This Must Be the Place (31 page)

‘OK,’ she says.

He moves his black shape out of the trailer door, into the heat and daylight, and then he is gone. Claudette blinks as the door slams. She turns to the nanny and to her PA, Derek, who has appeared from the kitchen area, phone in hand.

‘Could you please give me a moment?’ she says, as pleasantly as she can.

Sure, they say, of course, we’ll go get a coffee, we’ll see you later, take as long as you need.

Then they are gone and Claudette is alone. She feels the silence fasten itself around her like a cloak.

She stands for a moment, in the middle of the trailer. Ari is asleep in the bedroom; the door is in front of her. How she longs to take off these clothes, to loosen her hair from its clasp. What a relief it would be to slip them off until they pool around her ankles so she could step out of them, kicking them away from her. She would go into the bedroom and, without waking Ari, she would pull on that dress in faded indigo cotton, those sneakers with the lightning-bolt pattern.

As if to quash this line of thought, she steps up to the door and peers out of the tinted glass. Nothing. No one. A few small figures over by the catering van. She assesses the distance between the door and the black SUV parked beside the trailer.

What unfolds next in her mind takes the form of a film she might one day make, and one she alone will write and direct. She envisages a self that is not quite her but looks like her. This person is going into the bedroom, changing into her indigo dress, lifting Ari, who stays magically asleep, into her arms.

No, Claudette thinks, she would first have to find their passports because she couldn’t look for them if she was already holding Ari. So, she looks for the passports before lifting him. Or would she perhaps have it all ready? A bag, pre-prepared and hidden, filled with all the necessary documents, their French passports, details of secret bank accounts, into which she would have been siphoning money? Yes, that would work better, would save time, would cut to the chase.

So, a bag. Pulled down from a shelf somewhere. She is already in the dress, the sneakers, no need to show the change. Next, this Claudette, the one who isn’t quite her, would shake out her hair and stuff it under a wide-brimmed hat. The nanny’s. She would pick up the nanny’s sunglasses, the nanny’s security lanyard. She would put them on.

How simple and yet so effective, Claudette thinks, as she stares out of the trailer window at the line of people waiting at the catering van. How simple it would be to lift Ari into her arms. To pick up the velvet fox and the favourite blanket. Simple to strap him into his car seat, to stow the bag in the back. It would take this Claudette, the escaping Claudette, a moment, when she sits in the driver’s seat, because it has been so long since she’s driven herself anywhere, but it will come back to her the minute she puts her hands on the wheel. Simple, too, to drive to the gates, to wave the nanny’s pass at the security guard. How lucky that the nanny has the same build, the same hair colour as her, so very lucky that is; the thought, of course, had never crossed her mind when she hired her, not at all.

And then? Claudette runs a fingertip back and forth along the seal of the window, planning the next scene. They will be zooming, unstopped, undetected, outside the set, away from them all. The problem would be, Claudette thinks, as she sees Timou and his minders appear in the distance, over the brow of an incline, where to end the scene. What would come next?

If she had things her way, with this film, the on-screen Claudette would pull up at a river, swollen and brown with fallen rain. Ari would be completely happy to get out of the car, to stand there, beside the river, beside the SUV, while she opens the car doors and releases the handbrake and rolls the vehicle into the water, just enough so that a small part of it still shows. She envisages what this will look like: the SUV roof sinking beneath the oily current, the swirling eddies swallowing it, digesting it. She envisages the wheel tracks stretching from the road all the way to the riverbank. An accident, they will think. Police will be called, trucks, pulleys, divers. It will be a while before they realise that the car is empty, was always empty, and by that time she and Ari will be gone.

Tricky to film, of course, expensive, but so effective, so devastating, so final.

She leaves the door, leaves the scene of Timou and his people getting nearer and nearer. She goes through into the bedroom and looks down at her son. Ari has his fox tucked under his arm, his thumb in, his face tilted up towards her, absorbed in perfect, untrammelled, trusting sleep.

Claudette has to press her face to the bed next to him to rally herself, to support her own weight, so searing is her sense of entrapment, the futility of such fantasies. She has sketched for herself the cage door left momentarily ajar, she has caught a flash of a life outside this one, something beyond, something other.

After a minute or so, she hears the screech of the trailer door handle and hastily blots her tears on her sleeve. Staying, she tells herself as she stands up, means you get to do this work. You get to make this film. You get to finish it, then edit it, then send it out there. Then you get to make another. What, she asks herself, as she walks towards Timou, as she makes herself smile and nod at him – yes, she’s fine, she’s ready now, and the relief in his face is enormous, expansive, and it makes her think for a moment that, yes, he loves her and, yes, she loves him – what would she do without this work? How would she live, how would she feed and occupy her mind? Isn’t this what she wants? Where else could she find a valve, a vent, for the restlessness that has simmered inside her mind since she was a child? What else would she do with it, if not this?

She reaches Timou. He puts an arm about her shoulders, as if taking possession of her, holds the nape of her neck in his hand. They go down the trailer steps, and as they walk together, he is murmuring in her ear about what they are about to film.

She has no idea, as she walks with him, as she listens to him, as she interjects to say, let’s try it the other way first, that all is not lost. That it won’t be long. That a plan will unfold, a chance will arrive, the script will write itself.

She must, for the moment, keep her expression neutral, guileless, as she walks towards the set, Timou next to her, as people around them adjust their headsets, stand a little straighter.

She has no idea that, a couple of years from now, after this film and halfway into the next, she and Timou and Ari will be sailing the Stockholm archipelago with Timou’s parents in their yacht. A week’s break from filming in the city, a sequel to the movie about infidelity, featuring the same couple five years later. She has been suffering from more headaches, more vision disturbances, flares and flashes, sparks and stray lights, and a doctor has diagnosed acute stress, has told Timou that Claudette needs complete rest for a week. So here they will be, sailing the archipelago.

The Lindstroms haul up the anchor, unfurl the sails, uncoil the ropes, shouting to each other about this way or that way or this wind direction or that compass point. They run up and down the deck in their natty rubber shoes, calling to each other in urgent voices. She sees, as soon as they pull out of the harbour on the first day, that she has made a terrible mistake in agreeing to this trip. She hates the keeling motion of the hull, the water reeling by, the menacing flap of sail, the wild veer of the boom, the way she must fold herself and her child into a corner so that everyone else may run about unimpeded. The ever-present terror that Ari will be swept overboard, into the unforgiving water. She hates the cabins, the low ceilings, the cramped, airless beds. But, as Timou says, where else can they go? Where else will they be unbothered, unrecognised, unless they are at sea, in constant motion, never touching land?

In India, the people on set are making their way towards her, they are speaking, they are holding out their hands, as you might to an animal that may or may not make a run for it.

Not too far away in time, there will be a morning in a boat in Sweden when Ari will wake early, too early, before five a.m., and Claudette will raise herself from the cabin bed, careful not to wake Timou. She will pick up Ari, she will soothe his nightmare and, to chase it away entirely, she will take him up on deck.

Outside, the world is another place. She and Ari emerge from the hatch into a blue-lit dawn so still that she wonders for a moment if something has happened to her hearing in the night. The boat is moored in a channel between three islands, low-lying, wooded, their striated granite sides like the hides of sleeping leviathans.

She looks about her. She had come up here with the idea of showing Ari what the dawn was like, with the idea of letting the rest of them sleep, but as she stands there on deck another notion spreads its wings. She can feel the flex and strain of its feathers, the febrile power of its muscles.

‘Wait here,’ she says to Ari. ‘Don’t move.’

She ducks down again into the humid stillness of the boat, listening. The cabin door to where Timou is sleeping is shut tight. His father snores beyond a second door. From a space under Ari’s bed, she slides a backpack: she has it with her always, never lets it far from her reach. With deft movements, she shuts the door, climbs the ladder, lowers the hatch after her and smiles at her son.

‘Shall we go for a row?’ she says.

So easy to step into the little rowing-boat, to hold out her arms for Ari, to untether themselves, to push off. The plash-suck of the oars through the brackish waters. She keeps an eye on the contours of the yacht. If Timou or his parents were to appear – no harm done. What could be more natural than a woman taking an early-morning row with her son?

But no one appears. No voice calls her back, no shouts are raised. The yacht is motionless, anchor down, curtains shut tight, sails tied. A heron standing on coat-hanger legs in the reeds turns its face towards them, then away, as if to say, I never saw you.

She reflects, then, and only for a moment, on the film she is rowing away from. Half-made it is, half-realised, as yet in that state where it has the potential for perfection, for something outside their reach. Those small inhibitions and compromises have not yet crept in. It will be good – would have been good. She has that feeling. The script has an inner balance, a momentum, an endoskeleton all of its own. Shouldn’t she wait, shouldn’t she finish it? Can she really be considering throwing it up, abandoning it in its unformed state?

She keeps rowing. She rows until the muscles in her arms are aflame, until they have rounded the headland to a different gully, a different set of islands. The little boat comes to rest on a sanded shore where the pebbles are sharp underfoot and each rock is furred with waving green. She lifts Ari out of the boat, then pushes it back into the choppy waters, oars trailing loosely.

‘Let’s walk to the jetty,’ she says to Ari, and he takes her hand, without question, and she turns her head to see the double set of footprints obscured and smoothed by the waves.

By seven a.m., she and Ari have boarded a ferry to Stockholm, she in a hoody and large glasses. By the time Timou wakes, showers, makes coffee, discusses the plan for the day with his parents, wonders where Claudette and Ari might have got to and when they are coming back, they are in a taxi for the airport. By the time Timou sees that the rowing-boat is gone, they are boarding a plane. At around lunchtime, it seems to the Lindstroms that they have been away a long time, even for someone as flighty and capricious as Claudette, but by now it is too late. They have gone, they have escaped, they have found their loophole and have slipped through it. The next day, Timou will receive a single line on his pager:
I’m sorry. Cx

In India, however, Claudette is walking across the set, towards the men in headphones. She raises her hand, in a gesture of supplication, of defeat, of admission. Yes, she says to them, I’m ready, I’m coming, here I am.

The Girl in Question

Teresa, Brooklyn, 1944

T
eresa had been engaged for a week, her fiancé back in occupied Europe, when a young boy ahead of her on the subway steps slipped and made a grab for the grille under the handrail. She was close enough to see a loose wire slice into his hand, almost heard the clean butcher-swish of metal through flesh.

He cried out, in the voice of a much younger child, crumpling to the ground. People, stepping off the late train, flowed around him and she was crouching beside him, already pulling a scarf out of her pocket-book, when she noticed a man sprinting back up the steps, saying, ‘Jackie, Jackie, what happened?’

Blood was coursing in three neat lines from his finger and into the lap of his raincoat. His face was white, his lips pale under his cap.

‘It’s cut to the bone,’ she said to the man – the boy’s father, she assumed – without taking her eyes off the child, ‘I’m going to tourniquet it.’

‘Are you a nurse?’ the man said.

‘No, a librarian,’ she said, adding, ‘but we do a first-aid course as part of our training.’

She tied the scarf, once, twice, around the boy’s palm and put her hand on his shoulder. The man was hunkered down next to her; she was aware of laced shoes in a dark-caramel leather, a coat that smelt of rain-damp wool, but nothing more. Her attention was entirely on the boy.

‘You’ll be all right,’ she said, as she pulled tight the final knot. ‘Does it hurt much?’

Jackie lifted his eyes to her and nodded. Lips still pale, she noted, in her first-aid manner. His irises were the blackest she had ever seen, entirely swallowing their seeing centres, and brimming with suppressed tears.

‘He’ll need stitches,’ she said, closing the flap on her pocket book, dusting down her coat.

‘You think?’

She and the father raised the boy to a standing position between them.

‘You’ll need to get him to a doctor,’ she said, still looking at the boy.

The man passed a hand through his hair. ‘My sister’s going to kill me.’

‘Your sister?’