Their last ride that day left them outside a small village. It was already dark, and they sensed, rather than saw, the Rhône, which they’d followed all afternoon, in the valley beneath them. The wind was funnelled by high ground on either side. They climbed over the metal barrier between the road and the river, slid down a steep slope, found a stretch of flat grass wide enough for their tent. Sometime in the night the wind dropped away and Aoife, waking, became aware of a new sound, a low, steady moan. It seemed to rise from the ground. She turned on her side, watched Michael sleeping beside her. We are wild here, she thought.
The following morning, waking first, she wandered around a bend in the slope and found the source of the sound: concrete cooling towers, pylons, transformers and sluice gates, canalising the grey river. A nuclear power station, sucking in water to cool its reactors. It powers the grid, she thought. They had just slept – and more than that – for free, on a piece of land beside it, an offcut of nobody’s property between the river and the road, hidden from the world, too narrow to farm, too steep to develop, where she now saw wild flowers that grew through the grass. She was cold, a little hungry, alone above this famous river she had only known from maps. To be this free, she thought, we only have to keep moving.
I can see you, she told the power plant, but you can’t see me.
The following evening brought them to Nevers. Their driver, who lived in the town, dropped them on the old bridge.
I could take you to the northern edge of town, she said, but you won’t get a lift there. It’s too late in the evening. You should stay here tonight, or catch a late train into Paris.
She was a retired teacher. She said she gave lifts to young people because she missed looking after other people’s kids. She offered to help with their train fare. But money wasn’t their problem. Towse had been very generous.
The Loire at Nevers is shallow and wide, streaked with yellow sandbanks. The piers of the old stone bridge were built on the edge of a weir. Aoife and Michael leaned over the parapet, lit cigarettes, and watched the foam from the weir dissolve in the water, fading away like their smoke.
You want to stay here for the night, said Michael, or get a train for the last stretch, into the city?
She knew he would like to see Paris, but she dreaded the mass of it. She didn’t want to get drawn into stone canyons, concrete underpasses, hostile cops and watchful suburbs.
What do you think?
We should stay here, he said. Find somewhere to sleep in that park, over there. It’s a bad idea to arrive late at night at a big city station. There are cameras. And people follow you outside.
Were these, she wondered, the fairy tales on which his parents had raised him? Were stations and back streets his haunted forests?
OK, she said.
But he looked disappointed. A horn beeped behind them.
A Renault estate car had stopped on the bridge. The driver, leaning out his window, was a man of about sixty with a heavy grey beard. He called to them in French.
Hey! I’m going to Paris. I can take you, if you want.
Aoife looked at Michael.
Did you stick your thumb out, just now?
No. Did you?
No . . .
The Renault, engine idling, blocked the bridge’s northbound lane. Another car swerved to pass it, its driver leaning on the horn.
If you want to come, come now, called the bearded man. I can’t stop here.
They looked at each other again.
Looks like we’re going to Paris tonight, said Michael. It is written.
Nothing is written, said Aoife.
But she was beginning to worry that maybe it was.
The driver was called Didier. He wore a Phish T-shirt and he chain-smoked Camel cigarettes. Once he heard them talk French, he insisted on English. He spoke it well – if anything, too fast, swallowing his sentences, tailing off at times into nervous giggles. They drove through the old stone heart of Nevers to the retail lots and commerce on the northern edge of town.
We’ll have to take the autoroute from here, Didier told them. I prefer the N7, but I need to reach Paris by midnight. Don’t worry, though. I’ve put the spray on.
Spray?
Laque. Hairspray. On the registration plates. So the bastards can’t read the number. People like us need to mind our privacy.
Aoife wondered what he meant by ‘people like us’. Who, for that matter, was Didier? She knew about the hairspray trick. You put it on licence plates so cameras couldn’t read them. She also knew that the trick didn’t work.
The car drove on to the autoroute for the last stretch to Paris. They were in the countryside again, amid woodlands and corn fields. Inside, the car was lit only by the rise and fall of passing headlights, the glow of the dashboard. Aoife, who was sitting in the back, was able to look around the interior. Behind her seat, a blanket hid the contents of the rear of the estate car. She yawned, stretched, and, snaking a hand back, pulled aside a corner of the blanket. A truck, overtaking, flooded the car with its lights.
Yellowing varnish. Red, pointy hats. Sculpted grey beards. Patient hands, crossed on round bellies, or clutching rods that had never bent for a fish.
The back of the car was packed with garden gnomes, of varying designs and sizes, both wooden and plastic, most of them old and some badly weathered. They were arranged upright together, parade formation, all facing the front.
Aoife pulled the blanket back into position, yawned again. She prodded the back of Michael’s seat with her toe.
So Didier, she said loudly. Do you live in Paris?
Nah. I’m from Lyons. I fucking hate Paris. I’m only going there to meet up with some friends. We’re on a sort of a mission. But I can’t really talk about it. It’s kind of confidential . . .
He giggled, then trailed off.
I see . . . said Aoife. Tell me this, have you by any chance ever met a guy who calls himself Towse? Tall, thin guy? American? Wears an old business suit?
Didier turned, took a good look at her. Then he looked at Michael, then back at the road.
No, he said thoughtfully. No. I can’t say I have.
After that, he stopped talking.
They reached the outskirts of Paris a little before midnight. Aoife watched Michael, watching the edgelands move past in the night. Factories. Truck depots. Supermarket islands in acres of asphalt. Floodlit boxes of glass and aluminium, abandoned until day. Were they back in New Jersey? Had their journey been rewired, in the quantum uncertainty of a highway at night, transposing them to yet another of these discs of hope and commerce, some other city on some other world?
The road rose up on concrete stilts. Now there were human streets below them, apartment buildings, corner cafes, advertisements in French. Cars waited at stop lights. Kids stood on street corners, stamping in the cold. Still in France, then. Would this journey confirm for Michael the existence of Paris, the Eiffel Tower, all those other myths?
Didier reached the Boulevard Périphérique, turned on to its eastbound lane.
I’m getting off at Bercy, he said. On the river. There’s a Métro station there that can take you where you want.
They reached the Seine a few miles upstream from the city. Beneath a bridge was fast-running water, stone embankments lined with barges, a depot for gravel and sand. Ahead, a shopping mall stood in a tangle of slip roads, the exposed guts of the town. Didier’s car left the Périphérique, descended an off-ramp and stopped on the embankment beside the Seine.
I have to let you out here, said Didier. The Métro is over there, beyond that next bridge.
Michael shook hands with him. Aoife paused in the door, holding it open. It was safe to ask now. But she couldn’t think of the French word for gnome.
What are you doing with them, with the little men in the back?
Les nains? The gnomes? You
saw them?
Didier pointed.
Look over there.
There was a small green space by the embankment, a scrap of nature marooned between the footpath and an underpass. A single tree, a small oak, grew in the middle.
Underneath it, in cheap nylon sleeping bags, bodies lay on sheets of flattened cardboard. A woman and three young children, pressed close about her, borrowing heat. The children slept, but the mother was awake, looking at a smartphone. Its light showed them her face. Aoife could see her breath in the air.
Refugees, said Didier. They came west in boats, to escape from the wars that we started.
He jabbed his thumb at the back of his car.
Tomorrow morning, my little friends here will also go west. They are refugees from human servitude. We will put them in a boat that leaks, and float it downstream through the centre of Paris. I don’t know how far they’ll get. But at least they’ll have a chance to find safety and freedom.
I see, said Aoife. Good luck.
She saluted him, military fashion. They watched him drive off.
The Garden Gnome Liberation Front, said Michael, impressed. I read about them years ago. I thought they’d disbanded.
So did I. It looks like they’re back.
The houseboat was a converted barge, moored at a pontoon in Bercy marina. Padlocks told Aoife that its owners weren’t home. That was unlikely to change at this hour. She and Michael would be safe here, for one night at least.
A propane heater drove the cold and damp from the bare little cabin, and the electric shower gave hot water straight away. Michael went first. When Aoife came out of the shower, he was undressed, airing the mattress in front of the heater. They found ways to warm themselves until it was dry.
Afterwards, she craved a cigarette. But it would be rude to smoke inside this stolen refuge. Michael, lying beside her, was already asleep.
It was two in the morning, a weeknight in early spring, and the embankment was deserted. The few cars that passed on the boulevard, out of sight, overhead, seemed romantic and lost. She trailed her finger along the railing by the river and felt the sting of late frost. It reminded her of childhood and home, cold nights in winter, hard stars in the sky. There were no stars here, only the haze of light from the city.
Her feet carried her eastward, back along the embankment, to the spot where Didier had dropped them. She stopped by the oak tree, where the family slept.
The woman now lay on her side, spooning a daughter. Her headscarf, pulled around to the front, hid her eyes from the lights that burned on the embankment. One hand, trailing over the girl, still held her phone.
Even refugees have phones now. Even fugitives can network. No need for secret messages, gypsy codes, the signs that tramps used to scratch on door frames and gate posts. Gives food but not money. Angry dog here.
The children lay beside their mother, confined in their sleeping bags, faces buried inside.
It would be easy to hurt them or rob them, thought Aoife. Who would they complain to? No one wants them here.
The youngest child whimpered, wriggled, and the woman hugged her tighter, still sleeping. Her hand moved away from the phone, leaving it exposed, there for the taking.
It’s a burner phone, thought Aoife. Bound to be. A cheap phone, bought locally, with whatever money this woman had hidden about her, or could beg, so she could cling to the scraps of her life. Who does she reach for? Is the children’s father alive? Did he disappear into a prison? Is her family in Aleppo or Raqqa or Damascus, or in a camp in Jordan, Turkey or Lebanon? Aoife knew some of these camps first-hand . . . Are her people scattered along the road she has travelled, or is she lost to them for good?
It was many weeks, now, since Aoife had called her British burner phone, the mailbox she used as a cut-out for her parents. She hadn’t even seen the news, lately. Never before had she been out of touch for so long. But she’d had no way to call them, on the long road behind her, with no laptop or phone. France still had hitchhiking, but it had recently removed the last of its payphones. A driver had told them this, when they were hitching near Aix-en-Provence. Supprimer, that was the verb he’d used. France had suppressed the last of its payphones.
She stepped on to the grass. None of the sleepers moved. Watching her feet, she circled around them. The phone lay loose by the woman’s fingers, on the exposed corner of a sheet of flattened cardboard. Amazon, the cardboard said.
Aoife stooped, picked up the sleeping woman’s phone, put it in her pocket. Then she took out a thick roll of euros and placed it between the woman and her daughter. A short way downstream, when she was out of earshot, she leaned her back against the balustrade and turned on the phone. No password. Just a burner, then, its screen scratched and cracked.
She had five voice messages in her mailbox, all from the past four days. Her mother’s voice, increasingly anxious:
Aoife. It’s your mother. Please call me as soon as you can.
Aoife. It’s your mother. Please call me as soon as you get this.
Aoife. Your father’s not well. Call me as soon as you can.
Aoife. Where are you? Your father’s in hospital.
Aoife. You have to come home. Your father wants to see you before it’s too late. The hospital has discharged him. Please, please give me a call.
She shut off the stolen phone and turned, so that her elbows rested on the rail. The river flowed past, just beneath her. The lights of the city shone in its water. She no longer felt the cold.
Across the river, beyond the moored barges, surrounded by modern glass and steel boxes, she noticed an odd-looking building. It was much older than its neighbours, maybe late nineteenth century, made of riveted steel and ornamental brickwork, with a tall red-brick chimney. The whimsical arrangement of its windows – some squared, some curved – gave it a playful art-nouveau appearance. There was a sign on the front, worked into the brickwork: Distribution d’air comprimé. SUDAC.
Compressed-air network? Why would they have needed compressed air in Paris, back in the old days?
Then she remembered. The pneumatic post. Miles of airtight tubes, running through catacombs and storm drains and Métros. Sealed metal canisters – containing urgent messages, documents, cash money – blown through these tubes, all around the city, by bursts of compressed air. She had learned about this system as a child, seen it in black and white on a colour television. Her father had been watching with her, that day – the memory stabbed her. He had told her how, when he was a boy, he’d seen pneumatic tubes in a department store in London, shuttling payments and change between clerks and cashiers. He said it was one of his earliest memories. It might already be lost forever. She felt her world sway.
Aoife wondered if Towse, or something else, had wanted her to stand here and notice this ghost of an older way of doing things. She wondered if any pneumatic tubes were still in operation, here in Paris, or anywhere else in the world. Did money and words, invested in paper, still flit in secret beneath city streets, down in the dark, where no one could catch them?
She reckoned she could be in Ireland in less than two days, travelling by boat from Cherbourg to Dublin. Flying was out of the question.
Towse, too, would be in Dublin.
She looked again at the old compressed-air plant. It seemed to her brighter, more electric, than the modern buildings around it, even though it was dark and their windows shone with light. It looked as if it would dissolve into sparkles if you touched it, revealing its secret, a shortcut to the next level of this game, some other Eden in some other multiverse. Maybe Towse was right to worry about the simulation hypothesis. Maybe nothing she could see was real. Was someone, or something, reeling her in? Was it Towse?
You have to carry on, she told herself. You have to live by the old rules of thumb. Reality is whatever smacks you in the face if you walk around with your eyes closed. Her first job
, in this heuristic now, was to get rid of the stolen phone. At any level of reality, it was compromised. Once you picked up a phone, punched a number, the shockwaves spread outwards, alerting the sharks. Protocol demanded that she toss it into the nearest body of deep water. She had paid the refugee woman for it, many times over, with that fat roll of fifties. It was time to pick her spot, as far out as she could. She turned it over in her hand, bracing for the throw. And then she saw the sticker on the back.
It was a sticker of a pretty cartoon princess. Aoife recognised her as a character from the movie Frozen, though she didn’t know which one. The name was printed on the bottom of the sticker, but Aoife couldn’t read it. It was in Arabic script.
The colours were faded, the paper scratched and scored, and part of the sticker had come away, leaving its glue on the plastic.
Aoife looked at the smiling face of the strong, brave young princess, and calculated the damage that she had done.
Not just a burner phone, then. Not bought locally. This phone had come on the long road from Syria, treasured all the way. A long way back, in a peaceful moment, a little girl had put a favourite sticker on her mother’s phone. She had done this as a gift.
Aoife herself knew only six phone numbers by heart, and three of them no longer worked. How many numbers did this refugee carry around in her head? How many more were stored only in this telephone? Sisters, cousins, friends, strewn around the world.
Protocol demanded. Consider the alternative. This phone was now toxic, to the refugees as well. Aoife drew her arm back and threw it into the Seine.
*
I have to go home to Ireland, she told Michael. I have to leave right away.
There were yellow flowers on the nylon curtain, pulled across the little round window over the bed. They shone with the morning. She wished they could stay here for just one day more.
Towse?
He almost sneered when he said it.
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