by Adam Thorpe
‘Was Carole really dancing?’ I asked.
There was a pause, and I had to ask it again, shouting over the engine noise.
‘Don’t shout,’ said my mother, twisting her head round. ‘She gave it up when your father died.’ Her eyes glistened and she had to swallow. ‘She was very good, according to the teachers.’
‘At dancing?’
‘At ballet. She might have made a career.’
‘Ballet?’
‘You know what ballet is.’
‘It’s dancing.’
‘A special kind of dancing. Classical ballet, not this modern jigging about. Whatever’s it called, that awful hippy American thing? That awful musical?’
‘’air,’ I said, as if tired of it. Cuttings about it had circulated at school; one was a creased magazine photograph of the ‘orgy’ scene, with a lot of pink bodies under loads of hair.
‘That’s it. Awful nonsense, like a lot of little African savages. I don’t know what we’re all coming to. That girl poured it all away, her talent. One day she was dancing, she might even have made it to the Opéra. Lovely white tights and a tutu and proper satin shoes, she had.’
‘Carole?’
‘She was very serious. Twice a week after school, she went. Don’t you remember?’
‘No,’ I said.
Which was true. We were passing the factory with Colgate-Palmolive stuck in big blue letters on the front, where I’d always think I could smell our bathroom, the silky sweet scent of soaps and shampoos. Now there was only the metal smell of winter coming in on the draughts, fighting against the sweetness of my uncle’s pipe. I couldn’t bear it – that my sister had stopped something she was so good at. Now she wasn’t good at anything; she had gone mad, that was all she had done.
‘She hasn’t forgotten it,’ I said. ‘She danced really well.’
‘Know about ballet, do you?’ said my uncle, looking at me in the rear-view mirror so that only his dark eyes showed, like a gangster’s. This was some kind of tease, I realised.
‘Well, I liked it,’ I said. ‘What she did. It was nice.’
‘Nice, were they?’ my uncle said, as if he was making a joke – and my mother turned and glared at him, tutting. Her wig was so nylony it was like a doll’s. I didn’t understand my uncle’s joke.
‘When she gets better, she can take it up again,’ I broke in, to prevent more bickering.
‘Oh,’ my mother scoffed, ‘much too late, dear. She started when she was six. Completely her own idea. I didn’t know anything about ballet. Then she stopped because of what happened.’
‘When?’
There was another pause.
‘Henri,’ she said.
Now there was a long silence, only the engine moaning. It was always like this, when it came to mentioning my father’s death. ‘What happened’ followed by an embarrassed silence. It was like the piano at school, with its note near the middle that made a dull clonk. It was always this dull clonk, when my father was brought up.
‘The same day?’ I asked, after a bit.
‘What?’
‘Did she give up the same day?’
‘Oh, how can I remember?’ my mother said, snappily.
‘The shock,’ suggested my uncle.
He sniffed and drew on his pipe, resting one leather-gloved hand on the wheel. The glove had three lines of stitching rising out of the turned-back cuff, like bad scars.
‘State the obvious,’ said my mother, looking out of her window.
‘Is that why?’ I asked.
‘Is that why what?’
‘Is that why she’s gone funny? Because of the shock when she was thirteen?’
‘You tell me, dear,’ said my mother. ‘When I think of what we had to put up with in the war. We were tougher. We saw it through, somehow. With the good Lord’s help, of course. And the Blessed Virgin Mother.’
The draught around my bare knees made the war feel real to me: people were always cold and hungry and painted their legs to imitate stockings. People were shot for nothing. I put my hands over my cold knees and flickering images of tanks bumping through snow crossed my head. I started to feel thirsty. The dry air in the hospital had stayed in my mouth and throat. In a matter of minutes I was extremely thirsty. I told my mother. She said, as I knew she would, that I would have to wait. I leaned back, the thirst translating into car sickness. It was at times like this that I felt about six years old, not twelve.
‘We’re getting an order from that lot,’ my uncle said.
He waved his pipe at a brand-new office block with round windows like a row of washing machines in a launderette. The scaffolding was mostly off and there were stickers on the windows’ glass; because it was ordering from us, it looked friendly. I wished I had round windows in Lego. My uncle talked business for a bit while my mother nodded. Talking business was like climbing up onto a flat, dry plateau from something jungly and wet: it was a relief, despite the fact that I wasn’t listening through my thirst and nausea. Anyway, the language of vacuum cleaners was so well known to me that it washed right over: nylon bristle strips, thread catcher pads, flexible buffers … all that.
A poster for Schweppes Indian Tonic made my mouth drier. Home and its gushing taps felt a continent away. Then we braked sharply and I heard my uncle swear: there was an accident somewhere ahead, which we couldn’t see, and a jam which looked serious. Cars were honking. My uncle mumbled something and pressed the knob of the car’s lighter. I imagined it as the ejector seat, or something that would give us wings. An ambulance weaved its way past, its siren deafening us. My heart started to beat faster. I had always wanted to see a proper accident, maybe even someone dead: it would go down well at school – everyone else had these sorts of stories, some of them ridiculous, but I believed them. Everyone believed, even as they scoffed. The Simca’s chrome bumper was dented from my uncle having reversed into a concrete post and I had exaggerated it in class: now, perhaps, I would see the real thing. My uncle relit his pipe from the lighter-knob, muttering to my mother.
‘Don’t worry, I’m taking lessons,’ my mother said, looking out of her window at the driver beside us, who was picking his nose.
My uncle’s pipe wouldn’t light. Suddenly we were peeling off down a narrow side-street just next to us, bumping up onto the high kerbstones and then rocking back down again, the other drivers glaring at us as if they were jealous. My heart sank.
‘Where are you going?’ my mother asked.
‘Home. Peeling off. You want to sit back there all day? You haven’t even got your knitting.’
‘I hope you know where you’re going.’
‘Shut up, woman.’
‘Don’t tell me to shut up.’
‘Shuddup!’
‘Do you mind? I will not be ordered about by you or by anyone—’
We swerved fast round a corner, the tyres squealing a bit, and she gripped the door’s arm-rest and shut up. My uncle had got into a mood as bad as my mother’s and was driving much faster than he should, crashing the gears and accelerating up narrow streets between crummy concrete houses with graffiti on them. Pedestrians had to step smartly back, although he did slow down a bit when there were children. I felt both glad and terrified, taken control of by a superior force, zooming along at the speed of light. My mother just sat there in the front, tight-lipped, looking steadily forwards and taking the swerves with a hand on the arm-rest. I don’t know how fast and dangerously my uncle was, in fact, driving, it might have been all show, but the result was that we became completely lost.
‘Look,’ said my uncle, ‘we might as well be in bloody Algiers.’
‘Maybe we are,’ said my mother. ‘After all that driving.’
‘Bloody Algiers,’ said my uncle, ignoring her. ‘Bloody flaming Algiers. Look at it. Bloody Algiers, that’s where we’ve ended up.’
He snorted and slapped the steering wheel with his gloved hands, taking them both right off the wheel at the same time. He was driving quit
e slowly now, in an area that was either rising up from rubble or gradually becoming it. It looked nothing like the picture of Algiers in my school book or on the old railway poster in our nearest café. There were no white domes on a blue sky, no arches that reminded me of bites out of cheese, no robed women standing inside them showing nothing but their dark eyes. And certainly no camels.
It had started to drizzle, and the grey lay like a shiny varnish over everything. In one huge open area there were hundreds of clapboard huts, like builders’ huts, except that they had washing strung outside them and smoking chimneys made out of metal pipes. They seemed to go on forever, almost to the horizon, in a complete muddle.
‘Do you know what happens in this country,’ my uncle asked, ‘every two and a half minutes?’
‘Another immigrant worker enters it,’ said my mother, flatly.
‘How did you know?’
‘You’ve told us before, quite a few times.’
‘It’s probably every minute by now, anyway, from the look of it,’ he growled.
There were brick warehouses and rusty-looking factories and rows of proper houses with blind, boarded-up windows. There were quite a few new modern blocks but they were always surrounded by mud and earth-movers and tiny sheds. We passed heaps of rubbish. Mangy dogs kept running after us, barking. Men with sad faces sat on doorsteps, watching us pass. There were smart-looking young men in Brylcreem’d hair, in twos and threes on corners, talking and moving their hands as if they were hitting each other. They’d stop for a moment with their hands still up and look at us suspiciously, as if we were a threat to them. I felt nervous.
‘It’s very poor, here,’ I said.
‘They’re not really having rows with each other, Gilles,’ my mother said, as if she’d misheard me. ‘Arabs always look like that when they talk to each other.’
My uncle stopped the car and asked a small man with a bent back where we were.
‘Nanterre,’ he said.
Nanterre must be huge, I thought: it’s where the hospital is. My uncle swore softly and wound the window up.
‘Cretins. Bloody Arab cretins. Don’t even know where they live. Surplus to bloody requirements. Get some brain in there under the burnt nobs.’
‘It might be Nanterre,’ I dared.
I thought I’d actually seen the hospital again at one point, across a patch of waste land where more men were standing. But that sort of modern building looked like lots of others. ‘You can’t go west and end up east, all right?’ my uncle snapped back at me over his shoulder, swerving a bit.
A mobilette passed with its silencer off and my mother covered one ear. We were bumping over cobbles, now, down a sloping street lined either side with sheets of corrugated iron. They had lots of graffiti on them. It was weird seeing no women or children anywhere. We stopped to ask an elderly man in a flat sort of turban, but he shrugged his shoulders and said something we couldn’t understand.
‘Jesus Christ, doesn’t even speak the language of the Republic,’ my uncle hissed, through his teeth, winding the window up manically. The old man watched us as if he wasn’t sure we could be trusted. We spurted forward with an angry whine of the engine.
‘Try and find a white,’ said my mother. ‘Look out for a white, Gilles.’
‘That’ll be the day,’ said my uncle.
‘Look out for one, anyway, dear.’
I looked but there weren’t any among the few pedestrians, or no definite ones. A few moments later, at a crossroads strewn with paper litter, we saw a new-looking social services centre. At the end of its red plastic sign, the type that stuck out letter by letter as if it wasn’t attached, was DE N A N T E R R E. The second E was dangling crookedly off its metal support, which made me pronounce it funnily in my head. Someone had painted a hanged man on the concrete by the main door, the hands dribbling black paint like horrible long fingers.
‘So you have gone in a complete circle, Alain,’ said my mother, with one of her satisfied snorts.
‘Thanks for helping me, thanks for navigating.’
‘I didn’t.’
‘Exactly.’
‘You didn’t ask.’
‘I have to ask, do I? No initiative? Have to do everything myself, do I?’
‘That’s how you like it. Except for housework.’
‘Don’t give me a lecture now, please, Miss Women’s Liberation, I’m trying to get us out of fucking Algiers before curfew.’
‘I hope we do so in one piece, that’s all, and with less swearing.’
I kept very still in the back, the pit of my stomach deepening. My uncle fished out an old road-map from the glove compartment. The map was falling apart at the folds, like a pirate’s parchment. The windows had misted up and my mother and I were ordered out of the car to read the street signs, one of which was badly dented as if someone had hit it in anger. The air was damp and wintry, but I liked it after the car.
A jet plane went over, much lower than in Bagneux. I suggested that we might be near my aunt’s place next to Le Bourget. My mother told me not to make jokes, which I hadn’t meant to: I had no idea where anything was around Paris, except for Bagneux and Châtillon. The street was just broken-down houses on our side, little houses like cottages with pebbly designs on them. On the other side stood a high wall with barbed wire on the top and huge letters painted on the brick – the most popular being F N L A, which I knew stood for something sinister. There was even a huge white willy like a rude shout that my mother and I were ignoring. This was very embarrassing. I had to say something.
‘Why aren’t there any women or children?’ I asked.
‘They’re at home, dear. In their own country.’
‘Why not here?’
‘Don’t ask silly questions, Gilles. When did you last see women or children working on a building site? Think before you speak.’
We stayed standing in the chilly damp close to the car while my uncle talked away inside to the map, which seemed to have divided into bits. Some more men stopped and stared for a moment and then walked on. There was a smell of strange food which made me feel sick and even more afraid. One or two of the cottagey houses had dead rose branches still attached beside the door, while others had only the shadows of them between rusty nails. Just behind us, jutting out from the uneven slabs of the pavement, there was an old worn kilometre-stone with Paris carved on it and a blurred number underneath. I pointed this out to my mother but she was not concentrating.
‘If only they could get the drugs right,’ she said, out of the blue.
‘What? Carole?’
‘Yes. If only they could get those right. It’s like making a cocktail.’
She gave a rather strange little chuckle. I had never seen my mother mix a cocktail, it was something only the rich did on boats in films. My uncle was swearing away in the car, its door opened wide so that the corner was touching the pavement.
A man about my sister’s age came up, wheeling his mobilette, the chain dangling and a pedal missing. He stopped and asked us if we needed any help. My mother stiffened.
‘Alain …’
My uncle leaned out and ran his eyes over the young man; from top to bottom they went, glaring.
‘What do you want?’ he said.
‘You look as if you’re lost,’ said the man. He had a small moustache and dark eyes with large black lashes, like a girl’s.
‘Oh, do we? Well, we’re not. We can’t be lost in our own country, can we?’
The young man shrugged his shoulders.
‘That’s the Rue de Villafranca,’ he said, ‘which goes to the cemetery where my cousin’s buried, and that one there will take you to the main Paris road, but it’s a bit complicated. Here …’ He waved his hand over the Simca’s boot. My uncle was leaning out of the car, his mouth open, looking almost cretinous.
‘What?’
‘Open the boot. I’ll come with you to the intersection. Then it’s easy. Do you want to go to Paris?’
My unc
le blinked, stupidly. ‘Bagneux,’ he said.
‘OK,’ said the young man. ‘No problem.’
‘Heard of it, then?’
‘I’ve got an uncle who works there and I know the railway station.’
My uncle emerged after a moment’s hesitation and opened the boot without saying a word. He and the young man together placed the mobilette inside the boot, the front wheel and handlebars sticking out. It reminded me of Mademoiselle Bolmont’s wheelchair.
‘That’ll be OK,’ said the young man, resting the lid of the boot on the wheel.
He opened the rear door and indicated to me that I should get in, which I did. He slipped in next to me, his scent filling the car sweetly, and smiled.
‘Nice car,’ he said. ‘My name’s Khaled.’
‘I’m Gilles.’
‘Hi, Monsieur Gilles.’
He shook my hand. Outside, on the pavement, my mother was saying something urgently to my uncle, who was wiping his hands on a cloth and shaking his head at her.
‘My wife thinks you should get in front.’
‘No, it’s OK. I’m OK. Thanks.’
My uncle tried to close the rear door but the corner was stuck on the pavement with our weight in the car. Khaled and I had to get out again and the car door lifted clear from the slabs, its corner slightly chipped. My uncle crouched down to examine the chip, swearing softly. Then we all climbed back in and Khaled, leaning forward, directed my uncle from between the two front seats. We wove in and out of back streets and across the odd wide road. I saw a sign pointing down one of these roads saying Hôpital Foch. In the distance, over a patch of waste land, I saw again what looked like hundreds of builders’ huts or garden sheds with washing strung between them and smoke coming out of crooked chimneys, like a much bigger version of the gypsy encampment beyond Bagneux station. I wondered if it was the same one as before.
My mother pointed to some white concrete blocks in a sea of mud and said, ‘That’s the university. That’s where Carole went.’