The Standing Pool

by Adam Thorpe

  The attic was not responding. Nick was giving it an ultimatum along with a generous offer of financial aid, but with an air of helplessness, because the attic remained silent. He would have loved to have got inside Jamie’s head at some point in his childhood and readjusted the connections, like a nanoengineer. Now it was too late. Jamie’s aim was to shipwreck this little domestic enterprise called the Mallinson family. There he stood, on the rocks, flashing his lamp. The original wrecker.

  Nick remembered that this morning he had decided to love his son unconditionally. To pour love onto him. It had seemed a great idea at the time. To embrace him. To see him as a miracle and not – how had he put it to himself …? Somebody to be pitied. Was that it? He was Jamie’s only father. He looked down at his feet. He’d changed back into his sandals from his walking boots. Maybe he shouldn’t ever wear sandals, with or without socks. He needed the permanent authority of boots. But the Roman army had done pretty well in sandals. The Indian sages in nothing at all. Maybe he needed to frighten Jamie. Put the boot in. As his own father had done with his lanky, over-cerebral son. Damaged by the war, his father. The effects of shell-blast. Head with a continual miniscule wobble. At least he’d kept his head, unlike the five-year-olds in Iraq. How his dad had seen the world, life, living history! The noise of war had damaged his ears, a tin whistle in each one; as he’d put it to Mum – long-suffering, diminutive Mum, the ultimate domestic ritualist: ‘At least I can’t hear you give me orders.’

  What had damaged Nick’s ears? Rock music. Led Zep at full volume one famous day in Duncan’s room.

  All he had done was bleed his life away in words. Bearded Che still up in his study, as on Malcolm McDowell’s wall in If…; only now it was ironic, a referential wink for the young men and women passing through. His whole generation a façade, a film set. Indulgent mannequins. Baby-boomers continually squalling for attention. Somewhat on the fag-end of it, he was, but still a member of the club. He’d watched If… again recently and sided with the teachers, the well-meaning headmaster. It was terrifying.

  ‘Jamie? I don’t blame you. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I really am. Let’s try to move on?’ he added, adopting that same upwards inflection and sounding fake.

  Silence. He had always been apologising to Jamie, come to think of it. Or worse: for Jamie.

  He wasn’t unusual. Thousands of Japanese teenagers shut themselves in their rooms, sometimes for decades. It had a name. Kiryoko or something. A modern condition.

  Suddenly the door opened, just missing Nick’s nose. Jamie might have been standing there the whole time. The attic beyond him looked rather snug: reasonably tidy, even. The headquarters of the mission, scented with dope. Cosy, warm from the sun on the tiles and the paraffin heater.

  ‘You’re selling something?’

  ‘Toothbrushes,’ said Nick, grimly. ‘No, insurance.’

  The floorboards were bare, swept clean. Maybe Jamie had hoovered when they were out. Or used a broom. Maybe he was, after all, monkish. His eyes were a little red.

  ‘Life insurance?’

  ‘Life can’t be insured,’ said Nick. ‘It’s priceless.’

  ‘Wow, thought for the day again.’

  Nick was nettled by this. His voice hardened. ‘Just to say, Jamie, that our guests did not appreciate your Scrabble joke and we did not appreciate finding our fridge raided.’

  ‘It wasn’t a joke. It was serious. They were upset?’

  ‘Why, Jamie? What’s the point?’

  ‘Because they pushed him.’

  Nick looked pained. ‘What?’

  ‘That’s what the shepherd said, and at least two other people in the village. Original research, Nick. The Sandlers pushed him. Poussé.’

  ‘Not literally,’ said Nick, with an exasperated snort.

  ‘Like, we’re not literally pushing the planet over the edge?’

  Nick sighed, easing the grey force flowing from his chest straight to the knuckles of his right fist. ‘So they just put pressure on him to finish, like you have to, generally. With builders.’

  ‘With builders. Listen to yourself, Nick. I’d have had more respect for you if you’d started out a total fucking Tory.’

  ‘Hey, that’s –’

  Jamie slammed the door in his father’s face, genuinely angry, so that Nick had to retract his stabbing finger an instant before it got broken. Out of order was what he had been going to say. He saw the words swinging on the door, like a sign nailed to its wood.

  Nick waited a moment, until his own rage subsided. It was no doubt mostly his fault, anyway: Jamie had always been tricky, he was born tricky, but had been made even trickier by their hopeless parenting – the fads and fetishes, the careless self-seeking disguised as revolt. He went downstairs feeling utterly mortified and defeated. He dreaded a confrontation with Sarah: she would accuse him of weediness, as usual. Of not standing up to his son. And she’d be right to accuse him. He only ever went so far. In everything, probably.

  Fortunately, the Sandlers were back. They were in the kitchen. Alan Sandler was sweaty, red-faced, very excited, a walking exclamation mark. Nick thought, as he waved hello: they pushed the man to finish, to finish the roof. It was their doing. Regrets.

  ‘The guy’s an artist! I saw it on the table! This – what do we call it, Lucy? –’

  ‘Assemblage,’ said Lucy, who looked depressed.

  ‘Assemblage! An incredibly genuine example of raw art! Art Brut! Worth thousands, tens of thousands! A photo of your wife was on it! A nude study, stuck to a soup spoon? I recognised the hair. On the head, I mean! Did she pose for him?’

  ‘No, she did not,’ Sarah sighed.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Nick, confused, ‘this was something Jean-Luc had made himself?’

  ‘He’s seeing Art Brut everywhere,’ said Lucy, gloomily. ‘One does, when one starts. Like seeing faces in a blot. It’s really just Bad Art, capital B, capital A. And Bad Art is everywhere. He even saw it in Luton airport, not surprisingly. Braques don’t grow on trees, darling.’

  ‘Lucy, this had a title. A real whacky title. It was a self-conscious act. I wrote the title down in the car.’

  ‘I know you did, sweetheart. You’ve told me already. Jean-Luc manhandled him, by the way,’ she told them. ‘Really manhandled him.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Sarah, who even through her dismay realised that these types’ lives were probably always like this: dramatic, hysterical, rather interesting.

  ‘Exaggerated,’ said Alan, pulling a bit of paper from his coat pocket. ‘Here it is, translated from the French by my loving wife: The Resurrection of the Mutant Chicken. It was on the assemblage. On a strip of cardboard. That guy is a genius. He’s bats, but he’s a genius.’

  ‘It seems Jean-Luc’s an artist in his spare time,’ Sarah explained, addressing Nick. ‘There was this sort of eccentric sculpture of a chicken on the table in his bedroom. With a photo of me skinny-dipping, it appears. Proof he was spying.’

  ‘On a spoon,’ repeated Alan.

  ‘How very unscrupulous of him,’ said Nick. Jamie’s words boomed through his head: Listen to yourself. ‘What was the title again?’

  ‘The Resurrection of the Mutant Chicken,’ Alan cried, flapping one hand. ‘Genius! Another Damien Hirst!’

  ‘That man is very much not Art Brut,’ said Lucy, sourly. ‘That is calculated Saatchi and Saatchi art. You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Exaggerated,’ said Alan, pointing at her.

  Sarah waited for the tea to brew, standing by the sink with folded arms, manufacturing a sympathetic look as the Sandlers argued. She had the curious impression that she was unclothed, again. That Jean-Luc had permanently stolen her clothes and left her naked and vulnerable, even though she was no longer worried. He was creative; creativity was an outlet for darker forces. She had always been fascinated by really creative people, people who didn’t worry about the mesh of argument and substantiation, about everything having to be tucked in and ticked
off, folded in on itself, concluded. Jean-Luc wasn’t a disturbed voyeur, he was an artist. Things made sense, now. She didn’t mind hanging from his spoon, she thought: feeling magnanimous in thinking it. She herself had painted in her first year at Cambridge, but it was terrible: the life models looked like shop mannequins, in her versions. It takes all sorts, as her mother would say.

  Lucy wanted to leave Jean-Luc alone, having sacked him: Alan wanted to solicit him, or at least investigate further. Sarah wanted lunch, but Jamie had consumed all the bread apart from half a baguette in the freezer; the Sandlers had gone out for a ‘bite’ after seeing Jean-Luc, to a restaurant near the village that the Mallinsons’ budget would never match. They were wreathed in the fragrance of wine and garlic and looked slightly too big. All they wanted now, they said, was a good old English cuppa. Sarah had the feeling that two parallel timetables had entangled themselves. She’d come here to escape timetables. On the hob simmered an apologetic pan full of pasta shapes.

  The sun seemed to have gone in. The kids were hunched in front of a video next door, stopping up their hunger with a bowl of French crisps (which, they complained, tasted ‘boring’). She had not yet completed so much as a leaf collage with them from Exciting Things To Do With Nature. What she had to do was find her inner space, a calm within, or she would scream. But she was too tired to find her inner space. And if she did succeed in finding her inner space, smiling benignly inside it as tall as a house, one of the kids would be found floating face-down in the swimming pool. Or whatever.

  Lucy kept referring to their meeting with Jean-Luc as an ‘escapade’. He might have done much worse than just shove Alan out of the bedroom! ‘He didn’t really shove, doll,’ Alan interrupted, ‘he just pushed.’ She’d been genuinely frightened. Her eyes were bright. Supposing you’d been stabbed, with that awful poor bedridden woman looking on? Like something out of your own Fanny Connor, sweetheart. Flannery O’Connor, he corrected.

  Their voices trailed over Sarah’s mind like jets. ‘But he didn’t stab him,’ she pointed out, pouring the tea.

  ‘But he might have done,’ Lucy insisted, with an element of relish.

  ‘You can say that about anything. Milk?’

  ‘We historians call them counter-factuals,’ Nick proffered, clocking Sarah’s irritation and wanting to deflect attention. ‘The great what if?’

  ‘I can’t believe what I saw,’ Alan insisted. ‘The truly genuine article.’

  ‘What if the United States had not joined the Allies,’ Nick went on, regardless, ‘in 1917? And so on. What if young Hitler had not failed to enter the Vienna Arts –’

  ‘Weird, to be secretly photographed,’ said Sarah, with a slight shudder.

  ‘Or Bobby Kennedy – this is very interesting – had survived the shooting in Los Angeles?’

  ‘Ah, dear Bobby Kennedy,’ said Lucy, sipping her tea.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘I am so excited,’ Alan crowed. ‘So excited.’

  ‘But Bobby Kennedy didn’t survive,’ said Sarah, quietly. ‘Jean-Luc didn’t shoot Alan.’

  ‘Stab,’ said Lucy. ‘There was no gun.’

  ‘He just snapped me in the pink,’ Sarah finished, almost inaudibly.

  But it did frighten her, sometimes, considering the hypotheticals, the infinity of possibilities branching out like neural pathways, fired finally on only one track. And this idea she had at the back of her mind that everyone was, in the end, theoretically defenceless against the very worst possibility – that it was all purely a matter of chance; that you really were one tiny mote among billions, as the Earth itself was one tiny mote among billions. Was this all that coming here had done? Exposed a void at the back of her mind, open to the bottomless plunge of the over-starry nights?

  Jean-Luc had threatened to sue because he’d fallen in and there was no alarm. Nick didn’t know that. She looked across at him as the Sandlers rabbited on like uncharitable academic colleagues would do at meetings designed for everyone to participate; she saw, from the way he moved his eyebrows at her, that he’d got nowhere with Jamie, either.

  ‘I’m forbidding you to go anywhere near him, sweetheart,’ said Lucy.

  Alan stared her down. They were alone by the liverish pool, which nevertheless smelt of bleach. ‘I’m forbidding you to give me such orders. Hey, I’m going to offer him money, a career, fame and fortune. Without him moving.’

  ‘I don’t suppose that’s the point,’ she said.

  ‘The point, as you know, is that he keeps on being Jean-Luc. The genuine article of gouty Aubain. There were drawings all over the table. The walls were half-stripped and he had scribbled on the plaster. The whole room was art. The room of an artist who doesn’t know he is one.’

  ‘Or the room of a psychotic,’ she suggested, already losing the argument.

  ‘I’m surprised at you,’ he said. ‘In suggesting there might be a difference.’

  This time, she would be his minder. He promised not to pursue things if they turned threatening. He mopped his brow and looked up at the sky, which had a murky vapour over it that wasn’t quite cloud. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘as his hands were on my clavicles, pushing me out, I felt our fates were intertwined. And I loved him at that moment.’

  ‘Alan sweetheart,’ Lucy groaned, ‘please, whatever you do, don’t do American.’

  They drove to Aubain in almost total silence. The holm oaks on the way were horribly gloomy, a kind of gunmetal grey. They needed sunlight, in which their leaves shone and all but glittered. She was rehearsing what she had to say. ‘Happened’: se passer. She was considering the idea that this offer of Alan’s might neutralise any tendency towards revenge in the unknown part of Jean-Luc. The main street was just as empty as before.

  She had the vague idea that they were re-running the same scene, as in an experimental film. The weather didn’t help: it seemed to have turned English. Bad continuity.

  This time, when he opened the door, he kept a blank, expressionless face around his dark glasses. Lucy stuck all sorts of worrying possibilities onto it, as she remembered sticking plastic features on potatoes long ago. He didn’t seem surprised to see them, anyway. Alan beamed at him, clutching his homburg. Jean-Luc retreated to the other side of the table. He appeared to have hurt his foot. At least, he had a pronounced limp.

  ‘Sorry, Jean-Luc, but we have a very interesting offer to discuss with you,’ she said, feeling ridiculous. ‘A very interesting offer.’

  Alan beamed some more, nodding.

  Again, Jean-Luc wordlessly motioned them to sit around the vinyl-covered table. It was four o’clock. It seemed like a different day but it wasn’t.

  On Alan’s behalf, Lucy explained what he had realised, when he had gone back upstairs for his hat (Alan raised the hat from the table, still beaming and nodding, his breath audible in his throat): that what he had seen upstairs in the room proved that Jean-Luc was an artist.

  Un artiste. Or was it une? She stuck with un.

  Jean-Luc kept very still behind his wrap-around dark glasses.

  That although there was a lot of sous in that sort of art, they realised this wasn’t why he made his art. ‘Les dollars,’ put in Alan, rhyming with ‘bars’.

  The man still didn’t move, not even to nod; this wasn’t how any artist she had ever known behaved, especially at the mention of money.

  That Alan would very much like to see what else Jean-Luc had done. Everything that had ‘happened’ (ce qui s’est passé) was explained: it was all for the purpose of creation: pour la création. Throughout her discourse Jean-Luc retained his expressionless expression, hands folded in front of him. It was to do with the eyes being hidden, the mouth so firmly set in the dark stubble. But she saw the beat of the vein on the side of his neck; the muscles of his unshaven throat detach and settle separately from his swallowing.

  Finally, she stopped. Jean-Luc waited a few moments and then he opened his mouth and began to laugh, but very softly, like a duck heard in the far distan
ce. Then he shook his head once and said something extraordinary.

  ‘Oh,’ said Lucy.

  Alan asked for a translation. He’d heard something about being ‘nuked’ and was confused.

  ‘“You remind me of the Germans when they shot me in the back of the neck,”’ said Lucy. ‘I believe that’s what he said, sweetheart.’

  ‘They shot him in the back of the neck? Hey, that’s serious. Maybe it was Che Guevara did it.’

  Lucy translated somewhat apologetically from Jean-Luc’s static mumble: ‘He lost his face. On the way, they promised Jean-Luc a woman. Instead, they shot him in the back of the neck and the bullets came out at the level of his nostrils. I don’t think,’ she added, with a meaningful look, ‘this actually happened.’

  Jean-Luc said some more.

  ‘Hm,’ said Lucy, nodding. ‘Here goes, Alan. They shot away everything but my eyes. Not the eyes, but everything below. The jaw, the mouth, the nose. Everything but my eyes. I’m translating as precisely as I can. He’s definitely saying “my”, Alan. Perhaps we should leave?’

  ‘He’s bats,’ said Alan, quietly. ‘He’s beautifully, beautifully bats.’

  ‘Bats in the belfry, definitely,’ Lucy agreed, behind a mask of agreeableness. ‘N’est-ce-pas?’ she added, inconsequentially.

  And then she saw the gun, leaning against the soiled cooker. Its slim, metallic barrel shone, its wooden parts gleamed. Perfectly normal, she thought, in hunter land. Jean-Luc had caught her looking at it, that ripple of shock. He tensed minutely in his chair.

  ‘Vous partez à la chasse?’ she asked, sweetly and benignly. Dread filled her torso like a dark-green liquid mounting higher. ‘Perhaps we shouldn’t be here,’ she said, in a high voice, out of the corner of her mouth, as Jean-Luc rose without a word and picked up the gun by its dark barrel.