No Telling

by Adam Thorpe

  ‘It was me leaving the bag, the school satchel – that’s what did them in, chum. It was my fault.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘There must have been a bit of paper in it. The name of the school, my class. Some little typed note or other from a teacher. Not my name, or they’d have got me personally. Would have been better that way, wouldn’t it? One, instead of twenty-eight. I can see them now, all my mates. All my chums. Sometimes I see them waving at me. From the clouds.’

  ‘From Heaven,’ I said, wanting to cheer him up.

  He didn’t hear me, though.

  ‘Well, I didn’t like all of them, there were a few I didn’t like so much …’ His voice trailed away. He stared at a point just below the television screen. ‘I didn’t ever go back to school. Had to make my own way up, with twenty-eight of my mates hanging onto my legs. Heavy, they are.’

  He looked at me, then, for the first time since he’d started telling the story. His eyes were red and puffy above the bags. I was picturing the rows of faces in the creased school photograph I’d found in his drawer. The face that had been crossed out – it was his, obviously. He must have crossed it out himself. The only one not in Heaven.

  ‘Excess weight,’ he added. ‘You can’t fly, with excess weight.’

  He patted me on the knee, squeezed it. Then there was nothing for a while but the sound of the film. We were watching it without watching it. An actor a bit like Fernandel was trying to get some gold from some Mexicans. People fell off donkeys in little clouds of dust and then picked themselves up, brushing the dust off their baggy clothes. Girls laughed with very white teeth and their hands on their hips. Their bosoms stuck out. The adverts came on, mostly for washing-powder and oven-cleaner and hair shampoo, and then it was back to the donkeys.

  ‘Cowards,’ he said, suddenly. ‘It’s the same bastard cowards. The same bastard cowards who took my mates away beat my family. See? The flicks. We’re squeezed between the anarchos and Soviet infiltrators with their paving stones and the bastard coward flicks with their boots and clubs. That’s what France is, Gilles. That’s what this rotten bloody country is. This so-called bloody Republic.’

  I grunted, not wanting to stir him up any more. It was nice, escaping into the film, the donkeys and the girls and the straw hats in the sunshine.

  Gigi and Tante Clothilde came in quietly with some coffee. Tante Clothilde gave my uncle his coffee and sat down on the sofa between me and Gigi, sucking a strong mint for her digestion. Perhaps they’d heard everything at the door. She asked after Maman. My uncle cleared his throat and said that she was better. The brain was a bit bruised, they reckoned, she still couldn’t speak properly. The bruised brain would get back to normal, they reckoned, but in the end they had to admit that they didn’t know the first thing about the brain. The experts admitted that, even in the Service Chirurgie Crânienne. She needed stimulation, they said. She needed someone to get all those electrical circuits in the brain going. She’d had a cranial fracture and bad concussion and needed stimulation when she wasn’t resting, that’s how the brain worked. But she couldn’t read. The words didn’t make sense. That was normal, according to the experts. That was normal.

  He sighed and Tante Clothilde said the brain was very complicated. They could change a heart, but they couldn’t change a brain.

  ‘I’ll go,’ I said. ‘To see her. I can read to her or something. Read her magazines.’

  My uncle shook his head as he drew on his cigarette. ‘You stay put, Gilles. They’re expecting more trouble in the streets from the hired anar-chos and Soviet infiltrators. The uprising, they call it. Just a bunch of spoilt middle-class brats playing games. You can shoot the lot of them, as far as I’m concerned. Anyway, she’ll be all right. She’ll be coming home before your Communion, at any rate.’

  ‘That’s in a week’s time,’ I said.

  ‘It’s OK, they’ll manage it. If we haven’t all turned Soviet by then.’

  He took another deep drag on his cigarette. Gigi folded his arms and grunted. Tante Clothilde leaned forward and switched off the television. The donkeys shrivelled to a little crackly dot. You could see us all miniature in the blank screen, still staring at it as if it was on.

  26

  I didn’t like the sound of that – of my mother’s brain being bruised. I talked to her on the phone, though, on Sunday, and she seemed only a bit slurry. Because she’d woken up in the hospital, she had no idea I’d been dragged off, and I was told not to tell her. All she knew was that she had fallen over: selective amnesia, they called it. She blamed the Ricard and the uneven paving stones. She couldn’t remember actually falling over, because she reckoned we’d been to the Wimpy beforehand. Her last definite memory was of driving over the broken glass.

  She asked me about church things, because I was phoning Sunday morning and it was the last Sunday before my Communion. I lied and said I’d been to the earlier service. I didn’t feel well enough to go, in fact. I still felt as if I was made of glass, very fragile.

  Oncle Alain took us out to the park at Sceaux and we walked around between the flowers and fountains and trees. Tante Clothilde said it hadn’t changed since they were children. She kept finding spots where she remembered playing with Alain and Henri, her ‘naughty’ brothers. It was hard to imagine the three of them playing, just as it was hard to imagine myself ever being an adult.

  Gigi pointed to some huge trees with flowers like white candles in the leaves and said, ‘The horse chestnuts are bigger, these days.’

  It was very calm and a bit strange, walking around with them in the park. Gigi and his children – and then me, like someone added on.

  I had a check-up on the Monday. The X-ray showed no damage to my skull or any bones. I felt less fragile, but something weird was going on in my head. It was the opposite of what the beating had done to my mother.

  My memory was becoming very clear.

  If I closed my eyes and thought about a certain moment in my life, I could often see it and hear it so clearly that it was like something on television. Much better than television, in fact, because I was in it completely, with the smells and taste and everything. But at the same time I knew it was just a memory, as when you can dream and know you’re dreaming.

  This amazing recall went back to when I was quite small.

  The earliest moment was from 1960, about six months after my father’s death. I was in the kitchen with Maman, making an aircraft-carrier out of a piece of wood and asking questions about my real father. I could hear all the words and smell the kitchen and see her moving – I still can, if I close my eyes. The moment is about an hour long. I can remember much more of some periods – up to weeks, even. Then there is a gap.

  As for my memory of things after the beatings, it’s only as clear as the ones before in short bursts. Otherwise it’s fuzzy and half-invented, like everyone else’s memory. Almost the last little burst is of a shopping trip to the new Champion hypermarket with my mother that August, but it only lasts a few minutes. I’ve had one or two bursts since.

  It doesn’t have much to do with what’s important.

  For instance, even though my Solemn Communion was on the Saturday following Coppélia and the riots and everything, I only see fuzzy pictures of white albs and candles in the church, Père Phare’s round face grinning as we lined up, a long table smelling of wax polish with posh menus on it, a few blurred faces, Emil with chocolate from the profiteroles all round his mouth, and one clear flash of my uncle putting his arm around Jocelyne’s mother. I seem to remember people going on about there being not enough petrol, and that some guests didn’t manage to make it because of a huge riot during the night. In the evening, after everyone had gone, we listened to Radio Luxembourg because the students were talking to the rector live. Then there was another riot, or maybe the huge one during the night, and my uncle switched it off in case the crashes and screams and bangs disturbed my mother or me. I don’t even remember if I felt different that evening, being
confirmed.

  Just after my Communion, a few days after, there was the biggest strike in the history of the world, so we were lucky.

  I do remember how I kept feeling bad, during my Solemn Communion and the long meal afterwards, that Carole wasn’t there. Although Jocelyne was certainly there, as well as my mother with a white bandage on her head, my only real pictures of them during the big day are through the flickery Super-8 film that Emil took. It’s very shaky, because he kept joking the whole time. You can see how embarrassed I look, in my long white alb, with Jocelyne chattering away silently behind in her blue velvet dress. Then the next shot is of her turning to the camera and giving a silly little wave, her mouth moving away like a bad mime.

  A few weeks later, I fished out the Vietnam poster from under my bed and sent it to her, to prove that I’d put the other ones up.

  I don’t remember doing this, in fact, but last month, at my mother’s funeral, she told me that I had. She said she’d kept it for the last thirty-four years. Original posters from that period are worth quite a bit, she told me. She’d seen one going for 600 euros; it had said BOURGEOIS VOUS N’AVEZ RIEN COMPRIS with a student’s bleeding face. Of course, it might have been a fake, she went on, but it did look genuinely old and dirty under its plastic protective wrapper. I was surprised that she was going on about its value when she must be earning so much as a top lawyer.

  ‘And how are things with you, Master Diaghilev?’ she asked me.

  We were walking towards the gates of Bagneux cemetery. Her black dress was like a stove-pipe hat and she had cut her hair very short. She seemed incredibly thin, with black eye-liner and dark blue earrings that dangled almost to her neckline.

  ‘Well, my mother’s just died,’ I said.

  ‘No, I mean work-wise. Aren’t you incredibly broke all the time? I don’t know how people can survive these days, without lots and lots of money.’

  ‘Me neither,’ I said, ‘but I do. Mime’s out of fashion, especially illusion mime. It’s all dance, now.’

  ‘I don’t think I ever saw your show, in the end.’

  ‘Shows. I’ve done fifteen. Fifteen different shows, I mean.’

  ‘Isn’t Marceau still alive?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘And so is Gilles Gobain. Just.’

  She laughed in exactly the same way she’d laughed in 1968. It was a bit sad, though, to see her with wrinkles on her throat and under her eyes, smoking away.

  ‘Do me some.’

  ‘It’s my mother’s funeral.’

  ‘You did me some last time.’

  As we walked I did the cigarette mime – producing the packet, opening it, tapping it, taking the cigarette out, replacing the packet, searching for the box of matches, finding it in my inside pocket, poking it open, striking the match, lighting up, burning my fingers on the match, putting the box back, taking a puff. I added a silent chesty cough. It was all done very simply and smoothly. Nobody else saw. My hands had been a bit trembly before, but the mime movements took over automatically.

  ‘Not bad,’ she said. ‘In fact, amazing. I could really see it. You make it look easy, but I bet it isn’t.’

  ‘Just doing the box of matches sequence takes eleven separate movements,’ I said, waving away imaginary smoke. ‘Muscle control. I do most of it automatically, now.’

  She didn’t comment. She looked as if she was thinking hard, drawing on her own cigarette. I threw my mime one away – discipline, even at my mother’s funeral.

  ‘I was sorry to hear about your sister,’ she said, as we came to the gates.

  ‘That was years ago.’

  ‘It doesn’t seem like years. Nothing does. Do you think she – you know, I mean, mightn’t she have just fallen off sort of by mistake?’

  I shrugged. ‘Had the wrong shoes on, probably.’

  Jocelyne sighed and threw her cigarette stub on the gravel.

  ‘I just can’t believe we’re approaching fifty,’ she said.

  ‘We’re not there yet.’

  I turned to see if my uncle was all right. He had cried a lot into his leather gloves at the graveside. My mother’s name had not yet been added to Mamie’s and Nicolas’s and Carole’s and Gigi’s and Tante Clothilde’s and my father’s, but her name was everywhere on the flowers. Danielle Danielle Danielle. It was like her birthday, almost. I had not seen my uncle cry since the time he’d told me, thirty-four years before, about the execution of his classmates.

  He was walking quite straight, now, between Raymond and Geneviève. Their silvery hair stood out against the black suits behind as they chatted together, advancing very slowly. I could hear my uncle’s wheezing, even from five metres. The tallest and fattest and baldest black suit behind them was Christophe, talking to my ex-wife.

  ‘Here today and gone tomorrow,’ he’d said to me, pulling a face, when I’d gone round to see him behind the Champion meat counter, dressing spare ribs for barbecues. I wasn’t sure whether he’d meant my mother or myself, but I was touched that he was here, now.

  ‘They’ve just got back from a tour of India,’ said Jocelyne, nodding at her parents. ‘Then it’s a cruise to the Galapagos Islands, trekking and camping under the stars.’

  ‘I’d like to go to the Galapagos Islands,’ I said, thinking more about my mother, the months of pain, the way she’d slowed down and down and down until only her chest was moving and then the release. ‘Lots of weird animals and birds.’

  ‘Was I really horrid to you that day?’ Jocelyne said, suddenly, her hand on my arm. ‘It was only because I fancied you, you know.’

  I turned back to her, surprised. She was grinning at me, but a bit shyly. I started to blush. I opened my mouth to say something but just at that second her mobile phone started trilling and I didn’t really have the chance to talk to her again.

  I visited Carole on the Thursday before my Solemn Communion.

  Gigi and Tante Clothilde had gone home that morning, seeing my mother in the Hôtel-Dieu on the way. They’d left early; there had been even worse rioting on Monday and Tuesday, with lots of injured, but it always stopped before dawn. On Wednesday we’d watched the television news together. A big crowd had sung the Communist song around the eternal flame on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier the evening before, and seeing this on the news now upset Gigi a lot. Afterwards there were vehicles burning, which made him worse. They left at eight o’clock in the morning in Gigi’s little car and got caught up in the traffic problems caused by the President laying a wreath on the same tomb, under the Arc de Triomphe. But there wasn’t any rioting.

  We were worried that if things grew really bad, my mother would be trapped in the Hôtel-Dieu, right in the middle of Paris. A lot of students, not just the injured ones, were taking refuge there from the police. At one point some policemen in their black helmets walked through the ward, arguing with a nurse. My uncle wanted her moved, but she couldn’t be. He went to see her every day up to the Thursday, but I wasn’t allowed to go as it might disturb me to see the black helmets and bendy sticks again. I was having bad nightmares and my nose kept bleeding. My cabbage ear found its shape again in three days, which seemed incredible. I had been sure it would stay a swollen mess.

  Raymond had gone out again on Tuesday evening, sang L’lnternationale under the Arc de Triomphe, and got his finger broken in Mont-parnasse by some French fascists wielding a Zone Bleue Disque Obligatoire street sign. My uncle wasn’t sure about the ‘fascists’ part; everyone seemed to be bashing everyone else.

  Jocelyne phoned twice after hearing about my adventure, and told me that Papatito was jealous.

  ‘How are you? Are you having horrible nightmares? I’ll bet you can’t sleep.’

  ‘I’m OK.’

  I was staring at the picture of the French Petroleum Institute, but really seeing Jocelyne’s face.

  ‘You can’t be very sensitive, then. I’ll bet it’ll hit you when you’re about forty-seven and you’ll throw yourself off a bridge.’

  ‘I los
t the photograph of Giuseppina Bozzacchi. It got trampled on.’

  ‘How symbolic! If I tell Papatito he’s bound to write a poem about it.’

  ‘A poem?’

  ‘Oh, one of those funny little things mad people write now and again. What did the library say? Did they arrest you for defacing their book?’

  ‘They didn’t notice.’

  In fact, I hadn’t dared to give it back yet. I’d passed the date by so many weeks I imagined paying the fine all my life.

  ‘Vandal!’

  The line was a bit hissy, and when she laughed it sounded just like a pneumatic tool, her breath exploding against the receiver. Papatito was very happy to have his finger broken, she said, and was flaunting the splint like a wounded soldier. I could hear Raymond shouting ‘Nonsense’ in the background. I told her to be very careful about going out. She laughed, and I had to hold the phone away from my ear.

  ‘Fancy you advising me, Master Guevara!’

  It felt good, though, advising her.

  My uncle went to Bagneux police station and tried to make an official complaint about what had happened, but the inspector got cross and insulted him, saying he should go and see all the injured policemen in hospital. Because my mother couldn’t remember what had happened, and because I was a minor, there was not much more he could do. He told the inspector that he was ashamed of his country and that the values of the Republic were in tatters. Then he thumped his fist on the desk and walked out. Or so he told us.

  When we were watching the riots on television, though they didn’t show much except silhouettes dancing about against burning cars, he said, ‘One hydrogen bomb would do it. Like it did for the Japanese. It’s all the reds understand.’

  I asked him what exactly was evil about Communism.

  ‘Everything,’ he said. ‘No private property, no God, no little self-owned business pottering along quietly and innocently. It’s all mammoth and for the top nobs, Gilles. The leaders. The Party. You’re just a tiny little robot in the state machine. No decent suits. No food mixers. No power dinghies. One day I’m going to have myself a power dinghy. A Merc 200 outboard. They wouldn’t let me have that, not unless I was a top nob in the Party.’