Exchange Place (8 page)

The Foldable Trilby

I woke up. It was still dark. I groped for the bedside lamp. It was an old-style Bakelite lamp with a click switch on the column just under the shade at the base of the socket. My hand found the switch. The light came on. I was hungry. Aftermath of the Black Rose. I went to the washstand and splashed some water on my face. I replaced the towel on the rail and saw that the wall to the left of the rail was splashed with water that must have dripped from my hands as I moved from the washstand and groped for the towel. The water had dribbled on the wall in fractal rivulets like a root system or a river delta or a route map. I looked into the mirror and wondered how many other faces had looked into the mirror of Room 7 of the Adelphi Hotel, how many thousand other faces lay behind my face.

I was hungry. I dressed and went out on to the corridor in my stockinged soles. The corridor was lit by a single, dim, yellow, bare bulb. I walked to the landing. The stairwell was dark. There was a dimmer switch on the wall and when I pressed the button a light came on. As I came to the next landing the light went off and I had a brief, flickering after-image of myself descending the stairs. I pressed the next dimmer switch, and so on down until I reached Reception. The night porter was asleep. I tiptoed past him and stooped under the hatch. There was a rack of keys on the wall and I lifted the one labelled Kitchen. I went in to the bar and over to the door which had a blue and white enamelled sign reading Kitchen. I opened the door. It was dark inside. I found the light-switch and the strip lighting flickered on. The floor was littered with swathes of paper, crumpled photographs, photocopies, manuscripts, fragments of plaster, everything covered in paint droppings, Cobalt Blue, Green Lake, Madder Carmine, Burnt Umber, and I had to pick my way carefully in my stockinged soles to the big yellow fridge in the corner. Naples Yellow. I opened it and the light came on. There was a platter with a turkey on it. One leg was missing. I tore off the other leg. I had put the leg to my mouth when I heard a footfall behind me. I turned and saw a man in a white overall coming towards me. He had a boning knife in his hand.

I woke up. The dream had been very real and I could still see myself in its other world. I got up and went over to the washstand and splashed water on my face. I replaced the towel on the rail. The wall to the left of the rail was splashed with water that must have dripped from my hands as I moved from the washstand and groped for the towel. The dribbles made a pattern I had seen elsewhere. Axons and dendrites. I went back to bed.

I woke up. When I went down to reception I was told the security alert was now over and that it was safe for residents to return to their homes. After breakfast I packed my belongings and took the 1F bus, Antrim Road via Carlisle Circus. I presented my 60+ bus pass to the conductor and took the stairs to the upper deck. The bus began its normal circuitous route through the city centre, Donegall Square, Chichester Street, Victoria Street, High Street, Castle Place, Royal Avenue, proceeding onwards up Donegall Street and Clifton Street to Carlisle Circus. Three white police Land-Rovers had blocked the Antrim Road and a white security ribbon fluttered behind them. The bus took a detour up the Crumlin Road. I felt a tremor of unease. The bus took another turn, past the jail. There was a bar on the corner, draped in Union Jacks and paramilitary regalia. I had not been in this district for a long time and buildings began to loom out of the fog of memory, shops, factories, warehouses, office blocks, some of them six and eight storeys high, some with ornate cupolas or Gothic clock towers, mansard roofs, dormers, parapets, domes, steeples, tall brick gables with faded, painted signs – Belfast Rope Factors Ltd., Cohen & Co. Auctioneers, Sun Life Assurance Company of Canada, Rollins Glass Designers and Factors Ltd., Standard Hemstitching Co., Imperial Picture House, Belfast Model Dockyard Co., Hebron Gospel Hall, Holland Wholesale Radio Factors, Melville & Co., Ltd. Funeral Furnishers and Motor Hirers …

I had known these buildings from my childhood, but had forgotten them, and I felt both lost and at home, as if I were revisiting my past. I took out my notebook and was writing down the names when the bus turned again. From my vantage point on the upper deck I caught sight of a street sign. Berlin Street. I was definitely on the wrong side of the divide. Someone from my side could have walked these streets then, but not now. So much had changed, but the buildings, it seemed, had remained. The bus began to labour up a steep incline and the landscape seemed to tilt as if the bus was on a level. I didn’t like where it was taking me. I decided to get off. I would make my way back on foot. I would keep my head down, making no eye contact. I had thought to take off my hat, fearing it would make me conspicuous. It was a foldable, navy felt fur trilby, Lock & Co. of London. I could have folded it and hidden it in my briefcase. But when I looked down at the crowd on the thoroughfare below, I could see that all the men were wearing hats or caps, hats and caps bobbing along, borne by the human current. I would have been a navy hat among many navy hats. Then I remembered that it did not matter, that I was to all intents and purposes invisible, in the way I have been on the streets of this same city, threading my way through the crowds on main thoroughfares, or walking through a portal into a narrow entry, where you encounter but few people, solitary men and women, the odd couple, or a street musician, the sound of his instrument amplified by the high walls. I am my invisible twin, the one I see in the mirror sometimes late at night, the other who is high on weed. A little Black Rose. Was it Bill or was it Ben? I feel the mirror neuron firing in my brain, electrical bursts of activity connecting from axon to dendrite to make me see in the other what I see in myself as I mime the other. I got off the bus and joined the human tide of the others, the people of the other side.

It was October and a fog was descending, the street lamps dimly coming on. The black cars parked by the pavement glistened in the yellow light. I put my collar up and pulled down the brim of my Lock & Co. hat; hands in coat pockets, I joined the throng, threading my way downhill against the flow. The road to be taken was becoming clearer to me. I saw the map in my mind’s eye and the invisible fractal that would take me to my destination. I had not gone twenty or thirty paces when I found the crowds vanished from my orbit. I walked the pavement alone, past parked car after parked car, and something in me told me one of them was a bomb about to go off, but had not told me which one. They all seemed to be ticking over, when …

I come to lying fully clothed on the bed in Room 7 of the Adelphi Hotel, my face under my hat. I take off the hat. I am awake at last. I am John Kilfeather.

The Yellow Coat

Kilpatrick walked to Montparnasse and took the Métro to Trocadéro. Montparnasse was not his favourite station, but it had a direct line to his destination, and at least it was not as labyrinthine as Châtelet/Les Halles, whose endless corridors he avoided if possible. He thought of Patrick Modiano’s novel
La petite bijou
, whose protagonist, unusually for Modiano, is female. She is the Little Gem of the title. The first page finds her in the Châtelet Métro station, as I translate it:

‘I was in the crowd on the moving walkway, going down an endless corridor. A woman was wearing a yellow coat. We were immobile, jammed against each other in the corridor, waiting for the gates to open. She was right next to me. Then I saw her face. The resemblance to my mother’s face was so striking that I thought it was her … She sat down on one of the station benches, away from the others who thronged the edge of the platform, waiting for the train. There was no room on the bench and I stood back a little from her, leaning against a ticket machine. Her coat had no doubt been of an elegant cut once upon a time, and its bright colour would have given her a flamboyant air.
Une note de fantaisie
. But the yellow had faded and had become almost grey…’

The faded yellow coat becomes a recurrent motif as the girl begins to follow the woman night after night, trying to establish the identity of the woman, which is linked to the girl’s identity, the yellow coat flitting ahead of her through corridor after corridor, exiting a suburban station on to dark streets, entering telephone boxes or cafés, as the girl follows the woman in the yellow coat to an apartment on the fourth floor of a block of flats, night after night. Kilpatrick thought of the camel overcoat he had seen in Rue du Sentier and wondered if he would see it again. Freddy Gabriel seemed to have seen it in Boulevard Raspail; but then camel overcoats were not that uncommon in Paris. In any event Kilpatrick wondered if his memory of
La petite bijou
was accurate, perhaps he had exaggerated the multiple appearances of the woman’s faded yellow coat. Perhaps he had merely had her wearing the coat in his mind’s eye every time she appeared in the story, whether she was described as wearing it or not, and the coat was a memory of its previous appearances. The train stopped at Champs de Mars/Tour Eiffel. A woman in a yellow coat boarded the train. She sat down facing him.
Une note de fantaisie
. For a moment he thought of her as having stepped from the pages of Modiano’s novel; but the coat was new, not faded to a near grey. Nevertheless he thought of the two of them as being somehow complicit as they travelled under the Seine to Passy and thence to Trocadéro, as if he had entered the novel himself.

Kilpatrick was bound for an exhibition at the Musée National de la Marine at the Palais de Chaillot, featuring Jules Verne’s
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
. He had read the book as a child, and it was one of the first films he had ever seen, in the old Alhambra Picture House in North Street. He recalled that underneath the Palais de Chaillot, which replaced the Trocadéro when it was demolished in 1937, was a huge aquarium built in a former underground quarry. He wondered whether to visit the aquarium or the exhibition first, and pictured shoals of exotic, brightly-coloured fishes, cobalt blue and emerald, turquoise, scarlet, yellow, gliding through the coral reefs of the quarry underneath his feet as he took in the Jules Verne exhibits. At the back of his mind, too, was an image from Marcel Proust, written while German Zeppelins and Gotha biplanes were bombing Paris. Dusk was falling, and the sky above the towers of the Trocadéro had the appearance of an immense turquoise-tinted sea, which, at low tide, revealed a thin line of black rocks, or perhaps they were only fishermen’s nets aligned next to each other like tiny clouds. Then it was no longer a spreading sea, but a vertical gradation of blue glaciers, and the narrator thought of the twin towers in a town in Switzerland. Disorientated, he retraced his steps, but as he left the Pont des Invalides behind him there was no more day in the sky, nor scarcely a light in all the city, and stumbling here and there against the dustbins, mistaking his road, he found himself, unexpectedly, after following a labyrinth of obscure streets, upon the Boulevards.

On his arrival, Kilpatrick was disappointed to find that the aquarium was closed for renovation. The exhibition, too, was disappointing, held in a space made to seem larger by the circuitous route one had no option but to follow, doubling back into itself in a cramped labyrinth, tricked out with interactive computer displays. He emerged from the exit feeling cheated, as a young boy might from a tawdry fairground show. The only thing of real interest was a display of Verne’s notebooks, written in a hand at least as miniscule as that of Walter Benjamin, must have been written with a crow-quill pen, thought Kilpatrick, on what looked like account books, the narrative adding up in column after column on the page, some passages colour-coded, with notes inserted in the margins, crossings-out, insertions, arrows leading back to previous sections of the text, a universe of detail, afterthoughts about those details, in their own way as impressive as the legendary galley proofs of
À la recherche du temps perdu
, the printed text snowed under by the blizzard of Proust’s handwritten emendations and revisions.

To cheer himself up Kilpatrick decided to venture to Charvet in Place Vendôme, Charvet the makers of exclusive shirts and ties, cravats,
pochettes
in multicoloured silks; Charvet, where the rainbow finds ideas, as Cocteau said once. Kilpatrick remembered a tie he had seen in the window display once, a black shantung silk with orange and emerald green splotches. The price was beyond his means. He intended only to window-shop, but then again, perhaps they would have an end-of-season sale. He entered the Aladdin’s cave of Charvet. Shirts were arrayed in back-lit alcoves, shirts of pale lavender and acqua and sky-blue, ties spread out on a dark mahogany table in a radiant colour wheel of blues, greens, reds, browns and yellows – paisleys, stripes, polka-dots in glowing silks and soft cashmeres. The impeccably turned-out shop assistant approached him, smiling. Monsieur. He held up his forefinger, went behind one of the glass-topped counters, and took out a long thin package wrapped in emerald green tissue paper. Kilpatrick was given to understand that Monsieur had been in the shop earlier that morning, had purchased the tie, and had asked for it to be put to one side while he went on to browse some more, but when the assistant had looked for Monsieur, he had gone. And when he saw him come in again in the camel coat,
le manteau fauve …
Kilpatrick was about to demur. Then he thought, why not? He thought of the letter that had come to him that morning. From one John to another. He thanked the assistant profusely, put the emerald green package in his briefcase, and walked out on to Place Vendôme. He would wear the tie that evening to Freddy Gabriel’s soirée.