It took me over an hour to walk there. My feet hurt, and I kept having to stop to breathe deeply and to try not to cry. I could see from people’s reactions that I had become one of the weird people. I clearly had nothing to steal, and no one tried to talk to me. They pulled children and dogs out of my path. I was glad. I would not have trusted anyone or accepted anybody’s help.
The river path was busy, with a cross-section of what felt like everyone in the world walking by the Seine. I walked among them, dodging people on Segways and scooters, people running, people out with their dogs. I passed a group sitting on the ground meditating, and a lot of runners. I had always known how to keep my head down and become invisible when I needed to, and I did it now, ignoring the other lost souls who sometimes called out to me.
The water was choppy, and there was an intense, changing smell to everything. The air was baking hot and close, and the whole world seemed sweaty and slow, particularly me.
I looked at the water again. I really could, I thought, just jump in. If Zoe hadn’t taken my call, I might have done it.
She had hated me all along, I thought. She had said it herself, and I knew it anyway. I’d known it since our train journey; before that I had naively assumed that she loved me, simply because she’d said she did. It was too much to think about, and I forced myself to lock it all away. The only thing that mattered was getting home.
When I reached the Louvre I walked up the steps that led from the path beside the Seine to street level and crossed the road to go into the courtyard. I ignored the many people who were trying to make money from tourists and headed across the hot cobbles, pushing my way between the crowds to the entrance to the museum where the pyramid was.
Why did Natasha or Deanna or whoever she was want all my money, when life on Earth was about to end? I didn’t understand. I would have given it to her, and she must have known that. I knew her, though; it had been about the game. She wanted to pull off some kind of heist just for the hell of it.
I knew it would be a while before anything happened, so I sat on the low wall of the fountain and watched the queue snaking round, looking out for my maybe-cousin even though I knew she was long gone. People were working the queue, selling bottles of water and bars of chocolate, but no one was Natasha.
I was thirsty, and I had no money. I couldn’t see a drinking fountain, and I didn’t have three euros for one of the tiny bottles of water that men were selling out of ice buckets.
As soon as I’d thought how thirsty I was, though, I couldn’t think of anything else. I considered trying to drink the fountain water, but it felt like a terrible idea. I looked around. Nearby there was a man with an ice bucket (there wasn’t actually any ice in it any more – it was just water, and I would happily have drunk that instead). He saw me looking, and called ‘Water?’ in English. I shook my head.
I could probably have read his palm in exchange for a bottle of water, but I didn’t want to. I wasn’t going to hustle any more.
I walked down into the park, thinking that there had to be a drinking fountain in the Tuileries Garden, but I couldn’t find one. I was scared to talk to anyone, but in the end I saw a man picking up litter (out of kindness, I thought, rather than as a job) and asked him in French if he knew where I could find eau potable. The phrase came to me easily from somewhere in my mind. He pointed me in the other direction, away from the museum, and I hurried there, and found that there really was a drinking fountain, and leaned down and drank water for as long as I possibly could. It went down my chin, down the front of my dress.
It was well into the afternoon. I had no idea what I was going to do if night came and nothing had happened. Sleep rough, I supposed. I would have to find a place that felt safe (perhaps in one of the encampments: I knew there were some women’s camps around and I thought that if I asked enough women, someone might know where I could find one). I would have to depend on the kindness of strangers.
Yet I knew I could not trust anyone. Natasha had sent my emails to Zoe, and that was utterly excruciating (I kept remembering things I had written), but that was the least of my worries.
When the sun was getting close to the horizon I joined the queue for the Louvre. It was open until ten and I thought I would be safer in there than I was out here. Also, I had been out in the sun all day, and there would be air conditioning inside.
First, though, I walked back to the Tuileries Garden and found a chalky stone. That was easy, because the earth was gravelly, and lots of the stones in it were chalky. The chalk went up your legs when you walked on it. My ruined shoes were bright white.
I took a stone and went back to the fountain. I knew it was a bit rubbish, but I found what felt like the best spot, and wrote LIBBY IS IN THE MUSEUM on the little wall that surrounded it. I wrote it again, abbreviating it to LIBBY MUSEUM and LIBBY LOUVRE. I wrote it in every place I could find. I wrote it all over the ground and on the walls. I hoped I’d written it in enough places, so that even if someone rubbed lots of them out, one would remain. People stared at me and giggled and I didn’t care.
Then I joined the queue. It was long, and I knew I would be there for at least another hour, and that was fine. It was a good place to be, because if anyone did come to try to find me, I would see them. I queued behind a group of people of about my grandparents’ age who had travelled from somewhere in central France to see Paris while they still could, and I listened to their conversation in French, managing to work out most of it. I missed my grandparents. They would have helped me. Now Natasha had all their money.
The people behind me were from the Middle East and they spoke English, so I listened to their frantic planning of their itinerary for the next few weeks. They were trying so hard to see everything and still get the right trains home.
I wondered what would happen. Was everything about to break down? Would the trains stop working? Would I ever see my mother again?
Who had taken my place and answered her phone? I hated the idea of her hanging out with some random English woman who casually picked up her phone.
I couldn’t cry any more, but I felt so alone. I had never felt like this. I wanted to give up but I couldn’t. I had to wait this out.
Zoe was on my side, in spite of everything. That was the bright thing. I kept imagining her, though, answering a call from Elisha, getting back together, forgetting that she had said she’d go to Dad’s house for me. Remembering about me tomorrow.
We shuffled forward. Nothing much changed. It started to get dark, and my writing faded away. By the time I got to the front of the queue and told the security guard that I didn’t have a bag to X-ray, and stepped through a scanner that luckily didn’t pick up the fact that I had a passport tucked into my knickers, I had almost forgotten why I was there.
There was an escalator down to the entrance hall. I went down and took a random route away from the crowds, though there were still crowds everywhere. You didn’t need a ticket; once you were inside it was a total free-for-all because only the security staff were working now, and they were, I imagined, being paid handsomely for it. I picked up a map, the one in Spanish because I wished I was in Spain, and decided to start nearby, so I would be easily found. I went up the escalator marked Sully.
As I wandered past paintings of solemn old-fashioned people, I longed to be in the Prado. The Louvre was (newsflash!) enormous, and there was too much art here for me. It was overwhelming. I wanted to see The Garden of Earthly Delights but I was in the wrong city. I checked my plan and discovered that there was a painting by Bosch in this building. It was called Ship of Fools, and it was in the Richelieu Wing on the second floor. I started to navigate towards it.
It wasn’t as mind-blowing as The Garden of Earthly Delights, but I stood in front of it and stared. It was a fragment of something bigger, something that had been lost. There was a boat, and it had a bunch of people on it, and a few more in the water, overboard. Someone was rowing with a spoon. Someone else was being sick. A nun was playing an instrument. It was, essentially, a group of people who were adrift, being stupid, with the church on board. The more I looked at it, the more I liked it. It was less showy, but it was cynical and funny and amazing. I forgot myself, for a while.
Then I realized that it would take anyone days to find me here, so I set off to find the most obvious place in the museum to wait.
Ten minutes later I was standing at the edge of the crowd by the Mona Lisa, watching people looking at it, taking selfies with it, literally ticking it off lists in some cases. I looked over their shoulders into her face and thought that she wouldn’t have panicked.
I stood there and my legs hurt. I stayed there because I didn’t know where else to go.
I stood there for a long time. I wanted to sit down because my vision kept going strange and I heard ringing sounds that no one else seemed to be noticing, but I stayed where I was.
I was sure I was hallucinating when someone tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Libby?’