by Adam Thorpe
‘What do they call it in Japan?’ asked Nick, washing up after their unsatisfactory, late pasta lunch. ‘You know, this modern phenomenon of teenagers locking themselves in their room for years.’
‘Until they’re no longer teenagers,’ Sarah pointed out, wearily. ‘I’ve no idea.’
‘Something beginning with K,’ he said. ‘I think.’
‘We know too much,’ she sighed, pondering Beans’s porridge-encrusted bib. Could it last another day without being washed? What was the point of life? Interrupted nights are the seed-bed of depression: she remembered the phrase from the Guardian. ‘We know far too much, and comprehendeth nothing.’
‘The global democracy of knowledge,’ he observed. ‘Horror stories from the war zones, in your living room now. And every day and every night, 24/7. Depthless surface. A sort of unicellular murk. Unembraceable; as, of course –’
‘Jameson said. Probably. Or maybe we’re just seeing it through the dominant paradigm,’ she added, with a slight mocking lilt.
She binned the bib. It was frayed. It had been Tammy’s, then Alicia’s. There was already a history, artefacts, evidence. Destruction and obliteration and forgetting. ‘The Sandlers are exhausting,’ she said, after a moment. She checked she hadn’t put Nick into a sulk. She hadn’t. ‘I can’t wait for them to go back. It’s the pressure.’
‘They are. Tomorrow. We’ll breathe again.’
‘Sounds as though Jean-Luc’s sorted, anyway. One less worry.’
Tammy asked if they could go out and play. As usual, Sarah gave them strict orders to go nowhere near the pool, and to keep a permanent eye on Beans. She was so annoyed with the Sandlers and their nonchalance about the alarm. The girls ran out. She approached Nick from behind and hugged him around the waist. This calmed her, so she hung on as he scrubbed the dishes.
‘That’s nice,’ he said. ‘You’re not too traumatised, then?’
‘About what?’
‘Oh, then you’re clearly not.’
‘The nude photo? I think I’m sticking to the Carry On Camping perspective. This is my new resolution. To be lighter on my feet.’
‘Fantastic, Sarah.’
She squeezed him again as the dishes clattered.
‘I hope they don’t come back too soon,’ she murmured.
‘Oh, they have to give Jean-Luc time to knock something up for Tate Modern,’ he joked, keeping in the spirit. In fact, he was deeply troubled by Jean-Luc’s snooping. He would have liked to have confiscated the photos of his naked wife, but was fearful of the consequences. Not a single action was without consequences, despite each generation’s mass delusion that it was otherwise.
He placed a spoon on the back of a plate, then the scrubbing-brush across the spoon, then a tea-strainer. ‘There we go. It’s called Thinking About Lenin on a Rainy Day. One of Nick Mallinson’s earlier works. Yours for a million.’
‘Wowee, genius.’ Sarah squeezed him tighter. ‘I’m the one who’s always saying I could do it better myself.’
‘But you do everything well,’ he said, meaning it. ‘And I mean it,’ he added, in case she had in fact taken it the wrong way, despite his voice being full of love.
SEVENTEEN
It is easy for Oncle Fernand to force the Sandlers upstairs at gunpoint, because Oncle Fernand was in the war and was forced like that himself. Now it’s his turn. The Sandlers babble as they stumble upstairs, especially Madame. He prods her buttocks with the barrel. Oncle Fernand thinks women shouldn’t wear trousers, anyway. Jean-Luc watches him do everything from another part of his head; his head is like a tank, which Oncle Fernand is commanding, staring through the gun-slits. Jean-Luc is just part of the crew. A young, scared gunner crouched below in his desert goggles.
When the two pass Maman’s bed, covered in splashes of blood, they make strange gurgling noises and go quiet. He should have removed the big scissors, still sticking out of her throat. He pressed one of the blades in slowly as far as it would go. Her mouth is still wide open, her blank eyes staring up at the damp patches on the ceiling. She couldn’t believe that he would do it, but he did. Oncle Fernand can do anything, despite his limp. He’s never liked his sister-in-law.
The Sandlers crouch in his bedroom, very white, trembling as if freezing cold. ‘Dollars, dollars,’ repeats the husband; Madame is unable to speak. Oncle Fernand makes the husband tear the top sheet into strips and tie one of the strips around his wife’s mouth and the other around her wrists. Then Oncle Fernand, who has seen prisoners of the Germans tied up this way, ties the husband up himself, so tight that the veins swell on the wrists and the teeth push out from the stained cotton. The Sandlers’ grin like toothpaste advertisements and gurgle. The cloth gets wet quickly. Their eyes are huge and frightened. They remind him of owls.
He pushes them onto his bed with the gun’s barrel, where he discusses with Jean-Luc what to do. Everything that was on the monument must be replaced, quickly. The evening nurse is Colette. They have about an hour before she comes. It feels good, having no one watching them from the keyhole, no shrieks and orders and moans.
First, he must replace Bibi. The nails he used for her are too small. There are nails in the wall, for pictures, which he removes with the pliers on the table. Five of them. That will do, says Oncle Fernand. The hammer is also on the table. The toy pram lies where it fell the other side of the bed.
Oncle Fernand asks Jean-Luc to put on the Johnny Hallyday very loud again, which he does. But it is Oncle Fernand who unbuttons Madame Sandler’s silk blouse; he rips it off, in the end, because her hands are tied. Oncle Fernand has a great deal of trouble unclasping her bra at the back. She’s crying. Her breasts are not pointed like Bibi’s. Her husband makes a move and Oncle Fernand lifts the butt of the gun and brings it down on the gagged mouth. There’s a crack. The wet cloth reddens as if binding a wound. The husband whimpers and groans on the floor. Oncle Fernand, just to be sure, kicks him in the belly very hard because that’s what the SS soldiers did to him when they found the boys had gone from the Mas. The husband has trouble getting his breath, now.
Oncle Fernand doesn’t bother with Madame Sandler’s jeans, because Bibi is legless. He only undoes the top two buttons, to show the navel properly. A few hairs curl over and Jean-Luc feels his frog plump its cheeks up, wanting to croak, but ignores it.
He ties her wrists to the bed’s frame at the head and her ankles to the frame at the foot. Then he fetches the bloodstained top sheet from next door and tears that, too, into strips. This is the cobweb, says Oncle Fernand. For a joke, he retrieves the sieve from the floor and places it on his head. They all had helmets, he says; they made fun of my limp, their helmets wobbling on their foreign heads. The sieve falls off and hits the husband on the nose as he lies there, still trying to catch his breath.
Oncle Fernand has difficulties driving the short nails home through the rubbery nipples, even though he keeps his knees firmly either side, pressing on Madame Sandler’s armpits, pinning her down. Tap, tap. Tough beef-gristle.
The navel is easier, although Oncle Fernand feels the long nail should have been even longer; the navel is less like beef-gristle and more like punching a hole in an old dry orange. He doesn’t bang it all the way in, fearing he might otherwise kill her. Her muffled screams can hardly be heard under the music. My love is 100 per cent, blood for blood. Our blood is the same. She lies there like the wounded Christ, bleeding at the nails in her nipples and her navel. The last two nails are driven into her palms, but the picture-nails are more like tacks and fall out as the hands squirm.
He ties the husband, who has made a mess in his trousers, by his fat neck to the foot of the bed. His gag is bright red. The eyes stare at him, bigger than ever, as the next song begins. They are dark brown. Maybe he’s whimpering through the music. Oncle Fernand picks up two of the oxidised spoons and uses one for each eye, placing his free hand firmly on the forehead and holding the face still. It is like removing plum-stones, although Oncle Fernand’s hand is
shaking. It reminds him of what people did in the war, on both sides, French and German, even French and French. The eyeless husband roars in his throat like a distant boar, his sockets big and black and dribbling blood. Then he falls very quiet, quivering from head to foot.
The eyeballs sit in each spoon like stolen birds’ eggs. It is no different, Jean-Luc thinks as he watches, from removing the eyes of a fish.
Which reminds him about the spider, the fish-bone spine that was the spider. Oncle Fernand ponders. The spine will have to be exposed. Eight legs. Fortunately, Oncle Fernand (like Jean-Luc) has flayed many a hare or rabbit or tough, bristly boar in his time: old Gabriele, Jean-Luc’s grandfather, taught Fernand and his brother Elie, and Elie taught Jean-Luc. Who still remembers the smell of the hides.
Elie’s brother takes his nephew’s sharpest Opinel and begins at the shoulders with little nicks like stitches. The honey on the kisses of my mouth, Jean-Luc whistles as he watches from the back of his head. The skin has blemishes, spots, warts, the blood running past them down to the underpants exposed above the belt.
When the skin is tugged hard, coming away like a fishing net, the spine is not much more than a line of creamy nobbles under the blood and purplish matter, but Oncle Fernand says they haven’t time to do it any better, they still have to drive over to the Mas des Fosses and finish off there.
‘I’d like to go via Marcel Lagrange’s place, he’s usually there after five,’ says Jean-Luc.
Oncle Fernand agrees, of course. He remembers old Père Lagrange pointing him out in the café to the SS captain, but they can’t go digging up Père Lagrange. Marcel will do.
Jean-Luc thinks the husband might have passed out, because he has hardly resisted, wriggling only when the skin was tugged and jerked away; the fatty film underneath, more like a chicken’s than a hare’s, worked through sharply by the blade.
Jean-Luc feels the man’s pulse through the streaks of blood and can’t find it. The man’s dead. He must have had a heart attack from the pain. He’s certainly not a true martyr like the suffering saints flayed for their goodness, then, Jean-Luc jokes. The woman is panting, Jean-Luc sees it in her nail-nippled chest, her nailed belly going in and out. Her eyes are fixed on the ceiling, like Maman’s, but gleaming with tears. There is as much blood as when they’d slaughter a pig in the old days, back in the Sixties. Like the Arabs, Jean-Luc thinks. Like the Muslims and their goats. All over the walls.
Changed into blue overalls, his face and hands washed, Oncle Fernand has to reach the van just outside the door without being recognised. Because of Jean-Luc’s eye problem, Oncle Fernand is driving. He has perfect sight. Colette will be coming in fifteen minutes: she has her own key.
Jean-Luc watches out through the kitchen net until there’s no one in sight, and then bolts with Oncle Fernand to the van, parked just in front of the Sandlers’ hired car, a few long metres up the street. The limp is a nuisance, it slows him up, the street stretches away with all its difficult buildings. Old Lucille spots him from her door. He’s carrying the gun, but she doesn’t lift a hair.
‘Save some rabbit for me, Jean-Luc!’ she calls.
Despite Jamie’s manifold problems, they appeared not to be of a sexual nature because, as even Helena had once commented in a moment of despair, Jamie was a neuter. At least, he had never shown any interest in either gender. Helena, who’d always had a fondness for the subject and at one time (before the iceberg of Aids) had preached an earnest and rather exhausting form of free love as the key to a higher awareness, was left perplexed. Her attempts to throw pretty girls at him, or broach the gay question, had got nowhere. It was, in fact, the aspect of her son that most disturbed her. She even wondered, in a moment of revelation, if his restless dissatisfaction wasn’t because his life-role was to be a monk, and offered to pay for a retreat in a Carthusian monastery in its Alpine fastness. Nick would simply refer to him as their resident Bakunin, who was not only the founder of anarchism but also impotent, pouring his frustration into revolutionary activity and destructiveness.
Now, however, with the girls temporarily out of earshot, playing at the back of the house (Nick had briefly checked them – happy as lambs in front of the barn), they could worry the subject a little more, and Sarah reasserted her opinion that Jamie had been screwed up by his mother’s total anarchy on the sexual front. She and some of her more advanced partners would wander around the house nude, Nick had told her. There was even this cultural idea that children could be in on it all, being ‘magical’. Cherubs, faeries, elves, all that. (‘Yuk,’ Sarah had commented. ‘What a deluded generation you were.’ And Nick had earnestly pointed out that he was nothing to do with all that free-love stuff, that he’d been petrified of girls until he was about twenty.)
‘What I’m trying to say, Nick, is that I’m reasonably certain Jamie watched me skinny-dip.’
‘OK. So did Jean-Luc. Maybe half the village were watching.’
‘Right, thanks a lot. But do you see my point? Maybe I’m some of the problem. Maybe he’s attracted to me. Jamie, I mean,’ she added, glancing towards the door into the sitting room.
‘As Bakunin was to one of his sisters.’
‘Well, I’m not actually related to him, but I am forbidden fruit and not much more than ten or eleven years older. You’re almost nineteen years older than me.’
Nick scratched his thinning hair and pretended to look agonised. He did, in fact, feel fairly agonised, although this was not the first time they had discussed the possibility of a kind of vegetal attraction. ‘So what’s the solution? Put me in a nursing home and marry Jamie?’
‘Try to be objective, Nick.’
He huffed and puffed. ‘Maybe we should ask Alan to hire Jamie as an Art Brut chaser,’ he said. ‘He’d be rather good, smelling out naivety and oddity.’
‘Did I hear a noise?’ Sarah asked, lifting her head like a hunting dog. ‘From the back?’
They listened. Their nightingale was taking a break: they hardly noticed it, now. Nothing but slight gusts under the lintel. Nick rose and opened the door and looked. ‘They must be in the barn,’ he said. ‘Do you want me to check?’
‘Oh,’ said Sarah, ‘let’s be chilled out. Light on our feet. They’re fine. In the old days they’d have just roamed, wouldn’t they?’
‘Not at two years old, methinks.’ But they might have done even at two, back then. You’d have to research the yearly statistics for child accidents, drownings in pools and rivers. Like road accidents in the Twenties: appalling. You’d probably be surprised.
But he didn’t say this to Sarah. Instead he said, ‘Yeah. We’ve lost our primary innocence,’ remembering the way he’d roam in the fields himself, as a boy. Adulthood was like a photograph that wasn’t quite as good as the real thing.
The axe is already in the back of the van. It slides about among coils of rope and old sacks and various other tools as Oncle Fernand races around the corners. Jean-Luc is surprised Oncle Fernand can drive at all, let alone like this. Papa always said that his brother was timid, hardly drank, wouldn’t harm a fly, just gave off whiffs of the tannery.
Fortunately, no one else is on the road. There is no one at Marcel’s house, either, so Jean-Luc blows the yapping dog off its chain at point-blank range then boots the bungalow’s feeble door open for Oncle Fernand to go in and turn all the cooker’s gas taps on. Marcel would usually have a fag in his mouth. If his wife, Cécile, arrives first, or one of his horrible kids, too bad. There’ll be nothing much left of the house, if it goes up. Their fault, for having a gas canister under the cooker. Against the European norms, that.
They just have time to nip into the main bedroom for Oncle Fernand to piss all over the double bed before the gas drives them out.
Marcel Lagrange is on the drive, locking his four-by-four, eyeing the van suspiciously. He turns as they emerge and his jaw drops, his cigarette stuck to his lip. The gun is pointing at his head, which ends up a second later as a bright red smear over the four-by-fo
ur’s side window as Jean-Luc’s ears buzz from the shot. Marcel slides down as if drunk, the top half of his face blown off to the nasal bone, then manages to fall onto his hands. He waits there, on all fours, wrecked head dangling. He is still breathing; they can hear the whistle of it.
‘It’s because he’s got no brain,’ Jean-Luc laughs.
Oncle Fernand tips Marcel over with his foot. He rolls onto his back and the short, muscular arms subside slowly, quivering for a bit on the ground. The belly sticks up like Mont Blanc. The cigarette is still glued to the bottom lip. There is nothing much above it, to speak of. They can smell the gas a bit, even out here.
‘Pretty picture,’ says Oncle Fernand, rearranging the limbs as if Marcel Lagrange were a shot animal. ‘Don’t want to break with tradition, do we?’
They bump up the Mas’s track and stop in front of the plaque and Oncle Fernand attacks its stone with the edge of the hammer. The woods ring like a bell, like the village bell that has rung every quarter-hour of Jean-Luc’s life. The air is as dry as cigarette paper, the heat’s around the corner. Another summer.
When the name Fernand Maille has gone, they cut across on foot through the trees to come out by the tumbled wall, axe and rope in hand. Jean-Luc points out in a whisper that he never managed to get the kids’ heads satisfactorily, they were either blurred or too small. And now he’s lost the camera. Oncle Fernand tells him not to worry. It takes a moment before they hear the voices, understand them as human.
High, excited voices in the barn. Jean-Luc stumbles along with Oncle Fernand, whose limp doesn’t slow him that much after all. The long-handled axe is heavy; they leave the gun propped behind the pool-shed. He’s not so sure about Oncle Fernand’s ideas, now, but he is the tank commander, he does know best. The monument has to be made. What’s been lost has to be made up for. Years and years.