Mazarine

by Grimshaw, Charlotte

  ‘The child?’

  ‘The kid in the stroller. There must have been something wrong with the woman. So, poor kid.’

  ‘Oh yes. I suppose you’re right.’ I thought about it. ‘See, you immediately focus on the woman, her strange behaviour. So, what’s to be done with the possum?’

  ‘Save it for the next story,’ she said.

  I leaned against her, facing the full glare of the sun. A moment of happiness, despite everything. Was I gay now? What a question. It was such a novel idea that I relished it. I’d always been straight, not a hint nor an inkling of gayness — well, I’d avoided getting close to women, hadn’t I, had even worried I’d become some kind of misogynist. And now look at me. How horrified Inez would be, how she would scream and wince at the very idea …

  ‘Is sexual orientation not real? Not fixed?’ I said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Is there no such thing? Is it just the person you fall in love with, could be one or the other, it doesn’t matter?’

  Her tone was cautious. ‘Most people are one type or the other, I think.’

  ‘That’s what I always assumed. But if your perception changes, you question the whole concept. It’s sort of exhilarating.’

  ‘Still, you can’t throw the baby out with the bath water.’

  I yawned. My face was stiff with sunburn. ‘What on earth do you mean by that?’

  ‘Well, one’s own experience doesn’t equal the universal. You can’t generalise. Maybe I was gay all along, even when I was with Emin. Whereas you seem a bit more … changeable.’

  I sat up, disappointed. ‘Oh. I was quite liking the idea that it’s the essence of a person you fall in love with. Just the soul, and it doesn’t matter whether they’re male or female.’

  ‘Hm. Possibly.’ She paused, glanced sideways. ‘Have you fallen in love?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said with a half-laugh, and looked away. Emotion rushed through me.

  ‘Okay.’ Her tone was cool, guarded. She took out her phone, checked its screen.

  I said, ‘You told me you were straight, then fell in love with someone who happened to be a woman.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘You did say that.’

  She swiped her phone, clicked her tongue, annoyed. ‘Or maybe I was just gay.’

  ‘But you don’t think I am?’

  ‘Who knows?’

  I looked at her, uncertain.

  She laughed. ‘Your face.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Are you hurt if I don’t say you’re gay?’

  I turned away, said nothing.

  She stood up, stretched, tested her foot, winced. ‘Let’s get going, it’s a long way back.’

  I didn’t look at her. ‘Will you be staying at my place?’

  She paused, surprised. ‘Yes. Is that all right?’

  ‘Sure.’

  She peered at me, put her hand on my arm. ‘You are hurt.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  She reached out; we embraced awkwardly. Trying to balance on her good foot, she drew back and looked into my face. Her expression was searching, something hard and amused in it.

  We went back on the Métro, bought bread and cheese and fruit in a shop near the studio, returned hot and exhausted to find the room lit by the sinking sun, the dust a fine mesh of gold, the sky all in flames, reflected in the mirror on the wall.

  Mazarine brought up newspapers on her phone, reading out extracts about the United States presidential election contest. She laughed over the Republican primary race, the line-up of oddballs, crazies. ‘Talk about implausible. Look at these guys. You’ve got to be kidding.’

  I half listened, then dozed, and woke later to find her hunched over her emails, typing.

  She rolled her eyes. ‘What a drama.’

  I sat up. My mouth was dry, lips cracked. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Jasmine and her bees. Honestly.’

  ‘Bees?’ I couldn’t think who that was, then remembered — the ex.

  ‘She’s in the house. Someone had to look after the damn hives, the cat. Also, the agents coming through for the sale.’

  ‘Jasmine’s in your house?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘You are selling?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Going your separate ways?’

  ‘Yes, sure.’ Her tone was light, empty. She blinked, looked at the ceiling.

  I waited. ‘Or are you getting back together?’

  She didn’t say anything.

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘No.’ She dropped the laptop on the bed, stamped into the bathroom and locked the door.

  NINETEEN

  Dreaming, I was back in childhood with my cousin Aria, she nine, I eight, we were sent by her father Old Tyson to stay with Aria’s grown-up brother Sean, a cray fisherman who lived in a ramshackle house outside Gisborne with his dope-smoking wife and four kids. We were dropped off and told we’d be sleeping in an old car in the garden, and after that we were left on our own, long days ranging around the countryside, no routine, no adults, no meals, no bedtime, it was what Inez called an ‘ordinary Kiwi childhood’, what you might call ordinary Kiwi child neglect.

  Strange days: waking in the car, the trees tossing in the breeze beyond the speckled windscreen, wandering through the paddocks after sheep had given birth, the grass strewn with bloody afterbirth. The garden at night, the car windows lit up by torchlight. Listening to tapes on an old portable stereo, too scared to go outside for a pee in the bushes, the hard rain drumming on the car roof.

  There was an ancient claw-foot bath in the garden, in an open enclosure fenced by wooden sticks. We never used it, never washed, didn’t eat much except weird combinations of baked vegetables cooked up by the stoned lady of the house, who vaguely summoned us from the back door in the evenings, a dirty naked child on each hip.

  We stole Sean’s dinghy and took it out on the river, got caught in the current and nearly swept out to sea, had to abandon the boat and walk miles back. I remember the terror, realising we couldn’t fight the current that grew stronger as we neared the open ocean, the bar a haze of spray, the surf roaring, we were going to drown, and then some quirk of the current funnelled us near to the edge of the estuary, the low tide enabling us to escape and wade across the mudflat after abandoning the boat, which was never found.

  I remember crying on the long walk back, the miles of riverbank, my cousin in her fright and rage giving me a vicious tongue-lashing, scorning me for my crying, making sure I knew we’d never tell her brother who’d taken the boat.

  Aria and I were linked by water: the river, the estuary, the lethal surf beyond the bar that day, the Rimu Lake, those days and days alone, I the smaller, shy, snivelling one, she the leader and boss, with her strong arms and her cut-off jeans and her boyish haircut.

  Some holidays we stayed at our American grandmother Dee’s flat in the Hawke’s Bay; I remember hearing Aria crying in the night. In the morning she was fierce, gave nothing away, told me off for not making my bed, not that I listened to her rebukes, she was tough but I was a match for her, used to beat her at cards, word games, board games, I was weak but I had some kind of cunning she didn’t have; she was as straight and open and clumsy as a boy, and as gullible as my brother Frank. Boys could be incredibly obtuse, I used to think, and Aria was almost more boy than girl.

  That evening at Rimu Lake, Aria and the teenage boy fought, they pulled back and forth, her attacker let go; the anchor point went into her forehead. Aria running, screaming through the paddocks above Rimu Lake, her face covered in blood, I running after her, another self watching; it was what happened when things went wrong, I stepped outside myself. It became a habit, one that I wished in the end I could lose. I wished for one self, to be in the moment always, but instead I sometimes viewed the world through a film, was not wholly present, could not locate a central I.

  After patching Aria’s forehead with a plaster, Raye, Old Tyson’s wife at
the time, sent us back down through the paddocks in the dark. The Rimu Lake lies in the misty district of Waikato, and fog rolled down over the paddocks at night, blanking out the lights of distant farmhouses. Fog lay on the water, blew around our feet as we walked, the torchlight came up against its white wall, the sounds of the night beyond it. Nothing so evil as the harsh purr of a possum, a rattle like ghoulish laughter, and the groan of frogs, and the cows stepping heavily amid the tall reeds, trampling them with cracks you could hear across the still water. The night alive and unseen. The tent was a little box of light beside the black sheen of the lake. Crazy wreaths of fog hanging over the tips of the reeds, the wind in the raupo, sometimes the clouds parting to show the cold moon.

  A thousand and one sessions, I told Werner Bismarck stories about my life, seeking answers. Trying to keep things lively, to stave off the axe called termination. I entertained him with the time I and Frank and a five-year-old friend set off, with parental blessing, alone down the Pararaha Gorge in the Waitakere Ranges, a nine-hour trek signposted for experienced trampers only.

  We’d been staying in a borrowed house in the bush, on the wild west coast. To be fair, Inez and the Judge didn’t know about the warning signpost, they’d only happily consented to our plan: to enter the vast, unpopulated wilderness, and spend the whole day in it by ourselves.

  Three young kids, aged ten, seven and five, the five-year-old barefoot, we were soon hopelessly lost among steep rock bluffs, white-water rapids and impenetrable bush, with no clear track to follow. The gorge ended in wild, empty territory, and back then (before wind and tide altered the shoreline) the route back around the coast involved crossing surf-lashed rocks that were safely passable only at low tide.

  Lest Werner, a typical German nature lover, get all romantic about this episode I made it clear: we knew how much danger we were in. It was hours and hours of sheer terror, of crying and struggling, made more intense by the fact that we had a tiny five-year-old in tow who could barely manage the distance, let alone the rock climbs and swims.

  ‘It wasn’t Swallows and fucking Amazons,’ I told Werner.

  What was it with Inez and Old Tyson? Perhaps it was their own experience of ordinary American child neglect that made them toy with the idea of losing their children. In each of those episodes I’d believed I was going to die, and the belief was not only subjectively held, but objectively reasonable; in other words, death was not an unlikely outcome.

  Go and play by yourselves for a week. For a child, it’s hard to distinguish between a week and forever. I never forgot this; I made sure Maya knew I’d never leave her, would never send her away, that no matter where she was I would find her. And now, what had I done but carry on the family tradition, and lose a child myself?

  Werner Bismarck was a great believer in telling one’s story. He told me about a study of Native communities in Canada: some had high youth suicide rates and others had none. Trying to understand why, researchers found that the youths from the high suicide communities couldn’t give a coherent narrative of their lives. They had no sense of family history, and no sense that they had a future. They couldn’t see their lives as stories, and they couldn’t tell their own. The youths from low suicide communities could narrate their own stories, they had a sense of their history, and a clear idea of a future ‘I’.

  I thought about this: one of the symptoms of disorganised attachment is the inability to narrate a coherent personal history. Perhaps the high suicide youths were disorganised en masse. Attachment and belonging give us coherence, narrative gives us identity, our story gives us our selves.

  Strange to think, Werner enthused (I listening, glazed), humans have evolved beyond the animal to an extent where consciousness itself has needs, as crucial for survival as food and fluids. Where the brain grasps only the immediate, there is despair; where there’s a sense of my story and a future, where the ‘I’ is not lost but firmly located within a narrative context, there’s hope.

  What did this have to do with me, I asked him, but I was working my way to some kind of answer. My family, with their stonewalling and their denial, refused to let me tell the story as I saw it, and so I faced a choice: lack of I, or the story. Narrative or disappearance.

  If telling the story causes harm, so does not telling it. All that time I spent with Werner, in my role as Scheherazade, I was creating a true outline of my self. I didn’t believe in blame, I barely believed in free will. I believed my adoptive family and I were one entity; they were part of my self. I acted on them, they acted on me; we made our history together. All I ever wanted was not to disappear.

  I woke in the night and reached for Mazarine, held onto her. Dear life.

  In the morning, Mazarine had her laptop open again. She looked at me for a long moment, preoccupied, and when I spoke she held up her hand and frowned.

  ‘Just a minute. Thinking.’

  She was busy so long I went down to the café in the street below and sat over a coffee, waiting for her. It was already hot, souvenir stalls were being set up, the streets starting to fill. I watched the passersby, the stream of faces: workers, schoolkids, beggars, thieves, tourists. A haggard young woman came around the tables with a baby on her hip, and I found two euros for her, before the waiter raised a threatening arm and ordered her away. A boy hovered near, eyeing the tables for loose handbags, wallets, phones.

  Paris was the only city where Patrick and I had ever been mugged: wheeling our suitcases on a side street near Gare du Nord we ran into a group of women and girls, one woman carrying a baby that she thrust in my face while the girls surged in, their strong hands all over us, pinching and grabbing. I avoided the baby but pushed over one of the larger girls who’d latched onto Maya in order to get at my handbag. There was a lot of shrieking from our attackers, to confuse us, I suppose, and Maya let out a single, high-pitched scream, but Patrick and I were so taken by surprise we were silent, although perhaps more physical than they’d expected — the woman with the baby retreated quickly. I saw how you could act without conscious intention; I could recall no mens rea for the otherwise unthinkable act of shoving a strange girl violently onto the cobbles. We only lost one bag and a jacket in the fray, just a few items, not worth reporting.

  Mazarine appeared, threading through the tables. She sat down, slapped her palms on the table. ‘The house is sold.’

  ‘Oh. Congratulations,’ I said, cautious.

  ‘Well. As good as.’

  The waiter arrived and stared frankly at Mazarine’s cleavage. She was looking good, had tidied herself up, with straightened hair, a clean shirt and fresh make-up. Full of briskness and good humour she ordered coffee, took out her phone and made notes, talking to herself about arrangements, adding, ‘I got a message from Emin. He’s okay to meet.’

  ‘Where do we need to go?’

  She glanced up from her phone, off-hand. ‘Oh, do you want to come?’

  I snapped at her. ‘Of course I do. Don’t you remember what we’re doing?’

  She waved a hand, softened her tone. ‘Yes, right.’

  I tried to read her expression.

  ‘Sometimes I’m the bull in the china shop,’ she said, leaning close and resting her cheek against mine. The blood surged under my skin, my scalp prickled, I could smell her hair, her breath, her skin. Strange how she was able instinctively to disarm me, activate some switch, bypass the thinking part of my mind. My hurt and irritation subsided, I swallowed, closed my eyes. We sat in the heat; she absentmindedly stroked my arm, my thigh, my hand. I turned to kiss her, then stopped myself, glanced around, embarrassed, although no one was paying attention.

  The crowds were gathering in the square, a busker started tuning up on an electric guitar, the chords buzzing in his scruffy old amp. A bulging-eyed dog waddled past my chair with a pastry in its mouth, its owner yanking the lead.

  A sense of unreality folded in on me, each moment passing without fixing itself in my mind, leaving me wondering, Did that happen, did that just h
appen?

  ‘Let’s walk,’ she said. ‘We have time.’ She leaned down and adjusted the fresh bandage on her toes, turning her foot, admiring the new sandals.

  ‘Jasmine’s done well, it’s a good price. I’ve been pretty worried about money, Frances, let me tell you …’

  I followed her into the street, listening to her, thinking about money myself. The Airbnb didn’t seem much cheaper than hotels I’d stayed in with Patrick in the past, and my London account was running low.

  Emin wanted to meet near his apartment, she said. He’d be on his way to work and his wife, who was at home marking student essays, wasn’t so keen on her visiting, and tended to be extravagantly rude. Mazarine, still buoyed by the house sale, gave an imitation of the wife, hamming it up with French eye-rolling and pouting and shrugging.

  We walked down the long hill and into the crowds, the sky cloudless blue, the sun already burning onto the hot pavements, no breeze to cool the air. In the parks, walkers sat glazed under the trees, even the dogs had a languid air, lounging on the sand in the shady playground, tongues flopping.

  It struck me again: I had changed. I saw women everywhere, elegant commuters, tourists, shop assistants, old ladies towing little dogs, and it seemed that a filter had been removed, there was no barrier, I felt open, free, benign. It struck me, that I could be altered in this way. Instead of remote and separated, I felt part of something. Instead of not seeing, I was clear-eyed, in touch, connected.

  ‘You’ve changed my brain,’ I said.

  ‘Really.’ Navigating with her phone, she pointed: ‘This way.’

  ‘In the past I could see Maya clearly. I could get that right. I know I did motherhood okay. And my sister Natasha, I could understand her, but apart from that, I had a blind spot. I had a habit of not seeing, not engaging, not feeling part of. And now I feel different, more—’

  ‘More gay?’

  I looked at her quickly, ready to feel hurt if she was mocking me. Her expression was neutral.

  ‘I don’t feel gay actually, just liberated.’

  ‘The new openness.’ She shrugged, palms up, gave me her beautiful, wide, easy smile.