Paul Bert, where I was headed, was not in my neighbourhood but since I couldn’t claim to have a neighbourhood—not yet—I had no qualms about where I went and what I did when I got there.
The walk to Bertrand Rose took me along Avenue Parmentier. The streets had been rinsed by an oily rain and there were starchy gusts from the China Star dry-cleaners. The young man smoking from the window looked so forlorn. Only very early in the mornings did I feel that way too, although it was impossible to avoid—in Paris, you lived in an infinity of sadness. Moping princes writhed on Avenue Montaigne, dinner ladies flung four-course lunches at bawling children. If anyone was going there expecting cloaks to be thrown over puddles, if they were seeking old-fashioned rapture—well, I hope they found it.
I reached Paul Bert with half an hour to spare. Immediately I was amazed, upwind from the pâtisserie on the corner, by more sweet aromas. At that time in my life I was always hungry, simply because I never ate enough and because I moved around a lot. Away from work, I never bothered with anything other than sweets and the cheap stuff usually suited me just fine. Different foods appealed to me now and again—waffles from the truck at Jaurès métro—but never for long. A new bag of fizzy cola bottles was a big event in my life but, since this was Paris and I worked in a restaurant, I had to make an effort when it came to food. I struggled with most of it, the lingo especially.
I was amazed, too, by a note pinned to a doorway accusing someone of taking a shit in the stairwell and that the note featured a P.S. with a doctor’s phone number heavily underlined. I was amazed—no, hypnotized—by the conquering hero in a tuxedo exiting a taxi alongside the barefoot girl who was pulling her skirt down to cover her knees as she followed him to the doorway with the note pinned on it.
I was amazed more than anything that Daniel had already joined the long queue making its way out of Bertrand Rose.
—You must really like éclairs, I said.
—Only one way to find out, he said. Chantilly? Chocolate? Hazelnut?
My answer included all my stored-up feelings for him at that point in time.
—Dunno.
Daniel was from somewhere near New York and was white yet he had dreadlocks that reached all the way down his back. The dreads resembled a rope you might use to tie up an old fishing boat in Connemara or wherever. You didn’t need to have just arrived on the planet to find this peculiar, but I tolerated it like so much else because I found him funny. I found him funny even when he called me his little autistic, which was definitely not my problem. He moonlighted as a sommelier in Gravy and because of the dreadlocks and his feline eyes—which gave many women, myself included, the shivers—he also modeled from time to time. They were the colour of the hashish he bought daily at Pyrénées métro. A close-up of them, speckled brown like a suntan, had once been magnified and suspended above Hôtel de Ville in an advert for contact lenses.
I was tall—and thinner than I am now—with the long feet and slender hips of a Masai. I was as white as the average dinner plate. My lips and my cheeks and bum were almost non-existent and my biceps were beefier than my breasts. I was to look at about as substantial as a ribbon but I was much, much tougher than I looked.
It was also said that I would have made a handsome man. And Daniel was intrigued by my accidentally punk-rock hairdo, washed the night before with Fairy liquid.
—What happens now? I asked, motioning towards the shop’s door.
—We wait, he said. You know what this city needs? Chairs in the street. I spend on average ten hours a week waiting. Fucking standing.
—Not practical.
—Why does anything have to be practical? Look at that shit in the window. Next year we buy our Easter eggs at the Monoprix.
I didn’t want to admonish myself in front of Daniel for not knowing this was Good Friday. I had vague notions of days of the week—it was either a work day or a day off. Of course there would be people waiting at the pâtisserie.
The shop opened and we all shuffled forwards. The black smocks and the granite countertops gave Bertrand Rose the feel of a pharmacy in a nightclub. I was baffled by it all, this small sweet citadel, and I did a run-through of all the incurably Parisian things I saw most mornings—the great human surge from Bastille métro, prammed babies trouncing each other, maliciously, with cuteness. Perhaps it was all Parisian, even the things—being coughed on, death-stares at traffic lights—you weren’t supposed to think of as Parisian.
It was then that I saw the young man heading the queue. First of all, he seemed out of place in a room perfumed with such self-regard. He stood apart and looked like the kind of man to stand apart in happy rooms. The kind of man I saw impeccably alone at Enfants Rouges on Saturday mornings or alone in queues for Christmas trees.
He had just taken a croissant and was eating it so greedily that he did not notice the pastry flakes floating in slow motion onto the sun-bleached hair on his arm. I
was watching his back—there was an illustration of eagle on his T-shirt—when I noticed the blaze of psoriasis at his hairline. He had dusty blonde hair and a coarse copper beard so deluxe as to seem artificial. The hair on his arms was as thick as reeds. His eyes were of the watery, wary variety and the skin on his cheeks above the beard was blemished—a person who’d been set on fire but the fire had been quickly put out.
I fixated on his conversation with the female assistant. The woman, who had facial hair to rival his, produced a dark chocolate orb he had specially ordered. They were discussing whether this kind of bitter chocolate would be suitable for children. My French was limited but I heard the woman—whom I named Bristles—wondering what kind of chocolate wasn’t suitable for children. The orb was not an Easter egg by any means. Without tasting it I guessed it would have been too bitter for a child, and most adults for that matter. If he was buying this for a child he was bound for trouble.
The negotiation continued. His accented French was creamy and round. He was English, I guessed, from the way he pronounced vous as view.
—I recognise him, I said.
I knew him as you would your family’s former postman or someone off the TV—but, remembering from where was as impossible as sending a boat over a mountain with your mind.
Eagleback, that’s what I’d call him—even though I wasn’t one for names. Everyone called me La Plongeuse, anyway.
The dishwasher.
—It suits you, Daniel used to say. Until we find you another one.
Imagine Wanting To Touch the Fire and You Can Touch the Fire Without Getting Hurt
Eagleback was getting so angry with Bristles that his head was almost rotating. I was dizzy, too, but that was down to the hunger surely. I was enchanted by the crumbs still resting on the hairs on his arm, and that I would have liked to pick them off and eat them, when I felt it—a sense of certainty and fearlessness only found in suicide bombers and the insane.
Daniel, meanwhile, was singing a stupid song about cakes and pastries.
—Tarte Citron. Macaron macaron.
Eagleback paid for his chocolate orb and was coming towards me and—this was no choreographed scene—I was being raised up by a warm wind, I was certain of it. I had to take Daniel’s arm to steady myself. I tilted my chin, finding the light with my face in expectation of a moment of recognition.
I was sure Eagleback looked at me, but a customer had entered the shop and I was jostled from behind and rocked towards him. Eagleback was cradling his cake box and did not see me until I was right there, less than an arm’s length away, closer for being pushed together. I would like to be able to report a flare of recognition between us but Eagleback was scanning the space over my shoulder in order to squeeze his way out of the shop. His toing and froing about the orb had increased the sense of impatience in the room and the waiting customers mutinously groaned as one. My forehead, too, had a particular feeling that I recognized and could mean only one thing—another arbitrary migraine, thick enough to fell me on any other day of the week.
Eagleback left the shop and, with no good reason to follow, I imagined myself past the crowds and out the door.
Directions, even the distinction between left and right, still baffle me. Whether it was the headache or even the hunger or probably just confusion over which street Eagleback had taken, I didn’t know which way to go. Paul Bert is at the intersection of three busy streets and my mind was making a maze of them—peeled eyes useless for anything other than expressing alarm.
The area had woken up in the time we had been waiting at the shop but Rue Jules Vallès was empty apart from a man in overalls staring at the steaming bonnet of a white van and an old lady scolding a constipated dog. I shielded my eyes and looked up Rue Chanzy where a car pulled out and drove towards Boulevard Voltaire, which would surely be choked at this time of the morning.
The headache had not gone away. I knew that from my watering eyes and the urge to vomit right there on the pavement. There was a call as I began to run. I recognized Daniel’s voice as I ignored it. Other sounds rushed to fill my head—the normal ambience you get in the city as well as a muffled echo I compared to a violent form of tinnitus.
Chanzy was free from cars apart from the one I was pursuing, but I ran on the street to avoid a young mother with a stroller. Usually when I ran I felt airy—even in kitchen clogs—but here I was lumbering like an injured insect. The street felt spongy underneath me. A cyclist passed in the opposite direction and he shouted something to me. When I think about it now all I see is a crazy woman running along a city street.
His car was pulling up to the junction with Voltaire and I was within shouting range at the very least. Having missed my chance when Eagleback had exited the shop, this was going to be a moment I would control. Then the headache went off, a ship’s siren in fog—that was the first thing. The metal on the car’s bonnet appeared to melt from the heat of the engine. The entire car was disassembling and the rivets and bolts that weren’t floating away were transformed into balls of burning liquid. In my mind the roof was being soldered to stop it coming away. I was the only one who seemed to notice the smell of encrusted metal but it attacked my throat and brought these hot tears bubbling through my nose.
I drew level with the front doors but the driver—a woman in her twenties at the most—was Indian. She had not heard any of my shouting. I thought of kicking her door but my legs were shaking too much. She barely noticed that I was miming a ‘don’t worry’ motion at her window before she pulled away.
Wherever Eagleback had gone, he had not driven down this street in that car.
You could call it relief—I don’t know what you’d call it—but I could not resist falling to my knees. There I remained for a moment or two, apologising to the air in front of me. I took my time walking back to Bertrand Rose, carrying myself proudly—as if every morning I could be found falling to my knees right on the intersection with Voltaire. And no wonder people were keeping away. Another neighbourhood malingerer. Going by the note on the doorway on Paul Bert, they saw their fair share.
I was unimpressed with the éclairs in the end—Daniel had remained in the queue—but things may have been different on another day.
—Who was that? he said.
My techniques of evasion were well practiced but any cunning had not survived the sprint along Chanzy. The best I could do was glaze over.
—You turned grey when you saw him.
—He was in the restaurant last week. Took the wrong umbrella. I wanted to see if he had it.
—Did he?
—I was too slow, I said.
—He also went the other way, Daniel said.
I couldn’t tell from his darting eyes if he was going to prolong the questioning. I had been wearing a fixed smile all this time.
—You okay? he said. That was kind of impetuous.
Daniel’s yawn—he was known for them—was a godsend.
I made my way through the éclairs as I ran along the street. The deliveries arriving at the cafés along Voltaire were a reminder that I would be late. I needed to be at Gravy by eight and there was no way I could be late and jeopardise another day’s pay. I got meals every day I worked and I worked every day that I could.
The day before had been spent on my living room floor, which also served as my bedroom and kitchen floor. As soon as I had felt the headache smothering me I lay down—a coward expecting a beating. The signals the pain sent to the rest of me amounted to: lie down, don’t move until it’s over, wet yourself and cry, even though no one is listening. I was there for the whole day.
I used to run as much as I walked. There had been days when I ran myself into the filth, incommunicado with tiredness, heroic, miles from home in the nineteenth. I was never straining for recognition or training for a race—I had no desire to compete at all. Running was mech
anical, bone-throbbingly fulfilling and I could have run for days sometimes, along the Seine, in the parks, along the canal, even on lovely Champ de Mars where, if you so desired, you could run laps around the base of the Eiffel Tower. Today I made do with running the length of Voltaire and eating while I ran. By the time I got to the restaurant I had finished everything in the box and the headache had been replaced by an invigorating sugar rush. Apart from stepping into the direct path of the 56 bus, it might have been one of those rare days in Paris when you could feel the city singling you out and throwing you clues.
Young Girl, Go Slowly
Once upon a time I read a book that said, ‘Young girl, go slowly. The love of your life, whoever he is, will love you for who you are.’
What if it was my favourite book and I couldn’t remember it? What if it said, ‘I watch your movements, as though you are performing in a play I don’t understand, where I have arrived at the interval and have tried to keep up. I try to anticipate the rhythm, the serious intent behind each awkward movement of your hips, the rising colour in your chest, and I come to realise that the underlying meaning in the distant, pained look in your eyes may not be distance or pain at all.’
Forgotten City
My life as I was able to describe it had begun six months previously. I had come to in the kitchen at Gravy, slicing onions like a total pro. Apart from that there was very little to say because there was nothing else I remembered. The morning like the one I was spending at Bertrand Rose affirmed one thing—wherever my life may have begun I had not been reared in a city like Paris. I knew this was France because I was told it was France but I had a good idea that I was not from there.
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