Prawns
From the bath I can hear Ségo and Daniel arguing—him for this reunion, her against. There has been a battle and he has had his way. At the mention of my parents, I try to drop below the waterline and out of view.
When I am finished, I parcel myself up in a towel as if a fire alarm has just been sounded—quickly and carefully, afraid of being fully naked for more than a second or two. I wonder for a moment if I should dress up—I don’t know Quai 53—but I decide the bikini lying on the bathroom floor will do perfectly well. I dry my hair and leave the house to do what has to be done.
I dawdle so it’s nearly two o’clock by the time I get to Quai 53. From where I am standing, behind a telecom van, I see the couple—whom I don’t recognise—Daniel said would be dressed as milky teas. They are facing without any sense of anticipation a metal tray piled with prawns and melting ice. I have seen cheerier soup queues.
I go up to them and we make conversation as best we can—thoughts coming and going, coming and going. The sky is sugary and bright and Mum notices the restaurant has fairy lights dangling and they are burning in the daytime. We all nod in agreement. What a waste. Her eyes are loitering on the slender part at the top of my arms. I can tell very little from the way the tip of her tongue traces her top lip—I suppose there some bruises left over from my beating on Léon Frot. I suppose it has something to do with the weight I have lost. I really should have wrapped up.
—What kind of emergency is this at all? Dad says. Swimming togs. And prawns.
He is eating them daintily, solemnly. It is not his way, from what I’ve read. Already there is mayonnaise on him and he has made a pile of prawn shells resembling babies’ toenails.
Dad talks, he is everywhere—the menu, the prawns, his business interests. The way he seems to assume I am interested in the millions he’s made from part-baked bread. How he tries to explain that to me—he does his best anyway. It’s already difficult to imagine him without money, since he seems built for it—equipped for a life where you pick up the phone and within minutes are the owner of a wind farm or, for half an hour, absurd amounts of Yen. From what I can understand he has on the day before he came here just made another million in burger buns.
He speaks to me conspiratorially about the quality of the fish here—the Atlantic water, he says—when it is likely the prawns come from Bangladesh or Mauritius, like the waiters.
—You can have all the prawns you want, Mum says.
This is forgotten when Mum seeks butter for Dad’s bread—not that he should be allowed butter, she says. The waiter is confused and brings melted butter to go with the prawns, which are cold. Dad orders more prawns and the waiter tolerates his determination to speak in French.
The platter arrives suspiciously quickly and Dad pushes it towards me before changing his mind. He wants to peel one of the prawns for me.
—Allow me, he says.
I can’t resist. —Allow you what?
I watch his gnarled hands do an absolute job on the first couple of prawns. The shells are geting the better of him and he squirts innards onto his shirt to go with the mayonnaise stains. Mum is willing him on but he must be nervous and under the table his shoes accidentally hoof against my bare toes.
—Give her the bloody thing, Tony. She doesn’t want to be eating shells.
Dad picks one clean and hands it to me. He seems proud of himself and I enjoy the mauled prawn warm from his palm.
—Let’s get you something to wear, Mum says. One of those stripey yokes. Your father could do with a clean shirt after this performance.
—We’ll all get them, Dad says. Would you say there’s any ice cream for sale in this town?
We find ice creams easily enough but when we set off to find T-shirts I realise that I don’t know my way around. Dad looks cheated when I take a shortcut without knowing where I’m going. We end up in someone’s back garden in the syrupy afternoon heat. There are some chickens strutting around and some butterscotch-coloured bed sheets drooping on a line. I act as if we were supposed to turn up here, but I’m unable to fool them for very long.
Mum’s eyes have the intensity of someone who has for years been lost in the Amazon.
—It’s alright, she says. We’ll find our way. You haven’t done anything wrong.
We make our way out of the garden and eventually find a street displaying shrink-wrapped espadrilles and billowing beach towels. At least being lost has brought Dad to his point.
—You’re not doing this for fun are you?
—Just tell us you’re all right, Mum says.
—I can’t tell you that Mum. I wasn’t doing well, but I am getting better. I’ve ended up being a dishwasher.
—You don’t have to wash dishes any more, Dad says.
I can tell he means it. But I don’t know what to say, since I like washing dishes. All that matters to me is to be by Ségo’s side—a chalkboard of jobs to be completed to her satisfaction then ticked off. That is all I want to do. Cooking with my friends and earning their respect. How exhilarated I become, how satisfying to hear good words coming back from the dining room. The scabs on my arms and the cracked fingernails matter most of all. It is about no more than having worked and the good feeling of having implemented my system.
Mum gives me the rest of her cone to finish. I eat it so quickly and it’s so cold that I sneeze and get vanilla ice cream all over Dad’s shirt—that and the mayonnaise and prawn juice make him seem exhausted.
—At least the stains are in the right order, he says. Fish then dessert. Talking of which, you’ve gone very skinny. We might have to put you on the ice cream diet.
—I scream?
—You scream.
When Dad laughs his whole body moves like the man in the China Star. But he is handsome when he laughs, which—now that I remember it—used to be his favourite thing to do. I know he has been sick but I don’t know if he is sick now. I decide he is and that he has been sick all along. It doesn’t matter if the cancer is the size of a prized truffle or one of these prawns, it has been travelling quietly in him—all morning, all through lunch, and into the night it will do its work, which is to move. I need to see this and, as though the information can be found in a screen in the back of an aeroplane seat, I need to know how many miles there are until it reaches its destination.
—How’s your ice cream? he says.
—It’s nice.
—Mine’s nicer. It’s good but it’s not as good as Teddy’s.
—Who’s Teddy?
—It was your favourite ice cream.
—I’d like to try it.
—Does that mean you’ll come home then?
—Go on then, I say.
Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.
By the time we get back to the house—tired, but in matching Breton T-shirts—it is time to eat again. Daniel has been preparing a barbecue but a storm sets in and we are forced inside to eat. There are more prawns—he wasn’t to know—as well as champagne, nothing else is acceptable. He begins jamming it down everyone’s throats. He even hands me a glass I don’t want.
Ségo is behaving as an anxious parent supervising a first date. She wants to talk to me so badly that she follows me to the bathroom. In case I need reassuring, she says. She doesn’t want to admit that I have had a good time today.
—It could have been worse, is all I will say.
—Let me ask you something. Have you thought about what you’re doing?
—Going to the toilet?
—That’s not a good answer.
—What’s a good answer?
—There’s a life for you in Paris.
I want to reassure her so I go to pains to explain the things I plan to do when I get to Dublin—a real passport, the recovery of my official identity,
possibly a visit to the bank to discuss all the money they are owed. A visit to the social welfare office just in case anyone wants to give me some. Mum and Dad have said they’ll look after things but Ségo’s not sure that’s a good idea.
I’m not sure what I want to say in reply, so she says, —It’s okay, you can just come back here to me.
I am to take this to heart, I think. And so—me first—we kiss. What else is there for us to do? It is not like other kisses I have known. At first, in the intolerable moment in which I know I’m off-tasting, I feel we are doing it separately.
—Give it a minute, she says. See if we like it.
I catch my breath and go back in. Ségo tastes of very little—not even champagne—and yet I feel a kind of greed, my kisses pouring out of me and ending in brushstrokes along her neck. She hasn’t imposed herself on me but, like most things I know to be true, this has been her idea all along.
Ségo wants to do certain things and I want to do certain things but dinner is waiting. In something of a hurry to return to the world so I can discern how it has changed, I depart the bathroom in the knowledge that whatever we have just done—a mushroom cloud and lightning strike all in one—has made us both feel better. How could it not? Good kisses never leave the kisser.
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Dad is accepting everything Daniel offers him and very soon he is drunk—Mum, too. They ask Ségo for music and she plays along as if they are boisterous regulars at the restaurant. It might be the champagne but my mother wants everyone to know about my childhood. It still doesn’t seem to dawn on her that it is news to me as much as anyone else. The way I am representing myself has led everyone to think that I recognise what she’s saying.
—I can’t get over how little you eat. One or two tiny little prawns.
Mum takes us all back. I was a greedy girl. Whatever anyone else was having, that’s what I wanted. Is that yours? No, it’s mine.
Daniel asks, —What was her favourite?
—Pavlova, Mum says quickly.
—A demon for them, Dad says.
They go on to describe every variety of meringue there is. Mum remembers my ninth birthday party—and the glorious afternoon when I took a sponge cake into my bedroom, dropping my face into it to prevent it being taken from me.
I am about to speak when Dad shushes Mum and puts a finger to my lips. He invites me to join him on the rug before the glinting light of the candles. He asks Ségo for music and we waltz slowly and awkwardly to a song I don’t know and don’t care for.
My father dancing—I have no idea if this is out of character, but he moves his feet with a certain grace, heedless of the wolf whistles from Daniel. I am thinking Dad is well. I am thinking that people who have Tony Blairs don’t drink and they don’t dance. Or, maybe he is sick and this is his favourite song—he has many, it seems—and he simply wants to dance. I have to give him credit for wanting to dance and that his feet are working as they should. Dad coos the song’s melody into my ear while drumming its tune on my back with his thick fingertips. There is very little chance of knowing if we have done this before.
I place my chin on Dad’s shoulder to suggest that we should slow down to match the music—at
which his feet become less nimble before catching on the rug. Perhaps to compensate for this he leans backwards and sways this way and that, blurring his face in the process so that he is little more than a shape—a recognisable warmth. Inclining his head towards mine, he dignifies the next few moments with the longest unbroken silence of the day. His eyelids are closing. Is he drowsy after the champagne? No, he is just closing his eyes and in doing so he is halting time forever. The dance continues. I am looking over Dad’s shoulder—at my dipped head reflected in the windows and the night, and it seems as though he is already dancing away from me.
Touché
I do dream about bassett hounds in the end, as well various horny dealings with Nicolas Sarkozy. Sometimes we are in a hurry to Montparnasse to make the TGV from Paris to La Rochelle—Nicolas has free train travel because he was once president—and we make it just in time even though the poor dog is exhausted. Then one thing leads to another. Oh Nicolas.
Ségo has helped my parents secure an emergency passport for me but she isn’t happy about it. On the day we are due to leave she is ostentatiously sombre, not only around Mum and Dad but me, too.
Daniel, meanwhile, seems heartbroken. All morning he has been huddled on the beach, his head cocked in thought. His eyes are swollen with hay fever, he says. But his nerves not only seem tight but torn altogether. I wonder about him—whether he needs help—but there’s nothing I can do now. If ever there was a moment I would choose to forget, yesterday would be it. In some sarong he must have been wearing for a joke, he suggested we go for a walk while Ségo took care of dinner. One barbecue was blending into another but there was no point in anything other than forbearance, not when my folks were in the mood for an occasion. There was something not quite right about it in the first place—I needed no reminding that this was my last night.
The more Daniel tried to reassure me that I had very little—even nothing—to worry about, the more I worried.
One Star Awake Page 20