by Adam Thorpe
‘There’s only one way,’ growled my uncle, trying to turn the steering-wheel for her. The tyre scraped the kerb and the gears sounded exactly as though they were saying ‘Toronto’, the car juddering so much that the St Christophe above the dashboard danced about like a pop star. Then we stopped dead.
‘What are you up to?’
‘I’m parking,’ replied my mother, staring straight ahead. ‘I’m practising parking. I would like to drive without being ordered about, Alain.’
I could feel my heart beating in my lip where I’d squashed it. I felt it with my tongue.
My uncle opened his door slightly and looked down at the kerbstone.
‘You’ve not left a gap for the broom,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to leave a gap for a broom or the bloody gutter can’t be swept and you’ll fail the test.’
I wasn’t sure whether he was being serious or not. He just carried on looking down at the gutter while my mother started the engine again. His smoke was being pulled out through the open door. I felt bad saying what I’d said.
It wasn’t brought up again, but there was an ‘atmosphere’ for several days. I practised my two lovers kissing on the bench, but it looked stupid in the mirror and I cricked my neck, watching myself. Then suddenly my mother talked about Nicolas as if we were back in the car and only a few seconds had passed.
‘He’s in a special home in St Denis, Gilles.’
We were sitting at the kitchen table, just the two of us. Before doing my homework I always had a cup of chocolate and a madeleine. She would usually sit with me, and we would share each other’s news. Her news would be more interesting on the two days she went out to work: I liked the stories of the deaf-and-dumb charity, the peculiar people that worked there.
‘Where’s St Denis?’
‘The other side of Paris.’
‘Where, exactly? Which special home?’
‘The Ste Thérèse. It’s a special hospital.’
‘Ste Thérèse?’
‘Yes, why? It’s not unusual.’
This made me feel better. I imagined the hospital as a sort of giant Ste Thérèse, welcoming Nicolas in under her cloak.
‘So I have visited, Gilles. On my own. Buses and the métro, it takes ages to get there. It’s rather upsetting.’
‘Well, that’s normal. It’s a dustbin,’ I muttered, not wanting to show I felt better about it.
‘It’s a what?’
‘We’ve thrown him away, haven’t we? We’ve just thrown him away.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, dear. He gets specialised treatment—’
‘What, tied to the bed?’
‘Certainly not. He’s in a cot, anyway. This isn’t Africa. Really, Gilles, if you want to upset yourself then go ahead, I’ll take you.’
‘Why should it be so upsetting?’
She pulled a face and her glasses slipped down her nose. They were new, with black oval rims; they reminded me of the Lone Ranger’s mask but my uncle thought it made her look like Nana Mouskouri. She pushed them back up with her finger and sighed.
‘I do appreciate your caring about Nicolas. It’s what a good Christian should feel. His soul is the equal of ours, it’s just his physical part that isn’t right.’
‘So?’
‘So, I’ll take you.’
Of course, she was right: seeing him did upset me.
The home, which took two hours to get to by bus and métro, was a grey stone building the other side of a huge building site. A flyover passed very close, its thick supports covered in rude graffiti. We had to pass underneath the flyover to get from the station to the home; it was embarrassing walking past the rude drawings and words. A large hut had been built underneath the flyover; outside it stood a queue of people in old coats waiting for soup. Everything stank of rotten vegetables and wee, and we walked as quickly as we could past the queue.
The day was cold with little clouds hurrying overhead in a blue sky, but it still felt gloomy when we came out from under the flyover. A big bonfire was pouring out disgusting fumes on the building site. It was worse than the worst bits of Bagneux. It felt as if no one really lived here, despite the traffic rumbling overhead and a large brasserie smelling of chips on the corner.
We’d stopped to work out the way. My mother said that the building site hadn’t been there last time, but I wondered if she hadn’t come here at all.
We followed the yellow arrows between narrow fences, picking our way over mud. We came out among heaps of breeze-blocks and a group of Arab workers smoking on a girder. They grinned at us under their hard hats. The other side of a chicken-wire fence there was a huge stretch of mud with planks thrown about as if something had collapsed.
On the far side of this mud was a wall of grey concrete the size of a cliff, stretching either way as far as the eye could see. It was punched with rows and rows of square holes; it reminded me of graph paper, and somehow looked as thin.
‘More flats,’ said my mother.
The home was to our left, facing this mammoth unfinished block of flats. There was a home-made sign to it, hanging on the chicken-wire fence. It just said Hôpital.
‘It’s not just an ordinary hospital,’ my mother said, glancing at me, as if it was better that it wasn’t.
I shrugged. In fact, I had butterflies in my stomach.
‘I suppose they’ll plant gardens,’ she went on, as we stumbled over planks towards the main entrance of the home.
I counted twelve floors in the new flats.
‘They ought to turn it the other way up,’ I said. ‘It’d be better as a skyscraper.’
My mother laughed – she didn’t often laugh at my jokes.
‘An extremely tall skyscraper, dear,’ she said.
The home was stranded on its own, as if bombs had fallen either side. The end wall showed a sort of X-ray of the building next to it that had been demolished: its roof was a giant red circumflex, three-quarters of the way up. The lines that looked like a railway junction were the old chimneys. There were squares of flowery wallpaper and fireplaces in midair, and I could tell where the bathroom was: a pink patch of tiles, high up. The sun came out and made it all very clear, with the light slanting across. My mother had to take my hand to urge me on, forgetting I was too old for hands. I wondered who had lived there, and where they had gone to.
We went in under a sign that said Hôpital Ste Thérèse d’Avila in black plastic letters that stuck out. That wasn’t the right Ste Thérèse, and I felt cheated – as if this new Ste Thérèse had tricked me. I imagined her as very haughty and all in black. We gave our names at the desk and waited for a few moments in a brown room with no pictures on the walls and a glass table with out-of-date magazines. The building-site thumped away outside. The smell here was more medical than Carole’s home. There was only one other person in the room, a man with a long jaw whose mouth stayed open the whole time. He was dressed in a leather jacket, with greasy hair piled up on top of his forehead. A nurse came in and he asked her a question; his Parisian accent was so thick I couldn’t understand it.
‘Who was he?’ I asked, when he’d left with the nurse.
‘A father, I suppose,’ said my mother. ‘Nice to see them playing their part. Makes a change. Mostly they just run off.’
‘Run off?’
‘A lot of them do, dear,’ she said, twitching her nose. ‘We live in a very imperfect world.’
My face stared back at me, twice over, in the glass of her Nana Mous-kouri spectacles. My face was always younger-looking than I felt, although I didn’t really feel thirteen. I turned away and picked up a tatty magazine from 1965, thinking about mothers and fathers and babies, pictures running through my head like on TV when the screen ‘hold’ goes and flattened shapes and faces move up and up and up and up. There was an article in the magazine about a book called In 1990. I was sure the world would be better by then, if not completely perfect; I started to read the article out to my mother.
‘In 1990, we learn, there
will be 80 million French people, our average height will be 1m 80, we will drive at 120 kilometres an hour in 14 million cars, we will enter our homes and offices through automatic sliding doors and we will be telephoning each other on little transmitter-receivers resembling walkie-talkies, which will fit into a pocket like a packet of cigarettes.’
‘Goodness me, dear.’
‘They’ll have a screen on them, it says, so you can see the person you’re phoning,’ I added, but I could tell she wasn’t listening.
We were called, after half an hour, by a male nurse with teenage spots (though he looked in his twenties) and with what my mother said was an Ardennes accent. Part of her mother’s family came from the Ardennes, she told the nurse, as we went up the concrete stairs. The nurse was polite, but obviously couldn’t care less. We were led into a long ward, much longer than either of Carole’s. It was lined with cots.
‘Don’t look too closely,’ my mother said.
This made me look closely, of course. Strange beings inhabited the cots: alien-looking heads, some of them glistening wet, with weird arrangements of arms and legs – weird sizes and shapes and smells.
By the time I got to Nicolas’s cot, I felt sick and dizzy. It was too hot in the room: the high windows were closed and the radiators were huge. There was a sheet of paper attached to the end of the cot with a butterfly clip, but I couldn’t understand what it said: it looked like the form clients filled in when they bought a vacuum cleaner.
I bent over the cot, next to my mother. A female nurse had replaced the male one; she was dressed in the same blue as the ward’s curtains and had a clipboard tucked under her arm.
‘Good morning, Madame Gobain! How are you? And is this Nicolas’s brother?’
My mother had visited before, obviously.
The nurse seemed tired as she and my mother talked. Nicolas wasn’t easy to make out, in fact. He was on his tummy, his head resting on some towelling material that he’d made gummy with green stuff from his nose. The smell of his nappy was mixed up with talc. I realised with a shock that his eyes were open. I knelt down to be at their level, grinning through the bars of the cot next to a jingly plastic Minnie to go with his squeezy toy. I tapped the Minnie to make him notice me. Tling! Tling! Tling! His eyes wouldn’t meet mine: they were dead, or as if the eyeballs had been put in the wrong way round and he was staring into himself. They were still very blue, though, a weird pale blue.
The nurse told me to ‘mind’ and lowered one side of the cot. We could touch him, now, gently, but not pick him up, not hold him. My mother stroked his back, saying businesslike things to the nurse – asking when he fed, how much, whether he responded, whether he cried. The nurse answered nicely while all the time looking over at the rest of the ward, as if the other nurse there might call her at any moment. I stroked Nicolas at the neck, just where his curly hair met the top of his babysuit. My favourite place, very soft and private. I imagined God giving prizes, during your life, for being without sin – and that my prize was having Nicolas normal. But I’m not without sin, I thought: no one is. It’s almost impossible to be sinless, unless you’re like Nicolas. God could just give me this prize out of the kindness of His heart.
Nicolas gave a little start and burped, seeming to reflect on the burp as his mouth stayed open. Otherwise he didn’t react at all to us being with him, his own mother and his own brother.
‘He can’t see very well,’ said the nurse, making a note on her clipboard and smiling.
We didn’t stay very long with Nicolas, perhaps half an hour. I became very used to the ward in that time, as if I had been there a lot. Even the horrible smell faded after a few minutes.
Suddenly, I felt a new sense of confidence come into me. I was leaning with one elbow on the cot’s side like a man in a bar. The nurse was talking with my mother about how many times they turned him over. I felt very grown up. The big brother. I’m thirteen, I said to myself. I’m feeling thirteen. I’m nearly going to be in long trousers.
‘Excuse me, is he like this all the time?’ I asked the nurse, breaking in.
She squinted at me with tired eyes.
‘Like what?’
‘Well, really calm,’ I said, in a high little voice I didn’t mean.
The nurse chuckled, glancing at my mother.
‘I’m not sure calm’s the right word, young man!’
My mother chuckled back and I felt stupid.
I looked down at Nicolas. Of course he wasn’t calm. He was dead, that’s what he was. He was like a dead rock floating in outer space, with the lamps hanging from the ceiling above him like flying saucers. And then I saw that he had a bruise next to his eye, in the same place as before. It was green and brown. He was still hitting himself. He was so dead he couldn’t even work out what pain was.
Then I had an idea. I knelt down and blew on his face.
‘He likes that,’ said the nurse, as if surprised.
He was stirring. A sort of smile came onto his mouth. His blue eyes looked out, as if swivelled round the right way.
‘He likes the wind,’ I said.
‘He doesn’t go out, really,’ said the nurse, as I carried on blowing very gently. ‘Maybe when it’s warmer. What we need is a garden.’
I blew on him. He liked it.
I knew I didn’t want to visit him again, though. Or not for a long time. Maybe a year. Instead, I decided I’d communicate by telepathy, sending him messages every evening in bed and asking God to blow on his face – nice, warm, divine breezes. My mother had been going once a month, in fact: whenever she’d said she’d been shopping in Paris, she’d been visiting Nicolas. A lie, really. Well, it was her son.
‘A white lie,’ she called it, in the church at St Denis that she took me to visit after the home.
We were standing in front of the tomb of King Dagobert. Men in boats on little marble waves floated above the king, who was lying in almost the same position as Nicolas. Papa had never come along as he was ‘too busy’, she told me.
‘You know poor little Nicolas won’t live very long, certainly not to twenty. I would like to have him baptised properly in our church but the nurse says he has a fragile little heart, it’s not very well made, the shock of the water might kill him. That’s why we couldn’t pick him up, dear, he trembles all over unless it’s a nurse he knows – from the smell, apparently. There’s a priest who comes to the home regularly. I didn’t want you to get too attached. That’s why I didn’t tell you about my visits. I probably should have done.’
My mother was blinking a lot. Dagobert slept on, clutching his pillow. His song was going round and round in my head, its quick words tumbling through in the voice of the man on my old gramophone record.
‘Yes, I probably should have done. It wasn’t right, what I did. I should have told you. You’ll have to forgive me, Gilles.’
I grunted: I hadn’t ever said I was cross with her, anyway.
‘We can’t always know what’s right, in our miserable position,’ she said, copying last Sunday’s sermon.
She went quiet. I wondered if, underneath the stiff robes, Dagobert’s knickerbockers were really inside out.
‘He’s still hitting himself,’ I said. ‘There was a bruise.’
‘I know, dear. I hoped you wouldn’t notice.’
The métro was stuffy, full of people who looked as if they were up to no good, some of them very shabby-looking, others like robbers or murderers in leather jackets and oiled, quiffed hair ten years out of date. I had hardly ever taken the métro before – not even with my sister; the one or two times we had taken it, we’d jumped the barrier. A man punched our tickets, leaving little holes in them, and I thought of the Serge Gains-bourg song my uncle kept humming. It was like a wedding, around the man’s feet. The smoke in the carriage stung my eyes, it was even thicker than in a cinema. I realised with a shock that I was the only person wearing short trousers: a boy my age was wearing jeans. Or perhaps he was a very young-looking fourteen. I covered m
y knees with my hands. I had put on my best socks but they were embarrassingly bright and patterned.
‘By the way,’ my mother said a bit later, in a drawn-out way, as if she’d been storing it up all day, ‘your sister might say some very wicked things to you, Gilles. You must always remember that she doesn’t mean it.’
We were walking from the station to the house, Bagneux’s roads and streets feeling slightly out of joint after the trip.
‘You mean, she might call me names and stuff? I don’t mind—’
‘No, other things. To do with the family. I can’t repeat them. Let’s just ask the good Lord to bring her out of this awful shadow as soon as possible. It’s so awful being mad, because you don’t know what you’re saying. Or maybe it’s the Devil whispering in your ear. Because you’re mad, you see, you can’t tell his voice from your own. Because you’re mad.’
I nodded. I had the feeling that something peculiar was happening, though I couldn’t think what. An old man was bent over, stroking a poodle. We passed him and said good day.
‘He’ll raise an outcry,’ he said, pointing to the poodle.
We smiled and kept on walking. An old woman with a stick came slowly towards us. I made sure I passed her on the outside, even though there wasn’t much space, or I’d have been told off for bad manners.
‘You mustn’t visit her on your own.’
‘Why should I?’
‘Well, it’s not so far from the school, is it? You might suddenly get it into your head, Gilles.’
‘I can’t. I’d miss the bus.’
‘It would stir her up too much,’ she went on, not hearing me. ‘She might say very silly or wicked things that she doesn’t mean because it goes round and round in her poor head when it isn’t true. Like a film. The thing is, she has her treatment in the morning from Monday to Saturday and she’s not altogether right in the afternoon and sometimes even in the evening. That’s why we see her on Sundays.’
‘I thought the treatment was supposed to make her feel better?’
‘It will, Gilles, if we’re patient. The world wasn’t made in one day.’
A girl in high heels and a very short skirt turned in front of us and started walking back the way she’d come, muttering to herself. Her hair curved down to her chin and was all shiny like a doll’s. She passed between us and left her thick scent in my mouth and nose, as if she’d sprayed the air. She was muttering something about ‘beggars’. None of this was really very peculiar, but it felt peculiar. The simple things my mother was saying – they felt peculiar, too.
