Jess

Jess

A shout rips through the silence. A man’s voice. Then another voice, a woman’s.

I sit up in bed listening hard, heart kicking against my ribs. It takes a second for me to work out that the sounds are coming from the courtyard, filtering through the windows in the main room. I check the alarm clock next to Ben’s bed. 5 a.m.: morning, just, but still dark.

The man is shouting again. He sounds slurred, like he’s been drinking.

I creep across the main room to the windows and crouch down. The cat pushes its face into my thigh, mewing. “Shh,” I tell it—but I quite like the feel of its warm, solid body against mine.

I peer into the courtyard. Two figures stand down there: one tall, one much smaller. The guy is dark-haired and she’s blonde, the long fall of her hair silver in the cool light of the courtyard’s one lamp. He’s wearing a parka with a fur rim that looks familiar, and I realize it’s the guy I “met” outside the gate last night.

Their voices get louder—they’re shouting over one another now. I’m pretty sure I hear her say the word “police.” At this his voice changes—I don’t understand the words but there’s a new hardness, a threat, to his tone. I see him take a couple of steps toward her.

“Laisse-moi!” she shouts, sounding different now, too—scared rather than angry. He takes another step closer. I realize I’m pressed so close to the window that my breath has misted up the glass. I can’t just sit here, listening, watching. He raises a hand. He’s so much taller than her.

A sudden memory. Mum, sobbing. I’m sorry, I’m sorry: over and over, like the words to a prayer.

I lift my hand to the window and slam it against the glass. I want to distract him for a few seconds, give her a chance to move away. I see both of them glance up in confusion, their attention caught by the sound. I duck down, out of sight.

When I look back out again it’s just in time to see him pick something up from the ground, something big and bulky and rectangular. With a big petulant shove he throws it toward her—at her. She steps back and it explodes at her feet: I see it’s a suitcase, spilling clothes everywhere.

Then he looks straight up at me. There’s no time to crouch down. I understand what his look means. I’ve seen you. I want you to know that.

Yeah, I think, looking right back. And I see you, dickhead. I know your sort. You don’t scare me. Except all the hairs on the back of my neck are standing to attention and the blood’s thumping in my ears.

I watch as he walks over to the statue and shoves it viciously off its plinth, so that it topples to the ground with a crash. Then he makes for the door that leads back into the apartment building. I hear the slam echoing up the stairwell.

The woman is left on her knees in the courtyard, scrabbling around for the things that have fallen out of the suitcase. Another memory: Mum, on her knees in the hallway. Begging . . .

Where are the other neighbors? I can’t be the only one who heard the commotion. It’s not a choice to go down and help: it’s something I have to do. I snatch up the keys, run down the couple of flights of stairs and out into the courtyard.

The woman starts as she spots me. She’s still on her hands and knees and I see that her eye make-up has run where she’s been crying. “Hey,” I say softly. “Are you OK?”

In answer she holds up what looks like a silk shirt; it’s stained with dirt from the ground. Then, shakily, in heavily accented English: “I came to get my things. I tell him it’s over, for good. And this—this is what he does. He’s a . . . a son-of-a-bitch. I never should have married him.”

Jesus, I think. This is why I know I’m better off single. Mum had exceptionally terrible taste in men. My dad was the worst of all of them though. Supposedly a good guy. A real fucking bastard. Would have been better if he’d disappeared off into the night like Ben’s dad did before he was born.

The woman’s muttering under her breath as she shovels clothes into the suitcase. Anger seems to have taken over from fear. I go over and crouch down, help her pick up her things. High heels with long foreign names printed inside, a black silk, lacy bra, a little orange sweater made out of the softest fabric I’ve ever felt. “Merci,” she says, absent-mindedly. Then she frowns. “Who are you? I’ve never seen you here before.”

“I’m meant to be staying with my brother, Ben.”

“Ben,” she says, drawing out his name. She looks me up and down, taking in my jeans, my old sweater. “He’s your brother? Before him I thought all Englishmen were sunburnt, no elegance, bad teeth. I did not know they could be so . . . so beautiful, so charmant, so soigné.” Apparently there aren’t enough words in English for how wonderful my brother is. She continues shoveling clothes into the suitcase, a violence to her movements, scowling every so often at the door into the apartment building. “Is it so strange I got bored of being with a stupid fucking . . . loser alcoolique? That I wanted a little flirtation? And, d’accord, maybe I wanted to make Antoine jealous. Care about something other than himself. Is it such a surprise I started to look elsewhere?”

She tosses her hair over her shoulder in a shining curtain. It’s quite impressive, being able to do that while crouched down picking your lacy underwear out of a gravel path.

She looks toward the building and raises her voice, almost as though she wants her husband to hear. “He says I only care about him because of his money. Of course I only care about him because of his money. It was the only thing that made it—how do you say—worthwhile? But now . . .” she shrugs, “it’s not worth it.”

I pass her a silky, electric blue dress, a baby pink bucket hat with JACQUEMUS printed across the front. “Have you seen Ben recently?” I ask.

“Non,” she says, raising an eyebrow at me like I might be insinuating something. “Pour quoi? Why do you ask?”

“He was meant to be here last night, to let me in, but he wasn’t—and he hasn’t been answering my messages.”

Her eyes widen. And then, under her breath, she murmurs something. I make out: “Antoine . . . non. Ce n’est pas possible . . .”

“What did you say?”

“Oh—rien, nothing.” But I catch the glance she shoots toward the apartment building—fearful, suspicious, even—and wonder what it means.

Now she’s trying to clip shut her bulging suitcase—brown leather with some sort of logo printed all over it—but I see that her hands are trembling, making her fingers clumsy.

“Merde.” Finally it snaps closed.

“Hey,” I say. “Do you want to come inside? Call a cab?”

“No way,” she says, fiercely. “I’m never going back in there. I have an Uber coming . . .” As if on cue, her phone pings. She checks it and gives what sounds like a sigh of relief. “Merci. Putain, he’s here. I have to go.” Then she turns and looks up at the apartment building. “You know what? Fuck this evil place.” Then her expression softens and she blows a kiss toward the windows above us. “But at least one good thing happened to me here.”

She pulls up the handle of the little case then turns and begins stalking toward the gate.

I hurry after her. “What do you mean, evil?”

She glances at me and shakes her head, mimes zippering her lips. “I want my money, from the divorce.”

Then she’s out onto the street and climbing into the cab. As it pulls away, off into the night, I realize I never managed to ask whether what she had with my brother was ever more than a flirtation.

I turn back toward the courtyard and nearly jump out of my skin. Jesus Christ. There’s an old woman standing there, looking at me. She seems to glow with a cold white light, like something off Most Haunted. But after I’ve caught my breath, I realize it’s because she’s standing beneath the outdoor lamp. Where the hell did she appear from?

“Excuse-moi?” I say. “Madame?” I’m not even sure what I want to ask her. Who are you, maybe? What are you doing here?

She doesn’t answer. She simply shakes her head at me, very slowly. Then she’s retreating backward, toward that cabin in the corner of the courtyard. I watch as she disappears inside. As the shutters—which I see now must have been open—are quickly drawn closed.