by Adam Thorpe
My uncle came in slightly late to supper; we had to wait for him, hearing the voices rumbling in the hall between bursts of laughter.
‘Who was that?’ my mother asked him, as if I’d instructed her to.
‘Oh, someone,’ my uncle said. ‘Not bad for a debt collector.’
My mother gasped.
‘Do I look serious?’ he said, in a funny foreign accent, quickly, with a mock spread of the hands.
‘I don’t know,’ sighed my mother, removing his meal from the oven. ‘We’re paying so much in instalments.’
My uncle put an arm around her. I looked away.
‘My darling, you look so nice without worry-lines,’ he said, in his deep soothing voice. ‘Don’t spoil it. That was the man from the insurance.’
His eyes flickered towards me as he opened a bottle of wine, his teeth showing slightly.
‘From the flaming insurance,’ he repeated. ‘Checking out security.’
‘Why?’ My mother looked worried.
‘Why? Because of the times we live in, that’s why. Anarchos and commie types. It’ll be bars on the show window, next. Five bolts on the doors. Man-traps. Any profit swallowed up in keeping the world at bay. Animals in a zoo, that’s what we’ll feel like.’
He gave a roar like a lion, and then imitated a monkey, shuffling up to my mother and slapping her bottom, the bottle of wine in his other hand. She squealed, but happily. He’d ignored the fact that I wasn’t in my room and continued in a very good mood, telling jokes that I’d heard before but that I was relieved to hear, this time. He drank the whole bottle of wine, slopping it into the glass as if it was tap water.
The next day they went off, after Mass, to see Carole on their own. I had a special Solemn Communion class with an abbot. My catechism was usually on Saturday afternoons, but every so often we’d have an extra session on Sundays. I hated these even more than the normal ones. Christophe had a bad cold, and as the vestry classroom was hardly heated by its small iron stove, he had been excused.
It was exactly like school in the vestry classroom. There were metal-legged desks and benches and a heavy wooden Cross with an ivory Jesus carved in Dahomey. There was even an old blackboard on an easel, which the priest’s chalk squeaked across and made marks like white hairs. The only pictures, apart from one of the Pope shaking hands with someone in spectacles, were old framed prints of the Last Supper and the Marriage at Cana and Child Jesus in the Temple. They had tiny flies caught behind the glass. I liked the prints because I could travel in and out of them when bored. The girls, who had their catechism in the morning, had woven some palm-leaf baskets; these lay on an old wooden table in the corner, some of them scrappy, a few very neat.
Our teacher was the youngest priest, Père Lande.
‘I’m officially your catechist,’ he told us, once, ‘but I want you to imagine me as your bicycle headlamp.’
We’d all stared at him as he smiled with his head on one side, thinking he’d gone mad. In fact, his round, shiny face did look like a headlamp, so that became his nickname: ‘Père Phare’. We asked a lot of questions about the Phar-isees, of course, emphasising the first syllable while the rest of the class snorted behind their hands.
Père Phare was a ‘modern’ type of priest, the type my mother called ‘progressive’ and that Gigi said were even worse than Protestants, they were dangerous subversives planted by the Soviets; they didn’t believe in the infallibility of the Pope and had introduced the virus of democracy into the Church and had abolished Latin. Tante Clothilde always tried to shut Gigi up when he went on about this, because it always ended in him having a coughing fit.
Père Phare didn’t look dangerous. He had a high voice, almost like a girl’s, and was quite tubby. Sometimes he’d play a pop record on a portable gramophone. Once he brought in a football and told us about the difference between time and eternity: St Thomas Aquinas says that time is really just the before and after of movement but that eternity is a perfect whole and therefore has nothing before and after, like a football as long as it doesn’t move. He held the football still on the desk using his finger and someone asked him what team St Thomas Aquinas played for. Then the class got very noisy.
The old abbot, dressed in long black woollen robes with dandruff scattered on the shoulders, had several teeth missing and fingernails like scrunched-up orange plastic. He greeted us in the church with wide arms and then we were waved into the vestry classroom by Père Phare as if we were dead leaves.
Père Phare sat listening behind the desk as the smiling abbot talked for an hour, in a voice that went up and down all the time, about being a witness. He smoked quite a few cigarettes, the type that smell like bonfires, and let the ash fall on his robes. He kept mentioning knees and people falling on them, rubbing his own through the cloth. There was something about his old-fashioned accent that made him sound very satisfied with himself, and that made the talk even more boring than the sermons in Mass. The rest of the class, not daring to muck about in front of an important member of the Church, mostly went to sleep or sat with eyes like drugged hippies. The whiny, smiling voice entered into my skin, into my bones and my blood and my muscles, making my flesh itself feel boring, the way my arms were folded and my legs crossed and the hem of my shorts touched my thighs. God was boring. The Virgin Mother was boring. Even Jesus was boring. Everything to do with the Church was boring. The sun shone, if weakly, outside and I could see one of the trees in the churchyard being hopped on by birds, its leafless branches perfect to climb up. Birds didn’t have to think about God and witnessing and salvation. The boringness started to choke me, as if I’d swallowed sand and it was now silting in my throat: I was the hourglass at school, except that each grain of sand was taking a whole minute to fall through. Père Phare’s shiny, round face had rumpled up against the fingers it was resting on, the nose squashed against the middle finger so that the nostrils were exposed. His eyes were slits, but he was still awake, though his wide smile was like the smile of someone knocked out in a cartoon. Each time the abbot paused, the priest’s wide smile twitched and life came back into the eyes, but then the sing-song voice got going again, the tongue showing between the missing teeth and whistling on every s, the ends of words almost as exaggerated as General de Gaulle’s – and Père Phare’s face rumpled up even more against the fingers, like a rubber mask in the toyshop. It was horrible, being able to see right up his nose, which wasn’t very clean. I wondered if he knew that he was showing it like that, or whether he cared. The sing-song phrases started to change the way I was saying my thoughts to myself, even when I looked out of the barred window and imagined my balsa-wood Spitfire flying high into the sky, looping the loop, all my classmates amazed and gasping, having never seen anything like it before in their lives. My uncle told me that the Spitfire was an English plane from the war, an excellent war plane flown by gentlemen – and that we French had had excellent material, as well, but never got to use it, and that it all fell into Hitler’s hands almost straightaway: brand-new anti-aircraft guns, anti-tank guns, ‘one-hundred-per-cent French, chum’ – all in the wrong place when the Germans broke through the Maginot Line like ants over a line of salt. Bones in his jaw would start rippling up and down when my uncle talked about the war, and he would stare in a funny way, as if seeing something I couldn’t see that made him angry and upset. The abbot’s voice wound in and out of my head without a word sticking and I wondered if God, with Jesus sitting next to him and Mary the Mother of God behind, like God’s wife rather than his mother (or both), and Joseph in his own private place, shy of being with the main ones, perhaps secretly annoyed that God had taken his place – I wondered if God thought the abbot boring. And then I decided that this was a sinful or even heretical thought, because holiness was smooth and clean and pale, like washed-out sheets, and the very boringness of the abbot’s lesson was proof of its holiness and of my rough unworthiness like an old flannel.
Afterwards Père Phare put his hand on my head as
we were filing out – I was the last to get to the door.
‘Aren’t we fortunate, Julien,’ he said, in his high voice, ‘having such preaching prebendaries among us?’
‘Yes, Father.’
He gave a little giggle and looked at me in a funny way, as if I’d been naughty.
‘Never mind, I quite understand,’ he murmured.
His hand stayed on my head quite firmly, so that I was stuck. The others disappeared beyond the second baize door into the church.
‘Do you like my Saturday classes, Julien?’
‘Gilles. Yes, Father.’
‘I try to make them interesting, in the circumstances. One day,’ he said, squeezing my head a bit, ‘we’ll have a new Church worthy of Christ. He was a very simple fellow, you know. We’ve just complicated Him, haven’t we? All these words, all these rituals. I remember thinking that, at your age.’
‘Yes, Father.’
‘What does your Papa do?’
‘He’s the area agent for Philips, Aspiron and Tornado, Father. Industrial vacuum cleaners.’
He raised his eyebrows.
‘Industrial vacuum cleaners?’
I nodded.
‘It’s so very hard to keep things simple, isn’t it, Gilles? When greed and profit is all that counts in the world. Really all I’m teaching you is how to be good. Faith, hope and charity. Which in your opinion is the most important, Gilles?’
‘Faith, Father.’
‘I think it’s charity. Good, simple deeds. But for that, the Church needs to be simple. And it isn’t simple, is it? Christ was poor, wasn’t he?’
‘Yes, Father.’
‘And the Roman Church is rich. While we speak, the Vatican is doing business. Can that be right?’
‘I don’t know, Father.’
‘You must think about these things. You mustn’t walk through life like a zombie. What a pity you have to be bored, with your fresh, young mind. I’ve so enjoyed our discussion, Julien.’
He sighed. His hand came off my head. I smoothed my hair without thinking, as if rubbing him off me. I said thank you and left him standing in the door with his hands together, like a statue, staring down at the ground.
I walked slowly home feeling quite low. Père Phare obviously thought we were greedy, trying to sell vacuum cleaners. I tried to think if I had been charitable to anyone. Hardly ever. I’d hardly done one good, simple deed of charity in my whole life. Was I even good enough to receive confirmation? Probably not.
It was already getting dark and the streetlamps were flickering on in the mistiness. I pretended to zap them into life deliberately, the lights making a halo out of the air. Some cars, as they swept past, dazzled me with their yellow eyes, but others were waiting until the very last moment to switch them on and I was pleased to see that moment happen on one of them, as if I’d caused it by thought waves.
I kept to the edge of the pavement, allowed only one foot in each long kerbstone so that I was almost skipping. They’d redone the road when I was six, but you could still see the old paving poking through in big patches, coming right up to the kerb. The cars’ tyres made a flickery noise on them, vrap vrap vrap. It worried me, that the modern surface couldn’t cover them properly, or had been worn through by the traffic, like trouser-knees. I thought this about the buildings, too, which were mostly blackened by smoke or exhaust fumes from the road. Why couldn’t someone just give them all a clean-up and a nice coat of paint? Or demolish them completely and build new ones in aluminium and glass?
As I passed each one, I pictured a demolition ball smashing in. Vlaaam! Schlaaf! Bloing! Bing cling ting! Down went the upholsterer’s workshop. Down went the industrial dry-cleaner’s with its smell of ammonia. Down went the whiny Citroën garage. Down went the abandoned shop with IMPERMEABLES in faded letters above the windows. Down went the brick house where an old lady still lived with twenty-two cats. Down went the empty house next door where a dead body had stayed in bed for two months in 1952. Down went the barber’s with its completely out-of-date hairstyles, like people stranded in the window. Down – no, this was already a gap, full of rubbish and creamy-looking puddles and bits of lorries which the demolition ball just swung in and out of without touching. But down went the noisy machine shop with the picture of a spark-plug punched into a metal plaque. Down went the concrete block of flats my grandfather remembered being built before the war on a rubbish tip. Down went the one-storey house where an old watchmaker lived and worked, its window always showing the same three watches and a dusty Jaz alarm-clock on some green cloth with moth-holes in.
Last of all was the electricity generator behind its high wall, buzzing away, with Vive le Prolétariat scrawled on the brick for as long as I could remember. Vlaaaaaam!
‘Love thy neighbour,’ Père Phare had said, one lesson. ‘Start with your nearest neighbour. The one right next door, boys.’
We had all giggled, because some of us had put an arm around the boy next to them. The boy next to me looked like a girl, with slanty grey eyes, and I found myself blushing at the idea of putting an arm around him. Père Phare got slightly annoyed. He said he’d meant the next-door-neighbour at home.
I’d thought of the electricity generator. Now it was a twisted mess: fìzzzz bing tsoin! The whole of Bagneux plunged into darkness. The whole country, even. The whole world. Vlaaaaaam!
As I turned into our little concrete yard in front of our house, I heard a yip yip yip inside. We had no pets at all, as my mother said they would get run over; I was suddenly sure that my parents had brought me back a puppy to make up for having had ’flu, or being upset about Nicolas. It was incredible, the way my mind constructed this fantasy within seconds, and I came up to the porch already grinning. The car was parked in front of the garage, and I touched the bonnet to feel its warmth against my hand.
Yip yip yip.
The moment I opened the door, I knew it was a row. My parents only had big, official rows about twice a year, one around Christmas and the other in the summer (unless they had more when I wasn’t at home). The yapping noise was my mother, shouting. She was shouting hysterically, in fits or little bursts, and my uncle’s deep voice was coming in like someone trying to put a circle around the shouting. He wasn’t shouting at her, in fact, he was just making the noise a cowboy makes when trying to rein in a horse. He was standing in the kitchen, in full view of me, his lips pouting out, looking up at the ceiling and now and again raising his hands to calm her.
‘It’s slander! It’s evil! It’s evil slander!’ my mother was shouting, over and over, as if she couldn’t stop.
‘Whoa,’ said my uncle, ‘Whoa.’
But my mother was taking no notice. I glimpsed the edge of her arm, fingers writhing about in each other as she repeated the words in a sort of tearful shriek. She would, now and again, have these fits. She’d say the same thing over and over in the same angry and upset way and would then finish by throwing something unimportant that broke. Then, an hour later, the fit would have passed and everything returned to normal. They didn’t even need a row to make the fits happen.
I knew that this one had something to do with Carole: the warm bonnet meant they’d only just got back, and I’d smelt petrol in the air. She’d obviously been dancing in the nude again. I tried to remember what ‘slander’ meant.
Biting my lip, I wondered whether to leave, to come back later. Then my uncle turned and saw me.
‘There’s Gilles,’ he said.
My mother stopped her noises immediately and her head appeared around the door.
‘How long have you been there?’ She sounded angry.
‘About two seconds. I’ve just come in.’
She blinked at me, a handkerchief coming up to her mouth.
‘What’s happened, Maman?’
‘Oh, you can’t always know everything, Gilles,’ she snapped, and blew her nose.
My uncle came up to me and put his hand on my head. His left eyelid was trembling, which I’d never seen befo
re. I moved my head out of his hand’s grip, although he was being affectionate: I hated being treated like a little boy.
‘How long have you been here, chum?’
‘I said, two seconds.’
He looked at me for a moment, testing the truth of it.
‘Don’t tell him, Alain.’
‘There’s no point in telling him,’ my uncle assured her, without turning to her. I felt as if I wasn’t really alive, the way they kept referring to me as ‘him’.
‘Why isn’t there any point?’ I asked.
‘Because,’ said my uncle, in the smooth kind of voice he used when doing a deal in a manager’s office, ‘it’s not fair on Carole, chum. When she’s better, she won’t even know she’s said these things.’
‘Was it about us?’
‘In a way,’ said my uncle. My mother had sat down at the table, her head in her hands. ‘Your mother’s very upset,’ he went on, taking out a cigarette and tapping it on the packet, ‘but I told her, I said it’s normal, it’s what these types of cases do.’
‘What type is she?’
He put the cigarette in his mouth but didn’t light it. It jerked up and down as he replied. ‘I’m not a psychologist, or whatever they’re called, but it’s obvious she’s very kind of approximate, in her head. You see?’
I nodded.
‘Maybe she saw something which was a big shock,’ I said.
‘Eh?’
‘Christophe said his grandmother’s aunt went mad after seeing her husband come back from the war with a bandage on his head.’
My uncle took the cigarette out of his mouth. A shred of tobacco remained on his lip. ‘Well, she had a shock when she was thirteen, didn’t she? A very bad one.’
‘Yes.’
My mother said something I didn’t catch, her face enveloped in a cloud of smoke. Then she got up and started clattering about by the oven. She had her Mona Lisa plastic apron on, the face squashing when she bent over. The face went on smiling and not smiling at the same time.