Loving Amélie Read online

  Loving Amélie

  By Sasha Faulks

  Published by Freya Publications

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  www.freyapublications.com

  Copyright Sasha Faulks 2012

  Freya Publications

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means electrical or mechanical, including photocopy without permission in writing from the publisher.

  All characters within this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Produced in the United Kingdom for Freya Publications

  Acknowledgements

  With thanks to Debbie Pratt for her patience, skill and encouragement.

  Cover Design by Sam Lane

  http://cargocollective.com/samlane

  Loving Amélie

  Kindle Edition

  For all of us

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Suddenly, Amélie was back in his life.

  Back via a text message on his phone. There were words attached to her name. Her name, Amélie, that would be the first name in his directory until the day he died – or until he could no longer afford a phone, whichever came sooner. Even if he had to spell it with two As, like in aardvark.

  Amélie.

  He banged on Sara’s door. She was asleep in his spare room: the room, more accurately, where there was a sofa bed, and his books and CD collection.

  Chris Skinner was in his flat at the top of a high rise building in Battersea.

  London.

  UK.

  Earth.

  Universe.

  His mind was spinning like he was a child again, hearing the wrenching brakes of the Tardis and believing he was about to meet The Doctor.

  “Sara, you have to get up. I need you to go home!”

  Sara stirred and squirmed under the warm weight of the duvet, which was without doubt more comfortable and fragrant than Chris’s. Probably because she had bought it – and regularly laundered it – herself.

  “Mmmm?”

  “I need you to go! It’s Amélie. She’s back. She’s downstairs!”

  “Amélie?” Sara’s voice was sleepy and muffled by her bedding. “Good. I like Amélie. Send her up.”

  “Please, Sara. You shouldn’t be here.”

  There were reluctant noises behind the spare room door and it opened to reveal Sara’s head of tousled red curls and pale face: Vermeer-esque and chaste looking without her make-up; until she smiled her smile of pretty square teeth and bright blue-grey eyes, and she was alive with mischief.

  “But I need sleep. You kept me up really late.”

  “She’s sent me a text, Sara. She could be here any moment. If she finds you here it won’t look good for me.”

  Sara closed the door and rummaged for a towel and her wash bag.

  “What, you mean she will think, oh Chris is spending time with his best friend Sara, with whom he has had a platonic relationship for years? So I’ll bugger off for another few months?”

  “I don’t mean that. I mean she will think I haven’t, you know, moved on.”

  “In the sense of shagging someone else?” Chris was still at the door, now making a kind of desperate scraping sound. “Oh, give me a minute, for Christ’s sake! At least let me have a shower!”

  While his friend stood under hot water, attempting to sing some of the songs from the concert they had been to in Hyde Park the previous evening, Chris waited in the corridor outside, hugging his ribcage, cradling his thumping heart.

  His love affair with Amélie had taken over his life: it was the nature of his disposition. He had been the oyster waiting for the essential bit of grit to bury itself in his cynical, resistant innards and become the pearl. That had been Amélie. From the moment she had walked into the bistro that he ran with his brother until her final telephone message telling him succinctly: “We can do this over another difficult meeting or just get it out of the way right now, simplement. We both know it needs to be goodbye.”

  His love for her had consumed him: sampled and swallowed a part of him that would never be available for resale: her silky brown hair the colour of strong coffee; her tiny waist; her feisty Anglo-French vocabulary. He would spend a lifetime wondering how he had engaged the attention of such a captivating girl: a girl fifteen years younger than him, for a start.

  Although previous girlfriends had told him he lacked confidence and should believe in himself more, he knew from the mystified comments he received from mates when he and Amélie began to appear together at parties, that he was, as they termed it, “punching above his weight.”

  It was he, however, and not his brother Peter – who had always been the one more likely to be described on the pages of their schoolboy fiction as ‘dashing’ or ‘daring’ – to whom she had strolled up in her elegant heels, after one or two visits to the bistro, and said; “Shall we do lunch, somewhere else?”

  On her first visit, she had had coffee and dessert. Tarte au citron. On her second, she ordered six plates – an extraordinary amount of food for one person, and particularly such a petite person. But Chris acknowledged even then that he was applying an English perspective to a peculiarly French art form: cuisine. She had cut a solitary but determined figure at Table Two at the front of Skinner’s, in a sea of French blue tablecloths and scarlet-checked serviettes. He disregarded the usual stream of passers-by, whose heads bobbed above the red curtain that was threaded through with a brass pole, cutting the view from the window in half. He watched her try a little of all the dishes and, at the end of her meal, call him over - with a demure tilt of her head – to give him a critique.

  Usually a bitter receptacle for “feedback” – despite his brother telling him it was a necessary part of their evolution – he found himself disarmed, charmed; listening to her sometimes hesitant words and watching her hands glide expressively over Peter’s confit of duck, his own bouillabaisse and chicken liver parfait, with uncharacteristic composure.

  At the end of her recital, she seemed mildly relieved, as though she regretted saying anything that would be construed as criticism; and turned her deep, chocolate eyes to the more winning task of smiling sweetly into his face. He spotted one perfect dimple created by the smile, like a fleeting puncture on the surface of brioche before it went into the oven; and said:

  “All round, I think we win your approval?”

  “All round, there is but little room for improvement,” she replied.

  They shared smiles.

  “I hope this is your profession, Miss..?”

  “Benoit. Amélie Benoit.”

  “So that you can give us a good review?”

  “Ha! Sadly not. This was your review,” she said, with a blush that stirred his blood, too. She swung her satchel over her shoulder, bid her goodbyes and left the premises.

  “She is certainly hot stuff, my boy,” Peter’s wife, Linda, had said, in their busy kitchen. She was sliding trays of hot rolls in and out of the oven. She made kissing noises through pursed lips, wiping floury hands on her aproned thighs.

  “That’s dreadful, Sis,” Chris replied, good-humouredly. “It’s the sort of thing our dad would say, like “top totty”!”

  The three of them laughed. This was before Amélie’s fateful return to Chris at Skinner’s to offer him an elsewhere lunch.

  She became his girlfriend, his lover. Like many people who are blessed with loveliness, she had that special quality of coercion by association with her, which meant she managed to get his male friends to smoke cigarettes after meals without the nagging feeling that they were killing themselves; and his female friends to eat desserts without the dreary accompaniment of gui
lt:

  If Amé’s having the crème brulée, with her tiny body and flawless skin, why shouldn’t we?

  She was everybody’s companion, in a slightly aloof way. She worked as a legal secretary for a French firm of lawyers during the day and she helped out at the bistro in the evening and at weekends when required.

  She rented a ground floor flat in a pleasant white building near Paddington, but spent many nights with Chris in Battersea. They were together for the better part of two years; and he revelled in the unfailing surprise he felt at finding her in his morning bed – with her perfect small round breasts and buttocks and endlessly strokable, fragrant skin – and knowing it was his face she sought when she entered a room and looked about with those infinitely engaging brown eyes.

  And she had come back.

  The lock of the bathroom door shunted open and Sara padded out and into the living room, wrapped in towels. Her shower had been graciously brief, and she began collecting up her garments from the radiator where they had been strung the night before: soaked through from standing out all evening in the rain, watching The Killers and The Kaiserchiefs. They had dried to a crisp, inelegant finish.

  Behind her, the windows of Chris’s otherwise humble flat displayed an awesome panoramic view of London: a breathtaking visual swathe of the city sandwiched between two slivers of the Thames. It was a bright, promising Saturday morning after the night’s rain; and the sky was cloudless and blue above the Royal College of Art and the local streets. There was a school playground visible below with its chalked boundaries marking out eerily empty weekend spaces. In the distance loomed the capital’s familiar architectural landscape, including the London Eye, offering what Chris described as its “humorous modern take on the drudgery of sightseeing.”

  “I’m guessing coffee will be out of the question?” she asked.

  It was about his inertia, his lack of joie de vivre.

  (Amélie had been embarrassed to use this phrase: it seemed lame and overused to the point of losing impact; but couldn’t readily think of another to describe her need to leave him.)

  Chris was in shock. He had just confided in her that he had been saving for a trip round Europe. He planned to take some time off from Skinner’s, with Peter and Linda’s blessing, to see some of the world, to travel. Like other people did. In retrospect – which was a position he found himself in so many times regarding this conversation with Amélie – he couldn’t understand why she had not received this manifestation of his “ertia” with more positivity.

  “But, I wanted you to come with me,” he said, bleakly.

  “What for? What is the purpose of this trip of yours?”

  They were sat outside a pizzeria on the bank of the River surrounded by the hubbub of a city weekend.

  “To see Paris, Rome, Florence. To see where you were born in Paris..?”

  “But what for?”

  When, after a minute or so of him struggling internally to invent a plausible lie – as he thought the “what for” was self-explanatory – she laughed, not unkindly, and folded her pizza into calzone. They finished the meal in silence.

  Still leaning on the wall outside his bathroom, ignoring Sara, Chris had his eyes fixed on the screen of his mobile phone.

  “It’s Amélie. Don’t come down, I am coming up.”

  It had been eight months. And four days. He felt sick. He had woken up and gone to wine-induced sleep almost every day of those eight months in the pain of separation and loss. She would be at his door any moment looking achingly beautiful, no doubt, while he had rain-frizzled hair and the onset of a paunch. It seemed impossible that his misery – tolerated miraculously by Sara, Peter, Linda and a host of others – and which had manifested itself in drunken rants and fits of angry tears and days in pursuit of childish amusements like watching cartoons all night – was going to end today.

  “What’s happening?”asked Sara. “Where is she? Is she OK?”

  Sara was blotting her deflated wet curls with a towel. She had liked Amélie, of course. Who couldn’t? They had even met up for drinks once or twice after the split, as chummy girls do. She had some sympathy for Amélie’s plight with Chris – he could be an annoying bugger: obstinate and opinionated; but he was fundamentally a good egg, unlike most other men on the planet. She and Chris had something, mercifully, that went beyond the petty niggles that arose when two people shared a house, or a bed, for too long.

  “She is downstairs,” said Chris. He leapt as his phone bleeped another text. “She says you must come out to the lift now!”

  His anguish forgotten, the joy of seeing Amélie welled up in him like turning on the ignition of a car, and he raced to the front door. It was an immediate right turn to the lift: the air always ripe with the competing smells of rising damp, laundry products, and multifarious types of cooked food.

  Mal was her was a permanent marking in black spray paint on the facing brickwork: the last letter of the graffiti long gone or never completed. There were times when Chris stared vacantly, or drunkenly, at these letters while waiting for the lift, trying to use them to make up a new, long word in the style of a Countdown anagram. Swarm was the best he could do, although he often pretended that Lasherwam was a little known Indian goddess.

  “Amélie?!” he shouted, as the lift groaned closer. He was convinced, suddenly, that he was going to cry. Shit. He felt powerless to stop.

  The lift doors opened as Sara followed him gingerly to them in her stockinged feet.

  The two friends found themselves looking into an empty lift. Empty, except for what looked like a picnic hamper.

  Sara took the initiative and blocked the lift doors open with her body. She bent down to retrieve the basket.

  “What the fuck’s she doing to me?” Chris said, pushing his hands through his hair. “Is she coming up or not?”

  “It doesn’t look like it,” Sara answered, coolly, and she lifted out the contents of the basket while guiding it out of the lift towards him with her foot. “But she has sent you your baby.”

  Chapter Two

  Chris turned and fled down the stairs, dismissing the logic of taking the lift: condemning it as somehow complicit in an act of treachery.

  He was in his mid forties; and hadn’t run anywhere for ages, maybe years. A Nigerian co-resident chuckled to herself as he clattered past her; adjusting her plastic bags of shopping and mumbling something encouraging, but edged with sarcasm, under her breath.

  Out in the daylight, there was no sign of Amélie: just the usual loitering weirdo – possibly another resident of the flats – with his perpetual dog-end of a roll up cigarette stuck to his lip, sporting a greasy sweater. He, too, appeared amused by Chris’s endeavours; or was it just that he was mentally retarded?

  “Have you seen a lady go by, a smart, pretty lady?” Chris was panting, and leaned forward to rest his hands on the front of his thighs. “Dark hair?”

  He didn’t manage to look up to see the unfortunate man smile and shrug. It was occurring to him that the only pretty lady this chap might have seen would be thrusting inflated breasts and a tattooed pelvis at him through his television screen.

  “Cheers, anyway.”

  He ran on, across the car park, and onto the pathway of Battersea Bridge. She must surely have gone this way. Chris had been asthmatic as a boy, and he felt the familiar depressing constriction in his chest as his lungs began to react adversely to his burst of activity.

  “You look like you’re in pain, mate,” said a passing jogger, whose face he recognised as a regular from the bistro, Aussie Steve. “Take it steady.”

  “Have you seen Amélie, my ex?” Chris gasped.

  “Since..?”

  “Today. Just now. Did you pass her?”

  “No, mate. I’m sorry, I didn’t know you broke up. Aren’t you going off round Europe or something?”

  “Can’t chat, Steve.”

  Chris felt doubly suffocated by this affable man’s meaningless words, but was rescued by the
ringtone of his mobile, which was Steve’s cue to jog on with a friendly wave. It was Sara.

  “Did you find her?”

  “No. I’m on my way back.”

  Amélie, it seemed, had been and gone.

  She had delivered him a baby in a Moses basket: his daughter, whom Sara was rocking in her arms, in his living room, against a backdrop of the city where, presumably, she had been born. Without his knowledge.

  “Do you want to hold her?” said Sara. Her face ran with tears.

  “In a minute.”

  Chris rummaged through the Moses basket on his sofa for evidence of Amélie. There were a couple of baby blankets; a foam base covered in a fitted sheet; a tiny pink elephant.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “You have an inhaler somewhere,” said Sara. “I think I saw one in your bathroom cabinet. Go use it.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “You have her number. You’ll need all her stuff, if she’s…staying. Phone her.”

  “What?”

  Chris held out his phone and looked dumbly at the keypad for almost a minute. When it beeped a third time with a message from Amélie – three messages in succession after a wasteland of more than six months – he didn’t flinch.

  “She says a courier will be with you within the hour. He will bring everything you will need to take care of her for now.”

  “Christ, was she listening?”

  “Her name is Amélie Christina. I was not permitted to give her your surname without your consent. Please look after her, chéri.”

  His voice had risen to a rasp by the end of his speech, and he gave in to the gale of tears that had been threatening to undermine him at the lift doors. Sara, too, wept some more, attempting to embrace baby Amélie, and to console her father, at the same time.

  In accordance with the message, a courier arrived at quarter to twelve. He was dressed from collar to toes in black leather and a black helmet, and displayed a reluctance to raise his visor with what seemed like complicit secrecy.