by Adam Thorpe
‘Not really,’ I said.
‘You don’t know what looks good on you,’ said my mother. And she bought me a shiny bright green shirt to go with them.
It was strange that she was always tutting about modern times, yet wanted me to wear bright, fashionable clothes that made me stand out like a beacon.
There were thick wall-to-wall carpets in these stores that made you walk silently; I imagined staying after closing-time to live in them forever, coasting about silently in a kind of happy daze with a little den somewhere among the cabinets and shelves and rubber plants. It was like another planet from the dirty, noisy one outside. We bought some special shirts called ‘drip-dry’ and I thought how nice it would be if Carole, instead of being what she was, was one of these pretty, smiling assistants with a beehive hairstyle. Their lashes were thick with mascara and their sharp fingernails were painted purple. They patiently waited as my mother tried on this or that, as if this was all they had ever wanted to do in life.
I imagined Carole dancing, too. Or rather, I took the memory of her dancing in the nude in the mental ward and placed it down here. I was sitting by a pillar while my mother was in the curtained cubicle and I pictured my sister dancing in bare feet across the gentle blue carpet while the soft music trickled on. I held the huge, shiny carrier bag between my knees and pictured her dancing between the wooden, glass-topped cases and the rows of dresses and the murmuring people, and knew that no one else could see her, however real and bright she was to me. She was still in the nude, but not because she didn’t have any morals. I was sure of that. She wasn’t sinning.
I was ill the following week and missed a few days of school – my mother reckoned I had caught a chill in the damp draughts of the covered archway. I’d bought a Dinky Simca there – the latest model, an 1100 with Prestomatic steering and opening bonnet. I reckoned I was ill from getting so cold in the Gestapo side-car – I’d not been feeling quite right since.
I lay on the sofa in the sitting-room, flicking through old magazines from the magazine rack with its feet of coloured balls. There was a special Paris-Match on Churchill. It was three years old, from 1965, because that’s when he’d died: he went from a baby to an old man without changing his face, just as General de Gaulle had always looked like a big sad dog.
One afternoon in that week there was a variety programme for young people on TV. A girl in a sticking-out dress danced a ballet piece. I could sort of recognise my sister’s movements – the arms that waved about as if they were underwater and the way the feet looked as if they were running along a tightrope or walking on something very hot, or testing the water with their toes. I was lying on the sofa, sniffling, still sweaty in my head.
‘Are there any pictures of Carole doing this?’
‘Oh, somewhere,’ said my mother, sighing. ‘I don’t know where. She might have burnt them.’
‘Burnt them?’
She didn’t reply. She was ironing the new shirts on her special board, even though the advertisement had described them as ‘revolutionary’ because they dripped and went smooth and so didn’t need ironing. The leaflet with them had showed a pretty housewife jumping with her arms in the air and an electric iron in the rubbish bin next to her, over the words THE TRUE LIBERATION! I’d tried to picture my mother doing this, wondering if she’d have more time to go on outings with me (the cinema, for instance) now she had these shirts, but she carried on ironing the same amount.
Although I missed her ironing on the rug on the kitchen table, the smell of the cloth against the hot metal was the same – and the soft bumping that made everything calm. Since she had started watching television while doing it, I’d normally stay with her in the sitting-room when the ironing board came out. The ballet dancer was twirling round and then drooping, her weird little skirt flapping softly above her knees in a grey haze that was left behind on the screen as she moved.
There was something interfering with the reception that day – perhaps a heavy saw being operated in the metal workshop next door, or something from the electricity generator on the other side. A fuzzy line sparking with black and white bits would descend the screen slowly every minute or so, making a low ugly noise like someone taking a long time to clear their throat. It passed slowly over the ballerina, giving the impression that it was crushing her; it made me think of Carole as dancing happily until the deadly day passed over her when she found my father in the showroom.
It was an interference, but the dancer came back. In Carole’s case, the dancer did not come back.
‘Carole could take it up again,’ I said, looking at my mother. ‘She probably wants to.’
‘Take what up?’
‘Ballet.’
‘Too late,’ my mother replied, smoothing a sleeve on the board. ‘Much too late. What’s wrong with this thing?’
She put the flat of the iron near her face and spat. The metal fizzed, the spittle bubbling and then darkening into steam. My uncle had bought it for her for Christmas – a swish new Super-Puissant model straight from the Thomson factory just a few streets away. I could see no difference in it, in fact, apart from its transparent space-age handle.
‘Why?’
‘Why what?’
‘Why too late?’
‘You have to be very young,’ she said. ‘Carole’s too old.’
I carried on watching the ballerina, remembering my sister’s dance like the ghostly grey shadow left on the screen whenever the dancer moved too suddenly. Christophe had told me that in America they had TV pictures in colour, like films in the cinema; I found this hard to believe. It was another of his stories, picked up from magazines. He planned to be an electrician on the Apollo space programme, hopefully on a vessel in interstellar space.
‘Papa says you’re never too old to do anything.’
My mother made a noise halfway between a grunt and a chuckle. ‘He’s not talking about ballet, is he?’
‘I don’t know. Anything is anything.’
‘Oh, good,’ she said, ‘it’s Marcel Marceau. The mime artist.’
It wasn’t, it was someone billed as the ‘new’ Marcel Marceau. His face was very white with black lips and he had black eyebrows painted just below his hair. My mother had taken me to see the real one’s show when I was smaller. I only remembered the blackcurrant sorbet in the interval. The ‘new’ mime artist was seventeen years old and still at school and performed, said the presenter in the bow tie, the same sketches as the famous one.
‘What’s mime, then?’
‘It’s when you can’t use words, dear.’
It was a bit like watching someone going mad, at first. After a bit I understood that he was pretending to do things. By trembling his hands he produced invisible butterflies and then tried to catch them, his head fluttering about as he watched them with round eyes. He pulled hard on a thick invisible rope that pulled him back so that he fell over. There was something I couldn’t quite get, although the audience all clapped, and then he was a toy robot, all stiff. The robot grew bigger and bigger and smashed up a huge city and then melted into a stone statue in a really peaceful park. The music was very calm and the statue slowly came alive and revolved into an old lady knitting, a nurse pushing a pram, a soldier, an ice-cream seller, someone I didn’t understand, a naughty kid, and then two people kissing on a bench, the hands of the woman gripping the neck of the man and then running up and down his back – except that when he stopped and turned you could see it was only him, sitting on an invisible bench.
‘Not as good,’ declared my mother, over the studio clapping. ‘He should think up his own. It’s stealing, otherwise.’
I couldn’t reply. My mouth had been open so long that it was dry inside. I closed it. I could see my mother at the ironing board as a blue reflection in the screen and wondered what I would do if I turned round and there was no one there, as there hadn’t really been any butterflies.
There was a teenage singer now, in a shiny dress, imitating Mireille Mathieu, wi
th the same fringe but not as pretty as on my mother’s record-sleeves. Something had happened inside my head. I thought: that boy is the luckiest person in the world, he can do real magic. He can make you see creatures and objects and lots of different people where there aren’t any. He can make you think he’s dressed in a long dress when he isn’t. He can be two people at the same time. My mother was murmuring along to the Mireille Mathieu song.
‘Isn’t it awful?’ she said. ‘Nothing like the real thing.’
‘Did we really see, er … you know?’ The two ms of Mireille Mathieu had confused me: I couldn’t remember the famous mime artist’s name. ‘You know, the one we saw. Who does the pantomime.’
‘Marcel Marceau. I knew a girl at school called Marie Marceau who was killed by an American bomb, poor creature.’
‘Did we really see him?’
‘Well, that was certainly a wasted effort. You can’t even remember. You were too young.’ She always talked in bursts like this, when ironing. ‘You couldn’t work it out. What he was pretending to do. A bit of a mistake, taking you. It was in a big theatre. In Paris. Rather dear. For your seventh birthday. She lifted and then replaced the shirt on the board, smoothing it with her hand then scratching her neck. ‘I should have waited until you were older. Madame Groueff recommended it. She’d taken her daughter. Same age as you.’ She was poking the iron between the buttons, now. ‘She’d had no problem, she’d loved it. What has gone wrong with the telly? Don’t tell your father, or he’ll be getting a new one. We can’t go on getting new things all the time, dear,’ she added, folding up the shirt in that special way, so you couldn’t imagine ever undoing it.
‘I never said we should.’
‘It’s only two years old, for goodness’ sake. In the old days we kept everything, for generations. Never threw anything away in my mother’s day. Made stuff to last, back then. But you can’t stop him, oh no. Nothing can stop him.’
Now they throw away defective babies, I thought to myself. Leaning right forward, clutching my blanket to my stomach, I was adjusting the controls on the television, flattening and expanding the picture. It had collapsed into a smoky fuzz: shapes buzzed about in it like dark ghosts. I let the top of my head just touch the screen as I turned the knobs. I was a space pilot, in fact, passing through a dangerous alien atmosphere with the weird light falling on my hands and face and the static acting on my hair.
I asked if you could do mime in university.
My mother laughed. ‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘That’d be the day.’
‘So how do you become one?’
‘Oh, you train,’ she said, vaguely. ‘Or I expect you’re born into it.’
‘Like the circus?’
‘Probably. I don’t know much about it, really. That’s not helping at all, Gilles.’
I banged the television on top. The picture came back for a split second, showing a girl with her mouth and eyes wide open, as if she’d seen something terrifying.
‘Oh, we’d be so much better off without these things,’ said my mother. ‘Please switch it off. It’s bad for your eyes, up that close. They’ve done experiments. In twenty years we’ll all be blind.’
She lit a cigarette over the ironing board, sighing over the future. I turned the on-off knob until it clicked, the picture shrinking with a crackle to a white spot in the middle and then, after a minute or so, to nothing. The spot stayed in front of my eyes as a sort of negative, jerking about and turning yellow and blue and green and purple. The silence made me realise how ugly the buzzing noise had been. I lay back on the sofa. The glare from the telly had thickened my fever’s headache and I started to worry about being blind: I couldn’t imagine anything worse, though Christophe reckoned being deaf was worse than being blind. But I couldn’t imagine my mother without her telly, either: she watched it a lot, watched it more and more, it was on sometimes even when she wasn’t in the room, even when she was listening to the radio in the kitchen.
‘I’d like to see Nicolas,’ I said.
‘Best not to.’
‘Why?’
‘Don’t why all the time, Gilles. You’re supposed to stop that phase at six years old.’
I closed my eyes and let the light fever rock me in its folds. A hundred years ago, or whenever Ste Thérèse had died, I might have faded away, too. I heard the little sighs and hisses of the iron, the comfortable bumping, the eternal comfortableness of the moment, wondering if I could stretch my high temperature to tomorrow, Friday, and have three days of freedom before me. I could lie on the sofa in the day, Lucky Luke and Tintin and Astérix albums piled up on the floor next to the latest Spirou that my uncle had bought in a new motorway service station outside Lille. And my Kleenex tissues. And my VapoMist spray. And my little tub of greasy menthol ointment which I had to rub on my nose, bursting into a cold flame that made me blink.
The mime’s show bobbed about in my head, already unclear. I pictured myself showing off to my friends, making them see butterflies and ropes and old ladies and rubber balls and robots when there wasn’t anything there at all. The ancient Mireille Mathieu song was bobbing in my head, too. It reminded me of my eighth birthday, when that song was Number One and I was still at the school in the centre of Bagneux and getting the tips of my fingers rapped by the big board ruler for bad work: I could smell the cakes my sister had made for me that day, because she had forgotten them and they’d burnt, the raisins in them charring to charcoal.
I wondered whether my mother was right about it being too late for my sister to dance again, since the ballet movements had stayed in her mind like the smell of burnt raisins had stayed in mine, and would always stay in their little drawer in her mind. I pictured her dancing again, mingling it with the girl on the telly. My mother asked me why I had that funny smile on my face, I must be having nice dreams or was my fever going up yet again, dear?
That evening, over supper, the main subject was the television not working. I felt well enough to join them in my dressing-gown. My uncle, who had come in smelling stronger than usual of drink, told us about the project he’d been ‘musing’ on for some time. This was to knock down the wall to waist height between the kitchen and sitting-room and replace the hole with a sliding glass window, so that the television could be watched from the cooker. My mother pointed out that, with the windows open, the cooking smells would invade the sitting-room.
‘Close ’em, then.’
‘I wouldn’t be able to hear it.’
‘Do you need to hear it? The rubbish they put on? Piccies aren’t enough on their own?’
‘Don’t be silly, Alain.’
‘It’s no problem, anyway,’ said my uncle, who was definitely a little merry: he’d had ‘a few’ in a brasserie in Clichy for someone’s pay rise. ‘I’ll run a wire from the telly to here’ – he pointed to the ceiling, with the polystyrene tiles like an upside-down snowy plain stretching to the one bit missing – ‘screw in a big hanging bowl and plonk a speaker inside. OK?’
‘A speaker?’
‘A speaker,’ he said, as if telling her off. ‘Like a stereophonic gramophone speaker. Wired up. Hidden. For the sound. Of the telly.’
‘Oh yes,’ said my mother, weakly.
‘Then you can close the glass doors and keep your smells to yourself.’
He chortled and slipped back his wine.
‘Can you do that?’ my mother asked.
‘Of course I can. Why not?’
‘I don’t know. Sounds very complicated to me.’
‘Of course it’s not bloody complicated. I could do it tonight, if I had the material.’
‘What, knocking down a wall?’
‘The electronics, I mean. Of course not the bloody wall. The electronics. Why do women think anything with wires is complicated? Am I complicated?’
‘You’re not wires,’ I said.
‘I feel like I am, sometimes, chum. Bloody clients wire me up, I can tell you. Like dealing with liquid cement. Then just when you think
you’ve got a deal, they go hard on you, the tin-headed pederasts. I’ll get a bloody medal for it, one day, you’ll see.’
‘Do you have to teach the younger ones present such horrible language?’
‘There’s only one,’ chortled my uncle. ‘Unless you’ve got one hidden away? Have you got one hidden away?’
He was lifting the oilcloth and peering under it, flapping his hand about so that it touched our knees. I sat quite still, wishing he would finish his lemon tart so that I could slip away before the swelling argument burst. Apart from anything else, I wanted to practise my mime, starting with the two lovers on the park bench.
‘I’ll bet you’ve got one hidden away,’ he repeated, pointing at my mother. His cheeks’ veins looked as if they’d been drawn in purple ink.
‘Fat chance of that,’ said my mother. She got up and began to prepare the coffee.
‘Oh? Why?’
She didn’t answer.
‘Why, if you please?’
My uncle stared at her with his hands flat on the table, waiting. She didn’t move for a moment, just stared at the coffee machine. It was so quiet the fridge’s buzz sounded like a drill.
‘In suspended animation, am I?’ he said, quietly.
‘Don’t know what you’re talking about,’ my mother muttered, so angry it was more like spitting.
‘Suspended animation,’ my uncle repeated, in a sort of low growl. I preferred it when he shouted.
I realised, as the coffee bubbled in the machine, that having the television speaker and a glass window instead of the wall would get rid of these sessions. We would all be silent, chewing slowly and silently as we watched the evening’s entertainment or the news.
I saw it as if I was the television: the three of us looking like aquarium fish, gawping silently behind the glass, bubbles coming out of our mouths as we slowly chewed and swallowed and chewed.
8
‘Do you know that if something went really wrong on the sun, we’d have six minutes’ warning?’
Christophe looked at me after he’d said this, as if there was a follow-up.