The Ninth Life of Louis Drax

by Liz Jensen

  —So tell me about this family, Louis, says Maman. It’s her Ice Voice, that’s what Papa calls it. The clink-clonk of ice. —Who’s this lady Papa knows?

  And Papa gets up from the table and starts unloading the dishwasher and stacking the plates away in the cupboard.

  —She’s got two Chinese girls that just giggle. They’re adopted. And a baby that isn’t, with a stupid bunny hat with stupid bunny ears.

  —An ex-colleague of mine, says Papa, getting out the knives and forks. —Someone from Air France.

  He crashes the plates.

  —Which department?

  —Oh, er. Personnel.

  —And was she a nice lady? goes Maman.

  She is asking me but she is looking at Papa with funny eyes. But he has his back to her, crashing more plates and maybe he’s thinking the clink-clonk of ice.

  —Yes. Very nice. But we had to go. Papa said we had to go. We didn’t have to go, though. I wasn’t even hungry but we went to this restaurant that was meant to be Mexico.

  —I see, says Maman. —Mexico.

  She’s still looking at Papa, but Papa’s checking to see if the glasses are properly clean.

  —How about going to watch cartoons for a while, Lou-Lou? goes Papa. And he looks at me and his eyes are sad and if he wasn’t practically a Killing Machine you’d think he was being a scaredy-cat.

  I don’t know why I told Maman about the lady at Disneyland. I didn’t say who she was, I didn’t say she was called Catherine, I didn’t say he was married to her. But maybe she knows because now they’re going to argue. While I’m watching Madeline, Maman’s screaming at him and he’s trying to calm her down.

  —It was her, wasn’t it? You lied! Why did you lie? she yells. —Why couldn’t you just tell the truth, for Christ’s sake?

  He says something very quiet and low so I can’t hear.

  —You’re going to see her again, aren’t you? Throw yourself at her feet. Well, go on. Do it, if that’s what you want. Louis and I don’t need you.

  He says something low again, trying to calm her down, and then I hear her voice too. If you feel so guilty. Baby. Don’t you dare. Wish I’d never. Should have given you both what you wanted. Bleeding heart ... Made you happy. Have to live with it. Don’t blame me. Your mistake, not mine.

  When I’d finished telling him all this, Gustave didn’t say anything. You never knew if Gustave was going to answer you or just cough and cough until out came sick or waterweed. But he didn’t do anything. He didn’t even move. He was having a bad day, there was more blood than usual, bright red, that soaked through the bandages. I thought he might be crying underneath. Did I tell you his whole head is wrapped up like a mummy’s? Did I tell you he doesn’t have a face? Did I tell you he lives inside my head?

  He’s been getting worse. He’s been telling me about the time he was trapped in a dark place. He got hungrier and hungrier, but there wasn’t any food and anyway he didn’t have a mouth because his face was all eaten away. The blood’s soaking through the bandages and trickling down his neck like a little bright red river. Under the bandages, he’s dying.

  —Tell me some more of your story, Young Sir, he says. —Before I go.

  So I tell him about Fat Perez’s dirty secret.

  One time I’m there with him in his creepy apartment in Gratte-Ciel and he’s gone to his gay kitchen to get me a Coke because I always have to have Coke, I refuse to co-operate without Coke and sometimes sweets too. While he’s gone I start hunting to see if he’s got any new stuff. I look in all the drawers and under cushions because sometimes you find coins and once a ten euro note or some triple-A batteries and you can nick them and he never notices. Anyway this time I find something big and new. Binoculars.

  Cool.

  I point them out the window and twiddle them till stuff isn’t all fuzzy any more. It’s snowing outside and you can see the snowflakes floating down like big bits of torn-up paper. I want to find out where the music comes from, because when you’re playing Don’t Say Anything you can hear music thumping and a woman shouting things like, ‘one, two, three, squeeze those buttock muscles ladies, do we or do we not want those bums to be firm?’

  —What are you doing, Louis? says Fat Perez, coming into the room with his big monster body and my Coke.

  —Did you put ice in it? Tell me what you use these for and I’ll give you them back.

  —Yes, three cubes. They’re for seeing things from a distance. Such as birds.

  —What birds?

  —Well in town you can see pigeons and starlings and sometimes a heron, he says. —They come for the koi carp in ponds.

  I look at him, he’s just a huge blur. But when I twiddle some more I get his face. He’s smiling, his hand’s reached out wanting the binoculars back. But I haven’t finished with them, have I.

  —You’re a pervert, aren’t you? I go. —You look at ladies getting undressed and doing aerobics. You look at their bottoms and their bosoms. Don’t you?

  —Louis, I think we should get started.

  —You look at bare ladies and you play with your dick. You’re a rapist.

  —A what, Louis?

  —A rapist.

  He sits down and looks at me like I’m Wacko Boy, like they call me at school. It’s the same look. His face is just a blur again when I look at him, a big fat blur. But I can see he’s giving me a creepy smile.

  —Tell me more about rapists. It’s not the first time you’ve mentioned them. What do you know about rapists, Louis?

  He should look it up in the dictionary, shouldn’t he. I’m just a boy. Outside the snowflakes are still falling down and down and down and sometimes a bit up, when there is a current of air called a thermal. You could get dizzy watching these snowflakes, that look like torn-up paper. When you get dizzy you fall over. They talked about rapists on TV once, I didn’t know what they were then but Maman’s face went strange and she and Papa looked at each other and then they both reached for the remote control. Papa got there first and he turned it off and then they both looked at me in a funny way.

  —What’s a rapist? I said.

  —A bad man, said Papa, and he went bright red. And Maman didn’t say anything, she just went into the kitchen and started chopping onions to make herself cry.

  —I’ll never turn into a rapist, I tell Fat Perez. —Because either I’ll have bosoms or I’ll be dead.

  But I’m wrong about the bosoms, because those lady-pills you keep in your pocket and you eat at breakfast and lunch and dinner and a picnic, which don’t taste of anything even if you crunch them, they don’t work. Because after a few weeks you’re still a boy and you don’t have bosoms, even tiny ones. So Fat Perez was lying again. He was playing Always Lie, which is one of the secret games grown-ups play. They have lots of games, with Secret Rules just like kids have. There’s Vow of Silence which is like the grown-up Don’t Say Anything, and there’s Extreme Punishment, and there’s Pretend You Don’t Hate Him. That’s very hard to play. You have to be good at Emotional Work.

  —Papa isn’t my real dad. I’m adopted. I’m an Adopted Child, like someone Chinese.

  —Ah, says Fat Perez. —Interesting thought. It’s not an unusual thought for a child to have. And your mother?

  —She’s my real mum.

  —How do you know that?

  —Because she nearly died when I was being born. They had to open her up and pull me out and we both nearly ended up in a two-corpse coffin, you can order them from the Internet.

  —So Maman is your real mother, but Papa adopted you. Did someone tell you that, or is it just an idea that came into your head?

  —No one told me.

  —So how do you know?

  —I just know. He adopted me like someone Chinese. Like Chinese babies whose parents can’t look after them so they come to France and live with another family and laugh at other kids’ stupid gloves.

  —I see. So who do you think is your real father?

  —I don’t have o
ne.

  —Everyone has a real father, Louis.

  —Well not me.

  He has a long think with squinty piggy eyes. —If you could choose a father, instead of Papa, is there anyone who you might choose, Louis?

  I pretend think for a minute too by making my eyes go piggy like his. Think, think, think. And then I say, —Yes, there is, Monsieur Perez. It’s you.

  He looks like he might puke.

  —Really? he says, his voice all weak and croaky.

  It makes me laugh my head off. I laugh and laugh and laugh.

  —Gotcha!

  I can’t stop laughing, and the more I laugh the more he hates it but he can’t say anything because he’s being paid. You know something about Fat Perez? I don’t think he can cope with Wacko Boy. When Maman comes, they leave me in the living-room watching Les Chiffres et Les Lettres and they talk in his kitchen. And after he’s talked for a while she starts using the Ice Voice. So I turn up the volume with the remote control because I hate that voice. I have to keep turning it up louder. When she comes in to get me, she’s still in a rage and her mouth’s twitching like mad. It does that sometimes.

  On the way home in the car, she says that she and Monsieur Perez have had a little talk because he’s got some strange things into his head. And that’s when I know for sure that Fat Perez was lying. He said that whatever I tell him will never leave the room because it’s a secret between him and me.

  But look. He told her, see? So he is a liar like all of them and he plays the same games they all play like Pretend You Don’t Hate Him that’s like a show on TV. They’re all acting and I’m supposed to believe in it, like I’m supposed to believe Papa’s my real dad. But he’s just playing Pretend You’re His Dad. And that makes him the biggest fake of all and that’s why I won’t talk to him on the phone any more when he rings from Paris and that’s why I stop writing him letters and I start hating him because he’s done a terrible thing, he hasn’t got honour, he’s let me down very badly.

  I used to sleepwalk, as a child. My mother would find me in strange places. The first time I was only four or five; she found me hunting for something out in the garden; when she asked me what I was looking for, I replied that I was looking for ‘it’. I was to search for this unidentifiable ‘it’ in my sleep on later occasions – in the garden, or the neighbour’s field, or the nearby beach. Such episodes worried my parents, and they unsettled me too, when I learned of them the next morning. But in a strange way, I also found it fascinating that a part of me could be giving my body orders in my own absence. I never remembered my dreams afterwards, but I always awoke feeling groggy and exhausted, as though I had undergone a huge physical and mental ordeal in order to visit a place beyond maps. Sleepwalking became an increasingly regular feature of my life, and the habit peaked during my adolescence, when the mind and body are evolving so rapidly. During my puberty, those years of daily self-astonishment, sexual fantasy and furtive masturbation beneath the sheets, I sleepwalked almost every night. I never went as far as the beach again, but sometimes I would awake and find myself in a barn belonging to the neighbouring farmer, or in the storeroom where my parents kept antiques awaiting restoration. Surprisingly, I never had any accidents during any of these episodes. My sleepwalking appeared to be completely benign, and we all came to accept it as an idiosyncrasy which I would one day outgrow. And sure enough, I eventually did. By the time I had left home and begun life as a medical student, somnambulism had become a distant part of my mental landscape, faded to ghosthood like the old Polaroid photos of my youth.

  But it stirred up an impulse that would not leave me, however blurred the memories became – a curiosity to re-visit that country beyond maps whose contours I had once traced in my sleep, in my restless quest for ‘it’. Like anyone who becomes fascinated by the psychiatric side of neurology, I studied under Professor Flanque at the Institut. But ultimately it was the fully unconscious state, rather than the malfunctions of the conscious one, that held the most enduring appeal for me, and so when I left Paris, I decided to specialise in coma. Which is how I ended up in Provence. Apart from Philippe Meunier, who also went into neurology, my contemporaries – the surgeons particularly – have a theory that it’s a thankless task, caring for these devastated people. They see what I do as being only a step away from pathology: ministering to humans who are no more than the husks of men and women, living corpses. But they couldn’t be more wrong. Even damaged brains can make connections. The mind is more than the sum of its parts.

  As soon as I had taken my leave of Madame Drax, I went back to my office. Passing through the small annexe where Noelle works, I caught myself unawares in the small mirror she keeps on the wall, and was vaguely shocked by how severe, how dogmatic my face looked, framed by hair that thinned at the temples. How set in its ways. My eyes, deep-set, suddenly looked sunken. Did I still have what you could call handsomeness, or had age done for me?

  I will be dead one day, I thought suddenly. Dead and gone.

  One of the four bonsai trees a patient, Lavinia Gradin, had given me – my favourite, the cherry – was looking in need of a trim, so I began pruning it with my little secateurs while I rang Philippe Meunier in Vichy. Philippe had just returned, according to his secretary, from a short convalescent break.

  —Back on your feet? I asked when she put me through. —What did you have?

  —What did Michelle tell you? he snapped. He sounded even brusquer than usual, and I felt a nudge of the usual animosity.

  —That you were off sick, I said. I hoped he couldn’t hear the sound of snipping.

  —Just needed to recharge the batteries, he said. —A post-viral thing.

  He clearly didn’t want to talk about it. Doctors can be cagey when it comes to their own health. Frankly, we hate to succumb to anything. Illness always feels like a defeat of sorts.

  —The case of Louis Drax, I said, inspecting a small, shiny, perfect leaf.

  —He arrived OK then? asked Philippe heavily. —All in order, I trust?

  He sounded more than usually annoyed that I was bothering him.

  —No problem. He’s settled in the ward.

  There was a short silence, in which I contemplated my artistry. I remember feeling a certain dismay when Lavinia Gradin first gave me the trees, as a thank-you gift after her emergence from six years in a coma. Wasn’t it, I asked her, a bit like being presented with a pet? But she just smiled and told me to wait. They’re like coma patients, she said. They take a lot of time and nothing happens fast but then when they blossom–

  She was right: their restrained aesthetic slowly grew on me. But it’s a strange passion to have, as Sophie often reminds me. She calls them my geriatric babies.

  —So how’s he doing? asked Philippe bluntly.

  —Fantastically active. Jumping up and down all over the place and singing the Marseillaise.

  There was another silence, of a different shape, from Philippe’s end of the phone.

  —Well, what d’you expect? I asked. I found it nettling that Philippe couldn’t take a joke. Does something happen when a man hits fifty? —You sent him to me, what more is there to say?

  More silence.

  —Actually the reason I called is I’m a little intrigued as to the genesis of his condition. This fall he had.

  —Charvillefort hasn’t briefed you?

  —Who’s he?

  —She. The detective working on the Drax case. Stephanie Charvillefort.

  —Not yet. She’s called, I believe.

  —Well, don’t you read the papers? Family Picnic Turns to Tragedy? It even made Le Monde, I think. It was on TV too.

  Annoyingly, Philippe had now gained the upper hand; disconcerted, I put down my secateurs and reached for pen and paper.

  —I must have missed it, I said. —Tell me.

  —Well, he muttered. —It’s one hundred per cent awful. Detective Charvillefort can fill you in on the details better than I can. But the bottom line is, it seems Louis�
� fall wasn’t an accident. Even though he was a kid who had a lot of accidents. Due to undiagnosed epilepsy, I suspect, but who knows. Anyway according to the mother, he didn’t fall into the ravine. He was pushed.

  My throat suddenly went unbearably dry, and there followed a little pause, which Philippe did not seem anxious to fill. —As in? I asked, finally, almost against my will.

  —By his father.

  —His own father?

  —Yes. So there you have it.

  Words deserted me at this point. They seemed to have deserted Philippe too, because we didn’t speak for a moment. I fiddled with my pen and looked at the spiky pods on my horse-chestnut bonsai which stands next to the maple. In autumn they burst open and spill glossy chestnuts, small as beads. Next to it, on the other side, my willow.

  —So where’s this father now? I asked finally.

  Philippe sighed heavily, as though re-shouldering a burden. —On the run, apparently. There was a man-hunt, but last time I heard, he still hadn’t been found. I don’t know what the latest is. When Natalie Drax was here, she was terrified he was going to come after her. She even got herself an Alsatian.

  Poor woman, I thought. Philippe must have read my thoughts.

  —So how’s she doing now? His voice was still oddly tight. (Might it have been more than a virus? Marital problems? Something disciplinary to do with Louis’ ‘death’?)

  —As you’d expect, I suppose. A little tense, but – well. Dignified is the word I might go for. She’s taken a house in the village.

  —Did she mention Vichy at all? he asked.

  —Not as such. Should she have?

  —No of course not, said Philippe. —I just wondered.

  We talked for a few moments about the prognosis, which we agreed was poor.

  —She’s in denial, he said.

  —Yes, that’s the impression I got too. Well, perhaps not all that surprising, given his history of ... I trailed off.