Page 13 of Oyster

As I outlined all the avenues we’d yet to explore, she indulged me. I was clutching at straws, each one short, and we both knew it. But with Éti’s money, we could do this. We could explore every last-ditch, honky treatment the twenty-first century had to offer. For nothing but this, the soccer star could buy my silence. She never needed to know I’d have stayed silent anyway.

But my mum was shaking her head.

“No need to rehash, Nico, we’ve been over this a hundred times. Our doctors are doing the best they can. We know the score.”

“But what if they were wrong? What if better chemo is out there? In America, or in England?” The constricting band, never far away these days, tightened its grip on my ribcage.

She put down her mug and laid her cold, dry hand on my arm. “Me and your dad have been through this, love. And I’m in the newest trial. That fancy doctor we saw in Bordeaux explained it all. It’s this or nothing, Nico. And I don’t want to go anywhere else. I want to be here, at home. With all of you when...”

Those types of sentences always remained unfinished. None of us had the balls to say the last part of out loud, although everyone knew how they ended.

An hour earlier, as she pretended an interest in Max’s longwinded explanation of how he’d changed a fuel filter, I’d seen defeat in her eyes, for the first time. Eyes listlessly following my dad around the shed, as if trying to catalogue everything about him before the cancer stole her memories. My parents didn’t have a showy love for each other; after all, they’d been married coming up to thirty years and been together much longer than that. Nonetheless, it had been a reassuring constant throughout my life.

A scratchiness prickled in my throat; I swallowed it down. Merde, I rarely regretted being single, but at times like this someone just for me would be nice. They didn’t have to be a big love or a life partner or anything. Like Florian once was, the way we were for each other before he found his soulmate. A person with whom I could share my sheared-off sentences and sheared-off pain, someone not suffering their own. Someone to give me a hug or lend a shoulder to cry on—not that I ever did cry. Everyone else had shed copious tears, at the doctor's when we first heard the news, and with each subsequent blow since. My own tears just… wouldn’t come. Someone needed to be strong in those situations, and the role seemed to have fallen to me. The older brother, the oldest son. The responsible business manager, my mum’s rock when it all overwhelmed my dad, and he went on one of his benders.

“Okay,” I said, “As long as you’re sure. You can always change your mind.”

As we’d arranged, Éti came to the shed after the others had left. I made an excuse to hang around, told the rest of them I was going to tackle that health and safety pile. A sure-fire way to ensure everyone buggered off.

Half of me hadn’t expected her to appear. For a second after I woke this morning, I’d even questioned if I’d made the whole thing up.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

She hovered in the doorway, incognito once more behind shades and a scarf. Very expensive shades and a scarf. My usual confidence around women evaporated. Still starstruck, despite having witnessed her drunk and puking.

“There’s no one but me here.” I stepped back so she could see for herself. “You can come in. I’ll lock the door behind you, if that’s okay? Then you can take off your sunglasses. Your coat too, if you’re too warm. We’ve had the heaters on. Can I get you a coffee?”

She flustered me, an unfamiliar and uncomfortable sensation, not unlike waving enthusiastically at someone, then realising a second too late they’re not who you thought they were. Éti’s face was almost as familiar to me as my own, as if she was a person I knew really, really well, and yet… she remained a stranger.

Accepting a drink, she cast her gaze around. We called it a shed, but it was more like a big grain hangar. And not very impressive, as the real work took place in the ocean opposite. Storage racks lined the two long walls, rammed with empty packing crates, their shipping labels a who’s who of specialist seafood restaurants the length and breadth of the southwest and beyond. The far end housed tools and random bits of equipment in various states of repair, and nearest to us stood a row of filing cabinets, the office, and kitchenette. Strip lights and a too-small whiteboard covered in my and my dad’s scrawl completed the idyllic scene.

“Most of the work goes on outside,” I said, seeing her interest. “We package the oysters in here, and arrange shipping, but most of my day is spent on the beach at low tide, or in the yard, sizing them, grading them and moving them around the farm.”

“Where is the farm?”

I smothered a grin. I loved this question. The answer was obvious once you knew, but oyster farms were few and far between in landlocked Paris. I jerked my chin to the window, beckoning her over. A thick, earthy smell hung in the air; those northern rains were on their way.

“It’s there, right in front of you.” I pointed to where dull grey clouds gathered, knitting themselves to the murky grey ocean. A loose catch on the window rattled; the wind was getting up too. “You’re staring at it.”

This close, I inhaled a whiff of her floral perfume, not a strong scent but pleasant. It sure beat the smell of rain mixed with shellfish.

“I’m an idiot, aren’t I?” As colour swept up her cheeks, I caught a brief flash of chipped incisor.

“No, not at all. And believe me, you’re not the first to ask. We don’t always consider how food is grown nor how it gets to our plates. Anyhow, I bet people come up with all kinds of dumb questions about your life. I bet I would have done when I was younger.”

“They certainly do.” She huffed a laugh. “And not just kids. A journalist on live television once asked if I’d ever considered pro basketball as a career, because I’m so quick and agile on my feet. So, I told him to stand up, and I stood too. I came up to his shoulder, and he wasn’t much more than one metre eighty-two, one eighty-five maybe.”

I chuckled. The guy bags a rare interview with Etienne Salvador, and he comes out with that garbage? “Okay, so I like to think I wouldn’t have been silly enough to ask you that.”

“The commonest enquiries I get,” she continued, “especially from kids, is what car do I drive? And my favourite food. Or whether I’m good at playing FIFA on a games console. Nothing about soccer.” Her eyes returned to the window. “So, are you like Poseidon, or something? Do you own the sea?”

I smiled down at her. Her easy charm and this normal conversation were… unexpected. “Not exactly, no. You can’t see right now, because the tide is in, but my family have six hectares of oyster park here, in front of the sheds, and another three hectares over towards Ars.”

Her expressive eyebrows quirked. “I don’t know what nine hectares looks like.”

I performed some quick mental maths. “It’s equivalent to about twelve football pitches worth of land? We produce 140 to 160 tonnes of oysters per year. At low tide, you can see the rows and rows of metal tables embedded into the ocean floor. Covered in oysters. That’s our farm.”

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