‘You need me, don’t you,’ she gasped.
‘Shh.’
He covered her mouth with his hand and felt her tongue between his fingers and then her teeth in his palm and her nails in his buttocks. She was soft to touch, too soft, like something overripe, but he clung to her knowing she was right. He needed her in more ways than he could make plain to anyone. He felt his desperation winding into hers, his lies into hers, his gratitude, his shame, the shocking current that surged down his spine.
Forty-five
NEAR MIDNIGHT SCULLY STOOD dressed in the stark bathroom and emptied Irma’s shoulder bag into the sink. Her snores carried from behind the closed door as he shuffled through dental floss, crumpled tissues, lipsticks, a notebook in scrawled German, old boarding passes, mints, tampons, a condom, a receipt from the Grand Bretagne in Athens, some fibrous strings of dope that lay like pubes against the white enamel, a spectacle case and finally a python-skin wallet.
Inside the wallet was a lock of snowy hair, an EC passport in the name of Irma Blum with a photo of an auburn-haired Irma with a wicked smile on her face, a sheaf of carelessly signed travellers’ cheques in American dollars, a Polaroid snap of a fat baby, and eight hundred francs in crisp new notes.
Scully stuffed the money into his pocket and picked up Billie’s backpack from where he’d put it on the toilet cistern. His mouth tasted of cigarette ash and his head hammered. He looked at the brassy tube of lipstick a moment, hesitated and picked it up. He pulled the cap off, wound the little crimson nub out experimentally. Then he signed the mirror. XXX. Before the idea of it sank in he dropped the tube and turned out the light.
The city glow chiselled in through the open drapes and showed Billie and Irma in deep sleep, their limbs cast about the bed before him as he crept across the room. In sleep they could have been mother and child. He crept closer. Irma’s mouth was open. The room stank of booze and dirty socks. Her arm lay across the counterpane, white and still shocking. Billie bunched up at an angle to her, fist against her own lips.
He picked up Billie’s boots and coat, stuffed them into the backpack looped over his arm, then peeled back the bedclothes a way and gathered her up. Irma snored on like a surgical patient. He held the child to him and looked down a moment upon this strange woman. He felt a twinge of tenderness and a momentary impulse to wake her, but he was heading for the creaky door even before it passed.
Out in the sudden light of the landing he laid Billie on the carpet and pulled the door to without daring to breathe. He put his ear to the door. Nothing but snores.
As he struggled to get her boots on, Billie stirred and muttered.
‘What? What?’
‘Don’t talk — shh.’
Then she opened her eyes; they widened awfully a moment and settled on him. He put a finger to his lips in warning and went back to booting her up. She sat up to receive the coat, her hair upright, her scabs livid.
‘Hop up, love. You’ll have to walk, at least till we get down to the street.’
She began to whimper. ‘I’m tired!’
‘Me too,’ he said, clamping his hand over her mouth. ‘Now shut up.’
• • •
WITHOUT LUGGAGE and with him grotesquely whistling Christmas carols with barely enough breath to get a note, Scully took Billie through the tiny lobby without arousing suspicion from the dozing concierge. Out in the street it was all Scully could do not to break into a mad run. He drank in the frigid air and saw his breath ghosting before him. That’s it, that’s all it took to desert someone, to leave a woman behind with his bag of dirty clothes, his candles, his sodden picture by poor dead Alex, the strewn presents of the drunken day and his strapping hotel bill. This was how it felt to be an empty cupboard, to know you were capable of the shittiest things.
He hoisted Billie onto his back to cross the Pont St Louis as a great barge churned below. The bells of Notre Dame began to toll midnight, plangent and mournful. They rang in the cellar of his belly. Around them the cafés roared, echoing along the shadowy buttresses of the cathedral, setting his teeth on edge.
‘Where’s Irma?’ murmured Billie, twisting her fingers in his hair.
‘Listen to the bells.’
Scully felt the child’s breath against his neck and knew he needed to eat, but he was afraid to miss the Metro at Cité by the flowermarket before the system closed down for the night.
‘Where’d she go?’
‘Don’t talk for a minute.’
‘I’m falling, look out!’
Scully tottered and found the perpendicular again but Billie scrambled down off him.
‘You’ll drop me!’
He’d drunk more than he thought. Now that he was in the open he was all but reeling.
‘I’m cold,’ he said, pulling himself up on the arrowheads of the fence. ‘I’m so cold.’
Billie took the backpack from his arm and shrugged into it. ‘It’s the middle of the night,’ she murmured.
‘I have to get inside for a minute. A café, anywhere.’
‘Here,’ she said, pointing to the great cathedral which fattened with music and the voices of the dead and the living and the tolling of bells in the sky above them.
Scully looked up at its dripping gargoyles and the mist of light that hung over it, spilling faintly down its buttresses like rain. His drunkenness settled heavily on him, his throat burned and his vision was speckled with stars and blips of all kinds. He felt like a man who’d walked through a sheepdip, his skin was so clammy. Oh God, not tonight, not when his hands smelled of Irma and his heart was a clump of oozing peat.
Billie tugged and worried at him. He batted her off. Their shoes chafed on the cobbles.
‘It’s Christmas,’ she said. ‘This is where we should be.’
No, he thought, feeling himself steered like a big stupid animal, no, it’s much worse than that, much worse than Christmas. He was too dizzy to resist her, though. The entrance with its kingdom of faces and upraised fingers and sceptres and staffs rose above him like the opening of a tunnel where he joined a river of figures. They smelled of wine and burnt butter and onions, these people, the slow-moving and dreamy, half-hearted and freezing. Their coats were buttoned and their scarves tight, their midnight mass faces shining in the gloom. Sounds of feet on the smooth stones until the roar of the organ pipes as they made the vast vaulted cave of the cathedral itself with its haze of incense and candle-smoke, the perfumes of a thousand women, the feel of sweat-oiled timber and cool sepulchral air of an underground city.
Scully felt himself a man on sea legs. He sensed people making space for him as though they smelt sex and failure and theft on him. They edged politely but firmly from the sight of his weeping rogue eye, and they saw into him. They knew and it made his teeth chatter. You’re no better, their compressed lips said. No use feeling outraged anymore — you bastard. You know how easy it is to bolt and leave them sleeping.
The bodies of saints flickered all around.
The great kite of the crucified Christ loomed and caused the crowd to vibrate. Like a pyre before him the bank of burning candles waited. The hot pure smell of burning. A woman’s fan of blonde hair in front of him scented like roses as he walked. Billie beside him, her face glowing with hurt and understanding. He lit a candle and held it up before him. God, how his head soared and pitched, how rod-like his blood went in his veins. A candle for the birth of Christ, for the squirming of Job in his own shit, of Jonah running like a mad bastard from the monster he knew he was. A candle for Jennifer, just for the sake of it, for his poor deserted mother, for Alex, and Pete and Irma, poor Irma who was making him cry and laugh right in the middle of things here in the cathedral of Our Lady of Paris. Our friggin lady who let him cry and stumble into that rose-smelling hair with the writhing flame of his candle suddenly spitting and cracking and bursting hilariously into true fire right before him and the others whose mouths were open as if in adoration at the weirdness of miracles. Tongues of living fire as he went falling, falling into the yielding squelch of people, God bless them.