Maybe, I screamed at them, the last time, in their offices, before I left, when they were telling me again and again, with their pens poised just above their notebooks, what it is that I need to talk to them about. Maybe I am already talking about those things, I screamed, Maybe I’m talking about those things all the time.

10

We had to go to the shops then, for the baby gift. The nice ones on Rue de Rive. Afterwards I could check on M’s suits at the dry cleaners. I wanted to go to the park. I wanted to look for Nell. I filled containers with sliced cucumbers, tomatoes, a bottle of water, diapers and outfit changes, thousands of small packages each with their own lid snapped tight against all possible disasters.

I was in a hurry, for once, to leave, so I pulled the long coat from M over my stained saggy shirt, so thin and colourless as to be almost nothing, and pulled the beautiful camel-coloured lapels up close to my neck. Under the coat I could have been anyone. Anything. An elegant lady with a silk lace bra hugging her ribs, a jackal with a woman’s face, anything at all.

E had dressed herself, as usual. I felt monstrous but out we went. I was tired today in a way that made my face feel strange, peeled open almost. The coat was too heavy and wrapped up inside it, I immediately began to sweat. E ran toward the tram stop and I called for her to stopstopstop, but she skipped ahead without turning back.

The boutiques were sprinkled up and down the beautiful old street. E and B and I began ducking in and out of them looking for a gift, me practising the way one should smile on entering, on leaving. The little curl up at the corners of the mouth. Not too much, just a bit. Bonjour I would say when someone said bonjour to me.

In one of the shops, E and I and B in his stroller found a small table on which baby things were displayed. Fat-bottomed baby pants, white bonnets, everything plush, everything tiny. Wooden animals painted in soft colours, their noses sanded down, their teeth blunted, made delightful. Rattles filled with wooden beads tuned to sound like spring rain. Everything was expensive. I picked out a set of small white cloth squares tied with linen and a wooden elephant with an upcurled trunk. Then I drifted over to another part of the store to solve the problem of wrapping everything up.

I could feel E tugging at my coat, pulling me over to look at something or other that had caught her eye. But if I could only find the correct paper, the right ribbon, I would resolve this for myself. I was doing something that needed to be done. I gazed at the ribbons for a long time, the mounds of smooth coils, my eyes floating over the blues and greens, the pinks were numerous but none of them right. One was too soft, another too brash, needy: all elbows. The wrapping papers, displayed half unrolled, fluttered like eyelids or butterfly wings.