Coming Up for Air Read online

  The kitchen window overlooked the courtyard, and I glanced out and saw two men standing in the corner smoking pipes. One of the men looked up at me and I ducked. Under the window, the garde manger, breezy with the air that flowed through its open slats, where Madame had stored a jug of milk, some raw meat wrapped in waxed paper that looked a little suspect, a tomato and half an onion.

  On the wall under the cupboards, a dark bruise of damp in the plaster. I pressed my finger to it, and it gave way softly and there was the fusty smell of mould. I located the coffee pot and searched the cupboards for something sugary, and found, to my delight, a tin of bergamot sweets. I stuck one amber crystal under my tongue and wandered back down the corridor, opened the door to the WC. A simple porcelain toilet decorated with fine blue flowers. I balled my fists, happy and a little giddy at the thought of having a flush toilet just down the hall from where I slept. In the bathroom, a sink adorned with the same blue flowers, an enamelled bathtub and gas water heater, which consisted of a copper chimney with a tap running into the bathtub. A water heater! I couldn’t believe my luck.

  I went back to the salon and sat in an armchair and waited. From the apartment across the road, the hard rainfall of a piano being played mezzo-forte. There was wealth here, more than I had ever known, but neglect, too. Only a few weeks would have passed since Madame’s other girl had left the position, but the apartment was muted by a layer of dust that looked much older than that.

  I knew almost nothing about Madame Debord, had only vague memories of my grandmother travelling to see her in Paris when I was very young. I remembered that there had once been a visit planned, when Madame Debord was going to come and stay with us, and that it had to be cancelled due to her poor health.

  She woke up perhaps two hours later with a hoarse cough, just after 6 p.m. I hadn’t been asleep, but I hadn’t been entirely awake either, and I sat forward with a start, opening my eyes to an unfamiliar room that had become cut with shadow by the obtuse light of a spring evening. I rose quickly and stumbled, knocking my shin on a footstool, and, comically, propelled myself through the vestibule to the first door in the hallway. I knocked lightly.

  ‘Audette?’ Madame called, her voice tight, like wind passing through a tunnel.

  I opened the door and stood at the threshold. The blinds were closed and the room so dark that Madame would have only been able to see my silhouette. I considered pretending to be Audette (whom I assumed, correctly, was the laundry girl who had let me into the apartment) to save her a shock.

  The rasp of her breathing, then, stuttered again, ‘Audette?’

  I took a step into the room. ‘It’s me, Madame Debord,’ I said, and whispered my name.

  Shuffling blankets. Another, weaker cough. A match was struck and a lamp next to the bed was lit and there she was, propped upright, half sunk into a large pillow on a canopied bed that was partially recessed into the wall. She’d pulled the blankets up and was clutching them under her chin, and a cap was perched on her high forehead. She was petite and had glinting eyes, like those of a field mouse or squirrel.

  ‘Did Audette let you in? Did you lock the door behind her?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ I said. ‘Shall I go and lock it now?’

  ‘Always lock the door,’ she said. ‘The family who live on the third floor are Russian, and they are thieves. I’m sure of it. And that concierge, Monsieur Muller. He can’t be trusted either. He holds back the post and he’s cheap. I’ve been at him to repair the wall in my kitchen for over a year but he refuses.’

  ‘He did look the type,’ I said.

  Her hard eyes widened with the surprise, I thought, of someone who was accustomed to being pooh-poohed. She nodded curtly.

  ‘Will Madame take her coffee in bed?’ I asked, assuming this was what I was expected to ask.

  ‘Absolutely not,’ she said. ‘Lock the door, then come and help me dress and we’ll take our coffee in the salon.’

  * * *

  The girl who had been my predecessor was, apparently, also a thief. Madame Debord confessed that she had lied when she’d written in her letter that the girl’s position had been terminated because of a marriage proposal. In truth, I found out now, Madame had given her the sack because she’d been stealing. She didn’t want to alarm me, she explained, by writing about the duplicitous sorts of people I might encounter in Paris, so she’d lied. When she told me this, as we sipped coffee in the sitting room with a deck of cards on the table that never got dealt, with the sky darkening and my stomach rumbling and no mention of an evening meal, she did not apologize for the fiction.

  ‘What did she steal?’ I asked.

  ‘A silver salt cellar, which belonged to my mother. She also helped herself to a small sum of money. And I’m quite sure a pair of silk stockings.’

  ‘How awful.’

  ‘She took the spoon too. The one that belonged to the salt cellar. It was lovely. The spoon part of the spoon was scalloped and inlaid with gold.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Trust is foolhardy,’ she said.

  I nodded.

  ‘Believe me.’

  * * *

  My job was simple. I was to help Madame dress in the mornings and fix her petit déjeuner of milky coffee and toasted bread, sometimes a plate of fruit. Madame seldom left the apartment so it was up to me to buy the food, daily. We ate simply. Omelettes, crusty bread and cheese, charcuterie, beef stews, cassoulet, lamb’s tongue on toast and fish with butter sauce. Or, what grew to be my favourite, garlic and bread soup. I cooked a little but Madame preferred food bought in shops and restaurants and carried home. She loved sweet things, pastries with cream and jam, candied fruit, tarts and confectionery. She loved cognacs and wine and sugary coffee with brandy. You could see these indulgences in her face – a soft, shiny richness to her skin, her plump jowls. More important to Madame than food, however, was the accounts book she insisted I keep. When her husband, who had been a partner in a trading firm that dealt in textiles and apparel, was still alive, she employed a cook, who, apparently, had been skimming francs off the top for years. Madame was convinced that no one but herself was above slipping a few unearned sous into their pockets. I kept a detailed tally of every centime she gave me and every centime I spent, and each evening after supper we went over these sums together. Sometimes, when I came back from buying food or medicine or newspapers, it was obvious that my dresser drawers had been inspected, the blanket pulled back on the bed and the pillows disturbed. The little drawer in the bedside table was sometimes left ajar. She was searching my room, and wanted me to know it.

  Evenings, we played cards; we played dominoes. She drank a lot of wine and expected me to partake, so I partook, diluting my glass with water. She sat at the window and sometimes I wrote to Tante Huguette. I didn’t recognize this at first but came to see after a few months that my letters to her were a test, to see if she would write back, not just to acknowledge the small portion of my wages I regularly sent, but to see if I was missing from her life. She did respond, a couple of times. She wrote that she was pleased to know I was making something of myself and that now, with my contributions added to the income she was earning from my vacated room, she had been granted relief. Tremendous relief, in fact, was what she wrote.

  Madame had no visitors. No invitations. She owned no books but was a fool for the gossip and sensation of the newspapers and the serialized dramas of les feuilletons. When I asked her about the newspapers stacked around the apartment, she told me they were to be taken to the butcher and sold for five centimes a kilogram. Madame Debord didn’t need extra money, from what I could tell. Her husband had left her plenty and the partners in his firm faithfully sent her a small monthly dividend. But she was frugal, her clothes and furnishings years out of date. The apartment was in dire need of new wallpaper and paint. Or at least a good cleaning. When I suggested to her that maybe Audette, who lived with
her mother in one of the small loft apartments, would do a good job at cleaning, she said Audette couldn’t be trusted with anything more valuable than a soiled chemise. So, without being asked, I performed some light cleaning as well. Under surveillance, naturally.

  Despite Madame’s late, two-hour nap, which she took daily from 4 to 6 p.m., her bedtime was precisely nine-thirty. She asked only that I sit by her while she drank her warm brandy and fell asleep, which never took more than five or ten minutes. After that, the evenings were my own. I would turn down all the gas lamps in the salon and place a candle on the side table next to my favourite armchair, by the window. I would sit quietly. All day there was noise, either from the piano across the street or from a heated debate in the apartment above us. Always someone washing dishes, always feet on the stairs. From outside, the horse whip, the newspaper seller, someone hawking some new gadget one could not possibly live without. And laughter. People in Paris laughed endlessly. Not always mirthfully. But at night, in that narrow corner of the city, there was the hush that followed the end of noise, after the lamps were extinguished. I liked to stare out of the window at the darkness, the lack of light like a salve to my tired eyes. Sometimes I reread the day’s papers – mainly gossip, mainly grisly.

  Twice a week I helped Madame Debord bathe. It turned out the water heater that I had been so excited about leaked gas and wasn’t safe to use, and Madame didn’t think it necessary to spend the money to fix it. So I had to heat her water the regular way, on the stove. I had helped my grandmother to bathe so this wasn’t new to me, but Madame hadn’t been looking after herself at all and the first time, it took me an hour of scrubbing to remove the dead skin from her elbows and feet, to remove a black, gummy matter that had collected in the creases under her breasts. I could take care of her hair myself, but I convinced her to call in a manicurist, at least just the once, for her finger- and toenails.

  I loved running errands outside the apartment. It was spring and Paris was blooming. Tree blossoms rained on to the boulevards and flowers spilled from stalls on so many street corners, and the people – those who had the means to do so – dressed in colours a little more fantastic than real. Rosy-cheeked and flamboyant in skirt and hat. Shiny shoes fresh from the cobbler. Ribbons, scarves and lace. Foreigners wore clothing I didn’t then recognize: the turban, the fez. Scottish tartan and the embroidered Spanish cloak.

  I meandered between boucherie and boulangerie and charcuterie. I varied my routes to get a taste of different parts of the city. I had to take care though. Madame grew anxious if I was gone for too long. Once, as I had just come in and was hanging my hat in the vestibule, she told me that she had become convinced I’d absconded with the day’s food allowance and was only just, moments before I came through the door, preparing to go downstairs and ask Monsieur Muller to alert the gendarme. After that, when I left each morning, she got into the habit of leaning from the balcony of her bedroom and watching me walk down the road. I would turn and smile and wave, several times, until I reached the corner. Often, when I came home, she would be there again, waiting. Her claim was that she was out getting some air, but I knew better.

  Paris, however, provided me with endless excuses for being late: a dead horse in the middle of the road stopping traffic, construction, a crowd gathered around a fire eater or contortionist. A student protest, hundreds of young men marching, blocking the intersections, waving flags and singing ‘La Marseillaise’. I had to detour, I would tell her. I couldn’t face the crowds. Felt overwhelmed and had to sit down. She was very sympathetic.

  It didn’t matter that I couldn’t afford entry to the theatres on the Boulevard des Italiens or Montmartre or any of the others. The streets were spectacular enough. A string quartet amongst the cafe tables, a man coming out of a courtyard on stilts, his face covered in blue grease. Vaudeville in the Place de la République. A woman in stage rags, her face grimy with charcoal, singing a gut-twisting aria under the glass-topped acoustics of a dark passage, pigeons cooing and shitting on the steel rafters above.

  One morning in June, my basket heavy with bread, cheese, a bag of assorted sweets and a litre of wine, I stopped to watch a clairvoyant on the Rue de Rivoli, not far from the Hôtel de Ville. She sat stiffly on a tiny stool hidden by her skirt, her eyes blindfolded with a black kerchief. Her curly hair was unnaturally red and her neck queerly long, and she wore a simple yellow dress. Her companion, a much older man with a waxed moustache and an oily, black beard, walked amongst the crowd. He wore a smart purple jacket, too big, and under that a red waistcoat. Two young women who stood very near me, both leaning against bicycles, called out to him and he did a hop, a little half-twirl, and approached them. One of them dropped a few coins into the small wooden box he carried and the crowd hushed. He called to his lady in the yellow dress.

  ‘Will Madame describe the person I’m standing next to?’

  The clairvoyant sat straighter still and lifted her head, her odd neck extending. She brought one long-fingered hand up to her throat and placed it there in a kind of loose stranglehold, and thrummed her fingers just below the ear. She spoke calmly and with a foreign accent. I suspected her hair was a wig. ‘She wears a heather blouse with blue stripes. An oyster-white skirt and wide black belt. A black ribbon adorns her hat.’ She raised her hand to hush the crowd, which was now gasping. After a moment, she spoke again. ‘Her bicycle is black. It once had a bell affixed to the front handlebars, but the bell became defunct so she removed it.’

  People around the girl looked to her for confirmation. Her face had gone white and she was nodding, clutching the arm of her friend. The sound of hammering could be heard from somewhere else. The bell of a passing omnibus. No one spoke.

  ‘Would Mademoiselle care to know her fortune?’ the man prompted, jangling his box below the poor girl’s nose. ‘Only a sou. Always true.’ Caught in the wax of his moustache, a crumb.

  ‘She only wants to know one thing!’ her friend honked, releasing another coin into the wooden box. The crowd laughed, perhaps relieved that some black-magic spell had been broken.

  The girl gave her friend an elbow to the ribs, but faced the man with her chin up, determined. ‘Should I or should I not accept the proposal I received just yesterday?’

  The crowd jittered. The man held up his hand for silence and the people obeyed, and he turned to the clairvoyant, whose hand was again poised at her own throat.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And there will be children. The first to be born in the autumn of next year.’

  I left this debacle, smirking, anxious to bring Madame her lunch.

  6

  Nora

  Ottawa River, 1977

  Nora named her daughter Anouk two days after she was born, and by the fourth day she and her husband Red knew something was wrong with their child. She wasn’t feeding, and had not yet passed the green-black sludge Nora was expecting, had read about. Meconium: earliest stool. Tar-like, odourless, composed of materials ingested in utero.

  They went to the doctor in Pembroke, and were sent to the children’s hospital a few hours away in Ottawa. Anouk was given a blood test, a cruel pinprick to her heel, purple and round as a plum. She was given a test where a gel was applied to her thigh to make her sweat, and her sweat collected by a square of paper so they could test its level of chloride.

  Nora said to Red, while they waited for their baby to wake up from the surgery that was needed to remove the dry rocks of meconium and cut out a dying twist of bowel, Nora said: ‘This is like that dream you have, when you can’t get anywhere; the one where you’re trying to run but your legs just won’t.’

  Red wasn’t able to say much at all.

  The test results came back, and Nora and Red learned this: they were both carriers of a faulty gene. When their child was conceived, she inherited this gene from both of them. Having this faulty gene meant that the mucus secretions in Anouk’s lungs and pancreas were thicker than t
hey were supposed to be. Her pancreas wasn’t able to produce the enzymes her body needed to absorb the food she ate – she was getting very little nutrition. She cried all the time because she was always hungry. This faulty gene meant that the thread-like hairs in the branched pathways of her lungs, the cilia, were sticky and matted together, harbouring bacteria, trapping fluids, almost as if she were drowning. Her life would be marked by coughing fits, lung infections, malnutrition. A daily regime of antibiotics and physiotherapy, and later a nebulizing machine that would allow her to inhale her medications by mist. The condition was called cystic fibrosis and her life expectancy was twenty-six years.

  After the surgery, Anouk stayed in the hospital until her bowels worked the way they were supposed to. This took two weeks. Nora pumped her breast milk and Anouk was fed safe, enzyme-rich food through a tube in her nose. People came to speak to Nora. This was a whole new education. She was visited by a CF specialist, a dietician, a psychologist and physiotherapist. This seemed an initiation. This esoteric world, and all those who populated it, had been there all along, and now Nora and Red and their baby were a part of it but their arrival hadn’t made so much as a ripple. No one had been surprised or even impressed to see them. No one said: Hey, you’re not supposed to be here, or, this shouldn’t be happening to you. After two weeks in hospital, Anouk passed some kind of yellow jelly and the intensive care nurses said that was good, she could go home. Nora and Red were taught how to cup their hands and hit their baby on her chest, under her arms and around her back. This loosened and dislodged the gunk in her lungs, made it easier for her to cough the stuff out. Twice a day, five minutes each time. They had to be careful of bruising, of breaking a rib. They were shown how to lace fruit puree with tiny balls of Creon, the acid enzyme she would need to digest food. If they weren’t careful, the Creon would burn her mouth.