Chantale told me a cousin of hers might want English lessons. I was getting desperate; I pestered her to persuade them.
– You’re worried about money? You never used to be.
– But it’s running out and I have to move into a hotel in a few weeks, Chantale. I want to stay in Paris.
There was more to it than that. Any day now I would have to ring home to arrange a transfer. The conversation would inevitably lead to a justification for this, and as often as I rehearsed it in my head I couldn’t find one.
We climbed the avenues on the steep side of Père Lachaise, hunched into our coats against the wind. The stark beauty of the cemetery always cleared my head. The spread of tombs below us, grey and continuous, reminded me of a village. Some of the graves we passed had disintegrated to rubble, some were decorated with sculptures of the dead person, or demons from other worlds, or relief carvings highlighted by grime. There was a grave of a French poet I’d never heard of that featured a sculpture of him with an erection. Chantale told me enamoured women visited this grave regularly and attached themselves to the sculpture. There were family tombs the size of small houses with plaques at their entrance listing the names of all who resided within.
– Does your family have a tomb? I asked Chantale.
– No. Tombs are expensive in Paris, like real estate. Does yours?
– My mother’s family does.
My parents were old enough to be my grandparents; their parents were long dead, as were most of their brothers and sisters. My mother’s sister was a misanthrope who’d spent the last twenty years of her life in a run-down house full of cats. Every stray that passed she took in. When she died she left half her money to the RSPCA and the other half to her nieces and nephews because she hardly knew us.
– They shouldn’t have put my aunt in it, I said, she hated her parents but they buried her with them anyway.
– Yes, and my mother liked her parents, but I don’t think there’s any room left.
A leaf the colour of rust wafted down in front of me. Soon the plane trees would be bare. The sun emerged briefly and the avenue we walked down glowed with fallen leaves. Then the sun disappeared and again we walked in shadow.
– All these family tombs. I waved my hand. Imagine all the feuds buried in them, simmering away beneath the earth. I think families are just a disparate bunch of individuals who end up together by chance, and they’re stuck with each other till they die. It’s depressing.
– I don’t feel stuck with my parents, now they’ve left Paris, said Chantale.
– No no, I agreed. Me neither, considering mine are on the opposite side of the world.
Chantale said nothing. She kicked a stone all the way down the hill, singing to herself. I told her if you skewered our planet through Paris, you would come out at Tonga, so Sydney was not quite the opposite side of the world. Chantale had never heard of Tonga.
The trees near the exit were dark as cooking chocolate, making me long for the warmth of Bar Piaf.
We sipped our hot chocolate and watched the street.
– Your accent’s changing, Sophie. Tu parles plus clairement, she enunciated. C’est posh.
– Posh? I said in surprise.
– Like just before, when you were talking to the waiter, you say, Oui, merci.
Pulling her lips back, she pronounced it ‘wee’, as opposed to the more laid-back ‘way’. She did it again and I laughed with embarrassment.
– Must be that boy’s mother, Chantale said.
How awful that the Durebex were having such an effect on me; but it was inevitable, as I learnt French only by imitation. I never studied: the sight of a grammar book would bring on a wave of nausea, and although I liked French I retained an arrogant preference for my own language. It was normal that my speech reflected whomever I spent time with. Just the other day, in a moment of frustration as I pulled stockings on my damp legs, I had caught myself making one of Laurent’s favourite sounds – a brusque, guttural sigh. He made that sound constantly when he was doing his homework.
But my accent, my voice, had always elicited comment, even when the only language I spoke was Australian.
It was to my mother that I owed my patterns of speech: prissy, clipped, so correct that many mistook me for English. Me, with my genetic antipathy for the English. I have a sibilance that my mother never managed to eradicate, an irritant to her still.
Teaching Laurent composite numbers, I sidestepped the landmine of ‘sixth’.
– Fifth.
– Fiff.
– … Après?
– Six.
– Sixss.
My mother studied to be an actor, but marriage then children overtook her life. She used to give speech and drama lessons at the church hall. My father didn’t think she should tire herself out, six children to work for as well. But she insisted upon it, she enjoyed it. Sometimes I had to meet her there after school. I would stand against the back wall, paralysed with embarrassment, watching my mother enunciate and gesticulate. Her back was always straight, her feet placed one slightly in front of the other, in a split V. I couldn’t help standing like that as well. I still do.
I would go and lie on the oval behind the hall and dream of becoming a prima ballerina, or loiter around the shops. There was a Greek milk bar I went to, breaking the school rules by being in my uniform. While the man filled a bag with bulls-eyes and snakes, my left hand would creep up to the counter then back down – wrapped around a Cherry Ripe – and into my pocket.
My mother studied to be an actor and accepted the role of mother; her daughter never studied anything and was determined to act upon it.
These hands have become my mother’s – sturdy, veiny, the hands that paid for my hot chocolate in Bar Piaf, the hands that snatched Laurent’s comic from him in that afternoon’s battle.
– Sit down. We’re doing a dictation.
– Wut?
– I’m only repeating the words once.
– I said WUT?
– And I’m not speaking in French. At all.
Laurent leaned across the table, tense, apprehensive, a greyhound in the barricades.
– On Saturday Mrs Smith went to buy a new dress. It was expensive, but—
Suddenly Laurent bent forward, as though he had something important to tell me. I looked up, ready to receive it. He screamed a sneeze in my face. A yellow gob landed on his exercise book. I fought to suppress my mirth and disgust, but he had seen. He picked up the gob and took it over to the Persian rug. He placed it carefully in the centre then rubbed it in with his heel, grinning at me.
I droned on.
– It was expensive, but this was a special day. Laurent was strutting about the room, singing. He stopped, concentrated, then discharged a rapid fire of burps. They sounded alarmingly watery. A look of genuine contempt crossed my face. I held onto it warily, as onto a loaded gun.
With a disappointed sigh, Laurent came back to the table.
I felt a bit disappointed too. Laurent would have made a good playmate, but I had to work with him, and combining the two wasn’t possible.
Mme Durebex called me up to the kitchen before I left.
– I’ve just been speaking to another friend who wants somebody to teach her children English.
Finger to the corner of her mouth, she watched me.
– I underquoted you before, I said arrogantly, I should charge seventy.
She took a step backwards.
– Okay, okay, I’ll tell her.
I wasn’t going to let Mme Durebex walk all over me.
I went to the toilet before I left that evening. As usual, I used Laurent’s bathroom downstairs.
The door opened.
– I’m in here! I called brightly.
Mme Durebex walked in on me.
It’s practically impossible to stop pissing once you’ve started. I certainly couldn’t. Mme Durebex opened the cupboard above my head and got out a couple of towels. Dumbfounded, I clutched my toilet-paper and waited for her to leave. I thought of Nora, pissing with the door open at my going-away party, pissing with the door open anywhere, or in full view in laneways, any time.
Mme Durebex came back in immediately with a book. I had no spare hand to take it. She put the book on the sink, glancing at my spread thighs.
– Here. I’ll leave this with you. It’s a book Laurent’s English teacher gave him today.
Where was my sister now that I needed her? Where did she learn to walk around the house naked while the rest of our family never really got over our body shame? But if Nora were me, here, now, she would have invited Mme Durebex to stick her head in the toilet, not just in the toilet door.
Mme Durebex turned again on her way out.
– And Shona, I’d like you to decide by the end of the week whether or not you’re coming to the Alps with us for Christmas.