Everything Love Is

by Claire King

  ‘I know, I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s foolish with hindsight. It was just so typical of you, it was a moment I didn’t want to forget. I wanted to show it to you when you were older. As it turns out I never forgot, of course.’

  ‘You weren’t afraid?’

  She shrugged. ‘I was always afraid, but we couldn’t guarantee we’d always be there to catch you. We tried to let you learn your own lessons. And you’ve survived, haven’t you, more or less in one piece?’ She smiled at the photograph. ‘That’s your character right there, Baptiste. Always so curious.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Constantly. You had to break everything down until you’d figured out how it worked. You took your father’s radio to pieces once. The older you got the messier your bedroom floor became, always covered in dissected objects, and it all made sense to you. I wasn’t allowed to disturb them to clean. One day your father misplaced his slippers and went in to wake you in his bare feet. That was the only time I ever heard him swear.’ I tried to bring that stormy afternoon back into focus, my mother and I sitting on my bed, adrift in her stories. How had the floor looked that day? Was it messy? When she walked in with the laundry, how had she moved through the room? But the floor hadn’t seemed important at the time and all I could picture in the memory was the swept-clean, sand-coloured tiles that are still there to this day, a half-formed image completed from what I know is true.

  ‘But I’m so tidy,’ I said. ‘That seems so unlike me.’

  A shadow passed across my mother’s smile. ‘It all changed the day you discovered you were adopted,’ she said, the creases in her brow deepening. ‘After that it was just questions, questions, questions. You put away your screwdriver. You lost interest in things. You had decided that understanding how people worked was far more interesting.’

  ‘Just like that?’

  ‘Just like that. When you were little your father was convinced you’d make an excellent engineer. That’s why he didn’t mind so much about the radio. But after that day it was different. You still spent hours alone in your room, but no one knew what you were doing in there any more.’

  My father had put it down to adolescence. All boys went through that kind of phase, he said, but my mother was worried. At least the mess of objects had been easy to understand. But perhaps that’s exactly why I lost interest in it. Objects can be complicated but people are another story altogether. The day my parents told me the truth, a light came on. Behaviours that until then had seemed inexplicable made sense at last. My father’s single-minded pact with God that put so much distance between us. The way my mother changed around strangers, her body closing up like a lock, the warmth draining out of her. How she would startle when an unexpected knock came at the door, and the way she would alternate between clinging to me and keeping me at arm’s length. They had never been sure they would get to keep me. How long does it take until you stop looking for a loved one you have lost? The prospect of my family one day coming to claim me hung heavy upon them and its repercussions rippled through everything.

  My parents were one mystery to solve and I was another. At school I’d learned that there are approximately seven billion, billion, billion atoms in a human body. Hydrogen, oxygen and carbon mainly, with a few other elements thrown in for good measure. And yet you could take me entirely to pieces and not find the person I believed I was. If you dismantled me right there on my bedroom floor, where would you find my character? Somewhere in me was a part of my other father, my other mother, a woman I had grown inside who I now sensed inside me, buried treasure without a map. I was convinced that one day I would find her, or that she would find me.

  I know what I was doing in those long teenage years in my room. I remember it clear as day. I was bringing her to life. I didn’t give her a name but I gave her everything else, and in my own way I came to love her, or my idea of her. I took to laying her few possessions before me on the bed like a puzzle. They had kept them for me all this time, fusty-smelling from the cellar: the violin case, and the green springtime coat still stained with her blood. She had carried no other luggage and no identification. In the violin case, as well as a violin, was her train ticket (she had left from Barcelona) and a small piece of sun-bleached driftwood, roughly carved into the shape of a horse. I kept that little horse safe for years like some kind of totem, a clue in a murder mystery. Perhaps more mysterious still, one day it disappeared from the violin case and I never saw it again.

  When you have such sparse information, too much weight is given to the little you have. Was green her favourite colour? Was her personality as luminous as the coat? Or was it a hand-me down that she didn’t even like? A mark of frugality rather than flamboyance? Why did she carry nothing but a violin? Was it her most beloved possession or was that how she made money? Why was she coming to Toulouse and who had written her destination on her arm like an unaccompanied child? Was she running away from something bad, or towards something good? To help me I had nothing but my mother’s recollections, my imagination and a clipped-out image of her corpse in a newspaper.

  Ah yes, the photo. I found it tucked inside the violin case like a stain. Under a small column headline asking for help identifying her, she was laid out in grey ink, her hair smoothed against her cheeks and over her shoulders. Her eyes were closed. The coldness of her skin flooded over me. My dead mother. Not a mother, I told myself, just an abstraction. Only memories can make a mother: the scent of her, the softness of her, her words and expressions. All of these things were already deeply imprinted on me by the woman in the kitchen. The woman who nursed me when I was sick, who taught me to read, whose hands had pulled me into this world.

  But the woman on the train was someone to me too. She was important now. I had already started to form an impression of her from my mother’s story, an impression that was nothing like the woman in the newspaper clipping. Yet the more we look at a photograph the more time condenses into that one single moment. I had barely glanced at the photo before tearing it to shreds, but it was too late. For weeks my nightmares reeled with the image of her corpse until I could bear it no longer. I began work overwriting that memory of her with new, imagined ones. I told myself stories at night, picturing her boarding a train, walking on the beach at Barcelona, playing her violin. I repeated them over and over until the stories had sharp edges and vivid colours. Whilst my real mother was already closing in on her pension, soft and round and covered in flour, with earthy fingernails and thinning hair, I painted this other woman with bright skin, wild hair and lithe limbs. These images seem real to me even now, although I know they are not, nor the dancing violin music that insists on accompanying them. Strange, the tricks we can play on ourselves.

  After weeks of my introspection, my mother decided I needed a new pastime or project. Something to take my mind off things. I had played the piano from the age of three or four and was already quite accomplished, so one day when she found me staring at the violin case she suggested I could learn to play it. Maybe it was in my blood, she said. But from the first time I opened the case and looked at the instrument I knew that I could not. Just the thought of touching those strings invoked something deep within me that felt like shame.

  7

  Six months ago you woke in the pitch black with a jolt. You had been curled around my back as usual, your knees crooked into mine, your skin against mine along the length of me, your arm wrapped over my waist and under my own, with your hand flat on my chest, pressed against my heart. As you woke I felt your whole body tense. Just a bad dream, I thought, in a fog of sleep, pulling your arms closer around me. But you resisted and after a few seconds you were still frozen, your breath coming in short, agitated gasps. My heart, drenched in adrenaline, quickened against your fingertips as I tried to gather my thoughts. I had never imagined it coming in the night like that. I had no plan, no explanation as to why I was there in your bed when you had no idea who I was. I thought about whispering your name, but was worried I’d scare you. You�
��re more than twice my size. I’ve learnt from bitter experience that when you are disoriented or confused you become angry and unreasonable. What might you do now in the panic of darkness? For long moments we lay still, our breathing out of beat and fractured, both as scared as the other, then suddenly I felt your tension dissipate.

  ‘Ah, it’s you, my little chouette,’ you whispered, the tips of your fingers caressing the skin between my breasts. ‘You came back.’ I didn’t say a word, but I relaxed a little. You must still be asleep after all, I told myself. Still dreaming. I felt your head settle back into the pillow, your breathing calm again in my hair. Your chest rose up in a long yawn and your body sank back down against mine as tight and as close as ever, except for your right hand, which now rested softly, lightly against my bird-heart.

  We were still that way the next morning when we woke. I turned to you as you stirred, my face waiting for you. A question. When you opened your eyes you smiled your familiar crinkled, stubbly morning smile.

  ‘Good morning, Baptiste,’ I whispered.

  Your eyes flickered briefly and then you said, ‘Good morning, Chouette.’

  You lost me that day, and yet by some miracle you found a way to love me still.

  8

  It was a warm, light evening in the ripeness of spring. I had been at the piano, lost in a piece of music whose tempo was so close to that of a resting pulse it had almost become a meditation. The noise, when it came, startled me. It was hardly an explosion, just a soft thud on the deck above, but I’ve been jumpy ever since I came to Candice. In a way the quiet makes it worse. In the evenings there is so little to hear, an occasional boat approaching perhaps, but otherwise nothing but the lap of water, the chatter of birds and the churr of cicadas. When that sound came from the deck above me the adrenaline rushed through my blood as fast as if the sky were falling down.

  Up on deck at first I saw nothing out of the ordinary. No plants were overturned and the towpath was empty. I wondered if it might have been a curious cat, bounding aboard and leaving just as quickly, which happened regularly, but whatever had just landed on Candice had been heavier on its feet. A duck? I looked down into the water. Not a ripple. Not a mallard in sight. Nothing. Only when I turned to go back inside did I spot her, a newly fledged barn owl, still a little downy, but with a perfect white face, squatting gnome-like between the geranium blossoms and the lemon tree in the blue mosaic pot.

  I approached slowly. Was she hurt? She didn’t move a muscle, just hooked me in with her wide black eyes, clicking her tongue. I crouched down beside her. ‘Hey, little chouette, what are you doing here?’ I extended a finger. She ignored it and I withdrew it again. I had heard a human scent on a baby bird could cause its parents to abandon it. Could I touch her without hurting her? I wasn’t sure. I knew nothing about owls. I wondered if her parents might arrive shortly to retrieve her, but the air around was still. I waited, thinking that perhaps they would come, or that she would fly away, but either she couldn’t or wouldn’t. She simply stood there trembling and calling out, until eventually my ignorance and nerves were overcome by my desire to comfort her.

  She was soft and passive in my hands as I carried her on to the towpath, to the base of the tree I thought she had fallen from. I climbed up the tree as far as I could, but there was no nest in sight and no obvious hollows. I watched her for hours, waiting for an adult to join her, to coax her back to where she came from, but none did, and as darkness fell I became worried. She was vulnerable there. If she didn’t return to the nest she’d become prey for the canal-side foxes that seemed to thrive on this borderline between the urban and the wild. Eventually I carried the owl back on to Candice, made a nest in a box, and offered her some scraps of steak I’d bought to grill with the neighbours the next day. She ate them with little fuss and apparent satisfaction.

  I didn’t want to bring her inside for fear of disorienting her, so that night, which was clear but cold, I stayed out on the deck, resting my fingers on her lightly, trying to protect her without preventing her from leaving. I hardly slept for fear of crushing her in my sleep with the weight of my hand. Instead I whispered to her, ‘Hush, little chouette. Hush, my little chouette,’ and tracked the stars across the sky in order to stay awake.

  In the morning I tried again, putting her back by the tree and backing away, but she just sat there watching me as I ate my breakfast at a distance. Still no parent came for her and, back on the boat once more, she showed no intention of leaving. I kept watch on her as I went about my business, and she in turn tracked my movements, slowly turning her head this way and that. If you were so inclined you could have read so much into that face: calm, wide-eyed, the shape of love.

  So often we humans mistake other things for love in ourselves and in others – gratitude, servitude, lust – that we have forgotten how to recognise love for what it is. I felt something real for that little owl. Compassion, maybe, and a desire to keep her with me, but what kind of life would a creature like that have with a man on a boat? She was hungry, she was curious and she was not at all afraid of me, but it would have been cruel to encourage her to stay where she didn’t belong.

  That night we slept together again, and the next day the same thing. On the third night, when my body ached with the weight of itself and my thoughts were muddied with fatigue I finally gave in to sleep, telling myself that in the morning I would take expert advice. But in the morning my little Chouette had gone and I never saw her again.

  9

  You told me that story as we stood together at the helm. I had asked you to tell me as much as you could remember, ablaze with the desire to discover all of you in the short time we had. You didn’t look at me as you spoke, but cast your eyes ahead towards the next bend in the sunlit canal. I glanced at you from time to time, still with an uncertain restraint. On either side of us the poplars marked rhythmic breaks between fields the colour of ripening lemons. Your hands rested lightly on the wheel’s handles. I was to your left, with my right hand on its spokes, low enough that although our arms crossed they were not touching.

  You had always been more of a listener than a talker, but standing there like that something in the combination of the water and the shift that had come between us brought words to your lips. I had been waiting a long time for these stories and the wheel of Candice was where they finally found you. Even after we moored for the last time it became our custom to stand side by side in the wheelhouse, looking out into the distance and waiting to see what memories would emerge from the water.

  I knew what you wanted to say when you told me about that owl. You were telling me what you were afraid of. You always had such a knack of giving me whatever was important at the time, your stories perfect for the moment you told them. I wish it were still that way but you tell me very little these days, mostly either new versions of the same story, or stories that I know cannot be true. You prefer to hear a story than to recount one and I often read your own words back to you.

  I have done my best to make sense of the things you have told me. Some elements are crystal clear and others out of focus, but there’s a story in here somewhere. Some days you recognise yourself in these words, and other days they don’t reach you at all but you are happy enough with their fiction and we go with the flow. Even I am no longer sure what I believe to be true. Your mind is so watery now we could all sink within it.

  10

  I didn’t tell Sophie about Amandine for a long time. That first night I already felt hesitant and as my feelings changed it became harder with time. But Sophie could read me well and if she only looked hard enough the secret was there in plain sight.

  Jordi’s bar was only five minutes from the canal but the apartment blocks and offices separated it so completely that it had no feel of the waterside. Outside it was stuccoed and plain, with a blue neon sign above the doorway, but inside the walls were exposed red brick, hung with paintings from local artists. The art was Pascale’s thing. In principle she ran the place together
with her husband, but since Sophie had started work there a couple of years before she rarely made an appearance. When she did it was a brief affair, time enough to nudge her pictures straight and drink an aperitif at the bar. Since Jordi never came out of his kitchen, this meant Sophie usually ran the bar single-handed.

  My mind has become myopic, I have to hold so much at a distance to see it clearly, but I can still tell you everything about that place. It was my home from home for years. Since moving on to Candice I ate from Jordi’s menu almost every night. You’d think they’d be wondering what had happened to me now, wouldn’t you? You’d think they’d pop by.

  There were tables along the walls but the bar itself dominated the place, set in the middle of the room, a horseshoe-shaped counter forming a central island with stools set along its longest edges. Above it there was a shelf jostling with spirits that people hardly ever drank: rum, gin, crème de cassis. Only the pastis was kept handy by the bar, along with a crowd of wine bottles, open and corked. There were two taps, two choices of beer, and then there were the syrups – liquorice, almond, peach, mint, grenadine, violet and lemon.

  At the low curve of the horseshoe, the cash register sat facing the door. It was a squat grey monster of a thing, with levers and buttons bigger than even my fingers. The clunk and rattle of it was so noisy that Sophie used it as little as possible, preferring to keep tabs on scraps of paper pushed under wine glasses or scribbled on paper place mats, and having customers pay up as they left. Jordi trusted Sophie and Sophie trusted us.