by Liz Jensen
Liz Jensen is the author of Egg Dancing (longlisted for the Orange Prize), Ark Baby (shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize and longlisted for the Orange Prize), The Paper Eater, War Crimes for the Home (longlisted for the Orange Prize), My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time and most recently, The Rapture, which was a TV Book Club Best Read. She divides her time between Copenhagen and London.
By the Same Author
Egg Dancing
Ark Baby
The Paper Eater
War Crimes for the Home
My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time
The Rapture
First published in Great Britain in 2004
This electronic edition published in 2010 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © 2004 by Liz Jensen
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For Carsten
with love beyond words
‘When we see the brain we realize that we are, on
one level, no more than meat; and, on another, no more than fiction.’
Paul Broks, Into the Silent Land
WARNING
I’m not most kids. I’m Louis Drax. Stuff happens to me that shouldn’t happen, like going on a picnic where you drown.
Just ask my maman what it’s like being the mother of an accident-prone boy and she’ll tell you. No fun. You can’t sleep, wondering where it’s going to end. You see danger everywhere and you think, Got to protect him, got to protect him. But sometimes you can’t.
Maman hated me before she loved me because of the first accident. The first accident was being born. It happened the same way as the emperor Julius Caesar. They stab the lady with a knife till her belly pops, and then they yank you out, all yelling and covered in blood. They thought I wouldn’t make it out in the normal way, see. (Also gross.) Plus they thought she would die from it too, like Julius Caesar’s mum, and they’d have to put our dead bodies in coffins, a big one for her and a kid-size one for me. Or maybe they’d put us both in the same one, a two-corpse coffin and blah blah blah. I bet they make them. I bet you can order them from the Internet for mums and boys with a special bond. Being born was gross; even if you live to be a hundred years old, you and your maman don’t get over something like that, but it was just the beginning. I didn’t know that though, and nor did she.
The second accident was when I was a baby. I was about eight weeks old and I was lying asleep in my cot and suddenly I started getting Cot Death. Got to protect him, got to protect him, she went in her head. Don’t panic. Just call an ambulance. And they told her how to de-suffocate me till they arrived and they gave me oxygen that left bruises all over my chest. She’s probably still got the photos. She’ll show you if you want, plus the X-rays of my cute little baby ribs, all broken and smashed. Then when I was four I had a fit where I screamed so hard I practically stopped breathing for nine and a half minutes. True story. Not even the Great Houdini could do that and he was an escape artist. He was American. Then when I was six I fell on the tracks of the métro in Lyon. I was 85 per cent electrocuted. That hardly ever happens to anyone, but it happened to me. I survived, but it was practically a miracle. Then I had food poisoning, from stuffing my face with poisoned food. Salmonella and tetanus and botulism and meningitis are just some of the diseases I’ve had, plus others I can’t pronounce but they’re in volume three of the encyclopédie médicale, you can read about them, they’re gross.
—Having a kid like me was a nightmare for her, I tell Gustave. Gustave’s an expert on nightmares because his whole life’s one. —Every day, she was thinking about all the different kinds of danger, and how to keep me safe.
—You’re better off here, says Gustave. —I was lonely before you came, Young Sir. Stay as long as you want. Keep me company.
I’m getting used to him, but he still scares me. His whole head’s wrapped in bandages with blood on. If you saw him you’d think he was creepy too; you might even die of fright. But you might tell him things anyway, just like I’m doing. It’s easier if you can’t see someone’s face.
The thing is, I wasn’t to be trusted. Lose sight of me for a minute and I’d get myself into trouble. Everyone said having a high IQ made it worse not better.
—They say that cats have nine lives, said Maman, —because their souls cling to their bodies and won’t let go. If you were a cat, Louis, you’d have used up eight of your lives by now. One for each year. We can’t go on like this.
And Papa and Fat Perez agreed.
—Who’s Fat Perez? says Gustave.
Fat Perez was a fat mind-reader who wasn’t any good at mind-reading. Maman and Papa used to pay him to listen to me, and get to the bottom of the mystery. The Strange Mystery of Louis Drax, the Amazing Accident-Prone Boy. That’s what Papa always called it when he was turning it into a story. But it wasn’t a funny one. It was deadly serious and it drove Maman to sheer desperation.
Hey, Gustave. Listen to what everyone said. Everyone said that one day I was going to have a big accident, an accident to end all accidents. One day you might look up and see a kid falling from the sky.
That would be me.
Kids shouldn’t make their maman cry, so that’s why I went to see Fat Perez in Gratte-Ciel on Wednesdays. He lived in an apartment by the Place Frères Lumières. You might not know who the frères Lumières were. The frères Lumières were two brothers who invented the cinema, and there’s a museum about them and a fountain in the square and a market where Maman went shopping for salad and tomatoes and cheese. I hated tomatoes so much I was allergic to them. And she went to the charcutier to buy saucisson sec that me and Papa secretly called donkey dick. While she was shopping, Fat Perez and me, we talked about blood and stuff.
—Whatever’s on your mind, it’s OK to talk about, Louis. I’m here to listen.
Quite often it was vampire bats, because I know a lot about La Planète Bleue and also Les Animaux: leur vie extraordinaire and dead people like Jacques Cousteau and Adolf Hitler and Jeanne d’Arc and the Wright brothers and different diseases and poisons. The world blood-sucking record for a vampire bat is five litres, it sucks it from a cow’s neck or buttock after paralysing it with spit called saliva. I could tell Fat Perez anything I wanted, because it was just between the two of us and it didn’t leave the room. The grosser it was, the more excited he got. His leather chair squeaked.
I always thought that if he ever stopped being all excited by my blood stories, he could just leave a tape recorder in the room with his voice on it saying Tell Me More every few minutes. Then he could go and watch Cartoon Network and spend the money on sweets.
—How many euros does it cost per time?
—That’s a question to ask Maman, he says. —Or Papa.
—I’m asking
you. How many per time?
—Why’s it important to you?
—Because maybe I could do what you do. Earn some dosh.
He smiles his creepy fat smile.
—Would you like to help people, do you think?
That makes me laugh.
—Help people? I’d like to sit in a chair and say ‘tell me more’ and get zillions of euros for it per time, that’s what I’d like, it looks like an easy life.
—Do you feel that you’d like to have an easy life, when you grow up?
—Stupid question.
—Why is it stupid, Louis?
—Because I’m not going to grow up, am I?
—What makes you think that?
Does he think I’m a total moron? Does he think I come from the planet Pluto or somewhere humans don’t have brains?
—Second stupid question.
—I’m sorry if you think it’s a stupid question Louis. But I’m still interested in your answer, he says, with his fat face. —So. What makes you think you won’t grow up, Louis?
Don’t say anything, don’t say anything, don’t say anything.
Fat Perez was my biggest enemy but he never scared me the way Gustave does. Gustave’d scare you too, if you met him. Because underneath the bandages he hasn’t got a face and sometimes he coughs so hard it turns into being sick and sometimes I think I’m making him up just for someone to talk to. But if I am, I don’t know how to stop because if someone’s living in your head, how do you get them out?
You can’t, is how. You can’t, because that’s where they live.
There are laws and you go to prison if you break them but there are secret rules too, so secret no one ever talks about them. Here’s a secret rule of pet-keeping. If you own a small creature, say a hamster called Mohammed, and he lives for longer than a small rodent’s lifespan, which is two years, then you’re allowed to kill him if you want to, because you’re his owner. This secret rule of pet-keeping has a name, it’s called Right of Disposal. You’re allowed to do it with suffocation, or with poison if you have any, say weedkiller. Or you can drop something heavy on him, like volume three of the encyclopédie médicale or Harry Potter et l’Ordre du Phénix. Just as long as you don’t make a mess.
Visiting Fat Perez was Papa’s idea, but it was Maman’s headache because she was the one who had to take me there. Papa was busy working up in the clouds, saying cabin crew, fifteen minutes to landing, doors to manual and studying pressure maps and going on a people-skills course because–
Actually I don’t know why. I don’t know what a people-skills course is.
Fat Perez’s apartment was on the rue Malesherbes in Gratte-Ciel. First you rang the bell and he buzzed you in and there was a stink of bouillabaisse on the way to the lift, or sometimes green beans, and you had to go up four floors in a creaky old lift, and you needed to pee every time you got in. Fat Perez said it was about feeling trapped.
—You suffer from mild claustrophobia, he says. —It’s not abnormal, it happens to lots of kids and some grown-ups too, this need to relieve your bladder in confined spaces. Just try to hold on.
But every Wednesday I still had to rush to pee as soon as we were in Fat Perez’s creepy apartment. The bladder is like a balloon. It’s a muscular bag, but it pops if you hold on too long, trust me. Before I flushed the toilet I sometimes went out and put my ear to the door of his living room to hear what they were saying about me. Sometimes they’d be arguing, like they were married. But I could never hear the words properly, even using the glass he keeps his toothbrush in that’s always got gross green gunk at the bottom.
If you pay someone, they shouldn’t argue with you.
When I came out, she’d say, See you later, Louis darling, I’ll do my shopping. And then she’d leave so that me and Fat Perez could have our little conversation that cost a whole lot of euros from the cash machine that came from Papa being in the cockpit. Sometimes the stewardess brings him coffee while he is flying. Or sometimes tea but never beer or cognac.
—How’s life been treating you then, Louis? goes Fat Perez.
—Papa could get sacked from Air France if he drank beer or cognac.
Fat Perez is old, probably forty, and he has a big fat face like a baby. If you had a pin you could burst it, and yellow gob would splatter out.
—Yes. I believe that’s true. Or any alcoholic drink for that matter. They have strict rules for pilots, says Fat Perez. —Now my question, Louis.
Question One is always the question about how life is treating me. But sometimes he doesn’t ask it, he just waits for me to start but that never works because of the secret rule, called Don’t Say Anything, so we just sit there till he can’t stand it any longer. I’m much more patient than Fat Perez, because five minutes is the longest he can do before his chair squeaks, and he doesn’t know the secret rule because I invented it. When he asks me Question One, if I’m not playing Don’t Say Anything, I might tell him Everything’s perfect, thank you, Monsieur Perez. Is your diet going well? Or I might make up a story about school, about fights and stuff. Sometimes there’s a real thing that happened to someone else, but I tell him it was me. He’s such a sucker, because he always believes me or if he doesn’t, he pretends to. Pretending makes him even more of a sucker. It makes him a double sucker. Watch this.
—Today I got attacked ultra-violently, I go.
Squeak. —Tell me more.
—In Carpentry. I was making this spiral staircase out of balsa wood, a scaled-down model. Then along came the bullies, eight of them, saying Wacko Boy, Wacko Boy, Wacko Boy. They were all carrying hammers, but one of them, the biggest bully, he had a fretsaw too. He grabbed me by the neck and forced my head into the vice. And then they all got their hammers and started bashing nails into my skull.
—Ouch, says Fat Perez. Squeak.
What a creep. What a sucker. We don’t even have Carpentry, that’s from the old days when Papa was at school. We have IT instead, that’s much more useful because you can learn to be a hacker.
—It hurt like hell. And he was just about to saw my head off when the teacher came along. Monsieur Zidane. He’s a football champion too. But the worst thing was, it was me he punished. True story.
—Why did he punish you, and not the bullies? asks Fat Perez. —Out of interest.
—Cos bullies always win, and cos my blood made a mess. Football champions don’t like clearing up other people’s messes, when they’ve won zillions of trophies and the World Cup. When I got my head out of the vice, I left a trail of blood all down the corridor and into the toilets. Green blood. That pissed him off.
—Why green?
—Because I have leukaemia, and the chemotherapy turns your blood green. Didn’t you know that? I thought you were trained.
—Green blood. Leukaemia. Fascinating! Tell me more, he goes. Squeak.
He should be called Monsieur Tell Me More instead of Fat Perez. Or Monsieur Stupid Creep Sucker Arsehole.
Anyway I can say anything I want, because all feelings are allowed. Children should feel free to express their feelings even if they are negative. The world is a safe place, blah blah blah.
Ha ha, only joking.
Now pay attention, Fat Perez. My turn to ask questions.
Question One: Does my mum visit you on her own, when I’m at school?
Question Two: When she’s telling you things about her and my papa, does your chair squeak?
Question Three: Afterwards, do you sex each other?
And if he was there when I asked that, his chair would go: Squeak, squeak, squeak. And if Gustave was there he’d say: Steady on, Young Sir. Don’t waste energy. Keep your eye on the ball.
—We’re going to do something wonderful this weekend, she says. —For our birthday treat.
We’ve got almost the same birthday, see, just like we nearly had the same death-day when I was born. My birthday is on 7 April, just two days after hers, so we’re sort of twins her and me, we need each other, we’d die
without each other. So we celebrate them together, on the day in between. I’m nine, and she’s forty, which is called The Big Four-Oh. Papa comes down from Paris, where he sort of lives now, with his evil mother called Lucille, and I get lots of presents, and one of them’s a new hamster. He’s called Mohammed, just like the last one, and he’ll live in the same cage and poo in the same jam jar as the last Mohammed. I always call them Mohammed because it’s a good name for a hamster, Papa says it’s a dynasty.
Mohammed the Third came with a book called How to Look After Your Small Rodent.
—Let’s hope this one lasts a bit longer, said Papa. —You can take him with you to Paris, when you come to see me and Mamie.
But Maman gave him a funny look because Paris is a bad place.
He’s a pale hamster, his fur’s paler than the last one and his eyes aren’t black, they’re dark red, like they’re bulging with blood. Maybe because he’s scared. The Mohammeds are always scared till they’ve spent a week in their cage and started to learn the secret rules of pet-keeping. Papa calls their cage Alcatraz, which is a film about a prison where they escaped and blah blah blah.
For Maman’s birthday present, I gave her some perfume called Aura that totally reeked, it was worse than cat pee and a dead rat. Papa bought it at the airport for me to give her. He gets a discount. So it was a present from me but I didn’t choose it and I didn’t pay for it and I didn’t get the discount, I just had the thought.
—What a nice thought, said Maman, when she sprayed it behind her ears, and she hugged me and hugged me and kissed me and kissed me, and I could hardly breathe I was coughing so much from it.
It’s the thought that counts.
In a year’s time I will be The Big One-Oh.
I didn’t tell her I didn’t actually have the thought, even. I’d forgotten it was her birthday because I was so excited about mine and getting Mohammed the Third. Papa reminded me on the phone and told me to make a card but I was doing a Lego model of a rocket-launcher plus space capsule and I forgot about the card so in the end I just signed Papa’s when he came in his new car that’s a Volkswagen Passat. I used black wax crayon, which is for vampire bats and death stuff and the swastika.