by Maude Julien
I don’t know whether he deliberately chooses moonless nights, but as soon as I get any distance from the house, the light from the courtyard, which is meant to give me my bearings, disappears completely. I walk deeper and deeper into a black hole. Even Linda doesn’t have the courage to come with me. Numbed by the cold, I pick my way by feeling the tops of shrubs I can’t see. I know I’m near the pond when I can make out the contour of the Australian poplar that I’m heading towards, sometimes with the help of the faint moonlight. Often, though, it’s so dark that I can’t see anything at all. Then, I know I have to walk twenty-eight paces to the right after the last shrub, in order to reach the poplar. My heart pounds in my chest while my hands reach for the fence around the ducks’ enclosure. I can hear frightening rustles and hisses. At last I find the first light switch and turn it on.
During my slow count of three, I plot out the next stage. In the distance behind me I can make out my father’s silhouette framed in the window, as he watches my journey, rifle in hand. Now I switch off the light and, still feeling my way using the bushes along my route, I head towards the rotunda, where the second light switch is located. Then on to the third light switch by the workshop. After that I have to complete the longest section, which brings me back to the fence at the front of the house. I find my bearings by running my hand over the tops of bushes and keeping an eye on my father’s lighted window.
But the window always goes dark halfway through the circuit, suddenly plunging me into total blackness. Does he do it on purpose? Is this yet another technique to strengthen my courage? Panic takes hold of me. The house is still too far away and I now have only the bushes to guide me. I lose all sense of direction and stray into the undergrowth. Behind me and all around me, I hear a host of disturbing noises, footsteps, rustling leaves. I’m so tense it’s as if I have a giant cramp in my whole body.
It takes a tremendous effort to keep calm, to put one foot in front of the other until I see the weak light from the courtyard. The circuit ends with me climbing back upstairs exhausted and freezing. It’s one of the few occasions when I get back to my room with something like relief, almost a feeling of safety, tainted with a strange sadness. I feel so impregnated with damp from the garden that I don’t have the strength to undress and put on my pyjamas. I burrow under the covers fully clothed, worried that I won’t wake up in time in the morning.
My father must suspect that fear is my primary weakness. He is convinced that these training sessions will teach me to overcome it. Every month I have to carry out a ‘meditation on death’ and a ‘test of courage’. They are non-negotiable. I obey without a word, never mentioning my secret terror.
My only consolation is the thought that I can go and tell Arthur all about my fears, just like I tell him about everything else: my new bedroom, the two kinds of roots, the clocks, the punishments…I talk right up close to his ear and he listens attentively. My breath must tickle him like it tickles Linda. But, unlike her, he stands stock-still as if, more than anything else, he wants to avoid interrupting me. Sometimes as I’m whispering all my misery into his ear, it gives a tiny involuntary twitch that makes my heart melt.
But Arthur is sick today; he is lying on the grass with a huge swollen belly. When he sees me he tries to stand. He is clearly too weak and slumps back down. I crouch beside him, stroke him and try to talk to him. My parents tell me to go and practise the accordion. I would like to stay, but have to obey. I try to reassure myself with the thought that I get stomach-aches sometimes too…While I struggle with my Fratelli Crosio accordion, which is unbearably heavy on my shoulders, I think about Arthur. I hope he will get better soon, and that I’ll be able to see him tomorrow after lessons.
When I have finished my homework the next day, I go down to the verandah for my hour of music. It’s strange, neither one of my parents is in sight. Are they waiting for me in the garden? Have I missed some instruction to go and pull up weeds? I run down the steps, happy at the thought of seeing Arthur. It’s a beautiful day. I head over to where he’s still lying on the grass. ‘Arthur’s dead,’ my mother says. ‘We’ll have to bury him.’ I don’t understand. I rush over to look at him up close. And then I’m frightened. He looks so strange. Is it possible? Arthur is dead?
I turn to my father, who is sitting ten feet away on a wooden crate. My father who knows everything, can do everything. For the first time in my life I ask something of him. I ask him to bring Arthur back as he was before. He looks uncomfortable, says nothing. My mother is the one who breaks the silence.
‘The vet came,’ she says. ‘He said Arthur ate too many apples, and that’s what killed him. The vet said he was an old horse anyway; the man who sold him to us tricked us.’ She goes off into an explanation about how the salesman must have blown on Arthur’s gums with a straw to make him look younger.
I don’t understand. I don’t want to understand. I want only one thing: for him not to be dead.
‘And when did the vet come?’ I almost scream. ‘I didn’t see anyone.’
‘Oh, don’t you start crying now,’ my mother retorts. ‘If you’d looked after him he wouldn’t have eaten all those apples!’
‘That’s enough,’ my father interjects. ‘Now bury him. Go and dig the hole next to the duck pond.’
Dazed, I take a spade and desperately try digging up the ground. In front of me, my mother is also digging. It’s summer but the ground is very hard. I work like an automaton. There’s a huge iron hand inside my chest, crushing my heart.
In the end my mother puts down her spade and says, ‘We won’t be able to do it.’
My father sends us off to find something to cover Arthur. All we can find is an ugly plastic tablecloth with a design of fruits and vegetables. While we secure it around his body, I find I can’t take my eyes off the apples depicted on the oilcloth. The apples that killed Arthur.
All night long Linda howls desolately. All night long I cry, my heart still crushed by the steely hand.
I don’t know how long Arthur has been under the tablecloth with its poisoned apples. Several days. Raymond the gardener is here this morning, leaning on his spade next to the big hole he’s dug. My mother and I draw back the oilcloth. I scream. There are thousands of flies crawling over the slumped form. A hideous smell fills my lungs. I’m about to be sick.
I understand that it’s over, forever. I feel like I’m falling into an abyss.
On the outside I’m still an automaton. I help by grasping one of his legs; it’s so rigid it makes me shudder. But I’m not strong enough, I’m just a wisp of straw and I topple into the grave along with Arthur. Oh, the horror of that rigid body lying on me, and the suffocating stench. I fight off the flies and the cloying black earth.
‘What do you think you’re doing in there?’ my father yells, appearing from nowhere.
No one helps me out of the hole. In the end I manage to haul myself out. I feel ashamed, dirty, stinking. And so alone. How will I live without the clip-clop of his hooves?
‘Fill that hole in, and afterwards, Maude, you will help Raymond put the tools away in the cellar.’
No. No. No. For pity’s sake, no. Not the cellar. Not Raymond. Not today. This unvoiced plea goes around and around inside my head as I trudge towards the house like an animal to the slaughterhouse. It goes around inside my head as I walk down into the cellar. It goes around while Raymond presses up behind me. While he pins me with his left arm. While he whispers in my ear, ‘You loved that horse of yours,’ and blows his oily breath over me. While his still muddy right hand pushes aside my clothes and worms its way into my underwear. No. No. No. Please. Please.
It’s night-time. I’m in my bedroom, trying with no success to clean my underwear. I go and shut myself in the toilet, rubbing at the marks in the water inside the toilet bowl, then trying to rinse them by pulling the flush. I put them back on wet for the trip back to my room. I take them off to dry in the night, but when I put them on in the morning they’re still damp. It’s not the day
for new underwear and I’m too dazed to get my head around secretly doing a substitution. I’ll have to wear them for a few more days. I feel like they’ll never dry.
The day after the burial when I go to shut Linda away in the morning, I find her coat is full of soil: she spent the night trying to dig up Arthur. She misses him as much as I do. But she thinks she can bring him back to life. My father gets us to fill the hole in again. Then he tells us to break some bottles and scatter the shards on and around the pit. A wasted effort: the next morning we find Linda covered in soil again but with her nose and paws bleeding. A few days later an electrician comes and sets up an electric fence around the grave.
Only then does Linda give up her wild hope of resuscitating Arthur.
Raymond
That wasn’t the first time Raymond’s dirty mitts soiled my underwear. For a long time now he’s been cornering me in the cellar or the stables at every opportunity. My father calls him in one or two Saturdays a month for heavy work in the garden, pruning trees or trimming hedges. My father insists I help Raymond, as I do any workman who comes to do manual labour on the estate. ‘You’re thin, you can get up more easily into the loft to pass down the straw bales,’ or ‘Go and help Raymond fetch the tools from the cellar.’ I don’t see why I’m needed to fetch tools.
Raymond lurks in the cellar waiting for me. He grasps me around the waist from behind and holds me across the neck with his left arm. If I struggle or try to break away, he applies more pressure to my neck, closing my windpipe. I can’t move or breathe. While he paws me with his right hand, he presses his mouth to my ear and hisses threats at me. I’m sickened by his hot, smelly breath. His right hand unzips my pants and slips inside. Or he pulls down my pants and underwear. Sometimes he completely unbuttons my top and puts his roving hands all over me.
The first time Raymond caught me in the cellar I was six years old. ‘If you say anything at all,’ he whispered in my ear, ‘I’ll kill your parents.’ Did I fight him? Did I try to call for help? Either way, he obviously realized this threat wasn’t dissuasive enough. He gave me his warning again, emphasizing each word, ‘If you talk, I’ll kill your parents. But first, I’ll kill your dog.’ Not Linda. He can take it out on my parents, but I couldn’t bear him hurting Linda, couldn’t bear for her to suffer or die because of me.
With that threat he knew he could take whatever he wanted. He reiterates it every time. There are times when he says it word for word, at others he simply says, ‘Remember what I told you.’
When it happens in the cellar, he drags me over to the wall where the tools—screwdrivers, pliers, hammers, wrenches—all hang on a board with the position of each instrument outlined in white. He takes a screwdriver with a red wooden handle and trails it over my body. He often thrusts it hard into my vagina or my anus. I don’t understand what he’s doing, I just know it really hurts and afterwards I find blood on the toilet paper. My only means of escape is to stare at the white imprint of the screwdriver on the board. I penetrate that white silhouette on the board while the screwdriver penetrates my body.
Other times it happens in the stables. When I can tell my father is going to ask me to move some straw I run to the stables, race up the ladder and throw down the bales. I’m terrified of the mice that, disturbed by my sudden movements, scurry in every direction. But even more so of Raymond who’s on his way; I can hear his carefree whistling coming closer.
Occasionally I manage to get back down before he comes through the door. Then I run as fast as I can, pushing past him and escaping his clutches. But more often than not he has already planted himself in the doorway, his predatory eyes pinned on me, revelling in the fact that he has trapped me. I feel helpless. I can’t run. I can’t scream. I can’t cry. I’d just like to curl up into a ball in the darkest corner. His eyes take on an animal glint, his lips curl to one side in a half smile. I can feel myself falling into a bottomless pit deep inside myself.
At night he often comes back to torment me in my nightmares. I’m asleep in my room; I open my eyes and see Raymond standing by my bed with a red screwdriver in his hand. I try to scream but no sound comes out. Or I go to let Linda out in the evening but she doesn’t come out. I lean in and see that she’s lying there dead with a screwdriver driven into her body. Or I’m in the cellar and I’ve just finished doing a meditation on death. I go back up the stairs, but when I reach the door I find it won’t open. I battle with the doorhandle and suddenly feel Raymond’s arms grasping me from behind.
So before going to sleep in the evening I think up a thousand and one ways to kill him. Just as he’s bringing the screwdriver towards me, I snatch it from him, spin around and stab it into his heart. Or I ask him to come up into the loft over the stables to help me, and as he reaches the top of the ladder I push him. He crashes to the ground and his skull splits open. Or when he’s pruning the trees, I make him fall from the big ladder and he skewers himself on the shears. Or just when he’s coming towards me in the cellar with that predatory look in his eye, I take out my father’s shotgun. I fire once into his chest and he collapses, his face registering disbelief.
I so loathe Raymond that, apart from my murderous dreams, I try not to think about him at all. I erase him, annihilate him. He no longer exists. He has never existed.
But now Arthur is dead. Now what Raymond does to me is suddenly more than I can take. The dirt under his fingernails is Arthur’s body. Arthur is dead and all my floodgates have opened. I can’t pretend anymore, I can’t make believe. I wish Arthur weren’t dead. I wish Raymond had never touched me. I feel sad. Dirty. Dead.
Someone is howling inside me. But no one hears. No one is listening.
So where is Monsieur, my father, when this is going on, where is my shield, my defender, my guardian angel? The one who sees everything and knows everything, especially what’s best for me? Who devotes every moment of his life to protecting me from the depravity of this world and the evils of the human race. Who times everything I do, even going to the toilet. Who monitors how quickly I go downstairs, every day, every time? ‘You’re confusing speed with haste, start again,’ or ‘You’re thumping like an elephant, start again.’ How many times have I had to go back upstairs and come down again until he finally decided I’d established the ‘correct rhythm’?
Where is his legendary sense of the ‘correct rhythm’ now when I’m taking far longer than necessary to fetch a tool from the cellar or drop some hay bales into the stables? No one notices this, no one finds it strange. I’m overwhelmed by anger and pain. Raymond does whatever he likes with my parents; they are his puppets. How is that possible?
When I’m allowed out into the garden I go to the spot where Arthur is buried. I make a little cross with two pieces of wood tied together, and write his name on it. I stand by his grave in private reflection. I call him. I beg him to come back. Or at least to tell me how I might join him. I’m so worried about him. If he died of a stomach-ache does that mean he still has a stomach-ache? I’m afraid he’s still in pain. Or that he finds himself in the dark, frightened. I pray with all my might that, wherever he is, he is happy. I tell him that I miss him, that I love him. Since he died my days have been long, black, joyless tunnels, without hope or love.
My father is displeased by my frequent visits to Arthur’s grave. He informs me that next summer a gymnasium will be built over the site. I now have to work more seriously on my physical abilities, an indispensable requirement for eventually becoming a ‘superhuman’.
Whitey
I used to love the smells in the garden, the smell of shrubs, trees and flowers, of daffodils. And lilac most of all. But I don’t like anything anymore. I don’t like walking around the grounds. Sometimes I see Pitou, now the only free-ranging animal on the estate; he waits for me on the steps by the verandah or in the kennel with Linda. He strains his neck to see whether I’m coming out. We’re having an arctic summer, drowned in rainwater. Torrents of icy water outside, streams of tears inside me.
I’ve read in books that people read bedtime stories to children and tuck them into bed. I’m alone, with no one to talk to. Apparently I’m a breed apart, I must stand apart. But I don’t want to. Being kept apart is hell. I want to be like everyone else. I need to hold someone’s hand, to be in someone’s arms.
One of my favourite daydreams used to be about making my own hot air balloon from the special fabric in the workshop, and flying away with Arthur, Linda and Pitou, just like Samuel Ferguson, the hero of Five Weeks in a Balloon, setting off with his companions to find the source of the Nile. Off we would go, flying over villages and countryside, over Paris and London, cities I’ve read about in books. From high above we would watch people getting on with their everyday lives; we would wave to them and they’d wave back.
I’ve stopped dreaming of travelling in a hot air balloon. Without Arthur, there’s no point. Without Arthur, I’m barely alive. Life goes on around me in slow motion. Even with Linda, even with Pitou. I pretend I’m there, pretend I’m listening to what my mother’s teaching me, or doing my homework or playing the accordion. I pretend to obey, to live. I’m not there. I don’t know where I am. Maybe I’m nowhere.
My father mentions buying another pony, on condition that I do three somersaults on three consecutive days. In my father’s world lots of things come in threes. But I don’t want to do a triple somersault. And I don’t want a new pony.
