Scary Monsters E-Book

Michelle de Kretser

• Herausgeber: Allen & Unwin
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 356

Beschreibung

*** WINNER OF THE 2023 RATHBONES FOLIO FICTION PRIZE*** ONE OF SLATE'S 10 BEST BOOKS OF 2022 'Every page of her story feels charged, like an open circuit waiting for its switch; a lurking wallop. It's magnificent, peerless writing' Guardian 'When my family emigrated it felt as if we'd been stood on our heads.' Michelle de Kretser's electrifying take on Scary Monsters turns the novel upside down - just as migration has upended her characters' lives. Lyle works for a sinister government department in near-future Australia. An Asian migrant, he fears repatriation and embraces 'Australian values'. He's also preoccupied by his ambitious wife, his wayward children and his strong-minded elderly mother. Islam has been banned in the country, the air is smoky from a Permanent Fire Zone, and one pandemic has already run its course. Lili's family migrated to Australia from Asia when she was a teenager. Now, in the 1980s, she's teaching in the south of France. She makes friends, observes the treatment handed out to North African immigrants and is creeped out by her downstairs neighbour. All the while, Lili is striving to be A Bold, Intelligent Woman like Simone de Beauvoir. Three Scary Monsters - racism, misogyny and ageism - roam through this mesmerising novel. Its reversible format enacts the disorientation that migrants experience when changing countries changes the story of their lives. With this suspenseful, funny and profound book, Michelle de Kretser has made something thrilling and new. 'Which comes first, the future or the past?'

Leseprobe

Michelle de Kretser was born in Sri Lanka and lives in Sydney. Her fiction has attracted numerous awards. She is an honorary associate of the English Department at the University of Sydney, and Scary Monsters is her sixth novel.

For Jane, Pat, Clare

First published in Great Britain in 2022 by Allen & Unwin

Copyright © Michelle de Kretser 2021

The moral right of Michelle de Kretser to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

Permission to quote from Lustra by Ezra Pound is granted by Faber and Faber Ltd.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

Allen & Unwin

c/o Atlantic Books

26-27 Boswell Street

London WC1N 3JZ

United Kingdom

Phone:[phone]

Email:[email protected]

Web:www.allenandunwin.com/uk

Hardback ISBN 978 1 83895 395 9

E-book ISBN 978 1 83895 396 6

Cover design: Carmen Rodriguez Balit

CONTENTS

Lili

Lyle

Acknowledgements

The state is the coldest of all cold monsters.

Nietzsche

How does it feel to be a problem?

W.E.B. Du Bois

WHO DECIDES HOW TO READ A NOVEL?

This one can be read in two ways and this e-book provides you with both. In one version, LILI precedes LYLE. In the other, LYLE precedes LILI.

Their stories are the same in both versions, just in a different order.

The choice is yours.

That was the year we went to Sardinia to meet John Berger’s mistress. The night train travelling along the Côte d’Azur was packed. The heating in our compartment was fierce, so Minna and I took turns to stand in the corridor, where the windows opened, and blocks of raw spring air moved in. People were sprawled there, most of them teenage soldiers with freshly shaved heads. It was necessary to step over their kitbags, and there was grumbling about that. The soldiers spoke louder than was required and shoved one another. I remember the impatience in their faces. One of them was a stocky Corsican – the others called him Bonaparte with good-natured jeers.

The train was running late, with long, mysterious halts between stations. Back in our seats, Minna and I shared a packet of chocolate-coated shortbread, leaning forward to pass it to and fro. Later, thick with sleep, I stumbled over someone’s legs and went out into the corridor. The soldiers were playing dice like soldiers from the Bible, and the toilet was foul.

The Corsican asked if I knew the red chestnut beer brewed in his village. He was offering me a cigarette when the train dragged to a stop. The window showed a Meccano city, its towers and cubes lit by big golden stars; a different soldier explained that it was an oil refinery. Napoleon said that to understand a man you had to know what the world looked like when he was twenty. I was twenty-two and Minna was twenty and it was 1981.

At the time of that trip, I’d been teaching at a high school in Montpellier for seven months. There were three assistants at the Lycée Jean Moulin: Felipe, Dieter and me. Like hundreds of other foreigners we were employed by the French government to help with the teaching of our native tongues. Dieter and I had contracts that ran from September 1980 to the end of the following May, but Felipe had been an assistant for longer than I’d been alive. In the last weeks of the Spanish Civil War, aged seventeen, he’d fled over the Pyrenees to France. Fascists, finding him gone, threw his sister down a well. Felipe could be observed in the staffroom drinking sour machine coffee with other old men. I was told that he had seven children. Someone else said five – the truth could have been one or none. Wanton procreation was expected of the Spanish, entrenched in French opinion as a backward, priest-ridden race.

The lycée put me up in its boarding house for the first few weeks of teaching, while I looked for somewhere to live. In accordance with the instructions I’d received in Sydney, I’d arrived in Montpellier a week into September. French students had snapped up all the cheap furnished places by then. At the tourist office, the clerk in charge of rentals couldn’t believe it: turning up after classes had resumed and expecting to find accommodation! He placed his palms on the counter and leaned forward to assess me, tossing up whether to despise a foreigner or take pity on a fool.

Dieter threw a party soon after we met. He lived in a hushed, Haussmann-style building with a slate roof. There was a lift in an iron cage, and a marble staircase whose lower steps flared. I took the stairs to the second floor, where one of the double doors to an apartment was open. Dieter’s mother was French, and the apartment belonged to a distant cousin. This cousin had married a diplomat, who was presently stationed in Amman. Their entrance hall was furnished with locked, glass-fronted cabinets that held Middle Eastern antiquities: clay tablets, unglazed figurines and small bowls. A girl in tartan dungarees with brassy pigtails was looking them over. The first thing Minna ever said to me was, ‘Pillage, obviously. I bet they got them out in a diplomatic bag.’ Her English voice was quiet and fierce. She said, ‘Have you seen the paintings? Through here.’ In the living room there were the Sex Pistols and tortured gilt chairs. Minna turned her back on three canvases: ‘Imagine having the money to buy Arcimboldos and buying Arcimboldos.’ She lit a cigarette, and I noticed that she bit her nails.

Johnny Rotten yelled that he didn’t know what he wanted but he knew how to get it. Dieter blew me a kiss and carried on talking to a boy with the small, sleek head of a dancer. Minna told me that she was an artist. She said that there were several assistant language teachers at the party, and led me to one of them, her boyfriend, Nick. He was talking to Deb, another assistante, who was teaching at a different school. Like me, Deb was looking for somewhere to live, but Minna and Nick had an apartment in the old town, le centre historique. They’d signed the lease in June, and spent the summer working in Toulon. Nick had a dark tan and very light blue eyes – a combination I found both creepy and sexy. He spoke kindly to Deb and me: ‘Look, you can’t leave finding a place until September. You have to know how to manage these things.’

Madame Bisset, the head of English at my lycée, had a room for rent in her house. She showed it to me one day. It was warm and bright and the head of a deer glared from one wall. The Bissets’ son had shot it to celebrate his divorce. Madame Bisset drew my attention to a hotplate: ‘You see, this is perfect for your omelette.’ Her house was a short walk from the school, which meant it was a long way from the centre of town, and the buses stopped running at eight.

In the jetlagged hours I’d spent in Paris before catching a train south, I bought a postcard of a Willy Ronis photo. It showed a naked woman washing herself at a basin, a ewer beside her on the flagstone floor. A window set deep in a wall stood open; it had no pane, only a shutter made of vertical planks. I had the boring version of Johnny Rotten’s problem: I knew what I wanted but I didn’t know how to get it. I wanted to live in le centre historique. What was leaving Australia for France if not a wish to live in le centre historique? At Dieter’s party, I said what I feared: ‘I might have to take the Bissets’ room.’

We were eating pretzels and drinking wine. The others, being English, had spent holidays and school exchanges in France. I heard that it was impossible to find decent potato crisps except in the Marks & Spencer in Paris. Deb pointed out that ‘crisp’ was a really super word because the French couldn’t say it. ‘You go around the class and they get their tongues in such a twist. It’s really sweet. You get through a good fifteen minutes that way.’

‘Jelly’s useful as well,’ said Nick. ‘You ask who’s been to England, and how they liked the food. Then they talk for ages about how horrible jelly is and how it made them feel. If you’re lucky, someone stands up and wobbles.’

Minna was wearing a rosary lengthened at the back of her neck with extra links. She was sucking on the crucifix – when she took it out, it had a red lipstick stain. Different music came on. ‘Scary monsters’ … I didn’t know the song but I recognised Bowie’s voice. He was a scary monster for sure, I said, citing the Thin White Duke’s admiration for Hitler. Deb said that Bowie hadn’t meant it like that. Every white Bowie fan I knew had told me the same thing. Deb’s skin was faintly blue like milk that’s been skimmed. She had a doll’s face, pretty and hard.

Dieter came up to us, twisting the end of a joint, saying, ‘Is everyone happy? Soon we will dance. Germans dancing – do not be afraid.’ He asked if we’d met Adalbert. ‘There, near the music. Mein Schatz.’ His beloved was a tall, severely beautiful man modelled from ice. He was old – possibly thirty! ‘I know,’ Dieter said. ‘You are thinking, He looks like a Nazi.’ He told us that Adalbert had once played an SS officer in a film. The director was up and coming, and the film screened at Cannes. Adalbert felt that his career was assured. The world would never tire of films about the Third Reich. He went to Paris and rented a suite at the George V. ‘He was rehearsing being a star, so that when it happened, he would know exactly what to do.’ At the end of a fortnight, Adalbert had spent all his money. Four years on, the best new role he’d had was in a commercial for an electric shaver.

When he wasn’t being a Nazi, Adalbert kept a photo of a house plant in his wallet. He dug it out to show me. His English, like my German, conveyed goodwill rather than meaning, so Dieter translated: ‘This is called elephant’s foot, and it is Adalbert’s favourite plant. Its name is Ramón.’ I said that a plant with leaves the size of platters grew in Sydney and was known as elephant’s ears. But Adalbert had no feeling for elephants. He ran an amorous thumb over the plastic protecting his Schatz.

The party went this way and that. Minna said, ‘The minute they switch to disco, I’m leaving.’ They switched to disco. Nick was humming the Bowie song under his breath as we left. The door of the lift clanged into place, and Minna said, ‘Adalbert – what a name! He’s probably got a sister called Waltraut. There’s only one question to ask about people like that: what did they do during the war?’

‘He’s not that old,’ said Nick.

‘His father’s Austrian – they’re the worst. They have swastikas under their lapels. As for the French, you’ve seen what Dieter’s thieving landlord is capable of. You know Dieter isn’t out to his family, don’t you? Adalbert isn’t allowed to answer the phone – they don’t know he exists.’

In the street, Minna zipped up her jacket. It was made of synthetic fur in a jubilant shade of green. I had to take a taxi back to the school, dipping into my vanishing savings. Minna and Nick walked me to the rank. When they said goodbye, they kissed my cheeks once, twice, three times in the southern way. ‘So stupid,’ said Minna. ‘It takes forever to leave anywhere.’ She rubbed at the lipstick she’d left on my face, saying, ‘Don’t take that room.’

A furnished apartment came up for rent in le centre historique, in a street near the cathedral that smelled of cold stones. The building, which was the smallest in the street and seemed to be the oldest, had blue wooden shutters at the windows. A date was engraved over the entrance: 1703. The landlord, Monsieur Laval, met me there, and I followed him up a twisting stair. It spiralled around a massive column of roughly plastered stone that rose up from the lobby. What purpose did it serve? When I asked, Monsieur Laval said that it was a very old building, unlike any other and altered over time.

The apartment was on the top floor. Its two thick-walled rooms were like rooms I’d visited in dreams. They contained a few essential things, chairs, a table, a big, high bed that jutted from an alcove in the main room – my search for somewhere to live had taught me that in France ‘furnished’ was only a label used to evict tenants without a fuss. The kitchen had hexagonal tiles on the floor, uneven with use and a soft, blurry red. There was a shower stall there, in a corner, and a round-shouldered fridge. The toilet was a cubicle at the top of steps that corkscrewed up from the landing. It had a small window above head height, a wooden seat, and an enamel W.C. sign on the door. Not so long ago it must have served the whole building, but Monsieur Laval said that it would be for my exclusive use. The other apartments had their own toilets inside.

He also told me that he’d inherited the property and was gradually doing it up. It contained only four apartments, one on each floor – it was ‘very calm, very quiet.’ He’d done all the renovations himself, he went on, and still had one apartment to tackle, on the floor below. He’d just completed this one – the fresh-plaster smell reached to the foot of the stairs.

Monsieur Laval was as twinkly and weathered as a farmer in a children’s book, with bright blue wrinkles for eyes. He lived on a few acres not far from Montpellier, he informed me, and he asked where I was from. That was a question that made me tense up. Seven years earlier, my family had immigrated to Australia from Asia. Where was I from? Monsieur Laval’s tiny eyes widened when I said Australia. ‘C’est loin!’ he exclaimed. It was what every French person said at the mention of Australia. I agreed that it was indeed far away. I didn’t tell him that the distance made it easier to say I came from Australia. As for ‘I’m Australian’, the span of the planet wasn’t great enough for me to claim that.

The apartment cost seven hundred francs a month, more than I’d hoped to pay, but Monsieur Laval explained that the cost of utilities was included in the rent. He said, ‘C’est intéressant.’ He repeated this at intervals in his singing Midi accent – c’est ang-ter-es-sung – as he showed me around. Intéressant was a word that I didn’t fully understand at first. It could mean ‘interesting’, as I’d been taught, but it also carried the shrewd French sense of ‘in one’s interest’. Monsieur Laval was telling me that here was a bargain, while I thought that he was referring to the romance of the place. Two days later, I propped the Ronis postcard beside the deep porcelain sink in the kitchen. The fridge ground its teeth in welcome. The key to the front door was cold and heavy and the length of my hand.

My favourite stallholder at the open-air food market always dressed in a cracked leather jacket and motorcycle boots. Sandrine dyed her hair a frank, hard black and wore it in a long ponytail to one side. She liked me and expressed it by drawing my attention to this or that vegetable: ‘C’est ang-ter-es-sung.’ What was interesting about potatoes, about cabbages? This small opacity held my attention like a dark figure in a snowy field. There was something brutal about being flung into a foreign language – something thrilling, too. In those early weeks, I sometimes stood aside from myself, watching my progress as if following a character in a novel. Asking the way or opening a bank account, I’d listen to myself reproducing sentences from grammar books. I relished the strangeness of it as I relished the square-ruled notebook I bought and the chalky ring deposited in saucepans by the hard water. Everything was proof that I was living a different life.

The main square in the centre had an official name, but because it was egg-shaped everyone called it L’Oeuf. A promenade lined with horse chestnuts led away from one end. The trees had ripened and changed colour, and that too, the spectacular intensity of a northern autumn, was new. On weekends, old people sat on benches under the astonishing trees. Small children rode their tricycles carefully into each other. One Sunday there were sideshows. I watched a man aiming rope rings at the necks of dazed, tethered geese. It struck me as a sight from another century, something Flaubert would have seen.

Nîmes was only half an hour away by train. I went there on a grey Sunday with a questing wind. There were Roman mosaics to inspect, and a Roman amphitheatre where bullfights were now held. The wall in the amphitheatre was just high enough to prevent someone leaping it to escape. That was something I didn’t notice at the time. My mind was busy with sums as I walked about the city under clouds of yellow leaves. My salary wasn’t generous, and I wasn’t used to budgeting by the month. Train fares were cheaper if bought in advance, so along with my ticket to Nîmes, I’d bought two returns to Paris. I had Australian friends there, and we planned to spend Christmas together as well as the three-day break coming up for Toussaint. There was a phrase I’d encountered in novels, un fin de mois difficile. It referred to running short of money at the end of a month – I knew that, but I felt the force of the expression for the first time when I added up my fares, the admission fees to the sites in Nîmes and the cost of the long cheese sandwich I’d bought for lunch.

Crusty flakes from the sandwich littered my coat as I walked the stern gravel paths of a park. If I were to sit on a bench, within minutes a man would sit beside me and ask my name. If I didn’t answer, he’d ask a different question or invite me to have a drink. He’d leave after a while, and almost at once another man would take his place. Men like that were familiar to me. They wandered around Montpellier as well, under the blazing wreckage of public trees. They were North Africans, formally dressed in pressed trousers and jackets that didn’t match. Their shoes had creases across the instep but had been polished until they gleamed. On Sundays, the French retreated to their villas and their families. The streets were left to foreigners who had nowhere to go. If I answered one of those men politely, he’d move up to sit with his thigh along mine.

In Montpellier a flea market was held every Sunday under the eighteenth-century aqueduct that still supplied the city’s fountains. I examined rust-spotted lawn nighties there, varnish-dim paintings, cracked faïence plates. Much of this trash was priced like treasure, but I kept going back. Madame Bisset had lent me bed linen, inherited from her grandmother, to spare me the expense of buying my own. The sheets were monogrammed and weighty, fit for a shroud, and they took two hours to dry. I’d feed coin after coin into a machine in the laundromat and head to the market over the road.

Sometimes a procession of dark blue vans tore up to the aqueduct. Gendarmes would swarm out, station themselves around the market and set about checking people’s papers. I was always asked for ID, but as soon as I showed my passport, I was waved on. Australians were not ang-ter-es-sung. It always ended the same way, with a group of North African men herded into a van. I began to see why they put such effort into looking respectable. The French can overlook a whole heap of things if you’ve taken trouble with your shoes.

In a cafe near my apartment, a hand-tinted photograph of a port hung on a wall. It was labelled ‘Algiers, 1938’. The owner noticed me looking at it and said, ‘The bay was so blue.’ He said, ‘Bloody Arabs!’ and went on polishing a glass. I thought of him, in the park in Nîmes, and I thought of the vans. Then I swore at the man who hissed when I paused to look at a statue. We were the same colour, the North Africans and I, and that counted for a lot, but it didn’t count enough.

Deb told me, ‘I keep a big hatpin handy. Anyone tries anything, I let him have it.’ She offered to procure me a pin. Deb was in my debt. She’d taken Madame Bisset’s room. When I asked how she planned to get around after the buses stopped, Deb said that she’d rented a moped. I was stunned by her efficiency and common sense. I pictured her speeding along boulevards, the wind slapping her pretty, blue face. I didn’t know how to manage these things. When my family emigrated it felt as if we’d been stood on our heads. Events and their meanings came at us from new angles. Seven years had passed, but the three of us were still trying to manage that.

The scaffolding of study had held me up for as long as I could remember. Now that I’d graduated, the scaffolding had come down. Things felt makeshift. Wind rushed about my ears. Being young and clever and streaked with unfocused ambition, I was given to panic. My life was a bridge strung across a ravine: I was moving over it fast, and it was collapsing behind me like a scene in an old film. Safety lay in keeping my eyes fixed on my destination – but where was that? I tried to believe that I was looking into the unbroken perspective of possibility. I wanted to be loose-shouldered, to leap and twist. I wanted to be adventurous, to flower, but always a whispering voice returned. What will become of you? it asked. I was stalled at the lights. I was waiting for a sign. I was waiting for a letter. The letter might or might not provide me with direction. My days were pure suspension: time out of time, neither before nor after, a tireless now.

All this was complicated by two things. The first was loneliness. In bed at night I’d hold my own hand for comfort when falling asleep. Living alone signified adulthood, but I missed the noises gusting about share houses: voices and music, enormous sneezes, feet thumping down stairs. Loneliness was shameful. The thing to do was to transform it into solitude – but how? Solitude was lofty and literary, the realm of men and exceptional women. I’d written my undergraduate thesis on one of those women. Simone de Beauvoir was philosophy, Paris, politics, progress. I wanted to be her. I wanted her life. She was Bold, Intelligent Woman. When she wasn’t much older than I, de Beauvoir accepted a teaching post in Marseille. She had no friends there and spent her weekends striding about the rocky hills behind the town. When colleagues said that she risked being raped, she dismissed their warnings as ‘a mere spinsterish obsession’. She wrote, ‘there were certain things, such as accidents, serious illnesses or rape, which simply could not happen to me’.

The Promenade du Peyrou ran from one end of le centre historique. I returned to that esplanade often – it gave me Australia’s large sky. There were views over the city and of hills slumped on the horizon. Long walks – stride, stride – carried me to the outskirts of Montpellier, but the hills remained distant. Passing villas submerged in discretion, I fought the wish for someone to talk to. Adalbert had returned to the West Berlin record store where he worked, which left Dieter, too, on his own. But Dieter was taking a linguistics unit at the university and was supplied with student friends. He’d mentioned a gay club as well – he didn’t need my company, and I was too ashamed to ask for his. Minna had given me her address, but I was squeamish about intruding on the life of couples. I thought of it as solemn, ceremonial, fused. My experience of it had been nothing of the kind, but I believed that other people had more talent or fewer doubts.

The other thing on my mind was a discovery I’d made: my apartment was cold. My street was a cobblestoned crevice, and the building across the way was taller than mine. Between four in the afternoon and half-past seven in the morning my windows were black. The sun conducted itself like a timid visitor, entering my rooms hesitantly and fleeing in haste. There was a heater, fired by a hefty blue gas cylinder that Monsieur Laval had promised to replace when it ran out. He set up the heater in the doorway between the two rooms, saying that it would heat the whole apartment. After ten days of heating the whole apartment the cylinder was empty, and I tried to ring Monsieur Laval. I returned again and again to the phone box. Finally, he answered and told me that he’d replace the cylinder at the end of the month.

‘You said that you’d replace it when it ran out.’

‘It should last a month.’

‘It hasn’t.’

‘Buy another one.’

‘Where? And how would I get it to my apartment? In any case, we agreed that you —’

He made one of those expressive French noises like a verbal shrug. Then he hung up.

When striding around tired me out, I’d go to a down-at-heel cafe for warmth. It was the kind of place where old men hunched over drinks at the zinc-topped bar. Chronic little miseries seeped from the clientele – not operatic desolation, but the everyday erosion worked by creeping age and never quite enough money. A woman with receding eyes was always there, sitting in a corner with the furry croissant of a dog clutched to her heart. It was in that cafe that I learned to drink tea without milk. Milk came in a single-serve stainless-steel jug, whereas hot water was unlimited and free. The toilet à la turque was grim, but for the price of a cup of tea I was left alone for hours to draw up lesson plans, write homesick letters and read. There was never a flick-flick – the lightning, down-and-up glance with which the French took in every detail of someone’s appearance from shoes to hair. In the upmarket cafes at L’Oeuf, the flick-flick assessed, classified and dismissed me in the time it took to blink.

As October lengthened, the cold occupied my apartment like a malign force. The walls were icy – centuries of winter were trapped in the stone. To pass the long evenings, I’d get into bed, fully dressed, and read. The cold pressed into the sockets of my eyes and made them ache. My magnificent sheets seemed permanently damp. I’d go to sleep in my sleeping-bag and wake with my breath misting the air. When I thought of the weather that lay ahead, I knew I’d have to move. But where would I go? No one vacated apartments with winter coming on. Madame Bisset’s centrally heated room hung in my mind; it would be like living inside a mitten. Every time I brushed my teeth at the sink where I washed my dishes – a dual functionality that disgusted me – I was confronted with Ronis’s naked woman and her open window. It was a photograph of summer. Why hadn’t I seen that?

A couple called Berty lived on the ground floor of my building. Whenever I passed their door I’d hear them laughing. If I ran into them in the lobby, they’d greet me brightly, crying Bonjour! with brilliant smiles as they hurried outside or shut their door in my face. The apartment below mine was unoccupied, awaiting the ministrations of Monsieur Laval. The tenant on the floor below that lived by himself. Our letterboxes supplied his name, too: Rinaldi.

One evening as I was heading up the stairs, his door was open. Rinaldi was standing just inside. We remarked on the gusty weather, and he asked where I was from. He said, ‘L’Australie! C’est loin!’ I told him that my flight from Sydney to Paris had taken twenty-eight hours. Rinaldi flapped a veal-coloured hand and looked pleasingly aghast. I must have wanted to convey that I was no stranger to heroic air travel because I found myself telling him where I’d been born. I heard my earnest, teacherly voice add, ‘There are people from all over the world in Australia.’

Rinaldi said, ‘Un pays poubelle.’ His tone was affable – he was merely filing away the fact that Australia was a garbage bin for humans – and he smiled as he spoke. He said that we’d have to have a drink sometime. I went on up the stairs.

After that, it seemed that Rinaldi’s door was open whenever I went past at the end of the day. Warm air was an invitation streaming out. There’d be a light under the door to his living room but his hallway was always dark. A long coat hung there in the shadows – I’d forget about it and then, seeing it from the corner of my eye, think that someone was standing there.

Days of rain gave way to an urgent blue sky. The wind was hissing at my windows when I woke, but the sky and the sun shouted that this was a You Have Won the Car and the Holiday and the Money kind of day. I went downstairs joyfully, stepped into the street, and the mistral struck. Water from my eyes ran down my face as I sped across squares, along the tight, wind-funnelling streets. A figurine in an eighteenth-century nativity scene at the local museum came into my mind: a shepherd staggering in a wind-swirled cloak, one hand hanging onto his hat.

At the market, Sandrine had abandoned her rock-goddess look for a quilted coat, a scarf pulled up over her mouth and a beanie. The mistral would last three days, or possibly six or nine, she told me – it was always a multiple of three. And snow was predicted the following week, for Toussaint. I said that I’d be spending the holiday weekend in Paris. Sandrine was of the opinion that Paris was a filthy place. A woollen finger pointed to her ponytail. ‘Once I was stuck there for a whole month. The pollution was so bad, I had to wash my hair every week.’

Rinaldi, wearing nothing warmer than a trench coat, was lurking near the letterboxes when I got back. I greeted him and would have continued up the stairs, but he stood in my way. A merry cackling started up behind the Bertys’ door, as if they could see me there, weighed down by shopping, with Rinaldi cutting off my escape.

There was a cupboard in the base of the column that reared from the lobby. That was where the garbage bins were kept – the Bertys put them out for collection at night. Rinaldi deposited a bulging plastic bag in one of the bins and gestured at the stony heights above: ‘One can imagine a woman walled up alive there as a punishment. Or thrown down the stairs, and this structure built to hide the corpse. Things like that used to happen. Those who are chosen feel the reverberations still.’

He smiled then, showing humble teeth the colour of old paper. ‘You understand astrology, of course,’ he informed me. Now we were on familiar ground. Astrology was one of the subjects that came up around me in Australia. The others were cricket, Buddhism, yoga and lentils. ‘I am a Ram,’ announced Rinaldi. ‘You, mademoiselle, are certainly a Virgin. Fire and Earth. It might appear that we have little in common. But there is everything to discover.’

I edged towards the stairs, and he stood aside to let me pass. But he followed close behind, talking nonsense about Destiny – ‘That which is shrouded but certain. You might believe you have eluded yours, but it will be waiting for you.’ On his landing, he said he hadn’t forgotten that we’d agreed to have a drink. He said, ‘Tuesday evening, then.’ That was how he spoke – in assertions. I replied that I didn’t have a free evening that week. To forestall any suggestion of meeting over the long weekend, I added that I’d be going away for Toussaint.

‘We are all on a journey,’ said Rinaldi. ‘But what is the destination? As your Hamlet says,’ he switched to English, ‘that is the question.’

Returning from Paris, as the train pulled into Montpellier I thought back to the trip going the other way. Then the train had deposited me in a city of silvery light, mist and frozen white skies – it was like being delivered into a pearl. Montpellier was a sapphire, a cold, glitzy blue. As soon as the shops opened, I bought a two-bar electric radiator. It would cost a packet to run, but what was that to me? The bill would go to Monsieur Laval, which seemed only fair. That night I set the heater on low, plugged it in and slept in blissful warmth. A gentle plastic fragrance woke me towards dawn. The plug on the heater cord was melting into the wall socket. Too late, I remembered Monsieur Laval telling me with pride that he’d done all the wiring in the building himself.

One morning soon afterwards I touched the tiled wall while showering, and an electric shock thrilled up my arm. This time I went to a cafe to call so that I’d be warm while I waited. Monsieur Laval answered at last. My voice was triumphant – the apartment was unsafe, he’d be forced to act! I repeated, ‘The shower is dangerous.’

He spoke with the deliberate patience of a Frenchman called on to demonstrate logic to a foreigner. ‘In that case, mademoiselle, don’t take showers.’

On my way home I passed a salon de thé. Someone rapped on the window – I noticed that one of Minna’s pigtails was tied with a sock. I sat at her table, and we began at once, as if we’d planned it, to tell each other about our lives. Minna’s father was a Jew from Hamburg. His father had refused to leave Germany, even after Kristallnacht. He maintained that Hitler looked exactly like a slow-witted stablehand his parents had employed and could pose no credible threat. So Minna’s grandmother arranged visas to Britain for herself and her children, and Minna’s grandfather suffocated in a cattle car on his way to a camp.

On learning that my mother’s mother was Armenian, Minna said, ‘So we both have genocide in our history.’ I didn’t say that my Armenian ancestors had left Turkey well before 1915, because what struck me wasn’t ‘genocide’ but ‘history’. If Minna had asked why my mother’s people left their homeland and ended up in Asia, I’d have answered in terms of wishes and luck. In the same way, I didn’t think of the forces that took my family to Australia as history or even politics but only as our lives. That might have been because none of us had died in those upheavals, but more probably because I hadn’t read about them in novels, unlike the Holocaust and the Spanish Civil War. It was the beginning for me of thinking about why some people had history and other people had lives.

Another thing I learned that day was that months earlier, in London, Minna had fractured her arm. She’d been thinking of taking a year off art school to live with Nick in France, and the accident decided her. They’d driven over at the beginning of June and meandered south. Minna said, ‘It was the time of les fruits rouges.’ She didn’t speak much French but would suddenly pull out a phrase like les fruits rouges. ‘We lived on strawberries, raspberries, cherries. The strawberries were so big, we took turns taking bites.’ The life of couples – loneliness ran into every cranny as if I’d swallowed black milk. Minna’s eyes were as small as almonds, and the colour of almonds as well. They inspected me, and her soft, frightening voice asked, ‘Why are you sad?’ I wasn’t going to admit to feeling lonely, so I told her about my apartment instead.

‘Your landlord is a peasant,’ said Minna. ‘Peasants are rapacious – it’s a universal truth. Marx had no time for them.’ She said that French law required the provision of heating in rental properties – a revelation to me, accustomed to the rubbishy tenancy arrangements of a garbage-bin country. When she heard that I paid my rent in cash, Minna said, ‘Lili, before the end of today you’re going to ring that piece of shit. Tell him he’s guilty of tax evasion for a start. Tell him he’s breaking multiple laws, and that you intend to report him to the authorities. Say “the authorities”. Nothing impresses the French like authority – think what excellent collaborators they made.’

Monsieur Laval resisted at first, so I borrowed Minna’s quiet, scary voice. ‘I’ve been invited to this country,’ I said. ‘I know people in authority.’ After a while it was agreed: Monsieur Laval would provide me with three cylinders of gas a month. He delivered them the following day, huffing them up the stairs one by one. After the third, he had to sit down. He looked at the bottle of wine on my table but accepted a glass of water. He said, ‘Ce n’est pas normal,’ and repeated it a few times. It wasn’t clear whether he was referring to the water or to the bargain we’d struck. In any case he was no longer merry, and I felt sorry about that. Minna was wrong: Monsieur Laval wasn’t a piece of shit but only an old trickster who’d been outsmarted. The people in authority would have happily trampled us both, and that counted for something, although it didn’t count enough.

Another thing Monsieur Laval brought me that day was a rubber mat. He assured me that there’d be no problem if I stood on it while showering. So I did and I also took very good care not to touch the tiles, and in that way I avoided being electrocuted in France.

At night, electric lanterns strung on chains lit Minna and Nick’s street. In that part of the centre, Enlightenment architects with formal, beautiful pictures in their minds had created mansions of biscuity stone. Once the town houses of aristocrats, they now served as offices for lawyers and medical specialists, or grandiose apartments for the rich. Their street doors, wide and tall enough to admit carriages, were kept shut. A pamphlet from the tourist office had informed me that staircases and courtyards classified as national treasures could be found behind those majestic doors. Sometimes one stood open, allowing a glimpse of an elaborate balustrade or a potted tree. I told myself gloomily that I’d never have access to more of France than its splendid façade.

Minna and Nick’s building wasn’t a mansion but it was solid and high, with long, shallow-stepped flights of stairs. Their apartment, which must once have been used for storage or servants, occupied a space off the landing between two floors. The front door, set flush with the wall of the landing, looked as if it gave onto a cupboard but opened to reveal a string of four rooms. That echo of Narnia lifted the apartment out of the ordinary and the everyday at once. But it cost no more than mine. When Minna handed me a glass of wine on my first visit, I found myself swallowing envy as well. I looked and looked at everything – at art postcards propped on a shelf, a portable sewing machine, a Gitanes ashtray moulded from blue tin. The ashtray was spotless. As we talked, Minna tapped her cigarette on the rim of a vase full of flowers.

When it grew dark and the shutters were closed, lamps turned the rooms tender and mysterious. They were set in an enfilade so people walked through them in a straight line – it made casual movement look ceremonial. The ceilings were low, and Nick ducked his head when passing through a door or under the beam that ran across the living room. He had thick brown hair, the kind described as moppy. His books were stacked beside chairs, mostly white Folio paperbacks. He was reading only French writers while he was in France, he told me. I’d borrowed The Women’s Room from the American Library and felt ashamed.

The street door had a decorative iron knocker, a woman’s hand wearing a wedding ring. The door was kept locked, and the secret apartment had no buzzer, so visitors had to stand in the street and shout. Minna told me to whistle ‘L’Internationale’ on my next visit so that she’d know it was me. I didn’t know the tune, so she stood up and so did Nick. Minna was wearing a blue vinyl mini and a shrunken leopard-print top, and Nick hadn’t changed out of the secondhand suit he wore to work. Side by side, they threw back their shoulders and sang:

C’est la lutte finale

Groupons-nous et demain

L’Internationale

Sera le genre humain!

Minna’s mind worked in metaphors, spotting hidden connections. At the flea market she pointed to a wastepaper basket with a rim: ‘A perfect summer hat.’ She pounced on a girly maxi dress, blue with yellow sprigs and a ruffle down the front. The next time I saw it, Minna had slit open the ruffle, causing the neckline to plunge and revealing the lime-green shirt she was wearing under the dress. ‘My aim is the uglification of clothes,’ she declared. If I made the mistake of appearing in velvet or paisley, Minna would mime vomiting. ‘The sixties are over! Only someone as pretty as you could get away with dressing like a frump.’ She approved of an oversized, punky jumper with sleeves that hung down over my hands, but said that it would be better if it had holes.

The flick-flicks grew frenzied around Minna. She stirred a special mix of horror and pity in the breasts of French men. They wished to save her, but how? They might have been watching a mountaineer step wilfully off an alp – it was tragic, and there was nothing to be done. Whenever the sight of Minna induced that look of appalled bewilderment, we’d cry, ‘Goal!’, wet a finger and mark a strike on the air.

We were at the flea market one day when the gendarmes swooped. First they rounded up a Roma woman and her two children, all three in dragging skirts. Then they moved on to the North Africans. As usual, I was asked for my papers as I left. Minna wasn’t – she glared at the gendarme who’d stopped me and thrust her passport in his face.

Montpellier had no industry, Minna said, so North African men ended up working in construction or building roads. Many were harkis, Algerians who’d served as auxiliaries in the French army during the fight for independence. Afterwards they’d fled Algeria to avoid reprisals, but France had no use for them now. A reunification program, set up after protracted delays, had finally made it possible for their families to join them, but its implementation was slow. I had an honours degree in French, but that was the kind of thing Minna knew. Once, looking out at the city from the Promenade du Peyrou, she drew my attention to a forbidding set of buildings with small, barred windows. It was the maison d’arrêt, where prisoners were held on remand, and was known to locals as Le Château.