It’s such a random grouping of people, nothing in common with each other beyond the fact that they live nearby: weird quiet Mimi, who can only be nineteen or twenty; Antoine, a middle-aged mess; Sophie in her silk and diamonds. What could they have been talking about just now? It didn’t sound like a polite, neighborly conversation. I can feel their eyes on me, feel like they’re all looking at me like I’m an unknown specimen brought into a laboratory. Elle est dangereuse. I’m sure I didn’t mishear.
“Perhaps you would like a glass of wine?” Sophie asks.
“Oh, yeah. Thanks.” She lifts the bottle and as the wine glugs out into a glass I see the gold image of the chateau on the front and realize it’s familiar, the match of the bottle I picked up from the cellar downstairs.
I take a long sip of my wine; I need it. I sense three pairs of eyes watching me. They’re the ones with the power in this room, the knowledge; I don’t like it. I feel outnumbered, trapped. And then I think: fuck it. One of them must know something about what happened to Ben. This is my chance.
“I still haven’t heard from Ben,” I say. “You know, I’m really starting to think something must have happened to him.” I want to shock them out of their watchful silence. So I say, “When I went to the police today—”
It happens so quickly, too quickly for me to see how it unfolded. But there’s a sudden commotion and I see that the girl, Mimi, has spilled her glass of wine. The crimson liquid has spattered over the rug, up one leg of the sofa.
No one moves for a second. Maybe, like me, the other two are watching as the dark liquid soaks into the fabric and feeling grateful that it wasn’t them.
The girl’s face is a livid, beetroot red. “Merde,” she says.
“It’s all right,” Sophie says. “Pas de problème.” But her voice is steel.
Mimi
Fourth floor
Putain. I want to leave right now but that would cause another scene so I can’t. I have to just sit here and take it while they all stare at me. While she stares at me. The white noise in my head becomes a deafening roar.
Suddenly I can feel the sickness rising inside me. I have to leave the room. It’s the only way. I feel like I’m not quite in control of myself. The wine glass . . . I’m not even sure whether it was an accident or whether I did it on purpose.
I jump up from the sofa. I can still feel her watching me. I stumble down the corridor, find the bathroom.
Get a grip, Mimi. Putain de merde. Get a fucking grip.
I vomit into the toilet bowl and then look in the mirror. My eyes are pink with burst blood vessels.
For a moment I actually think I see him; appearing behind me. That smile of his, the way it felt like a secret shared just between the two of us.
I could watch him for hours. Those hot early-autumn nights while he worked at his desk with all the windows open and I lay on my bed with the fan blowing cool air onto the back of my neck and the lights off so he couldn’t see me in the shadows. It was like watching him on a stage. Sometimes he walked about shirtless. Once with just a towel wrapped around his waist so I could see the dark shadow of hair on his chest, that line of hair that arrowed from his stomach down beneath the towel: a man, not a boy. He hardly ever remembered to close the shutters. Or maybe he left them open on purpose.
I got out my painting materials. He was my new favorite subject. I’d never painted that well before. I’d never covered the canvas so quickly. Normally I had to stop, check, correct my mistakes. But with him I didn’t need to. I imagined that one day, perhaps, I would ask him to sit for me.
Sometimes I could hear his music drifting out across the courtyard. It felt like he wanted me to hear it. Maybe he was even playing it for me.
One night he looked up and caught me watching.
My heart stopped. Putain. I’d watched him for so long I forgot that he could see me too. It was so embarrassing.
But then he raised his hand to me. Like he did on that first day, when we saw him arriving in the Uber. Except then he was just saying hi, and it was to Camille too: mainly to Camille, probably, in her tiny bikini. But this time it was different. This time it was just to me.
I raised mine back.
It felt like a private sign to each other.
And then he smiled.
I know I have this tendency to get a little fixated. A little obsessed. But I reckoned he was obsessive too; Ben. He sat there and typed until midnight, sometimes later. Sometimes with a cigarette in his mouth. Sometimes I smoked one too. It felt almost like we were smoking together.
I watched him until my eyes burned.
Now, in the bathroom I splash cold water on my face, rinse the sourness of the vomit from my mouth. I try to breathe.
Why did I agree to come this evening? I think of Camille, throwing her little wicker basket over her arm, tripping out in the city earlier to hang out with friends, not a care in the world. Not trapped here like me, friendless and alone. How badly I longed to trade places with her.
I can hear him speaking, suddenly. As clearly as if he were standing behind me whispering in my ear, his breath warm against my skin: “You’re strong, Mimi. I know you are. So much stronger than everyone thinks you are.”
Jess
There’s a long silence after Mimi disappears. I take a sip of my wine.
“So,” I say at last. “How do you all—”
I’m interrupted by the sound of a knock on the door. It seems to echo endlessly in the silence. Sophie Meunier gets up to answer it. Antoine and I are left facing each other. He stares at me, unblinking. I think of him smashing that bottle in his apartment while I watched through the spyhole, how violent it seemed. I think of that scene with his wife in the courtyard.
And then, under his breath, he hisses at me: “What are you doing here, little girl? Haven’t you got the message yet?”
I take a sip from my glass. “Enjoying some of this nice wine,” I tell him. It doesn’t come out as flippant as I’d hoped: my voice wavers. I like to think I’m not scared of much. But this guy scares me.
“Nicolas,” I hear Sophie say, using the French pronunciation of the name. And then, in English: “Welcome. Come and join us—would you like a drink?”
Nick! Part of me feels relieved at his being here, that I’m not going to be stuck alone with these people. At the same time I wonder: what is he doing here?
A few moments later he appears around the bookcase behind Sophie Meunier, holding a glass of wine. Apparently living in Paris has given him more style than the average British guy: he’s in a crisp white shirt, open at the neck and setting off his tan perfectly, and navy trousers. His curling, dark gold hair is pushed back from his brow. He looks like someone from a perfume ad: beautiful, aloof—I catch myself. What am I doing . . . lusting after this guy?
“Jess,” Sophie says, “this is Nicolas.”
Nick smiles at me. “Hey.” He turns back to Sophie. “Jess and I know each other.”
There’s a slightly awkward pause. Is this just something rich people who live in apartments like this do, all hang out together? It’s not like any neighbors I’ve ever had. But then again I haven’t exactly lived in very neighborly places.
Sophie gives a wintry smile. “Perhaps, Nicolas, you could show Jess the view from the roof garden?”