Does Ségo need to know any of this? Does she need to know that for protection I made myself into an animal? That was how I survived in my mind, as a beast alive in the city. A monstrous, faithful animal with nothing to fear except other animals like me; no use to anyone—dirty, tired and in the way. I told myself that I was more alive and that I was seeing the world through new eyes. But being ignored as you huddle in a doorway is not being alive, not when it’s your day-to-day. You spend the days looking sideways for a kick of dust, a sudden dart. It is never more than waiting—and waiting for nothing. The best you can hope for is to let time pass.
—You wanna know what happened next? Ségo says.
—Does she? Daniel says.
—Button it, please. This ain’t easy. Eva, you were in a crash?
—It makes sense, I say. Doesn’t it?
—It makes perfect sense. But no. The morning we heard you were back, we had been about to disappear ourselves, to Normandy. Just for a weekend of nothing much except not-Paris, like we’re all doing now. We used to get away once a month but Ghislaine had been making life difficult for Jerome and the trips were becoming a case of waiting out weekends in some hotel within driving distance from the city. We would fucking disagree on the hotels, the amount of money we should spend. We disagreed on the length of a weekend, whether it should be two days, three or four. We disagreed on these conversations, too. I said they were fights, but Jerome didn’t think so. Without question, that morning’s conversation was a fight. The mere mention of your name was an affront to him. It sounds weird, but I became the one to say you needed help. Jerome was aghast that I would be your advocate. We drove off from Gravy in a kind of muggy silence. The argument began on the approach to Place de la République. She’s been fucking dealt with, Jerome said. End of. You can imagine that in his accent. End of. We were entering the square from Voltaire and were cut off by a van, the kind of manoeuvre that would spike Jerome’s aggression. He tried to overtake the van, as if we were fleeing a goddamn heist, and the car swung onto the kerb before totalling a fucking phalanx of Vélibs, maybe ten in all. Unfortunately, Jerome’s concrete head survived the clash with the windshield, but I lay there in the upturned car. We were creaking. Apart from that it was surprising how quiet everything was. The traffic lights going through their cycle, over and over. Shattered glass on my forehead, and I was watching the upside-down carousel on the square, and all I could think about was you.
—Can I interrupt? I say. Were you okay?
—I’m still here, so yes. My back is gone. It hurts to sit. It hurts now. But it gets better when I exercise. Maybe I’ll have a swim when we get there.
—You will, Daniel says. I hate to interrupt, I do, but we’re crossing the bridge to the island.
The beautiful bridge to the island is bowed and it feels as though the car is flying over the water. It has really taken off. How can this be the first time I have seen the sea? I want to lick the blue water and through the window I try to. I open my hand and place it against the window. The moisture of my palm on the glass shimmers before it evaporates and for an instant the entire ocean is sucked into the car and we are—all three of us—completely submerged.
An Evening of Hardly Any
Weather at All
The house on the island—tucked away near Ars-en-Ré—has not been well looked after but I know instinctively that the journey has been worth it. It is, I can tell, the holiday house of a wealthy person who has asked someone else to choose the decor. The kitchen invites a second look. It says we live well but simply, just the way you’re supposed to. If I had come to my senses here—instead of in Gravy—I might have thought I was raised by a family of tasteful smugglers. Woven sacks hang in frames and some piratey insignia on the mirrors to confirm that we are, indeed, by the sea. On the tea towels there are poems about boats and one in French about a drowning.
Ségo disappears to her room while Daniel flutters around photographing the broken shutters in order to blame the summer tenants.
—The letting agency should have a proper vetting service. Have you seen what those people did to the towels?
I ignore his suggestion that we skip up to his nominated beach—Conche des Baleines—where he wants to light a fire, sit in a circle and scoot through all the new music on his phone. I can feel water somewhere. I explore the garden and open the gate that takes me directly to the shoreline. All I want to do is be alone, if I’m lucky, on the beach right in front of the house.
The afternoon has been hazy but the haze has disappeared so I can tell we are facing the rest of France. A single gull lazes on the water. Another one patrols the beach. The patterns on the lacquered surface of the water start to move and the smell reminds me amazingly of Elias’ basement. The beach is just as quiet.
Ségo comes out of the gate. She is wearing the bottoms of a striped swimsuit that matches the apple green of the shutters and she has nothing on top. Her creamy boobs wobble enthusiastically.
There is silence—but there is no comfort in it and it is harder to bear than the silence in the car. She is half in and half out of the water and she suggests I strip off and swim with her.
Only when I start to move away does she speak again.
—Everything I told you all happened, she says.
—Just not in the way you told me?
—I’m sorry it happened. Believe me, I’m sorry for Ghislaine and I’m sorry for you. For me. I was there, in the car. I’m sorry for us all. But it happened and here we are. Now I’m going to say the rest very bluntly and you’re going to listen. The crash was the crash but that story I told you about arriving at Gravy the first time, it wasn’t the whole story. Consider this a P.S. to a letter.
—What letter?
—Shush, she says. No letter, just what I said in the car. But, last November I saw someone familiar on the news. This was on the morning of the crash, by the way. So you can connect it all up. A young woman had tried to throw herself under a train at Châtelet and they wanted to know about her identity. It was you. That’s why we were fighting as we were driving out of town. Jerome wanted me to leave you be. But you should have seen the picture. In a goddamn neck brace. I asked Jerome some questions. ‘How do you think I survived in Paris at first? Do you think I just walked into a busy restaurant one day? I can’t remember the names of the people who helped me. But they did. Don’t you see?’ I called the number on the website anyway. They put me through to the hospital and the nurse said you were at the wrong end of the platform. The far end. And the driver had been warned about a woman at Châtelet so he slowed the train enough to save your life.
Pallor in the sky. The beach is dust. A minute later I have yet to speak. Then I cry out as if something has collapsed inside of me. I can’t hear any more—it is as though Ségo is pouring seawater into my mouth, only so much will go in.
I calm myself with some exceptionally shallow breaths, as if preserving air.
—I was lucky not to go under the wheels?
—They cut the power to the tracks. The train wasn’t even delayed for that long. Kudos to you for making shit of trying to kill yourself.
—Why didn’t you tell me all this straight out?
—I just thought, what if she doesn’t have to know? She could just live in the here and now.
Seeing my widening eyes, Ségo invites me to question her. My expression must be an accumulation of the day’s strange discoveries. She puts her hands on my shoulders to say that I need to count to ten.
—What kind of person throws themself under a train? I say. Maybe I was texting and I slipped.
—Yes, maybe you were texting. And you slipped. Or?
—It could have been wet.
—Indoors? Do you remember anything about the train?
—Nope.
—After?
—No.
&
nbsp; —Before?
—Noooo.
—I think it’s good that you don’t remember, Ségo says. A bang on the head off a train will be sure to do something to your memory.
To Be the Woman Who Stopped
All the Trains
I can’t bear to tell Ségo that I do remember. Clear glimpses, not from meeting her at Saint Louis nor from arriving at Gravy—I have to take her word on all that—but from a few weeks prior. One night I had found a phone card on the terrace outside Rosa Bonheur and tried to sell it, but I couldn’t, so I used it to call the only number I knew.
Mum sounded stressed to hear from me. I don’t remember what she said or when she went to get Dad. Nor does anything come to mind about my conversation with him—other than he mentioned St Vincent’s Hospital and that Tony Blair was the size of a truffle. This he dismissed with a suppressed burp.
—He’s not staying, he said. He’s not invited.
A number of things were supposed to happen next. I was supposed to offer to come home, this was after asking for help in getting home. But I don’t remember doing this. I don’t remember saying goodbye. I know I walked out of the gates of Buttes Chaumont and headed all the way downhill to the busiest métro station in Paris. If you can’t imagine what was going through my mind then neither can I.
Châtelet métro was a dying body, the tunnels that ran from platform to platform the poisoned veins. The tunnels were occupied by sleeping figures, the people who lived in the station. I was one of them. Every time I went down there to sleep—when it was too cold to sleep in the park—I had the sense of being in an evacuation. When Jerome beat me and left me—well, it was impossible to believe that life had passed through my hands. I had been pushed out of life and was no longer alive anyway, not really. Throwing myself under a train was the best idea I ever had. The last moments of my life, as I foresaw them, would be filled with certainty and ecstasy. I couldn’t wait for the emptiness, of course—spotless and endless—but more than anything I was simply seeking humiliation. To be the woman that made everyone late.
I wasn’t crying on the platform. I wasn’t even speaking—there was no one to speak to. All I did was sit on a bench and watch carriage after carriage pass before choosing one. If anyone was calling me back I didn’t hear them.
Now I wish for a moment that I was back there—so I could go all the way under that train, take its full force, spraying myself all over the tiles of Châtelet station, if only to silence my memory—because now I do what I have not done before, what I should have done before, what I couldn’t do before. I see myself. And don’t believe anyone who tells you that life doesn’t flash before your eyes. I see myself stepping out from a little orange paddling pool—happy by the looks of it—to be wrapped up in a towel. A perfect little sausage roll.
Then, notions.
Then, Paris, and, for a while, fulfilment. Cauliflowers. Then, I was hearing my father talk about his Tony Blair. And just as I imagined Jerome’s hands closing around my throat I looked up and saw the windows of the train shimmer.
Is this 25 percent, Hippolyte? Is this 50 percent? No percent?
One day Daniel buys sixty out-of-season oysters and Ségo tries to sell Gravy to a woman she meets while having a massage in Ars-en-Ré. She doesn’t make the sale but she does post an announcement on Gravy’s Facebook page to say that the restaurant will be closed for another week. It is understood that she is in touch with Jerome although he is never mentioned by name. Did Jerome hit Ségo? Did he beat her bloody and bandaged, too? But all that matters is that he has gone and I am safe with my friends. Still afraid—but not afraid in any of the ways that I have expected.
That night we have dinner around the bonfire on the beach. Daniel asks me to describe Eagleback—but I can’t describe him because I can’t see him anymore. It’s then that I pull the diary from my pocket. I inspect the pages one more time, not to resuscitate old feelings—just a last blast before the book goes on the fire. Goodbye to my rambling and to the commotion of Eva Hand’s bleary mind. It was crowded with too much—too much ink wasted on too much that was becoming more and more remote. The man smoking at the China Star? Did he keep a diary or did he know to leave well enough alone?
I don’t have any of Daniel’s special oysters but I do have a flavour of ice cream that I didn’t think I’d like but is now my favourite. It’s made with rum and golden raisins.
—Malaga, Ségo calls it.
—Why Malaga?
—It’s sweet wine from Spain.
—Not rum then?
There they lie, the raisins resembling damp, well-fed babes. Beached in the sweet cream they taste concentratedly of happiness, even though I can’t say I have just experienced it—happiness that is—only relief. To me they are the same feeling. I never know when I pass from one to the other. Happiness might be the simple feeling of relief magnified by a thousand million. Ghislaine was wrong—happiness is a baguette. It’s rum and raisin.
Daniel #8
When he opens his eyes the blue sky is silent and he can feel the weight of another brilliant morning. They are walking along the empty beach and have stopped to watch birds dropping from the sky to fish for breakfast before they flitter away. He stares at the sky as though it contains the roll call of a recent air disaster, a feeling of dread that is not at all unusual but unwelcome and, this time, all his own making. Tony and Maeve, who don’t belong here, are here anyway. They will have had breakfast by now and, thanks to clucky Daniel, are expecting to have lunch with their daughter at a restaurant by the water in Saint Martin.
Sometimes it gives Daniel a strange little thrill. Other times he wishes he’d left the fuck alone. But someone had to intervene. Someone had to make the necessary arrangements. It just happened to be him. Now he wants to tell Eva to run, to flee the scene once more.
She is transfixed by the birds. Not only that, it’s first thing in the morning so she has some difficulty understanding Daniel when he says it.
—What would you say if your parents were to drop by?
—Do they have a boat?
Normally he approves of her jokes.
—I don’t know how to answer that, he says.
—Are they fishermen?
He can smell the sand, the warming shells, and Daniel is as jaunty and confused as any man in his position has the right to be. He has brought a towel in case he might take a swim, as if this is all a lark, but the waves sound about as comforting as an iron lung.
—What would you say if you were to meet them?
—I don’t think I would say anything.
The dunes loom and they are buffeted by a vaguely sweet wind. He says, —What would you say if you were to meet them today?
Not only is she unable to imagine meeting her parents, today or any other day, Eva is not prepared to discuss it. But she doesn’t have to fear what’s coming, does she? She’ll be the same Eva when she knows, won’t she? But it is Daniel who has changed. It is Daniel (who was only helping everyone out) who is not who he was. He takes her hands, and he whispers, and he tells her about himself, about filthy rich Conrad and his project.
They are entering a new territory of silence.
He could say something else, but he doesn’t dare. Eva steps back and looks askance at him, as he supposes she should, as if he could go to hell, as if she wants no more from him than he might right this minute begin the long, lonely swim to La Rochelle and leave her to the beach and this bullshit surprise. She tells him to fuck off. Very slowly she tells him to fucking fuck fucking off. And Eva’s face says this: the whole thing has to be a hoax, an ingenious one, a total shake-down to which she is incapable of resistence.
—So long as you’re okay with it, he says.
It was never going to be the day for a swim. Some good ideas don’t turn out to be bad ideas, they are b
ad ideas in the first place and can’t be explained.
At the house they are beset by Ségo almost leaping over the gate.
—What took you so long?
—The beach is a certain length, Eva says. And we walked at a certain pace.
Daniel interrupts. —She’s in that kind of mood.
—Please don’t be, Ségo says.
He wipes his brow, ignoring Ségo’s jousting gaze. She has a vicious and most profound opposition to this reunion; it is as invasive to her principles as it is (now) incidental to his. Eva has to be from somewhere, he has told her. And Ségo, who agreed with this and nothing else, guffawed this morning when she heard that Tony and Maeve were already on the island.
Daniel decides Eva is ready for the news.
—Your parents are waiting to meet you.
The words seem to roll around her head. A marble in search of a hole. She thinks this makes no sense. No one knows where they are. What they look like even. No, she says, her parents are a mystery and they should stay that way.
—They’re waiting at Quai 53 for you right now, he says.
—How did you find them?
—They found me. Then I found you.
Ségo is all the while sizing Daniel up as if they are going to fight. She directs a mocking smile towards him before addressing Eva.
—They don’t trust you to make it on your own.
Daniel interrupts, at the risk of running out of power mid-sentence.
—They care about you, he says. They care enough to ask me to help.
He tells Eva to expect a couple dressed as a pair of milky teas.
—But you can make your own mind up, he says. They’re waiting for you right now.
Daniel takes Eva in his arms but she is as unresponsive as a roll of carpet. He kisses her and she bites his lip. It seems to him that she is getting worse as a kisser.
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