For Holly

by Tanya Byrne

Genres: General Fiction; Coming of Age

Synopsis

Lola Durand hates her stepmother. It's a cliché but it's true. Lola Durand can't get through to her father. He never wants to talk about the things that matter: why they had to move to Paris, why he had to marry evil Agatha, and how they can get through the heartache of her mother's death together. If he won't listen, she'll show him. She'll show him the truth about his new wife and then her life can go back to normal, just the way she likes it. Lola Durand knows a secret about her stepmother. She's going to share it.

Release date: June 4, 2015

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 336

Sample

There are only four people who know this story. Five including me.

You’re the sixth.

As always, there are two sides to this: the one everyone knows and ours.

The one everyone knows is well documented so if you don’t believe me, and I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t, then you’re welcome to find out for yourself. But either way you’re not going to be able to avoid it because that’s how you’ll be defined from now on, as the girl who was at Gare du Nord. People will tell you how brave you are – that you’re a fighter – and you’ll have to just thank them with a smile and agree that you’re lucky, even though you feel anything but.

That’s why I don’t tell anyone I was there, because I don’t want to hear them say how glad they are that they weren’t. I overhear people talking about it sometimes, about how they should have been there but slept through their alarm. I don’t know why you’d want to lie about something like that, but I guess that’s what people do when these things happen. They want to be a part of it, sign their name to it. If I believed half the stuff I’ve heard then most of Paris was there. I doubt they’re all lying, but even so, it’s the way they say it that makes me want to be sick, like they’re special. Not lucky but special, as though they were spared because they’re a good wife or brother or friend. That’s rubbish. I need you to know that. Don’t think for a second that you were there because you’re none of those things. Sometimes you just sleep through your alarm. That’s it. You can call it luck or fate or whatever helps you sleep at night, but no one is that special.

No one.

Then there’s what happened to us. I hear the date all the time – 31 August – but I don’t think about what happened at Gare du Nord, I think about you. About what I did. That’s why I don’t talk about it, because I can’t, because you shouldn’t have been there and that’s my fault. I don’t even know how to begin to say sorry for that, but I’m going to try.

I don’t know how much you remember about that morning. Not much, probably. I don’t remember all of it, either, just pieces. It’s a bit like when you break a glass and you think you’ve swept it all up, but weeks later, you step on a shard and cut yourself. I remember the big bits that everyone knows, the stuff that was on the news, but it’s the little things that hurt, the things no one knows. The email I almost sent at 4 a.m. telling you not to come. How much I worried about what to wear as if I cared what you thought of me. That’s why I was running late, not because I’m special, but because I didn’t know what to wear. So I wasn’t even there when it happened – I was in a cab waiting to turn onto rue de Dunkerque – and while I was close enough to Gare du Nord to see it all play out, I didn’t see enough to be of interest to the pack of journalists who descended on the city soon after, picking through the debris with wolfish hunger as they tried to find the right angle to secure the next day’s front page.

I hope I don’t sound disappointed about that because I’m not. I have thought about it, though, because I should have been there. If I got my shit together that morning I would have been standing under the Arrivals board when it happened, waiting for your train to pull in. That would have made the front page, I’m sure. Young, sweet Lola Durand, only seventeen and still smarting from the loss of my mother. You know what it’s like to lose someone you love so I think you get how much I hate referring to my mother’s death as a loss, as though she was a pair of sunglasses I left in the back of a cab. Taken is more apt. Stolen. Not that there’s a word big enough – or loud enough – to describe it. But that’s what the newspapers would have said, I’m sure. I’ve even thought about which photograph they would have used. Probably the one my father keeps in his wallet, me smiling loosely, potential burning through my school uniform.

But I wasn’t there that morning. I’m lucky, Dad says. Maybe in a few years, when I don’t have to fly to Paris because I’m too scared to get the train or when I can sleep through the night without being woken by the sudden snap of smashing glass I’ll be able to smile when he says that.

Until then I don’t feel lucky at all.



Sorry. I had to stop. I didn’t think this would be so hard. Or maybe I did, which is why I’ve avoided talking about it. Either way, I hope you can read my writing. It isn’t the neatest, but it’s been a while since I’ve used a pen and paper to write anything other than a list. I wonder what the woman at the table next to mine thinks I’m writing. She keeps glancing at me so maybe she’s seen my nose stud and black nail varnish and thinks I’m a writer. Everyone in Paris is a writer, a writer or a poet. I don’t know what it is about this city, whether it’s the coffee or that when it rains everything looks slightly smudged, like a watercolour, but everyone here has a story they want to tell. I’m no different, I suppose, even if you’re the only one who’s going to hear it.

I’m going to assume that you don’t remember much about that morning, but you must remember how hot it was, the hottest day on record since 1976. It was horrendous, had been for months. It started Easter weekend and got steadily hotter so that by the time I arrived in Paris in June, the makeshift beach on the banks of the Seine was already open, a month earlier than usual. It was raining when I left London so I was startled to step off the train and feel the sun spilling through the glass roof. Startled then furious, its brightness in direct defiance of my mood.

I won’t bore you with the saga that is me and my father. Here are the CliffsNotes: My mother died on Christmas Eve and in the New Year Dad said that he wanted to move home to France and accepted a job at Hôpital Lariboisière. Three months after that, at the end of March to be precise, he married Agatha. I don’t know what more to say. I don’t understand it and I probably never will. I’ll try to watch what I say about Agatha, though, because you need to make up your own mind about her, but I’m not her biggest fan. But that was the deal: I could stay in London with my grandmother and finish my A-levels on the proviso that I spend the summer with Dad. I didn’t want to, but I was so desperate to stay at home that I would have agreed to anything. Besides, I assumed he’d be too distracted with his new job and new wife to remember, but he did, and as cross as I was I must admit, I was quietly relieved not to be forgotten.

The weather was a blessing at first; the perfect excuse to escape the apartment and the stiff pleasantries Dad, Agatha and I exchanged every morning between sips of tea. ‘A proper summer for a change,’ he kept saying with a knowing smile, as though the city was a second-hand car he was trying to sell me. I should have known then what he was up to, but I was too busy gorging on the sunshine to question his motives.

This is your first time in Paris, right? Before the summer I’d only been here a few times myself. My father’s from Carcassonne, in the South, so I’ve only been here for the odd weekend, usually when I’ve charmed Dad into letting me tag along to whatever medical conference he’s speaking at. This is the first time I’ve been here in the summer, though. The city looks so different. It usually has a greyish hue, but in the sun, the buildings look scrubbed white and the sky’s huge, this bright, unbroken blue that reminds me how tiny I am.

At first, I loved it. I ate ice cream and drank pastis and sat in parks reading magazines until I fell asleep (probably because of the pastis, which, no matter how much I water it down, is still lethal). It was so perfect that I almost forgot that I didn’t want to be here. When the sun was at its hottest it reminded me of Barbados, of ambling around Brighton Farmer’s Market, my dress sticking to my back as my grandmother sniffed mangoes and chatted to the woman filleting fish. It’s a heat you can’t fight, that you just have to give in to, and Paris did. The whole city slowed, everyone surrendering to the weight of the sun. There wasn’t a bus worth running for, an occasion worth venturing out at midday for. The roads became sluggish, scooters not darting up and down them with the same urgency. I know there wasn’t one in London, but by July there was a water shortage here, which left the city smelling like the inside of a broken fridge. The fountains and sprinklers were turned off, leaving window boxes to wither and lawns to scorch.

Before long it was too hot to sit outside, which is the only joy of such vicious weather, so people began to lose their patience. I did, too. I had no idea it would get to me so much. After all, I usually divide my summers between my family in Carcassonne and Barbados, so it’s not like I’m not used to the heat. But there’s a vast difference between falling asleep on a beach and having to get the Metro when it’s so hot you can’t summon the energy to hold onto the handrail.

It made the city feel even more unwelcoming, but in the end, the heat was what united me with the Parisians. I’d roll my eyes at the person sitting opposite me on the bus as I fanned myself with the copy of 20 minutes I’d found on my seat or agree with the waiter that the weather was insufferable when he brought my pastis. ‘Il pleuvra bientôt,’ everyone kept saying. But it didn’t rain and the heat got thicker and thicker until it seemed to inhabit the city. I could feel it curling around me, licking at my skin when I walked down the street. Even inside you could feel the nearness of it, following you from room to room like a cat demanding to be fed.

At least in Barbados, in the shade of my aunt’s porch, the breeze soothed the sting of the sun. But here, I feel hemmed in, the buildings inching closer and closer every day. And there’s always someone in the way, a kid spilling Coke onto the already sticky pavement or someone trying to jump the queue at Carrefour. I get it now, why much of Paris is on les vacances from mid-July, but then I was surprised when some of the cafés began to close as well, tired of the complaints about the lack of air conditioning and the people who took up tables for hours so they could take off their shoes and rub sun cream into their burnt arms until the sun began its retreat.

Those who could headed South. We usually do, too, but even there it was unbearable. It was too hot for my grandparents, who headed to Toronto to spend the summer with my uncle and his family. So Dad suggested that when my boyfriend, Pan, got here (a condition he was forced to agree to if he wanted me to come) we go to Marseille instead. He said we could rent a boat and sail to Cassis, which sounded blissful until I realised ‘we’ included Agatha and I refused, reasoning that Paris in the summer couldn’t be more claustrophobic than being stuck on a boat with her for five days.

It got even hotter after that, as if to spite me, so by the end of July, the city began to wilt, the news reporting melting roads and fights in supermarkets over the last bag of ice. I started to walk everywhere. Not that it was easier, but it was better than enduring the stuffiness of the Metro or the white and turquoise buses that chug around the city belching out even more heat. So when July melted into August – not long before I got in touch with you, actually – I was tired of it, exhausted by the perpetual stickiness that cold showers only offered a brief respite from.

One particularly heinous day, I caught myself praying for rain. I never thought I’d miss London’s grey skies, but I did. And I missed silly things like socks and jeans and wearing my hair down. But most of all, I missed sleep. Eight hours of sweet, deep sleep swaddled in dry sheets.

That morning – the one I was meeting you at Gare du Nord – I shouldn’t have been late. I was actually awake before my alarm went off and watched the sun rise between the gap in the curtains until it cast a hot white line across my bedroom floor. I’m not a morning person, I admit – I usually have to be lured out of bed with the promise of tea and a lift to college – so if it hadn’t been so hot I might have questioned why I was awake, if the heavy ache in my bones that pinned me to the bed was a sign. It wasn’t, of course, but when things like this happen I guess it’s human nature to look for something – anything – to explain it. Not just because I need closure, but to understand why I did it so that I can say something other than sorry.

I think that’s why I’m writing this. Dad told me to talk to you and I tried. I did. I even tried writing it down, which is why the first few pages of this notebook have been torn out, in case you were wondering where they were. I talked to you about everything I could think of, about the rain and the bird that comes to sit on your windowsill who I’ve named Dave and the nurse who prays for you even though Agatha’s told her not to. But I kept coming back to this, to what I did. I don’t understand it and I need to because I never want to do something like it again.

That sounds selfish – this is about you not me – but it would be easy to let this make me harder. I’m trying not to, but I don’t always succeed. That isn’t an excuse, rather an admission, because there’s a reason why I am the way I am. Maybe one day, when you’re better, you’ll let me tell you about that, too, but I think you already know. Hearts aren’t bones, are they? When they break they don’t knit back together, they stay broken. We just have to be careful what we use to fill the crack. That’s not to say I can’t change, because in my weaker moments, usually at night when I can’t sleep and I can’t remember what I’m so angry about, I let myself wonder if I knew what was going to happen that morning. After all, my restlessness was due to more than just the heat. I couldn’t sleep because I was having second thoughts, wasn’t I? That’s why I wrote that email at 4 a.m., telling you not to come. But I couldn’t get the words right and by 8 a.m. it was too late, your train had already left.

So I know there was no sign, no nudge from the Universe warning me that something was going to happen. I was so slow that morning – dropping my toothbrush in the sink twice then forgetting to wash the conditioner out of my hair – because I was exhausted. I don’t even know why I thought there was a sign. I don’t believe in stuff like that any more. There’s no such thing, only what we tell ourselves after these things happen so we don’t feel so useless. But the truth is, if I hadn’t done those things – dropped my toothbrush in the sink and not washed the conditioner out of my hair – I wouldn’t have been late and I would have been at Gare du Nord as well.

I’ve never found money in the street or won anything except for a swimming ribbon when I was four just for getting in the pool, so I’ve never considered myself particularly lucky. Especially that morning when I left the apartment much later than I intended so I was not only forced to take the Metro, but to run to catch it. By then it was 11.30 a.m. so the rue de Rennes was cluttered with tourists, most of whom were seeking shelter under the awnings of the few cafés that were still open. I could see from their red faces that they’d been caught out by the sun, no doubt thrilled when they first arrived until they were battered down by it, like the rest of us.

I don’t know how they could have been unprepared. It was all anyone talked about for weeks – the heatwave. People were dying. Parliament had been recalled from summer break. Planes couldn’t take off, their wheels stuck in the tarmac. All of this when the sun should have been dimming as everyone’s thoughts turned towards autumn, to jumpers and chestnut soup and going back to school. It was the last day of August so I was thinking about college, too, about being back in grey, grumpy London where I could wear a leather jacket without fainting.

Don’t ask me why I wore a leather jacket that morning. Another moment of madness, I guess. I could feel the collar sticking to the back of my neck as I ran towards Saint-Sulpice with all the grace of a newborn colt in my unlaced DMs. I was about to take it off when I neared the Metro and saw something was wrong. There was a gaggle of tourists gathered at the top of the stairs, frowning at their maps, and I remember muttering, ‘No, no, no,’ when I realised it was shut.

If I let myself, I’d say that was a sign, too, but at the time I didn’t think anything of it, assuming it was down to another track fire because of the heat as I tried to hail a cab. I don’t know why I didn’t keep going and take the Metro from Saint-Germain-des-Prés instead, but when I checked my watch and realised that your train was arriving in twelve minutes, panic got the better of me. It shouldn’t, but it makes me feel better in a way, making such a silly decision. Cabs are scarce enough that no Parisian would bother trying to hail one, especially on a Sunday. That’s what makes me feel better, not that it meant that I wasn’t at Gare du Nord when it happened, but that I’m still not a Parisian. I feel like one sometimes, when I’m giving someone directions or trying to find another charm for my bracelet at La Perlerie. And I don’t know when that happened, when the city began to feel like a pair of shoes I’d worn in.

My grandmother says it’s because I’m fearless. You’re my age so I think you get that. Do you even know how brave it was to come here by yourself? At least I had my father, even if I wasn’t talking to him. So maybe we are fearless. Fearless not in the fighting dragons sort of way, but in that way you can only be when you’re seventeen and scared of everything and nothing, all at once. But I like to think Paris has something to do with it as well. Quiet, charming Paris that you can’t help but fall in love with, like a boy you know will break your heart. And just like falling in love with those boys, falling in love with the city was something that just happened, even though I refused to unpack. I think that’s what surprised me more than anything, how the fridge in the apartment began to fill up with the fig yogurts I couldn’t stop eating. And I kept buying stuff for my room. Flowers and candles and postcards that I stuck around the frame of my mirror, next to the photos of me and Pan. Old ones I’d bought from a stall on the Left Bank which, when translated, weren’t that interesting, but looked so romantic, the ink faded to grey so it looked like the words would eventually disappear altogether.

I’ll deny it if my father ever asks because I don’t want him to know that he was right – I do love Paris – but somewhere between arriving in a huff in June and that sunny August morning in Saint-Sulpice, Paris had become, not home exactly, but it didn’t feel like I was on holiday any more, either. I even felt a shiver of pride the first time someone recognised my sing-songy accent and asked if I was from Carcassonne as well. Even so, I was still a tourist, because there I was, running up rue du Vieux-Colombier trying to nab a cab before it pulled onto rue de Rennes.

It didn’t make a difference, though. I remember feeling the collar of my jacket sticking to the back of my neck again as I stopped on the corner and looked up the street, hoping to see one with its light on. The day before it had peaked at forty-one . . .