Chapter Twenty-Two
NOW
I settle onto the bed in Emmett’s room, the aromatherapy oils making me almost light-headed.
I’m flicking mindlessly through the comments on my blog, just like I’d do at home when I want to escape my own thoughts. I click on my profile and see that my followers are still going up.
I’m never going to be a social media guru, I’m not even close to being in influencer, and I wouldn’t want to be.
I wasn’t lying to Emmett when I said that initially I just wanted a place to vent, and talk about the art that interested me, after my diagnosis.
I guess that deep down, I’m hoping that I’ll find an artist who’s solved it. Death – what happens after.
I read once that humans have evolved to live with death because we simply refuse to believe that one day it’ll happen to us. It’s one of the reasons why living with a life-limiting condition is so tricky. We don’t like to be confronted with our own mortality.
I’m bone tired, weirdly horny, and also now depressed. Which is a heady mixture.
I have several Instagram messages. One from Darth saying that he can’t find the blue door. I’m disappointed, since Darth seems intelligent. If anyone had found it, I’d have expected it to be him.
I scroll and reply to some more when a message from Vincent, one of my earliest followers, comes through. I jolt upright.
VincentVanGetOutOfHere: I think I found the building!
I reply right away.
TheArtofDying: What where? How did you find it?
VincentVanGetOutOfHere: AI. It only took all night and day.
Vincent has Parkinson’s disease. His muscle spasms make it difficult to sleep.
TheArtofDying: I could kiss you! Great work.
VincentVanGetOutOfHere: There’s more.
TheArtofDying: Do tell.
VincentVanGetOutOfHere: It’s an art studio. They have a class on tomorrow night, life drawing. It could be that Spencer actually went there to paint.
TheArtofDying: Wow, imagine that.
Even as I type it, I’m thinking that I could go there. I could draw in a place where Earl likely was. If drawing was a thing that I did anymore.
Vincent has sent a link! It’s to the art studio and I can see it then, the same bright blue facade of Earl’s painting.
TheArtofDying: Brilliant work!
VincentVanGetOutOfHere: I live to serve our leader.
‘Guess what!’ I tell Emmett the second he walks through the door, tiredness and unwelcome horniness gone. ‘A follower found the door in The Rubicon. It’s an art studio, and they have a class tomorrow night.’
‘What, no way?’ Emmett looks like a man who has endured several cold plunges.
His hair is flatter than normal, sticking to his head.
In my excitement at Vincent’s discovery, I’d forgotten that Emmett and I are staying in this hotel room tonight.
Together. In separate beds, but together still. ‘Are you going to go?’
‘I don’t know. They have a life-drawing class on tomorrow night, but it’s been so long since I drew anything, I’d be all crappy.’ This, I think, is as good an excuse as any.
Emmett walks over and sits next to me on the edge of the bed.
‘You don’t have to go. Not if you don’t want to.’
Emmett has asked several times why I don’t draw anymore, so it’s unexpected, the ease with which he gives me an out.
I think about how it would be to not go.
To just let this opportunity pass me by, float away into the distance never to be seen again.
It would be easier to return to neutrality, without living through this experience, I’m sure of it.
I think of the door. Choices. I could maybe just look at the building. That would be enough. Maybe.
‘I’ll think about it,’ I tell Emmett.
He nods and then says, ‘We can go to the graveyard in the morning, if you like.’
‘I do like.’ I feel so tired though, and my chest is tight. I think I’d better take Dr Dave’s advice and rest. Which is how I find myself on the giant bed in Emmett’s room, surrounded by a small mountain of food and watching Escape to the Chateau.
It’s like a very vivid depiction of every childhood fantasy I ever had.
It’s comfortable and familiar and I think about how easy it would be to slip back into this.
I catch Emmett looking at me from the other side of the bed and wonder if he thinks the same thing.
He might. But, as a sudden tightness in my chest steals my breath, I remind myself that I can’t have this.
I couldn’t have it then and I can’t have it now.
I can’t have this with Emmett, but I could have art.
I could bring art back into my life, however long or short that may be.
It’s this thought which makes me reach for my phone, in the darkness of the Parisian night.
It’s this thought which makes me scroll to the website of the art studio with the blue door, and it’s this thought which makes me book a place on the life-drawing class.
As I lay back down, I realise that I’m smiling, that I want to have things to look forward to, like I did when I was younger and I felt excited about each summer. I’m not like that anymore, but maybe just for tomorrow I can be.
We’re in the Pere Lachaise cemetery. It was one of the last things that Earl painted, The Juxtaposition of Life and Death.
‘It’s amazing here.’ I spin on the spot, my eyeline in every direction taken up by huge tombs, some decrepit and decaying in a particularly Victorian type of way, others new, with stained-glass windows and pictures of the dead.
Everywhere, there are trees. Flowers and grass spring up from the ground, or else force their way through concrete, demanding to be seen.
‘It’s a great cemetery,’ Emmett agrees. He has The Juxtaposition piece up on his phone, seemingly determined that we can find the exact place that Earl painted.
‘This way I think.’ He sets off and we pass through the heart of the cemetery, which is full of people.
Some like Emmett, hold their phones ahead of them, others have a map.
If there’s a significant person’s tomb, a little cluster of tourists gathers around it.
Like Oscar Wilde’s; even though a wall of glass protects it after someone hacked the penis off the angel there, there’s still a massive group of people. One or two of them seem to be weeping.
Needless to say, it takes us an age. Partly because I’m stupidly slow as per, but also because I insist on stopping to look at so many of the tombs.
‘This place is bigger than my actual house,’ I say, peering at a particularly large one covered in moss, which no one is looking at.
I wonder how easy it is to get a spot here; maybe Mae could come and chuck some of my ashes in one of the massive family crypts where they must have space.
I want the rest of me in the cemetery at home, the same place where Earl is.
It’s a sobering thought, and frankly it’s a testament to the brilliant cemetery that I’ve only just started to think that one day, and soon, people will be walking past my grave, wondering who I was.
I see a bad photo of someone stuck to the front of theirs.
Mae knows that only great photos are allowed.
I take some pictures for the Deathers.
‘Everything okay, Luna?’ Emmett is ahead of me, holding his phone up to the horizon as if it’s a compass.
I take a breath. ‘Yeah, absolutely fine. How’re you getting on?’
I lose him momentarily as a group of Japanese tourists, all wearing little red caps, cut between us, following a man with a flag.
‘This tree.’ He comes back for me and points to a tree at the front of Earl’s painting; it’s unusual, with a twisty pale trunk. ‘I think it’s over by that far wall. There’s some wall in the background, see.’
It’s not well defined, but there is a wall in Earl’s painting. There’s a sense of perspective; I don’t think the tree is right by the wall.
‘I think it’s just a bit in front of it. Let’s have a look.’
We keep walking, more urgently now that we’re close to the spot Earl painted.
‘It’s there,’ I say, hurrying, in the loosest sense of the term, towards the twisty tree in the distance. ‘What do you think Earl wanted us to realise, by coming here?’
‘I don’t know. But look, that’s it.’
We arrive at the point that’s obviously in the painting. We’re on the outer edges of the cemetery here, and the tombs are much smaller. Normal headstone-sized, almost. It’s quieter here too, away from the other tourists, more peaceful.
‘Do you think Earl was here?’ Emmett asks, and I think he must have been, since he remembered it so well.
‘I think so.’ We stand then, our hands almost touching, and I know that both of us feel closer to Earl than we have done so far.
I don’t know what Earl was trying to tell us, if we’re even doing what he instructed when he said the answer is always in the art, but it feels good, being somewhere he was.
‘Look,’ Emmett says, nodding his head towards the gravestone under the tree.
I move closer to get a proper look and I realise then what it says:
SEBASTIAN LACOMBE
19TH SEPTEMbrE 1928 – 27TH AOUT 1951
ARTISTE ET REVEUR
‘What’s reveur?’ I ask Emmett, staring intently at Sebastian’s grave.
‘Dreamer,’ he answers. ‘Did Earl ever tell you that Sebastian died?’
I shake my head. ‘Earl never said anything except that they got one summer together, and then he disappeared. Maybe he knew, after all, that Sebastian was here, if he painted it?’
‘He must have done. I didn’t know his surname before.’ Emmett is tapping into his phone, his eyes scanning whatever he finds before he hands it to me.
‘Sebastian Lacombe is buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. A talented young artist who was already making a name for himself in the post-war years, Sebastian succumbed to TB at the age of just twenty-three. His grave can be found…’
‘Earl must have known he was sick – you don’t die from TB quickly,’ Emmett says.
‘Or maybe he wanted to believe that Sebastian was well. Maybe it was easier to think he disappeared, rather than accept that he was dead.’
Emmett looks down at me, blocking out the sun for a moment.
‘That makes sense.’