by Louise Dean
The doctor poked his head round the door, and took Richard in ahead of the others.
‘How are you getting on with your meds?’
‘Famously.’
‘You’re not taking them, are you?’
He was a very modern man, the doctor, very sympathique, on the side of the shirkers, providing sick notes for the perfectly well.
Maybe he has a good sex life, thought Richard, noting the wooden ethnic nudes around the office that suggested someone who has had fun in developing countries. His only weakness, he’d heard in the waiting room, was a sports car and a great impatience with slow drivers.
‘You should take them, Richard; the meds. Better than the booze.’
‘That used to be my line.’
‘You’d find it easier to get on with day-to-day life, you know, if you took them.’
‘It’s the last thing I want to get on with, day-to-day life. Did I tell you she’s taken my son from me?’
‘Mmm-hmm. Let me look at your throat.’
‘Sure.’
The doc gave him a course of antibiotics and wished him luck with the bronchitis.
‘How’s business?’ Richard asked, folding the prescription.
‘Well, good. Hey, you’ll like this, Richard. All those people out there in the waiting room? What do you think they’ve come for?’ He rose and showed Richard to the door. ‘They’re here for your lovely little serotonin reuptake inhibiters. Old age is a depressing time.’
‘It’s all depressing.’
The doc laughed like it would all be fine, he slapped Richard on the back. A little depression was nothing to him. He saw kids with cancer. He’s so much better than me, Richard thought, and avoided paying the small charge by stepping outside smartly.
He went via dog-shit alley from the fountain square into the church square and passed by a new estate agent’s. There was a cheap little bistro coffee table with a vase of flowers in the middle of it. Beyond the window-posted properties, a fat woman hovered in a woollen poncho. Turning about, she came to the window to face him. It was Adele, the bottom-barer, Simon’s wife. And then she saw that it was him; Richard.
Her face fell and she turned round fast. Divorce was, he thought, another disease which is not a disease but which people hold to be catching. Like depression.
One property had caught his eye; his. He read how — just like all the agent’s other properties — his own house was ‘charming’ and ‘well proportioned’, ‘benefiting from three large bedrooms’, and, with the possibility to ‘enlarge the property’, an ‘ideal second home’. He considered that a ripe insult. There were three photographs and one of them was of the kitchen, showing the counter he’d installed with the damned salad bowl positioned as part of the ‘lifestyle’ shot. For the photograph of the pool they’d placed a similar bistro table to the one outside with a Champagne bucket, a bottle of rosé in it and two glasses, just waiting to be filled!
Looking down he saw Adele’s thick legs clad in tweed knickerbockers, and he stepped sideways to look at her.
A second home! He rapped on the window. Something in his expression defeated both her professionalism and the spoonful of greed that may or may not be part of the motivation for being a real-estate agent. She turned the key in the door lock. Four hundred and fifty thousand euros! Two hundred and five square metres! A second home!
Now he inhabited an airless hutch. He went back to the studio thinking through the problem of the showerhead. Of all the elements thrown in at the largesse of the landlord, this was significant. It was blocked with limescale and the water emerged at high-pressure boiling hot. The cord was wrapped in metal ringing which was broken in places and showed the yellow plastic tube beneath it. You had to wrap a towel around your hand to hold it, should it be filled with water. He’d used it to scald clean the interior of the toilet.
Since he tried to strangle his wife with it last Saturday the rubber cord was torn and leaking. He’d have to enquire how to go about replacing it. It would be a long litigious ordeal, necessitating a dossier filled with paperwork, he was sure.
Chapter 38
His wife was bringing max by after judo so that he could spend the afternoon with him. She wouldn’t let him stay alone with him more than a couple of hours now.
As he rounded the church he saw her, sitting outside in her car, a grey Ford Fiesta, waiting for him. She was not wearing make-up. He was surprised to see her like that; greasy.
‘How are you?’
‘Fine,’ she said, hands on the wheel, not looking at him, tense.
‘Apart from the fact I’m the shuttle bus.’ Max got out and came round the back of the car.
‘Well, sorry, but you had something to do with me losing my driving licence.’
‘I didn’t make you drink. I didn’t hold the glass to your lips.’
He put his hands on the side of her car, hung his head, looked at the tarmac, breathing in the petrol fumes, taking his time. ‘Are you working?’
She made a face. ‘No time.’
‘Me neither,’ he said. ‘Have a sense of humour.’
‘Your payment never came.’
He drew Maxence into his side and kissed his head. ‘I don’t know why. I set it up. Should have happened.’
She looked at him then. ‘Lots of things have happened that shouldn’t have.’
‘I lost my temper. That’s all. Anyway, can’t your boyfriend help you out with some money? I see the house is on the market. You might have mentioned it.’
‘My lawyer says it should be done so that we can share the proceeds.’
‘You don’t mean share though, as in half, half.’
‘I will have to take advice.’
He nodded. He had taken advice too. His lawyer was a first-class bitch. He thought that would be good; imagined, per the televised American model, she’d use that to his advantage. The French model was less customer-service orientated.
* * *
He’d made an appointment that week to see her. When he arrived, her secretary was on the phone in a side room. She had crazy hair, multi-coloured, and wore the kind of clothes that frighten men. She was regaling someone with a story about her son’s judo teacher. She saw him and nudged the door to with her toe. He stood all the while at the counter, watching the clock with growing anger.
He cast a good look at the bills and invoices on the counter ready to be put into envelopes and sent. The endless formulations which amounted to yet more dejection for the hapless recipients, the original amount, the taxes, the command for payment by a certain date or they sent round the guys to take your microwave. He grew angrier by the second. Eventually, twenty minutes after his arrival, she came out to reception.
‘I have an appointment with my lawyer at eleven. Madame
Schrecklich.’
‘She’s not here.’
‘But I have an appointment with her.’
‘But, she’s not here.’
‘How can that be?’
She poked her tongue through the gusset of the red gum in her mouth, and popped its cherry, leaving in the air a smell of cinnamon. ‘We called you. We left you a message, this morning.’
He put his mobile phone on to the counter, slammed it down.
‘There is no message on here.’
‘She’s not here.’
‘You didn’t greet me when I walked in, you didn’t come and tell me this, you haven’t apologized at all! Give me a piece of paper, please. I wish to leave my lawyer a letter about this.’
‘No.’
‘Give me some paper.’
‘We don’t have any.’
Behind her were reams and reams of printer paper. He pointed to them.
‘I’m not giving you any paper.’
‘I am paying for a service . . .’ She blew out, bored.
He was going to the door when, like a bucket of blood thrown against a glass window, rage soaked his vision. He turned round.
‘You’re a rude bitch!
’
‘And you, you’re a bastard! A rude bastard!’ she yelled, grasping the edge of the counter and pulling herself over it, her face come alive.
He slammed the door behind him and stood in the street, hyperventilating.
He wanted to get a gun and come back and shoot the place up. He walked up the street. Then he stopped. He wanted to cry, but an old woman had beaten him to it. Ahead of him, she was standing by the tourist information centre reading the charity posters, two shopping bags at her ankles, her shoulders rising and falling.
He was glad he’d taken the company cheque-book from behind the counter while the bitch was on the phone. He went into the information centre and wrote out a cheque for an animal charity there and then.
‘I’m through with France,’ he said as he wrote it out angrily and handed it to the girl behind the desk. ‘Here, have this. Fucking French.’
‘Merci, monsieur, c’est gentil.’
He slammed down the pen and went out. What the hell is happening to me? he thought, walking back to the grey dusty parking lot, between the plane trees.
* * *
‘I suppose you will not even say sorry,’ his wife said, tightening her grip on the wheel. ‘You could have killed me, in front of our son. You were like an animal. Meet the real Richard Bird, I thought. Now we know who you really are.’ She looked at him, her eyes narrowing, her lips pursing. It was comical in a way.
‘Doesn’t calling the police on me mean that we’re quits? Doesn’t another tribunal, another conviction, mean another nail in my ever-growing coffin? Don’t you think that sorry would be a little de trop?’
‘I don’t understand you. Why should you have a coffin, now, what is this? Are you planning to kill yourself, Ri-schard? Or me? Are you threatening me?’
He’d looked up to the sky. No sun. No rain. A strange day. Nothing at all for anyone. Nul points.
‘Why don’t you get yourself some work, Valérie?’
‘How can I work, Richard? I am so busy with your text messages, your phone calls . . . You know, I should get myself a computer. Then you can email me and I can keep it all on file. You never really know people, do you? I should write a book, you know, I really should. They say people like to read about these things.’
‘So they say,’ he replied. ‘It makes them sentimental, I suppose.’
‘Ha.’ She laughed flatly, then turned a softer face to Max. ‘See you later, kiddo. The bus will be back at five.’
‘Ne me dites pas que quand je l’ai quitté ça lui a fait de la peine . . .’ Richard sang out, quoting Mr Balavoine.
She shook her head and took off.
He put an arm around Max’s shoulders.
‘What do you want to do? I’ve got no PlayStation or anything.’
‘Oh, putain.’
He never had to ask where his son got his bad language from. Swearing; it seemed so unimportant.
* * *
It was the second time the boy had been to the studio. The first time, just the week before, had resulted in his father’s arrest.
‘Don’t worry, Max, all of that’s behind us now. Your mother wound me up.’
Actually it was Max who’d wound him up; he’d thought the kid looked disgusted by the place. Richard had shown him the view of the back of the church, he’d explained how good it was to be close to the village shops and his school and his friends. The boy had said nothing. He seemed to see it how it really was. She’d gone and said something and then the boy had said something about the place not being good enough for Richard. She’d said it again, whatever it was, something about his drinking, about the place stinking of booze and cigarettes; if only she’d held her tongue for once.
He’d taken her by her hair and dragged her to the shower room and forced her head down into the toilet bowl and turned on the shower and let the jet of boiling water burn the back of her neck and her hair and watched her hands, such strong hands, reaching about her, reaching towards the sink, trying to find something to get hold of, going for the plumbing pipes, screaming.
Then he saw it the way his son saw it. Max was standing in the bathroom doorway looking at them.
The father with his chin up, poised, straining to hold the mother down, taking a moment to look at the cord of the shower, about to wrap it around her neck. And then he let go.
It had been a bad month, all told.
Chapter 39
Rachel and Maud went by train from the local station to England. Maud cried with her hands up at the window, her breath obscuring the sight of her father, who stood crying on the platform, waving, with Rachel right behind her daughter, crying too, and mouthing at him, ‘Go away, just go away.’
That was the last exchange between them, her saying, but not saying, ‘Go away! Go away!’ and him miming, ‘I love you, Maud,’ looking like a wind-up toy, like Pierrot, all down at the mouth as if it were someone else’s fault, as if some big bad kid had kept on winding up his clockwork cock.
The train trailed the backyards of the modest houses with the kit swimming pools in their backyards; cement mixers, surrounded by refuse; and the white sit-up-and-beg vans parked with their rears ready for honourable thieving.
Coming into Marseille, birds swooped and swooned, milling around the high-rise towers, flirting with the antennae, dipping and diving, twisting and jiving. Tower blocks fell in, sidling into the city, taking over sideways. There were palm trees between washing lines. Waiting at the station for the train to get its nerve up for the high-speed assault on Paris, she looked at little Maud, at the expression on her face, that pompous disinterest which is the natural expression of the human face at rest. She took Maud’s hand in hers.
Outside, beyond the station fences, a yellow-boleroed working man peered into the face-shaped hole of a bottle recycling unit. The man put an arm inside the skip, his cheek pressed against the side of it. Maud pointed him out.
‘Yes, darling, he’s a French alcoholic, I expect,’ Rachel said. She was English. She was going back to England.
As they approached Paris, their eardrums blew in and out through the tunnels, and the long double-decker train eased into the Gare de Lyon and came slowly to a final halt. Its passive people sprang into life, recovering their ambitions starting with their coats and bags, descending the stairs of the train into the smell of someone else’s second-hand luncheon meat with garlic, and were held up in their haste the length of the station platform by old women with tight perms.
Rachel had nothing on wheels and Maud liked to walk into her path, which made carrying the big sports bags even harder. She was soon sweating and, as she could not face the Métro, they took a taxi to transfer to the Gare du Nord.
The driver was hunched over what might have been a cloakroom conversation; his radio was either very loud or very quiet, the volume went up and down according to the driver’s censorship, which was every time a few seconds too late. He sees my mouth as something to kiss the children and not to give him a blow job. (Volume down) Men, out there, any of you who are listening to the women’s show, be brave, be courageous, call in and help us to understand you. (Volume up) Now, ladies, something new to the market for intimate pleasure, the vagina kiss, it’s a long tongue suspended from lips (volume drops) which can give you a lot of vaginal pleasure. We have a caller. Hélène. My partner likes to sodomize me but he is rather voluminous. It’s a real problem. Hélène, make this a Friday-night thing, when you can relax and take your time . . .
Rachel intervened. ‘There is a child in your car, monsieur.’ She made no condescension to accent now. She added for her own benefit, ‘For God’s sake.’ It was the first time she had used the expression and the first time she had uttered an English phrase in front of a French person, for pleasure.
By the time they reached Waterloo, she had completed her metamorphosis. She dallied ostentatiously in customs clearance, ready to display her baggage purity, a faithful Englishwoman coming home, but they did not bother her.
They stayed
a few days with an old friend of hers and quite quickly she found a nice flat in Battersea, with a small garden and a lovely kitchen, just right for the two of them. She went to the bank and collected the cheque-book for her new current account, opened in her maiden name, to which she transferred a useful part of the money her mother had left her.
The first night in their flat she barely slept; she woke, and slept and woke and thought how we are so certain when we are young but doubt becomes increasingly seductive, like going over to comfortable shoes, and she thought about Richard’s doubt and then, it came right into her head, a borrowed thought, like eavesdropping at great distance — Do any of us even know that someone loves us in another place or another time? — and she sat up and wept, and the tears came horizontally, it seemed.
She could afford some of the small thrilling pleasures of belonging to Britain. She took out a Boots loyalty card and an Oyster card and bought a stack of celebrity gossip magazines, and with Maud enrolled at the lovely Church of England school just over the river she was free to idle in coffee bars.
She was not thinking about Jeff as she strolled. She was thinking about Richard. It was the mother in her, or possibly the English in her — the love of the underdog — she said to herself, as she sat down on a bench right in the middle of Sloane Square and gazed adoringly at the high church of Peter Jones department store.
Chapter 40
The beginning of November; the vines were russet and bawdy; they waved their taffeta at the approach of the cold and violent lover. They drove along the tree-lined road with Richard contemplating the scene. Treasures tumbled from the tree-tops, their rusting scales listing in the wind that shook them with the impatience of a child at a parcel, hoping to hasten Christmas. A cascade thickened and drifted. A leaf came at the windscreen, as if from fingertips, kiss-blown.
He was stuck in the throat of the vision but Simone saw none of it; the windscreen might as well have been a mirror.