The Dragonfly

by Kate Dunn

  Schooling himself, he looked beyond her to where the canal curved round. In places, the banks were obscured by the branches of trees, the burden of a long summer weighing them down as far as the water. His eyes rested on a crooked fishing platform bearing faded notices, discoloured threats and blandishments. “Actually,” he stood there, thinking that when it came to it, he couldn’t bear to tell her; thinking, obscurely, that he needed a shave; that he needed… that he couldn’t… “Actually, we were planning on making an early start–”

  “Oh,” her arm fell to her side. “Oh. Right.”

  “Just to – you know – get a bit ahead… Time to be moving on, and all that–”

  “Sure, sure.” She started inspecting a callus on her palm.

  “I mean, we’ll probably see you at the next lock – you know how these things are…”

  “Yeah…”

  “… What with delays – lock keepers’ lunch hours, that kind of thing. And hire boats getting in the way…”

  “Hire boats… Yeah. They do, don’t they?”

  “Yes.”

  “Get in the way…”

  “Yes.”

  Several ducks went clattering past, laughing raucously at their own jokes, and Tyler shoved her hands into the pockets of her shorts. “OK…” she squinted up at him, although the sun was not directly in her eyes. He could see that she was disconcerted, that she didn’t understand. “Catch you later, maybe…” she said abruptly, after a beat or two.

  “Yes,” he said, on the threshold of regret, “Yes, maybe catch you later…”

  ~~~

  “Look, if you don’t fancy the brocante, there’s a little museum that has an exhibition of tools used by forestry workers in the Morvan, according to the book…”

  “OK, OK, let’s go to the brocante.”

  Colin was balancing the guide on his knees, reading and steering at the same time. Delphine was watching him through the binoculars. “Colin, you have hairs growing out of your ears.”

  “Yes, alright, alright.”

  “It is dégôutant.”

  “It happens. When you’re my age. Lots of men…”

  “Yuck.”

  They moored close to the bridge leading up to the village of Asnois. The road was dusty and there were strange crops in the fields: piles of roof tiles, rusting iron work, tractor tyres and several burnt out dormobiles. The telegraph wires were strung with silent birds. The first house they saw had a rotting mattress bulging from an upstairs window. They exchanged glances and she reached for his hand.

  “Or we could just go back to the boat…” in a squeaky voice Delphine resumed a conversation which they had never started.

  “We could, but now we’ve come this far, we might as well…” Rounding a corner, they found themselves right in the centre of the village – in fact, almost out the other side. Ahead, there was a dilapidated chapel and nailed to what must once have been the parish notice board was the skull of a goat.

  “Hmmm,” said Colin, trying to sound noncommittal as his head filled with thoughts of devil worship and he was about to second her suggestion about going back to the boat, when she slipped her hand out of his and ran through the gate and up the path before he could cry out, “I wouldn’t go in there if I were you.”

  He hurried after her. It wasn’t some kind of rural coven where they sacrificed passing river folk, but the brocante. The straggled space around the entrance was crammed with old prams, zinc baths, enamel coffeepots, an umbrella stand stuffed with swords – yes, swords, cracked panes of stained glass, a bicycle with wooden wheels, an ancient twin tub, several stone bottles, piles of saucepans, broken ceramics…

  “Look at this!” she had found a porcelain lavatory glazed with blue hydrangeas, with a picture of a splendidly moustachioed man on the bowl at the front.

  Together they went inside the chapel, Delphine speeding on ahead. “Did you mean it?” she called over her shoulder, “Can I have something? Because of…”

  Happy to indulge her, he smiled and nodded, distracted by high tors of china crockery, their irregular strata consisting of side plates stacked on dinner plates stacked on saucers which even a sigh, let alone an over-excited nine-year-old, might dislodge. There were leather suitcases, their travels bragged about on peeling labels; boxes of door knobs; hundreds upon hundreds of odd glasses, some of them sticky, all of them dusty. He was just reaching for a small silver mug, its vine leaf engraving tarnished yellow, when she came bounding across,

  “Can I have this?”

  He was stretching up to a high shelf and turned incrementally, with his breath held, fearful of sending a pile of butter dishes crashing to the floor. “Absolutely not,” he said, missing a stained crystal decanter by a hair’s breadth.

  “Please–”

  “Certainly not,” in a complicated but compressed contortion he brought his arm back to his side. “Put it back where you found it. Now.”

  “But look–”

  “I’m trying not to,” he retorted, feeling himself blush. From some dark recess of the junk shop she had found what appeared to be a lamp made from coloured glass. It showed a jolly friar in the later stages of arousal, with a naked woman slung over his shoulder. She had a frayed electric cord with a Bakelite switch on it coming out of her bottom and he dreaded to think what might be illuminated when it was turned on. “Now,” he barked, as a woman appeared from behind a hedge of ashtrays and said something in French. He could feel the hot roots of his hair.

  “She says it’s from the 1930s,” translated Delphine, unabashed.

  “I don’t care when it’s from, put it back.”

  “But you promised…”

  “I might possibly have said… but I’m not going to… certainly not that.”

  “OK.” She put the lamp down and for one brief, naive moment he marvelled that he had got off so lightly. “Then you will let me have a pet instead…” she said with a subtle smile. “Non?”

  ~~~

  Colin bought Delphine the little silver mug with its vine leaf engraving even though she said she didn’t want it. He breathed over its tarnished surface and then buffed it on his T-shirt. “It’ll polish up quite nicely,” he said, holding it out for her to see.

  Round-eyed, she regarded him and shrugged.

  It looked like the kind of thing you might give as a christening present and on the way back to the Dragonfly he fell to wondering if she’d been christened and whether she was a catholic and what promises had been made on her behalf.

  “I’d like you to have it anyway.”

  She received it with casual indifference, though she did pause to inspect her reflection in it, opening her mouth wide and scrutinising her teeth, then closing her jaws with a snap.

  “I thought it might be rather good for drinking Coke out of…”

  “Have you got any Coke?”

  Once they were underway, he poured her some and as his beautiful duck egg blue boat fizzed along the canal; she played at rinsing her drink round and round until it went foaming up her nose. A good deal of spluttering ensued.

  After he had patted her on the back and done some light mopping up, he said, without considering the failure of their previous conversation, “What do you miss most about your mum?”

  Her mouth was full of Coke, which she took her time in swallowing.

  “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want. Her. You don’t have to talk about her…”

  The effervescence was all gone. She hunched over the little silver mug staring at the trailing vine leaves.

  “I’m only asking, because I didn’t really know her, not properly – I only met her a few times and I wondered if you could tell me what she was like…?”

  Delphine was breathing heavily.

  “I’m just interested, that’s all,” he went on, as kindly as he could. “It can be a way of keeping someone with you, talking about them, you know…”

  She looked away.

  “I thought she was very
pretty,” he said. “Very striking. She used to wear lots of lipstick, didn’t she? I remember that,” he tailed off, casting around. “And I remember…”

  “Her smell. She put on nice parfum when she went to see her friend.”

  She spoke so quietly that he could hardly hear her above the noise of the engine. Little by little he lowered the revs, letting the Dragonfly drift, and as he did so Delphine started to hum. It wasn’t a soft and melodious sound; it had an abrasive edge, a hard, industrial tenor. She was humming through gritted teeth. It wasn’t a tune that he recognised; it probably wasn’t a tune at all.

  “What friend was that, then?” he asked, as casually as he could.

  Her strange, riven music grew louder and he thought that sometimes he could read her like a book, a tender, slender volume; at others, everything about her, her moods, her wants, her history, was written in a language that he couldn’t fathom. “What did she smell of?” he asked, when she didn’t answer.

  “Powder,” she replied carefully.

  “My mum smelt of rather old Chanel No 5. She had the same bottle for years and years and years,” he tried to be conversational, the thought of Charlotte’s “friend” lodging itself like a thorn beneath his skin.

  “And cigarettes.”

  “Did she smoke a lot?”

  “Quite a lot.”

  “My mum gave up smoking and sucked on a cigarette holder instead, a little ivory one.”

  “Is your mum related to me?” she asked curiously, pouring the last drips of Coke into her mouth.

  “Bound to be,” he said, “I’m not good at that stuff. Some kind of grandmother, I should think. Great-grandmother?”

  She nodded.

  “Were they happy together, do you think? Your mum and Papa?”

  Delphine looked minutely at him and then looked away. She looked at him again, as though she wasn’t sure that she had heard the question correctly, and then she looked away. She looked at him as if to say, how can you ask me that, and then looked down into her lap.

  “I suppose I’m trying to make sense of what has happened, you see,” he faltered.

  “Maman was very nice to Papa and Papa was very nice to Maman,” it was more of a delivery than an answer and her voice had a welling sound, as if she might start humming her strange, raw song.

  He recalled the note that she had written him, the night of the mashed potato. It was safely tucked away inside his wallet. Colin is very nice to Delphine… It had been a hopeful whitewash of recent history: not a statement of how things were, but how she had wanted them to be.

  “Very nice…” she said uncertainly.

  “What do you miss most about your dad?”

  “Everything,” she whispered and Colin had to lean in close to hear her matchwood answer, syllables which might split and snap.

  “What, though…? he repeated gently, filled with his own yearnings – for Michael’s confidences, for those shared moments that weren’t shared anymore, for the hobbies, the question and answer sessions – What? Why? How? Why? Where? Why?

  “I miss the stories he used to tell me.”

  “The thing is,” he hesitated. He could feel the great weight of his heart in his chest. “I love Papa very much and I can’t understand why – I just can’t understand.” His head was once more full of that terrible apparition of Michael standing at the top of the stairs with his hand raised to strike, an image which he struggled to extinguish. “I thought that maybe you could help me…”

  “I miss riding on his shoulders. I haven’t done it for a long time because he said I was too heavy…” Delphine appeared to be in a state of suspension, as though any kind of action were possible, if only she could find a way to move. “I miss his mousse au chocolat. He used to write my name on the top in cream and once he wrote Papa with a big Chantilly heart around it.” She broke off.

  “Tell me what happened,” he said, drawing out the question that he hardly dared to ask.

  She flinched as if some scary tale were being recounted to her, full of details that she didn’t want to hear. He half-expected her to put her hands over her ears. He watched the tiny hyperventilations at the base of her throat as she took anxious sips of air; he could see the workings of her frantic pulse. “Maman was leaving…” her mouth opened, “and…” her breath stuttered, “and…”

  “And?”

  Silence.

  “I want Amandine…” the words came out in a jumble, “I am missing her so much.”

  He watched the spillage of tears down her cheeks. “Maman was leaving,” he prompted, the words inching their way out of him, “and…”

  “And Papa was cross,” she cried as if that were the whole story, as if it were the end of everything.

  “And then what happened?”

  She shook her head. She shook it brutally from side to side.

  “Did Maman fall… or…?”

  Her breath came in little scissorings that cut and cut. She was rocking to and fro. “I can’t–”

  “Or did Papa–?”

  “I can’t – I can’t – I can’t – I can’t – I can’t – I can’t – I can’t–”

  Colin sat with his head bowed, listening to her until he couldn’t take the carnage any more. “It’s alright, ssh, ssh.”

  “I can’t–”

  “Stop now, stop. You don’t have to… I don’t want you to… Ssh.”

  “Oh Colin! Oh Colin!” She pressed both hands over her mouth as if she might have said too much and went tunnelling into his embrace, into the darkness of his arms. He kept on holding her, wiping her eyes with the hem of his T-shirt, stroking her hair, rocking them both back and forth, back and forth, comforting her in the hope of finding some oblique comfort for himself.

  ~~~

  “The navigation is about to get extremely interesting,” he announced the following morning, as much to strengthen his own resolve as his granddaughter’s. Twenty-four hours and no Tyler. Scores of tiny insects had drowned in the dew on the cabin roof and Delphine was arranging them into patterns, her face sombre. It would be hard to persuade her that the words navigation and interesting could belong together in the same sentence. “We’ve got seven lifting bridges coming up – I’m going to need your help with those – and then, wait for it–” he totted up the numbers, “Twenty-seven locks in eleven kilometres!”

  She was unmoved. She was busy writing her name with dead bugs – D – E – L – P – H…

  “Twenty-seven locks! What about that then?” He could see the beginnings of a shrug and went on, “And after that we’ve got three tunnels. That should keep us busy, eh?”

  Raised up, the lifting bridges looked like emaciated wading birds bent over the canal, their angular necks dipped low so they could feed. They worked with a system of pulleys and counterweights and the first one that Colin heaved into the air – the pont levis de l’Arc – left flakes of rust and ancient paint all over his hands.

  They were approaching the village of Cuzy when he spotted some red flowers floating in the water, the waterlogged petals losing their colour. He stared at them as they eddied downstream, disintegrating, until the memory of Tyler’s fingers nervously deadheading petunias sprang at him, and then he knew without turning to look that Sabrina Fair would be somewhere up ahead.

  At the thought of her, every part of his body felt hot and he had to fight the urge to go throttling forwards, waving and calling out her name. He craned his neck as they went past the cherry-prowed peniche, twisting right round in his seat. He couldn’t see her onboard, although the engine was idling in neutral, so she couldn’t be far. As he straightened up he caught the expression of resignation on Delphine’s face; a look of bitter deflation.

  “It’s alright, we’re not going to stop, I promise,” he said, trying to master his resolve. She rewarded him with a torn little smile, as if it were against her better judgement to believe him. With an extortionate amount of self-discipline, he pointed his boat’s duck egg blue prow in the dir
ection of the next lifting bridge, and then he saw her.

  Tyler had hauled the bridge halfway up when she spied the Dragonfly. In the moment it took the two of them to exchange a diffident glance she relaxed the tension on the chain a fraction, but it was enough to allow the bridge to sink back gracefully to the horizontal, hoisting her four metres up into the air.

  “Hold on,” he cried, “Whatever you do, hold on.” He rammed the Dragonfly’s nose into the bank. “Turn the engine off, will you? And tie her up to something – a tree – it doesn’t matter what–” he shouted over his shoulder at Delphine as he leapt onto dry land and started running, “Don’t let go! I’m coming! I’m coming!”

  Strange yelping sounds were issuing from Tyler as she tried to get some purchase on the chain using her feet, causing the end of it to whip and swirl like the tail of an enraged animal. “Oh my God,” she wailed. “I don’t do heights…”

  “Don’t look down – youch!” The chain struck him on the shin, “Ow, ow, ow. It’s alright. It’ll be alright. Hold on tight,” he said, hopping about rubbing his leg.

  “Oh my God.”

  “It’ll be alright. It’ll be alright. Try and keep calm. If you can keep still, just so that I can grab–” The chain went scything past him again.

  “I can’t hold on any more. Oh my God.”

  “Hold on for a moment, just for a moment. Don’t look dow–”

  Her fingers unfurled; her body seemed to fall more rapidly than her limbs, so that she hurtled downwards in a crescent shape and he could almost hear the rush of air as she came tumbling into his arms. He staggered sideways, his legs buckling atrociously, so that he ended up flinging her on to the grass verge, before collapsing next to her.

  “Bloody hellfire,” he said, when he had caught his breath. They lay side by side. High above them, the white sails of clouds filled with wind and went scudding past. He stared up at them until that shifting moment when they stood still and the earth began to move instead.

  Tyler was pressing her fingers against various bones, testing them out. “My,” she drawled, “You sure know how to sweep a girl off her feet.”