by Louise Dean
Jeff had sat on Sunday afternoons in Richard’s kitchen, his head bobbing under the hanging lamp, eating salty snacks, cornichons, saucisson, going to the fridge for the both of them, slow as an old horse, for another beer, for more of the same.
Their mutual confidences mounted in the springtime, as he and Jeff spent more and more time together. Their friendship showed itself in the hand on the shoulder as they parted ways. Fishing trips, camping trips, holidays in Sardinia were mooted. Jeff showed him his poetry and his cartoons, he took him through the vineyards, had him taste the first wine he made. Richard had got to like the man’s quiet joy. Now he knew something of its source.
He’d even gone and told Richard how he screwed his business partner’s wife. (This was the guy whose house they were drinking in. It was this very Don Abrams who was paying the bills.) She was an opera singer, Don’s wife, she made such a noise, the major domo (as he described the servant) tried to break into the bedroom by shouldering in the door.
He laughed in slow motion. He took his time and there was some marvelling at himself in it, some callousness too.
Sometimes people tell stories for a reason, as a warning, as a way of spilling the beans, as a way of trying to part company with the bad, but the story is always bigger than the storyteller.
Chapter 26
He put a suitcase into the boot of the car on the Monday morning and stood looking at it with slowly dawning detachment, as if it were a person whose name he could not recall. He was having lots of moments like that since Valérie left.
A month after he returned from Kenya, he was going to Cairo again for another conference. It would be the last time he went away on business. In the interim his wife had left him.
He closed the boot and took off his jacket. As he stooped to put it behind the driver’s seat, on its rightful peg, he checked through the window the place by the kitchen door where she used to stand watching him go. It occurred to Richard now why it was she stood there watching him go. Nevertheless, there she remained, in his mind, paused in the act of caring that he went safely, soundly. Yes, in his head, his wife was leaning for ever more, leaning against the door with a cup of coffee between her hands, contemplating him as if he were the suitcase; with objectivity, one might say. She used to offer up a half-hearted wave, a faint-hearted fair-lady folding of the fingers on to the palm. She’d looked exhausted, worn out. But that was the look women wore there. Her mother bore the same. La douleur, la souffrance. It was the ancient order of things round there.
His son ran out of the house and came round to the passenger door. He leant across to push it open for him. His wife was attractive but Maxence was not a very good-looking boy. The smallest thing and Richard found he had tears in his eyes that day — it was as if a cobbler had sewn his heart to the back of his throat with leather cord. Richard kept his head low so it pulled less.
He had already told Max he’d be away at a conference for a few days. He drove him to the village to school; a bold morning, the sun striking hard, the elderly buildings and trees embarrassed by its mercilessness. Visor down, he drove in silence up the single street of the village that ended at the school.
Hey, he said as Maxence got out of the car. The kid gazed back at his father with great foolish eyes and buck teeth, poised on comprehension. Hold on, what am I thinking? You’re too big to kiss your father now!
Richard watched him run up the steps. The boy didn’t look back and that hurt, but he said to himself: That’s good, that’s good. He had the impression that everything he said or did mattered in a way it never had before. As he drove he looked from time to time in the mirror to see who he was and who was behind him.
At the airport, in one of the departure lounges, there was an enormous group of orthodox Jews fussing about, all untied, womanless, waiting for their flight to Tel Aviv, muttering and mumbling. Richard didn’t mind standing and looking at them. He didn’t mind if it made them feel strange to see how strange they were to him. There were things he needed to find out about human beings; clearly there was a lot he didn’t know.
He was sick of being a foreigner. All the pretence of being French! How irked he’d been when some shop person replied to him in broken English after he’d used his best local accent! He’d been a long time away from himself. It went back further than
France. It went back to how he left school and went straight into commerce, chopping and changing jobs, going to competitors for salary hikes. How he could talk his way into anything. Eye contact. It went back to his accent even in English, how he could be either plummy or working-class. It went back to how his mother left them when he was seven and his father took them from council house to oast house and women came and went with Easter eggs and high heels, wearing that year’s perfume. It went back to how his father had shoved him up the class ladder and in through the window of private schooling. It went back to how as a child he had to learn how to be a child by imitation. It went back to how surprised he’d been to find that girls wanted him to touch them between their legs, and how much their willingness depended on his own idea of himself.
His wife once said she didn’t know him, but he’d assumed things had changed since she’d not mentioned it in the fourteen years thereafter.
To all appearances, suited and smart, perfumed, clean-shaven, he was the man he used to be, the same man who flew this route back in spring.
He passed amongst his former sales brethren unremarked. It was embarrassing to him now to see how pharmaceutical sales reps conducted themselves. Freeloaders. Jackets off. Backpacks emblazoned with drug brand names. He stared at people because he wanted to see what was in their heads.
Rachel had told him once that if he looked, he would see that every single thing is a piece of God and that in any single event there is everything we need to learn. He was counting on it now.
She’d told him it at 1 a.m. the week before when they were sitting drinking in her kitchen, with the shining sincerity that two bottles of red can bring about, and he called her a silly cow and touched her face. It changed just as he touched it, as if by transubstantiation; the wine became blood.
So he was going to Cairo to have his head occupied with the clever thoughts that belonged to other people. He would listen to them talk about the mind, although what was getting him up every morning was the idea that he might understand something new about the human heart.
Just a couple of weeks ago, a fortnight after Valérie left them, he and Maxence went off fishing together one Saturday. He had stood by the side of the river bludgeoning a trout with a stump of wood when he saw himself. This is supposed to be father–son bonding time — and we’re beating this creature to death, he thought. He looked at Max and thought: Why am I even doing this? This is bullshit. Max’s face, the expression on it, reminded him of the whole of his childhood, all fixated patience, trying so hard to see the sense in what the adults were doing, waiting to see the point.
He said: Enough hunting, enough fishing.
‘Is this how we’re going to get to know each other?’ he asked Max.
Max took the fish in his hand and bit the head off it. The boy stood there with fish blood and bones in his mouth, the body in his hand, the head on the toe of his sneaker. He spat out what was left in his mouth two or three times and said, with a full grin, his eyes shining, ‘Done it.’
Richard nodded, kept his cool; he looked around to see if anyone was watching.
‘Is that what your grandfather does?’ he asked Max in the car, recalling the stories. The live frogs consumed whole. The pig’s heart still warm.
‘No,’ said Max. ‘I’m better than him. Can I have a Coca-Cola now?’
Chapter 27
Arriving in Egypt, Richard smiled like a son of a bitch, at everyone and everything. He wound down the window and opened his mouth. From the sweat and heat, he went into the cool marble lobby and had his bags taken from him; he impressed the staff with his smiles and thank-yous. He treated them like friends, better
than he treated his friends. This was the mainstay of his travel routine, and all of his life was a travel routine. His policy was being polite, being nice to stay safe and not because you were nice.
After dinner alone, having tried the Egyptian wine, and praised its virile fortitude, having got along very well with all the waiting staff and the door handlers going in and going out, and thanking them all and grinning hard, he went to his room to go to bed and when he got inside he dropped the trousers of his smile, he locked the door and put a chair against it.
The opening session at the conference was an address by the head of the World Health Organization. He had once been a noted psychiatrist, he’d written tens of books. But this whole thing was a front, paid for by pharmaceutical companies, including his. The old hack got straight to the point.
‘Advances in Psychopharmacology: New drugs for new disorders.’
He was wearing a brown suit, he was very thin and old, he stood with one hand in his pocket. The glasses, lightweight frames. The tie, a garish red and purple, a sort of visual hologram. A Swatch-type watch on his wrist. His hair dyed too brown for his pale shiny face, he looked like a crème caramel. The migraine-conducive lighting meant that they were all looking at him with various other images imprinted across his chest, the things they’d glanced at before they looked at him.
‘It is our endeavour to classify the world and simplify it. A child is born and knows what is a dog, then it sees small and large dogs and gradually it understands that there is not a single dog but creatures which have in common their bark, of course, and other features like a bone in their penis . . .’
Nobody stirred. But really this was a strange thing to say, and for the opening address too. One could only suppose he said what he liked because no one was really listening to him and he was used to that.
Richard scrutinized the other attendees, sitting there with their free folders and fliers, the crib notes to be stowed in the Sanitoxat-branded satchel. He looked back at the brown president. His shoes were of thin leather, you could see the shape of his toes.
It seemed to him that life was loss. Sometimes in drips and drops, sometimes by flood. What was it his son had said the night before he left?
‘I’ve lost so much lately.’
* * *
She didn’t deny it, Valérie, ‘the affair’. She packed and moved out. They went away together, the two lovers, somewhere modest in terms of a drive that cost a fortune a night. He got the credit card statement in the post. If only that were all he got in the post.
Rachel came round and told him she was going back to England with Maud. Before she left she said, ‘God comes into your life. They tell you to ask Him to and He will. They don’t tell you He can bugger off again.’
He’d stood to open the door for her. ‘Take care of yourself. You’re such a good person.’ It was all he could say; it was true. She tried to be and that was more or less the same thing; the only thing. Her look said: But so what? And that made him feel sad, and he was sad about it the next day and the day after and even after that until he had forgotten what it was that had made him sad.
Valérie left him the boy. He stayed in and drank heavily while Maxence played his Game Boy. Then she came in one Sunday lunchtime, with mascara under her eyes. They stood up, he and the kid. They stood to attention. Richard looked at his son to see what was on his own face; chin in, reproachful, afraid of this woman who for so long had been hiding how little she knew either of them.
She looked at the dirty dishes on the counter but said nothing.
‘I don’t think he loves me.’ Being French she cut to the chase. An Englishwoman would have sat minding her p’s and q’s, counting the pennies, folding the smalls before getting to the point.
Her lower lip went like it used to, when they first met, wanting something, as yet unpronounced. You just had to wait to hear what it was. You just had to wait.
She prepared a meal and they sat to eat it at the same places they had sat since Maxence was born.
‘I think he has been with another woman.’ She handed Richard the olive-wood salad bowl they got for a wedding present, with the utensils pointing towards him and the underside of her forearms hairless and pale, tending to him. ‘I want to be back with my son,’ she said. ‘I miss him. I need to come home.’ Then she wept.
‘I assume your home does not include me?’
She looked at him with pained reproachful eyes. ‘Rischard . . .’
When they met, her big hero was Daniel Balavoine. She liked the saddest song of all, the most popular one, ‘Mon fils, ma bataille.’ With its naïve, merry tune and its distressing words.
‘I am going to break everything if you take my son from me.’
But he doesn’t say ‘son’ he says ‘fruit of my loins’. So primitive, but it wasn’t too much to put it that way, perhaps, thought Richard, for someone as sincere as Balavoine, though of course, like many things, it’s better to sing it than to say it.
‘You know the gobstoppers that change flavour? We found them at Super U,’ Max said suddenly, standing, poker faced, his eyes startled. He looked like Bambi with the butterfly.
‘Do you remember, your mother wanted to see how many I could get in my mouth, when we were on the motorway? I nearly choked to death.’
‘She put one in your ear.’
‘What? What’s that?’ Richard tapped his ear and shook his head.
Richard poked his fingertip in his ear in staccato motions with his eyes wide and father and son, they ducked in and out of each other’s laughter.
The kid sat, and they each took a mouthful of food, then Richard looked at her. He let his knife and fork drop on to his plate.
‘If you need a home then have this one,’ he said. He took up his glass and drained it and put it back down in its place; empty.
‘No. No. She can’t come home now,’ said Max, shaking his head and repeating the phrase again, his head bowed.
She put her head in her hands and started to weep again.
The salad bowl sat, untouched, two wooden arms outstretched.
Chapter 28
He went to that last conference, hell-bent on attending as many of the psychiatry seminars as he could. He was on his own. Empty; every conference room, chairs in rows, pointing the right way, but lacking weight. He went from session to session. In each, suited speakers spoke through their studies, making an occasional aside for the benefit of the faithful, the one or two colleagues or the assistant who pressed the button for the next slide.
The supposed audience, those thousands of attendees, doctors and sales reps, were all either absent on one of the tours, or down in the ‘information centre’-cum-casino, or sleeping off a hangover in a hotel room.
He went to the vast hall that was the information centre. It was a futuristic marketplace, with its lightweight exhibitors’ stands, stacks of pamphlets and coffees on offer. The rubbish bins were filled with the pamphlets. The air hostess representatives of Big Pharma, with their sashes and smiles and shaved eyebrows, were calling the docs over to win. A game show host was wearing a headset, leaning over a circle of consultants in suits whose heads were bent to computer screens. They were being asked the question: Which drug is the only drug on the market that may* reverse or inhibit the development of paranoia-like symptoms in schizophrenia? (* Or may not.) The answer was emblazoned on the canopy, behind the host. It was on the coffee cups and on the computer mouse pads.
Richard took a small plastic receptacle of scalding black coffee and watched them pressing the mouse that makes no squeak, like techno-cats, one-claw winners.
It brought to mind the psychological experiments that are contrived so that no one wins apart from their inventor. You cannot win, you have the illusion of winning in the first game and thereafter you lose whatever you press. The point is the explanation one gives for losing. The depressive will say, with some accuracy, that there was nothing they could do, they were bound to lose, they always lose. The paranoid wil
l say, with an even greater accuracy, that the whole thing was rigged. Only the ‘normal’ person falls short of any accuracy of surmise, claiming they’re the architect of their ‘achievements’.
After Valérie left, he went up to the Bar des Chasseurs a couple of times with his former hunting comrades. He had explained the experiment there, and held the attention of the drinkers, and he had even done so after four or five glasses of pastis. He may have got the mental types confused but they got the idea. Putain, they exclaimed, baffled, morose. Denis Sabène, the butcher with the Porsche, had gone so far as to say that in this world the sane were mad and the mad were sane and Richard had praised the insight, being drunk.
He went into that butcher’s two weeks later, after he’d been arrested, and the guy stood with his hands behind his back, a muslin cloth staunching the blood dripping off the counter, and gave him no eye contact, and Frédéric Barret, the tobacconist next door, another one of the chasseurs, gave him his cigarettes most carefully, making sure the warning was face up. ‘Smoking kills’.
So suddenly he was English again, after they’d all pretended for so many years, when the drinks were on him, that he could pass for a Frenchman. He could have passed for a Chinaman. One of his friends, Maurice, an ex-cop, picked a row with him over some slight given to his dog by his in-laws, in order to escape the wider association. The English he’d partied with for the last year crossed the street to avoid him and his bad luck. Only the Dutch shook hands. They were busy people.
His home was not his home in any meaningful way at all, beyond the bricks and mortar.
The point is the explanation one gives for losing.
Chapter 29
The music over the loudspeakers in the hall seemed to speak to him. American songs pressed him to find the hero inside of himself. He wanted to fill his head, so he wandered on from session to session. He entered a small back room. The speaker looked anxious when Richard walked in, paused, then went on.