Us полностью

Connie had recovered her powers of speech and told me more about her large, messy family, her mother an ex-hippy, skittish and boozy and emotional, her biological father long absent now, leaving her nothing but his surname. Which was? Moore. Connie Moore — a terrific name, I thought, like a village in Ireland. Her step-father could not have been more different, a Cypriot businessman who ran a number of questionable kebab shops in Wood Green and Walthamstow, and she was now an anomaly in her family: the arty, smart one. ‘I have three half-Cypriot brothers, little bulldogs they are; they all work in the business, and they have no idea what I do. Same as my dad — he’ll be watching telly and he’ll see a view of the Dales, or we’ll be on holiday and he’ll see a sunset or an olive tree and he’ll say — she slipped into an accent, she has always been very good at accents — ‘“Connie, you see that? Draw that! Draw it, quick!” Or he tries to commission me. “Draw your mother, she’s a beautiful lady, do a painting. I’ll pay.” To Kemal, that’s the supreme achievement of the artist, to draw eyes that look in the same direction.’

‘Or hands.’

‘Exactly. Hands. If you can fit all the fingers on, you’re Titian.’

‘Can you draw hands?’

‘Nope. I love him, though — Kemal — and my brothers, too. They dote on my mum and she sucks it all up. But I don’t see me in any of them, or in her either.’

‘What about your father? Your biological—’

She shuddered. ‘He left home when I was nine. I’m not really allowed to mention him because it sets my mum off. He was very handsome, I know that. Very charming, a musician. Ran off to Europe. He’s … out there … somewhere.’ She gestured towards the east. ‘Don’t really care,’ she said, and shrugged. ‘Change the subject. Ask me something else.’

The biographies we give ourselves at such times are never neutral and the image she chose to present was of a rather solitary soul. She was not mawkish or self-pitying, not at all, but with the bravado gone, she seemed less confident, less self-assured, and I felt flattered by her honesty. I loved the conversation that we had that night, especially once she had stopped hallucinating. I had an infinite number of questions and would have been happy for her to recount her life in real time, would have been happy to walk on past Whitechapel and Limehouse into Essex and the estuary and on into the sea if she’d wanted to. And she was curious about me, too, something that I’d not experienced for some time. We talked about our parents and our siblings, our work and friends, our schools and childhoods, the implication being that we would need to know this information for the future.

Of course, after nearly a quarter of a century, the questions about our distant pasts have all been posed and we’re left with ‘how was your day?’ and ‘when will you be home?’ and ‘have you put the bins out?’ Our biographies involve each other so intrinsically now that we’re both on nearly every page. We know the answers because we were there, and so curiosity becomes hard to maintain; replaced, I suppose, by nostalgia.

In planning our trip I had initially adopted a no-expense-spared attitude, until I calculated the full extent of this expense, at which point I adopted a comfortable-but-no-frills policy. It was this that brought us to the Hotel Bontemps, which may or may not translate as the Good Times Hotel, in the 7th arrondissement. Room 602 was clearly the result of a wager to determine the smallest space into which a double mattress can fit. Brassy and vulgar, the bed frame must have been assembled inside like a ship in a bottle. On closer examination, it also seemed our room was a repository for all of Europe’s spare pubic hair.

‘All in all, I’d have preferred a chocolate on the pillow,’ said Connie, swatting them away.

‘Perhaps it’s fibres from the carpet,’ I suggested hopefully.

‘It’s everywhere! It’s like the chambermaid’s come in with a sack and strewn it.’

Suddenly weary, I fell backwards onto the bed, and Connie joined me, the covers crackling with static like a Van de Graaf Generator.

‘Why did we choose this place again?’ said Connie.

‘You said it looked quirky on the website. The pictures made you laugh.’

‘Not so funny now. Oh God. Sorry.’

‘No, it’s my fault. I should have looked harder.’

‘Not your fault, Douglas.’

‘I want everything to be right.’

‘It’s fine. We’ll ask them to come and clean again.’

‘What’s French for pubic hair?’

‘I never learnt that. It never came up. Rarely.’

‘I’d say, “Nettoyer tous les cheval intimes, s’il vous plaît.”’

‘Cheveux. Cheval means horse.’ She took my hand. ‘Oh well. We’re not going to be here much.’

‘It’s a place to sleep.’

‘Exactly. A place to sleep.’

I sat upright. ‘Perhaps we should get going.’

‘No, let’s close our eyes. Here.’