Chapter Seven #2
I start to cry as soon as I hear Mae’s voice. I hate this. I hate feeling so confused and feeble and like I need Mae to take care of me. It’s not the way that it’s meant to be. Plus, there’s just so much more crying than I expected there to be in Paris. I’m breaking all of my rules.
‘So, what happened?’
I tell Mae about the painting, how people in the gallery had realised that it was me and started asking me questions and taking pictures.
‘Wow, that must have been so stressful. Especially since you’re such a hermit.’
‘It was awful. I escaped and I’m in a park now, which is better, but that’s not all of it.’
I explain how Emmett had come to sit next to me on the bench and then asked me to meet him later.
‘Oh my god, Emmett’s in Paris. This is brand new information. Brand new.’
My chest tightens. I can read Mae like a book.
‘Mae,’ I say.
‘What are the chances of that? I mean Emmett, in Paris, on the exact same day as you?’
‘You didn’t,’ I say.
‘Didn’t what?’
‘Don’t play that with me. You told Emmett I was coming.’
My heart rate is up again. I haven’t felt well all morning, and I can’t help but assume that all this stress isn’t exactly great for me.
Dr Dave probably thought I was coming on a nice chilled mini-break; that’s likely why he agreed.
Instead, I’m so high on adrenaline that even my fingers are stiff and tense. I didn’t think that was possible.
‘No,’ she answers. ‘I didn’t tell him.’
‘Mae, you’re no good at semantics. You never have been. Just tell me the truth, I won’t even be mad.’ This is a total lie. I’m livid.
‘Fine, Fine. Emmett just dropped into my DMs to ask if you were going to the new exhibit, which obviously neither of us knew about. I told him that you might be there today. I gave him a piece of my mind, though, too, don’t worry about that.
There were paragraphs in my rant, that’s how long it was.
I made it very clear that I didn’t forgive or condone what he did back then. ’
‘Mae, I can’t believe you’ve done this to me. It’s so… so…’ I can’t even find the words to explain how betrayed I feel right now. Mae is the last person I expected to lie to me like this.
‘You said you wouldn’t get mad!’
‘I lied. Just like you did. This is already a lot for me, how can’t you see that? Throw Emmett into the mix and it’s… it’s… too much.’
‘I called him pond scum, if that helps?’
‘What? No, of course it doesn’t. Why would you…? Never mind.’
I’m so angry at Mae that I start pacing up and down a little patch of path in the park.
‘It wasn’t your call to make. I’ve told you already: stop trying to turn my life into a bucket list.’
‘It was one sky dive! One. And you didn’t even go, even though it cost me a fucking fortune. I’m trying to help you.’
‘I don’t need your help.’
‘Fine. Come home then and be miserable here. Never speak to Emmett again. Never find out why Earl painted you in his last-ever painting. Never see any bit of the world outside Bamburgh. Just come and hide here for the rest of your life.’
I gnaw on my lip as my anger subsides. Replaced instead by regret – or what might become regret. I’m well acquainted with regret. Regret for me has always felt like an absence of colour. It’s not even dark, it’s not dull, it’s just nothing. An empty space even, less than nothing.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ I tell Mae honestly.
I hear, rather than see, her breathe out.
‘Think of it this way: if you don’t listen to what he has to say tonight, how will you feel?’
Regretful, empty.
I don’t answer.
‘All I’d say is this,’ Mae carries on, and I think, really, she’s said an awful lot in the last five minutes.
I’m exhausted, though, drained by everything that’s happened.
‘When it comes to Emmett, it’s always been about him.
I know you stalk his socials and think about him more often than you should be doing.
You need to remember that you’re not as good a liar as you think you are. ’
‘I don’t think I’m a good liar.’
‘Oh, I don’t know, you’re doing a good job of pretending to wonder whether to go to that restaurant tonight when we both know you’re already there.’
‘It just… maybe this is my last chance.’
‘Don’t talk like that.’ Mae’s tone is sharp all of a sudden.
I roll my eyes. ‘I just mean because it’s not like we live in the same country.’
I can hear shouting in the background.
‘I’d better go – a hen party has just ordered fifteen scones.
But what I was going to say is that it’s always been about him, what he needs.
I typed a whole paragraph to him about it.
It wasn’t your fault, what happened. He made you feel guilty, but it was not your fault.
So this is your chance to get some closure for you.
Because it’s what you need. I think it’ll be good for you.
I wouldn’t have agreed to tell you about the exhibition if I didn’t think that. ’
I’m wound so tight I’m starting to ache all over. I make an effort to relax my shoulders.
‘Go back to work, Mae.’
‘You’ll let me know how it goes with Emmett?’
‘Course.’
More shouting in the background.
‘Go, I’ll call you later.’
‘Bye, love you, sorry for being a lying bitch, bye.’
I sit on my park bench, shell-shocked and dazed, thinking about what Mae said, about not letting it be on Emmett’s terms. When we were young, I was always the lucky one.
Like it seemed as if my life was so much easier than Emmett’s.
Objectively, it’s true. And youth doesn’t understand the nuance that things can be true and not true at the same time.
I didn’t have the same issues as Emmett had with Tanya, but I had problems even if I wanted to pretend that I didn’t.
So maybe Mae is right. When things ended, it was on his terms. It was him who never returned my calls, to the point where I stopped trying.
Because of him, I cried myself to sleep every night for a year.
Mum blamed him when I dropped out of law school.
That wasn’t Emmett, though; I hated law and law hated me.
Emmett didn’t give me a chance to explain why I acted like I did back then, so I never got any closure from the past.
But the painting… Emmett… Paris. Maybe everything that happened in the Time Before can finally be put to rest.
I spend the afternoon wandering around Paris, thinking about how I promised Earl that I’d come here one day. I keep my headphones in place as I take in the sculptures of La Danse Triomphale de Pallas Athénée, the wide avenues of Voie Georges Pompidou.
I pay for a tour of the catacombs and amidst the thousands of skulls I learn that, in the eighteenth century, undertakers would display unidentified dead bodies in shop windows, hoping that someone would claim them.
Earl once told me that beauty can’t exist without decay, but it’s even more than that for me.
Beauty is decay, because without decay, beauty is stagnant, frozen.
Decay is life, if you think about it. I smile to myself in the catacombs, and for the first time in a long time, my fingers twitch with the urge to sketch. Paris is a wonderful place to be a Deather. Paris is a wonderful place full stop.
Outside, the pavements are dusty after a warm summer, and there’s only the most gentle autumn breeze.
Compared to the still death of the catacombs, out here in the world of the living, every café is fit to bursting, every boulevard is full.
People hustle past me, and I step over a man sprawled out on the pavement, snoring loudly.
I leave him a couple of euros just for good measure.
I stop for coffee, which comes in a tiny little cup that I drink in one gulp.
When he clears my table, a cute waiter tells me that I’m very pretty.
‘Do you have a boyfriend?’ he asks.
‘Non… merci,’ I say in stilted French. ‘L’addition, s’il vous pla?t?’
‘Oui, très bien.’ He smiles and leaves.
As I head back to my hotel to get ready for the evening, I think that I was always going to go and meet Emmett tonight.
I’ve never had any sense of self-preservation around him.
None at all. Hopefully, this is my chance to explain why I did what I did.
To put the past firmly behind me, once and for all.
That’s it.
But as I wearily climb the stairs to my hotel room, I think that Mae was right. I really am a poor liar. And the person I’m lying to here is myself.