In Paris With You Read online

  or lie on the grass and gaze up at the stars (haha).

  I hope I don’t sound hysterical

  and I hope this isn’t embarrassing,

  and I really hope you don’t feel like I’m pressuring

  you into anything. If you don’t reply, I promise you,

  I won’t be upset.

  So good morning, and I’ll see you soon,

  hopefully this afternoon! Better go …

  Tatiana xoxo

  The message makes a sound

  like a rocket blasting off into the sky.

  Tatiana imagines Eugene opening it. She imagines

  his (blue) eyes

  reading it,

  line after line,

  and welling

  with tears

  of tenderness,

  perhaps.

  It is four fifty-four in the morning;

  a shard of sunlight spears the plum sky.

  This is exactly the letter that she’d felt deep inside.

  Tender, honest, direct.

  Sweet, yet discreet.

  I know, I know.

  You couldn’t hope for a better

  love letter,

  nor a worse one.

  If Tatiana were to read that ten years later … oh my God!

  That get-me-out-of-here moment,

  thinking: I wish I were dead,

  thinking: that wasn’t me,

  it can’t have been!

  She would never recognise herself in those words;

  she would see only the clumsy mistakes

  of another girl,

  someone who no longer exists:

  a shrinking violet,

  a frightened virgin,

  not someone who is studying the

  liquid elements in Caillebotte’s work,

  someone who is calm when shooing

  away her supervisor’s wooing.

  We are hard on ourselves when we recollect the past;

  we hate ourselves, in retrospect.

  But I swear that at this very moment,

  the moment when the message blasts off into the ether,

  Tatiana feels better than she’s ever felt before; not just

  liberated, not just unburdened,

  but something much deeper:

  she feels translated, if you will;

  she feels immortalised.

  There now exists, outside herself, a copy of

  her soul. She is proud to have brought it to life.

  Naturally, ten years later,

  this description will no longer fit.

  But the same is true of any photograph, isn’t it?

  Why do we feel the need to recognise our thoughts

  ten years later, when one look in the mirror

  will show us how much we’ve changed?

  We put our ideas on a higher plane

  than our appearance; we tell ourselves

  that they will never change,

  our titanium thoughts, our platinum promises.

  Yes, Tatiana’s words were true once,

  and time will prove them false;

  where the present caresses, now,

  the past will later pinch. So what?

  Tonight, those thoughts of hers are the living truth.

  And, for a thought,

  to be true once,

  even for just one night,

  is already quite a feat.

  *

  The next day, or rather the same day,

  Tatiana wakes at ten;

  a strangely late hour for this early bird.

  With her head on the pillow,

  she listens, through the open window,

  to the bees tapping the wisteria’s purple lips.

  She hears Olga sneeze (hay fever)

  down in the garden.

  Olga is eating her breakfast outside – Tatiana hears

  the scrape of a knife buttering toast;

  she hears the music from the MP3 placed in a

  glass to amplify its sound.

  Without looking, she knows that her sister is sitting

  between the cafetiere and the butter dish

  at the rusty table, as she always does.

  The song

  is by Muse, a cover version, soaring and ethereal,

  of ‘Feeling Good’.

  Olga sings along as she listens to it:

  Freedom is mine,

  You know how I feel

  If she’s singing,

  that must mean that Lensky

  has sent her a poem this morning.

  It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day,

  it’s a new life

  Tatiana gets up and goes to the window, waves to her sister

  and helps her finish the song:

  for me

  and I’m feeling good

  ‘It’s so wonderful to hear you two sing!’

  exclaims their mother.

  Da-dum

  Da-dum

  Da-dum

  Da-da-da-da-dum

  It’s Saturday. She’s in the garden too, reading

  Courrier International.

  ‘I used to sing all the time, when I was your age.’

  Tatiana hurtles downstairs to join them,

  to scrape butter across toast

  and get drunk on black coffee

  in the garden already invaded from the east

  by sunlight.

  She and Olga talk with their eyes: both girls

  are in a very good mood this morning.

  They are filled with love.

  They dance and whirl,

  and their mother quickly hoards this happiness while it lasts.

  She knows that at fourteen or seventeen,

  everything changes fast.

  From beneath her copy of Grazia, Olga

  watches her sister spread plum jam on her bread.

  Tatiana’s grown up this summer, she thinks;

  she’ll be fifteen in a couple of weeks,

  and there’s something luminous about her now.

  Olga has never thought her sister beautiful, but she cannot

  deny that there’s something about her that might drive

  a professor, a doctor, a solicitor wild …

  the kind of man who’s attracted

  to the harsh rind you find

  covering any very intelligent girl.

  Yes, she’s sure, somewhere there must be

  a guy who’ll find Tatiana sexy.

  Satisfied with this conclusion, Olga returns to her magazine.

  HOW

  TO CHOOSE THE

  BEST MOISTURISER

  One day this too will be of interest to her sister.

  Once she is done with books and daydreaming.

  AND DON’T FORGET TO REAPPLY IN THE EVENING

  Tatiana, meanwhile, watches a butterfly of butter

  bloom through the black liquid as she dunks toast

  in her coffee.

  She’ll check her emails later. There’s no rush.

  Without meaning to, she’s enjoying her youth.

  *

  In the meantime, Eugene has received the message.

  He’s read it twice or three times or even

  I don’t know how many times exactly, but the point is,

  he cares.

  Yes, this message matters to him. Speaks to him.

  Maybe it even touches him. Maybe.

  It’s hard to say. At first, he thought:

  Typical. Classic. Normal.

  Just another girl, charmed by yours truly.

  Completely predictable, utterly unoriginal.

  This shit happens to me every month, practically.

  He was expecting it, of course. He has to admit

  that he’s a little bit,

  I don’t know, disappointed,

  that she should make her feelings known,

  but, at the same time, that email she wrote,

  it was nicely phrased; he’s flattered,

&
nbsp; despite himself,

  and kind of confused too,

  and confused that he’s confused.

  It crosses his mind to take advantage of the

  situation; become the kind of person who goes to see

  Spider-Man purely so he can snare Tatiana in his web and

  snog her.

  But then Eugene feels uneasy,

  stopped in his tracks by a pang of morality –

  some kind of Catholic guilt from far away:

  the thought of seducing her leaves him queasy.

  He tells himself: ‘She’s just a kid.’

  Kid is a useful term. Kid means cute.

  Kid equals child, sister, daughter.

  Kids are flat-chested, slender-hipped,

  without soft, enticing curves.

  Kid means fresh and innocent, free

  of the burning desires of riper girls.

  Kid equals smooth, simple and sleek;

  no dangerous slopes or hidden creeks.

  You tuck a kid in. You read her books,

  stories to teach her about life and help her sleep.

  With a kid, your duty is to educate.

  Eugene feels as though he’s been assigned an important task.

  He knows now how he’ll reply; in his head, he composes an

  answer heavy with the weight

  of the three years longer than Tatiana

  that he’s lived;

  of the dozens of books more than Tatiana

  that he’s read;

  of the numberless loves more than Tatiana

  that he’s had.

  And here, I must interrupt the story briefly to confess

  that I am not exactly sure

  of the precise number of lovers Eugene’s had.

  He would say a lot.

  But men often brag like that.

  There’s not much trace of them in the records.

  And besides, he’s only seventeen, so I doubt he’s bedded

  a hundred girls in France, a thousand and three in Spain.

  But all the same,

  if Eugene’s already bored

  of such conquests, you can bet

  he must have quite a hoard.

  The answer he’s cooking up for Tatiana is a lesson

  drawn from all those loves,

  of which Tatiana’s is, in his mind,

  an infinitesimally small representation,

  a drop in the ocean,

  a typical crush, one of thousands;

  he will teach her a lesson based on hard facts.

  And one day

  (he thinks)

  she will thank him for it.

  *

  And yet the hours pass

  and the garden gate does not creak.

  Tatiana has bitten down most of her nails. She’s refreshed

  her Hotmail inbox thirty times and counting.

  Impossible to concentrate on the Elizabeth Gaskell she’s

  reading.

  The slightest sound – the buzz of a bumblebee,

  the honk of a car horn, a screeching magpie, a backfiring

  motorbike – and she lifts up her head, suddenly on edge.

  But the gate does not budge.

  In this universe of strange noises, Olga

  is contentedly reading Eat Pray Love.

  Apparently, all is normal, for her.

  Flexing her toes, she slaps her flip-flops against her feet.

  Time passes, and Tatiana hopes that Olga

  will suddenly spring up, weary of all this heat,

  and wonder, at last,

  what the hell her boyfriend’s doing.

  Her boyfriend, usually, is all she talks about,

  twenty-four hours a day.

  So why, today,

  is she acting as if he never

  existed in the first place?

  As if their lives had not been changed forever

  by him leading Eugene

  through that garden gate?

  After the fifteenth flip-flop flap, Tatiana cracks:

  ‘Isn’t Lensky coming today?’ she asks,

  cactus-throated.

  Olga, without looking up: ‘No,

  he’s gone to visit his cousin Anne-Marie

  with Eugene.’

  This cousin immediately appears

  in Tatiana’s overloaded mind

  as a cross between Liv Tyler and Angelina Jolie,

  a Nobel-Prize-winning Olympic athlete, founder of a

  fashionable charity for the benefit of humankind.

  No email that afternoon. Nor that evening.

  A night of silent screaming.

  Same time, next afternoon:

  ‘Isn’t Lensky coming today?’

  ‘Yeah, he is. He told me he’d be here soon,’

  says Olga,

  instinctively glancing at her Nokia flip-phone.

  And it’s true: Lensky does arrive alone.

  Tatiana can’t ask any more questions; she feels as though

  she’s living inside a body that’s no longer her own;

  and bloody Olga’s incurious as a stone!

  Eugene’s absence just sits there,

  like an elephant in a deckchair.

  What can she do, Tatiana,

  but drink tea with this enormous absence?

  Later, when Lensky’s leaving,

  she manages to articulate:

  ‘So Eugene’s not coming today?’

  Lensky: ‘Nah, he didn’t feel like it.’

  He didn’t feel like it.

  Does that mean:

  1. that he’s ill – he’s got stomach ache, he’s throwing up everywhere; or

  2. that he doesn’t want to see me because he feels insulted by what I wrote; or

  3. that he’s busy screwing Lensky’s cousin (who has, since yesterday, also become a neurosurgeon); or

  4. that he’s afraid he won’t be able to stop himself furiously kissing me?

  With the exception of the first (not fantastically

  interesting) possibility, these scenarios will circle Tatiana’s

  head all night.

  2:34 am.

  Still no email.

  Refresh the page.

  The next afternoon, Lensky

  turns up at the usual time,

  escorted by Eugene’s elephantine

  absence,

  which, having gained twenty pounds

  overnight, proceeds to break three wicker chairs, crush the

  parasol and smash all the porcelain

  before slumping across the forged-iron table.

  ‘Isn’t Eugene coming?’

  ‘Eugene? Ah, no, he’s gone to Paris to see his

  parents. He’ll be back tomorrow.’

  Tomorrow,

  still nothing.

  Eugene’s absence is getting to know the garden well now.

  It nibbles the mint leaves, terrifies the birds.

  It’s absolutely absurd, Eugene’s absence.

  Tatiana’s store of questions is all used up. One more ‘Isn’t

  Eugene coming?’ and even Lensky will fathom that she’s

  not asking out of politeness but passion.

  After the next day, and the day after

  that, and finally the day after that, Tatiana’s superhuman

  hopefulness runs dry,

  and she starts to await

  the daily creak of the gate

  that greets

  the absence

  of Eugene.

  To her surprise, she gets used to this routine

  non-event.

  It’s as if she’s closed the brackets around Eugene.

  From moment to moment, she is certain/not certain

  that he existed/did not exist in her life.

  This doubt seems unimportant. She loves him still,

  of course,

  but Tatiana’s love has never depended

  on anything particularly real;

  eve
n when she’s not quite sure the thing she loves exists,

  it doesn’t alter the way that she feels.

  In moments of lucidity, she is fully aware that it’s

  because of her that he’s disappeared.

  And so, feeling responsible for his absence,

  she takes great care to make it welcome here;

  she holds its hand

  and whispers secrets in its ear.

  *

  One day a thousand years later,

  or maybe it was just a week,

  the gate creaks open, and suddenly,

  here’s Lensky

  and ‘Eugene!’

  (cries Olga)

  ‘We missed you! Where have you been?’

  Eugene is there, in the flesh.

  He has taken the place of his absence.

  Tatiana was completely unprepared for this event.

  She had poured the non-cup of tea and taken out

  the non-tin of biscuits for her fat phantom friend.

  She was not expecting to feel so shocked

  if Eugene ever did come back.

  Her heart takes the lift

  up to her larynx,

  where it gets stuck

  hammering against the walls of her

  neck.

  Faced with something utterly unforeseen,

  animal instinct:

  fight or flight.

  Tatiana, faced with the real Eugene,

  goes for the one on the right.

  Suddenly she has something more important to

  do upstairs. What? Who cares! Revisions, reading, ironing,

  watching Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? …

  Entering the garden, Eugene finds only the

  absence of Tatiana; and it has to be said that it stings him,

  that absence,

  like a fresh little graze on the skin of the world.

  Through the window, Tatiana hears him say:

  ‘Isn’t Tatiana here?’

  ‘Oh yeah, she is, I just saw her run upstairs,’

  replies Olga.

  So now he knows: she fled. She’s a coward and a fool.

  Tatiana takes refuge in the bathroom,

  the only believable excuse that she can find

  for having run upstairs just as he arrived.

  But now she’s in a bind because, as soon as they

  hear the toilet flush,

  everyone will expect her back outside.

  For a moment she wavers on the landing floor

  like one of those spinning tops

  that, for a few instants of perfect grace,

  express their disagreement

  with gravity,

  refuse to

  topple