by Adam Thorpe
‘There’s the monster!’ they’d kept squealing, pointing at the flux of dark wavelets. It was like the study of the past, living or no. You saw what you wanted to see.
‘There’s the monster!’ cried Alicia. She was pointing at the lawn-to-be, this time. It had been trowelled up, hacked and cratered. Small clods of soil were scattered over the poolside tiles.
‘I think they’ve left the field of battle long ago,’ said Nick. ‘Welcome to the Somme. No, the Zone. Post-explosion.’
They were very impressed. Tammy asked why they did it. Her father told her they were looking for their supper.
‘Strewf,’ said Alicia. ‘I can’t see any chips or yoghurt.’
‘At least, I’m assuming they were. They do like rooting about, do pigs.’
Beans threw her plastic cup into the middle of the mess with a sudden, violent thrust of her arm. Sarah retrieved it, ticking her off. The soil, sticky from the watering, stuck to her shoes in clods.
‘I’ve a feeling,’ said Sarah, ‘that Lucy’s going to blame us.’
‘Jean-Luc, I thought.’
‘We’re the new arrivals,’ she explained, cleaning her shoes of mud with old tissues from her pocket. ‘The immigrants.’
The girls disappeared into the barn. Sarah asked if someone shouldn’t keep an eye. Nick volunteered. ‘I’ll kind of hover,’ he said.
‘I’ve got a letter to post.’
She’d jog up to the letterbox at the end of the track once or twice a week, otherwise they’d check en passant in the car. Sarah regarded it as ‘me’ time, and it kept her fit.
Nick didn’t like jogging: it jolted, and felt a shade naff. He wandered pleasantly about the old farmyard and noticed a low tumulus of builders’ sand behind the scrubby growth on the edge, just in front of the collapsed wall. The sand was old, with tufts of grass and weed growing out of it; a few sacks of some chalky white substance – lime, presumably – lay burst and no doubt rock-hard next to the hummock. Several stacks of old tiles, spotted with the scars of moss and lichen and clearly handmade, pretended to be a landscape-art installation.
It reminded him of his dream and he picked up a tile. They’d had their roof redone in Cambridge; he knew a bit about roofs, but from down below. Strangely enough, it was not only the right weight for the dream (heavy for its size), but it was correct in every detail: the moss-spattered, terracotta mould of a long-decayed thigh, tapering to a thickness at the ends, the tracks of smoothing fingers visible. A beautiful object of utility.
He thought of the Sandlers and their projects, the feeling he had about this place – that something had been abandoned halfway, despite the bright zinc flashing and guttering, the neat génoise cornice under the eaves, the walls knocked back to stone and sensitively pointed, the proud finials at either end of the handsomely ridged roof. It was a peculiarly poignant sight, that builders’ debris, but he couldn’t quite think why. A kind of intrusion onto the empty farmyard’s rusticity, yet beaten back.
The future stalled, grassed over. A strange concept. He breathed in the clear air’s present and felt firm with the moment, even joyous. He was looking forward to work, oddly. All this was such a good idea. Through the stone arch that led to the front he could see a castellated line of cloud over the invisible, far-off sea: thunderheads, he thought.
He sauntered in a broad arc over to the barn, just to check, high-stepping through the strip of briar and charred stones that they’d conjectured had been a wing of the house, destroyed by a blaze.
He and Sarah lived with this proleptic worry, this attempt to anticipate and thus cheat the gods, every day since they’d had kids. The kids were tiny, and the world was huge. They’d eventually get bigger (though he found this hard to imagine) and then they’d get boyfriends with motorbikes and go to parties where drugs circulated. Look at Jamie, who’d wanted to be an astronomer once. Jamie, the one great failure of his life. The guilt he couldn’t dilute.
This was why he was blinking into the barn’s darkness: it was a maw that had swallowed his girls. He considered the unseen rusty tools, their sharp flanges and points, the heights and the wheels and the places that were rotten. Then his eyes adjusted and he saw them squatting in a tumble of old, blackened hay in the far corner of the barn. In between lay a huge beam, strangely orange, with dark welts of decay. And thin hoops of rusty metal, piled one on top of the other, like a giant’s discarded bangles. He had this suspicion that the cart and the waggon, belonging to an age as lost as the Palaeolithic, might creak and inch forward at any moment, rumbling out of the gloom.
He had spent time yesterday explaining to the two older girls how this was what the western world used before cars; their first home lesson. Tammy had drawn a wheel with hub, rim, spokes, felloes and iron tyre marked in different colours, and Sarah had suggested they take a rubbing somewhere interesting on the vehicles’ planked sides with their chalks. It was a hands-on educational triumph, despite the rubbings not quite working out.
A thick slice from a tree trunk, like a giant cheese, was criss-crossed with nicks and blade marks. That’s what they chopped wood on, he’d told them. That’s what we’ll chop wood on.
They pretended not to have noticed him, now, only glancing up as he approached.
‘Look, Daddy,’ Tammy said, pointing to a large circle cleared in the rotted hay, ‘it’s our fatherlands. Towers and swift-eddying rivers and all our golden fields’ bounty,’ she added, reciting breathily from her starring role in The Odyssey at the end of the last school year.
‘Motherlands is better,’ Nick suggested.
‘Tammy’s got the morest,’ said Alicia.
‘Me Disneywhirl!’ shouted Beans, thumping the edge of the circle with her heel.
Alicia sighed. ‘I wanted Disneywold, but Tammy give it to Beans.’ She stood up, spreading her hands like a believer at prayer. ‘I’ve just got fowest,’ she explained, bending forward at the waist in emphasis.
‘Forest is really ace,’ Tammy insisted, losing patience. ‘You can have a tree-house and a lot of the trees grow brussels sprouts, Alicia.’
She was imitating the strained, diplomatic tone their mother used as a last resort before the heavy stuff.
‘Hey, brussels sprouts,’ said their father, nodding. ‘Cool.’
‘I don’t really like brussels sprouts,’ said Alicia. ‘I was only pretending.’
‘Too late. They’ve been planted.’
‘I don’t care,’Alicia said. ‘She’s got the sweet factory, of course.’
‘Brussels sprouts are far more nutritious,’ Tammy pointed out. ‘You’ll be still alive when I’m stone dead from too much sugar and coloureds.’
‘Colourings, Tammy,’ Nick corrected, hastily. ‘Short-term gain, long-term loss. Sounds pretty good to me, Alicia.’
Alicia stepped into the cleared circle and dropped onto her knees and brushed their sweet lands out of existence, all the towers and the swift-eddying rivers and the fields’ bounty, the long-settled hay-particles rising in sour and suffocating clouds around her. Beans wailed. Tammy clasped Alicia’s hair in her fist and tugged as if on a heavy door. Nick was rendered hors de combat by a fit of coughing; he’d swallowed a wedge of fruitcake made from dust.
‘Monsieur?’ came a voice from the far glare of daylight, oddly commanding. ‘Monsieur?’
Jean-Luc looked a lot bigger in silhouette.
He didn’t seem to care much about the ruined lawn. Instead, he pointed to a small heap of gravel on the edge of the pool. Jean-Luc told Nick that gravel is very bad for the pool, that it would abîmé the filters. The water was no longer green but a cloudy white.
Nick asked the girls if this was their doing. Tammy said they were pretending the stones were sweets, because they weren’t allowed sweets at home. Or not many. Not enough.
Nick explained this to Jean-Luc, who nodded.
Although Jean-Luc had said nothing of the sort, Nick quoted him as stating that ‘Never, ever are you to bring gravel near the po
ol, or you won’t be able to swim when it’s hot enough. I hope you didn’t throw any in,’ he added.
Tammy sucked her upper lip before saying, ‘Who do you think we are, Daddy?’
He sighed, unconvinced. ‘When was this, anyway? You’re not supposed to come near the pool without adults around.’
‘Yesterday. Mummy was with us.’
They had to pick up the gravel and place it in their palms stone by stone and return it to the front of the house. They looked like a procession carrying offerings to the gods. The gravel leaked from their hands and left a trail like breadcrumbs.
Nick tried to turn it into a game.
‘Empty your loads!’ he cried, with his hand in the air like a crane. Beans threw hers up and it hit her face. She screamed just as Sarah came back from her run, red and sweaty in the face.
‘It’s nothing,’ Nick reassured her, having checked for any damage to the eyes. ‘A case of friendly fire.’ Beans stumbled to her mother, who picked her up with the air of a superior humanitarian service. ‘By the way,’ he went on, ‘don’t let them take gravel near the pool again.’
‘What gravel?’
Beans was pointing to her woundless forehead while a miniscule bead of blood welled on her chin. ‘They said you were with them,’ he pointed out. ‘When they were taking this gravel to the pool.’
‘Beans is bleeding,’ Tammy observed. ‘He gave us blood to drive our hearts, our souls to drive our minds.’
‘Don’t exaggerate, Tammy,’ said Nick, pained by the religious guff – the legacy of her new, young, possibly born-again teacher. Beans, of course, looked panicked.
‘Goody-good,’ said Sarah, bouncing her up and down, clearly energised by the jog, ‘we can put some French-style iodine on it. I saw some in the medicine cupboard. It’ll look incredibly spectacular, Beansie!’
Beans sat on the bathroom chair and stared at her with huge glistening eyes, holding the precious wad of cotton wool stained with iodine. Sarah kissed her on the forehead. Immaculate little clutch of hatchlings. Everything working as it should behind the soft envelope of skin. The brimming personality behind the eyes: the innocent, open-eyed promise.
‘Mummy,’ said Alicia, ‘I really need that on my finger where I cut it.’
Tammy laughed in the echoey room.
‘You cut it last year, sweetheart,’ Sarah pointed out, creasing her eyes up. Where her glasses usually went on her nose there was a red mark.
Alicia winced, insisting it still hurt a really lot.
‘Just a bit. It’s not a game.’ Sarah stained the red thread of Alicia’s scar where her forefinger had been caught between two supermarket trolleys, a miniature digit versus a web of metal. That was a drama. ‘From what you’ve told me, we’re lucky it wasn’t severed,’ the hospital doctor had confided to her, after planting three stitches. Sarah nearly fainted, watching the needle ply the flesh like an oar. ‘But as long as you stop the bleeding and pick it up intact, there’s a good chance we can sew it back on.’ It was as though it were bound to happen again, only worse.
There were no angels guarding the doors. No all-seeing God, unless it be the wicked, creator God of the Gnostics. Yet she still offered up little goodnight prayers, as if someone good beyond cognition might be looking after them. A guardian spirit with wings of white goosedown. Sometimes she preferred the old gods and their tantrums, their jealousies, looking like humans in the flaring torchlight of their high-up abodes.
‘I’m hungry, Mummy,’ said Alicia.
‘That’s because you left your hot milk at breakfast.’
‘I wasn’t hungry then, stupid.’
‘Alicia, don’t be rude.’
‘I’m defnelly gonna starve to deaf,’ Alicia asserted, covering her face in her hands.
‘I think you’re going to be an actress when you grow up, mate.’
‘Can I have some hot milk now? With honey and cimmen?’
‘Missing word?’
‘Beans didn’t say it,’ Alicia pointed out.
‘Cinnamon,’ Tammy joked.
‘Alicia,’ Sarah chided, feebly.
Poor Alicia, she thought. Hard to be in the middle, but everyone has two elbows.
‘I’m a prodigy,’ said Tammy, looking through the bathroom’s small window, ‘and you’re a podgy.’
Sarah joined her at the window. Jean-Luc was raking the messed-up Zone. ‘Tammy,’ she murmured near her child’s small ear, ‘that was totally unnecessary and arrogant and cruel.’
‘Why?’ demanded Alicia, who had excellent ears.
He could have done it himself with a sweep of the broom, he doesn’t want the girls turned against him. They kept looking at him as if he was an ogre. It wasn’t that serious, the gravel business. They’re only kids. The Sandlers have provided him with a hoover for the pool, he’s supposed to hoover up stuff like gravel before it gets into the filters or damages the lining. The fact is, the pool is crap; installed by a firm of overcharging cowboys, it’ll begin to crack and buckle in a few years’ time, squeezed or pulled by the ground. The ground moves in the heat and the cold, millimetre by millimetre. Fifty-degree shift between summer and winter. Everything gets pulled about.
Nothing is certain in life. Jean-Luc knows this. Not even rock. Not even the North Pole.
He stands by the tormented-looking, gouged-up lawn and feels contempt for the Sandlers. At the same time he knows what the consequences will be of this disaster. Madame Sandler is as tough to work for as a Parisienne: oddly, Jean-Luc doesn’t mind her ways. He knows where he is with her, he humours her as he humours his own mother. She shouts and stamps her feet, and he measures his response in careful nods and shrugs, in moments of reflective silence. He’ll let her get to the edge of hysteria, and then sweeten her back again to sanity.
She is totally dependent on him. He’ll talk technically minded rubbish and she’ll go to her con of an American husband and repeat the rubbish, but get it so wrong that it comes out as sense. It is fun, this game. A pity, in a way, that they are here so little, these days. Now and again she’ll phone him at home, sounding anxious under the bossiness, and he feels a strange sensation of power, that he holds all these people in the palm of his hand, that he can close his hand into a fist and crush them to pulp.
Once, when the rains swept away some planting project or other, she threatened to hire a professional gardener from one of those firms that charge a fortune and advertise themselves in fancy websites on the Internet. He pulled a face. The problem, he said, after a thoughtful pause, is that you never know which firm to trust. Some of them are in league with the crooks, who are hand-in-glove with the antique dealers. Some of them are the crooks. They have all the time in the world to survey the house, knowing in advance the times when it is empty, the times when their mates can arrive with a furniture van and suck it dry. They’re no better than the blokes who sell rugs from the backs of vans, or the firms who pretend to be timber specialists, or the ones who phone you up again and again with some prize or other, seeing if you’re at home – going for the foreign-sounding names, the rich pickings. He knows builders who’ll nick keystones from arches (Marcel Lagrange, although he mentioned no names from sheer fear of the consequences), who’ll strip empty houses of every original door, who’ll steal the old capstones off stone walls, the slabs from a hearth, even the chimneypiece itself, if it’s fancy enough.
‘They are locusts,’ he said, and Madame Sandler frowned. ‘And if you make a mistake and you’re at home, they’ll knock you on the head. They wouldn’t even bother with the DVD player, the telly, the computer; we’re talking big stuff,’ he added, as a garnish. ‘Mafia. Organised crime. Not even Frenchmen. Russians, Chinese, Sicilians. It’s enormous, it’s international, because the rich love old stuff, don’t they? Quality stuff, stuff no one can make any more, because we live in a world of rubbish.’
He was sweating, by the end, and he imagined Lucy Sandler on her knees, trembling away, looking up at her house as if it were a he
lpless virgin surrounded by lusting old men, like the other employers he’d given the same spiel to. But she wasn’t kneeling. She had this little knowing smile on her face.
‘I understand what you mean,’ she said, in her decent French. ‘You’ve got to be very careful.’
Whatever, he’s become the guardian angel. It has never crossed her mind that he, too, might be in on the game.
But he isn’t, of course. That’s Lagrange territory. Dangerous. As dangerous as crossing the hunters. Not even the President of the Republic dares to cross the hunters. Jean-Luc keeps out of all that. Which is probably why Marcel Lagrange has called him a pederast, a homo. It is a Lagrange world, this world of ours, and Jean-Luc keeps his head down. He likes the woods, when they are left to the animals, the birds. In the woods he can think, in peace. He can work things out, where it is all quiet, where there is no one to judge him. He’s always liked the woods.
He looks up at a window from the edge of the smashed lawn, seeing something move, and is surprised to see the wife and one of the children looking down at him through the panes. He turns away, embarrassed. He was probably muttering to himself, pulling faces, moving his hands about. He’s got used to being the only person here in Les Fosses. The only living person, anyway.
He squats on his haunches and pretends to examine the disturbed soil. A boar’s droppings lie snugly in a crater, like a badger’s – only bigger. He is always surprised to see how deep those snouts can dig, the amount they throw up. He feels the Englishwoman’s face in the corner of his eye, like a warm pad on his cheek. He doesn’t want to lose his job here. Before, he couldn’t have cared. But now he does care. And he doesn’t want to be humiliated in front of her.