by Alicia Drake
“How does that make her a saint?” I said.
“An angel appeared to her when she was a child and told her to get up and come to this chapel and when she came in, the Virgin was here and she told Catherine to sit down with her and they talked all night. Mary gave her a medal, a miraculous medal. After that, miracles started happening here. That’s why people come to pray to the Virgin and to Saint Catherine. People who are ill or sad or dying, people who want babies, they are all praying for a miracle.” Scarlett wiped a tear from her eye.
“That’s the chair the Virgin sat on,” she said and she pointed to a blue velvet armchair behind the altar rail. It looked just like a normal armchair. “I sat on it once when no one was looking. Everyone hopes they’ll be the one to see her again, you know, like in Lourdes.” Her voice was wistful. “I wish I could meet the Virgin.”
It must be nice to believe; it must be a comfort to think, no matter how crap your life is, somebody loves you, like Cindy believes in Jesus. She thinks He’s watching over her, that He is there every day, every hour of her life.
After that we hung around in the courtyard for a bit. Scarlett went into the shop and I looked at all the plaques. I counted ninety-eight plaques saying thank you to Mary. I walked to the doorway and looked out; the gypsy women had been replaced by gypsy men.
“They do shifts,” Scarlett said, coming up behind me. “They all want to beg outside here because there are loads of poor people who come to the chapel and poor people are the ones who give the most money. So they have to take turns. That’s what it said in a documentary I watched.”
“Do you come a lot?”
“After school sometimes. On the weekends. When I’m feeling down. I just sit here on my own. I like thinking one day Mary will come.”
We walked home by the rue d’Assas. Scarlett told me that her parents were threatening to send her to boarding school if her grades didn’t improve. She told me Stéphane was posting stuff about her, talking about her body and what he had done to it, and she said that Inès was telling everyone Scarlett had given her the Zara top.
“I would never give that bitch anything,” she said. She talked about them all the way along the rue d’Assas, nonstop, not pausing for breath.
“Do you still like him?” I asked as we stood at the lights waiting to cross the road. She stopped talking then and tears came into her eyes.
“It’s not that,” she said. “It’s not being wanted, that is what hurts.”
There was a roadblock on the rue Auguste Comte in front of the lycée. There were cones and a plastic barrier, and a policeman wearing white gloves was standing on the corner. Beyond the policeman there were navy-blue buses lined up along the road; they were packed with gendarmes. I could see their bored faces staring out at us.
“Excuse me, monsieur,” Scarlett said to the policeman. “What is going on?”
“There’s a demonstration coming from Les Invalides,” the policeman said. “We’ve closed the road.”
“But I live there,” Scarlett said.
“Where exactly do you live, mademoiselle?”
“Rue Saint-Jacques, the other side of the boulevard.”
“You can’t pass here,” he said. “You have to go farther down the rue d’Assas and try cutting across there. You can’t pass here.” He turned away from us.
I wanted to ask Scarlett why she’d lied to the policeman about where she lived, but she’d already broken into a run and she was jogging on ahead of me.
“Come on, Paul,” she shouted over her shoulder without slowing. “It’s going to be wild.”
I kept jogging behind her, but she ran faster than me. The streets were empty and dark. We came to rue Michelet, but that too was blocked. She kept on running. We passed our road and I looked back along it; Cindy would be waiting.
“Scarlett!” I shouted. “Wait for me.”
She stopped then and I caught up with her.
“Where are you going?” I said.
“There’s gonna be a riot, Paul. It’s the guys from the suburbs, they are going mad and smashing up Paris. I want to see them. They’re burning cars and breaking shop windows. They’re fighting the gendarmes and shit. They’re on the rampage.”
“Why?” I said.
“Because they’re sick of being kept out.”
“Kept out of what?”
“Paris. Life. It’s a closed city, Paul, can’t you see? It’s like in the Middle Ages only now the wall around it is called the Périphérique.”
I didn’t know what she was talking about.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“Don’t you know anything, Paul? Don’t you ever watch the news? It’s the guys from the suburbs. No one’s giving them jobs because they’re Arab. No one wants them. They are stuck out in the projects and we don’t want to know. Sarkozy says they’re scum. So now they hate us, they hate Paris. They want to burn Paris, they want to prove they count, prove they’re alive. Don’t you ever dream of smashing things up, Paul?” She had that glittery look in her eyes.
She started running again and I did too. We came to the corner of rue Chartreux and rue d’Assas, where Kayser is. There were a couple of people heading home after buying their evening baguettes. They looked scared when they saw us running toward them. Scarlett turned onto the rue Chartreux; the road was wide open, there was no police block.
She looked at me; she must have sensed my doubt.
“Listen, Paul, I’m not missing the only exciting thing that’s ever happened in the sixième arrondissement. You go home if you want. I’m going to watch.”
I was scared. I didn’t want to watch what Scarlett wanted me to watch, not unless it was on my screen. But I couldn’t leave her; Scarlett was a pied piper leading me along the road. And so I ran behind her along the rue Chartreux, past the niches in the red-brick wall where the homeless make their beds, past their sleeping bags and folded cardboard, past the wall smeared with shit. I would have followed her to the end of France if she’d asked me to; I would have walked to Marseille with Scarlett. She only had to ask.
Le Jardin d’Observatoire was already locked, so she climbed over the first low metal gate we came to and then the next and I followed her in. No one was playing table tennis. No one was about, only a homeless guy in a black overcoat sitting on a bench. I could smell him as we walked by. He was pouring sugar into his mouth from a pink and white carton. The sugar spilled out of his mouth and onto his lips. There were crystals of it, wet and white, caught up on his black beard. He closed his eyes. I knew that pleasure.
We crossed the narrow jardin into the play area for little children. It had changed since I used to come. They had made the floor bouncy underfoot and they’d taken away the rocking horse and put in a rocking bird instead. There were more gendarme buses parked up on the road on the other side of the hedge. The men had gotten out of the buses and were lined up waiting outside, standing all along the road. There must have been at least fifty of them. They were wearing a kind of black armor, with breastplates and leg protection and big plastic shoulders; they had truncheons hanging from their waists. They all looked like Iron Man.
Some of them had helmets on; others wore little cloth hats, like they wear at KFC, pushed down over shaved heads. They were chatting and smoking, leaning up against the walls, waiting under the streetlights. We crouched down behind the hedgerow; it smelled of piss. We stayed like that for a while, fifteen, maybe twenty minutes, crouching in the kids’ play area until my legs ached. Scarlett kept messaging people to tell them where she was.
Then one of the guys threw his hand up in the air and motioned the others forward like they were going into battle.
“Unit fourteen!” he shouted. “We’re moving out.”
He was small and wide with a big mustache and he was shaped like one of those fighting dogs security men have on the RER—the transit system—only he didn’t have a muzzle. He was shouting orders, telling some to wait, others to move fast. It was the guys wi
th helmets who were moving off, about thirty or so of them, jogging in formation.
“Onto the boulevard,” he ordered. “They are coming.”
Scarlett grabbed my arm.
“Can you hear that, Paul?”
There was the sound of running boots as the gendarmes jogged together down a small side street that led from the avenue de l’Observatoire onto the boulevard Saint-Michel. All the demonstrations come down the boulevard Saint-Michel, all the strikes, the unions, gay pride, techno pride, they all take the same route. I’d seen gay pride before, loads of guys dressed in leather and feathers dancing on top of floats with booming sound systems, but this was different. There was an eerie noise coming from the boulevard, the hooting of car horns and drums beating, the sound of banging on metal, and there was a roar I had never heard before.
“Let’s go,” Scarlett said. She started running toward the noise, out of the play area and along the wet sandy path. I followed her to the metal gate and then we stopped and stared at the road in front of us. There was a white vehicle parked at the end of the road where it joined the boulevard Saint-Michel. It looked like a kind of military tank with metal wings, and the gendarmes stood on either side of it, forming a blockade behind tall plastic shields, stopping the rioters from breaking off the boulevard.
The blue buses in front of us were empty; all the gendarmes were deployed and out on the streets.
Scarlett started to climb over the metal gate.
“What the fuck are you doing?” I said. “You can’t do that.”
I was inside the gate and Scarlett was on the other side. Her back was to me.
“Look,” she said in a whisper, “they’re here.”
Just beyond the barrier of the gendarmes we could see rioters running and shouting, throwing rocks, surging along on foot. The white vehicle turned on its headlights, blinding white, like prison searchlights, and the rioters put their hands up to shield their eyes. All the residents on the side street were out on their balconies looking down, watching as the neighborhood exploded around them. I remember one of them, a guy, was standing on his balcony on the second floor, holding a glass of wine in his hand, as the gendarmes clashed with the crowd below.
And then somehow a couple of the rioters broke through the barricade at the end and suddenly they were running down the side street toward us.
“Scarlett,” I shouted, “they’re coming!” I reached across the gate and tried to pull her arm, but she shook me off and stood watching as the two guys smashed their way through the gendarmes. They were charging bulls, heads lowered, wearing motorcycle helmets with the visors pulled down, so you couldn’t see their faces. One of them was carrying this big metal bar and he was striking out at the gendarmes as he ran, and there was a third guy, I hadn’t noticed him before, he was running backward down the street just in front of the two charging bulls.
“Scarlett!” I shouted again and then I threw myself down into the bushes just behind the metal fence and lay in the sour leaves. Seconds later she crashed down beside me.
“He’s filming it,” she said, “that’s what the guy’s doing, filming on his phone.”
She was scared, I could see that, but at the same time she wanted this, she wanted it all to blow up around her. She wanted the sky to fall in on us in the 6ème. We pressed together as we heard them near us, her chest against my chest, her hair in my mouth. They jumped over the metal gate that Scarlett had jumped over seconds before.
There was a whoop and then a voice shouted, “Did you see that? Did you get that? I smacked his fucking head in.”
“Where are we?” another voice said and then someone called out, “They’re coming.”
They started running again, I don’t know where. We heard the gendarmes running too, heavy boots down the side of the jardin, along the pavement, just on the other side of the fence. “Going down into the RER,” a voice shouted.
We lay next to each other. Scarlett was breathing in short shallow gasps. We listened to the drumbeat on the boulevard, the screams and shouts, the crashing of metal and the hooting of horns.
After a while she said: “They’ve gone.”
We stood up cautiously. She had dirt on her white jeans. My hip was grazed from where I’d thrown myself to the ground. Scarlett brushed down her jeans and I turned to look again at the boulevard. The gendarmes had managed to reseal the entrance to the side road. Beyond the riot shields, there was smoke rising on the boulevard and the rioters were still running, still fighting. But there were fewer of them. The headlights from the vehicle illuminated their bodies, lit up the smoke around them, so they appeared like figures on a stage, like gladiators fighting.
“It’s too beautiful,” Scarlett said and she was right; it was beautiful. “Putain,” she said. “Why can’t it be like this every day?”
Chapter Nine
I’d never had a friend like Scarlett before, someone who really cared. I’d had guys who hung out with me, who went to the cafeteria with me or who sat next to me in lessons, but Scarlett was different.
Every day, by the time I woke up there were seven messages waiting from her. She sent me tons of stuff—jokes and films, photos, texts. She sent cute pictures of puppies wearing Christmas hats, videos of white fluffy kittens hanging off branches, photos of chimpanzees hugging. Constantly. She sent me videos of cars upside down and on fire, police helicopters circling housing projects, faceless guys in hoodies hanging out in the black of night.
Too cool, she wrote beside the videos she sent me.
Look at this, with masses of exclamation marks.
I think she dreamed of finding those guys we had seen, of joining their gang, of running through the streets, throwing gasoline bombs through the air. That is what she wanted.
We hung out every break time. The guys in my class asked if I was going out with her and when I said I wasn’t, they called me gay. A week after we’d been to the chapel and seen the rioters on the boulevard Saint-Michel I asked Scarlett if she wanted to come back to my apartment and she said yes.
Gabriel was there when I opened the door; I wasn’t expecting to see him. He was lying on the sofa in the living room, drinking a bottle of beer and playing on my Wii.
“Hey, Scarlett,” he said as we walked in. “Nice hat.”
She was wearing a knit beanie with the word Queen embroidered in black across the front. She turned to me and said: “Where’s your bedroom, Paul?” She was chewing gum.
“Don’t you guys want to watch me play Federer?” Gabriel asked.
“Nope,” she said.
She walked ahead of me into my bedroom. She lay down on my bed and did stuff on her phone. I don’t know what she did. She took photos of herself, I know that, she was always taking photos of herself that she posted or sent around. I don’t know who she sent them to.
She spent forever on her phone and I sat playing on mine. Then all of a sudden she looked up and said: “I stopped eating last summer.”
“What?” I said. I remembered the cookies and salami piled up on her breakfast plate in La Baule. “What did you do that for?”
She shrugged. “I wanted to see if anyone would notice.”
“How come you didn’t die?”
“Well, I did eat half an apple a day, half a Granny.” That’s what people call Granny Smith apples in France.
“What happened?”
“I got really thin and after a while I wasn’t hungry anymore. The emptiness felt good, like I was winning. But then my parents stopped me.”
She said her parents took her to a doctor and the doctor made her go to a psychiatric hospital in the 16ème. She told me she lay in a bed under a blue light for two weeks and then they told her to go home.
“You don’t believe me, do you, Paul?” she said, narrowing her eyes. “You think I’m lying.”
I didn’t know what to think. She held up her phone for me to look at. She’d pulled up a hospital home page with a photo of a big glass building and caption above it that
said: Welcoming adolescents from twelve to twenty with acute mental-health needs.
“You see,” Scarlett said.
Then I heard the front door open and Cindy knocked on my bedroom door.
“Are you okay, Paul?” she said; I opened the door, and she was there holding Lou in her arms.
Scarlett jumped off the bed and ran over to them.
“Lou,” she said, “at last. Your brother’s been hiding you from me.”
Cindy turned Lou around so that she was facing Scarlett, holding her up by her armpits and bobbing her up and down. Scarlett leaned in close to her face.
“You’re gorgeous, Lou,” she said. At first Lou just looked at her the same way she always looked at me, blank and flat-faced. But then Scarlett made her voice go sweet and gurgly and she said Lou’s name over and over until Lou’s face opened up into a smile. I’d never seen Lou smile like that. It was like a flower’s petals unfurling. It started with her mouth, but then it went up into her eyes and then she started making a noise at the back of her throat, cooing at Scarlett, and she curled her tongue at the same time and she wiggled her toes.
“Can I hold her?” Scarlett said to Cindy.
Cindy passed Lou to Scarlett, carefully, like she was a vase. Scarlett held Lou close to her; she nestled her face in Lou’s neck.
“You smell so good,” she said.
Gabriel was still in the living room. I could see him playing tennis on the Wii, jumping up and down and swearing at the screen. Scarlett was asking Cindy which brand of milk she gave Lou and how many bottles she drank a day.
“You’re lucky, Lou, do you know that? Paul and I had carcinogenic bottles made with bisphenol A that leaked into our bloodstream because the bottles were heated up in the microwave. We’ll probably be dead by the age of thirty. But you, Lou, you’ll be okay because lovely Cindy has got you the new bottles.” Scarlett spoke to Lou like she could understand.
“Is that true?” I said.