~ ~ ~
At the airport early the next morning, Viv finds there’s not enough credit on her card to get back to London. Her cell hasn’t worked since she got to Addis and the battery is dead, and if she returns to the hotel and stays another night to email Zan, it’s money that could go toward getting her back. She’s not certain what Zan would be able to do anyway. Zan would be the first to acknowledge that it’s in such situations when he becomes most flabbergasted that Viv is coolest.
Beginning to feel the hangover of the long sleepless night, she finds thinking that much harder. She decides to try and use the credit card to buy a less expensive ticket to some place in Western Europe from where she’ll find a way to England. Her best prospect appears to be Berlin, more out of the way than she would like, and she’s about to book a seat when, at the last moment, a flight to Paris becomes available.
~ ~ ~
After the seven hour flight to Orly by way of Khartoum, Viv takes a bus to Paris’ outskirts and then the metro further into the city, making the mistake of getting off at Châtelet. From there she could transfer to a direct line to where she wants to go but doesn’t know this; pulling her bag into the street, she keeps hailing cabs until she finds one — in the thick of rush hour as dusk falls on the city — whose driver seems to understand that she needs to get to whatever station will put her on the express rail to England.
Once in the taxi, however, she’s not so sure the cabbie understands at all. The only thing clear is he’s drunk and agitated; she can smell the Côtes du Rhone like she’s sitting in a cask of it. “Train station!” she keeps trying to explain, “anglais!” but then realizes it must sound like she’s commanding him to speak English when what she means is England. He lets loose a torrent of French and something else, Turkish or Eastern European she supposes, and then — with deliberation and intent, she’s certain — he drives his cab straight into the limousine before him, nearly hitting what looks in the twilight and blur of the event to be a young boy about Parker’s age, pulled from danger at the last moment.
~ ~ ~
Viv hurtles forward in the back of the cab, hitting her head hard on either the ceiling or the seat in front. To her astonishment, the collision hasn’t sobered the driver but sent him further into a rage. He backs up the cab and floors the accelerator, careening again into the limo in front, and then does it again.
He keeps doing this until finally she grabs her purse, throws open her door, leaves behind her luggage and lurches from the vehicle. She half expects to leap into the path of oncoming traffic; the repeated crashes, however, have brought everything around her to a stop. She hits the ground, stumbles, picks herself up and keeps running, into the large glass building before her, and the only thing that could almost astound her as much as what she’s just been through is to discover that in fact she’s where she wants to be, in the Gare du Nord, from which the Eurostar departs for London.
~ ~ ~
She doesn’t have enough money for the train, and on sheer adrenaline from what happened in the rue Dunkerque outside, she almost slips past the ticket booth before one of the officials stops her.
Depressed and rattled, she can’t bring herself to sleep in the station. She wanders several blocks east, to the cheapest no-star hotel that she can find on the rue d’Alsace.
~ ~ ~
Paying for one night upfront, she spends the next day at the Gare du Nord casing the crowd like a thief, sizing up its ebbs and flows, points of vulnerability. She thinks, I’ve become the vagabond rebel of my youth, who hopped trains on a whim. She spends a second night in the hotel, slips out in the morning without paying, spends the second day at the station; hungry to the edge of nausea, she rations out to herself juice and a single baguette. Having left her bag with her clothes in the cab that she fled two days before, she breaks down and buys a hairbrush and clean underwear.
From Addis to Khartoum to Orly to the Gare du Nord, she’s viewed every telephone — the broken ones on the walls, those on the other sides of windows, those that people gaze at in their palms as they walk along never looking up — with an unbearable longing, believing her family only a flurry of digits away. When she finds a public phone that works, she stares in dismay at the foreign instructions, terrified she’ll waste what money she has on a call that won’t go through. For as long as she can remember, she’s had a recurring nightmare in which she rushes from dead phone to dead phone trying to make a call; and now she’s in that nightmare. A couple of times she asks someone if she can borrow a phone and they just push past, glaring at her temerity if they understand at all.
~ ~ ~
I must seem like a panhandler, another homeless beggar, she thinks, and then realizes that in fact at this moment that’s exactly what she is. In the Gare du Nord she feels herself under the surveillance of patrolling police as though she’s wandered over from Pigalle to ply her trade. Her hair has grown out but still has streaks of a pale blue that faded back in that room at the center of Addis Ababa.
In the light of the sun coming through the station’s skylight, Viv eats the rest of her baguette, drinks the rest of her juice and watches a single butterfly flutter out of the morning mist and steam off the railway tracks to the glass above. The butterfly has wandered into the station through an open door, or where the trains come and go, to spend the rest of its brief life amid the furor of people and machines in passage — and as Viv watches, she wants to shield it in armor. She wants to envelop it in one of the metal frames with which she surrounded her stainless-glass recreations back home, to honor and protect what’s all the more beautiful for its precariousness; but she can’t do that anymore. Someone took from her, carelessly, a singular and beautiful vision, in order to steal not only her past but her future.
~ ~ ~
No, she thinks. She’s lost her armor but not her future or her vision. Looking at the train to London on the other side of the station, there it is, right there, the future just beyond the ticket gate; it begins in mere moments. All aboard.
Viv ascends to the level from which the Eurostar departs. Milling with the crowd that files toward the train, she presses past the officials taking tickets; when she hears an authoritative declamation of French directed at the back of her head, she picks up her step, and when she hears another she moves at something only slightly less conspicuous than a mad dash, darting in and out of other passengers, knocking some out of the way. She steps onto one of the sleek cars and makes her way up the train, slipping in and out of doors, dodging the attention of whoever’s behind her; she disappears into a bathroom and locks it. Staring in the mirror, struggling to hold herself together, Viv waits for a pounding on the door.