Harm's Way Read online

  ‘They are. But that’s not the point.’

  ‘Listen, Anna, I just want to see you, even for a night. But it’s too risky here in Paris. So I was thinking, that you and I could … I mean, if you wanted to …’

  I had difficulty interpreting his scattered speech.

  ‘I do want to. But where?’

  ‘I’ve got my brother’s birthday in Aubervilliers this Friday. Come with me to that.’

  It was a long way from the elaborate montages I had constructed in my head. We both turned to stare at an Italian woman who had yelped with laughter a little way off, grateful for the distraction.

  ‘She’s got a work dinner that night,’ he continued, ‘and I’ve got to be back at the restaurant by seven the next morning to take a delivery. I’ll just say I went out with the boys after work, and no one will ever know we’ve gone.’

  He couldn’t bring himself to say her name, and it stirred me up. I nodded, noting that the Italian lady and her noisy companion were leaving the room.

  ‘So you’ll pick me up from here at what time?’

  ‘Six o’clock.’

  ‘Six o’clock on Friday.’

  And he was gone.

  * * *

  It was hard to contain my happiness. On the journey home every mundane action was gilded with excitement. I mouthed the word ‘lover’ to myself over and over again, enjoying the shape of it in my mouth, and revelled in the knowledge that the man selling me my bus ticket had no idea what I would be doing that weekend, treating him with undue kindness, as if to compensate for his ignorance.

  There had been an awkward moment that evening when, during the course of dinner with Beth and Stephen, she had suggested that we meet up after her work event the following night to see a late-night film. Unprepared, I had made up the only thing I knew would put her off: a man.

  ‘Ah! So you’re going on a date?’

  ‘No, no. Just a friend.’

  ‘Well, if he’s only a friend you won’t mind if I join you two later on, will you?’

  I looked so obviously put out that they both started laughing.

  ‘I knew it: she’s going on a date. You’re a mysterious little soul sometimes, Anna, aren’t you?’

  Enjoying Beth’s complete attention, I began to tell them the fictional circumstances in which I had met this man, borrowing details from the past and sprinkling them with a smattering from my own imagination. Satisfied I had quashed their curiosity, and pleased with my lies, I opened another bottle of Chablis no one wanted to finish. As I left and got into the lift that night I was surprised by the flushed face staring back at me in the mirror and my very apparent lack of conscience.

  I hadn’t doubted he would be there, parked directly outside the visitors’ entrance, the hazard lights on his car causing the air around them to quiver in the heat. I opened the door and slid into the passenger seat. A gentle embarrassment, which I luxuriated in, hung in the air for the first few minutes as we decided whether to put my bag in the boot and he cleared away an accumulation of empty Evian bottles and fast-food wrappers from beneath my feet. Craving intimacy I leant across, tried to kiss him on the cheek, missed and grazed an ear. He laughed quietly, projecting little puffs of hot air against my cheek, and the knot in my stomach relaxed.

  It was the last hot day of summer, and as we drove along the Seine sequins of light winked their goodbyes from the water’s surface. Kicking off my shoes and putting my feet on the dashboard I pretended I was not myself, but the plaything of a married man. To complete the picture I lit a cigarette, inserting the tip of it through a slit of open window every ten seconds, watching the ash being snatched away by the wind. We had only exchanged a few words; I was beginning to feel uncomfortable, my cigarette too obvious in its intent. Deciding to empty the ashtray out of the window, I held it too close to the air current and watched helplessly as the plastic tray was ripped from my hand and carried away, as lightly as a piece of confetti.

  ‘What have you done?’ he shouted above the roar of the traffic, apologising with a gesture to the car behind.

  His eyes still fixed on the road, Christian broke into a wild laugh filled with sexual impatience, unease, and exhileration at the night that lay ahead. Seeing no alternative, I joined in.

  Aubervilliers meant nothing to me, other than the recollection of an article I’d read in Le Figaro the first month I had arrived in Paris. A young Algerian’s flat had been stormed by police a few months earlier and two miniature missiles in their initial stages of construction were discovered in his kitchen. Still, I was too curious about Christian’s background to feel apprehensive.

  We had pulled into the outer lane, ready to turn off the motorway, and I had no doubt that the cubist cluster of tenements looming before us was Aubervilliers. I’d heard about the concrete suburbs of Paris, but in my sheltered life, broken by spells on the Côte d’Azur and weekends in the Cotswolds, I had never had any reason to visit them. Olivier, Christian’s brother, lived in one of the estates nearest to the motorway. From inside the column of flats the speeding traffic was reduced to the whirring noise of a fly. Concrete pens delineated by wire grills low enough for a child to climb over formed zoo-like enclosures, each with a single tower block in the middle.

  ‘Here we are.’

  Christian squeezed the top of my arm: the first time he had touched me since we left Paris. Bob Marley’s ‘Could You Be Loved’ filtered joylessly from a window above us as I let him pull my face to his, keeping my eyes open as he kissed me, so that I could decipher any hint of emotion.

  ‘Ah, c’est joli les amoureux’.

  A crackle of retreating bicycle tyres dissolved into the rapidly descending night.

  Walking up twelve floors to Olivier’s flat (the lift had been vandalised) I wondered why anyone would choose to have a party at home, if this were their home. Plump red lettering scrawled across the landing read ‘Fuck the police’. Christian, walking ahead of me, kept looking back with apprehensive eyes. I was flattered at the time that it was I who had been brought there, not Beth, wondering whether the whole excursion was a test, to show me where he came from and see whether I still wanted him. I now suspect that he cared too much about Beth’s opinion to introduce her to the family he was embarrassed by.

  There could have been more than the twenty or so people I had at first calculated were packed into Christian’s brother’s flat. The low ceiling made it impossible to see the walls, and clusters of smokers had capped their groups with clouds of peppered, fudge-scented hash fumes.

  ‘Eh, Christian! Ça va?’

  A black man with skin so dark his pores shone liquid amber in the blurred light of the room play-wrestled his hellos with Christian. I took a step back, surveying the room for anything or anyone that might be of use to me, and saw nothing. Just do it, Feel it, Get to it – nearly every man, and some of the women, bore the insignia of a global sports brand, preaching to the world pointlessly from chests, backs or thighs.

  ‘Christian!’

  A pretty, heavily built girl in trainers and jeans so tight you could make out the delineations of her underwear came over, raised herself on tiptoe and kissed him noisily on both cheeks.

  ‘Eve.’

  It was his sister-in-law; the eighteen-year-old mother of his baby nephew.

  ‘And you must be Anna.’

  Her smile was warm, and devoid of subtext. How had Christian explained the fact that he was bringing me? Were his family even aware of Beth’s existence?

  ‘Come with me,’ she went on. ‘Let’s get you a drink. Christian, tell your brother to turn that down. I refuse to have to deal with that bitch from downstairs again. If she comes up, he can sort her out.’

  Taking me by the hand she pulled me through a room of appreciative male glances into a cupboard-sized kitchen with slanting fittings. Pulling a bottle of muscat from the fridge she filled a Tintin-themed glass, of the kind you get free with supermarket French mustard, to a millimetre beneath the top.


  ‘There you go. Are you hungry? There are various bits and bobs on the side there so help yourself.’

  Leaning back against a cupboard and lighting a cigarette, she looked over at me with a total lack of self-consciousness.

  ‘So how long have you known my brother-in-law?’

  ‘Only a few months …’

  ‘And you met at the restaurant?’ Without waiting for an answer she went on: ‘We hardly ever get to see him, he works so hard at that damned place. Still, it must be good for meeting people: Christian’s come across tons of interesting characters there, and they’re not all boring Parisians, you know? Which is nice.’

  Back in the sitting room the atmosphere was one of drug-entranced torpor. There was only room on the floor around the coffee table for those presiding over the spliff-making – lost in the studied beatitude of their cross-legged postures – to be seated. The rest were slouched against walls or perched on sofas, talking earnestly about nothing at all. Christian pulled me down to the free corner of carpet in between him and his semi-recumbent brother, and I leant cautiously against a giant flatscreen TV, still in its box, taking short drags of whatever, periodically, came my way.

  Gradually the room flatlined into a monotone whirr of a similar pitch to the traffic beyond, occasionally perforated by a high note from the speakers on the dresser or a single word I recognised. In the early hours of morning I remember Christian’s hand against the skin of my back, but the rest of the night remains a blur. Still, I remember feeling relieved when at some indefinite hour, and well after most of the guests had left, Christian finally suggested we follow their example.

  Pushing open the heavy metal door into the morning light, I saw that for the first time that summer it was raining. The slap of the cool air against our faces stopped us in our tracks. Despite the weather and the hour, there were now more people about than when we had arrived the night before. The diagonal shards of rain gently speared a gaggle of hooded boys, no older than fourteen, who were huddled by the swings in a partially built playground I had failed to notice earlier. As we walked past, one of the smallest turned and fixed vicious white eyes on me. I shuddered.

  ‘Are you cold?’ Christian took off his light summer jacket and put it around my shoulders. ‘The car’s not far.’

  ‘Good. I’m exhausted. What time is it?’

  ‘Nearly six.’

  He turned and smilingly took my hand. The desire that had ripened throughout the evening with every complicit glance and fleeting touch opened, and I wondered if we could find somewhere quiet for an hour before beginning the journey back to Paris. Christian must have read my mind: once in the car, he collared my neck with one cold hand and slipped the other beneath my skirt. His fingertips, wet from the rain, skated across the goose-pimpled skin of my thighs which contracted further beneath his touch.

  ‘Is there anywhere we can go?’

  ‘Not really – and definitely nowhere around here.’ He looked at my mouth as he spoke. ‘We’d better get going, there’ll be the usual Saturday morning tail-back as we get nearer Paris – all these bloody campagnards coming in to Paris for the weekend – and I’ve got a big delivery in a couple of hours.’

  Pulling away, he started the car and I relaxed against the head-rest, watching the muscles in his thighs straining against the fabric of his jeans as he changed gears. It was raining hard now, and as the windscreen wipers whined their endless refrain, I succumbed to the insistent weights dragging my eyelids shut.

  ‘Watch out! Watch out! Jesus. What was that?’

  Steering the car back on to the road from the hard shoulder, Christian swallowed and kept his eyes fixedly ahead. We had only been driving for twenty minutes, but with the first lurching swerve my eyes had flown open.

  ‘Sorry, sorry. God. Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Shit. I must have closed my eyes for a second.’

  A hot-pink line of exhaustion was stencilled beneath his eyes, and his usually steady hand trembled on the steering wheel.

  ‘Let’s stop somewhere. I don’t want to die today.’

  I smiled but the flippancy of my words chilled me. I imagined a faceless policeman delivering the news to Stephen and Beth, and wondered which would take precedence in the mind of the bereaved: losing someone you love or realising that you have been double-crossed by them?

  We pulled over at the first place we could see: one of the futuristic motels lining the motorways in to Paris. As soon as the engine was switched off, Christian began to breathe again. We were only forty minutes away from Paris but my concern that he was in no state to drive, and the decision I had made earlier not to walk away from our night together without quenching this empty feeling, had conspired to make him pull over.

  The motel’s façade, like a Mondrian painting, was a rectangular box broken up into primary-coloured squares. There were no staff. A machine by the front entrance inhaled Christian’s twenty-euro note, spitting out a plastickey-card in return. This allowed us into the reception-less building, where a series of felt-lined corridors with fast-food shop lighting and passenger-ferry-style bars lining the walls led the way to our room. Number 122 (I can still remember it now) looked like a child’s play-pen with a climbing frame for a bed. The rest of the details I have forgotten, but I do remember pulling, pushing and bending over those bars, in a series of acrobatic gestures that seem both obscene and ridiculous in hindsight. I remember too the synthetic feel of the sponge-like material beneath my naked flesh, and its readiness to absorb our mingled sweat. Afterwards, we lay in that peculiarly embarrassed state brought on by the utter selfishness of physical pleasure, until we fell asleep.

  They say that afterwards you glow, that it makes even the ugly look beautiful – but that’s a lie. Glancing at myself slyly in the windscreen mirror as Christian started up the car again, I was shocked by my reflection. Our rough games had swollen my cheeks and lips, shined and reddened my nose, while Christian’s teeth had marbled the perfect skin of my throat. No, the sex Beth had so accurately described hadn’t made me beautiful, but it had stopped me caring. So I didn’t care, and he didn’t notice.

  It was gone eight o’clock by the time we left, and the sky was willing itself to brighten through the heavy rain. As we approached Paris the clove-like smell of rubber from the motorway became stronger, the traffic thickening till we came to a gradual stop. Christian had turned on the radio, and I mouthed the words to a catchy song I disliked at the woman in the car to my left. Next to her, just visible in the passenger seat and framed by the stiff blue foam of its chair, was the downy head of a small child. She handed it something, a bottle or a toy, and I wondered, without really caring, whether you were supposed to put children beside you or in the back seat. Looking up at one of the grey bridges that intermittently broke up the motorway, I was surprised to see the figure of a girl, dramatic, standing there above us in a long black trench coat that glistened in the rain. It struck me as odd. I hadn’t realised that pedestrians were allowed up on those bridges, and besides, there were no houses as far as the eye could see. Opening my mouth to voice the thought I was pre-empted by Christian’s calm tones.

  ‘Look at that girl. People are weird, aren’t they? Why on earth would you choose to go for a walk across a motorway, on a disgusting morning like this? I mean there must be …’

  Before he could finish his cursory indictment of the human race, the forlorn shape straddled the balustrade, perching a few feet above the rapid traffic moving in the opposite direction. Around us, other cars had begun to notice her. I could see the driver in the car in front of us gesticulating wildly at the shadow in the passenger seat, and instinctively I turned to the woman beside me, separated only by sheets of glass and metal. But she wasn’t looking at me. In a gesture as lucid as it was graceful, she leant across to cover her child’s eyes. As she did so, the girl looked down for a split second, and jumped.

  In my memories, the sound of the two cars that screeched off the
road to avoid her has been drowned by the dull, anti-climactic thud of her body against the tarmac. At the time I noted with a kind of clinical interest how it had broken with the impact. One leg lay at a right-angle to her torso, and a single All-Star trainer had landed upright, in a weird feat of physics, a few feet away. On our side of the carriageway, people scrabbled for their mobiles, Christian started to laugh, a shrill laugh, not quite hysterical, which stopped as abruptly as it started, before he too pointlessly dialled the emergency services.

  It was the kind of experience about which there was nothing to be said. For a few minutes, I had sat petrified with fear that he might utter some banal cliché; try to make sense of it. Instead, we reached a rain-soaked Paris without exchanging a word, making a tacit pact that we would tell no one what we had seen. I sat at the little table in my flat that day, book in hand, watching the print scramble before my eyes, wishing it wasn’t so cold but not able to close the balcony doors. What had happened to her that was so terrible she couldn’t bear to live any more? My pristine youth could not, then, comprehend the human capacity to feel pain, and I lamented the fact that I could not call Beth, tell her what I had seen, and ask her what it meant.

  Eight

  In the period that followed I felt closer to Beth than ever before, needing her to redress the balance. The events of that night had acted as a temporary barrier to thoughts of Christian; no hypnotherapist would have been able to conjure up a more dissuasive mental connection. Even pushing aside any feelings of supersition, our night together was tainted by the girl’s suicide, a disabling memory we needed time to shake off.

  Confident that Christian would sooner or later turn up on my doorstep or wander through the revolving doors of the museum, I delighted in having Beth to myself again. There was a newfound fascination for me in the sheer physicality of her, and the knowledge that at night we both conjured up the same face in our dreams helped to cancel out any sense of wrongdoing on my part. I urged her now not to hold back in her sexual descriptions, recognising my own experiences in them, taking instruction even, and relishing how similar our tastes were. Our weekends had regained their initial flavour: tender, aimless, languorous days of the kind I have never experienced since. Only now there was this slow-beating sensuality infecting everything. We would discuss our common passion affectionately together, and where I had been careful to keep any of my views quiet in the past – whether real or concocted for her benefit – I was now happy to join in with the deconstructions of his character, which Beth never seemed to tire of. I have since wondered why she did not question my readiness to devote whole hours of conversation to Christian, knowing, as she affectionately did, that nothing usually aroused my interest unless it had some bearing on me. But suspicion was an alien concept to Beth. Despite the knocks she had suffered throughout her life, she had an amazing capacity to see only the good in others, naturally expecting the trust she held in them to be mirrored by those close to her.