Karen dressed in silence. Her body registered the covering of clothes. She had awoken in plenty of time, did not feel pressed or pressurised, and dressed with deliberation, the day all fresh and new.
She ate the muesli, drank the fruit juice. The washing of the breakfast implements took maybe two minutes, and she placed them back in their drawers and shelves and presses. She wiped down the surface. Her mother leapt into her mind, and there began a conversation therein that came increasingly to resemble an argument. She wiped the surface and did battle with her mental mother, but then cut loose and suppressed these thoughts, for there is no greater stressor than internal conversation. She put the cloth down in the sink.
The morning feel was soothing, imbuing her with a sense of calm, wise, melancholy. If our lives are free from evil, well is this just the best that we can do? She brushed her hair and teeth, combated wrinkles and dryness, and applied lipstick and perfume.
She was ready to leave the flat. The lift hummed in old familiar compliance, and she reached the bottom and the street. A bus or something roared by. She swept the ground with her stick, advancing easily, mounting and dismounting kerbs and steps. So Karen, in her time, reached the St. Sulpice metro.
She was never at her most comfortable on these trains. Of course, they were fine, nothing had ever gone wrong, not really anyway, but they were firmly classed under ‘necessary evil’, and she took a bus, or buses, if time or route would allow.
She sat there amidst the rattle and the din. The human noise of coming, going, shifting, talking was everywhere. She had thirteen stops, heading north, before she got to Chateau Rouge. She was on an errand for Michel.
She had met this man before. Once, at Christmastime. She had touched his weary face, had heard his rumbling voice. Had listened to the rasp while he murmured in his phone. He would be here now, at the Chateau Rouge metro station, because he had stuff for Michel, and Michel was in Bordeaux.
The call had come the night before. Michel, sweet, pleading, on the phone from his parents house, with his please, it would mean a lot. Collect some stuff from this guy, you remember him, cause I can’t make it back, and he says he can’t wait. Karen had wondered why, where was the urgency in this, but Michel said I don’t know, and he’d sounded so sincere.
So here she was on the train. Friday morning. They got off, they got on, they shuffled here and there, finding seats and excusing themselves. She was sure some eyes were on her. This was the tenth stop she counted, so this was Gare de l’Est, with three more to go. She thought of the El back in Chicago, those childhood trips downtown with her mother, and then later with friends, or alone. The strangeness of her first drink. She remembered just how cold, just how to the bone freezing, that city got, and however bad Paris was, ice and snow in Chicago made for nightmares without end. Temperatures of death, and streets of crystal traps.
The train reached the stop. She moved through the exit door, and people pushed past, surging, the many who don’t pay and evade the dumb control. She heard others jumping over the barriers.
Coming up the stairs and into the day, the sound of markets – fish, carpets, fruit – was everywhere. Her left hand gripped the rail. There was the feel of other bodies, other human beings, clambering about. The heat of breathing souls. As she reached the final step, she heard a sudden cough, and turned to face this man, knowing who it was.
February 7, 2010
Part 3: Blue, July – Sept 2002 (scene 7)
February 6, 2010
Part 3: Blue, July – Sept 2002 (scene 6)
Dev spat an olive stone.
“They’re addictive these things,” he spluttered. “This is my third jar today.”
Frank had made soup in his apartment, but he had no idea why, as the two of them sat there eating, sweating for God and country. It was siesta in Sevilla.
“So they made you sweep the parts you’d already swept?” said Dev. “Just to be doing something.”
“Yeah.”
“For fucks sake.”
Frank pushed away his soup bowl and wiped his brow.
“It wasn’t even dirty in the first place,” he muttered. “They don’t have any fucking guests.”
Dev sat up and rolled a joint. A big cone that could floor an elephant. He folded, rolled and licked, his tongue protruding from the left side of his mouth, like an eager child, engrossed in what he was doing.
They smoked in silence.
“When I was about six,” said Dev, “I got my first erection. This wasn’t in the gaff my parents have now, it wasn’t in Dublin. It was when I was a kid, in Navan. It was summer, really hot – not as hot as this obviously, but y’know, hot. I was in the garden, or we were in the garden I should say, cause it was me, Johnno, and PJ. Jesus, fuckin’ PJ. Last time I saw him he was on parole. Anyway, yeah, we were in the garden yeah, me Johnno and PJ, and y’know, summers day, I think we had ice-cream or something. I was six. Anyway, the next-door neighbour was out sunbathing, like, in her garden, and I mean, fuck, what a fuckin’ slapper. Lying there real kind of, I don’t know…there was only a little fence between the two gardens. I couldn’t see over, but I could see through. She was lying out there, covered only in a towel, and I mean, it was obvious to us, through the fence at six years old, that there was nothing underneath. I’d say she was about thirty. Anyway, she’s lying there, we’re watching, and the thing is, she knew we were watching, y’know? She knew. So…what does she do? She takes off the towel. This is Navan, 17, 18 years ago. And she knew we were watching, y’know? She takes off the towel, lies there, totally naked, and we were watching through the fence, and, I mean, we had never seen anything like that before. She was about thirty I’d say, and she wasn’t bad. But what a fuckin’ slapper, y’know? To get your thrills from doing that. And that was the first time. Just lying there, y’know..?”
Frank exhaled slowly. The air of a confession hung over this story, and Dev had seemed nervous in the telling. Frank glanced at him now, and he was smoking. He was leaning back again, silent. A scooter went by outside, a churning headwreck growl, and Frank’s knee flinched, in sudden shock from the sound.
Dev stood up and went to the window. He spat down below. Frank finished the smoke and stubbed it out, wiping tobacco entrails off the table with his left hand. They rained slowly toward the floor, a waterfall of matter, a tumbling little shower that the ground was calling home. He spied an ant and squashed it.
“Sometimes I don’t know about this fuckin’ place,” said Dev, his voice half muffled with his body leaning out. “It’s a bit of a shithole to be perfectly honest.”
He laughed then, easy and fine with himself, and Frank smiled also, because the man by the window was right.
“So leave,” he taunted gently, standing up to stretch, and he moved toward the window, where Dev was leaking spit.
“Leave for somewhere new.”
“I might,” said Dev, dribbling, laughing and foaming and mad, his body now suspended over a twisting cobbled street.
“I could leave and go to Holland, and never go back home, and draw and smoke and dance, just like nature intended.”
He spat down below, and laughed as he wiped his chin.
February 5, 2010
Part 3: Blue, July – Sept 2002 (scene 5)
The dog was on the roadside. His tongue fell from his mouth in a perfect expression of defeat, and his blood stained the tarmac in a semi-circular arc. A dead dog in the dream time. Flies were buzzing; landing, invading, and raw, and Aria stood sadly. Heat haze rose about, shimmering and delicate, and she put her hand to her mouth, child-like, deriving shallow comfort from a stance of blue compassion.
She stepped down onto the beach. This time one week ago she should have been landing in Paris, but she wasn’t ready yet. Laura had understood. Aria had made enormous strides recently, but it was still a little soon to just jump on a plane and go live somewhere new. She pushed back her hair and breathed deeply.
Gulls darted overhead. There were people visible in the middle distance, the tide way out, and the people out there also, walking, scattered, where the ocean licked the land. She could turn around and see occasional traffic, or could re-focus her attention on these dot-like figures, but neither image allowed for sound accompaniment. She heard nothing but her own breathing and footsteps, and the circling overhead birds.
Her trainers were caked in sand. It was wet, slushy, a heavy clinging sea-sludge, and the sky was overcast now, although the humidity remained. Santa Clara July. There were little marks in the sand-surface, where worms had buried and emerged, with speckled greyish seashells arranged in random curves. She rubbed her foot against the matter.
The grey-white sky was purposeful. Enormous bags of raindrops, hovering, intent, waited to spill and batter, with Aria below. She looked up and pushed hair from her eyes. Someone had dropped a can, a red one, and it lay there in the sand, half-covered and rusting. She went to pick it up but didn’t. All alone with her breath and her body, she realised how far she had come, how distant now was the panic and the fear, the incapacitating nausea of just a few months before. How sad she felt for what she had done.
Then she did pick up the can. She held it aloft, motionless, and cried.
February 4, 2010
Part 3: Blue, July – Sept 2002 (scene 4)
Frank and Sjal and Dev ate olives. It was another sweltering day. They were at an Alameda café, and a heroin addict who used to be a ballerina was floating about for change. Sjal gave her something. A child threw a tomato on the ground in a tantrum, and his parents weren’t overly concerned. He wanted chocolate instead.
Frank had a fair amount of chocolate in his back pocket, but not like the kid wanted, and himself and Dev smoked some discreetly. A stalling car engine burst up in flames. There were shouts of surprise from the driver, hurling himself from his vehicle, pleading in his eyes for someone to approach. Their waiter strolled over with an extinguisher.
The event aroused interest for about thirty seconds, and then everyone forgot and went back to whatever. Frank watched carefully. The burn smell was in the air, in the hot already burning air, and he ate another olive, and gazed at the poverty and dust. The man was thanking the waiter, “gracias, gracias,” and this in itself was unusual, because nobody in that city says thanks. “Vale,” said the waiter, and walked off.
“Is anybody hungry?” said Dev.
Sjal ate an olive.
“Hungrier than this I mean.” He swung back in his chair and yawned. “I’d love a big roast chicken and spuds. With gravy and peas and carrots.”
Sjal eyed him in amazement, and Frank laughed softly, bemused and amused at once.
“Feckin’ roast spuds as well,” said Dev. “And stuffing.” He made an exaggerated lip smacking sound, and then a moan of pleasure, and spat an olive stone back into the world.
“Spuds and stuffing and chicken. Ya can’t bate it.”
So they went for food, but sandwiches and crisps – Dev’s mind far bigger than his belly. Sjal didn’t eat meat. She told them she had lived in Paris, had seen a lot of great films there, and once found a key ring on the Boulevard Saint Michel. She took it out, and it was a pink bear that lit up if you pressed a button. They couldn’t see this very well, but she semi-covered it in her hand and it was better.
It was made of a glass-like plastic, and had a red dickie-bow. It looked somewhat the worse for wear. Frank and Dev held it. Handing it back, Frank thought he thought something, but then dismissed it. He turned away with a frown. She put it back in her pocket, and Dev stole one of her crisps.
That night there was a flamenco show, a cantankerous affair of wailing and death, and they sat there drinking, Frank rotating his ankle muscles again and again, a cracking sound audible. Today had been tough, and the pain was acute now. Sjal adored this music, was spellbound and moving and light, her duende eyes dancing also, both yearning and pulsing at once. She took a drink and ate a peanut.
Dev got up for beer. The music grew more intense, a cathartic clenched cacophony, and Frank watched in wonder, as Sjal shamanically swayed. She was there and not there also. Almond eyes, and a young face lined with faint anxiety, from thought upon thought upon thought. Her knuckles were tapping the table. She turned to look at him then, but he felt he couldn’t be seen, and maybe in her trance-state she detected the system breach. His hollowness in need. This was July and sweetness, the damage a year before, and Frank in Spanish night-time doesn’t know what is to come. He’s had the pain, the repair, the physical re-knitting of the cartilage and bone. But the thunder hasn’t rolled yet, the soul has not yet screamed, and the sense of dislocation has just begun to loom.
February 3, 2010
Part 3: Blue, July – Sept 2002 (scene 3)
Johnny was selling a lot today. Things were going so fast he felt like he was on the stuff himself. He jumped up and down, bug-eyed, yanking the phone out of his pocket and speaking in code to the weirdos on the other end. They were always saying they’d know the final order in an hour.
“Je ne peux pas attendre,” he hissed, again and again. “Dis-moi” He was sweating, and he sensed his agitation may be growing apparent to those around him.
Tourists were gaping, and not at the Centre Pompidou. He was gonna have to cool it. He looked around, the building’s blue pipes blurring as his head swivelled, the pipes and the tourists and the crepe smell and this fucking guy in his ear all mashing into one bizarre sensory experience, his stress refusing clarity or perceptive definitions.
He stuffed the thing back in his pocket and sat down. Maybe he should change the ring tone, cause this one sure was annoying. Later. He really wanted to play something loud about now, to shout and rock and whistle, but he was too frazzled, and then the unholy thing went off again.
He leapt up like he was on fire, cursing and answering at the same time, so the caller received merde instead of oui. He put his shades in his pocket with his left hand. The guy told him he wasn’t sure right at this moment, cause he had to talk to “some people,” but he’d know in an hour.
“Fuck you Yank!” Johnny screamed, unaware of how this man could even have his number, or who he was. “You have a wrong number,” he seethed, managing to squeeze this phrase through his rage. “Do not call again!”
He hung up and sat down, but then stood up to swap the contents of his pocket, reseating with the phone in the pocket and the shades on his head. This head he shook violently in anger, his face contorting into a grimace of dismay and confusion.
“I don’t know,” he said to a passing English child. “I really do not know.”
Later he felt better. Some of the heat went out of the day, and he sang a few songs to ease the tension. He winked at two Japanese toddlers. The buttons of his coat scraped the guitar as he strummed, the whole thing covered in random marks and scratches. “Why?” he roared. “Why ayayayayayay?”
People came and sat with him. Some he knew. A joint was passed, a champagne bottle went pop, and he left this hippy girl in charge of the guitar to go and buy crisps and bread. He kneaded his fingers as he walked to the shop, feeling alright now, and noticing some white guy in a Senegalese jersey. Dakar back streets, but that wasn’t today nor yesterday. He banished the thought. The hot July night came swooping, and he made it back to the group and sat down. All this energy around, and he had that twitch in his groin. He looked about and clicked his tongue, thought about resting an arm on the girl beside him, but didn’t. Her laugh was not conducive. She was laughing here, having fun, and he could never put the moves on a certain type of joy. Disappointment was a target, innocence was not. It was terrifying.
He rubbed his nose and checked his messages, and there was one, but he couldn’t be bothered reading it. Now might be a time to change that ring tone…ah, later. He put it back in his pocket. A few pigeons remained, strutting and bickering low, and he watched them momentarily, before closing his eyes.
“Why have you left me lonely?
Why have you made me cry?
Why have you left me lonely?
Why ayayayayay..?”
February 1, 2010
Part 3: Blue, July – Sept 2002 (scene 2)
They lay in bed together. Softness. She felt his breath against her right cheek, and moved closer. Was he sleeping or not?
“Michel?” she intoned gently, not wishing to wake him if he was sleeping, seeking a response if he was not.
“Hmmm,” he murmured.
She got up for a glass of water. The sound of the tap. It touched her lips in coolness, the water from the tap, and in her mouth, in her throat, was the liquid joy of living. The fullness and the peace, and the mystery of drinking water.
She returned to him. Pulled the sheet over her body, their bodies, and lay still. She thought of that junk TV, sitting in an old box in the living room, and it probably wouldn’t even work when she tried to plug it in. Why she took it she couldn’t say. That poor old man, Boulier, his leathery face and calming foyer touch. His paternal grace.
“Bonjour Mademoiselle, il fait beau aujourd’hui, non?” His laugh, and his fingers on her wrist.
Karen cried there in bed, the Monday morning news of his death absorbing up to this point, and now being accepted. The tears released the pain. She cried on this Wednesday afternoon, and Michel slept alongside, his easy nasal breathing a partner to her sobs.
January 31, 2010
Part 3: Blue, July – Sept 2002 (scene 1)
Cities are built by the strong, for the strong. Steps and curbs hamper the disabled. Everything is motion light and sound.
Frank is by the river. There’s sweat on his brow, and there are sunbathers stretched randomly on the grass around. A man who works for the city is picking up rubbish, and the sprinklers wet the areas he has cleaned. There is a water skier out there, on the river, his cries and shouts carried easily ashore. Two girls and another boy are in the boat, laughing.
Frank watches all this, the cleaner and the surfer, the birds alighting easily, and the distant sun-haze policeman on the far bank, his shirt sleeves rolled up, with essentially no traffic to direct. Frank sees this man every day, or maybe it is different men and he can’t tell, but he suspects it is the same one, always. He pulls from the joint, and the world seems sweeter, a bubble in a bubble, a crystal in a stream. The world feels vaguely sealed, and functioning.
There, across the water, is called Triana. It’s long associated with gitanos. It’s one of the oldest areas of the city, but Frank doesn’t live there. He lives by the Alameda, by the flea markets and the smack, the tiny cervecerias and the winding, broken lanes.
Sevilla makes him feel like exploding. He doesn’t stay still very long. He just moved here in June, and now it is July, with the squealing fucking scooters, and the 45-degree heat. He shares a flat with a French girl on calle Castellar, and has friends close by, in a house on calle Feria.
The walk to the river takes twenty-five minutes, and he does it every day, although it causes considerable distress. It’s like exercising inside an oven. He trudges through the dead-heat streets, sweating, and feels anger rising in his soul. The ancient streets seem to wobble and constrict, and the old women eye the extranjero through callous wizened squints. His shirt like liquid skin.
He makes it every day though, and falls down in a sweat-heap, blinking. The river can generate a slight breeze, and this is worth a great deal, when your apartment has no air conditioning. He sits beside the water.
Later he called for Dev. Dev and his girlfriend had a room in the calle Feria house, the house also containing a Dane, a Spaniard, an Argentinean and a Swede. Everyone spoke Spanish but Frank, all of them girls but Dev. Dev and Frank had gone to school together in Dublin, had smoked and drank and puked, and Frank had arrived in Sevilla about two months after Dev, eager for adventure after incapacitation.
They sat in the living room and sweated, two floors up in the thin rising house. Dev was wearing a pair of shorts and picking his nose.
“That kind of shit is like shooting ducks in a kettle,” he said, “ or whatever the phrase is. I mean it’s just so easy that…who’d be bothered?”
Frank settled into his chair, relaxed, but fidgeting nonetheless. Dev went and got two glasses of water.
“Do you want ice?” he said.
“Yeah.”
He turned around and went back to the kitchen, and Frank heard the plop of the cubes in the glass.
“So how’s the job?” asked Dev, reseating. For a week now Frank had been a morning cleaner in a fleabag hotel, revelling in the stillness of the dusty Spanish hallways. It was his calmest part of the day.
“It’s alright. It’s fine.”
A cockroach scuttled across the floor. Dev seemed to think about reaching for the broom, but then slumped in a manner that suggested he couldn’t be bothered, exhaling loudly in self-deprecation. Frank rubbed a sweat-drop cascading down his nose.
They could stay like this for hours. A plate with bread crusts sat nearby, an empty glass previously containing milk. Clinging residue. They say a glass used for milk can never be used for beer, no matter how many times you subsequently wash it. Frank eyed this innocent glass carefully, nothing about its appearance suggesting awareness of a strictly sober future. He sighed and rubbed his legs.
The Swedish girl came in and sat down. Frank couldn’t remember her name, and Dev didn’t use it in greeting. She sneezed. Frank wasn’t sure if she was 18 or 26, and his opinion on this changed with every passing moment. Her clothes were of a style befitting 1958, but she was playing with a mobile phone. He wasn’t sure if this was contradictory in a pleasing way or not.
“So Dev says you’re cleaning a hotel,” she offered, putting down the phone and looking at him full-on. Right then she was 18.
“Yeah, just in the mornings. It’s fine.”
“It’s fine?”
“Yeah, it’s alright y’know?”
He shifted in his seat. She seemed to be waiting for more.
“Jesus it’s hot,” said Dev, picking up a nearby guitar. “I can never tune this feckin’ thing.”
He handed it to Frank, who tuned it after a fashion, and handed it back. Dev started playing G and C and singing about a diner.
Sjal, for that was her name Frank suddenly remembered, listened carefully. Dev switched to a comedy falsetto, closed his eyes tightly, and bashed the guitar like a bin lid. He shook his head and tapped his foot. This rhythmical tapping was accompanied by the swish of his leg on the couch. He screeched and shook. When he was finished, he splayed back into the softness, the guitar balanced upon him, unheld. Sjal clapped and Frank smiled. She thought he was funny, and Frank supposed he did too.
“And you play too?” said Sjal to Frank. “You were what do you call it for him.”
“Tuning.”
“Yeah, you were tuning for him. So you play too right?”
“Yeah,” said Frank. “A bit.”
“A bit? So will you play a bit then?”
Dev handed him the instrument, and Frank went to tune it again – an introduction, a prop, a way of readying himself.
He sang a song about a girl, a song he had written, a girl he hadn’t known. A song about insomnia and transport. The B string went flat at some point, but nobody cared. He finished and settled, smiling at the ground. He felt pretty good. They went out for coffee, and Frank fell into a daydream. He moved his ankle about under the table to prevent stiffness. Stabs of pain were induced momentarily.
“I wish I knew what you were thinking,” said Sjal sweetly. “You seem to just go off sometimes.”
He knew he liked her now, but nothing as simple as that. Not the easy beauty of courtship. He didn’t want to impress her, he didn’t want to try. It was like discovering a relative, a connection of blood and outlook, and this is strange in the world. He moved his ankle, and wasn’t sure what to think.
January 30, 2010
Part 2: Aria (scene 6)
If your wishes are not granted, there’s a chance you’ll have to kill. Nobody wants to, but wrongs took place in history. Unholy acts were sanctioned. The French marched into his country, long before he was born, and they claimed it for themselves. They scorned as mindless his religion. He heard the stories growing up – the barbarism, the flame, the callous Western putdown of all it doesn’t know.
More than one million lost in the War of Independence. Nearly two million more made instant refugees. Over one hundred years of French Imperial rule, and when they finally left, the country shook with pain. It was into this that he was born. The Western leaning authoritarian governments. The failure to uphold true Sharia law. The final humiliation came in nineteen ninety, when the holy Islamic party won legislative elections, and had their victory nullified. He was 14, and this was not too young to act. It was soon after they started calling him Djinn. Civil war began, chaos could bring change, and no one else made bombs for cars like the genie from the slums.
Their group was strong and certain, and members acted as they saw fit. They insisted on an Islamic state. They cut the throats of villagers, blew up foreign journalists, and left to suffer women who would not become temporary wives. They killed the blood kin of colons. Djinn wanted more. In the heat and dust of some deep Saharan bolt hole, he knew it couldn’t end with simple government displacement. It was the French who had to pay. Hiding from his own military, a wanted man in a desecrated land, he began to search in earnest ways to flee and plot.
Passage to Lebanon came unexpectedly. A dark and terrible Mediterranean crossing, and a mad man in the galley screaming “Tell me where is Egypt!” He made it safely, and left that sorry ship behind. He is sitting in a sun-filled apartment, a space he shares with no one, in the Lebanese capital of Beirut. He has one knife, one fork, and two glasses. Three guns. Djinn spends hours by the window, thinking, watching, smoking cigarettes. It is calming. In the middle distance is the bay, blue and dream-filled. He cannot see the Lebanon Mountains that rise to the east, behind him now, unless he goes up to the roof. He saves this for the evenings. For the eerie final sunsets on the jumbled tension city. On the Christian hills of Ashrafiyah, and Muslim Musaytibah. For the simple aching beauty of the white buildings in light. He has four shirts, two pairs of trousers. He has a watch with Western writing – mode, display, water resist.
He has been here two years. This apartment, this routine. Prayers in the morning and the evening. Traffic sounds are soothing, and silence speaks of peace. Allah expects duty to be done.
When the bomb goes off in Paris the world will finally listen. The plan is nearing completion. It has been gently coaxed from infancy, and is now a rumbling, almost real event. It has teeth, and claws, and the wisdom to carry itself through. When he speaks it aloud, he smells the smoke it will create. The building metal will soften, and the Western dogs will scream. He walks the streets for exercise, and gives the little children who live downstairs sweets and coloured pebbles.
Very often sunsets can make him want to cry. He doesn’t cry of course, but wants to. The arching light embalms the stonework. The sky is magical, is perfect, and is the glistening protection of the Middle Eastern kingdom. He stands on the roof in the evenings, looks to the eastern mountains, smokes and wants to cry. Children sounds from the street below. Cooking utensils clattered in kitchens, open windows and murmurs of radio. Turn to the blue bay. Boats, the harbour, the odd unlikely tourist. The scars of civil war, and subsequent Israeli and Syrian occupation.
After this he returns to the window. Night falls, and he watches waking street lamps, with sweet mint tea slipping on his tongue.
January 29, 2010
Part 2: Aria (scene 5)
Aria’s new flat was in the 10th. You went up a cobbled street and down a tiny passage. When they got there she was sweating, and she threw down her bags and collapsed on the purple couch. She felt circular tingling throughout her body, with a strong pulse clearly evident, hitting her bones in about six different places. She blinked and looked around.
Laura was glad Aria was here, cause Marie had moved out five days previously, and she’d been sitting waiting for Aria’s arrival ever since.
So had the landlord.
“We don’t know why the weather’s this hot,” said Laura at the sink, dropping ice into two glasses of water. “It’s been on the news and everything.”
Aria drank slowly, and Laura sat beside her. They’d been friends since they were ten. Laura still worked in that restaurant she’d mentioned in emails, the course at the Sorbonne still put all the emphasis on grammaire, and, you remember that guy Lukas I told you about? Well, he turned out to be nothing but Swedish hairgel! A child bawled at her mother, audible now through the open skylight, and possibly audible at any other time also, and Aria smiled sadly, reminded of that baby on the plane.
She started to unpack, then left it, and lay down on her bed. Making the acquaintance of a new bed is unusual, more so when it’s your bed now indefinitely. She rubbed the surface – nail catching fabric. This bed was in a loft, not quite a separate room, up a ladder from the living area, and separable by curtain. Laura’s was the same, in the other room, which contained a desk, a lamp, and a fair amount of the Spanish landlord’s junk. Aria sat up from her bed, and could see traces of Selotape on the walls, where Marie must have put and removed her pictures.
Laura went to work, and Aria had pasta. Leaned out the window, and saw the neighbours leaning back. Her view was of a tiny courtyard – green trash cans about ten feet below, Arabic speaking women eyeing her curiously from windows opposite. She said Bonsoir, and one echoed it back, faintly.
She unpacked to low music. Sat still afterwards, awareness focused on her breathing and her heartbeat. The sensations of her body in this new place. She felt a wave of fatigue buck her, the muscles seemingly tightening and sagging all at once. She followed a tingling from her left cheek to her neck. The things we sometimes do, and the sadness it can bring us. Her head turned to the left, her wrists buzzing warm and ready. Warmth spread now, limbs and heart and soul, breathing coming freer, and teeth releasing tongue. She smiled, and yawned.
Sometimes in her mind she heard the clicking of the camera. Less than before, but sometimes. That oh so strange feeling positioned there before it – a feeling so exciting it was frightening and sore. A headlong wildness, and the genuine belief she was nearing some completion. Her own body glowing, vulnerable for the lens, with the muttered dark instructions, talk of tits and ass and pussy.
*
The next day they saw the famous things. They took the Metro to Anvers, and there was the glorious Sacre Coeur. Aria was thrilled. It was crawling with the sightseeingly minded, but the sun was high and clear, and together they gazed calmly at the shining Christian white. The city stretched before them as a rounded peaceful whole, looking ancient, perfect, and utterly deserted.
“I think it’s great that you’re here now,” said Laura. “Better late than never.”
Aria turned to look at her, the railing rubbing her arm, and they hugged right there in silence, below the tourists and the domes.
Montmartre was warm and quiet, the crowds of the Sacre Coeur left easily behind. They walked the streets in secrecy, ascending and descending steep steps and gradients. Birds sang songs of parochial self-containment, and the two American girls drifted, not caring to do more than walk alongside one another.
“It makes me think of home,” said Laura. “Although it looks nothing like it.”
One hour later, atop the Arc de Triomphe, Laura’s phone rang. What followed was indecipherable to Aria, and not particularly like her language tapes. She strained to catch words and phrases, thinking she recognised some but not sure, and gazed down the Champs-Elysees at the trafficked lines of shining metal. Americans, Spanish, and Northern Europeans gazed with her. Laura got off the phone and they moved around the different sides. Put a coin in a creaking telescope. The streets came alive for Aria as she squinted, people and vehicles moving, like tranquil earth revealing teeming ant life in the eyepiece of a microscope.
Horns were occasionally audible. Shape and movement in the map-like distant streets. Laura took a turn to look, and Aria was asked to take a picture by a grinning Finnish couple. A child in a soccer jersey dashed past, too low to be caught in the viewfinder. She strolled around and looked west, the sun hitting the glass of the nearby La Defense skyscrapers, radiance held there like sheet metal, making her close her eyes and see red dots, flashing.
They clattered down the steps in the company of many, eyes needing to grow accustomed to the gloom. It was quicker going down than up. Back on the street, they craned their necks to where they had just been, other people mere specks up there now, and probably some of the same people too. Ice creams were in order. They sat down on a bench – squealing tyres and Japanese tour groups. Mushi, mushi. The men eyed them attentively, their near-identical plaid shirts holding pens, cameras, and foldable city maps. Their wives chatted absently. What words describe the sound of Japanese? They made memories for development, and set about the business of collective monument entry. The traffic circled crazily, on what is apparently the world’s first organised roundabout.
Aria and Laura spoke of San Jose. Of streets, incidents, and middle aged women with day-glo hair. Of high school. Laura said she never wanted to go back. They sat for a while, awoken to nostalgia, and stood up then in unison, and left.
Laura took Aria by Pont de Bir-Hakeim, cause this is where Marlon Brando walked in Last Tango in Paris. They stood midway across, looking down at the tree-lined solitude of Allee des Cygnes. An old man sat on a bench hanging over the river, and the sun went in behind a cloud. Crossing the road to the other side, and remaining at the midway point, they stood in full view of the Eiffel Tower.
Laura took out her camera, and Aria stood in an alcove commemorating something she couldn’t read. A light wind took up, the sky and water grey now, and her hair was fluttered gently.
“So here’s your big Paris photo,” said Laura, the camera strap catching on the belt around her waist. A siren somewhere softly dopplered, and the American girl was snapped before the monument, in the sweet year of the Christian Lord, 2003.
January 28, 2010
Part 2: Aria (scene 4)
Michel sat down beside him and they talked of this and that. Johnny wanted full payment for last time before he gave any more. He spat, and reminded Michel of his aversion to mixing business with pleasure. Coke was not discussed when the guitar was out. Coke was not dealt at Beaubourg. Coke was purely a minor activity to pay the bills, he was not a coke dealer, and if Michel wanted a coke dealer he, Johnny, was sure there were plenty to be found.
“Je suis chanteur,” he barked. “C’est tout.”
Michel, smiling to himself, shifted position on the ground. C’etait chaque jour la meme chose, and cajoling and haggling would be needed to derail Johnny’s righteous conversation train, and still leave with the necessary. He lay down on his back. Johnny’s guitar case served as a functional pillow, and he closed his eyes easily and thought of darling Karen, almost immediately beginning to worry after her well-being.
*
Karen walked the sunny street slowly, taking in the day sounds. Her stick tapped lightly. She held a bag of groceries in her left hand, and expected to be back at the flat around 11.40. The morning air was sweet and pleasing. Friday, February 6th.
She was glad of this change in the weather, what with winter’s wily treachery. Slippy and rushed, with invisible collisions potentially imminent, everywhere. Ice on pavements, and your stick can slip. Other people can slip, and hit you falling. You can have a nasty accident that way.
She reached her building and punched the code, and the lift brought her up to the third floor landing. Exit lift, turn left, first door on left. Her key had her name inscribed in braille – a gift from Michel. She turned on the TV, and could hear twelve year olds squealing as they were remade as sexy popstars. Could hear their talk of favourite lipsticks.
Karen ate and listened to TV. Warmth on her face through the window. She turned down the sound, left the TV on, and heard birds. There was a plane flying somewhere overhead. With the television sound gone, the room settled into the atmosphere of daytime. The fridge hummed in the kitchen area. She turned the TV off, and there was stillness.
All alone in the afternoon light, she finished the tuna. She exhaled and leaned back, slowly. Whenever Mom called it was to worry. Whenever Michel called it was the same. They’d never met one another, but in ways she felt they bore so much in common. They worried. For her.
The sunshine threw crystals on the vase by the window, but Karen on the sofa doesn’t care for light refraction. It isn’t pertinent. Way back one time when, and she fell on the Chicago street, someone had expressed horror at all that red. Of course Karen knew what she was talking about, even as a little girl, but she’d decided quite soon after that colour didn’t matter. Colour wasn’t there. Yes her stick was white, and yes her hair was brown, but what’s the use in knowing, if knowledge brings a blank. She stuck to the relevant, the pertaining. There was feeling, there was sound, there was touch and smell and moments. There was love. There was healthy eating and newspapers.
There is an exception to all of this. An important part of Karen, illogically so. She got a glass of water and returned to the couch. Sat there thinking calmly. There is a photograph above, above Karen’s head right now, in colour. It’s there for all to look at, and for her to know it’s there. It’s framed. There is a boat out on a harbour, and distant glinting shoreline buildings, the sea all speckled randomly with golden frozen jewels. The camera-captured sun on the blue Lebanese ocean. “Fishing In Beirut,” the taker called it.
Fishing in Beirut 