by Adam Thorpe
The very first thing she said to him on the phone, years back, was: ‘Are you for hire?’ Or maybe that was just her bad French. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not a car.’ She liked that answer.
She phoned him up late at night, once, all the way from England, telling him to plant some red geraniums in pots either side of the door before they got there that weekend with her friends. She wanted to impress her friends. She didn’t want the house to look unwelcoming. Ordinary large pots, Jean-Luc. He did what she’d said, but it was the wrong type of geranium and she was shocked by the pots. He’d chosen the fanciest ones he could find in Jardiland – shiny blue glazed pots imitating baskets, with basket-type handles. ‘I said ordinary, Jean-Luc; these are disgusting pots!’ Her friends laughed. She laughed. Monsieur Sandler laughed. Jean-Luc was upset: he couldn’t see what was so disgusting about the pots he’d chosen.
They were thrown out and replaced by two very old terracotta pots from an antique shop, chipped and peeling like bad skin, with moulded heads sicking up leaves. They were expensive, even though they looked as if they were about to disintegrate. He had to come and water the flowers in these and the other pots she’d bought every other day: she didn’t want a watering system with its little black pipes running everywhere. A year later the two antique pots were stolen. No doubt by one of the passing hunters, as nothing else was nicked. So he went to the café and told Louis in Marcel Lagrange’s hearing, but all Marcel said was that some Arabs had stolen the chrome badge off his Cherokee when he was in town. They’d sell it back in Morocco, he grunted. They all need sending back, then we’ll be comfortable again.
Madame Sandler was glad that nobody had broken in, when Jean-Luc told her on the phone. She hardly seemed to care, otherwise.
Yet she cared about her lawn.
The fence has worked. Jean-Luc feels good about this. There are fresh boar-spoors all the way along the margins. He senses an obscure triumph over the primitive forces of life, shadowing him from the woods. Oncle Fernand isn’t talking today, or he’d have congratulated him. There was nothing said, even by the plaque. There are often days like that. Of rest. Yesterday Oncle Fernand chattered away, boring his nephew. Who has bought another throwaway camera, but not at the same shop. It’s in one of the pockets against his thigh in his military-style hunting trousers: light, but he can feel it. He is armed.
A jay warns the others from the woods.
His ears prick to it, as in hunting days. He still has his gun at home, not touched now for four or five years, not even for the rabbits. It belonged to his father. One day he’s going to dismantle it and oil it and put it back together again and shoot Marcel Lagrange. This is the fantasy he plays with in his thoughts for the fifteen minutes it takes him to fiddle about with the fence and the watering and the pool. The pool is slipping back to being green, a very diluted menthe, even though the filtering system is working. The English haven’t done what he asked. He tests it: normal. That’s not good, if it goes green for no reason. If it gets worse, he won’t see her swimming for a few days at least. He thinks he sees tendrils of slime waving around the base of the filter.
He wants to see her again, suddenly – not close up and clothed, but secretly and distant and naked. It is the most valuable thing in his life, apart from the monument. And the two are linked by her. He can barely stand the idea of sinking to the normal level of life and talking to her about the house, jobs, the lawn, the pool, her mouth struggling with her bad French, her eyes looking impatiently at him.
The pool is in the balance, if he doesn’t pour the chemicals in it might turn to pea soup by tomorrow and then take several days to return to transparency. As it is, he’ll have to warn her not to swim for the next two days.
He stares at the water from the end of the pool nearest the woods: most of the liquid rectangle is white sky, interrupted by the dark line of the roof further up, the blackness of the house tipped upside down. He remembers swimming in the rivers, the pools that streams make, when he was a kid; there was something in him that was afraid of the depths, the slimy weeds that clung to your legs, the deep invisible pike. The same spots are no good now, there’s less water and the rivers are lower and the pools are mostly standing and stagnant by early July. He hasn’t swum in years.
He could give it a dose of copper sulphate and shock it with granules of chlorine, but he’s no expert. That would condemn it for a couple of days. He can’t not tell her. She might swallow some, or get a rash on her beautiful face. But how can he tell her without his voice trembling, giving away the fact that he knows she’s been using the pool?
A breeze gets up and gusts over the water, combing all the shapes away in one sweep. When it settles he notices a big bird on the upside-down roof, a hunched silhouette like a vulture.
He looks up. It’s not a bird: it’s a human being.
He can’t move a finger. His neck has seized.
The silhouette surveys him. His heart and lungs are confusing themselves. He forces himself to lower his head and looks only at the reflection. The main thing with ghosts is never to catch them in the eye, even if the eyes are not visible. He calls on Oncle Fernand and the Virgin to help him, to keep him from harm. But he has abandoned her Son. He doesn’t know if the Virgin would want to help him. Oncle Fernand is out.
Someone (he noticed earlier) has taken the new cardousso off the front door: only the old, broken one is left. That’s not enough. That’s no protection at all.
But he prays, nevertheless, and the ghost of Raoul disappears, seems to grow smaller and melt into the roof. Jean-Luc lifts his head slowly to check. Nothing but the crest of the roof against the white sky. Jean-Luc squints to see better, to lighten the shadow. The bird has flown. He has trouble swallowing. He glances all around him and looks up again and then something, some pale and spectral movement, catches his terrified attention lower down, where the sunlight deepens the shadow over the back of the house: the cobwebs on the back door are fluttering, half-broken. This scares Jean-Luc almost more than the ghost of Raoul Lagrange, because Raoul was always nice to him. As nice as his brother is nasty.
Except that now, Raoul is Jean-Luc’s rival. Jealousy is a bitter thing.
There’s a munching of tyres on gravel as the car stops. The family are back.
The girls play near him as he stacks stones by the tumbled wall: he plans to attack it before the summer, but time is running out. They are building a hide-out on the edge of the woods, with their father’s permission. He thinks they look healthier than when he first saw them. They wave to him, chattering, a few metres off.
He strolls up to look. The girls stand in the camp, a ridge of dead leaves, as if posing for a photograph. His new throwaway camera is in his pocket and he takes it out, surprising them. They laugh and so does he. The two eldest stand like policemen, the youngest is hiding her face. Two, three, four clicks, just a simple press of the finger: it thrills him, the way it works again, the way he shoots them and they get sucked into the camera to wait there until the laboratory does its bit and sends him the plastic envelope to open like the best present in the world. The middle one grabs the young one by the wrist, shaking it, trying to get her to look at the camera. They all laugh and then the youngest one points.
Their mother is walking towards them slowly from the house with her arms folded. Her face is divided in two: the top half is frowning and the bottom is smiling. He is embarrassed to see her, of course. He avoids her eyes as he goes back to stack the stones. She stands at a little distance and watches the children, who continue making the den. He is conscious of the sound of the stones clipping on each other as he stacks them in their various piles, small and medium and large, like the uneven beat of his own heart.
He remembers he has to tell her about the chemicals in the pool. He hurries up to the shed and takes out the plastic canisters and starts tipping the chemicals into the pool before she goes back inside; as the copper sulphate gurgles out of the bottle and spreads in curls of blue through the
water, she turns and watches. He knows she’ll come over and she does. She’s like the little inquisitive robin. His heart warms to her, but all he does is acknowledge her with a nod. He can’t help it, he’s flushing so hot he has to wipe his brow on his sleeve.
She says, in her poor French, how toxic the chemicals look. All he has to do is say yes, they are, but after a couple of days the poisons are dispersed. So he says it. Then it’s fine to swim, if we have to do this in the summer? Yes, he says. Come the summer, he goes on, he’ll make sure he tells her when the treatment is done. His ears feel blocked with the rushing of blood: it’s as if this conversation is not taking place right here and now.
He looks after her as she walks away, her arms still folded, the body he’s so familiar with hidden by her clothes. The worst and best part being that she doesn’t know.
He grows closer and closer to her over the next couple of weeks; especially when using the binoculars, with their nice leather smell reminding him of the animal skins stretched out at home in his father’s time. Most days he has come up to the thickening spurge behind the hut, even if she only swims two or three times a week. He never forgets his brush knife, laying it within easy reach in case he needs an excuse for being here, ready to act the gardener and start cutting. One day she came out early but got straight into the car. She didn’t come back, although he waited two or three hours. He wondered if she had left her husband. But no, two days later he watched and she came out of the house as good as new and swam. The ghost of Raoul Lagrange has not appeared again on the roof, although he keeps checking.
Today there is a violent, cold mistral and her appearance is unexpected. The overloaded stems of spurge splay and shift in the gusts. He has to be careful. The wind excites him. She strips, shivering, and he takes another picture to add to his collection as he’d once collect pebbles or moths.
There is an explosion of glitter and the sound of splashing, faint on the wind. It must be very cold in there, he thinks. It must be very cold against her bare skin, against the nipples on her breasts and the soft furry kitten below that he strokes in his dreams so that it purrs and purrs.
The low, uncertain sun flares off the water as it moves, so all he can see of her body is a dark shape among the flashes, a shadow that changes to white then back to black, until she turns at the end and swims in his direction, towards the woods. Then he can see her face chinning the water. It always looks surprised, happy and surprised at the same time. Ten lengths, no more nor less.
He takes another photograph as she climbs out. He takes no more than one or two each time. There are twenty-seven exposures and there are only thirteen remaining. Soon, he thinks, he won’t bother at all and just take them with his brain.
She gleams all over, hugging herself. Then she straightens up side-on to him and spreads her arms wide like wings, with the sun full on her. She is still shivering, though. He can see tiny droplets winking all over her pale body. She has her eyes closed. The spurge sways again in a violent buffet and she gives a little delighted gasp. The kitten has glittery droplets on its head.
When the stems that hide him shift, he feels the early sun glancing off his face, spotting it and leaving dark marks on his vision. He wants to see the goosepimples on her skin and grabs the binoculars too eagerly before he’s properly put the camera back in his top pocket; the camera falls down the front of his jacket as if down a cliff and clips a big stone with a surprisingly sharp report. His father always warned him about getting careless, when they were hunting together: in all the excitement of it.
She looks up and her mouth drops open under a puzzled frown.
She’s looking straight at him with her black eyes, right through the swaying stems of spurge as if she’s taking time to understand. She hides her breasts with an arm, squashing them. He is stupefied. His heart pounds in his head, on the side of his head in the vein which is the only part of him moving, the rest of him hunter-still. Then her creased-up eyes shift slightly to the left and a bit further and he realises she has not separated him out from the plants after all, despite the early sunlight spotting him. He lets his breath out soundlessly. He must be invisible, he must have become the plants.
He sees her bend down to where her towel lies in a heap and reach for something spindly, putting it on her face; she straightens up with her spectacles on her nose, one lens flashing the sun in his eyes as she turns towards him.
He twists round and reaches for the brush knife in one dazed movement and then bursts clear with his back to her and begins hacking at the undergrowth behind the hut, at the tall, heavy-headed, milk-fat spurge.
He’s the gardener. He ignores the clots and dribbles landing in gobs on his clothes and face as if he’s being spat at. Never in his life would he normally have cut into spurge like this and the milk-sap is everywhere, as if a goat’s udder has exploded. Beyond everything he can hear his father shouting at him, furious and scared, as he pants and grunts.
He waits for her voice behind him but it doesn’t come. He goes on hacking without thought until that which is stinging is just that and storms into his brain and becomes the serpent.
Can eyes hiss? Jean-Luc’s are hissing. He presses the flat of his palms against his sockets and bends right over but nothing quietens them and yet he still doesn’t howl. It is something else that is howling into the air from his mouth.
Sarah grabbed at her little heap of clothes and pressed them against her as she backed off.
The undergrowth beyond the pool-shed had exploded into a man.
She wasn’t sure who the man was but he was dressed like a soldier and he was crazed, he was swinging something like a machete with his back to her. She wanted to run but her legs had jellified, all she could do was back off step by step towards the house with her clothes pressed against her nakedness. It was so extraordinary, the sudden irruption of this terrible figure, that she considered herself in a kind of parallel existence from which she was observing the action unfold.
She could hear him grunting with effort, the plants falling with a rustle, the light smack of the blade as it flashed and made contact over and over; she could hear her own breathing as she walked backwards on trembling legs, leaving the poolside and reaching the rough ground that was uncomfortable against her bare feet in this other universe. She felt she might reach the house unseen, that the man hadn’t yet seen her although she knew elsewhere that he had been watching her, that this was as old as myth and would end badly for one or the other of them. She had met women in the Congo who had been raped by rebels or government troops or coltan miners, who had colostomy bags tied to their waists because of the damage done to their insides with bayonets or pieces of wood, and now they came vividly into her mind and she felt terrified again. She’d loved the forest in the Congo, it might have been a kind of teeming, humid paradise, but instead it had been made a hell.
This paradise had also been made hell in a matter of seconds – it was all the same: paradise, hell. Her legs were weak but she was almost there, crouched and stepping backwards with her clothes bundled against her, the huge stone wall of the side of the house beside her, the door just a few yards further, her children inside and the madman with the machete without.
She must scream for Nick, he must phone the police from the chair in the bathroom, she had forgotten the number, she should have written the number down precisely for this kind of eventuality in this remote place.
The man like a white mercenary had stopped swinging his machete. He was very still, bent over with his back to her –even from this distance she could see him clearly because the plants were now gone and the early sunlight splattered his tunic.
And then something between a whoop and a howl went up, freezing her before she got to the door.
The man went yai-yai-yai-yai, covering his face, and then howled in short, angry bursts, like a monkey defending its territory. He was mad. He had dropped his machete. He wasn’t a killer or a rapist, he was Jean-Luc the handyman, staggering out with hi
s hands pressed to his face, stumbling out towards the pool, blinded as if by some unearthly force of retribution.
THIRTEEN
Afterwards, Nick was to ask her why she hadn’t at least pulled her knickers on. He was intrigued, not worried. ‘I mean,’ he added jocularly, ‘I’m only asking from my metaposition as objective historian, not as interested husband.’
‘I didn’t have time, is the short answer. I thought the priority was to get him out of the water. And there is no metaposition. Only overlap.’
‘Problematised metaposition,’ he clarified.
The fact is, she didn’t think. There were no priorities. There was only the action, the instinct. She had been in the netball team at school: the instinctive dart forward, the thrust, the body calculating height with its labyrinth of muscle and tendon before you knew you even had to jump. Nick had been bad at sports, shambling about the muddy field on his long legs. Even the running track had foxed him: he’d thought too much on the way instead of blanking everything out but the finishing line.
Once, while taking the art-club painting class in her enthusiastic first year at Cambridge, the stark-naked life model – a good-looking guy in his late twenties with an improbably large willy – had wandered about in the breaks checking out the efforts, munching on his apple among the clothed without a care in the world. No one commented or turned a hair: but he didn’t come back – the more radical feminists in the group had decided he was an exhibitionist, taking advantage of them, appropriating their space.
