Anouk, drugged, lifts one limp wrist to ensure she has not been strapped to the table. A radio plays somewhere, jazz. A saxophone requires great physical effort, she thinks. The stretching of the cheeks, the trachea, the flexing of the tongue. The strength of the arms, the abdomen muscles and diaphragm. The lungs. The lungs. Her legs are lovely and warm and the smell of detergent, of sterilized metal, is also lovely and warm.

The anaesthetist comes into view, and he’s speaking but she can’t concentrate on what he says. This is the person who will cast her away to sleep, who will do her breathing for her and then. This is the person who will bring her back. Now, he asks her to do something and she isn’t quite sure what he’s asked, but, seeing as her life is in his hands, she feels obliged to react in some way, to do some thing, so she sings.

‘Michael row the boat ashore, hallelujah. Michael row the boat ashore, hallelu-u-jah.’ This is the song the anaesthetist sings in the poem, and it’s the last thing the poet hears before he loses consciousness. ‘The River Jordan is muddy and cold, hallelujah.’

The anaesthetist’s eyes crescent as if he’s smiling – he has no mouth – and he says something to someone standing on the other side of the bed. No, he’s speaking to her.

‘. . . going to sting. The propofol. It’s coming now. You’ll feel it burning but only for a short time.’

She raises her hand, the cannulated hand, and as she does she sees a white liquid travelling up the plastic tube that is attached to her hand. It hurts a goddamn lot. And then a mask is placed over her nose and mouth. It smells like rubber.

‘Breathe deeply,’ says the anaesthetist. His voice is river silt. Move to capture it and it’s gone.

Anouk tries to turn her head but she is drowning.

44

L’Inconnue

Paris, 1903

The original mask that depicted my dead face, having attracted no attention whatsoever, was packed away with the mould on a bottom shelf in the messy storage shack of the Mouleur Statuaire. The crate in which it was entombed gathered dust for four years amongst the detritus of broken and rejected statuary: half an angel’s wing, a bust of Montesquieu missing its nose, stacks of crumbled cornicing. The young mouleur eventually moved on to another, more senior position in Reims, and forgot all about the death mask of the unknown woman.

It was the girl who swept, the girl who’d been mistaken as simple-minded by the young mouleur, who eventually found the box and opened it. Seventeen by this time, her mind was riotous with schemes and ingenuity. One wet Sunday morning a few days after her discovery, while everyone else was either sleeping or at church, she let herself into the atelier and stole the crate – mask and mould together – and brought it home to show her mother, father and four brothers. While the spring rain misted the windows of their cramped loft apartment, she lovingly dusted the mask, turning it in her hands and explaining to her family the technique required to produce such a perfect, unblemished piece of plasterwork (the young mouleur would have been so proud had he known this, because praise, even from a girl cleaner of the lowest order, was, for him, like catnip). She lied, naturally, telling her parents it was going to be thrown out anyway, and that she had asked as a favour if she could take it home.