But he is far from feeling at ease with anything. All week – while preparing his story about himself in the past simple – he has been wondering whether Hannah has noticed the missing notebook. In an apartment so perfectly organised, surely a missing pencil would cry out, let alone something so personal? Perhaps it would be better if she had noticed it – and turned him away at the door. It is almost too distressing, seeing her in front of him and constantly trying to find ways to get closer to her, word by word, sentence by sentence.
* * *
His mother used to say that he suffered from too much attachment. When he was younger and it was only the two of them in the house, she would occasionally want to shake him off. It was never personal: every now and again she would be taken over by one of her moods, becoming worried about things she would never name and he could never see.
Qu’est-ce que tu as, M’man? he would ask.
Rien du tout. Va finir tes devoirs.
He had two mothers: the mother who was there when his father was home or there were other people about, and the mother who was there when left alone to her own devices. This second mother was the real mother – the one no one in their village knew about. Only his friends noticed her strange interludes and asked about them. Pierre would say:
Mon père lui manque.
Or:
Elle s’inquiète de sa famille en Afrique.
But the fact that his mother was frightening only made him want to attach himself more to her – at least when he was younger. Perhaps he hoped to neutralise her worries with his proximity, his love. The trouble was, she always blew hot and cold with him, the one night asking him to sleep with her in the big bed because she was too afraid to sleep alone, the next night sending him up the squeaking stairs to the attic. On many nights, he peered down at her through a gap in the floorboards. Often she was doing nothing more than sitting on the bed, holding her feet, staring vacantly ahead. Sometimes she spoke to people he had never heard of, in a language he didn’t know.
* * *
Walking around Paris, he feels like half a person, as if his complete body, which has its paired arms and legs like every other body, is half a dream. Under the gaze of Hannah Meade, he can imagine becoming whole. Yet it is painful, this yearning towards the idea of completion. It is the pain of it that gives him this outward calm, this dignified gait, like a condemned man walking towards the rope.
* * *
At one minute to ten, he presses number six. She buzzes him up without a word. Again he feels like a condemned man, a criminal, passing through the metal door of the lift with its small meshed window, the trellis sliding and snapping shut – followed by the heavy ascent in that dim green light.
The lift smells of someone’s sausages. The worn chipboard floor is wet from someone’s feet. It is all so unlike her, this building, this crummy lift. Only when he recalls the deliberate calm of her shuttered room does he begin to believe in her again.
* * *
He finds her already standing in the doorway. She is wearing tight jeans that flare around her feet – which are bare except for mustard-yellow socks – and a black shirt that emphasises the tightness of her waist, the neatness of her upright breasts. She is looking at him with eyes glittering with some private merriment.
Is it still raining?
It is.
Your hair is sparkling, she says, looking up at him.
Sparkling?
Glittering. Like there are little stars inside it.
He returns her gaze and hears himself laugh.
There are stars inside my hair?
Yes!
She moves away from the entrance and he slips off his trainers, placing them carefully next to a pair of collapsed brown leather boots. He knows now that she didn’t miss the notebook, or that if she did she didn’t blame him for its absence. The prospect of the next hour unrolls before him like a magnificent landscape. This is what it is to feel alive, he thinks. This is what I have been missing all along.
I will make myself at home, he says behind her, slightly too loudly for that surprisingly small room.
You have to be invited to do that.
Invited to relax?
I suppose the expression means that you can behave as you do at home – not stand on formality.
How ‘stand on’ formality? he says, looking at his feet comically.
It means that you can sit, I suppose, she laughs. Put your feet up. Though not literally, of course.
As she continues through to the kitchen, he shakes his head and mutters:
Les Anglais!
VI
Hannah
That morning, she bought Pierre some Bonne Maman biscuits. The kind Oliver might have liked: rich in butter, pleasingly crisp and crumbly. Poor Oliver – had he lived, he might have grown softer around the middle. He was rather offhand about the idea of exercise. He claimed to find joggers amusing.
Oliver said he would avoid the pitfalls of bourgeois life and do things differently. He wouldn’t drive a sensible car like their mother. He wouldn’t flatter fools in power to get ahead or to keep a job. He would never lie to a friend, or be duplicitous with a lover. He would always choose to be honest, no matter how much it hurt. His heroes included Sebastian Flyte – and for a while in first year he often took a teddy bear with him to the shopping mall – as well as Dorian Gray, Arthur Rimbaud and Withnail. He made no distinction between Mahler’s Kindertodenlieder and Nirvana’s Unplugged and claimed to like them equally.
He had a long tweed coat that had dried highveld flowers in the lapel that he wore even in midsummer. His daily uniform under the coat was black schoolgirl shoes with a flower stamped at the front of them, white long-sleeved grandpa T-shirts that he bought from the Oriental Plaza and baggy khaki shorts. Along the insides of his arms were rows of neat cuts – and, especially towards the end of his life, he was stoned for much of the day. Throughout his time at university, he refused to have a rucksack and arrived every morning carrying shopping packets with all his books inside.
One of Oliver’s more cynical lecturers in history of art – a man obsessed with Beckett and who died prematurely after slipping in the shower – once told Olly that all he now needed was a pith helmet. Oliver loathed him for that comment and never looked at the man again. He wanted to provoke and yet was hurt when people were provoked. Perhaps all he really wanted was to hurt himself. But that was the late Oliver, the fallen angel. At school he had been everyone’s dream – the boys as much as the girls.
* * *
Oliver was dead by the age of twenty-one, an age when he could still eat whatever he liked and remain practically skeletal. But he was also vain. In the end, he might have resorted to exercise, along with everyone else.
* * *
Black, she says. No sugar.
She finds Pierre standing too close for comfort near her long line of notebooks.
You remember, he says.
Absolutely everything.
* * *
When she ate her half banana that morning for breakfast, she had to force herself to swallow it, almost gagging with every bite. Food can become nothing more than fuel that has to be shoved down. Otherwise, whole days will go by in which she forgets to eat.
* * *
Her hands are shaking so much as she pours the coffee that it spills over one of the Bonne Maman biscuits.
Shit.
She takes the cloth from the tray and starts to mop up the coffee.
I don’t know what’s wrong with me today.
* * *
She woke that morning after a night of thin sleep in which she was much preoccupied with Oliver. She doesn’t know what has triggered her recent return to the past, but she senses it has something to do with this student – who disarms her from an angle that recalls Oliver. Pierre is already inside her, in some sense. In spite of knowing next to nothing about her, he is already an insider.
* * *
You have cold?
You say
‘Are you cold?’ when you want to know if someone is cold, and ‘Do you have a cold?’ if you think someone is ill.
Are you cold?
No.
Do you have cold?
A cold. No.
Then why do you shake your hands?
I don’t shake them. They are shaking themselves. Perhaps it’s my blood sugar. I have problems with that. But we use the present continuous because they are shaking now. If I say my hands shake, I am using the present simple and talking about a general habit or situation. And my hands – they don’t shake generally.
The present continuous. I remember that.
You will remember it. In the future. Future simple.
He picks up the biscuit that was splattered with coffee, not wanting to take the better biscuit. But even then he does so cautiously: at any moment, he seems to think, she might want to take it back.
Pierre also has a different expression on his face today – as if he has heard some disturbing news about her that hasn’t reached her yet.
Pierre
Often when Hannah corrects his grammar, it feels more as if she is correcting herself, or steering herself back to a place that is more comprehensible. She keeps returning to her language compulsively, habitually, like a dog to its basket.
Hannah
You do this every time?
Sorry?
With every student, he says. You drink the coffee, eat the biscuits?
Sometimes. If people live across the river, I can agree to meet them halfway. At a café – even a park. Usually, I take the bus to the Louvre. I have one student I like to meet at the Musée Rodin. He’s rather ancient. Italian. Monsieur Levi. He’s dying. Cancer, actually. Have you been to the Musée?
Never.
It’s little wonder you aren’t a proper artist!
He attempts a smile.
The Musée is one of my favourite places in Paris, she continues. The house where Rodin lived, the gardens running all around it. It’s the small marble works I love the most. They look like they are made of wax. They – glow. I suppose they absorb all the light around them, somehow. Is that how it works?
I don’t know.
‘The Centauress’. The body of a woman melding into the body of a beast. You know that sculpture?
No.
Well you should go there and have a look. It might inspire you to make your own work – to branch out.
He says nothing – pondering this, perhaps – or is he mildly offended?
I think you can buy a season ticket for the gardens, she adds. We could have our lessons there, if you liked?
I think I prefer it here.
He is looking at the banana on the table in front of them: half a banana in the fruit bowl, which is almost translucent it is so thin. She bought the bowl a few weeks ago because it looked like a lamp. It’s the kind of bowl that would soon become cracked in any house but hers.
* * *
As children, she and Oliver shared bananas, as they shared toothpaste, baths and punishments – at home and then together at boarding school, until they were sent to different schools at the age of thirteen. They shared what they could after that in the holidays, as well as stories about all that had happened in the interim. In truth, Oliver liked bananas more than Hannah did. It was the only fruit he was prepared to eat.
* * *
That is my breakfast, she tells her student.
A half a banana is what you have for the breakfast?
And a ginger biscuit. Yes.
He looks at the banana with renewed interest.
You can have it if you like.
He peels the banana and starts to eat it, like someone who hasn’t eaten for a day. Which makes her wonder: is he very poor? But another glance at his hands, his clothes, affirms that he’s prosperous enough.
I never eat anything else for breakfast, she tells him as he chomps away.
* * *
Half was always enough. Even half a womb was enough. The world was a simpler, more substantial place when she knew how to share it. Back then, the only difference between talking to Oliver and talking to herself was that Oliver was inevitably a bit more advanced than she was. He had fresher perspectives, a better idea of which path to take, plans that could encompass more.
When Oliver was dead, everything around her suddenly felt new, as if she was experiencing it for the first time. The news of his death, however, was still unmanageable. Her first impulse was to tell him about it, to test it against him, yet his absence was the very thing that she couldn’t communicate to him: he was the one person who would remain forever unavailable.
On the night of his death, she sat very still on her bed and listened to her mother’s howls coming from her bedroom – knowing that her mother didn’t want her there, and that she would probably have preferred the death of her daughter to the death of her son.
Hannah went to see where the accident had happened the next morning. She arrived in time to see what was left of Oliver’s car being extracted from the wall and lifted off the traffic light. The dark pool was there on the pavement – and all the motorists and pedestrians paused to look.
More than anything, Hannah wanted to see Oliver’s body. But because the police suspected suicide, his body had been taken to the forensic morgue in Hillbrow – where it would be examined before being transported to the crematorium. Her mother went alone to the morgue later that day to identify him – which felt like a trick at the time, a way of keeping Oliver all to herself. It was only later that Hannah realised her mother was trying to protect her from the experience.
But they did go together to pick up the ashes a few days afterwards. Hannah remembers the crematorium as a yellow brick building surrounded by concrete a few blocks away from the Oriental Plaza – where Olly bought those grandpa T-shirts. Across from the car park, homeless kids were making a fire out of other people’s rubbish in a house that had long ago been burned out.
When Oliver’s ashes were handed to them, the box was wrapped in dark blue paper, like a Christmas present. It was heavier than Hannah had expected.
* * *
In the weeks that followed, the only place where Hannah could still find Oliver was in herself. She clearly remembers the morning she ate her first banana for breakfast. She was sitting in her mother’s kitchen when she picked up a banana and automatically cut it in half. She ate one half and left the rest in the wooden bowl. The next morning, she cut off the brown bit at the end and ate the diminished remains on his behalf.
VII
Pierre
So our grammar point for the day is narrative tenses, she says. Past simple, past continuous, past perfect. I’m sure you’re familiar with these terms?
Yes.
I want you to start by describing a day using the past tenses. It can be any kind of day. A happy day, a sad day, a boring day, a perfect day. But remember: we mainly use the past simple.
But what about my story? The story of my family?
We will get to that.
* * *
For much of the previous night, he lay in his bed and stared at the square of orange sky while one of the girls and her boyfriend tore strips off each other’s self-esteem on the floor below. Further off, there were motorbikes racing along the river, police sirens, the smashing of a bottle, a drunkard’s song, but he barely registered any of these sounds. Every time he closed his eyes, all he saw was her handwriting, like stitches bristling along a wound, dug deep into the whiteness of the page, multiplying and expanding, until there was no whiteness left, just the twists and turns of her thoughts, too harsh and jagged to forget.
* * *
I describe a happy day, he tells her.
Will describe. Future simple. Okay?
* * *
Eventually, he tried to masturbate, just to change his internal frequency and find another way towards sleep. But he couldn’t even manage that. He felt too bleak for sex. Each erotic scenario he pictured for himself had some abhorrent tho
ught standing behind it. To think of Hannah erotically was still a form of sacrilege. To think of Élodie was to remember his hate. When he tried to think of girls less contentious, and put them in scenarios that were made up or half remembered, his body was not up to it. He felt dead inside, a stone man, like his name.
Only when he imagined himself under Hannah’s gaze did he begin to find any interest in himself, in pleasing himself, but afterwards his blood felt grainy and uncomfortable again, and he returned to that watchful state he had been in before – only sadder now.
And still he couldn’t sleep.
* * *
When I wake. Sorry – woke.
Up. You woke up. A modal verb in the past simple. Yes?
When I woke up, I stretched myself with my arms wide and I got out of my bed.
* * *
When the sky had turned a silvery gold, he did manage to drift off to sleep – only to wake with a start an hour later, thinking he had overslept.
This time, he was determined to ring her bell at exactly ten o’clock.
This time, he would be the perfect student.
* * *
Had you slept well? It’s an event even further back in time from the series of events being described, so it takes the past perfect tense.
I had slept well, he says, more to practise his grammar than to attempt the truth.
Good.
I had dreamed a dream.
We generally say ‘dreamt’ in this context. What was it about?
A girl, I had dreamt a beautiful girl.
* * *
Although he has spent many of his waking hours thinking about Hannah, he hasn’t dreamt about her yet. She is too alive in the world still – and too inaccessible. But now he imagines that he did dream about her: she stands before him like one of those Rodin statues she talked about, and he melts into her, burning into her soft wax.
* * *
I see.
Suddenly, she sounds very English – and much more interested.
So you got out of bed?
I got out of bed, I went to the shower, I turned it on, and I stood under the water and I washed me.
The White Room Page 7
