Chapter 2: Relay
The train was forty minutes out of Brussels-Midi when a Bavarian MEP stopped in the aisle beside their table and asked, very seriously, whether this was the one that went to Disneyland.
"Only on special occasions," Benoît told him.
The MEP laughed, uncertainly, and went on towards the buffet car. Across the table Fran didn't look up from the voting list. She had four highlighters out, one for each language she was likely to get the amendments in, and she was going down the list with the pink one, marking every number that could be misheard. There were a lot of them. It was a Strasbourg week; it was all numbers.
"I was on that train," Benoît said. "The Disneyland one."
"No, you weren't."
"I was. October. The driver took the wrong line after Paris and we came out at Marne-la-Vallée and there was a man in the station dressed as a dog, and an Estonian Green cried."
"You weren't on it." She uncapped the yellow highlighter. "I was on it. Carriage four, with Ger. If you'd been on it I'd have heard about it every day for three years."
"I heard about it," he said. "Very vividly. From a friend."
"From Ger."
"From Ger." He watched her mark a seventeen. "The dog was real, though."
"The dog was real."
Benoît had taken the window seat facing backwards, so that the roar of the train came in on his right and Fran's voice came straight across the table into his left. He had got very good at seats. Restaurants, he sat with his back to the kitchen. Meetings, he took the end. Booths, the right-hand chair, so whoever was resting beside him was on his good side, and if he leaned an inch towards them it looked like friendliness. He was a friendly man. People had always said so. It covered a great deal.
Ger was asleep in the aisle seat with the Irish Times open over his face like a tent, breathing in long slow whistles through the newsprint.
"Why did you become an interpreter?" Benoît asked.
"They pay you on the day."
"That's not why."
"You never have to have an opinion. Someone else has the opinion, and you just say it nicely." She marked a forty. "And you get a free lanyard."
"That's three whys and none of them is the why."
"That's because you asked a nosy question," Fran said, "and I gave you an answer to a different one. Which, if you think about it, is also the job."
He laughed loudly enough that Ger's newspaper rose and fell. She looked pleased for exactly a second and then went back to her list. He'd started counting the seconds. He'd been working with her for a month now, on loan, three or four days a week, and in that time he'd made Frances Mulcahy laugh out loud precisely twice, both times by accident, and she had looked furious with him afterwards both times, as if he'd taken something out of her bag.
He liked her more than was reasonable. He liked that she wrote numbers as if they owed her money. He liked the four highlighters. He liked that she said ta and nowt and I'll not in a building where everybody else had smoothed their English down to the mid-Atlantic paste they taught at the interpreting schools, and that she would never in a hundred years explain any of them to him. He liked her voice, which he'd known for nine years before he knew her, and which had turned out to belong to someone much less polite.
Ger surfaced from under the newspaper somewhere after Lille and said something into the aisle with his face turned away. Benoît caught the shape of it and none of the words. "Absolutely," he said, which covered most things.
"I said have you a pen, chief."
He gave Ger a pen. Across the table Fran's highlighter stopped moving for a moment, and then started again.
He leaned in a little. She glanced up.
"Your fifteen," he said, and tapped the list. "You've missed one."
She looked. She hadn't missed one. She looked at him with narrowed eyes, and he smiled at her, and after a moment she highlighted it anyway.
The Louise Weiss building had been built, Fran had been told on her first trip, to look like the Tower of Babel in the Bruegel painting, all glass and unfinished on one side, as if the builders had been interrupted by God. Then they'd filled it with interpreters. She had never decided whether this was the architect's joke or the Parliament's.
The booths ran round the top of the hemicycle like boxes at the opera, twenty-four of them, glass-fronted, and from the English booth you looked down onto seven hundred blue seats and the President's high desk and, at nine on a Tuesday morning, about forty MEPs reading their phones.
It was one-minute speeches. You got sixty seconds on any subject you liked, and most Members spent forty of them on the subject and twenty on greeting the President, the Commissioner and their constituents, by name if possible. The man speaking now was from somewhere in the Netherlands and had written his minute out in advance in order to fit in ninety seconds' worth of words, which he was reading at the speed of a horse-racing commentator.
Fran was live. She was chopping him into slices as he came, the way you had to with the fast ones: subject, verb, done; subject, verb, done; let the adjectives go if they wouldn't fit in the van. Beside her Benoît had the pad and was writing the numbers down a fraction ahead of when she'd need them. 2,4 MILLION. 2019. 30 %. He wrote the comma decimals the way the Dutchman said them, and drew a little arrow under each one to remind her to turn them into points.
Then he wrote, in neat capitals under the thirty per cent: THIS IS THE FOURTH TIME HE HAS SAID "AT THE END OF THE DAY." IT IS 9.06 A.M.
She didn't look at it. She looked straight ahead at the President's desk and interpreted the Dutchman's view on cross-border rail and did not laugh. Her thumb hovered over the cough button and stayed there.
The Dutchman said aan het eind van de dag again.
She heard Benoît make a tiny sound in his throat beside her, a man trying not to be pleased with himself, and she reached over without looking and drew a line through his note so hard it went through two pages.
At twelve they voted. The President read the list off the screen at the speed of a bingo caller, amendment, number, show of hands, roll call, open, closed, adopted, rejected, and the booths read it into twenty-four languages behind her. It was all numbers and it was Benoît's turn, and Fran wrote every one of them on the pad in her biggest capitals, boxed, before he got there.
Halfway down the list he took the pen from her and wrote, under amendment 112: BIGGER PLEASE.
She looked at him.
He wrote: MY EYES. I'M OLD.
She wrote the next number twice the size. Then the next. By amendment 140 she was writing one number per page and tearing them off and laying them on the desk in front of him like playing cards, and he read them off without looking down for longer than a blink, and his voice in the English channel never changed at all.
It went into her head and stayed there, for some reason. Not the joke. The please.
In the afternoon a Lithuanian took the floor on a point of order, and down the row of booths the little relay lights changed as the booths without Lithuanian came across to English. To her. She could see the French booth's light from where she sat, a green dot through two panes of glass. She had never once in nine years thought about who was on the other end of it. She thought about it now, and breathed in through her nose before the first number, and heard herself do it, and nearly lost the number.
The winstub was off the Rue des Tonneliers, all dark wood and checked curtains and a ceiling so low that Ger had to sit down before he could stand up straight. There were nine of them: most of the English booth, two of the Maltese, a German from the Council who'd got lost and been adopted. They had tarte flambée on boards, and the white Alsace wine that came in the green-stemmed glasses, and a table by the bar where a party of Danish lobbyists were celebrating something with a song.
It was loud. Fran liked loud places after a day in the booth. In a loud place nobody expected you to catch everything.
Benoît had taken the seat at the end of the bench, with his back to the bar and the wall on his right. She noticed because she'd noticed his chairs all month. He was telling the Maltese about Charleroi, which, he said, a Dutch newspaper had once voted the ugliest city in the world.
"Is it?" said Daniela, from the Maltese booth.
"It's a very unfair result. The judges hadn't seen Liège."
"Where's Liège?"
"Exactly," said Benoît, and the Maltese end of the table cracked up.
Ger leaned across the tarte flambée towards him, Polo mint in his cheek, pink from the wine. "Here, chief. Are you seeing anyone?"
"Thursdays, usually," said Benoît.
There was a short pause, and then the table laughed, all of it, Ger loudest, slapping the wood. Benoît laughed with them and raised his glass as if he'd meant it to be funny, and maybe he had. Fran didn't laugh. She'd been watching him when Ger asked, and she'd seen his eyes go to Ger's mouth and stay there, a fraction too long, the way you looked at a sign in a station when the announcement was in a language you didn't have.
Are you staying till Thursday? That was what he'd heard. Near enough. He'd answered it.
"Seriously," said Ger.
"Seriously, Ger, I am a married man. To my work."
"God help it," said Ger, and turned to argue with the German about rugby.
Fran picked a bit of lardon off the edge of the board and ate it and didn't look at Benoît for a while. Then she did. He was listening to Daniela with his head turned a little to the left and his eyes fixed on her mouth and an expression on his face that would have looked, to anyone who hadn't grown up across a kitchen table from it, like charm.
They walked back along the river. The others had gone for a last drink at a place Ger knew, which was what Ger always said, and which was always shut. Petite France at eleven at night was all black water and white timber houses leaning over it, and geraniums in window boxes that someone was clearly paid to keep alive into October. Every few minutes a tourist boat went past empty, lit up like a fridge.
"What does your dad do?" Benoît said. "Ger says you go home a lot."
"He's retired. He was a print finisher."
"What's that?"
"After the printing. Folding, cutting, binding. Thirty-one years in a works in Reddish. It's flats now." She had her hands in her coat pockets. "He's Deaf."
He didn't say oh the way people said oh, as if she'd told him her dad had died. He said, "Since always?"
"Since always. Born. So was his brother. So was my nan's cousin in Ennis." She shrugged. "I was the first hearing one in a while. My first language is BSL. British Sign. I didn't really speak English till school, and then I didn't shut up."
"So you've been an interpreter since you were—"
"Seven. Officially." She could feel herself about to tell him the story, the one she told at parties, and decided to let herself. "My mum had gone by then. To Fuengirola, with a man called Clive who sold conservatories. He sold us one first. Then he took her to Spain."
"No."
"Dad kept the conservatory. He says it's the only good thing Clive ever made." The boat went past again, or another one. "So the gas bill was wrong, and you couldn't do it by letter, and I was seven, and I rang the gas board from the phone in our hall in Edgeley. Dad stood next to me and signed what to say and I said it in my best voice. The man asked to speak to my father. I said he's Deaf. He said can you get your mother. I said she's in Spain. He said I need to speak to an adult, and I said, I am speaking for an adult, and he hung up on me."
Benoît had stopped walking.
"We rang back," Fran said. "Four times. I put on a voice the fourth time. I was quite good. I was Mrs Mulcahy from number twelve, very cross. They sorted the bill."
"Mon Dieu."
"Parents' evening was worse." She hadn't meant to tell him the next one. It came out anyway, like the second biscuit. "Mrs Hargreaves said I talked too much in class and I'd been rude to a dinner lady, and Dad asked me what she'd said, and I told him she said I was a delight."
He laughed, a real one, with his head back, and she laughed too, because it was funny, it was the funny part.
"Did he believe you?"
"He took me for chips." She looked at the water. "Your turn."
"My mother," he said, "came to Binche in 1984 on a coach trip from Kirkby with her netball team, to see the carnival, because a girl on the team had seen it on Blue Peter. She was nineteen. She was standing on the Grand-Place in a borrowed anorak, and my father, who was a Gille, threw an orange and hit her on the head. Here." He touched the side of his own head, above his right ear. "She says she married him to get it back."
"She did not."
"She stayed for the weekend, then she stayed for the summer, then she opened a friterie. Friterie Pat. She calls it the chippy. Nobody in Binche knows what a chippy is. She does a chip butty on Fridays and three old men come specially and eat it in silence like it's a sacrament."
"Is she happy?"
He thought about it, honestly, which she liked. "She says Belgium is all right but the tea is a war crime." He bumped her shoulder with his, lightly, walking again. "Teach me something."
"Teach you what?"
"Sign. Something useful."
"For the booth?"
"For my mother. Something for the chippy."
She took one hand out of her pocket and made her dad's sign for orange: a loose fist beside the mouth, squeezed once, like getting the last of the juice. "That's Manchester," she said. "They do it different in London. They do everything different in London."
He tried it. He got it wrong; he opened and closed his whole hand like a puppet talking, and she said, "No, you look like you're doing a duck," and without really deciding to she reached over and took his hand and fixed it: folded the fingers, tucked the thumb, set it by the corner of his mouth, and squeezed.
His hand was warm and bigger than the sign needed. She'd been not touching him for a month. She had been aware of not doing it, the way you're aware of not looking at a clock. She let go.
"Orange," he said, and did it again, perfectly, and looked delighted with himself.
They walked on. The bridges with their old square towers were lit up gold ahead of them, and the water ran fast and loud under the lock gates, and Fran, who had said more in the last ten minutes than she usually said in a month that wasn't someone else's, said quietly, on his right, looking at the water and not at him, "I'm glad it was you they lent us."
He didn't answer. He kept walking, looking up at the towers, with his hands in his pockets.
She felt her face go hot, and then, under the heat, something colder and very familiar. She walked three more steps. Then she said, at exactly the same volume, still on his right: "Your lace is undone."
Nothing. He was looking at the towers.
She went round behind him without thinking, the way she'd gone round the kitchen table all her life to get where her dad could see her, and came up on his left, and said it again.
"Your lace is undone."
He looked down at his feet. He was wearing Chelsea boots, brown, with elastic sides. He looked at them for a second, and then up at her, puzzled, and laughed. "Mulcahy. They don't have laces."
"So they don't," said Fran.
She walked the rest of the way back to the hotel on his left. He didn't ask her why.