Chapter 10
Doubts wash in as soon as he heads off to pay for that bauble, a gift I wish he had shoplifted instead of joining a long queue to pay for.
Those doubts rise the longer he waits in line.
I’m knee-deep by the time he finally pays for his egg, and getting it gift-wrapped creates even more time for second-guessing.
I can’t help making a different, more hesitant, offer. “Actually, I-I could go flag down another cab for you.”
“For me?” Calum drags his gaze from the ribbon being tied around a gift he can’t wait to watch his mother open. “You just said you’d show—”
“There’s no time.” My blurt sounds all kinds of strangled. I clear my stupid thick throat and start over. “I didn’t realise, but it’s after five already. You’ll be late for your evening thing.” I’ve seen it blocked out on his schedule. “I know you have a prior commitment.”
He pulls out his phone again. This time he places a call and speaks up over the piped music. “Robin? I’m running late. Get started without me, yeah?” He slides his phone away. “There. I’ve got time.” He leans in close. “Show me?”
The warmth of his breath coasts my ear, and every Christmas light around us brightens.
I’m a little bit dazzled. I must be to set aside doubt, at least until we exit.
It surges back in a hurry when we walk up Regent Street together.
He matches my pace, walking right beside me when I know he could stride ahead if he wanted.
Calum stays close, moving at the same speed as this tide of shoppers who slow our progress, even though I know they’d get out of his way if he showed them his icy game face.
He doesn’t.
Calum keeps in step beside me. We’re shoulder to shoulder, our hands brushing.
Maybe that brushing creates sparks—I’m hot all over until we reach the black-and-white frontage of Liberty of London, where the pavement is blocked completely.
There’s no way through, which leaves more time for overthinking.
Tourists take photo after photo of a Christmas window display while I have a sudden and secret panic about this switch in focus. About the spotlight being on me. Panicking now seems pointless—hundreds of thousands of people used to watch me chase after the truth behind other people’s stories.
Yeah, but they were strangers.
I didn’t tell them my own story or have to watch their reaction to it.
Maybe my panic isn’t quite so secret. Calum’s arm comes around me, which I hope no one catches with a camera.
He’ll have no choice about going back to the US earlier than he wanted if anyone videos him pulling me into his side.
I almost say so, only his arm does stop my nerves from skipping like a speedboat.
Besides, our contact barely lasts for a few too-short moments.
His arm drops as soon as I stop at a side street.
He asks, “This way?” and it would be so easy to walk in the wrong direction.
I don’t even know why I want to. As urges go, it’s a blast from the past that I haven’t felt since making my very first upload.
I’d hesitated then about following a different path from the one mon père wanted.
I came so close to pressing Delete. To quitting YouTube before I’d even started, so sure I’d be a failure and would have to sail home aboard la Sylvie.
You got your shit together then.
Get it together again right now, Juno.
I drag in a deep breath to do that. “Oui.” That comes out as if I’m breathless. So does the French that follows. “We’re here.”
He’s quiet then. Calum follows me into a building, where he takes another turn to wait in line.
He blinks when I’m kissed on both cheeks by a curator I’ve met before, who chats in my mother’s tongue on the way to a display space where he leaves us.
That’s where Calum turns in a slow circle once we’re alone. “What did he say?”
“The curator? That they’re closing soon.”
Calum squints. “He knew you. Kept saying your name. Not Valentin. Juno.” His frown lines pay a return visit. “Something about this exhibition. I didn’t know you took still photographs as well as video.”
“I don’t.” It is a decent guess given that this room is lined with headshots. “He was talking about my, uh . . There’s a . . .”
I snag his hand, and he lets me. More than that, Calum threads us tight together here where no one can out him before he’s ready. He doesn’t let go, not even when I show him why I don’t need a Christmas bauble.
I walk us both down that line of headshots, but he keeps glancing at the far side of this display space where a silver cup gleams. I don’t look at that shining trophy. Or at Calum, who has already won a much bigger version. I fix my gaze on the line of photos.
“These are contest winners. Documentary makers.”
Each one of them got to kiss that silver cup like Calum once kissed his, although not on an open-top bus. Ticker tape didn’t rain down like confetti on these past winners. Their celebrations happened in a film institute building.
Now I face the very real possibility of never lifting that cup to kiss it for myself, and it isn’t easy.
“This is last year’s cup winner. His contest entry was challenging.
Confronting, but it wasn’t divisive.” I move along to the next photo.
“Neither was her entry, the year before. Both of their work united two nations, and both of their entries raised the bar for this contest. That means mine needs to be even better.”
Calum glances at the silver trophy again. “This is the same contest you’ve entered?”
I nod. “There are four entry requirements. Each documentary needs to be relevant in both France and England with no language barrier for viewers in each country. The visuals need to tell the whole story from start to finish. Mine is about small-boat crossings.”
“Like you filmed with Reece?”
“Yes, but my focus was on who supplied the boats. Because some fuckers are making them to order, and they have to know what they’re used for.
The media calls those boats small, but they really aren’t, and they aren’t constructed in British or French boatyards.
I was gathering evidence of where that trade originated when I met Reece. ”
“You said there are four rules. What are the others?”
“The second is that each hour-long entry must be unique. I can’t recycle any previously seen footage.”
“So you can’t reuse any of your channel content?”
“Non.”
“But you haven’t—”
“Videoed any new rescues in well over a year?” I can’t hold in this sigh. “No. No, I haven’t.”
“So you really do need more content.”
Calum’s hand slipping from mine means I talk even faster. “I held back the best work I did when I was shadowing Reece. Forty minutes of it, which helped me to meet the third rule.”
“Which was?”
“Submitting a draft for shortlisting in October. The final entry is due—”
He proves how hard he’s listened. “The same day the boat show closes?”
“Oui. Just over a week away. It’s then or never.”
“Because?”
“Because this is a contest for under twenty-fives, like the videographer the contest is named for.”
We’ve worked our way along a wall curving towards a prize that I’ll age out of ever holding if I don’t submit an entry this December. We reach the end of the line together, where Calum reads a placard under a final headshot. He sighs, and I know why. I did the same the first time I read it.
“Awarded posthumously.” He studies a photo of a woman I don’t know. Who I don’t remember. And who could be a stranger if Calum didn’t read out the name we share. “The Juno Award.”
Christmas music plays somewhere in this building. It’s faint. Or maybe I’ve got Dad’s increasingly selective hearing. I tune into the rough velvet of Calum’s Cornish accent.
“Her name was Sylvie?” He touches the glass covering my mother’s photo.
I shouldn’t be able to feel that. Shouldn’t hold my breath next as if it’s my hair his fingertips brush.
“You have the same waves.” His fingertip moves on to trace her jawline.
I feel that too. “Same sharp lines. Same stark angles. Same big, dark eyes too. I mean, she looks . . . interested, yeah? You do as well. All the time, Valentin. So fucking interested in everything and everybody. You never stop watching.” He flicks a glance my way, then gets back to reading. “This says she won it after . . .”
He pauses for so long that I finish for him. “After the Anglo-French convoy of medics she was shadowing was blown up in Afghanistan.”
“You can’t have been—”
“Old enough to remember her?” I shake my head.
“That’s why you grew up with your grandparents?”
“I don’t really remember my grand-père either. Just my grand-mère.”
“And your dad. You had him too.”
He’s certain. Then he’s doubtful.
“Didn’t you?”
“Not often. I mean, not until later. He was busy resurrecting an old family business. He transformed it. Made it what it is now.”
Calum is silent.
Don’t ask me why I rush to fill it. “You know how the boat-show circuit is. All that travel. Dad sent so many postcards. From Cannes, Dusseldorf, and Barcelona. From Monaco and Southampton, all with speedboats on them. And he didn’t just sell boats.
He designed them. Was closely involved with every build.
” I wince as if I can still hear the squeal of shearing metal and the non-stop drilling that Dad shouted over to explain a boat-building process while a younger version of me wished I was someplace else entirely.
“It was better that I went to boarding school.”
“When?”
“When I was eight.”
“In France?”
“No. He, uh . . .” I’ve always viewed my sudden change in location from a close-up kid’s perspective. Focussed on having the wrong accent in a country where I didn’t know the word for homesick. Now I stand with Calum, who has only known me as an adult, and it’s so easy to zoom out.
Dad’s decision looks different.
“He said England was better.”
“Because?”