The future hero of children’s bedtimes, Jean mused as he listened to Max’s marvellous storylines.
‘… and the one where little Bruno complains to the guardians of heaven about the family they lumbered him with …’
As Max continued, Jean savoured a sensation that was like delicate flowers unfolding inside his heart. He was so fond of this young man! His quirks, his eyes, his laughter.
‘… and when people’s shadows go back to straighten their owners’ childhoods out a bit …’
Wonderful, thought Jean. I’ll send my shadow back in time to straighten my life out. How tempting. How sadly impossible.
They arrived back at the barge in the dead of the night, an hour before dawn came stealing across the sky.
While Max took himself off to his corner, noted down a few thoughts and then fell asleep, Jean Perdu paced slowly around his book barge, which was swaying gently in the current. The cats pattered along beside him, their eyes trained closely on the tall man; they sensed impending farewells.
Again and again Jean’s fingers met thin air as he ran them along the rows of books, caressing their spines. He knew precisely where each book had stood before it had been sold, the same way we know the houses and fields on the streets where we grew up – and continue to see them, long after they have made way for a motorway or a shopping centre.
He had always felt that books created a force field around him. He had discovered the whole world on his barge – every emotion and place and era. He had never had to travel; his conversations with books had been sufficient … until finally he prized them more highly than people. They were less threatening.
He sat down in the armchair on the low dais and gazed out at the water through the wide window. The two cats leaped onto his lap.
‘Now you won’t be able to stand up,’ said their bodies, growing heavier and warmer. ‘Now you have to stay.’
So this had been his life. Eighty feet by fifteen. He had started building it all when he was Max’s age: the barge, the collection for his ‘soul pharmacy’, his reputation, this anchor chain. Day after day he had forged and tempered it, link by link – and shackled himself with it.
But it somehow no longer felt right. Were his life a photo album, the random snaps would have all been alike; they would always show him on this boat, with a book in his hand, his hair alone growing more silvery and thinner. At the back would be a picture of him with a searching, pleading look on his wrinkled old face.
No, he didn’t want to end up like that, wondering if it was all over. There was only one solution, a radical one that shattered his chains.
He had to leave the barge. Leave it for good.
The thought made him feel nauseated … but then, as he took a few deep breaths and imagined life without Lulu, relieved.
His guilty conscience stirred immediately. Rid himself of the Literary Apothecary, as if she were a troublesome lover?
‘She’s no trouble,’ mumbled Perdu.
The cats purred under his stroking hands.
‘What am I going to do with the three of you?’ he said dolefully.
Somewhere nearby Samy was singing in her sleep. And a picture formed in his mind: maybe he didn’t have to leave the barge an orphan, or search high and low for a buyer.
‘Would Cuneo feel at home here?’ he asked the cats on his lap. They nuzzled his hand.
It was said that their purring could patch a pail of broken bones back together and revive a fossilised soul; yet when their work was done, cats would go their own way without a backwards glance. They loved without reticence, no strings attached – but no promises either.
Hesse’s Stages came to Perdu’s mind. Most people were familiar with the first line, of course: ‘In all beginnings dwells a magic force …’ but very few people knew the ending: ‘For guarding us and helping us to live.’ And hardly anyone realised that Hesse wasn’t talking about new beginnings.
He meant a readiness to bid farewell.
Farewell to old habits.
Farewell to illusions.
Farewell to a long-expired life, in which one was nothing but a husk, rustled by the occasional sigh.
35
The day greeted Jean and Max for their late breakfast with 34-degree heat – and a surprise from Samy, who had already been out shopping with Cuneo and had bought them all prepaid mobile phones.
Perdu studied the one she pushed across the table to him between the croissants and cups of coffee with scepticism. He needed his reading glasses to make out the numbers.
‘These things have been around for twenty years; you can trust them,’ Max mocked him.
‘I’ve saved our numbers for you,’ Samy instructed Jean. ‘And I want you to ring us. Even if you’re fine or don’t know how to poach an egg. Or if you’re bored and tempted to jump out of a window to feel real again.’
Jean was touched by Samy’s earnestness. ‘Thank you,’ he said awkwardly.