Au Pair

by Fiona McGregor

  With a disappointed sigh, Laurent came back to the table.

  I felt a bit disappointed too. Laurent would have made a good playmate, but I had to work with him, and combining the two wasn’t possible.

  Mme Durebex called me up to the kitchen before I left.

  – I’ve just been speaking to another friend who wants somebody to teach her children English.

  Finger to the corner of her mouth, she watched me.

  – I underquoted you before, I said arrogantly, I should charge seventy.

  She took a step backwards.

  – Okay, okay, I’ll tell her.

  I wasn’t going to let Mme Durebex walk all over me.

  I went to the toilet before I left that evening. As usual, I used Laurent’s bathroom downstairs.

  The door opened.

  – I’m in here! I called brightly.

  Mme Durebex walked in on me.

  It’s practically impossible to stop pissing once you’ve started. I certainly couldn’t. Mme Durebex opened the cupboard above my head and got out a couple of towels. Dumbfounded, I clutched my toilet-paper and waited for her to leave. I thought of Nora, pissing with the door open at my going-away party, pissing with the door open anywhere, or in full view in laneways, any time.

  Mme Durebex came back in immediately with a book. I had no spare hand to take it. She put the book on the sink, glancing at my spread thighs.

  – Here. I’ll leave this with you. It’s a book Laurent’s English teacher gave him today.

  Where was my sister now that I needed her? Where did she learn to walk around the house naked while the rest of our family never really got over our body shame? But if Nora were me, here, now, she would have invited Mme Durebex to stick her head in the toilet, not just in the toilet door.

  Mme Durebex turned again on her way out.

  – And Shona, I’d like you to decide by the end of the week whether or not you’re coming to the Alps with us for Christmas.

  Little Lies

  Mid-morning in Sydney was the best time to ring my parents because my mother would be at home, my father at the hospital.

  But it was my father who answered, accepting the operator’s request for a reverse charge call with a harried, Very well!

  – Are you working? was the first thing he said.

  – A bit. Teaching a bit of English.

  – Well, that’s an improvement since I last spoke to you. How many hours a week?

  – It varies.

  The cord that carried his voice to me was snarled, forcing my head close to the phone box. My eyes perused the emergency numbers and renseignements.

  – Only twelve this week, for instance, I added.

  It was closer to eight. It made me wonder what I did with the rest of my time, because lately life just seemed to be waiting to go to the school, teaching Laurent, coming home, waiting to go to the school, and so on.

  – Hmm. And is this going to continue forever?

  – Dad, you know I haven’t got any papers. It’s illegal to work in France without papers. I’m lucky to have this much work.

  I was standing at the bottom of the stairs, next to the toilets in Bar Piaf. Two girls came down and put a franc in the toilet door, then went in together.

  – How is everybody? I said.

  Dad listed the latest. He had just performed a successful transplant. Caroline’s case in New York was in the newspaper. Mum was teaching again. Paul was working very hard, as usual. David had gone to the Middle East and Mum was worried. Nora was working on her thesis, he assumed, and Thomas was doing he didn’t know what.

  I made the appropriate noises in response, thinking, But how is everybody?

  – Is that all, then? Dad said gruffly. Phone calls cost an arm and a leg at this time of day.

  The equivalent expression in French was Ça coûte les yeux de la tête. I was going to explain this to my father, but I didn’t think he’d see the humour.

  – And amputations are not my speciality, as you well know, Siobhan, he added.

  – I was wondering if you had Nora’s address handy, Dad. I’ve lost my address book. I need Matthew’s number in London too.

  Dad’s voice hardened.

  – I had the impression you’d finished with that business, Siobhan.

  Why was he in such a bad mood? There’d been a paragraph in the paper about freak storms in Sydney. Maybe they’d torn the roof off, or stripped the house bare so he’d be shelling out for a new paint job three years too early. Maybe the mould had ruined his medical encyclopedias, maybe he’d seen a rude movie on television the night before. Maybe he didn’t like me.

  My nails were scratching a word into the doorframe. Halfway through the letter ‘K’ I stopped, ashamed of the word that, so normal to me, was stupendous blasphemy in my father’s company. I put my hand in my pocket.

  – I haven’t spoken to him for almost three months, Dad, I said through my teeth.

  – Well, I have no idea where it is. You’ll have to ring back and speak to your mother later.

  The two girls came out of the toilet looking guilty. I put down the phone and followed them up the stairs.

  I stood on the moving footway in the métro, my pack at my feet, back aching. People zipped past me. It was getting late but I couldn’t move. I felt like I was on a treadmill, travelling along the brightly lit tunnel, travelling along memories of last winter.

  When Matthew arrived in December, almost a year ago, I already knew which exits were the quickest, the least crowded carriage to get in, the most efficient changes, the stations where you could jump the turnstiles without getting caught by the controlleurs. I picked him up from Charles de Gaulle at eight a.m. and took him into the city on the express train.

  He was surprised when I jumped. I encouraged him to follow. At Les Halles I dashed through the pneumatic doors behind a commuter. They squeezed shut between me and Matthew. I went around to the side. He stood there cursing, dark rings of jet lag under his eyes. An African approached and I asked him to take Matthew through, but Matthew wasn’t quick enough and the doors closed on his backpack. The African’s friend, behind, didn’t have a ticket either.

  – Poussez! Tirez! Allez!

  He pushed Matthew, and I pulled him, until we got him through. The doors wheezed in protest as the second man squirmed after Matthew.

  They walked off laughing, shaking their dreads. But Matthew wore a look of utter helplessness and confusion that soon wiped the smile off my face. I had never seen him like that before. The expression returned frequently in the ensuing weeks. I wondered whether he had always looked like that and I had only just noticed. Was I seeing the real Matthew for the first time, or was the real Matthew obscured by his foreign surroundings? Was I seeing something new about myself?

  I had been in Paris almost two months. I was looking after an apartment for a friend of a friend near Canal St Martin. Once there, safely inside, we held each other as we used to in Sydney. We spent the first few days in bed, talking, eating and drinking, dreaming together, making love. We only ventured out for more wine and food.

  – Where’s the bottle shop again, Siobhan?

  – Prisunic, on the corner. It’s a supermarket but you can get wine there.

  – How do you say it?

  – Vin.

  – Van. And how do you say, Do you have …?

  – Don’t worry. It’s a supermarket. You just pay.

  – But what if I can’t find it or something?

  He was a dejected looking figure in his old japara. I went and gave him a hug.

  – Why are you so nervous, Matthew? It’s just a supermarket.

  My words sounded hollow and false. Matthew’s hands didn’t leave his pockets.

  – You go, he said.

  I changed at République. Music beckoned, and in the next corridor I came upon a group of musicians from the Andes. They had played a lot at St Michel last winter, then disappeared. I thought they’d been deported but here they were
again, five small brown men vigorously strumming five small guitars, voices soaring in unison. Matthew and I used to seek them out. On a good day, finding them, or a mime artist, or the drummers from Guadeloupe, we’d be underground for hours.

  We holidayed around the galleries, had snowball fights when the first snow fell; together we walked the length and breadth of the city. But by the time the friend of a friend returned and we had to leave the apartment, we were growing restless and eager to settle down. Matthews sculpting fingers had become soft with so much leisure. That was good for me but not for him. He needed somewhere to work, we needed somewhere to live. We had answered every ad for accommodation we’d seen in bookshops and newspapers, but nothing had come our way.

  The first hotel we investigated was the one I had stayed in almost a decade before with my family, after the skiing trip. It was in the sixth, near Beaux-Arts. Matthew and I looked at our reflections in the gleaming window, not daring to go in.

  – This is far too posh, Matthew scowled.

  – I can’t believe how expensive it is. It must’ve been done up.

  – You just didn’t realise back then. Your standards have dropped.

  We stayed in a hotel in the eighteenth that creaked all night with the comings and goings of hookers. The sheets were lime-green and the texture of shower curtains. We moved to another at St Paul. The shower cubicle in our room reminded me of Dr Who’s time machine. I wished it really were. I would have asked to go to the Ritz in a time long enough ago for it to have been affordable. But we were only cleaner when we stepped out of it. We had to move from this hotel after a week because the room was booked.

  Eventually we found the hotel near Bastille that I was going back to now, nine months later. I picked up my pack and walked out of the station.

  Hôtel des Etrangers was cheap, clean and well located, and you could cook in the rooms. All these assets made it hard to get a room there, and I had come here twice in the last week to wheedle and charm my way in. You paid weekly and they preferred long-term tenants, so I said I wanted to stay at least a month, although I intended to be out of there sooner. We swapped lies. To keep her tenants grateful, each week the patronne would say she didn’t know if the room would be free the next. There was a booking, but perhaps something could be arranged.

  The patronne remembered me.

  – And your husband? she asked.

  – He’s in London. Working.

  She stepped forward to pursue conversation. I smiled dumbly and went up to my room. It was on the fourth floor, near the stairs, room twenty. Twenty, my age when I had stayed here with Matthew on the same floor, up the other end.

  Hôtel des Etrangers had not changed. Its clientele was mainly French; some had lived there for years. The yellow light on the landing was always on. Every Sunday the tantalising odours of the proprietors’ family lunch would waft up the stairs to mingle with the smells of gas and cleaning fluid. The bottom of the lightwell was an eclectic rubbish dump. Amongst the bottles, papers and used tampons there was still the chair with three legs; there was that old notebook, puffed and warped, that I had always wanted to climb down and rescue, and, wilted against a bucket, the only bit of red in the refuse, were my favourite underpants that Matthew had thrown down one day after an argument.

  I didn’t tell Mme Durebex of my move. When she employed me, one of the requirements had been having a telephone so that I could be contacted in case of an emergency. But all that was in my room was a dirty sink. I was terrified of losing this job – there seemed to be no other prospects for me in Paris – without it I would have to go home to Sydney. So I rang Mme Durebex every day to check arrangements and avoid the possibility of being found out.

  One day she took us in the Rolls to meet Laurent after sport because there was supposed to be a student demonstration on Boulevard des Invalides and she feared for his safety.

  But it was a cold, quiet afternoon and the fiercest demonstration was going on in the car.

  Laurent told Mme Durebex he got seven in his English test.

  – Out of twenty? So you failed!

  Laurent’s hand caressed the collar of his mother’s mink coat as she shouted at him.

  – Oh là là! T’as pas honte? This is serious. What are we going to do? Dis-moi, Laurent, qu’est-ce que tu as dans la tête?

  – No! He held up an index finger, his face bright with an idea. I was wrong! I got fourteen! No! Fifteen! No, it was fourteen.

  Mme Durebex accelerated, braked, accelerated, braked again. She smiled sweetly at her son; how good he was for getting such a mark! She wagged her finger and the ruby flashed; how naughty he was for frightening her like that! She hoped he were telling the truth this time.

  She turned down an unfamiliar street, oh là là-ing at the police van hovering behind us. Laurent begged for his pain au chocolat but his mother would not hear of it: he was going to the dentist.

  – I couldn’t go swimming today. I had to play tennis instead, Laurent whimpered.

  Mme Durebex’ mouth crinkled with suspicion. Tennis was nearly all girls.

  – Why? she said. And then, Dis-moi, who’s the best at tennis?

  Laurent looked out the window, his hand still embedded in the mink coat.

  – LAURENT!

  – I DON’T KNOW!

  Mme Durebex manoeuvred the tank in and out of back streets, searching for a park. She said it was a disgrace the way cars and bikes were parked on both sides of the street, bumper to bumper, making it impossible for people like us to drive down them safely. There was a crash, and through the rear vision mirror I saw a motor scooter topple into the gutter. Mme Durebex swore and sped back onto the boulevard.

  – Ah yes, she nodded firmly. You didn’t go swimming because I don’t want you coming home with wet hair in this cold. I don’t want you getting sick. Did you play outside, Laurent? Did you put on your jacket? Were you cold afterwards?

  Laurent widened his eyes.

  – I was freezing.

  – Oh là là là là!

  She nagged and nagged, and Laurent’s hand twirled obliviously through her hair as he made faces at a group of children on the footpath who were trying to see through the tinted windows.

  Up in the waiting-room, while Laurent was having his teeth examined, Mme Durebex pulled out his cahier to examine the test. She muttered away, Eight out of ten, ten out of ten, two out of five? I sat in the seat furthest from her and buried my face in a faded old Paris Match, hoping this gave me an air of studious detachment. I read an article about Princess Grace having a mole removed. She was recovering in her Monaco mansion.

  Then Laurent’s cahier slid into view. Mme Durebex’ finger jabbed the page.

  – I don’t see how he only got fourteen with such good marks, do you Shona? I don’t see why the teacher gave him that total.

  She paced about before me, her heels disappearing into the white pile.

  The dentist appeared in the doorway.

  – Madame Durebex?

  – The teacher must have made a mistake, Shona, Mme Durebex said to me before she went into the surgery. Calculate it again!

  I obeyed. I recalculated once, twice, three times. I didn’t trust my own mathematics. But each time the result was .5 less than the total the teacher had written.

  The dental nurse ushered Mme Durebex and her son back out of the surgery, Mme Durebex exclaiming, Only one filling! I know children with eight or nine!

  She asked me about the mark as we drove home, and I assured her it was correct.

  – Je n’en reviens pas, she shook her head. Are you sure?

  Nadenne let us in and Mme Durebex set to work on Laurent’s shoelaces, saying to me, Now, Shona. Have you decided whether or not you’re coming to the Alps with us? Can you ski? Well then, you had better buy yourself some ski clothes.

  – Aiiiiee! screeched Laurent. You scratched my toe!

  I told her I would get some clothes, knowing I wouldn’t. If I skied I would wear jeans.


  Mme Durebex put Laurent in his favourite track pants, the yellow ones with a hole in the crotch. Laurent liked to put his feet on the table and his fingers in this hole. He would fiddle with his balls, laughing through his teeth, looking at me sideways for a reaction. A new trick was to flick his fountain pen all over the room.

  But I didn’t react to anything. I held it all in.

  No sooner had I settled Laurent down to work than he was pleading to go to the toilet. In the habit of disbelieving everything he said, I insisted he finish reading the Rimbaud poem he had to memorise. But a bad smell began to drift my way. I allowed him to go, feeling terribly guilty at having assumed the worst yet again. I tried to think of a treat I could give him when he came back.

  For some reason he went upstairs to his parents’ bathroom, and stayed there for a long time. Maybe he had constipation, that ailment suffered by so many French. Poor little boy. I began to play with one of his computer games. Engrossed in bombing the enemy, I was unaware of Mme Durebex until she was almost in the room. She entered saying something to the absent Laurent.

  – Isn’t Laurent upstairs? I said, shoving the game under a book. He told me he was going to the toilet.

  Surprisingly unperturbed, Mme Durebex clacked back up the stairs. I heard Laurent run into the kitchen and whisper loudly.

  – But Maman, she’s going!

  – No I’m not. I’m still here, I called.

  – Shona! Mme Durebex screamed over the landing. Never leave when there is still work to do!

  Laurent bounded down the stairs and gasped at the sight of me.

  – Oh! But she is still here! Oh!

  – Of course I am. You know I wasn’t leaving.

  – Has he learnt his poem, Shona? You’re not to leave before he knows it by heart!

  Laurent took his place at the table and recited the poem word for word. He looked up smugly. I mustered my most authoritarian voice.

  – Never do that again.

  – But I thought you were going.

  – You did not. You lied.

  – No!

  Laurent turned in his chair and yelled towards the open door,

  – Honestly Shona, I thought you were going!