Black Chalk

by Albert Alla

  It started in Antibes. He picked me up in his red 2CV, and drove away before I had time to close the door.

  ‘I’m taking you to a spot no Englishman knows about,’ he said, refusing to answer any of my questions. We pulled away from the main road, and hugged the dented coastline. At one stage, he stopped in the middle of a tight turn, got out, and climbed on the parapet. His finger first indicating I should do the same, then pointed high up towards the red hills.

  ‘Do you see her? That’s where we’re going.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I said, balancing on the parapet, ignoring the drop behind us, and not wanting to disappoint him. ‘How do we get there?’

  He went back into his car and waved me in urgently. At some stage, he turned into a road much like many we’d passed before. In first gear, his car struggled up the hill, its frame rattling with every bump. Denret looked straight ahead, first at the bitumen road, then at the clayish track.

  ‘We have to walk now. Are you afraid of walking?’

  He would challenge me with such statements whenever I started to feel comfortable. And an instant later, he’d be talking as if he hadn’t noticed my startled look.

  ‘This is forgotten history, Nathan,’ he said as we neared the top of the hill. ‘Notre-Dame d’Afrique. Look at her, and look at her closely. Ask yourself why you haven’t heard about her before.’

  I could see a weeping Madonna facing the sea, her arms outstretched. She was looking in the general direction of Africa. Around her, at her feet and all over a low wall, were hundreds of plaques. He kneeled down and tapped a plaque with his finger: ‘Bertrand Denret, Algers’. He waved at a section of the wall:

  ‘All of these were killed in a single massacre. You won’t find it in the history books. Is that right, Nathan? Is that right?’

  My mind went blank.

  ‘No, that’s not right,’ I tried to say. To my relief, he started talking about the war.

  The question of what was right seemed to preoccupy him only when he was around me. He lumped our lives as we were living them now, me with Marie and a comfortable flat, him with his mysteries, on the side of wrong. On the side of right was a leap towards a greater justice.

  When I tried to piece his days together, I found that the hours he spent with me were by far the most contemplative. The rest were spent in action of one kind or another. He worked, but when I asked him more about the subject, he always answered vaguely. ‘Let’s talk about something else. Business isn’t very exciting.’ When we were on the French Riviera, he spent large parts of his days at sea, either on a boat, or if the winds were right, on a windsurf. Up in the Alps, he alternated between ice climbing and skiing. And every evening, he was out and about, sometimes with a girl in tow, but mostly alone. If spending time with him was exciting for me, it must have been a more sedate affair for him.

  ‘There’s no need to beat around the bush, Nathan. You’re smart, and I’m smart. But look at us. Shouldn’t we be doing better?’ he told me once, when we were sipping rosé at his friend’s bar.

  ‘You worked sixty hours last week, and how much did you make?’ he asked me another time, at another friend’s bar.

  ‘You’re almost twenty-five,’ he said once as he stopped his car on the side of a Nationale. ‘I’m closer to thirty.’ He put his car in neutral, and revved the engine. ‘We’re not meant to be slaves, you and me. What are you going to do in September?’

  Denret infused his words with his own vitality, so that everything he said sounded like a challenge. His musings over the rights and wrongs of our lives were never mere complaints. He meant to do something about them, and while he worked out what, he was using me as a sounding board. Had they come from anyone else, I would have gladly ignored them. But there was a sense of impeding action surrounding Denret, so that, after having sex with Marie, I’d cover myself up with our duvet, stare at a mouldy spot on the ceiling, and think about my life.

  Those were never productive thoughts. Rather, I was concocting a brew of past and present: thoughts of home and my years on the road mingling with the day’s tiredness and the echoes of an orgasm. But for the first time, I started to think about what my life would be like had I stayed at home, my mind sticking to the sort of plans I had as a seventeen-year-old. I imagined three raucous years at university ending in a 2:1 and a job in the City. Going by what my father had done, I imagined taking up a consulting job or a banking one, and earning a bonus as big as my salary.

  Whenever Marie left me in my world for too long, I ended up staring at the stains on the carpet, at the dirt between the tiles. My fingers would feel the threads of our sheets and find them coarse. And every time I emerged from such depths, I looked at Marie’s body in a new light: tobacco was darkening her teeth, loose skin dangled from her arm, dark veins were breaking through her hitherto smooth feet. In such moods, I found it difficult to speak to her: everything she did and said seemed tainted. My eyes were following her fingers, as they toyed with series of lit roll-ups, the cigarettes’ paper drawing lines of red against the white wall, before turning ash grey and crumbling into a full tray. My ears were listening to the texture of her voice, as her words rubbed rough against the tender part of my ears. She stood between me and something out there. I didn’t know what, but it gripped me tight, leaving behind only isolated images. Blackberries, honeysuckle, grass running down a hill, stone walls whitened with chalk – these appealed to the child buried deep within. A gold watch with three precise dials, a large clean room in a tidy house, leather seats and a smooth gearbox – though new, I felt these were the sort of desires a man should have.

  Denret disappeared for the whole month of July 2006. In that time, I broke up with Marie. To my surprise, tears poured down her cheeks. She turned away, and covered her eyes with her palms. I came closer impulsively, but then, considering what had just happened, I stopped awkwardly and put my hands in my pocket. For a few seconds, she looked at me through her fingers, her shoulders oscillating between facing me and showing me her back. But then, just as I was becoming too tense to move, she seemed to make a decision, and using the momentum of a turn, she laced her arms around me. Holding tighter than she ever had, she dug her fingers in my shoulders, and told me she loved me. I was taken aback. In my mind, she was too smooth to let herself fall prey to her emotions. Feeling her warm body crying, I hesitated. My nose brushed her forehead, and falling back on habits, I sniffed hard. There was that faint acridity along her hair line, the trace of rose rising from her neck, and my nose skimming past her eyebrows, the muted lushness of her cheeks. Nearing her mouth, I first felt the dampness of her breath, soft on my skin, the broad, familiar spice of her cigarettes, and then, a fraction of a second later, coming from deep within her, I smelled a sharp pungent note. I inhaled again and again, letting it dispel my doubts.

  When Denret came back, I sought him out, and with more strength than I’d used in a long time, I told him that we ought to do something. For the first time, I saw surprise etch two deep lines along his brow, but it only lasted an instant.

  ‘Yes,’ he told me with his usual force. ‘I have a project you can help me with.’

  Denret prized my English – with me as a translator, he could expand his operations to new markets. We weren’t working within the law, but we weren’t far from it either. Just like one would in a normal framework, we were buying and selling legal goods, putting people in touch for an introduction fee, and running errands for those who would pay. The only difference was that the goods we dealt had dropped off the normal circuit, that we weren’t signing receipts. Still, I was so eager to do something well back then, that if Denret had told me we were going to trade cocaine, I would have asked him why we weren’t adding crack to our inventory.

  Unloading trucks at two in the morning, driving vans down little country roads, organising drops and collecting money, shadowing our competitors and ensuring they weren’t shadowing us – for months, I enjoyed following Denret’s lead.

  I followed hi
m until he went too far. On the 8th of April 2007, he deemed that we were betrayed, that he was betrayed, and decided to retaliate. When in the right, he was unstoppable. I skirted and evaded and he spent the night at the gendarmerie and they barely knew half the story – I couldn’t help Denret, and in any case, he’d only ever used me for his own purposes – and I expected the gendarmes to come for me that night, or in the middle of the next, as they were wont to do, and I decided to leave. I narrowed my life down to a single suitcase, and made for Marseilles, where a friend had told me he could find me a job in the port.

  ***

  My first two days in Marseilles, Julien put on a black t-shirt, clasped two gold chains around his neck, and went out to work. I spent both days researching the Foreign Legion: how to join, what being a legionnaire meant. This time, I could run away and come back with a new identity. On the evening of the second day, he told me he’d found me something. ‘You spend a month working nights, and then you’ll get day shifts.’ I remembered our gloves, hats, precautions – had we really done so much harm? – and I put the Legion to the side.

  Dividing my days between a job in the Port de Marseilles, and the one-bedroom flat I took near the Vélodrome, I started to feel dirty. The twenty-one-year-old boy who’d arrived in Chamonix was nothing like the twenty-five-year-old man watching sitcoms on a torn armchair. Dirt had seeped into the boy’s bones and made him a man. Dirt in everything that ought to be beautiful. After Marie, I could never again believe in the purity of love. I would always second-guess it. After Denret, every man was out to use me. I still half expected a gendarme to come and knock on my door, and ask me where I’d been on the night of the 8th of April 2007.

  In England, if only I could get over my apprehension, I could go to a good university, rely on a well-connected family, find myself a good job. The last few years had been so full that the shooting had become a distant memory. An item in my past, yes, but one that almost belonged to a different man.

  ***

  After three months of night shifts, the stevedores moved me to day shifts, and I settled into a comfortable routine, split between work, my flat, and a bistro next to the port.

  On the 19th of December 2007, my father rang the bell of my apartment. His auburn hair gone grey, a box of chocolates in hand, his skin duller than it used to be. The man who’d scored countless centuries for Hornsbury CC looked unable to swing a bat.

  ‘I didn’t think you’d want flowers, and there was a chocolaterie near my hotel.’

  I kept my arm across the doorway. ‘How did you find me?’

  ‘Your mother,’ he said. He appraised the situation. ‘Will you let me in?’

  The question shook the surprise out of me. I accepted the chocolates, and waved him through the door. He asked me how I was, and, settling into small talk, I listened intently to every single one of his words, his intonations. I imagined him relating the most minute of details to my mother, and for a fleeting moment, they were both in the room, in my space. But then my father’s presence took over, his formal brevity, and with it, I fell back on my old comfort with his ways. Later, while he was sitting in the only sound armchair, he summed up the reason for his visit in a few words.

  ‘It’s your mother, you see. James has had some problems of late. They’re over’ – he knocked on the wood of his chair – ‘we hope, but your mother… She’s not as strong as she used to be.’

  Seeing my aged father mentioning problems, the image I had of my family suddenly shifted, a depressed void in its stead. My mother was closing on sixty, I realised, and I tried to imagine what that meant. But the image that affected me most wasn’t the one I expected: I’d left my brother just as he was hitting puberty, as an already rebellious thirteen-year-old. He was now twenty, the same age I had been when I was working with Sally in the Pacific. I couldn’t picture him taller, broader, hairier.

  ‘What problems is James having?’ I asked my father.

  He drew a deep breath, averted his eyes, but then, true to the man I had always known, he looked directly at me.

  ‘James fell in with the wrong crowd early on, Nate. It was my fault. I should have realised, but I thought he was acting like a difficult sixteen-year-old boy—’

  Seven years on, I was only going to listen to him if he gave it to me raw. I interrupted him:

  ‘What sort of problems, Dad?’

  He waited to see whether I had any more questions before he went on:

  ‘Drugs. He smoked cannabis with his school friends. And then he went out with a girl who did heroin. Liz realised what was happening, and we pulled him out of that school before he had time to become fully addicted. She did everything she could to help him. For a while, it worked. He passed his A-levels and got into UCL.’ He paused, and frowned. ‘He didn’t want to, but we thought it was too good an opportunity. For the first year, he was fine. But then he met the wrong sort of people again, and…’

  My father’s voice trailed off, and his chin dropped. I didn’t ask any more questions. Before he left, he asked me whether I could write my mother a letter, if only a few lines. I hesitated out of habit. But then, faced with my father’s rational presence, I asked myself why I wasn’t answering her, and I couldn’t settle on one sound reason. My hesitancy cast into absurdity, I took a piece of paper out, and writing big so the page would look full, I wrote: ‘Hello Mum, Dad just brought me chocolates. I don’t think he thought too much about it, because there are plenty with liqueur in them. Perhaps he will learn one day… I wish you a merry Christmas and a happy New Year.’ I thought about signing Nathan, but I didn’t think she would understand, so I gave her a big sprawling ‘Nate’.

  Two weeks later, my mother wrote me a letter:

  I received the best Christmas present I could have hoped for. I’m very grateful to have such an enterprising son as you, darling. Your father told me all about seeing you, and he mentioned your travels. You know the world better than us.

  Later in the same letter, she wrote:

  James was in Oxford for Christmas. He spent the morning of the 25th with us. He looked very pale. He told us he wants to get better, but that he’s not ready yet. Perhaps it would help if you wrote to him.

  That letter moved something deep in me. Seventeen years of love and care and comfort. With each winter, I’d laid slabs of ice on all that had gone well before it had all gone bad, and now they’d tricked me, and I’d let myself be tricked, and we’d reopened a narrow treacherous channel across our distance.

  Before responding to it, I took three days off work and went skiing in the Pyrenees. It was on a chairlift after a great powder run, as the sun’s rays glanced off my shoulder, that I decided that I couldn’t hide behind Nate the teenager forever, that whatever there was with my parents, I was now man enough to deal with.

  Pen in hand, I felt as though I’d made a decision but I hadn’t quite worked out what it entailed. I wrote that I was thinking of coming home, but that I was unsure of what I could do. My mother’s response was more like the woman I knew: she’d researched the subject, and presented me with a list of options, nuancing her enthusiasm with sentences such as: ‘If you still find physics interesting’, or ‘Perhaps you aren’t interested in university anymore, in which case.’

  For some months, we exchanged handwritten letters, never an email. My letters mentioned hazy ideas, and spoke of my father and my brother as if I had seen them the previous week. Hers, on the other hand, were far more concrete. I wondered whether I wasn’t too old to go to university, and she was quoting studies on mature-age university students. I talked about living in London, and she spoke of opportunities and median house prices in Reading.

  Just as I was becoming comfortably entrenched in the position of the soon-to-return son, she wrote about an incident between James and my father that happened the day after my brother came out of a Berkshire rehab clinic.

  Your father went to speak to him before dinner. He normally listens to him, but not this time. They had a few wo
rds, James packed his bag, and then he left.

  Later on, she added:

  We’re getting too old for James. He doesn’t listen anymore. But you remember how he looks up to you. Perhaps he would listen to you.

  Everything in the letter was veiled, but that only made it worse. The overall tone, the reference to James listening to his father and hence not to his mother, and the ‘few words’, which I knew to mean that they’d had a fight. I pictured my brother, stubble on his chin, hitting the man he’d once have never dared touch. Shocked, I looked online for plane tickets and bought them that night.

  Two weeks later, in late May, I left France. She was waiting at the Heathrow arrivals, holding hard onto the railings. When she came to hug me, she didn’t walk with the same purpose. There was a hesitancy as she shifted her weight from one leg to the other that made me want to protect her. She covered my cheeks with her palms, and traced the contours of my face with the tips of her fingers.

  ‘This is new,’ she said, as she brushed a crease on my forehead.

  ***

  The first time she made a suggestion, she shrouded it deferentially. I’d imagined that I would have to rise up and tell her I couldn’t be dealt with that way now that I was twenty-six. But instead, I realised how frail her hands looked and did what she said.

  Coming home, even if we no longer lived in Hornsbury, brought the ghosts of the shooting to the fore of my consciousness. Now that I drove past streets in which Jeffrey and I used to play, now that I saw a shop in which I bought Anna a present and Eric a card, I realised I had to do something quickly. There was a dark grey mass radiating heat in a corner of my mind: every time I came close to it, I shrunk away like a hand getting too close to a hot plate. And it was growing a tongue: the sort that’s normally rolled neatly in between two sets of fangs, but which jumps out further than an iguana is long when it darts at a firefly. The early hours of morning were the most dangerous: the tongue licked me with its stickiness, and they were shaping themselves around Mr Johnson’s desk, the window he would look out of. They were gathering strength. I had to stop them. I’d heard the solution a hundred times before: bring them out into the light of day, and they will wither. And so, I decided to write the events that led to my departure as they happened.