“It’s conditional.”
She took Gerrard by his shirt collar and marched him to the front of the class. She asked Gerrard to stand in the corner with his face toward the wall, instructed the boy to push his nose against the wall, to stand extra close. Gerrard did as he was told. He stood perfectly still, with his nose smashed against the wall, and wondered how he knew the wall would stay. After all, he could push very hard.
* * *
After school Gerrard had settled in to look at the pictures in the latest Tintin when his mother and her new boyfriend Patrick arrived. They made noise in the stairway, laughing and shouting, and a sinking feeling took hold of Gerrard. Patrick was going to stay the night. Gerrard knew it right in the middle of his stomach.
“How was school, Gerrard?” Patrick asked.
“Fine, sir.”
Patrick stood in the doorway and blinked.
“Hello, little one,” his mother said. She was wearing dark red lipstick and had her hair pulled back in a bun. Usually she wore her hair down and went without makeup on days when she had to work. She said it didn’t matter if she got made up or not, that there was always another girl behind another desk for the boss to look at. There were a hundred girls on her floor, all of them typing on IBM electrics, and, according to her, all of them more presentable than his mother usually was. She would be the only one wearing slacks, but not on the days that she was going to see Patrick. His mother was still dressed casually, but to Gerrard the black skirt and grey turtleneck seemed wrong on her. It would have been better if she’d just gone ahead and dressed up in something formal, like the other mothers Gerrard knew, rather than this way, like a yé-yé girl.
“Hello, Mama,” Gerrard said.
“Patrick is staying for dinner.”
Patrick just stared at Gerrard, and Gerrard closed his comic book and went straight to the divan. Patrick took off his trench coat and folded it in half, then took off his tie and folded that. He placed these on the table, next to Gerrard’s plate, and then headed for the kitchen while Gerrard’s mother picked up the jacket and tie and hung them up properly in the hall closet.
“Where is the wine?” Patrick asked from the other room.
Gerrard looked out over the rooftops at the Eiffel Tower, at the chimneys, antennas, and soot. Outside the buildings and the sky were both the color of limestone. As Gerrard lay down on the sofa and stared at the high ceiling he listened to his mother move dishes around in the kitchen.
Later, after dinner, Gerrard asked if he could stay up to listen to Europe 1, to the bebop jazz they played after seven. Rather than answer him herself, Gerrard’s mother looked at Patrick.
Patrick told Gerrard’s mother that he’d take care of bedtime. He grabbed Gerrard around the waist, and before Gerrard could object, he carried him to his bedroom, placed him on his bed, told him to strip down and go to sleep.
“Do you like Bud Powell?” Gerrard said.
“Strip.”
“I’m not tired.”
Gerrard reassured himself that in a few minutes he would simply get up off the bed and leave. The lock on his bedroom door did not work because the mechanism was jammed. All he had to do was wait for his mother and her friend to go to her room, and then sneak back to the kitchen where Billie Holiday would be singing “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off.” He waited what seemed like a long time, but what might have been only a few minutes, before lightly stepping out of bed. When Gerrard tried the door he found that it wouldn’t open. Patrick was outside the door, in the dark, holding it closed, and Patrick was stronger than Gerrard.
“Let me out,” Gerrard said.
Patrick didn’t budge. Gerrard pulled and pulled on the door, but the door did not open. Finally, after trying and trying again, Gerrard lay down on the bed determined to wait it out. Patrick had to go away sometime.
* * *
Gerrard dreamed that the ground beneath his feet was made of soft grey clay. Gerrard made an indentation, the beginnings of a trench, as he walked a tight circle around a metal pole. When he looked to the horizon he saw that there was light, but there was no source for it. The sky was a matte painting—it didn’t just look like a painting; he could see it really was a painting—a lighter shade of grey than the ground, but that was all. He touched the metal spindle, looked at his loafers, and then out at the horizon again. It was nothing but a screen, and he thought about walking up to the sky and punching his hand through it.
In the way that often happens in dreams, the scene shifted. Gerrard was in the city. The clay beneath his feet hardened into … Paris. He was standing on cobblestones. The metal spindle was gone, replaced by an elephant made of stone and run through by a spiral staircase. The staircase pierced the elephant’s belly, and if he’d wanted he could have climbed in through the hole in the elephant’s stone stomach. Rainwater poured from the elephant’s trunk.
The elephant sat in the centre of a roundabout. Narrow avenues led away to each point on the compass. On one of these narrow streets, perhaps eleven meters away, a glamorous woman was sitting at a café table. From a distance she looked like the actress Simone Signoret. She held up a pastis glass and the orange color of her Ricard reflected in the sunlight of the early afternoon. She saw Gerrard and waved at him, gesturing for him to approach.
As he sat down she asked, “Do you know where you are?” She pushed a bulbous glass bottle of orange soda to him. He unscrewed the cap and then paused, nervous of taking a sip. Instead of Simone Signoret the dream woman now looked like his mother, only her hair was a darker shade of brown, and her skin was a bit darker. She looked like his mother only younger and more beautiful. She was a dream.
“You’re precocious,” the woman said and brought her Ricard up to toast him. She drank. “You think you can tell the difference between being awake and dreaming already?”
Gerrard took a sip of his drink, but it was watery and weak. He looked inside the bottle and saw the orange pulp had settled at the bottom. He screwed the cap back on and shook the bottle, watched the sugar water and bits of orange and nectarine mix, then unscrewed the cap and took a quick sip. That was better.
“You’re not my mama,” Gerrard said. He drank from the bottle and then tried to set it back on the table, but the table was grooved. Pictures of animals—of snakes and ducks and lizards and owls and more—were engraved into the uneven surface of the stone tabletop. Gerrard put his bottle down slowly, carefully, but it tipped and spilled anyway. The liquid sloshed out.
“It’s true. I’m not your mama,” the woman said. She was smiling in a condescending way, like she was laughing at him. She reached over and set his bottle right.
His dream mother stood up. She was stunning and strange in her red silk dress with black polka dots, with her aura of celebrity, but still she went into the café to fetch a dish towel. She left Gerrard sitting outside by himself. He looked up and down the street and worried that he heard footsteps. He knew he was dreaming, but he wasn’t sure if there would be monsters in the dream or not.
Gerrard sat in the sun on the cramped avenue, in an old part of Paris where the streets were narrow and dirty, a part of Paris that smelled of dirt and cigarette smoke. Gerrard took another swig from his bottle, swallowed the carbonated liquid in the wrong way, and started coughing and sputtering.
If it was all a dream, why couldn’t he stop coughing? Were his worries bringing on exactly what he feared most? He decided to think of something else, but even when he quit coughing he could still hear footsteps. He listened to them get louder.
The woman in the red dress put down a white dish towel with green stripes that reminded Gerrard of snakes on the spot where he’d spilled his orange drink. He saw her arm and the towel before he realized she’d returned. He was startled.
“I don’t want to see him,” Gerrard said.
“Who?”
“I don’t want to see Papa right now,” he said. “He’s dead. I don’t want to see him dead.”
“What if it wasn’t your re
al father, but your mother’s friend? What if you could do something about him? Isn’t that why you came here?” She wiped the table with the dish towel, soaking up the sugar water that had pooled around the owl, the kangaroo, and the snake.
Gerrard did want to do something about his mother’s friend. Before he could think of just what that might be his dream mother reached under the table and brought out some stuffed animals. She placed a stuffed bear, tiger, kangaroo, and a little stuffed donkey on the table where the spill had been.
“Gerrard, do you know where you are?” she asked.
“I’m in the dream,” he said.
“And do you know who I am?”
“You’re my mother. You’re my mama after all,” he said.
She took him by his hand and looked at him. She looked Gerrard in the eye and told him that she wasn’t exactly his mother, but he could call her that and it would be fine. “Let’s talk about your animals,” she said. “Your father told you about them, didn’t he. He read to you about your animals from a book?”
“Not my animals. They’re Christopher’s animals.”
The animals on the table were threadbare and old. The yellow bear’s button eyes dangled from strings, and the donkey had spots where his grey fur had been rubbed away. The woman who was not Gerrard’s mother picked the animals up again and put them back in her cloth purse. She finished her wine and then asked Gerrard if he was finished with his orange soda. Gerrard nodded yes.
“Let’s go for a walk.”
The woman in the red dress led Gerrard back down the narrow street. They squeezed between the limestone walls and made their way toward the elephant building. Gerrard thought it might be a Heffalump and that he didn’t want to go inside or up the stairs. Gerrard remembered the animals that had been carved into the table, the way the grooves felt, and he wished that he’d drunk all of his orange soda when he’d had a chance. He squeezed through from Paris back to the flat grey circle where he’d been before, ending up not at an elephant building but back at the metal pole. Back on the damp and giving clay, Gerrard was thirsty.
“You remember where you are?”
“I’m nowhere,” Gerrard said.
“It hasn’t changed. You told me before.”
“I’m in the dream.”
She took the animals out of her cloth bag and put them down in the clay. Then she dragged the bear and the pig across the surface, pushing hard enough so that the clay moved. Pushing the stuffed animals along, she made ruts in the clay. She was digging with them.
“You want the tiger?” the woman asked.
“I don’t know. Won’t they get dirty that way?”
The woman held up the stuffed animals to him and he saw that they were spotless. If anything they were now in better condition, a little less threadbare than they’d been. The bear’s eyes were tightly sewn in place; the donkey and kangaroo seemed to have more fur.
Gerrard used the donkey to mark the earth. He pushed the small animal against the ground and dug a hole using the donkey’s head. He piled up the clay into a hill. The woman used the bear to make a figure eight in the clay, and then together they both dug a trench around the pole, using each animal to mark the spot.
“Are you dead?” Gerrard asked the woman. He didn’t know why he asked. It had something to do with the digging, and the weight of the stuffed donkey in his hands.
The woman said nothing, but she reached out and touched Gerrard’s cheek. She had clay on her hand, wet clay that stuck to him, and Gerrard pulled back.
“Am I dead too?”
“No.”
“Why am I not dead?”
“You haven’t lived long enough.”
“I don’t want to die,” Gerrard said.
Gerrard thought about how everybody died, how everybody was fragile. Even his real mother, even her friend, they were neither of them so big that they couldn’t get hurt or die. His mother especially was small. She was always getting sick, telling him about what hurt and where it hurt, but even her friend could be hurt. He’d seen it. His mother’s friend had shown Gerrard a wound on his shin, right below the knee. A three-millimeter gash, a straight line below the knee. His mother’s friend had been trying to climb a fence and cut himself when he fell onto a street sign. The edge caught him on the leg.
Gerrard had been awake when he’d admired the wound. It was a real wound, and Gerrard had asked to see it again and again. He was impressed that her mother’s friend didn’t cry, but even more impressed to see him wounded. Gerrard asked to hear the story of how it had happened, how he’d gotten the cut. It didn’t make any sense. His mother’s friend had been climbing a fence in the sixth Arrondissement, a fence around the hotel where he worked, and he admitted he’d been drunk. Why was he on the fence? Why was he drunk at work?
“It was late. Long after we’d gotten off for the night.”
“Why did you go back?”
“It was late.”
“Why were you on the fence?”
The answers never came and his mother’s friend pulled his pant leg down over the wound.
Gerrard felt better. Looking at the blank grey earth, at the grey screen that had replaced the sky, he felt as though he was making something.
5
Gerrard’s mother looked young and scared as they sat in the hall outside Patrick’s hospital room in Hôtel-Dieu. She was nervous being there and responded to every request the staff people made. They were sitting in wooden chairs against the rubber strip set into the plaster to protect the wall from wayward gurneys. The infection in Patrick’s leg had spread, and now his mother’s friend had a blood infection. The doctors had given him drugs to make him sleep and slipped a mask over his face to help him breathe.
Patrick wasn’t threatening anymore; he wasn’t the big man he’d been, but had shrunk. The unconscious body under the stiff hospital sheets was a fragile thing, and Gerrard felt bad for it. He wished Patrick would wake up so that Gerrard could say he was sorry. He hadn’t really meant it.
Gerrard and his mother were asked to wait in the hall and, since Gerrard’s mother was not married to Patrick, the two of them were viewed with suspicion by the nurses. It was late at night, much later than Gerrard was usually allowed to stay up. The hospital had a strange smell. There were a variety of machines to see and old men and women were occasionally wheeled by on their way from a procedure to bed, or from bed to a procedure. There was fear in their eyes, and Gerrard felt a certain amount of pity for them, but in a detached way.
Gerrard felt a bit guilty for his curiosity. Were the bruises on the old lady’s arms a symptom of her illness? Was the old man with thin grey hair that stuck out in all directions and who was wearing a sunflower patterned gown muttering obscenities because he was scared, or were his words a symptom of his disease?
Gerrard’s mother looked at herself in her compact mirror, adjusted her lipstick, put the mirror away, and then took it out again and looked at her cheeks. She took out a piece of tissue paper from her purse and wiped the rouge from her face and patted at her lips in an effort to remove the red color there. She didn’t want to look pretty after all. She looked at herself in her little mirror and thought it over again, turned the bottom of the tube of lipstick, and then turned the tube the other way. She couldn’t decide.
“This is the hospital where you were born,” she said. “I gave birth to you here.”
Gerrard didn’t know what to say, didn’t particularly like being reminded of being an infant. He wasn’t curious about the circumstances of his birth, but he did want to know about the hospital, about how it worked. “Did it hurt?” he asked.
His mother smiled a thin smile, her soft face tightening, and her partially red lips pressing into a slightly curved line. “I don’t remember if it hurt,” she said. “They gave me drugs to make me sleep and forget.”
“What kind of drugs?”
“I don’t remember the names, but they told me. Pain drugs partially.”
“Did
they stick you with needles or give you pills?”
“They injected the drug, or one of the drugs. I think they gave me pills too. I remember they wheeled me around on one of those gurneys and I saw strange things.”
His mother described a machine the size of a small room. They were keeping the children who had polio inside the machine, and it was breathing for them. Four children were stowed in the machine, with their heads outside and propped on shelves attached to the machine. The children were sleeping and the machine made a sound like a vacuum cleaner.
She said that she’d thought the children in the machine were dead. She worried that the nurse had killed them, but then she’d remembered how the doctor had warned her about the hallucinations and paranoia the drugs might cause.
“The drugs made it hard to think. I remember the wall of the breathing machine, and I remember waking up to find you were already born.”
“Did Papa stay here when he was sick?”
Gerrard’s mother went back to adjusting her makeup, licking her lips and holding up the compact mirror to the light.
Gerrard watched as a man in a white lab coat walked past rolling a tray that contained knives and scalpels, and a basin of dark fluid.
“He was on a different floor. I hate this place,” his mother said.
Gerrard got up from the chair and walked the length of the hallway. He found an open door and stepped inside the empty hospital room. It smelled like bleach and dust burning on a warm radiator. The dark wood floors were scuffed from metal wheels and the blue cotton curtains on the windows had faded in the sun.
He left the empty hospital room and moved on to explore what was behind the next door. There the walls were lined with light blue tile that reminded him of a swimming pool. It was an operating room. Knives and rubber gloves, basins and paper aprons were set out on a table. Gerrard stepped inside, stood in the middle of the room, put his hands on the pillow, on the spot where the patient’s head would go, and thought about blood and internal organs. He listened to his heartbeat, realized that his stomach was empty, and wondered if he needed to pee yet. He stopped and felt his body working, all his parts sloshing along, working together.
Billy Moon : A Transcendent Novel Reimagining the Life of Christopher Robin Milne (9781429948074) Page 4