This was what insanity was like. Or perhaps Hell.
He was flotsam in the jostling tide of bodies; swept aimlessly and pitchforked aside by elbows and heels, dolls’ heads and reticules, sticks and hoops and handles and jutting stays, in the hot garlic-sweat and acetylene flare of a crowd whose tides of purpose flung him to and fro without understanding. Sticky hands were over-intimate and voices shouted blankly in his face, wide red meaningless mouths that cursed or touted or propositioned in profanities from every language under the sun. And above the jabbering howl of humanity rose the squeal and roar of Coney Island like some great hydra-headed beast: mechanical mouths that brayed calliope-pipes or bellowed out the clatter and rush of wooden wheels and grinding gears or shrieked with the tongues of gongs and bells and whistles, and waving limbs that plucked and dived and circled watchfully above its peeling painted mass.
All around him, New York clutched greedily at its hours of leisure, drinking every cup of enjoyment to the dregs. An opulent woman in coquelicot stripes almost swamped her sharp-faced escort in his loud check jacket, reaching eagerly for the candy cane a stall-holder held out to him; her frills were torn and muddied and a mustard-stain smeared the straining front of her jacket, but the high colour in her cheeks owed nothing to cosmetics and she leaned in to the little man’s paddling caress with a giggle of tipsy abandon. Behind the ill-matched couple her lap-dog yapped unheeded at the feet of the crowd, snapping at those who stumbled over it. Raoul flinched, lost his balance, and garnered angry shouts in his turn as a guy-rope twanged beneath his flailing grasp and the barber’s booth beside him swayed and billowed violently. He plunged blindly back into the crowd, away from raised fists and the flash of a razor-blade.
The press of bodies in the Midway battered at him, merciless and single-minded in the face of hesitation or loss. He was thrust aside and elbowed out of the way, sent reeling against hard corners and hot brass, and cast up at last into a dank alleyway between two tents, where he bent double, gasping. The canvas walls breathed mildew and stale piss, and the greasy litter at his feet stank of worse things than decay. He was caught in a nightmare: a nightmare from which he could never awake.
He had to get out of this place. He checked his pockets, automatically; found them empty, watch and card-case and every dollar he’d had on him all gone, lost to light fingers that knew an easy mark abroad. The tickets to Cherbourg — the lifeline that was to have carried his little family home — lay torn and trampled somewhere far behind already where he’d let them fall like the mockery they were. He could have raised some money on those, perhaps... but it made no odds. He was broke now, broke in all the ways that mattered, and a little question of ready cash was nothing at all.
He had his baggage, back at the hotel, if he humbled himself to his rival. He could throw himself on their mercy at the Embassy, if it came to that. Have himself shipped home like a failed theatrical troupe whose trunks were under the confiscation of madame la concierge.
Home... to the debts that they— that he could not pay, and the whispers and stares of Society, and a life shorn of everything that had given it meaning since boyhood when first he’d heard her sing. An empty house he couldn’t afford, and memories he couldn’t face: and haunted eyes that looked back at him from the mirror.
Or he could trade the good coat on his back now for enough rot-gut liquor to buy a day and a night’s oblivion. Sink back into a stupor like the dog that returns to his vomit — forget his own foulness amid the New World’s rancid underbelly...
For a moment he wanted it so badly that he could see the coins shoved across the bar: see the smeared glass, and the bottle beyond. See that saturnine half-mask leering back at him—
God, no! A wave of revulsion swept over clammy skin. Never again — never, in this lifetime. Never, while memory could bear witness to what he’d done. Never...
Only... he’d heard vows like that before, on the lips of men with shaking hands and bleary eyes. Heard them, and seen them broken. Once the drink had got to you — it never truly let you go. You became its creature: its pitiful plaything. How far down that road had he gone already, these past few years? How long before the craving blotted out the shame and the horror, and he came crawling back?
He doubled over again, half-sobbing, sickened by the rush of self-knowledge.
Cool and clear and clean... The thought drifted in so vividly above his own gasping breath that for a moment he thought he heard it in her voice: Meg Giry, borne in on the dawn breeze that morning like a flaxen ghost of things to come.
She’d been... she’d been for a swim. Out there on the pier, where the sea washed endlessly, caring nothing for conscience or hurt or times past; the sea came in and the sea went out... and of what it took, nothing remained behind.
Sink into the sea — blue and cool and kind—
The water would be grey now, faceless and forgiving. It had carried weightier burdens: it had carried Christine from France. It would not bear her back again... and one more burden to that vastness would mean nothing at all. To be set free— washed clean—
Almost without volition he found himself moving, no longer buffeted by the current of the crowd but carried along in it, as if the whole of tonight had been leading him only to this moment of yielding; of consent... the appointed culmination. He should have known. What need of a magic rope, after all, here on the shores of Coney Island? To close your eyes and let go... would be easy, in the end: leave the hurt behind.
He’d gone into the sea for her once before; he had almost forgotten that. The water had been cold in Brittany, and the waves had tried to take him away... but the little girl’s arms had been warm around his neck when she’d kissed him, and the red scarf had been clutched like a trophy in one hand. And the gulls had cried up ahead above them as they were crying now.
Raoul de Chagny’s face had found a peace of its own at last, and his eyes saw only memories as his limbs took him towards the water’s edge.
When the shot came, it tore through that reverie as brutally as if it had struck home on those two children on the beach, after all.
A sharp, explosive crack. Not loud — not here, where the music blared, and the roller-coaster swept down — but a sound that carried like none other. To those around him, preoccupied and voluble, it meant little more than a momentary glance out at the pier before the next barker’s spiel or shriek of excitement brought distraction. But to any man who’d ever primed a pistol, that flat, uncompromising echo held an ugly resonance.
Raoul’s head came up sharply, focus returning without conscious thought. There had been a shot, and then a scream: woman... child? Others now had stopped, beginning to mill in confusion, but old instinct had him moving already towards that sound, starting to run as he gained the pier. Something out there was very wrong — and if it could take him out of himself, so much the better.
But the small body that came streaking towards him like a speeding bullet was one that, unbelievably, he knew; one that flung itself into his arms and clung desperately, with the terror and distress of a much smaller child.
“Gustave—” His own grip tightened around the boy like that of a man saved from drowning.
But he could make nothing of the incoherent outpouring buried in his waistcoat save his own name over and over again, the old baby-name that Gustave had long since outgrown: “Papa — Papa — it’s not true—”
There was dampness on the boy’s sleeve. Raoul’s hand came away red-smeared, sticky — his stomach lurched. Gustave could not be hurt, not that badly, not by the way he had been running and how fiercely his hold was clinging now: but what horrors had he witnessed, out there? What had he been exposed to?
If anything goes wrong — if there’s an accident— His own promise, so easily made, so easily broken. A wave of bitterness rose.
“If this Mr. Y has dared—” He should never have left the child, never. Should never have let his own shame drive him away like a thief in the night. His voice tightened. “Where’s your mother? Where’s Miss Giry?”
“Miss Giry?” Gustave looked up at last, his eyes huge with disbelief and accusation. “But she said — she said you told me to go with her—”
The words, once unstoppered, came pouring out, breaching every wall of illusion, of resignation, of noble self-sacrifice he’d tried to throw up, and letting in the howling flood: oh dear God, what had he done? Caught up in his own obsession and misery, blind to all else around him — in cowardice masked as honour, what had he done?
He held Gustave tight, so tight, the boy’s shuddering sobs echoing through them both in place of the tears he could not shed. Gustave, whom he had lost, and found again — only, it seemed, to have lost him all along.
He had no more denial left in him. Christine’s son: tossed from father to father, only to have his mother torn from him out there on the pier. Where he would not, where she would not —should not— have been, save by Raoul’s own act.
An agony of knowledge. Christine; Christine...
Give me strength to do this right: to make the right choice at last — at this, the end of all things.
“Gustave.” His pockets were empty; he found the boy’s own handkerchief, wiped the small face and dried the child’s eyes, setting the same gentle assurance into his touch that he would have used on a frightened horse. “Gustave. We have to go back.”
An oasis of willed calm in the heart of the whirlwind. Outside, the nightmare beat at him, betrayal and guilt and loss. Gustave — it was Gustave who cried out for me. Christine’s thought was only for him...
“Gustave, we have to go back there. We have to... say goodbye.”
The boy’s eyes were screwed tight as he shook his head, violently. “I don’t want to see it. I don’t want it to be true!”
He, Raoul, had left her; spurned her choice. She’d died — was dying — believing that.... If it were only still that other time— if wishing could change the world, make time itself somehow bend— if he could just believe, with the ardent belief of a child, pit himself against reality and force it to break—
That way, madness lay. He could taste it, very real, very close. As sweet an allure as the call of that grey water: as dishonoured an escape.
“Gustave — take me to her. Please. She’s all alone now: all alone with Mr. Y, and he—” He couldn’t say it.
Found the strength from somewhere, to do what he must. To do this — finally — right.
“He’ll need someone too, Gustave...”
A moment longer, as his son — the son that was not his — looked up at him. He stooped to the boy, on impulse, feeling the smooth cheek damp against his own; held out a hand.
And small fingers closed over his at last, tugging a little. Raoul followed without a word.
He did not know how any of them were to bear it.
Christine — ah, Christine...
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