Two hours later we were at the station. I didn’t want to go. Natasha had said Violet was my sister, and I was being pulled back to Mum. I wanted to know if it was true. And I knew that Mum needed me. I felt that somehow I had stolen her strength.
But I was seventeen, and I had never seen Paris. We were all going to die, and anyway I was only going for a few days.
The station was filled with plants. There were huge trees growing through the atrium and up to the glass ceiling. It felt like its own ecosystem, like an indoor rainforest. I was enchanted.
‘Olivia Lewis,’ Natasha said, seeing me hanging back, ‘the world might end next month. And neither of us has ever seen the city of love. You’re going for less than a week. On August the twenty-ninth you can come back and fix your mom, and take her home on the trains and ship you’ve already booked. There’s time. She’ll be ready to talk by then.’
She took me by the hand and, as ever, I was swept up. She pulled me, laughing, towards the train.
It was the most seductive thing. A train to Paris in the hot European summer. Everything we had was in our bags (again, free-spirited Natasha was twirling around in her backpack, while I pulled my suitcase like a tourist). I loved it that we were carrying our lives with us.
We changed trains at a place called Figueres, but we didn’t leave the station, even though it was Dalí’s birthplace and I was sure it would have been cool. We just sat in the cafe and drank Diet Coke and ate tortilla sandwiches. We didn’t even really talk to each other. I was a mix of excited about the adventure, and scared, and worried about my mother, but the surroundings made me languid. The sun was shining outside, and the cafe was sticky and friendly, with an older couple drinking red wine, and a few backpackers waiting, like us, for the train to France.
The next train was a double-decker, and it was completely different. I had never been on a double-decker train: I hadn’t even known they existed. Our seats were on the top deck. Natasha pushed me into the window seat. I leaned against it and closed my eyes.
I dozed for hours, dreaming of Walter and poisonous air and suffocation and dinosaurs and tiny unknown Violet. Violet became a dinosaur. Natasha spoke to the dinosaur in Walter’s voice. Violet kept nearly telling me, and nearly telling me, and nearly telling me her story.
I woke with my heart pounding, but I was just leaning on a window on a warm train, going through the south of France. The train was full, and I could smell people and perfume and coffee and food. I stayed where I was, my eyes closed. Natasha was chatting to a man across the aisle, and laughing, and (of course) she was speaking fluent French. The man was laughing too and leaning closer to her.
I looked at my phone. There was a message from a telecoms company welcoming me to France, and there were a few texts and emails from Mum, but the only message I opened was from Zoe.
Libby! So cool to hear from you. Loving the sound of your summer. Am in Winchester with the fam. Dad wanted to take us to Nigeria to reconnect with the family there, but turned out they wanted to come and visit us so we’ve done that instead. I’m at home, with loads of cousins here. ‘Tis fun, but … not as much as doing magic tricks in Madrid/Paris!!!!!! OMG!!!!! Show me everything when you come back and let me know when you’re here. I can’t wait to see you. Let’s meet up as soon as you’re back.
And don’t be silly about Vik’s party. Nothing was awkward. It was fun.
Z xxx
It was a real message. I had sent mine, and I’d got one back. It had happened, in real life.
I smiled, and leaned my head back against the window, formulating a reply in my head while pretending to have drifted back to sleep. I could understand enough French to work out that the man Natasha was talking to was telling her about his bunker, stocked with tinned food, pasta and bottled water and compressed air that would last him and his family for a year. They were going to retreat there before the Creep and hope for the best. Natasha was telling him that talking about it in public was a grave error, because if people knew about his air supply they would turn up in the dystopian future wearing gas masks and bang on the door demanding to be admitted, and then his air would run out much faster.
They stopped talking. I felt the vibration of Natasha’s phone in her bag, which was leaning on my thigh. I heard her say, ‘Libs?’ in a very quiet voice, and then I felt her take her phone and retreat.
I opened my eyes a few seconds later. Natasha had gone. I needed the loo, and so I stood up, took my bag because it had my purse in it, and walked to the end of the carriage.
I stood by the toilet door and heard my cousin’s voice. She must have been just round the corner. I stopped, only for a moment, to listen.
‘Not a thing,’ she was saying in a quiet voice. ‘Hundred per cent. Sweet, but so stupid. Oh my God. I’m doing her such a favour, you have no idea. Pathetic.’
She was talking about me. I knew she was. No one else was sweet, stupid and pathetic.
‘Yeah,’ she said after a pause. ‘The twenty-eighth. I know. And the Violet stuff. I’m ramping that up.’
I opened the toilet door, slammed it behind me and stared into the mirror. I wanted to be sick.
I thought of my mother. Don’t trust her. That was what she had said over and over again. She has a negative energy.
I thought of the things Natasha had said that hadn’t added up. And now I was not going to trust her.
I felt the bond between us snap, just like that.
For the rest of the journey I pretended to be asleep, while going over Natasha’s words in my head.
The Violet stuff. I’m ramping that up.
I didn’t know who she’d been talking to, but I knew this: if she was going to ramp ‘the Violet stuff’ up, then I would be looking out for it. I realized that Violet might not be my sister. I only had Natasha’s so-called spirit guide’s word for that. Whoever she was, whatever ‘Violet’ actually meant, Natasha was using it against me. Using it to control me.
I remembered how close I had come to believing in Walter last night, and hardened myself. Natasha was toying with me. She thought I was stupid and pathetic; she had said so herself in her own voice.
And I was stupid, because I’d known all along that she was a queen of manipulation, but for some reason I’d imagined I was special. I had spent weeks watching her mess with other people’s heads for fun and for money. And all along she had been doing it to me as much as to anyone else. Probably more than to anyone else.
I wondered who she had been talking to. Someone else knew what she was doing. I wasn’t the person on the inside of her plan – someone else was.
I opened my eyes because the sun was in my face, and there was a city outside the window, and the train was slowing down to stop.
‘Is it Paris?’ I said sleepily. I was going to mess with Natasha too. I was going to pretend to be more stupid, more naive, more in thrall to her than I had ever been before. And then, when she wasn’t looking, I would slip away. Today was the twenty-third, and it was Sunday. That meant the thing she had in mind, for the twenty-eighth, was on Friday. She was expecting me to leave on Saturday, but now I knew there was no way I would still be here on Friday.
‘Hey!’ Natasha had put on bright red lipstick and brushed her blonde hair, and she looked ready for anything. ‘Sleeping Beauty! Welcome back! Not Paris yet. It’s Nevers, which means we’re not far. Ten hours on trains is a lot, I know, but it’ll be worth it. Two hours to Paris from here? Something like that.’
The bunker man across the aisle leaned over. He had dreadlocks and a lovely smiley face.
‘Is she your twin?’ he asked Natasha in accented English. ‘I didn’t see because she slept, but you two are the same! Two of you!’
‘Oui, des jumelles,’ said Natasha. ‘Tu aimes ça?’
‘Wow.’ He laughed. ‘Oui, bien sûr!’
They dropped back into conversation and I tuned out.
I looked out of the window. I’d been to France once on a camping holiday with Mum and Sean, but all I really remembered was croissants for breakfast, and baguettes for lunch, and sandy beaches and books. I had read so many books that holiday that I’d barely looked up at what was around me. I’d certainly never been particularly curious about the country. I knew nothing about what France was like.
I stared and stared, at the houses with shutters, at the unfamiliar words on the shops. Carrefour. Leclerc. Monoprix. It felt so different from Madrid, and different from home. I felt myself drawing back from it all, retreating into my old shell at the onslaught.
Planning.
When we did finally arrive it was nearly midnight and I was steely. I stepped off the train behind Natasha, watching her. Every movement she made was affected. Every second, she was acting. Suddenly it was all clear to me.
The air smelled different here. It felt strange to walk through it. I could hear distant shouting, car engines. Paris felt like a tense place, a city on the brink of something. I remembered news reports about riots. The night was hot and dangerous, but it was less hot than Madrid. Less hot, but more dangerous.
‘Come on, Libster!’ Natasha called. ‘Paris! The city of love! La ville de l’amour. We made it!’
I let her take my free hand and pull me along as I wheeled my suitcase behind me, skipping a bit to keep up with her. I didn’t know where we were going, or what we were going to do, but, as ever, my cousin had a plan.
She led me down a staircase and out on to the edge of a road, where a couple of taxis were waiting. Natasha opened the back door of one and nudged me in. The bunker man from the train tried to get in too, but she pushed him away and he stormed off.
I stared out of the taxi window. I looked at the street lights, at the buildings that were different from buildings at home or in Madrid. Here in Paris buildings were tall and imposing, like townhouses but grander. We drove along main roads, and there were few other cars, but the ones we did see were driving fast. One was revving its engine and looping around across the road, on one side and then the other, all the way down the street. Another was stuck on the pavement, its wheels half on the kerb. Down a side street I thought I saw a car on its roof, though we were past before I had a chance to focus. I did, however, see a group of people sitting cross-legged round a collection of candles.
The rest of the time, it was eerily quiet.
The car stopped, and Natasha handed the driver some cash (she was, of course, in charge of the takings from last night) and jumped out. She set off into a hotel, and I wondered how, if she’d never been here before, she had managed to book a place for us to stay and get a taxi to take us there.
The hotel was just a door in a wall. A grumpy man let us in and looked us up and down and said the word ‘Jumelles?’ and Natasha agreed that we were, indeed, twins. He led us up three flights of narrow stairs and unlocked a wooden door with the number seven on it. Inside were two narrow beds. He showed us a bathroom off the landing, shared with the other two rooms on this floor, and wished us a good night.
Natasha put her backpack on the bed nearest the window.
‘Right!’ she said. ‘Paris! I’m starved. Let’s get some food.’
It was past midnight. I lay on the other bed and closed my eyes even though I was too wired to sleep. I didn’t want to go out with Natasha. I didn’t want to be with her at all.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Tired.’ And I closed my eyes, in my clothes, without caring for once what my cousin wanted me to do. She waited for a while, and I felt her looking at me, and then she said, ‘Suit yourself,’ and left.
Before the door clicked shut I heard her say hello to someone on the landing.
I didn’t hear her come back in, even though I stayed awake for a long time, but when I woke up in the morning there she was, sleeping, snoring gently, with one dirty foot poking out from under her sheet.