This Must Be the Place (52 page)

‘Really?’

‘Because it doesn’t get to see me every day,’ says Zoë, with the myopia of a five-year-old, lacing her fingers together and pressing her forehead into the glass.

‘Well, perhaps he—’

Ari is interrupted by someone barging into him, pushing him so that he nearly drops his phone. He staggers forward, towards the cheetah, which is now on the other side of the glass. He turns to see Marithe, who is dressed in peculiar shredded trousers and a black hoody, earphones in.

‘Urgh,’ she says, holding her nose. ‘What’s that stink?’

‘It’s the cheetah,’ Zoë explains, putting her arms around the legs of her aunt. ‘He does poos in there but he can’t help it because he doesn’t have anywhere else.’

Marithe looks down at Zoë, momentarily speechless. Then she says, ‘Gross.’ Then she turns to Ari. ‘Have you got any food? I’m starving.’

‘People in refugee camps are starving, Marithe,’ Ari says. ‘You are merely hungry and probably only because you didn’t bother to eat any breakfast.’

Marithe rolls her eyes. ‘Who made you minister for food?’ She takes Zoë’s hand and tugs on it. ‘Come on, Zo-zo. Let’s go and hit up Grandmère for a fiver and we’ll get ourselves some chips.’

They find Claudette at a picnic table beside the trampolines, where Calvin is bouncing around inside a net. Zoë runs towards her and Claudette envelops her small form in a sweeping hug.

‘Did you see the cheetah?’ his mother is saying to Zoë, as Ari approaches. ‘Is he as beautiful as ever?’

Zoë is nodding, thumb in, head inclined against Claudette’s shoulder.

‘And was he walking his walk? Did he look at you and smile?’

Calvin sees his family as a blur: smears of colour in the hinterland beyond the net encircling the trampoline. Snatched syllables reach him. An ‘erp’ in his mother’s husky tones; a ‘tting’ from Zoë. A rumble of an ‘aah’ from his brother. Marithe, he knows, will be mostly silent from the outside but inside – inside! – her world will be one of aural colour, music, beat, lyrics filling her skull, a private stream of sound from her earbuds. She lets him listen sometimes, if he asks her nicely, in the back of the car: she will hand him one earbud, which he will insert, and they will listen together, caught as a pair in the eddying world of her music.

Right now, he can hear the hammering of his heart, the rush of blood in his ears, the rhythmic thunk of his feet against the webbed elastic surface of the trampoline. He is pure sensation, pure motion. The sky reaches down and smacks the top of his head, again and again, the trees lurch their branches towards him, like Baba Yaga’s forest but the rest of the world is gone – his family, the crowds, the walls of the aquarium, the chip stand.

He is bouncing higher, higher, trying to remember the rhyme his mother says sometimes, about a gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, which ends with an emphatic
I must have you
, at which she would always scoop him off his feet into a flailing, tangled hug, when he was little, when they were on the trampoline at home together. He is getting his vision above the top of the net: he can see the monkey enclosure, the tops of buses on the roads outside the zoo and the entrance gate, which is why he is the first to see his father.

Daniel is walking towards them: he appears to Calvin in stop-motion, his progress across the zoo punctuated by the trampoline net, but he’s getting closer with each bounce. He has on a grey overcoat, one Calvin hasn’t seen before, and a paisley scarf around his neck.

‘Hey,’ Calvin yells, breathless, his legs buckling under him so that he falls to his side, dizzy and disoriented by the sudden return to static life. ‘It’s Dad!’

Claudette, in the middle of drawing a picture with Zoë, looks round at Calvin, crayon in hand, as if to admonish him for yelling such outrageous untruths. Ari, who is texting Sophie with a photo of Zoë and the cheetah, looks up from his phone, which is just this minute receiving a message from Daniel:
I’m here. Where are you?
Marithe does nothing. She’s wired up to her music and so has no idea that her father, who lives these days in New York, whom she hasn’t seen for a month and a half, is coming up behind her.

‘Oh,’ Ari says, flushing, turning to his mother, aware all of a sudden that his stammer might make an unwelcome appearance. ‘I … I … I m-meant to say. He mentioned … ages ago that he … he might be in town and I just – I just – I just thought—’

His mother is staring him down. She raises her eyebrows at him, then reaches for her sunglasses, on the table in front of her, and puts them on. ‘I see,’ she says.

‘I’m sorry,’ Ari says, trying to motion to Marithe to take off her earphones: he could do with her help here, but she is miles, oceans, time zones away, ‘I thought I’d said …’ he lies. ‘M-m-maybe it slipped my mind.’

Claudette is smoothing Zoë’s hair with a stiff hand. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘he’s here now.’

And indeed he is. Daniel reaches their group, a huge grin on his face, overcoat flapping open. ‘Hey!’ he booms, and Ari smiles, despite himself, despite the awkwardness swirling around him, despite the incriminating messages on his phone, which his mother must never, ever find. Daniel’s voice has always carried a head-turning volume, more than he himself is perhaps aware.

‘What’s with you all?’ he yells, then seizes a surprised Marithe off her seat, bear-hugs Calvin, hurls Zoë into the air and slaps Ari across the shoulders. When all this is done, he stands in front of his ex-wife. Ari is finding it hard to breathe; he is trying not to look at them yet is unable to tear away his gaze. Claudette and Daniel haven’t, as far as he’s aware, clapped eyes on each other for three, maybe four years. In that time, Daniel has moved back to the States, been to rehab, taken up running, got himself a new teaching post, seen the children every six weeks, and has started a charitable trust for elective mutes. He is, in short, a different man from the one Claudette kicked out four years ago.

Daniel waits, Claudette seated before him. He lifts his palms into the air, as if to say, and?

Claudette fiddles with the cuff of her glove, then extends her hand. ‘Hello, Daniel,’ she says.

Daniel looks down at Claudette’s hand. He lets out a laugh. Marithe looks at Ari and grimaces.

‘Seriously?’ Daniel is saying. ‘You want me to shake hands with you?’

Behind her sunglasses, Claudette gives one of her shrugs, learnt at the feet of the master of Gallic froideur (Pascaline).

‘Come on,’ Daniel says and, pushing aside the gloved hand, he leans in, cups the face of his ex-wife and kisses her on the cheek, for perhaps only a fraction too long.

Daniel seats himself, without looking at Claudette, and pulls Zoë onto his knee, asking her what she’s seen at the zoo, this cheetah he’s been hearing so much about. Ari sits at the neighbouring table, under the guise of watching his daughter but actually keeping an eye on Claudette and Daniel. He has invested too much time and effort in this meeting to abandon them, unsupervised, so soon. He is interested to see how his little experiment will progress. Calvin resumes bouncing, working up to being able to see over the net once more. Marithe is asking Claudette, then Daniel for some money so she can buy snacks, bringing Zoë on-side for leverage, and Daniel is saying, I’ve been here for two minutes and already you’re asking me for cash?

‘Nice picture,’ Daniel says to Claudette as an aside, nodding at a crayoned drawing of a monkey.

‘Thanks,’ she says.

‘Did you do it all by yourself?’

Ari sees his mother frown, trying to be cross but actually battling amusement. He wants to punch the air. The minute she smiles, he knows that Daniel will have won a significant victory. Daniel was always so good at puncturing her hoity-toity tendencies with humour.

‘So,’ Daniel says, as Zoë clambers over his head and onto his back.

‘What?’ Claudette says.

‘How come you’re being all …’

‘All what?’

‘I don’t know.’ He rubs a hand over his stubble – should he have shaved perhaps? Ari wonders. ‘All Pascaline Lefevre.’

‘What do you mean?’ Claudette demands.

‘You know.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Yeah, you do. All,’ Daniel waves a hand in the air, ‘chilly and elegant and disapproving.’

‘Is that what you’ve come here for? To insult my mother?’

‘No, never. I was in Ireland for … a conference and thought I might come and pick up those things of mine still at the house and I heard you guys were going to be at the zoo today so I came to see my kids. Our kids.’

‘Hmm.’

‘And since when,’ he says, ‘has “elegant” been an insult?’

Marithe stands among the iron picnic tables, unsure what to do, where to go. Calvin is back on the trampoline, singing now, something about camels and deserts and moving shapes. He’s learning it on the guitar at home. Ari is accepting Zoë onto his knee; they have their dark heads bent together; Zoë has her thumb in and her feet dangle down almost to the ground. How can she have grown so much? She’s a proper child now, Marithe suddenly sees, not at all a baby, her face no longer round and squishable. At the next table, amazingly, sit her mother and her father. Together. In one place, at the same time. She could almost use the word ‘parents’, something which, she now thinks, has slipped from her vocabulary.

She stands facing these people, her family, uncertain to whom she should attach herself. Ari cradles Zoë on his lap, saying something into her ear: there seems no requirement for a third person there. Perhaps she should go to her parents, to smooth things over, to ensure they don’t start a row.

She assesses them from between her narrowed lashes. They don’t, she knows, look like other people’s parents. Daniel is larger, louder, more expressive than other dads. He waves his arms in the air. His hair is wilder, his shirts more elaborate, his coats scruffier. He picks up on the things people say, the way people say them: he is obsessed with the words people choose and why, with accent, with inflection, with why you say what you say, whom you’re copying when you say something in a certain way, with the differences in what he calls regional vocabulary. Marithe realised a year or so ago that not everyone’s fathers do this.

It seems to Marithe that her life has undergone two changes: one, when her father left. And two, about a year ago, when she turned thirteen, when her life and the way she felt about it and the way she viewed it suddenly tilted, like the deck of a ship in a storm.

At first it seemed to her that her house, her family, her dogs, her accordion, her books, her room with its geology samples, its display of feathers, its pictures of foxes and wolves, all took on an unreal aspect. Everything felt like a stage set: she kept viewing herself as if from the outside. Instead of just acting, just doing, just running or speaking or playing or collecting, she would feel this sense of externalisation: and so, a voice inside her head would comment, you are running. Do you need to run? Where are you going? You’re picking up that rock but do you want it, do you really need it, are you going to carry it home?

Certain things she’d always loved, like lighting the dinner-table candles or stirring a cake mix alongside her mother or sitting up on the roof to play her accordion or decorating the Christmas tree or collecting the eggs in the morning, felt suddenly hollow, distant, staged. It was as if someone had dimmed the lights, as if she was viewing her existence from behind a glass wall.

And her body! Some mornings she woke and it was as if lead weights had been attached to her limbs by some ill-meaning fairy. Even if she had the urge to walk across the paddock to feed the neighbours’ horses – which she hardly ever did any more, she didn’t know why – she wouldn’t have the energy, the sap in her to do it.

She wanted it returned to her, Marithe did, that sense of security in her life, of certainty, of knowing who she was and what she was about. Would it ever come back?

She had asked her mother this one night, lying on the sofa, looking up at the gold stars they had cut out and stuck up there once, a long time ago, her mother teetering at the top of a ladder, which had made Daniel shout, later, when he found out, because she was pregnant with Calvin and Daniel said Claudette must be ‘out of her mind’ to be climbing up stepladders. Marithe had looked at her, at the zone around her head, and wondered what it would be like to be outside her mind, where it would be, what it would feel like to be caught, luxuriating, hanging around in all that hair.

Anyway, the older, longer, sluggish Marithe had looked up at the stars and asked her mother, who was sitting in the chair opposite, whether it would come back, this sense of being inside your life, not outside it?

Claudette had put down her book and thought for a moment. And then she had said something that made Marithe cry. She’d said: probably not, my darling girl, because what you’re describing comes of growing up but you get something else instead. You get wisdom, you get experience. Which could be seen as a compensation, could it not?

Marithe felt those tears pricking at her eyelids now. To never feel that again, that idea of yourself as one unified being, not two or three splintered selves who observed and commented on each other. To never be that person again.

For Calvin, she feels a simultaneous jealousy and pity. He still has it, that wholeness, that verve. There he is, on the trampoline, completely on the trampoline, not worrying about anything, not thinking, but now what? Or: what if? Pity, because she knows now he’ll go through it. He’ll have to lose several skins; he’ll wake up one day wearing new, invisible glasses.

And where does she even start with her mother? When she was a child, her mother had been her mother, but Marithe is aware that most children don’t grow up in a house like hers, most people are not taught at home instead of going to school, that what she has is not normal or ordinary, that people sometimes stare at them, then look quickly away.

The last time Ari came to stay, Marithe had seen a line of light under his door late one night. She’d knocked, then tiptoed in. Ari had been sitting up in his bed, his laptop open in front of him, working, she supposed. He had set up some website in London with friends of his; they took tourists on guided walks through the city, telling them about places that appeared in films or books or plays. He’d explained it all to her before.