This is Life
Authors: Dan Rhodes
Also by Dan Rhodes
Anthropology
Don’t Tell Me the Truth About Love
Timoleon Vieta Come Home
The Little White Car
(writing as Danuta de Rhodes)
Gold
Little Hands Clapping
Thanks to Blondelle Woods, Jenita Colganova and M.E.M. Rhodes for early readings; F. Bickmore and all other humans of Canongate; Christine Glover; the American Academy of Arts
and Letters; The Society of Authors; a cormorant in Cork; another cormorant in Paris; The Laugharne Weekend; Aberdeen Art Gallery (which is where Eugène Carrière’s
Enfant
avec casserole
really lives); parents, and family in general.
Special thanks are due to the true author of this work, the petite, beautiful and forever young Danuta de Rhodes – cruelly felled in her prime.
And thanks most of all to Arthur.
This book was written in Buxton, Derbyshire, through the long, cold winter of 2010 & 2011.
First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2012 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Dan Rhodes, 2012
The moral right of the author has been asserted
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on
request from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 85786 245 7
eISBN 978 0 85786 247 1
Typeset in Sabon by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd, Falkirk, Stirlingshire
For Wife-features and Arthur
MERCREDI
A
urélie Renard was standing on the west side of the small square. She struck a match against the wall, lit her fourth cigarette of the
morning and tucked the dead stick back into the box. It was the tail end of the rush hour, and a stream of people rose from the exit of the Métro station and walked past her on their way to
jobs in the streets beyond. On the other side of the square, intermittently visible through the passing bodies, sat a thick-bearded old man, wrapped in a heavy and ancient brown coat as he played a
hurdy-gurdy. She enjoyed the rattle and drone they made together, and remembered it well. He wore a Russian hat, and it was because of this that Aurélie had always thought of him as
The
Russian
. She really had no idea where he was from, or what his instrument was called. To her it was just
that Russian instrument
, and she didn’t want to risk spoiling its magic by
finding out too much about it.
The previous evening she had taken off her blindfold, walked over to the map of Paris that she had pinned to her wall and been pleased to see that the dart had landed somewhere familiar. The
summer before last, when she was nineteen and had just arrived in the city, she had found a job in a kitchen shop a few streets away, selling expensive pots and pans to people who seemed to have no
idea that they lived in splendour. This had been the nearest Métro station to her work, and for a while she had walked across the square almost every day. She liked the idea that she had
once been a part of this same flow of people. She pictured herself as she would have been back then; bleary-eyed and walking fast, almost running, as she tried to get to the shop on time after a
muddled start to the day. Now, though, she stood still, cigarette in hand, as she waited for the right moment to begin.
The Russian had been there every morning, and he had always worn his coat and hat, even at the height of the summer, when any clothes at all felt like a hindrance. Just looking at him on such
days had made Aurélie feel a dull throb of heat exhaustion. Today, there was a real chill in the air, and this was the first day this autumn when his clothes would have seemed appropriate.
Aurélie could even see her breath, and some of the people walking by were wearing thick jackets, even winter coats and gloves. Others, the ones the weather had caught by surprise, were
trying not to look uncomfortable as they hurried along faster than usual on their way to work.
Nobody seemed to be paying any attention to the hurdy-gurdy man. Most of them would have walked past him several days a week, just as she had done, and they had long since stopped noticing him.
She had never known anyone to stop and listen, or throw him a coin, and she had even wondered whether he was really busking; maybe he had a landlady whose nerves couldn’t stand the noise, and
who sent him out of the house to practise. Though his case was open, it was on the bench beside him rather than in the traditional buskers’ spot, on the ground by his feet. These ambiguities
had stopped her from ever giving him a euro or two, and even now she felt half bad about it. It seemed a strange way to try and make money though, playing for the same horde of hurrying,
inscrutable commuters every day.
She considered her own clothes for a moment. She had given a lot of thought to what she was going to wear. First impressions were going to be crucial, and she had wanted to look like an artist
in a way that was plausible without being overbearing. She was confident that she had done a good job. Almost everybody walking by was wearing ordinary clothes for a working day, just as she had
whenever she had walked through the square, but today she stood out, wearing black work boots that were spotted with various colours from her recent failed experiment with oil paint, black jeans
and a brand new red quilted jacket, a last minute addition thanks to the temperature. Her hair, after years of changes, had finally returned to its natural colour, a colour which in her early
teenage years she had condemned as
mousy
before attacking it with bleach and dye, but which she had lately come to think of as a pleasing dirty blonde. She had yet to decide whether to grow
it out properly, but for now it was just long enough to tie back, which was what she had done. She knew she looked right. The first impression was going to be a good one.
She smoked her cigarette as far as it would go, then ground it out on the wall and put the stub in the matchbox. The time had come. A new batch of passers-by was spilling from the Métro,
and they were augmented by the passengers of a bus that had just pulled up. She switched on her video camera, and rested it on her shoulder. It was quite heavy, an old-style one that used VHS tape,
and she hoped its antiquity would help towards the
mixed-media
aspect of her assessment. She took the stone from her pocket.
She had chosen it carefully. It was a smooth pebble about the size of a small grape, and so dark grey that it might as well have been black. She had decided that a dark one would be ideal for
the task, because it wouldn’t be lost against the backdrop of light stone apartment buildings. She had taken it from the collection of interesting stones she had built up as a young girl,
most of them found on beaches on family trips to the seaside. She couldn’t remember which beach this one had come from, but it must have been the combination of its smoothness and darkness
that had marked it out from its neighbours and inspired her to pick it up and take it home.
She had spent the preceding Sunday afternoon practising in the Bois de Boulogne. When she was growing up, her father had often told her he wasn’t prepared to raise a daughter who
couldn’t throw, and over the years she had developed a good right arm. The problem was going to be capturing the stone on film. She had begun with horse chestnuts, throwing them as high as
she could and trying to locate them in the viewfinder at the same time, following their trajectory as they rose and fell. Once she had practised enough with horse chestnuts she had moved on to
stones. She had been so lost in her task that by the time she gave up, her arm aching so much she could no longer throw, the park was growing dark, and unusually beautiful silhouettes had begun to
appear along the roadside.
It was a clear morning. Yesterday’s rain and clouds had gone, leaving only a few puddles. The sky was blue, and the light was good. She held the stone as she pressed the
record
button, closed her eyes, counted slowly to fifteen, pulled back her right arm and threw.
She knew before it had left her hand that the throw was a good one, high and true. She opened her eyes and immediately caught the small black dot in the viewfinder, just as she
had practised. It rose to its apex, and seemed for a split second to hover, completely still, before beginning its descent. It was at this moment that her doubts set in: she went from a state of
absolute confidence in her plan to a feeling of wretched stupidity.
This is art
, she had thought, exhilarated as the stone had left her hand. But she no longer felt that way, and she had no
idea what it was, apart from a ridiculous and ill-thought-out thing to do.
She had intended to stay silent, but she couldn’t. Even so, she had no idea that she had spoken. It was only much later, when she played the tape back, that she heard, above the music of
the hurdy-gurdy, the words she had uttered as she saw where the black dot was heading.
Oh God. Oh shit
. . .
She realised with horror that the stone – smooth and black and the size of a small grape – was about to land, hard, on a baby’s face.
I
t had been a long day for Professor Papavoine, the one he dreaded more than any other in the academic calendar. The students had been given free
rein to come up with a personal project, and it was his job to listen to their ideas and either sanction them or not. As always on this day of the year he was running late, but at last he had
almost made it through. He had only a handful of ten-minute tutorials left in a day that had been full of ten-minute tutorials. The door opened, and his latest student walked in. His heart thumped
as if she had pulled a gun on him, and he stopped breathing.
He coughed as air rushed back into his lungs, and tried his best to pull himself together. ‘Sit down,’ he invited, his tone welcoming, just as it had been for all the other students.
He looked at his schedule. ‘Aurélie Renard?’
‘Yes.’
‘Aurélie Renard. Aurélie . . .’ He left a deliberate gap, smiled and rolled the
r
for as long as his tongue would allow. ‘. . . Renard.’ This double
repetition had become traditional, and he did it without thinking. It was a friendly touch that was designed, successfully, to put the student at ease and give the misleading impression that he was
going to be fully engaged in the conversation that was to follow, listening very carefully to every word of their proposal. This time, though, he added a third repetition which, it struck him
halfway through, was for his own benefit, to imprint her name in his memory. ‘Aurélie Renard,’ he mumbled, his eyes glazed. It was a repetition too far, and his intonation left
its meaning unclear.