‘Isn’t it exciting?’ Nora said, her voice barely audible over the sound of rain. ‘The air is, I don’t know, it’s . . .’

‘We get storms like this at home, too.’

‘I know. And I loved them there too. It’s just different in the city. Smells different. Feels closer.’

Anouk shrugged. ‘Can we watch the end of the movie now?’

Later, while they slept, their garbage cans were burgled by black-masked raccoons with nimble fingers. Later still, the yowls of cat fights at dawn.

Cherry Beach became a daily thing. Anouk would swim out to the spit and scramble up and over its bank. One day, she thought she saw the head of a turtle, but it was a shampoo bottle. Another day, she found a dead chipmunk with its eyes pecked out and its body sunken like a squashed can. Maybe there wasn’t a lot of life under the surface of the lake, like Red said. But stuff was happening on top. Sailboats and windsurfers and motorboats. Long, cumbersome war canoes paddled by fourteen people in perfect unison, a cox yelling orders from the back. Every day, she sat on a rock at the end of the spit and scanned the water for Carolina Cho and the father in the faded cap, and she would look out at the waves, across the long, long summer where nothing much was happening.

26

L’Inconnue

Paris, 1898

Not long after Axelle left me in the doorway, perhaps two or three days, I was coming out of the apartment with a basket and shopping list, heading for the Boulevard de Sébastopol, when I came nose to nose with Nicolas. In that moment, I had been ruminating. It was only a meaningless thing: a pair of pale freckles at the base of Axelle’s right ear, one smaller than the other like the moon orbiting earth. It was these, the smallest, sweetest things, that hurt the most. And then there he was, and he had the look of someone who’d had a lot more liquor than sleep. His eyes were bloodshot and without any spark, and his lips hung dumb and wet. I carried on walking and he lurched beside me as if, in his mind, the whole world were tilted and he was walking perfectly upright. I tried not to be afraid but my toes curled, grabbing for balance. We came to the corner, busy with road traffic, and had to wait to cross.

‘You promised you wouldn’t get me into trouble,’ Nicolas said. His eyes wandered to a spot on the top of my forehead and he licked his upper lip.

‘And I didn’t,’ I said. A carriage passed, and I stepped into the road to cross to the other side. On the opposite corner, a man stood watering a horse. Passing very closely to the animal, I tried to use it as a barrier to cut Nicolas off, but he managed a clumsy, drunken spin and kept pace with me.

‘I’m deep into the shit with the Compagnons.’