by Jayne Tuttle
I wander back through unknown streets towards Belleville, looking in doorways and behind gates, lost in thought. On the steep rue de Belleville, I go to mount my bike and realise with panic that my phone has been switched off since the audition started. When I turn it on I’m shocked to see it’s nearly six pm. There are seven missed calls from Adrien.
‘Where are you?’ he says.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, throat tight. ‘I got sidetracked on the way home. Something amazing has happened! I have a big surprise for you. And guess what else?’
‘What?’ he says flatly.
‘I got the job! I’ll tell you about it when I get there. I’m on my way now.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Still up in Belleville. But I won’t be long.’
‘Are you telling me the truth?’ he asks.
My jaw clenches. ‘Of course,’ I say, and hang up.
I push off, deflated, but determined to get back quickly and make things right. From up this high on the hill, I can see the Eiffel Tower glimmering in the distance, like a jewel at the end of the rainbow. I ride dangerously towards it down the steep hill, across the boulevard and down through my old neighbourhood in the 10th, which feels still and empty, pedalling hard across the canal and past République, hurrying towards Asnières.
As the streets grow wider, I pedal harder, and the faster and further I go, the more something opens inside of me, as though the motion is removing something heavy and constricting. Something seems to have blown off me in my rush. My jaw unclenches, my brow softens, and a new sensation fills my body, something light and free. I am alone. And also, deliciously, not alone. As I fly along I feel a strong sensation of Mum being with me. And Kiki. My sister, Kate. Dad. My brothers. Australia. My heart feels full of light and a burning joy. The limits that were binding me seem blasted away. Australia is right there, I can go back now. Paris is right here. Mum has disappeared, but she is here. Kiki is gone but not disappeared. Everything is okay. Everything is perfect.
I pedal on through the city, hitting a traffic jam as I arrive in the Place de l’Opéra. The sun has started to sink, leaving the sky a burst of intense oranges and pinks. The grandeur of the square is intensified by the glory of the sky, and outside the fairytale Palais Garnier I’m not sorry that I have to dismount and walk my bike to the island in the middle of the intersection, to wait for the traffic to budge. I stand in wonder, gazing at the merging colours above the dreamlike palace with its sculptural homages to the gods, the great arts and artists, losing all sense of time as the traffic honks and blares around me. The golden angel of poetry lifts her wings high on the top of the building, set alight by the dying sun. Her svelte shape burns into my eyes.
As the traffic starts to flow again I mount my bike. Then, as though the bike has made the decision for me, instead of heading towards Adrien’s I find myself turning back the way I came.
Back to Belleville.
Back to the rue de la Chine.
Harry brings a big bucket of white paint and four rollers. Marie-France brings a potted wild geranium and helps with the first coat of paint before running off to her rehearsal for a travelling play. Sophie and Lou help me plant the geranium and some cheap roses in the window boxes, though Sophie says they won’t live long in the cold. They stay all afternoon as Harry and I paint, wrapping tissue paper around each of Carrie’s frogs and placing them in boxes, which Fred, Sophie’s quiet and serious husband, later carries down to the cave for me, along with the marble table and the heavy, dreary lamps. Luc from the restaurant downstairs brings a box of beer and he, Harry and I drink it sitting on the drop-sheets with loud music on, before Luc leaves and we do a final coat of paint. You can still see patches of the wallpaper beneath, but the place feels mine.
After a week, Adrien comes. When I didn’t turn up that night he was furious, then confused, then sad. The phone calls followed, the emails, the text messages. Then, silence. We weren’t moving in together. We weren’t getting married in long grass. Just as something inexplicable had brought us together, it was now keeping us apart. It was decided. I missed him viscerally, curling up in the new bed as though I’d had my core removed. It was a hot pain, unlike the stillness of Mum’s cold death. It seared and scorched.
He stands in the doorway, handsome as the night I first saw him. My heart still pounds. I ask him in. He puts my things neatly in a corner, looking around. The place is nice, he tells me, c’est cosy. I invite him to sit on the couch. There is some saucisson and bread on the table and I offer him some. It is ending, as it began, with sausage. He takes a piece and starts peeling away the skin, which he doesn’t normally do. I point this out. He shrugs and eats the sausage. I take the skin for him and put it back on the plate.
When I would tell people at parties that the night Adrien and I met was the first time I’d eaten meat in a decade, he would squirm and later say, ‘Don’t you get it?’ Of course I did. That was why it was funny. The more he squirmed, the more I’d say it and the more I’d embellish the story. It pained me to see him cringe but I couldn’t help myself. Perhaps I thought if I pushed him hard enough he’d come around to the other side. Perhaps I was testing him. Or perhaps I was trying to push him away.
But I did love him. I loved him in a powerful way, a way that defied the constraints of the day-to-day, defied logic, defied earthly concerns. There was something in him I wanted, that I knew was in there but could never touch. I still know it’s in there but I know I can’t get it.
Looking into his face, I sense that he feels the same. He felt me, deeply, too, felt some fire in there he wanted, but in the end I was just a normal person, with an annoying desire to embarrass him. He needs a nicer person. I was going to say, like Marie-France, but she is defiantly not nice, and would smack me for insinuating it. A nicer, Frencher person.
Stop looking into my eyes. Like that night at Odéon, his eyes are locked on me, but there is a new obstacle between us now. Someone else on the telephone. But that desire – still there. Damn that desire.
He kisses me on both cheeks in the doorway. A thousand tiny pins of electricity.
The following weeks are dark. I can’t bring myself to tell anyone at home what’s happened, and on Christmas Day I sit in the cold apartment, eating hot noodles from a cup. Dad lent me the money for the bond and the first month’s rent, and I don’t have the stomach to borrow more, so the heating is off. If I can just get through the holidays, work will begin at the marionette theatre and all will be wonderful.
The Sorbonne classes keep going through the holidays, so I get up for my eight am phonetics lesson in the dark and take the métro across town. I don’t have enough money to go to the movies or sit in a café, and it’s too cold to be outside in the park, so I make my way slowly home each day to the noodles and the silence. Harry is in Australia, Nadine is at her housemate’s country manor for Christmas, Marie-France is at her grandparents’, Sophie and Fred and Lou are in Normandy, Luc has shut the restaurant and the neighbourhood is quiet. The street lamps come on at around four pm and cast their light through my window boxes, creating long, curled patterns across the floorboards. My favourite place to sit is in the salon, looking at the patterns, back against the cold cement wall. I must not call Adrien.
A pile of letters arrives one day, which he has redirected to me. Wedding acceptance letters, each a stab in the soul. ‘Delighted!’ ‘Excited!’ ‘Thrilled!’ The letters fall around me in a listless pile. Every day I come home and allow myself to open a few more. Each one brings a different kind of pain.
One cold evening, I open a pink envelope. Inside is a Christmas card from my nan. To my ecstasy, enclosed is a twenty-euro note. I jump up and rip a cartwheel through the salon, almost knocking a wall out.
As if my sudden movement has woken the dead, for the first time in weeks my phone rings. It’s Sophie. They’re back. She asks me to come for dinner.
Guillotine
‘Mademoiselle?’
The woman le
aning over me keeps saying mademoiselle, and I keep answering oui, but she can’t seem to hear me. Perhaps because she is under water.
‘Mademoiselle —’
‘OUI!’
This time she hears. ‘Mademoiselle? You can hear me?’
‘Yes, I can hear you,’ I say in very polite French. She isn’t wet anymore. I am. I’m wet all over. Everything is wet. I’m lying on a floor. On my back. Something warm is dripping in my ear.
‘You have been in an accident,’ the woman says, her brow furrowed. ‘What is your name?’
I tell her and she says, ‘Good, Jayne, we’re going to get you some help. I am Eveline, a nurse. I live here in this apartment block.’
The sound of wet footsteps thudding up the stairs. Sirens blare, voices murmur in different places around me.
‘Was there a bomb?’ I ask. I want to sit up and look around but I can’t feel my body. My breath is short. The woman smiles, holding my hand between her two hands like she’s protecting a tiny baby bird. I can see my hand but not feel it.
‘Don’t worry. Everything is okay,’ she says.
The dripping in my ear is now a steady running. The woman’s face looks strange, her features won’t stay still, they pixelate and fade. Then everything is black again.
A handsome face is above me. A pompier! Finally, a Paris firefighter, come to rescue me.
The woman tells him, ‘Her name is Jayne.’
‘Jeanne?’
‘Jayne. Une Anglaise.’
He can’t pronounce me. ‘Stay with me, Jeanne,’ he says.
Yes, I will stay with you. I love you. God, I love you so much. I will love you forever, pompier, even if you can’t pronounce my name, even if we make no sense.
He asks me to move my fingers and when I try I gasp; I’m falling back into the dark again, into the dark and wet, a drain.
A light shines in my eye. Another face moves into view. Sophie! Her hand is on her mouth. Her face is white as white. ‘Oh Jayne,’ she squeaks, eyes wet.
‘Ça va?’ I ask. ‘Is Lou okay? Is there a war?’
Her head disappears and though I have the urge to follow it a voice says in my head, Just look forward. Lie very still.
The pompier is here again. Hello, my love.
‘Keep looking in my eyes.’
Yes of course, my love.
‘We are now going to lift you down the stairs. We need to fit a neck brace. This will not take a moment.’ He smiles. There is movement behind me. The trickling continues in my ear and I want to rub it, but the voice in my head says not to move. I let them do what they are doing. I can’t feel anything.
My body begins to rise in the air. There is red on the wall. Now I am floating down the stairwell, backwards, watching the dim grey walls, the lift cage, the carpet, Eveline’s worried face withdrawing. Someone keeps turning the volume up and down, woWOwoWO.
Look at the wall, the voice instructs. Just keep looking at the wall.
Black.
‘Mademoiselle?’
They won’t let me stay in the drain. They keep saying mademoiselle, mademoiselle, over and over, it’s driving me crazy.
‘Mademoiselle?’
I’m in some kind of van. Tubes and sheets: an ambulance. The doors are open. We are not moving. I can just make out the dark and misty sky.
Sophie’s voice is beside me, talking in muffled French. ‘I don’t know. Her face. Her head. They don’t know. I don’t know! Oh Fred … On the staircase. I don’t know why … fainted. No, I don’t think she understands. To Tenon. Lou is with Eveline.’ She stops speaking and sobs into her hands, loud and gutteral. I try not to listen. People outside the van are shouting. Lights are flashing.
I whisper, ‘The elevator.’
‘Jayne?’
‘It was the elevator,’ I croak again. ‘The light. It was dark. I was excited. I wanted. To see Lou – wanted her to see me. I got stuck, my head, the rail …’
‘Ohmondieu,’ she says in one breath.
There is a long pause.
‘Who should I call?’ she finally asks.
‘Adrien.’
As we tear dramatically through the streets of Paris I feel fine. I’ve always feared something bad happening to me here, thinking how terrible it would be to be far away from home. But now that it’s happened, it’s okay. Paris has looked after me before and she will again. Look forward, I tell myself, don’t think about it.
‘We’re going to the hospital now,’ shouts the pompier from the front seat. Someone beside me pats my hand. I keep looking straight ahead.
At the emergency entrance a team of people run out and lift me onto a trolley. They are all silent and serious and don’t look at me. They wheel me into a room with very bright lights, past people who stare and put their hands on their faces. Now Sophie is with me again, holding my hand. Her hand is clammy. There is a fine, crooked crack in the ceiling. I fix on each craggy little angle: it’s a river through Central Australia. Sophie leans over and looks into my eyes. I tell her not to worry, I am fine. She nods slowly. Her eyes are glassy.
Everything is okay. Nobody is dying. Nobody has cancer.
They wheel me through a series of corridors and the lights keep flickering and going off. We pass a man with a huge bump on his head who is screaming very loudly. There are other screaming sounds and I wonder if I have been brought to the madhouse. Now we’re in a darkened room that feels as vast and empty as the gym at high school and they wheel me to the back corner and pull a curtain around me. Faces come to loom over me, look shocked, then disappear. I am clearly a horror show. The screaming and moaning from the man in the corridor mounts. Someone shouts, ‘Ta gueule,’ and he shuts up for a moment. Then he starts whimpering, before building up to a loud moan again. The lights go on and off, fluorescent bands flicking, strobing. Sophie sits next to me, silent, white, holding my hand. I’m not sure why she is so upset. I’m fine. I smile at her and she looks shocked.
‘Have you … has … anything, like this, ever happened to you, before?’ she suddenly blurts.
What does she mean? Have I put myself in unnameable danger before? Stood on a railroad track? Shot myself from a cannon?
‘You just seem so … okay,’ she says. ‘You keep smiling.’
I am okay. I am happy. A strange ecstasy is burning through me, a brightness, like I’ve just been born.
She moves closer to me. ‘I’m pregnant,’ she says and smiles as a tear runs down her cheek. ‘I just found out today.’
‘Congratulations!’
We sit in silence again for a few minutes and she caresses my hand. ‘If only,’ she says, then stops.
If only what? She hadn’t been running late? If only I hadn’t been on time? If only the man hadn’t arrived when he did and pressed the button for the ascenseur? If only he lived on the third floor and had a saying Under four, lift’s a bore? If only the dim stairwell lamps had been replaced just once since 1933? If only the lift hadn’t been recently serviced, making it chillingly silent on descent? If only the liftwell had been enclosed? If only the stairwell rail were higher? If only I’d never come to Paris in the first place …
But Sophie never finishes her sentence. ‘I have to go,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry. I’ll come again.’
‘Okay,’ I say.
She kisses me and leaves, her footsteps interrupted by a warm male voice outside my cubicle.
Adrien.
The lights go out, it’s black, but I know I’m here because I can hear Adrien’s murmur and Sophie’s sniffing interjected with deafening bellows from the man in the corridor. Panic sweeps through me – I can’t see the wall – I don’t have anywhere to look. Nausea swells and rises.
The lights flick back on.
Adrien.
His face is kind. He is wearing his long dark coat. His beard is at my favourite length. He sits down and looks me over.
‘Oh la la mademoiselle,’ he says. ‘What happened?’
He is my family here, the only
one I want to see. He is real as real, standing there in the flickering light, more real than he has ever been. Perhaps we are friends after all. I am so grateful to see him, tears spring into my eyes. I tell him about the elevator.
‘Bi-zarre,’ he says and rubs my arm.
The lights go off completely. When they flick back on Adrien is gone.
Now there’s a nurse at my side, come to clean my wounds. She is very stressed.
‘PuTAIN,’ she says as the lights flicker again. ‘It’s fucking Baghdad in here.’ She washes my head, saying, ‘Oh la la la la,’ with continuous las as the extent of my injury is revealed. I still feel fine. I can’t feel my body. There is a salty chemical smell. I look ahead and don’t think about it. Nobody has cancer.
The lights flicker and turn off, flick back on. I’m happy. But the nurse has returned with a grave look on her face. She tells me in a slow, loud voice that I need to be transferred urgently to another hospital, where they have the facilities to deal with my condition.
My stomach clenches. The voice says, Just look at the wall.
A team swoops in and rushes me through the corridors and out to another ambulance, another set of doors. This time, as the ambulance tears through the city, I feel every cobblestone, every crack, every cigarette butt in the street beneath me. The trip is purple, my stomach is a rock, the smell of mothballs is overwhelming.
Just look ahead.
They take me to Salpêtrière, the old lunatic asylum. Perhaps I have gone mad. A new team runs out and wheels me inside, leaving me in a corridor. My head is starting to throb and it feels sticky, like I have a piece of clingwrap around it. I hear lots of swearing. It’s astonishing how much the doctors and nurses swear. I’m backstage now, I have never been here. The light is bright. A man in a white coat is inspecting my head. He has a lovely warm face.
