by Louise Dean
‘You don’t listen to me. You interrupt the whole time. It’s just pointless. I might as well whistle down the wind. It’s a total waste of time. I’m getting another drink. I hope to shit we’ve got more cigarettes. Did you smoke the spares?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh, great. Can’t you buy some when you’re out?’
‘You’re out all the time, you buy them.’
‘So we’re even arguing over buying cigarettes now.’
‘You don’t feel the same way, do you? Do you? It’s obvious. Not like when I was your neighbour’s wife.’
‘Don’t be so melodramatic.’
‘Well, can’t you understand why? Think about it. I just left my husband for you, you idiot!’
‘Don’t raise your voice. You’ll wake the kid. Do you want to wake him? Do you want him to hear this?’
‘I don’t care.’
‘Well, I do. Jesus Christ, we’ve got to have some standards, Valérie. I don’t feel well at all. I’ve got to get myself healthy again. All this smoking and drinking and not sleeping. All these arguments. I’m going to have to go to London, you know, to see Maud.’
‘I’ll come with you.’
‘Oh no. Oh no, baby. No way. That would be a total disaster. It’s not too much to ask you, is it, that I spend a few days with my little girl? Why don’t you spend some time with Max? God, Valérie. You’re like a child. Don’t you ever think that what we’ve done here, it was wrong, or greedy or anything? I mean don’t you ever ask yourself if any good can come of this whole thing?’
‘I was meant to be with you. That’s all that matters.’
‘I just feel bad about it all sometimes. Like about two in the morning when I’ve had a lot to drink, when I’m tired, when you’re ranting on at me, when there’s no cigarettes. When I want to go to sleep or for you to go to sleep. Or when I want quiet to think a minute.’
‘You’re out all day long . . .’
‘Well, so what? I need to get out.’
‘You’ve been fucking someone else. I know you have.’
‘You’re ridiculous.’
‘I know who it is! It’s Adele.’
‘Adele! You’re crazy. Jesus Christ, Valérie. Maybe we’ve made a mistake here.’
‘Don’t say that! How can you even say that, Jeff ? I love you. I don’t care. I’ll do anything, just don’t say that, just hold me, just love me, say you love me . . . we can start again, we can have our own children, maybe a little girl . . .’
‘Baby, you don’t even like children. I guess I’m not going to have a cigarette then. Look, let’s just lie down together, peacefully, without talking. I’ll hold you, but just keep your mouth shut, please, and maybe we can sleep, maybe you’ll feel better in the morning, maybe we both will. Shh. Don’t speak, honey.’
‘But I need to talk to you. I want to know you. I want you to know me . . .’
‘Please be quiet.’
* * *
He wished he could take it back, saying he loved her. He’d said it in a way because he knew she required to hear it to sleep with him. He’d said it in a way to enjoy the sex more. He’d said it, in a way, to make sense of what he was doing to Rachel and Maud.
If only he hadn’t got mixed up with her.
He found Valérie very sexually attractive; that was the problem.
He was angry with her about it. He’d had the idea to use another woman to satisfy himself and found one just down the road in the shopping centre. If he could stop being turned on by Valérie, he’d be more able to think straight, to hold himself apart, and do the right thing. Maybe he could make it up with Rachel and they’d come back, his girls. He should have just carried on fucking the woman who ran the dry cleaner’s. That was easy, that was a cakewalk compared to this.
He’d taken in some of his trousers. She was a nice woman with hair like a rat’s nest, backcombed right back into the nineteen sixties. She was long-limbed, kindly. She wore a miniskirt, red lipstick and could never seem to make her top lip meet her bottom lip. Her small inadequate shop was next to the supermarket. He bought bread and passed by nearly every day and she would give him a kind of startled smile; she looked like a cat having its tail pulled. Her commentary was inane, benign, pleasant. ‘So you’re an American, huh?’ as she crimped the plastic over his shirts. He went in there about closing time one Tuesday evening.
‘You’re an attractive woman. I bet your customers flirt with you, don’t they?’
His bad French was sufficient. She closed the shop, pulled the blinds to and asked him to come behind the counter. They kissed at the counter like a happy trades-couple, except he squeezed her right breast hard and pulled her hair. He popped her up on the counter-side and brought her down on to his cock a number of times. She was slender and lusty and these were her qualities so far as he knew her.
After that he’d skip in with a baguette in the morning and arrange to meet in a lay-by at lunchtime. With the exhaust of her red Clio going — she had to get home to make her husband lunch — they met in clearings and had sex on the ground, coughing because of the fumes. His trousers and shirts got flecked with mud and he set them aside when he got home to drop off at the dry cleaner’s.
She got that look on her face one day when he was giving her the lunchtime seeing-to, and she held his head just as he was getting close and kissed him in a different way. He withdrew, got her to suck his cock while he lay on his back thinking, his hands behind his head looking at the sky, and afterwards she said to him, her face on his chest, ‘Every time those bells on the door go, I hope it is you.’
His hands made for the dirt, he held himself up and he looked down the line of his nose, his chin on his chest, at her. He thought she resembled Marge Simpson.
‘This is not an affair, you know.’ Though afterwards it occurred to him he’d used the wrong word. ‘Affaire’ in French meant business.
The next morning, he passed by with a pain de mie and some croissants and told the woman he felt bad about the whole thing, it was ‘pas bon’, he said to ‘baiser une gentille femme comme ça dans la terre’. What’s more his life was ‘compliqué’. He just had the one shirt and a couple of pairs of trousers to collect. She had them handy.
‘Donc c’est tout?’ she said to him as he handed over the fifteen euros sixty cents and he took the dry cleaning with the wire hangers biting and snapping at the plastic wrap under his arm.
‘Oui, merci,’ he said cheerfully. The wind chimes clunked against the glass. He held the articles aloft one by one to check through. Yes, one shirt and two pairs of trousers, that was all.
Chapter 43
Maxence wandered into the hallway and sat on the bottom of the flight of stairs that went up to the bedroom suites. He could hear a bed moving. He trod up the stairs, a hand on the banister, his socks slipping on the polished tiles. He liked to wear his socks to bed. His mother said he couldn’t but he liked to have warm feet. His feet ached, his legs ached, he was always cold. Growing pains, his father called it. He didn’t know the French term.
He put his hands out as he reached the top stair and went on to his knees, advancing on all fours, until he got to the end room. He put his head through the cracked doorway, the sidelight was on, and he saw her feet, the soles of her feet, and he saw Jeff ’s hairy arse and his two hands on the pillows and then his mother’s legs went right up in the air like bedposts and Jeff sat up more and when his mother started to say ‘I love you’ over and over again, Jeff put his hand over her mouth and took over being the one making the noise, grunting with the bed-head rocking against the wall, and when Jeff ’s hand slipped off her mouth, his mother cried out, ‘That’s it, hurt me . . .’
Maxence let his head fall against the side of the doorway, relying upon the contact with the cold plastered wall to help him stay there and stay quiet.
He closed his eyes. He thought of his mother in the restaurant in Cannes, one hand behind her neck holding back her hair in a ponytail, smiling as she pu
t out her chin to eat a palourde from the small fork he held to her.
It was only when he heard Jeff make a few nervy snorts that he went. He withdrew on all fours as he had come, shuffling back on the tiles. By the time he got to the stairs, he could hear Jeff snoring evenly, drawing on the night, and he could hear his mother sighing as if there was not enough air.
He went downstairs back to Maud’s bedroom, where he slept now, with its neon-pink Ikea rug and floral wallpaper, and he opened the shutters and opened the windows and looked out and saw his grandparents’ small bungalow with the TV like a fire in the hearth.
His own house was invisible in the dark; he wished he could sing like his grandmother to call the past to him. He could remember the house when it was alive, the sound of the shutters whining as they swung, the bath emptying, the oven door banging, plates in and out of the sink, the drone of the television, the doorbell going, the stereo chewing on scratched disc, the washing machine in its last violent cycle, banging out a tantrum; a storm in a teacup.
And now he was trapped in the house that he’d watched being built. It took the best spot, it grabbed the best view. And his mother was drawn to it more and more, and his father went along too, and he used to follow in his pyjamas and socks to find them, with his own home less and less inhabited until finally it was only a matter of turning off the lights. A week ago he’d stood with his grandfather, watching him turning off the town water at the supply.
It had all happened as suddenly as if someone had whipped the sheets off them and pulled them by their ankles out through the back door and had put him and his mother in a van, their mouths taped up, their hands tied behind their backs, and taken them a hundred metres up the hill, leaving his father lying on the dirt.
When he closed his eyes and pulled the My Little Pony duvet up around his neck, he could see his father, in their home, sitting on the sofa at the end of a day, lifting a sock from one foot, then the other.
He got up and went into the kitchen. In a bottom cupboard was a box of things his mother had brought to the big house. He took it out and unfolded the interleaved cardboard and took from it the plastic bag of weed. He took the rolling papers from the cutlery drawer and the oven lighter and he sat with all the kitchen lights on, rolling a thick and ungainly sausage of weed. He lit it, it went up in flames and he had to blow on it to calm it down, and then he smoked it.
After he smoked it he went into the living room and took three photos out of their frames and sat holding them over the kitchen bin with the lighter; the neighbours and their daughter, Maud; Maud on a swing; the neighbours with his parents and him at dinner on the terrace. His mother had her eyes closed in every photo. He did not burn them. He let two of them drop into the bin and the third he ripped such that he was left holding only the image of Rachel.
In the morning, at breakfast time, he beat a monotonous noise on the kitchen table with the spoon. She came downstairs, looking pale and wretched, and asked him to stop it. He continued.
She ripped the spoon from him and grabbed his arm. ‘Listen, you’re getting everything you want, you have a quad, you have a PlayStation, Jeff is making such an effort with you, and you’re going to wake him up now, you should think of someone other than yourself. I don’t know why you have to be so weird all the time. I’m going to take you to see the doctor . . .’
She was tightening her grasp on his wrist. He shouted into her face, ‘Why do you let him fuck you?’
She swung her hand to hit him, and the rings on her fingers made contact with the bones in the side of his head and he fell sideways, but it wasn’t enough, she grabbed him by his pyjama top and pulled him off the chair and took him through the door outside and she bent him over the walled garden and pushed his face into the soil where the herbs grew, and she shoved his face into the dirt again and again. When his eyes were yellow, when his face was white, when his mouth was loose and open, when he looked a child, just a child, then she stopped.
She put her hands to either side of her face, rubbed her eyebrows, smelt the earth on her fingertips and turned to see Jeff watching her from the kitchen window. But that didn’t matter to her at all. Whether he saw her or not, what he thought, that was unimportant. All of that went when her son’s face was in the dirt, when she made her child do the crying for her.
Chapter 44
Richard was lonely but he thought he might be hungry. He went to the Spar and bought canned cassoulet, something he’d always thought he’d end up eating one day — he’d given it a cold shoulder hitherto — but each time he’d passed it in the store, he saw it and it saw him; that canned duck and beans in sauce had had him in its sights and won. He bought some cheese too and a bottle of whisky.
Then he went up to the school. The kids came whooping and cheering down the long steps in front of the school with their cases on wheels, a stampede of red-cheeked breathlessness, pigtails and Mohicans, the boys with highlights, the girls in many-buckled boots, their parents waiting, arms folded, smoking, with something on the stove and a letter to post.
He sat on the bottom step, receiving blows from cases and bags, in the back draught of the flapping kids. He finished his cigarette, turned sideways looking up at the school, waiting for the older kids.
His son emerged, almost last, with two or three others, his face dispassionate, and he trudged across the playground in a sort of stupor. He arrived at the top of the stairs, like a diver bored by the board, he seemed to gather himself and took the first step halfheartedly, stopping on each for a moment, the same foot swinging forwards each time, then he just let himself drop, step to step.
‘Max!’ Richard stood up.
The boy’s face was pale, he had rings around his eyes. He came to a halt before Richard.
‘Max.’ He took him in his arms but the boy remained lifeless, not returning anything, his arms hanging like whole dead fish.
‘I’ve missed you. I love you. Max.’ He shook his son. The boy’s eyes were on the road, down at the throng of parents, and Richard pulled him close to him, put him under his chin, rubbed his stubble into the soft thick hair.
‘I’m not allowed to talk to you. I’m not well, they say. One of us is going to prison or to hospital. I don’t know which is which.’
He held him away from him to look at him, to ask what he meant, but the boy’s eyes turned again to the road. Richard followed their direction. The town’s two fat policemen, who drove round in a car two sizes too small for them, were standing at the front of all the parents. He let Max go on down the steps and into the car park where he found Jeff ’s car and got inside.
Richard dragged himself past parents with their children, like a leper. He stood on the pavement outside the optician’s with tears coming down his face. He knew then how alone he was, how little he had. He felt the absence of Maxence like a physical pain; he thought of the sheep that drag around their prolapsed wombs, the pain was tugging his entrails, as Balavoine had warned.
Plenty of people saw him. No one stopped, no one stopped to say: Hang on a minute what’s going on here? This isn’t right, a grown man crying in broad daylight . . . How had he come to this, so quickly, in a matter of weeks?
After the snack hut which was blowing the smell of old fat up and down the street, he picked his way through the Hôtel Du Parc’s painted wicker chairs. He’d stopped in at that bar early evening a few times in the last week, he’d set himself a little routine, telling himself to be there by 6.30 p.m. After a few drinks he felt quite outgoing and was willing to offer friendship and experience, and after a few more drinks it was hard to be humble about this offering. It worked fine for a while, until the barman got irritable and asked him to drink elsewhere. During the off-season, a regular could be like a wife.
He saw Maurice going into the PMU bar and he went in and offered to buy him a drink. Maurice was as uptight as ever, ‘Mauroo’, his cop eyes permanently wide in shock, his pale face shrunk away from the heat of their terror. He loomed at the end of the bar by
the door with an arm across his chest, holding his elbow, looking stiff and in want. ‘I can’t stay. I’ve got the ironing to do,’ pulling his button collar into a sharp V about his throat.
Nevertheless, they tilted the heads of their glasses together. They ran through their former acquaintances’ bad luck. Marc’s girlfriend was bitten by dogs and raped on the way to St-Tropez. David had been cheated by a crook from Bargeoles. Bruno had died of alcoholism. Richard said he’d seen his wife in the doctor’s. She was probably picking up the same prescription he was, he quipped pathetically, inviting enquiry.
Maurice would not be drawn that way. He was a very hygienic man.
‘How’s your little woman in Cannes? That still working for you?’
‘She’s a good woman, an old-fashioned sort.’
‘How much do you give her these days?’
‘She hasn’t put the price up in years.’
‘You don’t ever think of going somewhere else?’
‘No.’
‘You don’t think of maybe taking her out, of suggesting you see each other as a couple, or that she come and stay with you?’
‘She’s not that kind of a woman. She’s very whole.’
‘But you obviously care for her, in saying that. Perhaps she cares for you. Perhaps you love each other and you’re mistaking it for sex. If you didn’t come to her — what is it, on a Thursday? — she’d worry, she might look for you. And you, if you went there and found her gone — or worse, dead — how would you feel?’
‘Look, I can’t chat. I am meeting a fellow from the Town Hall any minute now, they want to get my involvement in the elections. He’s coming in here to speak to me.’ He tipped his head forwards. ‘Please don’t tell anyone about my getting involved in politics.’
‘No, sure, of course not, but who would I tell now? No one speaks to me. I have been cut off all round. Want another?’