My Little Blue Dress (11 page)

“Hail. Where is everyone?”

“Hail. It's New Year's Eve. Sometimes we do do something here, but this year the owner's away on business so . . .”

“Look, is it okay if I just drink? I mean do I have to order an appetizer, or . . . ?”

“No, no. That's fine. Have a seat. What'll it be?”

“Mm . . . brandy.”

At a table by the window I sipped thoughtfully from a tumbler. Snow was still falling in the street outside, the flakes so fat and heavy it seemed absurd that they should hit the ground and make no sound. A year was ending, a decade too, and the barman sat at a table by the fire with his own little glass of something, totaling columns of figures in a big parchment ledger with a quill pen that he filled from an inkpot. The flames of the fire fluttered, the pen scratched hypnotically . . .

. . .
and suddenly I was in the function room of a cheap hotel, a guest at a surprise party to welcome in the Nineteen Thirties. Every other guest was a decade. The Twenties were there, in a floppy jazz hat and a string of pearls, dancing crazily while trying not to spill a little glass of absinthe . . . The Teens stood erect and apart in military fatigues, sucking on the end of a pencil while they worked on a poem about life in the trenches . . . The Zeros were off to one side in Victorian garb, basking in their own personal downpour of new-century optimism . . .

Suddenly footsteps! I dove for the lightswitch and we stood in the blackness with thumping hearts as the footsteps
crescendoed, the squeak of the handle . . . SURPRISE!!!!! we yelled at the figure in the doorway, a . . . a nondescript man in a white T-shirt . . . with hair of ordinary length. I looked at him harder, the veins in my forehead popping out.

He mumbled something I couldn't hear . . . in a voice I couldn't describe
 . . .

“Hey! Hey!” The barman stood above me in a raincoat and a fedora. “You were shouting.”

“Where are you . . . where are you going?” I didn't want him to leave. Not yet. Not now.

“I'm going to a party.”

“No, please, I . . . not alone. Please.” I wrenched apart the front of my blouse and invitingly cupped my breasts. “Don't leave.”

It was no use. The man sensibly ignored me. “There's a set of keys on top of the register. Lock up when you leave. Happy New Year.”

With that the barman departed.

And boulevards away, a drunken crowd began the New Year countdown.

Ten.

Nine.

Eight.

I wasn't
ready
. I wasn't
ready
for the thirties.

Seven.

What would they be like? What would the world be like?

Six.

Five. I fell off my chair, felt my face crash where the floor met the wall.

Four. I . . .

I . . .

[jesus fucking christ what the fuck is a slope of foreboding? hmm?”

you MUST know something else. thirties

thirties thirties, come on THINK

if you can survive not sounding even faintly like an infant or a yokel or a girl of any description you can wing it through the thirties despite total gaping ignorance

time now is
27 AUG--7:53
P
.
M
.

a.k.a. only 30 yrs done in nine hours—half of it wasted on typing word “eloïse” a million times. Did she HAVE to have an umlaut? MÖRÖN?

fucking only ten hours left so TYPE LIKE THE WIND—and also obviously like an incredibly old woman recalling her life in the 1930s.

stakes = INFINITELY high

and delete all notes to self when finished, obviously

27 AUG--7:54
P
.
M
.]

 

Three.

Two.

One.

“Happy New Year.”

1930–1939
NEW INTERIORS

[27 AUG--7:54
P
.
M
.]

T
O START WITH,
reader, I really thought I was fine. The ceiling of the
apartement
looked the same as it always had. Checking my body with my hand I felt no blood, wet or dry, and when I swung my feet to the floor and sat up, I felt no sharp, stabbing pains. Greatly relieved, I commenced my usual morning routine: get to feet, pull on bathrobe, kettle on stove,
tick tick whoosh
of gas, go to bathroom, sit down, urinate, stand up, back into main body of room, activate radio with hand . . .

An announcer was reading the news. Unbidden, my right hand scrabbled for the off switch.

Silence.

I looked at the hand, then ran to the bathroom to be sick.

Something was wrong with me.

Hunger forced me up again at twenty past eleven. Obviously it would be about a decade before I could show my face at the restaurant downstairs, but there was a new crepe place a few boulevards over that I'd had my eye on. I slung on my poncho, grabbed my keys, and started thundering down the stair. I made it as far as the final staircase.

Somebody was on our doorstep, some sort of news urchin, waving a rolled-up newspaper at passersby and urging them to buy it.

I felt sick again, and I remember thinking to myself, Oh dear. If he's going to insist on standing there and shouting that . . . stuff, then I shall not be able to leave the building.

And I went back upstairs.

U
PSTAIRS, USING THE
'phone at the end of the hall, I put a call through to the crepe place and ordered a delivery, then I hurried back to bed and pulled the covers over my face.

My crepe arrived very quickly. I sprang up and ran to the door to receive it. My voice didn't sound like my own when I said:

“Hail there. How much do I owe you?”

“Hello lady!” The delivery boy was of ethnic, possibly Algerian, origin with kinky hair and had a big toothy smile. “How you today!”

“Sorry,
how
much?”

I could see my bag of food dangling right there at his side but the boy wasn't even
trying
to give it to me. “Oh lady!” he exclaimed, eyebrows shooting skyward. “You hear about office workers in America?”

I winced.

“Look, can I . . . can I just have my food, please? I have the money right here.”

“They all suicide themself. Issin all da papers!”

“Look . . .” I felt myself flushing red. “Look, you
have
to give me the food. I ordered it and it's mine and . . .” Falling to my knees I scooped a dripping bouquet of notes and coins out of my handbag. It looked like a head of lettuce dipped in mercury. I thrust the money at the lad, grabbed for the bag, and slammed the door.

Inside, on my bed, despite not knowing what was happening at all in my life anymore, I successfully unwrapped my spinach and crabmeat crepe and tipped it onto a plate. Hell, I even managed to hack off a little piece with my fork and get it in my mouth . . . but then the food sort of fell back on the plate again because I was crying and my mouth wouldn't chew.

Whatever it was hadn't gone away.

In fact it was getting worse.

In the same way that some people's digestive systems can't process milk, I, for some appalling reason, had
lost the ability to process information
.

I
T WAS AN
insane
thing to have happened, an
unbelievable
thing.

But happened it had.

Nowadays in the twenty-first century, of course, we're a lot more evolved in our understanding of the human mind than we were back then. These days we accept without question that not only
can
conditions like information-phobia suddenly cut people down in their prime, but that it happens
all the time. In fact, let me quote to you briefly from
The Caregiver's Bible
by Dr. Steven Hearne.

As weeks turn to months, increasingly the caregiver and care receiver find themselves inhabiting a sphere of lonely isolation. Curtains are drawn, newspaper subscriptions canceled or allowed to lapse, as the caregiver seeks to obliterate all evidence that an outside world even exists. At best the outside world is of no use to her, at worst it may even contribute to the chaos within the home against which she wages a daily battle.

Obviously Dr. Hearne is talking specifically about information-phobia as it afflicts
caregivers
—a caregiver being a person who spends their days looking after another person who is terminally sick or elderly (hello!)—but I offer it here as evidence that from time to time people genuinely do find themselves in the same situation I was in on January 1, 1930. I have a caregiver myself, like most people over a hundred, and he has it himself. Although he doesn't draw the curtains (we don't
have
any curtains) he rarely leaves the apartment if it isn't absolutely essential.

Back in Paris, though, of course, at the dawn of the nineteen thirties, not only had I never heard of anything like this happening to anyone, I had no idea what might have caused it. Could it be Eloïse? Had I suffered some weird delayed reaction to her leaving? That's how the ends of relationships tend to work, after all. You feel euphoric for forty minutes, delirious at having successfully extricated yourself with zero pain . . . and then boom. The forty minutes expire and you spend the next three years drinking beer and not shaving.
Had the shock of losing Eloïse unhinged me . . . ? Or maybe the shock of turning thirty . . . ?

I didn't know.

But it didn't matter.

The key thing was to work out what I was going to do about it.

I
HAD TO
get out of France, that much I was sure of. I loved the French, loved them like brothers, but they were famously prone to all sorts of obscure cultural upheavals and revolutions in which even people cloistered away in garrets would be expected to participate, and I couldn't afford to take that risk.

England.

I wanted to go back to England. As alien and foreign as the whole universe had suddenly come to seem, some places were less alien and foreign than others, and the more I thought about England, the more I found myself rehashing the plotline of one of my favorite childhood books, this book about some children and their nanny and all the fun they had indoors without ever going outside.

Should I do that? I wondered. Go be a nanny.

Or should I do something else?

I
COULDN'T THINK
of anything else.

M
R.
M
ONTGOMERY GREETED
me at the foot of the steps that led up to his large terraced house in a formerly grand residential district of London. He looked just as I'd
imagined him on the 'phone: tall and stooped, in bowler hat and threadbare suit, with long soft eyelashes and peaked angular features that betrayed the strain of the last few months. His wife had just died, they had told me at the agency, of a long complaint, leaving Mr. M to raise their two children: Veronica, six, and Peter, four. That was where I came in.

“You encounter me in a state of some urgency,” said Mr. Montgomery, using the clipped and proper tones of the English upper classes, “I was anticipated at the bank in the ante-meridiem period and it is now the post-meridiem period. Please make yourself at home. Peter and/or Veronica will show you to your quarters while Cook shall prepare for you a nourishing sandwich,” and with that he was off, expertly pumping his umbrella as he stalked to the end of the street and out of sight around the corner. Tilting my head I admired the tall white house, its peeling paint, its faded grandeur, then dragged my hat boxes up the steps and through a heavy front door that I hoped I wouldn't have to see the other side of for at least ten years.