Billy Moon : A Transcendent Novel Reimagining the Life of Christopher Robin Milne (9781429948074)

by Lain, Douglas

  “Work on derailing things,” Debord said. He showed Gerrard the comic strip page from Barbarella, held it up for him to read under the street lamp.

  “We’ve seen it,” Natalie said.

  “Any elements, no matter where they are taken from, can be used to make new combinations. We might derail whole cities?”

  “I don’t know,” Gerrard said.

  “Forget what I said before. Life is disorienting. That’s just how it is. Madness is the risk we take, but derailment, this is your project, it’s what you’re doing already.”

  Gerrard let out a puff of smoke. He didn’t seem to be quite able to figure out that he was receiving an invitation. Natalie’s Cyril was just as thickheaded, as stubborn, as Cecile’s in Bonjour. He started coughing and Guy Debord slapped him on the back, tried to get the smoke out of him. When the cough subsided into sputtering, Guy smiled.

  “You’ve got to remember one thing,” he said.

  “What?”

  “The trick is to create disorder without loving it.”

  12

  The American family in his bookstore was more interested in seeing him, in meeting Christopher Robin Milne, than they were in any of the books. It was difficult to tell the age of their little boy, but he was maybe eight years old, and his parents asked if Chris sold stuffed animals, and helped him search the store for evidence of Edward Bear.

  Christopher found a volume of his father’s poetry and brought it over for them.

  “Don’t you have the bear stories?” the father asked.

  “They move fast. I need to order more.”

  “You don’t have any copies at all? Nothing?”

  “Only my own private copies, and those, of course, are not for sale.”

  The American considered this. Christopher waited for a bid, sure that this man with his wide-collared suit jacket and his mod wife, whose rust-colored polyester dress was marked with a bright yellow sunflower on her hip, would insult him with their money, but they didn’t. Instead they made a different, if still entirely inappropriate, suggestion.

  “Would you read one of the stories, from your copy, to my son?”

  Christopher stepped back from the counter and raised his hands involuntarily, but the tourist persisted.

  “You could read to both of the boys,” the American said. He gestured to Daniel, who was sitting in the far corner of the shop, perched Indian style on a step stool. Daniel was counting the books with red covers.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t read to your boy?”

  Christopher did, of course, read to Daniel, but he did not read children’s stories to him. His son couldn’t follow even the simplest plot, but wanted to hear about gardening, photosynthesis, and home repair. Christopher had never even considered reading any of his father’s stories to Daniel, and would not have done so at this man’s suggestion if Daniel had not turned away from counting and taken an interest in the idea himself.

  “Story time?” Daniel asked. “Grandfather’s stories?”

  “No. Not now, Daniel,” Chris said. “He doesn’t really remember my father.”

  “I want to hear Grandfather’s story time,” Daniel said. He carried over two red books, The Catcher in the Rye and the New Testament, and then sat down heavily in one of the beanbags there.

  Christopher realized that to resist this would be more embarrassing than to give in, and he was surprised by Daniel’s interest.

  The American boy was very quiet. Christopher read from the table of contents of The House at Pooh Corner and asked him to pick his favorite, but the boy wouldn’t answer him. Instead Christopher picked out the chapter he wanted to hear. A feeling of recognition, of déjà vu, overtook Chris as he sat in the wooden rocking chair, cleared his throat, and found the correct page from which to begin. Chris read his father’s words. He lingered over the strange capitalizations.

  “‘It’s a Missage,’ Edward Bear said to himself, ‘that’s what it is. It’s a very important Missage to me, and I can’t read it. I must find Christopher Robin or Owl or Piglet, one of those Clever Readers who can read things, and they will tell me what this missage means. Only I can’t swim. Bother!’” Christopher read.

  When Christopher reached the end he looked to where he thought the American boy had been, but didn’t see him anymore, and the American couple weren’t paying attention. Instead of keeping an eye on their son they were examining a coffee table book, an oversized photography book entitled Moulton’s Barn.

  “Excuse me,” Christopher said. He looked around the store for the boy and didn’t see him anywhere. “Excuse me,” he repeated as he got up from his stool.

  The couple didn’t seem very concerned when Chris approached them. He’d been reading from The House at Pooh Corner, just one story, and when he looked up the boy was gone, but rather than helping Chris look the parents just continued flipping through his inventory.

  “Sometimes he does that,” the father said.

  “Sometimes SHE does that,” the mother corrected.

  “I thought we’d agreed.”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter anymore, does it? And I’ve always wanted a girl.”

  Before Christopher could ask any more questions, before he could really figure out what was going on, Daniel intervened.

  “The Woodentops are falling down,” he yelled.

  Chris stepped toward his son, realizing immediately that the boy was about to switch over from his usual routine of counting and echolalia into a full-blown fit. He reached out for Daniel so as to contain him before he started kicking and hitting, before the random violence began, but Daniel stepped out of reach, and Chris fell, sprawling onto the beanbags and orange carpet.

  Daniel took off, tearing through the store, knocking the postcard spinner to the ground, smashing into shelves, pulling books down, and then, finally, spitting and kicking, falling to the ground himself.

  The Americans were oblivious. “Take a picture, Tom,” the wife said. They stood over the scene as Christopher tried to talk Daniel back into his usual state of quiet detachment. Chris spoke to Daniel of railroad schedules, average temperatures, and mentioned the channel numbers on television.

  “Twelve and eight and three,” Christopher said.

  “But eight doesn’t show anything. No signal on eight. Just static,” Daniel said. “Just static.” His arms and legs relaxed. Chris held the boy down and felt the energy of the struggle dissipate.

  “That’s right. No picture on eight, but only static,” Christopher said.

  After the scene was over, when Daniel had returned to his stool and resumed counting books, the Americans thanked Christopher for his time, and started to leave.

  “Wait a minute,” Christopher said. “We need to find your son.”

  “Our daughter,” the father said.

  “Either way. Your child has gone missing,” Christopher said.

  But the Americans demurred. They hadn’t had a child really, not a real child. It was actually a personal matter, between the two of them.

  “We’ll buy that book of poems. Your father’s book?” the husband asked. “Will that do?”

  “You’ve been very kind. It was very nice of you to read to her,” the wife told him.

  * * *

  Christopher sat on the cement steps built into the hillside that divided Dartmouth. For centuries the town had been constrained by the hillside, split by it. People had built as far as they could at the bottom and then had climbed to solid ground and continued on building. There was a ring of grassy unspoiled hillside, a natural gap that had to be navigated if one was walking from Townstal to a friend who lived above. At least there had been a gap, but now the local council had seen fit to fix the problem, to bridge the gap with concrete steps.

  Chris sat halfway up and let his disapproval fester in his stomach. There had been a natural beauty to the empty hillside but now there were steps that made his walk easy and convenient. Sitting there on the cold concrete
, listening to the wind, it seemed to Christopher that he didn’t understand anything, and without this hillside, without the gap between upper and lower, Chris could scarcely perceive the town at all. He saw his bookstore, the library building, the rows of pretty cottages and lawns, but Dartmouth itself had been obliterated.

  Chris had set out that evening in order to get away from Abby and Daniel. The boy always enjoyed his programs, his time with the television, and usually Chris didn’t begrudge him this pleasure even if he did not share it with him, but that night Chris had opened the window in the study before switching the picture box on, and the feeling of cool air on his face, the goodness of that breath, made him resent the idea of an hour with the BBC or Eurovision.

  Christopher tossed down stones he’d collected. He frequently gathered stones and interesting twigs along with whatever clearly edible mushrooms and roots he might find. He tossed an oval sandstone and watched it bounce down the cement steps.

  When Chris had been eight or nine his father had written a poem about him, about little Christopher Robin. The poem was entitled “In the Dark” and it described young Christopher talking to dragons and imagining himself as a pirate, and it culminated with Christopher drifting off into an easy sleep.

  The poem had been a lie. While his father described Christopher’s time in the dark as another example of how easy it was for Chris to experience innocent and narcissistic pleasure, in reality Christopher had tossed and turned at night for the usual reasons. He could never get comfortable and could never let go of his fear.

  Listening to the beat of the bouncing stone, he remembered trying to dance with the first girl with whom he’d ever been romantically involved. He remembered occupied Italy and meeting a girl named Elene.

  Chris had been so unsure of himself with her, that while he’d known full well how to move his feet in a waltz, when he got her on the dance floor he hadn’t been able to start dancing because he hadn’t been able to find the right moment for it. His feet had twitched. He’d moved his right foot forward a bit, and then put it down again, and then stopped. Would she take his cue and move when he did, or would their bodies collide? He’d worried himself into paralysis through the whole song. He hadn’t danced to the tune “Honeysuckle Rose.”

  Chris had been good at building bridges and giving and taking orders during the war, but terrible at dancing.

  When he’d been very young he’d dreamt that he was falling. Not that he was falling off a cliff into empty space, but more that he was gliding.… Christopher would close his eyes and feel himself slip, feel himself slide down, like he was on a track or like he was being pulled by a string.

  His father wrote stories about him, about a Christopher who was always little and silly. But was that how his father really saw him? Was that how his father wanted him to be?

  Sitting on the steps Christopher couldn’t decide if it was the Americans with their fictional son, the way Dartmouth was changing, or the sale of Cotchford Farm and the destruction of all of his father’s personal effects that was causing him to fall. He didn’t understand why his father’s death made him feel more and more trapped as Christopher Robin.

  The last time Christopher had thought he was quite through with stuffed bears and his father’s distant judgment was when he’d gone off to Cambridge. He’d thought that while he had not received the tools from his father that he’d needed—he’d gotten nothing to help him make the transition from being the girlish and somewhat dim child of his father’s stories and poems into manhood—that he had nonetheless somehow managed to do well enough.

  At Cambridge Christopher had purchased a pipe to puff on while working on equations and sums for his courses in applied mathematics, and he’d thought he’d appeared as an adult this way, but soon enough the incompetent schoolboy with long hair and a stuffed bear had returned.

  * * *

  It was a rare thing to find a phonograph player in one of the cottages at Cambridge, but the fellow Christopher shared his bedroom with in 1939 had such a device at his disposal and would play records at all times of day or night. If Chris was studying, or attempting to discuss politics or sport in the sitting room, his roommate would interrupt with the sound of the phonograph needle skipping across a Satie symphony or the crooning of some jazz singer like Bessie Smith or Josephine Baker. However, over time the existence of the phonograph player became less of a nuisance. Christopher became accustomed to it and even able to enjoy the over-proximity of recorded music. It was only after his roommate decided to use the phonograph in order to pull a prank that Christopher had to request a transfer to a different cottage.

  Simon Palmer was the boy’s name, and he’d gotten ahold of Gracie Fields’s recording of “Christopher Robin Is Saying His Prayers,” a song that simply lifted his father’s poem entitled “Vespers” and set it to music.

  The prank was playing the poem twice through while Christopher had company. As it spun Chris’s face grew red and then redder still.

  “God bless Mummy, I know that’s right. God bless, Daddy. I quite forgot.”

  It wasn’t that they’d laughed at him, though they had laughed, but that he himself couldn’t distinguish between the little boy saying his prayers to God in the poem and the Christopher who hoped God might see him smoking his pipe and let him finally be an adult. Christopher felt himself to be just as flat as the record and, like the record, etched with grooves and notes that were not of his own making.

  13

  In January of 1968 the newly constructed swimming pool at Nanterre was opened, and Natalie attended the inauguration ceremony with a plan to intervene. Gerrard stood next to her at the edge of the indoor swimming pool and suggested that they try imagining that the building was a milk bottle. Instead of concrete walls they were behind transparent glass fogged over by the steam rising off the chlorinated blue water. Natalie thought about this, about glass, as she stared into the blue water. She didn’t look up until the university president shook hands with François Missoffe, the minister of youth affairs and sport, and started speaking into the microphone.

  There were maybe a hundred people attending the ceremony including newspaper reporters, professors, administrators, and students, and all them were bored. The men’s and women’s swim teams stood in lines of six by the shallow end of the pool. The men were first, nearer to the edge, and the women were behind them. They stood shivering and yawning in black elastane swimsuits. The minister of youth affairs, a skinny middle-aged man with curly grey hair, looked something like a film star, a bit like Paul Meurisse. Confident in his tan cotton trench coat, vest, beige pants, and leather gloves, he coughed politely, removed his gloves and coat, and handed them to the women’s swim coach. This middle-aged blond woman in a red and brown and orange track suit took the minister’s effects to the bleachers and, after folding the coat and stashing the gloves in the breast pocket, handed them to a younger woman in horn-rimmed glasses.

  The minister waited for the university president to finish the introduction, then stepped up to the microphone, adjusted the stand so that it stood higher, aligned the device with his mouth, and then announced that he was pleased.

  “This new addition to the University of Nanterre will bring fitness and sport to the students and teachers here. It strikes me as an essential facility, one that is both good for the student body at the university and for the larger body of France,” he said. “However, today’s university students are so focused on getting ahead in their careers, so determined to make their way to the top of their chosen professions, that they may not feel they have the time for a leisurely swim. It is difficult to predict to what extent these students will find time to use the new facility,” he stated. “This is why it is imperative that all students be required to take physical education classes, and specifically to be instructed in effective swimming methods, as a part of their general education course work.”

  The reason the university put the new pool behind glass, the reason they trapped it in a milk
bottle, was because they wanted the students to be bored. Watching the women’s swim team stand on the cold concrete, seeing the girls stretch, yawn, and scratch at the edges of their suits, Natalie could feel their power and energy evaporate. The ceremony was constructed, planned out, to contain the students behind glass, to bottle up the boys and girls in black swimsuits. The swimming pool suppressed desire by naming it health.

  Natalie was not bored. She wasn’t trapped in a milk bottle, but armed with a hammer.

  A boy named Daniel Cohn-Bendit smiled at Natalie. He’d heard his cue. With his red hair and freckles he looked a bit like a movie star himself, or like Elvis Presley, and he walked around the edge of the pool to the minister, slowly and deliberately, so as not to slip. He was twenty-three years old and probably the oldest student present. He stepped forward and raised his hand to interrupt the youth minister, but he did not wait to be called upon to speak.

  “Sir, I understand you’ve written a book about us?” Daniel Cohn-Bendit asked.

  M. Missoffe tried to continue with his speech about physical education and personal ambition, to continue his advocacy of a program for both, his argument of the necessity for both in a modern capitalist state, but Cohn-Bendit kept on.

  “You’ve written a thick book about youth in France,” Cohn-Bendit said. He turned to look across the pool at the dozen or so students who were his real audience. “It’s about three hundred pages long?”

  “I wrote a book. That’s correct. May I continue?”

  “I’ve read your book,” Cohn-Bendit said. “It covers quite a lot of ground, quite a lot about us, about university students, but you left out the one subject that affects us most.” Cohn-Bendit turned back to face his adversary again. He smiled at the minister, and paused. “You didn’t write about the problem of sex.”

  The minister didn’t blink. “You have a problem with sex?”

  “Yes, sir. But you never mentioned it in your book. You only hinted at the problem with talk of career and personal drive, individual effort. Sex is an economic issue. Something a girl saves up like a dowry. Something a man purchases like a car, or with a car.”