No Telling

by Adam Thorpe

  ‘Don’t you know?’

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘He watched me through the window,’ she said.

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘I’d practise my ballet in the showroom with the blinds down, right? It was like a real rehearsal room, lots of space and a nice smooth lino floor. Really smooth. No floorboards, no stupid splinters.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But I’d look up and see him watching me through the window.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Him. It put me off.’

  ‘Oh.’

  She was staring at the bench, now, the other side of the gravel path. I had to sigh to slow my heart down.

  ‘You mean Oncle Alain?’

  She snorted, as if I’d said something stupid.

  ‘Course not. He’s just the useless kid brother. Behind the bench. Those bushes behind the bench! He’s hiding in them. He’s watching me with that look. Just the same look.’

  I whipped round, a bit scared. The sun was almost set and the bushes were very shadowy, though there was still quite a lot of light in the sky and on the lawn.

  ‘Can’t see anyone,’ I said. ‘Another patient, is it?’

  ‘He’s watching me dance again,’ she said, her eyes all creased up. ‘I’ve told them about it, but they say I’m just seeing things and that it never happened.’

  ‘What? What never happened?’

  ‘It did happen! Don’t say it never happened! I’m not seeing things and it did happen!’

  She was angry with me, now.

  ‘I’m sure it did happen,’ I said.

  ‘It did.’

  ‘But you haven’t told me what it was.’

  ‘Him watching me, stupid.’

  I nodded, thinking that she hadn’t got any better – that she was worse, in fact, than the last visit.

  ‘In my costume,’ she said. ‘My skin-tight costume. Through the window. Our father. Who art in Hell.’

  My face caught fire, but it wasn’t a blush.

  ‘I see,’ I said. ‘But I thought the blinds were down.’

  ‘Not the plate-glass window, stupid. The little one at the back, in the back wall.’

  ‘Oh yes. I know.’

  ‘His whole face in it, like someone on television doing the news. Watching me. With a – a sort of soft look, all – all tender.’

  She imitated it, obviously exaggerating. It looked weird, with boggling eyes and lips pressed together so they disappeared, but in a kind of smile. I couldn’t imagine my real father looking soft and tender like the Virgin Mary, but then my memories of him were very blurred. I only had a few photographs to go on, in fact.

  ‘Standing on a chair to do it,’ she went on. ‘It was too high, otherwise.’

  ‘It is quite high,’ I nodded, plucking at the grass.

  ‘Standing on a chair especially to do it, you see, kid. In the yard. Thinking I hadn’t even noticed him. But I had.’

  ‘That’s good,’ I murmured, without thinking. I didn’t know what to say, in fact; it didn’t seem very wicked, what she was telling.

  ‘I thought it was just to check that I was practising properly, at first,’ she smiled. ‘I still didn’t like it, though.’

  My uncle had stopped chatting to the pretty young nurse and was walking towards us over the grass. I realised he probably couldn’t see us, in the shade of the horse chestnuts. I looked at Carole. She was rubbing her hand over the grass, as if she was cleaning it. I so wanted her to be normal.

  ‘He maybe just liked ballet,’ I said, as quietly as I could. ‘I’ll bet you were really good.’

  She laughed, and put her hand on my shoulder. She squeezed my shoulder, which was still a bit painful from being hit in the riots. I didn’t show the pain, though.

  ‘Listen, I can’t tell you what I told them, kid,’ she said. ‘You’re not old enough.’

  ‘Yes I am,’ I hissed. ‘Of course I am. I’m thirteen, Carole!’

  She was staring at the bushes behind the bench. I felt as if the air was getting thicker and thicker. My uncle had gone off in the wrong direction.

  ‘I’m thirteen, Carole!’

  ‘You’re not old enough—’

  ‘You let me put the posters up!’

  I was quite annoyed, in fact. She smiled, still staring at the bushes.

  ‘Yes, you were very good at putting up the posters. For that stupid bastard.’

  ‘It wasn’t just for him.’

  ‘No. It wasn’t. It was to make the world better. I’ll tell you, then. As a reward for trying to make the world better. One day, one nice sunny day, I went up to our father. He was greasing a vacuum cleaner in the showroom. I wanted to practise. I came up to him in my ballet costume and I told him. I told him how I didn’t like him watching me. I was really nervous! “I don’t like you watching me, Papa, it makes me feel shy.” “Shy?” “Yes, like you’re watching me having a shower.” ’

  She continued staring out, as if she had to keep watch, with her hand even tighter on my shoulder.

  ‘And then?’ I asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘He turned round and slapped me.’

  ‘Slapped you?’

  ‘Yeah. Right across the face.’

  Her hand left my shoulder and touched her face. My shoulder carried on hurting. Then she hid her face in her hands. I had to ask her something, quickly. But my mind had sort of emptied out.

  ‘Did you tell Maman?’

  ‘And then he shouted at me,’ she said, her voice badly muffled by her hands over her face. ‘Really screamed at me, with his greasy hands squeezing my shoulders, leaving stains all over my nice clean ballet costume. “How dare you say things like that! How dare you! If you tell Maman I’ll stop you doing ballet altogether!” Screaming at me. Squeezing and squeezing my shoulders. Shaking me. Grease stains all over my nice, spotless ballet costume. And my hair – it was coming out of its clips as he shook me. Coming right out!’

  She gave a big sniff and showed her face again. Her hands had left red marks on her cheeks. Her eyes were red, too.

  ‘I didn’t tell Maman, or anyone else. I didn’t want him to stop me doing ballet, did I? Anyway, he didn’t watch me again. Or maybe he did, secretly, through a hole in the wall or something. He was very very religious,’ she added, with a little smile. ‘He made me pray for forgiveness, next to him, on our knees together, by my bed. Every night for ages. For what I’d said to him. And all the time I was thinking, in my nightdress: I hate you. I really hate you.’

  Our uncle was in view again, standing on the edge of the lawn, obviously wondering where he’d left us. I kept very still in the shadows, not knowing what to say. The breeze was rustling the leaves a bit, covering our voices.

  ‘Now he’s watching me again, like he always does. Always, always, always—’

  ‘The little window was blocked,’ I said, quickly, worried she might have another fit. ‘With stock. With boxes.’

  ‘It wasn’t. Not before he – fell over. Then they blocked it. Maybe they knew.’

  ‘Knew?’

  ‘But I couldn’t dance any more, anyway. I just couldn’t. How could I dance any more, when he could be watching me all the time – without me even knowing it? His invisible face, dead, with blood still on it, eyes all open and staring. All grey and thin. Peeping. With that look. That sort of tender look, that little funny smile. Although underneath he’s very angry with me for what I did. Well, now I don’t care, OK? I can dance even without any clothes on at all, to show I don’t care. Then he always runs away, because he’s too afraid and shocked. He’s very religious, you see. There he goes. With his stupid striped tie. Slipping away – coward!’

  She stared out, with very wide staring eyes. She looked really mental, now. The shadowy leaves behind the bench were swaying about, as if someone had just left. Then she snorted, looking a bit more normal.

  ‘He’s gone again. Until the next time. Very very angry for w
hat I did. Although he never shows it, not in his face. It’s all hidden.’

  ‘You didn’t do much,’ I murmured.

  Oncle Alain appeared, panting. He held his pen up.

  ‘Got it. Just enough light to see, eh? We’ll use the bench, chums.’

  She didn’t say another word about that window business. She signed the form and, on the way back, put her arm through mine and Oncle Alain’s. That was just as well, because my knees were trembly. Oncle Alain was very happy, smiling and joking all the time.

  He went off to the toilet before we went back home. I was alone with Carole in the ward. I’d had an idea about what she’d said. The deep-voiced woman with the electronic hair-grips stood near us, nodding away. She was wearing a long blue nightdress that smelt.

  ‘Carole,’ I asked, ‘who mopped the floor?’

  ‘What?’

  She was sleepy again, chin on her hand in the wicker chair.

  ‘You know, when our real papa slipped and hit his head?’

  She smiled.

  ‘Pandora’s box,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s what the doctor said. Who’s helping me. He thinks I should draw. I don’t like drawing, especially not boxes. I like dancing. It wasn’t my fault. I couldn’t do my pirouettes, could I? I was hurting my knees. I could go right up on point and all I wanted to do was a pirouette all the way round and then maybe two and I practised hours and hours in the showroom. Don’t you remember?’

  I frowned. Maybe I did remember.

  ‘You used to watch me, sitting on the floor. You were tiny, but ever so quiet, ever so good. All I wanted in life was to do a pirouette, like Giselle does, OK? But the lino was too sticky and it hurt my knee. It kept twisting it. You can’t do ballet with a damaged knee, can you? So I put water on the lino, OK? Then it was too slippery, there was no grip, so I put rosin on. Then it was perfect. But I didn’t put rosin on everywhere. I’m not perfect. I can’t put rosin on every tiny little square centimetre, can I?’

  ‘Not every square centimetre,’ said the deep-voiced woman.

  I nodded. Carole was leaning forward, now, getting anxious again.

  ‘I’m practising, though,’ she whispered, frowning. ‘I’m doing them in my head.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘So I’ll be ready, you see, for when you bring the shoes. I think that once they’ve taken away your metal they don’t give it back.’

  ‘OK. I’ll bring the shoes.’

  I changed the subject to our dishwasher. I didn’t ask Carole any more questions. I didn’t want to. She was talking about our father. I couldn’t stand her talking about him like this any more. She hated him and this hate made him into something horrible – with that nasty, staring look. She was saying wicked things, in fact. And that nasty staring look was turning into his face when he lay on the showroom floor, dead. I’d not seen him lying there, of course, but it was no problem picturing it.

  He believed she had done it on purpose. That’s why, I realised, he was haunting her.

  My uncle came back from the toilet and the deep-voiced woman shook his hand and said, ‘Not every square centimetre, you see.’

  ‘I like your kimono,’ he joked.

  I didn’t want to bring the ballet shoes, now. I didn’t want to encourage her dancing, any more. It frightened me. I tried praying every night, asking God to tell our father that Carole hadn’t made the floor slippery on purpose – but I kept picturing our father’s face in the little dirty window, staring into the showroom with those eyes and that funny little smile, and I knew it was useless. I pictured myself leading my army of industrial vacuum cleaners when I was smaller and his grey, dead face watching me all the time, just like someone on television, even through the boxes. Just like General de Gaulle’s grey face when he came on television to speak to the nation about the huge riots and terrible strikes two weeks later, the day Maman had her bandage taken off.

  ‘Why does he need two microphones?’ she asked.

  ‘Because he’s got two gobs,’ said my uncle.

  I went out one day into our back yard and looked at the little window. Perhaps she was inventing it all, in her madness. Maybe Maman was right. And then I wondered, if it wasn’t true, how Carole could have remembered that the little window was there, when it had been hidden since 1960. And something started rising in my chest, a sort of feeling that the window was actually alive, an evil alien very cleverly taking the form of something no one would suspect, and I picked up a piece of brick in the yard and threw it as strongly as I could, hardly taking aim.

  My mother hurried out into the yard. The smash had been very loud.

  ‘What is going on, Gilles?’

  ‘Sorry, I’ve broken the window.’

  ‘How?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘Really, at your age. So careless. And you know I’ve got a headache. You can pay for it out of your savings. At least you owned up. That’s something, dear. Alain was going to have to replace it, anyway. You’re lucky.’

  Broken glass was scattered over the showroom’s lino, while jagged bits still hung in the frame. It wouldn’t be a good idea to dance here now, I thought. The outside – the sky and some factory chimneys – looked much closer through the window, without the glass. Maman tried poking the jagged pieces out with a broom until one fell and nearly hit her foot. We decided to leave that to my uncle. I swept up, thinking how weird it was to remember the client standing in the doorway, stroking his throat in the sunlight, and to have no memory of Carole practising her pirouettes in here.

  I checked the photograph of our father in the sitting-room, above the glass animals. I half expected it to have smashed, too, like in a creepy story. Or just cracked across, over his face. I was almost disappointed that it hadn’t. It did look, though, as if his face was overflowing out of the frame. I tried to remember him more clearly but couldn’t, just as I couldn’t remember watching Carole dancing in the showroom.

  My uncle, when he saw the window broken, just grunted and said, ‘You beat me to it, chum.’

  He did nick his thumb, though, removing the jagged pieces. I rushed to get a plaster, but he didn’t need one. He didn’t believe in plasters.

  Two days after General de Gaulle’s speech, it was Carole’s twenty-first birthday. We had just enough petrol in my mother’s car to get there and back. I gave her a coloured poster of a parachutist with his arms out high above the countryside, that she could put up behind her bed. My mother thought it was a strange present for a grown-up girl, but Carole seemed to like it. She had forgotten about the ballet shoes and going on point, thank goodness. The treatment made her forget a lot of things.

  We thought we weren’t going to be able to use my uncle’s tickets to the variety show. The whole country was on strike by now, the biggest strike in the history of the world: everything closed, the trains not moving, the rubbish piled high in the streets, Parisians eating a lot of potatoes. It was a very dangerous crisis. It was like the war, everyone kept saying. Gigi reckoned it was more like the Revolution. The hum from Thomson’s and the aluminium factories stopped. The gymnasium where my mother did her exercise classes was taken over by the police and filled with people who had been arrested, but I didn’t want to take a look. Père Phare joined a demonstration and got his jaw broken and we had to pray for him in church, although my mother said it served him right. Even my school was blockaded, so I stayed at home – anyway, there were no buses and the filling-stations had notices on them saying they were empty. The road outside stank with the rubbish and my mother said it was like the war. She’d hoarded lots of tins and Maggi packets of purée, so we wouldn’t have to exist only on real potatoes. She was upset at not being able to visit Carole, even though I offered her my bicycle. My uncle used it and came back very red in the face, his legs aching: Carole was OK. In fact, she didn’t know that France was disintegrating, along with everywhere else.

  Gigi reckoned the country would be swimming in blood,
soon. ‘We like cracking each other’s heads open, we do. We’re French, aren’t we? It’s in our veins.’

  And Tante Clothilde told him to stop talking like that in front of Danielle – though my mother still thought she’d just slipped on the wet paving stones. So it was Tante Clothilde who was nearly giving the truth away, I thought.

  Then the crisis was settled just in time, as if for our sake. Everything felt a bit flat. The schools opened and the rubbish disappeared.

  The two of us, just my uncle and I, went on the train. I suddenly found myself sitting in a huge theatre next to him, staring up at a platform coming down from the roof with girls in feathers showing their bosoms, bare except for a glittery spot on the points. One of them smiled right at me. Oncle Alain’s face was staring up, like a little boy’s, tiny spots of light passing over it. The show on the stage was also full of girls with huge blue and green and purple feathers on their heads and hips and bare glittery bosoms. They danced the can-can and you could see their slips. Everything kept glittering and the music and colours and glittery bosoms went round and round in my head all that night, helped by the beer I’d been allowed to have in the interval.

  ‘So,’ asked my mother in the morning, ‘where was it you went to in the end?’

  ‘Les Folies-Bergère,’ I said.

  ‘Goodness me, Alain. No wonder he looks as if he’s had the cream.’

  On the way back in the train, my uncle had told me that he’d got the loan, using Carole’s money. Not a word to Maman, though. Maman still got headaches and went weepy very easily. Just between men, this was. He was setting up in business as a door-to-door salesman, he told me: vacuum cleaners again. Just one model, the Rolls-Royce of home vacuum cleaners, the Miele 1600-watt cylinder job with in-built carpet beater and brush roller. You had to go to the client, he said. You had to show the human face. They had to smell you, and you had to smell sweet. All those bored housewives, they needed the human face and the sweet smell, not a photograph in a magazine. But the key to it was: he was going to demonstrate the product in their own homes. Not just a dab here and there, but a proper job. Vacuum one room from top to bottom: an hour’s work. They’d be asking him back, that was the joke. Hiring him. And he was going to say: it’s not me, it’s the machine. Then they’d buy it, he’d do them instalments and special deals. He’d had it with industrial vacuum cleaners. The future was in the personal, the private, the individual. It was amazing to see him so excited. I could picture the doors opening and the bored housewives smiling at him all over France as he stood there, on doorstep after doorstep, holding the miraculous German machine.