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It’s Saturday morning, so I shake off the dream and hit the brocante market just a stone’s throw from Fabienne’s apartment. With a seminar tour ahead of me, I should be working on Being Sleek, but after yesterday’s emotional rollercoaster – and the dream – I need a cultural antidote.
Place de la Victoire is abuzz with stalls and patrons. Trestles and car boots and rugs on the ground display all manner of second-hand goods. Old gramophones and broken tools, vintage hand basins and costume jewellery, books and vinyl records stacked in boxes, and old clothes mounded on tables. Stallholders chat with their neighbours over cigarettes, ignoring the customers. It’s their negotiation strategy – feigned indifference.
I’m cruising the improvised displays looking for jewellery and scarves – gifts to mail to Gretel and Wanda and Davina, even to Judy if she ever gets off her sick bed and deals with Andrew. At one table I get into a kind of conversation with an old lady who’s fingering trinkets tangled in a box. “Une bonne présentation,” she says to me and chuckles. I’m thrilled because I understand. She’s being ironic – dumped in a box is hardly ‘well-presented’ – but I can only laugh and reply, “Oui.”
As she moves away, I see the ducks: a set of six, each a tiny silver stand that sits beside a table-setting for your cutlery to rest on. I’ll buy them for Nigel and call them mutton-birds. I begin to bargain in my best French but the stallholder lapses into English. We agree on twenty euros, which seems a fair price to me – until the man beams and I’m sure I’ve just been ripped off.
That’s when a movement catches my eye – a woman turning away. A scarf covers her hair, but the face I glimpse behind the sunglasses is ringing a bell. She strides across the square and disappears down the alley towards the artisan quarter. It’s her figure that makes me recognise her. Just like when I photographed her leaving my office. Genevieve.
The man is wrapping my parcel and I won’t leave without it, so it’s an excruciating sixty seconds before I can make chase. I take off across the square and dive into the alley she went down, running all the way to Place Plumereau and looking right and left down each narrow lane. Not a trace of her.
As I hobble on a twisted ankle back to Fabienne’s, I remember that I’ve got form when it comes to being stalked by phantom women. My mind must be turning any French connections into visual tricks. But why am I thinking about Genevieve?
Over a baguette and coffee at the kitchen table, I open the parcel to look at Nigel’s ducks. They’re charming. After I collected his silver spoon that night, he told me about his soft spot for brocante. I rub my fingers over each one, admiring their simple shape and hoping he likes them. Then I drop one as if it’s hot. It’s not a duck. With trembling hands I pick it up and confirm that I’m not imagining it. On my palm is a tiny silver donkey.
The guy in the market must have put it there. Why? He was one duck short and slipped the donkey into the parcel when I was distracted by the phantom of Genevieve? But when I count the ducks there are six. And the donkey makes one more. Seven.
I pace for a while, then Skype Derek. He’ll tell me it’s spooky, that seven is a magic number, that it isn’t a coincidence – and he’ll be right. It’s got something to do with me. I’m the one who found the bloody ducks and bought them. I’m the one who felt compelled to go to see Donkey Skin and related to her plight. Or am I doing what Stella always accuses me of – imagining it’s all about me?
Derek listens to the story of Donkey Skin and makes no comment about the seventh ‘duck’. He’s either sick or he’s up to something. He limps away from the screen and returns with a torn and taped-together photograph. When he holds it up, I see a donkey.
“Why are you showing me this?”
He smirks. “Guess.”
He’s been doing this ever since Davina pronounced I’ve got ‘psychic powers’. But my flashes of intuition don’t come with a guide-sheet.
“Stop trying to make connections where there aren’t any,” I say in desperation. But after another look at the donkey pic, a word leaps out of my mouth. “Shit.”
Derek grins. “Pony up.”
“You mean ‘donkey up’. It’s the picture I tore up, isn’t it? Of the mutton-bird?”
He nods. “The donkey was on the back.” He remembered it from when he taped the mutton-bird back together.
“So it wasn’t the mutton-bird I was collecting. It was the donkey.”
“Looks that way.” He makes his smug expression worse by adding, “Isn’t this fun?”
We don’t have Davina on tap, but Nigel’s at home. Derek’s in his element summarising the Donkey Skin tale for him. But when he starts to expound on the symbolism in the story, Nigel interrupts. “Selkie’s turn.”
I sigh. “Well, the only fairytale I know anything about is the selkie story. And Donkey Skin seems to be about the same thing.”
“How?”
“They’re both about identity theft. And escape.” They listen as I think aloud. “In the selkie story, the man steals her sealskin so the selkie must live with him as his wife. Without her true identity, she’s living in another skin – as a woman instead of a seal.”
Just like the girl called Elkie was trapped in her marriage to Andrew.
“Makes sense,” Nigel says.
“In Donkey Skin,” I continue, “the king wants his daughter for his wife, but that’s not who she is. It would be another form of imprisonment. And abuse. She tries to stop him with impossible gowns, but when he kills his precious donkey at her demand she’s got no choice but to run.”
In last night’s dream, I was trapped in the skin that didn’t fit – a mirror of my years with a family who couldn’t ‘see’ me, who called me Elkie.
“The donkey skin is a false coat,” Derek says, “but in the selkie story the sealskin is her true self.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I like that twist.”
“It’s the job of every offspring to leave home, to not be clones of their parents,” Derek says. “That’s what the story means.”
But my mind keeps worrying away at the fairy godmother in the grotto. I tell myself that the look in her eyes was just a trick of the light. Light that threw shadows like my troglodyte dream.
“The donkey’s one of the seven symbols,” Derek continues. “You’re on a journey, Selkie, and you’re ticking them off one by one. The fruit bowl to keep me out of it, the rock you left behind in Sydney, the Moulin Rouge in Paris. Now Donkey Skin in the Loire.”
“The Moulin Rouge wasn’t destiny, DD. That was you, buying a ticket.”
But Cherry gave me a fresh perspective on home. And the donkey image was in the seven symbols, I just wasn’t aware of it. Its discovery now – after seeing the sound and light show – seems to confirm what DD wants to believe. That I am on some kind of quest, doggedly following the prophecy of my own subconscious even though I have no idea what it is.
***
It’s time to get back to the seminar – something I’ve got control over. But first I check my inbox and find an email. From Genevieve.
I know you saw me. I’m not following you. I’ll explain. Meet me at 3 at the Irish pub in Rue Colbert.
The Irish pub is hard to miss. Its garish facade of shamrocks wraps around the corner of a side street in the pedestrian precinct of Rue Colbert. I get there early, grab an outdoor table and order a beer and a bowl of cacahuètes. As I wait for three o’clock to arrive, thoughts about Genevieve swirl. She really is in Tours. I’m not psychic, just observant. But relief morphs into worry. In her email she made a point of saying she isn’t following me, so what the hell is she doing here, in the very town where I’m running my seminar? It must be more than coincidence, bumping into her in the market like that. And why did she take off when I spotted her? She’s had time to come up with a story.
Into my second beer, she arrives, wearing the same dress as this morning, but the scarf has slipped to her neck. She waves when she sees me, and signals to the waiter for a drink.
“I must have given you a fright,” she says when she sits down.
“Only because you bolted. You looked familiar, but when you took off I recognised you.” Or what I took for her phantom.
She picks at the peanuts in the bowl. She’s got some explaining to do and I’m not going to make it easy. The waiter puts her drink on the table, and fishes the change from his pouch.
“I’m looking for Tony,” she says. “I think he came back to France and I’m going to find him.”
“OK.” Meaning ‘bad idea’. “But France is a big place.”
What she tells me is strange. After losing Alister and hearing about my disappearance, she decided to get serious about looking for Gaston.
“I found a blog called On the Luce. It’s a joke he used to use about himself, before he married me. I think the blogger is him.”
“Is Luce an unusual name in France?”
“Not really.”
“It could be anyone, Genevieve. It’s an obvious play on words.”
And the blogger could live anywhere. Why Tours?
“There’s more. Tony loved to mix French and English. Goofy poems using both languages – franglais. He was good at it, made people laugh. The On the Luce blogger does it too.”
She pulls out a tablet and opens a blog entry. It might be none of my business, but Gaston’s story is nibbling at my edges like a jellyfish. What if he disappeared like I did, but woke up somewhere else and didn’t remember who he was? Just a name on a photocopied passport? Another victim of ‘the curse of Bantry’s Bluff’? “Amnesia only happens in bad movies,” Derek said. But it happens. It’s happened to me.
I shade the screen with my hand. The blogger calls On the Luce a bloglo, which I assume is a French word for blog. I read a few entries in the franglais Genevieve’s talking about. Then I read them again.
A fenêtre and a lune, fenestrating one true trou, oh grand air.
Pain in my heart. Pain at my door. Baguettes à la porte. Any port in this orage. O’rage against my cage.
I don’t understand the poetry but the emotion behind the words is palpable. I close my eyes, trying to zone in on the feelings, and a wave of revulsion envelops me, followed by paralysis. Suddenly I’m rigid in my chair.
Genevieve’s voice brings me back. “Are you OK, Selkie?”
“Fine. Just exhausted. I’ve had a busy couple of days.”
But as I take a slurp of beer, the message is clear. There’s something unhealthy emanating from this bloglo. Is it foreboding...death?
Genevieve resumes her story. “I went through the things Tony left behind. I’d looked before but I wasn’t thinking straight then – I just threw all his stuff in a box. This time I had a proper look and I found a postcard, from someone called Hugo. He never mentioned Hugo to me, and the message is smudged. But the postmark on the card...is Tours.”
A postmark on a postcard and she dropped everything and rushed to Tours. Poor Genevieve. If Gaston really is alive, has he got any idea how much she loves him?
“That just means someone called Hugo was passing through Tours and sent him a postcard,” I say. “It doesn’t mean Gaston’s here.”
“You’re here.”
Bloody hell. She thinks I’m going to lead her to Gaston. She’s gone a bit loopy since she found out we both disappeared from that beach but when a man’s involved, any woman can lose her common sense. And Genevieve’s got a big stake in the outcome.
“I can’t help you,” I tell her. “His disappearance has got nothing to do with me.”
“I know that. It’s just another...coincidence.”
Something makes me look up and see what I missed behind the shamrocks – the name of this pub. Bantry’s Bar. Shit.
“You chose this place on purpose,” I say.
She nods. “I saw it on my way to the market. Then I saw you. It seemed...propitious.”
This revelation calls for another drink. I signal the waiter and consider my predicament. I’m sitting at a table outside Bantry’s Bar talking to Alister’s ex about a string of coincidences linking me to her missing French husband. How did this happen?
“You said you weren’t following me.”
“I wasn’t. I really didn’t know you were even in France.”
“It’s all over my website.”
“Yeah, I saw that when I went looking for your email address. It’s why I ran off this morning. When I saw you in the market, I got one hell of a fright.” She laughs. “You’ll think I’m mad, but I thought you were a ghost.”
She hasn’t asked for my help. She’s content that she’s in the right place – that all the coincidences have lined up to put her in Tours. I don’t tell her that my own convoluted journey indicates things are never that simple.
“What have you done with the twins?” I ask.
“With my sister. She’s out of rehab so she’s looking after them, for a change.”
Rehab from what? Alister was concerned about Genevieve’s emotional state, so I hope her sister is more stable than she sounds. Five-year-old twins are a handful for anyone, but it’s really none of my business.
“I’ve taken a month off work,” she adds.
This is one serious agenda.
“What will you do now?” I ask.
“I’ve already looked in the phone book. There’s no Gaston Luce, but there’s someone called Hugo Luce. He’s got a brocante business – vintage jewellery. That’s why I was at the market this morning. I thought he might have a stall.”
“Call him,” I say. “You’ve got nothing to lose.”
She shakes her head. “My French is terrible. What would I say?”
“Ask him if he’s related to Gaston. I’ll do it. Even I can understand oui or non.”
I pull out my phone, but she stops me. She’s desperate to find her man, but she’s also afraid. The last five years – and the last few weeks – have taken their toll on her.
“It might be another coincidence,” she says. “The wrong Hugo.”
“So you’re just going to hang around the markets, hoping to chance on his van?”
“Don’t look at me like that. This is my mystery, not yours. I’m going to wait. It’s how I want to play it. For now.”
Her passiveness is reeling me in and I repeat her warning to myself: her mystery, not mine.
We kiss each other on both cheeks and wish each other luck. Then we walk down Rue Colbert in opposite directions.