Siren (15 page)

The philosopher was famous for, among other things, having kept incredibly meticulous journals every day of his life—his ‘excerpt mill’ he called them.

A coincidence?
No.
This kid was naïve, perhaps, but no dummy.

Mak felt sure she would get a much better feel for what made Adam Hart tick after reading his intimate thoughts. She was not one to fall for card tricks or magic shows. She believed in science and reason. A disappearing act like Adam’s could not be without clues. Makedde was determined to find them in his own words.

Only the first hundred or so pages of this journal were filled, with numerous blank pages waiting to receive his new thoughts and ideas. The final page of entries was bookmarked with a colourful vaudeville flyer: ‘Le Théâtre des Horreurs’, it proclaimed in elaborate gothic-style script.

‘Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse!’

It was an hour before their performance for the Brisbane audience, and Bijou clapped her slender white hands together to punctuate each word, as the five younger performers sat in a circle at her feet, their heads bowed. No one dared talk back as their star berated them.

‘What will you be like?
Merveilleux? Non.
You are sloppy.’ Bijou shook her head. ‘Lara, you missed your cue last night.’

Lara opened her mouth to speak, but said nothing. She
had
missed the cue, but only by half a beat.

‘If you were better performers, we would have a full house! You never listen to me! Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. It takes practice to be
magnifique
. Practice!’

‘We had a great review in Melbourne,’ Michel ventured. ‘This tour’s been going really well.’

Bijou ignored his valid point as if he had not spoken. ‘I’ve looked after all of you for too long!’ she shouted dramatically. ‘So long! What must I do? When will you learn? I’m docking
your pay this week. All of you. Sometimes I don’t know why I bother with you.’

She doesn’t mean that
, Arslan the contortionist told himself.
She can’t mean that.

She paced around them as they sat on the floor, silent. This was something of a routine for the troupe. Every month or so it came to this. It had been that way for years. Arslan could not remember things having been any other way. This was life. Bijou was the brains behind the troupe, and she pushed all of them to be their best. She pushed them hard so they would be great one day. Without her, what would they be doing? Where would they be? Where would he be without her?

But Bijou was not finished yet. ‘Yelena!’ she went on. Arslan’s sister looked up, eyes wide. ‘You’re getting plump,’ she was told. ‘Day by day you are becoming a fat little pig. How will your brother lift you? We can’t have you being lazy like this. I won’t stand it any more.’

Yelena, though twenty-four years old, still reacted to Bijou’s scathing comments as she had when she was little more than a child. She clung to her brother Arslan’s arm and wept quietly, hiding her face. Arslan felt her hot tears on his biceps, and feelings of frustration and sadness swelled inside him.

‘Honestly, you look like a fat little dumpling out there. It’s disgusting,’ Bijou snapped. ‘Gia, you were supposed to keep an eye on her. Why hasn’t she lost any weight?’

Gia sat on her thin hands and said nothing.

Bijou, her still-beautiful face set in a pout, stalked off, her silk robe trailing behind her. The hectoring was over. For now. Arslan squinted darkly as he watched her. The contortionist rarely spoke, even when his sister was picked on in such ways. He understood English and French, but Russian was his first
language. Bijou spoke Russian too. She had travelled through Russia as a performer for a time. But Arslan and Yelena had been banned from speaking it. Now he sat in a lotus pose, his arms folded tightly. Yelena’s grip on his biceps was beginning to ache.

It was Michel who was always the voice of reason in these moments. ‘Arslan and Yelena, your act is tight.’

‘She’s not even watching. She’s too busy with that kid,’ Lara complained. She was the rebellious one in the troupe. She always spoke her mind, though perhaps not in front of Bijou.

That kid.

‘That kid’ was Adam Hart. Arslan, though merely five years older, was envious of the boy’s fresh-faced appearance. Bijou had pointed out the lines on his own face. The aging. The slow and irreversible loss of tone. More than that, though, Arslan was envious of Adam’s place in Bijou’s affections.

He had not at all recovered from being cast out of her bed.

He wanted Adam gone.

Adam waited in Bijou’s trailer with an agonising sense of excitement.

His lover had stepped out to attend to business with the troupe, and he had been trusted to remain there alone—an honour. Basking in fresh love, he soaked in the atmosphere of her private space, and decided it was the next best thing to being with her. Every detail spoke of her—the lingering scent of her perfume, her silk-and-lace slip hanging on a doorknob, her gowns and costumes hanging against the cupboard, her makeup and creams on the dressing table. This was a woman of sophistication. Never before had Adam been given the time of day by someone like her.

What will Mum think of her?

It might take some time, but he was sure she would be happy for him and this new love he had found. Yes, it would just take time and some planning.
Amor vincit omnia.
Love conquers all. With a love like this, surely she would see the importance of what he had found. Who cared about age gaps or differences of culture? His mother would understand. And even this strange beginning could be forgiven one day.

A wistful look came over his face as he admired the many magazine covers of Bijou framed in a clever wooden foldout screen she dressed behind. He stepped closer and looked carefully at each one. One cover showed Bijou standing in a white medieval-style gown, with a flowing fabric belt. Another was of Bijou with some ghoulish-looking players performing a dark horror piece. Before she’d left the trailer to rehearse with the others, she’d thrown a silk slip over the edge of the screen and Adam gently pushed it aside to take in his favourite cover of her. In this one she posed, hands on hips, in a burlesque showgirl outfit on the cover of
SHOW
. He could not understand the headlines, as they were written in French. She looked younger, and her dark hair was pixie-short. The paper was faded. He recognised that most of the covers were decades old, but he thought she looked just as beautiful now as she did in the pictures. Even more so.

Adam felt he was in a time of great growth. Once he’d met Bijou he’d realised that he’d never been in love before. What he’d felt and experienced with Patrice paled by comparison. Every moment of his life before Bijou had been nothing, he now realised. It was as if every minute of his young life had been leading up to their meeting. He had never felt anything
remotely like this before—this longing and painful need to be near someone.

Adam was overwhelmed.

It was such a glamorous, free life the troupe lived. A life to be envied. Especially Bijou’s. She was by far the most elegant and glamorous. She was a star.

Adam ran a fingertip over the stage photos she’d propped up against her mirror. She had a stack of magazines on her makeup table and he flicked through them, aching for her return. Underneath the magazines he found what looked like a photo album.

He opened it, and found it contained a number of newspaper clippings.

COMÉDIEN A ATTAQUÉ, a headline declared.

The string of words made Adam uneasy, though he did not know precisely what they meant. He did not have much French, but he knew that the word for actor in French was
comédien
. And was
attaqué
like the word ‘attack’? He flipped the page over and found another clipping slipped into the plastic sleeve on the other side.

It looked to be a scrapbook of the troupe’s reviews over the years. He turned the book sideways to read the next page. There was a large picture of Bijou, looking glamorous.

ATTAQUE A L’ACIDE! LA REINE DU HURLEMENT GRILLÉE SUR ENROULER DE SON AMANT

He squinted. Grilled? and
amant…
Didn’t Bijou use that word as some sort of endearment when they were together?

His brows pressed together. He looked at the face of the young man in the newsprint. The caption said ‘Jean-Baptiste Trevillie’. Jean-Baptiste was blond and young. In fact, Adam himself looked passingly like the young man in the photo.

Jean-Baptiste…
He had heard the name somewhere.

A small yellowing photograph fell out of the album. He picked it up.

Bijou?

Adam smiled at this one. It was a happy-looking snapshot. In this photo she was much younger, and there was a little boy by her side. He was dressed in a leotard and was folding his leg over his shoulder and behind his head. She was holding his hand affectionately. A little girl of about the same age was in the background, clothed in a tutu and caught unawares by the camera.

The door of the trailer opened, giving Adam a start. He quickly closed the book and put it back where he’d found it, under the magazines. He shoved the photo underneath.

Bijou looked magnificent.

‘
Mon ami…
What are you doing?’ she purred in her intoxicating voice.

He smiled nervously. He could not lie to her, but he sensed that she would not be pleased that he’d been looking through that book. She might accuse him of snooping. He hadn’t meant to snoop. He had come across it innocently. Maybe it was nothing at all, but something told him to keep quiet about what he’d seen.

He continued smiling at her, terrified of upsetting her. He was relieved when her expression softened. ‘
Mon ami
, come here,’ she said, walking over to the bed, and gesturing for him to join her. ‘You love me,
non
?’ she asked.

He nodded. ‘Oh, Bijou. You have no idea how much I love you. I have never loved anyone before you. You are everything to me.’

He had so hoped that she would want him to stay with her,
and she had been adamant that he not tell his mother where he was, but how long could he keep this going? As each day passed he fell further in love with her, and slipped further into a state of guilt about his selfish abandonment of his mother.

‘The ticket will be secured.’

A knot formed in his stomach. He would do anything to be with Bijou, but he was nervous. He had known her less than two weeks and already he was planning to run off with her. For good. The idea was exciting, but troubling.

Go with your heart. Don’t be a coward.

Perhaps he was not as brave as the heroes in the novels he loved. He wanted to be a great adventurer, but…

Bijou moved in close to him and he felt a warmth spread over his skin. As she began smothering him with little kisses his concerns became less urgent.

‘Oh, darling…’

Who cares what anyone thinks
, he decided.
Who cares?
His parents had never let him do anything exciting. With uncharacteristic bitterness he remembered how his mother had admonished him for his desire to travel instead of going straight to university when he finished school. Just because she’d chosen that for her own life, why should he? He was his own person. He had his own life to live. Where did she get off telling him he had to go to uni? Adam didn’t want to be a chartered accountant like his late father had been. He didn’t want to be surrounded by boring numbers and papers and files and the dusty smell of libraries. He didn’t want that. He wanted something more.

He wanted
life.

Again, the feeling in him shifted, and his youthful anger was quickly overtaken by the weight of his guilt. His mum
deserved better. She would be so worried already. And when he did call her, how would he explain where he was? How would he explain her missing things? Had his mother even noticed? How could he make her understand what he was going to do with these strangers?

But Bijou was not a stranger. Adam loved her.

Love is never wrong.

She pulled away from him a little, her eyes intensifying. ‘You have your passport?’

He nodded. He had brought his EU passport, and left the Australian one at home. His mum hadn’t even known he’d obtained the second passport, thanks to his father’s English birth.

It seemed that Bijou could sense that something was wrong. ‘
Mon ami
, you look sad.’

‘I…’ he began, then faltered, concerned that he might put her off the idea if he said the wrong thing. ‘I think…maybe…’

He trailed off, trying to choose his words carefully. He didn’t want Bijou to think that he didn’t love her. He did love her, so, so much. It wasn’t puppy love like he’d had in Year Eight. Not a crush. This was true love. He didn’t want to risk anything ruining that.

He sat upright on the corner of the bed, not wanting to seem weak. ‘My mum will be really worried. I should call her first, I think. Just to let her know that I’m okay. I won’t tell her where I am, I promise.’

‘You said you wanted to run away with me. You don’t wish to? You don’t wish to come away with me, my lover?’

‘No, it’s not that. No…don’t be upset,’ he pleaded, trying to reassure her. He had been afraid of this. What if she rejected him, like Patrice?

‘You promised me you wouldn’t,’ she reminded him.

He had. She was right. At the time he was furious that his mother did not want him to go out. His late father had always insisted that he stay home at night to study, saying he needed to improve his marks, insisting that he follow in his footsteps as a successful accountant. After his death, Adam’s mother continued to enforce that discipline. But Adam did not want the life of an accountant. Or a teacher. He wanted to escape, he needed to escape, and he had promised Bijou he would escape with her. That was only a week ago, and already he could see that it would be more difficult than he had imagined. It would be hard for him to carry through his plan of forsaking all he knew. The conundrum of what to do was troubling him more by the day. He was torn.

‘I love you, Bijou,’ he said. He clung to her hand.

‘Good. Then get the champagne. We will toast our trip.’

Paris.

The knot in his stomach pulled tighter. He hesitated.

‘Oh, my beautiful darling, my beautiful delicious boy…’ Bijou purred, softening his hard thoughts—unravelling them—as she clung to him, looking impossibly beautiful and arousing, and smelling of freshly applied perfume. It was something by Nina Ricci, she had told him. None of the girls he had met before could wear a real perfume from France. None of the girls his age would do or say the things Bijou did, he felt sure. No one could do what she did to him. She was like nothing he had ever experienced before. Her sophisticated scent curled into his brain and rested there, as she took possession of his body.

‘
Je t’aime
,’ she whispered, her fingers caressing him, running over his hairless chest, pulling his shirt open. With her other
hand she gripped his hipbone gently, then slid her fingers across to feel the form of his erect penis. Her fingers seemed to know exactly how to touch him. He throbbed and grew even more painfully hard. The excitement of her presence was almost too much for him to bear.