French Lessons
by Emma Hart
Celeste’s flat was nice. It was big and airy with built-in storage, which is rare to find in the area. Even with sloping ceilings (usually a big drawback), the space was more than she was used to. If she were to walk from the sofa to the kitchen, she’d take twelve whole steps. In her old place, it would have been about three, because the kitchen was barely a cupboard, and the living room, kitchen, and bedroom were like one open plan thing.
Other than the fact that her new building sometimes smelt like burnt toast, it was nice, too. One of those Victorian terraced ones. Used to be one swanky house ages ago, before it was split up into six flats, with the benefit being she had access to a lush communal garden out back.
She’d moved in about two weeks ago. Finally felt settled, figured out where the gas metre was, and that the street was so empty she could walk about naked with open curtains, no stress. Sure, it was further away from her friends but just look at the floor plan. Plus, it was only ten minutes from Lidl. And when she got bored, she’d indulge in some me-time, either on Hinge or Duolingo, where she was practising French in preparation for her next trip to Paris.
“Ou sont les toilettes?”
Da-ding!
She envisioned herself in a little bistro in Montmartre (the pretty bit not the part with all the sex shops), finishing the last drop of a café au lait, rising from her seat, clip-clopping over to the bar in her Pierre Cardin kitten heels, where she would lean over the counter and ask Monsieur where the bogs are. Shocked by the eloquence and linguistic prowess of this exotic foreigner, he’d stare back open-mouthed, clearing his throat before answering her.
“À la droite, mademoiselle.”
“Merci.”
Summer was going to be elite. A new flat, maybe a new Parisian boyfriend, a new start. The only problem was at nighttime. She wasn’t used to quiet—back in Dalston there was always something going on, neighbours knocking about, voices carrying through the walls, sirens blaring from the street. But here, there’s nothing. Silence. She thought about getting a fish tank or something. Bubbles and filter-hum could add some chill ambience.
In the darkness, she googled fish tanks, algae, tank gravel, and betta fish life expectancy. Then she opened Pinterest and saved high-protein recipes and European summer inspo. Launched Duolingo, where the screen glare wore out her eyeballs as she picked apart conditional, past tense, and reflexive verbs.
In between da-dings, something catches her attention. A low groan echoes through the hallway. The kind you hear when wind pelts the roof and the walls shift. Old houses make weird noises in bad weather. But when she glanced up towards the window, expecting to see a storm battering the garden about, the trees were standing still. There wasn’t even any rain. Outside was a calm, balmy Spring night, almost grey by moonlight.
She lay stiff for a few minutes, disappearing into the bed sheets. Then she convinced herself she was stupid; if someone were in the house, they would have come in here by now. It was probably just the pipes anyway, and she should probably get up to check in case there’s a leak.
She had hardwood flooring after all! But when she threw on slippers and crept out, the noise faded away. The moaning stopped, but there was something else, like shallow breaths, right close to her ear. She switched on the light. Everything seemed normal enough.
On the wall, she’d hung this gold ornate mirror. It was vintage from the 1950s, or so the guy had told her. She looked and two eyes reflected back at her. But they weren’t her own. Instead, a pair shadowed in black like two pinholes, rubbed raw and wet with tears. The mouth didn’t look much like a mouth is supposed to, all dried up and shrivelled, as if it’d wilted away in her face hole. But it moved, opened, and shut gormlessly like a goldfish and screeched the same word over and over. “Foo! Foo! Foo!”
Celeste sprinted down the staircase and into the front garden, feeling something tickling the backs of her feet as she ran. When she’d put a good distance between herself and the flat, she booked an Uber to her friend’s place. She crouched behind someone’s recycling bin, half-expecting to see the lady floating down the road towards her.
Because she knew the thing she saw was a ghost. She knew because it wasn’t in the room with her. She only existed in the mirror, behind the glass of her lovely frame.
When she arrived at the friend’s, Celeste said there was a bunch of mice, and it freaked her out so much she had to come over. She assured her she’d go back tomorrow. There was nothing else she could really do. All her stuff was there. It was her new start. So, she set out to do some research. There was a lot of waffle to wade through, but the big takeaway from pages of Reddit and weird oracle websites and some argumentative Facebook groups was that most spirits don’t want to hurt you. Mostly, they’re just lost and confused, like someone with dementia.
When she arrived back home, she ducked low to the floor army-crawl-style, away from eye-view of the glass. It took her a while to stand up properly. But the lady wasn’t in the hallway mirror. Nor was she in the bathroom mirror, or the wardrobe mirror, or the little makeup mirror she kept next to the sink. The first thing she did was go around and hang towels and sheets over them.
It was some days later, when refreshing her Duolingo streak, that a new word popped up on her screen. “Fou.” The same thing the lady kept on screaming. Fou meant “crazy” in English. She thought about it and decided being a ghost probably would make you go completely mental. Maybe she was saying the situation was insane, like “it’s so crazy being a ghost and also not one of these tenants speaks my language.” Whatever she meant, Celeste wanted to know. They were basically housemates at this point.
But the ghost doesn’t show. In fact, she’s almost forgotten about the whole thing until a few weeks later, when she hears it again. This time, the noise pulls her out of sleep. She wakes sitting bolt upright, unsure if she’s still dreaming or not. Because there had been mad dreams. Ones where she was pulled through smoke by a hand, she couldn’t see. Bitter taste on her lips, a sharp, searing pain biting at her ankles, sliding up her calves. Right before she wakes up is when she realises, she’s on fire.
“Fou!”
Putting up those towels didn’t do much to muffle it. But this time around, she didn’t feel scared and went about switching on the light and unsheathing the glass. The same terrible face looked back at her. But she wasn’t angry, just ugly. The way her mouth contorted made her look terrified. I guess it’s like when you’re a kid and your mum says the spider’s more scared of you than you are of the spider.
“Bonjour… no, sorry, bonsoir.”
The lady spouts something back that Celeste doesn’t understand. She raises her hand in a kind of friendly wave, indicating her to wait two secs, while she pulls out her phone and launches Google Translate.
“You’re going to be okay,” she overenunciates every French syllable. “Can you tell me your name?”
“Fou!”
“No, your name. What is your name?”
The lady whimpers.
“My name is Celeste.”
“Fou, fou, fou!”
What a hopeless situation this is. As if fed up with the futility of poor conversation, too, the lady paws at the glass, softly at first, silently grasping and pushing against the transparent boundary. Then her fists ball up and start pounding. Cracks split the mirror, fracturing her face with small, sharp veins. The screaming begins again. Her head slams the barrier, sending quivers through the walls, shaking the frame, and splintering the glass into five pieces. The lady distorts into misshapen fragments. One eye bigger than the other, her right cheek partially hidden, her lips fluttering still.
“Fou!”
It’s all too much for Celeste. She swings the towel back over, which pisses off the lady, who bashes until the glass shatters and crashes to the floor. It is silent now. She’s gone.
Celeste stands still for some time, and when she finally moves, it doesn’t occur to her to clean up the glass or walk around it; she drifts through, pieces crunching beneath her toes, spattering warm blood with every step. In the living room, there’s a large wicker box from which she pulls a lighter, one she picked up on a Greek holiday with the girls and slips it into her dressing gown pocket. Then shuffles to the kitchen, where on top of the fridge she keeps a collection of half-empty liquor bottles, bought for various house parties over the years, dusty and slightly sticky to touch. She pulls a bottle of whiskey and vodka, one for each hand. It doesn’t take very long to douse the rooms, the doorway, and stairs in a stream of carpet cocktail. First, she lights up her own flat before returning to the bottom of the stairs. The final ignition. Fire catches the landing, spreading like a red spectre, eating away at the floor, and crossing the beige walls where it licks the ceiling hungrily.
She wanders to the garden below and watches from beside a rosemary bush as her vision unfolds in a black tumble. It is beautiful. Suddenly she is back at the party, the one held by Monsieur Bastien in his elegant Surrey summer home where she is shocked to find herself much neglected by her fellow guests, who are all disposed with the news of the day—Mary Parker’s engagement to Richard Bellow, and what a wonderful couple they make, so well suited to each other and so charming. No one listens to her when she plays the pianoforte or makes a witty joke about something or another. Mr MacGregor drones on to her about Newton’s Third Law of Motion, and how every action has an equal and opposite reaction, even though she doesn’t speak good English and hates science. When he goes to replenish his drink, she escapes to one of the upstairs bedrooms, where she shuts the door behind her, slips a match from her silk clutch, and sets fire to the bed. Only, when she goes to return downstairs, gloved hand clutching the doorknob, it won’t budge. The doorknob was broken. She had no way to know that this door shouldn’t have been touched, that Monsieur Bastien had sent for someone to fix it the following day.
“Feu! Mon Dieu… Feu!”
Feu, the French word for fire, one that may easily be confused by English ears with “fou,” which means crazy. But by the time the guests, who were enjoying the magic of gossip and music and dancing two floors below, took notice of an acrid stench of burning, it was too late. The entire top floor burnt away to ash, and her with it.
From the safety of the garden, Celeste sits, grass tickling her bare legs, when the windows rupture and blow glass flying like a gust of hail. For a moment, she thinks she sees a lady standing in the open mouth of flame. Then she vanishes into shadow, as slippery as a wisp of smoke.
Other than the fact that her new building sometimes smelt like burnt toast, it was nice, too. One of those Victorian terraced ones. Used to be one swanky house ages ago, before it was split up into six flats, with the benefit being she had access to a lush communal garden out back.
She’d moved in about two weeks ago. Finally felt settled, figured out where the gas metre was, and that the street was so empty she could walk about naked with open curtains, no stress. Sure, it was further away from her friends but just look at the floor plan. Plus, it was only ten minutes from Lidl. And when she got bored, she’d indulge in some me-time, either on Hinge or Duolingo, where she was practising French in preparation for her next trip to Paris.
“Ou sont les toilettes?”
Da-ding!
She envisioned herself in a little bistro in Montmartre (the pretty bit not the part with all the sex shops), finishing the last drop of a café au lait, rising from her seat, clip-clopping over to the bar in her Pierre Cardin kitten heels, where she would lean over the counter and ask Monsieur where the bogs are. Shocked by the eloquence and linguistic prowess of this exotic foreigner, he’d stare back open-mouthed, clearing his throat before answering her.
“À la droite, mademoiselle.”
“Merci.”
Summer was going to be elite. A new flat, maybe a new Parisian boyfriend, a new start. The only problem was at nighttime. She wasn’t used to quiet—back in Dalston there was always something going on, neighbours knocking about, voices carrying through the walls, sirens blaring from the street. But here, there’s nothing. Silence. She thought about getting a fish tank or something. Bubbles and filter-hum could add some chill ambience.
In the darkness, she googled fish tanks, algae, tank gravel, and betta fish life expectancy. Then she opened Pinterest and saved high-protein recipes and European summer inspo. Launched Duolingo, where the screen glare wore out her eyeballs as she picked apart conditional, past tense, and reflexive verbs.
In between da-dings, something catches her attention. A low groan echoes through the hallway. The kind you hear when wind pelts the roof and the walls shift. Old houses make weird noises in bad weather. But when she glanced up towards the window, expecting to see a storm battering the garden about, the trees were standing still. There wasn’t even any rain. Outside was a calm, balmy Spring night, almost grey by moonlight.
She lay stiff for a few minutes, disappearing into the bed sheets. Then she convinced herself she was stupid; if someone were in the house, they would have come in here by now. It was probably just the pipes anyway, and she should probably get up to check in case there’s a leak.
She had hardwood flooring after all! But when she threw on slippers and crept out, the noise faded away. The moaning stopped, but there was something else, like shallow breaths, right close to her ear. She switched on the light. Everything seemed normal enough.
On the wall, she’d hung this gold ornate mirror. It was vintage from the 1950s, or so the guy had told her. She looked and two eyes reflected back at her. But they weren’t her own. Instead, a pair shadowed in black like two pinholes, rubbed raw and wet with tears. The mouth didn’t look much like a mouth is supposed to, all dried up and shrivelled, as if it’d wilted away in her face hole. But it moved, opened, and shut gormlessly like a goldfish and screeched the same word over and over. “Foo! Foo! Foo!”
Celeste sprinted down the staircase and into the front garden, feeling something tickling the backs of her feet as she ran. When she’d put a good distance between herself and the flat, she booked an Uber to her friend’s place. She crouched behind someone’s recycling bin, half-expecting to see the lady floating down the road towards her.
Because she knew the thing she saw was a ghost. She knew because it wasn’t in the room with her. She only existed in the mirror, behind the glass of her lovely frame.
When she arrived at the friend’s, Celeste said there was a bunch of mice, and it freaked her out so much she had to come over. She assured her she’d go back tomorrow. There was nothing else she could really do. All her stuff was there. It was her new start. So, she set out to do some research. There was a lot of waffle to wade through, but the big takeaway from pages of Reddit and weird oracle websites and some argumentative Facebook groups was that most spirits don’t want to hurt you. Mostly, they’re just lost and confused, like someone with dementia.
When she arrived back home, she ducked low to the floor army-crawl-style, away from eye-view of the glass. It took her a while to stand up properly. But the lady wasn’t in the hallway mirror. Nor was she in the bathroom mirror, or the wardrobe mirror, or the little makeup mirror she kept next to the sink. The first thing she did was go around and hang towels and sheets over them.
It was some days later, when refreshing her Duolingo streak, that a new word popped up on her screen. “Fou.” The same thing the lady kept on screaming. Fou meant “crazy” in English. She thought about it and decided being a ghost probably would make you go completely mental. Maybe she was saying the situation was insane, like “it’s so crazy being a ghost and also not one of these tenants speaks my language.” Whatever she meant, Celeste wanted to know. They were basically housemates at this point.
But the ghost doesn’t show. In fact, she’s almost forgotten about the whole thing until a few weeks later, when she hears it again. This time, the noise pulls her out of sleep. She wakes sitting bolt upright, unsure if she’s still dreaming or not. Because there had been mad dreams. Ones where she was pulled through smoke by a hand, she couldn’t see. Bitter taste on her lips, a sharp, searing pain biting at her ankles, sliding up her calves. Right before she wakes up is when she realises, she’s on fire.
“Fou!”
Putting up those towels didn’t do much to muffle it. But this time around, she didn’t feel scared and went about switching on the light and unsheathing the glass. The same terrible face looked back at her. But she wasn’t angry, just ugly. The way her mouth contorted made her look terrified. I guess it’s like when you’re a kid and your mum says the spider’s more scared of you than you are of the spider.
“Bonjour… no, sorry, bonsoir.”
The lady spouts something back that Celeste doesn’t understand. She raises her hand in a kind of friendly wave, indicating her to wait two secs, while she pulls out her phone and launches Google Translate.
“You’re going to be okay,” she overenunciates every French syllable. “Can you tell me your name?”
“Fou!”
“No, your name. What is your name?”
The lady whimpers.
“My name is Celeste.”
“Fou, fou, fou!”
What a hopeless situation this is. As if fed up with the futility of poor conversation, too, the lady paws at the glass, softly at first, silently grasping and pushing against the transparent boundary. Then her fists ball up and start pounding. Cracks split the mirror, fracturing her face with small, sharp veins. The screaming begins again. Her head slams the barrier, sending quivers through the walls, shaking the frame, and splintering the glass into five pieces. The lady distorts into misshapen fragments. One eye bigger than the other, her right cheek partially hidden, her lips fluttering still.
“Fou!”
It’s all too much for Celeste. She swings the towel back over, which pisses off the lady, who bashes until the glass shatters and crashes to the floor. It is silent now. She’s gone.
Celeste stands still for some time, and when she finally moves, it doesn’t occur to her to clean up the glass or walk around it; she drifts through, pieces crunching beneath her toes, spattering warm blood with every step. In the living room, there’s a large wicker box from which she pulls a lighter, one she picked up on a Greek holiday with the girls and slips it into her dressing gown pocket. Then shuffles to the kitchen, where on top of the fridge she keeps a collection of half-empty liquor bottles, bought for various house parties over the years, dusty and slightly sticky to touch. She pulls a bottle of whiskey and vodka, one for each hand. It doesn’t take very long to douse the rooms, the doorway, and stairs in a stream of carpet cocktail. First, she lights up her own flat before returning to the bottom of the stairs. The final ignition. Fire catches the landing, spreading like a red spectre, eating away at the floor, and crossing the beige walls where it licks the ceiling hungrily.
She wanders to the garden below and watches from beside a rosemary bush as her vision unfolds in a black tumble. It is beautiful. Suddenly she is back at the party, the one held by Monsieur Bastien in his elegant Surrey summer home where she is shocked to find herself much neglected by her fellow guests, who are all disposed with the news of the day—Mary Parker’s engagement to Richard Bellow, and what a wonderful couple they make, so well suited to each other and so charming. No one listens to her when she plays the pianoforte or makes a witty joke about something or another. Mr MacGregor drones on to her about Newton’s Third Law of Motion, and how every action has an equal and opposite reaction, even though she doesn’t speak good English and hates science. When he goes to replenish his drink, she escapes to one of the upstairs bedrooms, where she shuts the door behind her, slips a match from her silk clutch, and sets fire to the bed. Only, when she goes to return downstairs, gloved hand clutching the doorknob, it won’t budge. The doorknob was broken. She had no way to know that this door shouldn’t have been touched, that Monsieur Bastien had sent for someone to fix it the following day.
“Feu! Mon Dieu… Feu!”
Feu, the French word for fire, one that may easily be confused by English ears with “fou,” which means crazy. But by the time the guests, who were enjoying the magic of gossip and music and dancing two floors below, took notice of an acrid stench of burning, it was too late. The entire top floor burnt away to ash, and her with it.
From the safety of the garden, Celeste sits, grass tickling her bare legs, when the windows rupture and blow glass flying like a gust of hail. For a moment, she thinks she sees a lady standing in the open mouth of flame. Then she vanishes into shadow, as slippery as a wisp of smoke.
Emma Hart is a Scottish writer with roots in Edinburgh and Hull, and now based in London. Previously working in journalism before taking a left-hand turn into copywriting, she’s currently undertaking a master’s degree in creative writing at the University of Hull. She enjoys writing short stories and hopes to write her first novel soon.