Scully saw the hooded figure appear on the terrace and felt a rash of gooseflesh. The figure froze, then turned in a whirl of dark coat as Scully straightened. He watched it stride toward the Orangeries, walking too fast for a stroll in the park. A white flash of face, a quick look and suddenly the figure tipped into a run.
Scully grabbed Billie’s arm and broke for the terrace steps. The fountain hissed. The gravel squinched and cracked like ice underfoot. He felt Billie wheeling and stumbling beside him, her legs too short to keep balance at such speed. She cried out, wrenched away and went skidding on all fours but he didn’t stop. The terrace steps were blows in the spine, the handrail burning cold, and at the moment he made the last step, he saw the shoulders and hood ducking down the street entrance to Place de la Concorde, so he wheeled right, knowing the Metro entrance was out on the corner and he had an even chance of coming down ahead of her. The gravel slurred, gave perilously beneath him. He hit the stairs and went down five at a time, barely in control, and heeled around the corner to the Metro entrance where there were more stairs and steel doors that swung to as he hit them. He burst through into the stink of piss and electricity and the sound of the train doors closing below. Empty stairs, drifts of butts and yellow billets. Four ways she could have gone and a train pulling out. The gritty air hung on him as he stood gasping and impotent against the tile wall.
‘You’re killing us!’ he screamed. ‘Fucking killing us!’
Two kids in a French parody of surfwear came up the steps nudging each other at the sight of him. The doors opened behind him to let in a shock of fresh air that stung his eyeballs and pressed him flat to the wall like the shadow he was.
• • •
UP IN THE COLD CHOKING fog Billie screamed and saw it all about her. Whirling all around were statues and birds and her own frightened voice, and pee ran down her legs hot as molten lead, burning her up, just burning her up.
Thirty-seven
SCULLY CARRIED THE CHILD tightly wrapped in his denim jacket down the Rue de Rivoli. In the steadily rising wind, the Christmas crowd avoided contact, made way, registering the desperate look of them in a second. Billie did not talk. Her face was swollen with weeping and something worse. The wind battered the canopies of oyster stalls and the upturned collars of holly sellers. Wreaths and wrapping paper skidded out into fogged gloss of a thousand gridlocked cars. Outside the glass doors of the BHV department store Scully submitted to the body search with a kind of hopeless rage. The guards smelled the piss on Billie’s jeans and recoiled. Scully hurled the wet jacket into the street and greeted the warm rush of air as the doors opened before him.
• • •
BILLIE TRIED TO PULL THE new jeans up over her knees but the floor was sagging everywhere and her skin was cooking. She looked in the mirror and saw a crybaby, a sook, a beggar with scraped knees and no knickers, glowing like a bushfire.
With an armful of elastic-backed jeans, as Christmas muzak rained on him and women bustled by with chirping kids, Scully stood outside the changing booth and tried to complete a thought — any thought. Knickers, jacket, credit card. Words, things petered out in his mind.
‘Scully?’
Billie’s voice was quavery.
‘You alright?’
He slid the curtain aside a little and saw the kid pressed against the fogging mirror, pants around her shins.
‘Can’t you get them up?’
She turned slowly as a tightrope walker and he saw the glassy sheen of her eyes. ‘I’m… I’m hot.’
Scully fell to his knees and touched her bare skin. She had a fever. God, she was burning. Her wounds pouted nastily beneath their moist plaster strips.
‘Okay,’ he murmured. ‘Let me help you. We’ll get undies on the way out.’
He had the little jeans almost up when he felt the shadow of someone behind the curtain and heard the sharp intake of breath. He swivelled and saw a woman with a hand to her mouth. A livid flush came to her cheeks as he pulled the jeans up and snapped the press-stud without looking down. He tried to shrug casually and smile in a comradely parental way, but the woman turned on her heel. Scully set his teeth and finished up grimly. He gathered Billie in his arms and headed for the register.
Thirty-eight
INTO THE WINDTUNNEL OF THE Rue de Rivoli they come, bent as a single tree, clothes and shopping demented with flapping. She slips back into the bleak doorway to let them pass blindly by without feeling the heat of her love. She knows where they are going. She knows everything there is to know about them the way the dead see the living. The wind pricks her nipples and knees, the tip of her nose, and she watches her life limp by in the weird light of afternoon while she decides how far to follow, wondering when enough is enough, asking herself why it hurts to need so badly.
Thirty-nine
A TELEPHONE, THAT WAS THE first thing. Somewhere out of this wind, a phone. Dominique would be in town. She’d have a GP. She could translate for him. God, Scully how could you let this happen?
The streets were icing up now, the cobbles slick with it. Clochards hauled themselves out of doorways and headed for the shelter of the Metro. Billie’s mittened hand fluttered against his cheek. Car horns bleated in the narrow alleys of the Marais. He knew a place, a good place.
He swung into the fuzzy doorway of Le Petit Gavroche where the goldfish still swam in its glass orb atop the beer tap. The barman greeted him noncommitally, trying to place him. Faces came and went here. Scully slipped past the bashed zinc counter into the blue bank of cigarette smoke and found a table by the payphone. He sat Billie down, unwrapped her a little, and stowed the shopping bags beneath her.
The place was full of the usual crowd, mostly site workers on their lunchbreak. Scotsmen, Paddies, Luxembourgers. The cash work crew, hard men without papers, dodgy truck drivers, some local students, a few old hookers with big smiles and eyelashes like dead crows. It was Scully’s place. He’d heard a lot of stories here. The food wasn’t much but the beer was cheap and there was always someone lonely or drunk enough to talk to you.
Scully ordered hot chocolates and sat down to remember Dominique’s number. He cancelled Billie’s chocolate and made it lemonade. The kid sat there dreamily, trying to pull her mittens off. No, he was a blank. He dragged the butchered phone book out of its slot and looked it up. Yes. What was wrong with him? A simple thing to remember. God, his mind was going.
He stood up, stuck some francs into the phone and dialled. It rang and rang without an answer. The drinks came. Billie drank greedily. He got up and dialled again but no one picked up. Bugger it — that meant he had to ring Marianne. There just wasn’t anyone else. He dialled.
‘Allo, oui?’ The familiar deep voice. She had the timbre of a forties movie star. He paused a second, hesitating.
‘Marianne, it’s Scully.’
‘Scully?’ The mellifluous tone wavered. ‘My Gahd, Scully, where are you?’
‘Just around the corner, as it happens.’
‘Comment? Scully, what did you say?’
‘The Marais. I’m in the Marais.’