4

France was around five months in. After Thailand, Laos, Krakow, Berlin, but before England, New York, Mexico. They spent about a month there, mostly working on organic farms. WWOOFing, it was called — Willing Workers On Organic Farms — and the idea was you exchanged labour for food, lodgings, skills. They stayed in three places, with three families, all English — where were all the French people, they wondered — and only one was anything like what they’d hoped it would be. The other two were disasters, although one of these disasters had little to do with the farm. And then once, between stints, they’d stayed with Marco in Paris. That was a disaster, too.

Marco ran a squat on the outskirts of the city, far south of the thirteenth arrondissement. They were given his email by a friend, Tess, who gave it with trepidation.

He is intense, she said, Full on, and she fixed them with a look that suggested a gravity her words could not quite convey. She tried again: He was in a bad place when I was there. But who knows, maybe he is doing better now.

They took note of this and would use him only as backup, they decided, if they had time to kill between farms, which, in the end, they did have — a week in fact. He was receptive to their email, and they turned up one afternoon to find him alone in the courtyard of the squat, an old factory of some kind, sitting at a picnic table with a laptop, in front of a fireplace fashioned out of bricks and corrugated iron.

The squat was nicely set up. The fireplace, the picnic tables, plants in pots scattered around, raised garden beds full of herbs and staked tomato plants heavy with fruit. A clean, light-filled kitchen with benches made out of recycled timber. People had put effort into it, and recently, but it was strangely quiet now, as if everyone might return at any moment and the place would spring back to life, but it never happened. There was only Marco.

Marco was an unkempt, ruggedly handsome man, kind of timelessly aged, with piercing eyes and long black curls streaked with grey, which were permanently entangled in a scarf hanging loosely around his neck. He was charming, kinetic, and he welcomed Tom and Clara with a winning smile and immediately made plans.

A dinner was proposed for later that evening, and he would take them to the markets and show them how to source free food. They would pay only for the fish, and he would teach them about Paris as they walked. Tom and Clara were tired after travelling — to get there from south of Lyon had taken three trains, and then it took a long time to find the place so far beyond the nearest station — but they could not refuse him, and they set off.

On the way to the markets (the oldest markets in Paris, Marco said), which were a long way from the squat — a walk, a train back into the city, and then another walk away — Marco pointed out a street where barricades were erected during the commune, and later a cafe where André Breton and Philippe Soupault read pages from their experiments in automatic writing that would become the book The Magnetic Fields. He was impressed that Tom and Clara knew who Breton and Soupault were, too impressed, and embarrassingly pronounced them the most cultured guests they’d had in a long time.

Usually, we have only stupid fucking students, he said, snorting snot back up his nose. People who only want to fuck and get wasted and who don’t care about anything like culture or art. There are so many morons everywhere, he said. Culture is everything. If you are cultured, you understand some real things about life, understand the value of work and struggle and resistance and love.

Marco got worked up like this easily, of his own accord, his thoughts inevitably drifting back to the same grievances — it happened several times during their trip to the markets alone — and when he did, his speech, which was already quick and agitated, became more so, and the snorting worse. He made them nervous. Tom could tell Clara was nervous by her over-eager smile, her forced receptivity to Marco’s talk — it was so rare to see her strike a false note — and for Tom the nervousness was compounded by the dawning realisation that Marco had designs on Clara.

At the markets, they bought fish, dumpster dived for vegetables, watched Marco extract free bottles of wine from an initially sceptical-looking merchant as he packed up his stall, and returned home, listening the whole way as he talked. Their good cheer was an effort to maintain, but they both sensed the importance of keeping him happy.

Prompted by a discussion of certain recipes and his culinary skills in general — that, despite its reputation as a nation of food-lovers, most men didn’t cook in France, while he was a fantastic cook — Marco asked Tom how Aboriginal people separated domestic roles according to gender. Tom was studying history and must know these things, he said.

Surprised by this, by the misunderstanding of his degree — he had readings on urban history with him as part of his degree in architecture and urban planning, not history — but also by the sudden swerve in the conversation, the way Marco demanded this knowledge from him, Tom laughed awkwardly. He explained that he had not studied Aboriginal history or culture in any depth — not since high school, at least — and admitted, guiltily, that he did not know much at all about gender roles in Aboriginal nations. Marco did not hide his disappointment, indeed he evinced shock — a shock that was ludicrous in its performativity, but which nevertheless had the desired effect — and Tom found himself bumbling through an incoherent explanation about the secrecy of certain aspects of Aboriginal culture, the idea of secret men’s business and secret women’s business, which westerners were not allowed to know and out of respect did not pry into, but the whole time he was speaking it felt like a cop-out — he knew it sounded like one — and it was accompanied by a sinking feeling that he had fallen into a trap. Regardless, he did feel ashamed. Even though he suspected the question had been disingenuous, designed only to humiliate him, he couldn’t help but think Marco was right, that he should know more about Aboriginal culture, and that he was every bit the arsehole he sounded like in that moment.

Clara saved him, distracted Marco by talking about something else, asking him questions to get him back on the tour-guide tack, and then, as they walked, she found his hand. He didn’t know why he still remembered that — maybe because she never did things like that. But she found his hand, and they walked hand in hand, while he smarted and sweated in the third arrondissement. Maybe, he thought now, it was only to signal to Marco that she was loyal to her boyfriend.

The turn against Tom, then, was sudden and vicious, but not unforeseen. The impasse over his knowledge of Aboriginal gender roles was one warning sign. Another was the obviousness of Marco’s crush on Clara. He lavished attention on her and complimented her in a way that was transparently seductive, pouring his tour-guide facts and charming grins upon her with ever more intensity. It didn’t seem to trouble her much — when they went to bed the first night, Clara laughed about it, said she found Marco ridiculous — but it gave Tom a sense of impending doom.

But it was the guitar that took the blame.

The squat was once a music-filled place. This was evident in various ways. Adjacent to the courtyard was a long, single-storey building that faced the street. Once the factory office, it now served as an open-plan kitchen and dining area, and there was a small riser built into the far corner of the room. It had a single, limp mic stand on it and bits of gaffer stuck to the carpet. And there was Derek, one of the only other people they met during their three days there. A tall African man with dreadlocks down to his waist, Derek came to rehearse in the basement, which, when they followed him down there, turned out to have several rehearsal studios built into the space, all carpeted and soundproofed and fully wired. Derek was friendly, soft-spoken, and on good terms with Marco, although his responses to Marco’s efforts to engage him in conversation were muted, bordering on perfunctory. For his part, Marco was clearly pleased to be associated with this musician in the eyes of their guests, and he boasted about his friend’s talents and his success in the underground music scene.

The guitar Tom had spotted the moment they walked in the place, a blondwood acoustic guitar resting on a stand in the corner of the kitchen. The first night, after their fish and wine, and after Marco had finally gone to bed, Tom came back down for it and took it up to their room, a mezzanine floor in the main factory building, where a double mattress lay under slanted, frosted glass and the diffuse yellow glow of street lights. Tom didn’t want to play the guitar in front of Clara, but he badly wanted to play it, so he did, quietly, while she read.

The next day, in the afternoon, after they got home from their visit to the city — to be tourists, to visit the Louvre, to buy baguettes and cheese and climb the Butte Montmartre to the Sacré-Cœur — Marco wasn’t around. In their room, Tom played the guitar again, and Clara read and worked on her laptop, until, finally, they heard Marco downstairs, whistling to himself and calling out to see who was home. They roused themselves and clambered down from the whiteness of their room, through the darkness of the warehouse, and into fading daylight.

But Marco wasn’t much interested in them. He was expecting a visitor, a woman who was a dear friend of his and whom he respected greatly, he said, as she was a true champion of revolutionary art and artists in Paris. He was in high spirits and was setting out a cheese plate for her, making much of the goats’ cheese and a tiny bottle of black truffle oil he had bought, and he had sourced more wine.

When she arrived, Juliette was warm and vivacious. At least a decade older than Marco, maybe more, with similarly grey-streaked hair tucked into a scarf around her neck, she exuded cultivation and charm, but, unlike Marco’s, her charm was not aggressive — it seemed to come at less of a cost, and her conversation was easy. She expressed interest in Tom and Clara, their travels, their work and studies, and was kind and affectionate to Marco, whom she had obviously known for a long time and whom she indulged and faintly patronised, as if he was a precocious, sometimes errant, child.

In turn, Marco treated Juliette with great reverence. He played the attentive host and deferred to her on all things, and went to great lengths to pump her up in the eyes of his Australian guests, telling them of all her great work in social justice and arts organisations and her championing of squatters’ rights and, again, revolutionary artists in Paris. He was lighter with her around, more playful, he enjoyed playing the child, but inevitably his anger bubbled up, encouraged by a kind of hammy petulance he affected with her that, as a mask for his real anger, continually worked its way off. When this happened, she shot him looks that quietened him back down.

Juliette did not stay long, an hour at most, but Marco drank several glasses of wine in that time and was noticeably affected when she left. He tried to detain her, to drag her back into conversation by bringing up scandals and people from their past and imploring her to tell their guests about them, but she extricated herself. Tom and Clara extricated themselves also — they were tired after playing tourists all day in the city, Tom said, chuckling like an idiot and demurring when Marco suggested more wine — and retreated to their room.

Later, Clara went to use the bathroom and Tom could hear voices — Marco’s and hers — in the kitchen. And then a crash. Slow to move, listening for signs she was okay, Tom had only reached the ladder when she appeared beneath him.

Marco had intercepted her. Implored her to drink more wine with him, told her he wanted to make her dinner — but only her, because he didn’t like Tom, who was ignorant of his own country and a fascist for playing the guitar by himself in his room and not entertaining the house. If you can play, you play for the people, he said. Music is to be shared. Tom was a fascist and a philistine. Marco switched manically between the two registers, she said, between the tactics of seduction and accusation: he had more wine for her, more fish he would cook, he liked her because she was discreet, didn’t talk too much … and then he changed tack and attacked Tom again, over whom he became venomous, spittle flying from his mouth. Eventually — when it became clear she was not going to sleep with him — he picked up a wooden chair, smashed it on the concrete floor, and left the room.

Clara said they had to leave. She was not surprised he had come on to her — that was bound to happen, sooner or later — but his rage, the way it rose so suddenly in him, was suddenly huge, irrepressible, convinced her they had to go. They couldn’t be sure what he might do, next time.

In the morning when they left, it was quiet. They didn’t know if Marco was up yet, waiting for them — in the kitchen perhaps, or out in the courtyard — and so, instead of making a run for it through the front, they searched for an exit at the rear of the building. Walking through, they found abandoned bedrooms with mattresses on the floor, other empty rooms with the ceilings caved in, and finally a back door leading out to a rubbish-strewn yard choked with weeds. There was no back gate that they could find, but there were cardboard boxes and crates lying around, and they stacked those up and scaled the wall.

There followed a few anxious moments after this, while they stood at the bus stop, wondering if they should keep going, look for the next stop — they weren’t even sure where the bus would take them, and he had only to look out the front door to see them down the road — but the bus arrived, and they were gone.

Tom took the guitar. He felt it was the right thing to do. He travelled with it to the next farm, and the farm after that, where he taught Benjamin Henderson the chords E, A, and D, and then left it out in the rain one night and the wood buckled and split. He gave it to Ben, before they left for America. He felt the boy deserved it, after the weirdness between them, and because of Ben’s horrible parents, who had no interest in music at all.

Thinking about it now, Tom felt these times might be his and Clara’s best times together, when in opposition to other people. Their parents, people in worse relationships than theirs, arseholes of one kind of another. It made them feel better about themselves. Closer to one another. At least we’re not like that.

He had been humiliated by Marco, in front of Clara, but she didn’t make him feel that. She glossed over it, and he was so grateful for her then.