by Adam Thorpe
‘Mother’s fine, baby’s fine,’ he said.
He always sat up very straight, driving, though his head touched the roof. I felt a sense of joy creeping through me: Maman hadn’t died, like Tante Madeleine had when I was two.
‘Is it a girl or a boy?’
‘Boy. Nicolas.’
Gigi was even severer than usual. I wasn’t looking forward to my stay with him: the bungalow, with pebbles like spots all over it, was claustrophobic, the big dark pieces of furniture crowded inside as if it had shrunk around them at some point. Tante Clothilde kept it spotlessly clean, mopping the tiles every day so that there was a permanently damp, slightly rancid smell in the house. I’d only stayed overnight like this once before, when I was eight – after two days Tante Clothilde had collapsed with a sort of fit, and I was collected by my uncle. All I remembered was being permanently sleepy from boredom. I don’t know what I did that could have made her have a fit. For supper they never had bread, only dry biscottes, and every time I’d tried to spread butter on one, it had shattered. Even when Tante Clothilde had told me not to press so hard, despite the cold stiffness of the butter, my biscotte shattered.
This time was similar, even down to the shattering biscottes. I made a great effort to be as unannoying as possible, in case. They had a very old television (or it seemed very old to me), which they kept on a sideboard in the kitchen and sat watching during meals. For some reason, they always laid for me in the worst position, so that I had to twist round to watch it. After three meals I had a stiff neck, but didn’t say anything. It would have been rude not to have watched, even though the programmes didn’t interest me at all, and I kept a faint smile on my face the whole time. Reception was very bad, the inside aerial like something you dried towels on, and Gigi was always getting up and fiddling with the thick black cable that connected the aerial to the television. This annoyed Tante Clothilde.
‘You’re in the way again, Papa,’ she would say. ‘I can’t see a thing.’
In fact, he always seemed to be in his daughter’s way. He dressed permanently in workman’s overalls; they were worn at the knees and always had a screwdriver in the top pocket. He’d limp around the house doing odd jobs I never quite understood. Tante Clothilde told him off a lot, even though he was severe himself and would grip my arm very hard even when he wasn’t annoyed, perhaps not judging his own strength. I particularly hated the way he’d dip his croissant in his coffee and then scoop the soggy pastry up with his mouth, bending his head down violently and shaking the table. That was one thing Tante Clothilde didn’t seem to mind, though.
We didn’t say anything about the baby – at least, not after the first few moments of my arrival. This was strange, since Tante Clothilde had never stopped talking about babies in the early days. I wanted to talk about it but didn’t dare to. Planes from the airport at Le Bourget kept roaring overhead, as usual, making the wire-mesh in the electric fire sing a sort of tune. Gigi made rude remarks about the louder ones, as if he knew the pilots. The idea began to grow in me that they could hear him, that he was someone they respected. I thought this even when I stood in the neat little garden and saw the planes’ white bellies block out a lot of the sky, the roar not as bad as the whistle.
‘Worse and worse,’ said Gigi. ‘No bloody respect. One day I’ll get my shotgun on ’em.’
‘That’ll be a lot of deaths on your conscience,’ said Tante Clothilde.
‘And d’you think I haven’t got a lot of those already?’ he growled, tapping his thigh. I knew it was just his tobacco tin, though.
I was allowed to phone my mother on Saturday evening from a call-box nearby, with Gigi putting the money in. She was concerned at me missing Mass, but I told her that Tante Clothilde had said she would take me to their local church. The baby was fine, everything was fine.
‘And you, Maman?’
‘I’m fine, too. Are you looking forward to having a little brother?’
‘Yes, of course.’
I immediately pictured this little brother as already about eight or nine, enough to be interesting but young enough not to push me around. It never once occurred to me that there were twelve years separating us and that these would never get less for as long as we lived. The next morning we went to the modern concrete church near the bungalow. Gigi and Tante Clothilde were dressed in their crisp black Sunday suits, smelling of stale sweat and mothballs. I prayed for my new brother. With a flush, I realised I couldn’t remember his name. The congregation were nameless to me, too – I didn’t even know the priest’s name. I felt almost frightened, while the Pater Noster went on like a long groan.
After lunch, in which I had to put up with Tante Clothilde’s dark, bitter-tasting sauce on a lump of mutton, Gigi showed me a shoe-box in which black metal balls rolled about among other rusty bits, one shaped like a belt buckle.
‘Found these in the orchard,’ he said.
‘Here?’
‘We haven’t got one here, have we? Your place. Where you’ve got the showroom. That used to be an orchard.’
‘I know.’
‘Bullets,’ he said, picking up one of the metal balls.
‘Really?’
‘Really. Old-fashioned bullets.’
‘Was there a war in Bagneux?’
‘Must have been,’ he said.
I rolled the bullet around in my palm. It felt heavier than it looked.
‘It’s not my war,’ he said, holding up the buckle. ‘Maybe the first one.’
‘I thought the first one was your war, Gigi.’
‘Wrong. The first one with the Boche was a hundred years ago,’ he said. ‘The 1870 war. Heard of it?’
I shook my head.
‘They’ve invaded us three times, boy. Trampled over my orchard and garden three times, the Boche have: 1870, 1914, 1939. They even kicked us out of the house. Our own house. Gave a good view down the road both ways, that’s why. Had to go and stay with the in-laws at St Ouen. There’ll be a fourth, and a fifth, and a sixth time. What do I care? I’ll be dead soon. They can have the bloody orchard. And the cabbages. I won’t know about it. I won’t care, will I, if I won’t know about it?’
He talked about his orchard and vegetable garden as if they were still there, as if he hadn’t built over them himself, as if the trees were still standing and the cabbages growing. I said nothing: I didn’t want to upset him. We looked at the rusty fragments for some time, Gigi explaining each one. There was a curled bit from the stock of a rifle and something like a knife-blade that he reckoned was a bayonet. There was also something yellowy-white – a small knuckle-bone which he said was from a human finger.
‘You never know,’ he smiled. ‘It may be all that remains of a French hero.’
‘Or a German.’
‘A dog’s bone, in that case,’ he growled, poking me in the chest with the old knuckle. It hurt, as if it was his own knuckle.
‘That’s how we end up,’ he said. ‘The soul goes up to God’s luxury hotel in the sky and the poor old body gets a single room in the ground, with no shower.’
‘Hôtel-Dieu,’ I said, imitating a flashing sign with my fingers. It made him chuckle.
My first sight of the baby was that evening, on my return. He was deep inside a cot in my mother’s bedroom, a tiny red-faced thing with no hair. He was whimpering, as if he was in pain, his whole face screwing up in pain.
‘What’s he called, again?’
‘Nicolas, dear,’ said my mother. I’d expected to see her in bed, but she was already bustling about with bottles and towels.
I tried to interest him in me, but he carried on whimpering. He never screamed as I thought babies screamed. My uncle came in and puffed on his cigarette over the cot.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘how’s the navvy doing?’
‘Hard work,’ said my mother.
There was a sweetish smell as she changed his nappy. I watched, disgusted and fascinated.
‘Look at your mother,’ said my uncle. ‘She can do it with tw
o fingers up her nose. And all those years ago.’
‘I wouldn’t mind two fingers up my nose,’ my mother joked, a safety-pin between her teeth.
‘I thought Carole was going to help, Maman.’
‘Gilles, she’s not very well at the moment,’ she said, pinning the cloth between the tiny fat legs. ‘You can say hello to her, but don’t stay long.’
‘She’s weak,’ added my uncle. He looked as if he was about to say more, but he didn’t; he just carried on smoking as he watched my mother’s clever hands over the nappy.
I went into my sister’s room. She was lying in bed, propped up on a bolster. She looked very white.
‘Hello, junior,’ she said. ‘Get me a cigarette.’
The packet was on the chest of drawers. I got one out for her and she let me light it, leaning her face forward with her eyes closed. She looked all rumpled and swollen, as if someone had been hitting her. I sat on the edge of the bed.
‘How were the even older farts in beautiful Le Bourget?’ she asked.
‘OK.’
‘What did you have to eat?’
‘Don’t talk about it. I’ve got a tummy-ache.’
She laughed, the bed rocking under me like a boat. Then she stopped and put a hand on her chest.
‘Shit,’ she said.
I frowned. The front of her nightie was going dark and wet on one side, but it wasn’t blood. She saw me looking and said, ‘It’s OK, kid. I’ve sprung a leak,’ and chuckled, pulling the sheet up to her neck. Then she pulled on her cigarette and blew out the smoke and put her hand on mine.
‘Listen, Gilles, it’s going to be OK. You’ll love having a brother.’
‘Maman says you’re ill.’
Her hand felt cold.
‘Yeah,’ she drawled, ‘it’s a drag. I’m ill in the head.’ She smoked for a bit, with little nervous drags, and then said, ‘The world’s ill in the head. I want the world to be sane. To be better, a lot better. It’s possible, but meanwhile the fact that it isn’t – well, that really gets me down, it really gets me down. And I’m not letting God into it, OK? All that holy crap, it’s part of the illness.’
I nodded, biting my lip, hoping God would understand that she was ill.
‘Otherwise it’s not worth bringing babies into the world, is it, kid?’
I shrugged.
‘All that biological breeding crap, it’s just to make more cogs in the machine. You see?’
‘I dunno. Not really.’
‘You’ll learn, mate. But I don’t want to ruin it for you now. Enjoy it while you can. Then I’ll open your eyes, when you’re ready.’
‘My eyes are open.’
She sat back, chuckling. The cigarette had gone out, a little white stick in her mouth. She took it out and I relit it for her.
‘I met this old guy in a village in the Cévennes, once, when I was travelling around,’ she said. ‘He’d go up into the tower of the Mairie every morning and wind the clock, a hundred-and-twenty-three turns it took, in the open air. It didn’t have a roof, you know? He got a free glass of wine for doing that, for going right up into the tower in rain or shine. Then they got an electric clock. Now, he told me, he doesn’t have to go up. Then this other guy next to me in the café said, “Yes, he drinks his tipple without even going up. We don’t have to motivate him, now. He drinks it anyway.” Everyone laughed, including me. It was a joke. I thought, hey, that’s a great way of seeing things. Inside out. Back to front. You get it?’
I nodded, although I didn’t.
‘Do you know, Carole, that one of our ancestors went round with a dancing bear?’
‘Yeah, and he got a woman with child. The bloke, not the bear.’
‘A woman?’
She looked at me, smiling.
‘Out of wedlock, Gilles. Illegitimate. The big family secret.’
‘It can’t be secret if you know it.’
‘Isn’t it shocking? We’re descended from a bastard. The real bastard was the man with the dancing bear,’ she added, her face going fierce as she pulled on the cigarette.
I shrugged. She closed her eyes and I left her to nap. Back in the kitchen, my mother asked me how she’d been.
‘She’s telling jokes,’ I said.
‘Oh, that’s a very good sign.’
Bottles were heated in pots on the stove, the washing-line was crowded with flannels and nappies, my mother smelt of warm milk and rubber. I grew used to Nicolas being there, after a week or so, except for when I first woke up and forgot that I had a little brother.
My sister carried on being ill, refusing to help: in fact, she was refusing to leave her room. My mother didn’t seem to mind. I brought Carole her meals on a tray and tried to engage her in conversation. She didn’t tell any more jokes and almost stopped saying anything at all. A doctor in a three-piece suit prescribed her pills that made her sleepy. I thought of her bedroom as a sick-room; she lay in bed and did nothing but listen to the radio for eight or nine hours at a time. She did not want to know anything about her little brother, and because he only made his strange whimpering sound, she was never disturbed by him. My mother said, anyway, it was best not to go on too much about him to Carole.
The radio’s volume was turned quite low. Carole would lean towards it, staring at the opposite wall on which there was a Beatles poster from a few years before, now curled around the drawing-pins. I sat with her for up to an hour at a time, while she picked at her food or mushed it into a heap. Together we listened to whatever programme was on – mostly offshore pirate radio stations playing rock music, stations which I imagined as little boats with antennae in the middle of a stormy sea, since that is what they sounded like. Her radio was a big old valve type in varnished wood that she had bought in a Paris flea-market, and sometimes she would tune in on short wave to pilots flying aeroplanes. Because of the ancientness of the radio, I imagined them wearing goggles and piloting the sort of aeroplanes I saw pictured in books or comic-strips about Blériot or the First World War. They were mostly talking in English, through a fog of interference, so we didn’t understand anything they were saying. Sometimes there were other voices, even more mysterious and distant, like something out of a dream, crying out and far away. We would say nothing as we listened, her hand on the knob of the dial, seeking these voices and staying with them as they faded in: police and radio hams and pilots and ship’s officers and friends on walkie-talkies, turned into something far away and mysterious and long disappeared.
She would often drop off to sleep and I would tiptoe out like a Red Indian slinking away from a troop of US cavalry – if she was woken up in the day she would start to panic, her eyes staring at something only she could see.
‘What’s exactly wrong with Carole?’
‘She has a condition.’
‘What’s that?’
‘She feels very low about everything. They’re giving her pills to cheer her up, but it’ll take time. We just have to keep mentioning her in our prayers, that’s all.’
‘I do, Maman.’
It was weird, seeing my mother holding her own tiny baby. She began to look younger, remembering things about my own babyhood. She sat feeding my brother with the bottle, struggling with it because he didn’t suck like her two other children had done.
‘You mean Carole and me?’
‘Who else, dear? You sucked so hard I couldn’t get the teat out of your mouth without tickling you first.’
I didn’t mind these memories of hers too much, even when she went on about me not liking her own milk, the stuff that actually came out of her.
‘You mean like Jesus suckling on the Virgin?’
‘And that’s why I was so disappointed!’
I didn’t mind because it was as if she was talking about an historical character. Then, one day – when she realised there was something wrong, that Nicolas wasn’t doing what she remembered me doing at the same stage – she grew pale and anxious again. I would sometimes catch her looking at the bab
y in horror, as if she had no idea what to do with him. He could not grasp your finger, as all babies were meant to do very early on, and feeding him from the bottle was a terrible struggle, she said: the rubber teat would sit in his mouth and his lips would hardly close around it.
‘Maybe it’s because he’s too young,’ I suggested. ‘He’s not even a month.’
My mother shook her head.
‘No,’ she said, ‘sucking’s instinctive. I remember you sucking fit to burst right from the beginning, dear. Even if you didn’t like my milk, you certainly liked the bought stuff. I think he’s just being awkward, is our little Nicolas.’
‘He’s got nice blue eyes.’
‘They’ll change, probably. Babies always start with blue eyes. Neither Alain nor I have blue eyes, have we?’
Nicolas grew thin, instead of fat. His crying was like the low scream of a dentist’s drill, which wasn’t what babies usually did, apparently. My uncle (when he was at home) would lean over the cot and make funny faces, booming away as the boring drilling sound went on. He would stay two minutes, and then dive back into his office or go out again to visit a client.
My little brother’s face uncrumpled, but the blue eyes were wide apart and the mouth looked as if it had slipped down too much. My uncle called him Cassius Clay, pretending he was tough and a fighter, and carried on referring to him as the ‘navvy’. He bought Nicolas a Mickey Mouse squeezy toy and squeaked it over the cot, but Nicolas didn’t notice. I’d catch my mother looking afraid.
‘We should ask a doctor,’ I said, tickling Nicolas’s tiny hand, hoping it would curl around my finger, this time, as it was meant to do.
‘They always want to know everything,’ my mother replied, half to herself. ‘Poor little foal.’
We made a big effort, trying to win a reaction from Nicolas. We bobbed about above him, wiggling our fingers and making silly noises. He’d just stare up. When we held him he was always limp, as if he needed winding up or the batteries had not been put in.
I did my best to make our sick ones better.
In church there was a side-chapel dedicated to Ste Thérèse de l’Enfant Jésus. There was a candle burning in a glass with her face in a nun’s shawl, a big photograph of her propped against the altar, and smaller photographs on a double-screen that showed her on her death-bed in the nunnery. She was smiling and had both hands around a crucifix. You could make out a water jug and an oil lamp on the bedside table, with patterned wallpaper behind the wooden bed-end and a blurred door in the background. Maybe she died at home and not in her nunnery, because I didn’t reckon nunneries had wallpaper. She had always been there, and I would talk to her in my head during the boring services – especially the longer ones around important holy dates. When I had to line up to eat the Body of Christ, feeling embarrassed each time in front of the rows and rows of faces, she’d give me courage. We had a kind of private pact with each other, even though her eyes in the big photograph never quite looked at you.