by Kate Dunn
Her round, reproachful eyes regarded him.
“It couldn’t matter less, honestly. There’s nothing that won’t wash,” he tried again, but as he spoke the two of them caught sight of Amandine, supine on the bunk, plastered with puke from head to toe. The child’s lower lip began to wobble, but with some effort, an acceptance of another affliction, she kept herself in check.
The spew was drying to a damp crust on his shin, but it was the dejected figure of the child, sitting with quiet, green dignity, which perplexed him. He looked at her doubtfully. He’d intended to do a quick circuit of the sights of central Paris to put her in the mood before heading south to the suburbs, but he knew from past experience that the thing about boating was never to make plans. As Jeanne Moreau went thundering past them, he leaned across and with a cautious hand he ruffled the child’s hair. “It’s OK, we’ll soon get everything cleaned up and then you’ll feel much better.” He wasn’t sure if it was his imagination, but for a second it seemed to him that she leaned her good cheek against him and he was conscious of the burden of the responsibility, the unanticipated obligation he’d acquired. “Perhaps we’d better head back to port. We can have a shower and I’ll make us both a cup of tea.”
“Coca-Cola,” she corrected him before he had finished his sentence.
“Of course, Coca-Cola. That’s just what I was thinking,” Keeping her as steady as could be, Colin turned the Dragonfly so that she was facing into the current and malodorously yet sedately, they began the journey back.
CHAPTER SIX
“It’s legal, honest – you’ve got to try it.”
Michael glimpsed a tiny plastic pouch held like a hidden cigarette between Laroche’s fingers.
“S’called Benzo Roar.”
He shuddered to think what orifice it had come from – or whose. “It’s alright,” he said, “it’s not my thing. I’m not–”
“Like all the rest of us?” said Laroche with a smirk.
Christ, thought Michael. The days are long here.
“Everyone thinks that, when they come here. I’m not like all the rest. You wait. You’ll see.” He gave a smile that wasn’t really a smile. “You sure?” he said, dangling the pouch between his thumb and finger. “Little ickle taste? You won’t know until you try.”
“No, I’m not interested.” He picked up his book and started reading.
“If you change ya mind, you know where to find me, oink, oink.”
He didn’t like Laroche’s laugh. He didn’t like his… proximity. A sense of antipathy rose like heat inside him. For a moment everything he hated about his situation: the privation, the confinement – for fuck’s sake, the grief – was made flesh in the figure of his cellmate sitting at the table, sprinkling some white powder into a Rizla, wrapping it with another and another, making a small paper bomb which he swallowed with a swig of water. Then he sat, holding on to the sides of the table, his eyes closed, waiting. Michael was transfixed by the veins standing out in his arms, the lunar whiteness of his knuckles with their bodged tattoos, LOVE HATE done with a needle and ink on another interminable afternoon in a cell just like this one.
Stop, he said to himself. Laroche is right. I will end up – he was going to say like him, but he corrected himself. Full of hate. Where had this whittled edge inside him come from? He was a designer. He was interested in function and form. He tried to make beautiful things. Everything had gone so wrong.
He started the paragraph he was reading over again.
Laroche began beating some insistent rhythm with his foot upon the floor. Michael went back to the beginning of the paragraph, trying to focus. Laroche kept beating his foot. Michael tried mouthing the words to himself to help him concentrate. Laroche introduced a counterpoint, tapping his fingers against the tabletop. With a single, flowing action, Michael could have thrown the book to the end of the bed to make a point; he could have thrown it across the floor perilously close to where the guy was sitting. He had it raised and ready. Then he remembered the guttural sound, the other night, of Laroche trying not to cry. He rested the book against his chest. He reminded himself of the man he had been, of the man he still wanted to be.
“You alright?” he said.
Laroche let his head fall back. “Too fucking right I am, ya Rosbif ponce.”
~~~
“The number you have dialled is unavailable. The number you have dialled is unavailable. The number you have dialled–” For a moment, Michael understood why a man might throw a chair against a door time after time, or start a fight, or beat his head against the bricks, or sob into the private recess of the night. The disappointment was like a stain – blood, or some other bodily fluid, hard to erase. The whole fabric of the week was spoilt. “Please try again later.” He listened as the dialling tone clicked in.
“Can I try again later?”
The kanga shook his head and then jerked it in the direction of the door.
“She’s my daughter, please –”
The kanga shook his head.
“She’s only nine.”
“One call, that’s the rule.”
“But if she’s got her phone switched off?”
“Not my rules. I don’t make ’em. Shift yourself, now.”
Michael followed him back to the cell, dragging his feet like a child. He remembered the race they used to have on sports day in primary school: see how slowly you can ride your bike without falling off. It was an art he was perfecting now: see how slowly you can do things – eating, reading, walking. See how slowly you can go, without falling.
Back in the cell he slumped on his bed with his head in his hands, something he regretted straightaway.
“Woss up, Rosbif?”
He sat up straight. He didn’t answer. It was the only way he had to protect himself.
“I said, woss up?”
“Nothing.”
“Louder – can’t hear on the dark side over here.”
“Nothing’s wrong. Everything’s fine. Everything‘s absofuckinglutely great. If you want to know.”
“Alright, alright. Just asking.”
“It was my phone call today. My daughter was out. That’s all. I’m – sorry.”
Laroche gave him a long, assessing stare, weighing something up. “I’ve got a daughter,” he said.
Michael glanced at him, arrested for a moment.
“Yeah, yeah. Got a daughter. ’Nother kid on the way, woss more.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Zazie. Poncey name. I didn’t pick it. I’d have called her Marianne, after me mum. She’s four. Zazie, for Christ’s sake.” He shook his head.
“Mine’s called Delphine. She’s nine.”
“Delphine, eh? That’s a poncey name an’ all.”
Michael didn’t answer.
“Different mothers, mine – obvs.”
“Yes,” he said. “I see.”
“Wotch you need,” said Laroche, leaning forward with a swift action, seeming to burrow inside his mattress, “is one of these little lovelies.” He produced a cellphone which he threw into the air and caught in the heel of his hand, backwards.
“Where did you get that?” asked Michael, in astonishment.
“You can get whatever you like. Just need the contacts. And the notes. Chapot,” he said darkly, “is taking deliveries by drone. An-y-thing.”
Michael hadn’t yet clocked who Chapot was. He didn’t want to be seen to be looking.
“There’s a lag in here, done for fraud, runs a business on his mobile buying and selling container ships he doesn’t own. The world’s yer oyster, mate.”
“Could I…?” said Michael.
“It’ll cost yer,” said Laroche, twirling an invisible moustache.
“How much?”
“I’ll think of something,” he said with a leer. “You can be sure of that.”
Michael hesitated. It would be another whole week before he could speak to her otherwise. “OK. Thanks.”
It took three missed calls before she answered.
“Delphine?”
“Papa!”
Hearing her voice made her absence better and worse.
CHAPTER SEVEN
They set off the following morning with Amandine, who had been soaked overnight in a bucket of disinfectant, lashed to the flagpole to dry out, and her owner curled up in her sleeping bag in the cabin, turned away from her grandfather, staring into nothingness.
The evening before they had washed their clothes and their bedding and themselves, hosing down the deck and lockers just for good measure and now, as they crept back onto the Seine at a sober pace, Colin’s nostrils were full of the ferrous smell of river water and the faint whiff of Gauloises that was always in the air.
The child was holding her grey tweed hat in both hands, pressing it to her mouth, breathing in and out through the material. Her hair strayed over the pillow in brittle curls. Wordlessly, she’d declined the croissant that he’d bought her for breakfast.
“You won’t be sick again today, I promise. The wind’s dropped, it’s as quiet as a millpond out there and we’re going where no Bateau Mouche would dare to go…”
She didn’t answer.
“Would you like some orange juice? Or some tea?” I can’t give her Coca-Cola at half-past eight in the morning, he thought. “Or some Coca-Cola?”
At all his patient little offerings, she shook her head.
As the Dragonfly followed a judicious course south towards Ivry, he maintained a running commentary, to cheer himself up as much as her.
“We’re just going under the Pont d’Austerlitz,” he called to her, “Austerlitz was one of Napoleon’s biggest battles – did you know that?”
Nothing.
“Do you know why French bread is the shape that it is? So Napoleon’s soldiers could tuck it into their boots as they rode along. It says so in the guidebook…”
In the face of her overwhelming indifference, he looked hectically round for more inspiration. The river frontage was changing: the opulent constructions of empire and ambition drawn aside to reveal the workings beneath. The plate glass office blocks and the broken glass of decaying quayside warehouses; angular cranes like mechanical birds; pallets and containers; the blue flank of a passing barge; the strenuous arches of a railway bridge; a couple sitting on the embankment next to an empty pushchair, the man holding a baby on his knee, the woman looking away; the exhalation of a slender chimney stack; a streak of graffiti and stretches of concrete, intersecting; a vapour trail high in the wistful sky. From the corner of his eye he could see a gravel barge coming up behind them, shouldering through the water. As it drew abreast of them, the river billowed and then flattened. There was a Renault Mégane mounted on the rear deck. The bargee gave a desultory nod of his head as he went past.
Colin decided that they would find somewhere to tie up for lunch, to give them both a break. He wanted to walk to the nearest bakery with the child. He wanted to point things out to her. He wanted to buy her a cake in the shape of a swan and bet her a euro that she couldn’t finish it. He wanted everything to be simple and straightforward.
She wouldn’t come with him though, in spite of all his persuasion, so he went to a Petit Casino on his own to buy the bread. Cake-wise all that was on offer were some madeleines, sealed up in cellophane bags, which looked as if they’d bounce if you dropped them, so he didn’t bother.
When he proffered a ham baguette she regarded him with watchful eyes.
“You’ve got to eat something.”
She shrugged.
“And eventually you’re going to have to say something, too.”
“I don’t want to be on this boat. There.”
“Look, I know that we didn’t get off to the best possible start, but we’re on our way now and once we get out of Paris–” he broke off, a thought occurring to him. “Actually, I’m going to need your help this afternoon.” He flipped up the seat at the stern and rummaged around in the everything locker. “It’s a VHF radio,” he explained when he found what he was searching for. “There’s a lock coming up fairly soon, a bit of a whopper actually, and we need to radio the lock keeper to ask him when we can pass through. The barges have priority, but hopefully he’ll be able to squeeze us in at the back.”
The child took the radio and turned it over in her hand. She ran her thumb over the brand name and pushed a button or two, then turned it over in her hand again.
“The trouble is, I can’t speak French…”
She held the radio up to her ear.
“It switches on at the top,” Colin said. “Then you turn this knob here to tune it to the channel that you want…”
The hiss and whisper of the VHF sounded between them. Technologically nimble, the child’s fingers moved over the keys.
“It’s channel ten for the lock. You might be able to speak to other barges, too. You press the button at the side to talk and you let it go to listen.”
A voice squawked so loudly she almost dropped the handset. She swung her legs over the edge of her bunk and wriggled her way out of the cabin, a sly grin playing around her mouth.
“Press to talk, let go to listen?”
He nodded.
Reaching for the baguette, and groping for Amandine until she remembered she was tied to the flagpole, the child fired up the VHF. “Bonjour? Allo?”
A push-tow barge was grinding down the centre of the river. Divided into two separate craft, the container at the front was rammed full with building rubble, while doing the hard work at the rear was the engine section, topped off by the living quarters. There was a battered Citroën Xantia at the stern, with a hoist for lifting it on to dry land; squeezed in next to that was a washing machine apparently going through the spin cycle and in front of the cockpit was a playpen the size of a small British semi. The boat was called Calista.
The child was talking with her mouth full, wolfing down unintelligible syllables and sentences, scattering crumbs, her chatter voluble and artless. She started waving her baguette in the air as if to attract attention. “Au secours,” she said as she signed off. “Au secours!” With a flick of the switch to turn the handset off, she flashed Colin a beguiling smile.
“Did you speak to the lock keeper?”
“I talk with Denis. We must be quick.” She began tugging at the rope. “We need to throw off the boat, hurry, hurry.”
“Denis?” queried Colin, starting the engine. “It’s cast off. Cast – not throw. Is Denis the lock keeper?”
“Denis is Mister Calista,” she gestured with the remains of her lunch at the disappearing push-tow.
Obligingly, at such short notice, the Dragonfly made her way up river in the wake of the massive barge. Colin viewed his granddaughter through narrow eyes. She preened at him – like a small bird, she settled her feathers. If there had been more space on deck, she would have strutted up and down. Coming under a road bridge, he could see the entrance to the lock on the left bank. The gravel barge was already tied up and the Calista was docking alongside her.
“But this is your lock,” Delphine nodded at the sign by the entrance.
He squinted up at it. Port à l’Anglais.
It was an up lock and from their vantage point nearly three metres down, tucked in behind the churning sterns of the two barges, the quayside seemed unreachably high. The distant bollards were spaced for two hundred foot vessels, not small fry like the Dragonfly. Colin manoeuvred close to a ladder set into the wall and grabbed onto it with a boathook, which he passed to the child.
“Hold tight, now.”
He was in the process of looping the line round the ladder and keeping an eye on the little girl, when a voice called down from above.
“It is Denis!” Delphine whooped, letting go of the boathook to wave. Colin lunged at the ladder as a bargee in a nylon singlet, sporting much armpit hair, frowned down on them. Not for the first time, he felt as if he were under scrutiny as a child protection risk. The lock was filling and
inch by inch the boats were rising. When he and Mister Calista were nose to knee, the man began speaking. Colin couldn’t understand much of what he was saying, he could pick out one or two words – kidnap, for instance, which like trout and mayonnaise were the same in English – and gendarme, he got that one, too. He turned to Delphine.
“Am I right in thinking what I’m thinking?” he asked her. “Am I fully up to speed with this?”
His granddaughter was making a detailed study of the hoist on the back of the barge, as though she might sketch it later, from memory.
“Perhaps you could put me more fully in the picture? What exactly did you tell our friend here?”
She didn’t look at him directly, but her eyes flicked sideways. “I said to him that I am on this boat against my will. Which is true,” she added defiantly. “I say the same to you, non?”
A complicated inflection escaped from Colin. “You did say that, yes. Although that is slightly different from…”
“I didn’t think that he would call the police,” she said in a small voice.
“Has he called the police?”
The bargee took a long hard look at the darkening bruise around the child’s eye and switched his gaze to Colin. With a hand the size of an Alsace ham he cleaned out the contents of one ear, wiping his finger on his trouser leg.
“He says you must give a satisfactory account, or–”
“I’m her grand-père,” he began, while the man cleaned out his other ear. When assistance with translation was not forthcoming from his granddaughter, he said in a louder voice, “Vacances… grand-père… Angleterre.” He smiled and nodded and then for good measure he attempted a Gallic shrug.
Denis was unimpressed. With ostentatious slowness, he craned his head to look at the back of their boat, where the Dragonfly’s name and registration number were emblazoned in a deeper shade of blue. He appeared to be making ponderous mental notes.
