Chapter 4: Off Mic
"You can't keep it," Fran said. "It's a euro."
"It's a souvenir." Benoît held the plastic cup up to the lights. It had a picture of the cathedral on it, and the year, and a smear of mulled wine down one side. "I have one from every year. I have one from 2017. I have one from the year they cancelled it, which I bought on the internet from a man in Colmar and is probably fake."
"You've got a cupboard full of plastic cups."
"I have an archive."
The Place Broglie was full to the edges. There were wooden huts in rows under strings of white bulbs, selling gingerbread and wooden stars and little paper bags of bredele, the Alsace Christmas biscuits that came in shapes like moons and pretzels and had been, Ger insisted, invented by monks, though he couldn't say which. A brass band in red jackets was doing Stille Nacht by the carousel with great feeling and slightly different ideas about the tempo. Somewhere behind them a crowd of schoolchildren was shrieking in three languages at once.
It was the worst sort of place. Benoît had known it would be. Every sound in the square came at him the same size, the band and the children and the man at the next hut shouting Glühwein! Vin chaud! Hot wine! and the woman talking right in front of him, and his right ear took all of it and pressed it flat, like a car going over a can, and handed him back a single long roar with a whine on top.
He'd been fine at this two years ago. He used to love it. He used to come out after the late session with whoever was still standing and drink too much vin chaud and talk to strangers at the huts about where their sausages were from.
Fran was on his left. She'd been on his left all evening. She'd been on his left, now that he thought about it, since October, in the booth, on the train, in the queue for the tram, at the coffee machine; at some point she'd just stopped standing anywhere else, and he couldn't remember the day it happened, which was how good she was.
The woman at the bredele hut leaned across her trays and said something to him, smiling, with her hands out.
He got the smile. He got the hands. He did not get one word of it. He stood with his souvenir cup and smiled back, and started to say pardon?, and before he'd got the first syllable out Fran said, in clear, easy French, "Les étoiles à la cannelle, s'il vous plaît, et un petit sachet de chaque, pour mon collègue," and the woman beamed and began filling bags.
She'd asked him which ones he wanted. That was all. Which ones, and how many. He hadn't heard, and Fran had heard him not hearing, and she'd answered for him. She'd just interpreted French into French for a Belgian.
He paid. He said merci and bonne soirée and joyeux Noël, all perfectly. He walked away from the hut with a paper bag of cinnamon stars in one hand and his archive cup in the other and a feeling in his chest like he'd swallowed one of the stars whole.
"You're welcome," Fran said, without looking at him.
"I didn't say thank you."
"You were going to. It was all over your face."
He wanted to say something to that, something light that would make her laugh, so the thing in his chest would go back down. Nothing came. For the first time in his life the end of the sentence simply wasn't there.
Ger appeared out of the crowd holding a brioche man by the head. It was the size of a toddler and had raisins for eyes.
"It's a manala," Ger said. "It's traditional. I'm calling him Declan."
"You can't eat something you've named," Fran told him.
"Watch me," said Ger, and bit Declan's arm off.
Benoît laughed. It came out loud and a bit too long, and Ger looked pleased, and Fran looked at him in the way she had, sideways, as if she were reading the small print at the bottom of him. He drank the last of his vin chaud and put the cup in his coat pocket, for the archive.
Her dad had moved Wednesday to Monday because of Strasbourg, and also, he said, because Wednesday was the Christmas quiz at the club and he wasn't missing it for her.
He had the iPad propped on the arm of the settee, and behind him, across the cushions, lay what looked like several hundred yards of Christmas lights in a single knot.
What are you doing?
The front. Every December since she was a baby he'd put lights along the front of the house in Edgeley, under the gutter and round the bay window, and every year he set them flashing in a sequence he worked out himself and refused to explain. The doorbell flashed too, and the smoke alarm, and the baby monitor had flashed when she was a baby. Her dad liked a light that meant something. Doing them tomorrow.
Not up the ladder.
How else do you get up a house?
Ask Kev next door.
Kev next door is seventy-four and frightened of his wife. He picked up one end of the knot and looked at it with contempt. I've been going up ladders since before you were born.
That's what worries me.
He waved that away, and then he looked at her, through the screen, the way he did, as though he could see the room she was in and the hotel round it and the city round that. How's the Belgian?
Fine.
Fine, he signed back at her, and made the sign look like something he'd scraped off his shoe. Thirty-six years old.
She sat on the end of the hotel bed with her coat still on and the paper bag of cinnamon stars beside her, which Benoît had pushed into her hand on the tram for no reason, and found her hands were already moving before she'd decided anything.
I like him.
It was easy. That was what surprised her. In sign it was just a small thing your hand did near your chest, in front of your dad, in your own language. It didn't cost anything. It didn't need a voice.
Her dad put the lights down.
Does he know?
No.
Are you going to tell him?
I don't know how.
You're an interpreter.
Not into English, Fran signed, and her dad laughed so hard he had to hold on to the settee, his whole silent laugh, shoulders and all, with the knot of lights sliding off onto the carpet behind him.
The Sakharov laureate was a lawyer from a country that had put her in prison twice. She was small and grey-haired and she spoke French, and she came to the lectern in the hemicycle in a plain dark suit with seven hundred Members on their feet for her and waited, quite calmly, until they sat down.
Fran was live.
The laureate didn't hurry. She had a voice like someone who'd spent a lot of time talking to people through glass. She said she would not talk about herself, and then she talked about the four hundred and twelve days of her second sentence, and how she had counted each of them on the wall with her fingernail, and how on day three hundred they had moved her to a cell with a window the size of a book, and she had stood under it every morning to see whether it was raining.
J'ai compté chaque jour.
"I counted every day," Fran said, in the first person, into the English channel, to everyone in Europe who'd chosen English. "I did not do it because I was brave. I did it because I am a lawyer, and I wanted the record to be correct."
The hemicycle laughed, a little, and then went very quiet.
She'd said I for thousands of people. She'd been a Finnish farmer and a Spanish Commissioner and a man from Ghent who wanted the bins collected more often. She had said I am deeply moved for a hundred MEPs who weren't. She'd been angry and grateful and outraged and sorry, all in the first person, all with somebody else's name on it, in a voice that was clear and kind and belonged to no one. She was good at it because none of it was hers. She'd never once thought that was a sad thing to be good at.
"I am not asking you for anything for myself," Fran said, for the woman at the lectern. "I am asking you to keep counting."
Her voice didn't wobble. She wouldn't have let it. But when the laureate stopped and the whole chamber stood up again and the applause came up through the floor of the booth, she took her hand off the mic button and found it was shaking, a fine fast shake like a phone on silent.
Benoît didn't write anything on the pad. He didn't say anything. He put his hand flat on the desk next to hers, not touching, with about half an inch between them, and left it there, and after a while she moved hers that half inch.
The late session that night was on rail freight, and at a quarter to eleven there were eleven Members left in the hemicycle and one of them was asleep.
The booths were emptying around them. Down the row Fran could see the lights going off, Greek, Latvian, Slovenian, teams packing up as their last speaker finished, pulling on coats, waving through the glass. The President thanked the remaining Members for their perseverance in a tone that suggested otherwise, closed the sitting, and the house lights in the hemicycle began to go off in sections, starting at the back, so that the blue seats went grey and then went out, row by row, like a theatre after everybody's gone home.
Benoît was winding up the cable of his headset into a careful figure of eight. He did it every night. She'd never seen anyone else do it.
"Mulcahy," he said.
"What."
"Thank you for the bredele."
"You paid for the bredele."
"You know what I mean."
She did. She wound up her own cable, badly. Down in the hemicycle the last bank of lights went out and there was just the glow of the booth's own lamp and the little red standby lights along the console, and their two reflections in the glass, a man and a woman in a box above a dark room.
"I'd like to kiss you," he said. "I've wanted to since about the sand eels. I'd like to now, if that's—"
"Is the mic off?"
He looked at the console. He pressed his button once, to check. The red stayed red. "Off."
"Check again."
He laughed, and turned his whole body round in the bad chair to check again, and while he was doing it she leaned across the desk and the pad and the column of numbers she'd written for a debate on rail freight that no one in Europe had been listening to, and kissed him on the side of the mouth, the left side, because she'd been on that side so long she didn't know how to come at him from any other.
He went completely still. Then he put one hand up to her face, carefully, as though she might be hot, and kissed her back.
It was a good kiss. It was slow, and nobody was recording it, and it went on long enough that somewhere in it she stopped being the one listening and was just there, in the booth, in the dark, with nothing to say on anyone's behalf.
When they stopped he kept his forehead against hers.
"That's against regulations," he said. "Definitely. Some article. Annex four."
"I'll interpret it for them."
"How?"
"The Member indicated his support."
He laughed with his forehead still against hers, and she felt it more than heard it, a shake that went through both of them, and somewhere below in the dark a cleaner started up a vacuum cleaner in the empty hemicycle.
The hotel was four tram stops away and they walked it, because neither of them wanted to sit down in a lit tram with other people in it. It was very cold. The streets were empty and smelled of frying and pine. At every corner he stopped and kissed her again, against a shutter, under a sign for a pharmacy, beside a stone saint with snow on his shoulders, as if he were afraid that if he didn't keep doing it she'd remember who she was and go home.
In the lift of the hotel, which was the size of a confessional and older than both of them, she put her hand flat on his chest, on the navy jumper with the elbows out, and he put his own hand over it and held it there.
On the third floor, outside her door, she found her key card and then didn't use it. She stood with it in her hand.
"You can say no," he said. "You can say no and I'll go down the corridor and drink the minibar and write you a very long letter in the morning about cups."
"I'm not saying no."
"Then say something."
She opened the door. He laughed, quietly, at her, at both of them, and came in, and shut it behind them.
She woke at five, which was what her body did in Strasbourg whatever she told it, and lay in the dark listening to him breathe.
He slept on his left side, facing her, his good ear in the pillow, his bad one turned up to the room. His arm was across her waist. The radiator ticked. A car went past outside on the wet road with a long sound like tearing paper. She lay there and listened to all of it, the way she always listened to everything, and tried to remember the last time she'd woken up next to someone and not been planning how to leave.
Brighton. A man called Owen, a conference on ports. Six years ago.
"You're thinking," Benoît said into the pillow, not opening his eyes.
"How can you tell?"
"You think loud. Like an engine." He shifted, and his arm tightened. "What about."
She hadn't meant to say it. It was five in the morning and dark and warm, and she was not, for once, keeping a sentence and a half behind anything.
"I've been thinking about going home."
"Now? It's very early."
"Next year. Maybe. To Stockport." She looked at the ceiling. "Dad's sixty-seven. He's on his own. And there's never enough BSL interpreters, you can't get one for a hospital appointment for love or money, they just give the Deaf patient a leaflet. I could train. I've been signing since before I could walk, I'd only need the qualification. And I'd be there."
He was quiet for long enough that she thought he'd gone back to sleep.
Then he said, "Stockport needs interpreters? For the pyramid?"
She laughed, because it was funny. She waited for the next thing, the real thing, the question. Do you want to? Is that what you want? Or even, What about me? She would have taken any of them. She would have known what to do with any of them.
He said, "The pyramid will be very lonely without you," and his breathing went long and slow again, and he was asleep.
She lay with that. She thought about waking him. She thought about saying I didn't say it for a joke. She thought about it so long, and so carefully, framing it and reframing it like a difficult paragraph from the Hungarian, that in the end it was half past six and she hadn't said anything at all.
At half past six her alarm went off.
Her phone was on the bedside table on his side, where she'd dropped it last night, about eight inches from his right ear. It played the factory ringtone, the bright tinny marimba that everybody hated, loud enough that the man in the next room thumped once on the wall.
Benoît didn't move.
She didn't reach over. She didn't know why she didn't. She lay on her back with her heart going and watched him, and the marimba went round, and round again, and got louder the way it did, and he went on sleeping with his good ear deep in the pillow and his face turned up towards the noise, smiling a little at something in a dream, for one whole minute, until it stopped on its own.