Chapter 6
I did the sensible thing and checked her admission card. She was travelling alone. Duration of visit, three nights. I set myself up in the common room with coffee, near the door where I could see all comings and goings. When Tilda passed by I would take another x-ray and if successful move to the next stage where I swaggered more and perhaps tried some Shakespeare.
Two hours I lingered, reading newspapers with one eye. No sunflowers or plums appeared. Only a scraggy not-Tilda, a girl-woman with short hair and scabbed pimples. She waved her hands and babbled French—Je m’appelle Yvonne and s’il vous plait—and tried to take my hands in hers. Her touch was cold and greasy. I pulled my hands away but she persisted with her s’il vous plaits.
‘What’s the problem?’ I said. There was obviously a problem. ‘Speak English. You speak English?’
She said she spoke a little English and started off with her name, Yvonne. ‘I need money, sir. My money stole.’ She made a pick-pocketing motion with her fingers and sniffled snot back up into her nose. ‘Please help. I need home. Boat. France.’ Her hands sailed a hilly ocean. A thick coughing crackled inside her. ‘My brother, he sick. I need go home.’
She doubled up at my feet and I patted her shoulder and said it was dreadful her situation but she should call the police.
‘No,’ she grunted. ‘Money. Please.’ Her hair smelled of not being washed of its oils. There was dandruff in the skin of its parting. Her maroon jacket had absorbed a layer of damp grime.
It was this moment, of all the two hours, that Tilda strolled by to order coffee at the common room counter. My first impulse was to fend Yvonne away—I didn’t want Tilda seeing me associating with beggars. I stood and stepped free of the girl. But she followed me, shuffling along on her knees. I took a handful of change from my pocket and presented it. I said, ‘There you go’ loud enough to make a public display of my charity.
Yvonne poked the coins. Her nails were eaten down and dirty in the quick. ‘Twenty fucken P,’ she complained. ‘Twenty P.’ Her English wasn’t French-English now, it was Liverpool or Manchester. She got to her feet and called me a tight-arse bastard because twenty P is like handing out nothing. She was so loud Tilda and others in the room stood still to watch us.
To save face—a childish thing to do over twenty P—I demanded she give the money back. I took her hand to tip the coins into my palm. She made a fist and screamed thief and rape and help. I let go and appealed to the room for witnesses that I was the victim here, not this fake French urchin.
Yvonne switched her attention immediately to Tilda at the coffee counter. Or rather the wallet in Tilda’s hand. S’il vous plait, she begged, fingers steepled together, using the same routine she’d tried on me. She could not take her eyes off Tilda’s wallet and even reached out to touch it as if it were hers to claim. Tilda protested but Yvonne kept coming, ranting that the wallet was hers and that Tilda was a thief and must be arrested. She then made the mistake of trying to snatch the wallet. Tilda was not going to let it go, she had a two-hand grip on the thing. Yvonne persisted, but she did not have man-arms. Tilda’s veins were popping out along her biceps and she sent Yvonne to the floor with an elbow jolt.
Yvonne screamed and swore she was being assaulted but Tilda kept wrestling her on the ground and retrieved her wallet with a yank and grunt. Yvonne was furious and tried to get back into character to continue her accusations but by now I had gone over to ask if Tilda was hurt. She had opened the wallet, removed her Australian driver’s licence and said, ‘There, you lying bitch. There’s my ID. How dare you!’
I stood between them both, my arms out like a referee who favoured Tilda and was acting as her shield.
Yvonne hit out at my arm. ‘’E tried to touch me,’ she said in her silly accent. ‘’E, how you say, try to rape me?’
‘That’s absurd,’ I said. My leg nerve began electrocuting me.
Tilda was suddenly at my side. She placed her fingertips on my forearm. My bare forearm. Her bare fingertips. Our first skin-to-skin connection. She steered me, such a light touch, back, back, please, taking charge. ‘He no more raped you than you own this wallet. I am his witness. So you go and call the police, because I’ll be delighted to fill them in on your s’il vous plait rubbish.’
She turned to me. ‘Will you be my witness? She’s a con artist.’
‘Of course I’ll be your witness.’
‘We can sit down and write out statements.’
Yvonne started shuffling in a circle, clockwise, a dozen granny-steps then back the other way. She knocked on her head like a door and shouted at the floor for us and everyone else in the world to go away. She granny-stepped out of the room, up the exit stairs and was gone.
Chapter 7
Yvonne, you don’t know what part you played in me and Tilda. You were our accidental matchmaker.
‘It’s an affront,’ Tilda said, karate chopping the common room table. ‘Your possessions are your possessions. It’s like an invasion of me.’ She shivered invasion like a sudden chill. Her eyes squinted against tears coming. She poked her plait to re-tuck burst hair as if tears were controlled in the knotting. She said she was determined to return to her afternoon plan. She would finish writing her statement, no matter how pointless—surely it was the last we would see of Yvonne—then she was off to any gallery that was open. The National. The Tate—all those Turners. ‘He was abstract before abstract was invented. Have you seen them?’
‘No, not yet.’
‘You don’t like him?’
I had never heard of Turner. But I remember Mr Lipshut at school used to say, ‘With art, boys, there is no such thing as like. No value judgments or rash generalisations.’ I said as much to Tilda.
‘That’s true. Very good,’ she nodded, and with this came the offering of her hand for a formal introduction. She had a man’s grip in keeping with those arms.
We signed each other’s statements. ‘It’s been quite cathartic actually, writing this,’ she said, taking a deep breath of musty hostel air as if it were a forest fresh with blossom. ‘Just like art. You get something off your chest. You make something clear.’
I smiled, though I didn’t know what cathartic was. It sounded like arthritic.
‘I’ll tell you what is not cathartic: crying.’ She had managed to squint back her tears. ‘When I came on this trip I promised myself two things. Number one: no crying. Do nothing to bring it on. This is a holiday.’
She buttoned her statement into her pants leg. Her right index finger began tracing out her talk in some table salt-spill, like a doodle. ‘Let me get this out in the open. So there’s no misunderstanding. Because, I sense you are, you know, trying it on. Which flatters me, but my number two for this trip is: no men. No flings. This is an art trip. No men. My marriage has recently ended and I’m enjoying being man-free.’
Blood blushed and burned in my cheeks from the embarrassment. I let my head hang lower behind my face curtain. ‘You’ve got the wrong end of the stick,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t trying it on.’
‘You weren’t?’
‘No. You’ve made a mistake.’
‘Really?’
‘It was the last thing on my mind.’
It was her turn for burning cheeks. She tapped a full stop to her doodling. ‘I just presumed. I’m sorry. I just thought you were trying it on.’