Another Country. Anjali Joseph

and salad. A spear of sun slanted in through the window behind Nina, lighting part of her hair. Leela watched dust fall. She felt dazed, not by the wine, or the overtures of friendship as Nina told her more about Thomas, the guy from the concert. They’d gone out once or twice. ‘It’s not serious,’ she said, but her face was eager. ‘I’m not sure how much we have in common.’ It was instead the unspoken sense of their homes, in other countries: Leela’s a strange place familiar only from early childhood and emotion, the India to which her parents had unexpectedly returned, a place of silence, bird calls, a balcony next to her room, trees outside, and the life of the facing building; and Nina’s, the modern house in an open landscape, near a beach where Christmas Day was celebrated with a barbeque, and a student world of working in a Mexican restaurant in Auckland, and not getting New Year’s Eve off. For each girl, the other’s home was non-concrete, but superstitiously to be believed, in the way of a story heard in infancy; it held a reality that had nothing to do with experience. Both knew it, and it made them feel tender, as though for their own lives, which might have been continuing elsewhere.

      ‘I was wondering whether to bring him to Kate’s party, eh?’ Nina said.

      ‘Party?’

      ‘They’re having a party on Friday, remember? Kate said we could bring people.’

      Leela thought she would ring Patrick; she could legitimately invite him to a party, with real French people. Surely he’d be glad. She turned self-consciously to the page in front of her and looked for mistakes.

       Chapter 6

      In the métro, Leela scrubbed surreptitiously at her cheeks. They flamed. It was possible she’d overdone the highlighting gel, which she’d found in the beauty department of the Monoprix while making last-minute preparations for the party.

      She tried to catch her reflection in the window of the train; she was sitting on one of the fold-down seats near the door. Against the darkness of the tunnel, the glass was smeared with swiftly passing yellow lights and their comet-like tails. She glimpsed herself: hair up, brown skin, and large, comically anticipatory eyes. The person in the reflection was someone she recognised, but who it was hard to believe represented her. The cheeks, yes, they were sparkling away. She sat back. She would reassess, at Kate’s.

      In the last few years, she and Amy had made a ritual of getting ready. Wine, cheap and horrible, was procured; Amy blasted out her favourite music on the stereo; they would dissect the feelings and motivations of their friends and current love interests, long circling discussions that adduced, with all the precision of the legal mind, pieces of evidence and conversations and inferences from them, amounting, often, to an extenuating and essentially uncertain summation of psychological ontology: ‘Maybe he’s just insecure.’ A phrase that became a joke between them.

      Those moments of preparation contained aspiration, but also nervousness and self-obliteration – Amy, taking a palmful of foundation, would rub it all over her face, till her features were all but erased, then draw them back with eye- and lipliner, eyeshadow and mascara. In both girls, there had been a primitive uncertainty about cause and effect that still subsisted in Leela. It was what had led her to put a minimal dab of highlighter on her cheekbones then, unsure this would work, daub the stuff on her browbones, her temples, her collarbones, even her shoulders. The world was one thing, and it was colossal. One, next to it, was perpetually in danger of being forgotten. Tactics would have to be employed; but anxiety persisted about whether they would bear fruit.

      ‘Have you seen our bathroom? Oh my God. You’ve got to see it. It’s horrific.’ On the last words, Kate’s voice dropped to a stage whisper. She pushed the door.

      Leela peered into a narrow chamber painted in black gloss. ‘I love it!’

      ‘Really?’ The other girl looked disappointed. ‘I think it’s hanging, completely hanging. The girls’ father did it.’

      ‘Our dad is crazy,’ Eloise said cheerfully to Leela. She and her elder sister liked Leela, who basked in their approval. Amandine was a sweet girl, reserved but warm, and would have been nice to anyone. But she nodded silently at her sister’s summing up. ‘Nina is sweet. But your French is better.’

      Kate’s room was unusual too: the walls were a deep, blue-red gloss that made it feel like a Chinese lac box. There was a single inadequate lamp, a sullen globe on the bedside table. Leela put down her bag. ‘Stay over,’ Kate had said. ‘You’d have to sleep in my bed, but it’s big, don’t worry.’ The bed had an iron frame, slightly fairy-tale-like. Leela’s mind drifted onto a sailing boat with Henri, the girls’ wicked father who had abandoned them in order to bob on the ocean with his American sweetheart. ‘It’s an amazing flat,’ she said.

      ‘Isn’t it?’ said Kate dryly. ‘Right, I’ve got to get ready. I’ll just close the door. You don’t mind if I strip off a bit, do you?’

      She shut the doors into the passage and living room, and took off the floppy, flared black trousers she always wore, and a blue t-shirt. ‘I feel so fat,’ she muttered.

      ‘You’re not fat,’ Leela said. She couldn’t have judged the other girl’s body as she would have her own: they were so different, Kate alabaster-white, straight-hipped, long-legged, but as she made embarrassed noises about herself and pulled on another pair of black trousers and a black shirt, and laughed, and said, ‘Right’, and opened the blinds again, Leela envied the differences.

      The telephone in the hall started beeping; she heard Eloise’s voice, saying ‘Amandine!’ and the other girl’s murmur of protest from the kitchen where she was making tacos, then a flurry as the younger sister darted to the instrument. Leela had given Patrick the number in case he got lost; she had a premonition he’d arrived. She opened the door into the hall and saw Eloise, vigorous, certain, her blonde corkscrew curls bobbing. She was saying, ‘Oui … oui … Ah!’ and then in English, ‘One minute. Leela!’

      ‘I’m here,’ Leela said.

      ‘It’s your friend – Patrick?’

      Leela took the receiver. ‘Hello?’

      A few minutes later, the doorbell rang. It was Lucien, a childhood friend of the girls, and his girlfriend Claire. Just behind them, a familiar tall figure, booming as though to conceal embarrassment, ‘Hello Leela. Bonjour, bonjour.’ Eloise had come to the door and was smiling. Patrick bent to do his kisses, and Leela encountered the soft cheeks of Claire, a beautiful girl with short hair, and Lucien, a perhaps equally beautiful boy, short, dark-haired. Patrick and she, old acquaintances, didn’t kiss; it would have been too weird. But he was clutching a bottle and they all came in, and no sooner were they in the living room than the bell rang again. Eloise rushed out, crying, ‘Oh, it’s starting!’

      Leela, in one corner of the room, talked to Lucien and Claire about her job and their commuting. Claire was still living in Bordeaux, teaching and reading for the agrégation. ‘I already have the CAPES,’ she was explaining with a weary face. ‘I just have to take the agrég, and then I can apply for a permanent job and we can live in the same place.’ Lucien put his arm around her. The two of them were like appealing cartoon characters. Leela excused herself, and passed the chair where Patrick, still with his bottle of wine, now open at his feet, was sitting and accepting conversational overtures. Right now it was Eloise who crouched near him, lively and interested. ‘What are you doing in Paris?’ she was asking him in French.

      Patrick’s voice boomed out. ‘Je suis flâneur. Je flâne.’

      ‘You can’t say that,’ said Leela, scandalised.

      ‘Non non, c’est bon, flâner, c’est ça,’ said Eloise, thinking the disagreement was linguistic.

      ‘Mais c’est tellement prétentieux,’ objected Leela.