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And so, they carried on talking. All evening, they talked, circling and swooping away from the whole point of their meeting. They were each protecting the other, Mireille thought. In their reluctance to inflict pain, they held it there, like a voile curtain between them. Eventually, their talk slowed, their eyelids drooped, and a contagion of yawning passed from one to the other.
‘Au lit,’ said Edith. Bedtime.
‘Au lit,’ said Mireille, wishing she had said it first.
* * *
And now, despite the drapes and the luxury bedding, Mireille still couldn’t sleep. She turned over and thumped the pillow, turned again onto her back and lay staring into the darkness.
It had been a good day, better than she had any right to expect. That was the thought running through Mireille’s head when she heard a shuffling noise from the salon, followed by a gentle knock on the bedroom door.
‘Entrez,’ she said, sitting up.
Edith pushed the door open and crossed to the end of the bed. ‘Emm.’
Mireille waited.
‘Ça te dérangerait si je dormais ici avec toi?’
And that was when, for the first time that day, the tears overflowed Mireille’s control. She could find no words to express just how little it would disturb her – or quite how happy it would make her – to have her daughter sleep at her side. Mireille scooched sideways to make space. Folding back the elegant covers, she patted the mattress.
Edith slid into the bed and lay down. She turned her back to Mireille, so that they both faced the elaborately draped window. With her hand still lying on the mattress between them, her fingertips a hair’s breadth from Edith’s skin, Mireille closed her eyes.
‘Ces oreillers sont trops grands,’ whispered Edith.
‘Oui,’ Mireille whispered back, smiling. It was true: the pillows were indeed too big.
The River of Dreams
My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.
Oscar Wilde
In the equally insulated luxury of a different hotel, Harry opened his eyes to complete darkness.How would I even know,he thought,if I was dead?He stretched an arm across the sheets, cool and smooth, unanswering. A dull pain tugged at his backbone.
He hauled himself to a sitting position, found the cord for the bedside lamp and pulled it. It was pain that had woken him. He remembered, now, the nightmare, something – tiny creatures – eating his bones from the inside out. Maybe spending his day in a graveyard wasn’t such a hot idea.
He threw back the covers and padded into the bathroom, rummaged through a Ziploc bag of pills until he identified the strongest painkillers, then knocked a couple back with a slug of water from the tap. He felt clammy and light-headed. The pain was pulling harder, dragging everything downwards.
Better sit down.
Harry perched precariously on the side of the bath and reached for the service bell on the wall. It looked like an antique, probably didn’t even work. Raising his arm aggravated the creatures. They climbed up his spine, into his head.
Harry slid to the floor, allowed his head to sink and felt the smoothness of the marble tiles against his cheek. It felt good, cool. If he could just lie very still, maybe it would pass. Silly, he thought, to think he could hide like an ostrich from this thing, this disease. It didn’t care whether he ignored it or faced it head-on. It was going to get him either way, whether he played ostrich with it or fought it with all guns blazing. It didn’t care that he was rich, and it didn’t care that he was sorry.
Nancy. In his head, he saw her throwing her head back and laughing. He loved her laugh, the way it came from the very centre of her. He loved the sureness of her, her certainty of absolute right and absolute wrong. Even when he was the one in the wrong, he loved her for seeing it and having the guts to say it. He felt that her measure of him was the only measure that mattered. To be good enough for her – that was precisely as good as he needed to be.
Being good enough meant not telling her.
Harry lifted his hand and reached up towards the top of the bath, thinking he might be able to haul his body upright. The effort sent a wave of pain rocketing through his neck and down his spine. His head spun with a wave of nausea.
So this is how it ends,he thought, as a tingling darkness closed in around him.
Down a Dark Alley
Compared to the recycled warmth of the Métro tunnels, the air at street level felt cold. Yeva set off in a brisk, business-like manner towards the looming arch of the Porte Saint-Denis.
Her pace slowed as it dawned on her that she didn’t know what to do next. A girl at the Halte Humanitaire had warned her to steer clear of this street, implying that she would be sucked into prostitution if she so much as breathed the air around rue Saint-Denis, but maybe it wasn’t that straightforward. Maybe there were rules. Maybe there were territories not to be invaded or pimps not to be crossed.
