Loving Amélie (2 page)

Still leaning on the wall
outside his bathroom, ignoring Sara, Chris had his eyes fixed on the screen of
his mobile phone.

“It’s Amélie. Don’t come down, I am coming up.”

It had been eight months. And
four days. He felt sick. He had woken up and gone to wine-induced sleep almost
every day of those eight months in the pain of separation and loss. She would
be at his door any moment looking achingly beautiful, no doubt, while he had
rain-frizzled hair and the onset of a paunch. It seemed impossible that his
misery – tolerated miraculously by Sara, Peter, Linda and a host of
others – and which had manifested itself in drunken rants and fits of
angry tears and days in pursuit of childish amusements like watching cartoons
all night – was going to end today.

“What’s happening?”asked Sara.
“Where is she? Is she OK?”

Sara was blotting her deflated
wet curls with a towel. She had liked Amélie, of course. Who couldn’t? They had
even met up for drinks once or twice after the split, as chummy girls do. She
had some sympathy for Amélie’s plight with Chris – he could be an
annoying bugger: obstinate and opinionated; but he was fundamentally a good
egg, unlike most other men on the planet. She and Chris had something,
mercifully, that went beyond the petty niggles that arose when two people
shared a house, or a bed, for too long.

“She is downstairs,” said
Chris. He leapt as his phone bleeped another text. “She says
you must come out
to the lift now
!”

His anguish forgotten, the joy
of seeing Amélie welled up in him like turning on the ignition of a car, and he
raced to the front door. It was an immediate right turn to the lift: the air
always ripe with the competing smells of rising damp, laundry products, and
multifarious types of cooked food.

Mal was her
was a permanent marking
in black spray paint on the facing brickwork: the last letter of the graffiti
long gone or never completed. There were times when Chris stared vacantly, or
drunkenly, at these letters while waiting for the lift, trying to use them to
make up a new, long word in the style of a
Countdown
anagram.
Swarm
was the best he could do, although
he often pretended that
Lasherwam
was a little known Indian goddess.

“Amélie?!” he shouted, as the
lift groaned closer. He was convinced, suddenly, that he was going to cry.
Shit.
He felt
powerless to stop.

The lift doors opened as Sara
followed him gingerly to them in her stockinged feet.

The two friends found
themselves looking into an empty lift. Empty, except for what looked like a
picnic hamper.

Sara took the initiative and
blocked the lift doors open with her body. She bent down to retrieve the
basket.

“What the fuck’s she doing to
me?” Chris said, pushing his hands through his hair. “Is she coming up or not?”

“It doesn’t look like it,” Sara
answered, coolly, and she lifted out the contents of the basket while guiding
it out of the lift towards him with her foot. “But she has sent you your baby.”

Chapter Two

Chris turned and fled down the
stairs, dismissing the logic of taking the lift: condemning it as somehow
complicit in an act of treachery.

He was in his mid forties; and
hadn’t run anywhere for ages, maybe years. A Nigerian co-resident chuckled to
herself as he clattered past her; adjusting her plastic bags of shopping and
mumbling something encouraging, but edged with sarcasm, under her breath.

Out in the daylight, there was
no sign of Amélie: just the usual loitering weirdo – possibly another
resident of the flats – with his perpetual dog-end of a roll up cigarette
stuck to his lip, sporting a greasy sweater. He, too, appeared amused by
Chris’s endeavours; or was it just that he was mentally retarded?

“Have you seen a lady go by, a
smart, pretty lady?” Chris was panting, and leaned forward to rest his hands on
the front of his thighs. “Dark hair?”

He didn’t manage to look up to
see the unfortunate man smile and shrug. It was occurring to him that the only
pretty lady this chap might have seen would be thrusting inflated breasts and a
tattooed pelvis at him through his television screen.

“Cheers, anyway.”

He ran on, across the car park,
and onto the pathway of Battersea Bridge. She must surely have gone this way.
Chris had been asthmatic as a boy, and he felt the familiar depressing
constriction in his chest as his lungs began to react adversely to his burst of
activity.

“You look like you’re in pain,
mate,” said a passing jogger, whose face he recognised as a regular from the
bistro, Aussie Steve. “Take it steady.”

“Have you seen Amélie, my ex?”
Chris gasped.

“Since..?”

“Today. Just now. Did you pass
her?”

“No, mate. I’m sorry, I didn’t
know you broke up. Aren’t you going off round Europe or something?”

“Can’t chat, Steve.”

Chris felt doubly suffocated by
this affable man’s meaningless words, but was rescued by the ringtone of his
mobile, which was Steve’s cue to jog on with a friendly wave. It was Sara.

“Did you find her?”

“No. I’m on my way back.”

Amélie, it seemed, had been and
gone.

She had delivered him a baby in
a Moses basket:
 
his daughter, whom
Sara was rocking in her arms, in his living room, against a backdrop of the
city where, presumably, she had been born. Without his knowledge.

“Do you want to hold her?” said
Sara. Her face ran with tears.

“In a minute.”

Chris rummaged through the
Moses basket on his sofa for evidence of Amélie. There were a couple of baby
blankets; a foam base covered in a fitted sheet; a tiny pink elephant.

“Nothing,” he said.

“You have an inhaler
somewhere,” said Sara. “I think I saw one in your bathroom cabinet. Go use it.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“You have her number. You’ll
need all her stuff, if she’s…staying. Phone her.”

“What?”

Chris held out his phone and looked
dumbly at the keypad for almost a minute. When it beeped a third time with a
message from Amélie – three messages in succession after a wasteland of
more than six months – he didn’t flinch.

“She says
a courier will be with you within the hour.
He will bring everything you will need to take care of her for now.
”

“Christ, was she listening?”

“
Her name is Amélie Christina. I was not
permitted to give her your surname without your consent. Please look after her,
chéri.”

His voice had risen to a rasp
by the end of his speech, and he gave in to the gale of tears that had been
threatening to undermine him at the lift doors. Sara, too, wept some more,
attempting to embrace baby Amélie, and to console her father, at the same time.

In accordance with the message,
a courier arrived at quarter to twelve. He was dressed from collar to toes in
black leather and a black helmet, and displayed a reluctance to raise his visor
with what seemed like complicit secrecy.

“Did you see the lady who sent
these?” Chris asked him, compelled to raise his voice to penetrate the helmet.
“Did she look alright? Was she with anyone? Family?”

“I just need your signature,”
was the courier’s vapid response.

“Is he in on this too, do you
reckon?” Chris remarked more quietly to Sara, and he signed, and they took
delivery of three large, carefully sealed cartons.

They unpacked a treasure trove
of baby paraphernalia. Nappies. Bottles. A sterilising unit. Tins of powdered
milk formula. Tubes of
Bepanthen.
Dummies in plastic boxes. All-in-one baby suits. In an
envelope, Sara found Amélie’s birth certificate: a sharply creased document in
official pink print, with entries completed by a registrar in exquisite
calligraphy.

“She was born at St Mary’s
Hospital and Birthing Centre, Paddington, on the 13
^th
of June at
four ten in the afternoon,” she said. “That makes her a Gemini, I think.” Sara
looked down at the tiny round head with its caplet of soft hair, the colour of
garden birds. “Aw!”

“Don’t give me any astrological
bollocks,” said Chris, heatedly, unable to focus on the small person that had
brought chaos and disappointment into his life that morning via one implausible
stunt. Sara eyed him disapprovingly; so he wailed: “I know
Jack Shit
about babies, Sar’. Why has
she done this to me?”

“Oh, man up, Christopher,” Sara
replied. “This can’t be about
you
right now. Or
any more
, to be honest. God knows what Amélie has been going
though, while you’ve been drinking your own body weight in wine every day. This
baby is here now, and she needs looking after. By her dad!”

Chris battled with a selection
of responses; and settled on: “It just seems so wrong, dumping a baby on a guy
with no notice. It’s unfair.”

Between the two of them - while
baby Amélie grumbled a gentle warning of impending hunger -
 
they took turns to soothe her: Sara
rocking her gently, Chris holding her in her blanket like a bottle of Cava he
was afraid might explode. They quickly read instructions; turned on the
steriliser and mixed feeds.

Confident that lids were
tightly fastened and all was going to plan, Sara turned her attention
uncharitably back to her best friend.

“Perhaps if you had made a
proper effort while Amélie was with you, you wouldn’t be in this fix.”

Chris was reminded fleetingly
of an occasion when he had met Sara for dinner shortly after Amélie had
finished with him. She had been particularly cagey because she had come hot
foot from drinks with his former lover; and spent the evening hovering over
“the other camp”, not wishing to be drawn too much, but, nevertheless, making a
number of critical observations (that increased in number as the evening wore
on and the wine flowed).

He was also mindful of the many
more occasions when Sara could hardly bring herself to say a positive word
about his relationship with Amélie: usually when he had been too fed up and
demoralised to get out of bed and keep her company.

He didn’t want to argue,
however: by God, he needed Sara onside more than ever before.

“Proper effort?” he found
himself repeating, despite himself, in mild disgust. “What’s that supposed to
mean?”

Sara’s hair was now thoroughly
dry and had filled out to its usual imperious red cloud:

“Well, come on, did you make
any serious attempt to even learn her language?”

Chris gaped as though he were
about to mention that he worked in a French-style restaurant serving
French-style food, before his friend, second-guessing him, added:

“Properly?”

“I was watching French films.
And planning a trip to France with her, for God’s sake!”

“By
French films
do you mean that
one
film with
Kristin Scott Thomas?!”

“Bitch!”
said Chris, in exasperation.

“Cock!”
Sara retorted, jiggling the
baby with more gusto than Chris would have recommended, even as an amateur.
“With a ‘q’!”

At the raised voices, baby Amélie
began to whimper and they stared intently at each other with eyes lit with
blame, like school children who had been rumbled smoking behind the bike sheds.

“
Don’t
make her cry!” Chris hissed.

“She will only cry, I think
you’ll find, if she is hungry or wet,” said Sara, with a superior flounce of
her curls.

“And don’t leave me.”

He knew that, prior to the
morning’s drama, Sara had been due to meet her boyfriend, Rick, for their
habitual dirty weekend in a London hotel. Rick lived in leafy suburbia with his
wife and three children; and, despite the closeness of her relationship with
Chris, Sara had never introduced them in the five years she and Rick had been
“together.” It was an arrangement too fragile to compromise, she had told him;
and Chris thought better than to point out it wasn’t a matter of national
security and he, himself, would be thoroughly
uncompromisable
– even if he were
threatened with having his finger nails pulled out.

“You were happy to show me the
door a couple of hours ago,” she said, huffily, settling the baby back into her
Moses basket. She seemed to be peaceful, for the time being. “And I
have
to leave
you: I might not see Rick till after the school holidays if I don’t go today.”

“But I don’t think I can cope
without you.”

“Of course you can. You’re her
dad. And you have all you need for now.”

“You sound like Amélie. This is
a conspiracy.”

Sara shook her head and covered
her eyes briefly with the palms of her hands.

“Bloody Amélie.”