Everything Love Is

by Claire King

  Thin white winter sunbeams washed through the nets and on to the nativity scene, on to Mary and the baby given to her, but not belonging to her. ‘Hallelujah’, sang the host of angels, as Mary gazed down on a son she was destined to lose. She already knew it, yet she was smiling. How could she still be smiling knowing what lay ahead? I thought of what Amandine had said, about how the foreshadowing of loss could make love stronger still. I thought about the soft furrows on her skin, where my thumb had traced over her belly. What had happened to that child? What pain had I inadvertently uncovered?

  I rose silently, put the guard around the fire and picked up the tiny manger, where the pale face of the Christ-child now stared out from the custard-coloured hay. I turned it around in my fingers. An orphan boy, given into the keeping of strangers. Loved and loving, but nevertheless always something other. What a son to have, I thought.

  When I was younger I was obsessed with finding my birth family. I tried to convince us all that it was because we owed it to them, but in truth deep down I believed it would help me find myself. Eventually, after years of uncomplaining support it was clear my parents wanted to put it behind them. It fatigued my mother especially, and one Sunday after I’d brought up the idea of searching again on the internet, trying to get new leads that way, I found her crying silently into the dishwater and knew I couldn’t raise it with her any more.

  Later my father had taken me aside. ‘Why are you still looking for answers outside yourself?’ he said.

  Perhaps, I thought, although I didn’t say it, it was because my role model was a man who was too scared to look inside himself. ‘Isn’t that normal?’ I said instead. ‘Don’t we all need to know where we come from, to make sense of who we are? If Jesus hadn’t known he was the son of God, do you think he would have gone on to lead people as he did?’

  My father had pressed his hands into the small of his back, stretching out his spine. ‘That’s not a comparison I want to hear again,’ he said. ‘And if you want to know what I think, it’s that trying to understand who we are by understanding our parents is shirking responsibility. In the end you will be whatever you make yourself. You are who you are.’ He lay his hand on my heart. ‘The answers are all in there.’

  I understood what he was trying to tell me. I agreed, mostly. But still I knew I carried a blind spot within me, a part of me that came straight from her, concealed by my ignorance.

  ‘Christ is born.’ My mother’s voice startled me.

  ‘You’re awake,’ I said.

  ‘And there you are, a non-believer, staring at Jesus as though there was something he could teach you.’

  I smiled. ‘The light from the window was making the whole scene look divine. It made me think of the way you talk about my birth. You always make it sound miraculous. Was it like that for you every time, delivering a new life into the world?’

  She laughed gently. ‘Baptiste, maybe I do tell it like that, but in truth there’s nothing religious about birthing a child. It’s the most animal experience I know.’ She pursed her lips and dropped her eyes. ‘Death is a far more religious experience than birth.’

  Her words hung in the air as I placed the model of Christ back into the stable beside Mary, who seemed to have become more radiant overnight. My mother stared down hard at her sampler. ‘That was tactless of me,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘No, it’s OK.’

  ‘No, it came out wrong. I’m still upset about that poor boy. What I meant to say is that when a child is being born, there is such an immense effort from the mother, the midwife, even the child itself. In that moment they are just a few souls on a tiny corner of the earth, struggling to give life, to save life. It’s a very human moment. Death is different. It always comes as a surprise. We find birth easy to accept. It’s only in death that we seek answers from God.’

  I moved Mary a little closer to the manger. ‘It’s sad,’ I said, ‘how she always knew she would lose him.’

  ‘You can’t lose something that was never yours to keep.’

  I thought of Amandine again. It was rarer and rarer in those days to find a moment when I was not thinking about her. ‘Do you think that made her love him more?’

  My mother put down her sewing on the basket beside her and folded her arms. The soft skin below her elbows fell in folds against her chest. ‘Who are we talking about now?’

  I shrugged. I wasn’t sure myself. ‘I don’t know. A friend.’

  ‘A friend, yes, that’s right.’ She looked at me critically. ‘When are you finally going to admit you’ve fallen in love,’ she said, ‘and do something about it?’

  ‘I tried.’ I shook my head.

  My mother smiled. ‘That’s a good first step,’ she said. ‘Stick at it and you’ll work it out. Now, I for one could use some air. Shall we go out into the garden for a while? I could use your help picking those last persimmons off the top branches, and you could tell me about her if you feel like it?’ Yes, I thought, that was exactly what I wanted to do.

  As I picked the soft fruits and handed them down to my mother, she told me how she was thinking of getting a gardener. She was still keeping up with raking the leaves, but the hardened soil needed turning and the apple tree pruning and she wasn’t feeling up to it that year. ‘You know I can always help you,’ I said, ‘you only have to ask.’

  My mother tutted. ‘I’d rather spend time with you than have you doing all my jobs when you’re here.’

  I turned to look again at the garden. From the top of the stepladder the perspective was different, and my eye was caught by the shutters outside my bedroom window, still thrown back against the wall, their vivid iris paint now faded to a pastel blue, peeling in splintered curls off the wood. I wondered if the bats were still behind there. The thought of it brought with it a sensation of falling and I felt a sudden wave of vertigo. I stepped down hurriedly from the ladder, resting a hand against the rough trunk of the tree. My mother eyed me with concern. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Remember the time I fell out of my bedroom window?’ I said.

  ‘What?’ My mother’s brow furrowed as though trying to remember. ‘You never fell out of a window, Baptiste, what are you talking about?’

  I couldn’t believe she had forgotten. Despite her age she had always been very sharp. ‘Because of the shutters, remember? That’s why Papa put those bars up.’

  She shook her head and lay a hand on my arm. ‘You always did have some funny dreams.’

  I was uncertain for a minute. ‘No, Maman, I didn’t dream it.’ I pointed to the flowerbed below the window. ‘I fell into the tulips.’

  ‘Which tulips? That’s lavender.’

  ‘I know,’ I said gently, ‘but it was tulips back then.’

  ‘That’s been a lavender bed as long as we’ve lived here,’ she said, but she looked doubtful.

  ‘No, there were these beautiful, huge scarlet tulips. Almost too large for life, remember?’

  My mother frowned, staring over at the pale slender-leaved lavender bushes. ‘I must be going senile,’ she said, ‘you’d think a mother would remember something like that.’

  It was the first time I’d seen any kind of decline in her mind. Of course you expect it to come to your parents eventually, but I had always relied on my mother as the keeper of my childhood stories. I faced the stark realisation that they were fading away.

  The telephone was ringing. ‘I’ll get it,’ I said, running back into the house. When I answered, there on the other end of the line was my father’s grinning voice.

  ‘Testing, testing,’ he said. ‘What took you so long?’

  30

  It was January, yellow-green catkins hanging like sherbet rainclouds over the towpath and the streets of Toulouse groaning with the weight of feet. The slate-grey skies matched my mood. There was no longer any need for me to imagine the void Amandine would leave in my life. She hadn’t called since the kiss.

  The rain came in sideways at Jordi’s misted windows and desp
ite the fire that roared up the chimney we all huddled in layers of clothes over our stews. There was fresh tarragon in the daube de biche, citrusy against the dark earthy game. I sat at the bar, drinking strong red wine to warm me from the inside and take the edge off the ache that wouldn’t go away. I was hoping Sophie would provide some company but lately she had been giving me the cold shoulder too, always too busy to speak to me even when the place was empty. It was as though she were trying to spite me. If I sat at the counter she would always be around the other side of the bar.

  This particular day she was leaning across the bar, talking to her dragon. She had a scarf the colour of figs knotted around her throat with ends that trailed down over her breasts. Didier’s gaze flicked between her eyes and the place where the scarf ended, bringing knots to my own throat, but if Sophie had noticed that it didn’t seem to bother her. They were deep in conversation and every now and then Sophie would point over to the TV, which had been permanently tuned to the news station since the new year, footage of the riots on perpetual loop. Riots was the only word for them now, spiralling out of control, going from bad to worse.

  Down by the canal you would never have known anything was amiss, but the centre of Toulouse was starting to look like a war zone, slick with unleashed anger. Barricades had been set up across main roads. Shops and cafés remained shuttered during the day. One group had torn up the cobbles from Place Saint George and hurled them indiscriminately through any unprotected windows of shops, restaurants and apartments. Before they boarded them all up, a Molotov cocktail had smashed through a first-floor window at Galeries Lafayette. Students were blaming Arabs and Arabs blamed Roma. No one knew for sure who was who any more; the bare faces of autumn were long gone and in their place were hooded rioters with scarves or ripped cloth over their mouths. In the suburbs it was worse; shops had been looted in broad daylight and at night cars blazed in the streets. The union rallies still continued, now heavily policed and the various protesting factions moved together and apart like storms in separate weather systems. Toulouse needed reinforcements, but France’s resources were disastrously stretched. Other cities were burning too.

  In Paris the riots had spread fast into the heart of the unprepared city and there had been threats on the American embassy. The police were already using tear gas. In Marseille a gendarme had shot two immigrant brothers dead in the street and now there was hell to pay. There was a fresh clamour from fearful residents across the country to clear the Roma from their camps, resulting in an outcry from humanitarian organisations. It was winter, where could they go? An incendiary editorial in Le Figaro had called it France’s Arab Spring, a headline catchy enough to be picked up on by the world media despite it being wildly inaccurate, and out of the shadow of this propaganda the far-right party rose. It was perfect fuel for their upcoming electoral campaign. Many of these rioters weren’t even French, they said. This is not how we expect guests in this country to behave.

  I can sense it all so vividly now. I can smell the cars burning, hear the smashing of glass, taste the sickly sensation of my own fear. The images I saw on TV have become indistinguishable from my own memories, as though it doesn’t make any difference where the information came from. As though the television reports have become a part of me.

  Sophie was refilling my glass. I reached over as she poured and put my hand on her wrist. She met my eye, defiantly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I miss you.’

  ‘You need to start hanging out with people your own age,’ she said, pulling her hand away. But as I spun the stem of my glass in resignation, staring down into the vortex, she hovered there, and I wondered if she had decided to take pity on me.

  ‘You do look miserable,’ she said.

  ‘I am.’

  Her face was hard but her eyes were soft, and she leaned towards me a little over the bar. ‘I think we should talk.’

  Out of the corner of my eye I could see Didier watching us. We weren’t going to get any privacy any time soon. Sophie followed my eyes and nodded. ‘Perhaps later,’ she whispered.

  ‘I used to come here to relax,’ I said. ‘Do we have to have the news on permanently?’

  ‘Most people want to know what’s happening in the world, what’s happening on our own doorstep right now. Most normal people.’

  ‘OK, but the TV sensationalises everything. It doesn’t tell us what’s at the heart of all this. It doesn’t separate the issues from the anger.’ Didier was moving towards us. ‘And then every fifteen minutes, with apparently no sense of irony, it gives us another lecture: want more. Expect more. Need more. Fast food and weight-loss miracles, a perfect family, an exotic holiday. When people realise they can’t have it all, of course they get angry and frustrated.’

  ‘You think we’re all so easily persuaded?’ Sophie pulled her wrist out from under my touch, put her hands on her hips.

  ‘I think it’s hard not to be.’

  ‘I agree.’ The dragon had stepped in by my shoulder, close enough for it to feel like a provocation. He winked at Sophie. ‘The truth is not on the TV. The only way you can understand the truth is to be out there on the streets.’

  ‘Good evening, Didier.’

  ‘Baptiste.’ He shook my hand firmly. ‘I take it you’ll not be joining us tomorrow?’

  ‘You’re not serious?’ I looked at Sophie in despair, the wine souring in my mouth.

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘You were right when you said the issues need to be more prominent. But no one is going to do that for us. We need to put ourselves out there. We need to be seen on TV too, a voice of reason in all this. Otherwise people will think all we are doing is fighting each other, which is exactly what the government wants.’

  ‘Sophie, are you crazy? It’s too dangerous for you out there now. Don’t go.’

  Didier rolled his eyes. ‘Why, because she’s a woman, or because you think she looks like an Arab?’

  Sophie glared at him. ‘It’s no more dangerous going out to protest in the daylight than it is going home at night in the dark, and I’m not afraid to fight for what’s important to me,’ she said, ‘unlike you.’

  ‘And no one likes a coward.’

  ‘Shut up, Didier,’ Sophie snapped. ‘You have no idea what we’re talking about.’

  ‘Sophie tells me that people assume she’s your daughter,’ he motioned around the bar with a vague hand. ‘That must be embarrassing for both of you.’

  Sophie glared at him as his greasy peal of laughter erupted. She grabbed me by the arm. ‘Look, everyone needs to stop worrying,’ she said. ‘It’s all organised. There’s a police cordon. I’ll be fine.’ She was looking down at my forearm, writing something on the skin. ‘I know you won’t want to call me at home, so here’s my mobile if you want to talk.’ I kept my eyes on her face as she spoke, listening not to the words but the way she softened them by barely parting her lips, studying the curve of her nose, the dark eyebrows. She could have been my daughter, there was no doubt, although why Didier would think I’d be embarrassed by that I couldn’t think. Yet as I looked at her I realised there was something uncanny in what I saw, like a faint note in a glass of wine that you know is familiar but impossible to place out of context. I strained to recall the grainy grey newspaper clipping of a dead-faced woman, but all I could bring to mind was the imprecise, dark-haired dancer of my own imagination.

  31

  We rarely go into Toulouse these days; there are too many places that make you edgy. I never know when turning a corner will trigger a flashback to a time when you were here before, so we tend to stay close to home. Sometimes there is no choice though. We were delayed this morning at an appointment in the city and you suggested eating lunch in a nearby restaurant, well known for its excellent meat. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but as we were shown to our table, a woman recognised me and stood to greet me.

  You smiled as I made the briefest of introductions before leaving them to enjoy their meal, but once we were
seated you turned to me accusingly. ‘Who was that?’ you demanded.

  ‘Just someone from work,’ I said. It was true in a sense, but I must have appeared guarded and your expression darkened. It wasn’t the first time something like this had happened, and I thought I could brave it out, but I should have known better.

  We ordered and began our meals with no more mention of it. It was only later when I returned from the bathroom that it became clear it was not forgotten. The contents of my bag were spilled across the table, in the food, on the floor. Fury came off you in waves. The other diners were self-consciously continuing to eat as though nothing was wrong and the waiter hovered nervously at a distance. I nodded to him apologetically. I’ve got this.

  I forced myself to return to the table, sitting down calmly and looking you in the eye. There, small and insignificant-looking, in the palm of your hand you held the driftwood horse. ‘Where did you get this?’ you said. ‘Where did you get this –’ there was panic in your eyes, you were missing the word – ‘this animal?’

  I had kept that secret for so long, long after you thought you had lost it, long after I became Chouette, safe in my bag like a talisman. I had no choice now but to tell you the truth, and hope that even if you didn’t understand it, you would see it for what it was. ‘You gave it to me,’ I said.

  32

  I woke in the dark. The cowbell was ringing a continuous, urgent alert. Something terrible must have happened, I thought, scrambling for clothes, for a hair comb, for the door. But no one was there, just millions of air particles crushing and blowing. The wind had come for me. The window frames rattled. Candice heaved. I unhooked the bell and brought it inside, standing it amongst the geraniums. Back in bed I tried to sleep but too many thoughts trespassed across my mind and eventually I capitulated and got up to make tea.