A Lack of Understanding

Paris

She walks into a café that could easily be mistaken for a bookshop, or a club with its overflowing bookcases and live band.  The band, headed by a young woman, perhaps nineteen or eighteen, who sings like her life depends on it, seems to be playing a miscellaneous collection of jazz and folk.

 It's been two years. Two years of new countries and people. But the one person she wanted to find still remains elusive, and she fears he always will. Although its not for a lack of effort, she called in every favour she could, tried to prise information out of people who didn't want to know, mostly the British Government, who gave vague reasons why people were imprisoned and what happened to them after the were incarcerated. Nothing of what any said gave her any hope.

Fran heads up to the enthusiastic man behind the counter and orders a coffee. The man greets her like an old friend and talks to her while making her drink.

“I can’t seem to place you, are from here Miss?” He asks in French.

“No, I’m from England, but I’ve been traveling.” She replies, also in French. Travel is the best way to pick up a language.

“Ah, I thought as much, you accent is not like this cities one. Maybe you have an Everywhere accent.” He smiles and slides the coffee cup towards me and takes the money she offers him.

“Maybe” She smiles “Thank you”

“My pleasure, Miss”

She turns to find a table, but then notices all of the books scattered around the room and turns back to the counter.

“The books, can I borrow one. Just to read” She asks.

“Of course, you can take them. I leave them there in the hope that someone would steal them, that they would all disappear” He looks at the books like they were his enemies. Fran notices his fingers subconsciously tiptoe to his pocket and pull out a silver ring, which he fiddles with. His composure fails a little.

She nods her head “Thank you”

“But if you do,” His composure was back “Leave Les Miserables. My lodger, he would like to read it”

“I will, thank you” She smiles at him again before finding a seat by a window overlooking the Seine and a book.

She is so engrossed by the novel that she forgets the time. She is interrupted by the man at the counter, who gives her another cup of coffee. He waves down her offer of payment.

“You remind me of my lodger.” He begins “He can sit for hours reading and the only way he can stop is if he finished the book, or someone physically pulls it away. He travelled here, like you, I think he was running from something.”

“From what?”

“He’s forgotten. I think he was beaten up badly, hit his head.”

“He's forgotten everything?”

The man nods. “Everything. Some things come back to him, some stay, while others disappear the moment that they arrive. I think he has lost someone, he talks in his sleep. Someone called Fran?”

She stands up suddenly, jolting the vase of flowers that tip to the side and rolls off the tables with a smash of glass and water and flower petals. The room fell into a sudden silence.

“What’s his name?” she whispers.

“James”

She nearly cried then, nearly fell to her knees in the middle of a small Parisian café, surrounded by strangers and the warm aroma of coffee. Instead she gripped the table edge with white knuckles and something that tasted a little like disbelief.

Then the sound of someone hurrying down the stairs cut through the silence. The man in front of her looks up and behind her, his face changing to one of recognition.

She turns around.

He’s there and staring at her like she’s a ghost, frozen, before his legs give away under him. Fear pushed her into rushing to him, kneeling beside him; fear that he’s not real, that he is a hallucination. But he isn’t, he’s real and so is the hand she blindly searches for and clutches.

“I don’t remember” His words are muffled by her blouse and his tears.

“It’s alright” She whispers back.

“I remember you and your eyes…”

“It’s alright” She repeats.

“Everything else…Gone” He sounds pitiful.

“I love you.”