FIC: Goldcrest

[a_changing]

Title: Goldcrest
Character: Anisette (FOC) with mentions of Jean Louis.
Summary: Anisette isn’t afraid of heights. She’s afraid of failure. NaNoWriMo preperation.





Goldcrest

Back on the scene, we’re all alone...

*

The ceilings of Chambre des Députés, old and kept to the appropriate state of governmental austerity, have always been higher than the sky. Anisette has been too small to reach in many ways throughout her life; too small to get her own plate in the kitchen when she was five. Too small to understand the speeches on the telly when they came in French without German subs. Too small to go with her sister to the fair and too small to muster up an appropriate reaction to the resultant disappointment, apart from kicking and screaming. Too small and now grown, as things happen and times pass. But in parliament, she thinks she’ll always be too small and the sky so high that nature gives in to the implications. She understands that Jean Louis gave her wings to fly when he made her one of his ministers and recently, spokesperson for the party. She understands that he doesn’t do it because he thinks she’s incredibly competent or to make her happy; it doesn’t matter. She’ll always be grateful that he didn’t pass her by because she knows he could have. Easily, without a care in the world.

That’s why she shows up to work every day, dutifully, passing by his empty office and quenching the urge to scream. Because in parliament, she’s still dwarfed by the prospects of global responsibility and he’s... he’s sending her to the fair without a bag, without money, without even the mandate to buy or to borrow a single thing. Anisette isn’t afraid of heights. She’s afraid of failure. On her own behalf and on the behalf of their voters, the people who have to live with their incompetence.

Her office overlooks Place Guillaume. She used to love the view over the streets, the chocolate café an ever-present temptation during the dark winter months. And really, things haven’t changed as such. She still loves the view. She still loves chocolate with whipped cream and the sounds of café visitors, sharing their lives over the old, wooden tables inside. She still loves. All of it. But even her window pane is littered with books and letters and papers and magazines and articles. Her old orchid, watered to perfection for a decent stretch of years, has been downgraded to the floor next to the radiator. She can’t really... see a lot. Unless she stands on her toes and even then. Even then, Anisette is quite afraid that she’s slowly, surely, becoming too small to reach. Regression, despite her age. Despite the fact that she’s been granted wings, despite the fact that falling from so high up would be worse than death.

When she writes him an e-mail, he responds. Promptly. And while the answers are curt, she finds herself clinging to them pathetically, despite the fact that she can’t write him more than twice a day without setting him off into a fit of angry impatience. She has to choose every question with care; has debated running it by some of the others, maybe see whether they find it relevant enough, pressing enough to warrant his attention. But she’s given up on that idea now. Quite frankly, she... doesn’t know who to ask anymore. Who to trust. Today, perhaps Girard will support her ideas and her choice of action. He might even be delighted, show a hint of motivation despite the way they’ve been left afloat without even the tiniest spot of dry land in sight. But tomorrow, she knows, he’ll be drowning like the rest of them and his strength will be spent on threading water. She’ll be writing Jean Louis another e-mail, trying not to ask questions that will get her fired. He’ll respond with single words, those quick and helplessly literal sentences that have made her realise, slowly and with an increasing sense of dread – he doesn’t know. If they run aground, he’ll be blind to the waters until they’ve hit the sea floor. Or until every rat has scampered for security. Elsewhere. In either case, she’ll stand there with her thousand maps and her silly little spyglass and he’ll...

He’ll stand next to her with his empty hands and he’ll go, “Anisette. What the hell just happened?”

She knows. She knows because she’s known him for two decades and counting. Jean Louis has many projects but he doesn’t care about them anymore than he cares about people. Everything’s dispensable, everything’s made to break. Her wings are just the same, of course they are. Anisette isn’t stupid enough to believe that she’s made of gold just because she’s been left out on exhibition. No, she’s never been foolish enough to expect special treatment from a man who doesn’t think that anything she has to give is special in the first place. She’s never been bitter about it, either. Can’t see why she should be. But the thing about this... the thing about Jean Louis...

When they were in their mid-twenties, they’d staged a small campaign for the party. It had been one of their rare failures. Fortunately, it had been during the silly season and the world was granted a laugh for the occasion and little else. She can’t remember what they’d been trying to do, exactly; but she remembers what went wrong. At some point, they’d been held up for an interview and he’d been asked a question he didn’t like. He didn’t like it, she thinks, because he couldn’t answer. He’d been out the night before, drinking – and as a consequence, the appropriate reply had gone missing in the haze of his hangover. Before she could answer in his stead, he’d basically told the journalist off for being the most incompetent and most redundantly irrelevant existence in all of Luxembourg and possibly, in the world at large. The journalist, of course, wrote the whole tirade down and published it. She thinks Jean Louis got a talking-to by Barrault – she thinks, because she doesn’t snoop and that’s his private business. The point, however, is not the consequences. It’s how, afterwards, Jean Louis placed the blame squarely on her, agitated enough by the entire thing to yell at her for close to half an hour.

You’d think she would be angry, right? And Lord knows she has been, many times over the past years. But more than that... she’s sad. For him. Because he loathes failure, he loathes making mistakes and she loathes it too and she understands. She doesn’t want to stand there while their ship is sinking because he makes mistakes that he can’t recognise. She doesn’t think – and this may be naive of her, but so be it – that she gets to carry the weight of his failures because he doesn’t like her. Or because he wants her to suffer. Once again, she isn’t anything special to him, neither in the positives nor in the reverse. He puts the blame on her because that’s all he sees. Because he’s got a blind spot wide enough to leave the power of the country sinking between the waves.

So darn it all, she’ll fly. She thinks. And puts another stack of papers away, her desk a mess of post-its and unfinished business. She’ll fly and she’ll strain what wings she’s been given against the currents. If the ceilings are too high to reach, surely there’s also a line she can walk beneath them. Surely, there’s a chance – if she doesn’t look down. Anisette is small, yes, but she’s also a grown woman and unlike him, her sight has only grown sharper with age. Perhaps she can’t see the chocolate shop right now (and perhaps that’s not all bad, everything considered) but come spring... come autumn... Some day, she thinks, his office won’t be empty any longer and she won’t have to beg him for the rights to sail his ship. Someday, surely, surely, he’ll be back.

Until then...

Until then, she won’t mind. She’ll be strong enough to stand it and the party will be strong enough to stand his failures and his disregard. The ceiling is high, yes, but the buildings have stood for over a hundred years and what came before has left the foundation more solid than rock. So Anisette closes the door to her office. Ignores the view that she can’t see and pretends that the flower isn’t wilting on the floor. She’ll be strong and they won’t know, they won’t ever know exactly how small she feels when the dark is falling and her daughters are going to bed without her for the fourth week in a row.

~