‘A long time ago. In winter. I haven’t seen her afterwards.’
‘OK. Thank you. Merci.’
‘Il n’y a pas de quoi,’ he said, and went to clear a table of empty glasses.
I looked at the paper.
I have something for you, BC. Go to our late-night smoking place. B. XOX
I sipped the wine and stared out of the window with my brain in a strange place somewhere between miserable, excited and cross. Maybe I should stop following Butterfly’s clues. I didn’t have to passively accept something that didn’t make me feel good. All I had to do was stop if that’s what I wanted, I snarled to myself in irritation. I knocked the wine back in one gulp, went to the bar to pay, shook hands with Our Waiter as he passed and thanked him, then left.
I trudged up rue Ménilmontant and as it got steep I felt my legs stiffen. Somebody was walking behind me so I carried on quickly, pretending I couldn’t feel the burn. I turned into the little cobbled street of Cité de l’Ermitage and the footsteps followed. I turned to the left and sat on one of the concrete bollards. A man arrived, realised that it was a cul-de-sac and turned to go. He jumped when he saw me sitting there and moved quickly away. After a moment I looked back down the street to make sure he’d gone and then lit a cigarette. I wished the rain would start again, but it didn’t. It was nighttime, but not late. Not twenty past three. This was the place I sometimes came with Butterfly to smoke because she loved this street. She wanted to buy a house here with a garden. I leaned back and stared at the cobblestones and the weeds in the dim light.
‘What do you think, Cat?’ Cat appeared and looked around and then sat down a couple of metres in front of me. Where would you hide something here? I stood up and looked around. There were no stones or doormats to leave something under nor any earth to dig in. I ran my hand round the back of the concrete bollards that Tomomi Ishikawa and I had used as seats, and behind the smaller of the two I felt a familiar texture. Sure enough, there was a layer of carefully placed duct tape. I tried to peel it off but it had been glued (I guess the tape wouldn’t stick). I looked for something in my bag to scrape it off with, but all I could find was Butterfly’s blue on/offable pen. I poked through the tape and ripped out a sealable plastic bag with a brown envelope in it. On the front of the envelope was my name.
I was annoyed. This was a rubbish place to leave a clue. Anyone sitting here could have found it and it was only by chance that I went in the bar and even more by chance that Our Waiter found the ‘shit’ to give me.
Cat looked up at me and raised an eyebrow, but I don’t think it meant anything. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘If we’re quick, we’ll make the last metro.’
If you are Benjamin Constable and you are reading these words, then you truly are a skilled treasure hunter. I take my chapeau off to you, sir.
The next treasure is made of gold. My Paris and yours have overlapped at times; perhaps we came to places from different directions and with different stories. This is a drop of history, the facts of which we have disagreed upon. Do you know what I’m talking about?
The treasures in this part of the trail are sequential, and if you choose to follow, it will carry you far away, to another of my worlds for us to explore together and me to delight in your treasure-hunting joy. I want to imagine you scrambling and rummaging around for clues leading to the manyfold prize. Some of the prize is more about me than you, but hopefully in all of this, BC, there will be things you find beautiful and that will give you pleasure. And if there is no pleasure (which I quite understand that there may not be), then maybe at the very least something may inspire you to write, notes or even a whole book. (Not that I think you need inspiration—it’s just that I miss you and I want to leave some of my spirit here on paper with you. Do you forgive me, Ben Constable? I don’t expect you to, but I hope there are things here that will make you smile.)
LOVE, Butterfly. XOX
Cat got up and went to sit on the other side of the room to move away from me and I scowled at him. I got out my notebook and a black pen.
Dear Tomomi Ishikawa,
There is no joy in this. You have disappeared without explanation, leaving vague and improbable clues to bloody and disturbing stories. Am I supposed to be entertained? Am I supposed to laugh in shocked excitement at your destructive adventures? Why didn’t you leave something happy? Why didn’t you think that this might be confusing and upsetting? Why do you have so little idea of how this might make me feel? I guess you were ill and dying and weren’t thinking clearly. If I could have chosen your death, I wouldn’t have done it like this. I think I would have tried to make the end of your time happy and comfortable. I think I would have liked to have been there when you died, I think I would have been good at that. And when you were dead, I would have liked to be able to let you go, and for you to become a memory. Maybe I would have kept one thing, something of yours as a souvenir, but that’s all; a tiny keepsake which I could guard preciously. I don’t want to be the inheritor of all your junk writing that you’re too vain to throw away. And it feels too precious for me to get rid of. Damn.
I’m pissed off with you, Tomomi Ishikawa. You seem to have constructed a grand scheme to waste my time and get me into dangerous and difficult situations. I don’t want to follow your treasure trail and I don’t want your spirit with me. Yeah, and another thing, why the hell am I in your ‘My Dead’ folder? Were you planning to kill me as well? Thanks. I think you should go now.
Ben
So, I’ve entered into correspondence with a dead person and I’m being supervised by an imaginary cat. I’m not sure that this is how I would have planned my own mental health, but hey, I still feel fairly sane and if it wasn’t for all this, I think I’d be quite happy with my little life. I don’t need great adventures. I like watching the clouds and hearing the noises from the street. I like drinking with friends, talking to strangers in bars. I like living in Paris and being foreign. I don’t need anything else.
My mood had changed. Writing back to Butterfly had done something to me. I still felt bruised and embarrassed by my cowardice, but I wasn’t angry anymore. I wanted to understand. I wanted to solve the puzzle and find the treasure.
I looked at Tomomi Ishikawa’s letter again. Something stood out. ‘The next treasure is made of gold . . . . This is a drop of history, the facts of which we have disagreed upon. Do you know what I’m talking about?’ Yes, I knew what she was talking about. I turned on the computer and looked in her ‘My Paris’ folder, scanning through the file names for something familiar, and I found it. There was a file called ‘La Goutte d’Or’. I didn’t read it. I didn’t need to. It’s the name of a neighbourhood in Paris. I know it better than Tomomi Ishikawa ever did because I used to live there. She and I did not agree on the origin of its name—her version of a golden-coloured wine produced there hundreds of years ago was more likely historically accurate. My version was probably just urban myth. I tore the reply I’d written to Butterfly from my notebook, folded it with her letter and put them in the envelope, which I placed on top of the ever-growing pile of things to do with her. Then I went to bed.
10
Treasure Hunting
The next day’s lethargy was lighter of mood and I felt quite comfortable doing nothing. I was on holiday; I could do what I wanted. After breakfast I had a nap, the day passed, and despite half-serious good intentions, I didn’t get out of the house until well into the evening.
I took line 2 to La Chapelle and cut through the back streets of La Goutte d’Or. Youths hung out on street corners and people scurried about their business in and out of doorways, shops and cafés. There was a smell of summer and nighttime, dry and spicy. This isn’t exactly a pretty area, but it’s alive and I like it.
I detoured up to rue Doudeauville, then down towards Château Rouge, where hawkers offered me sunglasses and belts until alerted to the presence of a police patrol, and street stalls laid out on car bonnets were wrapped up in cloth and swiped away in seconds. I crossed boulevard Ba
rbès and followed rue Poulet past numerous shops for African hair products, up the lower slope of Montmartre. At the top of the street, where rue Poulet and rue Myrha meet, is a narrow art deco building that had recently been converted into a bar. I sat on the terrace, ordered a beer and examined my surroundings. There was treasure here.
Before the art deco building there had been a much older one. Hundreds of years ago there had lived an alchemist on the top floor. He was a reclusive type who spent most of his days locked away, calculating the transmutation of lead into gold and conducting experiments. However, later in his life he attracted attention from locals because at eleven o’clock every day a single drop of gold fell from the top of the building onto the pavement below. And people would gather from early in the morning, hoping to be the one to harvest this daily gift from the heavens, and that is the true reason for the name of the area. La Goutte d’Or—The Drop of Gold.
The most obvious place to hide treasure was a large plant pot on the pavement next to me. With a halfhearted attempt to seem normal, I adjusted my shoelace and tried to look under the pot at the same time, but the ruse was ineffective and I spent a second or two on my hands and knees feeling the underside of the pot on the off chance that there was something lodged there for me to find. I sat back as though nothing interesting had happened and watched the street. I took Tomomi Ishikawa’s blue pen from my bag and casually plunged it into the soft earth over and over again until it struck something remotely solid a few inches below the surface.
Still with the hope of maintaining an air of normality, I pushed my hand through the dirt and pulled out a sealed transparent plastic bag with an envelope inside, then smoothed the earth back into place. On the front of the envelope was written: ‘BE CAREFUL WHEN YOU OPEN THIS; SOMETHING MIGHT FALL OUT’ in familiar block capitals. Wrapped in a shit of paper, bruised with blue handwriting, was a tiny drop of gold in the shape of a tear with a loop at the pointed end. It had once been part of an earring I’d found in the metro. I’d removed the rest and kept the drop and given it to Butterfly one day, and told her the story of the alchemist on rue Myrha, and she had rather ungraciously disputed the historical accuracy of my tale.
I couldn’t help but smile. It was perfect Butterfly. It was a perfect treasure.
On the paper was written a single sentence in quotation marks:
“The brown current ran swiftly out of the heart of darkness, bearing us down towards the sea with twice the speed of our upward progress; Tomomi Ishikawa’s life was running swiftly too, ebbing, ebbing out of her heart into the sea of inexorable time.”
I struggled to keep a straight face because I was very pleased with myself. This was a quote and I knew where it came from. I suppose it helped that the title of the book was in the writing, but I still felt clever.
* * *
Back at home I pulled my copy of Heart of Darkness from the shelf and flicked through the pages. I found the passage easily enough. She had of course replaced the name Kurtz with her own, like a sickening reminder of her disappearing life, ebbing, ebbing out of her heart as she prepared this whole game for my entertainment. But now I was stuck. Did I have to read the whole book to find something that would lead me down a dead-end trail to one of Butterfly’s dark secrets? ‘Ebbing, ebbing’—I’d read that somewhere before, and I knew where to find it scratched in blue ink on the inside cover of this very book.
Paris, November 2006
A present for your dark heart. You remind me of the thoughts, ebbing, ebbing inexorably from my hands and into my brain like a twisted revelation.
XOX
Butterfly
I had presumed the dedication nonsense. ‘Ebbing, ebbing . . . into my brain.’ I opened the ‘My Brain’ folder on her computer and clicked on a file named ‘The Revelatory Vision of Saint Butterfly’:
The Revelatory Vision of Saint Butterfly
Once the sun had passed below the horizon and the stain of red drained from the sky, leaving a pale wash illuminated from the streetlights below, I walked south towards a tower and the quarter of a lost generation.
And through the clouds pushed the moon, waxing regrets, heavy, falling.
From my left I heard voices from the cemetery, the calling of the dead for me to join them, sometimes in rich choral harmonies and sometimes the din, cacophonous, assaulting my ears and weighing on my spirit: Baudelaire, de Beauvoir, Beckett, Duras, Franck, Garnier, Gainsbourg, Guilmant, Larousse, Maupassant, Sartre, Sontag, wait. Wait! I’ll be with you soon.
I hesitated in front of the glass façade of the station and watched the souls of the transient living come and go. About me gathered a crowd. At first I thought it coincidence, as though I had wandered into the middle of some kind of meeting, but gradually attention turned to me, with angry shouting and taunts.
I raised my hands to protect my head and wished for the ground to swallow me. What are you waiting for? Take me now. But the ground did not, and fear drove me to change my behavior.
“Stop!” I cried, and silence rolled across the square. I stretched my hands to the sides, and the people backed away. From my mouth came the words “You will not judge me,” and a murmur rippled through the crowd.
Now I raised all before me, carrying them up through the station past the ticket hall and the ready-made sandwiches, the clock and the departure board, past the platforms and their high-speed trains lining up on tracks, stretching to the south and to the west, like shoots pushing up through the earth to find daylight, they reach for the ocean. “I will show you all, I will tell you everything, and you will look on in awe, enchanted by the illusion.” How else could I escape them?
Higher still we went and to a garden; the island of Hesperides, an oasis in the desert mountains and a gateway across the Sargasso Sea to a new world.
The crowd watched in amazement, paralyzed by fear, but there was one who did not notice. He was distracted by the garden. “I love this place,” he said.
I knew he’d come. I was right to be afraid.
“My path is chosen,” I cried. “Mine is the path of the dead. Do not judge me. Please.” But he was not listening. It’s not that it was of no importance, he was simply unaware. (Or was he deliberately avoiding that which he did not wish to see?)
I pointed: “Everything is written down for you to find. Look around you. It is here.”
And as he looked I moved to leave quietly so as not to draw attention. Heavy clouds rolled in and the dead called out to me, come quick.
Go now, away from here. Fly from this garden across the ocean to my past and the small treasures that await you, and I will run before the storm takes me.
Shadows pushed across the moon and the wind stirred up a tempest threatening to uproot the trees and tear down the tower, and heaven will crash down, and the dead rise from their graves to bring me in, if I don’t come now.
Please leave before it is too late. Wake up. Wake up and leave. Come back when the storm has blown out and the dead have gone to rest.
The garden will be fresh and green, and blossoms decorate the trees, the water from the fountains will flow, cool, through your fingers.
Bloody hell. The tower, the station, the Lost Generation and the cemetery are Montparnasse. Above the station is a garden called the Jardin Atlantique, I found it one day in winter, when I’d missed my train and had an hour and a half to wait for another. I had told Butterfly about it, enclosed by tall buildings on all sides. It is accessed either from a stairway going up from the station or from two lifts situated on the east and west adjacent streets. It’s closed after dark, but I know another way in. In the centre of the garden is a steel structure called the Island of Hesperides. I checked the time and it was eleven o’clock. The metro was still running.
I took line 6 to Montparnasse and walked up through the station past the stairway leading to the garden with its locked gate at the top, and out of the east exit. I walked past the lift standing like a giant post box in the middle of the pavement and turned up past
Le Petit Journal on the left, and the SNCF headquarters on the right. At the top of the street there is a large circus and I turned right, following the curved front of the Hotel Concorde, and onto an access road at the back of the hotel.
Cat appeared and led the way up a ramp staying close to the wall in the shadow, which seemed like a good idea. When I got to my secret entrance there were four-metre-high ornate steel gates barring my route. How had I never noticed them before? Cat squeezed through at the bottom with ease and sat down on the other side, looking out at me. ‘I’ll never get through there,’ I said to Cat, and stood back looking higher up where the gaps were larger. I hoisted myself up the grille without too much difficulty, and with laughable ease past the spiky things to stop you climbing. There was a row of small gaps about eight feet from the floor. When I was young I had a theory that if you could get your head through a space, then you could get the rest of your body through (now on reflection I think that was a distortion of the idea that a cat’s whiskers are its way of judging its width), but then I was a very skinny youth. I’m a pretty slim man as well. I barely touched the sides and I was in. ‘Are we good at this, Cat, or is it just easy?’
I guessed there were cameras, but I also guessed that no one would be looking at them because they wouldn’t be expecting anyone to climb through those gates. I nonetheless tried to stay in the shadows, but to get to the steel structure in the middle I had to walk across open ground. I thought about crawling commando style, but suspected it would make me more conspicuous. The Island of Hesperides is a meteorological observatory and a piece of modern art. It has four legs straddling the path and a large metal disk at the top, angled to reflect something, although I don’t know what. The clouds maybe? At each corner of the structure is a device for measuring a different piece of meteorological data: rainfall, wind speed, temperature and air pressure. I hoped I wouldn’t have to start randomly digging up this park because I love it, just for its improbability. I walked round the structure, looking for a more obvious hiding place. It wasn’t hard to find. Facing outwards on one of the legs there was a verse in marker pen, hasty block capitals:
Three Lives of Tomomi Ishikawa Page 9
