Revolution - Jennifer Donnelly [142]
I stand up and start the long walk back.
74
“Hugo stinks. Don’t you ever wash him?” I ask Amadé.
The hellhound is lying on the bed next to me. He growls every time I try to push him off.
“Seriously. You could take him for a swim in the Seine, you know. Anything would help.”
I get no answer. Just the same chords over and over again. Amadé’s composing, or trying to. I’m lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling. It’s where I’ve been ever since I got back from my stroll through the catacombs. Amadé wasn’t exactly thrilled to see me, but he let me back in.
I put a pillow over my head now and try to block out the sounds he’s making but it doesn’t work. How did he ever get to be such a famous composer if he can’t get past the same three chords?
I can’t take it anymore. I raise the pillow. “Switch to B minor! There should be a tritone in the third measure. God!” I shout.
Amadé swears. He bangs his fist on the table. “Did I ask you for advice? No! I do not need advice. What I need is coffee!”
Coffee’s the least of our problems. We have no food. We’ve eaten everything I bought yesterday. We’ve run out of firewood, too. I sit up. Hugo’s funk is suffocating me.
“We need to eat,” I say. “I’ll go to the Palais. See if I can get a few coins. If I do, I’ll get some coffee.”
Amadé mutters something, but I don’t catch it. He’s bent over the table now, scribbling music.
I don’t want to go to the Palais—the memory of those drunken goons who groped me makes me shudder—but I don’t have much choice. I open my guitar case, to tune up before I go, and see that my E string has snapped.
“Do you have any spare strings?” I ask.
He points to a box on the table. I open it and find a tangle of strings. Trouble is, most of them look nothing like the strings I’m used to. Eventually I find what looks like an E. I replace the broken string, then try to tune my guitar. But it doesn’t work. The strings don’t sound right together. Probably because the one I got from Amadé is made of cat or dog or squirrel.
“This is no good,” I tell him. “I need a whole new set.”
“Go buy one.”
“With what? I don’t have any money. I just told you that.”
“Go to Rivard’s. My credit is good there. On the Rue de la Corderie. Just north of here. Go up the Rue d’Anjou.”
I get my Streetwise map of Paris out but the Rue d’Anjou’s not on it. What a surprise. “Way north? Or just a few streets north? Can you help me out here, Amadé?” I ask him.
He throws his quill down. “Fine! I’ll walk you there. Will that make you happy?”
“Yeah, it will. Will not starving make you happy?”
He doesn’t answer me, just shrugs into his jacket and stuffs the iPod into his pocket.
Outside on the street, I say, “You’ve got to give up on that chord progression. It’s not working for you.”
“I heard something similar on the music box. I wanted to try a variation.”
“Who were you listening to? Beethoven? Mozart?”
“Radiohead.”
I burst into laughter.
He pulls out the iPod. “Explain to me something,” he says.
“What?”
He points to the dial. “This one … ‘Fitter, Happier.’ ”
I shake my head. “Sorry, dude, not possible. I’d need the next two centuries to explain that one.”
75
It’s kind of beautiful, this scary world.
I still want to get out of it as soon as possible, but when I look around and stop thinking about how insane it all is and just see it without freaking out, it’s really beautiful. Stinky, but beautiful.
We’re walking north through the Marais. There are yards and gardens. I can see them through the gates of the houses. Flowers bloom inside them. A man drives a herd of sheep ahead of him through the narrow, cobbled streets. Another carries a cheese as big as a wagon wheel into his shop. A straight-backed girl in a slate blue dress, her gold hair coiled up on her head, washes windows. Men sit in a coffee shop, drinking from porcelain bowls and smoking clay pipes. Amadé stops and looks at them longingly.
“Come on, java-boy,” I say, tugging on his sleeve. “The sooner