by Adam Thorpe
I went back into the sitting-room and my mother opened her eyes. I asked her where Carole was.
‘She’s in her room, dear.’
‘She isn’t. She must have gone out. I’ve checked the whole house.’
‘She never goes out.’
‘Well, she must have done.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ my mother said, sitting up. ‘I’ve been in the whole time and Papa’s been sealing the showroom roof, I’m sure he’d have seen her go out.’
‘Maybe when you were asleep. We’d better ask him, anyway.’
‘He’s not there. He’s popped out to the shops. Only ten minutes ago.’
‘Ten minutes is enough.’
She looked at her watch. ‘Half an hour ago. Goodness me.’
Nicolas had dropped off at last, she explained. She had left him in the pram in the utility room, next to the washing-machine. She had been asleep herself for about twenty minutes. We searched through all the rooms of the house, twice – glancing in the first time and then examining them as if looking for a lost item of jewellery. Carole had gone. I ran up and down the road outside, just in case, the world of cars and buildings paying no attention. When I came back, my mother was standing over the empty pram in the utility room.
‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it. Help me.’
She stood with her hands up to her face, hiding everything but her eyes. She looked at me with those eyes, and I realised that she wanted me to tell her what to do. I felt very calm.
‘We’d better call the fire brigade,’ I said. ‘I’ll phone them.’
Through the kitchen window the washing was almost golden in the evening light, the sheets swelling and flattening in the wind. I felt strangely excited.
‘I’ll just check one thing.’
‘What?’
Not saying, I went out into the yard. The washing flapped around me, catching me like arms. Beyond the washing-line was a large shed. Gigi had used it for doing carpentry: all the frames and doors and windows in the house had been finished there. The shed was heaped with junk and never used these days as a workplace. The door was slightly open: inside was dust and wood smells and cobwebs that folded around your hand like material.
‘Carole?’
She was right at the back, in her nightdress, with the baby in her arms. I could just make them both out. The junk between us – frames of old chairs, broken pots, spars and bricks, thick sheets of something blue, rusty parts of vacuum cleaners, a pile of motoring magazines, twisted piping, an old lead basin – made a kind of barricade that she must have climbed over. She looked up, her expression unclear to me.
‘Look,’ she said, ‘he’s smiling. He knows.’
I clambered over to where she was huddled, tucked in the corner. A thin beam of wood fell over and bounced off my back. I was worried for the baby; I knew how thin its skull was. It was gazing up, as if surprised, its mouth lolling open and dribbling. A cobweb hung off its shoulder.
‘That’s good,’ I said. ‘He likes you.’
My mother’s face appeared at the door.
‘Carole? Oh, thank God, thank God.’
‘He’s smiling, Maman,’ Carole said, her voice very soft and high, like a girl of my age. ‘He likes the wind.’
The wind was coming through the open door and whistling through the gaps in the wood. It made the few light strands of Nicolas’s hair wave about. He did seem to like it.
‘You should support his head,’ said my mother, anxious and gay at the same time, ‘his neck’s not strong enough, be careful to support his head, my dearest.’
‘The baby’s all right,’ I said.
My sister looked down at the baby as if it was something she wasn’t sure of, now. Its head rocked back like a rag doll’s, as if broken, my mother looking very anxious by the door.
‘Why has he got a bruise?’ Carole asked.
‘He hit himself by mistake on the side of the cot,’ said my mother. ‘Babies bruise easily.’
‘Carole can help look after her little brother, now,’ I said, without really believing it.
Nicolas started whimpering, his nose all green and runny. My sister held him away from her chest, screwing up her nose.
‘Pouah pouah pouah,’ she said, pouting her lips.
I took him from her, careful to support the head. He always felt so light – even the head felt light. His runny nose and the pulpy stink of his nappy didn’t bother me at all. What bothered me was that he would never have any thoughts – I mean, any ideas of his own: I could drop him on the ground and he wouldn’t understand what had happened. And he’d be like this until he died in twenty-one years’ time.
I handed him to my mother over the barricade of junk. I wondered if a stepped-on ant, dying, ever understood what had happened to it. Carole looked as if she was sleeping.
She stayed in the shed all night, refusing to come out. We took it in turns to sit by the back door in case she did something silly. All through the night one or other of us was seated by the back door, trying to keep awake under a blanket. It made us feel more together, this crisis – we were like soldiers plotting a move, all for one and one for all. The wind had dropped.
Up in my bedroom, off-duty, I could smell my uncle’s Camels wafting through the night air. Now and again there were noises from inside the shed, as if dogs had got in and were rooting about, and we would listen very carefully as if just concentrating would protect her. Something ‘silly’ meant harming herself, or worse. I knew that.
I prayed to Ste Thérèse de l’Enfant Jésus when it was my turn, when I was sitting out there in the moonlight: Protect my sister, I pleaded in my head. I want my sister to be normal. I’ve given up on the baby, Nicolas, my little brother. The baby was too difficult. But my sister should be easy for you, dear Ste Thérèse de l’Enfant Jésus. In the name of Christ, Amen.
The moon, passed by tiny clouds, seemed to be speeding along. It reminded me, when I half-closed my eyes, of the white face of Ste Thérèse on her death-bed. The wind came back in little warm puffs, stirring my hair. I could see why Nicolas might like the wind. There was the odd shout from the streets around, yelps of dogs, a far-off ambulance. I wondered if I could hear the night-shift going on and on in the aluminium factory – the nearest one was just a block away, its lights glowing above it. I couldn’t. Maybe, I thought, it closes down on Saturday night. There was so much you had to know.
‘It’s like Algeria,’ said my uncle, standing in the kitchen doorway. He had half-woken me up, and I tried to pretend I had been awake. It seemed he had been talking in my dream for hours. ‘Sentry-duty. Warm nights. They’d creep up on you, out of the night. With sharp knives. They didn’t have hands, they had knife-blades. Born like that, probably.’
‘Did they stab you in the back?’
He gave a little chuckle. ‘If only they just did that.’ He drew a finger across his throat. ‘And more.’
‘More?’
‘I’ll tell you one day, chum. When you’re of the age.’
‘Tell me now.’
He ruffled my hair and told me to get to bed, ‘sergeant’.
I tried, back in bed, to imagine what ‘more’ they did. Scalped you, or something. My dreams were of people’s hair turning blue as they walked, although they weren’t bothered because they had Latin Bibles to keep the rain off.
In the morning I took Carole a bowl of coffee and some slices of bread with jam on them, balancing them carefully on the tray as I ducked under the nappies on the washing-line. She was asleep, curled up against the junk, her head on the piece of blue board. Her face was very pale and thin in the morning light through the window. I was admiring it when she opened her eyes and saw me.
‘What?’
‘Here’s some breakfast.’
She sat up. I handed her the coffee over the barricade of junk, spilling a few drops.
‘Why are they so evil?’
‘Who?’
‘You
know who. Them. Those two bourgeois parasites.’
She sipped at her coffee quickly, as if her thoughts were racing.
‘You mean Maman and Alain?’
‘I might sleep here all the time,’ she said. ‘I like it.’ She was looking around her, the steam from the coffee floating up into her eyes. There was a nice smell of old timber and shavings under the coffee, but otherwise the shed was miserable. ‘I really like it.’
‘It’s OK in the summer,’ I said, ‘but it’ll be damp and cold in the winter.’
She started to eat the bread.
‘Everyone’s bored,’ she mumbled. ‘There are very few fish in the river.’
‘The American said that.’
‘I hate Americans. They committed genocide. Do you know what the Red Indians did? They waited. They waited. Out there. It was theirs. It might have been an eagle, a rabbit, a tiger, but it was theirs. You don’t have … I’ve seen one, though, in a vision.’ There was jam all round her mouth. ‘An end is better than an endless hope. That’s true. No one asked to be born now, did they? Right here and now. Did they? I was a Red Indian. I’ll bet you were, too. Together, right? Before the killing started. Fucking vacuum cleaners. Factories. Everyone’s so bored. And wars. Have you ever smelt a colour? Like it … that …’
‘You’re splashing coffee on your nightdress.’
It was true, she had splashed the little bows running down the front – it was an old nightdress that she had bought when she was fifteen. I had gone shopping with her, holding her hand, and remembered her buying it. It was the first item of clothing she had bought on her own, with her own money. It hurt me to see it stained.
‘Who cares? I don’t. I’m not splashing my vibrations.’
She drank the coffee and tore into the bread, eating like a peasant. Her hair was a bit blue from the board and I began to cough from the dust.
‘Thank you, little Gilles,’ she said, talking with her mouth full. Cobwebs had fallen on her long black hair; they were like lace.
‘You’re looking like somebody I know,’ I said.
‘Your sister.’
‘No, somebody I know, in a photo – sort of know well – looks like you do now you’re thin.’
‘Am I better thin?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m going to stay here until it starts.’
‘What?’
‘The revolution.’
‘There’s definitely going to be one, is there?’
‘I love you, revolution. Tell me when it comes, will you?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Though being brother and sister won’t count.’
‘Why not?’
‘Blood ties are just primitive crap,’ she said, pouting. ‘Pouah pouah pouah. I don’t want to be appropriated by bourgeois crap.’
‘What’s appropriated mean?’
She handed back the coffee and wiped her mouth without answering. Then she settled her head against the wall of the shed and closed her eyes, her knees folded up against her chest.
‘Night night,’ she said. ‘Leave me to dream. Better world. The better world.’
‘Maybe you should help look after the baby,’ I said, my heart beating furiously.
I had planned all night to say it.
‘What baby?’
‘Nicolas. Your little brother.’
She opened her eyes and looked at me with a sad expression, as if she felt sorry for me.
‘Pouah pouah pouah. That’s all biology. You’re not going to hook me with biology. I’m not going to be hooked by anything. Not God or biology or anything. I’m completely free. Fucking freeeeee …’
Her teeth showed, as if she was snarling. I stumbled back over the barrier of junk, scraping my hand on a nail.
My mother was waiting anxiously in the kitchen, as if I had been off the other side of Bagneux.
‘I heard a scream.’
‘She wasn’t screaming.’
‘How is she?’
‘Not very good.’
‘Why?’
‘I think she’s going mad.’
‘Going mad!’ my uncle scoffed – I hadn’t seen him standing in the hall doorway. The kitchen was filled with smoke from their cigarettes. I coughed again, tasting the dusty shed in my mouth.
‘Why do you think that?’ my mother asked.
‘Because she doesn’t make sense. She’s talking rubbish without stopping. She wants to stay there until the revolution. What is the revolution, exactly?’
My uncle chuckled throatily.
‘Christ, the commies,’ he said. ‘As if we’re not leftie enough already.’
‘Don’t please start blaspheming and talking politics now, dear,’ my mother said, blinking down at the table. ‘It’s not the moment. Did she say anything else, Gilles?’
‘I didn’t really understand it. Red Indians and things.’
‘That’s all? Nothing about the baby?’
‘Not really.’
‘Never mind,’ said my uncle. ‘She’s not in a good way, that’s obvious. It’s obvious she’s not in a good way at all, Danielle.’ He rubbed my hair, making faint blue clouds, smiling as if to forget about it all. ‘Washing your hair in asbestos, then, chum?’
We saw a kind of dark flash through the nappies: Carole was running across the yard in the direction of the showroom.
‘There she is,’ said my mother, as if this happened every day.
‘She can’t get out,’ said my uncle, stubbing out his cigarette. ‘We locked the yard door.’
‘Then why is she running?’
I went out with my uncle, wondering how he was going to calm her. I felt that time had slowed down, that everything was happening as if we were moving underwater. Carole had disappeared. We checked the door and then looked up into the sky, as if she might have flown away. My uncle’s tall ladder was propped against the bricks of the showroom wall. He stood at the bottom of it and swore.
‘She gets vertigo,’ I said.
‘I’m an idiot. I’m a bloody idiot. Why didn’t I move it?’
My mother had come out.
‘Oh my God, oh my God,’ she said, looking up at the flat roof, her voice getting hysterical. ‘Why did you leave that there, Alain?’
He had started climbing the ladder. He shouted at her to shut up as he climbed the ladder. He disappeared. My mother stood at the foot of the ladder, her hands to her mouth, drawing her skin down so that she looked about ninety.
‘Is she there?’ she cried, plaintively.
There was no reply. My neck was stiff from looking up, or from worry.
‘Alain?’ She looked almost annoyed, now. ‘Is she there?’
Her cry sounded pathetic.
‘I’ll go up,’ I said.
‘I’m not having two of you killing yourselves,’ she said.
She wouldn’t go up the ladder herself, she was petrified of heights. I had never seen a woman up a ladder, I thought.
‘Is she up there?’ came the wail from my mother.
Nothing.
‘I think she’s up there,’ I said. ‘You stay here.’
‘Be careful,’ my mother called after me, as I sped off.
I hurtled through the house and out into the road where the cars were still passing, completely ignoring us. There were people at the bus-stop but they weren’t looking across at the showroom roof, they were looking down the road or chatting or reading newspapers. I couldn’t see much of the roof from immediately in front, by the plate glass, so I ran across the road in a gap and stood near the bus-stop. The people looked at me as people do when somebody new arrives, but I must also have looked panicky. The first fallen leaves swirled at my feet.
There were two silhouettes on the roof – the one in front, nearer the edge, being Carole. My uncle wasn’t very close to her. He was talking: I could see his hands moving. They looked like two people mending a leak, or retarring. Carole came nearer and stepped onto the low parapet at the front edge. She looked as thou
gh she wouldn’t be able to fit on, as if she was about to fall, but I knew the parapet was quite wide. I was standing as if praying intensely, although I hadn’t realised until now. I started, in fact, to pray intensely in my head.
‘What’s going on?’ someone said, coming up to me.
‘My sister’s on the roof,’ I said, sounding as if I was being strangled. What I must not do is burst into tears.
The man looked towards the showroom, the cars and lorries passing in between every few seconds until a gap happened and then more coming as if everyone had to keep moving to somewhere else in this life. Carole was holding her arms out to the side, her hands flopped down at each end. I could imagine her diving.
‘Shouldn’t she be up there?’
‘No. She’s ill.’
Other people were coming up, now, and asking questions, and looking.
‘His sister’s on the roof,’ the man kept saying, and the new ones would nod as if they knew all about this sort of situation.
‘Dear God,’ someone said.
There were about ten or twelve people, now. The bus came and half the people reluctantly got on it, while a few alighted and walked away without ever realising. The bus drove off and blocked my vision for a moment. Carole was walking along the parapet as if on tiptoe and then seemed to rise up on one foot for a moment, her arms lifted up. My uncle’s silhouette moved a little nearer to her.
‘Is that the fire brigade?’
‘She’s dancing.’
‘It’s like in a film.’
‘Dear God, poor soul.’
‘We should really call the fire brigade.’
‘Is she going to jump?’ asked a short, fat old woman with a veil on her hat.
‘I hope not,’ said a man, hands tucked into his overalls.
‘They do, you know,’ she went on, licking her lips and twitching her saggy face. She was clutching an ugly handbag in front of her. She didn’t seem to care that I was the brother, that I might be upset. What annoyed me even more was that my attention was being taken up by this woman, but I felt almost numb when I looked at the roof and at Carole silhouetted on the edge against the grey sky. As if it wasn’t really anything to do with me, as if the fallen leaves at my feet were more real. We could hear a bit of shouting over the traffic noise, or in the gaps. It was a girl’s shout.