The Standing Pool

by Adam Thorpe

  PROPPIÉTÉ PRIVÉ!

  ATTENTION AUX ENFANTS!

  PAS DE CHASSE ICI SVP –

  MERCI!

  The letters were a bit squashed up one end, but he considered the ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ necessary, if not meant. After he went off to have a shower (he was very sweaty), the three girls studied the signs with nervous pride, talking in whispers.

  They were having their afternoon tea when the hunt passed on its way back. They all held their breath around the table. Shouts, a couple of bomb-like shots, more shouts, and then laughter. They looked out and saw boars strapped to the bonnets of several of the vehicles, and a couple more nodding from the open back of a small van as it bounced away, leading the pack like a tiny terrier.

  Two of the signs were splintered driftwood on the track, printed with muddy tyre-marks and spotted by trails of blood. One was still on the tree but nicked into illegibility by gunshot.

  ‘How charming,’ said Tammy, glancing anxiously at her father.

  ‘Wow,’ said her mother. ‘So much for the power of the word.’

  ‘Bastards,’ growled the sign-maker, no longer lord of the analytic phrase. ‘Complete fascist bastards. Têtes des oignons!’ he yelled, in a polyps-fretting addition that daringly bounced through the woods as if trying to catch the hunters up.

  Jean-Luc hears about what the English have done from Henri at the agricultural merchants in Valdaron, when buying the electric fence. There are only two types of fence in the whole place, because this isn’t the Auvergne, where cows grow faster than the grass grows fatter, as Henri puts it.

  ‘Stones grow nice and fast here,’ says another customer, whose small curving nose and big curving upper lip make him look like a budgerigar.

  ‘They just have lots of babies,’ Henri jokes. ‘If they could stop stones breeding, then we’d be laughing.’

  Henri has a ponytail, but that doesn’t stop him knowing a lot about agricultural merchandise. He recommends the stronger voltage for boars. They have thick skulls. There are a lot of them. What sizzles us is a tickle to them.

  ‘That’s what my women say,’ whistles budgerigar, leaning on the counter.

  But they ignore him. The 6,000-volt-maximum type, running off a battery, is enough to give a large dog convulsions; it won’t kill anything that doesn’t have a weak heart. Henri exaggerates, usually, especially when it comes to prices; but this time he’s believed.

  ‘Just as well you told me, I was going to test it on my mother,’ Jean-Luc jokes.

  ‘I tested it on my missus,’ says Henri, ‘and now I’ve got to mend the hole in the ceiling.’

  ‘Just stuff her in the hole,’ cackles a bald oldie, looking for rat poison on the nearest shelf. But Henri doesn’t laugh. Instead he tells Jean-Luc to test it with his finger, after it’s erected.

  ‘Unless you’re a weakling,’ he grins, winking knowingly at Jean-Luc. ‘Unless you’re a girl with a weak heart.’

  ‘How much? And make sure you give me a receipt,’ says Jean-Luc, quickly. But it comes out as a mumble.

  The stronger voltage is three times as expensive. It has short green plastic posts with moulded hooks and a fancy blue battery made in Germany. Jean-Luc often emerges from Henri’s store wishing he hadn’t spent as much, but it’s usually other people’s money so it doesn’t really matter. And the other people in question are filthy rich, anyway. It is only the Dutch couple who fuss about how much he spends on their massive garden and its pool shaped like a kidney dish. He pissed in it, once – in the Dutch couple’s pool. Probably helped the pH levels.

  ‘Your English lot put up offensive signs,’ Henri tells him. ‘Marcel Lagrange gave one of the signs what for with both barrels.’

  Apparently, he flipped and it was all the others could do to stop him from emptying both barrels in the English themselves and tying all five of them to his bonnet. That would have finished the hunt for at least the rest of the season, as the others could have been charged for not doing enough, or even aiding and abetting. The whole club would have been closed down. Imagine! Henri laughs in disbelief at his own words. It would have been worse than that time Marcel’s young, trained-up dogs ripped poor old Madame Chaldette’s legs when she was out walking, and if he hadn’t hidden the dogs they’d have been put down. Two years’ hard training down the chute!

  Jean-Luc nods and feels ill. It would have been his fault, in the end, for telling everyone in the café about his problem with the boars on the lawn. Madame Chaldette dropped charges after someone, it was rumoured (one of the Lagrange tribe – Marcel himself most likely), had sent her threatening letters; she spent half her savings on her medical bills, even after the state had picked up most of them, and not got a penny back. She no longer went walking, and not just because of her limp.

  Jean-Luc would have had worse than a limp, if the hunt club had been closed down.

  From now on he’s going to zip up his mouth. He carries the electric fencing out to the van, vowing to keep an eye on himself, on his own mouth. It’s just that he sometimes can’t stop the words from spilling out.

  He crosses the street and buys a throwaway camera in Valdaron’s tabac. It is cheaper than he expected.

  ‘Going away on holiday, then, Jean-Luc?’

  It is Cécile’s joke, because she knows Jean-Luc never takes a holiday, never goes anywhere. She’s run the tabac from when Jean-Luc was a teenager, and he likes her. She is sixty-eight with dyed chestnut hair and looks about forty and sleeps two hours a night because her father was a market-stall fishmonger and that’s how she was brought up. But then he died and she ended up in the hills, selling fags and papers and a bit of everything, along with rearing six lazy kids. Jean-Luc wishes he’d been one of those kids, because something about Cécile makes him want her to have been his mum.

  ‘I never go on holiday, more’s the pity,’ Jean-Luc replies, pretending he doesn’t know it was a joke. He doesn’t want to say any more. He is burning with embarrassment.

  ‘I know what,’ says Cécile. ‘It’s to take pictures of your girlfriend.’

  This is also a joke, but Jean-Luc stares at her with his mouth open.

  ‘It’s not,’ he says, collecting himself when she looks uncomfortable. ‘It’s to take pictures of me killing my mum.’

  Cécile starts to laugh, then turns all worried. ‘I hope not. It does happen. I’ve seen it on the news.’

  ‘Better call the police now, Cécile,’ says Jean-Luc. ‘After you’ve given me my change.’

  TEN

  The washing line in front of the trees bore a holed sweater, wan tee shirt, encrusted socks and faded boxer-shorts alongside a multi-pocketed, vaguely military pair of trousers, stiff with use, and an Arab burnous whose hood dangled like a head. They hung shamefacedly next to the kids’ togs like those dead crows farmers suspend from barbed-wire fences, stinking and turning slowly to bone. Sarah recalled hanging those same trousers up when he was still in the sixth form, but that was seven years ago. Jamie was twenty-four or twenty-five. It was not her job to remember her stepson’s birthday. Or maybe it was, because Nick never remembered.

  Jamie was not visiting. He was staying. Since the girls thought their half-brother was good fun, they were happy. He’d always popped up like that, without warning. This time it was a text message activated only when his father had stood on the chair in the bathroom to check, as he did twice a day. Jamie was not only in the country, and not only in town, he was in a tiny hamlet three kilometres away. Nick and Sarah had to consult a detailed map from a drawer, trying to hide their dismay, their thumping hearts, hoping Jamie had his geography wrong and the hamlet lay at the other end of France or even the world.

  ‘It’s not in New Caledonia, after all,’ sighed Nick.

  ‘I don’t believe it, shit,’ Sarah murmured. ‘I was just beginning to relax. This is unbelievable.’ A vague sense of chaos invaded her, the empire’s borders falling to wild hooves.

  ‘It’ll be fine,’ said Nick. ‘He wo
n’t stay long, it’s too remote.’

  ‘Hooray!’ the girls yelled, when Jamie stepped out of the car an hour later. It had not been easy tracking him down, even in a hamlet. He was dressed in a long earth-brown hooded mantle and carried a huge stained ex-army swag shaped like a sausage; he couldn’t even go round with a rucksack, like everyone else. He had a discreet butterfly tattooed on the back of his neck; Sarah thought it was dirt and tried to brush it off. They laughed. It usually started well, with Jamie.

  For the last year, he told them, he’d been part of a Canadian circus without animals. This did not surprise the girls; nothing surprised them about their big brother. They didn’t, however, know he had circus skills, since their father would complain (at bad moments) of his son’s lack of any skills – basic, circus, or otherwise. He was short and wiry with small girlish features, a legacy of his now-plump mother. His hair was still the same, gathered in a plaited knot like those on Germanic tribes described by Tacitus. One of Nick’s colleagues had pointed this out: an Iron Age specialist. Nick had assured him it was an accidental reference.

  ‘I was a carer,’ Jamie informed them.

  ‘Of the lions?’

  He went pffff, and said: ‘That would’ve been a cinch compared to my job?’

  One of the trapeze artists had fallen eighty metres two years ago: he’d swung over the void to meet his performing partner’s firm hands but all he’d grabbed was air, the partner having left a fraction too late. He’d landed the wrong way in the safety net and broken his spine. Jamie had been this trapeze artist’s official carer, running errands, feeding him, washing him, holding the mirror while he shaved, changing him, putting him to bed. The girls were disappointed but their parents were amazed: Jamie had never cared for anyone in his whole life. It was tea-time. They sat around the butcher’s block in the kitchen, enthralled.

  Nick nodded. ‘Sounds good to me, Jamie.’

  ‘It was shit. But we travelled all over the world and that was really agreeable.’

  ‘Poor guy,’ said Sarah, ‘to go from high trapeze to wheelchair.’

  ‘Except that he was seriously evil?’

  ‘Evil,’ Nick sighed, resigned already to Jamie’s high metaphysical colouration.

  ‘A genius. Like the best and bravest trapeze artist in the whole world, a total perfectionist, always wanting to go that half an inch further? And unfortunately he also happened to be the Antichrist? The accident just made it worse because he couldn’t go anywhere at all and it was like when you married Sarah it didn’t change you one bit.’

  His father raised a weary hand. ‘Thank you for that, Jamie.’

  ‘It didn’t make you worse but it didn’t change anything and I really thought it would? Kind of dilute the dictatorship?’

  ‘Can’t win ’em all.’

  Sarah said she had to give the bedrooms a clean and trotted up the stairs while inwardly shouting abuse. She lay on the bed while the remaining members gave him a guided tour of the house and grounds.

  Jamie carried Beans on his back, Alicia and Tammy squabbling over his spare hand. ‘Yeah, it’s fairly phenomenal. I certainly like the fence knocked down like that.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said Nick, ‘we’ve the inevitable problem with boars.’

  ‘As in wild pigs,’ Tammy added, in an eerie imitation of her father.

  Jamie shrugged. ‘Maybe you’re the problem for the boars,’ he pointed out. ‘Like, you’re getting in the way of their wildness?’

  Nick conceded that Jamie looked better in a beard, despite its gingeriness. It made him look like a musketeer. His exposed ears were small and looked as if they’d been crushed against something: his mother Helena, probably, as she’d never put him down when he was a baby.

  ‘This is really wild,’ Jamie commented drily, looking at the pool, its crystal-clear waters like pewter in the ebbing light of dusk.

  ‘Hey, it’s great to see you,’ said Nick, ‘but in fact this isn’t a holiday house. I’m on a paid sabbatical. Sarah and I are working, yuk. We’re going to need quite a bit of help with the kids. So actually it’s good timing, you dropping in like this. Baby Sitters Inc.,’ he added, with a chuckle. ‘Child Minder Corp.’

  Miscalculation: Jamie’s face did not fall.

  ‘Whatever, yeah. I was thinking about families in South America and the extended families thing and how cool they are? And so that kind of fits in. How long are you in residence for?’

  ‘Erm, nearly five months more.’

  Jamie nodded slowly.

  ‘OK, yeah, that’s a deal,’ he said.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I like the hills here. I can take the kids up into the hills and have adventures.’

  ‘Hooray! Hooray for Jamie!’ His seated half-sisters bounced up and down on the sofa.

  ‘The hills?’ echoed Nick. His face had definitely fallen; he couldn’t help it, the props had slipped away.

  ‘Or swimming in rivers? I saw this wicked river where you picked me up. This one spot I saw was really wide and deep.’

  ‘Only suitable in the summer, Jamie.’

  He shrugged. He told them about a car crash in Peru involving a llama, with unpleasant details. On his lap was the dried flower with the golden eyelashes that had been nailed to the front door; he’d picked off the petals one by one onto his lap. The girls told him that Jean-Luc had said it was a golden sun, to protect the house and bring good luck. Jamie claimed the flower had fallen off by itself. All that was left by the end was the rustly centre, not like an eyeball or a sun at all.

  He threw the petals in the air for Beans to catch. They scattered on the rug.

  ‘What’s the point of that, Jamie?’ asked Nick, sounding exasperated at last.

  ‘Your definition of history.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘The disproof of superstition,’ Jamie sighed, lounging back in the sofa as if he owned it and would not be rising from it for a long time.

  Nick and Tammy left the shot-blasted sign on the tree and stacked the remains of the others neatly at the foot, as a subtle gesture of defiance. Then – unusually for him – he took a photograph, not for purposes of juridical evidence but because it looked like an art installation.

  He had a splinter in his thumb, from stacking the signs. He tried to press it out as Tammy watched. He also had several splinters in his mind; in the months to come here they would work themselves out, he was sure of it.

  They went back into the house. Beans was bouncing a small empty plastic Evian bottle down the stairs and shouting ‘Coco!’ This was because the sound that the plastic bottle made was incredibly like that of a bongo-drum. Jamie had spotted this, after an hour of bong-bong-bonging, and it was then they’d understood why Beans said ‘Coco’ every time she launched the bottle from the top of the stairs. The Congo Bongo Game, Jamie christened it.

  He was sitting at the bottom of the stairs, retrieving the bottle and taking it up to her over and over for a relaunch. He’d finally relinquished his one set of outrageously dirty and smelly clothes to the washing machine and was temporarily dressed in his father’s scruffiest gear: all-blue denim from Nick’s trendy-lecturer days. The collar rode high on his thin neck and the trousers and sleeves were rolled up at the ankles and wrists. Helena’s four-foot five had roped back whatever tall genes he’d inherited from his father.

  He had been assigned the attic to sleep in, at his own suggestion; although it had required a full day of cleaning and sweeping out, laying the dust with sprinkled water and opening the Velux window and rubbing the glass free of the sky’s deposits, he seemed very happy with the arrangement. In a remarkably short time, he was scrubbing the boards.

  ‘It’s because it’s just for him,’ Nick had said, when Sarah marvelled at the change in her stepson. ‘He’s always pulled his finger out when it’s just for him.’

  Jamie had found a spare mattress under one of the kid’s beds, and within two days had accumulated bits and bobs from here and there: a parachute clo
th strung across the middle of the vast room, natural sculptures in found olivewood, interesting stones, old chairs with sagging seats, a broken set of drawers retrieved from the back of the goatshed. Nick had succumbed and bought a cheap paraffin heater in St-Maurice, with the claim that ‘it would be useful anyway’, lugging the heavy flagons of fuel into and out of the car and straining his tender elbow tendons. Although they didn’t say it, he and Sarah were amazed at the attic’s transformation: Jamie had turned it into a cosy den by the end of the week. It already smelt of naughty, smoky, sweetish things over the paraffin. All he complained about was the wind whistling in the roof, because it never made a tune.

  ‘A natural melody,’ Sarah joked.

  ‘He’s good at building nests,’ Nick said, when Jamie was out. ‘But they’re always in other people’s houses.’

  ‘We’re not other people,’ Sarah had pointed out. ‘We’re family. We’re blood. At least, I am by proxy.’

  Sarah was at her little desk in the bedroom, writing her journal on the laptop. She had instantly minimised the text when Nick appeared so that all he saw was her screen saver of their girls playing on the beach in northern Portugal last year. Today’s entry was about her secret dip in the pool, which she’d managed to interleave while the rest of her family were on a short walk to pick thyme.

  The thermometer in the pool had registered sixteen degrees, well below her bearable threshold. Yet she’d done it. It had snatched the breath from her lungs, replacing it with ice, and guillotined her at the neck with its honed blade, but she’d done it. After a few moments her glaciated body, of which she had lost the sensation, had started to glow, and she’d dipped her head under. It was glorious.

  She would try to do it every morning, in secret in case the kids followed suit. Before anyone else was up. Slip out of bed as she was always doing for one of the girls. Her private corner of the day. Ten minutes max. Ten lengths.