Significance (12 page)

Then she's out, into the night.

The Running Man

Joseph felt as if he might burst with happiness. He sat on the ledge of the café wishing there was someone he could share his news with. His mother had rung to tell him that his application for funding had been successful. In just a few months his college education would begin. He had been accepted to read medicine and science at London University. His cousin had promised that he could stay with her in Camden Town. She'd sent him a photo of the house her flat was in. It was white with two fluted columns on either side of a front door which was painted a glossy kingfisher blue colour. The house loomed in his imagination, four storeys high with two large windows on each floor and an azure London sky above. He imagined himself seated by one of the windows, glancing up from a weighty book to watch a passing cloud – himself transformed and transforming – a doctor, a healer, goodness passing from his skilful surgeon's fingers to end suffering.

He set off walking slowly and thoughtfully. He felt as if he was airless, floating. He had not gone very far when behind him he heard the sharp echoing sound of footsteps. He turned and saw the English girl he had spoken to earlier, coming out of the bar. She hadn't been very friendly; she had stared at him blankly when he attempted to strike up a conversation. Which was a pity, as now more than ever he needed to practise his English.

She was walking rapidly in the opposite direction. He wondered why a young woman like that would be alone. It didn't make sense to him.

He was about to turn and resume walking when he saw a white object fall softly from the girl's shoulders. He fully expected her to notice this, but she didn't. She adjusted the bag on her shoulder and continued her brisk walk. The white garment lay in a ghost
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like heap on the pavement as she hurried off.

Without thinking Joseph ran after her. He was a good runner, had won several medals for his sprinting. He passed the bar and some way beyond it retrieved the fallen white object. It was soft and light and still slightly warm from her skin. He found himself bringing it up to his face, burying his nose in it, breathing in its sweet floral scent.

The sound of her heels clicking over the pavement was rapidly retreating. He looked up and could no longer see her. He sprinted in the direction she had gone. His footsteps, even when running at speed, were almost completely silent, and his breathing was easy and not even slightly ragged or laboured.

He shouted, ‘Hey!' and picked up his pace. He crossed two minor roads, quickly glancing up each narrow avenue as he went to see if he could spot her. When he came to a third, he stopped running. He gazed about him in all directions. He strained to hear her footsteps, but there was only the electrical fizz of the streetlight, the occasional sound of a car, then the furious buzz of a motorbike zipping past at high speed as the driver's powder
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blue cotton blouson jacket puffed up with air.

Joseph gave up. He was uncertain as to what he should do with the cardigan. He turned it over in his hands, inspecting it, wondering if perhaps there was a pocket and inside it some clue to the owner's identity or where she had gone. But there was no pocket, only a label that read ‘Monsoon' which made him think of thunderous rain, the beauty and boundless energy of it, its transforming power.

He resumed his slow walk, uncertainly holding the cardigan loosely bunched in one hand. When he thought he'd reached the approximate place where the young woman had lost the cardigan, he spread it out carefully over a low hedge of red
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flowered shrubs, so it could be easily seen.

He forgot about the girl and her lost cardigan almost immediately, let his mind fill with visions of his future life again, wished he could speed up time until he arrived at October and everything that that promised.

Liberty, Fraternity, Equality

In the bar Jean Laurens continued the argument with his old friend and customer Louis, about the young English woman who had just left. Louis was of the opinion that she should not have been allowed to leave at that hour unaccompanied. Jean reminded him that he was only a bar owner and had no authority over any of his customers, except the authority to refuse them service or throw them out. He cited the principle of liberty to defend his actions. Louis countered by reminding him of fraternity which he said must for any true Frenchman also include the protection of his sisters. Then darkly, Louis mentioned the prostitute who had been found murdered just three weeks ago. Her body was discovered near some industrial bins at the back of the manufacturing works on the Rue de Touvier.

Jean does not want to think about that. He is angry with Louis. He understands that Louis has five daughters, that the eldest is now fourteen and becoming a beautiful young woman. He understands his fears, but that dead woman was a prostitute. Yes, her life is no less valuable, but that was the risk she took, wasn't it? It went with the territory.

Thinking about this and unwilling to look at Louis, whose eyes seem to accuse him of some failure of courage or will, Jean turned his gaze towards the window at the front of the bar. The glass seemed even more fragile somehow, unable to quite hold at bay the blackness of the night. As he looked a figure ran past at speed, moving from right to left. A flash of scarlet from head to toe, white stripes marking out the pumping arms and legs, like diagrams designed to illustrate the workings of human locomotion.

It was the polite young African man who'd been in the bar a few days that week. The one who smiled so readily and so happily that you'd swear he'd never known a moment of pain or suffering his whole life. Jean did not have a clue as to why the young man was racing along the street outside his bar. He was dressed to go running, that was for sure, in his expensive track suit and flashy white and silver trainers. But Jean knew there were thousands, or more likely millions, of young people the world over who dressed like this, only to slouch on street corners and trudge to the employment exchange to draw their state benefit. At least one of them was getting some use out of the ergonomically built shoes, the carefully designed cloth which absorbed sweat and let your skin breathe and protected you from dangerous levels of ultra violet light.

But there again, Jean thought, who runs at night? And he remembered the fascist tendencies of a small minority of the town's disenfranchised kids and the dripping silver swastika spray
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painted on the railway bridge near the school. A swastika after what France had suffered during the war!

He kept his eyes on the window, imagining a mob of skinheads appearing, streaking across the night from right to left, a pack of filthy hounds in pursuit, hungry for any blood they deemed less pure than their own.

Jean kept a revolver hidden under the bar, loaded and ready. He imagined himself grabbing it, running out into the night. One warning shot should stop them, and if not? Well then he'd give the scum just what they deserved.

He frowned and tensed his muscles. He was no coward. But no one else ran past the window. A minute passed, then strolling peacefully by, with not a care in the world, went one of the waitresses from the café up the road. A skinny slightly bow
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legged guy who was not much taller than her walked by her side with his hand around her waist measuring the dip and swell of her body. They stopped right in front of his window and began to kiss one another. Jean looked away.

‘I am sorry,' Louis said. ‘You do not see the world as I see it. With a father's eyes.'

Jean grunted and merely nodded. No point getting tangled up in the argument again. No point reminding Louis that he too was a father.

He looked out of the window again. The waitress and her lover had gone.

He felt tired suddenly, and wished with all his heart that he was young again.

‘Another beer?' he asked Louis.

‘On the house?'

‘Yeah, on the house,' Jean replied, and shrugged as if to show he didn't care either way.

Finders Keepers

Suzette and Florian could hardly keep their hands off one another. They walked towards Suzette's apartment in stops and starts. They were eager to get there, but somehow had to stop every few yards to kiss.

Florian's kisses were every bit as good and tender as she remembered. And his eyes when he looked at her showed, she was certain, not only lust but something more, or at least the beginning of something more.

Suzette had wasted too many good years on that no good cop, Bertrand. She should have known he'd never leave his wife. All those lies about not even sleeping with her anymore, and the last Suzette had heard of him, his wife was pregnant again with their fourth child.

She had thought she was satisfied with the slow and secretive crumbs of happiness she'd got when she was with Bertrand. But they were nothing; as insubstantial as a communion wafer that melts on your tongue. It was either a morsel of rice paper or the body of Christ depending on your belief. When she had believed Bertrand's words about love, about the new start they would make, about his divorce and his stories of the endless cold nights he spent sleeping on the sofa, she had seen their few brief moments together as a taste of what was to come. Now she saw things differently and thought ruefully of how she had been lied to. Fooled and used, distracted from what should have been the proper course of her life, namely to fall in love with a man nearer her own age, to get married and start a family of her own.

And now here was Florian – a man from the wrong side of the tracks, who had (or so she'd heard) a shady past – gazing at her with such honesty, who could kiss her in the middle of the street or openly hold her hand or squeeze her waist without looking over his shoulder, without an ounce of fear or guilt or regret.

They walked at a fast pace, their strides matching one another's, their arms entangled. Stopped. Kissed. Walked. Stopped again.

It reminded Suzette of when she was thirteen or fourteen and had first discovered boys and along with boys her own first feelings of desire. How it felt in the pit of her stomach, flip
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flopping. So much of the kissing and groping was conducted outdoors. In alleyways, under bridges, in graveyards, sitting on benches near the tennis courts, lying in fields near her house. The endless, endless kissing. The cool hands snaking clumsily over her back, over her ribs, her belly. Herself allowing just so much. Never going so far as taking any clothes off, but things got disarrayed, unclipped, tugged, unzipped, twisted. Poor boys, she thought, remembering how satisfying it had been to feel the hard press of them against her and how she would never ever touch them no matter how they begged and cajoled.

Kissing Florian on the street was like that. It was even better than that first night they'd got together.

They walked again. Stopped and kissed. Breathless.

‘Let's go up there,' she said and pointed to a narrow alleyway between a restaurant and a general store. The ground there was cobbled; a narrow drain ran down its centre like a vein. But as the two of them looked and were tempted, a rotund man in chef's whites came out and threw a bucket of foamy greyish water onto the ground sending up a cloud of steam.

Suzette giggled. ‘Oop
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la. Not such a good idea eh?'

‘You crazy girl,' Florian said, and kissed her again.

They were only a few streets away from Suzette's place. It normally only took her ten or fifteen minutes at most, but this walk had taken much longer, not that she was complaining.

As they passed the Café de Trois, Suzette noticed something draped over the geranium tubs outside. It was a white cardigan with small shell buttons. Very pretty. Someone had placed it on the plant as if it were a gift for whoever happened to be passing.

‘How strange,' Suzette said, picking it up. It felt good in her hands, soft and natural. She, who had spent most of her young life in nasty squeaky, staticky acrylic sweaters, thought she knew fine wool when she saw it, knew for certain when she touched it.

The cardigan wasn't damp or dirty and when she sniffed at it suspiciously, she only detected a lingering scent of something like Yves St Laurent's Babydoll perfume. One of her favourite scents, but she could never afford it.

‘For me,' she said and held it against herself so that Florian could see how pretty she would look in it.

‘For you,' he said, confirming not only what she'd said, but also his perfectly matched moral system. Neither had any qualms about taking the cardigan. The orbit of a star had made a happy alignment that night, bringing Florian and Suzette together, and giving Suzette this beautiful gift. If he could find a general store open this late, Florian would buy a scratch card, his luck was obviously in.

Storytelling

As he walked back to the house, Scott was still preoccupied by thoughts of Aaron; of the future and (much as he tried to bat it away) the past.

He hadn't told Marilyn what the social services had said about the choices concerning Aaron; the threat of a residential home, or the suggestion that either Aaron come to live with them, or that he and Marilyn move in with his parents and brother.

Marilyn worked as a part
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time sub
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editor for a tiny and increasingly embattled independent publishing company. The work at times frustrated her as she would have liked to be more involved with some of the decision making, but she was loyal and ambitious and determined to stick it out and make her mark.