The White Room

by Craig Higginson

  Bon, mais dites-moi, qu’est-ce qui vous fait croire que mon fils a été adopté?

  Pierre

  Some part of him is pleased Hannah is still thinking about him, even if it is only to catch him out. The thought sustains him for his first few days back in Paris. All through that week he expects her to phone him, to summon him and demand an explanation. But the Wednesday comes and goes, and still he hears nothing. A dozen times he picks up his phone to call her, but that final image of her sobbing on the couch, his banknotes scattered around her like a torn-up love letter, is still too shaming.

  * * *

  On the Saturday, he sees that her name has been replaced on all the class lists. Someone called Hendrik is taking her lessons. None of the other students knows what has happened to her. Their guess is that she has gone back to London.

  * * *

  Eventually, on the Monday, he goes to rap on Andrew’s glass door, as if trying to attract the attention of a monkey in a zoo.

  Excusez-moi, Monsieur?

  Ah – the mysterious Pierre, says Andrew, swinging his chair around to face him.

  The room is airless and stale, with an animal smell that once again recalls a zoo.

  I was wondering about Ms Meade. She has left her teaching?

  She’s going home.

  To England?

  Johannesburg, I believe.

  Pierre takes this in, trying to keep his face impassive.

  She is left already?

  I thought she’d been giving you extra lessons. Didn’t you practise your tenses?

  We did.

  Well, I don’t know whether she’s left or not. We’ve already said our goodbyes.

  Andrew peers at him more closely – looking vaguely unsettled.

  What exactly went on between the two of you?

  She taught me every Wednesday at ten o’clock.

  But – did something go wrong?

  Pierre once again concentrates on keeping his face neutral.

  Is this what she said? he says. I mean – is ‘that’?

  She said nothing. The girl walked through here like a ghost. Did you at least enjoy your time together?

  Yes, Monsieur. Very much. I learned a lot from her.

  I’m sure you did, Andrew smirks, swinging back to the challenges of his desk.

  He starts to make little jabbing movements at his keyboard – which is his way of telling Pierre to get out.

  III

  Hannah

  Dragan and Filip are waiting outside her apartment block, the old Sony winking on Filip’s shoulder as if the moment she appears around the corner with her shopping bags has been rehearsed. She buzzes herself in with barely a word for them, and they follow her into the lift, their bodies pressed into the corners with exaggerated deference.

  Are you still wanting to make your film? she asks as she lets them into the striped light of her room.

  Hannah hasn’t started packing yet. She hasn’t even bought the boxes. It occurs to her then that they don’t yet know she is leaving – and that this gives her an advantage over them.

  We are still wanting to make it with you, says Dragan.

  She finds she no longer cares that they are filming her – and lets that mad red light blink on.

  You want coffee? I just bought some.

  Thank you.

  She moves through to the kitchen while they find places for themselves in the sitting room. The bronze statue of Narcissus stands on the glass table, looking down at his ghost of a reflection – but not finding enough of himself to fall in love with.

  How are your studies going? she calls out.

  Our studies are fine.

  She hears them sniggering for some reason.

  Soon you will be graduating?

  Yes – and going to America!

  It is Dragan who is doing the talking.

  She thinks it is unlikely these two will ever succeed in America – assuming they will be allowed in. They will end up making bad television in some Eastern European backwater, most probably, or they’ll join Dragan’s father’s business and justify the air of criminality they already carry about with them – like the sweet smell of alcohol and cigarettes.

  * * *

  When she reappears with the coffee tray, she almost drops it on the floor.

  Dragan is lying naked on the couch, caressing an enormous erection.

  Filip is filming him – and Hannah entering.

  Get dressed, she says, as levelly as she can manage.

  Get undressed, says Dragan.

  She sets down the tray and turns to look down at Dragan. He is bonier and paler than she might have expected – with an abundance of pubic hair, dark nipples, a scattering of moles and that grotesque purple root sticking out of him.

  As she looks at him, he begins to masturbate.

  Not knowing what else to do, she walks out of the apartment and slams the door.

  But the lock doesn’t connect and the door yawns back open again.

  She presses for the lift.

  Where are you going?

  It is Filip, standing there with the camera.

  Please come back inside.

  Tell your friend to get dressed.

  I will tell him.

  Filip goes back inside and nothing further seems to happen.

  * * *

  When she returns to the apartment, Dragan has disappeared from the room. Filip has placed the camera on the glass table, facing the small statue, and is helping himself to coffee.

  Where is Dragan?

  Waiting in your bedroom.

  In her head, Hannah has already slept with them – and so she lets it happen, as it has half happened anyway. She takes off her dress in front of Filip, who picks up the camera with some alacrity to start filming her.

  * * *

  The camera winks behind her all the way into the bedroom, where she finds Dragan stretched out, still fondling his ridiculous cock.

  She wonders whether she would have the courage for this were it not for the presence of the camera. She can pretend she is someone else – and is merely a girl in some dreadful Lars von Trier film. The camera gives her an angle on everything that is not her own. Through its dislocated gaze, she watches herself getting on the bed and lowering herself over the body of a beautiful man – with his dark lips and dark eyes and oversized hands that guide her.

  * * *

  When he is done, Filip takes a turn with her while Dragan films them.

  Filip is slower, needier. He makes love to her like someone who is actually in love with her, and is alone with her – and isn’t being filmed by his naked, world-weary friend.

  You are beautiful, he tells her.

  I know.

  Are you all right?

  He says this as if he’s wondering whether or not they are raping her.

  I’m fine, she says. Don’t worry.

  And she means it.

  * * *

  She is able to come with Filip. In another life, she might have fallen in love with him – had he arrived without his camera and his corrupted friend. Filip pulls out of her shortly afterwards and groans – coming all over the sheets exactly where Dragan did.

  When they sit up a moment later, their legs tangled and her feet still singing, they see that Dragan has already gone. Perhaps he didn’t like the note of sincerity that the two actors reached by the end of their performance.

  * * *

  She finds Dragan dressed and drinking Filip’s coffee.

  I would like to watch while you delete the footage, Hannah says.

  What footage? says Dragan.

  In the camera. Everything you filmed.

  But we didn’t film anything, Dragan smiles slowly. You see, there was never any tape inside.

  * * *

  When Filip arrives in his boxer shorts and sits at the glass table to pour himself more coffee, she asks if this is true.

  I’m sorry, he says. But we were never making a movie. We are builders, not
film students. The camera doesn’t even work. We were never planning to go to America.

  * * *

  As they are leaving, she agrees to resume the lessons after their trip to Belgrade. She will be gone by then, but they don’t need to know this.

  She takes a shower and smiles at the thought of them arriving at her empty white room – with their toy camera and their hard-ons.

  This time, she does not weep.

  * * *

  Later, she is pleased to discover, she doesn’t even pee blood.

  IV

  Pierre

  He has befriended the Indian man who owns the store on the ground floor of her apartment block. His name is Hassan. He has three daughters and wants them all to be doctors. He works an eighteen-hour day and a six-day week and he likes the idea of living in Paris more than he likes the reality – yet his ideas for the future are enough to sustain him.

  Hassan tells him that the upstairs girl, who has only ever greeted him in passing, has had a whole pile of cardboard boxes delivered. She was away and now she’s back, but the landlady has told him that she’s leaving again – for Africa.

  But surely you know this? She is your teacher?

  Not for some weeks, says Pierre, as if the decision came from him.

  Hannah

  She buys black bin bags for her rubbish and soon finds herself throwing away almost all of the things she brought with her from South Africa ten years ago: a disintegrating purple jumper that she and Oliver used to share, her bound volumes of university essays, random cassettes from school days, a stuffed leopard without eyes that she has had since she was three, shoes that she wore in a world that had Oliver in it, and books she knows she will never read again – which she leaves in open boxes on the pavement for people passing by.

  She also has all the letters Oliver wrote to her during boarding school, whole bundles of them tied together with their father’s colourful silk cravats from the sixties. She includes them in the last bag, without thinking, the exuberance of the purging getting one step ahead of her.

  But she takes that final bag downstairs to the street as she did with the others and it sits there for a full two days before it is taken away. By then little ratty dogs have urinated on it, the rain has slightly flattened it, and a hundred times she has had to resist the impulse to go down and rescue it.

  * * *

  When the bag is gone one morning, she feels a pang of loss gorging her throat – but it is little different from all the other pangs of loss that have accompanied the idea of Oliver over the last decade.

  * * *

  She hardly thinks about the letters in the days that follow. She goes for walks through Paris, often up to Sacré-Cœur and back down into the city. It is good to walk without Oliver, even if she knows that he is far too resourceful ever to leave her completely in peace.

  But Pierre she thinks about all the time. Her new information about him is stored in her like a confession that could scandalise a whole congregation. Needless to say, there is no congregation, but still their time together bustles inside her like a packed church, each gesture and word, every good intention, becoming like a congregant that has the potential to become outraged. He was a liar and a thief as much as she was. Before she leaves, she wants to tell him exactly what she thinks of him. But what she thinks changes from moment to moment. Which is why she delays the call. Until she starts to worry that he will go away and that she will miss her chance.

  * * *

  She is sitting at Le Refuge on her final Monday morning in Paris, tapping out the palindrome of her name across six fingers, backwards and forwards – the name a perfect reflection of itself – when she picks up her phone and dials his number. He answers after the first ring.

  Hannah?

  Wednesday. Ten o’clock.

  You want me to come?

  I really want you to come, she says – with some ambiguity.

  V

  Pierre

  What is happening?

  It is Wednesday morning, one minute past ten.

  * * *

  Hannah looks pale and tentative, her hair floating, as if she was recently subjected to electric shocks. She is wearing a faded dress that is strangely inadequate on her – and is crinkled around the edges, like tissue paper. She barely looks up when he comes through the door – which for once is standing open – and continues to pack her boxes.

  All around her the books stand in different coloured columns, making the room look more like a second-hand bookshop than a private apartment.

  * * *

  I didn’t think you’d come.

  You’re leaving?

  Yes.

  Paris?

  Call it Paris if you like.

  * * *

  It is only natural that she would be angry with him. For the way he treated her on that last occasion – throwing that money at her, making her feel like a whore – and also for lying to her about the death of his parents. While it is true that his mother has late onset diabetes and his father has an irregular heartbeat, it is conceivable they will live for another twenty years – maybe more. Then there is the matter of the phone call to his father, in which Hannah pretended to be a journalist. There is no telling what new information she might have gleaned from that. Yet the fact that she has asked him here suggests that, in spite of her anger, she is not yet ready to relinquish him. There is some small part of her that needs him for some thing, a thing she holds close to her like an injured bird. A few weeks ago, he would have done anything to find this out, and to make it grow, but he realises now that he is back in her apartment that he has grown wary of her, and wary of the pair of them. Perhaps this is a sign of health – a thing he has more of, he could argue, than this girl, whose limits seem to lie well beyond any horizon he has ever dreamed of.

  * * *

  Are you still angry with me?

  Call it angry if you like.

  * * *

  How could he have been so wrong about her, this not-so-English girl? He thought she carried with her all the things he lacked: a happy childhood, loving parents, a perfect body, and the knowledge that right at the bottom of her she was a good person and that the world would provide for her every need – as if experience was little more than a large supermarket in which you could take whatever you wanted without having to pay for it. Yet it seems that he has more of these qualities than she does. She is the one from the provinces, it turns out – and is much further away from any idea of home than he will ever be.

  * * *

  I have been feeling bad, he says. About the way we left it. I’m glad you summoned me back. You call it ‘unfinished business’, not so?

  I haven’t yet found the words for it.

  She picks up a new pile of books – these ones a faded blue, like a cuckoo’s egg – and lowers them into a half-filled box.

  You haven’t even noticed, she says.

  What?

  I’m wearing the dress. Your yellow dress.

  Hannah

  It is clear that he doesn’t believe her. He has to look at it again, and her again, to make the necessary adjustments. He, however, looks content enough. Almost prosperous. Dressed for summer in sandals, long khaki shorts, a grass-green golfing shirt. All he needs now is a pith helmet.

  The dress looks different.

  You mean I look different.

  He looks away, not wanting to betray himself, still hoping he will be able to keep himself looking all clean-cut and efficient, like someone on his way to open a gym contract.

  Maybe I should have ironed it, she says, trying to sound ironic.

  You’re still beautiful, he says brightly – hopefully.

  * * *

  Already she is beginning to regret this. It turns out she would rather not know how little she has meant to him. And she would rather not have to experience him throwing his bones for her – from the great height of his complacency.

  She picks up another leaning tower of books. At least this, sh
e thinks, is the last time they will see the light of Paris.

  What did you want? he says, looking more doubtful, sensing the mood in her. To say goodbye? To shout at me?

  There is a provocation in him that moves somewhere between violence and sex. Both choices are repellent to her, and yet what other options did she provide for him? Perhaps – at least for her – the two are inseparable anyway.

  Or is it because you wanted something else?

  He moves towards her, giving her some half-baked puppy expression that he probably imagines she will still find appealing.

  I have been missing you.

  He is close enough to touch her now, and she ducks away from his magnetic pull, which she can still feel – even as every bit of her body screams against him.

  The present perfect continuous. Good.

  He shrugs this off, looking slightly shamed, and perhaps also beginning to regret coming here.

  I went away, he says. Back to Pouilly. I saw my friend Étienne.

  The one who kissed your girlfriend under the tree?

  That one.

  What did you do? Did you hit him?

  We went to a party. We shared a cigarette.

  I see.

  He tells me Élodie will marry a middle-aged man who sells bicycle pumps.

  * * *

  She doesn’t like this new arrogance in him, but she can already see how thin it is – a mere garment he’s trying on for her sake. It keeps slipping away from him and he has to angle it back over his shoulders. What he is feeling underneath all this remains a mystery, as it has from the start.

  * * *

  I am glad you have put all that business behind you, she says.

  I can’t tell you how much your lessons helped.

  I’m sure you can’t.

  * * *

  She sees now that the garment isn’t arrogance. It’s a kind of bravery, which may be another way of saying a desire to be accurate.

  * * *

  It is not only the English. You gave me something else. Call it my own tree to stand under, with my own girl.

  So you’re saying you’ve met someone new?

  Not yet, he shrugs, attempting to smile. But maybe I’m ready. Thanks to you.