For Xinty, who didn’t get the chance to go.  

The traboule was lit – not brightly, but in the soft glow that enhances areas below ground like golden foundation on paler skin. The light bathed the stone walls and the low ceiling in a blushing yellow. It was like walking through the quiet heart of a flame.

Down here, in the tortuous little passages that wound between streets and through buildings like the cracks in a great flawed diamond, it was silent. She walked slowly, her eyes half-shut, each footfall stirring up breaths of ancient dust.

She was alone. She carried a tall backpack; in her left hand she held a map of Lyon, in her right a sketchpad and a pencil case, the latter dangling from her little finger.

Ahead, the yellow walls swelled outwards like a widening river and gave out into a stone courtyard out of the sixteenth century. Around the irregular clearing, quaint stone steps with their elaborately-carved banisters crept up the walls like wisteria vines, blooming into tiny doors in the walls. The walls themselves were infested with Gothic whorls of black wrought-iron that coiled in crevices and festooned doorjambs like a widow’s curls.

With measured steps, she walked into the middle of the courtyard, and then she looked up. The courtyard was open to the air, and the buildings swam together overhead to frame a jigsaw piece of the sky. The sky itself: a geometrical shape cut out of turquoise paper and pasted like a chip of vivid light in the pages of a dark scrapbook, a slice of colour in a film noir world. In the gloom of the Gothic courtyard, the piece of sky shone.

She set down her bag on the old stones; then she knelt, like a pilgrim in supplication, and lifted her face to the clear blue. Kneeling before the dark well where the traboules converged, with colour pouring from her fingers onto the clean page, she drew the sky.

*

When she emerged into the open, it was five in the evening and everything was turning pink. As she walked along the banks of the Saõne, the whole world began to blush; by the time she reached the bridge, the blush had deepened to a full musky rose.

She crossed the bridge and wandered through the rues till the sun set. In the face of autumn, the trees had yellowed into skeletons; now, like black netted filigree, they laced themselves up against the sky.

She found a café off a street corner, one Café de la Republique, and went in. The interior was smoky and cramped. She dropped the backpack on a rickety chair and sat down on the one opposite it. The smoke pressed against her face, snuck up her nostrils and pried at her thin drawn lips.

The waiter was a boy her age, perhaps older; he was tall and thin, his elbows jutting out above his apron like clothes-hangers. He scrutinized her through the smoke as if he was trying to see the Mona Lisa through the milling crowds of the Louvre. “What would you like, mademoiselle?”

“Soup and coffee, please. Cream of tomato and espresso.”

He wrote it down without taking his eyes off her. “Be right back,” he said, and pushed away towards the kitchen through the narrow spaces between the marble pentagons of tabletops.

When he returned with the meal, she had removed her leather coat and hung it behind her chair. Outside the chill of evening was setting in; inside the heat was stifling. She spooned up the soup, mopped every stain clean with the accompanying bread, downed the espresso in one breath.

She paid the boy. “Thank you,” he said as she buttoned the coat over the money. “Come again?” She said nothing, and went out into the already darkened street.

Along the streets, the leaves devoured the pavements and spread in oceans across the road. They blocked the drains and built civilizations at the kerb. At corners they ambushed her; one gust of wind and they flew up in arms, filling the air, whirling and chattering like a flock of crows till they descended upon her. She paid them no heed, crunching methodically through their oceans as if she had something else on her mind.

She walked past a school, the Lycée Edouard-Herriot, slipping deftly through the clusters of students in their fashionable black coats and clouds of cigarette smoke. She walked to Foch, and then from Foch to Masséna. She passed the lone bright sign of the métro station, followed the rues and reached the Parc de la Tête d’Or.

The park was huge and deserted, apart from the occasional midnight runner. It was pitch black, pierced by the intermittent streetlamps. In the darkness, all the light there was reflected off the few remaining leaves clinging determinedly to their branches, rendering them white and ghostly and suspended in mid-air, as if caught in a great spider’s web spanning the whole park.

Eventually she located a bench a little way off the track. Ignoring the damp, she sat down; and then came the realization that she had been walking all night, that her feet ached in their Timberland boots, that she could not possibly walk any further. So she stretched out on the bench, propping her boots on the armrest and her head on her backpack. She drifted into the uneasy half-consciousness of those who do not sleep safe.

*

At three in the morning, she awoke. She was frozen stiff. Dew dotted the grass, the bench and her coat; she brushed it off the last, rearranged her cream scarf around her chilly neck, and left the park, walking briskly to warm herself.

She had a week-long métro ticket, which she used to travel to Bellecour. She spent the morning walking slowly around the Place Bellecour in a giant square; but the shops, Esprit and Tie Rack and H&M, failed to interest her, and tiring of the square, she returned to the traboules.

Back in the silent, in-between world, she wandered through the Renaissance quarter of Vieux Lyon. Sitting on a low flight of dusty steps, she drew the Rose Tower, the traboule hotel with its flight of spiral stairs encased in a painted tower rising from the courtyard like a finger of rosy watermelon, every mullion window a black fingernail pressed into the skin of its dusty wall.

The travel guide told her that the traboules had been used by silk merchants to transport their goods directly to the Saõne, for Lyon had once been a silk city. Later they became the passageways between the courtyards, where the deep wells had become places of gathering.

She drew the wells in the eighteenth-century, with the canuts, the silk merchants in their elegant coats grouped around the well’s edge, the women in their dark gowns half-hidden, whispers in the shadows of the court. Cours des Voraces, Rue des Capucins, Quai St. Antoine: their names flowed lushly over the tongue, like silk rubbing at the tender flesh between the fingers, ribbons soft and supple against the skin.

*

It rained in the afternoon. She had nowhere to go, so she returned to the café with the ubiquitous name. Once more the boy was there by her table, fingers drumming the pen against his notepad. He had long fingers, she saw; long and fluid, like a pianist’s.

“Hello again,” he said on arrival. “Do you want the same as yesterday?”

She fixed him with an expressionless stare. “Do you have a different soup?”

He tapped the pen against the knuckle of his other hand. “Well…there’s cream of spinach.”

“I’ll have the tomato, thanks.”

She was sketching the café when he returned: the loud, over-familiar beer-drinkers at the bar, roaring at the soccer game on the huge TV screen; the teenagers clustered around the tables, thin dark girls with piercings and Arab boyfriends; the sticky glasses and the overflowing ash-trays, the blurring atmosphere of smoke.

“Thank you,” she said, putting away the sketchpad when he placed the tray in front of her. This time he lingered, watching her eat in neat mouthfuls.

“You’re not from around here,” he pointed out. “You parisienne?”

“No. I’m not French.”

He hugged his bony elbows. “Really? I couldn’t tell. Your accent’s good.”

“Thank you,” she said gravely, starting on the bread.

“Where are you living now?”

“Nowhere.” She rubbed a pattern in the sheen of soup at the bottom of the bowl with the chunk of bread, a sort of crooked web. “I’m homeless.”

She could tell from his stare that he was trying to see if she was joking. She kept her eyes on the rim of the bowl. Finally he gave it up. “I’m Étienne,” he said, expectant of an answer. She gave no response.

“If you ever need any help…” he tried again, and let the sentence trail off like a soup stain.

She stood up. “Can I have the bill, please?”

When she left, he made a show of cleaning her table, as she put on her brown coat, shouldered her backpack and set off down the rain-soaked street. She had walked all day on four hours of sleep. There was a throbbing in her head, like a flickering neon sign – ne-on, ne-off; ne-on, ne-off.

This time she went to the school a few streets away, the Lycée Edouard-Herriot. She mingled with the students, drifting through the corridors in their midst. They eyed her oversized backpack, but no-one approached her; eventually she went to the leisure room at the bottom of the building, where no-one paid any attention to the backpack if she put it down behind her chair.

When the last students left and the school closed up for the night, she hid in a classroom, under a desk with her knees tucked up beneath her chin, until all the cleaning staff had gone home. Then she came out and went back to the leisure room, where she curled up on a giant blue beanbag chair and slept.

*

She left the room before someone came to check on it. She waited in a stairwell for the school to open up, then nonchalantly joined the students milling about in the foyer. The bell screamed, shrill like an air-raid siren, running on and on like an alarm clock whose owner cannot be bothered to turn it off. She was headed for one of the staircases, pretending she was going somewhere, when someone snapped his fingers in the air beside her left ear.

It was Étienne, sitting on a bench with his long legs stretched out in front of him. He looked different in a windbreaker instead of an apron; it shrouded his thin frame like a tent. “I thought you said you didn’t live here,” he said reproachfully.

“I stayed here overnight.”

Étienne gave her a questioning stare. “You really are serious about being homeless.”

She gazed at him coolly, saying nothing.

“Look,” he began, “if you really need a place to stay – my sister’s just moved in with her boyfriend, so her room’s empty.”

“Won’t your parents mind?”

“They’re in Switzerland.” She raised an eyebrow. “No, really. It’s not that far away. Anyway, we’ll probably be able to work something out by the time they get back.”

She pictured it. Warmth, a bed; food, furniture, maybe even a shower. She might finally be able to let down her guard. She had been carrying it for so long, like a heavy bronze shield, and her arms were tired.

“I’ll think about it,” she said out loud, non-committally. “Thank you.”

He shrugged. “I’ll be in the café from four to seven. Come and find me then. I have to go for Math now, my teacher’s a hag about punctuality.”

“Ah,” she said. “What is her name?”

The question bewildered him, but he answered anyway. “Mme. Fournell. See you.”

He pushed his way through the rapidly thinning crowd. At the staircase he turned back once to look for her; she had sat down at the bench and was observing the parquet flooring. When there was no-one else left in the foyer, she picked up her bag and went out into the open square between the four classroom blocks. She selected a stone bench under a stilted, yellow tree, and took out her drawing materials.

The windows of the classrooms faced out into the square. Some of them had words printed on them in colourful font – random words that even she could not fathom the meaning of. Red plush armchair, proclaimed the words on the glass. Une hyper envie de bouger mes fesses. Some random moment in this life, when you appear to me.

She traced the last sentence on her sketchpad. Around it she drew the darkness of the traboule; above it she drew a window of sky, with a ray of light coming through to cast a spotlight upon a single butterfly, crouched on the yellow stones. Some random moment in this life, when you appear to me. She painted the butterfly the colour of copper sulphate, a blue bright as the sky.

She sat in the open till the wind picked up and made her fingers so cold that she could not hold the pencil steady. She set the page out to dry on the stone seat and pulled her gloves on.

A teacher, a plump apple-cheeked woman in a fluffy white coat, came over and glanced with interest at the drying page. “That’s very pretty, my dear,” she said.

“Thank you, madame.”

The teacher appraised her. She busied herself with packing up her pencils. “You must be an artist,” the lady said pleasantly. “Do you take art classes outside school?”

“Not really.”

The teacher inspected the butterfly. “Well, you ought to. Ask your parents about it. What’s your name, dear?”

“Claudine.” It was in a song, Claudine the Inflatable One. She thought of balloons, red and yellow ones, rising to fill the sky. They speckled the square of blue, strings dangling like cheerful promises, reflected in black-and-white in the many windows facing the square, over and over again. “I must go. I have Math next, and Mme. Fournell is very particular about being on time.”

“Have a nice day, Claudine,” said the teacher, as she gathered up her bag. “I’ll see you around.”

She crossed the square and passed through the foyer, holding the drying watercolour in front of her like a sacred vestment. She left the Lycée Edouard-Herriot and turned street corners till it could no longer be seen in the corner of her eye.

The painting dried quickly in the dry, chilly air. The wind sang in her ears as she walked along the pavement, slithering under the lobes and stinging the insides. She found the striped beanie in the front pocket of her backpack and tugged it on over her ears. Along the riverfront, the water curdled and skimmed like green milk.

She found a building with a wall that had fake windows painted on it with famous personages within them. The guide called it La Fresque des Lyonnais. She did not draw drawings, so she merely stood across the road and admired them for a long time. There was a painted café on the ground floor, two men doing something with a giant map – or was it a carpet? – and a beautiful woman in yellow leaning pensively on the railing. The Little Prince aimed his telescope at her from atop his planet on the second floor.

At half-past six, she went to the Café de la République. Étienne seemed both surprised and pleased to see her. He served her the same meal as the previous two days, and stood over her as she ate.

“So – are you staying over, then?” he inquired, almost succeeding in making it sound like an offhand question.

“I think I will,” she answered, slowly and carefully. “I hope it will be no imposition.”

“No, no,” he said, “hardly.”

She smiled, then. It was a short smile, a quick stretching and then shrinking of the lips. “Thank you.”

She rarely smiled, because she had realized very early on in her life the value of her smile. She had smiles like the fresh glimpse of emerald in the dull rock of a mine. People scrambled and clawed, fingernails bleeding, trying to pry them out.

Étienne clicked his pen, opened his notepad, dropped the pen, put the pen back in his pocket, picked up her tray and put his notepad on the plate. “I’m going to get my stuff. You wait for me here.”

“Don’t forget the check,” she said smoothly. He checked her expression for signs of sarcasm, failed to find any, and left.

Étienne came back with his own bag, and she stood up to go, scooping up her coat and scarf from the chair back. He reached out a hand to take her backpack, which she ignored. One of the other waiters stopped by the table. “Ah, Étienne, your girlfriend?”

“My classmate,” said Étienne dryly.

“I’m Amélie,” she said. This time a French song. Amélie câline ou cajolée, mélodie de vie, ode à la mienne.

“Enchanted,” replied the other boy. “I’m Léon. See you around, eh?”

She did not smile this time, merely inclined her head. “Let’s go,” said Étienne, and she went before him into the street.

The pink of evening rose around them like café smoke, suffusing rose into the blue of the sky. “It’s not your real name, is it?” asked Étienne. “Amélie?”

“No.”

They passed another street of shops, and then a blank wall. Étienne stopped at a peeling green door built into the wall and held it open for her as she passed through.

The silence of the traboule opened around her like an embryonic umbrella. Étienne led the way through the soft, quiet passages till he came to a courtyard barred by a black wrought-iron gate – a private area of the traboule. He tapped in a code on a number pad installed by the gate, which swung open to admit them. They climbed one of the spider-stairways and entered the house.

The house was always dim; it seemed a household custom to leave the lights off, and so they moved around it in bluish shadow. Étienne gestured at one of the rooms at the end of a wall-papered corridor, the china-blue buds faded and peeling. “My sister’s room. You can arrange your things in it, she won’t be back for a long time. I’ll be in the kitchen.”

The light in his sister’s room was blue like lavender. She leaned her backpack against a chair and sat down on the purple bedspread. The previous owner might have moved, but she had left pieces of herself all over the place like a strip mine – clothes strewn across the floor and the bed, a pair of taupe stockings dangling from the bedpost, an eyeliner pencil marooned in the groove of the desk.

She spent half an hour picking up the clothes and folding them, then stacking them on the sparsely-populated cupboard shelves. She did not unpack any of her own things.

When she went to look for Étienne in the kitchenette, he was putting a cling-wrapped bowl of refrigerated tabbouleh into the microwave oven. “Can I use your shower?”

“Sure,” said Étienne. He was setting the timer with his back to her. “Do you need anything?”

“No,” she said, “it’s fine.”

The shower, reminiscent of the time she had woken up frozen in the park, took a lot of willpower. When she came back out, Étienne was watching television and eating tabbouleh from the bowl. “Do you eat oranges?” he asked. There was a large bowl of them on the table; not true oranges but clementines, their smaller cousins. She selected one; it fit neatly into the round of her palm.

The current television programme, a bizarre talkshow, ended, and Étienne began to flip through the channels. She peeled the orange with a nail, digging it into the rough, tight skin and feeling the acid juices burn into the grooves of her nailbed.

The screen cast an odd and sickly light on the periwinkle blue walls of the living room. The orange sat on the tabletop, a pithy buddha in meditation atop a lotus of peel. She ate one of the segments, crushing it slowly between her tongue and teeth till the membranes gave and the juices popped and ran, acid between her teeth.

Étienne settled on the sports channel, which was showing a soccer match between Olympique Lyonnais and Paris Saint-Germain. She finished the orange, then went back into her room and got her art materials.

In the blue light she sketched a butterfly, taking her time with the curls and scrolls of its wing pattern. Then she cut the curls and scrolls out with her art knife, leaving a delicate paper skeleton. She made more of the stencils: butterflies, mostly; sometimes just curls.

In between cutting she drew the room, painted it blue like jazz.

*

Early morning: cold air and ripening sky. Étienne did not sit still when he was eating breakfast; he started at the table, then moved to perch on the counter, and then he began to pace around the kitchenette. Now he was standing by the window, clutching a mug of coffee. “Where are you going today?”

She sawed at the baguette, carving out a thin slice of bread. “I don’t know. Maybe Fouvrière.”

Étienne tried to drink his coffee and made a face when he realized it was still too hot. “You shouldn’t climb Fouvrière today. Do it tomorrow night; it’s the Fête des Lumières then, that’ll be worth the climb.”

“All right.” She shredded the bread with her fingers, ate it without butter. The pieces of bread resisted her teeth, their taste in her mouth dry and clean and whole.

Étienne had his back to her; he was watching the street below. In the pallid blue of dawn, he cut a sharp silhouette against the window, a black profile like a hole in the rectangle of young light. His sleeves were rolled up to expose his elbows, which were thin and abrupt like acute angles.

He turned away from the window with a sharp cry, glancing at his watch. “Merde, I’m going to be late.” He gulped down the coffee, bravely ignoring its temperature, and rushed back into the maze of corridors.

She stirred her chocolat chaud. Chocolat chaud had come somewhat as a surprise to her. Coming to France, she had expected real chocolate; instead they drank hot milk with two spoonfuls of Nesquik powder mixed in. It was like discovering the flaw in someone you had thought perfect; disillusionment, but nevertheless it made them all the more endearing.

Étienne rushed out again, schoolbag banging against his hip as he struggled to lace his boots one-handed. “Help me feed the fish, will you?” Then he was gone, clattering out into the courtyard.

She finished the chocolat chaud, brought the empty bowl along with Étienne’s hastily-abandoned coffee mug into the kitchenette, where she did the washing-up. Then she fed Étienne’s goldfish, a fat crowd who bobbed lazily in their fluorescent tank beside the paper towel roll.

That done, she went to fetch her things, and then she too was out, locking the door quietly behind her.

*

She had made herself used to waking up in strange places, so the ceiling of Étienne’s sister’s room never surprised her. It was late morning; the sunlight came through the perforated blinds as if through a cheese-grater, beading in large sequins on the side of the wheat-yellow cupboard. She lay unmoving for a while before getting up, counting the number of sequins in a row; the rows had different numbers of sequins, which increased and decreased as the blind flapped slowly in the air.

A note taped to the fridge informed her that Étienne was in school but would be coming home straight after it, as he had no shift at the café today. She found the remains of the tabbouleh, but decided she preferred it cold and ate it so. Then she did the dishes and went out.

 

She had never had so much time on her hands before.

She walked in a straight line across the city, through traboules, across streets. Time slipped by her like the wind in the trees. That was the beauty of her new existence; the time, the freedom, the complete detachment. Time was not commodity but custom; freedom was the power to keep running towards the horizon. She had not had these things back then, and this was like breathing pure oxygen for the first time: she might die and she would come back for more.

She did not draw that afternoon. She sat on a stone parapet overlooking the Rhône and breathed the pure oxygen of wasted time.

After sundown, she walked through the dark streets. The city changed at night; now it bore the stains of age, the crumbling stone and mossy cracks akin to the wrinkles on an old woman’s face, the ragged newspapers and rotting cartons in the gutter like the spittle at the corners of her mouth. Lyon at night had a stark, ruined beauty, a filthy loveliness borne by the muddy mountains of leaves in the gutter and the lonely glow of a light in an upper casement.

When she finally got back, Étienne was slumped in the armchair, watching television. “You’re late,” he said. “Where did you go?”

She bent down to unlace her boots. “Just walking.”

He sat up, arms hooked over his knees, staring at her. “It can be dangerous at night.”

She lined the boots up next to the umbrella stand, stuffed her socks into them.

“I was worried.”

She straightened up, looked him in the eye. “You need never worry about me.”

*

On Friday she found herself in the blue house with no desire to go out.

After lunch, she went back into her room and began to make an inventory of her possessions. She spread them out on the bed, made a note of them, and then proceeded to put them back in the backpack. From the other end of the china-blue corridor came the sound of running water; Étienne was in the shower. She was counting and rolling up the pairs of socks she owned, when a young woman came into the room.

The two of them stopped and regarded each other with surprise. The young woman recovered and spoke first. “What, are you his girlfriend or something?”

“No,” she said. “Is this your room?”

“Was.” The young woman relaxed and came into the room a little further, leaning on the chair. “I see he didn’t mention me.”

“Not your name. Only that you’d moved out.”

“I have,” agreed Étienne’s sister. “I’ve only come to get some of the stuff I left behind. I’m Vivienne, by the way – ” moving to kiss her on both cheeks. “You?”

“Anaïs.” She was hardly a spy in the house of love, but still fundamentally a spy. “Your clothes are all in the cupboard.”

Vivienne crossed over to the cupboard and opened it. Impressed, she raised an eyebrow in a manner startlingly similar to Étienne. “Some neatfreak you are.”

She said nothing, went back to rolling up her own clothes.

Vivienne collected her clothes, stuffing them into a plastic bag she produced from her tote. “Tchao, girl. You tell Étienne I was here.”

“No need for that.” Étienne had appeared in the doorway, shirt hanging loose and towel around his neck, his hair in spikes from the shower. “What are you doing here, Vivi?”

Vivienne displayed the bag of clothes. “Getting my stuff. I was in such a – hurry – last time. Anyway, it seems like you’ve found a replacement pretty fast.”

“It’s not like that,” muttered Étienne irritably. “She’s just staying here for the moment.”

“Do Maman and Papa know?”

“They’re in Switzerland, of course not.” Étienne folded his arms and leaned in the doorway, staring his sister down. She watched them quietly from the bed. She had never seen two siblings who looked less alike: Étienne an edifice of Kandinsky angles, juxtaposed against Vivienne’s curves, a Raphaelite Madonna in modern chic.

“Well, I shall be off,” concluded Vivienne brightly. “Didier’s waiting for me in the courtyard.” She kissed her again on the cheeks, and hugged Étienne. “So long, little brother. Don’t be a stranger, Anaïs.”

Then she was off, a noisy departure down the corridor and then the door banging. “Anaïs?” repeated Étienne, eyes narrowed.

She looked at him, then returned to her packing. “What is your real name?” he pressed.

She paused, then sat down on the bed with her hands folded in her lap, looking up at him. “I can’t tell you. If I give you a name it will be a lie.”

“Why are you packing?” he asked.

“I’m leaving.”

He was silent.

Eventually he said, “Why? Because of Vivienne?”

“No. Not Vivienne.”

“Why then?”

She gazed at him mutely, then bent to stuff her only other pair of jeans into the backpack.

Étienne tried another tack. “Where will you go?”

She shrugged. “Grenoble, maybe.”

“You can’t take the métro today,” he pointed out, vaguely triumphant. “It’s been closed for the Fête.”

“I could walk to Part-Dieu.”

Étienne raised his eyebrow. “The streets will be packed. And it’s too far.”

“I’ve walked farther.”

“Look,” he tried again, “you should at least stay for the Fête des Lumières. Don’t miss that. The métro will be running by ten tomorrow morning.”

She packed her scarf and gloves at the top of everything else, and zipped up the backpack. “All right, then,” she said, evenly. “Till tomorrow.”

Étienne relaxed, visibly. “We should hit the streets at seven,” he told her, “that’s when the real fun starts.”

She had not attempted to explain to him why she must leave, because he would never have comprehended. He had lived in this beautiful city of wasted time all his brief life; he would not have understood what it meant to want to keep running from time – for she would rather run forever than relinquish the power to run.

“Seven, then,” she concurred.

*

At seven, it rained.

It started as a trickle when they emerged from the traboule, then increased gradually in volume as they crossed the Saõne. By the time they had reached the Place Bellecour, the rain had turned to pure torrent.

Étienne had only brought one umbrella, which was not wide enough for both of them. She discovered that if she stuffed her hands deep into her pockets, the sleeves would keep the water out. Rain besieged her exposed face, bowed beneath the leather hood, and the chill of damp settled on her skin like a cold mask.

The streets were a riot of umbrellas, which formed an almost-complete canopy of colour above the heads of the crowd. The noise was nearly solid: the excited roar of the crowd, the shrill cries of enfants, the bellows of the street hawkers – and always somewhere in the background, music from an undefinable source.

She had never seen Lyon so loud, so lively before. The city had awakened to a clamorous commotion, a dusk-to-dawn party for the inexhaustible.

Above them, the lights populated the night sky. They hung in pearly strands across the streets, coiled lazy and golden around streetlamps, twinkled in braids of neon rose against pitch black. The trees of the Place Bellecour, by now wholly leafless, had been hung with a myriad of metal leaves, slender silvered curves that dangled and twisted in the rain like charms on a bracelet.

“Are you cold?” shouted Étienne over the noise and the rain, and too frozen to speak, she nodded. They stopped in front of the Virgin at one of the multitude of stalls that had sprung up like mushrooms in the streets, selling vin chaud, Nutella crepes and soup. Étienne bought two plastic cups of vin chaud.

The streets were emptier here; they slowed down, no longer caught in the press of umbrellas and wet bodies. She sipped the mulled wine. It tasted unexpectedly of apple; there were a few slices in the dregs that she inspected carefully, along with aniseed and what smelled like vinegar. Her throat burned in its slick casing of frigid skin. Overhead, the lights laced through wrought-iron supports, blooming into glittering clusters of golden flowers.

She followed Étienne through more narrow streets, and then the ground sloped upwards abruptly and they began the climb up Fouvrière. The steep cobblestoned streets were slick with rain; eventually they gave way to stone steps, as the ground ran nearly vertical in places. It was like the street had been tilted up, leading straight into the sky.

The tiny shops lining the crooked way, closed for the Fête, were emblazoned with giant corkscrews of neon-blue caterpillars. She and Étienne passed through a glimmering curtain of tiny turquoise lights, and the street flattened tersely into a plaza, where the blue caterpillars had given way to swirling butterflies.

She followed Étienne to the other end of the plaza, which was a steep drop. Below them, Lyon was lit up in a conflagration of a city. Fire lined every street, marking out the city like the glittering veins of a star.

She was glad, for a moment, that she had not brought her art materials. She would have been tempted to draw the view, and the attempt would have ruined the splendour of the reality. She curled her icy fingers in her coat pockets. Part of her fringe had fallen into her eyes, slightly obscuring her view, but she did not want to pull her hands out of their hibernation to tuck it back behind her ear.

Above the burning city, the stars assembled in a quieter sky. She realized that she had never seen so many stars before; where she had begun, there had been hardly enough stars to make a difference in the view. Now, they crowded the sky like a quiet glitter, filling the night with a gentle light as they regarded the strings of neon below with a benign and condescending celestial air.

Étienne’s face was alight with the fires of Lyon, lending its sharp features a strangely unearthly luminosity. “What do you think?” he said quietly.

She looked out across the city. “It’s beautiful,” she answered, equally soft.

His hand moved up in the air between them, hovering a few inches from her forehead, and she realized that he wanted to sweep the lock of hair away from her eyes, but did not quite dare.

She held his gaze for a moment, and then she reached up and tucked the lock of hair behind her ear in a quick, precise motion.

Étienne lowered his hand, and turned back to the view. Below them, the rutilant gold carnival of the city of lights; above them, the serene scrutiny of the stars.

*

 

She came down the steps a little way into the Gothic courtyard, backpack shouldered. Étienne watched her from the doorway, the room behind him thick and blue as a Monday morning, melding softly into the shadows, away from the piece of sky above her that was a clean blue crisp with light.

She drew a breath of the cold, spicy morning air, and turned to face him. “Thank you,” she said gravely.

Étienne made as if to shrug. “I liked having you here.”

She had left the drawing under the big bowl of oranges, where he would find it before long. Étienne and his coffee at half-past six in the morning, elbows sharp and black against against the rising light. It was no payment. She had learned to owe without recompense.

Étienne shifted slightly under her gaze. She could tell that he wanted very badly to ask for something, but he did not quite dare. It was there, the request, crouched at the edge of his mouth, what he wanted. Answers. Promises. Her name.

“Au revoir,” was what he said.

Did not the French have a better way to put it? The mere act of farewell became a promise to meet again. “Goodbye,” she said in English.

She left the blue house for the last time, entered the traboule. Her footsteps were soundless in the spaces. The walls glowed from unseen flames.

*

On the train south to Grenoble, she dozed and dreamt of traboules. Walking for hours in the rosy gloom, passing through the heart of the city, footsteps soaked up by the glow of the walls and the silence. Sometimes you saw the sky.

A/N: I lived in Lyon for a month, and am still very much in love with it.  None of the characters is real, though all the places are.