after he’d had a week trying to find where in God’s name you could buy hummingbird down for a doll’s-house cushion.
‘Mallard ducks have got feathers the same colour,’ Joe said, which surprised him. He was still getting to know himself, and he hadn’t realised he was that crafty.
Henrique told him that if he was too sharp he’d cut himself, but Joe caught him looking speculatively into the butcher’s window.
On the wall of the butcher’s shop, there was graffiti in English. It said,
WHERE IS EVERYONE??
Joe had a strange drop right in his stomach. He didn’t know what did the dropping, but some internal lift-shaft had just gone wrong. ‘What does that mean?’
Henrique only glanced at it. ‘Uh. Crackpots,’ he said crossly. ‘It’s election time. You know what happened to you, the epilepsy, and then the remembering things wrong? Happens to a lot of people. Except some of them are too stupid to understand what epilepsy is. They think they’re missing relatives and the government has drugged them and erased all the records.’
‘Could they have, though? Been drugged, or …’
Henrique snorted. ‘Well, my mistress is seeing a gentleman who sits in the Senate, and if he’s anything to judge by, the government couldn’t get opium to a Chinaman, never mind drug all of England.’ He gave Joe’s shoulder a squeeze and said nothing else about it.
Joe had to admit he couldn’t see how or why anyone might have pulled that off. But now that he had seen the writing on the wall once, he kept seeing it in other places: on the sides of old carts, in public toilets (there was a stamp on the Responsibility Card even for that) and then, once, outside St Paul’s Cathedral. Every single time he saw it, he wondered about Madeline.
After another three months, the mortgage labour on the attic was all paid off, and Joe was officially free after thirty-five years of service. M. Saint-Marie threw a small party and cried over his wine. Joe hugged him, feeling guilty. Saint-Marie was getting older, and poorer, and he didn’t go to Paris for the season any more. Most of his friends had left him behind, and now it must have felt like his household was doing the same thing.
‘I know you’re a grown man now, I know, but I’ve had you since you were tiny. I hate the idea of booting you out in the world and no one responsible for you but yourself …’
‘You silly hen,’ Joe said, touched. ‘You’re not booting me anywhere. I’ll still be living in the attic. I worked long enough for it.’
‘You won’t leave?’
‘No,’ Joe said, and smiled when Saint-Marie let out a relieved laugh. It was the first time since the Gare du Roi that he felt like he belonged.
Alice was overjoyed with freedom – she burned all her old Responsibility Cards in a pot on the windowsill and then dyed her grey day dress maroon with wine – but Joe didn’t like it. He felt exposed going out without the stamp card or Henrique. In the week he went out job hunting, just as the weather turned bitter, he was stopped and searched twice by the gendarmes for no reason. On the second occasion, he got a baton in the ribs for asking why. When he told Saint-Marie, Saint-Marie cut out the tartan lining of his coat. Losing it upset Joe a lot more than he wanted to say – that tartan was one of the few things that had been with him, wherever he’d gone in that lost time – but the gendarmes didn’t stop him again after that.
He didn’t want to leave the house for the next couple of days, but he had to gut up and do it on the following Monday. It was the middle of December, dim even at nine o’clock in the morning. The fires that burned at the top of the steelworks chimneys made an orange constellation above the weak street lamps, which were popping; there was always something wrong with the gas line.
Just outside the back door, he walked straight into the postman, who squeaked. The postman looked annoyed to have made such an unmanly noise, and thrust a piece of paper and a pen into Joe’s chest.
‘M. Tournier? Sign.’
‘What for?’ said Joe, who hadn’t ordered anything and didn’t know anyone. He squinted at the form. There was a line to sign on, and underneath in small transparent letters, recipient/recipient’s responsible citizen. He hesitated, because he didn’t have a signature