She moves away from him again, but he has her arm and draws her towards him, and the horror of him – his world and its forest of heads on sticks, all along the riverbank.
Because the sun is not up, I can slip away, into the bush. I can cross the old banana plantation —
His face distorts then and she thinks that he’s about to laugh, but instead he starts to weep, huge breaths of grief climbing their way out of him.
I ran away, he says, I fled. I left them there to die.
A woman in the background shakes her head and carries on. Perhaps she doesn’t understand the words. Or is it that she doesn’t like this public display – all this drama amongst the baguettes?
Are you satisfied? he says.
She holds his shoulders gently in both her hands, not understanding what he’s trying to say.
Is that enough darkness for you?
Pierre —
All the people, they were killed. Every one they could find was thrown on a mountain of bodies to be burned —
She drops her head and lets him continue.
He expands and contracts under her hands – trying to get the air in and the words out.
I was taken by the Médecins Sans Frontières. I was brought here to France. I was given to a white family in the Bourgogne to be adopted. And that is it, my story – that is how I came to be at Pouilly.
She can smell his cheap deodorant, and it all sounds so unlikely – about as unlikely as the truth.
Why are you telling me this now?
So you will see me.
But you’re standing right in front of me, she wants to tell him. I can see you quite clearly!
ACT THREE
THE CONDITIONAL
London
Hannah
It starts with a black crow appearing on a mountain, stomping its feet, looking for a fight. With the crow comes a snide headache, clamping the back of her head in a cage.
Slide into my cage, the crow tells her. Step into my grey room.
Everything becomes rough and haggard and she is filled with a terrible sadness. A metallic taste thickens in her mouth, a slight nausea, as the crow works the pain down her neck and into her left shoulder, always her left shoulder. It is a dragging, interminable ache that forces a new brightness into everything. Everything feels overexposed, including herself. All the world does is glare back at her.
When the blood finally comes, there is so much of it. And it is nothing but itself: it is only ever blood. But everything becomes swollen, heavier. She imagines this will go on forever – as if this is all that is left of her – this knife twisting in her shoulder, the blood leaking back into the world.
* * *
But by the time Hannah catches her train to London, the cage is gone and the crow has flown off. She feels lighter, pleased with herself, as if she has been given another chance of life. Her skin is clearer, almost translucent. It is like that feeling just after you have been dumped in the sea – a nightmare while it’s happening but afterwards you are invigorated and refreshed, restored to your proper scale.
* * *
Hannah likes the way her body measures out each month. It’s as if there’s a clock underneath everything that brings order back into the world. It lies deeper than a heartbeat, which is little more than a nervous tick. This a more patient rhythm, connected to the stars, the moon. She knows she is a sea that no man will ever fathom.
* * *
Hannah’s friend Monica lives halfway up a hill of terraced Victorian houses headed towards Camberwell. Hannah likes to stay there when she’s visiting London. The property has a long garden at the back overgrown with brambles and willow herb. Foxes emerge from the far end, cross a neglected vegetable patch and nose their way towards the dustbins at the kitchen door. The garden shed is where Monica sleeps. The previous summer, a mound of pink mice appeared under her bed, but she didn’t have the heart to move them.
* * *
Monica is the first girl Oliver slept with. In an attempt to find his way towards heterosexuality, he slept with several girls over the years, but none of them ever helped in the way that he hoped. Monica is relentlessly cheerful, with a slightly over-used, freckly face framed with straight dark hair. If she is ever unhappy, she becomes ashamed of it and doesn’t want anyone to know. She is the perfect counterpoint to Hannah, who is often ashamed to find herself approaching anything resembling happiness.
* * *
Hannah arrives around the time Monica – who is a trainee chef and out most nights – is getting up. Monica is wearing a long T-shirt with Mandela’s face fading from it and she has a blue towel around her hips. She is busy preparing French toast in the kitchen, a basement room that starts off as an entrance hall and finds its way, via couches, a washing machine and some gym equipment, into the glass conservatory at the back. The upper floors are all filled with bedrooms and bathrooms and South Africans. Although Hannah stayed in the house for a few weeks on first arriving in London, she has only ever been to the top floor once – with an Australian surfer called Brett, who said he was only passing through.
Monica places a plate of French toast and crispy bacon in front of Hannah as if she intends this as some sort of provocation. Knowing better than to comment, Hannah wedges off a square with a mottled silver fork.
I gather you saw my mother?
Monica goes back to South Africa at least once a year – whereas Hannah has only returned twice in the eight years since she left.
I went to your house.
And?
Your mother looks – much older.
And?
Has she run out of money, or something?
The French toast tastes of beach holidays, of breakfast next to Oliver.
She hasn’t had much money since we were kids.
It’s more the house. Have you seen what the swimming pool looks like?
It was like that five years ago. Apparently, she’s breeding frogs.
Since Hannah has been living abroad, her mother’s house has been falling into disrepair. The paint has faded from the tiled roof, the ivy and jasmine have consumed the walls and gutters, the flowerbeds are overgrown with blackjacks and cosmos, and the swimming pool is a tar-green soup – but still her mother refuses to move.
Your mom looks lonely. All those pictures of you and Olly all over the place, and both of you gone.
I haven’t gone anywhere.
Monica gives Hannah one of her long-suffering looks. She knew Hannah before she was beautiful, when she was still being belittled by her brother’s shadow.
Soon your mother will also be gone, Monica says. You should think about that.
* * *
That night, Hannah finds herself lying in the vegetable patch like a fallen star, looking at the sky. Monica and some of her friends are sitting nearby on an assortment of garden chairs, drinking beer and sharing a joint.
There are few stars visible above the great glittering plane that is London. The sky, like the sea, has always attracted Hannah: those measureless depths going upwards or downwards, and her standing on a precipice somewhere in between, pale and faintly glowing, all albumin and wishing bones – and all too available to be smudged out.
* * *
Hannah has been carrying Pierre’s family story around with her like a secret ever since that scene in the supermarket. It quickly merged with her monthly migraine and started to stamp its scaly feet. It quickly made her bleed. For a few hours, she thought she wanted to be dead – just to get away from it. But now the story feels more manageable, and increasingly unlikely, like a bad dream from which she is beginning to awake.
* * *
At least it will be summer soon, she says to no one in particular.
Paris
I
Pierre
Having handed his story to her like an offering, a sacrifice, there was nothing left for Pierre to do but walk out of the supermarket. She stood there and let him go. The men and women with the trolleys and the b
askets made way for him – the young man with the dreadlocks and the tears streaming down his face. Most of them probably assumed it was a lover’s quarrel. Some perhaps a racist attack – in which direction it was probably unclear. But none of that mattered to Pierre. He had told his story and for the moment he had nothing left to offer her.
He was a blank page again, unwritten, unspoken.
From now on, his story would also belong to her.
* * *
Only when Pierre returned to his room did he open his bag and take out her notebook. He laughed to find all the pages blank – as if both of their stories had been obliterated by the scene in the supermarket.
But what did this blankness mean? he began to wonder. That they had nothing to say to each other and their relationship was done with? Or did it mean that they would be able to start again?
Not knowing what else to do with the notebook, Pierre drew a kingfisher on the front page – in the place where she wrote her name and the date.
For the rest of the weekend, he filled her book with birds.
Hannah
Andrew, the director of Language Works, looks like one of those small sculptures made from wax and exhibited as a brilliant copy of a human being. He speaks nervous, rapid French, but Hannah tends to find his company soothing, perhaps because he seems to be in more mental torment than she is.
Usually, Andrew is to be found in the glass office that sits between the two teaching rooms. He is both the observer and the observed. His presence also gives each lesson an endangered atmosphere, and he has been known to slide open the inter-leading windows to correct a teacher or student on a particular grammar question – or otherwise to provide a more representative example. In Hannah’s case, however, he tends to leave her alone.
After her Tuesday morning lesson with the pharmaceutical students, Hannah returns to the language school to find the glass office empty. Sometimes, Andrew will leave to meet potential clients – or to sort out the wayward affairs of his Polish drug addict boyfriend. Hannah has started to question Pierre’s story: apart from anything else, the dates don’t add up. The Rwandan genocide took place a year after Oliver’s death, about nine years previously. After the genocide, the Interahamwe fled into the eastern Congo and carried out the kind of acts Pierre talked about. But Pierre is in his early twenties, so how can the Interahamwe have murdered his parents – and left them on a mountain of bodies to be burned? At the time of the genocide, Pierre would already have been in Pouilly, surrounded by all those nightingales.
She finds Pierre’s details in the Saturday afternoon file, where his name is given as ‘Pierre Mande’ and his address as ‘1 rue de l’Abreuvoir, Pouilly-sur-Saône’. The section regarding his next of kin, however, has been left blank.
Lost anything?
Andrew enters, smelling of aftershave.
As a matter of interest, she says, who pays Pierre Mande’s bills?
Pierre Mande? Ah yes. Sexy Pierre, sweet smile.
Yes – that’s the one.
He does. In cash. Every month.
Isn’t that strange?
Strange? In the category of strange, my darling, I wouldn’t call that very high up. He probably has some job where he’s paid cash. Some tax-dodging scheme. Building work, perhaps?
I’ve started teaching him privately on a Wednesday morning.
Moonlighting! You could lose your job for that.
Andrew blinks at her, waiting for a smile from her that never comes.
Is there a problem? he continues. Is he trying to talk his way into your pants?
Don’t worry, she smiles at last. There’s no danger of that.
Teach him the conditional, Andrew says. I’ve always found that a useful way of keeping a student in place.
II
Pierre
Today we’re learning about articulating conditions. If you do this, I do that. They’re called conditionals.
* * *
They are sitting on the two leather couches, the glass table with its bowl of bananas between them. On Pierre’s lap is the sketchbook Hannah gave him at the beginning of the lesson. It was a gift, she said, to encourage him to become ‘a proper artist’.
* * *
She is wearing an emerald green dress and black tights and she is allowing him to draw her. So far, his attempts to represent her haven’t met with much success.
* * *
As he starts another page, her phone buzzes on the table.
Why do you never answer your phone?
Do you remember the conditionals?
You have a way of looking at that phone – like you think it will bite.
We should probably start with the zero conditional.
The zero conditional? Present tense plus present tense.
Give me an example.
* * *
She has returned from her weekend away with the atmosphere of England all around her. It has made her seem harder to access. It has made her seem harder.
* * *
Tell me, he says. You want me to say about myself, but you never want to say about yourself. You prefer to be asking the questions. Why is that?
He tries to draw the line of her mouth, but he finds her new hardness isn’t around the mouth. It sits inside her like a firm decision – perhaps a decision regarding him.
* * *
Since arriving at her apartment at his allotted time, Hannah hasn’t once mentioned his story. It’s as if it never happened. Or is it that she was put off? Perhaps this new attitude of hers has nothing to do with going to England. She might resent him for handing his tale across to her. What do you expect me to do with it? she must be thinking. In what way do you expect me to help?
* * *
I ‘ask’ the questions, she corrects him, because I am teaching you how to speak English. I already know how to speak it.
She also seems freer and more flirtatious today. And yet he senses this is only because she has become less available to him. It is possible she has some lover in London that she won’t want to talk about. Maybe this is the person who keeps trying to phone.
* * *
So when you can speak English, he says, there is no longer a need to talk?
He turns his attention to her hair, which is coiled and pinned back as it was the first time he saw her at the language school, wearing her yellow dress.
My job is to pass on to you what I know until you can speak for yourself. It’s not to tell you about myself.
Then you must change your job.
He has no choice but to try to match her tone – for this is the only tone available to them right now.
* * *
He moves from the line of the eyebrow to the bridge of the nose. The corner of the eye starts up inside the shadowy curved line and reaches out to encompass the iris. The iris has a smoky jungle light inside it, impossible to approach with such a stubby bit of charcoal. Yet he also senses that she likes his artist’s gaze so intent on her.
* * *
You should have been content with what you had before you came here, she says.
I want what you have.
And what is that?
The world!
For the first time, she laughs, but it is more against herself, against the desert she seems to find around her – or perhaps inside her.
You are beautiful, clever, rich.
Rich? she says – not denying the other two adjectives.
But most of all, you are white.
He notes, with some satisfaction, her shock. White people, in his experience, never like to be told that they are white: they are forever hoping to get away with it.
You can go anywhere, he continues, always a bit higher than everything else.
He sees her glazing over. It seems she is touchy, like him. In spite of her new hardness, she can still be hurt.
That is not a very nice thing to say.
Maybe you don’t see it because for you it is normal, he says, attempting a teasing to
ne he doesn’t believe in. Or you do see it, but you don’t like it to be said. You don’t know what it is like to be made a bit lower than everything, always a bit suspicious.
She gives him one of her impatient looks.
The only person who can free you from that feeling is you, she says. There are bigots everywhere. They will inevitably pick on something – whoever you are.
They have picked on something in you?
Something in my brother – yes. He would occasionally speak like this.
And you? What about you?
She huffs her impatience again, shifts her angle. She presents him with what she seems to think of as her better side, the side from which she likes to approach the world.
You could try to help me, he says. By letting me in. By telling me about yourself as an equal, a friend.
Something seems to sigh inside her, or subside.
We are student and teacher. You came here so I could correct your grammar.
That is not why I came.
Okay, you wanted to ‘express yourself’. Aren’t you doing exactly that? Aren’t you getting from me what you wanted?
Not exactly.
Then what do you want – exactly?
I will tell you when you are softer.
Believe me, she says, I have never been softer in my life.
Hannah
Her internal world has always been a site of conflicting forces. On some days, she has to brace herself to go out. The front door feels like the lid to a tide of floodwater that will come crashing in and consume her. The air of Paris feels like alien air, as alien as trying to breathe underwater. Going down in the lift, she has to hold her breath – and then, as she enters the streets, she has to breathe carefully, as if there is a limited supply of oxygen that at any minute might run out.
Some days are worse, for the storm sits inside her, like an accumulation of high pressure systems and low pressure systems that leave upturned cars and ruined houses in their wake. At times – and this is perhaps the most devastating – the forces cancel each other out, so that barely a garden flower stirs.
* * *
Present tense plus present tense, she says. Try to think of an example.
The White Room Page 9
