Chapter 23
23
JESSE
Now
‘ Papa? Pourquoi le monsieur pleure? ’ a little girl asked her dad, clutching his hand, as she looked warily at Jesse.
Jesse, aware that the girl had seen him crying, did the best acting he could, turning his quiet, harrowed face into a laugh, which made him look and sound demented. The child looked even more alarmed.
‘ Le fourmilier… ’ Jesse said, pointing to the anteater, his eyes red. ‘ Il a une dr?le de tête non? ’ He said it not all that convincingly. The girl looked between the anteater and Jesse, unsure. The father nodded and looked at Jesse’s sketchbook.
‘ C’est un très bon dessin ,’ he said over his shoulder, his tone sitting somewhere between awe and pity.
‘ Merci .’
Jesse slung his sketchbook and pencils into his bag and decided to move on. He needed to hone his drawings for Beryl and Meryl, the chatty scarlet macaws and seek out Felix the flamingo, one of the central characters in The Amazing Adventures of Remy the Red Panda , all before meeting Minnie on the other side of the city. He’d been sitting quietly at the zoo for hours but time passed quickly when he was sketching, as if he were in a vortex where time sped up. He looked at his phone screen: it was already 2p.m.; he needed to get on if he were to sketch the macaws and the flamingos and get to the Latin Quarter for 4p.m. He stood up from the bench and nodded to the father and daughter, who decided to take the seat and use it as a base for a snack pitstop.
‘ Bonjour ,’ Jesse said with a little salute, as he wandered down the path towards the birds. He looked at his phone again. The tracker app was open, giving him data on the planes coming in and out of Charles de Galle, Orly and Beauvais. None of these flights interested him today. Today he couldn’t get Minnie out of his mind; he couldn’t stop thinking about her, as if he were holding onto all the nerves and excitement for her audition too. It was probably over now. How had it gone? Would they be able to celebrate? What was the director like? He googled Wim Fischer and looked at the photos. He looked even more eccentric than the anteater.