The Death-Defying Pepper Roux

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  DOWN WITH THE HONGRIOT-PLEUVIEZ AMENDMENT (CLAUSE 5)!

  Pepper caught the coastal train to Abaron. Its wheels—huge and remorseless as a dozen meat slicers—sliced the journey into wafer-thin petals of time that fell away into the dust, never to be recovered. Taking off his jacket in the hot carriage, he found a ragged tear in the sleeve—so either the saw or the meat slicer had caught him, after all. There was a matching bruise on his arm. It was time to change lives again; time to slice Pepper Salami so wafer thin that the light would shine through—time to slice him invisible.

  FIVE

  NEWSPEPPER

  Someone’s dead,” said Pepper, and immediately felt better.

  “Fill in the form,” said the woman behind the counter of the Étoile Sud newspaper offices.

  And so Pepper announced his own death, not so much for the benefit of any taxicab angels browsing through the paper, or even his aunt Mireille, but more to convince himself that le pauvre was indeed dead to the world. He was no longer Paul Roux and never would be again. Maybe you’ll leave me alone now, he found himself thinking.

  The woman behind the counter saw him struggling to fit all his words onto the form. “That’ll cost you,” she said. “Words don’t come cheap.”

  “

  “What about the free press?” asked Pepper, who had heard of it and thought it meant you didn’t have to pay.

  “Nothing’s free in this life. Put your head out the window and shout—there’s free speech. Us you pay for,” said the woman, snatching back the form and crumpling it up. “In here it costs two francs a line.” She had a face like a dishcloth being wrung out. Pepper thought she must spend too much time reading about tragedies in the newspaper.

  When he grasped that it cost money to put a death notice in the newspaper, he asked for another form and rewrote his entry in as few words as possible, paying with one of the notes rolled up in his pocket.

  ROUX, Paul

  formerly of

  Bois-sous-Clochet

  Drowned at sea 11 July.

  Sadly missed.

  “The sea shall

  give up her dead”

  “Gone to Glory’s cheaper,” said the woman, so he changed the quote, though it seemed a terrible lie. He crossed through Sadly missed as well. That probably wasn’t true either. Besides, he still had to pay for the announcement about Roche.

  Presumably the shipping company would no longer be sending Roche’s wages to his widow, knowing full well the ship was on the ocean bed. So there was no longer any point in pretending he was alive. Roche’s wife needed to know she was a widow, and he had not plucked up the courage to notify her. Was it kind to let her read about her husband’s death in the paper? Well that depended on what she read, didn’t it?

  Pepper could not say that Roche had gone down with the ship, because then she would start having the same dreams as Pepper: terrible, terrible dreams…. No, Claude Roche deceased must be all the things Claude Roche alive could have been if he had tried harder (and if he hadn’t been such a natural-born pig).

  “Someone else died,” he said, and the woman pursed her lips but gave him a third form to fill in.

  He wrote of the death of one Claude Roche of Aigues Mortes, a seaman who, having newly escaped a shipwreck, heroically sacrificed his life while on a visit to the Marseille zoo. Seeing a child fall into the lion pit, he had unhesitatingly thrown himself in too, as an alternative meal for the lions. Lifting the child onto his shoulders, he had been able to pass her into the arms of her mother before the lions attacked. Pepper even afforded Roche a “Sadly missed” as well as a “Gone to Glory.” The notice cost a small fortune.

  A door opened behind the woman, and noise burst through from the print rooms. Pepper glimpsed the presses—giant cylinders, windmill paddles wafting huge sheets of newsprint. A man entered in shirtsleeves and a beret; the woman’s eager smile and fluttering hands said that here was the editor.

  The editor of L’Étoile Sud was no good at listening or at looking people in the face, but he gobbled up the written word wherever he found it. He had clearly also heard that words cost money, because he was constantly in search of them. He sipped and sucked them up—off tickets, public notices, other shop signs, match-boxes, food packaging, and calendars. After glancing through the day’s mail, he let his eyes stray along the counter, reading advertisements and announcement forms:

  “…three cob mares sound in wind and limb…”

  “…to Godet-Dupont a son 5 pounds…”

  “…Lebec-Belot at the Church of the Bleeding Heart…”

  “Limoges, Albert, suddenly at home, aged 89. Gone to Glory.”

  Unsatisfied, his eyes came to rest on the death notice Pepper had just filled in. Snatching it up, he turned the form this way and that to read the extra words written up the sides for lack of space:…placing himself between the ravening beasts and the child…

  “Did we cover this? I don’t remember us covering this? Who posted this? A relation? Local? Did we cover this story?”

  Pepper was all set to creep away, but the woman pointed him out as the culprit.

  “What are you? A relation?” demanded the editor.

  “No,” said Pepper.

  “There’s a story here, isn’t there? A good story?”

  “Oh yes, sir, probably,” said Pepper, who hated to disappoint.

  “How come you’re posting the death, then?” The questions were sharp and aggressive, like a hand pushing him in the chest. Pepper retreated, starting to panic. What if an Étoile journalist went to the Marseille zoo and asked about the man in the lion pit? Pepper was not even sure Marseille had a zoo.

  The editor picked up a telephone and wound a handle beside it. “Who’s free to do a story in Marseille?”

  “I am!” blurted Pepper, and then, when the editor paid no attention: “I’ll write it!”

  “You?” said the editor, absently browsing through the telephone bill and an invoice for staples.

  “Why wouldn’t I?” said Pepper. He was starting to get the journalistic hang of this talking in questions.

  “You’re a journalist?”

  “Would I offer if I weren’t?”

  “What’ve you done before?”

  “What haven’t I?” But that came out sounding cocky, so Pepper quickly added, “You remember that Hongriot-Pleuviez Amendment? A scandal…particularly clause five.”

  The editor coughed and ran a finger around the collar of his shirt. Studiously he read a dropped shopping list and bus ticket lying on the floor. “You covered that story?”

  “Didn’t you?” said Pepper.

  “Freelance?”

  “Yes and no,” said Pepper, who had no idea what it meant but liked the sound of the lance.

  “Who do you work for right now?” said the editor, reading the maker’s label inside Pepper’s jacket.

  “For you, sir, don’t I?” said Pepper. And found that he did.

  Well, people see what they look for, don’t they? And people who never look at their fellow men get what they deserve. Thus Pepper stepped into L’Étoile Sud, a silo of words, hoping the words would close over him like grain and bury him from sight.

  They found him a desk and asked him to fill seventy-five column inches each week with newsworthy stories. The other journalists peered toward him through dense palls of cigarette smoke, screwing shut their eyes. The paper was losing money: Maybe the editor was bringing in younger, cheaper men, to save on wages.

  Pepper had no idea how to fill seventy-five column inches. He only knew that he did not want his stories to be as depressing as all the ones he had read by candlelight, in bed, in the Marseillais Department Store. First he wrote up the story of Claude Roche, making it even more racy and heroic than before, throwing in a dying wish for good measure: Roche was heard to shout, before the lions attacked, “Tell my wife I love her!”

  And after that, he wrote the kind of stories he would himself have liked to read, curled up under the s
heepskin rug in the Soft Furnishings department. Take Henri Leclerc, who won nine thousand francs in the lottery and so was able to marry his childhood sweetheart:

  Cont’d from Chapter 1

  Said Mr. Leclerc, brushing the rice from the shoulders of his fashionable Paris suit: “Before my good luck, Fleur’s parents would drive me from their door, throwing plant pots and tennis rackets, and shouting, ‘Begone! You are far too poor! Our daughter deserves better!’ I was severely injured on several occasions.”

  The bride told L’Étoile Sud: “I always knew love would find a way. We were willing to wait a hundred years to be together, but we are glad we did not have to.”

  The couple are honeymooning in Japan.

  By PEPPER PAPIER

  TREASURE TROVE IN SECRET BAY

  MARSEILLE—A wooden chest containing priceless pirate treasure has been found by vacationers in shallow water off the Provençal coast. The sea chest, thought to have fallen overboard from a Turkish galley in the thirteenth century, contains gold plunder and gemstones big as pigeon eggs, according to an eyewitness. The find also includes an embalmed parrot. “Stomach of bird is full of doubloons,” said Professor Euclid Valparaiso. “We investigate possibility is—how you say?—hush money.”

  The find will be studied, and then shared among the friends who found it. The exact position of the cove is being kept a close secret, to foil would-be treasure hunters.

  By PEPPER PAPIER

  MAN THOUGHT DEAD RETURNS FROM WAR

  QUOMBIER—A soldier thought to have died in the Siege of Paris returned to his home in the tiny hamlet of Quombier last Wednesday.

  Paul Blois, thought to have died in the siege, astonished friends and relations when he rode into the village on a bicycle.

  “I thought I was seeing a ghost,” stated Manon Ballon, 41, “but he was smoking a pipe, so I knew I wasn’t.”

  Paul’s mother, Aimée, 91, remarked: “He has changed somewhat, but I knew him at once. He is my boy. I said all along he was not gone. I would have known if my little boy was dead.”

  Paul’s fiancée, Mireille, was so upset by reports of her fiancé’s “death” that she never

  Cont’d in Chapter 1

  TODAY’S CHILDREN MORE AGREEABLE, SAYS GOVERNMENT REPORT

  OSLO—Young people are kinder and more charming than fifty years ago, says a shock report issued by the Norwegian government yesterday. The latest statistics have shown that children do not steal, fight, talk back or tell lies as much as their grandparents did.

  Though others dispute his results, Dr. Gustav Guberson of Oslo University claims that better food and more churchgoing have “turned our young folk into good citizens.” The words “thank you” and “please” are used more than 80,000 times during the average child-

  Cont’d in Chapter 1

  “Where’s Quombier?” called the typesetter from the door of the setting room. “I never heard of it.”

  “Eight houses, two barns, and a water mill,” replied Pepper at once, because, in his head (if not in person), he had been to Quombier and interviewed Paul Blois and his ancient mother and joyful fiancée. He had shared in their happiness, even though, strictly speaking, these people did not exist.

  He made them up. Every last one of them. He invented their names and their ages—even sometimes their villages. He invented their tremendous good luck or selfless bravery, their goodness, and their marvelous adventures. Like little flares they were lit one by one, to brighten up the lives of L’Étoile’s readers and to make them feel that perhaps, after all, the world was not as bleak and lonely and angry and scary and hard as they feared.

  As he feared.

  SEA MONSTER IS DECLARED EXTINCT

  PARIS—The kraken, once the terror of every ship’s crew, has been officially declared extinct. The Institute of Marine Biology in Paris yesterday announced that the heavy shipping of recent years has emptied the oceans of all giant squid.

  A spokesman said, “We have seen the last of these dangerous, destructive pests. They will be eating no more ships from now on.”

  By PEPPER PAPIER

  Like the cash canisters in the Marseillais Department Store, Pepper fired his stories off into space and saw them—miraculously!—appear in print between the advertisements for hair oil and chest rub, between accounts of war atrocities and reports of murder trials and escaped convicts roaming the countryside. The chief copy editor put them into better French (because copy editors cannot read anything without changing it), so Pepper was able to read them afresh when they were printed, and feel proud—to share in the happiness of his invented characters all over again. Pepper planted his stories around like little night-lights to keep nightmares away. Because, he reasoned, the readers almost certainly suffered nightmares.

  Just like his.

  Pepper dreamed of a giant squid embracing L’Ombrage. He dreamed of Roche beckoning, beckoning, calling out to him, through bloodied lips and two thousand fathoms of water: Throw down a line! Pull me back up! He dreamed of being driven in a tumbrel toward a guillotine like a giant meat slicer; of wading waist deep among soft, decaying pheasants toward a hangman’s gallows. At the foot of the gallows steps stood his father, holding a noose and a placard, protesting about his son’s crimes. At his shoulder stood Aunt Mireille, looking at her pocket watch, its ticking so loud that it drowned out Pepper’s excuses. He dreamed that the fire brigade was hosing him down with ink, indelible ink, and that ink-black rooks, as thickly strewn as the pheasants, were stuffing up the sky, blocking out the sun. Time and again they would swoop down and slash at his face, trying to pull it away, trying to see who he was under the mask….

  “This piece about the creature that’s been discovered, Papier…,” said the editor.

  “With the rainbow fur, sir?”

  “With the rainbow fur. And a taste for…what was it again?”

  “Crows, sir.”

  “Crows, yes.”

  “And candles.”

  “And candles.”

  “And household rubbish, sir.”

  The editor’s insatiable eyes trailed over Pepper’s latest article. “Do you have any pictures?”

  “No pictures—no, sir.”

  “Pictures would help, Papier. A photograph.”

  “I could describe it to the designer man and he could sketch one, sir.”

  “If you knew what one looked like.”

  “I could guess, sir.”

  The editor’s eyes opened very, very wide. His complexion darkened. “You do realize, Papier, that the public looks to us for fact. Absolute factually accurate, factual fact. The buying public cannot abide…fiction. The buying public detests fiction.” When he said it, his lips drew back from his front teeth as if he might, at any moment, spit the word back out again into a handkerchief and throw it in the trash. His eyes swerved to and fro now across the surface of his desk: an invoice for paper; Pepper’s article on the rainbowy lemurs raiding trash cans in Avignon; a child’s drawing of “Daddy.” They came to rest on the latest circulation figures of the newspaper, and there they stopped. For he saw, to his astonishment, that sales of L’Étoile Sud had actually risen ten percent in the last month. Advertising revenue was up eighteen percent. It was inexplicable: L’Étoile Sud had been on a downward slide for years. The editor shook himself, shut his gaping mouth, and thumped the desk.

  “Give me something meaty, Papier. Something weighty. Something verifiable before the end of the week, or I’m sorry, but I’ll just have to…” He let the threat hang in the air, unspoken. “Give me some cold hard facts, man! News, man! I’m killing the lemurs.” And he crushed the article into a ball and threw it in the trash without once resting his eyes on its author. Then and there, Pepper’s rainbow-colored lemurs ceased to exist. Amazing how a living creature could be bounding around one moment and extinct the next.

  Pepper was frightened. He liked being a journalist. He liked spread-eagling himself on the paper bales where he slept at night, like a penc
il-drawn stick figure. He liked reading his own (invented) name in the newspaper. If he did not think about the taste, he liked the pies his fellow journalists never finished at lunchtime. Above all, he loved sweeping together words—like dead flies from a windowsill—onto a sheet of white paper and seeing them come to life: events! characters! places! living, breathing news….

  He had no idea how to go out and find a true news story—something that had really occurred. Everything that happened out there—outside the street doorway—was cruel, dangerous, or sad: You only had to read the newspapers to know that. Murders. Fights. Thefts. Dangerous prisoners on the run. Train crashes. Arson. Anyway…

  Anyway. By now angels might be lurking around any and every corner, collars turned up, stiletto knives in their pockets. Saints were probably stopping boys in the street, demanding to see their identity cards, bundling them into the backs of black vans or flaming chariots. But if Pepper stayed put and had to write the truth, there was only one truly newsworthy story he knew—and that was untouchable.

  It hung in his head like a hornet’s nest, that story, that secret, that piece of knowledge. For weeks it had buzzed between his ears, stung the backs of his eyes until the tears ran down. What a relief it would be to write it, to put it on the outside for a change; to turn it outdoors along with the nightmares. So, threatened with losing his job, his home, his identity, his sanity, Pepper Papier wrote down the story of L’Ombrage’s last voyage. He started out not knowing how to begin. He came to the end not knowing how to stop. He wrote it rocking forward and back in his chair so savagely that the journalists and copy editors stopped clattering at their typewriters and watched. He wrote it crying so hard that his jacket cuffs were soaked and the paper crinkled like seersucker. Looking up, Pepper saw them staring and blushed scarlet.

  “The lemur story’s dead,” he said. “He killed my lemurs.”

  Then he went to crumple up his article about the coffin ship L’Ombrage. Of course he could not really allow the newspaper to print it. There would be Hell to pay. And Aunt Mireille had taught him all about Hell.