by Alicia Drake
“Where’s Maman, Cindy?”
“She’s sleeping now,” she said. “You want some rice?”
She took the bowl out of the fridge and put it in the microwave then nuked it until the cling film blew into a bubble then sucked back down and the grains of rice curled up like they were in pain. She plopped it out onto a plate. It made a sticky white mound. It smelled good. She placed the ketchup and butter next to me.
“Do you like your dad, Cindy?” I said.
“I like him,” she said. She went back to rubbing the metal behind the cooker, using tiny circular movements to take the marks away.
“Have you ever hated him?”
She looked confused by that, so I tried to explain.
“I mean, hated him for something he did.”
She looked embarrassed. She laughed a little and said nothing. I thought she hadn’t understood my question. I ate the rice. She carried on polishing and then after a while she said, “When I left the Philippines he said it was not right, what I did. He said I must stay with my children, but I said I must go to make it better. My mother said it was right. But my father did not understand. He said I was not a good mother to do what I did. He did not give me his blessing. I saved the money to come here. My family lent me money, my cousins and aunties. You need a lot of money for the ticket and the visa, you pay people and they make a visa, not a real visa, a fake visa, and then they get you in. It cost two thousand American dollars. My father didn’t talk to me for a long time. After, I was angry with him. Mostly I was sad. But now I send back money and he can go to hospital. He is not a fisherman anymore, he has a problem with his heart.”
She stopped and looked embarrassed. I had finished my rice. I felt tired.
“Thanks, Cindy,” I said. I got up to go to my room. It felt a little better somehow, knowing that Cindy got angry. I walked down the corridor and Maman called to me from her bedroom. It was dark in there, but she was awake, sitting up and watching television.
“Where’s Gabriel?” I asked.
“He’s got a gig.”
“Where?”
“Lyon, you know, the big time.” She laughed. “I wish he could just get a proper job and earn money and work regular hours and be here when I need him.”
“You should come home during the day,” I said. “He’s here all the time then.”
“What does he do all day?”
“Lies around on the sofa with his shoes on. Plays on my Wii. Phones people. He’s always on the phone.”
“Nice work if you can get it.” She looked sad. She patted the bed beside her. I went and sat down.
“What are you watching?”
“Some American trash.”
We watched it for a bit together and then she said, “What happened today, Paul?”
I kept watching the screen.
“Nothing.”
“Why did you stay out like that, getting soaked?”
“I just felt like it.”
“Is everything okay at school?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re not being bullied?”
“No.”
“You’re not in trouble?”
“No.”
“Is it that girl from La Baule?”
I turned and faced her then.
“Why do you say that?”
“I don’t know; she scares me. She’s like a magpie, the way she jitters around. I saw her talking to you in the queue in the restaurant that time. There’s something strange about her.”
“It’s not Scarlett.”
“What is it, then?”
I was too frightened to tell her, scared that I would make her angry or that I would hurt her, make her cry again like her mother had. I thought, If I tell her, if I hand her the pain, it will only take her away from me; she will curl herself up in a ball around the anguish so that it is at the very core of her and then she will roll away from me, so far away that I can never touch her.
“I’m okay,” I said. “I promise.”
“You would tell me?” She was looking at me, searching for clues but at the same time, I saw, she didn’t want to know. She was scared I would tell her, scared that she would find out the reason.
“Yeah,” I said, “I would.”
We sat back and watched TV and it was like the good old days, when she was on her pills and I was in her bed. Except it wasn’t. Later, about an hour later, she said:
“Do you remember how it used to be? When your dad left and you stayed with me in my bed?”
“Yeah. I remember.”
“You saved me, Paul, did you know that?”
She put her arm around me; I looked up into her eyes. She was beautiful again.
“You can stay tonight,” she said. “If you want.” She looked scared, frightened that I might not stay, that she would be alone.
She got up and went to the bathroom. I got under the duvet. I threw the top pillow onto the floor so that I didn’t have to sleep where Gabriel’s face had been. I kept my clothes on. I lay down facing my mother’s side. She came back wearing her satin slip and got into bed and switched off her bedside light. The streetlight outside cast a strange glow in the room; it lit up the bedroom as if it were the moon. She stroked my forehead. And I thought of my father and the hooded man. She stroked my forehead until I closed my eyes.
When I woke up, Maman was gone. It was late, around midday. My leg hurt where I had torn it on the spike and I had a headache. Cindy must have gone to church. I had eighteen messages from Scarlett. She’d sent a video of a piglet in a paddling pool and a message that said: Save me.
I went into the kitchen. I found a pack of four Flanbys at the back of the fridge. Cindy must have bought them for me the night before. She knows I love them. I turned the plastic container upside down on a plate and peeled away the little metal flap from the bottom of the pot so the caramel custard flopped out. I took my spoon and mashed the custard into the syrup and kept stirring until it made a dark golden liquid that smelled synthetic and sweet.
Scarlett had sent me a Flanby video the week before. There’s a whole series of them on YouTube, all the same joke showing strange dads stealing their kids’ Flanbys from under their noses. I tried sucking my third Flanby off the plate the way the dad in the video did. You have to get your mouth really close to the plate and open it really wide and then gobble and suck at the same time. I opened the last remaining pot. I chased it around the plate until it was all gone. I licked the plate.
I went back into my bedroom. The mother of the girl with black hair was standing at the window opposite. She was talking on the phone, staring right into our apartment, squinting both eyes like she was trying to get a better look. Her hair was dark and wavy, pulled back in a ponytail, and her face was always red, like she’d just been slapped. She must have felt me watching her, because her gaze fell on me. She looked at me for several seconds and then she turned her back to me, like it was me who was spying.
The girl with black hair has the bedroom opposite mine; she sits at her desk hunched over a book until late at night or she lies on her bed and reads. She pretends she can’t see me. Often she plays the piano in their living room. I hear her practicing every Wednesday afternoon and her music echoes in the courtyard. It haunts me. I don’t know why it makes me feel so lost.
I was behind her once on the street years ago when she was little and walking home with her mother. She must have asked for something more to eat because her mother turned on her and snapped: “That’s enough, I said. Do you want to be fat like an American?”
The mother finished her telephone call. I watched her switching off the lights in the living room, picking something up off a chair, adjusting the folds of the dark red velvet curtains. They don’t usually stay in Paris on the weekends. They must have a place in the country. Normally, as soon as the girls get back from Saturday school, their mother backs their big blue Peugeot minivan out of the garage, parks it in the courtyard, and calls out to the girls to hurry. Th
ey come down with their school bags and when they are all sitting in the car and the mother has packed the trunk, the father walks out of the doorway marked B carrying an old leather briefcase, wearing glasses, looking somehow more precious than the rest of them; he always sits in the front passenger seat and it is the mother who drives.
I opened my window a little. I climbed up onto my radiator so I could look down. The courtyard was green: dark ivy weeping in the corners of the building, green moss between the cobbles, green mold at the base of the wall, even the cream of the walls looked green in the December light. It was like living underwater.
Teresa was hosing down the courtyard, spraying the cobbles and sweeping the dirty water into the drain with a broom. Her hair was actually gray, but she dyed it. I could see the gray pushing out from the center part of her hair. It grows like that, the gray seeping farther and farther out, until one day I’ll see her vacuuming the staircase and she will lift her head and say, “Good morning, Paul,” and her hair will be black all over and she will greet me as if nothing has happened, nothing has changed. That is the strange thing about Paris.
I put my face to the gap in the window and smelled the bleach from below. Teresa was talking to her husband in Portuguese. He was standing around with the Sunday baguette tucked under his arm. Lucky bastard. I bet it was still warm. I could smell it on the wind.
I got my secret carton of Pringles out of the wardrobe and then I went back to my computer and I looked up more stuff. I read about an app for men who are looking for men who want sex. It’s called Bander, which means “to have an erection” in French. I opened the Pringles. You enter your location and a description of yourself and what you want and then a map comes up and there is a red circle that is you and there are green flashing circles near you and they are the men who want it as bad as you do.
I downloaded the app. I looked through all the photos men had posted of their torsos, six-pack abs without heads, faces with beards. I read about what they wanted to do, who they wanted to do it to. I had to look up what the abbreviations meant. One guy boasted he had straight men knocking down his door for sex and another guy said he was looking for tough love. Eric said he worked in retail at Charles de Gaulle, Terminal 2E, but he could do it on his lunch hour. He said he was big like you’d dreamed of.
And then Scarlett called.
“Why didn’t you call me back?” she said. “I was waiting for you. You don’t know how bored I’ve been.”
She wanted to know what had happened, if I had spoken to Max again. I said no and I asked her if she had heard of Bander. She had, of course, she knew all about it, she’d read about it on the Internet or in a magazine, I can’t remember how she knew, but she knew. She said the app came from America, that gay guys love it because it means they can get sex anyplace, anytime. She sounded like an ad on the radio when she said that. She told me they were going to launch an app like that for heterosexuals.
A text came in from my father while I was on the phone. He was asking to see me, asking if I could come around. I must have gone silent because Scarlett said: “Are you still there, Paul?”
“Yeah, I’m still here.”
“Talk to me, then.” Her voice was demanding, like a child’s. But then her mom called out to her and she said she had to go, they were driving back to Paris. She said she’d see me tomorrow at school.
I wondered if she was still in love with Stéphane. She’d started wearing her skirts shorter and her jeans tighter for school and she left her shirts undone so that you could see what you wanted. She made out she was over him, but whenever I went to McDo’s for lunch, as soon as I got back she always asked: “Did you see him?”
I knew she tracked him on Facebook. Sometimes she’d be at my apartment, lying on my bed, on her phone, and she would shout out, “Slut,” and I knew she was looking up Inès. She said Stéphane was only going out with Inès for her tits. But I reckoned what Stéphane really wanted from Inès was someone as beautiful as him, someone to add to his cool.
Sometime later on that afternoon, Gabriel came home. I heard him in the corridor first, and then he opened my bedroom door without knocking. I made the page on my screen go small.
“Hey, Paul,” he said. “Long time no see. Is your mom around?”
He looked rough, like he hadn’t slept for a week.
“She went out,” I said.
“Do you know where?”
“No.”
“Okay, well, I’m back from the gig. We had a great crowd; they really loved us. You should come next time. Bring Scarlett with you. I’ll get you tickets, I’ll get you a backstage pass.”
I said nothing. I just stared at him and then I turned back to my computer.
“Oh, yeah, Paul, I know what I wanted to ask. I don’t suppose you can lend me some cash, can you? I forgot to pick some up on the way home.”
“How much?” I was still facing my computer.
“How much you got?”
I heard him step toward me. I shrugged and looked at him. “A hundred.”
“Man, you’re loaded. Where do you get all that cash from?”
“Same place you do,” I said.
He laughed. He looked a little guilty.
I swung back around and opened the drawer beneath my computer. I could feel him watching over my shoulder. I pulled out the cash. He reached out his hand to take the money.
“Thanks, dude, I’ll pay you back.” He left my room, slipping the notes into his jeans pocket as he went, closing the door behind him. I turned to my screen again. A little later the intercom buzzer went. I knew Gabriel wouldn’t get it and Cindy was still out, so I stood up to answer it, but by the time I opened my bedroom door, Gabriel was heading down the corridor to the intercom. My bedroom was between him and the intercom and when he saw me in the doorway, I swear he picked up speed.
“I’ll get that, Paul,” he said.
I shrugged. I turned to go back in my bedroom just as he picked up the receiver.
“Yeah, dude, yeah,” I heard him say. “I’ll be right down.”
He went out, leaving the apartment door ajar. I could hear him as he thumped his way downstairs. The television was on in the living room; he’d been watching some home-improvement show and there was a guy in a shiny black suit telling a woman she would never sell her house because her front garden looked like a city dump. The woman was standing on her doorstep sobbing.
“First impressions count, Sylvie,” the man was saying, “and your garden makes me want to run away.”
I opened the windows in the living room and stepped up onto the balcony. This side of the apartment looks out onto the road. It was silent below; there was no one about, only parked cars. Nothing moved. The curling balustrades and the gray slate roofs pressed tight against me. I felt dizzy standing there looking down.
A figure moved in the shadows below. Someone was down there on the pavement outside our door. I leaned over, gripping the balcony rail. Someone was standing astride a moped. I thought perhaps Gabriel had ordered pizza. The guy below had a motorbike helmet on, but I couldn’t see a pizza box.
The door to our apartment building opened and Gabriel stepped out. I heard him say hi as he reached into his pocket and pulled out my cash. The guy in the helmet counted the notes and then he pulled out an envelope from inside his jacket and handed it over. Then he revved his moped and drove back along the pavement toward the rue d’Assas. I heard the door to the building close.
I came back in and closed the windows and walked back across the living room and stood at the entrance. A couple of minutes later Gabriel pushed open the front door. He had his head down and he was looking at the envelope; his right hand was feeling around inside. He didn’t see me standing there.
“What’s that?” I said.
He jumped.
“Paul, man, you gave me a fright. Why do you creep up on me like that?”
“I didn’t creep up on you, I was just standing here,” I said. “What’s in the enve
lope?”
“Just some stuff that I need, you know, for the band, some documents and stuff to do with the tour. Did I tell you we’re doing a tour? Man, that is a bad program, that is,” he said, changing the subject and grabbing hold of the remote. He flicked across the channels for a couple of minutes and then he said: “I gotta take a shower.”
He walked past me, the envelope tucked under his left arm. He went into Maman’s bedroom and shut the door behind him.
I went back into my bedroom and closed the door. Later, when I looked up from my screen, I saw the family opposite was having supper; it must have been eight p.m. Maman still wasn’t home. They were all sitting at their table. There were lamps in the room that made pools of light around their heads so they looked like a painting in a museum. I stood up and switched the light off in my bedroom. I sat back down on my bed.
They took ages eating. The mother was doing most of the talking. The father kept shutting his eyes and chewing. The light shone on his forehead. Every so often he poured himself a little wine. He dabbed at his mouth with a white napkin. The table was laid with a white tablecloth and there were silver pots for salt and pepper and a glass jug in the center. I wondered what they were eating. The eldest daughter got up and left the room. She came back carrying a plate of cheese. I saw the chalk-white skin of the brie—almost gleaming—and I could taste it in my mouth. There were five of them sitting around the table, each one of them alone.
Suddenly the girl with black hair stood up and turned so that she was facing me. She strode toward where I sat on the other side of the courtyard. She reached up her hand, grabbed hard at the red velvet curtain, and pulled the fabric across. She didn’t look at me, even though I knew I was the cause of her anger: me watching her. She walked to the other curtain and she snatched and dragged until both curtains closed in a heavy screen of darkness and I was shut out, alone.
Chapter Twelve
My father was waiting for me when I came out of school at lunchtime, waiting like he never waits for me.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.