The Ninth Life of Louis Drax

by Liz Jensen

  —No change? he asked sadly.

  —No change. We keep on hoping.

  I needed two sticks to walk. Even with their help, I couldn’t move fast. Everything hurt. I explained to Stephanie that the burns would take a long time to heal, and I might need some further surgery on my chest and legs. My hands were mending slowly.

  —Come on. I’ll show you the roses. Winter roses. They’re just in bloom. As we left the ward, Stephanie reached for her cigarettes, and I picked up an empty plastic specimen jar to serve as an ashtray, knowing that Monsieur Girardeau would never forgive me if I didn’t clean up after my visitor. We walked for a while in silence under a sky dotted with white clouds. The seagulls spun above us.

  —Have you lost your faith in women, Pascal? Stephanie Charvillefort asked abruptly. —I’m interested.

  I thought for a moment. I’d never asked myself this. I wondered why. The question was so obvious.

  —Perhaps I should have. But no. Actually, I refuse to. On principle. It’s more that I’ve lost faith in my own judgement.

  What I couldn’t say was that I wasn’t over Natalie Drax. That a sick, tortured part of me hung on, yearning for her still. Stephanie took out a cigarette and lit up. I winced at the flame.

  —Sorry, she said. —I didn’t think.

  —And what about you? Can one ask the same question of a woman?

  —No, because it’s different. You can’t lose faith in your own sex. That would be a kind of abdication. But you know what your own sex is capable of, and what it can sink to. I may not be a typical woman, she said, shooting me a wry glance, —but I do understand the female psyche.

  —And the male psyche?

  —To some extent. Men want to think the best of women, especially if they’re attractive. Isn’t there some truth in that? That we attribute moral goodness to attractive people? And to those who present themselves as victims? Natalie made a very convincing victim, she mused. —I was taken in too. Despite being female.

  I had a sudden flash of memory: Natalie’s scorched figure screaming and on fire. It was recurrent. Five times a day on average, I saw that small frail frame, running away from itself, from me, from the world. Hurtling into hell. Saw the once-pale hair on fire, a ghastly halo around that blackened, eaten-up face.

  We had reached the roses.

  —Aren’t they stupendous? I asked shakily, pointing a stick at the yellow mass of blooms. I forced the image of Natalie back into the corner of my mind where it lived and lurked.

  —A very striking colour, said Stephanie, stubbing out her cigarette before grinding it into the earth with her heel. —Didn’t Louis mention lupins? Do you have them here?

  —Hundreds, I said, pointing to what remained of them. —Highly toxic.

  At this she grew serious again, animated. —What’s so puzzling to me is that Natalie’s way of thinking comes from another era. From the time when women really were helpless, when they really did have to manipulate men.

  —A throwback, I murmured. —Some kind of relic. But to hurt her own child and call it love ...

  —Every day, a woman somewhere kills her own child, said Stephanie Charvillefort bleakly. —Believe me. We watched as Marcel Perez stood on the balcony with Jacqueline, then descended the steps towards us.

  —But I don’t want to believe you.

  —No one does. But it’s the truth. It’s the easiest kind of murder to cover up, because it’s the kind most people would prefer not to contemplate.

  —Which makes us accomplices, I said slowly, allowing the thought space. —Because we’ve colluded without knowing.

  —That was the end-point. But it all began with something very small. Natalie’s first mistake was negligible. It was easily understandable. It was even forgivable, if you’re into forgiveness. She wanted a man who didn’t want her, so she tried to trap him by getting pregnant. It’s the oldest trick in the book.

  —One of the oldest tricks, said Marcel, joining us as Stephanie took out another cigarette. This time she turned away from me to light it. —There are actually many. What lovely roses.

  —All of them listed somewhere in a psychology book, right? said Stephanie. He smiled and we walked on, rounding the corner and stopping by the ornamental pond. It struck me that Stephanie and Marcel must have spent some time discussing the case of Natalie Drax. I felt oddly out of the loop.

  I watched the tiny rainbows shooting up from the fountain. My legs were hurting and I had to stop for a moment.

  —It may be a morally questionable thing to do, said Stephanie, —but it’s not evil. It’s not even illegal. It’s just a dirty trick to play. Talk to any man who’s been caught out that way. He’s furious, he’s resentful. Women can be their own worst enemies.

  —But why invent a story of rape? I asked. I still didn’t get it. —It’s so – so drastic. How could anyone come up with an idea like that?

  Marcel Perez sighed. —That’s where I went wrong. I never doubted it, when I heard that story. You don’t, do you?

  —No, I said —You don’t. It’s too ... indecent. Indecent to question it, but the idea of making it up’s indecent too. No one with any pride–

  —Oh, but it came from pride, said Marcel. —Look at it this way. She could hardly tell the real story. It didn’t make her look good. But she could have come up with something that didn’t make her look so bad – some kind of halfway version. Most women in that position manage to. But she was too proud for that. And cunning. She took it a step further. The rape story gained her a sort of sick cachet.

  —It was actually quite inspired, said Stephanie dismally. —It made her a sort of holy martyr. Three cheers for the female mind.

  This thought depressed me. I didn’t like to think of women like that. Most are not. Surely, most are not?

  —That’s why I asked you if you’d lost faith, she went on. —Because in your position I might. But I don’t want you to.

  I smiled at her sudden seriousness. I could see Marcel smiling too. When I felt a little steadier, we walked on slowly, Charvillefort smoking and talking, Marcel and me mostly listening and thinking. I remembered at one moment, with a kind of shock, that I had rather disliked Stephanie Charvillefort when I first met her. Or at least not taken her seriously.

  —I got you wrong, I said suddenly.

  —I know, she said, turning sharply to look at me, and then smiling.

  —People do, Stephanie, said Marcel. —It’s the way you come across. Perhaps you should wear a bit of make-up.

  But I couldn’t join in their laughter. My feelings – would they ever leave me? – were too strong, too recent, too excruciating. The three of us sat down on the bench near the azaleas and looked at the garden in silence for a moment, each absorbed in our thoughts.

  —She loved her son, said Marcel Perez. —But she hated him too. There was an eternal conflict. It was more complex than Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy. The murderous instinct really was there. She said she never let him die. But she took him to the edge time after time. A part of him wanted it too. It was a game they played together.

  A sleek koi carp glided into view beneath the surface of the water, its scales smooth. Another followed, and then a third. I watched, mesmerised as their cool shapes swirled in the depths.

  It was February. Winter had laid everything bare. The mountains, capped with snow, rose dark and primaeval from the plain below: a desolate, almost lunar landscape. Huge rocks lay scattered like a handful of dice flung down by a petulant giant. There were hardly any other cars on the road, but the occasional HGV rumbled past, its tyres shooting up swathes of slush. Somewhere, in this emptiness, they took deliveries.

  After Ponteyrol the road narrowed; it took me another hour, from there, to reach the spot where the Drax family had gone for their picnic. It was higher up, more remote, than I had pictured.

  I parked in a clearing nearby and picked my way slowly along the track that led through tall dead grass spangled with frozen cobwebs. Stephanie had g
iven me the police map which showed the landmarks: a bent fir tree, a clutch of birch trees, two boulders. There were odd patches of mist; despite my thick coat, I shivered. The scars on my chest and hands ached as I struggled with the brambles that caught at my clothing. Slowly, I became aware of the sound of rushing water. I limped to the edge of the ravine and stood at the spot where Louis Drax fell.

  It was a few minutes before I summoned the nerve to look down. The drop was sheer and unrelenting. A wave of nausea overtook me. Vertigo. The trick is to breathe slowly, quell the panic. Unthinkable, that anyone could have survived such a fall. You could see a thin ribbon of silver far below, with a cloud of spray rising from it.

  I stayed there for a long time, just breathing. Breathing, and wondering if I would ever make sense of the dance that Louis and his mother danced together for nine years, the rituals and acts of complicity that led to him walking those five steps back. Or if I would ever know where Louis was wandering now. The mind is infinitely larger than the world it inhabits. There is more to the human brain than machinery or meat. I believe in the soul, I thought suddenly. Everything I know about the brain tells me not to, but I believe in it still. I believe in Louis’ soul. I felt myself swaying.

  To try and put a lid on things, I wrote about the case of Louis Drax. But despite the proof of a telepathic interchange – the CCTV footage, the witnesses – my article was rejected by all the major medical journals. In my heart of hearts, I had always known it would be. It was too bizarre. The editors indicated, gently, that publication would discredit me. That it would not help my career to be seen as any more of a maverick than I already was.

  Vaudin made sympathetic noises, but I knew he agreed with them. He didn’t disbelieve the proof, but he was cautious. I considered writing about it in a newspaper, but that would have involved telling more of the story than was wise. There was still a chance that Louis would emerge from his coma. It would be unfair.

  So I kept quiet about it, went on with my work, tended to my bonsais.

  Sophie returned, but she left every weekend to stay with the girls in Montpellier. I didn’t try to stop her. We were coming to a slow rapprochement But it was painful.

  Coming back to life can be as slow as dying. Slower. But there have been a few small signs of encouragement in Louis’ progress at the clinic. I still tend towards optimism, still believe just as firmly in the power of hope. I have changed in many ways, since the fire. But on that score, I am the same man. And so – unlike some of my colleagues – I like to think that whatever the evidence to the contrary, in a few months’ time, Louis Drax will have fully emerged from his coma.

  And then I think about the life we will have, far in the future. Yes, I sometimes – often – allow myself to dream about things like that.

  We will make an odd family. Perhaps by then Sophie and I will have reached an understanding of sorts, and be rebuilding a life together. Not the one we once shared, and which I shattered, but a new one, with a new shape and a new voice, new feelings. A wary tenderness. Lucille will still be suffering bad health in the wake of her son’s death, and although she will have come to live in the village, she will have asked Sophie and I to consider Louis our son. When she smiles, which is rarely, you will notice the effort it takes for her to summon the right muscles.

  Sometimes I will even call Louis ‘son’. It will be a joke, but a joke we both need. My daughters will adore him, and come to stay at weekends from Montpellier, with boyfriends in tow, and spoil the kid rotten with computer games, videos, trips to McDonald’s. Sophie will cook huge meals for all of us, just like she used to, and when Louis eats, she will watch him maternally, and I will watch her watching him and think of how precarious life is, how swiftly and irredemably it can be knocked sideways. How there are certain types of pain that never really go away. Certain things that are best left unspoken, even when a boy has started to ask questions.

  Lucille will keep Pierre’s memory alive for Louis, but none of us will talk of Natalie Drax. It will be best that way, if there is a ‘best’ in such circumstances. Louis will know that she loved him. That’s enough. Some memories you do not need. The brain is vaster than I ever realised, its workings more subtle and strange. When a part of you is cauterised, the mind compensates. The weirdest plants are the ones that grow out of ashes.

  Marcel Perez will come to visit once a month, and with his help, Louis will make visible progress. Marcel, Sophie and I will discuss how he is doing, always a little wary, always on the watch for signs that his memory is stirring. For we will be nervous, all of us: nervous that despite all the healing, despite the normality that now surrounds him, the past might find a chink through which to slip, and flood his soul.

  Don’t think that I didn’t grieve, when Natalie died. Don’t think that I had stopped loving her. I hadn’t. Even now, I am not sure that she’s out of my system. Maybe that’s what Sophie can see in me. Maybe that’s why we still have separate bedrooms, and why despite the tenderness, the new grace we have learned, she stays watchful.

  Yes, however misplaced they were, the disturbed emotions Natalie Drax stirred in me still linger, still renew themselves in tiny daily stabs of pain and shame and guilt and sorrow. Surely I might have been able to save her from herself? Surely, with the right kind of love, she might have ...

  —No, Marcel Perez tells me. —She wasn’t cut out for love. Love was never going to bring her happiness. Her agenda was different.

  One day I will be purged. The day will come when I wake up and do not think of her. But in the meantime, the best of her lives on. Her son. Who perhaps one day will be ready to reach out and re-enter the world – a different world from the one either of us knew before, a world where he has a place, and where I will do all I can for him. All, and more. And maybe one day, almost by accident, I will stumble into redemption.

  Let us imagine all that, as we stare at the creature, the two of us. It is a marvel, huge and milky-mauve with long pink tentacles adorned with suckers the size of saucers. It’s in a massive tank, and everyone at the museum seems, like us, to have become lost inside it. It hangs in suspended animation, a thing that nobody had believed in before.

  They once said that sailors invented them, even though the sucker-marks found on whales proved they must have existed in the dark bowels of the ocean. Deep down, they had hidden for years but now here they are, triumphing in the new climate, breeding like no other creature on earth, silent messengers from those shadowed chambers of the world we had imagined eternally locked, remote, unreachable. The miracle is not that we discovered them by breaking into their world, but that – washed-up and dead – they broke into ours.

  In his wheelchair, his head clamped in place, wide-eyed and unblinking, Louis stares and stares, so silent and blind and perhaps also so in awe that you can barely hear him breathe. And suddenly it is a stupendous marvel to me that creatures such as this exist, and that alongside, there can be a boy like Louis who might yet come back from that huge and unknown place beneath the surface of things.

  You shouldn’t think ‘oh poor Louis Drax.’ Because it doesn’t suck too badly. True story. I don’t mind staying here.

  Lots of stuff sucked before. It’s not easy being a Disturbed Child or accident-prone. Seeing Fat Perez sucked, and Maman and Papa hating each other sucked and school sucked and being called Wacko Boy sucked and even the Mohammeds sucked.

  This doesn’t suck though. See, what Fat Perez didn’t understand is, I never thought hospitals sucked. I just said that. I like them. I like it that people take care of you all the time. I like it that you can just lie there and think and stuff, and you don’t have to worry that they’re fragile or if they’re playing Pretend You Don’t Hate Him. I like it that you can just think about La Planète bleue and you can dream about people like Gustave and listen to Pascal reading to you from Les Animaux: leur vie extraordinaire. It’s even better than being asleep because you never have to wake up. All you have to do is just lie there and breathe. Yo
u don’t even have to talk. And the bits you don’t like, you can just switch off and sleep through them. I’m good at sleeping through the bad bits. I like Dr Dannachet, I like Jacqueline Duval and Marianne and Berthe and all the other nurses, I like Mamie coming to sit next to me and telling me about all the different dogs she had and what happened to them, and all the places she lived when she was young. I even like Fat Perez coming to visit.

  All my life I have been waiting for this hospital. Nine whole years. Nine’s my lucky number, cos this is my ninth life, and my ninth life is the best one. True story. I could stay here for ever. I don’t need a Papa or a Maman cos I’ve got Gustave and Dr Dannachet. Every night he comes and reads to me. And when when he says goodnight, he whispers, You can wake up whenever you want to, Louis. I would love to take you to Paris to see miraculous creatures pickled in tanks. But he doesn’t understand cos he’s a bit dumb. He doesn’t get it. He doesn’t get that I can already swim underwater, and I can see as many giant squids as I want to, and any other animal or any other thing, anything I want in the whole world. I can go anywhere I want and do anything I want.

  Anywhere in the world, anything.

  You’d have to be mad to swap that for being Louis Drax again.

  That’s what Dr Dannachet doesn’t get. But Gustave gets it. Gustave knows. My choice is I say, no thanks, Dr Dannachet. I like you. I like it here. My ninth life is better than the other eight, I promise you. I’ve been thinking and this is what I think. It’s OK to be here. So I’ll stay put. If you make a choice, and it’s wrong, you have to live with it. Everyone has to live with the consequences. You chose, Louis. It was your choice.

  —So is it OK with you if I stay put? I ask him.

  —No. I’m not sure it is, Louis.

  But it’s not Dr Dannachet’s voice. It’s Gustave’s. Papa. I haven’t heard him for ages. I thought he’d gone. He’s very faint.

  —You don’t have to stay, says Gustave. Says Papa. —You can wake up and live. If you want to. Do you want to?