by Lesley Lokko
Charity. That was the last time she’d seen fear on Lyudmila’s face. She saw it now. She picked up her bag and quickly left the flat.
53
ANNICK
Paris
‘Bonsoir.’ She looked up from her book. A man was standing in front of her, wearing a suit, unusual in the hotel’s run-of-the-mill clientele.
‘Bonsoir,’ she said dully. ‘Rates are on the board behind me.’
There was some sort of commotion in the far corner of the lobby where there was a bench and a small coffee table, though neither was ever used. She glanced past him to a couple seated on the bench, so close the girl was practically in the man’s lap. A big man, with a broad, fleshy chest and a dark, shiny face. The girl had on a red wig and a skirt so short it barely covered her backside. ‘What’s your best room?’ asked the suited man in front of her. Annick dragged her eyes back to him.
‘The best?’ It wasn’t a question she was often asked. ‘Well, the rooms on the third floor all have en suite bathrooms. I could give you one of those. They’re a bit more expensive, though.’
He glanced at the board behind her head and peeled off a large wad of notes. ‘Three . . . four . . . five. There. That should cover it.’ She looked past him again. The big man was angled away from her; she could only see the back of his head and the broad expanse of his shoulders, tightly encased in a dark blue blazer. Fascinatedly, she watched as the girl lazily tickled the rolls of fat around his neck with long, pink-painted fingernails.
‘Cover it?’ she repeated, confused. He’d put down five hundred euros in neat, clean notes on the countertop in front of her.
‘Yes. We’ll take all four rooms on the third floor. Please don’t allow anyone up. Not whilst he’s there.’ He jerked his head backwards, indicating the man and his painted, child-like companion. ‘I’m assuming there’s no one there just now?’ He looked past her to the rows of keys.
She nodded, and then shook her head. She was confused. His French was flawless, his manner impeccably polite – he definitely wasn’t the sort of customer she met on a daily basis. ‘No, yes . . . no, I mean. There’s no one there.’ She quickly reached behind her and pulled off all four sets of keys, laying them out in front of her.
‘We’ll take this one.’ He picked up the key to Room 313 and turned. ‘Sir,’ he called out. ‘It’s ready.’ The girl turned her head slowly, flickered a lizard-like glance over him, and then turned it back slowly. Annick watched, fascinated, as she licked the big man’s tiny ear, whispering something to him, and threw her head back, laughing, laughing. The sound of laughter was incongruous in the darkened lobby.
‘I’m busy, can’t you see?’ the big man laughed, a deep, sonorous rumbling that fought its way out of his stomach. Finally he lumbered to his feet, pulling the girl along with him. The girl carefully put her high-heeled feet down, one in front of the other. The man followed her, his eyes glued to her small, high backside, gazing blankly in the way men looked at women they’d paid for, no thought at all in their faces other than the thought of what lay ahead. The lift doors closed and suddenly, abruptly, there was silence in the lobby.
‘I’ll just take a seat over there.’ The suited man pulled a book out of his jacket pocket and walked to the bench his boss had just evacuated.
Annick nodded but didn’t say anything. After working at the front desk for so long, nothing shocked her anymore; she’d seen it all. Although, she thought to herself quickly as the man sat down and flipped open his book, she’d never seen a bodyguard who read Jean Genet. Journal du Voleur. Her eyes widened. She’d read it once, a long time ago. She looked down at her own book. It was a cheap American thriller of the sort she’d never even glanced at until she started working at the hotel. Those books passed the night like no other – page after page, murder after murder, clue after clue . . . all the way to happy-ever-after. It was a lie, of course. There was no happy-ever-after. Only in cheap American thrillers.
‘It’s good?’
His voice startled her. She hadn’t even heard him get up. She made a quick gesture with her hand as though to hide it from him. ‘Er, yes. No, not really. It . . . it passes the time.’
He looked at her curiously for a moment but before she could say anything, his mobile rang. He turned away momentarily. There was a hurried conversation in a language she couldn’t quite catch, then he shoved it back in his pocket. He turned back to her, gesturing towards the lift. ‘Does it work?’ He seemed in a hurry. She looked up. It was stuck on the fourth floor, a common occurrence.
‘It’s stuck,’ she said, lifting her shoulders. ‘It happens every night.’
He looked at it; then, with a sound that she hadn’t heard in a long time, he sucked his teeth together, a sound of impatience, irritation . . . a sound only Africans or West Indians make. Her father used to make that very same sound, she thought to herself in surprise. She looked up but he’d already pushed open the fire-escape door. He disappeared; she could hear him running up the stairs. She stared at the empty, swinging door. Unexpected tears prickled behind her eyes. Who was he? It made no difference. It was unlikely she’d ever see him again.
But she did. ‘Bonsoir.’ She looked up. A red, watery light from the neon sign opposite lit the interior of the lobby.
‘Oh, it’s you.’ She felt her face grow warm. Other than the few people she worked with, she rarely spoke to anyone.
He smiled, his white, even teeth startling in the dark, smooth face. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he mimicked, but teasingly, not unkindly. ‘It’s Yves, actually. What’s your name?’
She was so taken aback she had no idea what to say. ‘I . . . my name? An . . . Annick,’ she stammered.
‘Nice to meet you, Annick,’ he said, still smiling. He held out a hand. There was a moment’s awkward confusion, then she took it. His grip was warm and firm. ‘How long have you been working here, Annick?’ he asked pleasantly.
The question threw her. They’d barely spoken three words to each other but it was already more than she could handle. ‘I . . . we . . . we’re not really supposed to talk to guests,’ she said finally. She didn’t know how else to end the conversation. She just wasn’t used to making conversation with anyone, let alone a handsome stranger. And he was handsome, she’d noticed.
‘I’m hardly a guest. But it’s fine.’ He held up his hands in mock defeat. ‘If you’d rather I left you alone . . . ?’
‘I . . . it’s not that. It’s just . . . where’s your boss?’ she asked, unable to think of anything else to say.
‘He stopped off en route,’ he smiled. ‘He’ll be here soon enough.’
‘Who is he?’
He looked away. ‘Just a businessman. No one you’d know.’
‘Are you his bodyguard?’
He smiled. ‘Sometimes. Most of the time I’m a student.’
‘A student?’ She couldn’t keep the surprise from her voice. He looked too old to be a student.
‘A late bloomer,’ he grinned, reading her mind. ‘No, actually, I’m doing my doctorate. It’s just taken longer than I thought.’
‘Oh. What are you studying?’
He grinned at her as if to say, But I thought you weren’t encouraged to talk to guests? ‘Engineering.’
‘An engineer who reads Genet?’ She couldn’t help herself.
‘Engineers read all sorts of things,’ he said mildly. ‘Even American thrillers.’
She blushed and looked down at her hands. She who had once been the class flirt couldn’t handle a simple conversation. ‘Well, I’d . . . I’d better get back to work,’ she said eventually.
He raised an eyebrow but said nothing. He put down the money – in cash again – and picked up the keys to Room 313. He gave her a quick two-fingers-pressed-against-his-temple salute and walked back to his bench. A second later, his mobile rang. His boss was clearly on his way. A few minutes later, a second bodyguard pushed open the door and shadowed him in. As ever, he was accompanied by a young, heavily made-u
p girl whose arms were entwined around his thick fleshy neck as he lumbered into the lift. Annick watched the doors close slowly behind them. The girl was busy pressing herself against his bulk; he paid no more attention to her than he would a buzzing fly.
Less than an hour later, they were gone.
The rest of the night passed without incident. Customers straggled in and out: men in cheap, badly fitting suits, girls – young, old, haggard, innocent-looking – trotting obediently after them. She’d seen it all before. Occasionally, one of the people who more or less lived in the hotel permanently came in, smiled at her briefly and disappeared. Why would anyone choose to live here? she often thought to herself. There was one elderly woman who’d been at the hotel for almost a year, with whom Annick felt a strange, secret affinity. She’d given her name as Madame C. D. de Férrier-Messrine, and although it was true there was something faintly aristocratic about her bearing and her speech, it was clear that she’d fallen on hard times. Annick knew from the gossip she overheard when the cleaners exchanged shifts that the woman practised a frugality that would have made the social services cry ‘famine!’. She ate nothing but boiled rice. The chambermaids brought back the empty packets without a word. She was very thin, always dressed in black with one ornate piece of jewellery, a gold bracelet that hung off her bird-like arm, coins and medallions clanking every time she moved. She always said a polite, gravelly ‘good morning’ to Annick when she came upon her early in the morning. Where did she go, Annick wondered, at seven a.m? Once or twice she’d caught Annick coming out of the bakery opposite, her arms full of crusty batons of freshly baked bread and sometimes a bag of croissants, still oozing butter through their paper skin. They’d flashed each other a quick, guilty look of complicity but nothing was ever said. They both harboured secrets; that was enough.
At seven on the dot, she picked up her book, bag and coat and got ready to leave. Wasis, a sour-looking, taciturn man from Chad or Mali or Burkina Faso, depending on who was asking, took over. ‘Tout va bien?’ he asked in his gruff, staccato French.
She shook her head. ‘No, no problems.’
‘D’accord. Bonne journée.’
‘Toi aussi,’ Annick replied automatically and pushed open the door. It was cold outside; a nippy, chilly wind blew around her ears and ankles, the only parts of her that were exposed. She pulled her scarf up more firmly, settling her neck into her collar and shoving her hands in her pockets. She had no gloves; maybe next month. Her salary covered the absolute basics – rent, bills, food – and precious little else. She walked to and from work every day to save on transport and once a month she took the train to visit her aunt. That was it. She’d never had the dubious advantage of knowing how to live on very little. Most of her life had been spent cossetted in the kind of luxury that seemed unending. Not once had she even had to worry or even enquire about the price of food, the cost of transport, or the tariffs on gas. She’d never owed anyone money, or asked for an advance against earnings to come. In Paris, she’d learned quickly. She had to. After those first few months, she wised up. She took her weekly pay, deducted her rent and bills and put the remainder in one of the kitchen drawers. Everything came out of that drawer – food, the odd bus ticket, the odd book, a scarf, and even, once, a lipstick . . . not that she had any use for it. She’d seen the shade in the window of one of the small pharmacies that lined her route to work. Rouge Allure. Impertinente. Chanel. She stopped and put a hand to her mouth. Her mother had worn the very same shade. Annick lost count of the number of sleek, shiny black tubes she’d pilfered from the bathrooms in the Paris apartment, or the enormous, marble-floored bathroom at the palace in Lomé. Where were all those tubes now? She pushed open the door, hearing the familiar, two-tone chime coming at her as if from a great, great distance and handed over the last few euros in her purse.
For a week she ate nothing but ficelles and drank water from the tap but it was worth it. The tube sat unopened, month after month, the only item of luxury in the tiny flat six floors above a butcher’s and a baker’s, between them home to at least a dozen rats. She knew – at night she could hear them scrabbling around in the rafters.
She walked up Boulevard Barbès and, at Marcadet-Poissoniers, crossed the busy intersection into Boulevard Ornano. The rows of small shops sold everything from fake hair and the sorts of vegetables one would more readily expect to see on the streets of Algiers and Tunis and Lomé and Dakar than Paris, to cartons of dinner plates at knock-down prices. There were always sales on in La Goutte d’Or, the neighbourhood she now called home. It was another Paris. Dim, dank stairwells that opened out onto the view of the white onion-domes of Sacré-Cœur, tiny, bent balconies over which housewives hung brilliantly coloured rugs out to air; people swirled in and out of shops displaying rows of bright, sticky-sweet pastries with signs scrawled in flowery, Arabic script. She walked past the bakery where she often stopped, past the Métro stop at Simplon, down rue Neuve de la Chardonnière . . . Le Bar Yemen. Coiffeurs Hommes. Bar Taba. She walked on, blindly.
At the bottom of the road, just before rue de Roi d’Algers, she stopped suddenly. There was a hairdresser on the corner, next door to La Semeuse, a restaurant and bar that appeared to be housed in someone’s sitting room. She peered through the light-blue curtains. Inside were half a dozen women, sitting in mismatched chairs, reading magazines, laughing and talking – there was even one smoking a cigarette. She hadn’t been to a hairdresser for three years; it too seemed to belong to another life. But there was a fifty-euro note tucked into the lining of her purse – an unexpected gift from Aunt Libertine the last time she’d visited. She caught sight of herself, a large, bulky object, muffled up against the cold with no discernible sign of anything remotely feminine, or, God forbid, attractive. Her hair, which had once been her pride and glory, was perpetually scraped back into an untidy bun. She’d been trimming the ends herself ever since she’d arrived in Paris and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d worn it loose outside of the anonymity of her own bed.
She pushed open the door without thinking. The chemical garden-sweetness of the salon hit her like a slap. Several of the women looked up but there was only warmth in their faces. ‘Salut chérie, besoin d’aide? The woman who was standing in the corner, smoking and supervising, looked up with a smile.
‘I . . . I was just wondering . . . I wanted to . . . how much is a cut and wash?’
‘For you, ma belle, c’est pas cher. Come in, come in.’ She beckoned to Annick to come forward. ‘Have a seat, ma belle. Tu veux boire quelque chose? Un café?’
Annick’s eyes prickled. ‘Yes,’ she nodded quickly. ‘Un café.’
‘Ouh la la . . . regarde ça!’ The woman expertly unpinned Annick’s bun and her hair tumbled over her shoulders. The other women looked over enviously. All were paying for their hair to be straightened, teased, primped and tamed – Annick’s thick, curly locks were the envy of all. ‘You are a métisse, non?’ The woman asked her, but again there wasn’t a shred of hostility in her voice. ‘Lucky you. She got the good hair, non?’ she asked the others and there was a general, laughing murmur of assent. ‘So, ma biche, where are you from? Tes parents, je veux dire. Des Antilles?’
Annick shook her head. She hesitated. ‘My father is – was – Togolese. My mother was French.’
‘Was? Ils sont mort?’ the woman asked, parting the thick brown curls and inspecting the ends. ‘When did you last cut your hair, ma belle?’ she went on, without waiting for an answer.
The two questions carried the same weight. ‘A long time ago. My hair? I . . . I can’t remember . . . two, three years ago, maybe?’
‘Three years?’ The woman gave a mock scream. ‘No wonder you walked in here today. D’accord. Sophie . . . take the jeune mademoiselle to the sink by the window, yes, that one . . . give her scalp a good massage. Three years . . . mon Dieu. So you’re an orphan, like Arlène here. Dommage, non? Bon, Sophie is going to wash your hair and then I’m going to cut it myself, personelleme
nt. Three years?’ She turned away, shaking her head in disbelief.
‘Togolaise?’ One of the women, whose head was buried under the second, steel crania of the dryer, craned her neck to take a look at Annick. ‘You’re very clair,’ she said, noting Annick’s pale skin colour. ‘Très clair. Whereabouts in Togo are you from?’
‘I . . . I’ve never been to Togo,’ Annick said quickly. ‘I was brought up here.’
‘Ah.’ She seemed satisfied by the response.
‘Just as well,’ someone else piped up. ‘Terrible what’s happening there. Ter-rible.’
The women began to talk amongst themselves again as Annick was led to the basin by the window. She listened, fascinated. They were from all over the African diaspora – Sénégal, Congo, Rwanda . . . Martinique, Guadaloupe, Toronto. There were a dozen women in Céleste’s living room, which, as Annick had correctly surmised, doubled as her salon. They were all friends, or customers who’d been coming to her for so long they’d become friends. It was light-years away from the salon on the King’s Road that she’d gone to ever since her mother had taken her there at the age of eight, but there was a familiarity in the togetherness of the women – of all ages, all complexions – that soothed her instantly. They reminded her of her grandmother’s house in Lomé where the women of the Betancourt family met at family occasions – the births, deaths and funerals that were their rites of passage, a kind of female freemasonry that, even though she was too young to take part in it, she’d been given to understand would one day be hers, too.
