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  ‘Hello, Redmond,’ she said.

  What she wrote about Redmond in her little book was this: Redmond was lonely, being the king. When you’re a king, you don’t get treated like a person, you get treated like a king.

  On the far side of the island she sat on a submerged sandbar streaked with black, iron-rich sand and clay deposits. The current had carved perfect wavelets into the sandbar, and the shallow water that now flowed over the sand glinted black and grey and gold. Anouk dug her fingers under a tablet of clay and prised it away, clouding the water. She mashed the clay between her palms until it became a paste, then lathered it up and down her arms and legs, across her cheeks and forehead. Left a handprint on her bony breastplate. She climbed on to a ledge of granite, the rock glinting with mica, and stretched out in the sun like a lizard, and soon her skin began to tighten as the clay dried a silvery, flaky blue. Her face a mask. She was island. She was river.

  * * *

  This had been a really bad summer for wasps. Worse than usual. The day after Mel went back to Toronto, Anouk and Nora and Red ate their dinner on the porch, plates of barbecued chicken and the end-of-season peaches ’n’ cream corn balancing on their knees. Anouk watched a wasp land on her corn, searching with its antennae. Another two wasps danced around her chicken, bounced off her wrist.

  Nora asked Red to install screening around the porch so that the following year, they wouldn’t have to put up with all these goddamn wasps. She had been stung twice this summer, she said, and kept finding wasps in her drink cans.

  ‘I’m afraid I’m going to swallow one,’ she said.

  ‘Just check the can before you drink,’ he said. He swatted at a wasp that was investigating Anouk’s hair.

  ‘But I don’t want to check the can before I drink.’ She brought a cob of corn to her mouth, then put it on her plate again without taking a bite. ‘This effing place,’ she said. ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Plenty of wasps in Toronto,’ he said.

  ‘Did I mention Toronto?’

  The next day, Sunday, Anouk went with her mother into Pembroke, to the Canadian Tire, where Nora bought a wasp trap, a little plastic dome shaped like a cartoon hive. Since they were in town, they also stopped by the IGA for groceries, and walking back to the car they passed the movie theatre. Anouk stopped and looked up at the billboard. She called to Nora, already a few shops ahead, asked her to come back.

  ‘Can we see that?’ she asked her mother, pointing to the billboard.

  ‘No way.’

  ‘Look. It starts in twenty minutes. Please.’

  ‘I’ve got milk here.’ Nora raised one of the bags from the IGA and gave it an angry little rustle.

  ‘I really want to see this.’

  Bag still held aloft, Nora hesitated. Frowned. Anouk knew she had almost won. ‘We don’t have your Creon. So. No snacks,’ she said, and told Anouk to wait while she put the groceries in the car.

  Anouk stood under the shade of an awning and kicked off her flip-flop, and poked at a concave piece of glass on the sidewalk with her bare toe. August heat. No wind. Anouk’s hair, the deep and layered orange of pottery glaze, was tied back in a long braid. Not a strand moved. The rev of a cicada rose, sawed the air, crescendoed and faded. She imagined that, if you could see this sound, it would spiral tightly into the air like a spark from a campfire, then burst and fizzle and disappear. She ground the glass into the pavement with her toe. On her foot, a black and sweaty band of dirt between her big toe and the next from where her flip-flop rubbed all summer long.

  ‘What are you doing?’ A lazy call from across the street.

  Anouk looked up. It was Maggie, a girl from school, standing there holding a leash. At the other end of the leash, a small, wiry black dog pissed against a tree.

  ‘Going to a movie.’

  Maggie, bug-eyed, glanced briefly at the billboard. ‘Seen it.’

  Anouk shrugged.

  ‘Aren’t you going with anyone?’

  ‘My mom.’

  Maggie rolled her bulbous eyes. Rolled them so hard it was a miracle they didn’t pop out of their sockets and land in the gutter. Her dog shook his leg and spun about to sniff his own piss, then dragged at the leash, and Maggie carried on down the road.

  ‘Go fuck yourself,’ Anouk whispered.

  * * *

  Almost home, after the movie, Nora pulled off the paved road and on to the dirt track that rolled through the woods to their house. She stopped the car. Without discussion, she and Anouk got out and switched seats. Anouk put the car in gear and slowly drove, neck stretched to see out of the window. The woods here, delicate and mixed: thin-trunked maple saplings and jaunty, soft-needled pines. Silver birch trees peeling curls of papery bark to reveal salmon-pink flesh underneath. Anouk crept along the track, not wanting to kill a rabbit, a mouse. Not wanting to kill a garter snake or chipmunk or anything else. Halfway home, she stopped the car with a jolt and pointed out an oasis of sunlight a few metres into the woods, where a colony of buttercups grew in a patch of grass.

  ‘Pretty,’ she said.

  ‘Come on. I need to get this milk in the fridge.’

  At home, Anouk helped Nora set up the wasp trap. They poured cola into the tray at its base and hung the trap from a hook screwed into the top of the porch overhang. The trap was punctured with funnelled holes that tapered towards the inside of the dome. The idea was that the wasps would fly into the holes, attracted by the sugar in the cola and, once inside, wouldn’t be able to get back out.

  ‘Ingenious,’ Nora said, standing back to admire her work.

  ‘I think it’s mean,’ Anouk said.

  ‘You’ve never been stung.’

  ‘I don’t think Dad will like it.’

  Nora looked at her. Looked at her for a long time.

  ‘What?’ said Anouk.

  ‘You and your dad,’ said Nora.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  After a couple of days, Anouk inspected the trap. It was carnage. Most of the fated wasps were still alive, some boxing apoplectically against the inner walls of the dome, which was now sweaty with condensation. Others drifted drunkenly against each other. The tray at the bottom was a sluggish mixture of body parts and sugar.

  She watched another wasp as it worked its way into a funnel, busily scrabbling its strong legs, its black-and-golden abdomen striped and sleek and doomed.

  5

  L’Inconnue

  Paris, 1898

  The gare de Lyon grumbled and steamed. The train heaved into the station and I disembarked, my carpet bag light enough to be carried by one hand. It was a Wednesday afternoon and travellers swarmed the station, not just people from France but from other places as well. The platform clanged with languages I didn’t understand, tongues rolling backwards, guttural sounds shifting in the throat like stones. Baffling combinations of consonants. A short, dark man who spoke French with a foreign accent offered to sell me a miniature wooden omnibus from a collection of buses and carts and coaches lined up on his stall table. He showed no emotion when I declined. A Roma woman pirouetted up and down the platform selling silk scarves. Perhaps fifty of them fluttered from her swiftly moving arms, the colours so bright and loud and uncoordinated it was as if the scarves were shouting. There was the smell of coal from the trains but there was also some other kind of burning, and there was the smell of wool, of perspiration and perfume.

  The instructions Madame Debord had written to me in her final letter were to wait on the platform for the cocher, who would take me in his cab to her apartment building. He would be carrying a sign with my name written on it. I positioned myself so that my back was against an iron column, and waited, rubbing my thumb over the round, solid face of a rivet. Two well-dressed men passed by, very close, gesticulating aggressively. One of them knocked my bag to the ground with his elbow and didn’t bother
to stop. As I bent to collect it, I was approached by a man with no legs. He wheeled himself over on a small wooden platform, dirt-black rags wrapped thickly around his palms and up over his wrists. He smelled like piss and rot but had a friendly, gap-toothed smile. His thick black hair shone with grease and he spoke with a drooling crook at the side of his mouth.

  ‘I apologize, Mademoiselle, for the indecency of those fellows.’ His voice was an eloquent, dignified slur.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, remaining crouched close to the floor. I was aware of the skirts and boots and trouser legs that flowed around us, but thought that to stand would be unkind. The man entwined his fingers across his chest and tapped his thumbs together, raised his chin and smiled, lids heavy over his dark eyes.

  ‘We’re not all as hostile as that.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ I said.

  ‘First time to Paris?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Betrothed?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Here to work, then. To make your small way in the big world.’ He looked at my hat, at the cut of my coat. ‘Shop girl,’ he said, still smiling, ‘or seamstress. Perhaps a lady’s companion.’

  I nodded at his last guess, amused.

  ‘I couldn’t think of a more uninspiring position than the lady’s companion,’ he said, ‘but likely an improvement from whatever situation it is you’ve left.’

  ‘Well.’ My legs were going numb.

  He continued to stare at me, and I felt obliged to open my bag and reach for the small satchel of money I carried. I took out a few sous and offered them to him. He rotated his hands to make a bowl shape, his fingers having already been laced together, and into this I dropped the coins. He then did the most amazing contortion with his arms, a sort of figure-of-eight twist where his hands disappeared into the folds of his ragged clothing, then came out empty.

  I stood then, and with the straightening of my legs, the blood rushed to my feet. I felt as if I might topple over.

  He began to turn his trolley and move away. ‘Adieu,’ he said, and made as if to tip his hat, though he wore none. As soon as he’d gone, swallowed up by commuters, I wondered if I’d imagined him.

  The cocher and I soon found one another. He took my bag and bade me to follow him quickly through the station. His cab stood in the street, lined up in a row with several others, the horses lean and tired and resigned. It had rained earlier in the day and the hem of my skirt drew mud, but the sun was out now, its light reflecting off the limestone buildings. As soon as I was seated in the carriage we were underway. I stared out of the window like a baby peeking from its pram. Clermont-Ferrand was sizeable enough but this was my first city, and it was Paris. Stuck behind an endless line of omnibuses and carts and other cabs, we crawled slowly along Avenue Daumensil, towards Place de la Bastille. People were everywhere, everywhere. Women with babies, and girls hurrying with parcels stuck importantly under their arms. Slick, clever-eyed street merchants and workmen dusty with the remnants of hard labour. Gentlemen who seemed to just be strolling, doing nothing, stopping in the middle of the crowd to look in a shop window. These men seemed wholly unconcerned by anything, anything at all. All the cafes were full. Waiters pranced among outdoor tables, clearing cups away and setting down dishes of food. Women chirped to each other across the open air from every other balcony. On one corner, a group of elderly men had set up a semicircle of chairs, and seemed to sit and speak as casually as if they were in a parlour at home. Looking down a smaller street to my left, I thought I saw a dwarf-man riding a tricycle, but lost him in the crowd before I could be sure. Moments later I thought I saw Tante Huguette coming out of a milliner’s, black lace up to her chin, but was of course mistaken.

  Chestnut trees, gregarious with white blossoms, lined the avenue, and there was the perfume of a dozen flower stalls and the stink of mud and yeast and horse. At the steps of the Colonne de Juillet, a newspaper kiosk thrummed with people. On the Rue de Rivoli, a gleam of wealth I couldn’t quite comprehend. The cream-white facades of the buildings, decorated with rosettes and vines and other ornate carvings I didn’t have the language to describe, and the heads of gods and saints propped these buildings up, under mansard roofs of storm-grey slate. The northern sky beyond was almost the same colour as the slate, though darker, richer, and to the east the sky was a washed-out blue.

  We eventually turned into a warren of smaller streets barely wide enough to accommodate two passing carriages, where there was less light and the noise was more acute. The whipping and snorting of horses and the creak of wooden wheels, the frustrations of a baby, the clattering of dishes. Boots on cobbles and someone with a wet, chesty cough. I lost all sense of direction as we turned several tight corners and finally stopped in front of the gated entrance to a courtyard, the courtyard hemmed by blocks of apartments six storeys high. Flower boxes hung off balconies; gas lights perched on flourished iron brackets, waiting for the dark. No dung in the road and a narrow, paved walk on one side.

  Without dismounting, my cocher called out, ‘Le cordon, s’il vous plaît,’ and after a moment, by some unseen hand, the heavy bolt that had lain across the gate to the courtyard was lifted by cord and pulley. The cocher hopped down from his platform and pushed the gate open, then climbed back up and we advanced through the porte cochère. The courtyard was just big enough for him to turn his carriage, which he did before helping me out with my bag. Without a word, he climbed back up on his cab and was gone.

  I stood unmoving, unsure at first what to do. The only other person in the courtyard was a young boy, dressed in thin but well-maintained clothes, filling a bucket with water from a communal tap.

  At ground level, the buildings housed spaces of commerce: a wool carder, a milliner and a stationer. Clerical offices and an atelier for leatherworks. Next to the porte cochère, the office of the concierge. I approached the door and rang the bell. The man who answered reminded me of something fungal, mushroomy: grey skin that looked like it might darken and take the impression of your fingers if you applied pressure for too long. He was very short, and had a conical, bald head and the attitude of one who would prefer the dark and damp. Under a log, say. He motioned me inside, and returned to his position behind a tall wooden counter with nothing on it but a brass bell and heavy ledger.

  I handed him my letter from Madame Debord and he looked down his stubby nose at it, took his time reading. Behind him, a wooden rack on the wall with several numbered slots stacked with letters. From the ceiling there draped an iron chain on a pulley and this, I assumed, was the mechanism for opening the gate.

  ‘Has Mademoiselle journeyed far today?’ the concierge asked, looking not at me but out of the window.

  ‘Not far.’

  ‘Where has Mademoiselle travelled from?’

  I told him where I was from, though I could see from the flatness of his expression that he’d only asked for asking’s sake. He pointed me to a stairwell, directing me to go up one flight to the second floor. I collected my bag and headed up the stairwell, which was narrow and smelled vaguely of onion broth and tobacco, but was well lit with gas lamps. The paint on the walls was fresh. On Madame Debord’s door, a small brass plaque engraved with her name. I knocked twice, rapid and light. Quick footsteps and the door was answered by a girl only a few years younger than me, about fifteen years old. Her hair was twisted in a loose chignon at the base of her neck and she wore a simple cotton dress.

  ‘It’s you,’ she whispered, and waved me into the vestibule with a jerk of the hand, then disappeared behind the vestibule door. I remained there, holding my bag against my knees. A gilded clock ticked loudly on a marble-topped side table. The girl came back carrying a laundry sack over her shoulder.

  ‘Madame is having a nap but she’ll wake in an hour. She’ll want coffee and something sweet. You’ll find what you need in the kitchen.’ Without looking at me, she backed through the door and pulled it softly
shut.

  The clock ticked. To my left, a corridor with four closed doors and a kitchen at its end. From behind the door closest to the vestibule, gentle snoring, like a nesting pigeon. To my right, an oval mirror. I removed my hat and hung it from a hook next to the mirror, where other hats and scarves were hanging. My face shone with the grime of travel and my hair was a state, so I dropped my bag to the floor and tried to smooth it with my palms. This only made things worse.

  I stepped out of the vestibule into the salon, which was high ceilinged and decorated with yellow wallpaper. Two tall windows adorned with heavy, dusty drapes. The room was comfortable, and not so choked with the gilt and knick-knackery I had been anticipating. Two simple settees and footstools, an odd collection of armchairs whose upholstery didn’t match and yet, somehow, still looked tasteful. A mahogany writing desk by the window and faded, silk-covered cushions on the settees. All the cornicing that was to be expected and a large mirror above the marble fireplace. An expensive but worn rug on a tired parquet floor that could do with a waxing. A chandelier. Something peculiar too: piles of newspapers stacked into the corners of the room, under the side tables and up against some of the furniture. Some piles partially avalanched, others weighted down with heavy glass ornaments. The newspaper on the top of the pile closest to me was dated only two days prior. I made my way through the room to one of the windows and pulled back the drape. Outside, flower boxes of pink and red geraniums, slightly gone to seed and with the woody, arthritic stalks of an unpruned plant that had survived at least one winter.

  At the far end of the salon lay a small dining room with a table big enough for six, a table that appeared vast and out of place as there were only two chairs. A glass-fronted cabinet filled with fine dishes and some tarnished silver. Two portraits in oil on the wall, darkly shaded.

  I went back through the salon and vestibule, and down the corridor to the small kitchen. Copper pots, also tarnished, hung from hooks on the wall. There was a dark-grey cast-iron stove and oven, with four burners in various sizes to hold saucepans and casseroles. I opened the oven door and saw that it was fuelled by gas rather than wood – a novelty for me. A porcelain sink and lead tap with running water. The tap needed a polish. On the counter, a set of pewter canisters lined up by size. I lifted the hinged lid from the largest one: coffee beans. Others held hunks of sugar, salt, pepper, nutmeg, dried thyme and mace. The spices were old and ashy and only faintly aromatic.