by Adam Thorpe
Her hand rested on my leg, then squeezed it.
‘Don’t you go making a hash of your life, dear. That’s all I ask.’
She got up and went out of the door, leaving the book on my desk. The cut-out woman pointed at it, smiling with her stupid blue smile.
I stayed in the same position, not even picking at my nails. I felt Jesus and the Virgin Mother were looking down on me and shaking their heads sadly. He can’t even comfort his own mother, they were saying. He can’t even touch her. He’s lost to us.
I didn’t feel like reading the rest of the story, even though I wanted to know what happened with Swanilda and the mechanical doll. The book was somehow dirty, now. The stains my mother had made were like a spotty disease on its cover.
I lay back and batted the inflatable chair on my hands and forehead as if it was a giant ball, turning it all over in my mind. Tac tac tac tac. If the chair hit the ground, the whole area would be annihilated. My mother was obviously very worried about Carole. She might do ballet in the nude again. The chair rolled off my head and onto the floor.
No-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o!
A massive explosion ripped up the whole house, the whole of Bagneux, the whole of Paris, the whole of France, the whole of Europe, the whole of the world, the whole of the universe.
Hardly any of the story was clear in my head, now – and I hadn’t even finished it. I grabbed the inflatable chair again and held it over my face, turning the ceiling into an alien planet’s orange sky. Jocelyne knew so much more than me, about everything. I was a savage, in fact. She would laugh at me again. Even if I went along to the show, sitting in a cloud of posh scent with her fur-coated mother and leftie father with the connected eyebrows, she would laugh at me afterwards because I wouldn’t say the right things. My head was as empty as the inflatable chair. I pressed my face against its space-age smell. You could kill yourself like that. Suffocate.
I went downstairs when I was called, though with a slow, heavy tread like a gangster’s. I helped my mother clean the glass bowls of the lamps, avoiding her red eyes. She pretended nothing had happened and talked about church summer camps, whether I might be interested in going to one in the Auvergne.
‘I hate summer camp.’
‘You’re older, now. There’s canoeing and camping and outdoor sports—’
‘Anyway, it’s too cold and wet. I can’t think about summer camp.’
‘Gilles,’ she said, ‘there are so many things you could be interested in.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Lots of interesting things you could be interested in.’
There was a pause.
‘Like what?’
‘Not just outdoor things, if you don’t like those. Stamps, postcards, carpentry, like that man on the television who makes toys. We must get you a pen friend. Père Oliven was saying there’s a Tunisian boy who would like to correspond, not a Muslim of course—’
‘You know,’ I said, ‘that Carole had to be tranquillised?’
‘Yes, dear.’
‘No, I mean, was it because she wanted to dance again? I mean, without any clothes on?’
‘Maybe, dear. I don’t know.’
She carried on wiping the glass bowl of the lamp.
‘You must have asked, Maman.’
‘You know what I said in the bedroom,’ she said. ‘Everything’s muddled in her head.’
‘I’m not going to show her the book.’
‘Good.’
‘Is the home really a lunatic asylum, in fact, Maman?’
She didn’t answer. There was only the squeak of the cloth on the glass. The silence made my question ring in my head.
‘There are so many things for a healthy young growing boy like you to interest himself in,’ she went on. ‘There’s a fencing club in the gym, starting at your age. There’s something called judo, too. That looks interesting. Or pole vaulting.’
I slowly shook my head, acting despair.
‘You’re interested in the Olympics, dear. You’re very interested in the Olympics, for instance.’
Later, after lunch, I phoned Christophe to organise a rendezvous, then cycled out to our mini-republic. I was desperate to run about, to scream and shout and run as fast as I could.
I had a bad surprise, though.
I couldn’t get in. A chain with a huge padlock hung on the gate, the gap in the corrugated-iron sheets blocked up with a square of bolted metal. A painted sign on a long board tied to the top of the gate said Défense d’Entrer and two smaller metal ones announced that it was Private Property. I felt sick, as if I’d swallowed a disgusting medicine.
Christophe buzzed up on his mobilette. He yanked at the chain and kicked the gate. It made huge clanging noises.
‘That greasy bastard with the torch,’ Christophe said. ‘He looked all innocent, didn’t he? Him and his fucking trumpet.’
‘We’ll just have to find another way in, that’s all.’
The wall was high and topped with broken bottle-glass. I reckoned this was from when the SS were here, hanging and torturing: Christophe agreed. He rattled the gate in fury and the sheets of corrugated iron made a weird booming sound. There was never anybody on the little derelict street with its fans of cobbles, but I still glanced about anxiously. I tried to climb on his shoulders but couldn’t reach the top and then almost broke my neck.
‘Right, let’s look all the way round,’ I said, nursing my elbow.
We did, but there was no easy way in. Part of the old hospital disappeared behind run-down houses with hen-coops in their yards. The coops were constructed from old shutters, the hens poking about in litter. We worked out that one long section of dirty brick had to be the back wall of the main building; it had a few windows, all with heavy bars on them. We came back to the gate.
It was a horrible sensation, being kept out of somewhere we had supposed was ours for ever. We could see the top halves of the pine-trees over the wall: they seemed very far off, as if on a desert island or in a secret country.
We went back to Christophe’s to plot a strategy. His father was outside the shop, taking a chicken out of the new revolving spit-oven. He grinned at us, slapping the chicken into the greaseproof bag, making his usual joke when he saw us together:
‘Eh, big lumps, let you out of the dungeon, have they?’
Christophe used to answer back with things like, ‘No, we dug a tunnel,’ or ‘No, we killed the guards.’ These days he’d just walk past and say ‘Shuddup’ over his shoulder, with me grinning feebly next to him.
‘Shuddup.’
‘I’ve got a delivery at five, if you’ve not turned into an ape by then.’
‘Go hash your sausage,’ Christophe mumbled.
The cretinous cat met us in the hallway and stared with huge green eyes, as if we had just come from Mars.
‘She never bloody recognises me,’ said Christophe. ‘Stupid mangy rag.’
He stamped his foot and the cat shot off up the steep stairs, the lino on them so loose and shiny that they reminded me of a waterfall. His house was always dark, with a smell of meat from the shop, as if it was creeping in through the wall. You could only get to the kitchen through an L-shaped room full of huge wardrobes, sideboards with big keys sticking out of the locks, and an ancient butcher’s block covered in papers. The kitchen was small and there was no window, only a red-coloured pane that looked out onto an outhouse. You could see a mangle and a tin tub covered with cobwebs.
Christophe’s grandmother was in the kitchen, as usual. She sat on a wooden chair exactly like the ones in church. She would hardly speak, just suck her gums and give little groans. She always had a wine-stained glass sitting in front of her, but I had never seen any actual wine.
The old wireless was on as usual, crackling away on a shelf. Around the wireless were faded postcards of sunny, faraway places, pinned to the shelf like a café bar. The only light in the kitchen came from the bulb that dangled on a thick flex in the middle of the ceiling. The kitc
hen smelt a bit of lavatories, as did his grandmother, but Christophe liked to sit there rather than his room (which he had to share with his younger brothers). He would shout out information to her, sounding suddenly grown up.
‘Mamie, you’re going to tip over your glass!’
‘Mamie, sit up or you’ll get dizzy!’
I hardly saw his parents in the house; they were always working next door, winding up the shutters before I was awake and winding them down again while I was having my supper and then staying on inside to do the paperwork. The shop, although not modernised yet, was clean and bright, like at home. The house was dirty and dark.
We brewed some hot chocolate, discussing our strategy. Christophe’s grandmother made little noises. She had a black lace shawl draped around her shoulders.
‘We need a ladder,’ said Christophe. ‘Or a fretsaw. I tell you what, my Dad’s going to buy an electric saw for the shop soon, it’ll go through bone like butter.’
‘Bone’s not steel!’
‘I’ll bet it goes through steel, too.’
‘He won’t let you use it.’
‘Of course he won’t, the mean bastard, but that doesn’t stop us from using it.’
‘If it’s electric, we have to bring a generator with us,’ I said. ‘My grandad’s got an old generator from the war, it’s German, the Germans left it behind. I could mend it. If a good kick doesn’t do it.’
I was getting excited.
‘OK,’ Christophe said. He had a moustache of hot chocolate. ‘We need something to carry all this gear. My Dad’s van, I can drive it.’
‘OK.’
Mamie mumbled something. We ignored her.
‘We’ll meet at midnight. We can push the van until we’re out of earshot of the house, then drive it to your house.’
‘OK. But once we’ve cut through the chain, they’ll see it’s broken and mend it.’
‘Nah, that’s easy,’ he said, his voice a sudden squeak, ‘it was on this film, you just disguise the break with shoe-black, it’s no problem.’
Mamie said, very clearly, ‘It’s the climate.’
His younger brothers were playing outside, so we went upstairs and spent the afternoon working through a grown-up cousin’s stack of comics, most of them more than ten years old. They seemed like antiques, their paper furry and yellowing at the edges. There was a home-made bunk for the twins and Christophe now borrowed the top bed. I lay on the ordinary bed’s slippery coverlet and we turned the pages in silence.
We knew from sermons that reading comics made you into a cretin. You became ‘the putty of consumerism’. Comics, I decided, were even better when over ten years old. A picture of the Virgin Mother, with rosebud lips and watery eyes, hung crookedly behind my head. She seemed to be pleading with me to stop, but I could not stop. I finished one and started another like a chain-smoker, mainly because a lot of the strips had ‘A Suivre’ underneath, just at the most exciting bit.
Fortunately, Christophe’s cousin had hardly missed an issue. He’d been killed by a horse kicking him and then the farm had disappeared under a motorway and the mother had brought over the box of comics. There were bits of grass and seeds and things caught between the pages. Perhaps the cousin had first read them in a field, or in the barn. It was like Pompeii, which I dreamed of visiting one day.
Christophe’s long legs dangled from the top bunk. I showed him something in a Spirou from 1959. It was a full-page picture of ‘The Extraordinary Underground World of Paris’. The cut-away illustration showed heating pipes, an oval sewer, two access stairways, telephone cables, some huge concrete supporting pillars for buildings, a métro tunnel, a quarry, an inspection gallery, massive brick piers supporting the pillars, and a deep well. The street itself, and the cars and people and buildings in it, looked pathetic, on top of all that.
‘Jesus,’ said Christophe.
‘That would be a good way to get in. We could find the hospital’s old sewer or the heating pipes. Secret passage.’
‘Chic.’
I read, next to the picture, how there were two proper rivers flowing under the city, including one ‘which passes through the cellars of the Opéra’. I wondered if Jocelyne knew that. Probably not, I reckoned. I could mention it to her when we went to the performance of Coppélia, perhaps even take her along – the ballet school was probably very close to the Opéra – and go down to the cellars to view it. It must be full of giant black fish with luminous feelers and maybe even drowned ballerinas, their tutus up around their ears. I could really impress her, I thought. A flush of warmth went through my chest when I thought of Jocelyne, and my heart inflated. Oh yes, I could really impress her. All I needed now was to break my arm and have it in a sling. Perhaps I could pretend to break my arm and say I did it falling off a Vespa or tackling the robbers at our place, brushing the wound off and then wincing with pain as in the films after the cowboy hero gets winged by a bullet or an Apache arrow.
‘You OK, mate? Not having an epileptic fit?’
‘No,’ I said, my face snapped back to normal. ‘Just thinking.’
‘Plotting.’
‘I could get up on your shoulders,’ I suggested. My elbow had welded itself to the bolster. It hurt. I shifted onto my stomach with a loud creak of the bed. ‘To get in.’
‘Nah, we’ll get my Dad’s saw and stuff. You’ll see.’
Christophe yawned and went back to his reading. From the way he said it, I knew we’d never try, now.
It would be simple in a comic strip. The old military hospital coloured yellow, a single pale blue for the sky, the pine-trees the same green as the van on the grey road of the street, the gate and the corrugated iron in mauve, the chain in black. I saw us in our duffel-coats with our white balloons of talk and cottony clouds of thought (which I always read in a silent whisper), the saw giving out a jagged RRRRRRR, with a little bzzzzz for the generator, sweat-drops flying from our faces, the chain breaking in close-up with a bing, maybe one of us sneezing – A-HATCH! – and then, in the next box stretched right across the page, a huge question mark popping up from the masked man in a homburg hat under the pine-trees, about to uncover his loot, as the gate opens with a vvvvrrrrreeeek … Better than Buck Danny, I thought.
In real life, though, I knew that we were locked out of our secret place for good.
‘Maybe we should look for a tunnel, Christophe. Now.’
‘Yeah.’
He didn’t move, he was too deep in his reading. The cretinous cat came in a few minutes later and mewed, then squatted on one of the comics strewn over the floor and left a puddle. Our shouts had her flying off. Christophe said he wanted to kill it.
‘It’s not her fault,’ I pointed out.
‘So what? It’s a cretin. Its father is its brother. Imagine.’
‘Why should that make it a cretin?’
Christophe hesitated.
‘Well, it’s wrong, innit? If it’s wrong for humans, then it’s wrong for animals.’
‘Do you think God judges animals, then?’
We’d had a discussion about this at school with Jonquille. He said it was a very important question that great Christian thinkers had devoted much time to, and hinged on whether you believed animals had a soul. Some of us believed they did. Christophe, whose school wasn’t allowed even to mention such things, had only the old priest’s sermons in church to fall back on – and he never listened to them, anyway.
‘It’s nothing to do with God,’ he scoffed. ‘It’s scientific.’
‘Scientific?’
‘It’s not biologically natural, screwing with your mother. It makes cretins.’
‘With your mother? Ugh.’
‘Ugh, ugh,’ Christophe imitated, as if I was being girlish.
I flushed.
‘OK. So it makes cretins.’
I began to flush even more, triggered into it by the word ‘cretin’, by the idea flashing through me at the speed of light that Christophe might take my blush to mean that I was
thinking that Nicolas was a cretin because of me committing an unnameable sin – a sin so unnameable that I had never actually thought about it until this very moment, its horror crawling onto me with the sour smell of my mother’s nightdress first thing in the morning when she padded to the bathroom or prepared coffee in the kitchen next to me, her hair unbrushed and her eyes tiny and pink.
‘Not all cretins,’ Christophe continued, waving his hand about. ‘Some are just born like that. Obviously.’
‘Why does it, anyway?’ I said, in a gruff voice, pretending I couldn’t care less.
‘Biological. It’s not natural, is it? Your brother as your dad.’
He was looking at me out of the corner of his eye. My flush had begun to sink back into dampness. He wasn’t looking at me because of Nicolas. He probably hadn’t even remembered about Nicolas being a cretin: everyone had forgotten Nicolas. It was because my mother had married my father’s brother, that’s what it was. It was obvious. I knew this was allowed in the Bible – in fact, my mother had told me once that it was the duty of the dead husband’s brother to marry and thus care for his brother’s wife, to tend to his brother’s children. In Biblical times, anyway. But I also knew that it was unusual, even strange, stranger certainly than marrying your cousin, which is what my great-grandmother had done because she was deep in the Ardennes where it was even mistier and wetter than Bagneux.
‘It’s not natural,’ Christophe insisted, sitting on the edge of the top bunk. His long legs swung from side to side and made the frame creak. ‘Is it?’
‘Why are you asking me?’
‘I’m not asking.’
‘Shuddup about it, then,’ I said, threatening to shoot him with a pistol – aiming down my finger.
Christophe let off a few rounds with a submachine gun and I rolled off the bed with a cry, clutching my arm. I used the bed as cover to fire back. Tak tak tak tak tak tak! Christophe aimed wildly, making the noise through a pout of his lips that sent spittle flying.
‘You’re ripped apart,’ he shouted. ‘It’s an MG42. 1,200 rounds per minute—’
‘Nazi bastard!’
