Au Pair

by Fiona McGregor

  – Turn around. Sit still. Once more with the poem.

  He recited it with less enthusiasm this time. He knew I was angry. I wondered if he knew it wasn’t because of his misbehaviour so much as his betrayal of our ambiguous friendship. I was beginning to see my old school teachers in a different light; any figure of authority, even my parents. That phrase, when I’d gone against the grain: I’m so disappointed in you.

  I’d always imagined professional teaching precluded friendship. But then, I was more than just a teacher to Laurent and I was far less than professional.

  Laurent slouched over the table, doodling, while I got my coat from the entrance.

  – In any case, Shona, he said through the doorway, when you lie it means you make things up and that means you’re thinking and you’re always telling me, Think, Laurent.

  Away

  The days were getting shorter and colder. Night fell quickly, like dark powder sifted through the air. The street lights came on, doors opened and closed along the corridor. The impasse beneath my window remained dark and the sky glowed dimly over the rooftops. The soft orange of the clouds made me think of an Australian sky at dusk after a bushfire.

  The Durebex were in St Tropez. Chantale’s phone hadn’t been answering for over a week. I was in Paris alone.

  I was in limbo land, no longer a tourist, not really a resident. I had been overseas for more than a year and never had I thought so much about Sydney.

  Word had gotten to me, via Nora, that Dad disapproved of the way she and I had run off overseas as soon as we had our money. Well, that was nothing new. I had known it all along. Still, each time I heard about it the outrage I felt was fresh and strong, as if it were the last thing I expected to hear. Why couldn’t I get used to things? Why couldn’t I just accept things for what they were? Why couldn’t I just say, Your parents’ attitude to money + the way you handle it = one big disagreement.

  A simple enough equation.

  But I was never very good at mathematics. I had my own kind of rationale, a more organic one. The way I saw it, the handling of money in my family was a skill that lessened progressively with each child. And I was the youngest – there’s evolution for you.

  I lay on my narrow bed in my narrow room, trying to write a letter to Nora. I rubbed the ends of my hair together, conjuring up the disapproval, impelled then to self-justification, at which my mind became blank. I sought my instincts, which had gotten me here, on which I’d always lived, but tonight they were feeble and easily defeated. Footsteps went along the corridor. Somebody was clanking a pan in the room next door. Here I lay in this crummy hotel, nothing to show for my year overseas but a broken relationship and a few journals I would probably never want to read again.

  Squandering your inheritance.

  Don’t you realise how lucky you are?

  The radio went on in the room next door. I heard the occupant singing along. His voice was now very familiar to me, I spent so much time in this room. I had plenty to do in Hôtel des Etrangers. There was a plethora of demons to be entertained – demons who taunted me, judged me, assurred me I had good reasons for feeling so bad.

  I went to the laundromat. I would look at my watch then forget what time I’d put my clothes in. I’d come back and find the cycle not even halfway through, or my clothes a wet bundle in a basket. I wandered through the supermarket, examining the shelves, not seeing anything but my own unappetising thoughts, rack upon rack, not knowing what I’d come in for. Finally I’d purchase a packet of tissues or something else I didn’t really need. I didn’t need tissues – I never cried.

  Back to the hotel, passing that room at the other end of the corridor where Matthew and I had stayed, identical to the one I was in now, thinking of him each time. We used to kneel on the bed, face to smirking face, listening through old anchovy jars to the goings on in the room adjacent. All day, all night, the bed-springs squawked in there, accompanied by the maniacal laughter of a woman.

  I raised my eyebrows at Matthew.

  – It sort of sounds like sex, but it’s too monotonous.

  – Yair. Doesn’t build or anything.

  – And I can’t hear anyone else. Can you?

  – Nup. Maybe he’s a mute.

  We lowered our voices, laughing through hands.

  – Maybe it’s a she, I whispered.

  – There can’t be more than one woman in the world who laughs like that.

  – Well, maybe she’s masturbating, but she takes her bloody time.

  – Been at it since six. Must be getting sore.

  We never did figure out what went on in that room. Sometimes I stopped in the corridor on my way past. Sometimes I thought I heard her, sometimes I thought I heard someone else in there with her. Sometimes I thought the room was empty and everything I heard was really coming from another part of the hotel, another building, another part of my own mind.

  I got up off the bed and rinsed my red shirt, then hung it to dry on the back of the door. Wet, it was the colour of blood. It began to drip on the lino. No wonder we had gone mad in this hotel, the room so small we had to climb on the bed to pass one another. We tripped over each other, we tripped over our own luggage. Matthew’s bag of tools wouldn’t fit under the bed.

  – I nearly broke my neck, Matthew!

  – I’m sorry.

  – Why’d you have to bring them anyway?

  – I’m a sculptor. They’re my pen and paper. Of course I’d bring them.

  – Well, they’re not much use to you here, are they?

  – I’ll need them when I get a studio.

  – Matthew, we can’t even get anywhere to bloody live. How do you expect to get a studio?

  Matthew concentrated on the cigarette he was rolling.

  – I feel so bloody useless, he said in a wounded voice.

  – Maybe we’re just kidding ourselves, I said snidely, hating what we’d come to.

  I hated us, I hated him, I hated myself most of all. We left Paris in spring, we went away to Spain. I didn’t want to leave Paris, but I didn’t want to leave Matthew either, and the two of them didn’t get on together. I felt a split beginning inside me, like when you break a nail and the split will only grow. Eventually it has to break off. I felt the absence of Matthew now, but I also felt the pain of being with him, as it was then.

  Spain didn’t heal things. There was nothing much to do in that small Andalusian town. You could lie around smoking hash, or visit the cathedral. I couldn’t go into the cathedral due to the pathological revulsion I suffered the minute I stepped over the threshold of any church. Hash never did much for me, or to me, mores the pity, so my options were limited.

  I read. I took solace in My Last Breath. I loved Bunuel, I loved to see the bourgeoisie and the Catholic Church turned on their heads.

  But I didn’t like it in that town. I had permanent indigestion from the oily food. I didn’t like our conspicuousness. I was sure everyone saw our dissatisfaction with one another. I was sure they saw my awful secret: I was falling out of love.

  I pulled out the plug and watched the red soapy water recede. My secret, my failure, my sin, falling out of love. Away it drained, down the plug-hole. I tried to replace the plug but the water rushed on down, the plug lunging from side to side. Into the sewers of Europe the water was sucked, and down my love went, sucking my fingers with it. I dragged them back.

  The man next door began singing along with a flamenco tune. He sounded happy. The same sounds came from his sink and stovetop every night, as though he were making the same meal, at the same time, and had done so for years. So easily dissatisfied, this girl in the room adjacent. His voice got louder.

  I could have stayed in that Spanish town just for the music. Filtering out from the bar across the road, a tune so melancholy and beautiful it made me swoon. I looked at Matthew. He was feeling it too. I went over to him and the song enveloped us. We took off our clothes and pressed our skin together.

  Reliving the moment now,
I realised it was then that the reliving of moments past had begun. Because as time went on, I had to recall that song. More and more querulous, more selfish, going after my own pleasure, I looked after myself and Matthew just kept up with me. I wanted the song, I wanted ambience, no light to see the Matthew I was making love to because it was no longer him. I was making love to the music, I was making love to myself, to the memory of love. I was retreating from him, and disappearing inside myself.

  Did he notice? If he did he didn’t show it, which only added to my resentment. Matthew always wanted to smooth things over, just like my mother, just like a lot of people I suppose. I never wanted to be like that; I wanted to work things out and fix them all up. Matthew thought every bad mood, every argument, was temporary, whereas for me each had infinite resonance.

  I stared at the page. Nora hadn’t heard from me in ages, and so much had happened I didn’t know where to begin.

  You call me ‘steady stoic’ hanging on here in spite of everything. But I feel so fickle, I feel so aimless. I’m back in this hotel where Matthew and I stayed before we left Paris. That was when things started going off between us. All the bad memories are flooding back. Tonight I feel sure I really have fallen out of love and that was the beginning of it, but when I got back to Paris in September, when I last wrote to you, I was really missing him. Which is the real version? I don’t know, I don’t know, it’s hard to let go.

  I waggled the pen, hoping it would emit a colourful Parisian anecdote for my sister. Ink leaked down my fingers. I turned on the tap and waited for it to get hot. The small mirror above the sink steamed up.

  I washed my inky hands then rubbed the mirror with the cuff of my shirt. If I crouched, I could see my whole face. An almost triangular face, tapering to a pointed chin. Grey-white skin and dark hair, no prominent features except the eyes, deep set, glooming out at me. But how much of what I saw when I looked at this face was what I already knew and automatically applied to the image? Which was the real face and which my flawed vision? Tonight’s face wore a mask of the mirror’s flaws. A diagonal crack through the centre of the mirror robbed me of an eye and gave me one high cheekbone. My skin was jaundiced with age, my forehead was warped, and a dark birthmark slid up and down my cheek.

  I had trimmed my hair in this mirror with a pair of nail scissors. It took a long time to get through it, thick with splits and kinks.

  Standing up straight, I was eye level with my cosmetics and condiments on the shelf, and the mirror reflected my chest. My breasts were full and firm in anticipation of bleeding. Looking at myself, I thought of Matthew. I can’t believe what a sunken chest you’ve got, he would say, twirling his fingers in there. This, Siobhan, is your solar plexus, the centre of your being. He covered it with his calloused hand. Your soul …

  The centre of my being had a mole smack bang in the middle of it. I wondered where Princess Grace’s mole had been. I couldn’t bear to touch mine; I was convinced it would turn cancerous one day.

  Segement

  The leftover dahl in my one battered pot looked like effluvium from a wound. In Hôtel des Etrangers I felt like I was corroding within, and so sustained my exterior in compensation. I looked after myself well. I shopped and cooked carefully: salads, vegetables, grains and pulses. I ate wholemeal pasta and wholemeal bread. I fossicked through the little Asian and Arab grocery stores for the sort of rice and spices I liked. I always cooked too much, I always ate it all. I was getting fat on all this healthy food. But my excessive food habits were just another indication of the stoicism that was engulfing me.

  Once, when I was very young, I made myself a huge bowl of Weetbix and stewed fruit for breakfast and couldn’t eat it all. Dad said, Never mind, Siobhan, we’ll put it in the fridge and you can eat it for breakfast tomorrow. The next day it tasted so foul I swamped it with more weetbix and fruit to get it down. Still, there was too much and I couldn’t finish it. Dad said again, Never mind, Siobhan, you can eat it for breakfast tomorrow. The next day Mum intervened.

  She wasn’t too early; I’d sure learnt my lesson.

  But I was my own teacher now. I wouldn’t eat that dahl this time – I left it there, encrusted pus in the old pot.

  My father was a Depression man, his daughter a girl prone to depression.

  I lay on my bed with a book. I could hear keys in locks and footsteps down the corridor. It was Saturday night and I wished I were going out too. What about Bar Sangria down on Rue de la Roquette? Matthew would never go in there. Too trendy, he said. But I’d always wanted to. A bit of lipstick, some money in my pocket, all those cute French boys. An exciting night in Paris was waiting for me just outside my door.

  In I walked, immaculately dressed. I dropped my Bloody Mary all over my shirt. I sat in a corner furtively picking my nose, realising only afterwards they’d all been able to see me in the mirror.

  No cracks of light under the doors as I walked down the corridor to the toilet. Everybody was out. The occupant of room twenty-seven had finally taken the sign ‘Je dors, merci’ off his door. It had been there a week.

  I sealed the letter to Nora. The envelope stayed blank. I had hoped my address book would turn up once I’d unpacked properly, but now I knew I’d have to ring home again. It was a daunting prospect. I crouched over the toilet, feeling my thighs goose-pimple with cold. A man downstairs yelled, Bon! Je pars, and there was a rustling in the lightwell of rain beginning, slowly, softly.

  That was lucky. Who wants to go out in the rain?

  I was always up early scanning the column in the back pages of Libération. The rooms for rent required a hefty bond. Sometimes there was an obligation to buy the furniture already there, or they wanted to see a carte de séjour, at which I quickly made an excuse and hung up. Most often I stood in the phone booth redialling a number for up to an hour, waiting for the engaged tone to relent. Each of those beeps flashed a picture of someone else in Paris, phone to ear, trying to find somewhere to live. When you got through the place had gone.

  I was from Sydney, bright brassy flippant Sydney. I thought the metropolis pulse was my heartbeat. But every body’s and every city’s heart beats with a different rhythm. Sydney moved with a slow chaos, Sydney’s motor was made of spare parts, a sort of jalopy you could ride no-hands, distracted by all the beautiful views. Sydney was languid, ambience frenetic – lying around on a hot day with the whine of insects around you. And permeating my Sydney was family, family with all its comforts and constraints.

  In Paris I was on my own, no family help, no family hindrance.

  Cold Paris. They say Paris is rich with things to do and see, a city of beauty and romance. Paris is a sleek automobile. The duco is chipping. From it come people lean and mean. Slick with haste to get the last métro, the crunchiest baguette, the most prestigious job, the most comfortable apartment. Paris, city of dogs marking out their territory, snarling at anyone who covets their bone. Faces sour with intent rush past, and I rush with them. Day-to-day survival is so important you can not afford to lose your grip for a moment. Paris, city of high standards, where most people just survive.

  I looked at noticeboards in bookshops, I went back to the American church. I lined up with all the other hopefuls, hoping against hope. How could I have forgotten, rushing back like I did, that it was this accommodation problem that had driven Matthew and I from Paris in the first place? Foolish idealist, why did I bother, frittering away time and money? What did I expect?

  The patronne was at the door every time I passed. Did I go to work today? Where was my husband? Was he going to rejoin me? Was I looking for an apartment? Ah c’est très difficile à Paris. You know Monsieur Untel in room seventeen? Well, he has been looking for nine months, and he is Parisian! She hoped I was not doing my washing in my room; that was absolutely forbidden. I must be back before eleven at night because the doors were locked then and no exceptions were made. What was that I was carrying? A picture? It was against the rules to bring things back to the hotel. Nothing but your
personal luggage; this was not a storage space.

  It was like being at boarding school, sitting over my quadrillé notebook at the tiny table. The trough bed. The rules stuck on the back of the door and my childlike fear at the pink stain my dripping shirt had left on the lino. My money had not arrived and I stole tins of tuna from the Felix Potin on the corner. I had finished my bag of brussel sprouts but their farty smell lingered in the room.

  This is no good, I said to myself lying in the hotel room. Remember where you are, Siobhan. Paris, city of dogs and down-and-outs. Winter was coming and the clochards would die at night if the métro stations were closed. Paris, exotic and full of hidden delights for those who searched. Paris impervious, Paris charming. The Seine glowed at night and the Marais looked beautiful under snow. I wanted another winter here, at the very least.

  A tap creaked on and off, somebody cleared their throat with jarring regularity. I lay on the bed, bored, rootless, listening to two women and a man talking in the corridor about chercher un logement. I’d been glad when the Durebex went away, but now, after a couple of weeks, even their company seemed preferable to just my own.

  I hated the desperation of this city, I hated what it reduced me to. There was no consolation in being surrounded by others in the same boat, just more incitement to bailing out. But I couldn’t. The lower I was squashed, the more determined I became; like a repressed child, I only wanted to hit back harder.

  In the corridor the man began to recount an anecdote about the strange habits of an old neighbour of his. The neighbour would bring a woman home on the days his wife worked at the hospital. The man reproduced the sounds of whipping and screaming he’d hear coming from the neighbour’s apartment.

  The two women tittered. One of them fell back against my door. The man’s voice became low and urgent.

  – Un jour, j’ai appelé la police.

  Yes, I was going to stay in Paris. I wanted to understand this place better. I wanted to understand myself better and I thought I could here. My visa would expire soon. I would take up the Durebex’ offer and go to the Alps with them. It would give me a chance to renew my visa in Geneva.