by Kate Dunn
“Will you be alright on your own?”
“There is Amandine. She is always with me.”
“I won’t be long. I’ve already checked the line’s secure.” He hesitated, not wishing to be too obvious in his attempts at bribery and corruption. “Is there anything in particular that you’d like?”
Delphine had anticipated this. “Tiger prawns, please,” she said as she ducked back into the cabin, “and îles flottantes – Maman used to buy them in a little pot at the supermarket – and maybe a crêpe, too?”
“Hmmm,” he answered, “Maybe…”
She dismissed him with a little wave.
~~~
The charms of Moret-sur-Loing were lost on Colin as he zipped under the mediaeval gateway and went careering down the ancient high street with a bin liner full of sopping clothes clutched in his arms. Once, the walls of the town were fortified with twenty towers; Thomas Becket had consecrated the church; there were associations with the Three Musketeers. All of it passed him by – the war memorial with its desperate lists of names, the arthritic old buildings, the civic floral arrangements that shed their petals in the stupefying rain.
He hurtled into the launderette, stuffed the clothes into the dryer, realised he hadn’t got the right money, legged it back to the square where the only shop open was a florist and because he didn’t know how to ask for change he had to buy a bunch of something which looked like daisies but cost a fortune, hoofed his way back to the launderette, bought tokens from a machine screwed to the wall but only just, shoved them into the dryer and slumped down onto a white formica bench to collect himself.
He was soaked to the skin. When he had caught his breath, he peeled off his anorak and his sweat shirt and, as an afterthought, his socks, and added them to the drying clothes. He sat clammily, contemplating the shoe prints all over the wet floor, the general air of grime. Through the steam and the cigarette smoke he could make out what appeared to be an extended family on an outing to do the week’s wash: grandmother, several sons all talking on their mobiles, a young woman with a baby in a push chair. They spread and settled and conducted their business – the men kept darting out into the road to shout loudly into their handsets. The young woman stared out of the window, or smoked, or chewed at the broken skin round her fingernails. Briefly, Colin wondered what their home must be like, if the launderette on a rainy day was a better bet. He tried in vain to picture himself and Sally trundling off for a day at the washeteria with Michael. Eyeing the sprawling family, he thought of the compensations of poverty – time together, which they probably didn’t want, but which to him, bereft of his son and his wife, seemed beyond value. He wouldn’t have minded an afternoon doing the laundry, with his son for company.
How did it go so wrong? It was a question he had spent years both asking and avoiding. He knew the end point of it all: the fracturing afternoon in Charlotte’s office – that afternoon – when things were said that could not be retracted and lives were ripped apart as easily as tearing paper.
He watched the young woman hoist the baby onto her lap and clean his chocolatey fingers one at a time by putting them in her mouth.
For years he chose to console himself with the thought that the rot set in when Michael first met Charlotte. It was a narrative he could tell to colleagues and friends almost without flinching. Kids! You do your best for them and then–!
He remembered the phone call from Sally: the first intimation of catastrophe. He was in his office, the windows were open and a summer breeze was batting the vertical blinds against each other. He was halfway to the filing cabinet when the phone rang and he picked up the receiver absently, riffling through the files with his free hand.
Colin?
He remembered the sight of his hand resting on the drawer as if he had momentarily forgotten what he was looking for. He remembered the glint of the links in his watch strap, the pores of the skin on the back of his hand, and somewhere in outer space, the click of the blinds. He remembered fixing on detail after detail, searching for something that was safe and ordinary, that wouldn’t give way.
It’s me.
He hadn’t heard her voice for years. He could almost have believed she was calling from home to ask him to stop off at the supermarket and pick up something for their supper.
Are you there?
He couldn’t bear it. He clicked the receiver off and managed to get himself back to his chair before the phone rang again.
I need to talk to you about Michael.
He was incapable of answering her.
Colin?
OK then, talk.
He wants to give up college.
Was that it? The news was everything and nothing.
But he’s only just started.
I know.
Why?
He remembered the engulfing pause as she appeared to weigh things up, before she dropped her bombshell.
The thing is, Charlotte is pregnant.
The dryer slowed and the clothes fluttered to the bottom of the drum. He fished out his sweatshirt, shaking it to cool it, and put it on; the zip on his anorak burnt his neck. He put his socks back on, wobbling as he stood on one leg, then he filled the bin liner with the roasting clothes. He was halfway to the door when he remembered the daisies. He turned and went back for them. The listless young woman was feeding potato crisps to the toddler to keep it quiet, blowing smoke over its head.
“Madame?” Colin hesitated; he held out the flowers. She stared at him, taking the measure of his gift. She accepted them with an embarrassed smile, looking sideways to the street outside.
~~~
He arrived back at the boat with a tub of prawn cocktail and a packet of plasticky crêpes (none of that pudding which came in pots, no swan-shaped cake) to find that Delphine was entertaining.
“Colin! Colin! This is Tyler. She is an artist from America.” She was delighted with the crêpes.
The woman who had helped them moor stood up to introduce herself, catching her head on the spokes of the umbrella. “I came by to check on your granddaughter…”
He inspected her remark for signs of reproof, but found none: only an un-English kind of neighbourliness. “I just popped into town–” he hefted the bag in his arms, “–to dry our clothes.”
“You travelled quite a distance overnight…” The woman looked back along the river, “That was probably my fault. I guess I should’ve tied you to a tree or something.”
Colin shrugged. He fiddled with the bin liner, making much of ensuring the clothes were comprehensively covered by the plastic.
“Though then your line would have been across the path and that is not allowed. Have you noticed how the French do everything by the book? I mean – two hours for lunch? Who ever heard of that?”
He nodded, as if the matter were deserving of serious thought. She nodded also, but to a brisker tempo, then to restart the conversation she said, “I just wondered if your granddaughter–”
“Delphine,” interjected Delphine, her mouth full of crêpe.
The woman smiled. “I wondered if Delphine might want to come in out of the rain. My boat’s up near the lock. But she was very clear that she should stay here till you got back. But hey, you’re getting wet…”
Colin was conscious that if he joined them on the Dragonfly, with the drying, one of them would be obliged to sit practically in his lap. “It’s OK,” he shrugged. “I think it’s slacking off a bit.” He peered up at the unremitting sky. He could feel raindrops trickling down his legs, there was grit on his shins from where he had sped along the riverbank.
Tyler switched her glance from one to the other. For a moment nobody said anything. “Well, like I said, I just wanted to say hello to Delphine here. She’s French – I guessed you would be too, but you’re a Brit. Will you listen to that rain…?”
Politely, all three of them listened to the orchestration of rain on the umbrella.
“I’ll be getting along now…” As she stepped onto wha
t passed for dry land, drops of water splashing into her eyes and making her blink, Colin saw her features in close-up: they were sparely drawn, she had a dreamer’s face, a faraway face, as if she were an uncertain participant in the here and now.
“If you guys want to visit with me later…” she flipped her hood up over her hair; he noticed its cropped blackness had a silvery weave, like shot silk. “…my boat’s the one with all the pictures up, back that way. I make a good cup of coffee. You’d be very welcome.” She broke into a run, then turned to wave, running backwards, grimacing and pointing at the sky. “Can you believe it?”
Colin climbed down on to the Dragonfly and dodged under the umbrella. After he had dropped the bin liner onto the deck, on a reflex he stuck his head back out and watched with interest her long-limbed, athletic figure skipping the largest puddles, outdistancing the rain.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Oi, Rosbif! Come over here,” snapped Laroche with a jerk of his head, indicating his side of the cell. The boundary line between them was curiously drawn: Laroche could put his feet on Michael’s bed, but Michael had to be invited to sit beside him at the table. The evolution of these laws was touchy and intuitive.
“It’s payback time.”
Michael was a long way down. He had been trying to stop himself from thinking about the flight of stairs at home, the vertiginous distance from the first floor to the ground, the endless loop of Charlotte, falling. He’d been trying to stop himself from thinking about the coat that she was wearing – it was purple, and she only ever dressed in black. He’d been trying not to wonder what that signified, if it signified anything at all: a change of heart, for sure. He’d been trying not to think about that instant of lunacy: the physical strength in a pair of outstretched hands, the swift brutality of a single shove.
There was a storm coming. He stared through the slit of window at the blackened sky outside, where sudden shafts of sunlight glanced against grievous clouds. He remembered telling Delphine the rays were the souls of the dead flying up to heaven, before he knew better.
“Payback?” he said with a shiver, conscious that his voice struck a higher note than usual.
He was stalling for time.
“One good turn deserves another,” said Laroche. “Two phone calls, as I recall. Oink, oink.”
From some crevice hollowed out in the overflow behind the basin, he produced a cellphone, a different one from before. “My new kid was born last week, more than three weeks ‘overdue’, though there was no talk of inducing it,” he said with a grunt, “not that anyone told me about, leastways.” He stared at the phone before holding it out to Michael, who was conscious of a simmer in the air. “I want you to text my wife and tell her that she might think I’m fucking stupid, but the sums don’t quite add up on that one, and even I can work that out. Alright?” he said. “I want you to let her know loud and clear IN CAPS that I am so on to her, that I have been on to her for months and I know just what she’s up to, and while you’re at it you can say–”
“I don’t think I can do that.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I’m not comfortable–”
“Comfortable? Yer ’aving a laugh, mate.”
“–with the kind of things you want me to say. I wouldn’t feel–”
“No such word as can’t. Isn’t that what they tell you? In school? Not that I would know, oink, oink, ’cos I – didn’t – go – to – school–”
“I can’t get involved,” said Michael.
“Well, you are involved, mate. You owe me for two. Remember?” Without warning, he reached across and with one stringy forearm he pressed Michael’s neck against the wall, leaning into it until he couldn’t breathe. The swift brutality of a single shove. “You’re so fucking up yourself, you pussy,” he hissed before he let him go.
There were paisley lights before Michael’s eyes “Why don’t you write it yourself?” he said when he’d recovered his breath. He felt sick.
“Why do you think?” Laroche sneered at him.
“I think you don’t know how.”
“Tick. Go to the top of the class.”
He swallowed and half-swallowed, “I wouldn’t feel right,” he said, “writing that sort of thing for you.” His throat felt mashed.
“Well, la-di-fucking-da!” Laroche growled. “You’re taking the piss, ain’t you? Telling me what I can and can’t say to my woman, when you topped your own.” For a moment he glowered in his direction, then the steam seemed to go out of him. “The sums don’t add up,” he said. “Even I can work that out.”
“Can’t you read or write at all?” asked Michael.
Boot-faced, Laroche shrugged.
“I’ll teach you, if you like,” said Michael, cautiously. “to write it yourself.”
Laroche held out the phone again. There was no arguing with him. “I must only of been inside for a month when she said she was pregnant,” he said. “But I’m not stupid.”
Michael took the cellphone from him. “I just owe you for one, after this.”
Laroche nodded. “Now you can tell that bitch that I’m on to her, that I’ve been on to her for months, and if she thinks–”
He started to text.
I hope you and the baby are doing ok. “There,” he said clicking Send and passing the handset back. He looked out at the black horizon where the sun’s rays still shone, but he could see no sign of Charlotte’s soul, flying high into the sky.
~~~
He grew used to the daily routine and began to feel better. One of the kangas had told him he’d been made Bicycle Repair Man – cue fanfare and drum roll. He considered it to be overdue recognition of his former life in industrial design. He had a sneaking suspicion there was once a Monty Python sketch that he used to watch with his father called Bicycle Repair Man. It was a privilege granted to prisoners on remand and he knew he shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, although on reflection he would have preferred a Trojan horse in his current circumstances.
All the bikes left at all the tips in Paris were brought to the prison to be overhauled, and then they were auctioned off for charity. The idea was that it would be rehabilitation for both the bicycles and for VN1692F – Michael–though it would take more than some WD-40 and a squirt of oil to put him right.
He’d be starting on Monday. He felt like a person again, almost a man.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
In between the straitlaced, righteous little towns the countryside flashed green: the tired, maternal green of fields in high summer, the chemical green of abandoned quarries full of standing water, the munificent green of hedgerows. River rolled into river and Colin and Delphine stood to attention and saluted the statue of Napoleon, as he lorded it over the point where the Yonne branched off from the Seine.
The rain petered out, leaving the sky moist and discoloured like skin when you rip away a plaster; the weather remained queasy and convalescent. When the umbrella had dried out, Colin took it down and put it in the locker and the world seemed brighter in the revealed light. The effect of it was lost on Delphine, who seemed heavy limbed; he could sense the melodrama of her boredom, the slump and flop of it.
He handed her the guide book. “Tell me something about Sens,” he suggested.
She fell forward, crashing her head onto her knees as if the prospect of reading aloud would kill her. “Sens is in the Department of the Yonne in Burgundy, North Central France,” she began pulverising the words, making dust of them. “The town saw the trial of Peter Abelard; Pope Alexander III stayed there, as did Thomas Becket and…”
“…Colin Aylesford and his granddaughter,” he went on as she gave up. “That’s where we’re headed. Should be there by four-ish. Do you want to drive?”
No joy there.
“The Cathedral is well worth a visit.”
She groaned, mightily.
“It’s very old. One of the oldest in France,” he shrugged. “It’s all part of your education.”
“Don’t make me,” she gave a blistering sigh, but she perked up a bit when he told her how Peter Abelard had been castrated for the love of Héloïse. “It is not possible?”
“It happened.”
“Cut right off?” she asked, with lemon juice eyes.
He nodded.
“Merde…”
“You probably shouldn’t be saying that, should you?” he ventured mildly. “Not too often, at any rate.”
She scowled at him and then began to subside with boredom once again. He watched her shoulders droop and splay.
“We’ve got a lock in a moment, but after that, why don’t you make those beads…?”
“What beads?” she asked in tones of biblical doom.
“That set you brought. Papier-mâché. You could make some necklaces and earrings and sell them on the quayside when we get to Sens.”
She swung round and regarded him with interest. He made her take the tiller while he hunted round and found an old edition of Practical Boat Owner. “There you go,” he said encouragingly. Before long, streamers of torn up magazine were escaping in the wind and Colin put on a brave face as she mixed glue in one of the mugs, dripping it down the side of the locker and over the deck. The kit involved moulds and a brush which shed its hair and small pots of poster paint with flip top lids.
“Mind you don’t knock tha–” he fished a handkerchief from his pocket and started mopping up some unfeasibly yellow goo. “It’s fine – don’t worry – look, it’s almost gone.”
A kind of Sunday afternoon peace descended: Delphine cut up paper and glued and stuck with such absorption that she looked like someone at work, rather than a child at play: her movements had their own awkward economy; she was both intent and inexact. When she held up a row of knobbly spheres, tilting them this way and that in critical inspection, the concentration on her face filled him with a twinge of sadness and he glanced down, wondering how on earth her mother could have considered walking away from such a little scrap of hope and promise.
