by Adam Thorpe
‘For someone who’s not supposed to be good at maths …’ said Sarah.
‘I got more years,’ complained Alicia.
‘Hawo!’ cried Beans, pointing at a large crow-like bird hopping about on the gravel.
‘Tammy’s right, but then she’s older than you, Alicia. Now, how many years ago did he, um, die, Alicia?’ She thought ‘die’ was more honest than ‘pass away’.
She felt curious about him, about this sunlit, smiling face vitrified and embedded in the stone; he didn’t look forty-four, he looked about her age. It was an old snapshot, chosen by the grieving family to show him at his best. A good choice, she reckoned. Other graves had photos, too, some of them sinister-looking or blurred or somehow unreal, as if the person could never have existed except as a waxwork, or a phantom from the past in a silly hat and spectacles. Always a phantom, even in life. But only Raoul Lagrange seemed impossible to imagine dead. So many of us do, she thought.
‘He died eight and a quarter years ago,’ tried Alicia, earnestly, in a full-on classroom way.
‘Six,’ Tammy said. ‘Almost exactly. Just after Fernando, because March comes after February. That’s really strange.’
‘Slightly different year,’ laughed Sarah, albeit amazed at her daughter’s brightness. ‘And if this poor man’s year wasn’t a leap year, which has an extra day, we’re talking about two days after, because February only has twenty-eight days.’
‘What’re you on about?’ wailed Alicia.
‘Tammy’s actually right again,’ said her mother, compensating the news with a cuddle. ‘Six years it is. Ten out of ten. But you got pretty close, darling.’
‘I can have a Coke, then,’ said Alicia. ‘In the café.’
‘Soon.’
Sarah put her glasses back on and looked about for Nick. He was on his back on the grass that bordered the cemetery, arms flung out as if he’d been shot. She wanted to call him, shielding her eyes from the bright sun and waiting for a sign of life. He’d looked quite puffed and red in the face, carrying Alicia up the last part of the hill. A mistake to come here, she thought. Living history! It was morbid.
Dishy Raoul, four or five years younger than Nick. If he’d lived. How kinky, to fancy someone through a photo on his grave! She walked towards the prone form in a relaxed way, so as not to worry the girls.
He didn’t stir. She wanted him to stir. His arms were flung right out. He never lay like that, normally. Stretched out like that.
Then his head lifted up as she approached, her shoes scrunching on the gravel over the beat of her alarmed heart. He needed to trim his eyebrows.
‘Isn’t the sun marvellous?’ he called out, head still up.
His neck must be almost dislocated. ‘This grass seems OK,’ she commented. She was so relieved for a second that she wanted to cry. Now she was back to normal and saying dull, inconsequent things, assessing herself as usual.
‘Oh,’ said Nick, taking a moment to cotton on, ‘it’s a bit prickly. There are prickly things in it. Not exactly a sward.’
His head was back on the grass. A wash of buttercup-like flowers shared part of the grass with similarly yellow flowers which were probably dandelions from the look of the leaves. She found the way he emphasised words a little cranky.
‘We should get a book,’ she said, sitting down next to him. ‘A flower book.’ Tammy had trailed her and was now hovering.
‘I’ve always found flower books useless,’ he confessed, ‘like bird books. Very little ever seems to match up. They’re gone before you’ve found the picture.’
‘Flowers don’t fly,’ she said, leaning back on her elbows.
‘No, but they wilt and die before you come back with the book the next time, because you inevitably forget the first time.’
‘You’ve always got the following year,’ she pointed out. ‘Assuming.’
The crow-like bird flew up and disappeared over the trees.
‘Tammy,’ said Sarah, ‘I think the others want you. Let Daddy and I have some me time.’
‘Mean time,’ Tammy murmured, moving off.
The three of them, golden sun in their golden hair, were planted comfortably on handsome Raoul’s grave, their ceaseless jittery kid-movements casting long, nervous shadows over the slab. She wondered if this was legitimate, too liberal of her; whether a villager might come along and be shocked at the foreigners’ behaviour. But she couldn’t move in the warm sun, the first real warmth of the year. She felt spiritual buds burgeoning inside her.
Raoul was grinning at the girls from his gravestone as they chatted together. Tammy kneeled on the gravel and felt its painful impression through her jeans. The younger two were making roads out of the gravel between the stelae and the porcelain flowers, visiting each other for tea and cake.
Tammy glanced at Raoul and stuck her tongue out. He didn’t react, except (she guessed) when she wasn’t looking.
SEVEN
Jean-Luc studies the remains of the fish he has rescued from the kitchen bin. Fish is expensive. Just as well, then, that one of Jean-Luc’s hobbies is angling. He took it up properly when he was a teenager. He has one rod and no permit. He knows the hidden, special places you have to scramble down to. He always fishes alone. He prefers it to hunting with a gun.
He caught the fish in the autumn and froze it for lean times. Yesterday he shared it in the evening with his mother, making sure there were no bones for her to choke on. He pretended it was fresh, but she could tell it wasn’t. He insisted it was. ‘Pffff,’ she scoffed, spraying particles of fish all over the place. It was a smallish trout; where he fishes, up above St-Maurice, the river squeezed between rocks and forming pools as it descends, there is never anything big. He wants to eat all of it himself, but he isn’t that sort of person. Anyway, his mother would have smelt it cooking. The white flesh came off easily and he served it to her, as ordered, with a scatter of capers, a knob of butter, and an overdone mulch of salted spinach.
She’d been well enough to come down to the kitchen to eat, although she groaned on the stairs and he had to help her. She peered at her plate when he served her.
‘Is that all?’ she complained, her eyes widening at it nevertheless.
‘You’ve got half,’ he said, taking the plate back, teasing her with it. ‘But you don’t have to eat it. It’s fresh.’
She smelt of toilets. Her dressing gown needed washing.
‘When did you catch it?’
‘This morning,’ he lied.
His hand was on her shoulder; he felt the shoulder blade as a sharp ridge, like the edge of a flint. He squeezed it gently, imagining the skeleton so close under the skin, getting closer and closer as she thinned until it popped out, cackling like a horror film, and that was that.
‘I hope you’ve washed your hands,’ she said.
He threw the bones away and now he’s rescued them. They smell rotten already. His idea seems even better, looking at the bones. He cleans the skeleton under the tap, with plenty of washing-up liquid, then takes it upstairs to his room in a plastic bag, ignoring her snores.
It is all spine and a head with its gaping mouth. He tugs the head off and an eye goes flying, as round and white as the Sandlers’ gravel. His fingers are oily with fluids. He runs his thumb down the sharp backbone. This is what we came from. Bibi, the little doll, is caught in the cobweb. The sieve is no longer a sieve. He rocks the sieve as it lies on the table, although cobwebs don’t rock and make that noise, they just tremble in a draught. Bibi has a backbone, too. So does the Englishwoman. And Raoul Lagrange, once.
He bends the fish-spine back until it snaps, cutting his finger slightly on its sharpness. That’s what happens when you hit a stationary object too fast. Backlash. Rabbit punch.
He shot his first rabbit when he was ten or eleven, and didn’t kill it outright. He picked it up by the ears. It kicked feebly, although its rump was mincemeat. ‘Like this,’ his father said, making a chopping movement with his hand. ‘That’s why they call it
a rabbit punch, when you break your neck.’
Jean-Luc held the rabbit tight by the ears and chopped onto the neck. The rabbit kicked again, feebly. He chopped again and the rabbit kicked. It must be stuck in a nightmare, Jean-Luc thought. The worst nightmare possible. His father shouted at him and grabbed the rabbit and down came his father’s hard, calloused hand and the rabbit’s neck snapped with a tiny click, the eyes losing their spark, the legs dangling after a little judder. But his father was so angry with him! Jean-Luc had never seen his father so angry!
‘Never do that again!’ he shouted. He was upset, that was the thing. The rabbit had suffered. Jean-Luc wanted to chop his useless hand off; instead, he practised on sticks and planks of wood until the side of his hand was blue and bleeding. The next time, the rabbit’s neck snapped straightaway and his father nodded, obviously proud of him.
What he needs now is a head. A tiny, shrunken head.
The excitement is deep in his belly again. Better than playing with himself, and not sinful (while he doesn’t reckon God exists, these days, you never know, you can never be too careful).
It doesn’t have to be a real human head: that would be hard. A chicken’s or a rabbit’s, say: he can ask at the butcher’s for that, but it’ll go off. Or a cat’s head. He’d still have to shrink it, though.
Once, long ago, in the rubbish dump beyond Yves Dardalhon’s farm, he and another kid – Matthieu Soupault – splashed paraffin on a kitten and dropped a match on its tail. They watched it run about, screeching and mewling, until it lay down in its own flames as if tired, raising a burning paw to its burning face as cats do when they clean their whiskers. Then they poured water over the little black corpse and studied it. Jean-Luc had only watched, it wasn’t even his idea. It was mad Matthieu’s idea. Matthieu now worked at the tax office, in a proper shirt and tie, at his own desk with his own computer, making sure people paid their taxes. Jean-Luc felt sick for a week, after that.
It doesn’t have to be a head at all.
It can be anything that makes you think of a head. Something round. Or he can take a photograph and stick it on something shaped like a disc. Of course, he thinks of the photograph of Raoul Lagrange stuck into the gravestone. He looks over his shoulder, just in case. Although he never feels scared up at the Mas.
His room is in shadow, the desk-lamp pointed low so that his own form darkens whatever’s behind him. His high, old-fashioned bed is made up, the sheet folded neatly back over the thin blue quilt, touching the bolster like a collar. No one can make up a bed like Jean-Luc, except his mother. Sometimes, for no reason, it won’t come right, the folds and pleats and tucks not working, the top edge a few centimetres out, and he wants to scream. He does scream, now and again, when making up his bed: short, sharp screams, more like a puppy than anything else.
‘What’s up?’ his mother always calls out.
‘Mind your own business,’ he yells back, each time. Or doesn’t say anything at all and keeps very still, hand on the quilt, so she can worry for a bit.
He looks at the sieve and Bibi and the fish bone and the little white circle of gravel stones and feels something expand inside him, like a flower. It is going to be much larger, this flower, than he ever expected. He realises that, now. Will he be able to hide it, if it is that big? He looks up at the ceiling. There’s the attic. But if it rains hard, his flower might get damaged. So he needs a big sheet of plastic. Everything is possible.
He pictures the Englishwoman, her small, untouchable face behind the teasing spectacles. He pictures that face as a flower, repeated lots of times like roses on a rose bush. He remembers a picture book at school, when he first went to school. A big book with scuffed, cardboard pages a teacher gave him to look at. There was a garden with a watering can and a green-eyed cat and all the flowers had happy, smiling faces encircled by petals. One of the faces had been changed by a naughty kid with a biro, perhaps a long time before. It had been changed into a filthy old woman with missing teeth and bushy eyebrows and hairy spots. Her name was written next to it with an arrow pointing back, but he wasn’t old enough to understand the letters. Jean-Luc couldn’t take his eyes off her. In the end, he had to cover her face with his hand.
He pictures that page right now, thirty years later. And all the flowers will have the Englishwoman’s face on them, except one. And that one will be my mother, Jean-Luc thinks.
He glances out of the window and, like a miracle, he sees her. Sees the Englishwoman, walking down the street with her husband and her kids, then turning off towards the café! His heart is thumping as if he’s run up a hill.
It thumped like that when he went out hunting in the old days. When the animal cleared cover and the gun was tucked into his shoulder, all ready. She disappears with her family into the café, like a mother duck leading her brood to water. Now that, thinks Jean-Luc, is God operating. And all the angels.
He waits with his binoculars by the window, until they come out again half an hour later. Her spectacles flash the sun into his eyes, like a message, as she turns her head. The girls all have purple mouths. That makes him smile, as he follows them, closing one eye against the lens that is cracked.
A few days later, getting back home from a cultural expedition during which Beans left a stellar splat of sick on a museum step, they heard a regular thumping that juddered off the walls. It was Jean-Luc, knocking wooden posts in. He was building a chicken-wire fence around the Zone.
‘I ought to give him a hand,’ murmured Nick, neck stiff from looking up at roof bosses.
Sarah filmed him, although he did nothing more than hold the unrolled chicken-wire upright. The girls watched with a quiet, almost awestruck concentration, as though something was being burnished into their brains. Afterwards, watching on the camera’s little screen, they noticed how Jean-Luc had his back turned almost the whole time, as if he couldn’t stand being filmed.
He came the following morning to sow the lawn and fiddle about with the pool. He had passed Sarah jogging up to the postbox, and she had given him a polite wave. The chicken-wire had, rather surprisingly, kept out the boars – or maybe they couldn’t be bothered with something they’d already dug over. Jean-Luc’s French amusingly implied that the pool still had ‘troubled waters’: it was certainly a bit green again. They would be able to swim in June, in the real heat, but for now he must keep the water clean and clear or algae would deposit green-and-black slime on the sides and in the filters. He told Nick there were 15,000 types of algae, which Nick found hard to believe. He’d always had problems with numbers in French.
Jean-Luc tipped in granules of something called Shock Chlorine. The smell of bleach was suffocating, it actually burnt in Nick’s nose. No swimming for two days, Jean-Luc told him: it was a joke, the water was still freezing cold. He explained to Nick how to test the pH levels, using a paper strip that turned from white to purple. The darker it is, the more acidic. The lighter, the more alkaline. He showed Nick which chemicals to use to adjust the pH levels. This was, Jean-Luc claimed, in case he was not around in a couple of days. Anyway, it needed testing at least once a week, maybe more if it started to cloud. Nick nodded, perturbed. He knew all about colonialism and its aftermath, but nothing about pools.
‘Jean-Luc has Simon-and-Garfunkel’d the pool,’ he joked in turn. His eyes stung. The song went round Sarah’s head all day.
They hadn’t yet found the alarm’s code. Tammy put up a reward poster with a stubbled face and letters coloured with her new Caran d’Ache crayons: REWARD. $10,000. WANTED ALIVE OR DEAD. JIMMY ‘THE DROUND’ CODE.
‘On purpose,’ she stated, when Nick pointed out the misspelling.
‘Shouldn’t the code man look nice,’ smiled her mother, ‘rather than nasty?’
Tammy went off in a huff, and Sarah felt bad. They were so exigent as parents, she realised. Nick pooh-poohed this: they were softies, he reckoned. Over-liberal, if anything. Not everything kids do has to be praised.
Sarah tested a small key she’
d found in an ashtray; miraculously, it unlocked a drawer in the pantry, full of technical-looking papers and old string, but nothing to do with an alarm. The pool’s pump and filtration equipment were covered, as well as a food-mixer and an alarm clock, but the vital document was missing.
‘It always is,’ Nick joked. ‘That’s why everything’s so approximate.’
Jean-Luc unhooks the chicken wire and rakes the earth, having watered it for an hour but not so much that it sticks to the tangs, then throws the grass-seed from a two-kilo plastic sack; he has gone to the agricultural merchant’s in Valdaron and bought seed adapted to drought areas. He has done this at least four times before, but the difference this time is the amount. It turns the earth white, and the little English girls pretend –or perhaps believe – that it has snowed. Then he comes back from the tool-cellar with a fan-shaped leaf-rake, which he draws steadily across the area until the seed is reasonably set in.
Inside himself, he knows it will fail. It is too late in the year, however much he waters it. It will either burn in the frost (which can occur as late as April, in normal times) or in the heat of the sun. The little girls watch him silently through the fence, which is as tall (or as low) as the eldest. He likes them watching. He gives them a handful of seed each to sow for themselves. He takes the small claw-tool and grubs up a patch for each of them on the edge of the yard, where there are lots of tiny nissoun leaves. He digs up one of the nissoun’s swollen roots and peels off the brown skin, then pops it into his mouth. The little girls look astonished as he crunches it up, its sweet taste of chestnut and hazelnut flooding his head with childhood memories, the aftertaste of spicy carrot as reliable as a moan from Maman. He explains to them, in the simplest French he can muster, snorting for the boars, that the yard was covered in these plants, and that’s why the boars come to turn it over, because they love the roots. The girls like his snorting.
He keeps repeating the name of the plant.
‘Neess-oon,’ they reply, giggling. He peels them each a root and they bite and chew and swallow. Only the middle one makes a face and spits it out.
