Loving Amélie

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Copyright
Sasha Faulks 2012

Freya
Publications

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rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any
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permission in writing from the publisher.

All
characters within this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons
living or dead is purely coincidental.

Produced
in the United Kingdom for Freya Publications

Acknowledgements

With
thanks to Debbie Pratt for her patience, skill and encouragement.

Cover
Design by Sam Lane

http://cargocollective.com/samlane

Loving
Amélie

Kindle
Edition

For all
of us

Part
One

Chapter One

Suddenly, Amélie was back in
his life.

Back via a text message on his phone.
There were words attached to her name. Her name, Amélie, that would be the
first name in his directory until the day he died – or until he could no
longer afford a phone, whichever came sooner. Even if he had to spell it with
two As, like in aardvark.

Amélie.

He banged on Sara’s door. She
was asleep in his spare room: the room, more accurately, where there was a sofa
bed, and his books and CD collection.

Chris Skinner was in his flat
at the top of a high rise building in Battersea.

 
London.

 
UK.

 
Earth.

 
Universe.

 
His mind was spinning like he was a child again, hearing the
wrenching brakes of the Tardis and believing he was about to meet The Doctor.

“Sara, you have to get up. I
need you to go home!”

Sara stirred and squirmed under
the warm weight of the duvet, which was without doubt more comfortable and
fragrant than Chris’s. Probably because she had bought it – and regularly
laundered it – herself.

“Mmmm?”

“I need you to go! It’s Amélie.
She’s back. She’s downstairs!”

“Amélie?” Sara’s voice was sleepy
and muffled by her bedding. “Good. I like Amélie. Send her up.”

“Please, Sara. You shouldn’t be
here.”

There were reluctant noises
behind the spare room door and it opened to reveal Sara’s head of tousled red curls
and pale face: Vermeer-esque and chaste looking without her make-up; until she
smiled her smile of pretty square teeth and bright blue-grey eyes, and she was
alive with mischief.

“But I need
sleep.
You
kept me up really late.”

“She’s sent me a text, Sara.
She could be here any moment. If she finds
you
here it won’t look good for me.”

Sara closed the door and
rummaged for a towel and her wash bag.

“What, you mean she will think,
oh Chris is spending time with his best friend Sara, with whom he has had a
platonic relationship for years? So I’ll bugger off for another few months?”

“I don’t mean that. I mean she
will think I haven’t, you know, moved on.”

“In the sense of shagging
someone else?” Chris was still at the door, now making a kind of desperate scraping
sound. “Oh, give me a minute, for Christ’s sake! At least let me have a
shower!”

While his friend stood under
hot water, attempting to sing some of the songs from the concert they had been
to in Hyde Park the previous evening, Chris waited in the corridor outside,
hugging his ribcage, cradling his thumping heart.

His love affair with Amélie had
taken over his life: it was the nature of his disposition. He had been the
oyster waiting for the essential bit of grit to bury itself in his cynical,
resistant innards and become the pearl. That had been Amélie. From the moment
she had walked into the bistro that he ran with his brother until her final
telephone message telling him succinctly: “We can do this over another
difficult meeting or just get it out of the way right now,
simplement.
We both know it needs to be
goodbye.”

His love for her had consumed
him: sampled and swallowed a part of him that would never be available for
resale: her silky brown hair the colour of strong coffee; her tiny waist; her
feisty Anglo-French vocabulary. He would spend a lifetime wondering how he had
engaged the attention of such a captivating girl: a girl fifteen years younger
than him, for a start.

Although previous girlfriends
had told him he lacked confidence and should believe in himself more, he knew
from the mystified comments he received from mates when he and Amélie began to
appear together at parties, that he was, as they termed it, “punching above his
weight.”

It was he, however, and not his
brother Peter – who had always been the one more likely to be described
on the pages of their schoolboy fiction as ‘dashing’ or ‘daring’ – to
whom she had strolled up in her elegant heels, after one or two visits to the
bistro, and said; “Shall we do lunch, somewhere else?”

On her first visit, she had had
coffee and dessert.
Tarte au citron
. On her second, she ordered six plates – an
extraordinary amount of food for one person, and particularly such a
petite
person.
But Chris acknowledged even then that he was applying an English perspective to
a peculiarly French art form:
cuisine.
She had cut a solitary but determined figure at Table Two
at the front of
Skinner’s
,
in a sea of French blue tablecloths and scarlet-checked serviettes. He
disregarded the usual stream of passers-by, whose heads bobbed above the red
curtain that was threaded through with a brass pole, cutting the view from the
window in half. He watched her try a little of all the dishes and, at the end
of her meal, call him over - with a demure tilt of her head – to give him
a critique.

Usually a bitter receptacle for
“feedback” – despite his brother telling him it was a necessary part of
their evolution – he found himself disarmed, charmed; listening to her
sometimes hesitant words and watching her hands glide expressively over Peter’s
confit
of
duck, his own
bouillabaisse
and chicken liver
parfait
, with uncharacteristic composure.

At the end of her recital, she
seemed mildly relieved, as though she regretted saying anything that would be
construed as criticism; and turned her deep, chocolate eyes to the more winning
task of smiling sweetly into his face. He spotted one perfect dimple created by
the smile, like a fleeting puncture on the surface of brioche before it went
into the oven; and said:

“All round, I think we win your
approval?”

“All round, there is but little
room for improvement,” she replied.

They shared smiles.

“I hope this is your
profession, Miss..?”

“Benoit. Amélie Benoit.”

“So that you can give us a good
review?”

“Ha! Sadly not. This
was
your
review,” she said, with a blush that stirred his blood, too. She swung her
satchel over her shoulder, bid her goodbyes and left the premises.

“She is certainly hot stuff, my
boy,” Peter’s wife, Linda, had said, in their busy kitchen. She was sliding
trays of hot rolls in and out of the oven. She made kissing noises through
pursed lips, wiping floury hands on her aproned thighs.

“That’s dreadful, Sis,” Chris
replied, good-humouredly. “It’s the sort of thing our dad would say,
 
like “top totty”!”

The three of them laughed. This
was before Amélie’s fateful return to Chris at
Skinner’s
to offer him an elsewhere
lunch.

She became his girlfriend, his
lover. Like many people who are blessed with loveliness, she had that special
quality of coercion by association with her, which meant she managed to get his
male friends to smoke cigarettes after meals without the nagging feeling that
they were killing themselves; and his female friends to eat desserts without
the dreary accompaniment of guilt:

If Amé’s having the crème brulée, with her tiny
body and flawless skin, why shouldn’t we?

 
She was everybody’s companion, in a slightly aloof way. She
worked as a legal secretary for a French firm of lawyers during the day and she
helped out at the bistro in the evening and at weekends when required.

She rented a ground floor flat
in a pleasant white building near Paddington, but spent many nights with Chris
in Battersea. They were together for the better part of two years; and he revelled
in the unfailing surprise he felt at finding her in his morning bed –
with her perfect small round breasts and buttocks and endlessly strokable,
fragrant skin – and knowing it was
his
face she sought when she entered a room and
looked about with those infinitely engaging brown eyes.

And she had come back.

The lock of the bathroom door
shunted open and Sara padded out and into the living room, wrapped in towels.
Her shower had been graciously brief, and she began collecting up her garments
from the radiator where they had been strung the night before: soaked through
from standing out all evening in the rain, watching The Killers and The
Kaiserchiefs. They had dried to a crisp, inelegant finish.

Behind her, the windows of
Chris’s otherwise humble flat displayed an awesome panoramic view of London: a
breathtaking visual swathe of the city sandwiched between two slivers of the
Thames. It was a bright, promising Saturday morning after the night’s rain; and
the sky was cloudless and blue above the Royal College of Art and the local
streets. There was a school playground visible below with its chalked
boundaries marking out eerily empty weekend spaces. In the distance loomed the
capital’s familiar architectural landscape, including the London Eye, offering
what Chris described as its “humorous modern take on the drudgery of
sightseeing.”

“I’m guessing coffee will be
out of the question?” she asked.

It was about his inertia, his
lack of
joie
de vivre
.

(Amélie had been embarrassed to
use this phrase: it seemed lame and overused to the point of losing impact; but
couldn’t readily think of another to describe her need to leave him.)

Chris was in shock. He had just
confided in her that he had been saving for a trip round Europe. He planned to
take some time off from
Skinner’s
, with Peter and Linda’s blessing, to see some of the
world, to travel. Like other people did. In retrospect – which was a
position he found himself in so many times regarding this conversation with
Amélie – he couldn’t understand why she had not received this
manifestation of his “ertia” with more positivity.

“But, I wanted you to come with
me,” he said, bleakly.

“What for? What is the purpose
of this trip of yours?”

They were sat outside a
pizzeria on the bank of the River surrounded by the hubbub of a city weekend.

“To see Paris, Rome, Florence.
To see where you were born in Paris..?”

“But what
for
?”

When, after a minute or so of
him struggling internally to invent a plausible lie – as he thought the
“what for” was self-explanatory – she laughed, not unkindly, and folded
her pizza into calzone. They finished the meal in silence.