Perfectly Ordinary People(86)

When we got to our street, we went our separate ways. Christophe hugged me and said it was weird, and that he felt as if he was saying goodbye, and in a way, I suppose he was. We had no real plan to stay together beyond that point but, although we were sick to the back teeth of each other’s company, we also loved each other quite profoundly. So it was hard to envisage our lives alone.

I know a lot of marriages like that.

Well, quite! It had become very much like a marriage.

The front door to my building had been smashed in, and trying to imagine how that had happened made me nervous.

As I climbed the stairs with Guillaume, a downstairs neighbour who’d known me since birth – Madame Deloye – peeped out at me, but when I said ‘Hello’ she just closed the door in my face. I can only assume that she knew what had happened and didn’t want to be the one to have to tell me.

I knocked on our front door, and when I heard footsteps inside my heart leapt. I was so convinced my mother would be the one to open the door that I started to cry in anticipation.

But a very old, frail-looking woman I’d never seen before opened it instead. She didn’t seem to speak any French, and so we had this weird unintelligible conversation on the doorstep until eventually I got frustrated and pushed my way past her into the apartment.

The furniture was all ours, though they had moved some things around. But almost everything else had changed: the knick-knacks, the clock on the mantelpiece, the clothes, the pots and pans. Hardly any of it was familiar.

So I felt like I’d fallen into a dream. That sensation of being in the right place, which was simultaneously not the right place, felt nightmarish. Guillaume, who tended to pick up on everything, started to cry, and I ended up trying to calm him while simultaneously shouting at the old woman, demanding answers. Where were my parents? What had she done with my clothes? Why was she wearing my mother’s slippers? And eventually, Madame Keller, the neighbour from across the landing, came out to see what all the fuss was.

I told her rather hysterically that the woman had ‘stolen’ our apartment and wouldn’t tell me where my parents were, and she led me into her place, where she sat Guillaume and me down on the sofa so that she could give me some answers.

That can’t have been easy for her.

No.

But for you . . . I can’t even imagine.

You know it’s really very strange, but I remember all the wrong things about that day.

What do you mean by the wrong things?

All the irrelevant things. I remember that she served me mint tea. I remember the way the light was filtering through her net curtains, the way the steam was rising from the tea, the way the dust motes floated in the sunlight. I remember that she smoked a Gitanes cigarette and I remember the smell and the way the grey smoke twirled as it rose. I remember the feel of her beige corduroy sofa beneath my fingertips and the way Guillaume squeezed my hand as she spoke. But I honestly couldn’t begin to tell you what she said, or what I said by way of reply. I can’t remember anything about the conversation or how she actually told me.

It must have been just about impossible to hear.

Yes. It was unbearable. That’s a word we use willy-nilly, but I mean it literally. It was unbearable, as in the sense that what she told me was impossible to bear. I don’t think I said much. I just sat there running my fingernail across the material covering the sofa. And then I thanked her and got up and left without drinking my tea.

As I was leaving, she offered me a place to stay. Our flat had been re-rented to the Polish refugees I’d seen, so she offered to put me up. But I just wanted to leave. I wanted to get out . . . That need to escape the building . . . it was physical. I just couldn’t breathe there.

When I got downstairs I found Christophe sitting on the doorstep. His parents had given him the news, so when he saw me he stood and tried to hug me, but I pushed him quite brutally away. I was scared that . . . I’m not that sure what I was scared of. Perhaps that I would . . . I don’t know . . . melt down, or collapse, or something. I had this terror that if I allowed myself to feel anything at all I’d just . . . vanish, or perhaps stop breathing. It wasn’t that clear a thought; it was more just a sensation of fear.

I was aware that I had a young child holding my hand, and nowhere to live, and no future, and in a way, no longer any past. And it simply wasn’t possible to let myself feel anything until I’d found practical solutions to all of those problems. So I pushed him away.

I remember I kept thinking, I’m an orphan. I kept on and on thinking those words. But not in a moving, upsetting sort of way. It was more of a cold, logical revelation. I’m an orphan, I kept thinking, and then trying to work out what that might mean.

Christophe took me to a horrible, cheap hotel and I lay there comatose for three days while he looked after Guillaume.

I don’t know what they got up to, though, in a way, by deduction, I can probably work it out. We didn’t talk about it, but he must have gone looking for Johann, and then Leah and Matias. But he didn’t tell me what he’d found out. I expect he realised that I wasn’t strong enough to hear any more bad news. So without argument, he just let me stay there, staring at the ceiling. He didn’t try to talk to me about his own pain, and I still think of that today, of that amazing sensitivity in not asking for anything and not trying to help me either; in not even attempting to talk to me, or make me listen, or think, or do, or express anything whatsoever. It was one of his finest moments. He really was an exceptional friend to me.