The Standing Pool

by Adam Thorpe

  He thinks dark glasses suit him. He’s never worn any in his life, and these are the medical type that go round the side and enclose your eyes entirely, but he likes them after a day or two, they change his face, they make him look powerful and strange in some way. His eyes still sting and feel as if they have crumbs under the lids, but each day they hurt less. It was so terrible to be blind, to think he had blinded himself, that when he realised he could see, in the hospital, he felt he had been given a second life.

  She’d guided him by the wrist to the house. He barely recalled falling in the pool: the pain had smothered him and seemed to take him over. He’d felt the pain was a great hand wiggling his arms and bending his body and bursting out of his head.

  Then a step that had met nothing and a terrible, icy blast of water so shocking he couldn’t breathe. Hands pulling his jacket up beyond his head, making things worse. The blindness and the water combining to hunt him down and kill him.

  Then her softness, her smell, her voice. The angel. The guiding angel. Through the agonising fog he’d sensed her as being completely naked, but he now felt that must have been his imagination.

  The husband had asked him no questions in the car, where Jean-Luc sat panting in the front, his whole head soaked, hair plastered to his head, red weals appearing on his skin where his body was reacting to the sap. Each time he’d opened his eyes the light was a long blade pressed into the eyeball. It wasn’t really light at all.

  He’d still thought he was blinded and a terror took hold of him, and then a great sleepiness enfolded him. He’d been walked into the hospital through a galaxy of sounds that seemed to have nothing to do with him, they were voices and noises from somewhere else or from another time. He was entirely separate from everything but the pain, and the pain itself was a tiny beast shaped like the burr of a thistle, burrowing into him. Then the water and the special drops had sluiced it away, only for it to return as something worse, disintegrated into a million crumbs under his eyelids and under several places on his skin, where the burns were small but third-degree, the doctor told him, speaking as if he were deaf. His father had been right to warn him. He had reacted very badly, it was in the family.

  He is reasonably sure they won’t find the camera. Why should they? It fell into the undergrowth and then he cut the spurge; it would be hidden in the cut stems. As soon as he is better, he will go back and search for it. And the binoculars.

  Supposing they have found the camera?

  The future is as dark as how I see things now, he thinks. It’s all up to the gods. The Virgin and the saints. Destiny.

  He walks up the stairs carefully and knocks on the door. The nurse tells him to wait. He tries not to think of what is going on in there that is making him wait, but can’t help imagining the soiled flesh, the dark-purple rashes, the intimate horrors. He hopes they will open the window, after.

  He stands on the little landing holding the two cups in one hand, looking down into the darkness of the steep stairs made darker by his glasses, blurred by the lesions. The ceiling bulb with its faded, fly-blown shade is a dim moon. He can’t distinguish the loose and worn lino runner his father had always talked about changing. The walls need a lick, but all he can see is a muddy swirl. His little finger is sticky from the sticky-back plastic that lines the cupboards in the kitchen. They are very old cupboards, painted dark brown, but his father, back in the Sixties, lined them inside – shelves and sides and back – with plastic patterned with big bright flowers. The plastic is peeling off in places, but the stickiness is still on the back. When you reach in, it catches you on the fingers or the side of the hand. One day he will empty the cupboards and strip the plastic away. It will take about half an hour. But then what? He can’t picture the cupboards bare of those flowers, those patterns of once-bright petals. The cupboards have been like that ever since he has been on this earth, in the same way their smell never changes: old bread smells mixed up with biscuits and herbs and mice. You can bottle that smell and put it on my grave, he thinks.

  Once he dreamt he was following that scent like a hunting dog all the way home; home turned out to be a giant man-size bowl full of washing soda and drowned wasps.

  Eventually the door opens. The stink is as thick as slurry, he all but gags. He can’t understand how the nurse puts up with it; today it is Colette with the curly orange hair and squashed nose. She takes the cups from him with a wink. She has a loud voice, broken by too much smoking, and a drinker’s eyebags. The orange is dye.

  Six or seven years ago, before she was nursing his mother, she got drunk at an Aubain fête and pulled him from the back of the village hall, where he was helping with the lights in the shadows, and pressed him to her in a slow dance. He tried to free himself at first, but she had a nurse’s strong arms and he couldn’t use too much force because everyone was watching, and some of them were laughing, although he didn’t know if they were laughing at him. She was so drunk she asked him in his ear, after he’d stopped struggling, if he was afraid of women. It was a cool night in late February but he was sweating, his tee shirt clamped to his back. He felt her breasts on his chest, their moistness, and her breath was full of drink and bad teeth, roaring in his ear. He didn’t reply, he just waited for the music to stop, but it was a long song by an English singer he recognised from a few years back. His face was in the curls of her fake-orange hair, her thumb stroking the nape of his neck. He kept stepping on her toes.

  She asked him to guess her age and he said sixty, because that’s what it felt like and because she was from Paris he had no history to go on. She pushed him away, staggering a bit, calling him names, but there were a lot of people about and no one noticed. Raoul Lagrange passed by on his way to the bar and she shouted at Raoul, her face flashing from green to blue to green like a witch’s under the coloured lights: ‘I’m forty-six! Do I look forty-six or what do I look?’ And Raoul Lagrange laughed and put his arm round her and gave her a kiss and said, ‘My sweetheart, my lovely, you look twenty-six.’ She hugged him back, tight, and he made a funny face. They danced for a bit under the flashing lights, their faces turning blue then green then blue. She had to be carried home. Raoul’s funeral was a week later.

  Jean-Luc was back in the shadows while they were dancing. He felt sick, her cheap perfume on his clothes, a strand of orange hair on his shoulder, but he busied himself with the lights, the strobe. Fortunately, she has no memory of what happened that night. His own memory is of her warm, moist breasts and the thumb on the nape of his neck, but they are detached from the rest of her. The rest of her makes him want to run off, even now. But he has to keep her happy; she likes her mint tisane.

  Now she is ribbing him in her usual way, just adding rubbish about how he looks like a sexy film star in his dark glasses. Or a gangster. She suggests next time he bring up a whisky as she smooths out the rubber sheet, his mother talking at the same time from the chair about how that would be a miracle, he hardly bothers to replace her glass of water – so that the two women’s voices overlap and go on and on and drive him into his room like a pair of squawking vultures.

  He’s careful not to show his room when he opens the door. He’s careful to slip in sideways each time so that no one notices the state of the walls, half-stripped of wallpaper, plaster crunching on the floor.

  ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do in there!’ shouts Colette through the door, and he hears his mother laugh. The door shivers as Colette tries the handle, but the lock is firm. There’s a silence. They are listening. Maybe they’re afraid he might be about to blow his head off. Jean-Luc all over the walls. But the gun is in the cellar, needing an oil.

  He’s covered the monument with an old sheet. It is too big to hide anywhere, now. He sits on the bed and holds his head in his hand, easing the pain in his eyes, thinking of what his father would tell him about the Germans, how they’d put a beetle on each eyeball and stitch the lid over it, how you could hear the munching in your agony, munching back into the brain, how this h
appened to Resistance men his father knew before they were shot, how the shooting must have been a relief. Sometimes Jean-Luc is driven to think death must be a relief, even though he’s never been tortured like that.

  There’s still a silence the other side of the door. He doesn’t like that silence.

  He frowns, suspicious. The working lock replaced a much older lock which still has its keyhole exposed. He crouches down to look through it and sees a dim, wet eyeball. There’s an explosion of giggles through the panel. He searches about for something to stuff into the keyhole, furious, wanting to ram a sharp pencil in but settling for a page from his notebook, balled up and squeezed tight into the opening. He presses his ear to the door. Their voices are so piercing he can hear it all.

  ‘He’s got ten lovely girlfriends in there, your boy has!’

  ‘I don’t suppose they’re alive. I wouldn’t put it past him.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be saying that about your own son,’ Colette chirps, as if it is all a joke.

  They begin to talk about the nasty rape and murder of a teenage girl that has been first item all week on the telly news, squawking away so that Jean-Luc half-expects to see feathers floating in under the door. He opens the window despite the cool to let the smell out; although the smell is mostly on his clothes, it seeps in. There is no one on the street. Then a hooded boy – one of the Rodier tribe – goes by on a bicycle with something pale on the back of his black top. Jean-Luc squints through the blurred spots and makes out the shape of a fish.

  Of course! The first of April! Jean-Luc laughs, feeling sorry for the Rodier boy, then with a stab of horror he reaches back with his hand and feels paper.

  He rips its Sellotape off his jacket, stares at it. It’s a fish cut out from pink card, with a red heart drawn in the middle. He feels his heart has dropped down to his stomach.

  He never felt Colette stick it on. He hopes it was Colette, and that he hasn’t been walking about with it all day. He went twice into the village, keeping his head down, to buy bread and collect the eye-drops from Dr Demarne. His face is flushed with shame. He doesn’t remember anyone laughing at him, they just felt sorry for his eye allergy and made one or two jokes about the Mafia. It was bound to be Colette, the slag.

  He looks out of the window again. No one, not for five or more minutes. Aubain might have been the victim of nuclear attack, or alien mass abduction. He takes the sheet off the monument and blocks the bottom of the door with it, like you are supposed to do in a fire. Then he sits on the bed and thinks about the missing camera, strange currents running through his body.

  The photos of the girls are bound to be perfect, he’s sure. Most things are, when they’re out of your reach. He took the girls close up, not like the ones in the first film, when they’d been blurred or sticking their tongues out like frogs. Their faces would fit easily on the spoons. The only disappointment might be the eyes, reddened like a rabbit’s caught in headlights. He’s noticed that on wedding photos. The flash causes it.

  He imagines cutting their heads out. The girls make him feel happy inside. What he likes most of all is that he can make them laugh, their brown eyes twinkling with happiness. He likes their fair hair, their pale skin, their strangely dark eyelashes, their chirrupy laughter like sparrows in the bushes. Suffer little children to come unto me. Their sweet little dresses and shoes. They would be perfect for the flowers, gazing out from the heart of each rose.

  He thinks of himself snipping carefully round each face and sticking them onto the hanging spoons, pressing them into the spoons’ bowls so the brown glue bulges up around the edges. The garden of roses. It’s cruel, not to have the camera, not to have what it contains. He’ll have to go back and find it.

  It is quiet next door, but not suspiciously so; he hears Colette leave, saying goodbye to him through the door with a silly voice off the telly. Then: ‘Poisson d’avril, Jean-Luc!’

  And he sits there, frozen, not reacting. Like a dead man. Not even letting the bed squeak.

  Maman might be having her afternoon doze. He reaches under the mattress for the envelope and takes out the photos. Closing his left eye and swivelling his right downwards he can avoid the lesions like crystals, his nose bulking large in his view. He doesn’t look at the one with Raoul’s ghost at the back; he keeps it underneath the others, his heart thumping.

  The girls’ faces aren’t so bad, after all, and he snips them out, squinting through his dark glasses. The scissors are too big for their miniature heads and his eyes hurt. In the end, the cut-out faces are tiny pale counters, no good at all. He’s sliced one of them too low, so that the forehead’s gone.

  He blows them off the table and they land on the floor like drops of milk, like white sap.

  When he moves the monument on its wheels, just a few centimetres forwards and back, the spoons tinkle against each other. Oncle Fernand comes limping up behind and congratulates him. Once the girls’ faces are on the spoons, along with their mother, it will be the finest monument he can imagine, even though it does look like a big white-eyed duck. He’ll have to go back for the camera as soon as he can. Why not tonight? Because he can’t see well enough to drive. But if he closes one eye he can go up to where he hid his mobilette, slowly, steadily. He’ll take the big torch. He’ll smell his way to the Mas des Fosses.

  Legless Bibi can’t run away from the fish-bone spider. The nails hurt her breasts, her navel. She complains. Ah, Jean-Luc! Ah! Ah!

  ‘That’s life,’ Jean-Luc tells her.

  He catches his hand on a feather and it falls off. No glue is ever good enough, he thinks. Only soldering works. And even then.

  He pulls the pile of Spirou out from under the bed, but his eyes hurt too much to read. All he can do is skate over the pictures in the cartoon squares, one after the other. He knows most of the words by heart, anyway. He knows how each story is going to end, even over two-months’ worth, as if he can predict the future. Spirou Présente les Nouvelles du Monde Entier: he even knows half of those articles by heart, and especially the one about the teenager crippled by polio who receives his lessons at home through a microphone and wires carried by a friend from class to class at Columbia University. He’d be in his sixties by now. Philip Smith, fat, with glasses. He’s like an old, reliable mate.

  Maman is calling for water. He feels so good about things that he fetches some for her almost straightaway, breathing carefully through his mouth. She rabbits on to him but his mind is elsewhere. He wonders if the monument is finished. He can always make another one. As many as he wants.

  The Englishwoman never saw him spying on her. Her husband was very sorry about the accident. People are always falling into swimming pools. In the car, the husband went on about the time his eldest kid, when she was a baby, threw sand into his face on some beach in England, how much it hurt. It was probably quite lucky you fell in the pool, he said, because it helped wash the sap out. No mention of his wife swimming naked, the binoculars, the camera. Jean-Luc told him through the pain, just to be polite, that the sap of fig trees can give you serious burns. You don’t want to saw a fig tree until the dead of winter. The husband didn’t know that: he was very surprised. He asked Jean-Luc if he could see anything at all. Just enough to know you’re driving on the left, Jean-Luc told him, peeping and feeling the light scooping his eyes out.

  ‘Sometimes I ask myself if you’re gaga,’ Maman snorts. ‘Didn’t you hear what I was saying? Madame Sandler is coming.’

  ‘Coming where?’

  ‘Here! To the Mas!’

  ‘The Mas isn’t here. It’s there.’

  ‘You know what I mean, stupid. She phoned her English friend in Valdaron, the one Gabrielle cleans for. Gabrielle told Colette. Later this week, maybe even tomorrow. Now that’s got your bowels turning, I can see that.’

  ‘So what? I’ve treated the pool. I did it last week.’

  ‘And her lovely lawn? Nice and thick and green, is it?’

  His mother seems to want him to fail. She’s
grinning over her glass of water. On the sill is a jar with a spray of dried flowers, including big teasels, their tiny hooks balled with dust and stray hairs and flies. He pulls one out, scattering the rest, and taps it on her nose, tickling her face. She squeals, because the teasel’s head is rough and prickly.

  ‘Promise you’ll be nice to me?’

  ‘Yes, yes! Oh, why were you ever born?’

  ‘Your fault, Maman.’

  ‘An accident. Yow! A mistake.’

  ‘No I wasn’t. You tried for years.’

  ‘But I never wanted you, did I? That’s what your father always said. He’d say: “Where did he come from? We never asked for him.”’

  ‘He never said that.’

  ‘He did. Where did he come from?’ she repeated in a hiss, her head forward like a snake’s.

  ‘It was a joke!’

  He’s a little rough with the teasel, at this point. He doesn’t realise how fragile her skin is, these days. It seems to peel off her cheek in tiny strips. Strangely, she doesn’t notice. She just glares at him, now he’s stopped. Beads of blood well under her eye, on her grazed cheek-bone.

  ‘He never said that, Maman. Don’t lie.’

  She nods, slowly, instead of saying anything. The blood begins to run down and she puts a hand to its tickle. Then she looks at her fingers.

  ‘You’re mad,’ she says. She seems to be pleased at the sight of the blood on her fingertips, as if it isn’t hers. ‘You ought to be locked up.’

  Another day made it to the evening and Nick checked that the windows were properly closed, and locked the main door in the kitchen: leaving with her bedtime milk, Tammy heard the big key turn twice like someone starting to be sick. He’d never bothered to lock it before. She’d picked up that the gods were winging their way from London at the end of the week. And that locking up made no difference, as far as the Jean-Luc problem was concerned: Jean-Luc had a key. There were no bolts on the door.