by Kate Dunn
The child picked a flake of pastry off her cheek and ate it.
“I sailed her down the Canal St Martin, though. We came through the tunnel under the Place de la Bastille, at the end over there…”
She wasn’t listening. She swivelled round, bottomed her way along the cabin roof and slid down the sloping window at the front onto the bow. She slid down again, and again, not with joy, not with gales of laughter, but with great seriousness. Then she sat cross-legged just behind the flagpole – you couldn’t call it a foredeck – and waited.
When everything was stowed away and the rope was loosened but not undone, he placed the navigation book on the bench at the back, anchored it from the wind with a pair of binoculars, made an excited, thumbs up sign at the child then busied himself with the outboard motor. He checked that it wasn’t in gear, that the fuel switch was on and then let some air into the tank. He leaned in close, tinkering with the choke. The sun was shining and the heat was already collecting in thin folds just above the water. Satisfied with his preparations he gave one almighty yank on the starter cord.
There was a cracking sound and that slippery sense of a blow falling, of flesh splitting open. He spun round as the child screamed. She was splayed out on the deck at his feet, both hands covering her left eye. He had no idea that she had been standing right behind him. He dropped to his knees.
“It’s alright, it’s OK. Let me see. Let me have a look. It’s OK.”
Her mouth had that wide, breached look: the skin around it was stretched white and strings of spit ran from tooth to tooth. There was phlegm streaming from her nose and a red thread of blood running from under her fingers.
“Let me see,” he whispered, holding her wrists gently.
“I won’t hurt you–” Holy God – as if he hadn’t done that already. “I just need to look at your eye, just a quick look.” He peeled her hands apart. When she saw the blood, the child started sobbing, making her small frame judder. He put his arms round her, trying to collect her up and hold her to him, but she was uncontainable, punching and slapping in all directions, hitting him and hitting him,
“Laissez-moi, laissez-moi!”
He held her as best he could, though she kept slipping from his grip like a river fish. He held her until she was calm, until she had cried herself out. He was conscious of a knot of people gathering in that helpful way which boaters have. Cupping both her hands in one of his, he managed a brief inspection of her eye. His elbow must have caught her just on the line of her brow; there was a split about a centimetre long in her eyelid.
“It’s nothing, it’s just a scratch,” he said, to put courage into both of them. He wasn’t very good with blood. He clambered to his feet, holding the child in his arms. “Is there a doctor? A hospital?”
One of the boaters gestured up at the street on the other side of the marina. “There’s a hospital in the Faubourg St Antoine. Là bas,” she said. “You take a taxi,” she managed in English at the end.
Colin nodded. Still holding the child, he clambered onto the pontoon. He glanced back at the Dragonfly, her hatch open, her rope not properly tied. No time for that; no time for anything. He half-ran towards the quay.
“Amandine! I cannot leave without Amandine. It is not possible.”
He went racing back for the monkey and with his granddaughter half cradled, half slung over his shoulder, managed to shut the hatch and bolt it. There was blood and snot on his shirt, and his own sweat, and panic in the humid air. He climbed the steps to the street two or three at a time and ran along the boulevard and every taxi that he tried to flag down was occupied.
Finally, he succeeded in finding one and flung himself inside. The child lay in his lap, her stillness worse than all her screams. He felt rickety with age and remorse. He had barely caught his breath when they arrived at Accident and Emergency. He didn’t understand the questions that they asked him. A nurse detached his granddaughter from him as if she were some kind of mollusc and sat her on the examination trolley, where she explained what had happened, her French fluid, expressive, and from time to time the nurse looked in his direction, nodded and wrote something down and he found that he could comprehend all of it, and none of it at all. The child had become the adult and he felt as powerless as a child.
“They say I must be knitted,” she informed him.
“Stitched,” he corrected her, automatically, and the child regarded him in baleful silence. “I’m sorry,” he muttered, “I’m terribly sorry.”
The doctor, when he arrived, read the nurse’s notes noncommittally then studied Colin without speaking, sizing him up as a child protection risk, or so it felt. They’ll have the social workers on to me before you can say Jack Robinson. I haven’t even had her for twenty-four hours. He sighed and stared at the floor.
Lugubriously, the doctor turned back to the child, his manner suggesting Colin’s dismissal. He was halfway to the door when a frightened little voice said, “Please don’t leave me…” and he felt his heart rise to the surface of his chest.
~~~
It wasn’t long before they were standing on the pavement outside the hospital. The doctor had glued the edges of Delphine’s cut together as if she were an Airfix model. The swelling was spreading from her brow to her cheek bone and turning duck egg blue. (“To match the Dragonfly,” Colin told her.)
“Where can we go?” she asked.
“We can go anywhere that you want.”
“Anywhere?”
“Absolutely. My treat. To make up for–”
She shrugged, a Gallic shrug, so young, so young.
“I’m really sorry. I had no idea that you were standing there.” He wasn’t used to having people with him on the boat; that was the truth of the matter. The loneliness of the thought spread through every part of him. “I should have checked.”
“De rien,” she chirped. “Can we go to Gautier’s?”
“Gautier’s?”
“We used to go…” she tailed off, seeming to draw inwards, to grow smaller. “Before…”
He commandeered another taxi to take them to the ninth arrondissement and for a brief moment Colin felt like a young beau out on the town with his girl, not some old geezer minding a kid to whom he’d just done actual bodily harm. Her hand was lying next to his on the back seat, but he felt he didn’t know her well enough to take it and give it a squeeze.
He wasn’t sure what he was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t a former soup kitchen from the Belle Époque, a vast dining hall with brass luggage racks above the tables. The child stood at the entrance, staring at the revolving door, her eyes enormous; she turned to him and he felt as if she was offering him her sadness and he had no idea how to take it from her.
“Amandine likes ice cream for dessert,” she whispered.
“Does she, now?” he answered, shepherding her inside.
Fiercely, the waiter scrawled down their order – steak frites for Delphine and Toulouse sausage for him – on the paper tablecloth. His white apron had traces of gravy on it, or possibly, Colin thought, patron’s blood.
“Papa always has sausages,” she remarked.
It was the first time she had mentioned Michael. The chatter in the restaurant receded like the sea and for a moment he felt as if he was stranded on the shore of his son’s life: Michael used to come here with his daughter and eat sausages. It was something to know about him, a glimpse afforded. Colin had to remember to breathe. Papa always has sausages. She used the present tense, as if Michael might come flickering through the revolving doors even now.
“And what about your mother, what did she have?” he asked with a dry mouth, walking on broken glass.
“Fish – I don’t know the name in English – truite – with salad and a glass of white wine.”
“It’s the same.”
“What?”
“In English – trout – it’s practically the same word.”
“Oh,” she answered in retreat, as if she had already given away
too much. He felt as if he had no option but to press on, now that they had started: there was nowhere else for him to go.
“How is… Papa? Have you heard from him?”
The child started to swing her legs under the table. She sat Amandine down between her knife and fork and began speaking to her in sing song baby talk French, as if she were explaining something complex to a two-year-old. It sounded very involved.
He wondered when the food would come.
“Amandine wants to know why you stopped talking to Papa,” the child was staring at the Velcro on the monkey’s paw.
“It’s a long story.” He reached for a piece of bread and broke the crust, holding the pieces in his fingers. “It’s a bit complicated.”
“So?”
He sensed her glancing at him. He pressed the sharpened edges of the crumbs down onto the table.
“I worked in an office,” he cleared his throat, “A long time ago now, and we lived in England, your grandmother and your father and me.”
“Where in England?” she whispered.
“In a town called Bath.”
The slouch of her hat was obscuring most of her face, but he could just see the rim of the bruising.
“And your grandmother Sally taught in a university nearby.”
“Sally…” the child echoed.
“She taught part-time and there was another teacher there–”
“What did she teach?”
“She taught something called Economics. There was another teacher there, a man, a French teacher, and they became… friends–”
“What was his name?”
Colin broke the bread in half and then in half again. “Étienne. His name was Étienne. He was from somewhere in the north of France, I don’t remember now.”
“Étienne.”
“And he and your grandmother became very good friends and when his job in England finished and it was time for him to go home to France, he asked your grandmother if she would like to go with him.”
The food arrived, complete with the kind of zinc covers you see in work canteens. The waiter removed them with a vindictive sweep.
“What did she say? Sally? What did she say?”
To the child it was simply a story, too remote from her own life to have resonance or meaning. He wished that it were so for him. Bitterness can become a way of life; he knew that now. “She said yes.” He picked up his knife and fork. The sausages were covered in khaki lentils. He wondered what kind of man Michael had become – a man who ate this food, in this place, with this little girl and the woman he’d confessed to killing. “Do you want mustard with that?”
“Mayonnaise.”
“Mayonnaise? With steak?”
“For les frites,” she answered with her mouth full.
“You’d better ask for it.”
“It’s the same word.” She propped Amandine against her water glass, placing a finger against her lips for her to be quiet. “You moved to France also – yes?” she asked, eating, not looking at him.
“I didn’t go, no. Your grandmother went.”
“And Papa?”
Colin felt very tired. The events of the morning were catching up with him. He wasn’t used to all this… conversation.
“Yes,” he breathed. The noise from the neighbouring tables was breaking like waves around them. “Yes, she took your father. She took Michael.”
“And you didn’t see him after that?” she asked with incredulity. “It is not possible?”
“Of course we saw each other, just not so often. As time goes by it’s easy to lose touch.”
The child nodded. She started swinging her legs under the table again. “Amandine is hungry for her ice cream,” she said after a pause.
“What flavour does she like?”
“Chocolat!”
“And what about you?”
“I like vanilla and strawberry.”
With help from her, he ordered more ice cream than a monkey could conceivably eat on its own, and paid the bill.
“I loved your father very much – love him,” he corrected himself. “Like he loves you.”
“Is it very easy?” she asked in a low voice, “To lose touch?”
It took him a while to frame his answer. “It’s up to you,” he said. “In the end, it’s up to you.”
~~~
“Stand well back,” Colin glanced over his shoulder and grinned at his granddaughter. She was still out of breath from having run all the way round to the Capitainerie on the other side of the marina, to let them know that the Dragonfly wanted to pass down through the lock and out onto the Seine.
The outboard started first time with a brisk expectoration.
“OK, now the engine’s running it’s alright to cast off.” He waited as she bundled the rope back through the cleat on the pontoon and dropped it like spaghetti on the deck. “Coil it up, that’s right, like I showed you.” He watched her busy little arms at work. “Ahoy there – and off we go!”
“What is ahoy?”
He shrugged, “It’s something sailors say.”
“But what does it mean?”
“I don’t know – hello, I suppose, or look out.”
“Ahoy,” she called back at him, a note of mistrust in her voice; she sounded sceptical, miniscule French cynic that she was.
The Dragonfly swung out from her berth, shaking her tail as she went, her wash scattering opalescent water up into the air. He had to resist the temptation to put her through all her paces while they were still in the marina, but he wanted the child to be impressed. He throttled under the road bridge and into the open lock, halting neatly just next to the bollard at the lock side, and with a flick of his wrist looped the centre line over it. He put the engine into neutral.
“Look,” he said. “I have to stay with the engine, so I need you to look after the rope from the middle of the boat, like this. You must keep it fairly taut so we stay close to the lock wall…”
The gates were closing automatically, sounding metallic sighs.
“…but not too close – see? You need to make sure that the fenders stop the boat from getting scratched.” As the water began to sluice away, the rivery brickwork of the lock wall was revealed: slime and mucus in emerald and sage. “You might need to push her off a little bit.”
“Ugh!” she pulled a face when he pressed his hand against the side to ease the boat out. “But it is all green.” Reflexively she wiped her own clean hand on her T-shirt. “It is not possible.”
“What’s really important,” Colin was getting into his stride now, “…is to make sure that the rope doesn’t get caught – make sure it’s taut, but free, like this. That way, as the water goes down, the boat can go down with it. D’you see?”
He could see that she kind of saw. She was frowning as much as her sore eye would permit, her mouth ruched up in concentration. Too much information, he thought as he handed her the line. He could manage the boat single-handed, but he wanted her to feel part of it.
Strands of weed and twigs and empty milk cartons eddied round as the gates creaked open. It was like the curtain rising at the theatre – before them, the Seine was revealed. He didn’t rev the engine straight away, but sat there feeling the sort of wonderment that borders on gratitude. He was open-mouthed. “You can cast off now,” he called to her, collecting himself, and he tooted the horn which made her jump and with a quick zip of the motor sped out onto the river.
There was a breeze blowing and the water was choppy, but the Dragonfly took it blithely. The child seemed a little less blithe: as the boat skimmed the waves she held onto the grab rails tightly and then a moment later slid along the bench to sit close to him.
“Are you alright?”
She didn’t answer. Her eyes were enormous which meant, he was beginning to learn, that all was not well.
“Would you like to see Notre Dame?”
She swallowed.
Craftily, he tried another tack. “Amandine mentioned tha
t she would really like to see Notre Dame,” he began, “and the Louvre, and the Eiffel Tower.”
She gave him a look of such reproof that it left him in no doubt he had trampled his way over some invisible line. “Amandine has already been up the Eiffel Tower,” she responded with chill disdain.
“Hold on tight–” he advised, as a Bateau Mouche churned past them. She was called Catherine Deneuve and from their perch at the back of the Dragonfly, she seemed vast. The tourists on board waved and pointed as the wash from her sent the little boat skittering and toppling and Colin had to wrench at the tiller to keep them on an even keel.
Around the Île de la Cité was a complicated one-way system governed by traffic lights, which he had read up on the night before, which was just as well as the Dragonfly appeared to be fair game for the large pleasure craft – as they passed the cathedral, Yves Montand overtook them so fast it nearly sent them flying, cutting them up from behind by the banks of the Île Saint-Louis.
“It won’t always be this rough,” he exclaimed, struggling to keep them steady. The current was strong and the wind was blowing a force three, he reckoned: enough to tie a vessel twice the size of theirs into considerable knots. Not quite like the Kennet and Avon Canal, he thought, as they flew downstream under road bridges and rail bridges, stone bridges and steel bridges, bridges so gilded and ornate that they took his breath away.
“That must be the Louvre, over there behind you on the right,” he called as they went speeding past, spray breaking over the bows and misting the cabin portholes. He was starting to enjoy himself, getting the measure of the river, his wonderful, expressive, responsive little boat nipping past houseboats and matching the police launches stroke for stroke.
The child was sitting tensely, her elbows and knees gripped at ninety degrees. He eased back on the throttle as it occurred to him that she might have been frightened, bounding along as they were, and just as he did so she arced back and then forward with astonishing grace and let loose a projectile stream of vomit.
The sick missed her own lap entirely, splashing his leg and filling his sandal as it fountained through the hatch and into the cabin.
“Don’t worry. It’s OK. Don’t worry. Are you alright?” He couldn’t put the engine into neutral, not with the Dragonfly pitching and dancing the way she was and so much river traffic all about. “I promise we’ll stop as soon as we can. Just hold on a minute.”
