The Ninth Life of Louis Drax

by Liz Jensen

  My maman’s very fragile like glass because her life’s been very hard, Papa says. That’s why she gets headaches and she cries and sometimes screams at me and then says sorry and cries more and hugs me and hugs me and kisses me and kisses me. But Papa’s not fragile. He’s one of the strongest men in the world. If you met him, he might punch you in the face and give you a bad headache called concussion. He’s good at hitting, he could’ve been a boxer but he wouldn’t ever fight dirty, like the man who killed the Great Houdini by punching him in the stomach before he got his muscles ready. Papa works on his muscles at the gym; Pectoral and Abdominal are just two of them but he’s got others too, more than most dads. He could be a Killing Machine if he did the training. He just hasn’t got time to do the training, that’s all. He’s too busy flying aeroplanes. It’s a desk job, he says. The cockpit is a glorified desk. It’s a frustrating life, not as glamorous as you think, mon petit loup.

  Plus you have to be careful about how you drink beer and cognac, you have to do it in secret because nobody’s allowed to know, especially if you’ve been drinking more ever since Disneyland Resort Paris and you’ve gone all weird and angry with your wife and your son who are innocent victims of your frustration and shouldn’t be blamed for things that aren’t their fault because they’re no one’s fault but your own and you need to face up to it.

  —We’re all going away for the weekend, says Maman.—Out of Lyon, into the countryside. We’ll go for a lovely spring picnic down in the Auvergne, you and me and Papa, we’ll be a family again.

  All smiley with lipstick that’s pink.

  Papa used to fly on international routes but now he just flies domestically. It’s better to fly domestically because that way you don’t jeopardise your family life, that’s the most precious thing in the world. The birthday card I got, it said: To Our Darling Son. And the one him and me gave her, it said: To a Wonderful Mother. When she read it she did something sideways and twitchy with her mouth and she looked at Papa with a weird face and she said, I suppose Lucille chose this? And she put it next to the card from her maman who sent me one too but I’ve never met her cos Guadeloupe is far away where they grow mangoes and exotic fruit and blah blah blah.

  —There’s a wild flower up there, you can find it in the mountains, near Ponteyrol, she says. —It’s called Spring Glory and it flowers in April. We can pick some.

  —What for?

  —To put in a vase. And to give to people, she says—Friends. And she smiles again.

  Maman’s friends keep changing. They keep changing because one day they have a Major Disagreement, and the Major Disagreement is always about me and she has to fire them because she’s on my side, defending me from spiteful people who ask mean questions and say I’m Wacko Boy. That’s what mums are for but it’s very Isolating. My papa has colleagues. They’re other Air France pilots and beautiful stewardesses from other airlines that are rival airlines. And maybe people from the gym. But I bet they think flowers suck. I bet they’ve never heard of Spring Glory. I’ve never heard of Spring Glory. Have you heard of Spring Glory?

  Oh yeah? What colour is it then?

  See? No one’s heard of it. She made it up, to get us out of the apartment. She does that sometimes because she gets all cooped up. Mothers need air and space and freedom. They’re like birds, if you keep them in a cage they go mad. It isn’t just dads that need to fly. Plus they’ve been arguing on the phone.

  —All your fault!

  —My fault? Did you say my fault?

  And she’s trying to make everything all right again. That’s what women do. They do Emotional Work. If they don’t do Emotional Work he might stay away for ever and drink beer and cognac in bars and plot how to destroy our family with his evil mother called Lucille, who sent me a birthday card with fifty euros in it and a photo of her and Papa when he was a boy with their dog called Youqui who got run over by a tractor. His legs were paralysed so they had to do Mercy Killing. That’s a bit like Right of Disposal but the rules are less fun.

  —Now let’s see, goes Maman. —I’ve packed the suitcase. We’re spending Saturday night in a hotel near Vichy, then we’ll drive back to Lyon on Sunday night. Papa’s got the whole weekend off, so we’re having a bit of a treat. Now, picnic hamper, thermos ...

  The picnic things all look brand new, maybe it’s part of Emotional Work. I’ve never seen this stuff before, plastic plates and cups and knives and forks, because we’ve never gone on a picnic before. I’ve been on picnics, but not with them. With school. On school trips. If you drop litter you have to go back and pick it up. The teachers get you to sing stupid songs and on the way back, someone pukes in the coach. I see what’s in the hamper when she puts it in the car boot. I lift the lid of the freezer-box and there’s the food, all wrapped in cling film that’s dangerous for children because if you stretch it over your face you look cool like a mega-violent criminal but then you suffocate and die. There’s pâté and saucisson sec secretly called donkey dick, and Camembert and grapes and a birthday cake from Pâtisserie Charles. Papa comes and looks too.

  —You’ve really gone to town, Natalie, he says.

  And that’s what I think too but I don’t say anything.

  —You’re only forty once, says Maman.

  Donkey dick, says Papa secretly to me, but not aloud, just moving his mouth.

  —Can I bring Mohammed? I go.

  —No, chéri, says Maman. —Sorry. Out of the question.

  But Papa says, Why not, just as long as he stays in Alcatraz, so Mohammed goes in the car too, in the boot with the food even though it’s OK to leave him for as long as ten days because he’s a low-maintenance pet. And hey, just look at us, we’re being a family again, with a mum and a dad and a hamster. And Maman slams the door of the boot and we get in the Volkswagen Passat that has a six-stack CD player and a sunroof and Papa puts on his sunglasses that make him look cool like a gangster, and clicks his seatbelt and starts the car, zzhhmm, and turns and smiles at us, and says ‘let’s hit the road’, like nothing’s wrong, like they might love each other again, like there isn’t going to be a man in bandages who hasn’t got a face, and like nothing terrible’s going to happen.

  Little boys love sea monsters. If I had a son, I’d take him to see the giant squid that’s just arrived in Paris, fifteen metres long and pickled in formaldehyde. I saw a photo in Nouvel Observateur: a tubular body with suckered tentacles trailing balletically behind. It made me think of an orchid, or a slender, grasping sea anemone loosed from its moorings and wandering fathoms deep, lost and racked by doubt. The Latin name is architeuthis. In years gone by they were dismissed as a sailors’ myth, the product of too much time spent on too much ocean, salt-water madness. But now, global warming has blessed the giant squid; its population has gone berserk, and proof of its existence is daily flotsam on foreign shores. Its eyes are the size of dinner plates.

  If I had a son–

  But I don’t. Only grown-up daughters. Sophisticated young women with mobile phones, who have little time for freaks of nature. They’re both students in Montpellier. I’d have taken them to see underwater monsters, if they’d shown the inclination. But boys are different. A boy has all the time in the world for a giant squid.

  Louis Drax would have loved to see one, I’m sure of it. He kept pet hamsters, but he hankered after more threatening creatures: tarantulas, iguanas, snakes, bats – gothic animals with spikes, scales, scary fur, a potential for destruction. His favourite reading was a lavishly illustrated children’s book called Les Animaux: leur vie extraordinaire. He knew much of the text by heart.

  He had a vivid, eccentric imagination, according to his mother, Natalie Drax. A ‘reality problem’, was how his psychologist, Marcel Perez, put it in his statement to the police. Louis was a dreamer, a loner. He had difficulty distinguishing fact from fiction. Like a lot of highly intelligent, articulate children, he did badly at school because he was bored out of his mind. He was small for his age, with deep, dark eyes t
hat penetrated you somehow. That’s what everyone said. A weird kid. A remarkable kid. Unbelievably intelligent. Reading between the lines, you also got the impression that the same people might have added, privately, that he could also be a ‘typical only child’ – code for spoiled brat. But after what happened, no one dared to speak ill of Louis, whatever reservations they may have had about him.

  I have a feeling that the nine-year-old Louis Drax and I would have got on, if we’d met. We’d have discussed curious phenomena of the natural world, and maybe I’d have taught him a few card games: poker, vingt-et-un, gin rummy. I was an only child too; we had that in common. I’d have shown him my phrenological chart and waxed poetic on the workings of the human brain. Explained how different parts of it govern different impulses. How jokes and tongue-twisters come from a different place from algebra and map-reading. He’d have liked that. Yes, I’m quite sure he’d have liked that.

  But that wasn’t going to happen. Things got blown off track for both of us, and now – Let’s just say, I see no party balloons on the horizon.

  Everyone rewrites history. I’ve certainly been trying to. My favourite version of Louis’ story is the one in which I did the right thing every time, and had the intuition to sense what was really going on. But it’s not the truth. The truth is that I was blind, and I was blind because I deliberately closed my eyes to what was there.

  Fine weather and death should never go together. But on the day of Louis’ final accident, they did: it happened on a lovely afternoon in early April in the mountains of the Auvergne. Cool but with a bright sun. It’s wild, extravagantly rugged country, much favoured by speleologists, who come to explore and chart the underground cave systems made by earthquakes and volcanic disturbances millennia ago; deep rifts and fissures that stretch for miles, puckering the earth’s crust like scar tissue. The picnic site, near the town of Ponteyrol, was a sheltered spot on a mountainside, scented with wild thyme. I suspect that even the gendarmes, busy with photographs and maps, couldn’t help noticing how seductive their surroundings were. The roar of the ravine far below is soothing rather than menacing. You could be lulled to sleep by the rush of those waters. Some of the gendarmes may even have thought of returning here with their families, one summer Sunday in the future – though they would not have mentioned how they came to know the place, or spoken of the catastrophe that occurred there.

  After the accident, the boy’s mother was far too distraught to make a proper statement, but as soon as they got the gist of what had happened, the police called for urgent back-up to hunt for the missing father. Then Madame Drax was sedated and the ambulance crew bore her off, along with the wrecked body of her son. She wouldn’t let go of his hand. It was still soft, but extremely cold, like refrigerated dough. He had fallen to the bottom of the ravine, where the fast-flowing water had gulped him down, then regurgitated him on an outcrop of stone a little way downstream. That’s where they found his drowned body, soaked through by freezing spray. They went through the motions of reviving him, pumping the water out of his lungs and attempting resuscitation. But it was pointless. He was dead.

  I have often wondered what Madame Drax felt, when they winched the boy up and she saw the hopeless flop of his wet limbs, the stark whiteness of his skin. What was going through her poor mind? Apparently she screamed again and again, then howled like a wounded animal, barely stopping for breath. They managed to calm her eventually. A storm was beginning to gather; as the ambulance drew away, grey bloated rain-clouds were marshalling themselves on the horizon.

  In the ambulance, Natalie Drax became silent, almost composed, according to the policewoman who was with her. I am sure that at this point, as she gripped her son’s dead hand, she must have prayed. Everyone becomes a believer in a crisis, calling on a God with whom to cut a last-ditch deal. She’d have prayed that time could be reversed, that this day had never dawned, that all their choices had been otherwise, that all the words that had spilled from them could be unsaid, that the whole episode could rewind and stall. I also believe that on some level Madame Drax must have blamed herself, even then, for what became of Louis. She must have seen it coming. She, of all people, knew what was going on, where Louis was headed, the danger he was in. She had done her best to prevent the inevitable from happening – and perhaps even managed to delay it a little. But she was unable to stop it.

  At the hospital, the urgency of making a statement got through to her, briefly, before the drugs sucked her into an artificially deep and dreamless sleep. She told the police what had happened in more detail, in a dead voice that might have come from a machine. And in the same dead voice, she answered all their questions. She was the only remaining witness to the event. The family who found her, screaming, in the road, arrived ten minutes after Louis’ fatal plunge down towards the ravine and his father’s subsequent disappearance. It was they who had rung the police.

  By then the storm had split the sky, unleashing ugly gouts of thunder that crescendoed across the mountains. The lashing rain soon became so relentless that cars pulled in at the roadside, waiting for the worst to pass. In retrospect, it seemed an extraordinary quirk of chance that the ambulance crew managed to reach Louis’ body when it did. Two hours later the torrential downpour would have made any attempt impossible; by the time night fell, the police were forced to leave the mountainside altogether.

  The next morning, the storm had blown over and the sky was blue again, rinsed of violence. Returning to take more photographs and widen the search, the police retrieved the Draxs’ abandoned car, a brand-new Volkswagen Passat parked half a kilometre up the road from the picnic spot; in the boot was a live hamster in a cage, running madly on its little treadmill. They removed the now soaking rug, the picnic hamper, and the rest of the detritus from the picnic area: plates, knives and forks, a thermos of coffee, half a bottle of white wine, three unopened cans of Coke, some sodden napkins and – oddly – a blister packet of contraceptive pills, midway through the cycle. What they missed, I imagine nature would have claimed swiftly enough. Ants would march in determined lines to carry off what the rain had not swept away: tiny grains of sugar and salt, soggy fragments of crisps. Squirrels would discover the peanuts, wasps would buzz angrily over half-dissolved cake-crumbs and flakes of icing. Despite a rigorous search, which included sending frogmen down into the swollen ravine, and checking several kilometres of river downstream, the police could find no trace of the boy’s father, Pierre Drax. It seemed that he had simply vanished from the face of the earth, as though swallowed and digested by its volcanic crust.

  The fact is that only the three people involved in the tragedy knew what happened on the mountainside that day. Of those, one could never know the full truth. One was hiding from it. And the third was dead. That’s how it was. And if it had not been for a miracle, that’s how it would have stayed.

  There are many beginnings to Louis Drax’s story, but the day of his death at the ravine was the point where our existences began, invisibly, to mesh. I later came to see it as the day that marked the start of my ruin, and the probable end of my career. I nearly said ‘life’; bizarre, how I can still confuse the two, even after all I’ve learned. Hospitals – medical environments of any kind – are the strangest places on earth, crammed with miracles, horror, and banality: birth, pain, grief, vending machines, death, blood, administrative memos. Yet for a doctor it’s so easy to feel at home in them, more at home sometimes than in your own home, if they are your livelihood and your passion and your reason for–

  Well. Until one day something happens, and a man like me comes to realise there is a world beyond the clinic where he works, a whole alternative reality to the one he has lived and breathed for all these years, a reality whose toxic logic can send a man hurtling to the brink, destroying everything he’s worked for, respected, valued, cared for, earned, loved. That’s when life begins to go awry. Put a magnet to a compass and it loses its grip; it spins and jolts and abandons its allegiance to north. That’s wha
t happened to me. When the Drax case came along, it’s as if a magnet came and skewed my compass, forcing conventional morality to jump ship. You could try and write it up in the normal way but you’d get stuck. I know, because I’ve attempted it. It starts simply.

  The patient, a nine-year-old male, was pronounced dead on arrival at Vichy Accident and Emergency unit, following a series of catastrophic insults to the cranium and upper body caused by a fall, then drowning. The body was taken to the morgue in preparation for the post-mortem ...

  So far, so normal. But then–

  The same night, at eleven p.m....

  That’s when it stops making sense. It’s a simple enough scenario. The boy’s stone dead on the slab in the morgue in Vichy General Hospital, the name-tag round his ankle. The thunder’s still crashing outside, with sheet lightning illuminating the sky every few minutes. His heavily sedated mother, Natalie Drax, has been settled in a ward on the second floor, and placed under observation; she is judged to be potentially suicidal.

  One of the morgue technicians – his name’s Frédéric Leclerc – is cleaning his utensils in a corner; he’s about to come off shift. But then he hears a noise. Not thunder, he’s sure of that immediately. It’s indoors, and it’s human; he describes it as ‘a hiccup’. So he turns round on his heel, and what does he see but the kid’s chest moving. A kind of spasm. Frédéric’s only young, hasn’t been in the job long. But he knows it’s long past the stage where a corpse can have muscle reflexes. To his credit, he doesn’t panic – even though he must feel he’s in some B horror-movie. He rings upstairs straight away, and they mobilise the resuscitation unit.