Billy Moon : A Transcendent Novel Reimagining the Life of Christopher Robin Milne (9781429948074)

by Lain, Douglas

  The Forest was always there waiting for him because every story started with a contradiction. Gerrard took a step forward as one of the good little blond girls took her place on the stool, but when she got down and another boy, a neat and tidy good one in a nice red bow tie and grey jacket, climbed up on the stool to have his picture taken, Gerrard found he was stuck. If every story started with a contradiction then maybe there wasn’t really a floor or a police museum.

  Gerrard’s feet sank into the floor. He looked down and saw that the hard wood had been replaced, there wasn’t any hard wood beneath him but just soft mud, and Gerrard got down on his hands and knees to examine this difference. He stuck his fingers in, and the surface gave. He sat down and put both his hands in the mud.

  “Stand up, Gerrard. You’re blocking the way,” Mme. Mertfield said. He looked at her with her brown hair pulled back and her bifocals and felt glad to be in trouble. “You have to get out of the way now,” she said. She thought he was a good one too, he could tell, but maybe he’d disappoint her.

  “You can’t just sit there,” Mme. Mertfield said.

  She was right. Instead of just sitting there by himself Gerrard leaned over and whispered in the ear of one of the good girls. Her name was Louise. All Gerrard knew about her was that she wore very thick glasses—he’d tried them on once and could barely see through them—and that she could kick very hard if she wanted. He whispered that Albert said they shouldn’t get their pictures taken. Albert was just another one of the boys in class, but invoking his name had been enough. Louise smiled as she nodded to him, and then sat down too.

  “Now children, don’t you want to get your picture taken?” Mme. Mertfield asked.

  “No, Madame. I do not wish for my photograph to be taken,” Gerrard said.

  “We don’t want our pictures taken,” Louise said and giggled.

  Samuel sat down next, and then Philippe joined him, sitting in line. He was the boy who had already had his photo taken.

  “Who is next?” the tour guide asked and turned to find most of the children sitting down on the floor.

  “Children, you must all get up now,” Mme. Mertfield said.

  Lucie Melancon, a young woman who was killed on a streetcar, murdered, and then left to be found at the next stop, a woman remembered only for her mysterious demise, smiled at Gerrard from her newsprint portrait. Her blond bob and blue eyes were rendered in greyscale but evident despite this.

  “Children, you must get up so that our tour can continue,” Mme. Mertfield said. She turned to Gerrard; she was not smiling. “Gerrard, come with me.”

  She took him by the elbow and forced him up and out. She was a remarkably strong woman, but Gerrard could see that she was sweating as she clamped down on his arm with one hand and pressed the button for the elevator with the other.

  “I don’t know what kind of adventure you think you’re on,” Mme. Mertfield said, “but I won’t tolerate this disruption.”

  When the elevator doors opened Gerrard looked over his shoulder and caught sight of the tour guide as he paced back and forth in the mud. One boy stood up and the tour guide approached him, asking him to please get up on the stool for his picture and wouldn’t his mother like to get a photo of her handsome son, but the boy shook his head no. He reached out for the guide and put his muddy hand on the guide’s clean wool jacket leaving a handprint there, and then sat down again. Then another student stood up on the other side. The tour guide turned to her and paced over in her direction, and the exhortations and pleading began again.

  Mme. Mertfield dragged Gerrard into the elevator, pressed the button, and then stepped back into the museum when the doors started to close. “Go and wait by the front desk,” she said. “Tell the policeman what you’ve done.”

  When the elevator doors closed Gerrard remembered his father again.

  Papa shook his son by his foot, and Gerrard opened his eyes and laughed. “Are you paying attention?” his father asked.

  Then Gerrard was on the bottom floor, back with the fireman, the teacher, the policeman, and Charles de Gaulle. He looked at the painted figures from inside the elevator, but he didn’t move, and before long the elevator doors closed again. Inside the elevator Gerrard waited for someone, probably his teacher, to push the button and bring him back up again.

  3

  In July of 1961 Christopher found a poster on the Harbour’s bulletin board, a poster that didn’t belong there. What gave it away was that it was attached with paste rather than the tacks Chris provided. This, along with the poster’s French slogan and the title card and explanation—the silk screen poster was entitled “Pooh Attacks the Police” and the cartoon bear was apparently either a symbol or mascot for striking workers in a future Paris—marked the poster as out of place. According to the title card tacked underneath, it was a poster from the future, set to be printed seven years hence, in 1968.

  Chris noticed the orange rectangle as he wheeled in a shipment of new books on his handcart, but he didn’t stop to look at it at first. Instead he unpacked boxes and shelved the books by category and in alphabetical order. He used his pocketknife to cut the tape on the first box. The blade was rusty and dull after years of use on Cotchford Farm and passage through a world war, but it was still sharp enough to cut, and he opened a box containing a dozen copies of J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan.

  Barrie had been one of his father’s friends. Finding the right shelf Chris recalled how proud his father had been to help Barrie by funding one of his Peter Pan stage productions, but Chris didn’t see how the two of them had much in common. Barrie romanticized childhood and elevated fantasy while Chris’s father stood back from both in order to expose how these things were absurd. Chris’s father was just having a bit of fun even if many readers didn’t get the joke.

  Later his father admitted to it. He wrote his autobiography and directly spoke about the narcissism of children, but this was ignored. Critics and readers continued to insist that the Pooh stories and his father’s poems were somehow part of a general celebration of childhood. Certainly his father had not made his fortune because readers saw and enjoyed his cynicism.

  On the other hand, Barrie and Christopher’s father really did share some basic assumptions. After all, it took a hundred years to invent the bourgeois notion of childhood, and Barrie and Chris’s father helped along these lines. Before Peter Pan and Pooh, books written for children taught practical skills, but what with electricity and so many cogs and wheels children’s work was no longer necessary. Once children didn’t have to play a role in the economy they became something like a special type of pet, and their funny ways, their cute imaginations, their fantasy worlds and delusions—all of these things were to be indulged.

  The difference between Barrie and his father was that Barrie envied children. Barrie couldn’t quite stand up to the pressures of modern life, couldn’t hold up under the strain. For him, retreating into a permanent childhood, a fantasy, was an appealing prospect, but Chris’s father was made of stronger stuff.

  Chris looked at the poster but still didn’t see it as strange, a monochrome print of the silhouette of a bear encircled by three police officers. They were clearly French police officers, marked as such by the brims of their kepis as shown in negative space. Chris didn’t read the French words along the bottom but just saw they were there.

  Vous ne récupérera pas cet ours dans son cage.

  Christopher cut the tape on another box. And found a new book, something by Dr. Seuss, inside the box. Seuss’s title was a simple rhyme.

  “The Cat in the Hat.” Chris spoke the title aloud.

  It made sense; the trends fit together. Christopher’s childhood had been made possible by the technologies developed during the First World War. The Erector Set, the cellophane zoo animals, everything except for Pooh himself had been brand new. The teddy bear craze had come with the American president Theodore Roosevelt, but after the Great War there were even more of these mass-produced childhood fa
ntasies. After the war there’d been a flood of celluloid dolls and Kodak cameras.

  Vous ne récupérera pas cet ours dans son cage. That translated into something like “You will not put the bear back in his cage.”

  Christopher put down the box of Dr. Seuss books and approached his bulletin board. The poster was about 48 by 69 centimeters and had been pasted over a notice for piano lessons and an advert for A. J. Cronin’s The Judas Tree. Chris put out his hand and touched the edge of the notice, where it met the bulletin board, and wondered how it could have come to be in his shop. He tried to pull it down, but the paste held it fast and rather than come down the paper started to tear.

  When Abby came downstairs she wasn’t much help. “Why is the card in English while the poster is in French?” Christopher asked. “And how would something from an auction end up in my shop? That’s where this is from. See, at the bottom it says ‘Christie’s, London.’”

  “Sometimes in order to be realistic you have to accept the impossible,” Abby said. She fetched her iron and a spray bottle and they set to work on steaming the poster off the bulletin board.

  “How many times is this going to happen?” Christopher said. “I think something’s gone wrong. Something has broken somewhere, and this is the result.”

  Christopher took the bulletin board upstairs. He opened his cardboard box, the one he kept in the coat closet. Instead of books there was a stuffed cat made by Merrythought, a Munchies wrapper, a copy of Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse, and a jam jar full of mud inside. And, as soon as they could peel it from the bulletin board, Christopher would put the poster in there as well.

  “Here,” Abby said. “I think it’s coming loose.”

  * * *

  Daniel was standing up in his crib when Christopher brought the stuffed cat in. He was smack dab in the middle of the mattress, standing there so that the mobile dangled down around his little head. A plastic aeroplane with a bright red propeller was resting against his left cheek and an orange moon was covering his right eye, but Daniel didn’t appear to notice. Christopher leaned over the bars of the crib, but the boy was out of reach. He whistled to his son. He tapped the bars with his knuckle and called out to him.

  “Daniel,” he said. “What are you doing? Found a good spot to get your legs under you? Thinking about walking?”

  Daniel didn’t respond to Chris but just watched his own hands as he raised them to his face. Daniel stared past the plastic toys on strings. He flitted his fingers through the air and made a gurgling noise.

  Raising a son was different for Christopher than it had been for his own father. When Chris wasn’t secreting away anomalies around the bookshop he was expected to be involved in ways that his father never was. Daniel’s toilet training, for instance, was something that required thought, preparation, and discussion. Abby had ordered a good half-dozen different books on parenting and she’d asked Chris to read along. He’d tried Dr. Spock’s book and A. S. Neill’s Summerhill.

  They advocated a kind of humanistic approach that Christopher found very difficult to argue against, but now that his son was nearly a year old Christopher was deciding these authors might not be relevant. Quite apart from the contemporary problem of guiding a child without using force or the problem of not interfering with his natural development, something was wrong here. Daniel wasn’t human in the way these humanists required. He refused to lie down or sit; now that he could stand the boy always stood. And if Christopher were to pick Daniel up, try to hold the tot in his arms, the experience would be something like picking up a column or piece of lumber. Chris could pick Daniel up, but Daniel would just go on standing.

  Still, the boy looked just like him. This was his son. They kept his hair short and dressed Daniel in modern jumpers or footsie pajamas and never in britches and knee socks, but to look at Daniel was to see himself, his own storybook image. It was impossible to miss the resemblance.

  Christopher took the Merrythought cat, a cat no longer called Hodge, and held it out for his son to look at, but he couldn’t get Daniel’s attention. Chris ran his finger along the seam on the cat’s belly, fingered the red thread Abby had used to sew the animal up after William’s experiment, and wished he’d left the thing in the box.

  One reason Christopher couldn’t argue with Dr. Spock or Summerhill was because their humanism was his own. It was something Christopher had inherited along with the stuffed bear. Maybe his father’s version was different from the radical variety held in esteem by A. S. Neill, but there was common ground. His father and Summerhill thought that, even without God, there were human beings. There would always be human beings and a coherent world for them to live in. Standing there with Hodge, moving the animal back and forth and failing to get his son’s attention, Christopher wasn’t so sure.

  He tried again with another toy, a blue dog. This one was less appealing than Hodge; the dog was too stiff and stood in an unnatural way. It was run through with wires in order to hold it in an active pose, but it was also less unsettling for Christopher to touch. The blue dog toy was meant to exactly replicate a television character, and this gave it some sort of real basis.

  Chris held Huckleberry Hound out to his son. “Look, Daniel. You have a friend.” Christopher shook the toy but failed to bring it to life.

  Would Daniel ever develop a relationship with these objects? Could he do that? The truth about Pooh was that the stuffed bear had really belonged to Christopher. He remembered picking it out at the toy store from a row of identical silly bears. Christopher’s Pooh had had an especially pleading look in his glass eyes. That bear had sort of called out to him from the shelf in the toy store.

  “Yes, please. I’ll take that one,” he’d said.

  Pooh had made the transition from a shelf in the toy store to a shelf in Chris’s nursery and then, over a few weeks, the bear had come to life. The fact that his father had taken this life and used it, that his father had moved Christopher himself onto the pages of his fictions, didn’t negate the fact that Christopher had once held a stuffed bear with real affection. Christopher had once given a personality to something lifeless—to an object. Why did he have such trouble detecting a personality in his son?

  Daniel turned around in his crib but did not look at his father. He almost seemed to intentionally look away. Although that couldn’t be right.

  Chris shook the cartoon character again. “I’m a TV dog. Aren’t I, Daniel? I live on television?”

  Daniel stood in his crib with his head draped in the plastic toys from his mobile. He let his hands drop to his side. Christopher watched to see what would happen next. He wondered what his father might write about such a moment.

  As a little boy Christopher had always been mostly content to be a character in his father’s books. He’d quite liked being the famous Christopher Robin, receiving stuffed animals and other toys in the mail from acquaintances and strangers, and always being at the centre of some imaginary world. He remembered being delighted by an oversized stuffed piglet he’d received at the age of eight and then being rather disappointed in a red rubber ball that arrived in the post that same day. Had it been his birthday?

  “Daniel, I’m your toy dog,” Christopher said. “Woof. Woof. Woof.”

  Sitting with his son, sitting in the boy’s nursery with his memories of Pooh and holding the boy’s blue dog, Chris felt quite absurd.

  His own father had been more confident. So confident that he hadn’t made rules but rather suggestions.

  Once his father told him that one mustn’t hold one’s knife and fork vertically between bites but should place them in a horizontal position; Chris had asked why. His father, who never wanted to rely on mere authority or tradition, had cooked up a reason.

  “What if the ceiling should give way and someone should fall on the dining table? If you’re holding your fork vertically the person might be impaled while you’re having pudding,” his father said.

  Christopher generally ate his pudding with a spo
on. Also he thought it was unlikely that the ceiling should collapse during dinner in the way his father described, but he obeyed after that. He always replaced his cutlery on each side of his plate between bites. His father had power even when he was absurd, but now Christopher was the father and there was nobody there for Chris to convince.

  Christopher spoke, and he made the boy’s TV dog dance, but there was no response inside the nursery.

  4

  Gerrard had difficulty focusing on the repetitious conjugations he was asked to perform on his chalkboard. All the other students wrote how to be in the past, in the present, and in the future, but Gerrard looked up at the ceiling, put his chalk down, and wondered how it might be possible to get a firm grip on tense.

  Was. Is. Will be.

  Gerrard stared at the ceiling and did not see that the teacher was looking at him. The lady was frowning at him, calling his name, but Gerrard did not hear. It was not until she approached him, leaned down, and put her jowly face in between Gerrard and the place where the paint was flaking away on the ceiling, it wasn’t until he could smell the mix of mothballs and roses that clung to Mme. Mertfield that Gerrard realized he was in trouble.

  “Monsieur Hand, there is no sleeping allowed in this class. If you are not interested in learning then you should simply stay home.”

  “I was not sleeping, madame,” Gerrard said.

  “No? What is the conditional form?”

  Gerrard paused and tried to find the words to explain it to her.

  “If you don’t pay attention you will not learn,” the teacher said.

  “Yes, madame. That’s right.”

  “You agree?”