One Star Awake

by Andrew Meehan

  —She believes she is. It’s not my fault that she doesn’t talk about the things she wants to forget. It could be that she remembers something in particular and she just won’t say. Then why would she ask me to talk and then not talk? I don’t know. Anyway, why do you want to know all this? She is here, she has no memory. Voilà.

  Daniel was very quick to inform Hippolyte that fate worked both ways.

  —Did you come here by cab or métro?

  —Walked, Hipployte said.

  —I came by métro. And you don’t hear the gypsy walking up and down the carriage with the shoebox say ‘this is my destiny’. So why should she take it for granted that she washed dishes, for minimum wage? But take it for granted she does. Unless she faces her past she is destined to be enslaved to it. Her life is just another form of confinement.

  He was just getting warmed up but Hippolyte peered at him, more sober than Daniel had first thought.

  —Unless you are going to help this girl, you should leave her alone.

  The sense of gloom remained as the cab pulled up at Eva’s parents’ house. Daniel couldn’t fail to admire its imposing slate roof, the educated curve of the shingle, whereas the property itself was as straightforward and imposing as a small hospital.

  He interrupted the Hands in the middle of an ongoing conversation.

  —She’s wondering if we’ll want to eat later, Tony said.

  —We’re having a special lunch, Maeve said. So we mightn’t want a big performance tonight.

  —This woman has known for thirty years that there will have to be complications on the scale of nuclear war to prevent me from eating dinner in the evening.

  It looked as though Eva’s parents did all their clothes-shopping at airports. Maeve was, if not healthy, then not as overstuffed as Tony, whose skin resembled varnished teak. When he got off his stool to make cocktails (pints of them) it looked like either one of his knees might explode. They soon got down to the business of discussing Daniel’s parents which, blessedly, brought out his creative streak. He described their most recent skiing trip in voluptuous detail (in Gstaad they lived near Valentino, whose pugs were a menace) and by the end of the story Daniel started to believe it had actually taken place.

  No tour of the house was offered but Daniel could see from the kitchen window that the garden ran all the way to the sea, separated only by some small but possibly treacherous rocks. The bay was about as clear as Chinese soup. Maeve, meanwhile, was busying herself as if she was expecting royalty. Within minutes they were magnificently presiding over a lunch of freezing gin and caviar. Daniel thought: they are showing off, sending confirmation to his parents that, yes, the Hands were thoroughly schooled aficionados of the luxurious life. He wasn’t going to argue. The fish eggs were coming out by the shiny shovelful and without too many qualms they abandoned themselves to the merriment of a good lunch. Tony made no secret that he intended to run the gamut of the offerings, and Maeve went about things with the regulated watchfulness of a senior surgeon. A black speck dropped on Tony’s lap and it received her curious stare before removal with small tongs. It didn’t take long to realise that Maeve’s dedication was a spin-off of her nervousness.

  She wanted some music to accompany lunch: La Captive by Berlioz.

  —It was Eva’s favourite piece.

  —Not yet, Tony said.

  He was eating as though something needed to be chewed back to life. Between mouthfuls Daniel listened to more of Eva’s story.

  —Let me tell you something that probably won’t surprise you. Eva was a nervous child. What do you call it, but she had the shivers. The yips. Bats in the belfry. You’d find her dawdling on the shoreline, staring at the sea all day.

  —She was thoughtful, Maeve said.

  —Very thoughtful. And, in all her fits and starts, happy as much as unhappy. We have nothing to answer for, you know.

  Tony flicked his wrist and the promised Berlioz eked from some hidden speakers. The sound washed over everyone (rich, forceful, although it failed to awake anything in Daniel) and it bowled him over how exuberant Maeve became. From her eager expression Daniel was expected to be awestruck but he wasn’t awestruck. The music seemed musty and gave him a melancholy feeling he couldn’t account for.

  Tony said, —Eva could play Bach’s Cello Suite by the age of five.

  —With her nose, Maeve added.

  Eva was always a good little girl—as conscientious as a security guard, they said. She was six, perhaps a little older, when one afternoon she came home from school and Tony was waiting at the gate. It was the softer side to her father that few apart from Eva and her mother ever got to see. He drove them all out to Greystones where there was a man with instruments of all sizes in so many states of repair. Eva sat on a low stool as her dad told her the luthier had been building this instrument for a very talented musician, a little girl.

  She didn’t go back to school that morning but sat in their living room with a newly restored child’s cello. All week Tony led her through her scales, ensuring that she completed the painful and boring hand exercises. Needless to say, she didn’t play again for another ten years, when she set her mind on a standard of excellence she was not destined for and didn’t achieve. When she picked up the cello once more, she was in her father’s view a prodigy, which Tony, over his muesli and quite casually, announced as fact to Eva and her mother. After she had been talked down from applying to Juilliard and the Royal College in London, Eva practiced ten, twelve hours a day for her pre-screening audition for the Conservatoire de Paris. Tony planned to spend the summer beforehand as her tutor, when in fact he didn’t know the first thing about the intricacies of teaching music to a family member. Within a week they were communicating by slamming doors. Professional tuition had to be sought and paid for. Masterclasses. Eva’s repertoire expanded and her hopes grew.

  —An entire summer trying to understand the composers’ souls, Tony said.

  Then a difficulty following an ear infection left Eva incapacitated before her audition for the convervatoire. She failed at the first attempt and again the following year.

  This was all well and good. Daniel was enjoying being Conrad for a day and they were, he thought, having a lovely afternoon. But there were some things he thought Tony and Maeve needed to know.

  He flashed his best American smile and said what he had to say in a single, hoarse breath.

  —Don’t worry, she’s healthy, she’s happy, she’s fine, she has friends, people who care for her, but Eva has problems with her memory and she’s got some work to do to catch up.

  Tony’s response was unexpected: a hot groan, the kind of exhortation Daniel imagined was used in the bookmakers when a prized horse, anointed with a thousand or two and all Tony’s accumulated optimism for the world, changed its mind and sat down before the last fence.

  Tony slapped Daniel on the shoulder and said, —Take your drink with you.

  The house was more or less on the beach but the view from Tony’s study was obscured by smoke-caked blinds. There was a cigar-burned paisley scarf, some balled socks. A fountain pen had burst and grown into the carpet, but there were signs of hope, too: a full, yellow wall of National Geographics spanning many decades, newspapers from June, May, April, going all the way back.

  Daniel was waiting for Tony to speak, but the silence suggested they were about to pray. Soon he had almost forgotten why they were there. He sensed Tony weighing things out. In that way Daniel was reminded of his father. There was always something calming about the talkings-to. Daniel could only ever identify them by the careful way the vowels in his name would be elongated

  They remained silent until Daniel let it squirt out.

  —We’ve kind of been dating, he said.

  —As long as she’s happy, Tony said with a doctorly lack of warmth. But we did tell you our daughter h
ad a vivid imagination. So what you’re saying about her memory, or whatever it is, it doesn’t surprise us. She’s always been a very creative girl.

  Daniel inexpertly swirled the ice in the gin.

  —She has a charming way of looking at the world.

  —Not even that, Tony said. You should know that it is always easier to embrace something you can see in its entirety. That’s why, with all respect, when it comes to my daughter, I can see what you can’t.

  Daniel listened, as well as he could, to the deft description of Eva’s mental health problems.

  —She was a worrier, he said. I lost track of the number of times I was supposed to have gone bankrupt. I mean, I have had ups and downs, but not the way Eva imagined. She got so excited about everything. Having cancer was too much for her bear.

  By the time her father had transformed Eva’s teenage sectioning, and eventual sedation, into an inappropriately bland narrative, Daniel was unable to make any kind of sane analysis, he just couldn’t manage it anymore. He considered himself to have two options: either to tell Tony he could look after himself for the rest of the day, or to disappear altogether, not in any dramatic way but quietly and quickly.

  Tony’s face was visibly paling. Daniel was steeling himself for more but, without any preamble, Tony clapped his hands and announced they were going for a swim.

  —We haven’t had too much to drink yet, more’s the pity. What say we clear our heads?

  The famous swimming place near the house was nothing but a dim and muddy puddle. As far as Daniel had seen, the Irish were soggy people living on a barren rock, however much they liked to flog it to all the world as an island paradise.

  Daniel was impressed by the matter-of-factness of Tony’s size; although the tiny white Speedos he must have meant as a joke. He was tanned as a hazelnut, too. Daniel watched Tony slip into the water on tip-toes, as if it was his first swim in some time, then minced after him in his shorts. The water was cold but no colder than the air. It seemed strange that nobody seemed to be actually swimming as much as bobbing about; but as soon as he went to stretch out and attack the water he found that the swell was too strong.

  Tony waited until Daniel was acclimatised before he began.

  —If you really believe Eva has lost her memory, he said, you’ve been taken in. She is one hundred percent making this up.

  This portion of the story was over almost instantaneously. The music of the sea rushed into his head and Daniel was puzzled as to why Tony chose to have this conversation here, as though they were in some spy movie; the kind of location you chose when you wanted to confess a murder or commit one.

  As soon as they were out of the water, Tony insisted that Daniel take a nip from his hip flask. Daniel tasted cigars around the mouth of the flask, then something just as unpleasant: smokey whiskey.

  The changing room was nothing but a concrete bunker. Tony took his towel and held it at the ends, seesawing it between his testicles and his groin while growling. Daniel tried to look away, but there seemed to be balls everywhere. He wasn’t squeamish, he had been in Russian saunas with his father, so these old men’s bodies shouldn’t have bothered him; but they did. Tony was drying his hair then his back, vigorously but without reaching most of it. Daniel held his breath until most of the men had found their underwear.

  —Her mother was telling you about music school and all of that, Tony said. You interrupted at just the right time. We were about to get to the unpleasant part.

  Tony’s voice quavered but he hadn’t lowered it. His eyes were raw and his cheeks were burning up as he worked his gaze around the changing area. He seemed proud to be talking within earshot of the other swimmers.

  —Maybe we asked for this, he said. Or I did, for pushing her so hard. But was it so bad that she had to run away from us?

  —And she stayed in Paris?

  —More or less. Home for a while after the audition, about which the less said the better. Bed for a month or two. A few dead-ends then gone again. And I’ll tell you why. They went in after Tony Blair and they got him. The tumour was no bigger than one of these fish eggs. Big man, small tumour, but it spread and they couldn’t go after it. They had to fucking blast it out of me. No harm in a bit of aggression. Frightened the shite out of me. But I’m still here.

  Everything else Tony was saying, in his wooing and serious tone, could be summarised as: do you know Eva? Are you sure? Daniel had heard quite enough already, he could bet on that. And here were Tony’s ground rules: no lover can compete with the love of a parent. And it’s your word against mine.

  Tony stepped into his shorts then hitched his trousers over his belly. He took a draw from the flask and Daniel was sure he saw the dismal sea water shine, just for a moment. It may have been the tingling after effects of the swim but Eva’s father was certainly making a very good job of appearing hospitable, possibly in seeking to manipulate him. And Daniel didn’t know why anyone would do that. He knew the effort of lying. He knew the reach of a good story and how much they could hurt.

  Tony offered another hit from the flask.

  —Don’t take any notice of that girl, he said. She knows exactly who she is.

  Daniel knew he was supposed to feel differently about Eva now but he didn’t and he wouldn’t. He took a sip from the flask then bolted upright. The sky was suddenly bubbling.

  —Gimme a minute, he said.

  It might have seemed as though he was snarling but Daniel was actually retching. Tony’s whiskey and all the swallowed sea water and morning gin and the fair-to-middling airport Guinness and the previous night’s wine with Hippolyte were slowly drawing themselves out of his stomach. He moved sharply away from the changing area before scattering the waves with gaunt vomit. What was it Walt used to say? Daniel was good at making too much of nothing.

  Unstory

  January 20th 2012, Rue de Bac. I haven’t written for a while.

  February 3rd 2012, Rue de Bac. Dinner was fine. Mum was fine. Dad was fine. Jerome turned up, eventually. He was fine, too, after a fashion. Mum’s shepherd’s pie was yuck but no one said anything. There was lots of it, so there you go. She didn’t know the French for mince and she bought the wrong cut of meat and tried to chop it all up herself. So the food was a disaster but, again, no one said anything. That’s the thing. No one said anything. I didn’t know why nobody was talking. It doesn’t make sense, Mum and Dad were always talking. I could have suggested some topics: the meat was surprisingly tough, given how much it cost; the doors on the métro are a little stiff; people aren’t as friendly as back home. Acceptable topics all. It was as silent as if we were all doing the crossword. Then Dad came out with it: What does your wife do, Jerome? Where did he get that from? Well, I know where it came from, but why did it come out? There were other approved topics, as I said. Meat. The métro doors. Jerome, in fairness to him, dealt with the question quite well. By ignoring it. Mum, in fairness to her, chastised herself once more for getting the wrong cut of meat. Me, in fairness to me, I was the most captive audience you could have imagined. Dad? Well, Dad saved the best for last. I was this vaguely delightful … thing. He spoke about me as if I was—what?—a delicious chocolate dessert, a bunch of flowers. It was hard to say why he took such a shine to Jerome, and why he said, Can I rely on you to look after my sweet little girl? Was he going to offer two camels in return for my hand?

  Rue De Bac

  The entries in the notebook stopped soon after that, at the end of February 2012. Does that mean I stopped then too?

  One day it was so hot that I found it impossible to settle, even with the windows open to Ségo’s garden. I went for a walk for the first time in days. It was so strange to be on the streets again that I barely noticed the heat at first.

  I wanted to learn about pregnancy so I went to Galignani to read a book. The shopgirl I recognised from Gravy
—she would come in with her friends from Portland and drink the cheapest wine and share food and guffaw and smoke too near the kitchen window. She was on my side, I could tell, but Galignani specialised in fanciness and there was nothing she could do to help. Instead, she recommended a book on Cézanne.

  —His stuff is so monumental, she said.

  I lost my bearings immediately—where Ségo lived and where I was.

  —What I’m looking for, I said to anyone who would listen, is Rue de Bac. Can you please tell me the way to Rue de Bac?

  On Boulevard Saint Germain, in the baked blue of the afternoon, I was sure I saw a mirage. The afternoon was as dead as a distant planet. The heat was impure, electrical. My saliva was too bitter to swallow and periodically I spat what I could get out of my mouth onto the microwaved pavement. It was so hot that my chef’s trousers chafed as I covered so much ground so quickly. Once I started to remember where I was my heart started to pound. I was used to feelings of inadequacy. Everyone in Paris has those, Ségo used to say. But here, passing café terraces full of Sheikhs with their own private table fans—Arabian film stars for all I knew—I could feel them slipping away.

  My old stretch of Rue de Bac felt vacant, looted, unParisian. Café Répulsion was definitely gone. I walked up and down in a daze before I recognised the antique shop. I could not—not even in my most misguided fantasies—have imagined spending that kind of money on a mirrored sideboard. I was savouring the shadow and flinching at the prices on display, when out of the corner of my eye I spied a couple exiting the building next door. They were suitably startled when I leapt out of the shadow to stop the door from closing.

  —Pardon me, I said.

  Green and black tiles on the stairwell—I was interested only in the door on the ground floor. It was nothing special, a white door, but it was a wondrous thing to me, anyway. There was no name plate but I rang the bell, savouring its low note. I was standing by at the door with my hands in my pockets and a smile on my face—a smile because I was itching to share with someone that in there I had fallen in love and in there someone had fallen out of love with me.