The Ninth Life of Louis Drax

by Liz Jensen

  When we made love it was slow, gentle and intense. She cried, but they were tears of release. I felt like crying too. I didn’t know what I was feeling. But it overpowered me. I had to leave. I was confused, I said. The speed things were happening–

  She smiled. It was OK. She was confused too. Go.

  I still hadn’t told her that I loved her. Still had barely dared to admit it to myself. But I would. And perhaps one day she might blossom enough to love me back.

  After I left her I stayed on at the clinic with Louis, holding his hand and musing over the day’s events. I must have fallen asleep at one point because when I woke, the shift had changed.

  —You were sleepwalking again, said the nurse. —I just left you to it.

  —Where did I go?

  She smiled. —It was quite strange. I mean, a bit disconcerting. You were sitting in your chair next to Louis. Then you stood up and came over here to the desk. I was down the other end. I thought you were awake at first, but there was something strange about the way you were walking. And Jacqueline said you did it recently, and warned us that you might again.

  —What did I do? Did I just sit there?

  —For a while. And then you got the prescription pad and wrote out a prescription. Then you crumpled it up and threw it in the waste-paper basket. And then you got up again and walked back to your chair and stayed asleep again till just now.

  —I need to see it.

  —Of course. She stopped, looking at me with a quizzical smile. —I was a bit curious, so I read it. I hope you don’t mind. You wrote complete nonsense, Dr Dannachet. You’ll laugh when you read it.

  She fished a piece of paper out of the waste-paper basket and flattened it out before me. One look was enough. I tried to muster a laugh but it wouldn’t come.

  —Don’t tell anyone about this, I murmured. —OK?

  I tried to sound calm but I was beginning to sweat uncontrollably. Because although the handwriting wasn’t mine, the giant, lopsided lettering was sickeningly familiar.

  Insulin. Chloroform. Arsenic. Sarin gas. Lupin seeds.

  And I’d filled in the patient’s name: Madame Natalie Drax.

  She says I’m too young to remember it, I was only eight weeks old. But it looked like Cot Death. I couldn’t breathe. Lungs are like two bags made of meat. Breathe air in and the bags get bigger, breathe out and they’re smaller. I always slept in her bed, from the time I was born. Babies love to sleep with their mothers and it was just her and me in the big bed.

  Papa wasn’t there yet. I never told you that before, did I? But you know now. Maybe you even guessed. Sometimes I think you guessed all sorts of things, Lou-Lou. Before Papa came along it was just you and me. You won’t remember, because you were too young, you were just a baby. I didn’t tell you before because I didn’t want to upset you. But I can tell you now, can’t I? I can tell you lots of things now.

  Anyway, that night I nearly lost you. I nearly lost you so many times, but that was the first time.

  Poor Maman. Her heart must’ve been in her mouth.

  She says she woke up, she doesn’t know why. It was the middle of the night and everything felt wrong and then she realised I was struggling to breathe because the noises I was making weren’t baby noises, they were struggling noises.

  I turned on the light and I screamed because I knew I might have rolled on to you in my sleep and squashed you, it might be my fault, I might not be fit to be a mother, just like my sister said. That’s the first thing I thought. Your face was blue, your lungs weren’t getting enough air. I rang the ambulance right away, and they came and took over. You nearly died in the ambulance. They had to put you on a respirator to get your lungs working again. They took you away and I just sat in the day room, and cried. I cried so much that after a while there were no more tears left, I was completely empty. And then I phoned a man I met when you were really young, just a tiny baby, and he came and comforted me and spent the whole night with me in the day room, waiting to see if you would die. We sat together and he held my hand all night.

  And then when the doctor came in he got the wrong idea, he thought we were married. He thought the man was your papa. We laughed about it then but anyway, he did become your papa. Just a few months later we all moved in together in Gratte-Ciel, and later we got married. I thought it was the best thing that could happen for us, because we needed to be a family. We needed a man who would be kind and look after us. It was a shame for Papa’s wife but he didn’t really love her you see. He just thought he did. It was me he loved, even before he met me. It was me. Me and you.

  —I don’t get what she’s talking about, I tell Gustave. —All this stupid blah blah blah in my ear.

  —You don’t have to listen, says Gustave. —She won’t know.

  —She knows everything.

  —No, Young Sir. Children think that about mums and dads, but it isn’t true.

  Then there’s Jacqueline, stroking my arm. It feels good. Jacqueline smells of peppermint and she wants to be everyone’s mum, even the grown-ups. Her son Paul’s dead but she talks to him anyway. Most people don’t know you can do that. I didn’t know it before, I didn’t know anything except what was in the encyclopédie médicale and Les Animaux: leur vie extraordinaire and stuff. But I’m getting better at knowing things.

  —You look like you could do with some fresh air, Pascal, she says, because Dr Dannachet has come in and his name is Pascal. She’s worried about him, she thinks he’s going a bit mad. —You look terrible. Have you been getting enough sleep?

  —Not really, he says.

  —I’ve got the wheelchairs in; how about taking one of them out for a walk while you’re waiting for the detective? Come on. It’ll do you good.

  —I’m coming too, whispers Gustave. —I’m going everywhere you go, Young Sir. I found a cave map in Dr Dannachet’s office, on the wall. We could use it. Look, he says, and he shows me a picture in a frame.

  —It doesn’t look like a map. It looks like someone’s head.

  —It’s a map, Young Sir. Just trust me.

  —Fresh air, says someone. —Lovely day. Hot. Blistering.

  —I’ll take him round the garden, says Dr Dannachet. —Tell his mother where we are, if she turns up. I’ll take the Walkman for him.

  —The wheelchair’s waiting.

  —Yes, says Gustave. —We’ll go somewhere dark. Just you and me. Somewhere out of the sun. I know a place. It’s on the map. It’s cold there, like a fridge. You can hear water dripping down. You can hear bats squeaking. You like bats, don’t you, Young Sir. I’ll take you to the cave and I’ll show you where I wrote their names in blood. It’s a good place to die.

  Outside it’s hot and you can hear birds and smell flowers and smoke. It makes you want to turn into a weedy crybaby and we’re moving like on wheels and Maman’s talking in my ear again, all about how I am her darling baby, she will always love me, what happened to me wasn’t anyone’s fault, don’t worry sweetheart, they’ll find him and they’ll put him in prison and then we can live together again and I’ll take you to the Red Sea to swim with dolphins and we’ll buy a car, a lovely little red sports car just for you and me. You know something, Louis my darling? If you make a choice, and it’s wrong, you have to live with it. Everyone has to live with what they’ve done. You chose, Louis. It was your choice.

  And then her voice goes different. He scares me, Lou-Lou. He scares me. It’s like he’s here somewhere. I can feel him thinking bad things. I can feel him making up lies.

  —Just close your ears to her, says Gustave. —You can listen to me instead. Or Dr Dannachet. You can count to a thousand in your head. Anything you want. Just don’t listen to her, OK Young Sir?

  —My Papa drinks too much beer and wine and cognac, I tell Gustave. —And he jeopardises his family. But I don’t care because I miss him. When I think about him it’s like drinking hot blood.

  —Let’s stop here and sit a while, says Dr Dannachet. —D’you know something, Loui
s? I had a very strange letter, and so did your mother. I wonder if you might know something about it?

  —Don’t say anything, whispers Gustave.

  —No of course not, why would you. Do you think I’m going mad, Louis? Do you think it’s a bit unusual that your doctor should be prescribing your mother poison in his sleep?

  —Shhh, whispers Gustave. —Don’t speak. It’s against the rules.

  —Anyway, I’ve brought La Planète bleue. Listen here: In 1998 biologists observed the plundering of a grey whale carcass. First to arrive at the body were swarms of amphipoda, crustaceans just a few centimetres long, which have sharp jaws for cutting into flesh ...

  And on and on.

  —Do you know any good stories? I ask Gustave, while Dr Dannachet’s reading.

  —I can tell you Le Petit Prince. I know it by heart.

  —Blah blah blah, too babyish. Papa always wanted to read me that one because it was about aeroplanes.

  —And planets, and a boy, and a baobab tree. It’s about all sorts of things, says Gustave. —But maybe you’ve grown out of it now. OK then, here’s another. There’s a boy and he has a mum and dad who love him. Do you want to hear it?

  —No, not that one. It’s got a bad ending.

  —It doesn’t have to, goes Gustave. —You can choose the ending yourself. Anything you want.

  —These were followed by deep-sea fish, many of which were specialist scavengers with an acute sense of smell.

  —It’s not easy being the mum of a Disturbed Child, I tell Gustave. —Sometimes the danger was too strong. She couldn’t fight it. I know she tried. I know she did.

  And I wish I could see his face through the bandages and the land’s rocky and it smells of lavender and smoke and if I could open my eyes I’d see olive trees and a garden with gravel and flowers that look like yellow fireworks and maybe the sea and deep-down, underwater creatures.

  —Among them eel-like hagfish, which rip off pieces of flesh by twisting their bodies into a knot to get extra torsion. Next to arrive were sleeper sharks, which took massive bites out of the carcass. Once the first wave of diners had feasted, another group of slower-moving scavengers arrived: brittlestars, polychaete worms and crabs slowly stripped the whale down, leaving only a clean white skeleton such as the one illustrated.

  —I know the picture, I tell Gustave. —It’s of some whale-bones on the seabed. A dead thing that’s all eaten up by parasites. Live things can be eaten by parasites too. A clever parasite doesn’t destroy its host. The host is the thing it feeds off. A clever parasite keeps the thing it feeds off alive for as long as it can, because when the host is dead, the parasite has to find another host and if it can’t find another host, it’ll die too.

  —Let’s walk some more, says Dr Dannachet, and he pushes my wheelchair and Gustave limps along too and he doesn’t say anything for a long time. And then we stop, and Dr Dannachet says, —Lavender. Can you smell it, Louis?

  And I can, it’s right in my nose, but I can’t tell him.

  —She loves you, Young Sir, says Gustave. —She misses you. You can try going back. But it can’t be the same. You know that.

  —I know, I say, and we move on again.

  —When I was in the cave, this is what I dreamed of. Walking in a garden with a boy like you, and my wife, says Gustave. —We were a little family, the three of us holding hands with our little boy in the middle. We’d count to three and then we’d swing him between us. He liked that. All little children like that.

  —I know the name of every plant in this garden, says Dr Dannachet. —Every plant and every tree and every shrub. Because of Lavinia. She was a patient of mine, a garden designer. Six years in a coma. We used to read about plants together. She gave me some bonsai trees. I think you’d find them interesting, Louis. It’s quite an art, you have to prune the taproots.

  He sounds like he’s going to cry. Slowly we go all the way round the building. The front entrance is like a Lego model, all white. And it says in big letters in the white stone, La Clinique de l’Horizon and underneath, like in ghost-writing, L’Hopital des Incurables.

  —Did you know it was called that? I ask Gustave.

  He doesn’t say anything, he’s good at that, he starts to cough instead, and something comes out of his mouth on to the gravel. It looks like he’s been sick but it isn’t sick, it’s dirty water full of waterweed.

  —Yes I did, he says when we are disappearing into the woods and leaving Dr Dannachet behind. —I did know it was called that. I’m incurable, Young Sir. But you’re not.

  We’ve left Dr Dannachet behind now. The hospital’s far away, like the garden. Gustave’s walking ahead of me into the forest and you can see how his head looks all bulgy and white like a light bulb because of his bandages. There are trees everywhere and it’s hot, and there might be snakes, it’s just the sort of place that adders live. An adder has a dark zigzag stripe along its back and maybe a straight stripe and spots, and its bite can kill a child and seriously affect an adult too, especially the old and frail.

  —Let’s collect pine cones, he says. —For a fire.

  Which is a cool idea so I’m running all over the place collecting them, the biggest ones I can find, and we’re putting them all in a pile that gets bigger and bigger, you can stack them together, they hook on to each other and you can put sticks and even branches in too, higher and higher, till it’s as tall as me.

  —My maman wouldn’t like this, I tell Gustave. —She hates me playing with fire.

  —And what about you?

  —I love it. I’d like to be an arsonist one day. I could kill all my enemies.

  He hands me a box of matches.

  —Start now.

  And I light one and put it right down at the bottom in the dried twigs and branches inside the pile, and the fire creeps about in the pine needles and does sparks and then whooshes up. And we watch it all popping and fizzing with hotness and red light.

  —It’ll burn all on its own now, says Gustave. —It’ll do whatever you want because that’s how things are in this place, Young Sir. Come on. We’re going to the dark place. The darkest place on earth. But do you trust me, Young Sir? You have to be sure you trust me. People will say I’ve stolen you, but that’s not how it is. You know that, don’t you?

  And I do, even if I can’t see his face, so I take his hand and we walk down the hill together, through the trees.

  I went back to my office and sat there for half an hour, trying to think through what had happened. But my mind flailed around as feebly as a blindworm. Dusk was falling and the sunset throbbed fiercely outside, casting a tangerine glow across the pine forest and the vineyards on the slope of the hill beyond. I inspected my bonsais. The maple was doing badly; five leaves hung limp and sickly. Why had I prescribed Natalie Drax ludicrous poisons in my sleep? And written those two letters – which included one to myself? Either I was going mad, or Louis Drax was using me. But if he was, who the hell would believe me? Certainly not Natalie. Or Detective Charvillefort.

  The security system in the clinic, recently reviewed, required Security to change the CCTV tapes daily, and keep them for a week locked on the relevant ward. The changeover happened at six. I waited until eight, when the nurses were due to swap shifts, then returned to the ward. Both nurses were busy at the far end of the room, so I went to the ward desk. Swiftly unlocking the bottom drawer, I located the current tape, and the previous Thursday’s, and slipped them into my pocket. I felt light-headed and oddly unoppressed by what I was doing. Walking home in the gathering dusk amid the insistent shriek of the cicadas, I smelt smoke, stronger than before. The evening heat churned.

  The house felt huge and empty without Sophie. I went into the living-room and poured myself a Pernod, then settled myself down to watch that day’s tape. I was nervous, though I didn’t really know what to expect. Part of me tried to stand back and laugh at the absurdity of my own suspicions. The camera was fixed on a wide-angle view of the ward, with Louis’
bed as its central feature. I watched as the black and white images jumped jerkily from frame to frame. Louis lay there as usual, pale and motionless, but you saw occasional movement in the other beds, Isabelle’s especially. I fast-forwarded until I saw myself enter the ward, materialise next to Louis’ bed, and sit down. The image was a little fuzzy but my gauntness gave me a strange jolt. Was this what I had become? How other people saw me? I pressed play, and watched. I saw myself reach in my briefcase for a book, and start reading to Louis. I fast-forwarded again until I saw the moment when my shoulders seemed to relax and the book slid off my knees to the floor. I sat there with my eyes closed, but nothing happened. The tape showed the night-nurse going in and out and Isabelle moving restlessly. Then suddenly, from one frame to the next, I had got up. Walked over to the desk. Taken paper and a pen and written something very fast, then ripped out the sheet, crumpled it, and hurled it in the bin before returning to my chair. Due to the time-lapse nature of the recording, the whole thing seemed to last only a few seconds. I re-wound and looked again. There was something odd about the way I was holding the pen. An awkwardness I couldn’t identify at first, until it suddenly struck me–

  I’m right-handed. But I’d been holding the pen in my left. No wonder the script I’d produced looked so extraordinary. I didn’t bother watching the other tape. I knew what it would show.