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‘Do you think they just call them letters?’
She laughed out loud. ‘Can I be there when you try to buy them?’
‘A way forwards?’
‘Yeah.’ Her heart thumped in her eardrums, and she tried to swallow something that was stuck in her gullet, a lump made up in equal parts of relief and disappointment.
Le Gare de Lyon
Yeva liked the train station. She liked the building. With its sturdy bell tower, arched windows and cathedral-high glass roof, it felt like a place she could believe in. She liked the smell of it, a mixture of coffee and pastry and possibility, and she liked the noise of it. Most of all, she liked the fact that nobody looked twice at her. In the throng of rushed commuters and confused tourists, she slipped through like a phantom.
She watched a woman with a double buggy buy a cup of coffee and two croissants. She watched as the woman tossed her wallet into the nappy bag that swung from the buggy’s handles, then handed a croissant to each of the little boys inside. She watched as the woman pushed them down the platform with one hand, sipping coffee with the other. She watched as a wiry man in a navy-blue suit offered to lift the buggy onto the train, and she watched as the man, just as he lifted it aboard, slipped the wallet from the nappy bag into his suit pocket.
His timing was immaculate. He dusted off his suit pants as the scene of the crime literally revved up its engines and rolled away. Yeva clucked her tongue in disapproval. The man, as though aware of her attention, looked up and caught her eye. He waved, as if he knew her, and walked towards her.
Yeva turned to walk away, but she got caught up in a group of tourists pulling a clatter of wheeled suitcases. She felt a hand grab her arm and, from the corner of her eye, saw the man behind her. They were separated only by a piece of Louis Vuitton luggage. She made a dive for the door of the ladies’ toilets.
Yeva sat in a cubicle, waiting for her heart to stop pounding. Looking down at her hands, she realised that the chunky watch was gone from her wrist.
‘Kurva,’ she cursed under her breath and bit her thumb to keep from screaming. She was afraid, but more than that, she was furious. She was fucking seething with anger, aching with the frustration of her perfectly average life being reduced to this: hiding in a toilet cubicle.
The sound of an unquestionably female voice humming ‘La Vie en Rose’, along with a waft of lavender cologne, signalled the all-clear. Yeva opened the cubicle door enough to see an old lady folding a baby blue towel into an old-fashioned leather travelling bag.
‘Ça va bien, chérie?’ The woman spoke without looking up. Yeva emerged from the cubicle, uncertain if the woman was speaking to her. She looked around. There was nobody else, unless the woman was talking to herself.
‘Oui,’ said Yeva. ‘Merci.’
Standing at the adjacent basin, Yeva washed her hands and shook them dry. She watched in the mirror as the old lady combed her hair. The leather bag stood open between them. Yeva touched its chestnut brown surface with one finger. She could see the corner of a cream envelope poking out of an inside pocket, and wondered if the old lady carried a bundle of paper money with her, like Yeva’s baba always did.
The old lady directed a friendly nod towards Yeva in the mirror, then bent to gather up her bag in one hand and her walking stick in the other, before heading to the exit.
‘Votre chapeau!’ Yeva grabbed the yellow sun hat from beside the sink and held it out.
‘Ah, mon dieu! Mettez-le sur ma tête, s’il vous plaît.’ The lady inclined her head, and Yeva gently positioned the hat. Given the difference in their heights and the width of the hat’s brim, eye contact was no longer possible. Yeva held the door open, scanning the crowd for navy-blue suits.
The old lady put a light hand on her wrist. ‘Voudriez-vous m’accompagner jusqu’à un taxi?’
Yeva nodded. Company as far as the street was just what she needed. She stretched out her hand, offering to carry the woman’s bag for her, just as she had so often done for Baba. The woman smiled, handed over her bag and took the opportunity to adjust the tilt of her sun hat, the better to see where she was going. A sensation of solace flooded through Yeva’s bones as the old lady linked her arm, and they walked through the station together.
‘Merci, ma chérie,’ said the lady, as she got into the taxi. ‘Bonne journée.’
The Fake is a Secret
Claire had expected the streets of Montmartre to be bustling, but nothing was open. Only slow-moving street sweepers stirred up dust into the broad, acutely angled bands of light. They strolled at random until they found an ATM.
‘Sorry about this,’ Ronan said, when she handed him a bundle of notes. ‘I’m so pissed off about it.’
She smiled. ‘What’s mine is yours and all that.’
‘Ah, it’s not that—’
She raised a questioning eyebrow, but he didn’t seem to have anything more to add. He folded the cash and slipped it into his front pocket.
‘Hey,’ Claire said. ‘We should buy you a new wallet later on. Yeah?’
‘Maybe, yeah.’ He didn’t seem all that interested.
Claire followed the direction of his attention to the recessed porch of a florist’s shop, where a dark-haired man, close enough to their own age, was bent over in the act of stuffing a blanket into a rucksack. A small girl stood at his side. She wasn’t more than six, Claire guessed, and she was busily rolling up a bright-blue sleeping bag.
