by Adam Thorpe
‘One hydrogen bomb would do it,’ my uncle said. He drew on his cigarette. ‘Like it did for the Japanese. It’s all commies understand.’
‘What about the poor innocent souls, the poor innocent children?’ my mother asked, as if not really expecting him to come up with an answer.
‘You think commies care about innocent souls? They don’t even care about their own. They don’t believe in the individual. Or private property. Or God.’
‘Horrible,’ said my mother, with an exaggerated shudder.
‘Or decent suits,’ he added. ‘Or power dinghies. That’s what I want, one day. A power dinghy. A Merc 200 outboard. What, about 3,000 francs—’
‘They call you comrade,’ I said.
‘Before they shoot,’ my uncle laughed, the smoke crawling out of his mouth and nose in a way I always liked.
3
Apart from the new office blocks, the aluminium and machinery factories in Bagneux were our main clients: places full of grease and oil and whining noises and yelling men in overalls.
I sometimes visited these factories with my uncle.
You would never have guessed, from the outside, what a din they made inside, despite the rows and rows of dirty windows and the complicated roofs made of corrugated iron and the steaming or smoking chimneys. I saw what my uncle meant when he said that our vacuum cleaners were war horses, coping so well with those stained floors that went on and on, the endless shreds of metal shavings in the machine shop and the sea of crumbs and ham-rinds in the canteen. These floors had once been swept and swabbed by a lot of men and women armed only with mops and brooms; now, as my uncle would proudly tell me, it took just a couple of his models to do the whole lot, models which could suck, blow, spray, dry, wax. And, as he would joke, manicure the boss’s poodle.
Sometimes we would be invited to have a drink with a manager in his office and my uncle would make jokes like this or tell stories in his deep, booming voice that I couldn’t follow – stories which made the manager laugh over the glasses, the room filling with the scent of Byrrh or St Raphael. My uncle was like the special oil he’d put in his car, able to rub along with anyone, make them feel comfortable, worker or secretary or manager or even big boss.
‘Give me anyone,’ he’d say, ‘as long as they don’t start talking slogans.’
I realised that this was part of his job, that if he ran out of this ability everything would seize up and we would be poor and starving and in rags.
His demonstrations at home were like something on the television; he would open the metal swing door and wheel the vacuum cleaner outside on a long brown flex. Then he would scatter sand and grit from a bucket onto the concrete ramp the other side of the swing door and hold the mouth a few centimetres above the dirt and switch the cleaner on. The suction would make a circle appear in the sand, and you could hear the grit hitting the drum inside. The circle would become a hole, with the concrete of the ramp showing, completely clean. Then he’d suck up the rest. He never stopped talking – or shouting, in fact, because of the vacuum cleaner’s motor. The client would nod and look impressed, most of the time. Sometimes a client stayed sort of blank, just watching, as if he was suspicious. My uncle would go on demonstrating even harder and making lots of little jokes, using bigger pieces of grit or letting the outside tap run and pushing the wide mouth with rubber lips on it through the muddy water, to show how it could suck up the wet. Then he would offer the client a drink without any pause, even if the client had stayed blank all the way through. I really liked watching; especially when it ended in an order.
I was still standing a lot in the window of the showroom and directing my alien army. My army was very real to me. If one of the vacuum cleaners was changed, or sold as a showroom model, I pretended it was a casualty. But the new recruits would inherit the old names: always Chou for the green Tornado model, Cacao for the brown Philips, then names like le Grand Caïd or Tarzan for the heavy models in the Aspiron ‘B’ range, the rest inheriting Artichaux, Bouboule, Monsieur Bizarre and so on. Their buttons and handles and trademarks and flexible tubes and mouths gave each of them a character. They were all different. They were all alive. And I was their commander.
The life-size woman in cardboard was still there, smiling and pointing, but the colours of the photograph had faded to a bluey-green and her dress and hairstyle looked old-fashioned. Her eyes followed me everywhere but I ignored her. She wasn’t part of my game. And then, one morning in the summer holidays, about a couple of months after my flyposting adventure, I realised with a jump that another pair of eyes were following me.
He was sitting behind the showroom desk, hidden a bit by the rubber plant. The lights had not been switched on, and he had kept very still while I was fighting Earthlings with my army. I blushed a lot and stuffed my hands in my pockets, trying to look normal.
‘Gilles.’
‘Yes?’
‘I think you should go out more.’
‘It’s been raining.’
‘I don’t mean today in particular, I mean generally.’
‘I do go out.’
‘Hardly. You should kick a ball around, ride your new bike. You spend hours in here, like …’
‘Like what?’
‘Like your father did.’
I was very close to the place where my father had dropped dead, near the fire extinguisher. The spot was marked by two streaks made by an over-greased wheel on the lino. My sister had showed me this one day, waving her hand as if she didn’t care, almost making a joke of it. I looked down at the spot, at the black streaks like the marks on a banana.
‘I don’t remember,’ I said.
‘He didn’t get out enough, you know. He waited here for clients to come, service managers of factories and so on, but they were too busy, it irritated them, he should have gone to them first. The business was almost dead when I took over. Almost dead.’
I felt cold inside, as if his criticism of my father was an attack on me. I kept quiet, with my arms folded. No doubt I looked bored and cross. In fact, I was terrified that he would start telling me things about my father that I didn’t want to hear.
‘I’m always out, looking for business,’ he went on, in his deep boom of a voice. ‘That’s why I come home late at least three times a week. You’ve no idea how much driving I do. I went all the way down to St Etienne yesterday, you know. Drove back through the night to save on the hotel. I don’t even know whether the deal’ll go through. But it’s what you have to do. The cherries aren’t going to fall into your mouth while you’re snoring.’
I pictured the map of France we had drawn recently at school, to show the centres of industry. St Etienne was one of the larger red blobs more than halfway down. M. Plantard had issued the outlines already stencilled and we had filled it with red blobs and drawn black lines between for railway routes; it turned France into something small and criss-crossed and ugly, like a face with a disease. My uncle was talking now about the factory in St Etienne, and how the workers were all commies and how St Etienne had the longest tramline in the country built by Isambard Kingdom Brunel or someone. I pictured my uncle motoring down in the Simca on the busy main roads and felt lazy and ungrateful.
He stopped talking and was feeling his jaw, which was dark and unshaven. I wondered why he had sat there in the gloom with the lights out, whether it had been his aim all along to spy on me. He cleared his throat and fumbled with a packet of Camels, taking a deep drag on the cigarette, filling the air above the desk with blue smoke. There had been no smell of cigarettes when I had come in; it was as if he’d been waiting for me to be there. He would usually stop smoking only when his throat got too sore and then start again a few weeks later, until he was lighting one from the other like in the magazine advertisements, and have to stop again.
‘Your grandfather built this with your father in 1948, you know. There was a garden here, I remember it. What we’d call the orchard. Just where we are right here, chum. Cabbages, a few apple tr
ees back there. Little sandy paths. He built the house first, when I was tiny, must have been around 1930, 31. Then this bit, after the war, after the Boche had left. Twenty years ago. It was going to be a shop, electrical goods, thus the plate-glass window and those hooks on the wall, but Aspiron were looking for an agent in the area and the factories were going up or being rebuilt and so there we go. Wouldn’t want to be shopkeepers, would we? Little old ladies coming in wanting to know why their light-bulb doesn’t work. Buying ten centimetres of flex. But it’s not easy, keeping it all afloat.’
He looked about him and sighed.
‘Keeping your mum and your sister and you, it’s a job and a half. Ought to get a medal for it. Wouldn’t be so bad if your sister took a hold on herself, behaved like a responsible adult. But she doesn’t. She’s wrecking her health – I mean, your mother’s – with worry. Those student gypsies she hangs about with. I’m worried about your mother, frankly. She’s been very pale, recently. Have you noticed? Not herself at all. Sick.’ He took a deep drag on his cigarette. ‘Does this mean anything to you, Gilles?’
‘I hope she’s not going to die.’
‘Of course she’s not going to die.’ He gave a little grunt and let the smoke out of his nose in two streams. ‘I should take you out myself. I should do more with you. Take you out fishing, that’s what I should do. That’s what fathers are supposed to do, isn’t it?’
I nodded.
‘Can’t you say something? Is there something wrong with you?’
‘Don’t know what to say.’
He rose from behind the desk, coughing slightly, and came out to where I was standing. Behind his head was a poster showing a smiling woman in blue overalls. She had very white teeth and her painted nails rested on the biggest Aspiron model. It was only then I noticed his stitched-leather driving gloves on the table, next to a small aperitif glass with a brown stain at the bottom; perhaps he’d not gone to bed at all.
‘How old are you? You’re ten, aren’t you?’
‘Eleven.’
‘That’s right. I suppose you wonder why your sister’s so much older than you, don’t you, chum?’
I nodded. I had never wondered about it, in fact. I hadn’t even thought about it. He leaned towards me. There was a smell of drink on his breath, the one called Byrrh which he said was made from the bark of Peruvian trees. Whenever I think about Nathalie, even now, I can smell Byrrh.
‘Well, it’s because your mum lost a baby.’
‘Where?’
‘Came out very weak. Lasted a day. A girl.’
‘Just one day?’
‘Yes. She had a name, though. Nathalie, because she was born on the twenty-seventh of July. She would have been three years older than you. Fourteen or fifteen.’
He grunted and drew on his cigarette again, letting the smoke out between his teeth as if straining it.
‘Nobody’s fault,’ he went on. ‘Not your father’s, not anybody’s. You and Carole, you weren’t exactly bruisers, either, when you first popped up.’
‘I’d have had another sister?’
He put his hand on my shoulder. He did look as if he’d been driving all night.
‘Go and see your mother. She’s got something to tell you. This afternoon we’ll go out.’
‘Where?’
‘Fishing.’
I went to see my mother. She was in the kitchen, cleaning the stove. The radio was on, playing light music.
‘I’m supposed to see you,’ I said.
‘Did he send you?’
‘Papa?’
‘Yes.’
A magazine with a beautiful, dark-haired girl on its cover lay on the table and my mother put the striped canister down on the bright-red mouth. She sat and tapped on the table.
‘Sit down, my dear,’ she said.
I pulled out a stool and sat, feeling its cool plastic seat sigh like a puncture under my bottom. The checked oilcloth on the table was rippled where my sister had put a hot pan down on it a few weeks before. I pressed on each ripple with my finger, the oilcloth swelling. My mother sat down opposite me and lit a Gitane.
‘We’ve got to make plans,’ she said. ‘Do you know why?’
‘He told me about the baby you lost. Nathalie.’
She nodded.
‘So you’ve guessed.’
‘You’re going to have another baby.’
She nodded again. ‘That’ll be nice, won’t it?’
I wasn’t sure, from her anxious look, if she really believed herself. I nodded and pressed on a ripple. The scorch marks reminded me of the streak on the lino where my real father had dropped dead. Perhaps they had taken him away on a wheeled stretcher and it was the stretcher’s wheel that had made the mark. Through the kitchen window, past my mother’s head, the washing in the yard blew about in the wind. The strip-light in the kitchen made it look darker outside than it actually was.
‘I thought you couldn’t have a baby, with Papa.’
‘What on earth made you think that, Gilles?’
‘I just thought it. I dunno.’
The radio poured out its music. I tried to work out why I’d thought it. Perhaps it was just because I hadn’t had a younger brother or sister until now.
‘Well, put the thought out of your head, anyway.’
‘You’re going to have one, so it can’t be there any more.’
She nodded.
‘You’ll help in the house, won’t you?’
‘Yeah.’
My mother’s spectacles were twitching as she looked at me, her big dark eyes so anxious that I wanted to hug her and say everything’s all right, it doesn’t matter, I don’t mind.
‘I’m quite old to have a baby, you see. Forty-three.’
‘It won’t be like poor Tante Madeleine?’
‘Gilles, of course not, it’s not going to be dangerous! It’s just that I’ll be tired and maybe you and Carole will have to do a bit more in the house and when the time comes you might have to stay at Gigi’s and Tante Clothilde’s.’
‘When?’
‘The baby’s due in February.’
‘How will I get to school?’
‘Oh, I only mean a couple of days, dear. I’m just warning you, that’s all.’
I thought about all this for a few moments, trying to work out why my mother was so anxious-looking.
‘Is Carole going to be at home, then?’
‘Yes, for a few months.’
‘A few months?’
This astonished me. I pulled a face.
‘She’ll be giving me a hand,’ said my mother, studying her cigarette in the ashtray. ‘It’s quite normal. I was going to tell you. It’ll be nice, won’t it, having your sister back with us?’
The washing sagged and then billowed out again. I passed my finger through the smoke rising from the ashtray. The cigarette’s ash was staying in one piece above the picture of the Sacré Coeur. I wondered whether it would stay all the way to the filter.
‘She might not stay that long,’ I said.
‘She’s got no choice, Gilles,’ said my mother, her eyes suddenly angry, tapping the table. The worm of ash collapsed, to my disappointment. ‘For once she’ll have to learn to buckle down and not think only of herself!’
Her chair scraped back and she stood and took up the half-burnt cigarette and drew on it deeply, her other hand on her hip, ash scattering onto the front of her plastic apron with the big orange flower.
‘There are certain duties you can’t avoid, dear, and we’re talking about one of them.’
She was talking to me as if I was Carole.
That afternoon my uncle took me fishing, as promised. We drove for about an hour out to where there were fields and trees and farms instead of houses and factories. He seemed to know exactly where to go, ending up at the head of a rough track at the bottom of which was a stretch of river, not wide but dark and, according to my uncle, very deep. It was hard to find a place to sit that wasn’t slippery, but after a scra
mble along an overgrown path we came across some dry grass. The branches hanging over the grass were quite low and my uncle, after casting twice and not managing to drop the hook far enough out, caught his line in them. He started to swear. I kept quiet. It was a grey day and the flat landscape looked like a sheet that had just come out of the wash. When I’m older, I thought to myself, I’ll live somewhere where the sun never stops shining.
My uncle had bought me a cheap rod that morning, after our talk, and he gave up on his tangled line and cast with my own. He grew impatient with me as I watched him, the little tin of wriggling bait in my hand. I wasn’t to blame, though: it was because he hadn’t been fishing for twenty years. His rod was warped from leaning up against a beam in the attic.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘it’s caught on bloody weed now. Can’t you see?’
I wasn’t even holding the rod.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Why do I have to do everything? I deserve a bloody medal. You should be holding this. It’s no good just standing there like a cretin, chum – put that bait down and come here.’
I obeyed him, keen not to do the wrong thing but not knowing how to do the right thing. I held the rod. It seemed to be tugging on something, or was being tugged. There were clouds of midges on the water.
‘What are you holding it like that for? Hey, don’t you know anything, Gilles?’
‘It’s the first time I’ve been fishing,’ I said.
‘And the last, I shouldn’t wonder. You know how people hold rods, you’ve seen it enough along the Seine.’
‘Why didn’t we go along the Seine?’
He snorted.
‘What, make a fool of myself in front of that lot? I’m fed up with people. Don’t you appreciate the countryside? All true Frenchmen, they’re countrymen at heart. I thought you’d like to get out of that hole. You’re holding it like it’s going to bite you, for God’s sake. Anyway, the Seine’s full of muck. The fish are all dead, most of them. It’s an open sewer. You should see the outlets of the factories I go round. You wouldn’t believe it, chum. Straight into the mother river.’