by Adam Thorpe
‘Don’t tell her,’ she whispered. ‘She’ll only betray us.’
We walked away from the woman as I was mumbling a thank-you to her. A cloud, almost black, had shoved itself in front of the sunlight. I was sure I’d be found out and blamed for the attack. My mother appeared around the corner, full of anxiousness.
‘There you are,’ she said. ‘I think we’re just about to get drenched.’
I did notice, now, how exaggerated Carole’s careful steps were. She wouldn’t be hurried. I supposed that if she went too fast, the energy would overflow and we’d all be washed away or electrocuted.
Heavy drops started hitting us just as we arrived at the porch. Inside, Carole and my mother talked all about the weather. I mentioned the thin air in Mexico City, how thin it would be for the Olympic athletes, but Carole wasn’t interested. She said she was tired and we left her. I was very relieved not to have been found out.
‘She’s definitely so much better,’ my mother said, driving back. ‘The nurse told me they’re using a treatment with a funny name, the person’s who invented it. You make them go to sleep and then as they’re waking up you stroke them, their hair and arms and hands and so on and keep saying nice soothing tender things, like mummies with their babies. Like Our Holy Mother with the newborn Saviour, stroking Him tenderly. You know what I think, Gilles?’
‘No.’
‘I think that’s what happens when you wake up into everlasting life. The angels stroke you out of your sleep, all tenderly.’
‘How do they make her go to sleep?’
‘Is it insulin? Is that what the nurse said? Could it be insulin? An injection?’
‘I wasn’t there,’ I said, imagining the angels bent over my father, their huge golden wings brushing his face and making him sneeze. I could almost picture his actual face, a bit older and more real than in the photograph on the sitting-room cabinet.
‘Apparently,’ I said, ‘if you meet an angel it’s sure you’re not going to become one.’
‘Really? Who told you that?’
‘Jonquille. Père Forain-Jonquet. At school.’
‘That won’t stop me trying,’ she muttered.
When we got back, I went up to my room and thought hard about Carole. She’d almost been normal, and then something had slipped. I shouldn’t have talked about dancing. The ballet book was on the floor and I wanted to throw it out of the window. Its shiny cover was ruined: the spots, where my mother had cried on it, had sort of swollen up from the wet.
I couldn’t stop myself looking at the photograph of the dancer in the middle of the Coppélia story, though. I wondered what she would look like just in her pants. I suddenly started to feel dizzy. I was sure she was making me go dizzy as a punishment, staring out at me like that with her big black eyes, smiling and not smiling at the same time – like the Mona Lisa on my mother’s plastic apron. Hypnotising me. Giuseppina Bozzacchi.
I had to shut the book and shove it under the bed.
That evening, I was left in the house alone for an hour while my mother went to church to light a candle so that God would notice, scratching his huge white beard and smiling down. My uncle was out with friends who knew someone who was almost head of the insurance company.
I waited a bit and then went into the office. The venetian blind hid me from the street, and I could put the light on and open the drawer and take out the magazine with no danger of being seen. There was so much saliva in my mouth, I wanted to spit.
Christophe had once shown me a page torn out of a magazine he had found in a dustbin. It showed a woman pulling down her black knickers to display her bottom. We had giggled over it for ages before burning it, and yellow flames shooting from the paper. It was the bitter smell of it burning that I now remembered.
My palms were so damp the magazine’s shiny paper stuck to them. I flicked through a few pages, stopping for a while at a woman kneeling on a rug in a crimson nightie you could see everything through. Her hair curled in front of her ears like Mademoiselle Bolmont’s. My heart was thudding in my throat. I found the pictures I knew from before and they were better than the last time. On the last page there was a blonde woman sitting completely nude, with her legs crossed, in a basket chair. It was on a posh green lawn and her bosoms were shiny. I almost closed my eyes so she went unclear and she became Mademoiselle Bolmont. Mademoiselle Bolmont could not cross her legs, though, and was not as thin on top.
Something fell out as I turned the pages. It was a ticket, one of those Shell ones you had to join with its other half to win a huge prize. We were over three months past the final date stamped on it: 16 December, 1967. Because my uncle did so much driving, he was always stopping at service stations: he told me that they even had cheap shops inside them these days, and machines serving refrigerated drinks. Perhaps he took the magazine with him for when he was bored, far away from home. His favourite film star was Marie Dubois, but she wasn’t pictured in the magazine.
I put the Shell ticket in my pocket and shoved the magazine back under the envelopes. I looked in the drawers of the old wooden filing cabinet in the corner, which my uncle kept meaning to get rid of. The drawers gave off a smell something like shoe-polish, although they were either empty or strewn with paper-clips and pencil-shavings and ticket-stubs and the ends of rubbers.
I sat in my uncle’s swivel chair, my elbows on his desk, and gazed for some time at the photograph of the French Petroleum Institute. It wasn’t as alive as before. The red-haired woman with the white bag looked a bit weird to me, now, because she wasn’t topless.
There were never any clues, I thought. Anyway, looking for them meant that I wasn’t one-hundred-per-cent certain about the stupid lie. Now I was certain. Nicolas was my little brother, not my nephew. The stupid lie was a stupid lie. If the stupid lie was true, then my parents and my sister would have lied to me, instead. It was like a seesaw, with the whole of Bagneux on one end and my family on the other. I was on my own in the middle.
I pictured my mother lighting the candle in the church: in my mind she wasn’t in her furry nylon coat and round mauve hat, but in a black dress and shawl, like Christophe’s grandmother. The shawl was over her head like a scarf. As she lit the candle, God’s invisible hand descended and squeezed her shoulder.
Thinking about church and God’s hand made me feel dirty and full of sin. I looked at my palms and was sure that the magazine’s colour had come off on my skin. It was because of the sweat. I ought to burn the magazine, I thought. I ought to burn the magazine right now. I asked God to forgive me. I spread my hands flat on the desk. I imagined myself coming home to my wife, Jocelyne, with some excellent news from work that made her smile and kiss me on the nose while our baby gurgled happily in the cot.
I laid my head on my arms and was woken up by the sound of the front door banging: I had dropped off for half an hour, without meaning to. My name was called and I came out of the office, blushing. My mother had that shiny, hypnotised look she always had when she came back from church – perhaps I had it, too, when I’d been to Mass. She wondered what I was doing in the office.
‘Thinking,’ I said.
‘Yes, I expect you’re doing a lot of that.’
She was removing her gloves. Then she took off her round hat and shook her hair: incense and hot wax and the coaly stink of the old stove in the aisle floated out of it in an invisible mist.
‘Like father, like son,’ she said.
‘Did my father think a lot?’
‘Never stopped. That was his trouble.’
‘It’s OK to think, Maman.’
‘Up to a point. Praying and doing is better.’
I blew a little snort. She caught it out of the corner of her eye and arched her eyebrows in annoyance.
‘You wait and see,’ she said. ‘Oh, you wait and see.’
She reminded me of Carole by the crocus bed, talking about her special feet of very rare metal from a meteorite. It was the way she looked, not the way she sounded. It was he
r eyes and her mouth. Carole will look like my mother when she’s forty-four, I thought. The nose wasn’t the same, though.
My mother was shivering, now. Her coat was half off and she was covering her face with one hand and holding the shiny antler-rack in the other. I didn’t realise at first that she was crying. It was like the time in my bedroom, when she’d ruined the cover of the ballet book. I was too shy to hug her. I couldn’t remember ever hugging her, in fact. I held her at the forearm, feeling the sobs through my palm. One of the rubber stone panels was peeling off, I noticed, and it made me think of my uncle as dead. As if my mother was crying because he’d been killed. The white whirls of glue could be seen on the wall underneath, exactly as he had applied it, and this made me want to burst into tears, too. But I didn’t.
My mother leaned on the antler-rack and it came away from the wall with a jerk – but only a few centimetres, spilling white plaster onto her hair. She carried on crying, quietly, as she took the heavier coats off the antlers and folded them on the hall chair. I helped her. The rack came out a bit more and showed green Rawlplugs around the screws. Drops fell from her nose onto the coats, but she didn’t wipe them off.
We pushed the antler-rack back into its holes, then she leaned against the rough squares of rubber stones. She pulled her arm away from my hand and raised it to her face, as if the effort had exhausted her. Her shoulders were shaking up and down. I felt wrapped up tight in a kind of transparent film, or as if I had turned into a giant Coca-Cola bottle. I was just standing there carefully without doing anything, full up with some sort of liquid, desperately wanting her to stop so that everything wouldn’t break and spill. I wasn’t even looking at her, but at a picture on the wall of a kitten. I’d never really looked at it before. It was almost as good as a photograph. She did stop after a few minutes and blew her nose.
I asked her if she wanted a Caro. ‘Or a hot chocolate?’
She shook her head and said no. Then she said she was sorry but that a nasty woman putting up a notice in the church had passed a very hurtful remark.
‘About Papa?’
She nodded.
‘What did she say?’
She frowned, as if wondering whether to tell me at all.
‘The world is very cruel,’ she said. Her hand was pressing and releasing the part of the rubber stone panel that was unstuck, making little sucking noises. ‘And some people enjoy others’ suffering.’
‘Is that what she said?’
‘No, it’s what I say. They enjoy it, instead of sharing it. Do you know what Henri did, after that terrible tragedy at Fréjus in 1959? He lit candles in the sitting-room and made us all pray – you, Carole, me – as part of the national grief. He understood what others’ suffering was. He was a true Christian, was Henri.’
She wiped her face on her handkerchief; her make-up was all streaked. She said we’d have to tell Papa to put back the antler-rack properly.
‘I could try putting it up,’ I said, wobbling the rack by one of its antlers.
‘I don’t know. Papa does like things done properly, doesn’t he?’
‘Is it real?’
‘Oh yes,’ she sighed, recovering. ‘I’m sure it’s from an animal.’
‘Is Papa coming back late?’
‘I don’t know, Gilles. He has so many worries.’
He’d been getting back after my bedtime, most evenings. He was usually home on Sunday evenings, though.
We went into the kitchen, where we prepared supper. The phone went in the office. It was my uncle. My mother sounded fed up. When she came off she said that he was the other side of Paris where he had an appointment first thing in the morning and so wouldn’t be back tonight.
‘Where’s he staying?’
‘Oh, he has so many friends,’ she said. ‘He says to be effective you have to be on the spot. We’re certainly on the spot here, aren’t we, dear?’
It was almost boring, being on our own yet again. My mother cheered up, though, and we talked about weird inventions. I’d done my homework, so could watch television with her. There was a pop group playing with white ten-gallon hats on their heads and a lot of teenagers dancing in front.
‘That’s not dancing,’ said my mother. ‘They’re just shuffling about.’
She went to sleep again, a bit later, this time in front of a documentary about Mont St Michel. Most of her cigarette was burning away in the ashtray. I tried a puff and coughed.
I went to bed late. I heard her come up, maybe in the middle of the night, and scratch about in the bathroom like a bird or a mouse.
It took ages for me to get to sleep; thinking about the ballet book and the dancer staring out inside it gave me the creeps. It was as if she could send out thought waves from her eyes in the photograph, even when the book was closed and shoved under the bed. They were coming up through my back, the thought waves, and I had to curl up on my side. I knew it was completely stupid thinking this, but it still frightened me. I asked Jesus to be with me in the room. His smiling, golden face let me drop off in the end, my sheet over my ear.
I felt very tired in the morning. I nodded off in one of Jonquille’s lessons, and then denied it, so I got rapped on the tips of my fingers. I waited for the bus home feeling more miserable than I had ever done in my life before. My fingertips were sore in my pocket and my satchel was filled with tablets of stone. There was litter around the bus-stop, mostly sweet papers. I reckoned that I must beat all records for misery, in fact: I’d get the Olympic gold for it.
It was a damp grey Monday, with not a breath of wind, and the crocuses behind the railings opposite looked like more litter. My classmates fooled about outside the school entrance further up the road, hitting each other with their satchels and making sounds like tropical birds. I mounted the bus and it chugged along noisily, pulling away from stops as if it was a great effort. The windows were misted up so that I went one stop too far, coming to a halt outside the gates of the big aluminium factory. Men were flooding out on their bicycles as if they’d not really been allowed to.
I walked back home, pretending to be one of them. Our house, which usually greeted me with a friendly look, even though it was brown and cementy and not at all beautiful, had never looked sadder. My mother was vacuuming. I shouted that I was back, but the noise of the vacuum cleaner drowned me.
Grabbing a madeleine, I went straight up to my room.
I lay on my bed and thought about Jocelyne. I had found her address in my parents’ phone book and wondered if I should send her a postcard from Bagneux – the one of the big church, perhaps, or the main street, or the gleaming new extension on the Thomson factory. There weren’t any others. What would I say on it? Something about Coppélia, perhaps, in my best French, adapting one of the complicated sentences that we were studying in Grammar, the kind of sentence that snaked in and around the subject and then, at the last minute, surprised you with an agreement, and all in the subjunctive. I made up many such sentences but I could see her laughing at them – giggling, rather, with her friends. I hadn’t even finished reading the Coppélia story. I was all pretend.
I felt so bad that I sensed a migraine prowling, ready to pounce, and I swallowed a tablet in the bathroom. I hadn’t seen Christophe since helping with the meat delivery: he was always on his mobilette with some older boys who smoked and were all chasing the same stupid girl. I lay on the bed again. I needed more friends, I thought. I wished I wasn’t at this stupid Catholic school with its stupid teachers in Châtillon. Châtillon felt a long way away.
I looked at the little crucifix above my bed and shot it to shreds with a ray gun that made a noise like Jonquille’s ruler when he was beating you. I was amazed at myself. I was a terrible sinner. I was sick with sin. I was about to receive Solemn Communion and I was sick with sin, blaspheming and sinning. I told God that I was only joking, filled with a sudden dread that I would be struck dead with a huge electric shock. Or that my mother would be. I kept an ear open for the sudden cutting-out of t
he vacuum cleaner’s drone downstairs. It went on and on and on. I could beat the world record for saying the rosary, using the chaplet I’d been given for my First Communion, with its real ivory beads and silver cross – going right up to the Sorrowful Mysteries over and over again like a mad old lady and getting to a million Hail Marys and becoming famous, with TV cameras around me and my picture in the newspapers. Becoming completely holy.
Hail Mary, full of grace …
I looked over at my balsa-wood plane, scattered on the desk. I could lose myself in that, instead, I thought, but I needed more pins to hold the formers down. There was dust on all the parts.
I went into my sister’s room and searched for pins in her chest of drawers. I knew she had some, kept in an old cough-drops tin she’d bought for a franc in a Paris junk shop. The drawers smelt of stale cloth more than of her. My mother had been told by the people treating Carole not to change anything in her room, so the drawers were a jumble of stockings and socks and skirts, jeans and cardies and blouses. I wasn’t so sure what was what, in fact – it was all sleeves and legs and collars and something my mother had called ‘a lady’s two-piece suit’ from before the war; it had a name stitched inside the collar that Carole had reckoned was Jewish, if it wasn’t a joke: Wanda Weinstock. She’d bought it off a stall in a Paris market and it stank of mothballs.
I lifted it out, feeling its stiff, bristly cloth in my hands and wondering whether the owner had been gassed by Hitler. Maybe her posh furniture had been sold by Monsieur Mantharl. Underneath the suit, lying on the flowery paper lining the drawer, was a small cuddly toy made of silk. I pulled the toy out and it fell apart into a pair of child’s slippers, one tucked into the other. They were pink and soft and smooth, with a long curvy patch on each sole. They smelt, when I put the toes up to my nose, a bit like the pine-trees’ resin that I’d got on my fingers. They were stained, too, as if they had been used a lot. Tucked in the toes of each slipper was a small wodge of rubber, all dark and shiny like the insides of my own shoes.
