No Telling

by Adam Thorpe

  I didn’t like going in the showroom very much, now. Expensive glass with wire mesh inside it was used for the little window, and my uncle never made me pay for it. It was very like the windows in the police van, except that the glass was cloudy and covered in specks, as if it had just been raining. Nobody could look through it any more, not even a ghost. The American stock was taken away at the beginning of July and the huge room looked very empty, even when the home vacuum cleaners arrived from Germany in much smaller boxes. The address on the boxes was Carl-Miele-Str. 29, Gütersloh, which made me think of the address in the SS books. I checked, because I wasn’t sure. Yes, C. Bertelsmann Verlag, Gütersloh. I wondered if Gütersloh was a huge city full of factories, or whether these were the only two companies in a small town, facing each other with their piles of vacuum cleaners and books. I wanted to tell my uncle that I’d heard of Gütersloh, but I couldn’t: I was afraid of what might happen if he found out I had SS books in my drawer.

  There were only two models delivered, in fact: a 600-watt and a 300-watt. My uncle showed us, in the sitting-room, how the brushes on the carpet beater roller extracted loose threads and hairs, and how the three centres of gravity in the handle of the little 1000 S model meant small, effortless movements were all that were needed to move the machine into the required operating position. He was practising on us, really. His deep voice flowed on, almost like a priest’s. My mother had her chin cupped in her hands and kept nodding, with a frown from her permanent headache. I imagined the vacuum cleaner as a crippled space-ship, trying to moor before the deep waters of space claimed it.

  I took the ballet slippers out of my drawer and cycled out into the countryside one day in August, on my own, and found the spot on the dusty ‘C’ road with the long grass and old chair and trees. The chair had gone, though. I threw the slippers as far as I could into the field the other side of the hedge. They sort of twisted through the air and separated and disappeared.

  I lay in the grass on the verge, staring up at the little clouds in the blue sky. I felt a grey face with a trickle of blood on it watching me from the trees, but I didn’t care. It was too warm and peaceful to care. It was nice being alone. I realised I hadn’t become a better and more Christian person, since the Communion in May. I decided what I had to do, as I lay there, to make up for my sins.

  I cycled straight back in the heat and on to Mademoiselle Bolmont’s house. I took a deep breath and rang the bell. I could hear it chiming through the house, like a marriage. I half-hoped she wasn’t in. There was a bump against the door and it opened. She was there, staring at me from the wheelchair with her mouth open.

  ‘Jules! What a surprise!’

  ‘Sorry, but I’ve come to see if you need any help.’

  I said it so quietly that she didn’t seem to hear – she just reached up for my head and gave me a big slurpy kiss on the cheeks.

  I’d prepared a little speech but it didn’t seem to be right, now. She said I looked as if I had run all the way. I could smell my own sweat and my hair was sticking to my forehead. I told her that I’d bicycled over. We went into the living-room; she’d been watching television, not reading. It was Dim Dam Dom. She asked if I liked it and I lied and said that I did. We didn’t say anything for a few minutes, caught up in Dim Dam Dom. There were photographs all round the room of a balding man with thick spectacles and a polo-neck sweater, grinning at me. I pretended to laugh with her at Dim Dam Dom and then she showed me the new wheelchair she was using: it had a shiny steel skeleton and a very washable blue plastic seat and reclined into five positions. It was weird seeing her in it. She also showed me her new stereo and something Jean-Luc had bought which made funny-shaped ice cubes.

  Jean-Luc was the man in the photographs. She gripped my arm and put on a sort of wicked expression, her lips all pursed up, and said, ‘Jules, I’ll be honest with you. I’ve found happiness. Never underestimate the power of love. My life is like a novel. We met, of all places, in the post office. He works there. I got stuck in their silly door. He untangled me. Now we are extremely tangled up, but in the nicest possible way!’

  She shook my arm as she laughed, as if I was asleep. I realised that to offer Mademoiselle Bolmont my services in the garden would be a waste of time: her edges were as neat as a toothbrush, and lots of big round flowers filled the beds. She said they were dahlia, fifteen varieties of dahlia. Jean-Luc was an expert on dahlias. How many men even knew what a flower was?

  ‘Weren’t you very interested in gardening?’ she asked, turning in her wheelchair.

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘I love it, of course. It’s my chief love, after reading. And after Jean-Luc, of course! My angel!’ She giggled, her thighs wobbling under the short dress. She’d got fatter very quickly. Her dress was very short and up-to-date, in fact, with orange and black stripes so she looked a bit like a bee. I missed her fashions of the fifties, with the shininess and bows. Her hair had changed, too: it was scraped back into a thick pony-tail, except for a long curl coming down over each temple.

  ‘I’m trying to write a real novel, by the way. I think I have some sort of insight into suffering. What are you going to be, when you’re even more grown up than you are now?’

  ‘A mime artist,’ I said, without thinking.

  She stared at me, surprised.

  ‘Marcel Marceau?’

  ‘No. Gilles Gobain.’

  She squealed with laughter, clapping her hands.

  ‘Can you do some?’

  I half shrugged.

  ‘Show me!’

  I shook my head. She said she was sure Marcel Marceau would have leapt at the chance to show her, at my age. She had seen him walking without moving – walking, then running, then skating – all without moving, as if the stage was revolving. But it wasn’t. Oh, if only the world would revolve under her poor legs! But she was making it revolve through words, she said.

  ‘OK. Just one thing.’

  I got up and turned my back and did the snogging mime.

  ‘Oh! If only Jean-Luc could be here! Oh, he must see you do this! You must come over again and do it for Jean-Luc!’

  I hugged myself tighter and moved my hands up and down my back and kept my head almost completely still – just rocking it a tiny bit, as Jocelyne had told me to do. When I stopped she clapped and I turned round. Her mouth was open. She wasn’t laughing. She seemed amazed, in fact.

  ‘I swear there were two people!’ cried Mademoiselle Bolmont. ‘How romantic! You are a genius! You’ve made me cry!’

  She blew her nose and wiped her eyes and asked after my mother. She didn’t ask after my uncle. I had never seen anyone so jolly.

  ‘So, tell me, why did you come?’ she asked, as she poured some mint syrup, funny-shaped ice cubes slipping out with it over the jug’s spout. ‘You must have come for a reason.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, looking out at the garden. ‘To say hello, I suppose.’

  ‘Hello, Jules!’ she laughed, over the canned laughter of Dim Dam Dom. The negative of the lawn in front of my eyes blocked her face.

  We went out into the garden, with me pushing her along the new concrete path around the lawn. It was a bit uneven, because Jean-Luc had laid it himself, which was why I had to push her.

  The light was very bright and the colours of the flowers seemed to invade the inside of my head. It was sweltering, out here. I realised that a migraine might be about to happen. The sun was cooking my head and the purples and pinks and yellows and reds started to hurt. Her wheelchair was heavy and kept getting blocked on the concrete paving stones. The grass was clipped very short and the flowers were in very neat rows and between the beds were little white statues of deer and dwarfs with fishing rods and there was a round plastic pond with pebbles in it. The statues started to blur and become lumps of toothpaste and the water in the pond was dazzling. I thought I might be sick. I looked at my watch and pretended I’d forgotten something really important.

  In fact, I just lef
t the wheelchair there and ran out through the house, Mademoiselle Bolmont staring at me with her mouth open as if she was stranded there in her garden for good.

  It was only a light migraine, in fact. After a couple of days I was well enough to go outside into the road and watch the new shutter being put up. It was for the showroom’s plate-glass window. The showroom wasn’t a showroom any more, it was a stockroom. My mother kept on calling it the showroom, and my uncle kept correcting her. There were no demo models, just boxes stacked on the floor. The shutter had to be put up because otherwise the new insurance company wouldn’t insure the contents, even with the alarm and the fact that we’d hear the glass being smashed. The shutter was made of steel and covered the window on the outside, then rolled up into a sort of long cage inside. They had to knock through the wall above the window to install it, destroying most of Georges Gobain et Fils. Sunburst Inc. Aspirateurs de Qualité. It didn’t matter, because we weren’t a showroom any more. My uncle couldn’t afford the electrical model, so the shutter had to be rolled up and down by twirling a handle inside the stockroom. It took several minutes and was quite tiring.

  When the shutter was down, the stockroom was almost completely dark: the light coming from the little window at the back was made much less by the security glass. Without the lights on, it was like being in a dungeon. I looked up at the little window and imagined myself as the Count of Monte Cristo, stuck in there for good. It was quite realistic, the way the outdoor light travelled on a sort of beam through the little window.

  I stood so that the beam was on my face and pretended I was in a film. My face was hidden by a long beard and I was hungry and cold and courageous, staring straight into the beam of daylight and dreaming of being free. The plate glass reflected me perfectly, now that the shutter was behind it.

  My uncle still bothered to open the shutter each morning, perhaps because he wanted people to know that he had lots of top-class vacuum cleaners boxed inside. He spent a lot of time trying to sell them, taking about ten in the car each go and ringing on hundreds of door bells. I tried to avoid him when he got back late in the evening, because he’d usually be in a bad mood. He said the women got him to clean their carpets for free and then didn’t buy the vacuum cleaner. They were too stupid to see the difference, he said.

  ‘Maybe they haven’t got the money,’ said my mother.

  ‘Everyone’s got the money, these days,’ he replied. ‘Except us. I’ll tell you where we’re going to end up. We’re going to end up in those new bloody flats they’re throwing up, that bloody shoe-box where the old military hospital used to be, behind Thomson’s. That’s where we’re going to end up, thanks to the female race.’

  Smoke came out of him like an explosion.

  ‘But they’re HLM,’ said my mother, looking shocked.

  ‘So?’

  My mother covered her face with her hands. I imagined us living on the top floor of the flats like the boy in the Menie Grégoire programme, not able to play ball on the grass and only speaking to neighbours on the zigzag stairs. It would be weird, looking out of the window high up and imagining Christophe and myself chasing about between pine-trees where now it was just muddy grass and concrete.

  ‘I’ll sell the car,’ murmured my mother, sounding very sad through her fingers.

  My uncle stubbed his cigarette out and said, ‘A lot of people don’t have a car at all, Danielle.’

  I felt very miserable about our situation, in fact, even though France hadn’t ended up swimming in blood. My shoulder still ached from where the policeman had hit it, and I kept having nightmares about the riots. I felt unworthy of my Solemn Communion with the Holy Mother Church: the film and photos of the actual event didn’t help, because I looked so idiotic in my white alb, just like a girl. I needed to do something heroic. I prayed to God and to Jesus to give me something heroic to do. I also prayed for all the starving children in the world, in case They thought I was being selfish.

  My mother found the ballet book under the bed and shouted at me. She told me that I would be paying the fine myself.

  ‘Do you want us to end up in prison, Gilles? For theft? Or end up begging on the streets? Is that how you want us to end up?’

  Luckily, she didn’t flick through it and find the page cut out. Instead, she suddenly kissed me on the top of my head, squeezing my cheeks as if I was small.

  I squirmed out of her grip. She blinked at me. She said it must have been upsetting for me to have seen her unconscious. ‘It was the Ricard and those paving stones. You must have felt very upset, waiting for the ambulance. I hope those policemen were helpful.’

  ‘It was OK,’ I said, shrugging.

  I watched television with her that evening. My uncle had gone off for a few days with his vacuum cleaners to the countryside around Clermont-Ferrand, where he hoped people would be more easily impressed. There was a programme on the frozen tundra of northern Canada. It was so cold there that petrol didn’t burn and you could get frostbite in a few minutes. We saw trappers and caribou herds and Indians in tipis. I realised that I had spent more time with my mother than anybody else in the world. She said the glare from the TV made her headache worse and put on a Nana Mouskouri record instead. I studied the record’s sleeve; Maman and the singer did have exactly the same glasses.

  I watched the record going round and round, hypnotising myself, wondering how it would be if my mother was, in fact, Nana Mouskouri, and everyone knew this at school.

  I took the ballet book back to the library at the weekend and told the woman behind the desk, my heart thudding in my ears, that I hadn’t been able to bring it back earlier because of the strikes and riots. The library had been closed for quite a while, in fact. She nodded and said that she’d let me off the huge fine if I put it back in the right place myself. I thanked her and went over to the shelf where the dance books were.

  I squeezed the book in next to one called Le Mime pour les Débutants. There were pictures in it showing a man pulling an invisible rope and playing an invisible violin and leaning on an invisible bar. There was no snogging mime. He had a polo-neck on that looked like his skin, showing his muscles exactly. It reminded me of the crew in Star Trek.

  I took the book to the desk.

  ‘Given up on the ballet, have we?’ said the woman, looking over her glasses.

  I nodded, blushing.

  ‘As long as you return it before you’re as well known as Marcel Marceau.’

  I practised in our yard, just out of sight of the kitchen window. It was tiring, doing the movements step by step, and I didn’t have a mirror large enough to show the whole of me. Then I remembered how the plate-glass window in the showroom – no, stockroom – had reflected me when the shutter was down.

  I went back into the house and wound down the shutter in the stockroom. With the lights on, I could see the whole of me quite clearly in the plate glass. I started practising, doing the right exercises over and over again. I looked a bit like a robot, in fact, because you had to learn how to separate each movement, and how to freeze, and how to make shapes that were invisible objects by using something called the clic. Pressure, immobility and clic. My favourite mime was the weight-lifter. The people in the bus-stop opposite would have been amazed, if they’d had X-ray eyes.

  It was very hard, all on my own in the stockroom, with the shutter cutting off the outside world and the special glass in the little window blocking its view of the sky. But I wasn’t doing it just for myself. I was doing it for Carole and Nicolas and Nathalie – Nathalie was sixteen, the age she would have been if she hadn’t died. She was wearing jeans and a striped top and had long dark hair.

  I imagined them sitting on the floor together by the Miele boxes and watching me, as I had watched Carole practising her pirouettes all those years before – although I was too small to remember anything about it, in fact. They always clapped, after I’d finished a mime. Even Nicolas, sometimes in Carole’s lap, sometimes in Nathalie’s.

  I told
my mother, in the end, that I’d visited Mademoiselle Bolmont.

  We were in the brand-new Champion hypermarket, the one opposite the posh restaurant. The hypermarket had been officially opened three weeks before. The ceiling was just rows and rows of neon strips, so you could see the food and other products clearly. My mother did all her shopping in one go, now, including the bread and the meat. This meant that I would see Christophe less and less – we didn’t phone each other much, these days. When I’d told him about going to the Folies-Bergère, and the girls with glittery points on their bosoms, he’d looked fed up. We hadn’t seen each other since, and it was now two days before the new school year.

  There were loads of special prices stencilled in red, hanging from the ceiling above each aisle. My mother went for those, taking a lot of trouble. She knew where things were, by now, and went up the aisles one by one, in order. She bent over the long freezer with her finger to her lips, concentrating hard. I could see my breath in the cold coming off the freezer.

  I noticed a boy about my age in a wheelchair at the far end of the aisle, choosing sweets. He had no legs.

  ‘I saw Mademoiselle Bolmont,’ I said.

  ‘Really, dear? These are less, look.’

  She held up a giant packet of frozen peas. I handed her the smaller one to put back. The giant packet rustled and was quite heavy. I dropped it into the trolley.

  ‘Don’t just drop it,’ she said.

  We moved on, with me steering the trolley. Behind the boxes of eggs there was a life-size cut-out woman with thick black eyelashes, breaking an egg into a pan. The yolk was caught halfway between her hands and the pan, with a long transparent dribble of white joining the yolk to the pan. She was sort of laughing away – as if it was a big joke, breaking an egg into a pan. I could see the yolk wobbling, the colours were so real. I kept wanting it to drop, or even to go backwards up into the shell. Not just to stay there, hanging forever in between.