Harm's Way

  HARM’S WAY

  CELIA WALDEN

  To my mother and father

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Postscript

  A Note on the Author

  One

  It was on my way home from the dentist, nearly five years after we first met, the left side of my bottom lip numbed, that I saw her. Portobello Road was teeming with Christmas shoppers who moved in predictable lines, never varying from their tasks: an army of coloured ants. The crowd was beginning to suffocate me, but the winter air crystallised any ill humour into the freezing tips of my fingers.

  I had, over the years, imagined a hundred backs to be hers, the same thick ponytail on a dozen different heads. Once, after hearing a voice which I thought must be hers, I waited patiently at the swimming pool for a woman in the cubicle beside mine to emerge. This time I was sure.

  I stopped, tempted to follow her but suddenly afraid. The rain had shrouded her hair in a veil of crystal drops, and I watched as she disappeared into a side street towards Westbourne Grove. I found myself moving forward, hastening my pace. At the mouth of the narrow street cluttered with market stalls I caught sight of her again. She was also walking fast, and I struggled to keep up. In front of me, a woman swept a dog into her legs, giving me an accusatory look as I stumbled past.

  ‘Watch where you’re going, will you?’

  A group of youths ahead of me broke apart and, as though sensing my presence, she suddenly swung around.

  People were jolting our elbows, bags catching each other as they passed by, but Beth just stood there facing me, in everyone’s way, waiting for me to make the two steps that would take me to her.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘You live in London now?’ I heard myself ask politely.

  ‘I have done for the past two and a half years.’

  We were by a pub with outdoor heaters like a Parisian café, and I wondered if she too had made the connection. So despite the December chill, the chairs and tables outside were full of people, packages between their legs, coddling pints with their gloves on.

  ‘Shall we sit, for a moment?’

  It was only then that I saw the child. I had at first assumed that it belonged to someone else, but I could see now that it was hers, from the pale freckled nose to those translucent blue eyes.

  ‘We’ll be late, Mummy.’

  ‘No we won’t, tiger. We’re picking up a hamster,’ she explained.

  Clumsily, I indicated a recently vacated table.

  ‘Shall we?’

  ‘Yes, let’s.’

  It was perhaps the one conversation in my life to date with no room for pretence. Beth spoke first: ‘You look well.’ She smiled her saintly smile, flecked with sadness. ‘You haven’t changed a bit.’

  It sounded like an insult.

  ‘And you look beautiful – as always.’ I said.

  ‘What can I get you?’ A round-faced teenager – probably a student earning a bit of extra cash during the holidays – looked down at us expectantly.

  ‘We’ll have two glasses of rosé.’ And then turning to me, ‘Who says it has to be a summer drink, anyway? And – what would you like, darling? No, no Coca-Cola – and an orange juice, please.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You’re right. About the rosé, I mean. It shouldn’t have to be a summer drink.’ I felt young and gauche again; Beth was in control.

  ‘What are you doing now?’

  ‘Oh, I work for a gallery. It’s not one of the big ones, so the pay’s no good, but, well, it’s a bit more interesting than what I was doing before, when we … in Paris, I mean.’

  I saw her cheek twitch. She put a suede-gloved hand to it, brushing away a fallen eyelash, and with that small movement the rush of memories came back so strongly I felt dizzy.

  When I’d first left Paris I had nurtured the pain I was experiencing, addicted to the sadness I could evoke with the simplest recollection of the months we’d spent together. I’d dreaded the moment when that response would no longer come, knowing that as time went on I might have to drag the match not once but twice, then three times against my heart to spark the familiar flame.

  We had met in a very prosaic Paris. Not a set from a Godard film where elegantly disabused girls sat smoking outside cafés, but against a backdrop of tedious days and squinting mornings. To prepare me for my history of art studies at university, my uncle, a museum curator in London, had secured me a position as a guardian at the Musée d’Orsay – a cavernous converted railway station on the left bank. I had always wondered about those people who sat in rooms filled with paintings by dead artists, listening to the embarrassed whispers of dutiful visitors in search of self-improvement. Perhaps these guardians were life’s observers, content to sit by while others engaged with the world. I was initially unexcited by a job whose only purpose in my eyes was to give me a reason to be in Paris and to wait, as I had waited for a long time, it seemed, for my real life to begin.

  From my first day at the museum, when I’d seen Céline, the head of personnel, take a silver package from her bag and open it to reveal a perfectly cored apple cut into sixteen segments, I’d suspected I might have trouble fitting in. The thought of that apple has stayed with me as an example of the alienating precision of some Parisian women.

  My first week was spent in a flat belonging to a friend of my mother, who was out of town. Neither a stranger to Paris nor habitually shy, I nevertheless felt intimidated by the prospect of getting to grips with a city that was less like London than I had expected. I’d finished my A levels assuming there would be a greater buffer of TV days and pub nights than the few days I had been limited to. But my father, with uncharacteristic firmness, had casually mentioned the job in Paris on the very morning I lay recovering from the school leavers’ party held in our honour. ‘And don’t you dare start trying to sort out her accommodation too,’ I’d overheard my mother telling him late one night as I tiptoed down the hall to get a glass of milk. ‘We’ve got Anna this job and we’ll subsidise her while she’s there but after that,’ I heard the sound of her boot coming off and a shallow exhalation of relief, ‘she’ll just have to fend for herself, like I did to get myself through law school.’ I couldn’t remember a time when her voice hadn’t been shot through with weariness. Rarely home before ten, my mother’s devotion to her job meant that my father and I usually dined alone – something I was more than happy with.

  I moved to Paris two weeks before my job at the museum began to give me time to find a flat and explore the city, but the oppressiveness of my own company took me by surprise. Choosing to be alone can be poetic, but when there is no other option, solitude is less enticing. I took refuge in a stack of Georges Simenons I’d found in the guest bathroom and sank with alarming speed into a static existence, not bothering to change out of my dressing gown and eating dry cereal straight from the box. In my loneliness I became aware of every noise, even the sound of my own jaw masticating those flakes of corn. It was only towards the end of the week, when I had reached the bottom of the pile of books, that I decided to be brave and start looking for a flat.

  Fusac, a magazine for English and American students distributed free in Parisian pubs, had been recommended by a friend for its small ads, but it took an entire afternoon of roaming from the Frog and Lettuce in Saint-Sulpice to the Irish pub in Bastille, where the walls are papered with jaundiced postcards, to locate a copy. When I did I was disappointed to find that it seemed aimed primarily
at American students looking for non-smoking flatmates. I rarely smoked, but hated the idea of being told not to. Then a notice at the bottom of a page caught my eye. The American Church, it said in bold print, was the place to find temporary jobs and somewhere to stay in Paris.

  Enjoying the trail I was following, which had, at least, given me a reason to get dressed that morning, I made my way to the church, an uninspiring mottled building on the left bank. Foreigners surrounded the noticeboard, and after taking down a whole page of possible flats on the back of my curling Paris guide, I arranged four appointments for the next day.

  The first two studios I saw made one thing painfully clear: anything described as ‘un loft’ was for me, at five foot eleven inches tall, a physical impossibility. The second landlord hadn’t even let me see the flat, bursting into a large, humourless laugh as soon as he’d laid eyes on me.

  ‘Ahhh non, Mademoiselle,’ he’d smirked, looking from me to the invisible person beside me in disbelief, while wagging a fat finger inches from my nose, ‘this one is not for you.’

  The third flat was perfect. A box-like studio in the Marais, it was less than half the size of my bedroom in London, and slightly more expensive than I’d budgeted for. But it was exactly where I had imagined myself living. The pink-grey buildings of the Marais – the gay quarter of Paris – leaned towards each other the higher they rose, as though complicit in the promiscuity of the streets below. It seemed as if people living in the apartments at the very top could reach out and touch one another from their opposing I was charmed by the fact that in Paris, even in wealthy areas like the Marais, houses had peeling façades and shop fronts bearing their original 1900s lettering.

  There seemed no affectation, none of the frenzied desire for modernity that is evident in London, just a natural stylishness. Many of the ‘men-only’ bars had frosted windows to a foot beneath the awnings, so that all you could see if you glanced inside were the crowns of scarred, shaved heads tilting towards one another, below a thick, blue layer of cigarette smoke. Once I noticed a man dressed in a corduroy suit with patches on the elbows shuffle his little boy uneasily across the street when about to pass by a shop window filled with sex-aids.

  In what I already thought of as my street, many of the walls were decorated with ribald hieroglyphics. The imperious green door of the building with its defunct bronze knocker broke open to reveal a pretty hidden square where the windows – joined diagonally by a web of washing lines – refracted prisms of sunlight on to the cobblestones. My landlady, Madame Guigou, was a petite, nervous woman who suffered from acute psoriasis. Her neck always bore an imprint of the latest, violent scratch, so that one could see the blood humming beneath the surface. She spoke in a series of breathless gasps, spitting out her words as though fearing they might run out, while spasmodically running veined claws through her brittle hair.

  ‘It’s not been available to rent for a long time,’ she explained hurriedly, ‘because of all the renovations. The building’s quiet and the neighbours are assez sympathique.’

  I wondered at the ‘assez’ and cast an eye over the water-stained ceiling and well-used furniture, reflecting what it could possibly have been like before the ‘renovations’, but not much caring either. It would be the first time I had lived alone and the rush of excitement I’d been holding in since arriving in Paris finally came.

  There had been nothing to keep me in London, no boyfriend or friendship serious enough to anchor me to the city. At eighteen my few, brief relationships had been no more than a succession of passing sensations. Nothing seemed to cohere. I can still remember the exact moment, a month before my fourteenth birthday, when I understood the power maturing within me. During the previous two years my body had undergone a series of humiliating changes for which I wasn’t ready. Then suddenly harmony was re-established. We were on a family holiday in Pescara, an uninspiring seaside town near Abruzzo in Italy, and I’d run down to the beach opposite the hotel for an early morning swim. Family groups were already laying out their paraphernalia, and as I pulled my dress up over my head, I noticed a group of slightly older Italian boys looking at me, their brown skins still with that peculiar oily luminosity that is subsequently matted by age. At first, I couldn’t decipher their looks – and then I knew. I remember that the feeling of their eyes on me as I arranged my body on the towel and tucked my thick dark hair behind one ear was at least as enjoyable as the sun against my skin. I had a premonition that the sensation might be addictive, and, surprised at how delicious it was to luxuriate in someone else’s gaze, hoped fervently that I would grow up to be beautiful. When I got back to my hotel room that night I stood in front of the mirror for a long time, newly in love with myself, examining the gentle roundness of my breasts and the nascent curve of my hips, savouring it all through the eyes of the boys on the beach. The next morning, I’d awoken to find a small patch of blood on the hotel sheet.

  I hadn’t grown up to be beautiful; at best, I was occasionally described as ‘pretty’. I was too tall and boyish in figure, with deep-set eyes and my dark, messy features lacked the symmetry that traditionally defines beauty: the ‘before’ picture in a women’s magazine. The realisation caused me a moment’s pain, a snarl in the skein of my perfect existence, but I had one consolation: boys seemed to like me, and then men. In a mirror-like response to their collective gaze, I developed my own fascination with them. From puberty onwards – and this was a fault of mine – the only thing that secured my lasting attention was the opposite sex. Neither animals, landscapes nor objects held any value in my eyes. But my father, the look on a woman’s face when she speaks of a man, and the sinewy forearm of the bus conductor as he took my change – these things captivated me.

  Leaving the few girls I saw as friends posed no problem. Until that year – until I met Beth – my female friends had counted for very little. As an only child I had always found it hard to have the generosity of spirit that my friends demanded of me, assimilating myself more easily into large groups that I could drift in and out of. When people asked me how I felt about a particular subject I could never quite believe they cared what my answer was. I assumed that it was all a charade, that people only feigned interest in others so that they, in turn, would be indulged. I had always supposed that the kind of selflessness which made you interested in other people’s emotions would occur naturally in adulthood. Selfishness, at that time, seemed to me to be a good thing, making you act on your desires and achieve them faster than those who check with everyone before going after what they want, and as a result are too late to get it.

  My new apartment building was flanked on the right by a popular launderette, where men sat around pretending to read Wallpaper* magazine, pausing to tease designer briefs from the jaws of the machines while critically observing their neighbours’ laundry.

  To the left of number 35 rue Sainte Croix de la Bretonnerie was an even more surprising sight: the Sun Café, a bar and sun-bed centre where you could enjoy a frozen margarita from the comfort of your slippery-with-sweat glass bed. But my real joy, and the reason I had rented the flat, was the tiny balcony, just large enough to fit a flower pot and the skeleton of a chair I’d found on the street. Overlooking the blue slate roofs of Paris, it was a perfect spot. The only eyesore was the blackened plastic tubing of the Centre Pompidou, visible in the distance, like a mass of cancerous entrails.

  When your spirits are uplifted you want to tell someone about it, but after twice dialling my father’s number (my mother hated to be disturbed at the office) I hung up, knowing that his soothing voice would only induce the semblance of a complaint from me where there was none. At 3 a.m., I awoke to a banging noise coming from the flat next door: a slow, measured knocking on the wall. I waited for it to subside but instead it gradually increased in volume. Covering my face with my pillow and cursing French plumbing, I strove to sleep. Eventually the knocking stopped as abruptly as it started.

  Despite the loss of sleep, the next morning I felt brighter
. I bought a plant, attempted a French paper but gave up after a glance revealed an impenetrable thicket of statistics accompanying each and every article, and began to wonder how I would ever meet anyone in what I was starting to understand was a difficult city to break into. After the third day of speaking to no one, my cheerfulness receded and anxiety set in. A film was the only way to assuage the panic. While I was buying my ticket to the third part of a Hollywood trilogy, a teenage girl behind me in the queue tapped me on the shoulder and asked whether the first two had been any good. I walked into the cinema elated by the few words we’d exchanged, wishing I could somehow have extended the conversation, but left the theatre despondent that the prospect of any further human interaction that day was slim.

  I am pleased now, for those days of loneliness, because it was only after being forced to stare down the intimidating colossus of Paris that – all of a sudden and quite unexpectedly – I fell in love with it. In many respects, it is a city built for the lost: taking a wrong turn leads to such enchanting discoveries that one soon begins to do it deliberately. The French even have a word for it, ‘flâner’ – to stroll aimlessly – which I would do for hours, from the rue de l’Échaude, past the sleepy bookshop L’Or du Temps, down to the more refined rue de Seine, turning off at the rue des Beaux Arts to contemplate the hotel where Oscar Wilde died in poverty and disgrace. Like that of a medical student handed his first scalpel, my curiosity to uncover the city’s viscera knew no bounds.

  Just when I began to revel in my solitude, an antidote to my loneliness came from an unexpected source: a schoolfriend, Sarah.

  Sarah was the kind of girl who laughed differently in the company of boys. She’d rung to tell me about the last one she’d met, liberally interspersing her conversation with that large, slightly frenetic laugh, pausing only for the barest murmur of acknowledgement from me.

  I let it all pass over my head until she suddenly asked, ‘Did you ever meet Beth?’