The Life to Come

by Michelle De Kretser

  When it pulled in, she glimpsed her reflection in the doors. What had she been thinking of, making up her face, zipping up her boots, twisting up her hair? Soon she was speeding towards Paris. A woman sitting across the aisle took a picture book from her bag and handed it to her daughter. The child examined the book, turning it about in both hands. Her downy brows drew together: ‘Maman, what is the password?’ she asked.

  On the journey back from Besançon, Sabine had retrieved her case from the overhead rack as soon as the first grimy Parisian apartment blocks appeared. Fugit amor, thought Céleste. Sabine put on her jacket, drawing in her stomach as she did up the buttons, and smoothed her skirt. Her aunt had been much livelier that morning, talkative and alert, and Sabine returned from the visit elated. She told Céleste the news at once: ‘She’s left me her jewels.’ Sabine smiled and bit her lips. Her aunt had said, ‘With those eyes, you should wear sapphires.’ Sabine’s excitement lasted all the way back to Paris. On the train, she began to tell Céleste about a customer who had come into her shop to complain that the lemon tree he had bought was fatally diseased. ‘You won’t believe this, but it’s the fourth time he’s come in with this kind of story. The first time it was a bouquet of gerberas and lilies. I gave him a refund—it can happen, why not. But four times! The lemon tree cost a hundred and fifty euros, and this creep says it’s as good as dead. So I told him—’ Here Sabine broke off. She said in her unemphatic way, ‘Tante Rosalie came out with a strange thing today. We were talking about her jewellery and she described it all perfectly, even a little pearl brooch. Then out of the blue, she said, “Do you remember that colonel who used to come to dinner in Algiers? He had one of our gardeners tortured to death.” It must have been a dream she’d had,’ said Sabine. ‘She went on talking about the brooch, telling me to be careful because the catch isn’t reliable.’

  At the Gare de l’Est, ‘Until Tuesday,’ said Sabine, planting brisk kisses on Céleste’s cheeks. She was among the first passengers off the train. By the time Céleste followed, only a few stragglers remained on the platform. There was the clatter of wind on the roof. Céleste looked up and saw rain running slowly down glass—it made her long for gin. Bernard had probably brought the children with him to the station. Sabine would have kissed them all, and complimented Jennifer on her hair. Later, at home, there would be champagne—the girls, allowed a sip, would beg their mother to describe Tante Rosalie’s rings. Sabine would tell them, ‘You can look into a sapphire forever.’

  Remembering that endless walk to the head of the platform, Céleste relived the onrush of despair. When the black mist lifted, something remained: a pattern. She would always accept what she didn’t want so that Sabine could enjoy a spoonful of sweetness. The motive for her ridiculous expedition to the pharmacy was plain. What she had needed was not to inspect Bernard but to display herself to him. Dress, boots, upswept hair proclaimed, I exist. The reality of Bernard had never been in question. It was her own presence that could be wiped out by a flare of light.

  At St-Michel, Céleste decided to get out and walk. On the escalator, she spotted the girls from the cafe. Two of them, the pierced girl and one whose long, unbound hair was dyed yellow, were sharing an iPod, each with a bud in one ear. ‘Lonely Lisa,’ they burst out together, arms linked, swaying on their step. Their greedy young faces were turned upwards. Céleste smiled at them, but they didn’t notice her, absorbed in each other and the song.

  In the street, she resolved on a whim to follow the pack of girls. They led her along the quai, past a bridge. The rain had stopped, but people still had their umbrellas out and were casting glances at the sky. A faint brightness in the air, as if the sun were pressing close behind the clouds, created a peculiar, greasy light. The girls shoved along the crowded pavement, their shoulders thrusting sideways in the puffy jackets they wore over their skimpy tops.

  On the Pont de l’Archevêché, they came to a halt. Céleste loitered as if admiring the view downstream. The river, running high between its stone embankments, magically evoked the approach to Tante Rosalie’s house—Céleste saw beech trees stretching away. There were no gardeners: they had all been left behind in Algiers. In spring, the cherry blossom assumed the shape of a dead man—but that was only a bad dream.

  The pierced girl unzipped her backpack and took out a padlock that she handed to the blonde. Cameras and phones appeared. The two girls posed, holding up the padlock between them. Hundreds of locks were already fastened to the bridge, some engraved with two names and a date, others plain, some rusty—there was a handsome golden one shaped like a fish. The girls began to search for somewhere to add their own padlock; the blonde’s hair bounced down her spine. Presently they had attracted quite a little crowd. A space was found at last, inconveniently low, near the pavement. The girls crouched, attached their love lock to the mesh, posed for their friends’ cameras. ‘Vandals!’ cried a woman, leaning from a pillion. When the girls rose, the pierced one hurled the key over the bridge. The river received it—it received everything. The girls kissed. She love me! Faintly ironic cheers rose from bystanders, a horn sounded. ‘Congratulations!’ said Céleste. The girls didn’t notice. They were looking through her, at a future locked into place.

  Céleste walked on, over the island, past the fizzing, Christ-massy shops. A zigzag of back streets brought her to a doorway filled with a family of Roma, the sharp-faced children huddled against a calm brown dog. Further along the boulevard, a couple approached, arm in arm, the woman carrying a bouquet. The flowers were obscured by their wrapping, but as the pair drew closer, molecules of eucalyptus wafted past. Céleste held her head high: if she looked down, the old, stupid tears would fall. They were there, hard as beads, lined up behind her lids. For their first Christmas together, Sabine had brought her a sheaf of sweet-scented dollar gum. Later, Céleste made tea, and toast spread with butter and Vegemite. Sabine took one bite—‘My God!’ In the card she left that day, Céleste placed a round blue leaf.

  The couscous restaurant lay on her way. The street was the kind where the buildings breathed into each other’s faces, and evening arrived at half-past three. As Céleste paused in front of the restaurant, a light came on inside. At once the room with its white-draped tables was transformed into a stage. A man carrying a metal cash box entered from the rear, like an actor, and crossed out of sight. Céleste asked silently, Maman, what is the password? The brass key in the diorama seemed to grow larger, as if she were seeing it under water. Behind it, that other key traced an arc through her mind: it glittered like the ethics of possibility, like the girl who had thrown it into the Seine.

  Someone called, ‘Céleste!’ in a commanding trill. What was Valerie doing back in her old neighbourhood on a working day? ‘I was just about to text you,’ she told Céleste as they kissed. ‘What’s happened to Didier?’

  ‘Didier?’

  Valerie jerked her chin over her shoulder. ‘Didier. Who lives in the square.’

  ‘Oh—that guy.’ Céleste said, ‘He always disappears in winter.’

  ‘A charity picks him up. They take him to a hostel. But it’s too early for that—they only stop by a day or two before Christmas. Didier’s just vanished, and none of the shopkeepers can tell me what’s become of him.’

  Céleste saw that the environmentally responsible carrier bag on Valerie’s wrist held a foil package of the type used for roast chicken. The corner of a takeaway container showed underneath. She said, ‘Did you come all this way to bring him food? That’s so great.’

  ‘Of course not!’ said Valerie. Her high colour intensified, as if she had been caught out in a minor barbarity—double-dipping in an ambassadorial tapenade, perhaps. She said, ‘I always have my suede jacket dry-cleaned at that place near the metro—you must know the one. I wouldn’t trust anyone else in Paris with it.’

  ‘There’s a Roma family begging back there, on the boulevard,’ said Céleste. ‘You could give them the food.’

  Valerie’s curls were solid brow
n bubbles against her camelhair coat. She said, ‘Are you kidding me? That lot are all thieves.’

  ‘There were two children. With braids. And a dog.’

  ‘They’ll be fine, then. They’ll eat the dog.’

  Rain began to fall, the first heavy coins. A secret channel of association caused Céleste to recall the interior of the Katebs’ lodge. It contained a leather couch that Valerie had handed down when she moved away: mid-century modern, a little grubby but with good Danish bones. Valerie’s pug had chewed a corner of the upholstery, but the damage looked far less conspicuous than it had in Valerie’s big white empty flat. The light in the lodge, which seemed to glare through the frosted glass into the hall, was in fact quite dim. There was a fluorescent tube above a partition wall that didn’t reach the ceiling, but Madame Kateb preferred to set shadows floating by switching on a lamp. Céleste knew that on the other side of the partition were twin beds separated by a cupboard. There was also a wardrobe, mirrored on one door, which Djamila and her mother shared—it was one of Djamila’s grievances. Nowhere was there enough natural light for her to make up her face, and the electric lights threw shadows in all the wrong places.

  Whenever Céleste entered the lodge, she expected the smell of stale cooking—either that, or the reek of floors washed down with eau de Javel. In any case, she would brace for something unpleasant, unconsciously holding her breath. But every time, against logic and instinct, the airless room smelled clean and fresh.

  IV

  PIPPA PASSES

  SIX MINUTES LATER, PIPPA CHECKED her Twitter feed again. @warmstrong said, ‘Reading Martin Amis’s latest. Losing the will to live.’ That was her friend Will; Pippa retweeted him. The self she had curated at @pippapasses was warmly supportive of other writers, at least those on Twitter, but Amis, having contrived to be famous without the benefit of social media, didn’t count.

  On Facebook, Rashida had posted a photo of homemade labneh with citrus zest and truffle oil. The labneh sat on its blue plate like a fat white turd flecked with orange. Pippa Liked it, and so did nineteen other people, three of whom were Rashida’s sisters. Photos showed that all four Afzal sisters had the same podgy face embedded in long, amazing hair. In Rome, Matt and Pippa had seen a hairdressing salon called Capellissimmi. ‘It means hairy hair,’ said Matt, putting his arm around Pippa. Hairy hair! said Pippa to herself whenever she saw Rashida. The Afzals made red velvet cupcakes for one another’s birthdays and wrote ‘Gorgeous girl!’ under their sisters’ chubby selfies on Facebook. The latest post on Ferial Afzal’s page informed Pippa that Ferial’s baby, Iggy Syed, had celebrated his first birthday that weekend in Melbourne. Under damp-looking curls, Iggy Syed looked starey and haunted. Rashida wrote, ‘Aww. My big boy! So happy I could celebrate with you.’

  @gloriahallelujah tweeted: ‘Amazing party on friend’s yacht. Finally met @JoshKapoor. Be still my beating heart.’ A photo showed Gloria clutching a bottle, her flushed, kittenish face turned to a man who was smiling at someone else. Gloria was Pippa’s agent and she had had Pippa’s new manuscript for four weeks now. Pippa texted Matt: ‘Won’t hear from G today. She’s hungover again.’ Matt was teaching all morning, so Pippa sent the same message to George. He texted back: ‘Bummer. Were onesies 2012 or 2013?’ That was George: your classic narcissist. His latest novel contained a line about the Nineties being when there were more dogs called Max than people—that was something Pippa had said, and George hadn’t even thanked her. He never thanked anyone: his novels were published without acknowledgments, which Pippa considered a typically male move. George’s agent would never be photographed pissed with her tits falling out of a two-sizes-too-small designer dress. George’s agent was part Japanese, part Finnish and part vampire. Back in the day, when Pippa was looking for an agent, George had suggested Minako. Minako lived in New York, and according to George she was really shy. In Pippa’s experience, shy people didn’t send emails that said, ‘George showed me three chapters of your novel. I’m afraid I didn’t get past the first.’

  From Monday to Wednesday Pippa worked for a company that published restaurant guides. Today was Thursday; part of Pippa’s brain murmured that she should be planning out a new book or at least putting the sheets on to wash. She picked up the postcard from her mother that had come the previous day. Her mother ran a B&B in New Zealand, but the postcard showed garish flowerbeds in a nondescript Spanish square. Somewhere, Pippa’s mother had acquired multiple copies of this card with its out-of-focus fountain. Pippa received three or four a year. They said things like, ‘The lake is complicated today.’ Or, ‘Try to live life from beyond the grave as it were. Imagine what you will have been’—the last three words underlined twice.

  On Twitter, @warmstrong asked: ‘What is the point of historical fiction? #banHilaryMantel.’ Someone had a photo of the view from her Airbnb room in Porto. Someone else linked to footage of Syrian refugees pleading to be granted asylum in Australia. @gloriahallelujah followed @TheEllenShow. She retweeted a hilarious cartoon about the plight of cats trapped in folk music environments. Pippa retweeted it too.

  Hank the Tank came and looked at her from the door of her study. ‘I hear you,’ said Pippa. ‘Soon. We’ll go to the park soon.’ Hank produced a noise like a teddy whose growl had worn down to a wheeze. His eyes were large and dark and believing. Pippa checked her email: an invitation from Matt’s mother to lunch on the weekend, a special offer from FragranceNet, nothing from Gloria. Pippa retweeted @MargaretAtwood urging the donation of books to prisons. She followed every famous writer she could find on Twitter, but so far none of them had followed her back. Someone posted a photo of a dog on a skateboard. @warmstrong linked to a screening of Hotel Monterey. ‘Chantal Akerman: wonder-woman or wanker? You decide.’ Pippa read a Lydia Davis story on the New Yorker website. She googled to see if Lydia Davis was on Twitter. She read a Crikey piece about arts funding, followed a few links and some time later bought a swimsuit. Her email chimed; it was an overdue reminder from the library. Anyway, Gloria would call, not email. Gloria’s voice was always low and exhausted. Of Pippa’s previous novel, she had whispered, ‘Everyone here really, really loves it. The scene with the endives is amazing! I’ve never read anything so raw. It really amazed everyone. But we ran it through SIMS, our amazing new reader-response software, and it says readers are over the whole French thing. I hope you’re not expecting much in the way of an advance.’

  Pippa’s phone rang and she snatched it up. But it was only a former neighbour, so she let it ring out. She emailed Matt’s mother: ‘Hi Eva, Thanks for the lovely invite. Lunch would have been great, but a few people are coming over on Sunday. xxP.’ ‘A few people’ meant Rashida and Steve, an old friend of Matt’s. Steve was freshly single because his wife had repartnered with a divorce lawyer. Pippa had also invited Will and a friend of hers from work so that the set-up wasn’t too blatant.

  ‘Steve’s perfect for Rashida,’ Pippa had told Matt.

  ‘Can’t see it—they’ve got nothing in common.’

  ‘They’re both into, you know, environmental stuff.’

  ‘You mean Steve’s an eco-fascist. He spends his holidays killing poplars.’

  ‘Well, Rashida’s a vegetarian.’

  Matt said, ‘Steve’s hardly her type.’

  When Pippa moved to Sydney to go to university, she missed the town in northern New South Wales where she had grown up. In Sydney everything was strange: noises, intersections, buildings, views. Someone had put a dimmer switch on the stars. The city was daredevil, filthy and full of people who knew where they were going. Driving to a party in Leichhardt, Pippa couldn’t get off Parramatta Road: every intersection displayed a ‘No Right Turn’ sign. ‘It’s like a Communist Party convention,’ said Vince, peering through the windscreen. He was from the country too, a different part of it, and no help with navigation. Later, when Pippa was living in a share house by the beach, she would lie in bed at night listening to the surf. She felt how easily the city could pound
her, too. It was shocking and thrilling. Her thoughts ran with its rivers, flinging themselves into the sea. Sydney was a place where everything piled up behind you. All its windows watched and shone. Those sad palm trees—their broken green spokes! The city’s beauty, like its money, was self-important, calculated to stun. It judged all who came its way according to silent, iron rules. If you were not rich, you were nothing: that was the first rule. She was part of this place now, its snappy answers and impersonal brutishness. She set her teeth. She was going to be a writer. When she was famous, Sydney would be obliged to place commemorative plaques outside the houses where she had lived. Her future was as vast as the light beating its wings in clifftop parks.

  By the time Matt and Pippa became friends, she was living on the other side of the city, and the Pacific was nowhere near. Not far from her house was a park where they would meet—Matt wouldn’t go to the house, because a woman who had no further use for him also lived there. The wreckage of that relationship was what Pippa and Matt picked through that spring, sitting under a lemon-scented gum. There were scribbles of sun on their faces and arms. Until then, Matt had been the subject of stories told by Pippa’s housemate late at night as a joint passed back and forth—they were rather scathing little stories. In the park, he grew real to Pippa, emerging from a pack of boys who jingled coins in their pockets. On a sticky November day, she arranged to meet him there in the late evening. They arrived at the same time, each bringing beer, and exclaimed at the same thing: the ghostliness of a white flowering hedge at dusk. Matt did most of the talking. As he spoke, he moved his hands, which were nothing like Pippa’s idea of a musician’s hands: they had dimples for knuckles. After a while, lying on her back in her thin cotton dress, Pippa wanted to take one of those fleshy hands and place it between her legs. At home, she would write down things Matt had said. ‘She doesn’t care about people, she classifies them.’ ‘Her words pour out and her heart never moves.’ What mattered to him was music not books, but what he said struck her with the force of poetry: formal, wise. Pippa thought, He’ll be good for my writing. Then, lusty young animal, she drove fast through the fumy night to the disgusting Marrickville flat that Vince shared with two other guys. Vince already belonged to the past, but for different reasons neither of them could forgo the visits that Pippa still paid him that spring.