Au Pair

by Fiona McGregor

  He danced back in, waving his hands vaudeville fashion. Bread flew from his mouth as he sang, Bye! Bye-bye, Shona!

  I should have returned the farewell then and there. But I couldn’t stop myself.

  – Who do you expect to clean this up? I snapped.

  Laurent spat out his mouthful. It wasn’t much – the blob landed on his sock. He pulled up the foot and caressed the back of his shin with it.

  – The boys don’ know how to clean.

  – They do. My brothers do, for instance.

  That was a lie. I wondered who it came from.

  – But your brothers are stupid, Laurent said.

  – What?

  – I’ve saw their photo.

  – Oh, spare me!

  – Anyway, my father—

  – Your father, Laurent, is not like everybody else.

  I may as well have been talking to myself – he held up a finger.

  – Hé, Shona!

  – What?

  – Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose!

  He went careening down the stairs. He landed at the bottom with a whoop, then went into the study. The television came on, so loud I could hear it up here. Un film de Billy Wildeur. Little bastard. I hoped his father would wake up and go in there. And I hoped he would tweak his ear. Hard.

  I began to clean up Laurent’s mess. I found that it wasn’t so difficult to clean with one hand, which annoyed me even more. At least I couldn’t sweep the floor. That pleased me. I heard the front door slam – Mme Durebex arriving home. She retested the acoustics in the high foyer with my name. I stuck my head out the door and yelled back.

  – I’m in the kitchen, cleaning up after Laurent!

  She came up.

  – Look at the mess he makes, I tried to gesticulate. He eats like a pig! This time he’s gone too far, and I can’t do anything about it!

  She nodded vaguely and left the kitchen, finger to the corner of her mouth. The staccato of her heels receded down the staircase, then her voice trumpeted through the chalet.

  – Laur-ENT! Cette fois je vais te FRAPPER!

  Silence followed. Alone in the kitchen, I searched the drawers for the implements I would need. I opened and took and shut and opened, cursing this French family. I put a carving knife in my sling, a ladle, a wooden spoon. I took the three sharpest vegetable knives, coffee spoons, some forks and an egg whisk. I got out a couple of tea-towels and stuffed them around the cutlery in my sling, then I stomped downstairs to my room. It was hard to stomp in thick socks, with a sprained knee and a very broken wrist, and muffle the clinking of booty at the same time.

  I took two painkillers. I waited for bliss. Nothing happened. I took two more. I picked up my journal but the last page was written on. I put it back on the desk and perused the stack of books I’d brought with me. I’d read them all. I put them in my pack, along with my journal.

  One by one, I took down Paul’s photos. Sydney, my family – I’d come here to escape them, yet I’d had the photos on the wall all this time. I was good at denial, I’d been taught by experts. I put the photos back in their envelope, and I put the envelope into the pocket of my pack.

  The photos gone, I felt the absence of comfort, and the comfort of absence. Alone again, on the move back to Paris, I didn’t know what I was going towards. But I knew what I’d come from, and that I loved it as much as I hated it. Cosy, stifling, oppressive, just like this narrow room with its overactive heater.

  And just in case I did manage to get away, I had ended up in another trap. Once again, I was playing a role in a family.

  Jesus bloody Christ, Siobhan, you’re an au pair girl! It’s not a job.

  My own private hell – that inner circle of family. Laurent was right: boys didn’t clean because they were boys. Fathers were mean and fathers were distant because they were fathers. Mothers were pushed and mothers were pushy because they were mothers. Children were naughty because they were children. The circle of family, tight and vicious. I wanted out.

  The circle of family spinning around me. I felt dizzy, I couldn’t take my eyes off it. No beginning, no end, circles just go on and on. There was no escape.

  But then, there were no blood ties with the Durebex.

  I figured the Durebex owed me, in the same way Tom had said Dad owed us. I was going to make sure I got paid properly; I was going to get my Christmas bonus. I lay back and turned off the light, longing for sleep to overtake me.

  Revenge, revenge, I dreamt of revenge. I could get help in that African voodoo shop opposite my Montmartre apartment. They sold voodoo dolls that came with their own little packets of pins. There were all those magic elixirs to choose from. They swam across the back of my eyelids. Oils to rub into the skin – strength, beauty, long life, infusions of wisdom, essences – you only needed a couple of drops on the tongue. There were spells for parents to control their children, spells for children to take revenge on their parents. There were bottles of bonne chance, amour, argent.

  I woke in a tangle of bedclothes. It was dark outside. I went to the toilet, squinting against the bright light, opening my eyes gradually, adjusting to my surrounds. Yellow spots like planets bordered my vision. The light globe reappeared in the mirror and on the white tiled wall that Honorée brought to such a brilliant shine.

  I went back to my room. It looked as though a fight had been going on in there: pillows on the floor, blankets twisted, my pack half full.

  I looked at my watch – four a.m. The second hand ticked around and around the white face.

  Surely the world was a bigger place than that which can be contained in one circle. A stone is thrown into water and the ripples extend.

  Slowly I packed, neatly, carefully. I smoothed the blankets and got back under them, and I waited for dawn.

  Revenge

  We left the next night. The driver had fitted new chains around the tyres. Cautiously, he turned down the driveway and darkness swallowed the chalet behind us.

  – These chains are good! said the driver.

  We took the back road, a narrow ledge in the declivity of pine forest. We ascended into the mountains. When we came to an outcrop, or drove around a gorge, the orange lights of a town would appear beneath us, settled among the foothills like low cloud.

  No one spoke. The Mercedes was smooth along the twisting road and there was no other traffic. The only sounds were the hum of the car heating, and the beating of my own heart in terror at the theft I was carrying out.

  We pulled into the car park at Geneva airport. The driver turned off the ignition and got out. Laurent struggled with his seatbelt till Mme Durebex leant forward and released him. The driver opened the door and Laurent scampered away between the rows of cars, his mother calling him while she waited for the driver to come to her door. I slid across the seat after her.

  It was cold outside, it was freezing, my clothes no more than tissue paper between the wind and my nervous perspiration.

  The driver went ahead with the two heaviest bags. I took the lightest one on my right arm, my good arm, and Mme Durebex was left staggering under my pack and two suitcases.

  She stopped and shifted them around. She looked at me resentfully.

  – Your bag is so heavy, Shona! What on earth have you put in it?

  I limped alongside her through the car park. Laurent’s head popped up between two cars, pulled a face at us, then disappeared again.

  – What’s in it? she repeated. Rocks?

  – Books, I said. Most of my baggage is books.

  The driver came back through the glass doors, and took her bags. I followed them into the airport.

  A sign flashed above the baggage check: ‘Police order – all metal objects, electronic devices …’

  My spencer was stuck to my back. I might have been in Sydney – this muggy weather of my anxiety. Mme Durebex hovered around our bags, fiddling with the fastenings, examining them intently. Did she have x-ray vision? Laurent appeared and demanded she take him to the
cafeteria. Go, I urged silently, please go.

  – I’ll see the bags through, then I’ll join you in there, I said to Mme Durebex.

  I was thinking of the cutlery, the carving knife and ladle, wrapped in tea-towels. I’d also helped myself to bed linen from the cupboard in the room adjacent; I’d buried this under a bathrobe and a dark green cashmere jumper that reeked so strongly of mothballs I imagined I could still smell it, here at the baggage check. I imagined Mme Durebex had smelt it too, not just the mothballs, but the dark green cashmere, whatever dark green cashmere smelt like. Underneath everything, the jewel in the crown, was the suede jacket.

  Surely my bag would set the alarms off; it would be opened and all these things would spill out. Quelle honte.

  I watched the man at the baggage check weigh my bag. He looked at my passport, frowned, then reached into a drawer. He weighed the bag again and consulted a clipboard. Someone behind me was pressing their bag into the back of my knee, my sprained knee. I thought it would give way. The Durebex’ bags went through. The man spoke to the woman on his left. Without turning, I shifted so my good leg was against that bag behind me and I applied pressure. The man asked to see my passport again. He flicked through it. He pointed to a page covered in stamps.

  – Your visa has expired, he said.

  His eyes were little black stones. I took the passport and turned its pages. I handed it back to him.

  – You were looking at the old one, I said.

  He examined the passport, closed it, then handed it back to me. He stuck a label on my bag, then it wobbled off along the conveyor belt.

  Relieved, I went to the cafeteria. As I sat down my imagination commenced a new torture of searches at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. I couldn’t eat the sandwiches offered to me. My body was rigid: I felt as though I would never eat again, as though I never had.

  Suddenly Mme Durebex exclaimed, Laurent’s toys! Where are they?

  She put down her sandwich and glared at both of us. Then she answered herself.

  – It’s not me who was looking after them! Laurent, aware he should be cross too, deflected the glare onto me.

  – They’re your toys, I shrugged, glad for yet another pointless drama.

  I inclined my body to look around our feet.

  – They’re under your chair, I said to Laurent.

  Our flight was called. Laurent went through, followed by his mother. I went through last of all, and the metal detectors rang.

  The security guard motioned me into a cubicle. I was grateful for my limp and my sling, concealing as they did the trembling of my body. I saw the face of Mme Durebex looking at me, horrified, her hand on Laurent’s shoulder, and I held onto this image as if it were the last.

  It was only inside the cubicle, face to po-face with the Swiss woman in uniform running her instrument up and down my body, preparing to strip search me, that I remembered the lump of hash in my wallet. That stupid lump of hash left over from Spain all those months ago, resurfacing now like a bad memory.

  The metal detector paused at the top of my jeans, ringing. My heart rose in my throat.

  – It must be the change in my pockets, I said to the woman. My bracelet, my belt buckle.

  She looked me sternly in the eye.

  – Your shoelace is undone.

  I realised the thing to do was turn my injuries to my advantage.

  I did my helpless broken-arm shrug.

  The guard bent and did up my lace, then she thanked me and told me I could go.

  Mme Durebex carried my overnight bag onto the plane. She kept it on her lap for the whole flight and she kept finding reasons to rummage through it. She needed a pen, she wanted a nail file, she needed a place to put Laurent’s toy cars. I assumed Laurent’s toy bag was under his chair again, but I was strapped into my seat so I couldn’t check.

  Yes, I was sure she was on to me. I supposed she supposed I’d taken off with the family silver, or a couple of those insipid watercolours of marsh birds that hung in the entrance of the chalet. She was probably thinking I had the pewter goblets, more like weapons than things to drink from, or the set of napkin rings that resembled instruments of torture. But how much less embarrassing it would be if things like that were found. Better a thief who knew riches than a scrounger of scraps like me.

  There was nothing in that overnight bag that wasn’t mine, but I was too eager to surrender it. I was acting like someone with guilt to atone for. I was trying to prove I had done nothing wrong, so giving rise to the notion that I had. My subservience to Mme Durebex was never more apparent.

  Au pair – on equal terms. Impossible.

  At that moment it seemed to me I’d always acted like that, I’d always felt I’d done something wrong. Every step I took, all my life, the signposts of Right and Wrong were shoved down my throat. It was a habit I had acquired. Stepping out on my own, I was still looking for them.

  When exactly had this notion been planted? There were lapses of virtue around every corner of my childhood. That’s what confession was for. That’s what parents were for. Maybe it went back even further. I looked at my apple tart glumly. I didn’t know where all this began.

  I took a bite of my apple tart. It tasted old. I forced down a mouthful and left the rest. I couldn’t eat my airplane dinner. Mme Durebex ate her millefeuille while Laurent fussed over his. Maman, it’s stale. Then she ate his millefeuille, then she asked would I mind very much giving my apple tart to Laurent? Laurent finished it happily. Mme Durebex tightened the plastic over their leftovers, hesitated over mine, then put all three platters in one of the airsickness bags to take home with her, in case there was nothing to eat in the apartment. I bent my head to Liberation, but all I could see was the palpitation of my denim shirt. Puff puff puff! it went, gauging my frantic heartbeat.

  Our bags came out, one by one by one, intact, zipped up and labelled. Mme Durebex barged through the crowd with the loaded trolley. We waited in the taxi queue, Laurent stamping his foot so everybody would know how accustomed to good service he was. When the next taxi pulled up, Mme Durebex jumped the queue, and in her panic she forgot that I spoke French and that she didn’t speak English.

  – ’Ullo, ’ullo! she called to me. Euh, you comes?

  A man in front of me burst out laughing, and the queue of people looked more amused than cheated: Mme Durebex put on a good show.

  We came in Porte de la Chapelle, and drove around the périphérique. For a reason unknown to me, we had to go to the Durebex’ first, although my place was closer. Mme Durebex suggested I get out somewhere on the way and hail another taxi.

  – I could take your pack home, Shona, she said. And you could come and collect it tomorrow. That will save you trying to take it up the stairs tonight.

  – No, it’s all right, I’ll take it with me now. The taxi driver can carry it up.

  It seemed like this journey would never end. I felt like I would never get home. She searched my overnight bag again for the toys of Laurent which were already back in his bag, and searched my face as she handed the bag back to me.

  – After all, I said, I’d have to get it up the stairs tomorrow as well.

  We entered the city. Drawn into the boulevard stream, I pressed my face to the glass. Alleys veered off at acute angles, giving me snapshots of new directions; there were bright shop windows and cafés fogged against the rain. People ran, under their umbrellas, spotlit by cars at the crossroads. The Eiffel Tower was just visible in the mist. Paris was rainswept. There was a glow on the horizon, and the lights seemed to melt across the wet streets.

  We crossed the Seine, and crossing a river always feels like the crucial point in a journey, moving over a body that never ceases to move. Through the car windows the current was imperceptible. The Seine was just a long curve, pecked by rain.

  We reached the seventh arrondissement. It was as empty as ever. Mme Durebex embraced me before she got out of the taxi. I was happy to touch cheeks, and happier still to see the doors of
her building close behind her and Laurent. When we turned the corner, I started to feel even better. Now I was cruising on all those chemicals of fear. I felt triumphant.

  The driver looked at me in his rear vision mirror.

  – So, you’ve come to Paris to study, have you? he asked.

  – No.

  – Ah, he smiled. You gave up your studies to get married?

  The driver was North African. My hair was in the high pony-tail it had been in since I broke my wrist, and I was only twenty-one.

  – No, I said again.

  He laughed and shook his head.

  – Where are you from? English? American?

  – Australia, I said, slightly disappointed by the evidence that I hadn’t acquired any French provincial accents during my séjour in the Alps.

  – Austria?

  – No. Australia.

  – Aaah! Australie! Kan-gou-rou!

  He bounced up and down on his seat, grinning at me in the mirror. I smiled back politely, thinking of the moth-eaten kangaroos I’d seen at the zoo, the occasional distant wallaby sighted from the car when I’d gone to the country, or the corpses by the highway.

  We crossed the Seine again. This time, sitting high in my seat, I could see a progression of bridges down it, and the orange-rose of the water near the centre of the city.

  The driver was still bouncing and grinning in a way that was starting to embarrass me, and I imagined if Chantale had been in the back seat with me she would have said all Arabs were sleazebags. Sacs miteaux.

  – Where are you from? I asked, preparing to say, Aaah! Couscous!

  – Afghanistan, he said.

  That only made me think of war and men in turbans. I didn’t say anything.

  We drove up through the tenth. The green neons, the cafés, the hookers huddled in doorways, the traffic jam at Pigalle, and the dark dry aroma of the driver’s Gitane, all intoxicated me, snowbound these last three weeks. The driver honked, then wound down his window to abuse another car.

  We went up the hill of Montmartre. He looked at me again, perplexed.

  – Well then, what are you doing in Paris?

  – I just live here.