1. The End The fly that was at the top of the Tower was hanging on for dear life. The wind was fierce. It made him crouch and shudder. He ran in jerks to the edge of the metal and looked down at Paris, but his eyes were a videowall and split images made no sense. The wind dropped for a second and he twitched in the warmth of the sun, his back shining iridescent blue. In the silence he was still for a moment. Then he was in the air, hovering on the wind and spiralling down around the great Tower. At 10.59 a.m. on Monday March 31st, a fifteen year old boy climbed to the top of the highest tower in the world and leapt off. No body was ever found. He was called La Mouche – The Fly – and had tormented high society for a year with his magical dance over the rooftops of Paris. Acrobatic and graceful, he could swoop and soar, spin and tumble … he could fly. This story starts where it ends, one year before. Paris. March 31st 1889 2.00 p.m. The bluebottle flew down into the sounds of cheering and the music of a brass band. It was inauguration day for the Eiffel Tower and Gustave Eiffel was the proud man on the third level, holding his top hat against the wind, surrounded by honoured guests and journalists. M. Eiffel unfurled the French flag and waved to the crowd below. ‘Ten thousand tonnes, Monsieur Dubois,’ he shouted into the wind and noise, ‘and eight million francs. Nothing like it anywhere. Eighteen thousand pieces traced out to an accuracy of a tenth of a millimetre. This is the future, gentlemen.’ Some people called it magic, others said it was science. ‘Magnificent,’ muttered Dubois nervously, the journalist to his left , beginning to wish he had followed his usual habit of by-passing the event and making the story up over a beer at a city café. He decided to risk everything and let go of the handrail so that he could write. ‘Swaying ominously in the strong March wind,’ he wrote, ‘this arrogant ironmongery may prove to be the ruin of M. Eiffel…’ Fireworks intended to sound like a twenty-one gun salute interrupted his words and he looked down fearfully, grabbing the handrail once more. A bluebottle leapt out of the way and flew down towards a couple in the crowd on the ground, shading their eyes and looking upwards at the Tower. (The local Parisians were lost in admiration.) They tilted their heads slowly to the left. ‘What – a – monstrosity!’ said the man, finally. ‘They’ve put electric lights on that,’ said the woman, disbelievingly. The bluebottle flew off and circled a group of artists and intellectuals further back in the crowd. They were, likewise, spellbound. ‘What was he thinking of,’ whispered one, horrified. The others just shook their heads in disgust. But Laurent loved it. His sad blue eyes gazed in wonder at the tower. He loved the way it defied gravity and admired its daring and balance. Fourteen years old, he knew about reach and the desire for breaking free. He brushed the dark windswept hair away from his face, his large hands dirty and a little misshapen. He imagined his parents playing to the crowd … ‘Absolute silence, please, for Emile and Emilia, The Flying Rossinis!’ Emile leaps from his support in the Tower’s lattice ironwork and swings, his body arching and working the trapeze. Emilia does the same from her support opposite, they are building together, apart, then Emilia lets go, tumbling, four hands coming together. The crowd gasp, then scream as Emile grabs then drops … down, down … Laurent turned suddenly and ran back through the crowds and on towards the Seine. Clouds were drifting across the sky and the wind was turning colder. He turned right at the Pont de L’Alma, his favourite bridge, where the statues of the four soldiers seemed to hold up the arches. His favourite soldier on his favourite bridge was the proud and erect zouave with his baggy trousers and braided jacket. Not stopping for breath, he ran on beside the river on the south side. Paris was quiet here and it was unusual for Laurent to be free for a day. His mind was filled with the amazing Tower, all its latticework like a spider’s web waiting to trap a fly. Running on towards the Ile de la Cité and the immense, brooding cathedral of Notre Dame; Laurent looked up at its gargoyles silhouetted against the sky, all the terrors of Hell. He ran on and on down the broad Boulevards towards Belleville. The wide, tree-lined streets were busy with the noise of hooves on the cobbles and the drone of carriages and cabs, but Laurent’s mind was not on the traffic as he turned finally into a narrower street and inside a shabby hotel. There was a smell of urine and cabbage water in the stairwell, and as Laurent took the stairs two at a time he heard the banging and shouting of lives being led behind the doors of this dilapidated building. His chest was tight and his breathing heavy and painful as he swung around the iron balustrade on the third floor landing. His half-brothers were there, playing with a cat. ‘Hi, Laurent,’ said the six year old. Laurent was too breathless to reply. The three year old with matted white hair stood up to follow Laurent, struggling to carry the cat. ‘Don’t, Charlie,’ panted Laurent, his hand on the doorknob. ‘’pider, look!’ Charlie pointed to the scurrying legs up the wall, and looked up in awe at Laurent, the cat half-strangled as it slipped down his one-armed grip. ‘Look, Laurent!’ ‘Yes, spider. Let the cat go, Charlie, you’ll fall.’ ‘Ow! Cat!’ Charlie dropped the cat as it fought and scratched his legs. It bound away, back arched, dignity in tatters. Laurent did not get the kind of attention he expected from his father. As he opened the door he was rooted to the spot as a knife was thrown at him, just missing, and embedding itself in the door jamb, inches from his face. Laurent was rigid, his eyes wide. ‘Where’ve you been?’ shouted his father, his words slurred, saliva spurting and bubbling down his chin. He slumped down onto a wooden chair beside a small grease-stained table. ‘At the Tower,’ said Laurent. ‘I’ve only been gone an hour.’ He closed the door behind him and removed the knife from the jamb. As an ex-trapeze artist, Laurent’s father knew all about timing and balance. He took a bottle of wine from the table, put it to his lips, missed and fell over backwards on the chair, crashing onto the floor. Laurent awoke with a shiver. The two boys beside him on the filthy mattress had pulled the blanket off him. He tried to pull part of it gently back without disturbing them. He looked across the dusty floorboards to where his father lay snoring on the little iron bed. All was dark and still and he wondered what had woken him. He hadn’t been dreaming. Then a shuffling sound outside the door made his stomach lurch. He closed his eyes and lay still. The door burst open and his stepmother fell in, six feet six, drunk and crying. ‘Where are my babies?’ she wailed and leaned against the wall, then bent double and threw up over the floor. She straightened up, her huge frame swaying, sick drooling from her mouth. Laurent kept very still and breathed deeply as if asleep, aware of the drifting smell of tobacco and cheap scent. ‘Where are my babies?’ she moaned again, crying, and staggered across the room to the mattress where she fell on her knees and reached over Laurent to kiss each son tenderly on the forehead. But Laurent did not escape. He didn’t really expect to. She looked longingly at him for a moment, panting, then fell on his lips with hers, too passionately. Laurent retched against her tongue, her vomit, her sudden embrace. He tried to push her off as he always did but she was just too heavy. And too much resistance would wake his father who would then kill them both. But the ghost of Laurent’s beloved mother would appear to him at times of deepest despair with words of love and encouragement. And there she is now, behind him, gently rocking in her chair and smiling benignly. Always remember, Laurent, she says, greasy hands cost lives. And disappears. Laurent groaned as his stepmother began unbuttoning the front of her bodice. ‘Love me, Laurent, love me,’ she pleaded. ‘Get off. Please. Stop,’ gasped Laurent, struggling. He jerked his head away as she grasped his wrists and stroked her body with his hands, moaning and slurring unintelligibly. Against the opposite dark wall, where the old burgundy wallpaper is damp and peeling off and a jagged stain the shape of his complicity stabs too deeply into him, shimmering moonlight shadows begin to move into dancing black shapes, relentless and rhythmic, then stretch into a snake writhing, coiling and waiting to strike, then it explodes into a circus ring, bright colours and music and applause. Laurent gazed at the scene; a magician in top hat and black cape strides around the ring, his young assistant, yellow-haired, voluptuous and painted poses and applauds with the crowd. Laurent loved his Aunt Mimi. Twenty years ago she taught The Great Magnifico everything he knew. She turns her face to Laurent and smiles and winks and disappears. ‘Don’t. Don’t. DON’T!’ he hissed. ‘Please get off, I can’t breathe. No, don’t do that ….’ Laurent’s voice trailed away with his strength and resolve. Hunger had weakened him and the bottle seemed to have fortified his stepmother. He wondered how many men had dropped money into her hand that night, how many dark alleyways and dance-halls she had gone to. He saw her throw back her head in the streetlight and laugh and laugh, her huge bosom rising in the eerie glow, her male companions with bright eyes and eager step, touching their hats, touching her hand. Still pinned down, he closed his eyes as he heard the rustle of dark silk and his stepmother struggling with her skirts. ‘Our little … secret, Laurent, don’t forget, our secr …’ Eventually she collapsed on the floor beside him, snoring. In the dim moonlight he could see her thick white make-up and black eyeliner, smudged and tearstreaked. Her mouth was a large red stain as he imagined his own now was. He took a slow deep breath and sighed, squashed as he was between sleeping bodies, and began driving his hands hard against the mattress, trying to rid them of her. Carefully he reached up and wiped his face with a trembling hand. The darkness of the night was inside him. It was several hours before he fell asleep. Laurent was running again the following evening, this time home from work, another face darting through the crowds of workers. He was excited and couldn’t stop his face from laughing every now and then, such was the anticipation of getting out of the apartment for half an hour and seeing the Eiffel Tower illuminated by electric lights. He chided himself for his childish awe but the thought of the spectacle was irresistible. Paris came alive at night with dance halls and cafés, their lanterns dancing in the breeze, gas lights along the boulevards and now electric light on the fabulous buildings. The crisp, cold air seemed to intensify the colour and gaiety. Tired and cold as a fine mist of drizzle began to fall, Laurent turned up the collar of his jacket and screwed up his face against the wet. He saw through a shop window the butcher wrapping up a piece of meat for a customer and remembered being eight, one afternoon. He had been dragged off the street and brought to the bedside of his screaming stepmother. She was half naked on the bed and her knees were drawn up. The strange man and woman in his apartment made Laurent realise instantly that the game was up, he was going to be arrested and sent to the guillotine for their little secret. But then the man left and the woman yanked him beside her and said he was to assist. The first time he knew his stepmother was pregnant was when the baby arrived, blue and still, smeared with white vernix and blood. Now he understood that he must be the father and that was why he was here. The midwife took the baby away to revive it and told Laurent to catch the afterbirth. Assuming that must be clothes for the baby, he held out his hands ready. But with a heave from Eloise he found not clothes in his hands, but what appeared to be a platesized bloodclot. ‘Catch it in the newspaper, stupid boy,’ shrieked the midwife and she slapped him around the back of the head as he threw up over his stepmother’s leg. He didn’t think this was any way to treat a new father and bit his lip as he wrapped up the afterbirth. But the responsibilities of fatherhood had fallen on Laurent too suddenly and he had run out of the apartment leaving the crying baby, ruined Eloise, complaining midwife and spent the night between the dustbins behind the hotel, fending off the rats with his foot when they smelled the blood on his hands. He had emerged the following morning covered in soot from the concierge’s bad aim, and had nightmares afterwards about the yellow-eyed demons he had seen hiding in the bins, their evil clawing fingers, and their promise of damnation and hell. Of course now he knew a thousand Parisian men were much more likely to be the boy’s father than he was, but nagging childish doubts remained and he tried to be a good father to the boys in the small ways he could. He would look at them beside him on the mattress in the moonlight sometimes and search for likenesses. Out of a grand building to his left, stepped a woman beneath a black umbrella, held for her by a red faced gentleman in a top hat. She gathered her gold taffeta skirts to step into a cab, but her eyes met Laurent’s as he passed and for one of those brief, brief moments which seem to last an age, she could not look away. The trance was only broken as he passed behind the cab out of her sight, but he looked around as he ran on and saw the gentleman looking his way momentarily, before he too disappeared into the cab. He heard the cabdriver wake up the horses and pull away. The wind curled and whipped up some pages of an old newspaper in a corner of the buildings carrying them upwards past the windows, in jerks, higher and higher, and watched by a small black and white dog whose front paws lifted off the ground with every protesting bark. As the newspapers reached the roof, Laurent saw two women, dressed in black, beneath a lifting umbrella, lean into the wind as they passed, their skirts billowing momentarily. Once they passed the turbulence of the corner they trotted on their way, heads inclined together, laughing and chattering. He ran on across the wide boulevard, across the tram rails measuring them with each stride and close enough in front of a horse-drawn tram, filled with passengers, for the driver to stand up in his seat in shock and yell, ‘Oi, watch out!’ and then more loudly after Laurent, ‘Little shit!’ Laurent gave him the finger in reply and disappeared around the corner, smiling, and into another street. Nothing bothered him tonight. The bubble of excitement in his chest made him feel indestructible and alive. Along the length of a high wall bridging two buildings, were posters advertising all manner of leisure and entertainment. In the dim gaslight Laurent could see posters peeling off and flapping in the wind, some overlapping others. Cabaret and circuses, music halls, concerts and clubs invited Parisians with money to dance and drink into the early hours. Poorer workers could go to the dowdy taverns and cafes for coffee or absinthe and whole families would save francs on heat and light, old men would play dominoes or cards and fall asleep, face down on the tables. Outside homeless men would shuffle across the cobbles stooping to pick up cigar butts, tossed from the carriages of the rich. A poster advertising Cirque Fernando caught Laurent’s eye. A white horse with a ballerina on its back prancing around the ring were distorted in the lamplight and Laurent was jolted by the sudden memory of his mother’s fall and the odd dull thud of her body as it hit the floor, hair strewn across her open eyes … he couldn’t hold back the flow of memories now … five years old, hands clasped on his knees, head craned back, believing they could fly. Some things were so clear … the puff of white resin on his father’s hands, particles momentarily suspended in the light … late night grown-up conversation around a camp fire whilst the animals paced in their cages, reminiscing over days past. Faces in the dancing firelight laughing about Armand the elephant trainer who had shot himself during the Paris siege after they ate his elephant. Most of the animals had followed the same fate to stop the people starving to death. Laurent blew into his hands, white and numb from the cold, the palms with permanent dark calluses in the centre, not white resin, the fingers crooked and scarred from tangles with the machines, not stretched aloft to take the applause. Eventually he turned into the familiar Rue D’Arbeche where the cobbles were greased and slippery with rain, shining dull yellow in the gaslights. The hotel Bonnaccord was painted blue half way up and had rotten shutters, which had lost most of their blue paint and one of which was hanging off. Beneath a broken glass lantern, painted in large letters, were the words ‘Hôtel Bonnaccord’, and underneath in smaller ones; ‘Proprietor Deschamps’. It was difficult to read because great lumps of plaster were missing. He crept inside and closed the doors behind him as silently as he could, wincing at the creak, watching the concierge’s lodge all the time for signs of life. Winning on two counts, he thought, as he took the first stairs, but then … ‘Laurent!’ Laurent hunched at the sound of Monsieur Deschamps’ yell, but continued upwards, avoiding rotting refuse on the stairs. First landing: ‘I want some fucking rent from you, boy!’ Laurent shook hands with his friend Jacques briefly as they passed each other. Second landing: ‘It’s two weeks, now! You’ll be out on the fucking street, mark my words!’ Third landing: ‘I could fill your room with a hundred folk better than the pissheads up there!’ Laurent looked back and shouted, ‘Yeah!’ But Jules was suddenly in front of him. ‘Hello, gorgeous.’ He grabbed Laurent’s jacket lapels and flung him against the wall. ‘What’s up, circus boy?’ he said, leaning heavily on him with his chest. ‘No money?’ with mock concern. ‘Again?’ Laurent looked away. He wasn’t interested in this. ‘Why don’t you get a better job? In the Cirque D’Hiver, I hear they want clowns. You won’t need make-up with a face like that.’ He spat in Laurent’s face and swaggered away, winking at him and blowing him a kiss as he sidled down the stairs. ‘Night, night, darling.’ Laurent proceeded down the landing, running his hand along the drab green wall and thinking about the Tower. But before he could open his own door, his neighbour’s daughter opened her’s and popped her pasty face out, looking to right and left like a chicken. ‘Oh, Laurent, I thought I heard you. Watch him,’ she warned, nodding towards Laurent’s door. ‘He’s in a temper tonight.’ She smiled shyly and slammed her door. Françoise was not popular with the adult tenants because she coughed all night. Every night. Sometimes during the day she would cough until she almost drowned in the froth, then she would vomit. Laurent listened to her most nights as he lay awake and sometimes after a prolonged attack he would listen harder to the silence that followed, thinking she was dead. But then she’d start up again. The concierge said she was consumptive and would be dead in a year. He remembered the summer before when he had kissed her for a dare. Jules had asked him if he had given her the tongue and he had said he had but it was a lie. It had made his skin prickle with desire and dread. The concierge’s son, Jules, had developed a system of penalties for boys who left the front doors open. It was a choice between a duel and a dare, so of course no-one chose to duel. Snog the Sicko or you get beaten up, was the favourite dare, until this year when Jules upgraded it to Fuck the Sicko. But he was irritated to discover that half the boys had ignored the penalty system and were fucking her anyway. The other half, he suspected, were leaving the door open on purpose in the hopes that they could. As for the girl, she found sex a pleasant distraction from the coughing and was thrilled and bewildered that in her skeletal state she was such a success with men. As it happened, none of the boys caught consumption and she didn’t die. Laurent hesitated with his hand on the doorknob, trying to prepare himself for what might come; Knives? Forks? Spoons? Unlikely, they didn’t have any. Everything seemed funny tonight. The familiar bellowing voice of his father met him. ‘Where’ve you been?’ Laurent pulled off his jacket, still breathless. ‘I’ve been at work,’ he replied patiently, but looked at his father with wary eyes. ‘You know where I’ve been.’ ‘I’ve been waiting,’ roared his father. Dark and sallow and now in his fifties, the old circus life was still evident, etched in the declining musculature of his body. Square and stocky, his face sagged from his need for the bottle. ‘Where’s the wine?’ Laurent was beginning to panic now. ‘Isn’t there any?’ Then, out of nowhere, with a curse and a growl, the back of Laurent’s father’s hand hit him across the face and he was on the floor, dazed. Grabbing him by his shirt, his father pulled Laurent up and jerked him closer. ‘You’ve drunk it all!’ ‘I haven’t. Let me go.’ Laurent’s father reached for an empty wine bottle on the table and smashed it against the edge. ‘You drank it all! You drank it!’ ‘No!’ gasped Laurent, terrified. ‘Put that down. Please.’ His father, blinded with rage, sank the jagged edge of the bottle into Laurent’s back. After a few sickening, silent moments, his father withdrew a little, the bloody bottle still clenched in his hand. Laurent could feel something warm running down the back of his leg. A pool of blood began to ooze around his foot. His half brothers were flattened against the wall in fear, the eldest crying in violent sobs, the younger crying because the elder was crying. Laurent put his hand to his back and looked from his father to his own bloody hand. Time seemed to have stopped. No sound. Nothing moved. Then, as if jolted back into sense, he turned and ran from the room, down the stairs, his hand pressed to his back. Across the dark street and down another, breathless and dizzy and scared. ‘Laurent?’ called a woman from a doorway. ‘Are you looking for Mimi? She’s over there.’ Laurent looked to where the finger was pointing and saw his aunt seated at a café table in the street, laughing with a group of friends. He swayed and grabbed a nearby streetlamp for support. He couldn’t shout, he couldn’t run. His vision was beginning to blur, and he didn’t see Mimi’s friend nudge her and gesture towards Laurent. ‘Isn’t that your nephew?’ she said, trying to see through the heads of others at the café. Mimi broke off her conversation at the mention of the boy and stood up to see, smiling. But the smile fell away abruptly when she saw him against the lamppost, the blood dark in the streetlight. Ashen faced, she pushed away from the table of unnoticing friends, knocking over her chair, striding over a sprawling black dog, and struggled through other chairs and tables into the street and over to Laurent. ‘What on earth …’ she began, her voice breaking. Her hands flitted over him, looking for the wound. ‘Oh, my God,’ she whispered as she saw his back. ‘Come on. Quick.’ She prised his shaking hands from the lamppost and helped him to the doorway of a building across the street. Laurent could see his feet clearly, one, then the other, but didn’t know how he was walking. He couldn’t feel his legs. He couldn’t feel anything. But he saw his diamond breath in the cold night air more beautiful than ever before and he could see the rain on the cobbles, each shining dome, the refuse blown against the wall. The next thing he knew was the cool of a pillow at his face and the familiar lavender smell of his Aunt’s apartment. He wasn’t frightened anymore. He saw the picture of the brown-eyed nun on the wall, eyes he’d looked at since he was small. He would be safe here in this simple room, white lace on the dresser and bed, clean. ‘I can’t stay there,’ he panted. ‘He’s gone mad. He’s trying to kill me, I swear he is.’ He closed his eyes and whispered, ‘Is it bad?’ and began to sink into the soft bed, down and down, his Aunt’s voice fading, down and down … Mimi pressed a clean sheet to Laurent’s wound and held it there, suddenly aware, as tears patted onto the cloth, that she was crying. She wiped away her tears roughly, before he caught her. Laurent’s skin was as white as the sheets, his beautiful face swollen and red. She looked at his perfect body and saw beneath the bloodsoaked rags all the scars and damage and neglect of his fourteen years. She removed the sheet and smiled. The wound had gone. ‘There’s nothing there, my love.’ Laurent turned gingerly onto his back, his face beginning to bruise already. ‘I’m just trying to hold everything together. But it’s falling apart.’ He swung his legs carefully over the side of the bed and sat still for a moment. ‘I know,’ murmured Mimi. ‘’It’s all too hard.’ Laurent’s control was getting away from him. ‘I can’t do it anymore.’ He put his head into his hands, his fingers in his hair, and began to weep. Mimi touched his head and got up. ‘Here.’ She returned to sit beside her nephew and put a drink into his hand. He wiped his eyes on his sleeve and sipped from the glass. It was brandy. He felt it warm all the way to his stomach. A sudden movement on the bed caught his glance, and he watched a bluebottle for a moment lift one leg over its eye as if to wash it. It did it again. Then with the other leg and the other eye. ‘Sometimes I dream I can fly,’ he said softly, still watching the bluebottle. ‘I go over the rooftops at night. I see the light glittering … I’m free …’ He looked up at Mimi. ‘But then I fall, I always fall, and I’m back in bed and Dad’s kicking me to get up.’ He lifted his shirt to show Mimi his bruised ribs, and smiled ruefully. ‘If only.’ ‘You dream, my love.’ Laurent looked away. ‘Ah, what’s the point? I can’t escape this. It’s hopeless. Just tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, all the same, just the same.’ He shivered. ‘He’ll come and find me. He always does.’ The sound of someone approaching the door made them look up. A man’s voice, groaning and swearing. Someone banged furiously on the door. ‘Where is he?’ came the familiar voice. ‘Give him here!’ ‘Laurent’s not here, Emile,’ called Mimi calmly. ‘Go home, you’re drunk.’ Laurent’s father hammered his fist against the door once more, making it tremble. ‘He is here. I can see the blood, woman. Give him here.’ Mimi went over to the door and slipped out. Laurent could hear murmuring and growling. When she came back Laurent wasn’t sure … ‘Has he gone?’ Mimi nodded. ‘Why is he doing this? He shook his head slowly. ‘I don’t understand.’ ‘He dropped your mother, Laurent, and he can’t forgive himself. He can’t move on. All he has now are grief and regret, without that he has nothing. It’s become his life. You must be a constant reminder.’ She looked closely at Laurent and began to speak more definitely. ‘Sometimes when we reach for something new … we have to let go of something old.’ She looked across the room at the window and added softly, ‘He’s trying to reach but can’t let go and it’s tearing him in two.’ Laurent sighed and got to his feet. Mimi followed him to the door. He opened it and looked carefully about; the corridor was empty, the stairs were empty. He pulled open the double front doors. ‘Goodnight, Madame Concierge,’ called a man’s voice from the stairs. Mimi turned around briefly and called a reply. She watched Laurent in the doorway, his outline sparkling in the streetlight. Still. Waiting. On Monday, April 1st 1889, at 8pm, at a temperature of three degrees Fahrenheit something beautiful happened in the cloud high above the Rue Villiers. Six tiny spikes of ice became lace, then another, then another, all different, all perfect. Some people called it magic, others said it was science. ‘It’s snowing.’ Mimi’s voice behind Laurent was surprised. He wrapped his arms around his shivering body. ‘I don’t feel sorry for him,’ he said simply, looking at the few falling snowflakes. He lifted his face to the snow and the relentless beat of time and closed his eyes. ‘Oh, for something wonderful.’ Mimi smiled sadly at him, tears running down her face. ‘Go fly, Laurent,’ she called and swept her arm across the air behind him. Silently, Laurent began to crouch down. Then, with arms outstretched to embrace the night, he leapt up. And up.