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‘Mon sac.’ The old woman was shaking her arm, demanding to know if Yeva had seen her bag. In her other hand, the woman was holding up her walking stick. Yeva guessed that it was the source of the sharp whack she’d just endured.
Still clinging to Yeva’s wrist, the woman stood up and waved her walking stick in the air. ‘Aidez-moi! Police!’
A uniformed police officer, who had been queuing for coffee, jogged towards them. Yeva thought he looked very little older than she was.
‘Mon sac,’ cried the lady. ‘Il a été volé!’
The policeman looked suspiciously at Yeva, who leaned forwards and looked under the bench. There was no bag. She scanned the hall. Every person within earshot was looking their way, all except one wiry man in a navy-blue suit, who was striding briskly towards the escalator.
‘C’était lui!’ Yeva pointed to the man and shouted. It was him – she knew it.
‘Reste ici,’ said the policeman, before taking off in pursuit.
I don’t have much choice but to stay here, thought Yeva. The old woman’s hand held her wrist in a vice-like grip.
Ronan Drops the Ball
The doors opened on an almost empty carriage. Claire and Ronan took seats at the back. They sat quietly, shoulders, hips and thighs together, letting the steady rhythm of passing tracks sway their bodies left, then right and back, in unison. The darkness of the tunnel made a mirror of the window, so that everything was doubled. Claire watched as a woman three seats away used her reflection to check her hair, then licked a middle finger and smoothed each eyebrow. The woman caught Claire’s glance, looked back defiantly, as if to say Claire’s own eyebrows might benefit from similar attention. Resisting the temptation to inspect her own reflection, Claire put her head down on Ronan’s shoulder and closed her eyes. She listened to the clacking of the tracks, tried to understand the announcements, smelled the change of air every time the doors whooshed open, sensed the carriage filling up with bodies and never doubted that Ronan was watching everything, minding her.
Their stop, Porte de Clignancourt, was the line terminus. A motley assembly of hawkers and hucksters, professional shoppers and cheap bargain hunters disembarked together and walked along l’avenue Michelet towards themarché aux puces, the flea market. A man laden with wicker baskets jostled past, forcing Claire to step off the pavement and into the path of a street-sweeping machine.
Ronan grabbed her arm and pulled her body against his.
‘I’m not sure I’m up to this right now,’ she said.
‘My lady needs her second breakfast, methinks, and she’ll be grand.’
They stopped at the first bar they found, a rough looking place that smelled of beer and ash. An old man glanced at them with an unchanging expression, then bent his attention back to his newspaper. Two younger men never looked away from the football match, a replay, on the mega TV hanging over the bar.
Claire slid into a vinyl-covered booth at the back of the bar. The table, a vintage original in red-speckled Formica, was damp. It had evidently just been wiped clean, a small fact that Claire found comforting. She looked over at the dour-faced woman behind the bar counter. She was speaking to Ronan in rapid, thickly accented French and seemed to be pointing him towards something farther up the street. He smiled and thanked her, picked up two cups of coffee and came to sit next to Claire.
‘Do they have food?’ she asked.
‘To be honest with you, Claire, I really don’t know. She seemed to say yes, and then she told me to go to the bakery up the road. Let’s have the coffee anyway.’
‘Yeah, alright.’ She sipped the foamy coffee. It was mild and sweet.
‘How are you feeling?’ he asked meaningfully.
‘Yeah, I’m grand. I’m so sorry about all the crying. It’s not what this weekend was supposed to be about.’
‘It’s exactly what this weekend was about. It’s a good thing, you know, that you let it out.’
Her smile was weak. ‘Better out than in, and all that,’ she said.
‘Quite so.’ He looked down at his coffee, picked up his spoon, put it down again. ‘Claire, while we’re at it .?.?.’
‘Hmm?’
‘I have to tell you something.’
‘Okay,’ she said.
He was going to say something mushy now, that she was beautiful, his reason for being, that he’d always be glad he married her, for better or worse, no matter what life threw at them. She readjusted her skirt, sat up a little straighter. She would, for once, accept his compliment graciously.
‘Go on, then.’
‘Something happened, with Saoirse. A kiss.’ He looked up from the coffee cup, though his eyes still seemed to retreat, somehow, from hers. It was as if he was looking at her from somewhere further back inside his head. ‘Look, it was nothing ––’
