Beni and the Kids, Part II

There was a barman at Le Paris who had been fired over thirty times. He was called Jamel and he was second-generation Algerian: face gutted with acne scars, Kangol cap, fifty euro patent brogues. Sofi didn’t like him.

‘Ça va, meuf?’ he said to her as she wiped down the bar one late summer, late afternoon. ‘T’es délicieuse, toi. J’oublie.’ I forget. ‘Un milkshake. Fraise. Et mets du vodka.’

Beni couldn’t get rid of Jamel because he owed him so much money. He would come in with a friend who had gold teeth and a shaved side-parting and they’d eat lamb tagine out of takeaway foil and drink straight spirits from behind the bar.

‘Beni and Alessio owe me thousands,’ Jamel told Sofi this particular day, looking at her hair as if he might touch it. He had a cigarette behind his ear, and a toothpick in his mouth, which he dislodged from one tooth and passed with his tongue to another. ‘Allez. Just give me twenty from the till.’

Sofi said she couldn’t, that it would get docked from her pay. Honestly, man, I already have nothing.’

When Sofi had first met Jamel, she’d taken the piss out of his cap, but since then, there’d been rumours of a shooting or stabbing – something bad he’d been involved with, or done. It was hard not to tread more lightly after that.

‘Honestly,’ she said again. ‘Look at my shoes. I’m like Julia Roberts. I have to colour them in with a marker.’

Jamel ordered a steak and asked for it bloody. When Sofi was washing up, leaving her watch and bracelets on the bar, Jamel grabbed them and ran out, the greased bones from his tagine kicked all over the floor.

‘That little shit!’ Beni said when she told him. ‘I’ll kill him.’ But Sofi wasn’t allowed to tell the police because of all the money Jamel was owed. ‘You’re getting new ones – a new watch. We’ll sort it out between us.’

‘It was only from Argos,’ she said.

‘I’ll get you a better one. I’ll get you the best there is.’

He spoke certainly, comfortingly, like thick bread.

Beni promised to take a few of the kids to a Paul Simon concert too – a day trip to Bercy; Sofi would finally see Paris – but that didn’t happen either.

*   *   *

There were good days, bad days, days with fierce blazes of both. The only other time Sofi cried was after Pip had been in to see her. She had disappeared during evening service, and Arthur the Cornish king found her smoking a spliff in the doorway of the African hairdresser’s opposite.

‘Your eyes are raining,’ he said, then coughed, embarrassed.

‘Your English is worse than mine,’ she told him. ‘Sorry. This is yours.’ She offered him back the joint. ‘I jacked it from your pocket.’ She had a bottle of whisky at her feet.

‘Who was that guy?’ he said. He’d wanted to ask this.

This question seemed to make Sofi sadder.

‘Old boyfriend?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘No, not really. Just someone I used to know.’

Arthur helped her up, and she told him she didn’t know why she couldn’t stop crying. She put a finger on his tattoo as if she thought that might help. Triangles, she thought. The world’s not round at all. Everything always ends up in triangles.

His shaven head shone brown-gold in the streetlight. He had a short white scar on his hairline and he wrapped strong, chalky arms around her. She felt then, that even if her legs fell loose, she would still be standing. That was the first time they kissed.

*   *   *

After the second winter in the snow dome, Sofi had to leave. She was getting calls every day from Crédit Mutuel, and from Bouygues, the phone company she could never pronounce. Before the calls stopped, she phoned home. Her dad said her mum would be happy to have her back, that it worried her what Sofi’s life was like there. He did what dads do and passed the phone to his wife. Sofi told her mum that she was sad, and that she’d probably never get to Paris now. Her mum said she thanked God every day that her daughter had never made it to the Moulin Rouge.

By then, Beni had lost his spot in his corner. He came in less now, once a week maybe, and didn’t stay for booze or breakfast. The grapevine said he was fighting with Alessio, or suicidal, perhaps both, no one really knew. He never answered his phone any more. Sofi sent him a message saying she was leaving, and that she needed her money. She said she missed him, and the Beatles. She said she hoped he was all right.

Four days later, Beni called on the tinny work phone.

‘Throw yourself a goodbye party in the restaurant. Invite all the kids. I’ll come, and I’ll get you your money. On my honour, girl, I’ll get you your money.’ The reception was so bad she could hardly hear him.

The party got out of hand. They smoked inside and made Long Island iced teas with far more than four spirits. They ate whole-fish-long panels of smoked salmon out of the fridge, and people kissed in the kitchen. When the day-sleepers from the port tried to come in – a beat woman in a miniskirt and a man she’d found – they gave them a crate of Beni’s beer and then locked them out, so it was only the kids. Someone wrote Sofi a goodbye card, liquid eyeliner on napkin. Arthur held her, arms round from behind, and showed her that on the fifteenth step, on tiptoes – careful – you could look through buildings and see a tiny, bright slice of the Le Havre sea. Months and months, all those windows, she had run up and down the stairs and thought she had seen everything. But some things you don’t get until right at the very end.

Beni never came, so she never saw him again. They kept drinking; drinking to him, ironically and not ironically, they drank from bottles. Glasses were broken.

Around midnight, Beni called her.

‘Kid,’ Beni said. ‘The ketchup.’

‘What?’ she said. ‘Are you here?’ Phone to her ear, she did a full circle. She looked for him.

‘Far away,’ he said. ‘Ketchup, look behind the ketchup.’

No one knew how Beni did it, because only one week later, Le Paris shut down. Bailiffs arrived and took everything from the inside, including the sinks.

But that night, behind the ketchup, he’d left her an envelope. Brown, addressed to no one. He left all that he could in her hands.