Then Brown went through her new front door with her hands full of fountain pens.
She didn’t look back, so she didn’t see Blue throw the notebook away. She didn’t see the car, returning to the spot where it had left her, inching along as her lover stuck his head out of the window, looking for her. Blue walked over to him, and as the man spoke, Blue tilted her head and listened with an expression of great sympathy. .
Brown walked into her home under a row of crystal chandeliers, their octopus arms outstretched, their hearts layered with old gold. The high ceiling was painted with a map that looked both old and new — it was faded, the paint cracked, but the fade was bright. The map showed that the world had edges you could fall off, into blank white. Here. . be. . dragons.
Upstairs, on a desk by a window, there lay a fountain pen that looked identical to the ones she held. Brown picked up the fountain pen and shook it. The cartridge sounded empty. She wished she’d bought new cartridges instead of new pens; it would have been far more economical. Beside the desk was a wastepaper basket full of crumpled paper. There were more fountain pens in there, too. She didn’t really want to sit down at this desk; it seemed to be a place of nerves and wretchedness. But there was a fresh pad of paper open, and the chair was drawn out, so she sat down. She laid the new pens down one by one. She looked at them, twiddled her thumbs, picked a pen up, put it down, examined the notepad. She was clearly supposed to write something, but not a single idea made itself available to her. Was it meant to be a letter? Or a report? The fact that it was to be handwritten suggested a personal aspect. Her writing was to be addressed to someone in particular. Brown pushed a pen with her fingertip and it rolled against another pen, and all the pens fell off the table. How was she supposed to do this if she didn’t know who she was doing it for? It was ridiculous.
After about twenty minutes, she heard scrabbling at the door and leapt to her feet.
But whoever it was, they weren’t coming into the room, they were just pushing a piece of paper under the door.
It read:
Write the stories.
“Stories?” Brown howled. “What stories?”
She ran through the rooms of her house, looking for the person who had ordered stories. She ran downstairs and watched the street. It could have been anyone. Anyone. How could someone have slipped in and slipped out again without her knowing? Perhaps they’d followed her in. .
Brown returned to the desk and picked the pens up off the floor. She wrote down the words: Once upon a time, and then she stopped. She looked about her. There was something missing. There was something wrong. She found a mirror and turned around in front of it with her arms held out in front of her. She was all there, all in one piece. Then what? What had she lost?
Brown wrote down a list of things that had been stolen from her, things she had lost, both replaceable and irreplaceable. Umbrellas, gloves. Expensive tubes of mascara. Cheques. Earrings: one out of virtually every pair she had ever owned until she had had to leave off wearing earrings altogether. Several jackets, left at cafés and parties. A diary, once — a year’s thinking. What else. . a television and a cat, from the time she had lived by herself and left her front door unlocked one day. The thief had left a ransom note for the cat; she’d considered responding to it but hadn’t.
Another piece of paper came in under the door: WRITE THE STORIES.
This time Brown didn’t bother searching for the person who wanted stories. She would not be toyed with, and she would not obey. Instead she went out into the city, to look for what she had lost. There was no guarantee that she would recognise it even if she found it, but trying felt better than sitting at that strange and awful desk. Everything seemed like a clue. The glances of strangers, the first letter of every street sign she passed — she tacked them together and created the name of a street that was impossible to reach. She didn’t give up. She went looking every day.
And every day there was a note or two. Write the stories. And sometimes there was money, so that she could eat.
People began to call her Madame la Folle. One day she passed a man who stood playing his guitar on a corner of the Boulevard Saint-Germain, his back to the churchyard railings, and she realised he was singing about her — Madame la Folle with your money falling out of your pockets, trampling your own bread underfoot, leaving a trail of letters you meant to post. . What else have you lost?
The list in her notepad grew and grew. As she read it she turned a ring round and round her finger. It was made of cheap brass, and it was slightly misshapen, as if unable to withstand the heat of her body. She could not recall exactly how she had come by the ring, or when she had first put it on. She pulled the ring off her finger and felt pain, which surprised her. She looked up at the map on the ceiling, inspecting continents through the brass circle she held in her hand. Seen through the ring, the borders of each country throbbed and blurred.
“Where are you?” she murmured. “Where are you?” She wanted the question removed from her with forceps at white heat, leaving a clean cavity behind. Then, perhaps, she would be able to perform her task. She was beginning to feel that she owed it to whoever was keeping her alive.
There were moments in which Brown forgot her search. She came across a flock of red balloons once, tied to railings, and since no one was watching she popped them, one by one, with her sharp fingernails. And she enjoyed avoiding light. It made her feel triumphant. She made nighttime trips to Sacré-Cœur, darting around the glare of the floodlights that the boats flung out as they passed along the riverbank. When she reached the basilica she crept down its steps and jumped high where the bottom step sat directly on the hill. She jumped as high as she could and she closed her eyes and made believe that she had fallen into the city’s arms. Madame la Folle.
Blue’s man kept her waiting while he tried to get Brown back. He put up posters with photographs of Brown all around Paris, asking if anyone had seen her. But the wind blew the posters away into the Seine, or he saw people take the posters down and make off with them — a different person each time, and he would give chase, shouting out for an explanation. But no one explained, and no one helped him. He knew it was all coincidence — he told himself it was coincidence, because it was horrifying to think that, having made a decision, he was now being actively prevented from changing it. Blue was by his side at all times, and she was devoted and affectionate. Instead of asking annoying questions while he was working, she attended to her own affairs. Brown began to seem like a strange dream he had had. She would never come back, and it was perverse to chase her like this. Blue. . Blue was no trouble at all. So he turned to her.
It didn’t work. He kept it up for a couple of years, saying, “Yes, I’m very lucky,” to anyone who complimented him on his improved circumstances. But it didn’t feel like luck. It felt arranged. Blue was a stranger, and she never became a friend. One evening the man stood by the fireplace in their living room, looking at a photograph in a magazine. It accompanied an article about Blue and himself, a profile of them as an artisan couple. The man tried to read the article as if he were someone else, someone who didn’t know them. The couple in the photograph complemented each other beautifully: her glossy head on his shoulder, his arm tucked around her with his cuff drawn up over his fingers, so he held her through the linen of his sleeve. That was how precious she was to him — she couldn’t be touched with a naked hand. He built dollhouses, and she peopled them with dolls. Film stars and sports stars bought them for their children. The couple in the photograph hoped for children of their own soon. Quoting a poet, the artisan man said that their love was a lifelong love, a love for all the lives they might ever have had. He read that again. Had he really said that? He repeated the words aloud. Then he threw the magazine onto the fire and didn’t stay to watch it burn.