Page 68 of The Strawberry Thief
‘Maman, they’re a charity. They’re progressive about hiring.’
‘That wasn’t what I meant, Anouk.’ I tried to find the right words, but forming them was like seizing smoke. My own heart was beginning to lurch; there was a kind of buzz in my ears, and once more I thought of my mother, in the few months before she died; the feverish look and sound of her as she huddled against me on the bed of some anonymous boarding-house or hotel room, with the air conditioning making that same distant buzzing sound, and my mother saying:
‘What about it,chérie? I’ve never seen the Southern Cross. What about Australia? New Zealand? The Whitsunday Islands?’
My mother carried maps in her head the way I carried recipes. Both impossible, of course: those distant lands as exotic as the spicytaginesandlaksasandcallaloothat I had only seen in books, or in the menus of restaurants that we could never afford to try. And still she kept making plans, even when she could hardly walk: the Virgin Islands, Tahiti, Bora Bora, Fiji. Never mind that she was sick, that we were down to our last centime; that we were living on what I could earn from day to day, waitressing. That defiant spark in her eye – that’s what I saw in Anouk now.
‘What I meant,’ I said, ‘is it – safe?’
Anouk gave me a bright look that was curiously adult. ‘You can’t always be safe,’ she said. ‘Jean-Loup’s lived with that all his life. He knows he could die tomorrow, or he could live to be eighty. No-one knows. That’s why he wants to see the world. Not in a month; not in a year. Butnow. Because now’s all there is.’
‘And what about you?’ I could bear it no more. I already knew the answer.
‘I’m going with him.’
How could she not? The child is in love. She can’t leave him. Love, that eater of hearts, that wind that sweeps away everything we build.
‘Australia?’ I said.
Anouk, whose only wish as a child had been to stay in a place like Lansquenet. Everything was going numb. I felt like the survivor of some tremendous explosion: my retinas still stamped with the blast; my eardrums ringing with the tinnitus of shock.
‘Australia?’ I repeated.
‘Only for a year, at first. There’s Skype, and FaceTime, and email, and—please. Please, Maman. Please don’t cry.’
‘Of course not. It will be an adventure.’
She nodded. ‘We got married,’ she said. ‘Last week, in Paris, at themairie du dixième arrondissement. We wanted to do it quietly. No-one was there, except for two witnesses we’d only just met.’ She paused, set down the chocolate cup, and now I could see the tears in her eyes. ‘Tell me you’re not sad, Maman. Tell me you can be happy for us.’
There’s always a moment after a storm when the wind settles into a gentler routine. It plays at domesticity: it flirts with the clouds in the ringing blue sky; it tugs at the trees like a playful child, promising once more to be good. But this moment of playfulness is when the wind is at its worst. Later, when the promise has been broken like so many before, we tell ourselves:never again. And then, when we think it has taken all that it can possibly take, that tiny thread of hope returns, that this time, maybethis time—
I hug her very tight. I say: ‘Of course I can. I love you, Nanou. If you’re happy, I’m happy.’
‘We took some pictures. Want to see?’
I smile at her. ‘Of course I do.’
The photographs are in a book, a second-hand album no doubt bought on theMarché aux Puces. On the cover, a picture of old Montmartre in its heyday, faded by time; a sky the colour of memories. Inside, she is wearing jeans; a flower crown on her candyfloss curls holding a strip of veil that flies in the wind like a pirate flag. Paper confetti, like blossom, like snow, like the confetti that flew on the day that we came on the wind of the carnival.
I hear my mother’s voice in my mind.Children are only on loan, it says.One day, we have to give them back.My mother never gave me back. My mother chose to leave me instead. I wonder if Anouk will hearmyvoice at the back of her mind. Or will she simply move away into a different orbit?
Her smile in the pictures looks different: a smile that only Jean-Loup sees. Of course, the two of them could not afford a professional photographer. It occurs to me that Jean-Loup will soonbea professional photographer. The boy with the jigsaw heart and my child now interlocked together. Are they not too young? Perhaps. But wasn’tItoo young for a child? And how much older do I feel, twenty-one years later?
I turn the page. Here are some shots of both of them together. Jean-Loup looks taller than I remember; taller, more handsome and much more assured. The awkward teenager I knew has become a fine young man. Beside him, Anouk is a blur; illuminated with laughter and joy. None of these pictures are posed, but I sense the eye of a professional. And then I see a familiar face, half turned away from the camera, her silvery hair caught in movement, cutting into the air like a scythe—
The world stops turning for a beat. Everything begins to fly off.
‘Who’s that?’ I manage to ask.
‘Oh, that’s the tattooist. She was one of our witnesses. We thought it would be cool to get wedding tattoos instead of rings.’
And now she shows me her wrist, and I feel the world come away at the edges. Everything is burning; the sky is ripped apart like paper. A wild rose, as pale as young love, its petals barely unfolding, sends its tendrils down her wrist. The pattern is strangely familiar; its pastel colours shadowing the soft blue veins of her inner arm.
‘Do you like it?’
‘It’s beautiful.’ I do not even have to lie.
‘I’m glad,’ says Anouk, hugging me. ‘I feel like I’ve had it forever.’
