by Adam Thorpe
‘The thing is,’ my uncle went on, quietly, bowing down to my height and putting his hand on my shoulder, as if he was telling me secrets, ‘we could have been a lot harder on her, you see, at the beginning. On your sister. When she started going astray. That’s what your mother’s saying to me now, of course. A lot harder. Kept her in check a bit more. But that’s not the way of things, now, is it, chum? You have to move with the modern world, you see, Gilles, that’s what I said to your mother. You can’t be frightened of the year 2000, not these days. Do you know the joke? Supply manager at Gerflex Chemicals told it to me. The Jew Nathan, big gold chain on his waistcoat, meets this rich Arab in a train and they play cards and Nathan wins and the Arab says, writing it down and dating it, “I promise I’ll pay you tomorrow and no later, just as soon as I’ve sold everything down to my last camel.” ’
He let go of my shoulder and lit his cigarette with his gold lighter, his hands trembling slightly, the veins in them sticking out even between the knuckles. The lighter’s cap clicked shut under his thumb.
‘And so the next day, you see, Nathan goes to the Arab and says, waving the Arab’s note of hand, “Promises are promises, my friend.” “Ah,” says the rich Arab, reading the note, “that was tomorrow.” “Which is today, which is today,” cries Nathaniel—’
‘Nathan,’ I pointed out, studying the twirls in the hall wallpaper and the dark streak where elbows had brushed it.
‘Yeah, Nathan. Anyway, Nathan, Nathaniel, it’s all the same.’ He drew on his cigarette. “Which is today, which is today,” cries Nathan, hopping from foot to foot and making his gold chain tinkle. “Exactly,” says the Arab, “it’s not tomorrow now. You’re too late.”’ My uncle smiled at me through his smoke. ‘“That was tomorrow.” Nice line, eh? Because the thing is,’ he added, turning serious, ‘you’ve got to be the day after tomorrow, to keep ahead of the pack.’
Although I didn’t really understand the joke, I nodded my head and smiled.
‘Ah yes,’ he went on, pulling up his trousers with his elbows and taking a few paces up and down the hallway, ‘if you don’t move with the times, I said to your mother, you’re finished. Your sister had this shock, like Christophe’s grandmother or whoever – only it took its time, it wasn’t immediate. It rattled away inside her head over years and years and then short-circuited the system. The brain’s incredibly complicated, you see. And now, with the help of some modern science, she’s going to be all right. She’s going to be one-hundred-per-cent. You see? Those are the facts. Let’s stick with the facts. That’s what I’ve been saying to your mother. And that’s what you’ve got to say to her, too, when she gets upset.’
He squeezed my shoulder quite hard. I felt I was being given orders, not advice.
‘Think of a jet fighter, Gilles. Stuffed with fuel pipes, crammed with tubes for the pneumatics and hydraulics, hundreds of kilometres of wiring connecting all the electronic and electrical equipment, up to four extremely complicated and fairly fragile reactors – and it’s all flying through the air at over Mach 2, all sixty or seventy tons of it, the fuselage and wings one bloody great fuel container. That’s what the brain is. One little thing goes wrong, one tiny little short circuit, and it’s a load of twisted metal and a fireball for breakfast.’
I nodded, jittery suddenly at the thought of carrying this complicated object in my skull.
‘You’re a big lad, now,’ he continued, his eyelid still flickering. He picked the tobacco shred off his lip, studied it, then crumbled it to dust between his thumb and forefinger. ‘Carole, she’s going to pile on the agony, you see. It’s inevitable. And we’ll all deserve our medals at the end of it, eh?’
He smiled into my face, very close, shaking my shoulder as if to shake me into agreement with a chuckle. All I did was nod slowly again. His after-shave, although not fresh, was still strong over the tobacco. For some reason it made me think of him as even more powerful; that everything he said had to be correct, like the law.
‘You won’t tell me what Carole said, then?’
‘No, Gilles. No point. If she wasn’t in a mental state one’d say they were very nasty lies, and nasty lies should never be repeated. Once they get the drugs sorted out,’ he said, blowing smoke out in a steady stream before finishing the sentence, ‘we’ll be fifty per cent there.’
‘She’s upset about Nicolas, I expect.’
‘Yeah.’
‘She said she was only joking.’
‘Gilles, she’s carrying on joking, all right. But it’s not what your mother and I would call a joke. Or anyone else. Have you noticed anyone laughing, in this house?’
He looked fierce, all of a sudden, as if the strain of being understanding had been too much for him. He glanced towards the kitchen and called out that he had work to do. There was no reply. He grunted and nodded at me.
‘OK, Gilles?’
‘Yeah.’
He ruffled my hair and then disappeared into the office.
I hung my coat up and went into the kitchen. My mother’s clattering had made a bowl of her new instant tea. The powder dissolved in the rush of hot water from the pan. I let the sweet steam float into my nose.
‘Look,’ she said, picking up the Nestea jar, ‘it’s almost gone.’
‘I like it.’
‘I can see that,’ she smiled. Her eyes were still red, and her nose shiny. She sniffed.
‘It’s better than camomile,’ I said. ‘Camomile always tastes old.’
‘It’s so messy, tea. Blocks the sink. Do you want a slice of lemon?’
I shook my head. My mother had brought back the soluble tea from one of her ordinary shopping trips. The label was half in English, half in French. INSTANT TEA. 100% PURE. THE SOLUBLE INSTAN-TANE. The English word tea played in my head as I read it, refusing to settle down. Oo arre yu? Ah um Gilles. Whar ees ze stashon? Ze stashon ees thar. Our English teacher at school, Madame Royer from Marseilles, didn’t know how to speak English – it sounded nothing like the English words on pop records. She would just give us lists of words and phrases to learn by heart, and I could count up to twenty.
Wan, tooh, zree, fower, vive, seex, saven—
‘It’s so convenient,’ my mother said, sniffing a bit.
She hadn’t broken anything, in fact. That was good. There was a picture of a sailing ship and a twig with leaves on the Nestea jar. I imagined pirates with cutlasses in their teeth and a tropical island, the warm sea-breeze on my face. The desire to ask more about Carole had died away. My mother started to wipe the door of the fridge, wiping it into a gleaming pure whiteness, brilliant under the strip-light. The gathering darkness outside seemed to be hiding great sinfulness and sickness, like giant pirates, bloody cutlasses in their rotten teeth.
‘Why was Man created and put into the world?’ my mind murmured to itself. ‘In order to know God, to love Him and serve Him and by this means ascend to Heaven,’ I heard my classmates chant, like robots. It kept the darkness off until my mother pulled the blind down.
The subject of my sister was not brought up again that evening, or the next day. My uncle either had his head down (as he would put it) in the office, or he was out. On Tuesday he drove off early in the morning to Nantes, where there was an important deal to be completed. At school, during the morning break, one of the younger boys slipped on the ice and was knocked out: he looked dead, like my father must have looked, but he wasn’t. After homework, my mother and I watched part of an adventure film set on an aircraft carrier in the future and ate chocolates, finishing a whole tube of Chocorêve. She was worried about the ice on the roads and my uncle having gone off early in the morning, but I told her we’d have heard by now.
‘If what?’
‘If he’d had an accident.’
‘God forbid, dear.’
‘Except if the car was completely burnt out. Then they’d have to use the teeth, which would take more time to identify.’
‘Thank you, Gilles.’
In the middle
of the night I was woken by a crunching sound. The sound was in my dreams and came from a fist scrunching up diamonds. The fist belonged to a schoolmate and we were on an aircraft carrier that flew. The sound continued until it woke me up, but as soon as I was properly awake it vanished. Even so, my heart was beating hard and fast, as if somewhere the sound had frightened me. I let the dream’s images swirl away down the plug-hole, and then went downstairs for a glass of water, hearing a snore through the door of the main bedroom.
Once, a long time ago, I had woken up and walked straight into my parents’ room, still half-asleep, without knocking. There was a moaning sound and I could see grey skin and sheets mixed together, though there was only the light from the corridor. I touched the bed and my mother’s face appeared, horrified to see me, my uncle’s bare back and bottom showing for a moment and then his face, shining with sweat, his hair as messy as my mother’s. They both shouted at me to get straight back to bed, as if I had done something really wrong, the sheet pulled right up to their chins.
I wondered, now, standing in the kitchen with my tumbler of water, if they didn’t find it a bit weird to talk to each other in bed. Adult conversations were often weird, anyway, even when you understood all the words and the grammar – like a nasty Latin translation.
The refrigerator shuddered into life and made my heart jump. I could feel the freeze outside radiating off the kitchen window, the glow above the factories and warehouses making wobbly orange patterns on the frosted-up glass. I thought I heard thumps from somewhere close and felt scared in the darkness, thinking of what my uncle had said about the times we lived in.
I went up again two stairs at a time, but as silently as I could on my tiptoes. I remembered only then that my uncle was in Nantes, not here. I wished he was here, now.
My Dinky Simca’s headlamps glowed softly on the chest of drawers, but didn’t light anything. I wondered if fireflies were any brighter, imagining keeping one as a pet to scare away deadly night thoughts. Thoughts like the thought of the sun on the other side of the world, suddenly going wrong with just six minutes to go and millions of steel bolts and bars not being able to keep the catastrophe out.
Then I fell deeply asleep.
Luckily, as it turned out.
9
My uncle had some strange habits.
For instance, his coffee often had to be reheated; it wasn’t hot enough the first time. My mother would reheat it to scalding, careful not to let it boil – and then he’d wait until it was cooled right down to drink it. My mother never questioned this. Maybe she didn’t notice how stupid it was. He drank this morning coffee out of a big yellow bowl, into which he would always drop three sugar lumps. The rest of the day (if he was at home), he would drink his coffee in a normal little espresso cup – into which he would drop three lumps again, stirring it just as carefully. I wondered how he could put up with the difference in sweetness.
He drank Byrrh after breakfast. Byrrh was advertised as an aperitif, with a picture of Bacchus holding a bunch of grapes, but my uncle would always take a glass or two directly after breakfast and never (at home, at least) before lunch or supper. He said it was medicinal and that the quinquina cleaned out the stomach. A house at the end of the road had a huge white BYRRH sign painted on its side wall from top to bottom, like a slash. My uncle remembered it being done by a man on a long ladder before I was born. It was now faded. He’d salute this sign each time we passed it, even on the way to church; he’d then say, patting his stomach, ‘Stops the rust, stops the rust, chum.’
I was desperate to have an advertisement painted on the side of our house, or even on the front – Marilyn holding the vacuum cleaner didn’t count: her face was now streaked by black from the tarred roof and a bigger metal swing door had lopped off her left hand. I was very jealous of a boy at school whose bedroom window was in the middle of the D in MAZDA, done to look as if the letters were sticking out, casting shadows. But our house had a rough browny finish and cement-framed windows, was not in the right position and had no wall high or huge enough.
He had one really strange habit, even stranger than his coffee or his Byrrh: he’d paste up next week’s weather on a board in his office every Sunday morning. The real weather was almost always completely different, though. He was just guessing. Here’s a real example:
Monday: ‘It looks like rain.’
Tuesday: ‘Floods – take care!’
Wednesday: ‘As in the days of our youth: sun.’
Thursday: ‘Drizzle from time to time.’
He would even include monsoons and mosquitoes and hurricanes, which I took to be a joke. The other joke was the word temps, which always appeared each day somewhere in the sentence [‘Le temps est à la pluie’; ‘Inondations – at-temps-tion!’; ‘Comme au temps de ma jeunesse: soleil’; ‘Des petites gouttes de temps en temps’]. It was like a school grammar exercise, where one word would be used in different combinations. It wasn’t really like my uncle at all, to do this.
When the day was over, he would put a tick against it, or sometimes a cross. If he was away for a day or two, he would still tick or cross them on his return, but these marks never agreed with the actual weather. This is his hobby, I thought, like his betting on the horses or his motor-racing magazines.
I had asked him the previous summer, when sitting quietly in his office, what his ‘weather chart’ was for. It was boiling hot outside but the chart said, ‘Temps-érature moins que jamais: ça glisse!’
He chuckled throatily and said, ‘It’s my little game.’
‘Why is it a game?’
‘If I don’t do it, it’s bad luck. The house’ll burn down. I’ll crash the car. You’ll fall off your bike. Your mother’ll become a nun. Your sister’ll marry an Arab. Some bastard’ll invent a way of cleaning without a vacuum.’
‘By laser beams,’ I suggested.
‘Probably.’
He looked at the chart; there was sadness in his face and the hand holding his cigarette trembled more than usual.
‘It started as a game, Gilles. A game. This game, in Algeria. In the desert. Not much weather there, just hot and cold and sun and moon. You were fried in the day and frozen at night. So we invented our own. Our own weather.’
He paused, drawing deeply on his cigarette and letting the smoke leak out of his mouth, forming a kind of veil in front of his face.
‘Well,’ he went on, ripping the veil with his hand, ‘we wrote it out on a piece of card in the billet. Pinned it up by the door. It always had to have a certain word in it, to get our brains whirring a bit. You know which one?’
‘Of course I do, Papa,’ I said, rolling my eyes.
‘Right. Fine. So then. One of us’d say, at the end of some bloody awful day, sweat running off his face like a shower, “Oh shit, it didn’t snow after all. Wrong again. Bloody meteorologists.” Ruder than that, of course, but you’ll only go repeating it to your mother. Crazy game, made us laugh. We laughed a lot, inventing the weather like we were back home. Craving it. Desperate, you see. All we wanted was wet. Wet pavements, soggy grass, a nice grey ceiling outdoors. Mud, even. Us four or five mates, we were all from the north. Calais, even, one of us. You see? Algeria. Alge-ri-a.’
He looked at me without looking at me, his eyes were so glazed. They reminded me of Carole’s when she was dancing. He sighed, as if he’d just picked up something heavy.
‘Right, lost all my mates I did it with, Gilles. Ambushed, a week or two after we stopped the game. Just a week or two after. Five days, maybe. We stopped the game, like one does stop games. Bored with it. And then, a few days later …’ He swept the air with his hand. ‘Ambush. Like it wasn’t a coincidence. Very nasty ambush. All my mates, all of them. Ripped to shreds, left behind for the bastards to do what they did with you if you were dead or not even dead. I’d got my leave a couple of days before. Again, coincidence.’
He scratched his nose with his thumb, wrinkling up his face around it.
‘I hope you’
ll never have that in your life, chum. Not once, not twice.’
He swallowed.
‘I met this white Russian, years back. Lost everything, she had. Stinky little apartment in Belleville, now. She said everyone has the same amount of bad luck, only it can come in one big dollop or in little bits all your life. Depends what you mean by bad luck, eh? Lightning can strike the same spot twice.’
I nodded, not really understanding.
‘What was I, twenty? And your dad not much older. Though he wasn’t with me in Algeria, he was back in civvies by then, falling for your mother. Twenty, that’s all I was. Twenty.’
‘What did they do with you?’
‘Eh?’
‘When you were dead, or not even dead?’
‘What did they do with you?’ he repeated, and drew on his cigarette, his eyes screwing up as if he was blinded by the sun in the desert again. ‘What did they do with you?’
He was wondering whether to tell, I could see. His eyes unscrewed and he was staring at me, in fact, so I looked down at his desk. M. Alain Gobain on the aluminium block; Sylvia Lopez smiling in the ashtray; the rotating dates in the skull’s eye-sockets; the tube of Baume Sloan for foot-cramp. He got up and went over to the window, separating the slats of the blind with his fingers and peering out, as if there might be someone spying in the road.
Then he turned round and faced me.
‘They cut off your …’
He made a chopping motion in front of his trousers.
‘Then put it in here.’
He pointed to his mouth. I pulled a face.
‘Only don’t go telling your mother,’ he ordered, coming back to the desk.
‘Did they do that to you?’ I said, without thinking.
He laughed very loudly, crushing the cigarette on Sylvia Lopez’s big smile. I felt very stupid as he went on laughing. I hadn’t meant to say it; it was probably because I didn’t really believe him.
‘Not yet, chum, not yet.’
So, on the day of the robbery, after the flicks had been and gone, I checked what he’d put on the weather chart: