The two behind the counter discussed something between themselves for a while, and Nilly and Lisa realised that French must be a very difficult language even for French people. Because to make themselves understood they had to use their faces, both arms, all their fingers – well, actually, their whole bodies.
Finally, the woman grabbed a key that was hanging on a board behind them, came out in front of the counter and motioned that Nilly and Lisa should follow her as she hurried over to a wooden staircase.
Twenty-six steps and half a hallway later, she unlocked a door and showed them into a room.
It was very plain, with two twin beds, a small sofa, a wardrobe and a desk that was strewn with notes. Plus a door that led into a bathroom that was clearly in the process of being renovated. Or at least on the shelf under the mirror – next to two glasses – there was a hammer, a screwdriver and a tube of glue. There was a bath by one wall and a rusty pipe that was dripping. As Nilly unpacked his toiletries and put them on the shelf under the mirror, Lisa set her backpack down next to the desk in the bedroom. And there, in the middle of the papers on top of the desk, she spotted a drawing. She picked it up. It depicted a bath, just like the one in the bathroom. Under the drawing there were a lot of numbers. They looked like equations, rather complicated equations, actually. They seemed to involve borrowing, carrying, multiplying and dividing, Lisa thought.
“What is that?” asked Nilly, who had just come back in from the bathroom.
“I don’t know,” Lisa said. “But it sure looks like Doctor Proctor’s handwriting.”
“And this looks like his motorcycle helmet,” said Nilly, who had opened the door to the wardrobe and picked up a brown leather helmet. “So then these must be his white long underwear.”
The red-cheeked and very French woman started speaking French. She gestured dramatically with her arms, repeated the word “evaporay!” several times and made her fingers into a bird that flew away.
“He disappeared,” Lisa said.
“I got that,” Nilly said.
The red-cheeked woman pointed first questioningly at Nilly and Lisa and then at her own mouth with all five fingers.
“And what do you think she’s asking us now?” Lisa asked.
“How many fingers we can fit in our mouths,” Nilly said.
“You idiot, she’s wondering if we want something to eat.”
Lisa curtsied deeply and nodded and then firmly elbowed Nilly, who immediately bowed and nodded as well.
The pleasant woman brought them down to the kitchen and seated them at a table. Then she served them chicken thighs or wings or something, which Nilly thought were really good, whatever they were, before he got so full he couldn’t help but burp. All of a sudden he leaped up, bowed politely, something he seemed to have got the hang of, and launched into a long, rhyming apology that made the man and woman laugh out loud, even though they didn’t understand a word of it. Then Nilly yawned so loudly that it seemed as if his head would rip in half.
The woman left and came back with two sets of clean sheets that she handed them along with the key to Doctor Proctor’s room.
As Nilly and Lisa each made their bed, Nilly commented that those chicken thighs had been so small you might almost think they were frog legs. They both laughed pretty hard at that – because who in the world would ever dream of eating frog legs?
“Hm,” Nilly said after a while. “Why does your bed look so much neater than mine?”
“Because it makes more sense to put the duvet in the duvet cover than in the pillowcase,” Lisa sighed, walking over to Nilly’s bed to help him.
Then they went into the bathroom to brush their teeth.
“How are we going to find the professor?” Lisa asked.
“I’m too tired to think,” Nilly said yawning, his eyes half-closed, pushing the screwdriver on the shelf aside so he could grab his tube of toothpaste. “We’ll figure it out tomorrow.”
“But how can we find him when no one understands what we’re saying? And we can’t understand what they’re saying?”
“We’ll learn French tomorrow,” Nilly said.
“Tomorrow? Impossible!”
“Even little kids here seem able to learn the language, so how hard could it really be?” Nilly asked and squeezed a white dollop onto his toothbrush, popped it into his mouth and started brushing.
“It takes weeks and months,” Lisa said. “And I have a feeling that we don’t have much time.”
“That’s for sure,” Nilly gurgled. “We have band practice on Monday.”
“Quit joking around, Nilly! This is serious.”
She turned to face her friend, who smiled back with gleaming white teeth. Astonishingly white, actually. Yes, whiter than she had ever seen them before – Nilly was not a super-reliable toothbrusher.
“Nilly,” she said. “What’s wrong with your teeth, Nilly? Well?”
But Nilly just stood there with that grin, which was so stiff that it looked like his bottom teeth were glued to his top teeth. And when Lisa noticed the desperate look in his eyes and the frantic movements he was making with his toothbrush, she realised that that was exactly what had happened. She looked over at the shelf. Sure enough, his toothpaste tube lay there untouched, but the lid on the tube of glue next to it was off.
She picked up the tube and read the label out loud: “Doctor Proctor’s Fast-Acting Superglue! You grabbed the wrong tube, Nilly!”
Nilly shrugged his shoulders apologetically and kept smiling that sheepish, idiotic grin.
Lisa sighed and rummaged around in her own toiletries bag until she found her nail file.
“Stand still!” she ordered. “And help me!”
Nilly used both his hands to pull his lips out of the way and Lisa managed to slide the nail file between his teeth on the far left side of his mouth and started filing towards the right. Nilly hummed the Marseillaise as she slowly filed his top teeth and his bottom teeth apart.
“Whoa,” he said when she was done and he looked at himself in the mirror. “Check out these pearly whites, would you? And they’ll be totally impervious to cavities with this superglue on them, my dear Lisa. No more visits to the dentist for me!” He picked up the tube of glue and offered it to her. “You want to try?”
“No thanks. Why do you suppose Doctor Proctor’s Fast-Acting Superglue was sitting right here? Along with these tools?”
“Elementary,” Nilly said. “He was obviously renovating the bathroom.”
“Maybe,” Lisa said with a yawn. “Well, that’s enough thinking for one day.”
But after they got in bed, Lisa lay there awake, listening to the sound of water dripping in the bathroom, making a sorrowful seeping slurping sound. From outside came the distant rumble of traffic and some wailing accordion music. Plus a sound she couldn’t quite identify, but which could have been the creak of a light swinging in the wind. Or, for example, a roller skate on a wooden leg.
Such strange things go through your mind when it’s dark out and you’re alone in a big city. She glanced over at Nilly. Well, almost alone.
Surely everything would seem cheerier tomorrow.
And indeed, she would be right about that.
The Cancan, Snails and Margarine
NILLY WOKE UP because Lisa was shaking him.
He squinted at the daylight streaming in through the window and noticed that she was fully dressed.
“It’s nine o’clock,” she said. “I’m going to try to find a library and borrow a French phrase book.”
“A what?”
“A little pocket-sized dictionary with French in it so people can understand a bit of what we’re saying.”
Nilly sat up in bed. “And how are you going to find a library?”
“I’ll ask people for directions. If I just pronounce it the French way I’m sure people will understand: librairie.”
“No doubt,” Nilly said. “What’s for breakfast?”
“Nothing,” Lisa said. “They only
serve air and café au lait for breakfast in this country. I’ll buy a baguette on my way back.”
“Well, hurry up,” Nilly said, swinging his feet out of bed. They dangled just above the linoleum floor and looked as if they were wondering if it was going to be cold.
Once Lisa shut the door, he jumped down onto the floor – which was not just cold, but freezing cold – and sprinted to the bathroom. Shivering, he hopped up onto the chair in front of the sink and looked at himself in the mirror. And staring back at him he found – if he did say so himself – an unusually handsome, red-haired young man of modest physical proportions, but immense intelligence and charm. Indeed, Nilly was so pleased with the boy in the mirror that he immediately decided to give him a warm, relaxing bath on that chilly October morning.
So, Nilly turned on the water in the bath and let it run while he looked for some bubble bath or something similar. When he didn’t find any, he remembered that Lisa had brought some soap powder. He found her bag and, sure enough, inside it next to two nose clips he found a jar labelled time soap bath bomb. Nilly grabbed one of the nose clips and the jar of soap, hurried back to the bathroom and poured a little of the strawberry-red powder into the bath.
There’s a time for this and a time for that, Nilly thought as he watched the bubbles instantly start forming, growing and rising like a white snowdrift that soon filled the whole bath. Nilly stripped off his clothes, climbed up onto the edge of the bath, put on one of the nose clips and howled, “Bombs away!”
Then he jumped up, pulled his legs in, wrapped his arms round them and plunged into the bubbles. He hit the surface of the water just right and got the maximum effect. Soap bubbles and water sprayed all over the bathroom walls, all the way up to the ceiling. Satisfied, he let himself slowly sink down to the bottom, where he lay, holding his breath and gazing up at the surface of the water. It was covered with such a thick layer of bubbles that only some dim light made it all the way through. And in that light he saw an amazingly beautiful rainbow, like a line of multicoloured, high-kicking cancan dancers at the Moulin Rouge in Paris in 1909. Oh, to have been there!
Just then Nilly felt the bath start to sway beneath him and saw the surface of the water above him start sloshing up and down. As if the whole floor were moving. Yikes, maybe the whole building was collapsing? And wasn’t that music he heard?
The floor suddenly stopped swaying. Nilly spun round and stood up in the bath. And remained standing there – completely naked – as the bubbles slid down his body. The music had stopped. And a line of cancan dancers all dressed in red were staring at Nilly. Their faces were at least as astonished as his.
“Where did he come from?” he heard one of the dancers whisper.
“Where did that bath come from?” whispered another.
“What’s that thing on his nose?” cried a third.
“Oh, look at how cute he is,” giggled a fourth.
Nilly blinked at the bright lights and the audience sitting there with their mouths hanging open too, speechless, as if they had just witnessed a somewhat unexpected moon landing. Nilly didn’t understand what was happening. Only one thing was clear: he was onstage at the Moulin Rouge.
LISA STROLLED DOWN a big, broad, tree-lined avenue lined with small clothing stores and perfume shops, but no libraries. She had planned to ask the red-cheeked woman at the hotel before she left, but there hadn’t been anyone in reception, just a hippopotamuslike man sitting in an armchair in the lobby reading a newspaper who had eyed her with suspicion and wariness. And now she was feeling more and more dejected, because every time she would approach someone to ask for directions they would stick their noses up in the air the second they realised that she couldn’t speak French. She was starting to suspect that not all French people were as helpful to foreigners as the man and woman at the Frainche-Fraille. She let her eyes browse the various display windows to see if any of the shops seemed like they might carry books. But it was mostly dresses. Nice dresses, actually. Lisa stopped to look at one particularly remarkable dress. As she stood there, she suddenly noticed something reflected in the shop window, a woman standing across the street wearing a trench coat and big sunglasses. The woman was too far away for Lisa to be able to see her clearly, and yet there was something strangely familiar about her. And even though Lisa wasn’t sure who the woman was, it was very clear that the woman was watching her.
Lisa started walking again, pretending to be engrossed in the shopfronts, and sure enough, the woman across the street followed her.
Lisa felt both her heart and her feet starting to speed up. Who was this woman and what did she want? Was it . . . ? Could it be . . . ?
The woman was crossing the street!
Lisa started to run.
There were lots of people on the pavement and Lisa tried darting quickly in and out between them while she kept her head down so that the woman wouldn’t be able to see her. And yet, when she turned round she caught a glimpse of the woman’s coat between some pedestrians behind her. Lisa ducked into a narrow alley and ran. But she ran only a few metres before she discovered that it was a dead end with a wall at the end. She pressed her back in against the wall behind a drainpipe and waited, staring out towards the main street. There was the coat! It . . . it . . . passed the alley without pausing to look right or left. Lisa exhaled in relief. Now she had to get back to the hotel. The phrase book and baguette would have to wait. But, just as she was about to head back out to the street, she saw the coat again. It had come back and was now stopped right outside the alleyway! It stood there as if sniffing for her scent. Lisa saw an iron staircase leading down to a cellar door below her and scurried down the steps. The steps ended in front of a door and Lisa stood there, waiting and holding her breath.
Seconds passed.
Then she heard a sound from above her in the alley. Someone was approaching.
Lisa pressed down on the door handle. To her relief, it opened! She stepped into the darkness and shut the door behind her and leaned against it with her back. Her heart was pounding like a tap-dancing rabbit. It wasn’t so strange that the door had been left unlocked – as far as she could make out, this was a completely empty room. What was strange were the sounds and the smell. It was like an orchestra of squishing, slurping and sucking, as if there were about a hundred invisible fathers eating lamb and cabbage stew in there. And the smell was like . . . like rotten meat and stinky socks. Just then, she screamed. Something wet, slippery and cold had caressed the back of her neck! She ran to the middle of the room and looked around. By now her eyes had adjusted to the darkness enough that she could see that there was something on the walls . . . something moving, something undulating with long, enormous feelers. And not just over there, but there and there and . . . they were everywhere, they were what was making those sounds, the walls were alive!
As she stood there, frozen with fear, the cellar door slid open. Silhouetted against the daylight outside, she saw the shape of the woman who had been standing on the other side of the street.
“Hi, Lisa,” the woman said, shutting the door behind her and flipping a switch. The light came on. Lisa looked around and mostly felt like fainting.
“Why so pale?” the woman asked, coming towards Lisa. “Is it all these giant snails on the walls? They’re not dangerous, they just breed them down here. Once they get big enough, they serve them for dinner in the restaurant upstairs. Snails are a delicacy in this country.”
“They are?” was all Lisa managed to say, because the woman was so close to her now that Lisa could see her face. And it was definitely a face she recognised.
“Well, Lisa,” the woman said. “Maybe you’re wondering what these snails live on down here?”
“Uh, what?” Lisa asked, feeling her teeth chattering in her mouth.
The woman laughed. “Grass. And lettuce. Things like that. Why, what did you think?”
Lisa exhaled in relief.
“I’m—” the woman began.
“I know
who you are,” Lisa said.
“Oh?” the woman asked, clearly surprised.
“Yes, I’ve seen pictures of you. At Doctor Proctor’s house. You guys were on a motorcycle with a sidecar. You’re the professor’s old girlfriend. You’re Juliette Margarine.”
The woman in front of her gave her a big smile. “Impressive. And you recognised me again right away?”
Lisa smiled. “No, at first I thought you were Joan of Arc.”
“Joan of Arc?” the woman asked, surprised. “The saint?”
Lisa laughed. “There’s a picture in our history book at school of Joan of Arc being burned at the stake and I think you look like her.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence, Lisa,” the woman said in her slightly broken Norwegian, picking up a lock of her long, auburn hair. “We may have the same colour hair, but unfortunately I’m not a brave heroine, just Juliette Margarine. Which is actually pronounced Ju-lee-ETT Maar-gaar-EEN in French.”
“Ju-lee-ETT Maar-gaar-EEN,” Lisa repeated. “But how did you know my name was Lisa?”
“Victor told me about you and Nilly,” Juliette said.
“Victor?”
“Doctor Proctor.”
“Doctor Victor Proctor?” Lisa had never thought about the fact that Doctor Proctor must have a first name just like everybody else.
Juliette smiled. “Besides, I was the one who forwarded his postcard to you. Since then I’ve been keeping my eye on the hotel and waiting for you to show up. You have no idea how happy I was when I finally saw you walk out this morning. ‘They’re finally here!’ I thought.”
“But . . . but why didn’t you just come into the hotel? Why were you sneaking around after me? And where’s Doctor Proctor? And why is everything so secretive?”
“Cliché,” Juliette said.
“Huh?”
Juliette sighed. “The answer to most of your questions is Cliché, Claude Cliché, a very bad man, unfortunately. But that’s a long story and you look very hungry. Why don’t we find a café where we can have a croissant and a café au lait?”