Waiting for Monsieur Bellivier by Britta Rostlund

Author:Britta Rostlund [Rostlund, Britta]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781474605489
Publisher: Orion Publishing Group
Published: 2017-08-10T04:00:00+00:00

The entire Marais district smelled like falafel. We pushed our way through the hungry queues of people. There might not have been many Parisians around, but there were plenty of tourists interested in experiencing the multifaceted neighbourhood. And through them all, I walked hand in hand with my son, struck by a feeling of sorrow, of being on the outside.

For the first time, I realised how absent I had been lately. Now that I was holding my son’s hand, it seemed especially obvious. He had grown, I could see it from his shorts. To him, these past few weeks had been like any other, full of summer club and football practice. He wouldn’t have any lasting memories of them, other than the time he and his father had gone to A&E to pick up his mother after she saw an old man collapse in a cemetery. I squeezed his hand. He seemed sad. Had he looked that way for long?

‘Has something happened, darling?’

He shook his head.

‘Is everything OK otherwise? Summer club? Have you been playing with David?’

He nodded. It felt good to walk, and my sadness at having lost out on time with my son was replaced by an unbecoming self-pity at having to deal with everything myself. Having to watch a neighbour fade away, having to keep secrets, constantly being worried about what I had got myself into.

Though it was, to a certain extent, something I had chosen, I still needed to feel sorry for myself. We pushed our way forward through the falafel-eating crowds.

‘Can I do it?’ my son asked.

I picked him up and his eyes shone as he punched in the door code I whispered into his ear. He made a mistake twice, but it didn’t matter, I was just enjoying having him in my arms, feeling his body, the smell of the back of his neck. The door buzzed open, and he glanced at me to make sure it was a good idea to go in. I smiled and stepped over the wide threshold which led into the inner courtyard. He took my hand and we crossed it.

‘It looks like the gardener’s.’

He was right. There were plants and flowers everywhere. Someone had even planted some in the basket of an old bike leaning against the drainpipe. My son pointed over to it. The door into the stairwell was ajar, meaning, to my son’s disappointment, that we didn’t need to use the second code. We went in and climbed the stairs. At first, I thought the woman’s voice we could hear in the stairwell was coming from Monsieur Caro’s apartment, and that threw me off balance, but then the door of the apartment opposite flew open, and a woman in a green silk dress came out, laughing. She was clutching a bottle of wine, and said hello to us before she disappeared upstairs.

‘She wasn’t wearing any shoes,’ my son pointed out.

I knocked firmly on the door and glanced at my watch to make sure we were on time, something I assumed was important to Monsieur Caro.

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