Silence was all I heard when I put money into a phone at Place de la Bastille. I tried the next phone, and the next. Then there were four card phones in a row. I went almost the whole way around the Place before I found a pay phone that worked, and then I rang the only Sydney number I remembered. I had some coins left in my pocket, but I couldn’t resist. I rang reverse charges. My father’s voice was so close it made me jump.
– Elliotts!
My father hated answering the phone. He would never answer if my mother was there. I apologised, then I asked him for the addresses of Nora and Matthew. His voice became measured and cold.
– Now, you’ve probably forgotten about things like this, Siobhan, but there is a purgatory you know, and you’ll go there. And I’ll tell you what: you’ll really cop it.
– What have I done?
It was probably the reverse charges that had set him off. Or, even worse, Matthew’s name. He never could cope with the living together. Masochistically, I just kept stoking the fire, the cold fire of my father’s anger.
– Listen to me, my girl, I got on the blower about your friend’s number last time you rang. I spoke to several rather unhelpful people and finally tracked it down. I had it to give you, but you didn’t ring. You wait for a week before you ring back, and now I’ve gone and lost the goddamn thing.
– I was moving, Dad.
– And I’m late to mass, because every time I try to leave the house the bloody phone rings!
My father swearing. Such a wicked sound, it brought a smile to my face. Was he being serious? Into the curve of my smile tears were running. I felt sick. Down the wire, all that distance, came a screeching of cockatoos. I was there in the hallway: out the window would be a big summer sky over the garden. Seven o’clock, warm dusk, soon the crickets would take over from the cicadas. Maybe it was storm clouds on the harbour making the cockatoos come up from the bush, raucous and restless. If Dad turned he would see all this. But he would be looking at his feet, pacing on the spot, holding the phone with one hand and picking at the sunspots on the crown of his head with the other.
– I didn’t want to put you to any trouble, Dad. Can I just speak to Mum? Please? Is she there?
– She’s out. So cop that!
I hung up, hating him.
I walked around the Place. Sunlight was leaking through thin cloud and the snow underfoot had turned to slush. I meandered through the ants’ nest of back streets until I came to Rue du Faubourg de St Antoine. It was close to midday, the markets were finishing, and there was a crowd to rival the métro in peak hour. I walked among the people, a spectator, not intending to buy. The traders were selling furiously, singing prices, hands flying over produce, rearranging, piling up; a fruiterer had packed a bag of golden apples and thrust it to me and I was handing over money before I knew what was what. I wandered past the trucks and the crates stacked high alongside them, jammed with wilting fruit and vegetables. Old women in raincoats sorted through debris in the gutter for anything decent that had been overlooked.
I went to buy eggs and unwittingly joined the front of the queue. An old woman next to me grumbled. I excused myself and made for the back but the boy was giving me eggs, protesting to the woman.
– But she’s my sister!
– Oh? Your sister?
– Yes.
– Well, at my age—
– Mais c’est la famille! The family comes first, said the boy, winking at me.
I smiled back. I wanted to throw the eggs at him.
I went to a café just behind Bastille and had a coffee and a tartine. I bought the paper and my eyes moved across it, my hands turned its pages, but when I folded it up I didn’t know what I’d read. In what world were these people in the café, staring out at the street, talking to their companions, eating omelettes? I was in my own world. I was in Sydney, in my parents’ dining-room. I was in Paris, chipping out a niche for myself, I was in La Rotonde near Place de la Bastille, but I couldn’t get away from my own thoughts.
I paid and went back to my hotel room. Still hungry, I made myself a Vegemite sandwich with the last slices of pain de mie. In all the time I’d been away from Australia, I’d never been without Vegemite. A new jar would arrive from my mother when I was still scraping out the old. The French didn’t understand Vegemite. Chantale spread it thickly, like Nutella. Then she spat it out, saying it tasted like medicine.
Vegemite did not translate.
And there is no word for mie in English. Go and look in your dictionary. You will find ‘soft part of the bread, bread with crusts removed’. A pretty lengthy explanation for a three letter word, don’t you think?
I sat at the window with my sandwich and my journal, waiting for words. Behind the rooftops the sky was now a flat chilly blue. The Sunday painter on the top floor opposite had begun on a third window. All down the slate roof he dripped white paint. I thought jealously of how big his apartment must be. A clochard picked through garbage in the impasse below. It was impasse des Trois Soeurs, I noticed for the first time.
I had two sisters, together we were three. I might have had three, there might have been seven children. I am a superstitious person. I am a firm believer in symbols, though I don’t always recognise their meaning. Six is meant to be an evil number, and seven a lucky one. On a bad day I say there are six children in our family. On a good one I say my mother had seven children.
I had to get away, I was away, I could not get away.
Hours had passed. I would take my chances and try my mother at home.
She answered almost straightaway. I felt a twinge of regret that it was me paying for the call this time.
– Dad was so rude to me, I said dolefully.
Mum told me Dad had broken his arm. The left. She said he was in pain. Old bones don’t heal so easily. She said he couldn’t work and that was why he was feeling so irritable.
There was a pause. I wondered why he hadn’t told me. I wondered if I’d asked him how he was.
– That’s terrible, I said.
My mother’s voice became lofty and sharp.
– Yes indeed, I do think you could give him the benefit of the doubt, Siobhan. You’re so hard sometimes.
– He is.
– Well, don’t be so sensitive.
– You are!
My mother and I listened to our silences. A sigh wafted through hers – a sigh of pain, it sounded like to me. My father was not the only one in pain. Already there was a queue waiting for the phone. A man in checked trousers, probably an American tourist, blew on his hands, not taking his eyes off me. Two girls wondered loudly why I was taking so long if I wasn’t even talking. I was waiting for my mother to.
This distance was not just geographical. Why, as more time passed, did we only become more strange to one another? I wished I knew what to say apart from the cursory requests for addresses and money. I wished she could find the words to tell me more than what was written in her French impressionists address book, to ask me more than what the weather was like and how work was going.
All day in my hotel room I had conversations with myself, and I acted out the parts of others. I did not copy reality. Reality was cold, reality was lifeless. I understood what had attracted my mother to the theatre.
But she hadn’t learnt her lines this time.
She said she had to go. I could hear the kettle whistling. I motioned to the people waiting that I would soon be finished. Mum reminded me to ring her friend Libby.
– Every little contact helps, Siobhan.
I still had a handful of coins when we rang off. I went to a pay toilet across the road. I put one franc in the slot, the door slid open. I stepped inside and the door slid shut. I was used to pay toilets but retained an irrepressible fear that one day I would be trapped in one. The light came on, muzak trickled out of a box overhead, and I sat on the toilet.
I looked at the line of digits that would reach Nora in Mexico City. I went back to the phone box and waited my turn in the cold slushy street. What an orgy of international calls. Each left me a little dissatisfied, wanting more. The rapid pips of connection echoed my heartbeat. At the other end the phone was dropped, and then I heard Nora’s sleepy voice.
– Oh, she groaned, you woke me up. I went to a tequila party last night.
Suddenly the letter I would be posting tomorrow seemed sad and nasty. I blurted the conversation with Dad. It sounded hysterical. For response I got a gale of laughter, husky with sleep and cigarettes. Nora thought it was the other sort of hysterical.
– Purgatory! He’s like someone from another planet.
Pleading for her to stop laughing, I couldn’t help laughing myself. She said I must be premenstrual.
– It’s not hormones, Nora! Don’t trivialise it.
– Listen, you’ll feel better when you find somewhere to live.
– I feel like I’m never going to.
– Find a boy and move in with—
I hadn’t noticed the light flashing; the line went dead. I hung up the phone and tried to invent the rest of the conversation. Where would I find this boy? Could Nora have told me? I walked back to the hotel, adrenalin pumping, hearing her laughter. She had the right idea, she sounded so free. The windows of the boulevard cafés gleamed, people were coming out for a taste of good weather. Shutters were being opened on the sagging façades of the old artisan workshops I passed, and the last wisps of cloud were shrinking back towards Belleville. I passed Impasse des Trois Soeurs and went into the hotel.
The patronne came to the doorway, a beauty spot of chocolate mousse on her smiling top lip.
– Il fait beau?
– Oui, il y a du soleil.