One Star Awake

by Andrew Meehan

  An hour was long enough.

  The strangest thing about realising Eagleback wasn’t coming was that it allowed me, finally, to consider that I was hungry. If I was going to spend the last of my money on a lentil pancake then I was going to enjoy it. Everyone was eating them with their hands. I could have just slipped away, but that would have been accepting defeat. I asked for some more of the chutney and some rice. Funny how disappointment made you feel so light—the way you were supposed to feel when you were in love.

  I got back to Léon Frot just in time to see an ambulance crew gingerly loading a zippered body bag onto a trolley. Many of the building’s residents were there—more of them than I had ever seen before, tearfully standing shoulder to shoulder. I got snippets of their conversation, sniffing accompanying all the tears.

  The trolley, wobbling under a dead weight, was unceremoniously dumped on board. The crew members walked to the front of the ambulance with lowered heads. I was expecting sirens but they pulled away quietly.

  The door of Elias’ room had been broken in and inside a conference of people in uniform was taking place. A young policeman was slowly going through the contents—everything seemed fascinating. The policeman was wearing gloves but he wasn’t a neat worker. He was making notes in a notebook like the one in which I had written—you could tell from the way he was working, just glancing around, that he was just going through the motions. No one seemed to notice me either. Nor could they have made any connection between me and Elias anyway. My face was some kind of holy picture. All I could think was—what a life, and what a way for it to end.

  Elias had been found dead on the grass beside an empty tub of weed killer. One of the women in rollers said half a wine glass would have been enough to kill him but she reckoned he drank a full litre. She kept on repeating the word litre. There was something admirable about that. Good old Elias. Ten times the recommended dose.

  By now the women were saying he was a creep. I had gathered Elias wasn’t the type to have friends but it was a shock to hear him described as a peeping tom. Someone said he used to camp out in vacated apartments to spy on the rooms opposite. Someone said there were claims of missing laundry, underwear, and that he was supposed to have left Tunisia because of a scandal involving young girls his daughter’s age. Poor things—their families destroyed. On top of his shady past, someone said that Elias never did any any of the things they asked him to—the weeds, yes, but it was already high summer and that was too late. The only reason they had never reported him was because it would have been such a bother to hire someone new.

  Those women didn’t even know Elias. I wouldn’t have called myself a good judge of character—but I knew more than they did, and that he took care of the apartment complex well enough.

  Above Léon Frot the sky was bloated and the bushes and trees were dishevelled by wind. It was a war—the reverberations underneath me and faraway. When it began to pour all of Elias’ friends and neighbours elbowed each other out of the way to get inside. I stood in the courtyard, expecting something—there was an elongated silence then nothing.

  No, the storm wasn’t supposed to mean anything.

  I was standing on Rue de Charonne, soaking wet in my shorts. I was watching the rain rise as steam from the pavement and I was thinking about Elias and that I would need to spend the night somewhere. I was considering I might go back to the cellar when I saw Ghislaine approaching from the courtyard’s side entrance. She was moving slowly, at the pace of someone walking an elderly pet. I had to suppose she was leaving—she was carrying a bag—because people returning from a trip usually looked more relieved to be home.

  —Ghislaine?

  —Oh yes, I said, barely remembering that was supposed to be my name, too.

  Her eyes circled my new outfit.

  —I believe to a certain extent you live the Pippi Longstocking life.

  Ghislaine was wearing a very heavy quilted coat which was not right for these temperatures at all but must have been useful in the storm. Her curls had been twisted into an uncomfortably tight bun. Her complexion—and everything else about her, that coat especially—seemed dull. I noticed that her bag didn’t seem to contain clothes but concealed the angular shape of a box or the base of a lamp.

  She was definitely leaving. Living. Leaving.

  I pivoted to allow her a clearer exit, if that’s what she wanted. Ghislaine frowned, either at me or because she was registering something over my shoulder. A locksmith was patching up the door to Elias’ room.

  Every time I spoke it seemed that she was dreading what I might say.

  —Going anywhere nice?

  Her laugh drifted off into nothing.

  —Away from here. It is the same history.

  —I’m sorry, I said. You seem very unhappy.

  —Don’t be, Ghislaine said. You can’t find happiness on every corner of the street.

  —It’s not a baguette, I said.

  —No, she said, with a sudden smile. Happiness is not a baguette.

  Maybe the reason why Ghislaine so absentmindedly hadn’t mentioned Elias was that, like Ségo, she already knew the answers. She knew I had been staying in the cellar and that I had been due to meet her husband in an Indian restaurant that evening. Or maybe she was saying, in so many words, that she wanted to be on her way.

  —My father is coming and we are making a journey by car to our castle. I guess I am still saying goodbye. You make an odyssey to Ireland, no?

  Ghislaine didn’t expect a reply. She hoisted the bag to her shoulder before facing me with a polite smile you would reserve for someone you were stepping over in a shop doorway.

  This Is Fucked Up

  At first I thought Eagleback wasn’t there. There was no answer so I knocked again and then knocked again, thinking—what if he is there? If he didn’t want to see me three hours ago why would he want to see me now? I blotted the moisture on my forehead with the short hairs on my forearm. The lingering rain was pronouncing my curry smell. I hadn’t slept much and the next thing I knew it was catching up on me. I yawned and the first yawn led to another.

  Eagleback answered the door just as I was in the middle of a silent roar. He seemed somehow to have gotten younger over the past few weeks. His skin was smoother, pearlescent and sumptuous—but I saw his eyes were even warier than before and, tremoring in their little pockets, I willed them to take me in.

  Drawing a deep breath, I said, —Are you waiting for someone else?

  —No.

  I was a fool, a nervous fool in soaking wet shorts. I had a picture in my mind of the storm and what it would be like to be back in it. That’s what I would remember about this, being so wet.

  I looked past him. The light from where I was standing was as golden and moist as honey. It had taken me a month from the first morning at Bertrand Rose to get here.

  —Ask a question? I said. Have I been here before?

  —What do you mean?

  —It’s a valid question.

  —Of course you’ve been here before.

  I stepped inside, just like that. Thinking of it now, it seems strange that I was feeling so nervous or self-conscious.

  I couldn’t remember having been here—nor could I remember not having been here. There was a white laptop humming on a porridge-coloured couch. The drooping heads of the lamps echoed the posture of strolling dinosaurs. The organised shape of the dust on one of the side tables suggested the recent removal of an object—this had to be whatever Ghislaine had been carrying in her bag.

  Someone—not Eagleback, I was sure of it—had arranged off-white roses in an old milk bottle and by the looks of it they had been there for a while. The roses were the colour of the wall which was the colour of the floor. There were a few experiments in colour—one of the dinosaur lamps was the colour of pomegranate seeds.
Otherwise, the room overall was the colour of a dirty beach, and had been put together so as to say very little about its inhabitants.

  Eagleback sat in a spindly dining chair whilst trying not to occupy it. When he invited me to sit on the sofa I attempted to mimic his posture and ended up holding myself in the way of a prim aunt.

  —Nice T-shirt, he said. Very you.

  I took a breath instead of replying as he expected me to.

  A man was smoking on the balcony opposite. The thrown light from his TV making him seem casually demonic.

  —Did you hear about the caretaker?

  —Elias? I said.

  —Was that his name?

  —He died.

  —He was a sex freak. Ghislaine just called. They went through his phone and all his stuff and there were pictures of young girls.

  —Maybe they were his daughters? I said.

  —Maybe they were his daughters or maybe they were the young girls he was fucking. Some young girl’s underpants found in his room.

  They were mine, I knew. I was quite skinny around the bottom.

  —That’s not fair, I said. Maybe he had a girlfriend?

  —Maybe there were bodies under the floorboards?

  This conversation had one purpose—it allowed me to study Eagleback. His eyes, for instance, were unlike Daniel’s jewels. What they were were reflective surfaces for my confusion.

  —There’s some pizza in there if you want it. You look hungry.

  —Had a curry earlier.

  It was meant as a joke, I couldn’t help it. We were in no way behaving like the lovers I assumed we’d been.

  —What do I call you? I said.

  Eagleback frowned again and paid close attention as I repeated the question.

  —By my name.

  —So I call you Jerome?

  —What do you expect to call me?

  Eagleback—I couldn’t call him that any more. But Jerome did not stick to him at all. It implied an intimacy we had yet to earn. I had a name, too, everyone did—Bristles, Cheeks—and I didn’t want to use his until I knew mine. The next question was obvious—who was I etc?—and the next, they were lining up. But I wasn’t any good at following a straight line in my brain.

  I should have asked him more questions but I fell back into silence before saying, —Ask a question? Did I like chocolate?

  —Did you what?

  —Did I like chocolate?

  —This is fucked up.

  —And you will have to tell me about yourself. I have no memory. I said so in the email.

  He assumed the slow, annoying voice of a robot. —I’m Jerome. I’m from Australia.

  —But what are you doing in Paris?

  —C’mon, you don’t have to ask these questions.

  —I do. I really do.

  He shook his head. —This is fucked up.

  Neither of us spoke for a moment. You would have thought I could have come up with something, after all this time. But I had lost all sense of the outside world, the physical world.

  I began carefully.

  —There are some things you need to know. How should I put this? Something doesn’t work in my brain any more and I don’t know who I am. I wish I did but I don’t.

  —You’re freaking me out.

  Another sudden yawn—as if I was bored by all this or I didn’t want to go any further with the conversation. It just remained for me to run off as I had done on Ségo and Daniel. But the yawn was so intense that my ears popped and thus the atmosphere changed.

  That Would Be Me

  Had I been searching for the wrong person? The first thing that occurred to me on hearing who I was—who I had been and what I used to do—was to be afraid of her.

  Eva Hand—three syllables that were easy to say and wouldn’t take long to type.

  Once upon a time, she was born and raised in Dublin but had lived in Paris for more than five years, where, in an attempt to break into the walled world of music journalism, she wrote a blog called The Waves. The blog wasn’t very good, apparently.

  —Very shouty, Jerome said. But you were getting better.

  There was no more trace of The Waves online but he insisted on showing me a screenshot on an old phone. There wasn’t much to see in the photograph—most of it was hand and glass behind which was a bleary face barely recognisable as the person I was now. My face was the colour of steak and my hair, in wonky cornrows, had been dyed an avocado green. I looked distracted. I looked tired.

  Jerome told me that we first met at a party in a beamed loft in the Marais owned by a famous English singer who spent five minutes scowling at everyone before leaving to buy drugs.

  —Why were you there? I said.

  —Good question, said Jerome. I had a friend who worked at La Perle. He got the interesting hook-ups.

  I was, he said, wearing a long tweed coat that resembled a cassock. Under the coat I was wearing purple harem trousers and a neoprene top that Jerome said reminded him of the goofy T-shirt I was wearing now. You had these amazing nails. Painted black. Tapping off the screen of your phone.

  —Not any more, I said.

  He took a look at my filthy hands before sharing another detail. There was always blood on the toes of my ballet bumps.

  —Didn’t that put you off?

  —The opposite.

  I seemed happy on my own, Jerome said, happy to be drinking whatever was put in front of me while scrolling through my phone. It took a full hour to fend off his advances, which were as subtle as a falling piano. There was one bathroom at the party and we kept everyone waiting as we fucked standing up, over the sink. Apparently I said I wasn’t afraid of him, I was afraid of not being with him.

  —Pretty slick, I said. What does that even mean?

  —It means we had to be together.

  —There and then?

  —We were a lethal combination. We could have gone somewhere else, I suppose, but it made sense to get on with it.

  So it was that in the first weeks of our affair we were incapable of considering or even recognising the outside world. What we decided to do—what I decided to do—was check into Le Bourg Tibourg for weekends. So long as it was available on room service we didn’t care if we lived on cornflakes. We may as well have been fugitives, at the very least teenagers—stirring ourselves only to leaf through menus and exchange trays with the night porter. There were anxieties of course—Ghislaine—but we fought them off with champagne.

  Jerome all but gave up on work altogether. I took him to dungeons in So-Pi. Throbbing air. The darkness studded with dilating eyes. We’d hobble home fungal by the end of it—up for two days at a time, three. When I got a new apartment we started to meet there and to have sex in my hallway—faithfully and without variation—every day at the end of the school day. It was never that we were compatible in any way that wasn’t physical. It was never that he was going to leave Ghislaine. It was never that I wanted him to.

  He said.

  Jerome was full of stories—listening to them it seemed as though I would have been out of it all the time, more out of it than some sad safari park lion. I had to take his word for it, even though I might not have remembered it anyway, given the state I was supposed to have been in. Hell bent on intoxication in the nought-to-sixty style—I would put away lethal substances like breakfast.

  —Sometimes you wouldn’t leave your apartment from one week to the next, he said.

  I was, according to Jerome, a woman of means. Or that’s what you would have thought if you had visited my apartment on Rue de Bac. Impressive, echoing hallways could not disguise that I was, to put it mildly, an odd case. But I had to be doing okay—why else would I have spent three thousand a month on a ground floor apartment in the seventh? Why el
se would it have had three bedrooms and two bathrooms when I lived there alone and, according to Jerome, rarely left my bedroom? The mirrored art-deco sideboard I bought from the famous antique shop next door got cracked within an hour of delivery.

  —Do you remember the sideboard? he said.

  I didn’t remember the sideboard. No, I should say that I remembered the object but I didn’t remember buying it or the saving up of the five thousand euro for it, if saving up is what I did. It was hard to imagine why I would want such a thing. Jerome was, at first, very sparing when it came to the source of my income. It was just assumed that I was rolling in money until one day he saw me shoplifting. I lingered in jewellers but stole milk.

  —You never cared about money, so I reckoned you must have had a lot of it.

  That was one way of putting it. I had accumulated debts that, when he recounted the amount, made me wince. Fifty thousand. More. The figure loomed—a brick wall built inches from a window.

  I used to make a big deal about flowers and would buy them only on Thursdays from Lachaume. A taxi would be required to go to the métro. I spent a shameless amount on a Royal-Pedic mattress and bought a rabbit fur coat and threw it away when I botched up the job of dying it blue. I bought velvet curtains for my bedroom but discarded them when I didn’t like the dusty smell.

  —Who paid for all this? I asked.

  —You paid for everything with credit cards. Your parents paid the bill.

  I could only crunch my eyes shut. My parents—who might have been Las Vegas entertainers for all I could remember—always appeared in my mind at the wrong moments, when I was lipsticking mirrors and flicking towels. Where were they when I over-tipped in restaurants, when I honoured the baby Jesus, when I picked up other people’s litter?