I wondered how long I’d survive before something did me in, weeks maybe, a few months. Then I wondered what would kill me: hunger, sickness, something worse. I imagined my body in a ditch, or else propped upright and bloody somewhere remote. I wondered whether I would fight, or whether I would simply give up. If I would be scared. If it would hurt. If I would ever be found.
***
Then I thought, Fuck that.
***
In France I learned fast. I got good at not being noticed. Not meeting people’s eyes. Standing in the shadows. Never asking for directions. Memorizing maps. Clocking people before they even became aware of me. And, even though it was out of season, I found work, on a farm in Picardy where the owners kept a skeleton staff on through the winter. There were six of us: four men, one woman and me. We worked fifteen-hour days, slept in bunks in a barn and, after vast chunks had been deducted for accommodation, bed linen, food, heating, electricity, water, taxes, insurance and something called retainer fees, received a pittance in wages. None of us would complain. None of us could complain. We were all illegal there, somehow or other, that was clear enough. None of us ever asked direct questions or even looked one another straight in the eye. I guessed every last one of us had a story we didn’t want telling. You gave a name and got paid in cash. I was Elisabeth.
At first I was so miserable that I didn’t really look outside of myself, so it took a few weeks before it dawned on me that I probably wasn’t even the youngest one there. That place was almost certainly taken by a tall, thin, silent boy who would throw himself to the ground whenever a tractor misfired. He had beautiful green eyes and blooms of ringworm on his arms, and he slept in the bunk next to mine. We all went to bed fully dressed, but one night in February, when a biting cold pulled me out of sleep, I saw he was staring through the skylight at the moon, his eyes spilling over with terror and tears. I reached over for his hand and he took it silently, curling his fingers around mine as a single silver line worked its way down his cheek, like a riverbed filling after a drought. That was about the extent of our friendship. In the daytimes we mostly ignored each other just like everyone else. But I was fairly certain French wasn’t his first language, because he pronounced my name the Arabic way, Ilisabet. Of course, we didn’t stay in touch. All of us were on the move and none of us had phones back then, access to the internet or even a forwarding address. Jabir, he said he was called, and I’ve thought about him a lot over the years, worried about him, in truth. So many times I’ve found myself wishing that I knew where he was, or just that he was doing okay. Because this is what I’ve learned: the shy ones, the gentle ones, the sensitive ones, the good ones, they’re the ones that don’t survive out there.
And I am none of those things.
***
As soon as the weather began to improve, I moved south and started harvesting work. And I was lucky. I found work on a farm with some good people, Basile and Agathe Abadie. Not just good people but rather truly beautiful people, whose kindness and generosity I repaid with betrayal and theft. They had a child, a daughter about my age who’d been born with severe learning difficulties and needed constant care: she had to be turned and changed, to keep her clean and safe. Despite the fact she couldn’t walk, or talk, or see, Basile and Agathe were always talking to her, singing to her, touching her, always comforting her, wheeling her into the orchard so she could feel the breeze on her face. They always let her know they were close. In all my life, I don’t think I’ve ever seen such love given to another human being. Sometimes something like a smile would pass over her face, and those were the moments her parents would live for and celebrate. In fact, they seemed to celebrate everything about her, each and every day she was alive. I think they knew they could lose her at any moment. And they were kind to me too, so kind. Too kind. Looking back, I realize it can’t have been easy, having someone like me around, so similar in age to their daughter but living an active life, walking and talking, doing normal, everyday things. But if they felt that, they never showed it, not once, and at the end of the picking season they invited me to stay on with them, to help in the house, and I did. I actually stayed with them for more than two years in the end, cooking, cleaning, working in the fields; later even helping with the admin and books. They trusted me, Basile and Agathe, they let me into the absolute heart of their family. I lived in their home. And, gradually, I got to know that house inside out, where everything was kept. The daughter’s name was Claudette. And during the time that I was living there, I borrowed, no, not borrowed, I stole her birth certificate and applied for a passport. With my photograph. I stole from the very people who had been so good to me. I stole from a disabled child. And I became Claudette.
That meant when I turned seventeen and moved to Paris to start waitressing, I could work legally. I’ve always stayed in touch with Basile and Agathe. Whenever I go back to visit, I call myself Elisabeth. Whenever they come to Paris, I’m always too busy to meet. Both these things fill me with shame.
I can never tell them what I did. I can never tell anyone.
I have lived in Paris for twenty years now, renting a flat in the 20th arrondissement, an area populated by students, immigrants, musicians, painters, beatniks, free spirits and dropouts. It’s a tiny one-bedroom place, on the seventh floor of an old apartment building that does not have a lift. I suppose I could move now, if I wanted to. I could probably afford to. But I like it. It’s me.
***
For my first few years in France I thought about home all the time. I had vivid dreams about my mother and sister. I’d wake up with tears running down my face. I was desperate to see them, desperate to go home. For a long time I told myself I would return to England when I was eighteen. Then I told myself, to be absolutely assured of my adulthood and independence, better make that twenty-one. Then I pushed it back again. Twenty-five, I thought. But, at some point, I just became Claudette. I wanted to be Claudette: this girl who’d lived her entire life being loved for exactly who she was. A different me. How I saw it, Ilisabet was loneliness and terror, Elisabeth calculation and survival; Laika, impulse and rage. As Claudette I could be something else. As Claudette I could be composed, self-possessed. Balanced. I felt steady, and stable. I took up yoga, and eventually gave up waitressing to teach it full time. I liked the way it made me hold myself, the way it taught me to breathe, the way it made me think. Yoga gave me strength and I changed, all of me. I had dates. I had friends. It may not have been my own life, but it was one I enjoyed.
And I didn’t look back. I chose not to look back. When thoughts of my mother and sister crept in at the edges of my consciousness, I pushed them straight back out of my head. When eventually I got the internet, I never even Googled them. If ever I felt the urge, my fingers pausing on the keys to my computer, I made myself think about that gargantuan glass house. I would close my eyes and force myself to look inside it, to see them there: my father, smiling; my mother walking through that golden space in a midnight-blue dress. They could have found me if they’d wanted to, I told myself. But they didn’t. They were too busy going to parties and building that bloody thing. And if they weren’t going to look for me, why the hell should I look for them? I wasn’t even Laika any more. I was Claudette.
***
And then I met Nate.
He signed up for my evening class, arriving loose-limbed and smiling. He worked hard, laughed a lot, had all the kit. Sure, I liked him. He was confident, talkative, lean. I had his picture: he was someone, I thought, who would give yoga a few tries, find it all a bit quiet and at some point just stop showing up.
But he didn’t. He kept coming back.
After a few months he asked me for a date and, when I turned him down, he was good-natured about it. After a few weeks he asked again. Then again. Eventually I thought, okay, we’ll have one date, maybe two. He seemed pretty easy to be around—it could be nice. Maybe we’d end up in bed, enjoy ourselves for a few weeks and then just agree we’d be better off suited as friends. So finally I told him okay, yes, one date.
***
I arranged to meet him on the Left Bank, well away from my flat. He’d told me he wanted to take me to a concert, but the moment I saw him standing there, grinning with his hands in pockets, on the corner of Rue Saint-Jacques, I knew I should have asked for more details.
“Where are we going?”
“It’s a surprise.”
“I don’t like surprises.”
Nate beamed, and I could see he assumed I was joking. I wasn’t. My entire life was built on knowing exactly what, and who, was around the next corner. I felt my heart dropping. I should have known better. This wasn’t going to work.
“I’m serious,” I said, but he was already talking about his sister, filling me in about her life and kids in London, while, only half listening, I pulled up my mental map of Paris, checking each passing small side street for a quick way out, a fast escape into the dark.
My sense of dread built. We were somewhere in the Latin Quarter. I was just about to pull a fast migraine and excuse myself when he stopped outside the entrance to a dreary community hall.
“Nate—” I said.
“We’re here.”
I could hear shouts and hollers coming from the inside, and I threw him a questioning look as he held open the door. He stood back and, because I had to, after a moment I stepped inside a room full of young men tearing about, shoving each other and laughing. This couldn’t be it. We had to have come to the wrong place. It was a joke. As the group massed around Nate, I edged back, toward the door. It would be easy to leave. Nate had his back to me. I could be halfway up the street before he noticed I was gone.
“Eh, vous là!” he shouted. “Bougez-vous les fesses, on n’a pas toute la journée.” Instantly there was silence, and, in the sudden quiet, I froze, my hand already on the door, waiting for the racket to start up again so I could just slip out.
“Okay,” he said, “guys, true to my promise, tonight I have something truly special for you: your first ever audience.” Nate turned toward me and held out his hand. The group of young men turned too and I was met by a sea of wary faces. That’s when I realized they were really just kids. Nate grinned and after a moment I stepped forward a little, pretending I hadn’t been about to disappear. Nate pulled me to his side.
“Eh, les gars,” he said, turning his attention back to the group, “I’ll tell you now: not everything tonight is going to go right. There’re going to be mis-notes and duff chords and cock-ups and bits where we stop and start from the top. It doesn’t matter. Just support each other, go with it, it’s okay. Fall in love with the music, give yourselves over completely, plunge in. But, most of all, this is your moment. Show us what you can do and be proud of yourselves. Allons-y!”
Two plastic chairs appeared in front of the assortment of scrappy-looking instruments, and Nate and I took our seats.
He put his head close to mine. “To say they’re a little rough around the edges would be an understatement. But they’re truly great kids, seriously, every last one of them. They all want to learn.”
We were the only members of the audience. As they began to play, I saw the boys’ guarded caution start to slip away, and in its place came first the buzz of excitement, then true and absolute euphoria, their faces breaking into grins. They were changing who they were before my eyes. I was so—moved. Sitting, listening to them play, I felt something swimming up from deep inside me, something like hope. These were street boys with scabs and scars and knocked-off clothing and broken noses and shorn heads. Boys who’d never got a chance in life. Boys like Jabir.
At the end of the last number, Nate and I leaped to our feet, clapping, our hands held high over our heads, shouting bravo. The concert had been rough and chaotic and full of mistakes and also utterly transformative, a wonder, a delight. It was honestly the best music I’d ever heard in my life.
***
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