by Emily Paull
Michael moved onto his threadbare couch and turned on the television without sound. The city was in lockdown. People were being urged to stay in their homes. All over the internet, French strangers were posting messages: if you have nowhere to go, come here—#porteouverte. Pray for Paris, they were saying. It was like someone had reached down Michael’s throat and was twisting his heart, easing it back up his oesophagus.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ said his mother, in Cottesloe.
‘Me either,’ said Michael, in Paris.
* * *
He went to bed that night but not before he checked that the doors and windows were locked and pushed the couch against the balconette doors. Climbing under the sheets, his ears tingled with the pressure of straining to hear what was going on outside. Were the sirens getting closer or further away? Around 4 am, he pressed a pillow to his head and finally drifted off into a kind of sleep. When he woke, his shoulders were so sore from being hunched that he could hardly move.
He did not go to the café that day, and no-one rang to ask him why.
The next day, when he did go back, John was not there. Claudine, the day manager, took his hand and looked into his eyes in a way that made him uncomfortable. ‘He was there, Michael. A man two rows in front of him was killed. I am thinking he will not come to work for some time.’
He could tell that she was trying not to cry. He wanted to tell her that it was okay to cry if she wanted to, because something sad had happened, and yet, he also understood. The two of them were both unharmed and did not know anyone who had been killed. It would be selfish to cry, when the worst they had suffered was a night of broken sleep, a case of the jitters, a certain crack in the trust they felt in the goodness of the world.
Claudine was a capable manager, small but well-muscled and with a tattoo of the Cat in the Hat on one of her forearms. She had dyed blonde hair and very dark eyebrows. Michael had no idea how old she was, but he knew she was older than him. The way she spoke to him had the same incredulous, pitying tone that some of his teachers had used on him at the private school he’d gone to. It was like she couldn’t believe that someone as naive as him was still walking around. She was kind to him, of course, but she didn’t take him seriously. No-one did.
John came back to work a few days later. He’d lost his colour and seemed blurry around the edges. His hands shook when he carried the cups of coffee, spilling hot liquid into the saucers. Customers looked at him and pursed their lips in sympathy. He stayed long enough each day to prove that he could, then went home at midday, leaving Claudine with the keys. After a month, he called a staff meeting and announced he was returning to Tasmania.
Claudine was angry, but Michael was almost relieved.
‘You are letting the terrorists win,’ she spat, then let loose a stream of angry French. John listened without trying to defend himself but hung his head a little lower.
‘I’m sorry,’ John said. ‘I’ve already sold the café. I want to be with my family. My brother and his family are back in Hobart, and I’ve never even met my youngest nephew. Maybe the new owner will keep you on—do you want me to ask him?’
Claudine shook her head and tapped a cigarette out of her packet, wiping away a tear.
They stacked the chairs in silence and headed out onto the dark street. There were puddles all over the road, and the air smelled thick and dusty. Under the amber glow of a streetlight, John placed his hand on Michael’s shoulder. ‘What about you, Mike? Where will you go?’
Michael shrugged and reached his hands into his pockets. It wasn’t quite cold enough to snow. He thought of Cottesloe Beach this time of year, and almost willed his skin to sunburn with longing. John patted him on the arm and turned for home.
What would he do? He’d come here to write, to live in the city that had inspired Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and so many more great writers. Instead, he’d spent every moment feeling like he was waiting for a train that had been cancelled.
Behind him, he heard running footsteps, and when he turned, Claudine was calling to him from the corner. Her bottle-blonde hair was squashed under a knitted raspberry hat.
‘Michael, don’t go home yet. Come to a party with me. An end of the world party.’ She laughed, and on the silent street it was almost inappropriately loud.
‘I don’t know …’
‘You don’t have a job anymore,’ she said, placing a hand on his arm. ‘You may as well drink!’
Michael looked at her hand, and then back up to her eyes. His heart was doing something strange. ‘All right,’ he said.
* * *
The party was held at the apartment of a couple Claudine had known since she was a child. No-one could tell him for sure if Edgar and Raquel were married. Edgar was in his late fifties and had a look about him like Pete Townshend from The Who, with his shoulder-length hair artfully cut so as to look like it had not been cut in years. He wore a mustard-coloured corduroy jacket with a black T-shirt underneath, both of which smelt of camphor. Raquel was tall and tanned with curly blonde hair. She wore a man’s white business shirt tied with a scarf at the waist, and Michael could see the fine fair hairs on her legs.
She was smoking as she greeted Claudine at the door, a trail of smoke seeking the ceiling while the women kissed one another on both cheeks. Their voices alternated between anger and amusement, but he had no idea what either one of them was saying. Eventually, Raquel put her arm around Michael and led him into the kitchenette, where she handed him a bottle of red wine and a child’s tumbler with Tintin on it.
‘So, Michael, Claudine tells me you are from Australia.’
Michael nodded. ‘Perth. It’s on the western side.’
‘Yes, I have been there many years ago. It was very …
warm.’
‘Michael is a writer,’ said Claudine, using the hob on the stove to light a cigarette and levering it into her mouth. She took off her beret and stuffed it into the pocket of her coat.
Raquel smiled but to Michael’s relief she did not ask him what he was writing about. She didn’t seem to care. Already, she was rifling through the pantry and pulling out cans of butter beans, creamed corn and asparagus.
They were going to eat anything they had and pretend they were in a bunker, living off rations.
The end of the world. Michael couldn’t even begin to imagine it. He’d always assumed that it would be someone else’s problem. Where he was from, most people didn’t even believe in climate change.
Edgar joined them, and taking the wine from Michael, he poured first into his own cup and then into Michael’s.
‘You should drink. This bottle is older than Claudine. Luckily, for wine, this is a good thing.’
Michael obediently took a sip. He laughed to himself, suddenly remembering the last party his mother had hosted: a fundraiser to build a well in a Cambodian village. She’d invited everyone—co-workers, the school P and C, members of her tennis club—and Michael had been obliged to ferry around a plate of stuffed olives, smiling at these women as they, one after the other, commented on how grown up he was. The drunkest of them all was Sheera, who worked in real estate. Later in the evening, she had begun to dance and invited Michael to join her, but he declined when she ducked onto the floor and flicked her hair like she was in a music video. His mother, possibly the only person there for the sake of the Cambodian villagers, mercifully had not seen.
Michael looked around. Edgar and Raquel’s place was a studio apartment, a bench separating the kitchen from the bedroom. There was a toilet shared by all the apartments on the floor, and every time someone flushed it sounded like the water was rushing through the walls right past them. It wasn’t a huge place, but it made Michael’s look fancy. The carpet was the colour of cigarette ash; the curtains were unhemmed and didn’t match. There was no television, no bookshelves and a stack of old Mademoiselle magazines on the coffee table.
The other guests were crowded around a laptop, watching clips from the
news. One woman was crying, and wiped her eyes on the hem of her long skirt. He moved behind them to sit on the couch and stared dumbly at the screen, though he could not understand what the newswoman was saying. Paris, he kept hearing. Paris, Paris. Paris je t’aime. Paris je suis. Paris when it rains, when it rains it pours.
Michael shook himself—what was in that wine? He was falling asleep. Over by the bed, hastily made up with a pink crochet rug, Claudine had found a record player and was fitting the needle onto whatever had been left on it. David Bowie’s ‘Young Americans’ bled through the speakers, and she swayed drunkenly back over to Michael, sitting beside him and putting her head on his shoulder.
Her head was heavy. She smelled of coffee beans and smoke, and something candy-sweet. He let her lean there, realising that if this were one of his stories, he would have written this scene with the woman putting her hand on the man’s thigh, or unzipping his jeans, and that this moment would lead to the two of them having sex. He had written about French girls—and Australian girls—like Claudine before, and very poorly, he now realised. He had always made them out to be manipulative and sexually liberated, without ever considering why a person might behave this way. It was never about the women; it was always about the men, and what they wanted. But he didn’t really know Claudine. He didn’t know anything about her. It was yet another thing to feel guilty about.
Edgar watched the two of them and smiled, swilling his wine around before drinking it.
‘She always makes the most interesting friends,’ he said. ‘A writer. We haven’t had one of those for a while.’
Michael surprised himself by replying straight away. ‘I’m not a writer. I haven’t written a word since I got to Paris.’
‘That’s because this city swallows them up,’ said Claudine, without raising her head from Michael’s shoulder. ‘Too many words have been written about Paris already. It’s not even a real city anymore. It’s fiction, a fairy tale. That’s why those fuckers know that to hurt Paris is to make the world hurt. You don’t even have to have been here to have a Paris in your mind. It’s like chucking a grenade at Snow fucking White.’
Michael took a deep gulp of his wine. It tasted too thick to him now—soupy, bloody, even clotted.
‘What will you write about Paris now, Michael? Will you write about what has happened to us, the things you’ve actually seen rather than the things you’ve read about? You cannot write of what you know nothing about.’ Michael’s breath caught. He wondered if Claudine knew what he had been thinking about her just moments before.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, slowly. ‘But you’re right. My Paris is not Hemingway’s Paris.’
Edgar pointed a finger at him, the end of it calloused by guitar strings. ‘Don’t get me started on fucking Hemingway.’
* * *
Michael woke up the next morning tucked up in Raquel and Edgar’s bed, the pink crochet rug wrapped around him. He felt more rested than he had ever felt.
The weak-tea sunlight was streaming through the divide in the curtains and warming up the room. There were bowls of leftover mush in a variety of browns all over the coffee table, and the wine bottle had overturned next to the couch where it had fallen, empty, out of Claudine’s hand. Edgar was asleep in one of the swivel stools at the kitchen bench. The ridges of his corduroy jacket stretched tight over the hump of his bent back. Michael could see no sign of Raquel. Everyone else had left.
He wiped his eyes and drew the rug around him so that he could shuffle over to the window. Once there, he stuck his head around the side of the curtain and pressed his nose against the brittle glass. Out to his right, he could just see the Eiffel Tower, a monstrous black symbol, evoking the events that had taken place.
But life went on. It was early, but still there were people out walking. A couple of ladies in high stiletto boots walking a Dalmatian; a florist laying out his bouquets on a cart; a small child in a pink parka running ahead of her parents, pointing at something Michael could not yet see.
He would stay, he realised, at least for a little while longer.
If only to try to discover his own Paris on the page and escape the thousands of words that had made him believe that he knew the city already.
SISTER MADLY DEEPLY
As I bring the clippers towards the soft dome of my head, all I can think about is how much I do not want to do this.
Then I think of Josephine and how tiny she looked, swaddled in mounds of heavy starched white sheets on her hospital bed. She is the only thing that keeps me from putting down the clippers. Josie, who as a child I loved so fiercely that I wanted to squeeze her until her head popped clean off. Josie, who I once dreamed had died in a fiery race-car crash, which woke me up screaming, only to remember that neither of us could drive. My tiny, perfect sister, lying bald and infant-like in a bed that was far too big for her, pinned to the spot with the pain of movement like one of Nabokov’s butterflies.
It is the done thing to shave your head out of solidarity. It’s what they do on TV, it’s what celebrities do, it’s the foundation of an entire charity. To help my sister through the betrayal perpetrated against her by her own body, I want to think I would do anything at all, and yet the thought of losing my hair, of being bald, of not recognising myself when I wake up in the morning makes me lose my nerve.
I did not know I was capable of such base vanity. I own exactly three pairs of shoes—one flat pair for work, one heeled pair for going out, and a pair of thongs for walking to the letter box and out to the pool. But after thirty years of hating who I saw when I looked in the mirror, I have finally reached a place where I like the woman I see, and tomorrow, that woman will have been replaced by a skindome with eyes.
I realise this must be how my sister feels every single day.
My hand is shaking badly. I expect it to hurt. I expect to feel each lock of honey blonde hair being snipped away. Instead, I feel only the mildest tickle, followed by the sensation of lightness as my tresses flutter to the floor like long, curly snowflakes. They begin to carpet the white tiles of my bathroom. I watch my hand’s reflection in the mirror and its death grip on the electric razor which I bought for this purpose. It is a good thing that I live alone, I think. I would hate for some roommate—or worse, a boyfriend—to walk in and find me shaving my head and sobbing. They would think I was having a full-scale Britney Spears meltdown. And then I would have to tell them about Josie and her cancer.
When it comes to dating, that’s my only rule. I don’t talk about my personal life, my family or my problems. It’s never usually an issue. No-one stays around long enough to notice.
The last curl drifts away from my head, and I turn off the clippers at the wall. The bathroom is silent. I hear my own measured breathing. I have to force myself to look at my own reflection.
* * *
The next morning, I visit the hospital. Nurses greet me by name as I enter the ward, stopping at the designated points to put sanitiser on my hands from little red pumps. There is a smell in the hospital, and it isn’t the disinfectant smell that I’d always imagined, but something more pungent, like iodine. I picture this smell as a rust-red cream spread around the incision point of a fresh wound, the colour of old blood and healing.
I have not covered my newly naked skull with a hat, though it’s less than ten degrees outside and the chill has seeped all the way through to my toes. To wear a hat would be to hide what I have done, as if it is somehow shameful. The only shame is in how ugly I feel.
She is awake, but only just, in a dreamy childlike state, where she is fighting the urge to drift off. Her eyelids have always had a natural purple hue to them, like an eyeshadow she was born with, but today this is exacerbated by the tired grey pallor of her skin. She smiles when she sees me but is too exhausted to speak. The morphine is pulling her under. Her own skull is starting to grow tufts of white blonde hair, like the tips of cotton plants.
I head for the visitor’s chair under the window and pull a paperback
from my bag. When she sees I have settled, Josie’s shoulders relax, and I see the moment when she allows herself to fall asleep. It’s like a great weight has been lifted. She sighs in her sleep. I swallow around the lump in my throat and try to concentrate on the page before me.
Mum’s bag is in the corner of the room. One of us is here constantly now, though it’s harder for me to get away from work than it is for Mum. The first month was the toughest to cope with. It was impossible to block out the activity in the hallways, the people being pushed past open doors on gurneys, the sounds of shuffling feet and squeaking wheels, and the cheerful chatter of well-practised nurses on a cancer ward. There was a toughness to their happiness, a tone that said they’d seen and endured almost everything. I used to wonder if Mum and I would one day sound like that as well.
During the worst part of that first month, Josie was so spaced out from all the chemicals in her system that she began to see spiders crawling all over the walls, and she screamed and thrashed in her bed, too weak to get up and run, but too frightened to close her eyes. Mum climbed into bed with her, and held and hushed her like she was a little baby. It was like it didn’t scare her at all. When Josie was a child, she’d been prone to night terrors and had often woken up screaming—Mum said it was just like that, but I knew that it wasn’t. It was a grown woman screaming in sheer terror, staring at walls she thought would attack her. That night, I went home and stood under the scalding hot water in my shower, and I cried until my eyes felt like they might detach from my skull. How could this terrified half-human person be the same baby sister, the girl I’d fought with all through my teenage years over stupid things like who owned what lipstick and who was talking too much at the dinner table?