The Dragonfly

by Kate Dunn

  Colin squeezed her hand. “It’s just for tonight. Just to keep an eye on you. A real bed with proper sheets, you lucky girl. They might even let you have a bath if you ask them nicely.”

  She shrugged, making the foil in which they had wrapped her lisp and whisper.

  “You look like a chicken all ready to go in the oven. I could eat you for my supper…” he said to her, foil bright himself, trying to make light as the doctor passed him a clipboard full of forms to sign.

  “Will you stay?”

  “I’ll stay as long as they let me.”

  “But will you stay?” she urged.

  The doctor ducked out through the curtains, carrying the paper work with him.

  “Actually,” fastened round her wrist she had an identification bracelet made of shiny, laminated card and he started to fiddle with it, turning it round and round, “Actually, I thought I might go back to the lock, while it’s still daylight, just to see if Amandine…”

  He watched the penny drop, painfully.

  “Isn’t she – didn’t you–?” The child spoke from that place of sorrow where anger blurs with disbelief, “But Colin–!”

  “All we could think of was rescuing you. Tyler saved you.” He spoke judiciously, weighing out the reprimand. “You should never have jumped into the lock, you know. It was a very courageous, very silly thing to do.”

  She turned away from him on the trolley with a flounce that was recognisably hers and he almost smiled to see the old Delphine returning, even though her gaze, staring off to one side, was sullen and the quarter crescent of her face that was visible to him was closed up, her mouth a brutal line. Colin bowed his head. He recognised the roaring ugliness of bereavement: he knew it well.

  “There wasn’t time to look for Amandine.”

  She hunched herself further away, straining to emphasise the distance between them.

  “I’ll stay if you want. But if I go now, maybe there’s a chance that I might find her; that she might still be there…”

  She didn’t answer.

  “If you think it’s worth a look, I’ll…”

  This time she roused herself and glanced over her shoulder. She said something in furious French which he couldn’t understand but gathered meant Do what the fuck you like, I don’t care. She was only nine. She had seen and heard too much.

  He sat waiting by her trolley until a hospital porter appeared. She kept her back to him throughout. “I promise I won’t be long,” he said, as she was wheeled away.

  ~~~

  He walked back from the hospital, from the new fringes of the town to its old heart, the shock of what had happened still registering. The noise of the traffic, the pulse of the passing cars, was soothing. It felt good to be out in the ordinary sunshine and he stopped for a moment and tilted his head so that he could feel its commonplace warmth on his face. It was going home time. People were retracing their steps, laden with shopping, or busy on their mobiles, still carrying the day’s events with them, halfway to exchanging them for a quiet night in, and he tried to imagine falling into step beside somebody and strolling back with them all the way to their home life. It was the one thing he didn’t really have.

  He set off down the hill, the roads narrowing, the houses ageing from baroque to mediaeval within a couple of streets. He liked the frescoes of faded adverts on ancient plaster, the stooped doorways, the peeling shop fronts, the stressed angles of the half timbering – Clamecy was a timber town – the old brass lanterns strung from building to building, the water pumps on pavement corners, and set in high niches, the religious statues trying to horse trade with fate.

  The lock keeper had gone home. The gates were closed and the chamber was empty. As he peered down into the water, he remembered the flicker of her arms and her skirt twisting like rag as she disappeared. He wiped his hands across his eyes.

  There was some weed and a couple of sticks, but no Amandine.

  He searched the length of the lock on both sides, checking behind the ladders and in the corners by the gates. A fish teased the surface with its tail, but there was no little monkey, the side of its head worn with too much loving.

  He made his way along the quay and looked over his shoulder. At the end of the lock arm that stretched out into the Yonne was the bust of some local dignitary – the book would surely know which one – who contemplated Colin, giving nothing away. Colin, in his turn, stared back at him, until his eye was caught by some movement close to the far bank: a coot was threading her way through the overhanging grasses, trailing her tiny black babies like beads behind her, darting out into the current to avoid obstructions: branches, boulders, something felty.

  Something felty!

  He broke into a trot, down the quay, over the bridge, past the reinforced concrete chapel (the first of its kind etc) through a small park until he reached the spot, more or less, where he had seen it. No gently shelving shore to make life easy, but a sheer drop of about five feet. He leaned out as far as he could, craning his neck this way and that, but he couldn’t see anything. There was only one thing for it. He lay down on the path and hung himself over the bank, reaching down with both hands hoping there was nothing there which might bite, and began to feel his way between the rocks and pebbles and the muddy clefts, making his stomach muscles sing whole arias of pain, probing and groping until at last his fingers closed over something which could only be material. He yanked hard, sending water bucketing over himself as he prized his trophy from the river’s grip.

  It was Michael’s lavender grey tweed hat.

  He struggled into a sitting position and wrung it out, watching the drips fall with a keen sense of the futility of life. He sat there with it wetly in his lap, picking some grit from the weave and then with a suddenness which startled him, his phone rang.

  “Bonjour Monsieur Aylesford…” It was Michael’s solicitor.

  Colin hunched his shoulders, as if he were protecting his softer parts. “Yes?”

  “I visited your son last week.”

  He drew up his knees and gripped them with his free hand. “How is he?” He could hear a reedy note of need in his voice.

  “He’s doing OK,” she spoke English with an American accent, bestowing on him that sense of total focus which comes with a five hundred pounds an hour price tag. “We have a date for the trial. Things can be more quickly expedited because of his guilty plea.”

  “There’s no chance that he will change that, is there?”

  “To not guilty?” she queried. “Do you have some new information?”

  I have only doubts, only doubts, he wanted to say. No certainties, no belief, no hope. I am thinking things which to me should be unthinkable: Michael, standing vengefully at the top of the stairs… “No,” he said.

  “We could look at mitigating circumstances. Your son has made it clear that he does not wish to put forward a defence, but if you have grounds to believe…”

  “Mitigating circumstances,” he echoed, thinking, the guilt is mine. I let him down. It’s my plea.

  “You are caring for his daughter, no?”

  “Yes. I’m caring for Delphine…”

  “Then is it possible that she has said something?”

  “She hasn’t said. I’ll ask. I will ask. She hasn’t said.”

  “The trial is in October.”

  “October, yes.”

  “We’ll talk next week, perhaps? When you have spoken with Delphine.” There was an emollient and respectful silence. “Au revoir, Monsieur.”

  “Au revoir…” he clicked the phone off and slid it back into his pocket. The lavender grey tweed hat had fallen onto the path and he stooped to pick it up, his knees cracking. It was almost dry. He smelt the inside of it: the metal scent of the river; then held it to his face the way that Delphine sometimes did. We’re all bloody guilty, he thought, all of us, one way or another.

  ~~~

  When he arrived at the hospital, Delphine was fast asleep and he stood in encroaching stillne
ss beside her bed absorbing her peaceful abandon: her round-cheeked rosiness and the rhythmic catching of her breath at the back of her throat were a kind of benison, so different from the wan, grey-skinned child – Colin blinked. To banish the image of her straggled body lying on the deck of the Dragonfly, he leaned forward and smoothed a trickle of hair from her forehead, hesitating in the hope that she might stir and wake up. He found himself wanting her back. He found himself longing to hear her caustic little voice upbraiding him, holding him to account. She made a slight questing motion, as if a cool current from the open window had disturbed the air around her. With the exaggerated movements of a mime, he laid Michael’s hat on the locker beside her bed and turned for one last look before he tiptoed from the room.

  He couldn’t find the doctor – any doctor – but managed to corner a nurse on the main ward, whose reassuring words were limited by her elementary English and he set off back to the port full of renewed anxiety about antibiotics and maladies from the urine of rodents. “Precaution,” the woman kept saying, “Precaution,” but he wasn’t entirely comforted.

  Colin wanted to buy something for Tyler, some inadequate gift incapable of expressing the extent of his debt, but Clamecy had shut up shop. The florist was closed, the boulangerie was closed and even the supermarket was locked up for the night. He wandered into a tobacconist thinking he might be able to find some chocolates and saw, on a wire rack of esoteric publications (books on crochet, books on road safety) a book of photographs of rural France. He headed for the port with it tucked beneath his arm.

  Sabrina Fair was at the far end of the mooring reserved for larger craft and as Colin hurried over to it he felt a prickle of anticipation almost in spite of himself. He rehearsed the giving of his present: This is nothing really, but I wanted to thank you…/ I don’t know how to thank you for what you’ve done but I hope that this…/ This is a small token, I can’t begin to… His mouth was dry when he reached the foot of the gangplank. He licked his lips.

  She wasn’t there. The peniche was empty, its door was locked and the curtains were closed. He stood for a moment staring at a picture of what he took to be a culvert – something watery at any rate – that was hanging in the window in front of him. On closer inspection maybe it wasn’t a culvert, maybe it was a bowl of something – fruit, possibly…

  Disappointed, he turned away.

  Planning his supper for one – he ought to be hungry, if he put his back into it and made a bit of an effort he could be hungry – he trudged home to the Dragonfly, reflecting on the merits of tinned salmon versus chips from the chip shop if there was any damn chip shop open, when he caught sight of her.

  She was wearing a dress, a sleeveless shift dress in a vaguely retro print. He’d never seen her in a dress before. She was sitting on the quay next to his duck egg blue boat, her feet dangling over the side, writing postcards.

  His heart did something crazy: it leapt, and he started to run, calling out her name.

  “How is she?” Tyler jumped up, “How’s Delphine?”

  “She’s fine,” he panted. “At least I think she is.” He had difficulty catching his breath. “They’ve kept her in overnight. For antibiotics. They’ve put her on observations.” Still breathing hard, he shoved the book into her hands, “This is for you.”

  “Why, Colin this is such a – what a wonderful – you didn’t have to…”

  “To thank you for what you did.”

  “What I did was nothing – it was just…” Tyler began leafing through the book and as the moments passed and he recovered himself, he took a step closer on the pretext of looking at the photographs too, and as she turned the pages one by one the atmosphere between them was so charged it was as if they were already touching. She closed the book with enormous care and turned to look up at him and it would have been the easiest thing in the world to put his arms around her.

  “Those are the most beautiful photos,” her smile hovered at the corner of her mouth and then faded.

  He could have leaned down and kissed her then.

  She swallowed, “You can learn so much from photographs,” she hesitated, “If you want to be a painter…”

  He nodded, feeling her breath go glancing past him, her soft breath, her warm scent. He kept nodding, very slowly, as if there was much in what she said for him to understand. “I… er…”

  She waited. “Yes?” she whispered.

  His courage failed him. He ran his fingers through his hair. “I… er… wondered if you’d like to stay for supper?”

  “Colin!” she exclaimed, “Don’t you want to – you know, like – kiss me? What does a girl have to do–?”

  His head felt as if it was spinning, so that his hand moving shyly towards hers turned from a single action into a flickering sequence. Their fingertips touched. “I wasn’t sure… I didn’t want to presume…”

  “Presume what?”

  “I’m not exactly a young man any more…” he said as she stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the mouth. It was a tentative kiss, a kiss which gathered up and let go in the same breath. “A kiss as long as my exile…” he whispered, losing himself in Tyler’s gaze.

  “I bet that’s from Shakespeare,” she grinned, and then to his amazement she looped her arms around his neck and drew him down to her again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  “Amarillo Brillo – Frank Zappa”

  “Brooklyn Dreams – Neil Diamond.”

  “You can’t have Neil Diamond,” Laroche objected. They were playing cities in song titles, alphabetically, in the terminal stages of boredom. “On taste grounds. You can have Barcelona by Freddie Mercury, if you like. I had it up my sleeve ready but I’m giving it to you.”

  “I don’t like. I’m going with… Billericay Dickie – Ian Dury.”

  “Century City – Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, which is a double. Woop, woop.”

  “OK. Buried in Detroit – Mike Posner.”

  “El Paso – can’t think the fuck who… it’s coming, it’s coming…”

  “I’m going to have to hurry you.”

  “Marty Robbins!”

  And so they went on, ploughing from Kashmir by Led Zeppelin, through Meet Me in St Louis by Judy Garland which was a bit of a low point, to Viva las Vegas by Elvis Presley, all the way to Youngstown by Bruce Springstein. They couldn’t think of a Z, so Laroche suggested song titles where you replace the words love or heart with knob. “Can’t Stop Knobbing You,” was his opener.

  Michael was still trying to think of a song title with a city in it beginning with Z on his way to the hobbit shop. He tried not to let his spirits sink as he filed into the shed with its queasy lighting and its damp walls. He was working on a child’s bike so heavy it was difficult to lift and he glanced around the room as he heaved it into position, checking what was what and more importantly, who was where. Chapot was in which was unusual, looking sleek, but he didn’t think anything of it.

  There was a clot of earth with a few wisps of grass jammed into one end of the handlebars and it made him wonder briefly, about the child who had thrown it down on some lawn… Rosbif… Rosbif… or some verge, before hurrying in for tea. He started digging the dried mud out and it went crumbling onto his shoes… Rosbif… Rosbif… and he tried to picture the discarded bike with its pedals still turning and the tick tick tick of its wheels slowing: that sense of adventure, put on hold.

  He felt the hairs rising on the back of his neck, the pricking sensation of somebody walking a little too close to him. He glanced up to see a guy he hadn’t come across before… Rosbif… Rosbif… A heavy-set bloke with a dented nose in a face that had seen too many fights, arcing past him en route to the supplies cupboard, curling the long way round the room with a speculative swagger, before sauntering back to the privileged corner near the stove, where the men parted as he approached, Michael took note.

  He wasn’t concentrating; he was watching the bruiser. That was his first mistake. During the instant in which he cease
d anticipating trouble, trouble struck. Somebody knocked his wrench off the workbench – Belfiore, who never looked as if he could move quickly enough? As he stooped to pick it up… Rosbif… Rosbif… it was kicked beyond his grasp and he was diverted again as it was passed and passed back in a scuffle of feet. There were taunts in the air, although nothing was said. Incitements. The wrench was further up the line now, beyond the reach of easy retrieval.

  Same old, same old, he thought; which was his second mistake. He gave the wrench up for lost and turned his attention back to the bike, gripping the front wheels between his knees so he could straighten the handlebars. Out of the corner of his eye, on the far side of the room, he saw the new guy remove a sock from his pocket and unroll it and although that seemed odd and he was curious to know what the sock was for when rags were supplied for polishing off, he went on with his adjustment of the handlebars – a little bit this way, a little bit that way – squinting through a half-closed eye to see if they were level. He’d learned how to absorb himself into the task in hand, blotting out the murmurings; a transcendental concentration that gave him space and peace in which to be. He didn’t hear the whispers ebb, the flow of silence into stealth. Even the diversionary fracas on the far side of the room failed to divert him, although the kangas went racing across to deal with it – there was always some kind of a dust up going on. He was thinking of song titles with cities beginning with Z, that it’d be good to get one over on Laroche. He didn’t notice the footfall or the sweat stink, though he thought for a second that he heard the words wife killer wreathe around him, although he couldn’t be sure and he swung round to see, glimpsing the sock but not the wrench inside it and as the blow caught him on the side of the head he thought – Zanzibar – Billy Joel! – before he went sprawling face down onto the floor.

  ~~~

  “I’m sure there must be a song about Zamboanga City somewhere,” said a voice.

  Michael was trying to work out where he was, piecing himself together until a blurry sequence of memories gathered momentum and he remembered everything – the prison, Charlotte, all of it.