No Telling

by Adam Thorpe

  ‘Why should it bother you, anyway?’

  We were sitting in the kitchen, finishing our supper. It was my mother’s evening out – she had joined a women’s exercise club in the new gymnasium and would always leave us a simple cooked meal. That was lucky, because I had come back home with mud all over my shoes and socks and the seat of my shorts. My uncle didn’t notice and I put the socks and shorts in the wash-basket. He would always be annoyed by her absence (though it happened every week), and polish off a whole bottle of wine. On this particular night he had brought home some fresh sardines and had grilled them himself, without even telling my mother. I found them oily, but said they were nice, when he asked me.

  ‘It doesn’t bother me,’ I said.

  ‘Then why ask?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I ask?’

  ‘I didn’t say you shouldn’t ask, I asked you why you asked, that’s all. Bloody hell, can’t I ask my son a simple question now?’

  I ignored him, unrolling a Petit Suisse from its clinging paper. Some of the wet paper tore, as it did on bad days, and got mixed up with the creamy dollop. I added the sugar anyway, pressing it in. I didn’t want him to watch me excavating the shreds of paper, and the enjoyment of a Petit Suisse depended on it unrolling cleanly: it was already ruined, in fact.

  I hated these evenings alone with my uncle; in the back of my mind I was afraid that my mother would have an accident in her new car, and die, and that every evening would be like this until I grew up and left.

  ‘I’m definitely going to knock that wall down,’ he said, lighting up a Camel. ‘Very soon. I like to do a job properly, apparently. Well, I’ll do it properly.’

  ‘That’ll be good.’

  ‘So we can watch the telly instead of each other.’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘I’ll put the speaker in the lamp, up there,’ he went on, waving his hand at the glass lamp above us in a jet-stream of smoke. ‘Otherwise you’d have to turn it up too loud, it’d distort. Plastic ivy round the connecting wire. I’m not going to ruin my nice new ceiling.’

  ‘Great.’

  I was actually thinking about the old hospital – wondering how anything could disappear like that, that was so complicated, with its trees and hidden corners and hundreds of rooms.

  ‘Then we can all watch the telly instead of boring ourselves stupid.’

  I looked up. He was picking at his lip, staring at me. His elbows were on the table either side of his oily plate, creasing up the oilcloth. The stink of sardines had faded, but the taste of them in my mouth, their oiliness under the sweetness of the Petit Suisse, made me feel slightly sick.

  ‘Yeah, that’ll be good,’ I reassured him. ‘I can help you.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Why not?’

  He seemed to think about it.

  ‘The whole house might fall down,’ he said. ‘It’s a load-bearing wall.’

  ‘Oh, better not do it then.’

  ‘I’ll check with your grandfather. Gigi knows everything. He built the bloody place.’ He looked around, as if seeing the house for the first time. ‘Bloody load of curtain-poles it is, too.’

  ‘Isn’t it very strong?’

  ‘Oh, strong enough. Until I start making it wobble. You’ll think you’re on a landslip.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘When the land slips, chum. Down a mountain.’

  ‘We’re not on a mountain, anyway,’ I said, not really concentrating.

  ‘No, that’s true. Hadn’t thought of that,’ he said, sarcastically. He pulled hard on his cigarette. ‘Half these new blocks are built on dodgy land, y’know. Bloody shoe-boxes. Us taxpayers ripped off by these guys. Cockroaches fancy them, I suppose.’

  ‘Better leave the wall alone, then.’

  ‘Yeah. Anyway, I can’t gargle without your mum telling me off. I don’t suppose she’d let me do a man’s job with this house.’

  ‘Does she?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Tell you off?’

  He blinked heavily, smiling, then took a large sip of wine. I could hear it go down his throat in the silence over the buzz of the refrigerator, then blaze up again in his chest in tiny burbles and squeaks.

  ‘The other day, I was gargling, and she said I gargled too loud. How can anyone gargle quietly? You can’t. Can you? You can’t gargle quietly.’

  ‘I haven’t tried.’

  ‘I’m telling you, you can’t,’ he said, jabbing his finger at me, his voice rising in anger. ‘You can’t bloody gargle silently, can you? Not even bloody Superman could gargle without making a gargling sound. That’s what I said to her. Why do you think it’s called gargling, then? Women,’ he went on, in a more intimate tone, ‘have no logic. The wires aren’t there in their brains, chum.’

  I scraped my plate clean of the last streaks of Petit Suisse, the spoon squeaking too loud for comfort. My lips polished the spoon so that it looked as if it had been washed up in an advertisement. The burn on my shin was like a knife scraping away at the skin.

  ‘As soon as I try to have my little say, you see, she tells me off again for ordering her about.’

  I felt both pleased and uncomfortable, talking about Maman behind her back. I pulled a face, which could have meant anything.

  ‘Can I leave the table?’

  ‘As long as you clear away.’

  ‘I always do!’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘I do,’ I repeated, annoyed now.

  He grunted, pulling on his cigarette as if he was kissing it.

  ‘She told me about the ballet book,’ he said, leaving his mouth open for the smoke to crawl out by itself.

  ‘What?’

  My face started heating up. I pushed my chair back and started to clear the table, rattling plates in the sink. The dishwasher had broken down again.

  ‘Yeah,’ he continued, ‘she told me all about that.’

  I turned on the hot tap, letting the steam cover my red face.

  ‘You know what I said?’ he smiled. ‘I said it takes all tastes.’

  ‘I got it for Carole. I didn’t know.’

  ‘Didn’t know what?’

  ‘That it’d upset her.’

  ‘Right. That’s what she said.’

  He gave a light chuckle which echoed inside his glass as he drank.

  ‘I didn’t draw those stupid things in it, if that’s what she thinks.’

  The oily taste of sardines had burped back into my mouth. I wanted to run up to my bedroom and breathe in its air: I was painting the tissue-paper on the balsa-wood kit with dope. I liked the smell of the dope. For my French homework I had just conjugated the sentence, ‘I saw that I must appear guilty.’ [Je me rendais compte que je ne pouvais que paraître coupable.] It was going round and round in my head, now, the sound of it like kicking or knife-thrusts. My uncle had me trapped. He was looking at me with one eyebrow so low that the eye almost disappeared under it.

  ‘I used to be a fresh-air fiend, you know, in my youth, at your age.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘You don’t get out enough.’ He coughed. ‘Kick a ball around. I used to spend my whole time out of doors with my mates, on that very road out there in front, kicking a ball around or playing marbles or having a good old wrestle.’

  ‘OK,’ I said, sarcastically. ‘I’ll go out and kick a ball around on the road right now, if you want.’

  He didn’t reply. I had my back to him but I could hear the pop of his cigarette leaving his lips. I was enjoying the idea of my mother returning to find me sprawled like a dead cat in the road, bleeding from my mouth, the ball bouncing off all the way to the centre of Paris, bouncing down the boulevards and making the cars and buses screech until it got to Notre Dame and then bouncing off Notre Dame in exactly the right direction for Jocelyne’s house and ending up bouncing through her front door and rolling to her feet. But I was already dead. Made tragic.

  There was the crackle of his cigarette.

  ‘You real
ly could, in my day, mate. You could count the number of cars on your hand. Carts, horses, donkeys. Me and Henri, we used to be out there on that road, playing, and if we heard a car, it was like the country, we stepped out of its way and yelled after it. With all our mates.’

  ‘That was the war,’ I said. Gigi had told me this. ‘There was no petrol.’

  ‘A lot of dust, too, in the summer. It was only properly metalled in ’48. God, the dust used to whip up. I was your age when the war started, of course. Twelve.’

  ‘Thirteen.’

  ‘Hard times. Scooped up the crumbs, we did. Yeah. Threw nothing away. Seriously. Toughened us up, all that did. Took three days for the column to pass, just out there.’

  ‘What column?’

  ‘Bloody refugees, scarpering because they thought the Boche were coming. Going bloody south like rabbits.’

  ‘The Germans were coming.’

  ‘Thousands and thousands of ’em in bloody cars and wagons or on two legs, streaming past our window,’ he went on, ignoring me. ‘Didn’t stop for three days. A human stream of idiots. Wouldn’t think it now, would you? They’re all going the other way, now.’

  ‘Poor things,’ I said.

  ‘No, Gilles. They were bloody idiots. They stopped the reinforcements coming up from the south. That would have saved the day, in my opinion. They clogged up the roads, and the reinforcements were slowed right down and bombed and machine-gunned like bloody rabbits in a trap. Madness, it was. Everyone went mad. We might have won, otherwise. We had the same number of men as the bloody Boche. Half a million, at least. We fought the Boche bloody well until the spring of ’40. Don’t let anybody ever tell you otherwise, Gilles.’

  ‘Did you fight?’

  I was told he’d been too young, but he was talking as if he had fought.

  ‘Still at school,’ he said. ‘In bloody shorts. Or else I would have fought. No question. For my native land. The land of my birth. I would have fought to the death, otherwise.’

  He dropped the stub of his cigarette in his empty wineglass, where it sizzled out in the red dregs: something my mother never allowed. Then he stared at the glass with piercing eyes, as if he was seeing something important inside it.

  ‘Toughened us up,’ he said, ‘all that did. No pansying about on our tippy toes for us. Oh no.’

  I felt annoyed again. I carried on washing up, keeping my back to him. I couldn’t ever explain why I’d really borrowed the ballet book, he’d only tease me to death about Jocelyne. Even if I could have explained, I wouldn’t have done.

  We said nothing for ages, the pain of the burn on my leg coming and going. Then I remembered something Jocelyne had said.

  ‘You have to have good muscles to dance ballet,’ I mumbled. ‘You have to have very strong legs.’

  It was true, you could see it in the photographs in the book.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Applies to most things, doesn’t it, chum? Good muscles. Good head, good muscles. I’ll take you fishing, soon as I have the time.’

  ‘It’s OK.’

  ‘It’s not OK, is it? I’m not much cop as a dad, am I? Never take you fishing.’

  ‘I don’t like fishing, it doesn’t matter.’

  I wanted to escape the next phase and go up to my room, but the two plates were hard to clean. I’d stacked them, and then seen how the water was going into blobs because of patches of sardine oil. As he droned on, I squirted neat washing-up liquid in yellow dribbles onto the plates and rubbed them properly. Bubbles jumped out onto my shirt and face.

  ‘I’d help your grandfather, you know, Gilles. Carried a hod full of bricks up the ladder. These long-haired types, these students, they couldn’t carry a feather up a ladder. I’ll give them bloody revolution. They don’t know what it means. They don’t know what it means to fight. Bloody Maoists, bloody Trotskyites. Mad, they are. That bloke with the pipe, that famous clever git, what’s his name, ugly little creep, I know what I’d do to him. I’d put him up against a wall—’

  He stopped. I heard him swallow and his mouth make dry noises as he opened and shut it. Then, wiping the table, I saw how sad he looked, his whole face sort of faint, like a face on a blackboard after someone’s passed over it with a sponge. His hands were trembling either side of the empty glass with the cigarette stub inside.

  ‘I’ve tried, you know, Gilles.’

  ‘Have you finished with your glass?’

  ‘I’ve tried. Not as good as your father, I know. Always right, he was. Always right. Your mother, for instance, he was dead right to choose your mother. Brave lady. I’ve tried to look after her, you see. Protect her. Rub along.’

  He didn’t normally call Henri ‘your father’. I grunted just enough not to be rude, pressing the pedal of the kitchen bin and tipping the stub out of the glass. The stub’s tobacco-smell seemed stronger and bitterer in the wine dregs.

  ‘A job and a half, what with you and your sister, let alone your mother. The business. Keeping it all going. Ought to get a medal for it. She’s not been well lately. Have you noticed? Your mother. Pale.’

  ‘Can I leave the table?’

  It was a stupid question, because I was standing up.

  ‘What are you doing now, eh? I ought to play cards with you. Gin rummy. We used to play gin rummy, didn’t we?’

  When I was about nine, he had gone through a phase of playing cards with me that had lasted about a month. I didn’t want to play with him now, though.

  ‘It’s OK. I’ve got extra schoolwork.’

  ‘Peasants and sacks of potatoes, eh?’

  ‘Latin.’

  ‘Latin.’ His mouth stretched, but not into a smile. It was more as if he’d sat on a nail. ‘One works one’s way up in the sweat of one’s brow, that’s what one does. And then what?’

  I left him there on his own and went up to the bathroom and lifted my leg into the sink to cool the burn with a gush of cold water. It wasn’t too bad, the burn – there was hardly a blister.

  I almost threw myself into my bedroom. It was an incredible relief. The door was closed and I lay flung out on the bed. This room was like a private country. With a sudden jump in my heart, I remembered that our secret country under the pine-trees had gone. Tears filled my eyes. I saw my mother skidding off the road or being crashed into by a car coming in from the right at an unmarked intersection. She had never understood unmarked intersections properly in her lessons. I’d tested her with the little Code book and its hundreds of signs and pictures and arrows, using my Dinky toys on the kitchen table to show her properly, she often got it wrong. The gymnasium was only a five-minute drive away, but children were kidnapped fetching the bread, people were killed crossing the road, Christophe’s sister had been suffocated on the sofa by a newspaper. When Mademoiselle Bolmont had been paralysed in the car crash, it might have been on a five-minute journey. Death was waiting everywhere with its claws and slimy tail. Children were drowned in rivers every summer – children like me, my age, drowned in a few minutes when all they’d wanted to do was splash about in the heat. And my sister Nathalie – she’d hardly lived at all before Death came along, there probably wasn’t even time to bless her so that she could go to Heaven. She might even be one of the souls in Purgatory.

  And what had Jocelyne said about that ballerina? The one who had played Swanilda? She’d died. She’d died on her seventeenth birthday, during that siege, of some old illness like cholera or the plague. She was definitely the one pictured in my library book. Only three years older than me, if she was the one who had died.

  The book was under my bed, where I’d shoved it back again. I didn’t feel frightened of her eyes, now. I opened it and saw that it was a week overdue: I’d taken it out on 9 March and it was now 16 April. With my chest pressed on the edge of the mattress so that it was harder to breathe, I turned the pages of the book on the floor till I came to the old photograph in the
middle of the Coppélia story.

  The dancer was definitely beautiful.

  She had very dark eyes and they were almost hypnotising me again. She was smiling and not smiling at the same time. She was leaning an elbow against a stone wall with pillars and leaves and staring straight out at me, trying to put me into a trance. She was standing right up on one toe, in fact, the other foot lifted up a bit next to it and facing the other way. The foot she was standing on was completely bent in the middle. It was weird. It made me think of Carole and her metal feet.

  I hoped she was the one Jocelyne had talked about. Giuseppina Bozzacchi. It did begin with B, like Belmondo. I made sure I remembered it, although it was a weird name.

  She was wearing the same sort of ballet slippers as my sister’s, that was for sure. You could see the ribbons, tied around the ankles, and the patch on the bottom of the foot where it was bent in the middle. Just to be certain, I slid forward by walking on my hands, my feet just staying on the bed, and fished out the slippers from the drawer. Back on my stomach on the edge of the bed again, I held the slippers next to the photograph. I made the slippers do the same position as her, bending them by putting my fingers inside.

  My fingers were still a bit sticky from touching the pine-tree branch in the mud, so I wasn’t sure if it was the shoes or my fingers that smelt so sweet. I made the slippers dance on their tiptoes over the photograph, until I saw they were leaving faint marks. The satin on the shoes was sticking a bit to my fingers because of the resin. The tips of my fingers pressed against the rubber in the toes. I wondered if the rubber was there just to keep the shape of the ends, like the weird metal things my uncle put into his smartest shoes.

  I put the slippers down and studied Giuseppina again. Her left hand rested on a huge white tutu made up of layer after layer of transparent material, the layers building up into whiteness like the folds of the net curtain in the bathroom. She had a white sash around her waist, much wider than the white belt of a traffic policeman, and then a kind of beaded waistcoat covering most of her bosoms. Where the waistcoat was buttoned, though, between her bosoms, was right at the bottom of them. She had about five necklaces on, which didn’t really hide her bare skin above the waistcoat. Her shoulders were hidden under puffy white material out of which came her arms, which seemed very long and smooth. Her neck was very straight and her head was straight, too. In fact, the whole of her was very straight, her pointed feet exactly lined up with her head. She had a crown on with lots of jewellery on it, like little leaves, and more jewellery dangling down either side of her face. She had black hair to go with her black eyebrows and eyelashes. Her hair seemed to fall down behind her head in a lot of complicated curls. Her face was very beautiful. She had a chin that was tilted up a bit and a wide mouth and a straight nose to go with her straight body. Her eyes were hypnotising me again. This time, though, I didn’t mind.