Scribe Publications
AU PAIR
Fiona McGregor is a Sydney writer and performance artist. She has published five books, four of which have won or been shortlisted for major prizes, including the Steele Rudd Award for the story collection Suck My Toes. Her most recent novel, Indelible Ink, won The Age Book of the Year, and was published by Atlantic in the UK.
McGregor contributes essays, articles, stories and reviews to a range of publications. Her performance work has been seen internationally. She is currently working on a new novel.
Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia
50A Kingsway Place, Sans Walk, London, EC1R 0LU, United Kingdom
Published by Scribe 2013
First published by McPhee Gribble, Ringwood, 1993
Copyright © Fiona McGregor 1993
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.
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For Lizzie MacFarlane (1966–1992),
who showed me so much of Paris
and kept it fresh for me.
PART ONE: Alone
I was never an au pair.
I was back in Paris, renting a room with a view of housing commission flats on the eastern périphérique. In the corner was my pack – everything I owned spilled from it onto the grey lino floor. My visa had been renewed, my money was running low. I planned to stay. I needed a job.
– Vous êtes sérieuse? Madame Durebex asked. You must be responsible. Je cherche une jeune fille sérieuse.
Mme Durebex looked to be in her late thirties. She was tall, trim and impeccably dressed. Her hair was streaked, her face too tanned for autumn in Paris. She had large brown eyes and a thin suspicious mouth. The foul breath that came from it was unexpected for one so sleek. A plump valet wearing a white uniform vacuumed around us as we drank tea in the kitchen, a room twice as big as the room in which I lived. Mme Durebex didn’t lower her voice when the valet vacuumed out of the room.
– You must do Laurent’s homework with him in English. I don’t speak a word of English. Pas un mot de français, d’accord? He’s absent-minded: I’ve enrolled him in chess classes to make him concentrate more. He loses his books, he forgets what homework he has, he never brings the right books home.
Mme Durebex put down her tea and laughed nervously.
– He can be very difficult.
Work
Some days later I was back in the white marble foyer of their building on rue de Babylone. She said she was still interviewing people, but she took me upstairs to the kitchen and sat me down at that long wooden table. She thrust a piece of paper in front of me, instructing me to note down Laurent’s sport days and holidays. She watched me, a finger at the corner of her mouth, with an expression at once vague and mistrustful, as though she were sure I was doing something wrong but wasn’t sure what.
– Viens, I’m going to take you to his school in the car today.
She addressed me in the familiar form. The decision had been made, I had the job.
Mme Durebex, like most people seeking au pairs, had put up an ad in the American church and I, like most young foreigners seeking work, had gone there. I copied numbers from the noticeboard. I stood in a crowd of young anglophones doing the same thing, disconcerted by the evidence that there existed so many others like me in Paris. If you had no carte de séjour, if you weren’t American or British, if your written French was not perfect, then your job options were reduced to private English tuition and au pairing.
An au pair usually got a wage and a chambre de bonne in exchange for babysitting, English tuition, and often housework as well. But I just got the wage, I was independent, I was really just an English tutor. I considered myself very lucky – this was probably one of the best jobs around. Mme Durebex didn’t want to know about me outside of my working hours, and for this I was grateful. She never even understood my real name.
– Siobhan Elliott, I said. Sho-vawn, it’s an Irish name.
– Quoi? she said, over the echo of her heels on the marble staircase.
I squeaked down after her in my thick rubber soles, repeating my first name, disliking the fuzzy sound it made. It sounded wrong in a French accent, incomprehensible in an Australian one.
Mme Durebex went into the bathroom and wrenched a tissue from the box, a gold and white shiny thing that I would have kept my jewellery in, if I’d had any.
– Sheu … Sho … She struggled: the tissues didn’t stop coming. A ream of floral pattern trailed into the sink. I stood in the doorway spelling my name, which only confused her further. She frowned in the mirror, dabbing at an invisible blemish. The arrangement of letters seemed chaotic even to me. I had learnt every sound in the French alphabet by spelling my name over and over to French people.
Mme Durebex shook her head.
– Oh no, it’s too hard … Alors, Shona?
– Almost.
– Bon. We’ll call you Shona.
Shona. The name of my ex-boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend. Out of the French air Mme Durebex had plucked a name as foreign and idiosyncratic as my own; a name that displaced me, that at once reminded me of and removed me further from a time I’d left behind.
But I couldn’t help liking this new appellation.
Vaguely, Mme Durebex asked why I was here, what I was doing. The first answer that came into my head was that I was learning the language. She asked which university I was attending. When I said none, she sent me a puzzled look then rearranged her hair in the mirror near the front door. I followed her outside and down the street to the garage where the car was kept. She asked if I could live on my wage, and I said that I could, feigning nonchalance at the wine-coloured Rolls Royce we were getting into.
– But how come you speak such good French? Mme Durebex asked.
– I studied it at school. And I was here last year for six months.
The car tilted up the ramp and emerged from the basement garage like a submarine. The length of bonnet in front of us equalled the entire length of most other cars on the road.
– Ah, she nodded. And you went home to your family in England for summer?
– No, I smiled. Australia’s too far.
But Australia didn’t register with her.
– We travelled in summer, I continued.
– We?
There was a clamouring of horns. Mme Durebex manoeuvred the Rolls through an angry knot of cars, and along streets I’d never walked. Clean, stark streets of shuttered buildings, each much like the other, pale in the afternoon sunlight. We drove onto a boulevard and colours began to disturb the monochrome, people moved around us. With a 360 degree view I was captive; I felt exhilarated. Up on my high seat, being driven – this was something I never normally did in Paris. The last car I’d been in was the cab I got from the station on the night I came back here. Shoulders aching from carrying my pack, I’d deserved that cab.
We turned down an avenue hooded with plane trees, then arrived at the school.
Mme Durebex leaned on the horn and I was glad for the tinted windows that hid us from view. Eventually a boy trotted out of the throng of children and parents. He seemed small for an eight-year-old, but I have never been very good at telling the age of people younger than me. I am the youngest in my immediate family, the youngest in my exte
nded family; Matthew was older than me, my friends in Sydney were all older than me. Everybody has always been older than me.
I turned and smiled at my pupil-to-be. Laurent’s legs stretched across the leather seat; his feet dangled off the edge, waggling fiercely. A gash of red ink on his cheek gave him a piratic air. He corkscrewed a finger into his ear then examined the extract, and all of a sudden I felt too young to teach him things, and too old to enter his territory. He had the same rich holiday tan as his mother, and her Latin eyes. They stared at me defiantly from beneath a mop of dark hair, while the ear-waxed finger slid down the back of the driver’s seat.
– Have you rung Brenda? he piped to his mother. Because it’s me that’s going to do the talking.
Mme Durebex waited for the lights to change, hands restless on the steering wheel. Her right thumb was curled under, and the large ruby on her middle finger twisted from side to side.
– Maman!
Mme Durebex glanced at me then accelerated.
– Brenda didn’t speak French very well, she said with a hint of apology in her voice.
Later, I would remember this sentence, when it became clear to me it was my French that had got me the job of English tutor to Laurent Durebex.
– Take his satchel, Mme Durebex gestured to me as we got out of the car.
Laurent pushed past me and ran up the stairs on all fours. Mme Durebex seated us at the kitchen table and banged cupboards, heated hot chocolate for her son, spilled a packet of madeleines onto a plate, all the while talking, repeating, Now, open his satchel, look in his diary to see what homework he has. And check. Don’t wait for him to tell you. He’ll get it wrong. He always forgets. Make him learn the vocab; he has tests this week, don’t you Laurent?
– No!
– Don’t be silly. I know he has tests. He must learn it all by heart.
I flicked through his books in the commotion of Mme Durebex rushing in and out, and Laurent trotting from one side of the table to the other, sitting on the bench, kneeling, sitting, spilling his hot chocolate, fiddling with his fountain pen, demanding another biscuit. Nadenne the valet stood in the background, languidly stirring soup.
– Pass Laurent another biscuit, Sh—
– Shona, I said, and got up to fetch the plate from the sideboard just behind Laurent.
Nadenne smiled at me sympathetically. He looked Indian and I smiled back at him, wanting him to know that I came from the same hot hemisphere. But we had no chance to talk.
– She’s better than Brenda, Laurent yelled to his mother, who was yelling into the telephone on the landing.
Mme Durebex put down the receiver and redialled. In pidgin French she explained to the girl called Brenda that she was no longer needed.
Misbehaviour
Each afternoon Laurent made me carry his satchel and dawdled home behind me, stuffing his face with pain au chocolat. He usually demanded two, and he got them, until one afternoon when I didn’t have any money. He chewed with his mouth open and the flaky pastry went into it like a clod into a propeller. On the crowded métro, he enjoyed the disgust this elicited; he seemed to enjoy humiliating himself. I stood far enough from him to not be associated, close enough to get vicarious delight from the offence he caused.
Laurent dragged his feet, stuck out his belly, picked his nose constantly, shoved through the crowds in the métro as though he were in a hurry to get home. But the closer we got to rue de Babylone, the more sullen he became. His footsteps slowed.
Nadenne let us into the apartment and I hung my shabby coat over the pure wool and soft leather of the Durebex’. Mme Durebex’ voice preceded her rapid steps from the kitchen.
– How did you go today, Laurent? No bad marks I hope. Did you see Hugues? What did Hugues get in his maths?
Then, seeing him at the bottom of the stairs, she would swoop.
– Look at you! Filthy! Look at how filthy he gets, Shona! Look at your shoes! Oh là là là là!
Laurent lounged on the white pile, lifting his feet one at a time so his mother could remove his shoes and socks. Over her shoulder, he watched my contemptuous face with amusement, while Mme Durebex bellowed.
– Plein de sable! T’as pas honte? Why do you have to play in the sand?
– But there was sand EVERYWHERE!
That insolent boy sprawled across the stairs – that was me. Hidden in a swarm of heartbeats, my mother’s pained sighs descending, I waited in the nook just below the landing.
I was older than Laurent. I was ten. My mother was in plaster up to her thigh after a skiing accident. Blood from the pin that bolted her ankle together seeped through the plaster in a beautiful, horrifying pattern. I made her cups of tea and sat on her bed with her, just so I could look at it.
But she wouldn’t let me go to Palm Beach with Jane McCaughey that Sunday. I’d been grounded because I’d wagged mass. I wanted to do some damage, I wanted to hurt someone. I waited for my mother to reach the landing, then I stuck my leg out across the staircase.
– You dreadful girl! Do you want to break your mother’s leg again?
– You dreadful boy! screamed Mme Durebex. You’ve got stains all over your brand new trousers!
Laurent laughed and did a big fart. I’d skulked to my bedroom and felt guilty for the next few years.
After the first few days of scrutiny in the kitchen, Mme Durebex sent us to work in Laurent’s bedroom at the foot of the stairs, opposite the little bathroom next to the front door. Like estranged members of a family, these two rooms seemed to have nothing to do with the rest of the household, though they were connected to the same hot water system and the same electrical wiring. Upstairs I never went further than the kitchen, so I had no sense of the apartment as a whole, only a sense of some of its functions.
French was our language when out of earshot of Mme Durebex. Laurent didn’t have the patience to try and express himself in English, and I didn’t have the patience to try and discipline him in a language he did not, or pretended not to, understand.
Very early on I learnt that language was my weapon. And I needed it.
We sat opposite one another at a collapsible card table. Books, pencils, rubbers, everything ended up on my side to prevent Laurent from fiddling. He would use anything to create a diversion. After the usual struggle Laurent settled down to Punch and Judy.
– The, I interrupted his reading.
– Ze.
– No. The. Touch your top teeth with your tongue. Comme ça: the.
– The, said Laurent perfectly.
Then he enhanced the sound to a raspberry across the table, splattering his books and me with spit.
I looked at him with disdain.
– MAIS J’ARRIVE PAS A LE DIRE!
I felt like one of Hergé’s characters being bellowed at by Captain Haddock; one of the Thomson Twins, my hairpiece flying to the back of the room. Laurent gripped a pencil in both hands, baring his teeth at me.
– You managed to say it before, I said in English, and my monotone dampened any hopes Laurent had of a reaction from me.
The smirk sidled off his face.
– You’re not as strict as Brenda, he said, adding slyly, I don’t like Brenda.
He began to peel a label off his book.
I looked up with interest.
– Why not?
I heard a key turning in the front door. A thin man, bent with age, appeared in the entrance. He put his briefcase down to extract the heavy circular key from the lock. He couldn’t get it out; the door squeezed shut against his foot and he began to curse. Laurent switched quickly to English.
– I don’ know. I jus’ don’ like.
With fear and hope he watched the man, who paused in the doorway of our room to peer at us through thick glasses, glasses so thick the eyes behind them loomed and blurred like fish eyes. Without a word, the man continued up the stairs. Laurent flushed, putting his head in his hands to conceal it from me.
– Her, I corrected, you don’t like
her.
Laurent ignored me. He was listening to the harsh words between his mother and the man that were filtering down from the kitchen.
When I pulled my coat off the rack that evening, a postcard from the Louvre fell out of a side pocket. I turned it over. It was dated a month before.
Dear Mum and Dad
I’ve come back to Paris. I’m sorry, but I decided in the end to cash in my return ticket. My friend Chantale is subletting a room to me, so I’m going to get a job and try to stay here for a while. Beautiful clear days – it’s getting cold.
Love, Siobhan
P.S. Letter to follow.
There was no letter to follow. I hadn’t even remembered to send the card. I had addressed it to the Elliott family, even though Paul was the only one left in Sydney. But my parents’ address was the heart of the family, and the family was like a starfish – six children, two parents, eight legs – spread across the globe. Starfish don’t die when they lose a leg: another one eventually grows in its place. My family would be functioning as ever, minus a few appendages.
I felt guilty as I walked to the métro. My mother would be worried. The last time she’d heard from me I was crying on the phone after breaking up with Matthew. But they had never liked him much anyway.
I poked my ticket into the turnstile and hurried down the stairs. The métro was coming in. They could wait. I would write to them in due time.
Things
I watched them from a distance, sitting down to dinner in the building opposite, which through evening mist was pale, unmarked. This family created the busiest window, table pushed right up against it, a meal together every night. There were never less than four children eating, sometimes six or seven. The father was usually late or not there at all. Work.
Tonight the mother got the food to the table before the children, and, unobscured by their activity, I could see the meal more clearly. Steaming bowls at each place, a tray of dark shapes in the middle of the table. When the family sat down they took things from the tray and dropped them into their soup. All those quick and hungry hands described my own childhood. Now that I knew what they were eating – phõ – I also knew where they came from – Vietnam.
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