Aubervilliers, 18 June
MY ROOM HOLDS THE AFTERNOON heat, and outside it’s all sky – vast and blue with threads of pink cloud where the sun burns fat and gold on the horizon. Pollution swells at ground level like the city’s last exhalation. The haze softens and blurs in a grey mirage that shifts and glimmers in the light.
Twelve storeys below on the Péri, an ambulance shrieks above the roar of diesel engines as they grind through the gears. To the south, at the edge of the fort, the Ligne Rouge building sites sit a mile apart, each one surrounded by a scar of cleared ground. The half-finished hulls of apartment blocks lie open and exposed, like the ribcage of some giant beast. Scores of cranes crowd in, their jibs like beaks, pecking and guarding the carcase.
The sun drops, bulging on the skyline, drenching everything in orange light, and it’s like the city is on fire around me. The wind picks up, and the windows shudder as I turn from the view.
*
A backpack’s best when you’re on the run, something that won’t slow you down. I’ve kept it light for the trip south to a place I can wait until the story’s published without fear of what they’ll do. A change of clothes, a sleeping bag and waterproofs with money sewn into the lining.
I’ve stacked my father’s stuff against the wall for my aunt to collect once I’m gone. She’ll keep it safe until things die down, when I’ll return to make sure Sami’s released.
I’ve been back to his lawyer, expanded my statement and handed over my father’s wallet, too. I had it with me on Christmas Day at my aunt’s all those years ago, and I hid it at the back of a cupboard. It was still there after all this time, underneath a floorboard, wrapped tight in a plastic bag. If Sami’s right then it’s stained with his blood, not my father’s, and so now it’s evidence that will help him.
There are pictures of my father taped along the wall. Photos at work, with friends, with me, with my aunt. I peel them off one by one and stack them on the desk. The paper’s crisp and warped, colours faded by the sun.
I look at his face in the photos, remembering the times I scanned it for my likeness, and the relief I felt at seeing none. But even then, beneath the relief, there was always something murky and unexplained: why didn’t I resemble him?
It was a question I never asked, perhaps because I always knew. Maybe I guessed long ago, tapping into some intuition at a deeper level, like those frequencies of sound only dogs can hear. Or perhaps I just want to believe I wasn’t as easily fooled as him.
And what about him – how far was he fooled? He knew I wasn’t his son, but did he know whose son I was? Did he look at my face the way I did his, repulsed by my bushy brows and dimpled cheeks, and repulsed for a reason? Or was that the kind of thing that only came to him in nightmares?
I think of our fights, of the times I said I hated him. He must have wanted to tell me then. What a punchline it would have been – so how did he resist? But he never let on. Not once in any of his booze-fuelled rants did he succumb to the urge to hurt me like that. I was a complicated puzzle he hadn’t chosen and I feel the shame of it now. How unworthy I was of his restraint.
I look at that photo of us together – his hand on my shoulder, my pixelated face leaning into his on that sunny afternoon a lifetime ago. We look like friends sharing a joke, the way it should be. It was the newspapers’ favourite because we seemed so ordinary, so out of place beside the twisted story of the son who killed his father. If it happened to him, it could happen to you, the picture said.
I wonder if they’ll use it now to sell the papers once again.
I replace the picture and step back from the window. They say photos are memories and it’s true – they keep hold of a lot, but they hide secrets too. And some photos aren’t memories at all. They’re just evidence of lies you’ve been told.
*
The photo I saw at Elena’s this morning revealed a lie, too. She’d arranged her life across the ledges of her sitting room, the colours gradually bleeding into recent photos, so you could almost date them by the intensity of the light. Sepia pictures of her and Patrick on their wedding day, baby shots of Nathan and bright family portraits.
Lurking in amongst it all was that photograph of my parents. A once-sunny morning, now a grainy image in a dusty frame, hidden in the shadows of her shelves. I kept getting drawn back to it until finally something shifted and fell into place.
My parents are in a convertible car with the roof and windows down. The car is stationary, but my father’s at the wheel, staring straight ahead. My mother is young, while the others are quite a bit older. She’s in the passenger seat, smiling and leaning against the door, her arm resting on the ledge. Her hair is loose, flowing over her face like she’s just turned to the man standing at her side who’s bent over the car, whispering in her ear. He has his hand on hers, out of sight of my father, and something passes between them that only lovers share.
I was studying the photo at Elena’s this morning as she spoke about my father and Jean-Marc. In the picture, my father looks concerned, like he’s scanning the road for danger. Paul and Céline are standing next to the car, and Elena and Patrick are in the back. Elena can see the lovers holding hands and is close enough to catch what they’re saying.
When I saw them together like that – my mother and Jean-Marc sharing a moment caught forever, a scene once private now exposed, I knew he was the final piece of the puzzle I’d been trying to solve.
He was good-looking once, like you, Elena had said.
I looked at my father gripping the wheel, his brow furrowed, almost scowling.
‘I don’t resemble my father at all. I never have,’ I said, too quickly. I glanced over, but she’d already looked away.
When I spoke, I meant Eddy, of course, and it didn’t occur to me until later, when I went back to the photo as I was leaving, that she’d meant Jean-Marc. The realisation crept in slowly, but once inside, it grew, cascading around me like fear.
A crawling sensation filled my head as I leaned in and looked closer. When I met Jean-Marc at the Chambières’, I didn’t notice our resemblance, but in the photo, he still has the features that age buries or strips away – all those traces I’d looked for in Eddy but never found. Jean-Marc’s thick, bushy hair that had ebbed to nothing but a monobrow and a moustache by the time we met, sixteen years later. The dimples, too, that would recede into the fat around his face. Seeing him standing there smiling, his hand on my mother’s, was like scraping back sand to reveal my own face. Excavating the past to find the future. Those eyes, that arrogant nose. I stared at the picture for a long time – at my mother and Jean-Marc, wondering if I’d been conceived at that point, or whether that was all to come. I leaned against the bookshelf, stunned by the irony that the only person who understood their secret look was me – the very person they’d kept it from all these years.
But perhaps I wasn’t the only one.
‘You knew it was him, didn’t you?’ I said, eventually.
She sighed. ‘I was never sure.’
‘Not sure, or just didn’t ask?’
‘Of course, I didn’t ask.’
‘And Eddy?’
The ceiling creaked overhead like an eavesdropper shifting position and she reached for the photo. ‘Eddy knew about them, of course. As for whether he knew you were Jean-Marc’s son, I’m not sure. The timing would have been a dead giveaway, but he never let on.’ She glanced out of the window. ‘I think Eddy knew the truth but chose to ignore it.’
I think back to that night at the Chambières’. I wasn’t supposed to be there that weekend. We’d sat next to each other at dinner, and Jean-Marc had asked me about school and girlfriends, like the parody of a real father. How dare he play that role if he knew I was his son.
Eddy, on the other hand, was anxious. At the time, I thought he was worried I’d embarrass him, but now I see it was something much darker.
‘If the timing was right, then Jean-Marc must have known too.’
She raised her eyebrows. ‘Jean-Marc’s able to deny the undeniable. If he doesn’t like something, he’ll bulldoze through it, especially when he’s riding high like he was back then. It’s why he’s been so successful. He can ignore the truth even if it’s staring him in the face.’
‘Like I was that night.’
‘I watched him then. He knew who you were.’
‘But how could he have ignored it all these years? If you know, others must,’ I said.
‘It’s possible. As for Jean-Marc, he’s his own reality. His needs and desires are all that matters. The rest is fiction, something that happens as a backdrop to the main event, which is himself.’
I looked again at the photograph, at Eddy’s worried face as he grips the wheel, skidding along the edge of an uncertain future in which his son would grow to look less like him and more like his boss, his enemy, his murderer.
*
I reached the bus stop at Neuilly late this afternoon, and ran across the bridge, worried that visiting hours had ended. It was warm, and the drone from the Péri merged with the buzz of insects that hung over the water like mist. I paused outside the hospital to straighten my shirt before passing through the entrance security.
The waiting room was more like a gentlemen’s club than a hospital, with its soft light, panelled walls and newspapers on long wooden hangers. I signed the register as ‘Alex Garnier’, surprised at the steadiness of my lying hand, while the receptionist watched over me, and then gave me a pass and directions to his ward. When I saw the date on the pass it didn’t register at first but my legs felt weak as I walked down the corridor on this day that now held the weight of two dates – my birthday, as well as Father’s Day. I walked slowly, wondering whether this was a blessing or a double warning. I tried to compose my face for the CCTV, but my soles squeaked on the vinyl floor like the opening yelps of a siren.
The nurse on his ward looked confused when I said my name. ‘I’ve not seen you here before,’ she said, leafing through his notes.
I told her I lived out of Paris and had made a special trip for Father’s Day, then I asked whether his lung infection had improved. Finally, she smiled and closed his folder. ‘His temperature’s eased with the antibiotics, but he’s having trouble breathing.’
‘His asthma. The ichthyosis.’
‘It makes things difficult.’
‘I inherited that from him,’ I said, showing her the scaly patches on my forearms.
At the door to his room, she put her hand on my shoulder. ‘It’s getting late. You shouldn’t stay long.’
‘Don’t worry. I’ll be quick.’
She went in first, checked the monitors and gadgets at his bedside, and then left me there alone. For a while, I stood at the door, taking stock of the sterile room, the background hum of machines and the bedclothes tight as bandages around his body. I closed the door and stepped forward softly.
They’d shaved his moustache and taped an oxygen tube under his nose. Grey stubble shone in the perspiration above his lip, and his face and neck, though thick and fleshy, were damp and very pale. It was as though a thin, whitish film covered his skin, and it glowed with a sickly tinge under the bright fluorescent lights. His body was still, the only movement coming from his mouth and chest, and he didn’t so much breathe as fight for it. Each inhalation was slow and grasping, like he was extracting something from the air, his chest trembling on the rise, and then collapsing with a shudder.
I stood there for a while, making out the landscape that was my real father.
When his eyes opened, they were watery blue like mine but glazed and unfocused, and they strained with the effort to see me. Dried spittle had collected in the side of his mouth, and although he opened his mouth to speak, his voice was just a whisper.
His right arm moved under the sheet, and when his hand appeared, I saw the skin on his palm was cracked and scaly like mine. I had an absurd thought that maybe he was reaching for my hand, but in fact, he was fumbling for his glasses, so I took them from the nightstand and placed them on his face, folding them carefully over his ears.
When he recognised me, he tried to slide his body up and away from me. He looked so helpless that I almost felt sorry for him, but seeing his fear spurred me on, as if it were an endorsement of my plan.
His hand reached for the emergency cord, but I got there first. The tendons in his neck strained as he tried to raise his head from the pillow, but I pushed him down. His forehead was hot, and the terror that caught in his throat made him cough so hard I thought he’d do the job himself.
I leaned over with a cup of water from his bedside. His mouth gaped for the drink, and once he’d taken a few gobbling sips, he strained against me.
‘What do you want?’ he said hoarsely.
‘You killed Eddy,’ I said, my voice deep and hollow, unlike my own.
His words were in short supply, but I didn’t need to hear his response. I could see the answer in his eyes, which rolled like those of a captured animal.
‘You destroyed him, and then had him killed when he found you out. And you let me take the blame.’
‘You did that yourself,’ he rasped.
‘And had your thugs harass me. Nick and the others.’
‘Nick’s making sure you don’t make Eddy’s mistakes. You should be grateful. They were never meant to harm you,’ he said, his eyes closing against the weight of the lids. He breathed deeply, his body straining with the effort. ‘Don’t be stupid, Alex. None of this concerns you.’
‘Of course it concerns me! I spent seven years inside for something I didn’t do. And Eddy. He was an old friend and you stabbed him in the back,’ I said, our faces almost touching.
He stared up at me, and I felt a strange contraction in his body, as though he knew the game was up. His lips twitched as he struggled with his breath.
‘I never stabbed him in the back,’ he said, as his eyes blazed. ‘I always got him in the front.’
When I pressed the pillow over his face, his body stiffened. His legs kicked out, so I climbed onto the bed and straddled him, my knees pinning his arms to the mattress, the tight bedclothes doing the rest. It’s not an easy thing to smother someone, but adrenaline lends a fierce kind of power. I was overcome with an unstoppable drive as he thrashed against me, vigorous for an old man. There’s some strength in the old bastard yet, I thought with a flicker of satisfaction at the idea that perhaps I’d inherit that too.
As he struggled, I felt my power pitted against his, mine growing as his waned, each of his convulsions weaker than the last. I was inflamed with rage, stronger than anything I’d felt before, more powerful at that moment than my own urge to live. As I pressed down, I sensed that the fight was almost over, and it was in that moment of racing to meet death head-on, of feeling his life in my hands, on my terms, that suddenly, my anger faded and something else, something stronger, surged through me, creeping up my back like fire.
It wasn’t vindication or the sweet purity of revenge.
It was the edge of a huge emptiness. As if I was flying low over a vast and barren landscape wracked by misery and despair. I removed the pillow from his face, and stood at the end of his bed, stunned by what I’d nearly done, still seething with the adrenaline that almost propelled me to commit the crime for which I’d been falsely convicted. I backed away. How easy it would have been to keep going.
I stood there, my heart thudding and slowly, I felt the desolation and disgust recede, and in its place crept a deep sadness and longing for Eddy.
Jean-Marc meant nothing to me and Eddy meant everything, and I felt the loss of him then as if a blade had just severed him from me, a loss as real and aching as the shame that went with it.
I could never get Eddy or those wasted years back, but killing Jean-Marc wouldn’t get them back either. It would just be assuming the legacy of devastation Jean-Marc intended. There’d be nothing gained from destroying him. It was no more than he’d done himself.
Jean-Marc’s mouth was flaccid, and his tubes hung loose like a dismantled toy. He’d fainted, but he was still breathing, calmer than before, but the breath was there.
Peering into the old man’s collapsed face, I saw the things he’d taken from me – my father, my youth, my sense of myself. And in his face, I saw traces of the things he’d taken from others too – their money, their freedom and the reputations of people like Elena whom he’d drawn into his dark world.
Elena couldn’t stop him, and neither could Eddy or Patrick. You can’t stop people like Jean-Marc, but you can’t be swept along with them either, I told myself as I replaced his tubes, readjusted his head on the pillow and smoothed away the signs of struggle.
I took the TV remote and switched it to his own news channel. His demise would be the first thing he saw when he woke up.
‘You didn’t win this time,’ I said. ‘The story’s out. It’ll be on the news tonight.’
My shoes squeaked as I walked back down the long corridor. Although I hadn’t killed him, the will had been there, and I thought something around me would acknowledge that. The hairs on my neck stood up as if waiting for a shriek from behind me:
That’s him! Stop!
But the nurses just smiled as I passed, then went back to their papers.
I walked through the hospital reception, thinking an alarm would finally sound, that the wind would hammer at the glass, shatter the doors and pin me to the ground until the police came.
But everything was the way it had been and outside, a slight breeze rippled through the trees, making their branches sway and nod in silent approval, if anything.
*
I slip the photo of Eddy and me into the lining of my backpack as orange light slides across the windows of the tower block opposite. The wind rattles the glass against the frame, gently now, a farewell.
And down on the Péri everything’s calm, the traffic quiet as I close the door to my flat behind me.
All this time I’ve been trying to piece the lies together, matching edges to borders, but time moves on, making lies into memories, then fixing the glass and tightening the frame until the picture looks real. Jean-Marc may have been Vestnik, the messenger of lies, but I would deliver the truth of what he had done.
I step out of the lift and the warm night air surrounds me as I walk from the place that’s held my freedom hostage all these months. The past still stalks me, but I can see a way ahead. I know who I am, and I’ll try to start again. The choices I make are mine now.
I can finally say after all these years that I didn’t kill my father. It feels good, and this time, I might just get away with it.