Forty-two
IN SLEEP SCULLY FELT LIKE A flying fish, a pelagic leaper diving and rising through temperatures, gliding on air as in water. He heard the great oceanic static. He felt seamless. Weightless, free.
He woke suddenly with Billie’s face close to his, her eyes studying him, her breath yeasty with antibiotic. She ran the heel of her palm across the stubble of his cheek. Her skin was cool, her eyes clear. The surf of traffic surged below.
‘I’m hungry,’ she said. ‘I feel ordinary again.’
He lay there, muscles fluttering, like a fish on a deck, feeling the dry weight of gravity, the hard surprise of everything he already knew.
• • •
MIST LAY ACROSS the soupy swirl of the Seine. It hung in the skeleton trees and billowed against the weeping stonework of the quais. The river ran fat with whorls and boils, lumpy with the hocks of sawn trees and spats of cardboard. He felt it sucking at him, waiting, rolling opaque along the iced and slimy embankment. It made him shudder. He held Billie’s hand too firmly.
‘This isn’t the way to Dominique’s,’ she murmured.
‘Yes it is. More or less.’
In every piss-stinking cavity the mad and lost cowered in sodden cardboard and blotched sleeping bags. Out of the rain and out of sight of the cops they lay beneath bridges and monuments, their eyes bloodshot, their faces creased with dirt and fatigue. Was it some consolation to imagine that Jennifer might be here among them? Did the idea let him off, somehow, take the shame and rage away? These faces, they were generic. Could you recognize a person reduced to this state? Maybe he’d walk past her and see some poor dazed creature whose features had disappeared in hopeless fright. Would she recognize him, for that matter? Was his face like that already?
Beneath the Pont Neuf he stepped among these people and whispered her name. The stoned and sore and crazy rolled away from him. Billie tugged at his hand but he stared into their eyes, ignoring their growls of outrage until a big gap-toothed woman reared and spat in his face. Billie dragged him out into the faint light of day. She sat him down in the square at the tip of the island, and pressed the gob away from his face with his own soiled hanky. He let out a bitter little laugh. She hated to see the way he trembled. She hated all of this.
Scully looked back toward the bridge. Something in the water caught his eye. Something, someone out in the churning current. He shrugged off the child and went to the edge of the embankment to peer upstream. Dear God. He saw plump, pink limbs, tiny feet, a bobbing head. He wrenched his coat off. Please God, no.
‘Sit down, Billie, and don’t move! You hear me? Don’t move from this spot!’
He edged down the slick embankment, grabbing at weeds and holes in the cobbles. The current was solid. He looked about for a stick, a pole, but there was only dogshit and crushed Kronenberg cans. Close to the water he found a ringbolt and he hung out precariously from it, tilted over the water, reaching with one arm as the tiny pink feet came bounding his way. The steel was cold in his anchored hand. His face stung. His heart shrank in his chest. He saw ten perfect toes. Creases of baby fat. Dimpled knees. He poised himself, seeing his chance, and in one sweeping arc he reached out — and missed. Oh God! His fingers sculled hopelessly on the water. And then he saw it clearly as it floated gamely by — cherry mouth pert and cheeky, plastic lashes flapping as it pitched, cupped hands steering it through the soupy convergence at the end of the island.
‘I’m not really into dolls,’ called Billie, standing precariously close to the edge. ‘But I’m glad you tried.’
Scully hung there panting, the sweat cold on him already. He hated this town.
• • •
THE RUE JACOB WAS SLUSHY with thawing ice. Scully struggled in through the courtyard door to the quiet world of Dominique’s garden. Cypresses, sunning benches. Banks of tall elegant windows and Romeo and Juliet balconies. At the foyer he buzzed her floor and got nothing. It was early still. He buzzed again, waited a few moments without result. Then he leant on the button half a minute or so, feeling his hopes ebbing. All day yesterday she hadn’t answered. Last night again. But that call at Marianne’s. Where was she? Wherever she was, Marianne would have called her. Told her God knows what.
In her mail slot there were bills and a plastic-wrapped copy of Photo-Life. He looked at Billie who avoided his gaze. Her nose was rosy, her cap askew. He peered at the postmarks. Yesterday, the day before. She wasn’t in Paris at all.
He stabbed the button for the apartment next to hers.
‘Allo. Oui?’
‘Er,’ he stammered. ‘Excuse moi, Madame, je… chercher Mlle Latour.’
In the long pause Scully felt his accent, his foreignness sinking in upstairs, and he knew he was probably buggered.
‘Qui? Qui es la?’
‘Je m’appelle Fred Scully, un ami. Je suis Australien.’
Australie?’
Then the woman spoke quickly, too quick for him to understand, and all he really heard was ‘le train’ and then she signed off sharply and he could get nothing more from her. He hammered the button till his fingertip throbbed. The train? That definitely didn’t mean the Metro. Where would she go by train? What did it matter anyway. She wasn’t here. No help. He still needed money. He couldn’t go back to Marianne. Maybe Jean-Louis, but he’d be at work now, and besides who knows what Marianne had told him. Fat chance there. In a whole city, somewhere he’d lived the better part of a year there was nobody. Not a soul. It was hard to believe. He was water off a duck’s back.
That left American Express. Or the embassy. Way to go.
Out in the street a lonely Japanese tourist beckoned for him to take a photo in front of some statue, but Scully waved the camera aside and dragged Billie toward the nearest Metro.
Underground the city was surging, pressing, breaking into a jumbled run, thick with mittens, caps, greatcoats, mufflers and a foetid steam of damp and overheated wool. The tunnels were sweet and septic, echoing with shouts and the march of feet. A saxophone mooned around some corner. Stalls of flowers, their colours crazy and shocking down here in the monochrome blur, erupted at intersections where masses of bodies merged like forks of the khaki river above.
Scully stepped over men with scrawled cardboard placards, around women with swaddled babies and rattling cups. In a corner by the paper shop the Flics bailed up an Arab and snatched at his papers. Scully steered Billie down to the platform as a train came gushing out of the darkness on a blast of dry, stale air.
• • •
AS THE CARRIAGE HURTLED THROUGH the dark, a gypsy child made her way through the crowd with a small leather purse held open, her voice chirruping gaily down the aisle. When she came to Scully he closed his eyes against her and smiled faintly. She moved to Billie who stared uncertainly at her and then down into the purse. The gypsy child knelt daintily, her black eyes upturned, and Billie reached out and touched her hair. Scully shook his head, still smiling. The train braked hard and wheezed into the next station and the girl stood up, shrugged, smiled brightly at them, and made for the doors.
‘I liked her,’ said Billie as they careered off again.