Matthew, too, spun a web of mendacity. He sent off several letters to his anxious mother and father. Since these letters weren’t as informative as before, he was glad to announce that he’d been able to move out of his hotel and into an apartment belonging to a famous French author, whose children, as luck would have it, were not only his age but shared his interests.
This unforeseen turn of events thrilled his parents, impressed that their painfully shy son had broken out of his shell and got in with the right sort of people.
The cheques on the mantelpiece had long since disappeared under a mounting pile of books, magazines and comic strip albums, then been forgotten about. Matthew had an overdrawn bank balance provisioned only every other month by a cheque from San Diego. Raiding the supermarket had thus ceased to be a luxury and become a necessity. Unfortunately, the store’s detective had been alerted to the trio’s presence; and though they counter-attacked by setting up diversions and planting decoys, and once noisily rampaged through the store bearing about their persons only those articles they were prepared to pay for, with the idea of instigating an intervention on the detective’s part and pleading outraged innocence after a fruitless search had been conducted, they were soon compelled to acknowledge that the halcyon era of lobster and caviar had drawn to a close.
The kitchen sink was a graveyard of dirty dishes. Shirts, pullovers and jeans boasted an amazing spectrum of stains. Underpants disgustedly rejected days before as beyond redemption were picked up off the carpet, yanked from underneath sofas and armchairs, judged the best of a bad lot and pressed into further service. And because Théo’s ragged sheets kept coming loose and catching between the toes of their bare feet, obliging one or other of them to rise in the early hours of the morning and tuck them back under the mattress, they eventually decided to decamp to Isabelle’s room.
If this had so far remained off-limits to them, it was out of respect on Isabelle’s part for a bourgeois ideal of apple-pie orderliness. Like certain demented housewives who polish and scrub their front parlours to a hallucinatory sheen, so that no one ever dare set foot inside them, she insisted that her bedroom remain untrespassed-on by the others ‘in case a visitor calls’. Besides which, it had been convenient for her, whenever occurred one of their ferocious squabbles, to storm out of Théo’s room into her own and, biting into an apple as though it were her brother’s thigh, bury herself in one of the locked-room murder mysteries on which she doted.
Unhappiness may lie in our failing to obtain precisely the right sort of happiness.
Matthew not only loved Isabelle, he was grateful to her for having released him from himself, for having permitted him to spread his wings, where before he had felt beached and impotent, his soul as cramped and pinched and shrivelled inside his body as his penis inside his pants.
Isabelle loved Matthew, but the pleasure she took in making love to him derived above all from the opportunity it gave her to be privy to the pleasure he took in her. She never ceased to wonder at the force with which his head would throw itself back, his distended pupils would float upside-down to the tops of his eyes, his crimped, almondy brown, mild-mannered member would all of a sudden shoot into super-manhood and furiously cast forth its white sap – and this simply by being talked to, like a houseplant.
Both of them loved Théo. Yet, ever since the intrusion of Matthew, who had entered the life of the flat as one enters a film halfway, Théo had watched him arrogate to himself an ever more prominent place. At first, he had been hardly more than a pet, a tame spaniel wagging its tail at the least sign of affection, an amusing new acquisition to divert Isabelle and himself from their airless intimacy. Now, with the intruder’s ascendancy, Théo began to fancy, rightly or not, that he himself had become his sister’s lover rather than her twin and that he would henceforth be visited by those anxieties of the lover to which the twin is immune: the pangs of envy and resentment, the torment of sleepless nights spent mulling over what an equivocally worded remark had meant to convey. The knot binding them together had been fatally slackened to include Matthew.
If, as they once had whimsically fantasised about themselves, he and Isabelle had been mythical lovers, Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, what were they now? A mismatched couple; or, Tristan and Juliet.
It was now Théo who, night after night, would come padding back from the bathroom, as Matthew once had done, silently pause on the threshold of the bedroom and – resembling, with his alarming eyes and tousled mop of hair, a transvestite whose wig has just been snatched off – gaze at the two naked, tangled bodies and, beside them, at the crude imprint of his own body on the creased sheet and that of his own head on the pillow, as though he were seeing his own absence, his own ghost.
A taste for vengeance on his part, of an infantile type which he and his sister had exacted from each other since they were barely able to crawl, had brought Matthew and Isabelle together; had, in consequence, like a dull and nagging toothache, exposed him to jealousy, a sentiment he had never before known. It was not, as yet, as though he were truly unhappy: these twinges of his were still too faint and sporadic; just that the happiness granted him could not be reconciled with that which would have been of his own choosing had he been a free agent.
Was it of Matthew that he was jealous? It may have been, rather, that he was jealous, in the word’s other sense, of the exclusive hold that he himself had once had over his sister’s body and soul. At moments he found himself nostalgic for the purity of the taboo which together they’d breached. That that very purity had been breached in its turn by the insinuation of a third party, however fond he was of Matthew, was a source of obscure distaste to him. There was, too, a quality to their escapades which reminded him of South American transsexuals prowling the Bois de Boulogne by night, of those respectable avenues around the Bois whose pavements are lined by call girls as evenly spaced as parking meters, of orgies organised by middle-aged business executives in hotel rooms with luxuriously stocked minibars and two-way mirrors.
Nor was it of any help to Théo that Matthew continued to wear his heart stitched on to his sleeve. He loved both Théo and his sister the more for having been authorised to love them at all. I love you. These three words came to seem as natural to Matthew as breathing. He never wearied of repeating them.
Théo accepted as a right, as something which went without saying, the I love you addressed to him. That destined for Isabelle he couldn’t hear without a certain gnawing irritation. In this he was more like Matthew than he knew, for what he might have wished for himself was to have had innumerable lovers, for each of whom he would be the one and only lover.
Though these were becoming increasingly rare, there were still spasms of lucidity in the flat, when it would occur to one or other of them that the hour of reckoning was imminent, that the world at large, the world which had indulged them for so long, which had given them their heads, must eventually call them to account. Yet, strange as it seemed (though, truth to tell, they paid no attention even to this strangeness), that hour seemed to have been indefinitely postponed. No telephone call had come from Normandy to announce their parents’ impending return, nor had they ever been contacted by their aunt from Le Nègre Bleu.
In fact, the telephone had stopped ringing altogether; and once, when Théo picked up the receiver with the project of calling the house in Trouville in an endeavour to forestall the inevitable, he was mystified to find it quite dead, without a dialling tone.
His puzzlement lasted just long enough for him to wonder if he ought to inform the others. Then, assuming that the telephone had been cut off because of a bill left unpaid by their parents’ extended absence, he gave it no further thought.
Que reste-t-il de nos amours?
Que reste-t-il de ces bons jours?
Une photo, vieille photo
De ma jeunesse.
Que reste-t-il des billets-doux,
Des mois d’avril, des rendezvous?
Un souvenir qui me poursuit …
… qui me poursuit …
… qui me poursuit …
… qui me poursuit …
Like a nervous child stumbling over a multisyllable, the record, frayed from overuse, would invariably catch the needle on the same stubborn groove. Listening to it was an excruciating business. Yet, after a few experiments with other Trenet tunes, or else with popular classics, Sibelius’s ‘Valse triste’, Chopin’s ‘Tristesse’, they all equally felt an urge to return to the number with which the game had originated. And, in the end, the repetition which had once grated on their ears grew to be second nature to them.
They had turned the heating up full blast and would now sashay through the flat in the nude – except that they were never quite stark naked. Each would tend to wear a single item of clothing, which might be: for Théo, a white sheet that he would drape over his shoulders like a toga; for Isabelle, a pair of her grandmother’s jet black, elbow-length evening gloves that caused her in the dark to appear armless, like the Venus de Milo; for Matthew, a frontiersman’s suede belt worn low and loose round the waist. In this way, they lolled about the quartier des enfants, striking a hundred gallant poses a day.
None of them felt the need any longer to refer to the game – if it could still be considered just a game – as Home Movies, or by any name at all, so pervasively had it thread itself into the textures of their existence; and the cinematic allusions with which it had all started, and which its latest evolution had rendered redundant, were eventually dropped. Insufficient now were the playful tugs and tweaks, the giggly cross-dressing, the touche-pipi, the goatish adolescent pranks. The props of old had served their purpose, had been discarded, and all that was left was the hard literalness of sexual desire, the skin, the flesh, the body, down into whose orifices, like orphaned fox cubs, they went to earth.
Hunger, though, began to rack their temples with fearful migraines. Wholly without material resources, refusing to entertain the notion of reaching out to either family or friends (for which friends?), they would each in turn cast over their nakedness a dirty, stringy pullover and a pair of stained jeans, tiptoe down into the courtyard and forage in the dustbins that were lined up along one of its walls.
But what they extracted from these, and it was little enough, had the instantaneous effect of constipating them. After a deal of heaving and puffing, along with other, more comical sound effects, they would eventually produce stools that were hard, musky pebbles the shape and colour of miniature rugby balls, causing Isabelle to shriek in agony from behind the bathroom door that she would ‘soon have to shit by Caesarean section’.
One afternoon, ransacking the pantry for some edible scrap of food, a crumbling breadstick still inside its cellophane wrapper or a bar of mouldy Swiss chocolate, Isabelle came across a bounty about which she and her brother had forgotten. On the top shelf sat three cans of cat food which had been bought for a recently deceased Siamese.
Théo found a can-opener and screwed open the lids. Then, with their bare hands, they scooped up the moist, jelly-rimmed meat and devoured it without a thought for the future.
Alas, it had on their digestive tracts the contrary effect to the odds and ends they had been rifling from the dustbins in the courtyard. Their faces drained of colour. Their stomachs seethed and fermented with gassy bubbles. Cupping the palms of their hands over volcanically erupting mouths, the three of them made a simultaneous dash for the lavatory.
Isabelle, who had the greatest presence of mind, suddenly switched direction, heading for her parents’ bathroom, which was outside the orbit of the quartier des enfants, and immediately drawing the lock on the door to repel all boarders.
Théo and Matthew, remaining to fight it out, raced along the corridor to the lavatory next door to Théo’s bedroom.
There was a scuffle in the doorway, both of them struggling to keep their bodies from turning inside-out. Yet even if it was Matthew who reached the seat first, he was instantly ousted from it by Théo. Flung backwards, he slipped and lost his balance, skittering across the linoleum floor like a balloon from which the air has been let out, his intestines as giddily aflame as those of a Catherine wheel. Before the eyes of the safely enthroned Théo, his flesh dissolved into a raging, uncorkable torrent of mud, sperm, vomit, egg yolk, soft caramel and silver-flecked snot.
A moment later, when Isabelle entered the lavatory, he was still lying there, stretched out amid the multitudinous fluids that his body had discharged, like a blind man who has stumbled over his own breakfast tray.
Tenderly, she picked him up, sponged him down, poking the bursting sponge into his vaulted crevices, squeezing it out along the sore cleft of his buttocks. Half-acquiescent, half-scared, he let her cleanse him further by shaving off his pubic hair, not only around the penis but along the narrow, smouldering trail of gunpowder which ran between his thighs. Gazing at himself in the mirror, Matthew started to excite himself. He rubbed himself against his reflection. He caressed it all over, but it declined to kiss him anywhere else but on the lips. Afaint tracing of these kisses stayed for a while on the misted surface of the glass, before fading away like the Cheshire Cat’s grin.
Suddenly, without warning, Théo pinned him against the reflection. Wild-eyed, his nose bent sideways, his teeth scraping the glass, his left cheek flattened against his double’s right cheek, Matthew started to gasp for air, so desperately one might have thought his reflection was giving him the kiss of life.
It was obvious that Théo meant to sodomise him.
Previously, between the two youths, a sense of propriety, as to when and where to stop, as to how far to go too far, had always been observed. From its origins, now irrecoverable, lost for ever, their mutual horseplay had confined itself to the petty humiliations and self-abasements of rituals and raggings. Now, with Théo about to rape Matthew, a rape that already filled him with elation even as he knew its intention was to pain and degrade him, they had ceased to obey their own rules.
Silently thrilled by this bizarre new union, Isabelle watched her brother’s erect penis squeeze through the narrow, hair-snagged passage between Matthew’s buttocks, while, contriving to open a single eye under the pressure of the mirror’s reptilian scrutiny, Matthew himself made out a set of scrunched-up features that were his but not truly his, different from his but not truly different. With an agonised moan that could have been either of pleasure or pain, he capitulated unconditionally, assuming at last the role in which his whole life had cast him, that of the martyred angel, frail of physique and lamblike of character, to be caressed and beaten, cradled and spat upon, inspiring in those who are drawn to him and to whom he is drawn a desire to protect, and at the same time a compulsion to defile, the very innocence that seduced them in the first place.
Que reste-t-il des billets-doux
Des mois d’avril, des rendezvous?
Un souvenir qui me poursuit …
… qui me poursuit …
… qui me poursuit …
… qui me poursuit …
The household had found the identity it had sought since the morning of the grown-ups’ departure. Theirs – Théo’s and Isabelle’s – was the licence of the masturbator to do, inside his head, whatever he pleases with whomever he pleases for as often as he pleases, a licence that must lead to ever more extreme fantasies. The only difference was that Matthew had become the externalised object of these fantasies. Yet, tormented as he was, subject to whatever indignity they could devise, he also remained the object of his tormentors’ love. The indignity submitted to, they would at once tearfully hug him, smother him, suffocate him with kisses, beg his forgiveness with the humblest, the most sincere of apologies.
It was in this alternating current that he rediscovered, again and again, the arousing, demeaning sensations of the avenue Hoche.
The world at large, meanwhile, the world whose average, upright citizens they shunned and were shunned by, the world which came to a halt at the flat’s bolted front door as though no longer d
aring to put a foot inside, that world too, for anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear, was treading air. How else to explain the telephone’s stillness, the drum roll of footfalls reverberating from the pavement below the bedroom window then just as suddenly pitter-pattering into silence, the city traversed by ambulance and fire-engine and police-car sirens, criss-crossing one another in the night, traversed as well by what sounded like explosions, even if these were never more than half-audible, like bombs detonated under glass?
And these noises, deadened, anaesthetised, heard as one hears things when cupping one’s hands over one’s ears before releasing them, these footfalls, sirens, explosions, this shattered glass, this whole end-of-the-world pandemonium, served as an accompaniment to the game’s very last phase when, clinging arm to arm, Théo, Isabelle and Matthew would descend – or, rather, ascend – into Hell.
… qui me poursuit …
… qui me poursuit …
… qui me poursuit …
… qui me poursuit …
… qui me poursuit …
The flat was still, silent, sealed as tight as a coffin. The air was fetid. No ray of light pierced the bedroom curtains. Isabelle lay lengthwise on the bed, her head dangling upside-down, her hair brushing the carpet, her feet, as though foreshortened, those of a hanged man. Théo was curled up against her, a lock of lank hair obscuring his eyes. Matthew sat cross-legged on the floor, his head hung forward, his face and breast, like those of a Red Indian, blazoned with crosses, crescents and looping, curling lines, traced out in excrement.
Theirs was no longer the elegant entanglement of a monogram but the ghastly, grey-green quiescence of the Raft of the Medusa.
The Dreamers Page 9
