This is Life (6 page)

The buggy took up most of the available floor space, and she wondered what she was going to do with her new companion, where she was going to put him. She flopped on to the bed, and thought.

In a box at the back of her kitchen cupboard was her sickness kit. Her dad sent her new items for it every term; he hated the thought of not being there to take care of her if she was ever
unwell, of her languishing alone. He made sure she always had enough supplies to see her through a few days of being housebound: some dry crackers, powdered soup, spaghetti, rice, paracetamol,
vitamin pills and an emergency toilet roll. She had dipped into this kit a few times, when she’d had a cold or an upset stomach, but more often for hangovers, and those times when she had
nothing else in and hadn’t wanted to go out shopping in the rain. It had always been a comfort to her though, just being there, and now it was going to be a life saver.

She had her usual supply of potatoes, too. She and Herbert were going to be OK; they could just hunker down for the week, indoors and out of trouble. This plan wouldn’t provide her with
much in the way of photo opportunities, but she would just have to make do. She wondered whether he liked spaghetti, soup and mashed potato. ‘I know it sounds boastful,’ she whispered
to the sleeping child, ‘but I make really good mash. There’s no point in pretending otherwise – if it’s mash you’re after, you’ve come to the right
place.’

She took the bag from the back of the buggy, and emptied it on to the bed. There was a spare set of clothes, three disposable nappies, a plastic spoon, moist wipes, two jars of pureed food, a
bag of maize snacks, a pot of grapes, a kind of cloth, a first aid box, a plastic mat, a toothbrush, a small tube of toothpaste, some mysterious thin plastic bags and an unopened bottle of some
special kind of milk. There were also some items that she couldn’t identify, and she supposed their functions would be revealed as she went along. If this was all he needed, this was going to
be easy.

She gazed at him for a while. She could smell something, and in seconds the room was filled with a thick, awful fug.

Oh shit
, she thought.
I hadn’t thought about that. Why didn’t I think about that?
It made her wonder whether there was anything else she hadn’t thought about.

He opened his eyes, took one look at her and his mouth became a chasm, from which came a blood-curdling howl. Maybe it wasn’t going to be quite so easy after all.

‘It’s OK, Herbert,’ she said softly, reaching out to squeeze his shoulder. ‘It’s OK. It’s me. It’s your brand new auntie Aurélie.’

Herbert’s cries cut through to her marrow, and the smell thickened and thickened. She looked through the bag’s contents, still strewn across the bed, for the things
she would need to change him. She found a clean disposable nappy and a packet of wipes. She couldn’t see what else she would need. She examined the nappy, and with an artist’s eye she
quickly saw how it would attach to the baby. Those long summer days spent indoors folding paper birds while the other children played in the shadow of the power station had not gone to waste after
all. After a few attempts, she managed to unclip the safety belts that were keeping him in the buggy.

She tried to work out how to get him out of the buggy and on to the bed. She didn’t want to go anywhere near his bottom, and the most practical way she could think of would be to clamp one
hand under his chin and the other behind his head, and lift him out that way. She had never seen a baby carried like that though, and decided it would probably be best not to try it. She put her
hands under his arms, and he struggled to get free. She retreated, steeled herself and tried again, and a moment later he was there before her, dangling and wailing as she held him at arm’s
length. She tried to breathe only through her mouth, but even so the stench was inescapable. She laid him on the bed, and took off his shoes, socks and trousers, and there it was: her first nappy.
The cartoon characters on it seemed incongruous with the seriousness of the task at hand.

She undid the Velcro fastenings, and opened it. It was full to bursting with a stinking orange-brown slime. It was the most disgusting thing she had ever known, and she felt sick. She lifted his
legs, and moved the nappy to one side. Only then did she realise she hadn’t taken any of the wipes out of their packet, and with one hand grabbing the baby’s squirming legs, she tried
to extract one. Herbert broke free, and as he landed on the duvet he smeared it with a coating of sludge. She gave up trying to keep him still, and the duvet clean, and with two hands now available
she was able to take out a wipe. She lifted a leg, and ran the moist cloth across his bottom. Straight away the wipe turned from white to orange-brown, and she knew she was going to need several
more. She looked for somewhere to put the soiled one. There was nowhere obvious, so she piled it on top of the dirty nappy, which had started to leak on to the duvet. The last man to lie on her bed
had been Sébastien, and it seemed consistent that his successor would leave it covered in shit. At least Herbert was straightforward about it.

She got hold of a handful of fresh wipes, and after much struggling from both of them she completed her task. At last, Herbert was clean and in a fresh nappy. She had done it. The duvet cover
had been bundled into a plastic shopping bag, ready to go to the laundry along with his original trousers, which had somehow been caught up in the general slurry, and the dirty nappy and wipes had
been put in one of the no-longer-mysterious small plastic sacks she had found in Herbert’s bag. She opened the window, and as she breathed in the fresh air she was filled with a sense of
accomplishment. At last she and the baby could relax and get to know each other.

She looked at him for a while as he lay on the bed. The time had come to work out how to hold him properly. She scooped him up, and jostled him around, trying various ways of lifting him until
she found one that seemed natural, with her right hand under his bottom and her left cradling his back. She held him close as she walked up and down on the tiny patch of available floor. He was
still wearing his hat. She took it off, and saw for the first time that on his head was a coating of fine, golden hair. She stroked it, and was amazed by its softness.

‘You’re blonde,’ she said, ‘just like me. Only you’re a little bit fairer. But it’s OK, I’m not jealous. Well, that’s not entirely true – I
am a bit jealous, but I think I’ll get over it. Either way, with that hair and those blue eyes everyone will think I’m your real mother.’ She gave him a squeeze, kissed the top of
his head, and he looked up at her.

She noticed details she hadn’t registered before. A few teeth were sticking out of his gums, and she couldn’t believe how white they were. Maybe there was something to be said for
leading a life free of coffee, cigarettes and red wine. She felt she was starting to get to know the
real
Herbert, and getting the hang of having him around. Then she heard a rumble and felt
a squelch against her right hand. This was followed by a terrible, but by now familiar, smell. It had all begun again.

The second time, it was easier. She knew what was required of her, and she laid him on the plastic mat and got everything ready before the nappy came off. She was hoping that the new pair of
trousers hadn’t caught it, because there wasn’t a spare pair after this. She was in luck.

It was looking as though she was going to have to abandon her plan of spending a week indoors. As well as the room being far too small for the two of them, particularly when one of them was
making such violent smells, she was already running low on supplies. She had been wondering whether the baby’s mother had been planning on handing him to a stranger for the week all along,
but from the evidence it looked as if she probably hadn’t. There really did seem to be only just enough things in the bag to see him through the day. They would have to go out and get some
more.

Something else she knew was that there was no way she could cope with this on her own. With Herbert dressed again, and propped into a sitting position on the bed, she opened the window. With one
hand she held a cigarette, directing as much of the smoke as she could into the outside air, and with the other she sent a text to Sylvie:
Want to go shopping?

F
or reasons that she told herself (and others if they asked, which they often did because she made no secret of it) were nobody’s business
but her own, Sylvie Dupont wanted to find a husband. It was what she had wanted more than anything for as long as she could remember. She had read somewhere that the most common way to meet your
life partner is in the workplace, and this was one of the reasons she had taken on so many jobs: a different one each day, seven days a week. As well as providing her with a varied working life and
just enough money for her to always be able to wear nice dresses and not have to worry too much about the rent and bills, this strategy broadened her field of prospective spouses quite
considerably.

She made a point of taking on jobs that she thought would be interesting and unusual, partly so her shifts wouldn’t seem too much like work, but also because this way she was much more
likely to meet interesting and unusual people. She had no image in her mind of her ideal man, and she was ready to be surprised when he came along, but if he was to be interesting and unusual then
she would have no problem with that. If anything, she thought it would be a bonus.

If a job ever got her down, if her colleagues were tiresome or customers rude, she would walk out and find one she liked better, and as a result she was usually happy at work, and often to be
seen smiling. This rare trait, combined with her looks, which had never been a cause of concern for her (she knew she took after her mother, and she counted her mother as the most beautiful woman
she had ever seen) drew her to the attention of an apparently endless stream of young men who thought they had finally, after years of longing, found their own personal Godard-era Chantal Goya, a
sweet, smart and smiling dark-haired angel. As they found out fragments from the story of her life, any defences they might have had crumbled to nothing, and they were lost. When she told them, as
casually as anything and usually on a first date, that her dream was to marry and have children, the thought of anyone but them being her husband or the father of those children made their blood
run cold. If anybody could truly be said to have their pick, it was Sylvie Dupont. However, she had yet to take her pick.

Today she was in Montmartre, at the top of the hill, sitting in the driver’s seat of a white 1963 Citroën 2CV and waiting to be assigned her next batch of tourists to take around the
city. The morning had been pleasant but unexceptional, just a few short runs around the neighbourhood, and the afternoon had begun in the same way. She had a feeling that this wouldn’t be the
day she was going to meet her future husband, and the sight of her next passengers did nothing to change this. They were a retired Japanese couple and their interpreter, a young French man. There
wasn’t anything wrong with the interpreter, if anything he wasn’t bad-looking in a gawky kind of way, but a gut feeling told her she wasn’t going to be marrying him. She made a
mental note to make him aware of this at the earliest opportunity, should he reveal the slightest hint of amorous intentions.

She took no pleasure in reducing men to husks, but when she knew there was no alternative she was able to do so with lightning efficiency. She had come to learn that this was the kindest way:
several of the boys she had let down gently over the years still lived in hope, and she wasn’t going to let herself be bothered with that kind of thing any more; it was just too time
consuming.

The Japanese couple lowered themselves into the back seat and fastened their seatbelts, and the interpreter settled in beside Sylvie. She smiled, and greeted them, and asked them where they
wanted to go.

The interpreter turned to them, and asked the same question in Japanese. The woman answered. ‘They just want to go around the city,’ he said. ‘They want to see the
sights.’

‘That can be arranged.’

Sylvie pulled away, and off they went. She had been born in Paris twenty-two and a half years earlier, and had never lived anywhere else. She knew it inside out, but she had never taken it for
granted. She had not always lived in the best of neighbourhoods, but the city had always been there for her to escape into and lose herself in, filling her life with incredible places to go and
things to do. She had also found that it had provided her with endless opportunities for getting into trouble, but she had grown tired of sticky situations and had begun to learn how to avoid them,
so they were coming along with less and less frequency. One of her motivations for working so much was that she had that much less free time in which to go off the rails. She had learned to accept
that there was really no one there to watch over her. She had friends, but she had let very few of them get really close, and those few knew her well enough to understand that she didn’t
appreciate anybody interfering with her life. And besides, even the best of friends would never be the same as family, and she knew she had to be her own stabilising influence, that she had to
watch over herself. She was quite pleased with how she had been doing lately. She was keeping her life together better than ever before.

As they crept through the narrow streets, then raced down the hill, she was looking forward to the next few hours. She always liked to know who she was driving. ‘Aren’t you going to
introduce us?’ she asked the interpreter. She looked in the rear-view mirror. ‘What are you called?’

The slightly gawky interpreter passed this on, and she learned that the stern-looking man was Monsieur Akiyama, and his smiling wife was Madame Akiyama. Further questions revealed that they had
come all the way from somewhere called Funabashi, that they were on their second full day of a week-long trip to Paris, and had spent the entire day beforehand in the Louvre, sheltering from the
rain, and they had been faintly disappointed by the Mona Lisa but spellbound by plenty of the other exhibits. Now that the sun was shining they were looking to broaden their horizons. It had been
Madame Akiyama’s idea to head to Montmartre without any firm plans, just as it had been her very sudden idea to hire a classic car and go for a spin around the city. Monsieur Akiyama had yet
to be convinced that such impulsive behaviour would not result in disaster.