Alex

WHO WOULD HAVE thought it would all turn out to be this amazing? She thinks of her friends back in England, how they’d laugh at her for not minding being stuck out in the sticks all summer, for liking it, even – so much that now she’s actually begging to be allowed to stay on. At home they’ll all be hanging round the precinct, sitting with their arms and legs draped over the arms of the benches, waving cigarettes and drink-cans and squealing with laughter. She can see them staggering home at night with their arms round one another’s shoulders, dizzy with spliffs and beer. But it’s weird, she’s actually happy here. She lifts Jade out of the pushchair and sets her in the baby swing, settling the safety-bar over her little fat thighs. She gives her a gentle shove and the swing starts to sway backwards and forwards. Every time it comes to meet her she says, ‘Bo!’, and every time she says it Jade lets out the same throaty chortle. Over her shoulder the sun’s getting lower, their two shadows stretching across the grass. Somewhere over to her left the clock strikes seven, seven. How funny she used to think that was, when she first arrived in the village – the way it struck every hour and waited a few seconds and then struck the same hour again. She couldn’t imagine ever getting used to it. And now it’s like the most natural thing in the world.

And this is what happiness feels like. Jack . . . The low trees behind the playground go fuzzy round the edges and she blinks them clear again. And all that stuff with Jason seems like it happened centuries ago, it might have been another life. Her friends’ relationships are so childish, really – how can she ever go back to all that? How can she just go back and live in her parents’ cramped house like she’s still a little girl? If she turns her head she can see woods and fields spreading out into the distance for miles and miles. Just her and Jack and the swing ticking backwards and forwards across the grass, and Jade laughing. There’s nowhere she wants to be at this moment so much as here.

She’s waiting for the swing to die down when a car draws up at the edge of the green. She sees Susie leaning out of the open window. ‘Alex?’

‘Yeah?’ She leaves Jade swinging and goes over.

‘Look, it’s getting a bit late, and I’ve got to go – I’m supposed to be over at Laura’s at half past. Just give Jade her supper, can you? Don’t worry about her bath if you’re tired – I’ll do it in the morning. Have a good evening, both of you. Oh, and . . .’ She gropes for something in the back of the car. ‘Someone just dropped this in for you. It’s from Jack.’

‘Thanks.’ She opens her hands for what seems to be a bundle of cloth. It’s a child’s purple and magenta rucksack, its plastic buckles straining. She stands holding it in her outstretched arms like an idiot. What is it? And what’s he doing sending it to her like this, rather than just bringing it over himself? Is it some kind of present? The car pulls away, narrowly missing a rock that someone’s left lying in the road. She bends to pick it up and put it back in the pile with the others. Behind her Jade’s swing has come almost to a standstill. She lowers herself on to the tyre next to it and pushes backwards, her toes digging into the dirt. In a moment she’ll launch herself into the air.

But she lets the swing come back to the vertical. She reaches across and sets the other one in ragged motion again, making Jade squeal and wave her arms. Then she slides the plastic buckles of the rucksack open with two little clicks and loosens the toggle on the drawstring to reach inside.

It’s a book, she can feel the corners. She pulls it out, turning it over to scan the blurb. It’s some wartime story, something about a boy escaping. Why is he sending me this? Then something soft – a T-shirt, black, with some pseudo-Japanese logo – cool, though it doesn’t look brand new. Did it just catch his eye at the market or what? And then something small and hard – a roll-on deodorant – and what the fuck’s this? A toilet glove and a little piece of soap that leaves its cold and slime all over her fingers. Yuk. And someone else’s toothbrush and battered-looking tube of toothpaste, held together by a rubber band. She doesn’t get it. Is it some kind of joke? Is there something he’s trying to tell her? Is it a kind of code – is it his way of saying, ‘Come away with me’ or what?

She’s almost at the bottom now. Her fingertips brush against something silky. She tugs and out it comes – a small bundle of women’s underwear – a bra and several pairs of knickers, one of them crumpled into a tight ball. She almost laughs aloud with the surprise. What—? She feels suddenly cold. The ropes of the swing pull tight against her, squeezing her upper arms. For a moment she’s back in the throbbing dark of Casa Mia, and the dance-floor’s tilting upwards towards her face. Her throat’s suddenly dry, her hands are shaking. Why on earth would he want to send her a bag stuffed with some other girl’s underwear? What can he possibly be trying to say?

She closes her eyes and sees darkness. Like with Jason that night. She can smell the smoke, feel herself running down a dark passage, feel her bare arms brushing the condensation on the walls. How could he? On that manky old sofa in the alcove with that slag Charlotte Reynolds? The two of them wide-eyed and staring, his hand still up under her skirt. Charlotte’s face sort of glittery, like she was wearing fancy dress. Sorry, sorry, sorry, was that what he’d said afterwards? But it wasn’t enough. If you really cared about someone it wasn’t enough to apologise after you’d done something like that. If you really cared you wouldn’t want to hurt them in the first place. He was pathetic. His apologies were pathetic. They didn’t even begin to explain. All they did was salve his own conscience, let him pretend he didn’t have to take any responsibility for anything he did. He was a coward. He was too scared to tell her to her face. So he sent her some coded message and left her on her own to puzzle it out while he was free to feel completely innocent, free to go on to the next thing.

She feels sick. Slowly she stuffs the things back into the little magenta and purple bag. She lifts Jade from the swing to the pushchair and starts to wheel it across the grass. Should she get rid of the thing somehow? But maybe it isn’t what she’s thinking, perhaps she’s got it wrong? She has to confront Jack with it at least, give him the chance to explain himself. It might not mean what she thinks it means. She just has to see him – quickly. Tonight. In the shadow of the shelter she crouches by the buggy and feels the tears starting to well up, her nose suddenly streaming. She pulls out a crumpled tissue and wipes her face. She buries her head for a moment in her arms. Make it go away. Make things what they were before. Make time go backwards. She takes a deep breath, forcing herself to concentrate on the little noises – a cricket somewhere in the grass, birds twittering in the trees. The grass-blades tickling her bare ankles. She feels Jade move in the buggy next to her, touching her hair, patting her head gently like she’s a passing village cat.

She wheels the pushchair slowly back, lowering her head and stopping to wipe her cheeks with the tissue whenever the tears come. In Susie’s kitchen she lifts Jade out, hugging the solid little body for a moment against her own. There’s a murmur of voices from the next door garden and a wisp of blue smoke hanging over the newly clipped hedge – so the old Pirottets are getting ready to have a barbecue – trust them to choose the best possible moment! She goes over and closes the glass door to the garden. No point filling the whole house with their disgusting smells.

She hates them. She hates the way they’re always out there fiddling about with something – dribbling over their plants with the hose or worrying at the privet or gossiping to one of the neighbours. Or sounding off in loud voices to their stupid dog. They’re so typical of this whole dead-and-alive place. Is it possible that less than an hour ago she was half-wishing she could stay in this shithole for the rest of her life?

She almost laughs. There she was, wishing she could stay here with him and all the time he was probably already messing about with someone else. And it wasn’t just a spur-of-the-moment thing, either. If you weren’t actually planning to sleep with someone why would you pack a bag? She winces. But through the pain of it she feels something else – like this is what she’s been expecting, like ever since that night in Casa Mia she’s always known it was going to happen again. It’s almost a kind of relief. At least he did find a way of telling her, however devious. At least he isn’t going to let her go on loving him. He isn’t going to sit back and wait for her to find out the truth. It’s not like he’s going to do what Jason did, letting her follow him all over for days till she finally caught up with him and Charlotte Reynolds that night in Casa Mia in the ear-splitting dark.

She hates him though. She hates everyone. She’ll take the little rucksack up to Seyrac and confront him with it, see what he has to say for himself, make him tell her the whole thing. Maybe – just maybe – it isn’t as bad as she’s letting herself imagine. Even though part of her already knows.

She’s not hungry. When she’s fed Jade and put her down in her cot she pours herself a glass of rosé from the open bottle in the door of Susie’s fridge and takes it out into the garden. The barbecue’s died down now: in the sky above the privet hedge she can see just the faintest shimmer. You can hardly even tell it’s there. She pulls out the old deckchair that’s leaning by the door and puts it up. Shit. She’s forgotten to bring in the washing. All Jade’s things will stink of smoke and firelighters and scorching fat. But who cares? She lets her head fall back on the canvas and watches the little shadowy limbs waving gently to and fro above her against a background of stars.

When Susie comes back Alex doesn’t say anything. She slips back to her own flat to pull on her jeans and trainers and then goes out, with the backpack slung over one shoulder. She hasn’t thought to bring a torch, but she can see enough anyway. The playground’s deserted now, the swings like some sort of scaffold, the window of the pilgrim shelter a patch of lurid yellow against the black. As she goes past it she sees someone moving, the shape of a head coming and going inside. Unrolling his sleeping-bag on one of the slatted wooden seats, probably. She thinks of him eating and sleeping there in that tiny space, using the dank toilet with weeds growing out of the cracks in the walls, washing himself at the cold tap. And tomorrow, shrugging on the straps of his backpack and going on.

Her eyes are beginning to adjust to the light now. She can see the tiny flints gleaming at the edge of the road, and the pale heads of the hydrangeas in front of the cottages at the corner. As she passes the old village school she can read the numbers still painted on the walls. She can make out the name ‘Champfleury’, crossed through with a red line. She takes the main road, towards Seyrac, and walks steadily along the gravelly verge. She’s got the little rucksack on her back now – she could be some kind of night hiker herself – or a pilgrim choosing to clock up the miles while it’s cool instead of in the heat of the day.

She walks downhill towards the Seyrac turning, just before the valley levels out into the broad flood plain of the river, meandering towards the town. A motor-bike whizzes past her, so close she gives a little scream. Above the big trees on the bend the sky looks pale, as if it’s near dawn already. Then an edge of something white pushes itself up from behind them, like a paper petal of French confetti – the moon. She thinks suddenly of a wedding she saw a couple of weeks ago in Aubrillac, that idiotic photographer arranging the couple like dolls in unnatural poses for what must have been more than an hour while he leaped about like a gnome, pointing his various pieces of equipment in their faces. The bride and groom looked almost shame-faced. And then all those ribboned cars charging through, rattling over the cobbles, honking and honking, like they were all exasperated, stuck in some endless traffic-jam. When the dark car swerves and pulls up a few paces ahead of her her first impulse is to turn round and start running uphill in the opposite direction. Then someone winds down a window and she recognises Damien.

His grinning face looks odd in the moonlight – all sharp shadows, like something out of one of the old black and white films her gran used to watch sometimes on TV. He seems suddenly about twenty years older. ‘Where are you going, alone, so late in the evening? Do you want to come in the car?’

The words are harmless enough, but she shakes her head. ‘Thanks. I’m only going to Seyrac. It’s not worth driving.’

‘I can take you. You don’t want to walk on a road alone at night. With the car you’ll arrive in five minutes.’ He leans across and opens the passenger door for her.

She feels tears pricking her eyes again and blinks them back. He’s right: this isn’t really any fun at all. And the sooner she can get to Jack the sooner she’ll know for certain. ‘Okay then. Thanks.’ She slips the straps of the rucksack from her shoulders and slides in beside him, holding it in her lap.

In front of them the road’s lit up by his headlights, the shadows between tree-trunks are paths leading off to God knows where. He turns his head towards her and grins again. ‘I told you I will take you for a drive. Now you can speak French.’

For the first time this evening she finds herself smiling. It’s an odd sort of smile, like she’s holding the corners of her mouth up with her fingers. ‘Seyrac’s only a couple of miles,’ she says. ‘We won’t have time.’ But he shrugs and turns his head to grin at her and doesn’t slow down. Already they’re past the turning. She swivels in her seat and sees the finger-post shrinking in the back window. ‘You’ve missed it,’ she tells him. ‘You’ll have to take a left and go back.’

He doesn’t answer. He feels in the glove compartment for his cigarettes and shakes one out, his hands still half-resting on the wheel. She tenses and fixes her eyes on the road ahead, hearing the click of the lighter. When he exhales she can smell the alcohol on his breath. God! He shouldn’t be driving! She leans forward in her seat, watching the side of the road for an opening where they can draw in and turn.

‘Slow down. You’re going too fast.’

‘Why?’ He glances sideways at her and laughs. ‘You are so careful, you English. You are all afraid of something. You never really notice you are moving at all.’

‘But you can’t see where to stop.’ She hears her voice rising in a kind of squeak. ‘We’ve got to find somewhere to turn round.’

‘Why turn round?’

‘You’re driving me to Seyrac, remember? That was the Seyrac road we passed a couple of minutes ago.’

‘We will go to Seyrac after,’ he says easily.

They’re bowling along a straight, flat road beside a row of poplars, the trees casting long shadows across the tarmac in the moonlight. It’s like the two of them are tangled inside the spokes of a giant wheel. Her voice comes out as a sort of croak. ‘Où allons-nous?’

‘Mirlac. I told you. To the Truite d’Or. We can swim.’

‘At this time of night? Are you completely crazy?’

His face pretends to be offended. He’s not so frightening really. He’s just clowning about, he’s like an overgrown kid. ‘Why crazy? The Truite d’Or will be closed but the place is beautiful. You’ll see.’

Out of the corner of her eye she can see the door-handle gleaming next to her right elbow. No good trying to get him to turn round now, obviously. Seyrac’s a long way behind them already. Something makes her say, ‘I was going to see my boyfriend.’

‘Ah . . .’ He’s doing that French thing with his mouth, a sort of pout. ‘The English boyfriend. He is so young. And you are a woman with a woman’s feelings. You need someone more . . .’

‘More like you?’ My God! What has she just said? He won’t realise she was being sarcastic.

‘Precisely.’ He lifts his hand from the wheel to tap ash off his cigarette. A flake of something hot blows back in through the open window and lands on her arm. She jumps and brushes it off. He says, ‘Someone to . . . wake you up. Someone who can show you what love is. Someone who is more a man.’ He lifts his hand to his face again and the tip of the cigarette glows red.

A man! She hardly dares open her mouth. She watches the moon travel with the car. As they turn a corner it swims out above the trees into a patch of clear sky. The road’s starting to climb. I don’t want a man ever again. I don’t want anyone. But there’s something slightly pathetic about Damien somehow, and she doesn’t want to hurt his feelings. Better just go along with it for the time being. And anyway, who cares? I might as well be here as anywhere. And what was I intending to do anyway when I got to Seyrac – scoop up a handful of gravel and chuck it at Jack’s window? She squirms with the shame of it. For all she knows he isn’t even there, he’s somewhere in Aubrillac, or maybe Toulouse, shagging all night with someone else.

Damien’s right about the lake, though. When they turn into the Truite d’Or car-park she catches her breath. The expanse of water is almost circular, flattened just slightly by the line of the dam over on the far side, fringed by a sandy beach – man-made, presumably. In the moonlight the surface reflects the dark hills without even a ripple. ‘Do you see?’ he says.

She nods. It’s almost too much. It’s been such a terrible day.

‘If you like we can swim.’

‘I haven’t got a swimsuit.’

‘You don’t need it.’ She hears the click as he releases his seat-belt. The next moment he’s leaning across to kiss her, his lips soft and firm and practised, his tongue already trying to make her own mouth open in response. He tastes of wine and tobacco. In spite of herself she wants him to go on.

He’s so different from Jack. She wants to cry suddenly. The kiss has made her body ache in a way it never really has with Jack or even with Jason, she can feel she’s wet already. And yet she doesn’t want to, she doesn’t want this, she doesn’t want anyone. She pulls away from him, shivering. ‘I’m tired. Will you take me home?’ Her mouth feels weird as she says it – she doesn’t know where to put her tongue. Like when I was a kid, being kissed by some warty old aunt . . . He’s disgusting. And yet.

He looks at her as if she’s gone completely crazy. ‘But there’s no reason to be afraid. Let me show you.’ His hand’s inside her T-shirt now; she can feel his fingers moving up across her breast, catching and twisting at her nipple. A pulse swells and beats in the space between her legs. ‘No.’ His smell surrounds her – red wine and French aftershave and that sweet smell that means garlic but isn’t like garlic at all. She hears her own voice, hoarse with something she can’t even put a name to. ‘No. Damien, stop it. Please. No!’

But it’s too late. His hands are all over her, pulling at her trousers. She hears something rip. ‘You want it, you know you do.’ She feels him say it into her neck, his hands still groping, his breath all through her hair.

She wriggles away from him and pulls herself up into a sitting position. The door-handle jabs at her lower back. ‘You kidnapped me. I was going to Seyrac. You made me come here with you.’

‘And you didn’t want to see this beautiful lake, of course not. When I started kissing you you didn’t like it, you didn’t feel something in your body, you said, “No, thank you Damien, you are very attractive but I am promised to another.”’ His mocking voice refuses to be silent, echoing in her ears, filling the stale metal box of the car. She can’t listen. She fumbles behind her for the door-handle and half falls out, on her knees in the dirt. ‘You fucking English bitch! You all think you can come here and buy everything with your filthy pounds sterling!’ He sneers as he says it. ‘You are the lord in his castle, you take our work, you make our houses expensive so if we want to stay here we can’t buy them. And there is nothing here for us. Nothing! Our life is in the town now. And you come in after to eat up the dead farms and villages. You are vermin. Do you hear me? Vous êtes dégueulasses.’ He kicks out at her and she falls over, her cheek scraping the gravel, something like a burn flaring at the side of her right knee. She pulls herself to her feet and goes to run.

But he’s got her by the ankle. She tries to shake him off and almost falls again. He’s lying half-in, half-out of the car, his face craning up at her from thigh-level, mouth hanging half open, cheeks lined with vertical creases. He’s grinning. He’s actually grinning. She twists to grab the car door with both hands and slams it as hard as she possibly can.

She feels the impact of the blow right through her body – a sharp pain in her right shoulder, a tendon in the back of her hand stinging like flicked elastic. The door swings back half-open and she has a momentary glimpse of the back of his neck, the place on the side of his head where the metal edge must have made contact. But at least he isn’t coming after her any more. She bends down and rubs at her ankle. She can’t close her fingers. Her whole body’s starting to throb. There’s blood running down the inside of her leg.

The moon’s disappeared, but the clouds where it was are still backlit and silvery. She walks unsteadily down the beach towards the water, her feet sinking and turning in the soft sand. She reaches the edge and stoops to untie her trainers, struggling to undo the knots. It hurts. But the water, when she feels it on her bare skin, is cool. He almost raped you. You’re supposed to feel dirty. But it isn’t true. She feels clean, cleaner than the water. She takes another step forwards, immersing her hands. She’s up to her hips, her chest, her shoulders. She turns and sees the car, parked where he left it, the two doors still wide open, and something dark in the gap, that could almost be shadow. He hasn’t moved.

She’s out of her depth now. She waits, treading water, watching to see how long it’ll take him to struggle to his feet. In a few minutes he’ll stand and stretch and get back in and pull both the doors closed. He’ll switch on the headlights. She’ll hear the cough of the engine, the crunch of gravel under the tyres as his lights sweep the surface of the lake and turn uphill in a wide arc, then lose themselves in an occasional glitter between the trees.

The water’s warm. She swims slowly out towards the centre. It’s like leaving a con-trail across the night sky. For a long time, out at the centre of the lake, she hangs almost motionless, moving her arms and legs as little as she can get away with, turning in her small space to look at the broken reflections, the stars, the dark shapes of the hills. She’s still alive, anyhow. After a while she tastes salt in her mouth. The tears are running down her face, mixing with the lake water. She ducks under the surface and comes up spluttering, pushing her hair back, feeling the air suddenly cold on her wet face. There’s only this – my body still managing not to sink, the water. She turns over on her back and floats, opening her eyes wide to the emptiness, letting the universe flow in.