The Dragonfly

by Kate Dunn

Beneath his seat the crockery shivered in its locker, the vibrations changing key as the child accelerated.

  “Look at me!” she crowed.

  “You put it into reverse if you want to stop…”

  “Like this?”

  “Careful–” There was a smell of burning metal and the Dragonfly jack-knifed gracefully through blue smoke. The river settled as close as silk, shimmering and spun. “A bit like that,” Colin said weakly. “Shall I take her for a while?”

  They changed places and Delphine wriggled round in her seat so that she could dangle her feet over the side, her toes letting small slits of sunlight into the green water where the weeds bubbled under the surface, paddling which kept her amused all the way to the outskirts of Melun, where the Seine started to seem less like a motorway and more like an A road. There was a provincial feel to it: the depth was shallower and the current wasn’t bustling quite so busily. In the centre of the town it wound its way around an island. Colin had prepared himself for this.

  On the island was a prison.

  Delphine stared up at the implacably high walls, with Amandine peering out from underneath her chin; the expression on the child’s face as impenetrable as the jail itself. He kept looking straight ahead, as though, just now, their passage required particular concentration, but from time to time he risked a glance in her direction.

  “There’s the prison,” he said shortly.

  “I can see.”

  “How is Papa…?”

  She said something in French to Amandine, something disparaging, he thought. “Are we nearly south?” she asked him a few minutes later, with a flicker in her gaze.

  “We’re on our way…”

  “Good. When will we arrive there?”

  He didn’t answer.

  She spent the rest of the afternoon reading a comic in the cabin – it was as far away as she could get from him while still remaining on the boat. Eventually, she poked her head out of the hatch. “Where shall we rest tonight?” He noticed that her speech sometimes had a kind of quaint formality; her brittleness untranslatable.

  “I think we shall rest at Samois-sur-Seine, if it pleases you Mademoiselle.”

  “It pleases me,” she replied and he wasn’t sure who was humouring whom, but he was relieved that once again both of them were trying. “Je serai ravie. I will be ravished,” she added graciously.

  Even in July, with the lime trees sighing in the heat, turning the evening air syrupy with sap, a town with a closed funfair is a melancholy sight. The main square and the scribble of streets leading from it were lined with sideshows which had their lurid shutters up; the chrome ranks of the dodgems stared glassily into the middle distance and the arms of the rocket ride reared up at gawky angles. Like a soundtrack of dismay the generators kept up their enervating hum. The supermarket was closed; the library was closed,

  “Everything’s always shut in France. It’s shut because it’s a Monday, or it’s shut because it is lunchtime, or it’s shut because there’s a fair in town, but then the fair’s shut too. It’s a miracle that anybody makes a living here at all.”

  “The bar is open over there…”

  “I can’t take you into a bar – you’re nine.”

  The owner wore a white vest and had braces holding up his serge trousers and the only other customer wore a white vest and had a belt holding up his serge trousers, his style statement personalised by the addition of a greasy canvas cap. The cracks in the mosaic floor were filled with what looked like coffee grounds and they couldn’t find a table that didn’t wobble when they put their drinks upon it. Colin ordered her a Coke, but the delivery wasn’t due till Thursday, so she had to make do with Orangina and Amandine was not amused.

  Delphine slurped through her straw. Colin plotted the line of the rivulets running through the condensation on his glass. The room was divided by a brick arch which still had Christmas decorations pinned to it. The man in the cap turned the page of his newspaper. Delphine drummed her heels and Colin had to fight the urge to ask her not to. The owner wiped down the counter with a fraying piece of rag and as an afterthought cleaned a circular orange tray with something of a flourish. A bee flew in through the open window and then realising the error of its ways, straight away flew out again.

  A summer evening, a French village, stifled expectation, the lamenting heat…

  Colin swirled the beer around his glass and drank a mouthful, making it last.

  “Who was Albert Dreyfus?”

  A page was turned, a tray clattered, Colin swallowed his beer.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I saw a sign on a building back there.”

  He craned his head to see, frowning. There was a commemorative plaque high up on the side of the house at the end of the street opposite. “I can’t see.”

  Her mouth made small whisperings as she repeated, “In this house lived Fernand Labori, the lawyer who defended Albert Dreyfus and Émile Zola.”

  “It was a cause célèbre, I seem to remember” he answered, keen to show off his grasp of French history, “At least, I think it was. Dreyfus was accused of something that he didn’t do – was it treason? I’m not sure – but because he was Jewish and there was a lot of prejudice about in those days, nobody believed that he was innocent.”

  The bottle of Orangina, with its flakes of orange pressed to the occluded glass, was halfway to her mouth. She stared at the dulled surface of the table, not drinking. She set the bottle down.

  “What happened to him?”

  “He went to prison, as far as I recall.” He banished a fleeting picture of the pale, repelling walls in Melun. “Old Fernand can’t have been much cop as a lawyer, plaque or no plaque…” he went chuntering on, covering for both of them, until it became impossible not to acknowledge the change in atmosphere: hot air touching cooler air, currents shifting.

  Delphine put both elbows on the table. “Samois-sur-Seine is a very boring place and I feel sorry for anyone who ever had to live here,” she announced.

  Colin surveyed her with some surprise, “That’s not very nice,” he said placidly.

  “Very sorry for them,” she persisted.

  “Are you going to finish that?”

  “I don’t like it here, I don’t like Orangina and I don’t like–” A huge manufacture of emotion was under way. She scraped her chair back as he reached for her drink and took a swig.

  “I wish I was–” the lack of anything to wish for – her home, her mother, her father, her old life – only seemed to make things worse. She grabbed Amandine and bolted for the door, knocking into the furniture, making a chair topple and leaving him open-mouthed. He glanced at the men in vests, who looked away. The owner wiped down the counter; the man in the cap folded his paper in half and cleared his throat.

  Colin eyed a beer mat on the table. He touched the corner of it with his finger, conscious of the contained turbulence which seemed to sit so oddly with Delphine’s playfulness; of what near neighbours her laughter and her brooding silences were turning out to be. As he groped in his pocket for some change, he wondered which one of them was most out of their depth. He paid the bill, reminding himself that he was the grown-up, that right now he was all she had.

  As he hurried back through the little town, the funfair was beginning to strut its tawdry stuff and the air smelt of candyfloss and diesel and hot rubber. The bakery was open and he doubled back, scanning the yellow cellophaned glass for a cake in the shape of a swan among the tired fruit tarts and the cracked meringues. Nothing doing, but he spied a frog made of green marzipan and chocolate and dashed in to buy her one of those instead. In the window of the newsagent’s was a display in homage to another local boy made good – the musician Django Reinhardt. He bought an ancient CD housed in cloudy plastic and then hurried back to the port.

  He spotted her sitting on the quayside clasping her knees and for a moment her neat outline with its stilled angles seemed unimaginably familiar to him. He speeded up, waving the baguet
te above his head in salute and then, his joints making faint protest, lowered himself down beside her. He could feel the warmth of the stone through his shorts.

  “Was it talking about the trial and Dreyfus going to prison that upset you?” he asked without preamble.

  “Yes.”

  They looked at one another, each of them momentarily disarmed by their own candour.

  “I thought so,” Colin said after a pause. In the distance he could hear the spangled music of the funfair and for a while he sat listening to the fragmented chords. “Because of Papa…?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “I thought you might like this,” he slid the paper bag containing the marzipan frog towards her. She glanced at it, then rested her chin on her knees.

  “Because of his trial…?” he tried again.

  She sketched a shrug, a slight shifting of muscle, nothing more.

  “We can’t not talk about it, you and me.”

  He thought he saw her expression harden, but it was the hardness that comes from shouldering a burden: there was effort and stress and pain written in her face, though she said nothing.

  “The reason we can’t not talk about it is that we both love him, we care about him, we mind what happens to him.”

  She started picking at the bald patch on the side of Amandine’s head, running her fingernail along the thinning weft of the material. She didn’t utter a word.

  “Are you angry with him?”

  She stared at him in brief astonishment and shook her head.

  “For what he’s done?”

  A thread was coming loose in the tight black darning of Amandine’s nose and she rolled the end of it between her finger and thumb with renewed absorption.

  Given half a chance Colin would have retraced his steps to the bar and ordered himself a drink considerably stiffer than the lightweight French beer he’d had earlier – a cognac perhaps, or a Calvados. At difficult moments his default response had always been to walk away: to potter in his shed, to wash the car, to build a boat… He gnawed at his lip, “If you don’t talk about something, if you can’t bring yourself to talk about it, then you run the risk that it becomes bigger than it needs to be,” he went on, doggedly.

  Delphine looked at him with strange compassion, as if she could see that he was floundering because she was floundering too. “It is not possible…” she said haltingly and he couldn’t tell what wasn’t possible – for them to talk, or for the horrible, shitty mess that Michael had made to be any bigger than it was.

  High above them an arc of wild geese slung themselves homewards across the sky and Colin lost himself in the whirred telegraphy of their wings and the whisper of the lime tree leaves which shed their scent like rain. “Do you like marzipan?” He lifted the frog out of the bag and wagging it from side to side he croaked, “Hello Delphine,” and then answered on her behalf, “Hello Mr Frog.” It was the best that he could do.

  She took the frog and to oblige him she bit off its chocolate-coated toes.

  “Good.” He climbed onto the Dragonfly and helped her down beside him. “Tonight I’m going to give you your first one pot cooking lesson. We’ll make risotto and when we’ve eaten we’ll drink Coca-Cola by the light of the moon.”

  Delphine chopped garlic, onion and mushrooms somewhat erratically, while Colin put his new Django Reinhardt CD on the CD player. He didn’t just cook, he acted out the cooking with extravagant gestures, tossing the vegetables up into the air and catching some of them in the pan, while the rest bounced over the side and into the river. As they sizzled in the hot oil, he started tapping along to the music with a wooden spoon on the edge of the frying pan, then the outboard motor, the cleats and Delphine’s grey tweed hat, so that in the end she couldn’t not laugh.

  He put up the cabin door table and sat her down at it, spreading the drying up cloth over her knees as if it were the finest damask. With a sweep of his hand, he presented the can of Coke to her.

  “Mademoiselle…” he said in a cod French accent, “I zink you find zis is a ferry good year, non?” He ripped the ring pull off with a bow. “You waunt to taste?”

  Delphine tasted; she gave him a bashful glance.

  “Might I recommend ze risotto for zis evening? Ze onion I have plucked myself from ze shelves of Leclerc and ze mushrooms zey are waild…”

  He clowned for both of them and when he slumped back in his seat after the meal was over and smoked his one cigarette of the day and their merriment threatened to fold up into something small and disposable, he turned the volume on the CD player to full and towed her up onto the quayside and the two of them danced chaotically to Reinhardt’s indefatigable rhythms until the night was so black that they couldn’t dance anymore.

  CHAPTER TEN

  For one hour in the twenty-four they were allowed outside their cells. They could visit the library, they could watch TV (in the vegetable patch, where all the vegetables sat in rows) or go to Miami Beach (the gym). Michael chose to walk round the prison yard to inhale the different, diesel scent of the air, the fumes of Paris as potent as the sounds of the world outside: sirens and alarms, the chime of a church bell, a motorbike accelerating. He’d worked out who Chapot was; a middle-management baron who managed to procure a decent haircut for himself and through some dark deed had earned the privilege of wearing unobtrusively well-cut clothes. There was nothing intimidating about Chapot until you realised that he ran the money, he was the banker to the big guys. That was instructive in itself.

  Joubert had yet to reveal himself.

  As Michael walked up and down the yard he kept expecting to see Dustin Hoffman shuffling along beside him, going quietly mad behind his round Dega spectacles. He’d watched Papillon with Charlotte in their early days – it might even have been their first date. One of his favourite films had morphed into the story of his own life and now the person going quietly mad was him.

  ~~~

  The heat made everybody restless. Later that day the prison was put on lock down because some head banger tried to start a fire in the chapel by setting light to a pile of hymnbooks. As the evening drew in Michael could hear the sound of laughter in the dark – not the kind that might make him think of summer nights with Charlotte; the reckless, nothing-to-lose kind. The unkind kind.

  “Whyja do it, then?”

  He had been looking at his watch approximately every twelve minutes for the last two hours and there was still ages to go before lights out. There was something physical about the slow passing of time, the muscle burn of every hour, the cramp and spasm of a single minute. He felt riven with it. He could have groaned aloud – perhaps he did, because Laroche sent the same curveball question his way again.

  “Whyja top her? Yer missis?”

  He made a study of his watch. It had a red second hand, to draw the eye of those who might otherwise overlook the rhythmic sloth of its tick. He examined the white face, the black rubber strap, the buckle. He unfastened it and laid it on the table, pressing it flat.

  “I didn’t mean to,” he said, finally.

  “Tell that to the jury, oink oink.” Laroche leaned back in his chair and put his feet upon the table, close to Michael’s watch, far too close, within easy breaking distance.

  “I met her when I was sixteen and she was in her late twenties. She was a projectionist at the local cinema and I got a holiday job, tearing tickets. She’d wanted to be a film editor, originally, but it didn’t work out. When the lights went down, I’d glance up at the box and there she’d be, silvery and silhouetted, like a ghost. Sometimes, once the film had started, I’d go up to the box and stand at the back. I told her it was so I could watch the movie, but it was so that I could watch her, which of course she knew. She kind of – took me under her wing.”

  A derisive oink came from Laroche’s direction. “That’s one way,” he said, “of putting it.”

  Thinking back, breaking the rule that he had made for himself, offered a bitter release. “She always wore blood red l
ipstick. Everything else was black – clothes, nail varnish, everything. She was terminally sophisticated. There was something… guarded about her,” he said to mend the breach that he had made in his forgetting.

  Laroche curled his lip. He had a way of registering contempt that was economical.

  “Being with her was totally crazy, that’s why I loved it.”

  Laroche made an idle wanking motion with one hand. “You didn’t answer the bleedin’ question,” he observed, regarding him speculatively. “Devious little sod, aren’t you?”

  “I’m not the one,” he answered, touched on the raw, “who blubs into his pillow when the lights are out.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  They raced the weather all the way to Moret-sur-Loing. Small squalls of wind whipped loose along the riverbank and the molten afternoon was stretched to breaking point. On the horizon, clouds accumulated, darkly.

  “It’s going to be lively tonight.” Increasing the revs, Colin glanced at his watch and checked the book on the seat beside him. Along the right bank, the trees in the Forest of Fontainebleau closed ranks and the light in the wooded inlets turned to shadow. Birds fretted in the branches and a cormorant, impatient with drying its wings on one of the mooring posts in the river, took flight.

  Saint-Mammès was a blowsy village at the conjunction of the Seine, the River Loing and the Canal du Centre. It was a commercial port and already the great black slabs of barges were tied up one after another, vast bulwarks against the coming storm.

  They sped past the embankment on the approach to the town, looking to right and left, but even the smallest berths were crammed with tenders or dinghies. There was nothing for it – they would have to seek shelter on the Loing, though it wasn’t on their route.

  “You’d better put your anorak on,” Colin called to Delphine as the first fat drop of rain splattered over the deck. The wind stopped making sly jabs and thrusts and started a full on assault, and as they picked up speed and the landscape went slicing past them on either side, the strain on the engine shook the boat until Colin thought his teeth would rattle. Caught between the mauve river and the violet sky, he almost missed the opening to the narrow tributary and found himself swerving through the gap. He slewed the Dragonfly into reverse and the rain came juddering down on them.