by Jayne Tuttle
‘Oh la la la la. So you had a little altercation with a stairwell this evening, ma chère?’ he says. I love the way he pronounces ma chère with a very long, old-fashioned ‘airrr’ at the end.
‘The lift,’ I squeak out. All my muscles seem to be tensing up, my throat closing over. ‘I don’t know. I got my head. Caught. Under it.’
He raises his eyebrows and sits down on the bed and takes my hand. ‘And you pulled yourself out, they tell me. That’s how you hurt your face?’ he asks.
‘I must have. I don’t know.’
‘Un miracle,’ he says, with a serious look. His face is all delicate bonework, like a woman’s. ‘My name is Rigolette,’ he says, and I know I’ll never forget that name, as rigolo means fun. ‘You are going to need some surgery on your face. But first you’re going to have some scans, to check everything else is okay. Do you have any other pain, besides your face?’
‘Um, my neck is really sore and stiff, like I’ve slept funny.’
‘Move your toes.’ I do, and they move slightly. ‘Move your hands like this.’ I manage to move them.
‘If zero is no pain and ten is the most excruciating pain you’ve ever had, what level is your pain?’
‘Eight.’
‘Right,’ he says. ‘We’ll get you something for that.’
A boy nurse and a girl nurse come in, laughing and bitching about someone, using lots of brilliant swear words and expressions. I wonder if Mum swore like this behind the scenes. They pull back the sheet, then they take off my lovely boots, my socks, my jeans. They don’t take off my underpants. Then they look at the top half of me and sigh.
‘Désolé,’ says the boy nurse. ‘We have to cut.’
It’s my favourite red jumper, with the printed image of the unknown person on it. Some think it’s a little-known image of Che Guevara. Some think it’s the violent kid from Flatliners. I don’t care who it is, I just like the bell-shaped sleeves and the high neck that keeps me warm, especially on the bike. My favourite bra is underneath.
Snip, snip, from the wrists all the way up to the armpits and down the sides. It feels sacrilegious, destructive. My breasts are exposed but I don’t care. I am no longer a woman. I just want to get better. They put a pale blue gown made of Chux over me, straighten the sheets and leave.
Adrien comes in. Warmth runs through me. His presence makes these past two years real. He makes everything real.
‘Could you call my dad?’ I say.
He shifts in his shoes. He doesn’t know I still haven’t told Dad we broke up.
‘Maybe we should wait for the scan, to know exactly what the situation is,’ he says.
‘Good idea,’ I say, and he gives me a weak smile. Now I don’t feel very well.
They wheel me into a dark room and Adrien sits next to me. The light from outside the door casts a stripe over a medicine chart on the wall. I try to concentrate on it but it’s giving me nothing. A strong disinfectant smell hits my nostrils, causing my stomach to clench.
‘I think I’m scared,’ I tell him.
‘You’re going to be fine,’ he says. ‘Try not to think about it.’
Just look forward, I tell myself, look forward. But it’s not working anymore. A tear drips down my cheek. What will the surgery be like? What has actually happened? What did I do to my head? Have I ruined my face completely? Look forward. Why did I do it? Had I wanted to die? Stop thinking. You’re going to be okay. You don’t have cancer. Can I move? Will I walk again? I want to touch my face and the thought makes me sick. The fluorescent lights come on and a nurse walks in with a trolley with lots of plastic instruments and packets. Adrien leaves for a cigarette.
‘Bonsoir madame,’ I say.
‘Morphine,’ she says flatly. ‘Vot’ cuisse.’ A jab in my thigh.
White now, instead of black. Love washes through me like a warm wave as I glide through a hallway under rows of stunning lights. I am whisked into a lift and down through a maze of cement hallways to a beautiful concrete room. The clock on the wall is tick-tick-ticking and I love the clock so much and I love being on the trolley and being wheeled around. And I love the nurse who says, ‘Ten more minutes,’ and the man heaving and coughing on the trolley next to me and the sensation of the cold sheets against my hands and feet and the feeling that my skin is still on my body – most of it. I love that I am going to be okay. That I have so much to look forward to.
‘Allez … op op op!’ says a man with a magnificent face full of rivers and rocky crevices, as he helps me onto a tray in front of a big pizza oven, and my neck is so sore but I hold my head still as I move from one tray to the other, and I laugh as I say, ‘My neck is really sore!’ He feeds me into the oven, like Mum went into the oven that sunny day in February, and I wondered then if they would burn the casket too – what a waste! I lie there for a moment thinking of all the beauty of life – perhaps she was as peaceful in the oven that day as I feel right now – and then I am out and lying there for a glorious minute before they put me back on the trolley, and my neck hurts incredibly this time. But then it’s better and I lie there for a very long time, ecstatic at the simple beating of my heart. To be alive is extraordinary and I feel that no matter what happens from here, the beating of my heart right now is enough. I could lie here forever and revel in its throb.
Then, like magic, I’m floated back into the lift and into the same room as before. Adrien is there. His arms are across his chest and his chin is down.
Rigolette sits next to me and cocks his lovely head. ‘I have bad news,’ he says.
I look at Adrien but he won’t look at me. Terrible thoughts run through my brain. Is it cancer after all? Neck cancer? Face cancer? Did something happen to my brain? What am I doing here in this strange hospital in this strange country, with strange people around me, a man who’s not my fiancé anymore, not my family?
Rigolette puts a hand on my shoulder. ‘You have broken many small bones in your face and have some wounds that are going to require quite a bit of surgery. But you have a bigger, more serious problem. You have fractured your spine. Your C2.’
‘Oh,’ I say. What does that mean?
There’s a pause before he explains that the C2 is the second vertebra, that I have a hangman’s fracture, and then he goes off in a whole lot of words I don’t understand. Then: ‘We will know soon what is to be done, another surgeon is looking at the scans. For now, we need to operate on your face, it is important to do that quickly. Ça va?’
‘Ça va,’ I say, but my body has melted into the bed. Are they suggesting I may not walk again?
Look ahead. You don’t know yet. Anyway, your heart is beating.
‘I just need to have a good look at your face now.’ He turns to Adrien. ‘You might want to wait outside.’
But Adrien says, ‘I have no fear.’
I’m glad he’s staying. I need him to watch and tell me later.
Rigolette bends very close to my face, and with extreme focus touches a part of my cheek. I feel something warm on my ear, like peach flesh. Like cheek flesh. My flesh. Could that really be the flesh of my cheek touching my own ear? The feeling is cannibal. I look straight at Adrien, desperate not to know. He is pale but watching closely. I have a sensation of being very open, of air rushing in, like into a big canyon in the desert. Rigolette taps me gently on the head. ‘Okay, back in ten minutes.’
Adrien comes to the side of the bed with his eyebrows raised.
‘Don’t tell me,’ I say. ‘Not even eyebrows.’
‘He’s going to do a great job,’ says Adrien, patting my arm.
Rigolette comes back. ‘I have some news about your neck. Your C2 is definitely fractured, but the fracture is not displaced. This means you will be fine, you will walk; you can have surgery or wear a special brace until it heals. You are young, you will heal. You do not need surgery. It will just take four months of patience.’
A sense of relief and wonder runs through me.
‘You are very, very lucky
, ma belle,’ he says solemnly.
‘Yes,’ I say.
‘I have no idea how your fracture is not displaced – I assume it occurred when your neck came in contact with the lift. But then you fell down a flight of stairs! And we have been moving you around …’ His voice trails off. ‘So lucky. A miracle.’ He pats my arm and disappears.
‘I think you should call Dad,’ I say to Adrien.
‘Okay,’ he says, rubbing his neck. ‘But tell me the words.’
Rigolette comes back in with the two nurses. ‘Now I’m going to give you some needles in your face, then we’re going to do a beautiful job of you. I just need you to turn very gently this way.’ He carefully turns me onto my side with the aid of the nurses. Adrien isn’t allowed to stay. The boy nurse gives me his hand to squeeze. I look forward. Rigolette jabs my right cheek and it stings. He jabs again near the first jab and it burns. He jabs again close to the other jabs and it pricks. The boy nurse has to leave and he looks in my eyes and says sorry, replacing his soft hand with a squeezy rubber ball. Rigolette jabs deep in the same place on my right cheek and it pangs inside my soul. Then he says, ‘One more!’ It prickles.
‘Et voilà,’ he says. He bounces his thumb in various places, asking me if I can feel it, and when I don’t anymore he says, ‘I’m going to cover you up with this cloth, don’t be afraid. We’re nearly there.’
But the stitching takes hours and hours. I can feel him, sewing, sewing. I am a lampshade, I think to myself. I am a skin suit. I am no longer human, just a ball of flesh. I squeeze the thing in my hand. Rigolette talks to me like we’re in a knitting circle together and I talk back. We even laugh. He tells me to keep still or he will sew me up like an imitation handbag.
Afterwards I feel brave, noble. Adrien comes and peers at me. ‘Wooow,’ he says. ‘You have thousands of the tiniest stitches I’ve ever seen. How did he do that?’ When he has finished admiring my stitches, he takes my hand. ‘I have to go now,’ he says. He has an audition early in the morning. I ask if he wants me to test him on his lines but he says no. He tells me everything will be okay, gives me a kiss and leaves. I never see him again.
I wake in a room full of light. My eyes can only open a crack. On my bed sits a female figure. Mum. She smiles. Her hand is on mine. My eyes begin to adjust to the light and I see that it’s not Mum, it’s Kate. My sister. She smiles at me. Her hand on mine is the warmest sensation of my life.
I have been fitted with a contraption that at first made me feel suffocated and want to scream. A corset-minerve, it’s called. In Australia, they tell me, it would have been a ‘halo brace’, with bolts drilled into my head. The point is, the neck must never move. My brace is very recent technology. Dense, moulded plastic winds around my back and ribs, meeting at the front with velcro strips that are tightened. Around the back of my head, joined to the plastic strips down my back, is a solid headpiece that stays in place using a thick velcro strip that tightens across my forehead. A chin piece made of plastic is attached to a front bodice by bolts, which can be adjusted to keep it exactly in place.
Kate looks at me in that Mum-nurse way, unphased by what she’s seeing, though I know it’s bad. I don’t want to look yet.
Because she actually is a nurse, they will let her take me out of hospital after a week and home to the rue de la Chine. The ambulance men will carry me on a stretcher past Luc’s kind, shocked face and the concerned looks of the neighbourhood people. I will be placed in my bed and my room will smell so nice and Kate will let me sleep for days and days, administering the drugs and washing me down. Many days will pass and she will gradually lower the pain relief and I will hate her and cry but she will soothe me. The pain will be intense but it will be real and I will slowly return to reality. It will snow outside and I will start to eat again, the beautiful food that Kate has cooked, and she will take pleasure in coming back to the apartment with new delicacies she’s found in the local shops, and stories of her experiences trying to communicate in French.
‘The man told me off for touching a peach!’
‘How many kinds of chicken can there be?’
‘Can wine this cheap really be good?’
Kate won’t let me take off the brace, though I beg her over and over. It is making me insane, I am in a cage, and then one night, without her knowing, I loosen it, just to sleep. I wake to a giant standing over me. Bellowing.
‘Do you want to be dead? Worse?’
I whimper but the giant looms higher.
‘DO YOU WANT TO BE A BODY WITH A HEAD ON IT THAT CAN DO NOTHING BUT BLINK?’
The giant shrinks and becomes Kate.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘But I don’t think you realise how serious this is.’
‘Okay,’ I say.
She tells me a story of a man on a highway. He is driving along with his family when a car comes out of nowhere and collides with them head-on. His family are all killed instantly and he is thrown through the windscreen and lands metres down the road. Everyone in the other car is also dead.
‘Is this Wild at Heart?’ I interrupt. ‘I think I know this. Wild at Heart. David Lynch.’
‘Shut up,’ Kate says and goes on with the story. The man is in the middle of nowhere but he can see a house in the distance. Astonishingly, he’s able to pull himself upright. He is in a sort of trance, caused by shock and adrenaline. Carefully he begins to walk towards the house. He knocks on the door. A woman answers.
‘There’s been an accident,’ he says.
‘Where?’ she asks.
‘There,’ he says, and turns his head to point to the wreckage. And in that instant he falls to the ground, dead. He hadn’t realised it but he’d fractured his C2. If he had kept looking forward he would have been okay.
Point made. I promise not to take off my brace.
Kate continues to be stern and vigilant; she does not want to take me home in a body bag, she says.
I keep my word, even when ants crawl through my veins as I come off the morphine and the cage makes me want to rip my skin off. Kate is patient and brings me books and tea and little roast birds she’s bought from the butcher and cooked in the toaster oven.
One day I manage to stand up for a few seconds before fainting back onto the bed. After many panic-stricken attempts I take a few steps, and eventually reach the bathroom. A yellowed, sewn-together pile of flesh greets me: two black tracks of stitching fork out from a point just inside my right ear, towards my cheekbone and eyebrow. Another track lines my chin and there’s another beneath my bottom lip. My right eye is black, and around the stitching are swirls of dark blue and black and yellowish orange. The hair on the front of my head is caked in thick, blackened blood – no wonder my scalp is itchy. My right ear looks as though it has nearly been ripped off. I swoon and feel vomit rise. Kate sees it and ushers me swiftly back to bed.
People visit. Harry sits at my bedside and tries to make me laugh. Friends from school come, teachers. And, after a long time, Sophie and Lou.
They stand in the doorway of my bedroom, not wanting to enter, as if the displacement of particles caused by their moving towards me might result in my crumbling to a pile of dust. I beckon them in and they walk carefully, Lou’s tiny fingernails digging deep into Sophie’s stocking. Sophie manages to bring her around to the front and wrenches her onto her lap as she sits on the rickety blue chair next to me. But that means I can’t see her, so she sits on the floor across from me instead, with Lou safe between her crossed legs.
‘We have a present for you from Eveline,’ says Sophie. ‘She has been very worried about you.’ Sophie gives the package to Lou, who stands and brings it to me, running immediately back to the safety of Sophie’s legs. It’s amazing to think that Eveline is a real person and that I had been real to her.
It’s a book. Monsieur Caramel: Chroniques Parisiennes. On the cover is a badly photocopied photo of a simple Paris courtyard with cobblestones and a cat. Inside the front cover is an inscription: Pour Jayne, A story of a buil
ding and life in our quartier. Bon rétablissement! Eveline.
The idea of reading a pleasant story about life in our quartier right now makes my stomach turn. I thank them and put the book aside.
After three weeks in the apartment, Kate thinks I am fit enough to fly. She spends a week packing up my belongings, puts the keys in the mailbox and holds my hand in the ambulance to the airport, and all the way back to Australia.
Dad is at the gate, face pale. He hugs me delicately in my cage, and people stare and murmur as I pass. He brings me back to his new little house by the beach, where we live like an old couple, watching television, eating meat-and-three-veg, reading books and walking to sit on his rock. The locals are intrigued by the walking robot-girl, and one day, as much for my pleasure as theirs, I walk into the sea fully clothed in my brace and disappear beneath a cool wave.
I am unpacking a bag from Paris some time later when I come across the book Eveline gave me. The back cover tells me it’s about an old man whose wife dies, and rather than see out his days at home in the countryside where his family has lived for generations, he moves to Paris, into a tiny apartment in the 20th arrondissement. A light, refreshing book, says the blurb. A confection to be devoured.
Stomach tight, I decide to read it. Seeing the French words on the page gives me a pang of extreme, conflicting emotions.
The epigraph, by Jacques Yonnet, reads: To penetrate the heart of a city, to grasp its subtle secrets, one must brush against her with the most infinite tenderness, and a sometimes exasperating patience …
What was Eveline trying to tell me? That I should be tender and patient with Paris, though she nearly killed me?
Monsieur Caramel, now that his life has taken a new turn, is seeking something exciting, something unfamiliar. The apartment he rents in a modest building in a humble street is just big enough for a few belongings and his cat. He makes friends. He borrows a drill from his young female neighbour. He helps Madame Planchon perfect her monologue for the gates of heaven. He lives a simple daily life in his quartier, discovering his favourite boulangerie, wandering the nearby Père-Lachaise cemetery, talking to random people in cafés and parks. He is old, and living close to death, so his appreciation of every moment, down to the most banal, has a magnified importance. A newcomer to Paris, he is able to see the beauty in even the smallest things.