Chapter 29 #2
‘What is she talking about?’ Florian is looking at me now, this sort of helplessness on his features. He doesn’t know the details, but he knows that something bad is about to happen, the same way that animals know hours before an earthquake hits.
‘Florian…’ I shake my head. ‘I was going to tell you—’
‘Here, see for yourself.’ She reaches into her lap and pulls out her phone.
She fiddles for a moment until the screen illuminates her smug face.
The phone is placed face up on the table and she slides it towards Florian.
I see the header, the font, the colours; I know what it is and I know that I’m fucked.
‘What is this?’
‘A blog… quite a successful one at that too. I found it when I was at the hairdresser a few months ago; it featured in a magazine with a picture of a girl who I thought looked familiar.’
‘You’ve known all this time?’ I ask her, my fury turning into this heavy and inescapable sadness. This has been my fate since she realised I was here. Any ounce of happiness I had managed to seek out for myself would always be stamped on and squeezed out by her plan.
‘Oh yes.’
‘Why didn’t you say something sooner?’
‘I thought you would get your fill, sell your story, whatever you needed and then you would be gone, just like you were the first time around, and then you would leave my family in peace. But then I saw how you were with him, the way you wrapped yourself around another shiny thing, and well, I won’t let that happen to another one of my sons. ’
I look at Florian whose face is illuminated by the screen that he is slowly taking in, I see him scrolling, taking in the words, the headers, the pictures.
‘You make it sound like I’ve been planning it to work out this way. It wasn’t some scheme, it just happened. And it isn’t just me!’
‘You’ve written a blog about him?’ Florian interrupts, his voice spacey and distant.
‘Yes, but it isn’t about him, not really. It’s about me, about how losing him affected me.’
‘Okay. That’s fine?’ It comes out as a question. ‘I don’t see what the issue is here, I mean I don’t know why you didn’t tell me about it but it’s no big deal, Mama.’
‘You have always been a little too na?ve for my liking, my darling. Go on, Ava, you tell him what else has been going on, why you’re really here.’
I look from her to him, the venom in her eyes and the expectant disappointment in his. But there’s no use avoiding it; in a few minutes every secret I ever kept from him will be common knowledge.
‘There’s a book.’
‘A book?’
‘Yes, that’s what my loose end is. The blog got bought by a publisher a year ago and I’ve been working on it ever since.
She told me I needed to come here because I needed to find some ending to it.
She thought that me coming out here would give me some closure and then I was meant to go home and get the thing published and that would be it. ’
‘That’s why you came?’ His face falls into a stony stare. ‘Not because you missed this place?’
‘I didn’t want to come.’ The truth slips out now even when it isn’t needed, like I can’t stop it. ‘I had no intention of ever coming back here. I only came because she told me that if I didn’t then there wouldn’t be a book.’
‘But why not tell me?’
‘I was going to, but you made this big speech about how making art about Ettie would be sort of profiting from his death and… I wanted to wait, wait until it was finished and I could show you properly and… then you would see… see that, that isn’t what this is.’
I watch as the memory of the conversation we had in his studio plays through his mind. ‘I—’
‘And I didn’t think it mattered anyway!’ I don’t let him finish, I won’t let anyone say anything until it’s all out there.
‘Because you didn’t matter, not at first…
until you did.’ My voice cracks, all of the bravado and confidence evaporating.
‘Until I started to realise that I cared about you, that I do care about you, Florian, but it all got too big.’
Florian softens a little, for a moment it is all salvageable. He’ll ask her to leave, we can talk this through. It’s a harmless lie. No one gets hurt, no one dies, we can put it down to a complication. I have a second chance.
‘How dare he. How fucking dare he.’ Madame Grenaud’s voice cuts across the table.
We are both put off guard by the words coming out of her mouth, until I see the open page of the diary and realise that they aren’t her words at all, they’re mine.
‘“How does he get to be alive, him with all his fuck ups and bad decisions, how does he get to live and Ettie doesn’t? He’s selfish, just some selfish drug addict who’s entirely occupied with protecting his own back.
Ettie would hate that he’s back here, in our place, living out the life that Ettie should have had. ”’
‘Florian…’ I look at him, the pain of those words carving into his skin and through any chance of redemption.
‘I didn’t know that’s how you felt.’
‘I don’t! I wrote that after the first time I ran into you… it’s a diary, it’s just a stream of consciousness.’
Madame Grenaud clears her throat, an almost gleeful look of anticipation on her lips. ‘“I want to wipe the taste of him off my lips, to undo it all. I hate the person I am with him.”’
‘Stop it! You’re twisting it!’ I scream at her, snatching the diary out of her hands and standing there gasping, looking from the woman next to me to the man a few feet away whose softness and adoration have now entirely vanished.
‘You need to go,’ he says flatly.
‘Please, Florian, don’t,’ I sob, all dignity lost.
He steels himself; I watch the hardness wash over him. ‘Get the fuck out of my house.’