No Telling

by Adam Thorpe

  Opening the drawer had released my uncle’s smell. There were no clues about anything, here. Not about the stupid lie, not about the robbery. My mother’s face, under a fan of white lace, stared at me from the photo in its gilt frame. She was smiling, happy and younger. Almost all I could remember of that important day was an old lady in the church turning to her friend in front of me and saying, ‘That’s all you need to rise from the dead.’ I was only six, of course.

  I closed the drawer and, after a bit more prying about, crept out of the room. I was not allowed into their bedroom, except in emergencies – and even then I had to knock. It was a rule I had obeyed on the surface, but every now and then I would go in when they were out and bounce on the huge bed. I had never pried about in their things before.

  It had started when I was on my way to bed, half an hour before. My mother had dozed off again on the sofa, perhaps because of the special pills she’d taken to calm her down. Her mouth was open and she looked as if she’d been strangled. I didn’t kiss her goodnight, not wanting to wake her, and left the television on. She was wearing new, bright-green slacks; I could smell their newness even without bending over her legs. She had kicked off her indoor sandals, and there was orange varnish on her toenails.

  On the way to my bedroom, at the foot of the stairs, I’d noticed the office door was open. I went in with my cocoa and stood by my uncle’s desk. Then I sat in the swivel chair behind the desk, squeaking it to and fro, my eyes wandering over my uncle’s things – the miniature vacuum cleaner, the Sylvia Lopez ashtray, the aluminium block with his name etched in: M. Alain Gobain. As if to remind himself. His weather chart was just a scrappy sheet of paper, this week, with the sentences scribbled on it in pencil. They were ones he’d used loads of times before. He’d stuck it on the pegboard with one drawing-pin, so it hung crookedly.

  I’d started to open the drawers. I can’t think why. Not all of them were locked. It was very exciting, opening them in secret. Most of them had files in and boring papers signed by Mademoiselle Bolmont for my uncle. Her signature was like the crests of a lot of rough waves. She used purple ink.

  In one drawer, peeping out from under a heap of scrap-paper and blotting-paper and long brown envelopes with plastic windows, was a magazine. It was a smaller size than usual, about the size of my exercise books, but quite thick. There were women in it – a lot of photographs of women under smart beehive hairdos, with thick black eyelashes and red lipstick. They were dressed in transparent nighties or black bras and suspenders and some of them were ‘topless’. They had huge fat bosoms and were lying on old-fashioned sofas or beds. One held a shoe and was hitting her partner on the bottom. The one being hit was only wearing a pair of frilly black pants and her bosoms hung right down. Another pair of topless women were standing together in the shower, hands on each other’s shoulders. Some of the photographs were in colour. The points on the bosoms were like red boils and stuck out more than my sister’s had.

  My heart had gone like a stewed pear.

  I’d put the magazine back, hiding it completely under the blotting-paper and scraps. I couldn’t stop myself looking in the bedroom drawers upstairs, after that. I’d even opened the wardrobe and stuck my hand in between each of my mother’s dresses and skirts and jackets and slacks, her shoes in rows underneath as if a row of women had been evaporated by a laser gun. There were clothes she never wore these days, the type of fancy Sunday dress with ribbons that Mademoiselle Bolmont would always have on. I recognised one of the dresses from a photograph of my mother taken in 1945, grinning with a glass in her hand and an American soldier in a crewcut next to her.

  Now I lay on my bed and wondered if I would confess to what I’d done. Just to be sure, I opened the drawer in my own room and took out the five sheets of paper that were my lists of sins. Confession was in three weeks’ time. Some people only had two lists and their priest still didn’t remember from the time before last, but I felt safer with five.

  I put List Three on my desk and added ‘Peeping in Other People’s Drawers’. This was the list I’d be using next, and I’d almost learnt it again by heart. If you were careful not to rustle it, you could take it in with you. The lists were two or three years old; my handwriting was embarrassingly childish on the sins I’d dreamed up first. I thought about the magazine with the topless women in it, but reckoned it safer not to mention it.

  I went to sleep imagining these women tucking me up in bed, the points on their bosoms sweeping past my nose. I was wounded in a battle and they were Sisters of Mercy, special Sisters of Mercy who never wore anything but black frilly slips. The points on their bosoms touched my nose as they bent over me, stroking my poor bandaged head. They were very holy.

  We went to visit Carole again on the Sunday, again without my uncle. He was very caught up with things, after the robbery.

  There was a problem, for instance, with the insurance company. The friendly insurance man with the big belly had told my uncle that the insurance would pay up. They had paid a little of it, and now there was a problem. If they didn’t pay the rest, we would have to ‘sell up’. This meant selling the house, its contents, everything in it down to my beermat collection. I wasn’t sure if this was a joke of my uncle’s, or serious: my mother didn’t want to talk about it. So my uncle was out a lot. When he was in, he spent most of the time booming away on the phone and filling the office with smoke.

  My mother was certainly not in a perfect state. The doctor had given her pills to calm herself down and these pills did something to her stomach which meant she kept having to go to the toilet. She’d had an argument about it on the phone with the doctor, who said it wasn’t the pills, it was the nerves. She ended up being quite rude to him and then felt bad afterwards – so bad that she had had to go to bed early and leave me to do my own supper.

  She missed Mass the next morning. She couldn’t go because there wasn’t a toilet in the church, not even for the priest. No church anywhere had a toilet. It was very hard for the older people, she said, especially during the long services at Easter and Christmas and on All Saints’.

  ‘Good Catholics don’t go to the toilet, you see.’

  ‘We’re good Catholics,’ I said.

  ‘Apparently not!’

  I didn’t mention the sink in the vestry. Some of the pupils in my catechism class had seen one of the older priests relieving himself in it. This, they said, was why all sinks in church vestries are positioned so low. So the priest can relieve himself in it.

  ‘You will faithfully promise not to tell your sister about our situation,’ my mother said, peering through the windscreen of the Frégate as if it was foggy and not a nice bright day.

  ‘I’m always having to promise not to say things,’ I complained.

  ‘Promise. Unless you want her restrained again.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘You do promise, Gilles, to think before you speak?’

  ‘Promise,’ I groaned.

  As we were walking up the home’s drive, I asked her what the doctors were doing to make Carole better.

  ‘Different treatments,’ she said. ‘I don’t know the details. But that’s why we visit the sanatorium on Sundays. She hasn’t had any treatment during the day. It’s her day of rest.’

  ‘I know that, Maman.’

  It annoyed me, her calling it a ‘sanatorium’ instead of a ‘home’.

  Carole had grown plumper during the week, it seemed to me, and they’d had to take off her rings. She smiled a lot and talked in a bright, chattery way. Her ‘friends’ stared at us in the ward, grinning or looking nervous. One of them, not that old but with very short white hair, started talking in a loud voice about how people club little innocent baby seals to death on the ice, going on and on and on. Carole said the woman was called Sonja and was ‘a bit batty’ and only talked about this one thing, as if she had a tape in her. She wrote letters to everyone about it, too – even General de Gaulle and the Queen of England.

  ‘I don’t e
ven notice, now,’ said Carole. ‘It’s always the same words in the same order. She does it about once a day for an hour.’

  ‘Maybe she’s a robot,’ I whispered.

  Carole laughed. It was good to see her laugh.

  We walked as usual around the grounds of the home, along its gravel paths wiggling between the bushes and trees. The sun shone through cloud on the wet leaves: some of them looked plastic. Carole wore her thick winter coat over her dressing-gown; the cord dangled below the coat’s hem, just like a tail.

  ‘Spring’s here,’ said my mother. ‘You can smell it in the air. Isn’t that nice? The shrubbery’s going to look very nice.’

  ‘Where’s Alain?’

  ‘I said, he’s terribly busy. He’s very sorry he couldn’t come. He sends his love.’

  ‘Did you say that, Maman? I don’t remember.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, dear,’ said my mother. ‘I’m forgetting everything, these days!’

  ‘How did you get here without Alain?’

  My mother told her, but in a strained voice, because she’d already told her last week about passing the driving test. Carole had even sat in the Frégate and then walked right round it, laughing at her reflection in the hubs.

  A woman with a trembling head passed us in her dressing-gown, looking around as if she had lost something.

  ‘She’s always out here,’ said Carole, ‘they can’t stop her coming out. Old Béatrice.’

  ‘It’s nice you’ve made so many friends, dear,’ said my mother.

  ‘I hate her,’ said Carole. ‘She’s a bitch. I hate everybody here.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said my mother.

  ‘Is Béatrice looking for something?’ I asked.

  ‘She steals,’ said Carole. ‘She looks in everybody’s drawers and takes things out here and buries them. She should be put on trial and shot.’

  ‘Oh no,’ said my mother. ‘Come on now, dear.’

  ‘Can’t they lock the drawers?’ I suggested, too quietly.

  There was an awkward silence between us as we scrunched along. Carole kept walking with small, careful steps just like last week. The half-sunlight made everything look as if it was underwater. I thought of the crocuses, whether they were still there. We must be quite near them, I thought, but the grounds confused me. There were little paths disappearing into leaves and shadows and beds that had just been dug. My mother suddenly held her stomach and sighed.

  ‘I think we should go in,’ she said.

  ‘Bored already?’ said Carole.

  ‘Well, I’m going to have to go in, if you’ll excuse me,’ my mother said. ‘Just for a moment.’

  ‘Go on, then,’ said Carole. ‘The toilets here are top-class.’

  ‘How will I find you?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Carole frowned, suddenly looking anxious. ‘I’m not—’

  ‘We’ll just be around here,’ I said, not wanting to go in myself. The air was full of a leafy, earthy smell that was the opposite of the inside world’s – especially the home.

  My mother went off in a hurry, leaving a powerful whiff behind her. Carole and I took a twisting path between shrubs. The shrubs had big shiny leaves spattered with yellow. They definitely looked plastic.

  ‘It’s a nice day,’ I said.

  She didn’t reply, and my throat went dry. I didn’t know what to say to her, on my own; I was afraid of saying the wrong thing and setting her off. Then she suddenly stopped by a huge tree with very low branches full of blue-grey needles.

  ‘That’s a something of Libya, I think,’ I said.

  She faced me, holding my shoulder.

  ‘They’ve cut my feet off.’

  ‘Have they?’

  ‘It’s OK, they don’t know that I’ve got a secret pair, they can’t see them. They’re made out of a special metal, a bit like copper but it’s the rarest metal in the world. What do you call copper, Gilles?’

  ‘Call it?’

  ‘Scientifically.’

  ‘An alloy, I think.’

  ‘Well, this isn’t an alloy, it’s pure. In fact, it comes from a meteorite but we don’t need to go into that.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘It’s my weapon against the world.’ She looked down at her feet. ‘You see? Even you can’t see the difference.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I can’t.’

  We walked on a bit. Carole was smiling to herself, holding on to me by my arm. Someone passed us but I didn’t see who, I was concentrating too much on not setting her off. It was like the exercise we did at school to help keep our backs straight: crossing the room with a book on our heads that was always just about to slide off. Carole’s feet had heavy flat shoes on, like an old woman’s, and her stockings were dark brown and rumpled. Her feet scrunched carefully next to me, I was aware of them coming in and out of her coat. I couldn’t stand the silence between us any longer.

  ‘I saw some nice crocuses here,’ I said.

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Somewhere round here.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Last week.’

  ‘You musn’t worry about me not having my real feet,’ she said, kindly. ‘It’s even better with my false ones. It’s part of the plan. If you’ve got to struggle against the whole world, you’re bound to have to sacrifice something. And then you’re stronger.’

  ‘Like Jesus,’ I said, in a happy way.

  She ignored me.

  ‘It’s because of the inner being, it doesn’t worry about flesh,’ she said.

  I recognised the bed of crocuses, suddenly. We’d approached them from a different direction. There was the statue with Infinité on its tummy, looking like a different one because it had its back to us: the half-nude woman seemed to be watching us over her shoulder.

  ‘We’re here,’ I said. ‘That’s funny. These are the crocuses I was talking about.’

  We looked at them together. They didn’t have the same effect on me as last week: some of them were drooping, with holes bitten out of their petals, or had withered to a brown shred between their leaves, like burnt-out candles. Others looked new, though. The crocus bed wasn’t over yet. That wasn’t the trouble.

  ‘They might cut your hand off, Gilles,’ Carole said. ‘I’ve got a feeling about it. The right hand, too. But in fact you’ll trick them. It runs in the family. You’ll grow a false one made out of the same very rare metal as I’ve got. It won’t look like a hand, though.’

  ‘Oh, that won’t trick them, then.’

  ‘It will, because that new hand, made out of that coppery stuff, although it’ll look like a sort of tool, will in fact be more powerful. The metal comes from outer space, although they’ll think it’s just copper. There aren’t many of us, you see. They’re telling me this information right now. I’m relaying it.’

  ‘Do your feet hurt, then?’ I said.

  I couldn’t think of anything else to say: deep down I wanted to believe her – that we were very special, connected to outer space, being talked to by kind aliens.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Only when I dance.’

  ‘I liked your dancing,’ I said, my heart starting to thump. ‘It’s a pity you stopped.’

  ‘I had to stop,’ she said. ‘They cut my feet off.’

  ‘Can’t you dance on your new feet made out of this rare metal stuff?’

  ‘Of course I can,’ she scoffed, ‘I can do anything I like on them! But every step I take actually sends out a special force locked up in the metal, a sort of wave. That’s part of the plan. To feed the world with these special waves from outer space. It’s too dangerous to dance, though. I can kill with it. It would overflow. I have to be careful.’

  ‘Kill?’

  She started to shake. I felt it in my arm. I was taking some of her weight, she was threatening to fall, to collapse. I tried to hold her but she was too heavy and she flopped onto her knees on the edge of the crocus bed. She stayed on her knees but curled up, her hands coming over her hair, her head on her stomach. She
hadn’t made any noise. A bird flapped off out of the shrub near us. Others were singing a lot in the milky sunlight. I didn’t know what to do.

  ‘Come on, Carole,’ I said.

  I crouched down next to her, my hand rubbing her back. She was completely locked tight, like a snail in its shell or a rolled-up woodlouse, her face hidden.

  I had set her off. I would be blamed. I had talked to her as if she was saying normal things, when in fact they were mad. I thought about getting help, but didn’t want to leave her. She was keeping her balance, squatting on her heels in a round ball. There was no way in, even when I parted her hair. All I could see was her ear, a bit shiny in the light and very small-looking.

  ‘It’s OK, Carole. Let’s go back, now.’

  There were tiny sounds from inside the ball, like a mouse had got in there. She sounded annoyed, rather than upset. I hoped she wasn’t crying. It didn’t look as if she was crying, inside there. Her coat was all rumpled up over her thighs, the bottom of it getting dirty on the ground.

  ‘C’mon. Please. Of course you shouldn’t dance. Please,’ I pleaded.

  The statue hadn’t moved in the middle: I kept thinking it was watching us over its shoulder.

  ‘Please, Carole.’

  The gravel crunched nearby and I looked up.

  ‘Trouble?’

  It was the woman with the trembling head, who stole things from drawers and buried them in the garden.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘She’s got upset.’

  The woman smelt like Roquefort cheese as she leaned over us, studying the matter.

  ‘You haven’t seen my ball, have you, dear?’

  ‘Fuck off, Béatrice,’ came a muffled voice from inside the ball.

  ‘I need it—’

  ‘Fuck off, Béatrice.’

  ‘All right, only asking.’

  ‘Just fuck off and go away, OK?’

  Carole slowly uncurled. The skin on her face was bright red and creased from being pressed against her arms. She stood up shakily, brushed her coat, then slipped her arm into mine again.