Goodbye, Paris

by Anstey Harris

  It isn’t a sketchbook. It’s a diary. At least, a diary of sorts. It doesn’t have dates and times and ordered sentences of reporting. My diary when I was seventeen was neat, sensible; my handwriting reflecting my personality.

  Nadia is angrier than I ever was. These pages are covered in scrawls and illustrations. Every profanity known to man is writ large and colored in with furious scribbles of blue Biro. It is the crazed, looping scrawl of internal monologue and is clearly supposed to be private.

  I should shut the book. It is not mine to read. It almost feels as if someone else’s hands are flicking the page corners, watching weeks of Nadia’s life fall flat against each other. I stop on a block of text. And I read it.

  Fuck you, Harriet. Fuck your high-and-fucking-mightiness. I wish you knew what they say behind your back and I really wish you knew about me. I’m your best friend and I am so bored, bored of you pretending you have a perfect life and I’m bored of you not listening. You only care about yourself and your stupid boyfriend. Here’s a newsflash, Harriet, a word from our sponsors—you’re a dick and your boyfriend is worse. WANKERS.

  The final word is in huge blue letters that take the form of bubbles and butt up against one another. I know that Harriet is Nadia’s best friend, but I had no idea they’d fallen out. I do remember, though, the ricochets of teenaged relationships, the switchblade of friendships and taking sides.

  I flick forward a few pages. I can barely believe I’m doing this and I cannot convince myself that I’m not looking for a mention of my own name.

  I find David’s first.

  Today we mostly have to pretend that David isn’t married. Yes we do. True story. If I want to get paid, anyway. Grace is in France. Thank God, she would do my head in if she were here. Blah blah fuckety blah, twit twit, blah. Do I think it’s sweet that she still loves him after a lifetime? No, no, no, dear diary. I think they’re cocks.

  I’m torn between laughing at how like Nadia it sounds and being annoyed that she thinks we’re less than cool. I tell myself, under my breath, that no one ever read good things about themselves in anyone else’s diary. That doesn’t stop me reading on.

  He’s nice, the married boyfriend. And he’s not pushy or annoying. And, fuck, he is fit. But the giveaway is that he knows exactly how to talk to me without being an arsehole. And he’s not a teacher. He doesn’t work with kids, but he knows exactly how to talk to a teenager without being a massive dick. You know why, Grace? Because he lives with teenagers. True story. And you fucking know it. He lives with teenagers and he lives with their fucking mother, too. Who cares? Not me. But it does make me laugh that you think I don’t know. I couldn’t give two shiny shits whether he’s married or not. Everyone’s doing it. That’s true, isn’t it, dearest mummy and daddy? Everyone’s divorcing or pretending. Which one of you has the boyfriend or the girlfriend? And how long will it be after one of you moves out that you’ll try and pretend you just met them? And I’ll shout in your fucking faces because I already knew, you massive arseholes, you haven’t shared a bedroom for a fucking year. Just get on and divorce already.

  Nadia’s writing screams loudly in the empty shop. I am, literally, openmouthed, truly shocked by this revelation. The idea of Nadia’s perfect parents divorcing is awful. The idea of her being so sad and so angry is utterly horrible. The irony and the guilt hit me at the same time and each equally hard. I wonder if perhaps she’s wrong; teenagers can get the wrong end of the stick very easily. She’s been remarkably perceptive about David, though.

  I turn towards the end of the book; the entries are random and there are empty pages sandwiched by blocks of sharp text, squashed together and furious. On the second-to-last page, I find words I won’t ever forget.

  How does she expect her kid to learn music if she’s too fucking uptight to play and the kid’s dad can’t? By fucking magic?

  It’s simple and cold. It’s true.

  It may not even refer to me; I know that Nadia’s mum played a pretty decent level of piano when she was younger and that her father doesn’t play anything. Does Nadia even know that I want a kid, would she care? It doesn’t matter. Whether she is talking about me—and it isn’t meant for me, anyway—or not, I know that sentence will haunt my dreams.

  When I read on, I am absolved. When they put up a statue to Pushy Asshole Parents, it’ll be you, mother dearest. Without your fucking Botox. And without your makeup on. And Dad aswell. She makes aswell one word.

  I am absolved, but no less guilty.

  I hear the door and look up, expecting it to be David. It’s Nadia. I close the book and move it over to the rubbish bin, sweeping the sandwich crusts off the cover as she comes in.

  “I didn’t expect you today.”

  “You did,” she says. “You told me to come in all week.”

  “I definitely didn’t say come in today. I’ve got someone coming to look at a violin in an hour.”

  “Whatever.” She shrugs and takes the book from my hand. “I knew I’d left this here, anyway.”

  “I didn’t know you drew,” I say as she puts the book in her bag.

  “Yeah, sketches. Odd bits of shit here and there. You didn’t open it, then?”

  “No, of course not. It’s your book.”

  And just like that I have lied to her.

  * * *

  I get home to a happy house. David is sitting at the kitchen table, spreadsheets and emails flying across the screen of his laptop. The radio is on in the background, quietly filling the house with the news from the outside world, reminding us that we’re wrapped in this cocoon together.

  “Good day?” he asks me, looking up from the computer and smiling. He has a gin and tonic with ice and a small slice of lemon in it. Beside his computer is a bowl of peanuts. He looks like he belongs here, wrapping up his working day.

  “I did something a bit wrong. Something I shouldn’t really have done.”

  “How so?” he asks, his hand over his mouth while he eats the nuts and speaks at the same time.

  “Nadia left her diary under the counter.”

  “You didn’t? Did you read it?” He is laughing.

  “Don’t laugh. I feel awful. I really shouldn’t have. I only opened it because I thought it was a sketchbook.” I reach out to take a peanut from the bowl and David puts his hand over the top of it. He pulls the bowl towards him. “Mine,” he says, and grins at me.

  “I didn’t read much.”

  “Maybe she wanted you to? Maybe it was a cry for attention.”

  “Do you think?” I grasp at the straw he has offered.

  “I always think, every time I meet that girl, that no one listens to her. Her bloody awful parents; they’re so lucky to have her and they take bugger all notice of her except to boast about her exam results.” There is something in David that seems to be able to isolate the exact thing that makes people tick, identify with them so quickly and effectively. I suppose that is what makes him successful in his business.

  “You’re much more perceptive than I am. I see her almost every bloody day and I just sit there feeling jealous of how gorgeous and how accomplished she is. She always comes across as so perfect to me. I wish I’d been like her.”

  David disagrees. He illustrates his point with one wagging finger. “Uh-uh, no. That girl is so angry, it seeps out every pore. She’s mad as hell. Angry at everything.”

  “She said nice things about you.”

  “Of course she did, I’m amazingly nice.”

  “She said you’re ‘fit.’ ” I put speech marks around the word with my fingers.

  “Because I am.”

  I make another fruitless assault on the peanuts. “Her parents are getting divorced, apparently.”

  “No surprises there. That woman is so incredibly uptight. I’ve only met her on a handful of occasions and it’s just money, money, money. And her cheeks don’t move when she speaks.”

  It’s true. In the last couple of years, Nadia’s mother has obviously resorte
d to Botox, perhaps to try and cement together her crumbling marriage. I’m not sure it’s worked on any level.

  Mine and David’s relationship, although unconventional, has outlasted some married couples I know. Nadia’s mother and father are just another pair added to the pile of fatalities we’ve seen grow so high over the years. Even Natalie and Jonny who first introduced us went their separate ways two or three years ago.

  I’m not naive enough to think that the frisson of separation has no role in our passion for each other; it makes for a tender relationship when you are forced apart so often, but that’s not, I’m convinced, the main driver of our longevity. Few couples started with the same pain as David and me, fortunately for them.

  * * *

  After I’d told David I was pregnant, he had been unable to leave France for almost a month. He called; at least once a day, every day. We mostly cried on the phone, oscillating between moments of sunlight where I thought we might find a tangled solution—a half-truth of a future—and the cold dark fact of the life he’d had before we met, the bottom line that drained us of options.

  He shouldered the blame squarely, pointing out that he was the one with the existing family, with the marriage, not me.

  But it takes two.

  The sickness went on and on. I began to see it as a respite from thinking. It was almost a comfort.

  The day I started to make the tiny cello, I knew I wouldn’t have a termination. I cut out the pieces that would make my baby’s first instrument and my confidence started to take shape alongside them. I had to accept that I would do this alone and that David, however intense his pain, however valid and logical his reasons, would have to live with my decision.

  When I started to map the points of a minute spiral onto the piece of wood I’d chosen for the scroll, I knew that I would give David up if necessary. I could walk away from him if I was forced to choose between him and my baby.

  The mathematical calculations needed to reduce something from the size required for an adult to one that would fit an infant were intricate and important. I had to shrink each anatomical part of the cello without altering the acoustics and the physics of the finished piece. Each side of the scaled-down instrument had to work as a sound box; the interaction of the wood and the movement of the strings had to be as exact as on a full-size cello.

  There was no point in our baby starting with a less than perfect instrument; the whole idea was that he or she learnt the true beauty of sound at the same time as they discovered the rest of their senses. This wouldn’t be music from a tinny speaker or a scratchy low-grade recording but full, rich notes that would speak to their little soul.

  The long columns of numbers, the formula and algebra, brought solidity to me. I was relieved that there were still inalterable constants in the world. Working out the Fibonacci series of the scroll brought such calm and order that I was able to breathe smoothly for the first time in weeks.

  Outside my workshop, I took to looking at women in the street, women with children, wondering how they managed, how they looked so normal. First I would look at their faces; were they just people like me, or were they in possession of some knowledge I was yet to understand? Would I join them on an equal footing on receipt of my own perfect infant?

  Next I would look at their hands. Did they have wedding bands? Did they have a groove or a light strip of un-sunned skin where the ring used to be?

  With a confidence that wobbled and wavered, I used to follow them down the street thinking, If they can do it, so can I.

  * * *

  David is in the kitchen cooking. He sent me upstairs to have a bath while he filled the house with piquant smells and the illusion of a completely normal life. I lay in the warm water, soaking off the smell of varnish, the dust of my workshop, and listening to pots clatter in the kitchen as if he is always here, and only here.

  I go downstairs to see how far he’s gotten with dinner. I am wrapped in a bath towel, a second smaller one around my head like a turban. I love this domesticity, this casualness.

  The scene I could hear through the floorboards is over. David is packing his laptop into its case and I know straightaway that he is leaving.

  “My son knows.”

  I am completely blindsided. I stand very still in the kitchen, my hands hanging down. I don’t know how to speak or what I could even say.

  “He saw the video. On a Twitter link.” David does the zip up around the case. It is a long, loud noise in the shocked room. “In France.”

  I imagine the scattering of hissed French words that must have gone on in here while I was in the bath. An image of them spread like tiny insects pops into my mind; fragments of conversation scuttling under the fridge, vowels rolling between the cooker and the cupboard, consonants scurrying under the kitchen table like spiders.

  “How do you . . . Did he . . . ?”

  “His mother called me a few minutes ago.”

  “What will happen now?”

  He walks over to me. His face is ashen, his voice stilled. He sighs; an impassioned and terrible sigh. “Gracie, I don’t know. It’s like a fucking bomb’s gone off.” He takes a deep breath.

  I imagine the explosion rippling through his family: the questions, the shouting, all of them wondering what on Earth was going on in the video. I wonder if his wife asked him if it was me. I assume, although I have never asked, that she knows nothing about me beyond that I exist.

  I know a little about her. I know she is French and a lawyer. I know she has three children, a home in Strasbourg, and a family life I dream of. I know she is the redheaded woman I met briefly at Jonny and Natalie’s party; the woman who went home because she was feeling unwell.

  I know she and her husband have an agreement of silence, a contract of behavior that puts their children first. I do not know how she will react if this peculiar trust is broken. David doesn’t either.

  “What will you do?” I ask. After so many years, we both know the answer isn’t that he stays, that we take the opportunity to announce ourselves, boldly and clearly, to the world. Experience has taught me that I have to be mindful of his children, that I too must want the best—and only the best—for them.

  “I don’t know how long I’ll be gone, sweetheart. There’ll be a shitstorm to sweep up. He saw the video, he recognized me immediately and—more than that—he’s old enough to work out that I was avec une amie if he watches it too closely.”

  David draws me into his arms. “My darling girl.” More tortured sighs. “It’ll be all right in the end. And?”

  “If it’s not all right, it’s not the end.” I know the words. I still believe them, even if I sometimes have to paint a smile on my face to get them out.

  I compare every difficulty, every slope or hill, to our first two months together; ten weeks that were so awful that—if we got through that—we can get through anything. We can survive. It will just take patience, time, and trust.

   Chapter Seven

  My parents gave up everything for my dream of being a cellist. Their holidays were seaside weekends in caravans or cheap B&Bs, their social lives—if they’d ever had any—dwindled to chatting to other parents in the car parks outside rehearsals or exam rooms and, later with all the pride that anyone could feel, concert halls and studios. They had no treats or luxuries, all those were mine. Their needs were so frugally met that my dad paid more for my cello than he did the family car. And every joy they found, every triumph, was mine or connected to me. They kept long hours; my mum had a cleaning job early in the morning to make extra money for lessons, for strings and bow rehairs, and traveling to concerts. My dad would listen to me do my first practice of the day while he made my breakfast, his blue mechanic’s all-in-one unbuttoned down the front. “So I’ll feel the benefit when I go out,” he’d say, and then do the jacket part up over his old white T-shirt.

  My mum worked in a shop all day and was home in time to make my tea, and listen to the next two hours of my practice. They were ordinary
people, a bit older than most parents, who ate ordinary food and did ordinary jobs. All their wishes were saved for me.

  When I sent them the tickets for the recital, having already told them over and over what it meant to be one of the five musicians representing Nikolai Dernov, my mum would have gone up and down our street, knocking on every door and telling them what I was doing, what I’d achieved. Our neighbors would have had, for the most part, no idea what she was talking about, but her pride and enthusiasm would have told them everything they needed to know.

  In her last letter to me before they were supposed to have come to my concert—to Nikolai’s showcase—she described, in words dripping with guilt—certain she shouldn’t have “wasted the money on herself”—the dress she had bought for the evening. “It’s the palest blue, love,” the letter had said, “and so long I have to wear heels under it. You’ve never seen me in anything like this before and nor has your dad!” She was dressing like a princess because she thought her dreams had come true.

  It still breaks my heart that she never wore the dress.

  * * *

  Being pregnant softened me, just as it hardened up my resolve. I was thirty-two, so much had happened in the last twelve years and, for the first time, I allowed myself to regroup. I explained to David, over all the nights on the phone, how my dream of music college went so wrong, how I thought I would never heal from the humiliation, the shock and the disappointment at being asked to leave. I simply hadn’t been good enough, and that had taken me completely by surprise. I told him how Nikolai Dernov had ripped through my confidence with his frustration at trying to teach me and how playing in front of anyone had destroyed me ever since.

  Losing my parents while I was still in my twenties compounded my sense of failure and I had, increasingly, used staying in and playing the cello—alone—as a coping strategy, weaving a wall of safety around me through my music. It had become so much a habit that I’d stopped noticing that I did it.