Marina Kemp - Nightingale

Suki cocked her head to one side. Her expression wasn’t quite friendly, as if it held a challenge.

‘Yes? Well, anyway, I thought I’d say hello. And I thought, you’re an outsider, I’m an outsider.’ She gesticulated vaguely.

‘Are you new to the village?’

‘Not any more, though I often think I may as well be. I’ve been here – oh, a long time now. But I’m not from around here originally. Guess where I’m from?’

Marguerite sat down. She didn’t want conversation, didn’t want Jérôme to be woken by the noise; she wanted to go up to her room and crawl into bed and go back to sleep. And she hated guessing games, the ennui she felt when she contemplated their boundlessness.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Guess!’

‘Pakistan?’

‘Well, no – Iran. But the right continent, at least. You must be the only person who hasn’t guessed Algerian or Tunisian. Everyone just presumes I’m maghrébine . Maghrébine! Shit …’ She rolled her eyes, exhaling a long plume of smoke. ‘Oh, can I smoke in here?’

But she was stubbing it out already, in the sink.

‘I have to go, I was just dropping by. But you must visit me. I live right next to the doctor’s surgery.’

‘I can’t really leave Jérôme.’

‘What, you never go into the village? Not even to the library?’ She raised an eyebrow. ‘Next time, drop by for a coffee. Not before noon, I never wake up before noon.’ She walked to the door. ‘Goodbye …?’

‘Marguerite.’

‘That’s right. Goodbye, Marguerite.’

She expected to find him asleep when she went into his room to get the book. It was the hour after his lunch; after eating, he almost always fell asleep immediately, as suddenly as a child pretending, his mouth mordantly slack. But today he was lying with the sheets right up to his chin and his eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling. She thought that his look was one of deep fear.

‘Don’t you know how to knock?’ he snapped.

‘I’m sorry to have disturbed you. I—’

‘You what?’

‘I thought you’d be asleep.’

‘I see. And so you just wanted to skulk in here and watch me sleeping?’

‘Of course not.’

‘What did you want then?’

‘I wanted to take the book for a few hours.’

‘And do what?’

‘Read it.’

‘Without me?’

‘We’d still go back to where we left off.’

‘But then you’d be reading those passages twice?’

‘Well—’

‘Do you think you’re humouring me? Is that what you think you’re doing?’

‘Of course not.’ She braced herself for his next question but he looked suddenly weary.

‘I’m having some pain.’

‘Where?’

‘Everywhere.’

‘I can’t give you more Tramadol.’

‘Dolophine.’

‘I can’t give you that either.’ He groaned. ‘Let me give you a massage.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘I’m not.’

He opened one eye, looked at her warily and closed it again. There was silence, and then: ‘All right.’

She approached the bed, pulled the sheet down gently from his chin to his stomach and rubbed her hands together to warm them. Then she pressed his shoulders down, firmly. She didn’t rub his skin, she pressed it: his shoulders, his slipped pectorals, the large crown of his thorax. She hummed quietly as she worked.

‘Your hands are cold,’ he mumbled, his eyes still closed. And then, ‘You’re always humming.’

‘Does it annoy you?’

He didn’t answer for a while. She moved her hands to his head, pushed and pressed each side slowly and heavily.

And then, so quietly she could barely hear it, he said: ‘No. Not really.’

She lifted his thin left arm, wrapped it in the blood-pressure cuff.

‘And?’ he asked when it released.

‘Fine today. In fact, a little lower than usual. Perhaps you’re relaxed from the massage.’

‘Hmmm,’ he said. And then, meticulously casual, he said: ‘You’re Parisian, of course.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why did you leave Paris?’

She sighed as she removed the cuff, the tear of the Velcro the only other sound in the room. ‘Why not? It’s very beautiful here.’

‘But boring. Very boring. Why would you leave Paris to come here? At your age? On your own?’

‘Because I wanted to.’

‘But why?’

‘Why not? This is my job. I came here to work. The position came up, so I applied.’

‘But you didn’t have to work here .’

‘No. I can work where I like.’

‘So why did you choose here?’

‘Why not here?’

‘Why not Paris?’

‘Because I did,’ she snapped. The words came out too loud and too fast. His eyes widened, his shoulders gathered. He watched her intently and she pretended not to notice his gaze, busying herself by going through the drug chart she’d left at the end of the bed. She made a few notes, put the pen in her pocket, made to leave the room.

‘I won’t ask again,’ he said, as she reached the doorway.

She turned around. ‘You can ask me whatever you want.’

‘Oh, I’m not sure about that.’ He closed his eyes, smiling just a little as she turned back around to leave. ‘Not sure at all about that.’

Henri liked this time of the day the most, when his manual work was largely done and he could afford to slow down a little, to sit on the ground with his back against a fence or wall, feel the scratch of dried grass through his trousers. He could close his eyes and enjoy the thinning of the day’s warmth. His hairline was encrusted with sweat; he could rub it, and bits of dirt, and desiccated grass, and what he imagined to be his own refined body salt would fly as if startled into the still twilight air.

The dirt, all of the dirt, was a source of pleasure to him. Meticulous and clean by instinct, he nonetheless enjoyed the day’s long accumulation of filth before he headed back to the house on weary legs to take his bath. He dragged the pre-bath moment out as long as possible to build up its eventual release; he would stop at the basin in the kitchen and drink almost an entire beer, usually his only beer of the day, in virtually one go.

Then he climbed slowly into the bathtub that was really too small for his long limbs and he crouched there, only then turning on the taps. He watched the water reach the top of his foot, water that was already swirling brown with dried mud. It reached his ankles, it lifted his large, slack penis. When it reached the base of his back, he started to get to work; he scratched out the dirt embedded behind his nails, scrubbed his long back and torso until they were pink. Then he emptied the bath, rinsed it out, and started again – as many times as it took for the water to be quite clear, long past when it ran hot.

This evening’s bath was particularly welcome; today had been hot work. Spring was well underway, the sun swiftly gathering intensity. Henri imagined vaguely the great star’s rotation, its heat slowly spreading over Earth, from the Sahara to the Maghreb, over the sea, soaking through the Mediterranean mile by fish-filled mile, reaching the French coast and moving, an inverted shadow, towards the resilient, winter-bitten land around his farm. He had always envisaged it this way, as long as he could remember.

But the bath held a further charm today: the metallic gurgling of the tap, the clunks and creaks the running water set going through the walls of the house, the lightly hissing hum of the rising water level all worked together to drown out the women’s voices downstairs. This was one of each week’s two or three unannounced visits from Laure, the village boulangère and Brigitte’s confidante. Returning from the fields this evening, he had caught the small woman’s nasal voice just in time to avoid entering the house through the kitchen. That meant no long draught of water, no beer, but it was worth it.