Significance Read online

  ‘You’re being ridiculous,’ Scott had said. ‘I wish my brother was capable of such clarity, such clear signs of possessiveness and emotion. It’s not personal, believe me. Forget it. You’re wasting your tears.’

  She found that last phrase troubling. ‘Wasting your tears’ indeed – as if tears were precious and had to be carefully guarded, saved for the rarest of occasions. Scott was one of those men who was profoundly discomforted by tears, especially women’s tears. And Marilyn had always cried easily and helplessly from both sorrow and joy.

  She watched Scott as he put the dog-eared and yellowing copy of The Handmaid’s Tale on the chair and crept towards his brother. When he drew close enough he peered over Aaron’s shoulder and said gently, ‘Hey, whatcha got there, buddy? You wanna show me?’

  Aaron did not want to show him. He began to groan softly in protest and to rock from one foot to the other with more emphasis.

  ‘You gonna show me, huh? Come on, show me,’ Scott grabbed Aaron’s wrists and the groaning noise went up in pitch and volume.

  ‘Don’t hurt him,’ Marilyn said.

  ‘I’m not hurting him. Now come on, give it to me. Let go! Let go, damn you!’

  The noise coming out of Aaron’s mouth was awful – like that of a tortured animal.

  ‘You’re hurting him!’

  ‘I’m not hurting him. For Christ’s sake, Marilyn, shut up. Come here.’

  She moved across the room so that she was next to them. She could see that although Scott had a firm grip on both of Aaron’s wrists he was being measured and careful about the level of force he used.

  ‘Open his fingers,’ Scott said.

  Marilyn hesitated, then reluctantly did as she was told, discovering, as she pried Aaron’s fingers up, that he gave only the barest resistance. His left hand in particular opened as easily as a flower and there in the centre of his palm, resting in the crease of his heart line, was a round white button, smaller than a pea.

  ‘What is it?’ Scott asked.

  ‘A button.’

  Aaron wailed.

  ‘It’s mine,’ she said. She had recognised it straightaway as belonging to one of the few dresses she possessed that still fitted comfortably; a flowery print frock she’d bought in a vintage store in Ottawa eight years ago. It had struck her then as a very romantic dress with its row of tiny pearl buttons down the front. She had felt feminine and beautiful in it, like a woman from another age. Scott called it her Emily Dickinson frock, and she was never entirely sure if that was meant as a compliment or not.

  Exasperated, Scott sighed loudly, ‘Okay. Okay. Here have this.’ He let go of Aaron’s wrists and reached into his pocket, pulled out his sunglasses’ case and removed the glasses. Aaron didn’t move his hands once they were released, but stood posed with upraised hands as if he were a saint displaying his stigmata. Scott put the empty case in one of Aaron’s open hands, but the fingers didn’t close around it and it fell to the floor.

  ‘Do you want milk? Nice milk and cookies?’ Scott coaxed.

  Aaron was quiet for a moment, then he turned and began trudging in the direction of the kitchen. Scott watched him go, then turned to Marilyn and slowly shook his head.

  ‘What?’ Marilyn said.

  ‘How could you say that?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That I was hurting him.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t think. I know you’d never hurt him deliberately, I just…’ The look on Scott’s face silenced her.

  ‘You didn’t think? Yeah. No one else does either.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Okay, forget it.’

  Scott followed Aaron into the kitchen and got the cookie tin from the cupboard.

  ‘Okay, buddy. Nice milk and cookies? Yeah, you like that, eh? Yeah?’

  Aaron drank deeply from the glass, then lowered it to reveal a white moustache of milk on his upper lip. He blinked and crammed a whole ginger biscuit into his mouth. His eyes were glazed over with concentration and his left knee bounced up and down in rhythm with his jaw. Scott stood to one side with the cookie jar resting in the crook of his arm, waiting for Aaron to finish the biscuit he was eating before allowing him another.

  Marilyn stood watching them. Her hand moved to her belly and rested there for a moment, then remembering herself, she hastily took it away again. She did not want Scott to see her in that clichéd pose, to recognise the gesture for what it was; that of an expectant mother gracing her swelling womb with an exploratory and protective hand.

  Busying herself, she got the dress that had lost the button from the laundry basket where it was waiting to be ironed, sat down on a rustic milking stool in the corner of the living room and, like a penitent in a reformatory, stitched the tiny button back on.

  Creatures of Habit

  For the third night in a row Lucy is drawn to La Coquille Bleue. There she is, smiling at her old friend Madame Gallo as she seats herself at a table near the bar. And while she looks at the menu, she’s sipping milky-white Pastis and remembering the bullet-hard aniseed balls she sometimes ate as a kid.

  Tonight she orders steak with salad, refuses potatoes when asked. Nods thoughtlessly when the waitress asks if she wants the steak bleu. Nods vigorously when she asked if she wants vin rouge.

  Saying ‘yes’ she finds, has a sort of sweet madness about it. Yes, yes, yes. Oui, oui, oui. She likes the sound of the words – in either language the effect is soft and welcoming.

  The steak when it comes, when she stabs it with her knife, bleeds. Red wine and red blood.

  She finishes her meal and lights a cigarette, then gets the new silver compact from her bag and applies a slick, bright coat of the red lipstick she bought five days ago. She smiles and nods at Madame Gallo and wonders what it is precisely that makes the woman look so utterly French. She imagines her into black and white photos by Lartigue, Brassai and Cartier-Bresson.

  It’s the sculptural quality of the woman’s black hair, Lucy decides, and the fact that French women don’t opt to go frizzy blonde as they age, instead remaining as they were when young. She will try to do the same she thinks. I’ll stay here, never go back, never say a word to anyone – not Thom nor anyone at the college nor Mum and Dad. She feels mildly guilty when she considers her parents’ reactions to such a mysterious disappearance, remembering as if through a fog their reactions to her younger escapades, but pushes it aside to concentrate instead on this delicious dream of transformation. She’d be known as ‘the English woman’. Her accent, mild as it now was, would not reveal her Celtic roots, not here where the only thing to notice was her – so far – very poor French.

  She picks up her glass and downs the last mouthful of wine, stubs out her cigarette.

  Pays at the bar, leaving a generous tip. ‘Merci! Merci. Bon nuit, Madame Gallo.’

  She leaves the restaurant waving gaily and calling, ‘Au revoir!’ and wondering if all the damn foreign tourists sitting in the glass-fronted atrium think she is a native.

  It’s earlier now than on the previous two nights. The sky is a darkening violet watercolour streaked with scarlet. There’s no sign of the young man or his brother. She scans the street, looking up and down. She studies the house opposite, the one with acid-yellow shutters. Most of the upstairs windows are flung open; some, where they catch the light from the setting sky, glow rosy pink.

  She crosses the street diagonally towards a pay phone. Once there she lifts the handset and holds it to her ear. Pretends to dial, pretends to feed coins into the slot, pretends to speak, to listen and nod, all the time gazing over at the house with yellow shutters.

  During this charade, she thinks about where she’s come from; the small rented flat in Hammersmith that has been her home for nearly two years. During her first months in London the light was, or seemed to be, grey – grey and thin and unforgiving. The western coast where she’d grown up was hardly known for its sunshine and achingly blue skies, but London had somehow registered its presence on her co
nsciousness during that first rainy October, and now that image of London was fixed in her mind.

  She was meant to be back at her job as a part-time lecturer just over a week from now and she was also meant to have finished the final draft of her PhD dissertation. There were other things she was meant to be doing too. Her life was full of loose ends; it was frayed, unravelling, irredeemable. Her sense of dread about work was beginning to seep into where she was now. Freedom and happiness, the trip itself had been dying as soon as it had begun.

  Even here in France, she had taken up another routine, as if coming to La Coquille Bleue night after night might give her a sense of security and permanence.

  She continued to nod occasionally as she held the telephone to her ear. She imagined she was listening to some distant speaker who spoke such wisdom and sense that she could only absorb it in silence.

  She should perhaps not play these games – what begins as a perfectly normal flight of fancy could harden into madness. She’d had a breakdown at the age of eighteen when she was at the Glasgow School of Art. Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s ladder-backed chairs still gave her the horrors. She’d been trying to write an essay about form and function in design. There was something about those chairs, their Presbyterian starkness and the unnecessary height of the back rest had made her flip. That and the way she was living: the starvation diet, the drink, the vampiric men and the unwise experiments with drugs. Poor Charles Rennie would have had a fit if he’d known that somehow his chairs reminded her of swastikas and horror films and that she’d had to tear their pictures from the library book and burn them.

  Maybe it was happening again. Now. Here in Northern France. A Somme madness, where there was too much spilled blood in the soil.

  A light came on in the downstairs room of the house with yellow shutters. A warm orange light that seemed to both welcome and repel her.

  She saw a human shape move like a shadow across the window. A man who moved with a confident stride. Not the younger brother then, whose gait was hesitant, weighed down by a tangle inside his head, the permanent physical knot of brain damage.

  She found herself thinking about the rabbits she’d watched in the fields behind her parents’ bungalow last time she’d been home, the way they’d take short runs then suddenly freeze. The busy activity of foraging, then what? Sudden fear and the compulsion to be still. The dream of invisibility?

  The front door of the house opened. It was painted yellow like the shutters; it caught the last of the light as it swung open and flashed briefly before it was closed again. A tall figure hesitated by the door. She could not see his face. He was pulling on a light-coloured jacket, buttoning it, checking the pockets. Then he moved down to the front gate and into the pooled light of a streetlamp.

  She nodded at her imaginary friend on the other end of the phone, mouthed meaningless words.

  The man, and indeed it was the older brother, walked towards the telephone box. His pace was neither hurried nor was it quite an aimless amble. She was certain he had not seen or recognised her. He passed within a yard of the phone booth.

  She replaced the receiver, left the booth and, after a moment’s hesitation, began to follow him.

  She followed him without quite knowing why. Perhaps because she wanted to talk to someone in English. Maybe, she thought, this is a Babel trait – a sudden inexplicable need for someone whose language you speak, whose tribe you belong to.

  Or is it the desire for adventure? Or curiosity which, as she knows, killed the cat.

  He walks down a wide road, crosses another, then cuts down a narrow cobblestoned alley into a broad tree-lined street of residential houses. Lucy is momentarily distracted when an old man steps from one of the houses as she passes. He is bent double with age and his gaunt face is distinguished by extravagant wild black eyebrows that give him a surprised, even electrified expression. At the end of his outstretched arm is a domed pewter-coloured birdcage. Inside the cage is a gleaming blue-black creature with a vivid orange beak. The sight is so improbable that Lucy feels more than ever that she inhabits a surreal dream. Her step slows, then she recovers herself. She catches sight of her prey near the end of the street and picks up her pace.

  He turns into a wide boulevard where there are a number of bars. People are sitting outside at tables, eating and drinking. A perfect evening. Couples and families promenade. A pretty girl wheels her bike along and when she stops to chat with a group of young men three of them rise and exchange kisses with her. They talk animatedly for a minute or so, then the girl moves on, steering her bike confidently amongst the meandering crowds until she crosses the road and goes out of sight.

  Up ahead the man is still walking along at an unhurried pace. Sometimes Lucy loses sight of him when he is absorbed by small crowds or her view is obscured by slight turns in the road. She decides to follow him just to the end of this street. Her game is beginning to lose its edge and there was no purpose to it in the beginning, only the mischievous idea of acting on impulse.

  She slows, decides to walk a little further and then perhaps to stop at one of the little cafés for a coffee and a cigarette. She begins to pay more attention to the tables and chairs on the terraces outside the bars. All of them seem to be occupied and she doesn’t want to share a table, wants to be entirely alone. Unmistakably alone. The English woman, mysterious, self-reliant and confident. Needing no one.

  Further back, the cafés had been emptier and there were plenty of places to sit. She changes her plan. Walk another thirty yards or so, then turn around. She marks out the spot where she plans to give up; there, where a plane tree’s branches and leaves have embraced a lamppost, so that its ornately shaded light seems to sprout from it like a glowing amber flower.

  She is so busy thinking about this, projecting the future of her next half-hour, that she fails to see that the man she has been following for the last twenty minutes has disappeared into the very café where she plans to abandon her game.

  As she nears the tree, she realises that she has finally lost him. She stops walking and scans her surroundings. Trains her eye further down the road, then looks at the other side of the street – nothing. She searches the faces at the tables outside the cafés. He isn’t there, or anywhere to be seen. It is as if he has evaporated.

  She is still a few yards from the tree. A question remains. Should she continue as planned or give up now? She hesitates, suddenly aware of how strange and lost she must look. How crazy.

  This, she has always thought, must be the borderline between utter madness and a milder form of disturbance. Self awareness. Embarrassment at the thought of being perceived as crazy.

  As if to prove she isn’t insane, to show she has somewhere to go, something important to do, she looks at her watch. Looks without actually registering the time. She walks on, then stops under the tree. She gets her guidebook from her bag, pretends to study it as she leans a shoulder on the tree, assuming artificial casualness.

  She looks about her, then again at her watch. She gives a moue of disappointment, closes the book and returns it to her bag. Looking up she sees that there is now a small table free and decides that this is fate – that this is where she was meant to come, and that now something will happen.

  A waiter offers Lucy the menu, which she waves away, asking instead for a black coffee.

  It is a pleasant night, there is a slight breeze, but it’s balmy and she enjoys the sensation of the warm air on her bare legs, the soft movement of it over her face and hair. She could happily sit here for an hour or two.

  The coffee comes promptly, an espresso, thick and oily in a very small cup. She adds four cubes of sugar. She’ll be awake all night after drinking that. Maybe it’s a mistake. She’s agitated enough already, without sending a poisoned chalice of caffeine and processed white demon carbs careering through her system. She should have something else; something that soothes her and will knock her out enough to sleep when she gets back to the hotel. Insomnia has stalked her all her l
ife, lying dormant for months and even years at a time, only to return again and again, as it had a month ago – nudging her awake at ten to four in the morning with her mind in the grave.

  The outside seating area is arranged in an apron of tables bordered on two sides by low wooden troughs filled with glossy-leaved plants. Her table at the furthest edge of the terrace is next to one of these planters. She tips the coffee into the planter, amazed by how it soaks in quickly, leaving only a dark stain on the surface of the earth. Coffee probably isn’t very good for it. She hopes no one saw her. But even if they did, what does it matter? She’ll never see them again. They’ll never see her. And maybe the explanation will be, Oh, she’s English? Well, that explains it.

  She replaces the empty cup in the saucer, catches the waiter’s eye. ‘More coffee?’ he asks.

  ‘No,’ she says and orders a half litre of the house red.

  ‘Anything else, bread, olives, cheese?’ he offers, smiling.

  ‘No, just the wine. Merci beaucoup.’

  He smiles, though his eyes remain cold. He doesn’t like me, she thinks.

  He retreats to the interior of the building. Inside she can see a small semi-circular bar where a number of men are gathered on high stools. A slot machine blinks gaudily in the background showing a cascade of playing cards that are illuminated one by one to give the effect of movement.

  He does not like me, she thinks again, and gets her mirror and lipstick from her bag. Studies her face, applies more lipstick. She sees nothing to dislike in her reflection, only the slightly surprised, slightly disappointed look of a lonely young woman who nobody loves, not really. Not even Thom – who just pretends.