by Adam Thorpe
‘She’ll have to go higher if she wants to be sure of it,’ said the old woman, almost cackling at her joke, her fingers twitching on the handle of her ugly handbag.
‘I dunno about that,’ said the man in the greasy overalls, wiping his nose, ‘you can break your neck off the second rung of a ladder. I had a friend who did, nearly.’
No one responded, but no one shushed them either. There was quite a little crowd – about twenty by now – but no one told them to pipe down.
‘We could all hold a sheet out in case,’ a woman with a pram said, which provoked an argument about whether it would upset my sister into falling. One of the women there knew her a bit – she seemed proud of it, almost boasting under her scarf.
‘Hasn’t she had a baby?’ she asked me.
‘That was my mother,’ I replied.
I decided to cross the road and stand under the spot where Carole was, risking disturbing her. It was instinctive, like positioning yourself to catch a ball: I would catch her if she fell – or jumped. I felt the eyes of the crowd on me as I ran across in a gap in the traffic: it made me important, like an actor in a film.
From there, on the edge of the pavement, Carole seemed very close. I didn’t dare call out. She was keeping an eye on my uncle, who was hidden from me. Then she half-turned and looked down. Her nightdress was fluttering in the wind. I gave a little wave, without thinking. She didn’t seem to have vertigo any more.
‘I’m freeeeee,’ she called out.
‘Come down, Carole,’ I called up. ‘Please. Please.’
At that moment my uncle’s arm appeared and she was pulled out of sight, not screaming or even shouting.
I ran round to the back of the house. My mother was on the fourth or fifth step of the ladder, her bottom sticking out, craning her neck up. Carole and my uncle were at the top, my uncle holding Carole by the arms but not forcing her anywhere.
‘You go up and help, Gilles,’ said my mother, trembling on the ladder. I thought of what the man in greasy overalls had said and told her to be careful.
She came down. Carole was stepping onto the top rung of the ladder, my uncle’s hands all around her as she did so, protecting her. I clambered up to just below her, but in fact she came down quite quickly and easily, her nightdress billowing out and revealing her nakedness up to her hips. I might have felt embarrassed at being where I was, positioned right underneath her, if we weren’t in such a dangerous situation.
She sat in the sitting-room, giggling on the sofa. My uncle was drinking a large brandy, sighing through his nose while my mother stroked my sister’s knee and kept on talking about nothing much. I was told to go up to my room.
I stood by my window for a bit. The tree opposite our house was beginning to lose its leaves and I could see part of one of the flats’ spiral stairs like a spring stretched right down. There was hardly anyone at the bus-stop, now.
An ambulance stopped in front of our house and three men got out and walked up to the front door. The bell ding-donged. I stayed up in my bedroom, carrying on with a plastic model kit of a Messerschmitt Bf 109. The parts were spread out on newspaper on my desk, and I managed to shut myself off from the sudden yelling and screaming downstairs. The little knobs, dabbed with glue, were set into the proper little holes: they were all that mattered. My sister would be treated properly and with the latest, most enlightened modern methods in the hospital. It was all for the best, it was all for her. She would not die, but re-emerge smiling and cleansed, like an angel: I could imagine this easily, with me running across a lawn to greet her as she came out through the swing doors of a plate-glass hospital. She would find a job in an office or a shop and be happy. She would marry and have children, healthy normal children. I would stay with her in the holidays and have picnics in the sunshine and we would all run about in the forest of Vincennes.
But as I heard the shouting and screaming carrying on in front of the house, I jumped up and ran to the window that looked out onto the road. The ambulance was still there, the three men holding my sister by the arms and waist in front of its open doors. She was struggling, but not very much, just kicking out a bit. My window was wide open. The breeze was cool on my face. There wasn’t a lot of traffic, now.
She suddenly turned and looked up and saw me.
‘Gilles! It was a joke!’
I frowned.
‘I didn’t mean it,’ she called out, her voice very small in the road. ‘Gilles, tell them. It was a joke, right?’
I couldn’t shout down a reply: my throat wouldn’t work.
‘I never meant it, Gilles. It was a joke. It was all a joke! I was fucking pretending, OK? I was only pretending!’
Then she was pulled into the ambulance and the doors swung shut. I stood there, looking out, amazed by the knowledge that it had been a joke, that she had been pretending. Of course she had. People were watching again from the bus-stop, in the shadow of the big tree. They watched without moving, through the cars and lorries. They weren’t the same people, but they seemed so to me. Then, as the ambulance drove away, I ran downstairs. The house was empty, smelling a bit of clinics. I checked in the showroom: my mother and uncle were silhouettes against the plate glass, looking out.
‘It’s a joke,’ I panted. ‘I mean, it was a joke. She said – it was all a joke. She was only pretending.’
‘We heard, dearest,’ said my mother. She had been crying, and blew her nose. Her voice was muffled by phlegm. ‘A little bit late to say that now, isn’t it?’
‘But she didn’t mean any of it. She’s going to behave, now.’
My uncle snorted. He had a hand on my mother’s shoulder. They looked as if they were at a funeral.
‘People who are mental can say or do anything,’ he said. ‘You remember that. Anything. The doctor says she’s manic.’
‘But what if it was all a joke?’
‘I certainly wasn’t laughing when she was up there, chum,’ my uncle snorted.
‘She’s a danger to herself, dear,’ said my mother.
‘She’s in professional medical hands, Gilles,’ my uncle added, in a hard voice, over his shoulder. ‘We can’t take the risk.’
We stood for a moment as still as the people showing their white teeth in the promotional posters, as still as the vacuum cleaners themselves with their strips of dust under the handle, as still as the faded cardboard woman in her checked skirt: the only movement was outside, where cars slid by and the bus hid the people waiting for it.
‘Everyone saw,’ said my mother. ‘Everyone will know.’
My uncle’s hand slid from her shoulder to her waist. He gave it a squeeze.
‘Let’s drive out somewhere. Let’s have a drive.’
We drove out to where the suburbs broke into proper villages and the fields were not just building sites. I had wanted to cry but couldn’t, so my throat felt very sore. Now I felt excited. I was involved in something very important; people we drove past looked boring, huddled into their boring ordinary lives.
Nicolas lay on the back seat next to me in his cot, my hand on his stomach. His eyes had stayed blue. The countryside was made nice by the goldeny sun, lighting the stooks in the fields, the hay-ricks, making the tall thin trees glitter on the banks of the rivers. My uncle simply drove, of us knowing where we were heading for. He joined a long, straight road lined by trees that flashed past hypnotically, their shadows sliding up the windscreen, the Simca whining slightly as it sped very fast up the road. My mother usually told him to slow down, but this time she didn’t. There were very few cars coming the other way, and I imagined driving forever until we shot off the edge of the world. Either side the fields and farm-buildings on the flat plain passed us slowly. I could smell the harvest through my half-open window, the fresh country air messing up my hair.
We had to slow down for a wagon, its huge wheels creaking along behind a couple of horses. From the tail-board leaked straw and manure, and the sickly-sweet smell filled the car. We were stuck behind it bec
ause the driver’s companion was holding his arm out, his face grinning back at us as he wobbled and jolted. My uncle tapped the wheel impatiently, explaining to me why we couldn’t overtake.
‘Anyone’d think this was Africa,’ he added, ‘not modern-day France. Well, they’ve probably got more tractors in Africa, we’ve showered the niggers with enough lolly. And all they do is stand up and spit all over us.’
Then the wagon turned, the men on it – one old, one young – seeming to make fun of us from their high perches. I felt humiliated in some way, stuck in the back of our low motor-car. Even when my uncle speeded up again, I couldn’t shake this feeling off. Instead of appreciating the freedom of our spin, I felt trapped – and afraid that we might skid, crumpling ourselves against one of these hard, straight trunks that went on without end, with Nicolas thrown out by a miracle and the only one to be saved.
5
We visited my sister most Sundays, but not Nicolas in his special home. My mother said it would mean nothing to him and the home preferred it that way, it would only disturb things.
His home was somewhere in the north of Paris. A long scientific name was given to his condition, following the second lot of tests. What my uncle had told me was right, even about the two sides of his brain not connecting: Nicolas would never develop beyond the intelligence of a three-month-old. He would go on growing until he was about twenty, when he would die of old age because the cells of his body couldn’t make themselves again. It was nothing to do with my mother’s being forty-three, they didn’t think. It was very rare but it happened, like a tiny number of vacuum cleaners turned out to be faulty. I nodded, wondering why there weren’t more humans with faults in them.
It was strange, without Nicolas and all the fuss around him. I began to suspect that he hadn’t been put in a home at all, that he’d been done away with, perhaps put to sleep as Tante Clothilde’s cat had been when I was eight.
One morning in October, about a month after my sister had been taken away, I stood in the showroom and decided, thinking of Nicolas, to ask for a sign.
It was All Saints’ and I was on holiday for a week. For the last year I had been attending the Catholic school in nearby Châtillon. My mother believed that a private institution would improve my results. Apart from a heavy wooden crucifix in each classroom, and a lot more prayers, the main difference was in the teachers; they were priests and not (in my uncle’s term) ‘leftie atheists’ – though they were no softer on us and didn’t seem to know very much about their subjects.
Our class teacher, Père Forain-Jonquet (or ‘Jonquille’ to us), was in his forties. He had a protruding stomach and pudgy hands. He would wear a grey suit with a cross on its lapel when he was in a good mood; otherwise he would wear his black robes. He had talked about signs a few days before. He declared, mentioning Joan of Arc and Abraham, that a sign could be a voice.
‘It is not a voice that comes from oneself, as with the mad and afflicted, it is the divine breath, my dears, a whispering fragment of the Word. A sign might be a brilliant light such as the one, for example, that knocked a certain tax-inspector off his saddle. It might be the healing agitation of the waters of Béthesda, the sign that an angel had just taken a dip and flown off again like a swan. The burning bush that gave Moses a dreadful fright was the most dramatic of all. It might even have brought itself to your notice, my rabble.’
A hand went up.
‘No, Bosquet, an angel is not a sign, an angel is an incarnation of the Divine and if any of you boys are fortunate enough to be anointed with an angel’s golden light then either the Last Days have come or one of you clumsy oafs has successfully disguised, even from myself, His eternal face.’
We all laughed, as we were meant to, though some must have been disappointed. Jonquille never laughed, even when he joked: his lips were permanently curled in a sort of sneer. But he was kind-hearted, and very fond of us. When a sickly boy in my class died during the winter term, it was said Jonquille was seen to cry until his eyes were puffy.
A sign, he went on, could be granted to anyone, even the most wretched. He himself, of whom few come more wretched (laughter from us), had received a sign. We clamoured to know what it was.
He smiled, and scratched his underarm, his strong breath wafting over the desks as he passed between us.
‘When I was even younger than I am now, my dears, some twenty years ago, just at the end of that disgraceful war your parents mention from time to time, I was a wild heathen and rode a mobilette. I would flit on my mobilette through the grey streets of Clermont-Ferrand at fifty kilometres an hour. One day I found myself so flitting down a perfectly straight and empty boulevard early one morning after a sinful night of drinking and all of a sudden my little engine slowed down. I had nothing to do with this. It slowed right down, and I was not a little cross.’
A hand went up.
‘No, Jussiaux, I had not run out of petrol, despite its shortage. I endeavoured to accelerate, but to no avail. Suddenly, a great hole appeared in the road. Thanks to my reduced speed I was able to avoid it. Then my mobilette was mine again, I felt it, I could accelerate to my usual delightful fifty kilometres an hour. A great warmth flooded through me. I knew that God was responsible, that He was granting me a second chance in His eternal mercifulness. That he had agitated the healing waters like a swan. So I took it with all my heart and soul. The chance, that is.’
‘Did God make the hole, sir?’
‘No, of course he didn’t, cretin. It was the war. The war made the hole. It was very large. If I had hit the hole at my usual speed, I would have broken my neck and not been here to illuminate the minds of my little dears.’
‘Did you tell the authorities about the hole, sir?’
‘What’s that got to do with it, Lagrange?’
‘Well, God couldn’t save everyone on that road, could he, especially when it got busy?’
‘Impertinence, as usual. Write out a hundred times And I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and multiply my signs and wonders in the land of Egypt. No spelling mistakes, or I’ll have you eat boiled squirrel for breakfast, as I had to do in my infancy. It is very nasty, I can assure you.’
I had kept quiet, of course, as I always did. Jonquille took my shyness for stupidity. If I managed a mark above 13, he would always say: ‘You may look like a donkey in shorts, but appearances can sometimes deceive—’ and everything would crash into laughter around my ears.
Underneath, however, I was often burning with excitement: his rolling rs and funny gestures hypnotised me as he spoke, his past life unrolling like a brightly coloured magic carpet. All sorts of ideas and notions were transported daily on this carpet. No one talked like that, or of such things, at home. Although I was a bit frightened of him, and even hated him in his crueller moments, Jonquille opened my mind.
And I was certainly under his influence that October morning, standing in the showroom: my eye caught the new cardboard poster that stood next to the latest Tornado model: Total Effectiveness Flying To Your Help However Big the Task. Another, older poster for an Aspiron model had Superpowerful written excitedly across it. These empty slogans suddenly meant something to me. I closed my eyes.
‘Dear Lord, you are superpowerful,’ I murmured to myself. ‘Please, Lord, fly to my help, if it be so granted, and give me a sign that Nicolas is still alive, that he has not been done away with like a kitten, that he’s not in your luxury hotel in the sky. Amen.’
I stayed there, with my eyes closed, for several minutes.
The low hum of the electricity, muffled sounds from the road, the soft boom of my uncle’s voice somewhere in the house … perhaps in the kitchen, where he was sticking polystyrene tiles to the ceiling. Under everything else there was the faint rush of my own blood through my head. My thoughts were full of bits and pieces that were not right, including a song-and-dance routine on the television the previous evening – Fernandel and Maurice Chevalier pretending to be negroes in New Orleans. I also saw Jonquille o
n the mobilette, but not as a young man. Then I forced that out with a picture of Nicolas, his green runny nose and pale blue eyes and low mouth. Carole was holding him. Pouah pouah pouah. The end is better than an endless hope.
Please give me a sign, dear Lord. Please agitate the waters like a swan.
I opened my eyes. A man in a homburg hat was walking slowly past the plate-glass window, head turned, looking in.
He stopped and stared upwards, as if he’d seen a bird on the flat roof. Perhaps he was reading our name on the front:
Georges Gobain et Fils.
Philips, Aspiron, Tornado.
Aspirateurs de Qualité.
I waited to see if this man could in any way be a sign.
He disappeared for a few moments and then came back, walking the other way. He was definitely looking in, now. There was only the weak bulb that was left on when there were no clients coming – just enough to show that it wasn’t a shop. It reminded me of an offertory candle, this light. I knew that the man would not be able to make me out, if I stood very still.
His eyes swivelled, looking all about – and up, and down. A sign could be found in anything. A dead leaf. A door-handle. A man in a homburg hat searching for something in our showroom. If you were filled with the warmth of revelation, then a sign could be found in anything.
The man’s hat-brim pressed against the glass. His face was very wide, with thick sideburns and a ginger moustache almost the same shape as Hitler’s. The suit didn’t seem to fit him very well, it was too small for his broad shoulders. He made me think of the villains in the stories I was reading, or the type of tough that appeared in the strip-cartoons for teenagers. He should have had a scar. His breath made a cloudy circle on the glass.
Perhaps it was an angel, an angel in disguise. Our church had taken the catechism class on a trip to watch a religious theatre group in Paris, and many of the actors – even those playing the disciples – wore black leather jackets and Elvis Presley haircuts, just like men in the rougher sort of cafés. Jesus Himself wore white overalls. It was a ‘modern’ production, with guitars and guns and giant spanners, and toured factories and hospitals. Well, this man might be a modern angel, I thought, and his thin briefcase reminded me of the one I’d seen on the day my father died, under the arm of the client waiting on the doorstep. Perhaps he had been an angel, too, come to carry my father’s soul up to Heaven.