by Adam Thorpe
‘That’s an idea. We can make that choccie cake.’
‘Choccie cake,’ echoed Jamie, his head moving up and down like a toy sheep Tammy had. The two words buckled under the derision unfairly loaded onto them.
‘Yum, Damie,’ said Alicia, waggling her bottom as if she were desperate to go to the loo. ‘I’m doing it all, not Tammy one bit.’
Sarah announced, in a gay and carefree voice, that they were fatally short of flour.
The day the photographs come in a plastic envelope, his mother is down in the kitchen, watching his every move with eagle eyes.
‘What’s that, Jean-Luc?’
It has dropped through the letter box and sits in the wire basket hanging off the door. Jean-Luc can hardly believe it. It is like a miracle. It has only taken three days. He stands up slowly and calmly and retrieves the envelope, although his hands shake.
‘Fishing stuff,’ he says.
She snorts. Her eyes are like a young girl’s, in terms of sight. She’s noticed the pale footprints on her carpet and the stairs from the plaster-dust in his bedroom. She notices everything. ‘That’s photos,’ she chuckles, as if she can see right through the envelope. ‘Photos of your girl, my sweet?’
Jean-Luc wants to hit her. ‘That’s right,’ he murmurs, too feebly. He puts the envelope into his jacket pocket and sits down and carries on with his hot chocolate, lifting the bowl with both hands and dipping his head with a stretching movement of the neck as he’s done in the same way at the same table every morning since he was three, when he was allowed his first bowl, red and made of tin. He sucks it up and she tells him, as she’s told him for three decades, that he’d win the Olympics for noisy drinking. And as usual he ignores her.
He’s loaded the van with the kit for the electric fence and the bright-yellow outdoor paint for the Belgian couple’s garden furniture, which he is overdue on because he got the wrong shade and they fussed. He’ll look at the photos somewhere on the way to Les Fosses. The idea that he might meet the Englishwoman, with the photos of her nude in his tunic pocket, terrifies and excites him at the same time. His mother watches him, chortling to herself. She used to make everyone laugh, they say, with her Limousin humour.
‘I wish it was photos of your girl,’ says Marie-Thérèse. ‘Instead, I’ve bred a Félix la Ponte.’
Jean-Luc is used to her calling him this. Félix la Ponte was an artiste in a travelling revue way back, before he was born, who dressed up as a woman. The revue went from town to town, and she’d watched it as a kid when she was still living in Dijon. Even though no one except his mother even remembers Félix la Ponte, it hurts him, it makes his chest pop like a roasted chestnut, but the one power he has over her is to ignore her insults. Everything that comes out of her mouth is not much different from what comes out the other end. It stinks, anyway. It’s like her rolling Dijon rs that she’s never got rid of, strange as Spanish.
He takes a sip of his chocolate and pretends to be watching the telly with great interest. It is a programme on parrots. No, on where to go for your holidays. Martinique, they suggest. Shots of lovely black and browned girls in bikinis, gleaming with oil. Palm trees and surf. Then another parrot.
‘Your dad always said you were an odd one,’ she continues, pulling out another cigarette against Dr Demarne’s orders. ‘No one but yourself to blame, I’d tell him. He can’t even hold a gun straight, he’d say. Unless it’s pointing at his foot,’ she adds, in his father’s rasping voice, chuckling again then bursting into one of her coughs that seems to seize her and shake her like a giant and go on and on.
Jean-Luc gets up and leaves the house, even though she is having one of her coughing fits. Let her die, he thinks. He’s walked out like that before now, but she’s always been right as rain on his return. Now, as he closes the door behind him, stepping into the street, he hears her trying to say something, begging him not to leave her like that. Of course his dad never said what she claims he said! Her tongue is not like a viper’s, it is worse than a viper’s. Vipers don’t talk, for a start-off. They only sting.
He pats his packet of photos and starts the van. It coughs like his mother and dies. He tries again. Lucille’s watching from two doors up, as usual, bent forwards on her front step. It fires, leaving its dark smoky trail all the way up the narrow main street of Aubain as he heads for Les Fosses, the posts for the electric fencing jiggling behind him. He hasn’t been back all week, and he is nervous. He glances in the driving mirror and sees he still has a smear of chocolate on his upper lip, like a small boy. A kid he’s never seen before circles on his bike in the road as if he owns the place.
He stops on the way, pulling in off the Mas’s track where there’s a passing space overgrown with low brambles. They rustle under the van and catch in the trailer-hook that he keeps meaning to unbolt because he hardly uses it. He high-steps into the acacia woods to where the slope dips sharply into a hollow darkened by a cover of holm oak. He opens the packet in a single blot of sunlight. His fingers are huge and clumsy and dirty-nailed. A smell of laboratories with technicians in heavy glasses replaces the scents of vegetation. Plastics and chemicals and city life. The faraway dream of Paris.
The first photograph is of her walking nude by the pool, but she’s blurred into a ghost and everything is sloped, including the house in shadow behind. His heart sinks. The second photo shows her from the back, crouched to the water. Although he was standing behind the hut and felt very close, there’s much more background than there is of her and her rear end is not much bigger than a bread crumb, you can almost blow it off. The right side of the photo is blurred by spurge leaves sticking out from their stem, huge compared to her rear end. He should have crawled even closer, snaked up closer as they used to snake up to the German sentries before garrotting them.
Then there are the two he took of her standing up, ready to go in. One is all blurred again because his hand shook so much. The other is better, her chest is outlined against the house – two swollen egg-shapes that make him think of the flowers of the pétaro around the old bucket on their little scrap at the back.
He squints closer. The sunlight and shadow muddles her arms and stomach and the clinging black cat is hidden by her thigh. Her face doesn’t look the same, what he can see of it – she didn’t know she was being photographed and her mouth is pinched in. Below her hair she is as pale as a shaved branch. Her hands are too big. Three useless ones of her swimming, her head a dark blurred spot in the water and then a final one of her that is almost completely blacked out by his finger.
He is disappointed, but not surprised, that the ones left are those he used up on the little girls. He was hoping he’d taken more of her, but knew inside him that he hadn’t. When she’d come out of the water she’d trotted to her clothes with little happy gasps and he was scared of being seen, he’d kept still as a post. Really, there is only one of her that is any good. He feels ashamed of his efforts, looking at them again.
Tick tick tick. A robin hopping about in the hollow, ticking away. He studies the photo of the three sisters posing with serious faces in front of the barn and holds it up to show the robin, talking to it, and it jumps about excitedly.
He thinks he hears voices as he looks at the ones of the kids. Little girl voices as they run about, all blurred, or pose with serious faces, or put their fingers into the corners of their mouths and stick their tongues out like frogs. The one they took of him, tilted as though he’s on a deck in a storm. He looks weaker than he’d expected, and his hunting gear seems as though it’s not on the right person. His face is crooked, completely wrong. Nothing like what he sees in the mirror. He should’ve smiled.
Then silence, apart from the gusts filling the leaves. The patch of sun wobbles like water. The robin has gone further off in a burst of its wings. The holm oaks are twisted with age and their trunks are covered in pale green splashes of lichen. Oncle Fernand would have seen the same ones, probably. Trees live longer than humans, when left alone. He used to
think he could talk to them and they were listening, but now he reckons they don’t care.
The best photo of her begins to grow the more he looks: he’s a look-out man on a hunt who after an hour or two starts to see more and more in the muddle of vegetation, slopes, far blue hills. The shape of her breasts is the shape of bells.
There’s someone standing at the back.
Where the zinc gutter meets the drain, there’s someone standing. He feels his heart lurch like a sprung rabbit.
It could be a set of blue overalls hung on a peg. It’s in the shadows, because the sun never touches the back of the house.
He changes the angle of the photo in the sunlight and squints at it until everything fogs. There’s a paler bit on top of the overalls, exactly where the face should be.
The gutter sticks out like one of his mother’s varicose veins; his eye follows it down to the tiny smudge of blue and black. Surely he’d have noticed a man in blue overalls a few metres away, even if he was in the shadows! There are two dots that could be hands. He tries to remember if there was anything propped by the gutter and just to the left of the back door, the one with cobwebs like white bandages across the hinges because no one ever uses it. He’s left a sweaty thumbprint on the glossy photo, that fades as it dries.
And then he shudders, despite himself: the person – if it’s a person – might have seen him taking the pictures. Might have seen him doing much worse. The man – whoever he was, probably not the husband – might have been watching him with sharp, hunting eyes. Jean-Luc looks around, as if expecting hordes of police to erupt from the trees.
And then he hears the voice of Oncle Fernand. A calm voice, as usual, but cross underneath. Strolling about in the back of his head.
‘Don’t be stupid, nephew. You didn’t see him there, out of cover, so how could he have seen you? Go and erect the electric fence.’
It makes everything easier, the silence of the empty yard.
He doesn’t feel scared any more, either. He isn’t ready to face the Englishwoman. He’d stammer and go into a sweat. He keeps expecting the kids to run out of the big black cave of the barn to watch him, he doesn’t know why. His father could remember Les Fosses when it was a working farm; twelve hands, at one time. He’d say you wouldn’t have known where to put yourself for the bustle, the voices, the carts. The hard work, the hay, the weeding between the vines. You could eat a lot of the weeds, chopped up in a salad. Or take them as medicine. You were taught from the day you could walk. These days, his father would say, they just pour in their poison. That’s the world gone backwards, pouring poison into the earth. And everyone would laugh at him, including his wife. Backwards! You silly goat!
And he’d say: ‘What about young Michel Renaux?’
Michel Renaux, back in 1913, sprinkling his father’s vines with potassium, had taken a thirsty gulp from the bottle of wine he’d brought along for lunch. Except that it wasn’t the wine: it was the potassium, the same colour through the green glass. Label hidden on the other side. Oh, how he’d suffered!
‘You weren’t there,’ Jean-Luc’s mother would scoff.
‘But I know people who were,’ said his father. ‘Oh, how he screamed! And only twenty-two! He carried on screaming even after he was dead!’
But no one listened to him except to laugh, and so he just poured drink into himself until it killed him. But Jean-Luc knew what he meant, though he didn’t say so. He’d once felt sick, standing over the pesticide-vat on old Pierre Lézinier’s tractor heading up to the field; suffered a splitting headache for days after.
He works hard, dismantling the old fence, tapping in the plastic posts (short, only up to his waist) with their hooks ready-made to take the electric wire. At least someone’s dealt with the cherry tree and put it back upright, although there’s no sign of the buds breaking and the earth’s not stamped firm enough around it. He takes a break only to test the pool’s levels: a bit high, the pH, so he pours in a shot of acid. That’ll be perfect for her, he thinks. It’s like preparing a bed, smoothing it out, folding back the sheet exactly right.
The messed-up earth is already dry, as dry as the skin on his hands – as if dusted over with cement powder. He’ll smooth out the earth and sow it yet again. It’s much too late to plant seed, unless you water almost all day. And then the water will run out. The old boys in Aubain say it’ll be a drought summer, the chiffchaff arrived early and the wood anemones were out a week too soon. They’re always right, as his father was always right. There’ll be none left for the pool, because he has to top up the pool – making up for the litres lost every day to evaporation once the sun gets going in June, the water melting into the heat and gone forever.
But the main thing is to show he cares. He needs to come to Les Fosses; he’d burst, otherwise. And he can’t come if he’s chucked out. They’d call the police.
Unless he sneaks up here early, to watch her. But she might never do it again. He can at least try, even if that was a lucky present from God, that time.
Maybe it was an angel, stood by the gutter.
He looks again at the spot. He walks over to it and studies the ground, as if there might be some trace. And then he feels a cold flush hiss through him from head to foot – he can hear it, hissing like the sea in his head – as he remembers something.
He remembers something and looks up at the roof. Raoul Lagrange always wore blue overalls, working. The Beau in Blue, he was known as. He’d wear them unbuttoned at the chest, so you could see his hairs. The women undid the rest, they’d say. Or: he hadn’t had time to do them up to the top before the next round. Viper tongues.
He can hear the thump, like the thump of his own heart, as he stands by the gutter. He steps away, as if there’s something there that might bite him.
The Beau in Blue, neck broken like a rabbit’s, was curled up like a baby. Like a little baby, like a foetus in the mother’s tummy, Dr Demarne said, who was called out and saw it for himself. It was normal, it was something called a reflex. Bruno found the body. His brother’s body. Just here. Where tufts of wiry grass grow by the drain. That good-looker’s face.
He ought to clear the drain of dead leaves: it smells a bit.
He turns his head suddenly and checks behind him and all around. For the very first time at Les Fosses, Jean-Luc feels his neck crawling. The Beau in Blue was watching. The Englishwoman is Raoul’s woman, that’s why. And Raoul watches her, invisible, from where he landed with a thump and a crack. Maybe he fell for her the very first time she entered the yard. He’d chase anything in a skirt, let alone nude.
Jean-Luc Maille and Raoul Lagrange are rivals in love.
But instead of running away, speeding off in the van, Jean-Luc stands his ground. Raoul Lagrange is dead. Jean-Luc Maille is alive. This is his one advantage. He feels the air whip and go colder around him, as if Raoul Lagrange is everywhere.
But he is nowhere, really. Because he is not flesh and blood like Jean-Luc Maille.
The fence operates off a battery unit that impresses Jean-Luc by its small size, although it’s heavy. It can go up to 6,000 volts. It has six months of life, if the fence is continually operating. He runs two sets of wires through the posts. Henri advised him to string the lower wire about ten centimetres from the ground, to catch the babies. Baby boars can turn earth over just as nicely as their mum and dad, Henri said. The upper wire is only knee-height from the ground.
The baldie in the shop went on about protecting the battery unit from rain, as if Jean-Luc was stupid.
He finds some breeze blocks in one of the cellars and builds them up around the unit, roofing it with an old washing-machine cover from another of the cellars, and fixing that with a big rock from the tumbled wall. He works without stopping and in complete silence. He doesn’t even drink anything. Something’s filling him up with fuel.
It’s all in place by midday. He is nervous about the connections: the two copper clips spark as they touch the battery. He hears a clicking in his head whi
ch is also outside. The fence is alive and its heart is beating in time to his own. The juice is flowing round and round and inside there is somewhere cut off from the outside world, but it is a mess. It reminds him of the mountains of the moon. Only the moon doesn’t have a boar’s turds perched on the rim of a crater.
He turns the switch to the highest voltage and tests the fence on himself, as Henri challenged him to do. Don’t grip, Henri joked, or you might not be able to let go. He isn’t worried; he’s spent so long with the fence it has become what he knows best in the world for now. He taps the wire as lightly as he can with the pad of his forefinger and there’s something about the shock, the way it takes on his arm, his shoulder and then the roots of his teeth without cutting out even after he’s leapt back, that reminds him of the time he received the joke Valentine he thought was for real. He feels sick and shaky. He doesn’t visibly shake, but he is shaken inside, and it is poisonous. It has bitten him. The boars must feel something like that when they’re shot, he thinks. The air biting them before they even hear the noise.
He takes a seat on the top step of the cellar, until the nausea goes. He feels satisfied with himself, for once, looking at the powerful thing he has created, ticking with its poisonous pulse that still stirs around in his limbs and makes him want to drink a lot of cold water. At the same time, it looks like a toy fence, not a real fence. Everything he does in life is playing. He might be a small kid circling on his bike. He studies his hands, which are cut and bleeding in places and have grown-up blisters on them.
He rakes and sows the loose earth and sets the watering to two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening. He is hungry, damp with effort, sweat running off his nose in the cool gusts. He has burst one of the blisters.
Madame Sandler won’t get rid of him as easily as that. He’ll keep the voltage on the highest possible. He doesn’t want to take any risks.
The six of them left the house on foot for a walk and a picnic. Jamie actually wanted to join in. Although it was cloudless, there was a coolish, frisky wind that seemed to grind the air’s lens to the finest degree, giving it a kind of magnifying quality; even the front view’s most distant visible trees were over-detailed, as in a pre-Raphaelite painting, instead of being the requisite blueish blur. More bright flowers were out – white, yellow, pink – and new leaves rustled in high-up, pale-green sweeps that had suddenly given substance to the deciduous parts of the slopes behind the house.
