by Adam Thorpe
Her breasts are a lot smaller than in the shiny magazines, where they always look as if they’ve been blown up with a pump until they’re almost exploding; they jiggle up and down as she walks towards his end and then turns her back on him. She crouches down yet again, so that all he can see is the white scuts of her buttocks and the back of her feet pressed against them, a circle of dirt on their heels. He takes another picture, despite there being no face. His hands are shaking so much that, if the camera were a gun, the shot would have missed.
He raises himself slightly to ease the big, swollen frog in his trousers but his foot has gone to sleep and he topples over, scratching his cheek on a dead spurge stem, hard as bamboo.
She doesn’t notice because of the noise she’s making herself, slipping into the pool bit by bit, sighing and gasping with the shock; the high sounds float into his ear like a shared secret, like she’s sharing her secret with him, his ear warming against her lips. He watches her slip into the water, head sticking up above the edge of the pool with a look of pain, both hands raised above the surface until she disappears with a cut-off yelp.
Jean-Luc is happy. He’ll have to wait a few days for the film to be processed – he sent off the camera to the enclosed address – but he’s in no doubt of the triumph of his efforts.
The Englishwoman is like a ghost haunting him in a nice way, and he takes to drawing her in his notepad (the notepad he keeps for his jobs), over and over in blue biro. He draws her special jiggling breasts, the furry kitten clinging on between her legs, her expanding white buttocks released from their jeans. He draws her face crowned with the glittering crown of a beauty queen. He draws arrows to show his love for her, the gush of his ardour sometimes drowning her in seas of biro-squiggles that break the cheap paper of the notepad. Marie, he writes, Marie of the Holy Pool. He draws big fat frogs, croaking in their pools.
Measurements for the Dutch people’s shelves and the Parisians’ watering system and the Germans’ concrete steps into their bathing hut; quantities of compost and grass-seed and liquid feed; algicide and clarifier and shock chlorine; ship-varnish for the Belgian couple’s outside table and lubricating oil for the Danish family’s barbecue set: the history, over several years, of Jean-Luc’s odd-jobbing, all in cash (sometimes not even paid for when some clients’ family crisis takes over), vanishes under these drawings when, because the notepad is full, he runs out of blank pages.
By drawing her, he finds she remains in his head: his queen, his love. Like measurements and quantities and what a client demands in bad French or no French at all.
She smiles at him secretly the whole time. She knew.
He ties the sieve to the baby pram. Bibi and the fish-bone spider are inside the sieve. They’re on the cobweb. One caught, the other in charge.
He decorates the wheels – hiding them, really – with feathers he’s picked up over the years, kept in the box under his bed. He uses the strong glue he bought for mending his boots, so the feathers lie against tiny brown pillows stuck to the rims and spokes of the wheels. Although they no longer move after he’s fixed them with a wire, the wheels still have to be hidden. This is not a pram, he thinks. This is a monument, like the monument to the war dead in front of the church: on which the name of Oncle Fernand has always winked at him, right from when he was a little boy. But never spoken to him like the plaque on the track to Les Fosses, because the monument is not where Oncle Fernand died.
The notepad is full, so all he can do is turn the pages. He can’t draw her on anything else. This is the one and only Bible. He has an urge to draw her on the walls of his room, but the wallpaper is too old and there are hardly any blank parts, so he starts to peel off one strip so that he might draw on the bared plaster, only to find it isn’t bare but painted a sky-blue colour familiar to him from the older people’s houses. He likes this colour. Why did his father hide it?
He begins to strip more of the wallpaper, talking to his love the whole time. She lies on the bed admiring his notepad, stark naked but for her crown.
He ignores the shrieked or moaning demands of his mother through the locked door. It is so pleasurable, peeling the wallpaper slowly so that it won’t tear. Scabs and even large lumps of plaster sometimes come with it; he wishes for more rooms like this. For soon it will be over, as the making of the monument will be over. And it strikes him then, taking a pause to scrunch over the fallen plaster and shout to his mother that he is fast asleep, how like a bird the monument looks, squatting there on the table in its pride of feathers, with its long bare tail ending in a pink hand-grip that he will have to hide too, somehow, in case anyone thinks it is the handle of a toy pram.
ELEVEN
The two of them went on a little excursion that began at the source of the local river, leaving the girls with Jamie. He’d got the message about the pool, he claimed, nodding sagely. About never leaving the two younger girls alone outside, especially at the back, because of the pool. He’d loosened his Iron Age topknot and it now poured like a frizzed-up horse’s tail out of a red hairband, more prehistoric than protohistoric, Nick thought.
‘Well, Romans invented scissors,’ he joked.
They’d told Jamie about the danger so many times that he made his sisters laugh by turning it into an advert once the parents were gone. He wrote something out and then put on a baseball cap he’d found in a cupboard and read aloud what he’d written in a funny American voice, poking his elbows out and prancing from foot to foot like a show-horse:
‘Hey, folks, introducing probably the Most Dangerous Swimming Pool in the World, with enhanced drowning levels and no operating alarm! With this state-of-the-art model you can lose your life in two minutes flat! No one will hear you, thanks to its unique location just far enough from the house to make it a true and deadly risk! Yes, folks, there’s one name and one name only when it comes to choosing your family pool: Death Trap Inc.!’
Tammy cheered and Alicia squealed, Beans going over the top and slamming her fist onto her Petit Suisse pot, which seemed to explode in ectoplasmic globs.
‘Death rapping!’ yelled the girls. ‘Death rapping!’ Tammy pretended to drown in bubbling paroxysms and lay on the tiled floor, asking for the kiss of life, which Alicia granted by dripping cold cocoa onto her face. Tammy had to welt her with an elastic hairband, which was quite effective. Jamie said ‘Whoa,’ as ineffectively.
Their parents filmed their romantic excursion on the camcorder. The spring was a muddy whelm in a cave in the side of a rocky overhang, reached through a sloping field of silvered grass the wind kept switching from right to left, left to right. They couldn’t work out exactly where the water came from in the rock behind. It just seemed to seep up, almost a pool, then to trickle through the grass and end up tumbling out of an ancient stone conduit at the bottom of the slope.
There were echoing drips in the little cave. Nick blocked the trickle with stones. ‘Manon des Sources!’ he called out. He pulled a gruesome face for the camera, which made the girls laugh during the laptop screening that evening.
‘It’s that peasant, Ungulino or whatever he’s called,’ came their mother’s voice as the image wobbled. ‘Who blocks it first. Isn’t it? With his dad.’
‘They’ll be looking at the parched fields down below, shaking their fists at the sky,’ Nick declared, lifting a large stone into place. ‘The coolants in the nuclear power station will be at critical levels.’
Despite the leaks in his dam, the muddy whelm became a pool quite swiftly. It was a dryad’s pool, clear and lovely, nestled in the little cave with its strange, greenish light. It lapped at surprised ants on the dry edges: Sarah captured these on the zoom, but for too long and was photographed doing so by Nick. Then the water reached the top of the stone dam and trickled over. Nick pointed to this, as serious about it as a small boy. The pressure of the water had loosened the stones and the pool was diminishing. Where did the water come from? All they could see were secretive little whirls and turbulences in the sinking p
ool.
Sarah lay back on the field’s tough, springy grass. It was cool but sunny and she didn’t care about the insects, she’d let them explore. She opened her eyes and flicked a tiny winged thing off her cheek; it stuck to her finger, a broken biplane crashed into the giant whorls of her finger. For which she was sorry. She looked up and rejoiced in the puffy white clouds high up like a dream of elsewhere, scarcely moving, as the camera panned away and onto a revolving buzzard none of the others would be able to see on screen.
And the ants were too small to be interesting. The girls could hear their mother breathing behind.
‘Don’t I look unbelievably old?’ said Nick, sitting on a cushion on the floor like a teenager.
Jamie was a fun big brother, quite a good child minder. Nick and Sarah returned from their walk to the source to find the four of them playing sleeping lions in front of the barn: an idyllic portrait, down to the sun playing in Jamie’s wispy chestnut beard as he pretended to snore, his small eyes open just a slit. Sarah said nothing about the use of one of the Sandlers’ magnificent Middle-Eastern blankets, which had picked up half the yard’s natural detritus. Instead, she filmed him. The tiny break had done her good. Seeing her children again, intact: a decision someone had made in a shady heaven.
She also filmed the boat of dead flowers, circling in the water. Jamie had gone off for a pee and discovered it. Tammy had said nothing, feigning ignorance. They’d placed it in the water because a beetle had drowned. The ribbon saying REGRETS was still on it, pinned to the stems and just legible.
Sarah said how strange, to find a funeral bouquet in the trees. Dragged off the plaque by an animal, maybe.
‘It makes me think of military burials at sea,’ she remarked.
The flowers were completely wilted, like overboiled veg. Nick fished it out with a stick and carried it into the trees, relieved that it hadn’t traumatised Sarah, in the end.
‘All gone,’ he said, on his return.
‘We hope,’ said Jamie.
He’d smoke his dope up in the woods, which meant he was out a lot. He only appeared, in any case, at midday: he tended to stay up into the early hours and emerge mid-afternoon with tiny, bloodshot eyes. He never had a meal with the others. He used the very low and cobwebbed back door which opened directly onto the yard and was reached through a kind of scullery, thus avoiding the kitchen entirely. Jamie’s Door, they called it. No one else used it because no one else liked spiders, especially not the long-legged, hairy type that lived in the Mas des Fosses, so big you could see their beak-like mandibles muttering. Jamie could open the door without breaking their webs, which lay across the hinges and half hid the panels in dusty, Victorian swags.
He’d walk occasionally to Aubain (an hour on foot) and from there hitch to Valdaron. He’d met the Chambords, from the sound of it: Hugo, Hölderlin and concrete engineering. They sent their best wishes, he told Nick, and hoped he and his family would come to dinner one day. Nick’s heart sank: what lies would Jamie have told the Chambords? Was his French even good enough? In Valdaron he had a favourite café in which (Nick and Sarah surmised) he was dealing dope. They assumed he’d brought back dope from South America in tight little high-grade wads of darkness to pay his way. This was all they could gather, and much of that was guesswork.
He ate quite a lot, compared to the others. He liked bread. The bread was cut in hunks (rather than slices) straight onto the table – adding to its cleaver-scars – then devoured with butter but without a plate, casually, anywhere in the house. You could trace Jamie’s progress via the crumbs, but only the ants – miniscule, as if assembled through a microscope – appreciated it. Sarah didn’t want confrontation, since any victory on her part would lead to something worse than Jamie the Annoyance: namely, Jamie the Avenger.
He helped a bit. ‘Now you’re here,’ his stepmother said. He even hung out the washing one day, with Tammy’s help. The trousers were the right way up, which was the wrong way up, legs expecting feet. Tammy showed him what she called the ‘Irish strawberry’ bushes next to the line, which now had creamy flowers, but the ripe fruit on the biggest and best had been completely stripped – by the birds, obviously.
‘They’re kind of rough and gooey at the same time,’ she said, handing him one. ‘They made flutes out of them in Ancient Greece. They look like mini hedgehogs, don’t they?’
‘Must have been messy, blowing them.’
‘Not out of the fruit, stupid!’ cried Tammy, creasing up.
Jamie ate one. ‘Hey, I love eating foetal-sized hedgehogs. Now I’m going to die very slowly and in incredible agony, right?’
Nick suggested appointing him as pool manager, but Sarah said no: the idea of a stoned Jamie leaning over the troubled waters with a bottle of acid or whatever was not reassuring.
Unknown to the others, she was skinny-dipping every two or three days, just after dawn. The last time had been under a grey sky, and the pool was a grey slab. Deliberately lowering her body into a liquid grey slab was unpleasant, and she couldn’t quite reach the glow phase before she emerged, as cold as a slug, the filters clucking their disapproval. Afterwards, though, she’d felt good – tingling with health as she towelled herself vigorously. It was a secret corner of her life, like lost ground rediscovered.
‘The thing is,’ said Nick, with his mouth full, ‘we’ve got bags of time in front of us.’
‘He might stay right to the end.’
‘He can’t.’
‘I’m not clearing up after him. He never does his teeth. He never washes his hair.’
Nick shrugged. ‘An anarchist. Or just absent-minded, like me.’
‘Whatever else he is,’ said Sarah, the prunes in her lamb stew swimming like blind eyes, ‘he is not absent-minded. He’s calculating. He’s a schemer. He’s like Peter Osterhauser.’
Nick groaned. ‘Peter Osterhauser?’
‘That’s all just a mask, all that hesitating of Peter’s, those ums and ers.’
‘Ums only. He never ers. As it were.’
Sarah laughed and leaned across the little table and gave him a kiss on his high forehead; the smooth pale sweep seemed to dwarf his features, gathered between it and his jaw as if conferring.
The Bobo Stenson Trio were edging Swedishly through calm connecting lakes of jazz and making him feel forgiving and tolerant. ‘Graffiti,’ he said, miming it in the air with his knife, ‘on the walls of Fellows’ Court. Pffff! Peter Osterhauser: he may, um, umm, but he never errs.’
‘Why does Jamie want to be here, anyway? He can’t stand us,’ he admitted, later, after they’d finished the bottle between them. He fiddled with his plum stones, rearranging them on the bread-scoured plate.
‘Helena? Her suggestion?’
‘Probablement. Knowing we were having a good time.’
‘Mind you, he gets a good deal,’ Sarah pointed out.
‘A good deal of what?’
‘I mean a good deal, period. Fed, watered, sheltered, shown affection. He does love his sisters.’
‘Do you think the way he talks is the way he thinks, or is it a mask?’
Sarah didn’t reply, not really concentrating. She found Nick’s type of jazz tiring after a while, and CDs went on too long.
‘Don’t you think CDs go on too long?’
‘He could’ve got into Oxbridge, you know,’ said Nick, ignoring or not having heard her. ‘If he’d pulled his finger out. Of course he could’ve done,’ he added, draining the very last of the bottle. ‘Instead, he didn’t even manage more than a couple of terms at Chester.’
‘That wasn’t Chester’s fault,’ Sarah pointed out. ‘Your brightest graduate student last year had got his first from Chester, if you remember. The one who did his thesis on the Brazzaville Conference and never stopped talking.’
Nick nodded. ‘The one from Coventry who said he’s going to be a city trader because money equals freedom.’
‘Yup, ’fraid so.’
‘At sixteen Jamie wanted to be a
policeman,’ said Nick.
‘Because that was the one sure-fire way to annoy both you and Helena.’
Nick shrugged. ‘We all need the police,’ he said.
‘Did you tell him that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘You OK, Sarah?’
‘I’m OK. Thanks, Jamie.’
‘Cool, yeah, I can kind of imagine what that’s like?’
Sarah smiled sympathetically, spreading apricot jam on a slice of baguette for Beans. Nick was at work upstairs.
‘I can just about imagine it,’ Jamie went on, ‘cos I have this memory of it from somewhere around eight years old? Eight and a quarter? Nine?’
‘I’m practically nine,’ said Alicia, wandering off into the sitting room with her plate of biscuits at a dangerous angle.
‘Silly Bin-Bag,’ chortled Tammy. ‘Bin-Bag Ali. That’s me who’s nearly nine.’
‘Don’t spread crumbs,’ Sarah called after her, her eyes flicking over the king of crumb-spreaders. Alicia came back into the kitchen and said, ‘I’m nine in –’ Here she stopped, counting on her fingers. Tammy laughed.
‘Tammy, you’re not nine for another seven months,’ Sarah said, trying to seek equability between them, placing weights on the scales like a goldsmith.
Jamie’s eyes narrowed, suddenly, as if peering through a bunker’s slit.
‘It’s good you’ve made your life so comfortable,’ he said, perched on the stool with his elbows on the table. ‘With my old man.’
‘Yup, there’s good and bad.’
‘There’s bad then, is there?’
‘I want to do some cookery,’ Alicia announced, tugging on her mother’s sleeve. ‘Mummy.’
