The Death-Defying Pepper Roux

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  In among their legs he went, into a mangrove wilderness of moving hooves and hocks and dung and dust, ducking and threading his way through it, losing direction, jumping up to sight the gates again, barged and buffeted by the sweat-wet, brown-smeared flanks of seventeen unbroken horses. Colliding with the gates, he shot the bolts with the heels of his punctured hands, leaned all his weight against the bowing, scraping, splintery planks, and pushed.

  Pepper himself spilled out into the road: A passing pedestrian had to step over him. A mailman on a bicycle braked to avoid him. But the horses in the yard—still at last—only stared. There they stood, motionless, framed in the rectangle of the gateway.

  The slaughterhouse hands, thinking the gates had come open accidentally, froze too, for fear they would spook the horses out of their trance. The situation might yet be saved, if they kept very still.

  Pepper picked himself up from the ground. He stretched his arms out to either side. He snapped his fingers twice, three times. The horses swiveled their ears and turned their heads—every one—toward the boy in the roadway.

  The mailman, seeing what was coming, put his feet to the pedals and shot away down the hill, narrowly missing a—“What the—?”—loose sheep. The slaughterhouse man who had opened the side gate glimpsed Pepper for the first time and bellowed:

  “That b—let them out!”

  The shout jolted the horses like a bolt of electricity. Legs deliberately lamed, eyes rheumy from pestering flies, sinews stringy from imprisonment suddenly recalled the wild, glittering glory of the open spaces. So close to the edge of town, the Camargue was in plain view, beyond a garden or two. The mares from the bottle trap were first to move. They leaped from standing into a full gallop, and behind them the stained and grubby livestock Jacques and Jeanne had trapped for horsemeat turned back into the white ghosts of the Camargue.

  Witnesses afterward said that the boy in their path did not move a muscle. But he did.

  He tipped his head back and looked up at the sky.

  Glimpsing a flicker of orange and pink above him, Pepper watched a skein of birds fly east in a flapping chevron banner of peachy splendor. After weeks working on the Camargue, he knew they were only flamingos and not an angel host. He laid no store by them as birds of omen. He just wanted to enjoy their preposterous beauty. After weeks on the Camargue, Pepper was wiser in all kinds of ways—about flamingos, about thoroughbred horses, about people.

  But he still trusted horses one hundred percent.

  Quite rightly on this occasion.

  Witnesses said afterward that a torrent, a dam burst of horseflesh erupted through the open gates, hooves sliding on the paved roadway, necks stretched, teeth set, eyes rolling with the exertion of movement from a standing start. The boy in their path was engulfed, slight as a bulrush in a river spate. Then the horses galloped on, their wet manes shedding water drops, as whitely overwhelming as roaring surf.

  And the boy was gone. All that was left was the mangled wreckage of two old motorbikes bleeding fuel onto the roadway. They turned out to belong to a couple of unsavory vagrants all too well known locally as “wrong ’uns.” “Their kind—it’s in the blood,” people agreed, picking over the wreckage for scrap metal.

  EIGHT

  SWIMMER

  Pepper went to the public swimming baths above the beach and found that it was easier to lose himself in a crowd than in the wide-open spaces.

  He had been chased downhill by Jacques and Jeanne throwing curses at him like stones. If Jacques had brought his shotgun with him, he would have done the angels’ work for them at the touch of a trigger. But unhampered by hernias or armadillo overcoats, Pepper easily outran them. At about the time the sheep found its way home, Pepper was sprinting along the sea-front promenade and into the pool enclosure: a needle threading its way into a haystack.

  The pool was set into a concrete pontoon: a rectangle of seawater and litter. Algae on the walls had turned the water bottle green. Pepper sat and caught his breath. The noisy splashing nearby brought back to him the day he had picnicked on a riverbank at home, watching other children playing in the water while he sat sandwiched between two women discussing suitable hymns for his funeral.

  There were children playing here, in the emerald-green pool—jumping in, diving, splashing, floating: children much younger than Pepper. He wished he had defied his mother—taken a risk and plunged in. He wished he were one of those children now—five, seven, nine years old. He wished he could take over the life of one of these children and be allowed to swim, to be young again—not have to inhabit an adult’s life anymore, with all its bewildering complications and unkindnesses. He even walked along the edge of the pool, looking at the many piles of clothes strewn about there. What if he were to put on those dungarees, those short jackets, those small shoes…would they make him little again? Their smallness made him huge—one of the Ugly Stepsisters wondering how to fit her great hoof into Cinderella’s tiny slipper. The children in the pool shrieked, plunged, bobbed, laughed, and slithered in and out of one another’s shiny, wet arms. But Pepper was marooned on the desert island of fourteen, cut off from being little ever again. He had no choice but to be a man. The tears brimmed over and ran down—which was appalling in someone who is supposed to be being a man. Birthdays ought to be optional. Then he could have stopped at thirteen and stayed thirteen forever, at home with Mama and Papa and Aunty.

  Pepper lay down on the cracked concrete terrace, his jacket rolled up under his head.

  “You should go in, you should,” said a youth in an undershirt and shorts, sitting down beside him. He was a swarthy, skinny chap no taller than Pepper, though old enough to have attempted a mustache. The top of his head was sunburned and peeling, so he looked like a baby with cradle cap. “Healthy, that water is. Heals all sorts.”

  Pepper looked doubtfully at the cigarette packets and dead wasps floating in the water.

  “You should go in, you should,” insisted the stranger. He had a double-headed eagle tattooed at the top of one of his skinny, muscular, sunburned arms.

  “I can’t swim.”

  The youth barely blinked. “Betcha can in there. It’s the salt. Keeps you up. Trust me. You look like a swimmer. I’ll look after your things.”

  So Pepper took off his shirt, trousers, socks, and shoes, and he eased his way, gawky and nervous, down the pool ladder. Its rungs were slimy with seaweed. The saltwater stung the holes in his hands. Looking down into deep water, he thought for a second he could see Roche submerged and beckoning…. But it was only a deck chair that had blown into the pool the month before, canvas billowing in the green depths.

  In comparison with hot, white daylight, the green water was very cold. But the idea of getting clean persuaded Pepper down the ladder. His reaching toes found no bottom—the pool was deep. He did not let go of the ladder, having learned recently not to trust everything he was told—but he was pleased to overcome his fright. Come on, then. Drown me, he thought, and let go of the ladder.

  He sank like a stone. Luckily the ladder came to hand again, and he hauled himself back into the air, coughing and gasping.

  Just as he got into the pool, everybody else started to get out. Pepper thought it must have something to do with the film of filth spreading out like an aura around his body, but in fact it was just the weather’s doing. Locals recognized the ominous signs: black clouds rolling in to snuff out the sun, gusts of wind scuffing the water’s surface, the deck chairs shiftily shuffling this way and that. By the time Pepper had begun to enjoy himself, holding on to the ladder by just one finger, floating, treading water, changing hands, he was alone in the long green pool. The sea’s grumbling had grown to a roar. When the rain began, he did climb out—harder going up, harder because he had not eaten today—and ran back toward the warmth of his clothes.

  Except that his clothes were gone.

  So was the stranger with the eagle tattoo.

  Pepper looked this way and that, scoured all the spots wh
ere his clothes might have been put for safe-keeping—and found nothing. He climbed a wall to look along the beach, to try to spot the stranger, and all the time a snicker in his throat was growing into a giggle and then a laugh, then a big, uncontrollable fit of hilarity. Finally he had to stand and lean his hands on his knees and laugh and laugh and laugh. Someone had stolen Pepper’s outside! For weeks he had been trying to run out of his skin, only to be fleeced of it by a stranger.

  The rain came down on him so hard that his skin roughened and turned blue. He was shuddering violently with cold, but there was no one there to see. It was as if the entire population of Saint-Bonnard-de-la-Mer were made of sugar and had melted away.

  A line of laundry, pegged out to dry in a garden, hung so heavy with rain that the shirt and trouser cuffs were dragging on the ground. Pepper unpegged his new identity—a man’s, of course; there were no boys’ clothes available—and tried to put it on. Surprisingly hard to slide cold wet arms into cold wet sleeves, cold wet feet into cold wet trousers. The over-long legs folded under his feet, so the lack of shoes hardly mattered. He set off to walk, feeling in every pocket for a clue as to his name or what he now was, this flapping, shivering, undersized Jonah swallowed by his clothes. Nothing.

  His muscles began to work of their own accord, contracting, knotting, stiffening; they pulled his head down toward his chest and made him hunchbacked. He could not shed his shroud of an outfit, because his fingers were lost inside the cuffs and rigid with cold.

  Oddly, it got warmer after the sun went down. Well, intermittently warm and cold, as though sea waves were breaking over him on a sunny day. And then, by turns, hot and icy, as though winds off the Sahara and the Russian steppe were taking turns to blow on him. After the rain stopped, the clothes did dry on him, except around his feet. Scuffing through mud and grit had crammed his trouser cuffs, so they swung with every step and each caught the other ankle and tripped him. On and on he stumbled, past shops and garages, houses and a hospital. If he saw someone coming, he turned left to avoid them. Or right. How vast the town must have grown, that he walked for hour after hour and never reached its edge. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw herds of horses stampede out of alleyways, and all the streetlamps wore haloes—their gas flames watched him with grinning, sneering faces. Saints lurked on basement steps, or under hatches in the pavement. The pavements under his feet lifted and rucked like a hall carpet in a draft.

  One by one, the town gave up its sinister nighttime secrets. When, on hands and knees, he looked down through the metal bars of the drain covers, he was sure he could see prisoners manacled there. The cats of Saint-Bonnard-de-la-Mer were long-haired patches of darkness, prowling the roofs until they spotted a boy and came down to sink their long teeth into his cold, flapping hands. The statues discussed him, calling him “cockroach,” “lag,” and “bane.”

  A gendarme looked into his face and asked him his name and where he lived—questions far too hard for Pepper to answer, given the pain in his chest. Luckily a commotion in the next street drew the policeman away and left Pepper in peace, sitting with his back to a shop window. Opposite was another sheet of glass—an aquarium?—and within it the most terrifying vision of all. Floating there, white gown spreading out and clouds of white light veiling his head, eyes fixed steadfastly on Pepper, was the pale form of an angel drowning.

  Pepper curled himself up into a ball, keeled onto his side, and made himself so small that the rainwater gushing down the gutter had no difficulty in washing him entirely away.

  Circles expanded to the size of planets and shrank back to pinpoints. Fish hatched out of the pinpoints and grew and grew until breath bubbled from their mouths, and from the bubbles more fish hatched, and more and more and more, and they all had to be organized, slotted together…except that Pepper was a thousand miles out in space and his arms were a thousand miles long. He was separated, alone, drifting, and nauseous, tumbling through darkness….

  So it was nice waking up in the hospital. The sheets were so smooth, he could not feel his body. The pillow was so soft that he might have been afloat. The smells and sounds were so strange and uninvited that he knew they had nothing to do with him. He did not have to do anything about anything.

  Ever again.

  He had finally outrun his body.

  For there he was in the next bed! His clothes hung at the next-door bed-curtain rail, like a man cut down from the gallows: his bleached, braidless navy jacket, his nicked and torn trousers. His body made a mound under the next-door blankets. Pepper squinted down: Yes, there were his sensible lace-up shoes, scuffed, colorless, stained by the sheep. No clothes hung at the end of his own bed. Ah well. Ghosts don’t need clothes.

  But apparently they do need to cough. Suddenly a string of coughs ripped through Pepper like a gas explosion demolishing a house. Around the room, a row of heads lifted and watched him with more joy than he thought was called for. “He’s back with us, nurse!” called one old man. Even Pepper Roux in the next bed sat up and looked across as well as he could with two black and swollen eyes.

  Except that it was not Pepper at all but the stranger from the swimming baths—the one who had stolen his clothes.

  “Five parts dead and gone you were when they brought you in,” said the thief, as if he were bringing Pepper up-to-date on a football score. “Bad night to sleep out in the rain. What were you drinking?”

  Pepper did not trouble to answer. Words had to be mined from somewhere too deep inside him, and though he could feel them, like lumps of coal in his chest, he could not muster the energy to fetch them to the surface. With immense effort, he lifted one hand and waved it in the direction of the thief.

  “Me? What happened to me? Yeah! Right! What happened to me? You want to know what happened to me? Common assault, that’s what. Aggravated bodily! What am I doing? I’m doing nothing! Who am I harming? No one! Then along comes her. One minute she’s got her arms around me, and I’m thinking, Do I know you, right? Get off me; I got standards. Next she’s punching seven colors of the rainbow out of me! And you know what? (You don’t, trust me.) She never even robbed me—well I’d got nothin’, but she couldn’t know that, could she? Woman scorned, right? Woman scorned, that’s what I reckon. I was too slow—I’m guessing now, right? I’m too slow with the romance, and—wham!—she’s all set to kill me! But I mean fair’s fair: You’re not expecting that kind of thing from her kind, are you? I mean women are women, yes; there’s no telling with women. But a nun?” This lament was addressed to the ward at large, and the other patients shook their heads or tuttutted or got on with reading their newspaper, having heard it all many times already. The words rattled down on Pepper like a million horseshoe nails: too hard and sharp, too bent out of shape to be useful. And he dreamed that horses were galloping to and fro over him, trampling him into deep, soft leaf litter—painlessly, painlessly—to hide him from flocks of rook-black nuns on motorbikes.

  Pepper could not fathom, at first, why the thief did not apologize, or even mention the pool and the matter of the stolen clothes. But the fact was, Pepper—washed, brushed, soothed, and smoothed, hands bandaged, body tucked into a hospital bed—looked nothing like the gullible boy on the beach, the one so easily persuaded to leave his clothes in the care of a stranger. Konstantin Kruppe simply did not recognize him. Besides, addicted as he was to taking other people’s belongings, Kruppe tended to look at people’s pockets and not their faces.

  Konstantin would slip out of bed at night and help himself to things from the drug cabinet at the end of the ward. He did it not so much to dull the pain, or to get better, or to alter his brain waves, but just to prove that he could. The drug cabinet was kept locked, and Konstantin bet the other patients he could get it open in under a minute. No lie—he could. Tablets, syrups, powders, capsules: He tried them all.

  As Pepper began to recover—and he did so amazingly fast on three square meals a day—he watched with a kind of fascination as Konstantin helped himself to another
patient’s tobacco, drank ethyl alcohol from the sterilizing bowls, sniffed oxygen from a cylinder in the corner…. It was not so much the desire to have it as the getting something for free. Konstantin’s unhappy experience with the violent nun had wounded his masculine pride; it was as if he had to prove he was a hard man and a true master of his trade, even if that trade was thieving.

  In the depths of one dark night, Pepper could not contain his curiosity, and asked, “Konstantin—are you that man who escaped from a chain gang?” Konstantin (who was just then standing astride Pepper so as to unhook and steal his bed-curtains) looked down at him sharply. “We wrote about you in my newspaper,” said Pepper.

  “No fooling! You did?” And Konstantin beamed with pleasure to think that his name had appeared in the papers. “You tell anyone, I’ll have to kill you,” he added, and Pepper nodded.

  “Is it safe to stay here?” asked Pepper, who had been considering staying for as long as possible. “The food’s good.”

  Konstantin wrinkled his nose, so his front teeth showed, mouselike, under his little mustache. “Nah. I’ll be out of here tomorrow. Get a bike. Always a bike rack outside a hospital. Bike around to Nice or Cannes. Kidnap a millionaire. Nice fat ransom. Something along those lines. Want a candy?” and he pulled out a fistful of pills filched from the drugs cabinet. “I like the red ones.”

  Pepper politely turned him down, so Konstantin swallowed the whole fistful himself.

  Next day, the police arrived to arrest Konstantin. But he had made good his escape once and for all. The stolen jacket and trousers were still hanging there at the end of Konstantin’s bed, but Konstantin had cunningly eluded his pursuers. The bed sheet was pulled high up over his head, and its soft, white folds softened out the spiky shape of his dead body.

  “Sudden death,” said the nurse, seeing the shock on Pepper’s face. “These things happen. No reason. Patient seems to be making a good recovery, then…” She snapped her fingers. “Gone.”