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Éponine is drowning. The undertow pulls at her, drags her by the legs. She closes her eyes —
— and she’s sitting on the kitchen table, Azelma swinging her legs beside her, as Mamma picks burrs off their stockings.
“What did you have to go running in the fields for?” Mamma asks. “You’re both covered in them; you look like little rats. Little rats with sharp teeth.”
(Something moves in the corner of the room.)
“How do they stick so?” asks Ponine.
“Hooks,” says Mamma, her pincer hands moving across the girls’ calves. “A hundred little hooks in every one, horrid things, holding fast and never letting go.”
“Ow!” says Azelma, “ow! Don’t pinch! Please! I’m sorry!”
But it’s not Azelma who’s crying out it’s —
— she blinks her eyes open. The pain is everywhere. She lifts her hand in front of her face, and she can see through the hole in it. She feels his arms around her. I’m dying, she thinks. I’m —
— she’s in Paris in that first cold year, running through the streets in shoes with a hole in them. There are streets they try not to walk through, not again; it’s a game, and it’s not a game. You try not to let it catch you. Some places are too full of the last time you were there, and when you walk out it’s clinging to you again, as if you’d never left, as if you were still in that dark house, where —
— she blinks her eyes open. Why isn’t she dead yet?
“Kiss me,” she says. “When I’m dead. I’ll feel it.”
He nods. She claws her hands into his arms. She wants to hold onto him. Around her, the walls and pavement prickle. A hundred thousand little hooks a thousand footprints, she feels her legs pulled away under her —
— she’s standing in the icy stream, up to her knees, her petticoats swirling around her. Mamma will be so angry.
Azelma, crying, holding the doll they used to have.
“I don’t want to go to Paris,” Azelma says, jutting her chin out. “I’m not leaving. They can’t make me do anything.”
But they can —
— the current sucks at her legs; she sets her knees. She can feel herself start to pull away from her own body, and it’s a tremendous lightness all at once, the end of an ache she had stopped noticing.
And what happened to that doll, anyway? Éponine hasn’t thought about her for years. She thinks, too, of the cat, of its soft paws and little tongue, and the mews of protest it gave when they dressed it up, or —
— or when Papa took it down to the river. Was the doll in his sack, too, with her ribbon sash and her pretty hair? Surely not —
— Éponine digs herself into the ground. Into the walls. It’s a blind, panicked scrabbling, like a cat in clawing in the dark. She knows she could just stop fighting and let the current take her. She could even walk with it; who knows where she’d end up.
But she can’t leave. She can’t, and she doesn’t know any more if it’s that she can’t let go or if it — the place, the city, the bricks and paving slabs — won’t let go of her —
— (It’s the second year in Paris and already they’ve given up the game of avoiding streets. Already there is nowhere that feels safe, only places where she has stored pieces of herself. She walks from place to place, trying to gather them up. Her soul itself is ragged, so full of holes she can see through it, when she holds it up to the light. These reminders she has stitched into the walls are all that is left of everything she is.) —
— And they cling to one another, a girl and a city, hook into each other, entwine themselves together. The current tugs and then goes still.
Everything is very quiet, and cold, and dark. From outside her body, she watches Marius kiss her forehead. She doesn’t feel it. She doesn’t feel anything.
She watches other spirits leave, over the next day and night, slowly then all at once. She can see the shimmer as they lift away, then a little eddy and a drift, a sound of footsteps, sometimes a cry as one greets another and they leave together.
Perhaps Marius will leave, she thinks, and perhaps she will go with him. Maybe it was only loneliness that kept her here, or fear of leaving alone. But she doesn’t see him among the dead, and she tries, in the end, to slip in behind a group of the others. She trails close behind them, travelling in the ripples they leave. They are just barely visible, even to her, a silver shimmer in the air, voices that sound like echoes.
“Take me,” she says, but her voice is cracked and rough, and they don’t seem to hear it.
She follows them down street after street, wondering where it can be that they’re going, for they seem so sure of themselves where she is so unsure, so quick and fluid where she is broken and halting. They grow fainter and fainter, and harder to keep up with, just the slightest disturbance in the air. At last she loses them.
“Come back,” she says, to the empty street. But no-one does.
It is morning again.
Being a ghost is a lot like being alive, only she’s never hungry — there’s just a hollowness deep inside her that never goes away — and she’s never cold — only there is no warmth either, anywhere, in anything. She sneaks into a wineshop and stands before the fire, but though her fingers pass through the flame it doesn’t feel any different to the street outside.
She walks through the streets, and occasionally she comes across a place that makes her remember. Then, sometimes, she gets a pain that’s almost like having a body again. She feels more solid. Sometimes she waits in those places for a long time.
One day she sees Azelma. Éponine is walking down a street — she feels like she should know its name, but she is losing her sense of how places connect to one another. The streets join up in one spiralling maze and she never knows exactly where she is inside it.
And then her sister is walking towards her. She forgets herself and cries out, runs forward.
Azelma looks cold. There is a pinched, tight look about her face like Papa’s when he first came out of prison.
“Zelma, oh, oh, I’ve missed you,” says Éponine, even if the most she can manage these days is a scratchy whisper. It sounds less like a voice and more like owls moving in the attic, rats in the walls, a sort of scraping and scuffling.
Azelma has frozen in place. Éponine can feel her limbs becoming denser; they almost have a weight to them.
“It’s me,” she says. “It’s me.”
Azelma is staring somehow both at her and through her. She blinks hard, turns, then walks away, her pace quick and urgent. Éponine follows, but it’s hard to keep up. Azelma turns onto a busy road; people press into the space between them. Éponine tries to keep sight of the dark brown of her hair, of her thin arms and small hands, if nothing else just to keep her own form solid and definite. But Azelma is fast and nimble, where Éponine’s steps still have the floating slowness of a dream. She sees Azelma turn a corner, but when she gets there herself there is no sign of her.
Éponine fades once more, along with the memory of that frozen, pinched face. And though she searches and searches, she never sees her sister again.
She wanders through the city.
She’s starting to lose the thread of things, now. She moves through walls. Sometimes she tries to catch sight of herself in silver puddles of rain, or in dark shop windows. But the face she sees is so hard to keep clear, so faint where the shops’ contents are so solid. She can almost believe she’s imagining herself, just a wishful thought giving form to the cloudy shapes visible in dusty glass or muddy water.
When she sees someone else she recognises, it takes her by surprise. She’s allowed the wind to lead her into a green space, where the walls are made from box and cypress. There are rows of such pretty flowers that she lets herself get lost for a minute, following the breeze from one to the other. Then she looks up, and there’s M. Marius, except - it can’t be him, for how could he have grown so old?
But for all the lines on his face, he’s unmistakeable. She cries out wordlessly, thinking for a moment that he’s seen her too, but he stares right through her, bends stiffly and reaches out his arms. Éponine turns to follow his gaze and she sees a small girl, darkhaired and nicely dressed, running at him full tilt. Éponine’s own limbs — or the memory of where her limbs used to be — prickle at the movement, and something about the child’s face is terribly familiar. She moves out of the way just in time to avoid the girl barrelling through her, and suddenly she’s hit by a painful longing to be substantial again, to feel the ground resist her steps.
Since she’s nowhere better to go, and since he moves slowly enough for her to keep up the pace, she follows him home. It’s a big smart daydream of a house, all balconied windows and fresh paint. She drifts in through the door after him, brushing her feet on the step as if mud still clung to them.
“Is your headache better?” asks Marius, to someone on the stairs.
“Much,” says a voice she knows — it’s her, the Girl. So he married her after all, thinks Éponine, and carried her to a castle like a girl in a fairytale.
She looks over at the woman’s face, and gets a fright.
Not because it’s her Lark; she’d known that always, even if the sharper, older lines of her face make it more obvious. But because the woman is unmistakably looking back at her, straight into her eyes. Her mouth’s half-open.
Éponine pulls herself back into the wallpaper at once. It’s a reflexive jerk; she’s not been seen in so long that it feels like burning on her skin. She makes herself small and curls up in the hollow under the floorboards. She can smell the dust. It strikes her that for a long time all she’s smelled, all through Paris, has been smoke and gunpowder.
She waits there, listening to the footsteps passing over her head, until the last cracks of light between the floorboards go out. Then she draws herself back into the room and walks up the stairs.
Cosette, Éponine’s Lark, is by herself in a room at the top of the staircase, in the pool of light from two candles. Éponine glides through the door and stands in front of it, hesitant. Something keeps her from getting closer, tells her it’s forbidden, that there is a line she cannot step through.
Cosette unbuttons the cuffs of her dress and unhooks the front panel, lifting it gently over her head. She ought to have a maid to do for her, thinks Éponine, with a little indignation, although the thought of some cold-handed, tight-lipped matron performing these offices doesn’t seem quite right either. She’s still trying to make herself move out of the darkness, make herself known. Meanwhile Cosette rolls down her stockings and steps out of her petticoat, giving Éponine a full view of her soft white legs and — oh. A real girl would be blushing by now, but Éponine only shivers, which is to say, the air she is standing in trembles, like the surface of a lake disturbed by the wind.
Cosette unlaces her corset from the front, then reaches behind herself to loosen it at the back. She takes it off and places it on a chair, then, humming softly, takes the candles over to her dressing table, where a bowl of water is standing. A mirror, somewhat scratched and blackened, catches the light and shows Cosette’s face, her throat; her nipples are two pink blurs flickering in the mottled silver.
Cosette continues to hum as she splashes herself with water. Suddenly Éponine remembers the feeling of cold water on warm skin, and the sensation of it pulses through her. She watches Cosette’s body in motion, and the echo she now has instead of a body repeats the feeling of each movement, the physical fact of Cosette. There are so many nerves in a living body; she had forgotten this, even before being dead, since the last few years of her life were spent retreating from her own flesh, watching it freeze and grow numb. Now she ripples with mirrored sensation. It is almost unbearable.
While Éponine is trying to take this in, Cosette turns, moves a couple of steps, reaches for a nightdress. She’s turning back when she gives the quickest of glances up towards the doorway. Éponine tries to dart away, like a fish in water, but her drifting slowness betrays her, once again.
She feels the start Cosette gives, and, simultaneously, the brittle jolt as her own body comes back into focus. Cosette has frozen in place, looking at Éponine, seeing her. Cosette’s eyes on Éponine’s body make her feel like she’s on fire, as if Éponine were the one naked, the whole surface of her skin suddenly illuminated and laid open. The feeling dances through her body. It is a pressure building within her; she is bright and thin, a shadow made visible; she wants to draw this moment out, to allow it to remake her; the world begins to shimmer.
Cosette, staring at her, has not closed her mouth. Her breathing is shallow and strange. She chokes out, “You!”
Éponine snaps back, into the wall.
Travelling through brick and stone is faster than travelling through air. Éponine, half-undone, is gone from the house in less than a second. She darts from street to street diffusely before pulling herself back together in a dim and narrow alleyway. That part is slow, the knitting up again; she keeps forgetting which parts of herself she can still untangle from tile and paving, which parts she lost too long ago, which parts she never had but always looked for, feeling the lack all the same.
She crouches in that alley for a long time, trying to put it all back in place.
Not many people disturb her. The alley is hers, and they seem to know it, shivering before they turn in, finding other routes. A child, having got lost and somehow ended up there, begins to scream about halfway down. He is frozen in place, too frightened to move. Éponine tries to comfort him with a gentle touch and a few murmured words, but she can’t shift his terror. In the end he forces himself to move, eyes watering as he drags each foot, running only when he reaches the main street. Then she is alone again.
When she emerges, she is ridged with the lines along which she was mended. Paris too has a strange energy; there is frost on the trees but fire in the air, a charge and spark. She walks in crowds as it moves from one person to another, and though she cannot take in its heat she can feel its movement, dancing from one body to another.
She can’t tell when it fully takes hold, only that she’s suddenly tasting blood in her mouth; the crisp winter day is full of iron. There is shouting, somewhere, everywhere; she is in a press of bodies; she feels she is not here but elsewhere. Her feet are moving, this dance is so familiar; she steps halfway out of time, as she follows the crying mass of men and women.
The other ghost isn’t hard to spot, through this crowd of the living. He is walking as if in a dream, along the scarline between this riot and that other one. He is still, in a manner of speaking, alive, although his face is pale and his heart has slowed almost to stillness. But he’s only haunting this body.
Éponine comes alongside him. “Monsieur Marius,” she says.
He looks, and doesn’t see her in this time; but he sees another Éponine, one who was also, in a manner of speaking, alive. He nods but keeps moving, blindly. There is gunfire, somewhere beyond sight.
Cosette comes up to his other side. “Let’s go home,” she says, pulling at his arm. “Not now.”
Marius shakes his head absently.
“There are plenty of other people here,” she says, “and you’re not well. Come home with me.”
In another time, Marius is walking alone through the streets and Éponine is following him. He mutters to himself and she skips through the dark in borrowed trousers. In another time, they both believe they are walking towards their deaths.
In this time, Cosette pulls at Marius’ arm just as a louder shout emerges and the gunfire gets louder, closer. In this time, there is a chaotic intelligence to the way the crowd moves away from the shooting, dividing into two and seeking cover.
In another time, Marius keeps walking, half in a dream.
In this time, Marius falls.
Cosette drops down, calling his name. A man and another woman help her to drag him to safety. His waistcoat is a bloom of red. He coughs up a fine mist of blood.
Cosette is weeping, saying, “No, see here, my love, this is just silly. Let’s go home. We both know you’re not up to this. We’ll go home and you can read the children a story. They say they’re getting too big for that but I know they’re not. I’ll tell you a secret; I’m not either. You must promise not to tell the children, though. Promise me, won’t you?”
Éponine reaches out her hand, and touches Cosette lightly on the shoulder. She’s not even sure if the contact will register; she is no denser than a mist, and no more solid than a shadow. But Cosette starts, then reaches her fingers up to touch Éponine’s. Cosette’s body is so warm it’s almost painful, and Éponine suddenly remembers Mamma dunking her into a bathtub full of just-too-hot water, Azelma already in it and shrieking; when they had warmed up they started to enjoy it, though their skin had a red line after where the heat had been. And, of course, she remembers the girl who stared at them the whole time from the corner, a thin shawl held tight around her bony shoulders as she shivered.
Cosette is holding Marius’ hand but his grip has slackened. Éponine can see that he is slowly leaving his body for good; as he stands and looks down at it, his eyes still have that dazed expression. This is my chance, she thinks. I could go with him, now. He’d show me the way, wittingly or unwittingly. I know he would.
But then she’d have to leave Cosette here alone.
Cosette is crying, angry, surprised sobs.
“Shh,” says Éponine, as gently as she can manage. She gets in front of Cosette so Cosette can see her. “Shh, look at me.”
Cosette stares at her, and oh, it’s that feeling again, as if all the light in the universe were shining in Éponine’s direction. She squirms a little but holds Cosette’s gaze.
“There,” she says. “You’re all right. Is this the first time you’ve seen someone die?”
Cosette shakes her head. “My Papa,” she says, quietly.
“Still, you’re not used to it, I’ll bet,” says Éponine. “It gets you, the first one or two times. You need a bit of brandy. Gin’s not bad either but brandy’s better, if you’ve got it. You’ve got brandy at home, haven’t you?”
Cosette nods.
“Let’s get you back, then,” says Eponine, wishing her voice could do anything but whisper and scrape.
The gunfire has begun again. Cosette stands cautiously, then mumbles, “No, I can’t leave—”
They both look down at the thing Marius used to be. but only Éponine can see the thing he is now, walking away from them purposefully, can see the shadows press out from the nothingness to meet him, can hear the echoes of their voices, their words inaudible but the joyful greeting unmistakeable.
“He’s not here any more,” says Éponine. “You can get that later. Now, it’s not safe. Come.”
She leads Cosette home, or rather, Cosette leads her home without realising it. The knotted streets untangle themselves for Éponine as long as she’s touching Cosette’s hand; the clouds in her mind disperse, too, and a sort of watered-down clarity comes upon her, like the kind she used to get when she’d not slept for days, when she walked through the small morning hours alone, on calloused feet and no rest and no food, and the dawn finally came up thin and grey over the river.
Cosette is very quiet, but once she stops and says, quietly, perhaps to herself, “He’s dead, then.”
Éponine, turning to her, sees all at once that Cosette is grown up. She’s ten - no, fifteen at least - years older than Éponine will ever be. Her waist is thicker, her jaw firmer, and her mouth, sad as it is just now, is marked by many years of smiles. Éponine feels cold, except not really. She doesn’t say anything, just waits, holding Cosette’s hand in her own hand (except, not really), until Cosette starts walking again.
She leaves Cosette on the street where the big house is. She doesn’t feel like she can watch Cosette walk up the front step, so she lets herself slip away along the streaming pavement, carried through the stone like a leaf on water, until she’s far out of sight. She thinks, perhaps, that she’d like to see Marius again — or, rather, to see Marius’ body — someone should be keeping it safe, after all. But without Cosette she’s lost; she can’t keep her thoughts clear or the path straight, and instead she flits anxiously about as the air fills up with shouting and bullets. She thinks, I am looking for something, and then, a body, I am looking for a body, and then she finds herself in a narrow street where the brickwork is scarred with bullet holes and someone has scratched letters into a wall.
She traces the scored stone with her finger and spells them out. V-I-V-E-N-T—L-E-S—P-E-U-P-L-E-S. Something is missing, she thinks, and then realises that she’s made a mistake. It wasn’t Marius she saw, after all; it was some other gentleman, some other wife she took home weeping through the gunfire. Marius is twenty-one, a boy really, and she’s just a girl in a too-big shirt and patched trousers, and she’s hungry, so hungry.
And the other girl — oh no, she thinks, I let her go, I lost her. This is a terrible dream. She walks from one house to the next, but the pavement moves under her, catches her feet and pulls her into spinning eddies of stone and mortar. The city is moving, uprooting itself and unspooling, and all the bits of herself she’s forgotten are unearthed and broken apart.
The pounding of hammers against brick, the snapping of wood, the rolling of the earth — it’s all so loud that she hides herself, in the end, in a stormdrain, presses her hands to her ears, and shakes while her bones are disassembled and her skin is peeled away.
If this is a dream, it’s one from which she can’t wake. She waits in the dark, in a stagnant pool of water, until men follow her there, too, with shovels and picks. She spits and hisses at them, pinches their arms while they’re not looking, whispers curses in their ears. She doesn’t know why she’s fighting, only that every last thing has been taken from her and she cannot recognise herself any more. Whatever the reason, it doesn’t make any difference; the men cross themselves and shudder, but keep digging and drilling, bricking and building. She runs, runs, hides, and then at last rises up through a grille in the street. It is spring, floodwater time, and the pavement glistens with melted frost.
There is birdsong in the air, but there is a singing in the buildings, too. Even the ground is alive with it. Two women walk down the street, stout and middleaged but almost skipping with excitement.
“So much to do!” says one, sounding more happy than harried. “You! Girl over there! You look hungry. Have you eaten today, citizen?”
“Cosette, whatever can you mean?” says her companion, laughing. “We’re alone in this street but for the sparrows.”
“Well, maybe the sparrows are hungry,” says the first woman. “And aren’t they citizens as much as any of us?”
“You’re very odd, sometimes, you know,” says the second, with affection.
“Perhaps a little,” concedes the first. “I sometimes imagine — but what does it matter, anyway? We’re free, that’s the important thing.”
But a few moments after they’ve left, she comes back on her own.
“Are you there?” she asks, then laughs. “Listen to me. I’ve become a strange old woman. I just thought…”
Éponine has hidden herself in a wall.
“Well, you’re welcome, anyway,” says Cosette, into the air. She sounds tired. “I suppose you’ve come to take me. Well, they can do what they want to me, I’m not leaving. There’s too much to do here.”
She turns and leaves Éponine in the street alone. It’s odd, seeing Cosette’s old, familiar walk in a body that’s changed and grown and worn itself down. Éponine feels an ache in her limbs that’s part jealousy and part something else, the salt-and-vinegar taste of being left behind. Everyone and everything she once knew has gone, either to that world beyond the shadow or this world full of song, and only she is caught in the hitch between one breath and the next. There are other people walking in this street but they pass through her, and their clothes are wrong; even their accents are just a little different, the slang she overhears is slightly strange, and it’s a lot like being alive except it isn’t, really. Not at all.
Then Cosette comes back, bleeding.
She’s walking with difficulty, supported by a younger woman; Éponine has to blink to convince herself this isn’t Cosette herself, as she once was. But this girl has too much of Marius’ look about her, a curious sort of overlay, his lashes laying against Cosette’s cheeks.
“Here, Mamma,” says the young woman, and helps Cosette to sit on a step, crouching beside her.
“I’m afraid it’s still in there,” says Cosette, wincing.
The daughter squeezes her left hand. “Can you feel that?” she asks, anxiously.
Cosette shakes her head. “Ought I? Oh, I see, you’re pressing it. No, I can’t feel a thing. You’re such a clever girl, you know.”
“Listen, Mamma,” says the girl. “I think it’s hit the artery. I’m going to tie this up in a tourniquet.” She’s already untying the ribbon from around her own neck. “Then I’ll go and fetch Georges. I need his help, and some more things besides. I wish I weren’t leaving you here, but it’s not good for you to walk any further, and this street’s fairly quiet and safe. Will you wait for me to come back?”
“Of course.” Cosette’s eyes go wide, “And where would I be off to anyway?
Her daughter smiles. She sticks her tongue out in concentration as she ties the ribbon tightly around Cosette’s arm. She looks behind her over and over again, as she walks away, leaving Cosette alone.
Cosette says, “I can see you there, you know.”
Éponine, her skin prickling, steps out towards her.
Cosette looks her up and down. “You were there when he died,” she says. “Is that why you’re here now?”
Éponine starts to say, “No”, then realises she doesn’t know why she’s here, why now.
“I don’t think so,” she says, flinching at the sound of her own voice.
“Well, good, because I’m not leaving,” says Cosette, setting her chin. “Even though I know this —” she inclines her head towards the mess of her left arm and shoulder “— is worse than she’s letting on. But there’s too much still to do.”
Éponine nods.
“Will you hold my hand?” asks Cosette. “The right one, I mean. The other isn’t working so well. But my eyes aren’t quite right, either, and I think I’d like to know you’re here.”
Éponine takes her hand.
Cosette hums, “Cold hands,” she says. “I don’t know why ghosts are always supposed to have such cold hands. It’s like the first air in the morning. Did you ever wake up with the dawn, just so that you could go out in the garden in that air? No, you didn’t, did you? Forgive me. I’m losing the thread.”
“Listen,” says Éponine, clutching at her hand. “Take me with you. Please.”
Cosette’s brow furrows. “Didn’t you hear what I said? I’m not leaving.”
“No, no,” says Éponine. “But remember that I asked, won’t you?”
Cosette’s eyes keep closing, but then she flutters them open again. “I don’t think I could forget that,” she says. “Oh, where’s that girl? She should have stayed here, I knew she should have stayed here, but she gets so fretful when she’s not doing anything. And I think I wanted you here.”
She’s started to pull away from her body. It looks gentler than what Éponine went through, but it’s not a simple stepping out, as it was with Marius. It’s as if she can’t stay in focus without effort; when her strength slips, she splits into two, the body and the soul.
“Take me, please, please,” begs Éponine. “Don’t leave me here.”
Cosette smiles, and sighs. She wriggles her shoulders, at last shaking her body off like a coat, then leans over and kisses Éponine on the forehead. “I wish I could take you,” she says. “But I’m not leaving.”
Éponine takes Cosette’s face in her hands. She tilts Cosette’s head up and kisses her on the mouth. Cosette’s soul tastes sweet, sweet, and for a minute Éponine thinks she’s understood what Cosette means, that they’ll be here together, the two of them clinging to each other as the river flows past them, and Éponine’s heart brims up with the joy of that, but then Cosette breaks away.
“I’ll see you again,” she says. “I’m sure I will.”
Then she turns and strolls down the street, and though Éponine tries to go after her, in the blink of an eye she is gone.
The city begins to burn.
For days the air is full of ashes, and when the fires have died down so has the singing.
Paris feels empty, then, and it strikes Éponine that she’s been forgotten. Nothing remains that bears any trace of her. She doesn’t look for her face in windows any more; she is sure it’ll be a blank, at most a blur, something nameless and lost.
It’s hard to get used to being forgotten, so Éponine starts trying to be noticed. She scratches at walls, writes messages in dusty windows, bangs at windows. Some people are insensible, whatever she seems to do; others are more receptive. One woman is especially sensitive, so Éponine hides in her house, whispers to her from the walls, moves her things from room to room. She is working towards allowing herself to be seen; the woman has only glimpsed her once, when she turned unexpectedly and Éponine was at the end of a corridor. It’s difficult for Éponine to imagine wanting something so overwhelming again, but she’s trying to build up the trust to try it out.
Then the woman has a visitor, which is unusual for her. He is a priest, which is even more so. They take tea and cake in the drawing-room, and then the priest gets out a bible and a bell, lights incense and candles, and orders Éponine to leave.
She tries to explain herself, but the incense he is burning chokes her, and the light from the candles burns her eyes. She would weep, if she could; instead she puts out every lamp in the house and flees to the street. She hovers by the door, listening to the horrible screeching of his bell. When everything is quiet, and she tries to pass through the walls again, the way is barred.
For a long time, she is quite alone.
She hides from company, seeks out old places that have been forgotten, like her. One day she is curled beneath the floorboards of a dusty atelier when she hears voices and footsteps, and her first thought is to run at once. Then she hears a woman saying,
“What a strange atmosphere this place has! It makes my spine shiver.”
“It seems utterly ordinary to me,” a man says, “but if you don’t like it, you shouldn’t take it.”
The woman laughs, an easy, joyful laugh. “Paul, don’t be ridiculous,” she says. “Of course I’ll take it, it’s perfect. If it were utterly ordinary it wouldn’t do at all.”
They leave, but the woman comes back on her own with suitcases and furniture, boxes of clothes and canvases. She sets up an easel by the window. Éponine has drawn some lines in the dust for her, in case she came back; the woman lifts a curious hand to the windowpane, almost touching the marks but pulling her fingers back sharply before they disturb the pattern.
She sleeps in a narrow bed in a corner of the room. The next day she paints the light falling through the window, copying Éponine’s fingermarks and the shadows they cast upon the floor, in purple and gold. Éponine watches her carefully. She is wearing a great blue smock over her clothes, the sleeves gathered at the wrists and shoulders, and her feet are bare. The paints she uses fill the room with a bitter, oily scent. She has a bad habit of chewing her paintbrushes. Her hair is long and black but she wraps it into a turban while she works; later, in the evening, she washes it over the sink.
While she sleeps, Éponine rearranges her brushes for her.
The woman’s eyes glitter when she sees them in the morning. She touches the handles, closing her eyes and breathing in. Later that day she draws the room in charcoals, but fills it with shadow figures, black smudged people who hover about the corners, behind the door.
Paul comes over later, carrying a bottle of wine.
“These are interesting,” he says, when he sees her last two days’ work.
“Really? That bad?” The woman laughs.
“Not at all.” He frowns. “They’re quite good, actually, I think. A bit odd, though.”
“I want them to be odd. Paul, it’s the twentieth century! We’re in a new era, all the clocks have been reset, the calendar begins again. We’ve been given a fresh copybook, so why write the same old turgid rubbish inside it?”
“You’re drunk, Louise.”
“Well, and if I am?”
He leaves at midnight, and she stands for a while looking through the big windows at the sky. She writes her name on the glass, LOUISE. Then she sleeps.
Éponine traces out her own name beneath it, ÉPONINE. There’s a strange sort of restless dancing inside her. She knocks the wine bottle over, but it’s empty already.
Louise wakes up late, goes to the window, starts visibly. She goes out and doesn’t come back for most of the day. When she returns, she draws herself and her shadow, or, at least, the shadow of a woman; it’s not quite the right shape to be her own: too tall, too thin, too angular. She writes at the bottom, Éponine.
Louise, it seems, likes to sleep on an unmade bed, tangling the sheets around herself, her black hair spilled out. Éponine likes to watch her from a distance. If Louise grows too still, Éponine gets afraid, although she’s not sure of what, and raps on the walls and moves the furniture until she stirs again. If Louise is out all day, Éponine pulls her clothing out of the drawers; it smells of Louise’s body mixed with the sharp notes of paint, and, beneath that, of dried lavender, from the bags of it she scatters everywhere to keep the moth away.
At night she sometimes tries to help with this or that task; Louise keeps forgetting to clear away the plates where she’s eaten her dinner of bread and cheese, or to clean her brushes, or to wash her clothes. But Éponine’s ability to move objects is variable, her grip clumsy and uncertain, and all too often all she manages is to drop heavy crockery, spill paintwater and palettes onto the floor, or leave the tap running until the sink overflows. She consoles herself by writing her name over and over again, in the crumbs or the spilled water. ÉPONINE, ÉPONINE, ÉPONINE.
She spends most of her time hidden in the brickwork, but Louise always seems to know where she is; will stand beside it, her palm on the whitewashed wall, still and silent. Éponine wishes she dared show to show herself more openly. Louise’s paintings all have these shadow women now, walking the street or standing outside the window. She paints Éponine bending over her as she sleeps, as if she knows that Éponine gets closer to her every night, has sat on the edge of the bed for hours watching Louise’s ribs rise and fall.
Louise is sometimes beset by dreams. On these nights, she cries out, sweats through the bedsheets, reaches into nothingness. Éponine tries to hush her calm. She sings lullabies that come out wrong, because her voice is too scratchy and rough to do anything like singing; she’s just whispering nonsense words into the darkness. The only thing that works, in the end, is to take Louise’s fever-damp hands in hers. Éponine clutches at them though they burn like hot irons.
“Hushhhhh” she whispers. “Don’t you cry, Papa’s going to buy you a lacewing fly —”
Louise untenses, blinks open her eyes.
They only stare at each other for a second. Louise’s eyes are large and blue, and — oh.
Éponine steps back into the wall. She doesn’t come back until Louise is asleep again, a half-empty glass of wine standing by her bed. Éponine tips it onto the floor. She wets her finger in the paint from yesterday’s palette and writes a name on the window:
COSETTE.
The next day, Louise begins a painting that isn’t like her others. It’s small, dark, just an ordinary image of a girl dressed in black, with curled hair and old-fashioned clothes. Éponine watches her paint while hiding in things, or behind things, or sometimes standing just behind Louise — behind Cosette, she whispers to herself — as she works, then darting away when Louise turns her head.
Paul comes over that evening. He brings absinthe and drinks most of it himself. “I’ve not seen you in ages,” he complains.
“I’ve been working,” says Louise. “I’m very happy, I promise.”
Paul studies the new painting intently. “What’s this?” he asks. “A change of direction?”
“Nothing of the sort, don’t worry. It’s a dream I had, a long time ago.”
“What’s her name?”
“Euphrasie.”
“She looks like you.”
“The nose is different,” Louise points out.
“None of the features are like yours, but still. She looks like you. Won’t you have some of this? If I get any drunker —”
“No, thank you.” Louise tenses a little. “I don’t think I’m up to it, not today.”
He looks at her fiercely. “Why aren’t you getting out more, Louise? You need to sell, to exhibit. You can’t just hide here on your own forever.”
“Can’t I?”
“Your paintings are good, but nobody knows about them.”
“It’s just — it’s awfully tiring, you know?”
Now his look is more fearful. “You should go back to the doctor.”
“I don’t want to, Paul. He’ll just tell me I should rest, or send me abroad again, when all I really want to do is paint. I’ve far more to do here than time to do it in.”
Paul looks troubled. He leaves early, and when he’s gone Louise-Cosette sits on the bed with her head in her hands and begins to cry quietly. Éponine doesn’t know what to do. In the end she hides under the bed, curled up underneath where Louise is sitting.
Then Louise-Cosette says, “I know you’re there.”
Éponine ripples and trembles. She crawls out from under the bed.
“I told you,” says Cosette. “I told you I wasn’t going anywhere.”
Éponine takes Cosette’s hands, which have paint worked into the nailbeds and the cuticles, and red knuckles from being scrubbed, and she kisses them.
“I’d love to paint you,” says Cosette.
She’s begun to smile again, and her smiles are so delicious that Éponine kisses her, and the soft touch of Cosette’s lips, her tongue, call up Éponine’s body into solidity, into this place, this now.
Holding still while being painted is difficult, especially since Éponine isn’t used to being looked at or staying in once place or holding herself in the shape of a body. But it’s something she learns to do. All the same, Louise-Cosette’s paintings tend to come out broken and disjointed; sometimes Éponine looks like a trick of the light, or a strange shadow cast by an assortment of objects.
They sit together looking at the stars out of the atelier’s big window. Cosette knows the names not only of all the constellations, but also of individual stars.
“I learned them when I was little,” she says. “I thought it wasn’t fair that they didn’t get to have names of their own, so when I found out that they did I learned as many as I could.”
The morning star is ‘Hesperus’, and the evening star is ‘Phosphorus’, and Cosette shows her both, a morning and an evening, and in between they lie in the blue night in each other’s arms.
“But there’s only one, really,” Louise-Cosette says. “They’re the same star. One brings the dawn, and the other one brings the darkness, but they were always, all along, the same star.”
Then one day Louise-Cosette goes out for a walk and doesn’t come back. Éponine waits up for her all night, lying on the floor and counting the seconds, but when the morning comes she’s still not there. Paul comes by in the middle of the day; he seems angry. He picks up some clothes, a few books, a sketchbook, and pushes them into a small bag. Then pauses, takes the sketchbook out. Then puts it back in again. Then leaves.
Éponine bangs the windows, raps at the walls, overturns furniture, but Cosette doesn’t come back to her. The paint has started to dry on her palette; the brushes will be ruined. Éponine thumps on the floor, over and over, so loudly that eventually the landlord comes in to investigate. The couple who live below are with him.
“There’s nothing here,” he says. “She’s been gone for weeks, she was taken ill. I think she’s staying with her family.”
“Something’s been making a real racket,” says the husband. “Could a bird have got trapped inside?”
“You can see for yourselves, there’s nothing here.”
“It’s a mess, it’s been turned upside down.”
The landlord shrugs.
When she tires of thumping the floor, she drags the bed around until the brass shrieks.
Then Paul comes around again. This time he takes everything away. Éponine pinches him and pulls at his hair but he barely seems to notice. It takes him several trips to empty the place out, but though she tries to make it difficult — hiding things, unpacking one suitcase while he carries another down the stairs — she can only slow him down, not stop him.
When the room is empty, she tries to cry but she can’t even summon up a memory of tears. Instead she sits beneath the floorboards, practicing a scream, which she also can’t produce. All she can make is a sort of scraping croak, like a raven’s, so she does that constantly, until the family downstairs insist that the landlord prise up the floorboards.
“There’s a nest of them in there! A nest!” says the husband.
“We can’t sleep at all,” his wife agrees.
“Well, you see for yourself,” says the landlord. “There’s nothing.”
The building is empty most of the time for a long time. People stay for a few days, but leave quickly.
Louise does not come back.
The building is torn down, and Éponine is on the streets again.
She sleeps under bridges, with the rest of the unseen. The city rewrites itself around her, and she tries to remember the stars’ names but she feels scattered and broken again and can’t seem to call them to mind. Only that they are all the same star, just one, with a thousand names.
She is missing something, she thinks, has forgotten something. She hisses her name over and over again, into the night.
Éponine’s walks from one place to another, trying to find somewhere she might remember or which might remember her. The city has been shaken, lately, by cannonballs that drop from the sky like falling stars. Something is familiar about the hurrying tread of this young woman, wrapped in a large coat which she clutches about her. Her skirts are short, as they all seem now to be, and a little skin is visible through the thin stockings which cover her calves. Éponine cuts through a building to get in front of her, then makes herself as solid as she can be. The woman almost trips over her; she’s not looking where she’s going but down at the pavement.
“Oh god, oh god,” she says, then looks up, and her eyes are Cosette’s eyes.
Éponine has so much to say but she is out of the habit of speaking; she makes a hissing, scraping sound. Cosette grabs her and pulls her into a doorway.
“For god’s sake, be quiet,” she whispers, and Éponine grows limp at her touch. Cosette softens. “I tried to find you,” she says. “I looked but you weren’t anywhere.”
“You came back,” says Éponine.
“Of course,” says Cosette. “There’s so much to do.”
Éponine puts her hands on Cosette’s waist, and Cosette pulls her in closer. Their lips almost touch; Éponine feels Cosette’s hips gently tilt towards her.
“You scared me so much,” whispers Cosette. “I thought — oh, I’m just being stupid. Only, I need to do something tonight, and I thought maybe you were someone else. I thought they’d found us.”
Éponine doesn’t know what she’s talking about, but Cosette looks genuinely frightened. “I’m sorry,” she says.
“No, no, please don’t be. I’m just — I wanted you to know why I’m so on edge.”
“I forgot all your names,” says Éponine.
“I’m Valerie. That’s my name, Valerie.”
“And Cosette.”
“And Cosette, if you like.”
“But that isn’t what I meant. I forgot your names for the stars. For the one that means the morning’s coming.”
“The morning star. Phosphorus.”
“That one. The last one.”
Valerie-Cosette kisses her forehead and says, “Wait here, I just need to do this. I’m meeting somebody. Don’t move, I’ll come back here, all right?”
Éponine waits, pressed into a doorway, until she hears the shouts, the crying sound Cosette makes, the two gunshots.
She’s always known the city must have other ghosts, but as she can neither see nor hear them she hasn’t thought much about it, not before. But now she is conscious of walking between layers of them, of all the city’s dead and missing and lost, a mouthful it can’t swallow and is choking on. She carves a name, VALERIE, into a brick wall. She walks and says, my name was Éponine. I lived here once. I was alive. I loved her.
She keeps walking until she finds Cosette again, marching and happy. She’s dressed in trousers, and her hair is short, clipped back. But she reaches out a hand to greet Éponine, and her eyes say, you.
“You didn’t leave,” says Éponine.
“I couldn’t,” says Cosette. “There was too much still to do here.”
People are digging up the paving stones and laughing. Éponine feels it in her flesh. Cosette is carrying a sign which says, UNDER THE PAVEMENT, THE BEACH.
Éponine takes her hand, and they walk together, again and again, until all their work is done.