Aubervilliers
‘YOUR APPOINTMENT WAS TWO HOURS ago,’ my parole officer says, pushing the door wide against a stack of empty bottles.
Sunlight floods in behind her, panning across the room like a searchlight. She steps carefully over the stained tiles, taking in the mess all around. ‘Looks like it was some party,’ she says.
I tell her about the break-in and she nods dubiously, then hands me a plastic vial. ‘Make it quick,’ she says, her eyes cold. ‘You’ve already wasted most of my morning.’
When I return from the bathroom, she’s at the table writing her notes. I place the sample in front of her, its warm contents fogging the sides. Usually she bags it quickly, but this time she leaves it there between us as a mark of her contempt.
‘There was a problem with your last sample. You tested positive for morphine.’
‘Morphine?’
She sits back, pointing her pen at the jar. ‘What will it be this time? Cocaine? Cannabis?’
I force a weak smile. ‘What is this, some kind of joke?’
‘Denial just makes things worse, Alex. Drugs are a parole violation, you know that,’ she says.
‘But you test me each week.’
‘And you didn’t show up today.’
‘I slept through.’
She rolls her eyes.
‘This is a mistake,’ I say, but my voice is thin, unconvincing, and my mind races. Did someone spike my drink? The water? But no, that’s not possible – no one’s been anywhere near me.
‘Mistakes on these tests rarely happen,’ she says, ripping out a page and handing it to me. ‘Get a full blood test by tomorrow, at the latest. There’s a clinic opposite the metro. If you go there now they might do it this morning.’
She holds out her key to my flat. ‘And why doesn’t this work?’
‘The locks were changed yesterday, after the break-in. I was going to get a spare one cut for you and bring it today.’ The words come out in a rush, defensive, and she laughs at the blatant lie.
‘You were going to bring a key you don’t have to an appointment you missed? Come on, Alex, don’t just make things up. This is serious.’
She drops the old key on the table, puts the sample in her satchel. ‘So what did they take?’
‘I just said. I haven’t taken anything!’
‘No, I mean your robbers,’ she says, emphasizing your as if they were friends I’d invited in for the night. ‘Computer? Phone?’
‘They didn’t take anything. Not even the TV.’
She surveys the room. ‘So they just broke in and made a mess?’
‘And dumped dead fish on the floor,’ I say, pointing to the tiles where the grout channels are stained a dull pink.
She scans the floor then looks at me sceptically.
‘It makes it worse when you’re like this,’ I say.
‘Like what?’
‘Always suspicious. Never believing me. It’s like I’m on trial again.’
‘I’m not suspicious,’ she says, gathering up her things. ‘I’m careful.’
Outside the sun clouds over, chilling the room, making everything feel disturbed and unfamiliar.
‘I can’t stay here after this,’ I say quietly. ‘Can’t you move me someplace else?’
‘This is a hostel, Alex. It’s not Club Med. You can’t just call reception and ask for a nicer suite’ – she looks out of the window to the darkening towers – ‘a sea view. Something a little further from the lifts.
‘Last time we met you said you were going to speak to your mother. Perhaps she could help,’ she adds cautiously.
‘I haven’t had a chance.’
That was a lie. My mother called the day I got out and sent me some money, which I spent on food and a phone. She promised a weekly amount, but it had been two weeks and no more had arrived. She had two other children now and I was just a messy reminder of a past she’d rather forget. I’d always been an embarrassment, even before I became a criminal, so I knew the money would fade from the agenda, like her promise to visit.
‘Get a job and live wherever you like, which you’ll have to do soon,’ says my parole officer. ‘You need to focus on the future. So far, all you’ve done is obsess about the past.’ She points to the chaos all around, like it’s my past hunkered in around me.
‘Who’s going to give me a job? They see my record, and it’s over. I don’t stand a chance.’
She comes closer, perches on an armchair. ‘We’ve been through all this. There are apprenticeships, programmes, courses you can do.’ The chair wobbles and she bends down, gathering papers about my trial from beneath a leg. She glances through and shakes them at me. ‘Forget all this. Put it aside, you need to get on with your real life.’
‘Real life? And what’s that exactly? Being imprisoned here? Being harassed? Getting my place trashed?’
‘Alex—’
‘Is that the real life I need to be getting on with?’ I say, yelling now. ‘That stalking charge from Lisa, and now this fake drug test! I’m being watched all the time. Followed and chased.’
‘You need to stop all this travelling into Paris—’
‘How do you know where I’ve been?’
‘Stop digging around in the past.’
‘Have you been tracking me?’
She leans forward. ‘I’ve been listening to you. Every time we meet there’s a new crisis. There’s always somebody following you, chasing you. There’s always someone out to get you. It’s time to move on.’
It was pointless to talk of moving on. It’s like there’s this force pulling me back. Each time I start to break free, it’s there, tugging at me, and the more I struggle, the more it tightens.
‘Look,’ I say, pulling up my shirt to show the eczema on my back, then revealing my forearms. ‘It hasn’t been this bad since I was a kid. This place – all the stress, these new problems – have brought it back. Even in prison it wasn’t like this.’
She sighs. ‘I noticed that on your arms last week. But listen, burglaries happen around here all the time. It doesn’t mean they were after you. Maybe someone heard you’d just moved in.’ She stands and smiles, places her hand on my shoulder. ‘Even after your years in prison you still look like a rich kid, perhaps they thought you’d have some valuables. There are other explanations, Alex. It’s not always about the past.’
‘What’s it about, then, since you know everything?’
She looks around the flat. ‘Well, the place has been torn apart.’ She nods towards the kitchen. ‘There’s no need to trash cupboards like that. So what were they after?’
‘No idea. Somebody did this to scare me.’
‘But why? Why would someone want to scare you?’
‘It’s like they want me back inside.’
She walks to the window, then turns. ‘It’s hard being released after so long inside. I know you still hold a lot of guilt about the past. Maybe that’s what you’re feeling.’
There’s a cold shifting in my stomach, a tightening in my throat.
‘It’s understandable, this anxiety. While you were in prison, you had a routine, you were focused on the future, on getting out. Now you’re outside, you’re forced to confront the things you left behind. Freedom can be hard to accept,’ she says. Her voice is low and patronising as if she’s explaining something to an imbecile.
‘I feel watched and followed. Not guilty,’ I say, but she’s right. Guilt about my father, and about blaming Sami hollowed me out. It overwhelmed me. Freedom means nothing if your conscience is still locked up.
‘So, who’s watching you? Who’s following you?’
I stare at her for several seconds. Sami’s the only person who hates me that much – the only person who has a good reason, anyway. And the fish guts.
‘Don’t be so gutless,’ I whisper. One of the last things Sami said to me.
‘What did you say?’ she says.
I just shake my head. I can’t tell her any of that. Bringing him up will just make things worse – it would feel like another betrayal.
*
Later that morning, my aunt arrives for our trip to the storage depot to collect my old things. Everything I packed in a hurry before I went into prison. I figure if I haven’t missed something in seven years, then I don’t need it, but she insists, saying it’s time to face up to it.
Face up to what? To the reality that the life those boxes hold is lost and gone forever? Well, I got used to that a long time ago, and sorting through that old crap won’t help. I tell her it’s a waste of time, but she says someone needs to collect it all and she won’t do it alone.
I wait in the car park, hoping she’s forgotten, but she arrives on time and on the way there she chats about her job and her recent holidays. Her calm voice relaxes me, and I tune out, knowing she won’t ask questions to check I’m listening. My father would often laugh at her cheerfulness, saying she was pathologically optimistic, as though her positivity was a kind of illness. Like him, I used to find her chat annoying – just white noise filling the air, but now it’s soothing. She deals with adversity by not dwelling on it, by not teasing out the threads and staring into its dark heart. That doesn’t make her stupid – she just feels its throb and moves on. It would have made her a bad journalist, but luckily for her she became a teacher.
She’s optimistic about me, too, never letting on she doubts me, even when I tell her blatant lies and stories about my father that I know she likes hearing. When we talk about him together, it’s like we play a game where we reconstruct the past with only good memories – holidays at my grandfather’s place, trips to the beach, and Christmases together when I was small. I play along, rearranging the facts until we build a fantasy of the family she lost and inhabit it together.
It’s sad that the person convicted of killing her brother is the only family she has left, and I wonder if she sees the irony of that. I don’t know, but despite everything that’s happened, there’s no trace of the fear I saw in Elena’s eyes, or the weary suspicion of my parole officer. Béa believes in me because she wants to, and that kind of faith amazes me. I’m grateful for it, but sometimes all this pretence feels thin, it gets exhausting, and I wonder whether my father was right, and that optimism is a weakness after all.
To tell you the truth, her belief in me is unsettling. There’s a weight to it that requires something of me, something I can’t provide, and I often think it’d be easier if she just blamed me. At my trial, people like May, and Paul Chambière gave evidence about the difficult relationship between my father and me, citing arguments in the months leading up to his death. When it was Béa’s turn to speak, she hardly acknowledged any of it. It’s as if she has her own version of the past, bullet-proofed and shielded from attack. Testimony that chipped away at my father’s reputation seemed to make her sadder than the fact I was on trial for his murder. At the end of the day, her rose-tinted memories are as much of a fantasy as the lies made up in court.
I look over, nodding at something she’s just said, even though I didn’t hear it. She glances back, and I get a shock because she looks a lot like my father. Now she’s old, her features have sagged into his, and she wears her grey hair cropped short at the back, like he did. She has his fine, papery skin and the same purplish shadows under her eyes, like old bruises that refuse to heal.
To offset these looks, she wears a lot of make-up. Glancing at her now I see this strange, painted image of my father peering at me from beyond the grave. His sad eyes rimmed with black liner, and his gaunt, powdery face smeared with rouge.
‘I know this isn’t what you want to do,’ she says softly as we pull off the Péri, mistaking my shudder for anxiety about the trip.
‘Let’s just get it over with. We can dump it in a skip or something,’ I say, as we drive past the building sites, through a grey wasteland of corrugated warehouses and fulfilment centres.
She looks over at me, shocked.
‘I just want to get rid of it all. I can’t even remember packing it,’ I say.
That’s not true – I remember the cop who stood outside my door as I packed the things I was allowed to take to prison, and tipped the rest straight into those boxes. I recall the heat on that surreal June morning, the acrid smell of road tar from the works outside. Béa and my mother moved around each other cautiously, Béa going through my father’s things while my mother, dressed in black, went tearfully between us, speaking in low tones on her phone. The situation was a nightmare in which she had a starring role, and my father’s death was something that had happened to her, not to him.
*
The storage facility is beside an underground car park, and we walk along a narrow corridor flanked with padlocked doors, lit by buzzing strip lights, and smelling of damp, forgotten things. The attendant leads us into a small storage room and points to a flatbed trolley we use to take everything to the car.
We fill the car with boxes until we can’t see out of the back, then drive in silence against the flow of traffic. The cheerful mood from before has gone, and the ghost of my father crouches in among the crates, his presence looming over us, as dark and fathomless as one of his black moods.
My aunt still lives in the building next to our old apartment, and my stomach flips as we swing into the narrow street. We leave the boxes in the car and head upstairs, my aunt ushering me into her small dining room. It’s the first time I’ve been here since my release and my father’s old furniture is all around. It looks out of place, as though the room has twice the number of things it needs.
She sees me looking as she lays the table. ‘All this furniture is yours whenever you want it, you know. I’m just keeping it here until it finds a home.’
‘I was thinking about the rest of his stuff. Where it went.’
‘Most of his clothes I gave to charity shops, other things to friends like Patrick and Elena. I kept his favourite books, and the more personal items, of course.’
‘You know Patrick died recently?’ I say, when she returns from the kitchen.
She eyes me carefully. ‘Yes, I went to his funeral.’
There’s a pause as if she’s considering whether to continue. ‘Actually, he came here quite a bit. He spent some time looking through Eddy’s things,’ she says. ‘In the weeks before he died.’
‘What things?’
‘His old papers and notebooks.’
‘You have his papers?’
My interest startles her. ‘They’re down in the cellar. I haven’t been there for months, not since Patrick died, in fact.’
‘Why was he looking at them?’
‘I ran into him in the street and for some reason, we started talking about Eddy’s papers. I said I couldn’t bring myself to go through them, so he offered to do it. He even apologised for not offering sooner.’
She shrugs. ‘He thought it would take a couple of days, but he was here for several weeks. I set him up with a desk, a radiator, gave him his own key. We often had lunch together.’
‘For weeks? Why so long?’
‘I don’t know. I was just happy for the company, to be honest. At one point he told me it was a puzzle. “It’s all a big puzzle, Béa. I’ll tell you once I’ve worked it out myself.”’
‘Can I go down there? I want to see what he was looking at.’
‘It’s too late now,’ she says, pushing her plate aside. ‘The spare room’s made up. Stay here tonight, and I’ll take you down tomorrow.’
My heart pounds at the thought of looking through my father’s stuff, and I’m not sure whether it’s excitement or dread, seeing his notebooks and papers sorted and ordered by another dead man.