Kéthani

by Eric Brown

  “Just wondered what you’d make of her, that’s all.”

  “Disruptive?”

  “The Hainault girl?” He grunted a laugh. “Quite the contrary. Brilliant pupil. Educated privately in France before arriving here. She’s wasted at this dump. It’s just…”

  “Yes?”

  He hesitated. “You’ll see when you take the class,” he said, and stubbed out his cigarette.

  I watched, puzzled, as he stood and shuffled from the room.

  “Tomlinson, Wilkins—if you want to turn out for the school team on Wednesday, shut it now.”

  Silence from the usually logorrhoeic double act. I stared around the class, challenging.

  “Thank you. Now, get into your study groups and switch on the screens. If you recall…” I glanced at my notes, “last week we were examining the final scenes of Brighton Rock. I want you to watch the last fifteen minutes, then we’ll talk.”

  I glanced around the room. “Claudine Hainault?”

  The new girl was sitting alone at the back of the class, already tapping into her computer. She looked up when I called her name, tossed a strand of hair from her eyes, and smiled.

  She was blonde and slim, almost impossibly pretty. She appeared older than her eighteen years, something about her poise and confidence giving her a sophistication possessed by none of her classmates.

  I moved to her desk and knelt. “Claudine, I’ll run through what’s happened so far, then leave you to it.”

  “It is okay, Mr. Morrow.” She spoke precisely, with a slight accent. “I know the film.”

  Only then did I notice that she was not implanted.

  I returned to my desk, sat down, and willed myself not to stare at the girl.

  The lesson progressed. Once, when I sensed that she was not looking, I glanced over at Claudine Hainault. The skin of her right temple was smooth, without the square, raised outline of the implant device.

  With five minutes to go before the bell, a boy looked up from the screen. He shook his head. “But Mr. Morrow… he died. And this was before… before the implants. How did people live without going mad?”

  I felt a tightness in my throat. “It was only two years ago,” I said. “You’ll learn all about that in Cultural Studies.”

  The class went silent. They were all staring at Claudine Hainault. To her credit, she affected an interest in the screen before her.

  Then the bell shattered the silence and all was forgotten in the mad scramble to be the first to quit the classroom.

  At four I followed the school bus as it crawled along the gritted lane between snow-drifted hedges. I lived in a converted farmhouse five miles from the school, and Claudine Hainault, I discovered with a pang of some emotion I could not quite define, was my neighbour—our houses separated by the grim, slate-grey expanse of the reservoir.

  The bus braked and the girl climbed down and walked along the track towards an isolated farmhouse, a tiny figure in a cold and inhospitable landscape. I watched her until she disappeared from sight, then I restarted the engine and drove home.

  I pulled into the driveway minutes later, unlocked the front door and stepped into a freezing house. The framed photographs of Caroline glimmered, indiscernible, in the twilight. I turned on the lights and the heating, microwaved an instant meal and ate in the lounge while listening to the radio news. I washed it down with a bottle of good claret—but even the wine made me think of the Hainault girl.

  For a long time I sat and stared out through the picture window. The Onward Station was situated only a mile away, a breathtaking crystalline tower, scintillating in the moonlight like a confection of spun ice. Tonight it illuminated the landscape and my lounge, a monument to the immortality of humankind, a tragic epitaph to all those who had suffered and died before its erection.

  The following Friday at first break, Miller approached me in the staff room. “So what do you make of the Hainault girl, Jeff?”

  I shrugged. “She’s very able,” I said non-committally.

  “I’m worried about her. She seems withdrawn… depressed. She doesn’t mix, you know. She has no friends.” He tapped the implant at his temple. “I was wondering… you’re good at drawing the kids out. Have a word with her, would you? See if anything’s troubling her.”

  He was too absorbed in relighting his cigarette to notice my stare. Troubling her? I wanted to ask; the poor girl isn’t implanted—what do you think is troubling her?

  I had spent the week doing my best not to think about Claudine Hainault, an effort that proved futile. I could not help but notice her every time I took year thirteen; how she always sat alone, absorbed in her work; how she never volunteered to answer questions, though I knew full well from the standard of her written work that she had the answers; how, from time to time, she would catch my eye and smile. Her smile, at these times, seemed at odds with her general air of sadness.

  At lunchtime I was staring out of the staff room window when I noticed a knot of kids gathered in the corner of the schoolyard. There were about six of them, confronting a single girl.

  I rushed out and crossed the tarmac. The group, mainly girls, was taunting Claudine. She faced them, cursing in French.

  “That’s quite enough!” I called. “Okay, break it up.” I sent the ringleaders off to visit the head-teacher and told the others to scarper.

  “But we were just telling Claudine that she’s going to die!” one of the girls said in parting.

  When I turned to Claudine she had her back to me and was staring through the railings at the distant speck of the Onward Station. I wanted to touch her shoulder, but stopped myself.

  “Are you alright?”

  She nodded, not looking at me. Her long blonde hair fell to the small of her back, swept cleanly behind her ears. When she finally turned and smiled at me, her expression seemed carved from ice, imbued with fortitude.

  That afternoon I remained at school an extra hour, catching up on some marking I had no desire to take home. It was dark when I set off, but at least I wasn’t trapped behind the school bus, and the lanes were free of traffic. A couple of miles from school, my headlights picked out a quick, striding figure, silhouetted against the snow. I slowed down and braked, reached over and opened the passenger door.

  She bent her knees and peered in at me.

  “Claudine,” I said. “What on earth are you doing walking home? Do you realise how far…?”

  “Oh, Mr. Morrow,” she said. “I missed the bus.”

  “Hop in. I’ll take you home.”

  She climbed in and stared ahead, her small face red with cold, diadems of melting snow spangling her hair.

  “Were you kept back?” I asked.

  “I was using the bathroom.”

  I didn’t believe her. She had missed the bus on purpose, to avoid her classmates.

  We continued in silence for a while. I felt an almost desperate need to break the ice, establish contact and gain her confidence. I cleared my throat.

  “What brought you to England?” I asked at last.

  “My mother, she is English,” she said, as if that were answer enough.

  “Does your father work here?”

  She shook her head minimally, staring straight ahead.

  I concentrated on the road, steering around the icy bends. “Couldn’t you have phoned your mother to come for you?” I said. “She does drive?” Private transport was a necessity this far out.

  “My mother, she is an alcoholic, Mr. Morrow,” she said with candour. “She doesn’t do anything.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.” I felt myself colouring. “Look,” I said, my mouth dry, “if you don’t want to catch the bus in future, I’ll drive you home, okay?”

  She turned and smiled at me, a smile of complicity and gratitude.

  I was aware of the pounding of my heart, as if I had taken the first irrevocable step towards founding a relationship I knew to be foolhardy but which I was powerless to prevent.

  I looked forward to our
short time together in the warmth of my car at the end of every school day. I probed Claudine about her life in France, wanting to know, of course, why she was not implanted. But with an adroitness unusual in one so young, she turned around my questions and interrogated me. I found myself, more often than not, talking about my own past.

  At one point I managed to steer the conversation away from me. “I’ve been impressed with the standard of your work,” I said, aware that I sounded didactic. “Your grades are good. What do you plan to study at university?”

  She wrinkled her nose. “Oh, I thought perhaps philosophy. I’m interested in Nietzsche and Cioran.”

  I glanced at her. “You are?”

  She smiled. “Why not?” she replied. “They seem to have all the answers, I think.”

  “Do they?” I said, surprised. “I would have thought that a young girl like you…”

  We came to a halt at the end of the track leading to her house, and the sudden silence was startling. She stared at me. I could see that she had half a mind to tell me not to be so patronising. Instead she shook her head.

  “Life is awful, Mr. Morrow,” she said. “It always has been. And it hasn’t improved since they arrived. If anything, it has made things even worse.”

  Tentatively, I reached out and took her hand. I wondered for a second if I had misjudged the situation completely; if she would react with indignation and fright, or even report me.

  “If there’s anything I can do to help…” I said. Did she realise, in her teenage wisdom, that my words were just as much a cry for help as an offer of the same?

  She smiled brightly, filling me with relief. “Thanks, Mr. Morrow. It’s nice to be able to talk to someone.” She climbed out and waved to me with a mittened hand before setting off down the farm track.

  That night I set out to get seriously drunk. I placed three bottles of claret on the coffee table before the fire and sat in the darkness and drank. I would be lying if I claimed that I was trying to banish the painful memories of Caroline that Claudine stirred in me. More truthfully, I wanted to banish the knowledge of the failure I had become through inaction and fear. A lonely man has the capacity for self-pity so much greater than his ability, or desire, to change the circumstances that brought about such self-pity in the first place.

  I was drinking because I realised the futility of trying to seek solace and companionship from a mixed-up eighteen year-old schoolgirl.

  I awoke late the following day, lost myself in a book for a couple of hours, and later that afternoon watched the live match on television. Leeds had a returnee playing up front, but after the year’s lay off he had yet to find his previous form, and the game ended in a dull nil-nil draw. At six, as a new snowfall created a pointillistic flurry in the darkness outside, I started on the half bottle of claret remaining from the night before.

  I was contemplating another drunken evening when I heard a call from outside and seconds later a frenzied banging on the front door.

  Claudine stood on the doorstep, wet, bedraggled, and frozen. She began as soon as I pulled open the door, “She has fallen and hit her head. The lines are down and I can’t call the ambulance. We don’t have a mobile.”

  “Slow down,” I said, taking her hand and pulling her across the threshold. “Who’s fallen?”

  “My mother. She was drinking. She fell down the stairs. She is unconscious.”

  She was wearing a thin anorak, a short skirt, and incongruously bulky moon-boots. Her legs were bare and whipped red from the frozen wind.

  “I’ve a mobile somewhere.” I hurried into the lounge, dug through the cushions of the settee for the phone, and called an ambulance.

  Claudine watched me, teeth chattering. With her hair plastered to her forehead, and her bare knees knocking, she looked about twelve years old.

  I took her hand, hurried her from the house to my car. She sat in silence as I drove past the reservoir and turned down the track to her house.

  She had left the front door wide open in her haste to summon help. I rushed inside. “In the lounge,” Claudine said. “Through there.”

  The lounge was a split-level affair, with three steps leading from the higher level to a spacious area with a picture window overlooking the water. Claudine’s mother sprawled across the floor, having tumbled and struck her head on the edge of a wrought-iron coffee table. She was a thin, tanned woman with bleached-blonde hair. In her unconscious features I saw the likeness of Claudine, thirty years on.

  The reek of whisky, spilt from the glass she had been carrying, filled the room.

  I rolled her onto her side and did my best to staunch the flow of blood from her forehead, noticing as I did so that she, unlike her daughter, was implanted.

  The ambulance arrived fifteen minutes later. The paramedics examined Claudine’s mother, then eased her onto a stretcher. I watched them load her into the back of the vehicle, my arm around Claudine. One of the medics asked Claudine if she wanted to accompany her mother in the ambulance.

  “I’ll take her in the car,” I said before she had time to reply.

  The ambulance backed up the track and raced, blue light flashing, down the lane into town. I made for the car.

  Behind me, Claudine said, “I don’t want to go.”

  “What?”

  She stood, pathetic and frozen, in the snow. She shook her head. “I don’t want to go to the hospital. I’ll stay here.”

  “On your own?”

  She gave an apathetic shrug.

  “Look… there’s a spare room at my place. You can stay there until your mother’s released, okay?”

  She stared at me through the falling snow. “Are you sure?”

  “Go get some clothes and things. And lock the door. I’ll be waiting here.”

  I climbed into the car and watched as the lights in the house went out one by one. Claudine appeared at the front door, carrying a holdall and fumbling with a key ring. She climbed into the passenger seat and I set off up the track, turned right and continued along the lane until we reached my place.

  I showed Claudine to the bathroom, and while she showered and changed I prepared a simple pasta dish. I had experienced a rush of adrenalin while attending to her mother and waiting for the ambulance, and I realised that something of the anxiety was with me still. My hands were shaking as I set two places at the table. I went over and over what I would say during dinner.

  I was wondering what was taking her so long when I heard a voice from the lounge. “This is really a beautiful place.” There was a note of surprise in her voice, as if she thought that the domicile of a washed-up forty year-old teacher would prove to be an inhospitable dump.

  I crossed the kitchen and stood in the doorway, watching her as she moved around the lounge. She was barefoot, dressed in flared jeans, which were back in fashion, and a white T-shirt that had either shrunk in the wash or was designed to reveal a strip of slim stomach.

  She paused before the photographs of Caroline on the wall. She looked at me.

  “My wife,” I said.

  She said, casually, “I didn’t know you were married.”

  “I’m not,” I said. “Any longer. She died in a car accident two years ago.”

  She winced, ever so slightly. “Before they came?” she asked.

  “Just a month before,” I said.

  I joined her and stared at the photograph. Caroline smiled out at me. “She looked like a lovely person,” Claudine said.

  I nodded. “She was.”

  As if she feared that the subject might move us on to the reason why she was not implanted, Claudine drifted across the room to inspect the bookshelves.

  I returned to the kitchen and served dinner.

  We chatted as we ate, going over things we’d talked about before, school, local attractions, novels and films we admired.

  “You can phone the hospital later,” I said at one point. “I’ll drive you over tomorrow if you like.”

  She shook her head, not meeting
my gaze. “It doesn’t matter. I’m not that bothered. She’ll come back when she’s better.”

  I paused. “What happened between you two?” I asked at last.

  She smiled up at me. She was so pretty when she smiled; then again, she had a certain sullen hauteur that was equally as attractive when she deigned not to smile.

  “Oh, we have never got on,” she said. “I was always my father’s favourite. I think she was jealous. They fought a lot—it might have been because of me. I don’t know.”

  “Are they separated?”

  Claudine looked at me with her oversized brown eyes. She shook her head. “You might have heard of him—Bertrand Hainault? He was a philosopher, one of those popular media intellectuals you don’t have over here, I think.”

  I shook my head. “Sorry. Not up on philosophy.”

  “My father took his life last year,” she said quietly. “He and mother were fighting constantly, but I think it was more than that… I don’t know. It was all so confusing. I think it might have been a protest, too—a protest at what they were doing.”

  Something caught in my throat. “He wasn’t implanted?”

  “Oh, no. He was opposed to the whole process. He argued his position in televised debates and in a series of books, but of course no one took any notice.”

  Except you, I thought, beginning at last to understand the enigma that was Claudine Hainault.

  She changed the subject, suddenly brightening. “I’ll help you with the dishes, then can we watch a DVD?”

  Later we sat on the settee, drank wine and watched a classic Truffaut. Claudine curled up beside me, whispering comments on the film to herself. She fell asleep leaning against me, and I watched the remainder of the movie accompanied by the sound of her breathing and the pleasant weight of her shampooed head against my shoulder.

  Rather than wake her, at midnight I carefully lowered her to the cushions and covered her with a blanket. In the pulsing blue light from the TV, I sat for a while and watched her sleeping.

  In the morning I was woken by the unfamiliar sound of someone moving about the house. Then the aroma of a cooked breakfast eddied up the stairs. I had a quick shower and joined Claudine in the kitchen. She was sliding fried eggs and bacon onto plates. The coffee percolator bubbled. She could hardly bring herself to meet my eyes, as if fearing that I might consider this rite of domesticity an unwelcome escalation of the intimacy we had shared the night before.