Free Exchange Place by Ciaran Carson Page A

notebook and was writing down the names when the bus turned again. From my vantage point on the upper deck I caught sight of a street sign. Berlin Street. I was definitely on the wrong side of the divide. Someone from my side could have walked these streets then, but not now. So much had changed, but the buildings, it seemed, had remained. The bus began to labour up a steep incline and the landscape seemed to tilt as if the bus was on a level. I didn’t like where it was taking me. I decided to get off. I would make my way back on foot. I would keep my head down, making no eye contact. I had thought to take off my hat, fearing it would make me conspicuous. It was a foldable, navy felt fur trilby, Lock & Co. of London. I could have folded it and hidden it in my briefcase. But when I looked down at the crowd on the thoroughfare below, I could see that all the men were wearing hats or caps, hats and caps bobbing along, borne by the human current. I would have been a navy hat among many navy hats. Then I remembered that it did not matter, that I was to all intents and purposes invisible, in the way I have been on the streets of this same city, threading my way through the crowds on main thoroughfares, or walking through a portal into a narrow entry, where you encounter but few people, solitary men and women, the odd couple, or a street musician, the sound of his instrument amplified by the high walls. I am my invisible twin, the one I see in the mirror sometimes late at night, the other who is high on weed. A little Black Rose. Was it Bill or was it Ben? I feel the mirror neuron firing in my brain, electrical bursts of activity connecting from axon to dendrite to make me see in the other what I see in myself as I mime the other. I got off the bus and joined the human tide of the others, the people of the other side.

    It was October and a fog was descending, the street lamps dimly coming on. The black cars parked by the pavement glistened in the yellow light. I put my collar up and pulled down the brim of my Lock & Co. hat; hands in coat pockets, I joined the throng, threading my way downhill against the flow. The road to be taken was becoming clearer to me. I saw the map in my mind’s eye and the invisible fractal that would take me to my destination. I had not gone twenty or thirty paces when I found the crowds vanished from my orbit. I walked the pavement alone, past parked car after parked car, and something in me told me one of them was a bomb about to go off, but had not told me which one. They all seemed to be ticking over, when …

    I come to lying fully clothed on the bed in Room 7 of the Adelphi Hotel, my face under my hat. I take off the hat. I am awake at last. I am John Kilfeather.

The Yellow Coat
    Kilpatrick walked to Montparnasse and took the Métro to Trocadéro. Montparnasse was not his favourite station, but it had a direct line to his destination, and at least it was not as labyrinthine as Châtelet/Les Halles, whose endless corridors he avoided if possible. He thought of Patrick Modiano’s novel La petite bijou , whose protagonist, unusually for Modiano, is female. She is the Little Gem of the title. The first page finds her in the Châtelet Métro station, as I translate it:

    ‘I was in the crowd on the moving walkway, going down an endless corridor. A woman was wearing a yellow coat. We were immobile, jammed against each other in the corridor, waiting for the gates to open. She was right next to me. Then I saw her face. The resemblance to my mother’s face was so striking that I thought it was her … She sat down on one of the station benches, away from the others who thronged the edge of the platform, waiting for the train. There was no room on the bench and I stood back a little from her, leaning against a ticket machine. Her coat had no doubt been of an elegant cut once upon a time, and its bright colour would have given her a flamboyant air. Une note de fantaisie . But the yellow had faded and