By Tom Edgar
There is a restaurant in Montmartre, a few hundred metres away from the Basilica of Sacré-Coeur, down a backstreet where the narrow concrete road is flanked by two raised pavements, and the low shopfronts open to the Parisian sky. The restaurant is a weathered crimson, with intermittent patches of flaked and ochreous wood — and, above the fusty windows, in a gilded, antique font: MAISON PIERRE.
Every year, in the first week of August, when the city is hot and the bin-bags fester on the street corners, and the tourists swarm the haunts where Hemingway drank and Camus questioned suicide, Pierre, the Maitre d’, leaves the now unfamiliar city and travels to his farm in Burgundy where he harvests blackcurrants.
It is always the same. He arrives at the farm, nestled in a shallow vale between two low hills, and sees the overworked sun spreading its tired white fingers over the clusters of deep purple blackcurrants, hanging on the etiolated bushes. He sets about his task; the rusted blades of his scissors osculate on each strig of currants, which Pierre tosses into the old feed buckets, where a few docile bugs attempt one last, decadent feast. Once clean, the currants are crushed: their bruised skin torn, the brutalised flesh falls into his ensanguined hands. He soaks the flesh in Eau de Vie, the water of life, whereby it delicately resurrects into Creme de Cassis, a sweet, heady liquor, which is mixed with chilled white Burgundy. It is for this, the Kir, that Maison Pierre is loved by its patrons.
In the early nineties, John’s parents happened upon the restaurant as they hiked through a quiescent, autumnal Paris, on their way to Sacré-Coeur. Tired, they paused in a backstreet, next to an old-fashioned brasserie, with red-and-cream woven chairs and heavy white table cloths, the romantic kind John’s dad so detested. He interrogated the menu, like a priest confronting an heretical mass, doggedly questioning whether or not it was done ‘properly’ here. Deciding it wasn’t, he turned away, started walking off, when his wife grabbed his shoulder. “Darling,” she said, with unprecedented authority, “we’re eating here.” They did. They drank sweet, heady Kirs, and ate foie gras and bavette steaks.
They were happy, briefly. They never returned.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
“Dad,” John spoke, drawing out the monotone syllable in expression of his otherwise latent tiredness. “How much further is it?”
They had walked for two hours, now, through the mid-August’s disquiet heat. Most of the restaurants which they had passed were closing for the afternoon. The blackboards, with their lists of chalk-scribbled specials (Escargots x 12 – €18 Steak Frites – €25), were being hurried inside, tucked under the arms of waiters who had rolled up their sweat-heavy sleeves.
John’s top was damp and it stuck to his chest. It was blue-and-white and stripy. He had always wanted a top like it. At least, always since they had arrived in Paris, earlier that week. The day before, when his father had bought it for him, he had put it on immediately, tearing off the one he was wearing with such alacrity that the shop-assistant rolled her eyes. That it was Dad who had got it for him made it that much more special. Dad, who he so rarely saw, who could be so reserved and so cutting in his misbegotten efforts at fatherly love. But now the t-shirt was sodden and by tomorrow it would smell. He wouldn’t be able to wear it again all week. He tried to contain his frustration but it made his head sore.
“John, will you shut up? It’s around here,” he paused. “Somewhere.” Even if John’s father’s words expressed doubt, the tone was always certain. It was as if he had a subjective concept, or rather contempt, for natural law. What he said would come to pass. And, if it didn’t, then Nature was to blame for not allowing herself to be beaten into the requisite shape. His lips were parsed tightly. Pensiveness, frustration, anger, or absence? John could never decide. To him, his father’s face was an illegible scroll, its features an unremitting cuneiform. There was a drop of sweat on his untrimmed beard. He beat it away with one swift brush of the back of his hand.
“What you mean is, you don’t know where it is. That’s it, isn’t it Dad?” Alfie, John’s older brother, retorted, his eyes alight with the prospect of battle.
“If you’re that hungry, Alfie, we’ll eat here.” He pointed towards a Tourist menu with an inflated photograph of a grey steak and soggy fries. “Perfectly good, don’t you think?” Alfie didn’t reply. He looked down at the floor, sheepishly, content with the reaction, but now wary of provoking anything more extreme.
“No, Dad. Don’t worry. We’ll find it soon.” John smiled timidly, with the eyes of a told-off Spaniel: a sense of hurt and sadness glinting beneath the still dependent gaze. “I’ll help. Pass your phone and I’ll see if I can find it.”
“Thanks, John. At least one of you is helpful,” he said, passing his unlocked phone to John.
Looking up, John asked, “What’s it called?”
“How the fuck am I supposed to know?”
John pursed his lips, unwilling to say anything, but unsure how he could help any further without that crucial information.
“Well, Dad,” Alfie said. “It’s your restaurant, isn’t it?”
“Oh, Alfie. Fuck off.” He turned away. “Useless prick, you —” he paused. A tour group was walking past, a militia of cargo shorts and baseball caps, chattering away happily and unaware, clearly, of the consternation they had caused as John’s father was made to back into the wall to let them past. He glared at them, sternly. “Bloody…” He sighed. “Well, the restaurant. Yes. It’s Paul’s? No. No. It can’t be.” It was a moment of unusual interest to the children — a brief exhibition of their father’s internal monologue. “It’s um. P – something. P. It’s Pierre’s. That’s it. Pierre’s. Maison Pierre.” He raised his hand, limply, to gesture to John to get on with it.
John tapped away at the screen with his small fingers, so pared and bitten that their tips were like cratered moons. He pressed on the search bar and started to key in the word. The screen was so damp from his clammy hands that the keyboard wouldn’t respond. He rubbed the phone and his hands against his shorts to dry them. He started again. P. The first letter. He paused. A list of suggestions appeared.
Pornhub
Private Escorts, Hungary — visit Budapest in Style, V.I.P.
Peace — Find Help Now, near you
The phone shook in John’s hands. He was sinking, sinking, inhumed by the weight of a thousand fallen stars. He trembled. And Dad …. And Dad … And Dad. Lurid images flashed before his mind. He was sinking, back into the long, dark, high-ceilinged corridor at home — so little, and so unsure of the voices, the loud voices, which scratched at his eardrums and wet his eyes. And then. It faded — to a blankness, a blur; and weight, the weight of it all. Absently, palely, he stared at the pavement, his heart and breath and all his innards wobbling and shaking and uncertain.
He looked towards Alfie. On his t-shirt, there was a woman posing for some 1950s edition of Vogue. The woman. Not that woman. She would be Hungarian and pale, a prostitute, much paler than the woman in the black-and-white photograph, pale and wearing deep, black eyeshadow, which was maybe just her tiredness and sadness and not eyeshadow at all. John couldn’t speak. His eyes failed. Trembling, the phone fell out of his hand and it hit the floor. “Sorry,” he stuttered. “Dad.”
John’s father leant down to pick the phone off the floor, passing John’s line of vision as he did so. There was a crack in the top right of the screen, a snowflake on a pond at night. He sighed, spoke quietly: “You fucking moron.” He paused, looking at John, and then waved his hand in John’s direction as if to bat away an impertinent fly.
He continued the internet search which John had started; either he didn’t notice, or was simply unaffected, by what John had seen. “Oh well. It looks like the restaurant’s closed. Sorry. Let’s eat here instead.” He gestured to the Tourist menu from earlier. “They can’t fuck up a steak haché, can they?”
“No, Dad.” John stammered.
“God, what’s got into you?” He paused to think. “You probably haven’t drunk enough water. I told you this would happen. Some food should sort you out.”
He signalled the waiter. “Une table pour a tres.”
“Ouais.” The waiter pointed them towards a table. Alfie was about to sit down, but their father shook his head, and said, “I’ll sit there.”
The waiter returned with three menus. But there was no need to look since John’s father had already decided. “Tres kir, pour entre; tres steak ash, oon carafe de vin roug avec duh there.” The waiter was confused and asked John’s father to repeat the order, which he did; only this time he said it much quicker. The waiter, it seemed, partially understood and hurried back to the kitchen.
“He must be from the South. They don’t speak French down there, you know?”
Alfie lit a cigarette. “Oh please. Don’t get smoke in my eyes.”
The kirs came. They were sickening, saccharine. John’s father smiled, his yellowing teeth bared fully. “Typically French. Poor Cassis, the wrong wine. I told you it’d be awful.”
* * * * * * * * * * * *
John and Alfie were standing in front of the Basilica de Sacré-Coeur. Their father was ‘doing business’ on a shaded park bench, interrupting the flirtations of the German couple with whom he shared it. He was speaking to a colleague on his phone’s loudspeaker. The Germans looked at one another, not with love, but with a newfound awkwardness and silence.
“What’s up, John? You were quiet all of lunch,” Alfie asked.
“Nothing. It’s really nothing.” He spoke quietly. “Just dehydrated — like Dad said.”
“Really? I don’t believe that.” Alfie lit a cigarette and passed it over to John for a puff. He coughed. He was fourteen. John moved his eyes to look at the view. Paris stretched into the horizon. There was too much of it, simply too much of it for him to make sense of. He saw but he could not feel. He turned back towards Alfie.
Their father looked over, saw the cigarette in John’s hand, and didn’t seem too concerned. Then he waved to them and shouted, “Go inside. I’ll catch up with you. I’ve seen it plenty of times before … Sorry about that, yes — the kids. You know how they are … Yes, 14 and 16 … Not the best age.”
John and Alfie walked into the church. “Alfie, I’ll talk to you later. I just don’t feel like it now. That’s all. Please can you leave it.” The church was not so busy as the crowds out front had led them to expect. There were a few tourists, unaware that you should look away from Sacre-Coeur rather than at it, who were now struggling to determine why the place was so esteemed by their guidebooks. An American family, pondering the same question, decided it was big. “Hey, look kids,” their father spoke adoringly. “This is ancient. It’s from way back in the Renaissance. Would you believe it? Heck, that was like five hundred years ago. And there’s Jesus, too — watching over all of us.” He said, pointing above the Choir, where a vulpine Christ scowled down at them gallically.
“Hey, John. Listen to these yanks. So cringe.” Alfie said.
John wasn’t listening, and if he was, he was listening not with his brother’s scorn, but with a kind of envy of the loving simplicity of those transpontine innocents.
“John. Listen to them. So irritating, I mean really.”
“Yeah,” John replied blankly. He could only really think about his father. He felt so terrible and alone and isolated in his knowledge. That Dad fucks prostitutes — poor, mistreated Hungarian ones; that he wanks and watches porn; and that he’s unhappy too. And could he really say these things? Could he tell anyone? Wouldn’t that be unfair? To tell people things which would make them think differently about his father. It is a lie to say that knowledge is freedom. Knowledge is a burden, one which can rarely be offloaded without consequence. He could tell his mother, but then she’d just hate his father more.
He was sitting in one of the front pews, looking up at the mosaics. He felt so alone that, impulsively, he kneeled down to pray. It had been so long since he’d done this. He leaned forwards, his knees pressed reassuringly against the kneeler, and felt a big whoosh of relief. It’s alright, he thought. It will be alright. It is fine. God is with me, and God will help me, even if Dad won’t. John had been drowning and, he thought, God had fished him out of a cold and Arctic deep.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
John was standing in the gift-shop queue. There was a thick black-string necklace with a cross on it in his hand. He wanted to buy it. He felt good, now — close to God and reassured. It will be alright, his thoughts incanted, it will be alright. His father had given him ten euros earlier that day and he was going to spend it on the necklace. The cross was metallic and it felt smooth in his hands. He wanted it more than anything he had ever wanted. More, even, than the t-shirt; it was like a hug from his mother, or the corridor light which would glow through his slightly-opened bedroom door on cold Winter nights. It made him feel safe. As he neared the front of the queue, both Alfie and his father joined him.
“There you are,” his father said. “We’ve been looking everywhere for you. What are you buying?”
John didn’t speak. He showed his father the necklace.
“Well, get on with it then.”
The woman at the counter scanned the necklace. John handed her his ten euro note.
“Mais non. C’est quinze euros.”
John hesitated and then turned to his father. “Dad, please could I have five more euros for this?”
“Really, John? You spend so much money.”
John turned to the woman at the counter and said, in a hushed voice, “Sorry.” She snatched it back, putting it under the counter. He looked down at the floor, briefly, and noted how the cheap white lights reflected on the fake marble floor.
“Come on, then. You didn’t need it, anyway.”
“Yes Dad.”
“Besides, it’s not like you believe in any of that crap.”
