Loving Amélie (9 page)

“Well?”

“I don’t know. Who’s your
friend?”

This could be any number of
girls, depending on which one was currently taking advantage of Naomi’s needy
disposition. Naomi was like the hunchback in
Scooby Doo
who assisted the villain in
his evil deeds: too uneasy on the eye to have a starring role in any school
adventure of her own. She turned and pointed behind her at Kirsty Wade –
a new girl, although not actually Scottish, as her name suggested – who
appeared to be awaiting his response. She was seated on a low wall, swinging
long legs with clean white socks and patent leather shoes. She had plaits tied
at the end with bobbles, which were not unlike marbles.

“She won’t be kept waiting,
Chris Skinner!” said Naomi, at his hesitation, her eyes as wide as an owl’s
behind thick lenses. She flounced back to her mistress without the response
they had hoped for, encouraging her down from her perch and away to a place
where she might find comfort, although not before they had both shot him a look
of disgust. He watched after them, his bag of marbles hanging dejectedly at his
side.

She won’t be kept waiting.
What
did that even mean?

He was left with the same sense
of bewilderment he had whenever he was asked a difficult question in class:
like the ones about telling the time that still confounded him and sent him
home anxious, as none of his friends seemed to have the same difficulty. (Not
the obvious ones like ‘o’clocks’ and ‘half pasts’, but the ones where ‘twenty minutes
to’ and ‘twenty minutes past’ were, somehow, stupefyingly, related to the
numbers 4 or 8.)

Up until that day, when Naomi
Jones had bothered him, school had simply been about getting through lessons,
playing playground football and deciding which flavour sauce to have with his
sponge pudding at lunchtime: the choice was strawberry or chocolate. (Or, of
course, custard.)

Now there was Kirsty Wade
– looking at him in maths and making him have to think about how he might
look back without turning red in the face.

She started going out with
David Staples, who everyone knew was the best footballer and who began
strutting around school with his arm draped round her neck. It came as another
surprise – on top of the Naomi Jones interruption – when Kirsty
bumped into him in the corridor, accidentally on purpose, flanked by a couple
of giggling accomplices, and passed him a note in the form of a hastily folded
piece of A4 paper.

He waited until he was on his
own, in a cubicle in the boys’ loos, before he opened it to find a page of
girlish scribbling: the heads of cartoon ponies with different coloured manes;
hearts drawn inside hearts etc; and, in the centre, an especially large heart
containing the words
KW loves CS
.

He stuffed the note into the
bottom of his school bag; until it became dog-eared and dirty: a timescale of a
week or two.

The boys and girls in his world
who were ‘going out’ were in the habit of writing the name of their loved one
on the inside of their wrists, which became particularly evident and newsworthy
on the day they went to the local swimming baths for lessons. Chris was bound
to notice, therefore - after the note-passing incident and a few nights had
gone by when he had found it hard to concentrate on homework or get to sleep
for thinking about her – that Kirsty had David’s name Biroed on her skin.

Infected by a new type of
courage, he took a compass out of his pencil case and used it to scratch her
name along his forearm, from near the elbow to where it reached his only
partially useful watch:
KIRSTY W
in spiky capital letters dotted with his blood.

He sent the fervent Naomi to
get Kirsty Wade’s attention at break time, who - when Chris’s act of chivalry
was not immediately apparent from a bared forearm held aloft across a sea of
wild heads – whispered the news into her friend’s ear.

“She said
Yuk, tell him he’s a weirdo
,” was
Naomi’s blunt report back, delivered with more glee than Chris thought was
either honourable or necessary.

(He would retell this story
years later with tears of laughter in his eyes and usually say: “After all
we’ve been through, Naomi, this is what you bring me?!”)

At ten, however, he was
heartsick; and so relieved he hadn’t told her that he loved her back, wanted to
marry her, and was even prepared to share his stash of marbles.

*

Chris strode off to work that
Tuesday morning, satisfied that he was leaving Amélie in the care of good
people.

His mind was made up. He was
going to take that trip, after all: starting small with a visit to Paris
– where Amélie’s mother was born – and home for a three-month
developmental check for his daughter, and then off again; wherever his
confidence in the new world of travelling fatherhood
 
might take him. He had a spring in his step: and an odd
sense of being liberated by a change in his circumstances that was, clearly,
far
from
liberating.

Skinner’s
was alive with the usual
early morning activity: deliveries arriving to be signed for; the man who
serviced the coffee machine to be appeased (ironically) with several cups of
tea; the preparation of the
plats du jour
in full orchestral swing; and the first customers
sitting down to their hot rolls and croissants.

There was a regular clientele
that came and went; which had been a comforting feature of Chris’s work while
his life had been the same as everybody else’s: that is, either dulled by
the
 
anaesthesia of routine; or
energised by a special intimacy. When Amélie left him, these regulars served to
remind him of his loss, with their daily enquiries after his well-being ringing
hollow in his ears and denying him even the most meagre compensation of being
able to return to the peace of the life he had before she came.

After Amélie, he preferred the
daily throughput of strangers, who came and went without any obligation to
share the story of their lives: who just came to eat and pay, oblivious of his
history.

On that Tuesday morning, he
noticed a pretty girl with a briefcase and elegant legs crossed at the ankle;
stirring her coffee and observing the world from the window; and he smiled:

I was watching you,
he
remembered.

Amélie’s words were meant to
sound cheekily menacing. She told him she had been to the bistro a couple of
times with a girlfriend, for a coffee or a
croque
, before she had gathered the courage to
order her taster menu
.
How could he have not noticed? How he wished he had, so that he
could draw the image of her sweet, flirtatious face from his memory on one of
his lowest days and bring her love for him back to life.

The pretty stranger was now in
conversation with the waitress; her brow furrowed with a question or complaint.
The waitress squared her own shoulders, preparing to offer a replacement cup of
coffee, if madam insisted.

Tell me what makes you happy
Chris
heard in his head
And I don’t mean one of those idiotic sentiments like puppy dogs or
sunsets

There had been a time when his
first, maybe flippant, response would have been adequate – even amusing
– drawing them both into an easy state of philosophising and physical
closeness. But then his answers began to fail to satisfy her; and disappointing
silences became his means of defence.

It was dissatisfying for both
of them, perhaps, that his only honest reply to her question about his
happiness was
Just
to be with you, and to believe that it will always be enough.
Maddeningly,
it was probably somewhere on the puppy dog to sunset scale.

“What was that all about?” he
asked the waitress, Alison; when the pretty customer had gone.

“Nothing much,” said Alison. “
French.
You
know the type.”
 
She fixed Chris
with an unapologetic stare, devoid of interest, or irony.

He received some text messages
from both Ian and Tash during the day. He might have expected something more
humorous than what he received from Ian; who was clearly taking his
responsibilities ‘in loco parentis’ very seriously.

He went about his own duties
feeling slightly ill at ease: his brother and sister-in-law were busy, as
usual, but there was an inevitable change in the air in the kitchen despite the
familiar billows of steam and scents of hot pans. Peter and Linda had greeted
Chris’s original concept of a trip around Europe with a gale of enthusiasm:
like that which parents might bestow on a youngster discussing a gap year
before university. It was deemed a wonderful opportunity; character-building;
just what he needed, etc. It was likely that they had assumed – as he had
himself – that Amélie’s departure had taken away with her his incentive
to go; and they were now, these months later, forced to rethink the
ramifications of running the bistro without him. It was a strange development
for all three of them; and they were, perhaps, glad to be busying around with
plates of food that day rather than prising open any lids on deeper
consequences.

It was a passing thought; along
with his baby daughter, somewhere without him – now such a part of him
– as he garnished bowls of onion soup with chunks of bread strewn with
melted cheese and parsley.

“One of those is for Aussie
Steve,” said Alison. “He’s asking to see you.”

“Tell him, if he doesn’t like
it, Chris made it,” said Peter through the mist.

Chris could not be surprised
that Steve, a regular customer and friend, would be curious about the aftermath
of their meeting outside his flat, when he had been chasing the ghost of his
girlfriend.

“How did things pan out?” Steve
asked, before his first mouthful of hot soup.

“I had an interesting time of
it,” Chris replied. “It seems I am a dad.”

“So I hear, mate. What a
shocker,” said Steve, his tone more sensitive than his words. “I had no idea
till I saw you on Saturday; and then Trudy filled me in.”

“How is Trudy?”

“She is on top form, Chris,
mate, couldn’t be better.” This came out dismissively, as though Steve didn’t
want to enthuse too much about his own girlfriend while they were poised,
awkwardly, on the brink of discussing Chris’s. He made appreciative hand
signals over his food.

There was an obvious opening:

“Does she still see Amélie?”

“I have to tell you,” said
Steve, shaking his head, his eyes roving round the room – a fairly busy
lunch crowd – informing Chris that a casual call from the kitchen was, in
fact, a more significant gesture from a down-to earth Australian. “Things are
not good for her, mate. She’s taken it all kinda rough, you know, what with you
and the kid.”

“She said that? You’ve seen
her?”

“Not me, Chris. Trudy. She
isn’t doing so well. Without you.” Steve, usually a heartier eater, pushed his
bowl away. “I haven’t come to tell you a tale, or break anyone’s confidence.
It’s just that I thought you should know.
I
would want to know.”

He got hastily to his feet and
paid Chris with cash from both pockets. With a hugging slap on his friend’s
back and a wave to the waitress, Steve was gone, sending Chris back to the
kitchen in an altered state.

“Everything OK?” asked Linda.

“I sometimes wonder about
French onion soup,” he replied.

He was glad when a moment came
to take a break and get outside into the cobbled yard: so bumpy that even
standing still hurt the balls of his feet. Out of character, he smoked a
cigarette that he scrounged from Neal who loaded the dishwashers. There was a
lightness in his chest – not completely related to the rush of nicotine
in his bloodstream – as he replayed and made sense of Steve’s plainspoken
message.

Amélie still had feelings for him
.

This sudden, thrilling
knowledge seemed to jangle all the instincts that he hadn’t dared to trust like
a row of musical pipes in the core of his being. She had reached out to him,
entrusting him with their daughter, not
abandoning
her like he – and the rest of
the world – might have perceived.

He had inhaled down to the
filter before he allowed the other stuff to creep back in: the reality that she
had left him, and hadn’t come back to him when she realised she was pregnant
with their child. And that she was suffering something she was unable or
unwilling to share with him.

He returned home that evening
with a Tupperware box of bourguignon but little appetite of his own. He was
relieved to take baby Amélie, cosseted and contented, into his arms and to hear
all her news.

He had a baby passport to
organise and travel arrangements to set in motion; but he suddenly felt dead
tired. Tash and Ian were sweetly animated about their day with his daughter;
but their brief help seemed suddenly irrelevant in the greater scheme of all
their lives.

The last few days had been
straightforward, in relative terms, when he had only been required to put one
practical foot in front of the other, while dealing with the simplicity of self
pity (a status quo which he had grown accustomed to, and maybe even fond of,
over recent months). Now he felt suffocated by a confusion of new emotions:
intermittent surges of hope, sinking into doubt; and helplessness.