by Lia Louis
“Emmie!” She grins, dropping Lucas’s hand and holding her slender, brown arms wide. “You’re here! Shall we sit? We have so much to speak about. Oh, you look so beautiful!”
“And so do you,” I say as her arms envelop me, her warm, perfumed cheek to mine. “You look lovely. Truly.”
Impossible. Impossible to call her anything else.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Date: June 25, 2018
Subject: School Counselor Services Administrator position
Dear Emmie,
I wondered if you would be interested in a position that has become available at a local secondary school. I know you said you would prefer not to work in a school environment, but it seems a shame to not pass on a position like this to you, considering your certificates in education and training, and your experience in admin. The salary is also very competitive.
Would you like me to organize an interview?
Kind regards,
Hina Alvi
Recruitment Consultant
* * *
Laughter is universal. To understand laughter, you do not need to be multilingual. Half an hour I was waiting at the bus stop, bus after bus passing by without Calais on the front of it, or anywhere I had even heard of, actually, and eventually, after thirty minutes of countless buses and countless passengers filing off and on, I got onto the next bus I could see, and told the driver in the best French I could muster that I needed to get to Calais.
He laughed. For ages. As if he was auditioning for a rerecording of The Laughing Policeman. “It does not exist,” he told me from under his thick black mustache. “No more.”
“But I—I looked on Google,” I said pathetically, and he lifted his chubby hands at his side, as if to say, “What do you want me to do, lady?”
“It is old,” he grumbled. “Last December, service stop. No more. You get taxi to Boulogne, and then bus. Or train. But…” He tapped the glass face of his watch and shrugged. “No time.”
I panicked then; stood flapping for a moment, face dewy with sweat, before realizing a busload of people were staring at me as if they’d all quite like to disembowel me. I got off and watched defeatedly as the doors slammed, and the bus whirred away.
It’s never happened before, Lucas letting me down for a lift to the port. Didn’t want to wake you, Em, but I’ve had to come into work, his text said. I read it through bleary eyes, having just woken. Fucking Frederic AGAIN. Guy’s a prick. You’ll have to make your own way to Calais. Is that okay? I’ve left a taxi card in the kitchen next to the coffee machine. They’re local. Reliable. So so sorry to do this. Text me!!!
And although it’s nothing, really—it’s work, it can’t be helped—I still had to graft hard at ignoring the swirling in my stomach when I read his text. The churn that said, Everything is changing now he’s engaged, Emmie. He doesn’t even have time to take you to your ferry, like he always has.
It was a good ten minutes before I admitted defeat on the side of the road and trudged back to the Moreaus’ under the blistering sun, where now I find the side gate to the back garden wide open. I can hear the distant sound of Eliot sawing and a radio blasting, and I wish there was a way I could call that taxi number and pay whatever the fare is, make it so I don’t have to see Eliot’s smug “I told you so” face. He stayed the night, after the dessert party, without Cold Ana, thankfully. Eliot is a carpenter. A cabinetmaker, actually, something he corrected me on every time, back then, when he was working as an apprentice for a local furniture designer. And he’s working at the house today, making a start on a decked bandstand for Amanda and Jean’s garden. We barely spoke as we drank coffee on the patio this morning, and he’d simply looked up as I’d left for the bus stop, pulling down his dust mask just in time to tell me that he didn’t think any sort of bus service existed anymore.
“There’s a bus in fifteen minutes, actually,” I’d announced proudly as I passed him in the garden, sunglasses on, my case in hand.
“You’re sure?” he’d asked.
“Yup,” I’d sung. “Good old Google; a fine invention.” And Eliot had shrugged and said, “Cool. See you later, then.”
Now Eliot looks up at me, unsurprised, as I slump down onto a deck chair on the Moreaus’ lawn. He pauses, saw in hand, then straightens. I can hardly breathe with the heat, but Eliot looks completely at ease, in nothing but a pair of jeans, his chest golden, dots of sawdust clinging to the hair on his forearms. He pulls the mask down and looks at me.
“No buses,” I pant, cheeks pounding with sunburn. “Old service.”
“Yeah,” he says. “I think I did say.”
I nod breathlessly. It’s eighty-seven degrees today here in Le Touquet, and the air is stifling and thick. There is not a wisp of breeze to be found. I feel like I’m suffocating.
“You need a lift to the station,” says Eliot, swiping a forearm across his forehead.
I hesitate, fan my face pointlessly. “Yes.”
“No worries. What time’s your ferry?”
“Three?”
He looks at a thick brown leather watch at his wrist. “Right. I’ll finish up here and then we can jump in the van. Good?”
I nod, feel something like shame prickle up my back. Maybe it’s being unable to afford the taxi. Maybe it’s at having to rely on Eliot. “Yeah,” I say. “Thanks, Eliot.”
He shrugs, stretches the mask back over his face, and continues sawing.
* * *
“So, Lucas left getting to the station to you,” Eliot says, adjusting his backward red baseball cap, tufts of dark hair sprigging from the sides.
“It wouldn’t have been an issue had the buses been running.”
Eliot drops a hand to his lap, the other holding the steering wheel. “Lucas drops everything for that boss. Whatshisname. Dude with the eyebrows.”
“Frederic.”
Eliot nods. “That’s it.”
“Well, he left me details of a taxi service and texted me to—”
“And why didn’t you get a taxi?”
I look over at him. He says nothing more, just looks at me, then back at the road, and lifts his shoulders as if to say, “Well?”
“You, um, said you didn’t mind—”
“I don’t,” he jumps in. “Not at all, actually. It was just a question.” He laughs and holds a hand to his chest as if in surrender.
“Right,” I say, and Eliot reaches to turn up the radio louder than it was.
The van rattles as it turns a corner, and the smell of creosote and the sweetness of wood reminds me of when I’d first begun visiting Lucas and the Moreaus. The way Eliot would come in from work at his apprenticeship, hair full of dust, smudges of varnish on his T-shirt, and smile a hello before going upstairs and joining us for dinner, hair wet, and freshly showered.
“Nice wheels,” Lucas would laugh, gesturing to the truck on the gravel drive through the dining room window, and Eliot would say, “Least I’ve got wheels, dude.”
“Least I don’t sound like a rag-and-bone man.” Lucas would grin back, nudging me, and Eliot would lean in across the table and say, “Ask Luke about his wheels, Emmie. His little BMX out front. How far’s he going to take you on that, eh?”
I’d giggle behind my glass and Jean would look sternly over his spectacles. “Stop now, boys. Eat your mother’s dinner, will you, please. And Emmie, don’t engage them.”
I loved those evenings around the table. It felt like being part of a family. The sort of families I’d see through windows around dinner tables or in front of televisions when I’d walk home in the dark in the winter, the edges steamed up with cooking. How easy my life would be, I’d think, if Amanda was my mum, and Jean was my dad. If this was what I came home to, every day.
“Sorry,” says Eliot now, over the music. “Didn’t mean to pry. You can get to the station however you like. Taxi, dragon, hang gliding.” He looks over at me and smirks. “Bloke with a van…”
>
I give a reluctant smile. “I can’t afford it right now,” I admit. “I have thirteen quid in my bank, all of which I’m hoping to spend on food on the way home for the fridge, and I thought the bus would be far cheaper.”
Eliot nods. “Well, Lucas should’ve left you some money if—”
“He didn’t know,” I cut in. “I know he’d feel bad that he asked me to come out here with so little, but I wanted to. He needed me. And I don’t want charity or to borrow, so…” I trail off, catch a look outside the passenger window. The sky is so blue, it’s as if we’ve been tipped upside down, and the ocean is now high above us. No clouds, not even a tuft. Just endless, still blue. The sort of sky, I imagine, that helped my balloon make it all this way, intact.
“Sorry to hear that, Emmie,” says Eliot. “Is it… work troubles?”
“It’s not really work troubles,” I say. “Just… life stuff, really. I got in a little debt a couple of years ago, trying to keep a flat I couldn’t afford. But I moved into a cheaper place, which really helps, and my job at the hotel doesn’t exactly pay well, but there’re always extra shifts, so I’ve gradually been able to get back on my feet. I’m just not left with much at the end of the month. But it’s fine. Much better than it was.”
“Well, that’s good,” Eliot says gently. “Life’s a dick sometimes. Creeps up on us while we’re not looking. Throws us a curveball, chucks us off track…”
“Sounds about right.” I smile. “But I think that happens for a reason.”
“Seriously?”
I pause, raise my eyebrows with surprise. “Yeah. Don’t you?”
Eliot laughs, rubs the stubble on his chin with his hand. “Um, no. Definitely not,” he says, his smile lopsided. “It’s all just—life, isn’t it? Disordered and chaotic and out-of-nowhere, and we have to plan and navigate our way around it the best we can.”
I look at Eliot over my sunglasses. “So you don’t believe in chance, then? At all?”
“Oh God, no,” he says, pulling a face, pink lips stretched into a grimace. “I mean, maybe I used to. When I was young, a kid. But… life happens, and you learn you sort of just have to roll with it, right? Make the best of it. That’s all we can do, really. Thinking some divine power has our back. I mean, seriously, how stupid do you have to be to—what?”
“How do you know there’s no divine power?” I ask.
Eliot gives a heavy shrug, hand on the wheel, forearm resting on the open car window. “I’m just saying, I think if you don’t take charge of your own stuff and instead, sit back and wait for someone—something—to handle it for you, you’re sort of doomed.”
I stare at him. “So it’s all on us. All of it.”
“I reckon so,” he says confidently. Then he looks at me, a little smirk on his face, and says, “Mind you, I’m not sure I’d fancy having you in charge of my stuff. You planned your way to Calais, and look what happened there. You planned your bus route, too. I saw the little Post-it you were carrying…” Eliot laughs, biting his lip, and it surprises me that my back goes up, defenses clinking into gear. “Faith didn’t make the buses run, did it, Emmie B—”
“I suppose your life is perfect, then,” I barge in.
Eliot hesitates. “No. Not really,” he says. “But it’s nice, yeah.”
“Well,” I say, giving a harsh nod. “Good. Good for you.”
Eliot opens his mouth, pink lips parted, and gives me a double take, as if he can’t quite work out if I’m joking or actually offended, but he thinks better of speaking any more on the subject.
“Let’s, er, have some more music,” he says, then he turns up the radio once again.
I lean my head against the window and watch greens drift by in all the colors of the ocean, and will for the journey to speed by. “It must be nice to be you,” I want to say to Eliot. But faith is how I got to be sitting right here. If I hadn’t believed better things were coming, that all that pain would be for a reason, to make me stronger, I would have disappeared the night of the Summer Ball. Mr. Morgan would have won, after what he did to me that night in the IT room. Georgia and all her friends would have won—pushed me out of college before the first year was out, with their stories about me lying and home-wrecking, about me crying assault—and then where would I have been? Faith kept me going—probably kept me alive. And silly old chance dropped my balloon in Lucas’s path. Chance brought me my best friend.
“Food?”
“Sorry?”
“Are you hungry?” asks Eliot. “We could stop here. We have plenty of time.” He motions with a quick, lazy hand to a string of shops, a café, and a KFC. “Coffee? Almond croissant? You still like those, right?” Then he lowers his voice and says, “A bargain bucket?”
“I’m fine, thanks,” I say, despite the hunger bubbling in my stomach. “I’ll eat on the ferry.”
“Sure? Jean did say the food was comparable to eating human flesh, this morning, remember?” Eliot pulls the handle of the driver’s door. It clicks open. “But then again, he said that about the one and only Beefeater restaurant we ever visited.”
“I’m sure I’ll survive. My expectations are far lower than Jean’s. I like a ferry sandwich.”
“Suit yourself,” Eliot says, and slides out of the car, shutting the door behind him.
Twenty minutes later we are pulling up at Calais, in a busy taxi rank. Eliot keeps the engine running and circles the van to retrieve my bag from the back as I unbuckle my seat belt.
“Have a safe journey, Emmie,” he says, handing it over, and jumps back into the driver’s seat. A taxi driver presses hard on his horn as Eliot pulls away, and I hold my hand in a wave as he drives off.
On the ferry, I text Lucas.
* * *
Me: This is a message for Curly-Haired Screech: I am about to get on the ferry!
Lucas: Hey! Good!
Lucas: Curly-Haired Screech is really sorry he couldn’t take you himself.
Me: I accept his apology (but never his suit).
Lucas: hahahaha
Lucas: Text when you’re home safe, Em.
Me: I will x
Lucas: xxx
* * *
The ferry judders as it pulls away from the port, and in almost-synchronization, my stomach rumbles with hunger. I unzip the side pocket of my bag for my purse. Sitting on the top is a white paper bag, folded at the top like a seam. Inside: two still-warm almond croissants.
There is one lovely thing about living here, at Two Fishers Way, with Louise, my of-few-words landlady. It’s waking to the comforting sound of a day that has already begun. I am in no way a late riser, but Louise is always up at six, or before, and I wake most mornings to the chink of cutlery, the scrape of a broom against the patio, the muffled sounds of the radio from the kitchen—BBC Radio 4 usually, sometimes Magic FM—or the smell of warm food. Louise cooks a lot of soups and marmalades. Things in big pots with handles, which she stands by, unmoving except for her skinny hand, which stirs. After Adam moved out, the last place I’d wanted to end up was in a rented room in an old, cluttered, dusty house like this, but most things in life have their plus points, and waking up in Shire Sand, this close to the beach, knowing I’m not alone, is one for living here.
This morning when I open my bedroom door to go downstairs, the radio is on—Radio 4 today. A poet talking about the Industrial Revolution—and I am expecting to find Louise, as usual, at the padded bottle-green cushioned chair at the head of the kitchen table, where she sits with murky cups of mint tea and giant crossword books. But as I turn to descend the stairs, I see the silvery top of her head, the ball of her neat bun at the nape of her neck. She’s sitting on the second-from-last step, her hands on her knees.
“Louise? Louise, are you okay?”
Louise turns to look over her shoulder, the skin of her face pale.
“I, uh, I dropped the vase. Lost my balance. I was emptying the old flowers.” Louise’s voice is strong and clear as it always is, but I can’t help bu
t notice the wobbles at the edges of her words. I trot to the bottom of the stairs, and bend to pick up the vase. I place it on the wooden radiator cover where she always keeps a spray of fresh lavender. There is a puddle of water by her feet, staining the brown carpet black.
“Let me get some cloths.”
Louise nods. “In the top cupboard. Next to the sink.”
I go through to the kitchen—clean but cluttered, and straight from the seventies, with pale yellow units, and a lino floor in brown and mink squares and circles—and return to the hallway with a roll of paper towels. Louise is trying to pull herself up on the banister, but groans, then sighs, and stays where she is, on the steps. I wonder, crouched down onto the wet carpet, how long she’s been sitting there.
“Are you all right?” I ask.
Louise sighs raggedly. “Fine. I just lost my balance, as I said. Almost fell. Grabbed on to the banister, dropped the bloody vase.”
I nod and carry on, pressing squares of paper towels onto the puddle of water. “Well, better it be the vase and not you.”
She makes a sound in her throat; an amused scoff, as if to say, “Is that so?” and says nothing else as I blot up the water. In the eighteen months I’ve lived here, Louise and I have probably only had two conversations that have lasted longer than a few minutes. She isn’t rude, but abrupt. That’s the word for her. I imagine she was once the head teacher for an all-girls’ school, or a matron in a hospital. She says what needs to be said, with no filler whatsoever, because filler would just waste everybody’s time. No “Did you sleep well?” No “They say we’re going to have an Indian summer, don’t you know.” Just “This is what needs to be done” and “Oh, stop sniffling, it’s only your spine that’s utterly irreparable. Accept it and move swiftly on.”
“You didn’t eat dinner,” she says.
“Sorry?”
“Last night. You came in, went straight up to bed, and I didn’t see hide nor hair of you until just now.” Louise watches me, her breath slowing, her thumb and finger twiddling the rings on her hand, all large colored stones and pewter.
