The Paris Apartment (16 page)

When I get back to the apartment I just want to go to my room and pull the covers over my head, crawl deep down into the darkness
with Monsieur Gus the penguin and sleep for days. I'm exhausted by the drinks upstairs, the effort it all took. But when I
try to open the front door I find my way blocked with crates of beer, bottles of spirits and MC Solaar blaring out of the
speakers.

“
Qu'est-ce qui se passe?
” I call. “What's going on?”

Camille appears in a pair of men's boxers and lace camisole, dirty blond hair piled up on top of her head in an unraveling
bun. A lit spliff dangles from one hand. “Our Halloween party?” she says, grinning. “It's tonight.”

“Party?”

She looks at me like I'm crazy. “Yeah. Remember? Nine thirty, down in the
cave
, for the spooky atmosphere—then maybe bring a few people up here for an afterparty. You said before that your papa would
probably be away this week.”

Putain
. I totally forgot. Did I really agree to this? If I did it feels like a lifetime ago. I can't have people here, I can't cope—

“We can't have a party,” I tell her. I try to sound firm, assertive. But my voice comes out small and shrill.

Camille looks at me. Then she laughs. “Ha! You're joking, of course.” She strides over and ruffles my hair, plants a kiss
on my cheek, wafting weed and Miss Dior. “But why the long face,
ma petite chou
?” Then she stands back and looks at me properly. “Wait.
Es-tu sérieuse?
What the
fuck
, Mimi? You think I can just cancel it now, at what, eight thirty?” She's staring now, looking at me properly—as though for
the first time. “What's wrong with you? What's going on?”

“
Rien
,” I say.
Nothing
. “It's fine. I was only joking. I'm—uh—really looking forward to it, actually.” But I'm crossing my fingers behind me like
I did as a little kid, hiding a lie. Camille is looking closely at me now; I can't hold her gaze.

“I just didn't sleep well last night,” I say, shifting from one foot to the other. “Look, I . . . I have to go and get ready.”
I can feel my hands trembling. I clench them into fists. I want to stop this conversation right now. “I need to get my costume
together.”

This distracts her, thank God. “Did I tell you I'm going as one of the villagers from
Midsommar
?” She asks. “I found this amazing vintage peasant dress from a stall at Les Puces market . . . and I'm going to throw a load
of fake blood over it too—it'll be super cool,
non
?”

“Yeah,” I say, hoarsely. “Super cool.”

I rush into my room and close the door behind me, then lean against it and breathe out. The indigo walls envelop me like a
dark cocoon. I look up at the ceiling, where when I was small I stuck a load of glow-in-the-dark stars and try to remember
the kid who used to stare at them before she fell asleep. Then I glance at my Cindy poster on the opposite wall and I know
it is only my imagination but suddenly she looks different: her eyes wild and frightened.

I've always loved this time of year, Halloween especially. The chance to wallow in darkness after all the tedious cheerfulness and heat of the summer. But I've never been into parties, even at the best of times. I'm tempted to try and hide up here. I glance at the shadowy space under the bed. Maybe I could climb under
there like I did as a child—when Papa was angry, say—and just wait for it all to be over . . .

But there's no point. It will only make Camille more suspicious, more persistent. I know I don't have any other option except
to go out there and show my face and get so drunk I can't remember my own name. With a stubby old eyeliner I try to draw a
black spiderweb on my cheek so Camille won't say I've made no effort but my hands are shaking so much I can't hold the pencil
steady. So I smudge it under my eyes instead, down my cheeks, like I've been crying black tears, rivers of soot.

When I next look in the mirror I take a step back. It's kind of spooky: now I look how I feel on the inside.

She caught me. It's not like me to be so sloppy. Well. I'll just have to watch and wait and try again when the opportunity
presents itself.

I'm back in my cabin. The buzzer for the gate goes again and again. Each time I hesitate. This is my tiny portion of power.
I could refuse them entry if I wanted. It would be so easy to turn the party guests away. Of course, I do not. Instead I watch
them streaming into the courtyard in their costumes. Young, beautiful; even the ones who aren't truly beautiful are gilded
by their youth. Their whole lives ahead of them.

A loud whoop—one boy jumps on another's back. Their actions show they are children, really, despite their grown bodies. My
daughter was the same age as them when she came to Paris. Hard to believe, she seemed so adult, so focused, compared to these
youths. But that's what being poor does to you; it shortens your childhood. It hardens your ambition.

I talked to Benjamin Daniels about her.

At the height of the September heat wave he knocked on the door of my cabin. When I answered, warily, he thrust a cardboard
box toward me. On the side was a photograph of an electric fan.

“I don't understand, Monsieur.”

He smiled at me. He had such a winning smile. “
Un cadeau
. A gift: for you.”

I stared at him, I tried to refuse. “
Non, Monsieur
—it's too generous. I cannot accept. You already gave me the radio . . .”

“Ah,” he said, “but this was free! I promise. A two-for-one offer at Mr. Bricolage—I bought one for the apartment and now
I have this second, going spare. I don't need it, honestly. And I can tell it must get pretty stifling in there”—with a nod
to my cabin. “Look, do you want me to set it up for you?”

No one ever comes into my home. None of the rest of them have ever been inside. For a moment I hesitated. But it
was
stifling in there: I keep all the windows shut for my privacy, but the air had grown stiller and hotter until it was like
sitting inside an oven. So I opened the door and let him in. He showed me the different functions on the fan, helped me position
it so I could sit in the stream of air while I watched through the shutters. I could see him glancing around. Taking in my
tiny bureau, the pull-down bed, the curtain that leads through to the washroom. I tried not to feel shame; I knew at least
that it was all tidy. And then, just as he was leaving, he asked about the photographs on my wall.

“Who's this, here? What a beautiful child.”

“That is my daughter, Monsieur.” A note of maternal pride; it had been a while since I had felt that. “When she was younger.
And here, when she was a little older.”

“They're all of her?”

“Yes.”

He was right. She had been such a beautiful child: so much so that in our old town, in our homeland, people would stop me
in the street to tell me so. And sometimes—because that's the way in our culture—people would make the sign against the evil
eye, tell me to take care: she was too beautiful, it would only bring misfortune if I wasn't careful. If I was too proud,
if I didn't hide her away.

“What's her name?”

“Elira.”

“She was the one who came to Paris?”

“Yes.”

“And she still lives here too?”

“No. Not any more. But I followed her here; I stayed after she had gone.”

“She must be . . . what—an actress? A model? With looks like that—”

“She was a very good dancer,” I said. I couldn't resist. Suddenly, hearing his interest, I wanted to talk about her. It had
been such a long time since I had spoken about my family. “That was what she came to Paris to do.”

I remembered the phone call, a month in. Not much email, back then, or texting. I would wait weeks for a call that would be
cut short by the bleeping that would tell us she was running out of coins.

“I found a place, Mama. I can dance there. They'll pay me good money.”

“And you're sure it's all right, this place? It's safe?”

She laughed. “Yes, Mama. It's in a good part of town. You should see the shops nearby! Fancy people go there, rich people.”

 

Now I watch as one of the partygoers staggers over to the nearby flowerbed, the one that has just been replanted, and relieves
himself right there on the soil. Madame Meunier would be horrified if she knew, though I suspect she has rather more pressing
matters to concern herself with at the moment. And usually the thought of her precious border being soaked with urine would
give me a dark kind of pleasure. But this is not a normal time. Right now I am more anxious about this invasion of the building.

These people shouldn't be here. Not now. Not after everything that has happened in this place.

I'm pacing the apartment. Wondering: are the rest of them still up there, in the penthouse, drinking wine? Laughing at my
stupidity?

I open the windows to try and draw in some fresh air. In the distance I can hear the faint wailing of police sirens—Paris
sounds like a city at war with itself. But otherwise it's eerily quiet. I can hear every creak of the floorboards under my
feet, even the scuttle of dry leaves in the courtyard.

Then a scream rips through the silence. I stop pacing, every muscle tensed. It came from just outside—

Then another voice joins it and suddenly there's loads of noise coming from the courtyard: whoops and yells. I open the shutters
and see all these kids piling in through the front gate, streaming across the cobbles and into the main building, carrying
booze, shouting and laughing. Clearly there's some sort of party going on. Who the hell is having a party, here? I take in
the pointed hats and flowing capes, the pumpkins carried under their arms, and the penny drops. It must be Halloween. It's
kind of hard to believe there's a world, time passing, outside the mystery of this apartment and Ben's disappearance. If I
were still in Brighton I'd be dressed as a “sexy cat” right now, serving Jägerbombs to stag dos down from London. It's not
much over forty-eight hours since I left that life but already it feels so far away, so long ago.

I see one bloke stop and pee in one of the flowerbeds while his friends look on, cackling. I slam the shutters closed, hoping
that'll help block out some of the noise.

I sit here for a moment, the sounds beyond the windows muffled but still audible. Something has just occurred to me. There's a chance someone going to that party might know Ben; he's been living here for a few months, after all. Maybe I can learn more about this family. And frankly anything is better than sitting here, feeling surrounded and spied upon, not knowing what they might be planning for me.

I don't have a costume, but surely I can make use of something here. I stride into the bedroom and while the cat watches me
curiously, sitting tucked into its haunches on top of Ben's chest of drawers, I tug the sheet off the bed. I find a knife
in the drawer, stab some eye-holes into it and then chuck the thing over my head. I march into the bathroom to have a look,
trying not to trip over the edges of the sheet. It's not going to win any prizes, but now I've got an outfit and a disguise
in one, and frankly it's a hell of a lot better than a sodding sexy cat, the basic bitch of Halloween costumes.

I open the door to the apartment, listen. It sounds as though they're heading into the basement. I creep down the spiral staircase,
following the music and the stream of guests down the stairwell into the
cave
, the thump of the bass getting louder and louder until I can feel it vibrating in my skull.

I'm on my third cigarette of the evening. I only took up smoking when I came back here; the taste disgusts me but I need the
steadying hit of the nicotine. All those years of clean living and now look at me: sucking on a Marlboro like a drowning man
taking his last breaths. I look down from my window as I smoke, watch the kids streaming into the courtyard. I almost kissed
her this evening, up on the terrace. That moment, stretching out between the two of us. Until it seemed like the only thing
that made sense.

Christ. If the lights hadn't gone off and shocked me out of my trance, I would have done. And where would I be now?

His sister. His
sister
.

What was I thinking?

I wander into the bathroom. Stub out the cigarette in the sink where it fizzles wetly. Look in the mirror.

Who do you think you are?
my reflection asks me, silently. More importantly,
who does
she
think you are?

The good guy. Eager to help. Concerned about his mate.

That's what she sees, isn't it? That's what you've let her believe.

You know, I read somewhere that sixty percent of us can't go more than ten minutes without lying. Little slippages: to make ourselves sound better, more attractive, to others. White lies to avoid causing offense. So it's not like I've done anything out of
the ordinary. It's only human. But, really, the important thing to stress is I haven't actually lied to her. Not outright. I just haven't told her the whole truth.

It's not my fault she assumed I was British. Makes sense. I've honed my accent and my fluency pretty well over the years;
made a big effort to do so when I was at Cambridge and didn't want to be known as “that French guy”. Flattening my vowels.
Hardening my consonants. Perfecting a kind of London drawl. It's always been a point of pride for me, a little thrill when
Brits have mistaken me for one of them—just like she did.

The second thing she assumed was that the people in this building are nothing more than neighbors to one another. That was
all her, honestly. I just didn't stand in the way of her believing it. To tell the truth, I liked her believing in him: Nick
Miller. A normal guy, nothing to do with this place beyond the rent he paid on it.

Look. Can anyone say they've really never wished their family were less embarrassing, or different in some way? That they've
never wondered what it might be like to be free of all those familial hang-ups? That baggage. And this family has rather more
baggage than most.

I've heard from Papa this evening, incidentally.
Everything OK, son? Remember I'm trusting you to take care of things there
. The “son” was affectionate for him. He must really want me to do his bidding. But then my father excels at getting others
to do his bidding. The second part is classic Papa, of course.
Ne merdes pas.
Do not mess this up.

I think of that dinner, during the heat wave. All of us summoned up to the roof terrace. The light purplish, the lanterns
glowing among the fig trees, the warm scent of their leaves. The streetlamps coming on below us. The air thick as soup, like
you had to swallow it rather than inhale.

Papa at one end of the table, my stepmother beside him in eau-de-nil silk and diamonds, cool as the night was hot, profile turned toward the skyline as though she were somewhere else entirely—or wished she were. I remember the first time Papa introduced us to Sophie. I must have been about nine. How glamorous she seemed, how mysterious.

At the other end of the table sat Ben: both guest of honor and fatted calf. Papa had invited him personally. He had made quite
an impression at the drinks party.

“Now Ben,” my father said, walking over with a new bottle of wine. “You must tell me what you think of this. It's clear you
have an excellent palate. It's one of those things that cannot be learned, no matter how much of the stuff you drink.”

I looked over at Antoine, well into his second bottle by now and wondered: had he caught the barb? Our father never says anything
accidentally. Antoine is his supposed protégé: the one who's worked for him since he left school. But he's also Papa's whipping
boy, even more so than I am—especially because he's had to take all the flak in the years I've been absent.

“Thank you, Jacques.” Ben smiled, held out his glass.

As Papa poured a crimson stream into one of my mother's Lalique glasses he put a paternal hand on Ben's shoulder. Together
they represented an ease that Papa and I had never had, and looking at them I felt a kind of ridiculous envy. Antoine had
noticed, too. I saw his scowl.

But maybe this could work to my advantage. If my father liked Ben this much, someone I had invited into this house, into our
family, perhaps there was some way he would finally accept me, his own son. A pathetic thing to hope, but there you have it.
I've always had to hunt for scraps where paternal affection's concerned.

“I see that peevish expression of yours, Nicolas,” my father said—using the French word,
maussade
—turning to me suddenly in that unnerving way of his. Caught out, I swallowed my wine too fast, coughed and felt the bitterness
sting my throat. I don't even particularly like wine. Maybe the odd biodynamic variety—not the heavy, old-world stuff. “Quite
incredible,” he went on. “Same look exactly as your sainted dead mother. Nothing ever good enough for her.”

Beside me I felt Antoine twitch. “That's her fucking wine you're pouring,” he muttered, under his breath. My mother's was
an old family: old blood, old wine from a grand estate: Château Blondin-Lavigne. The cellar with its thousands of bottles
was part of her inheritance, left to my father on her death. And since her death, my brother, who has never forgiven her for
leaving us, has been working his way through as many of them as possible.

“What was that, my boy?” Papa said, turning to Antoine. “Something you'd care to share with the rest of us?”

A silence expanded, dangerously. But Ben spoke into it with the exquisite timing of a first violin entering into his solo:
“This is delicious, Sophie.” We were eating my father's favorite (of course): rare fillet, cold, sautéed potatoes, a cucumber
salad. “This beef might be the best I've ever tasted.”

“I didn't cook it,” Sophie said. “It came from the restaurant.” No fillet for her, just cucumber salad. And I noticed that she didn't look at him, but at a point just beyond his right shoulder. Ben hadn't won her over, it seemed. Not yet. But I noticed how Mimi snatched furtive glances at him when she thought no one was looking at her, almost missing her mouth with her fork. How Dominique, Antoine's wife, gazed at him with a half-smile on her face, as though she'd prefer him to the meal before her. And
all the while Antoine gripped his steak knife like he was planning to ram it between someone's ribs.

“Now, of course you've known Nicolas since you were boys,” my father said to Ben. “Did he ever do any work at that ridiculous
place?”

That ridiculous place meaning: Cambridge, one of the top universities in the world. But the great Jacques Meunier hadn't needed
a college education, and look where he'd got himself. A self-made man.

“Or did he just piss away my hard-earned cash?” Papa asked. He turned to me. “You're pretty good at doing that, aren't you,
my boy?”

That stung. A short while ago I invested some of that “hard-earned cash” in a health start-up in Palo Alto. Anyone who knew
anything was buzzed about it: a pin-prick of blood, the future of healthcare. I used most of the money Papa had settled on
me when I turned eighteen. Here was a chance to prove my mettle to him; prove my judgment in my own field was just as good
as his . . .

“I can't speak for how hard he worked at uni,” Ben said, with a wry grin in my direction—and it was a relief to have him cut
the tension. “We took different courses. But we pretty much ran the student paper together—and a group of us traveled all
over one summer. Didn't we, Nick?”

I nodded. Tried to match his easy smile but I had the feeling, suddenly, of sighting a predator in the long grass.

Ben went on: “Prague, Barcelona. Amsterdam—” I don't know if it was a coincidence, but our eyes met at that moment. His expression
was impossible to read. Suddenly I wanted him to shut the fuck up. With a look I tried to convey this.
Stop. That's enough
.
This was not the time to be talking about Amsterdam. My father could never find out.

Ben glanced away, breaking eye contact. And that was when I realized how reckless I had been, inviting him here.

Then there was a sound so loud it felt like the building itself might be collapsing under us. It took me a couple of seconds
to realize it was thunder, and immediately afterward a streak of lightning lit the sky violet. Papa looked furious. He might
control everything that happens in this place, but even he couldn't order the weather what to do. The first fat drops began
to fall. The dinner was over.

Thank Christ.

I remembered to breathe again. But something had shifted.

Later that night, Antoine stormed into my room. “Papa and your English pal. Thick as thieves, aren't they? You know it would
be just like him, right? Disinherit us and leave it all to some random fucking stranger?”

“That's insane,” I said. It was. But even as I said it I could feel the idea taking root. It would be just like Papa. Always
telling us, his own sons, how useless we were. How much of a disappointment to him. But would it be like Ben?

What had always made my mate intriguing was his very unknowability. You could spend hours, days, in his company—you could
travel across Europe with him—and never be sure you'd got to the real Benjamin Daniels. He was a chameleon, an enigma. I had
no idea, really, who I had invited under this roof, into the bosom of my family.

 

I reach into the cabinet under the sink and grab the bottle of mouthwash, pour it into the little cup. I want to wash away the rank taste of the tobacco. The cabinet door is still open. There are the little pots of pills in their neat row. It would be so easy. So
much more effective than the cigarettes. So helpful to feel a little less . . . present right now.

The fact of the matter is that while I've been pretending to Jess, I could almost pretend to myself: that I was a normal adult,
living on his own, surrounded by the trappings of his own success. An apartment he paid the rent on. Stuff he'd bought with
his own hard-earned cash. Because I want to be that guy, I really do. I've tried to be that guy. Not a thirty-something loser
forced back to his father's house because he lost the shirt off his back.

Trust me—as much as I've tried to kid myself, it doesn't make a difference having a lock on the front door and a buzzer of
your own. I'm still under his roof; I'm still infected by this place. And I regress, being here. It's why I escaped for a
decade to the other side of the world. It's why I was so happy in Cambridge. It's why I went straight to meet Ben in that
bar when he got in touch, despite Amsterdam. Why I invited him to live here. I thought his presence might make my sentence
here more bearable. That his company would help me return to a different time.

So that's all it was, when I let her think I was someone and something else. A little harmless make-believe, nothing more
sinister than that.

Honest.