by Adam Thorpe
‘To fall to snow’s share.’ [‘Temps-ber en partage à la neige.’]
It was quite like the poems we learnt by rote at school: Verlaine’s, for instance. It was too cold for snow, though: it was a moonless but cloudless night, which the police said had been well chosen, even though the road was shiny with ice. Perhaps even the iciness was a part of the plot, to make the chase harder. It certainly meant no bus, and therefore no school.
The main metal ‘loading’ door had been forced, the kingbolt ripped off by an iron jemmy. All the stock had been taken, including the demo models – Chou, Bouboule, Cacao and all the rest. A cat had got in and peed on the lino; we had thought at first it was one of the robbers, and this had upset my mother more than the disappearance of the stock. You could see the lorry’s tracks in the broken ice on the side of the showroom. The floor was brown and slippery around the door.
The police asked us if we had heard anything. I shook my head, not wanting to mention the crunching noise in my dream. Meanwhile, my mother was trying to contact my uncle, who was still in Nantes. She was not, of course, in a good state.
‘Supposing our insurance is not in order?’
‘What’s insurance, exactly?’
She explained, adding that I ought to have known this at the age of twelve.
‘Nearly thirteen,’ I said.
She assumed we were insured, of course, but she knew how ‘pernickety’. these insurance companies could be. She said it all through the day: ‘So pernickety’. At about seven in the evening, my uncle phoned from Nantes. My mother had left the office door open, so we could hear the telephone ring. Although it didn’t ring very often, its loud drilling noise would always make me jump if I was nearby.
Standing in the hallway, heart thumping, I could hear his low quacks. My mother was terrified he would drop dead on hearing the news. I knew that he wouldn’t, but didn’t say so.
‘He’s coming straight back,’ she said. ‘I do hope he doesn’t rush.’
‘Why should he?’
We were standing in the showroom, now. It was dark outside, the neon strips making it very bright and clear within. The showroom was stripped to the bone. Only the desk remained, the papers and files swept over the floor; and the rubber plant, broken in two like a flag on a battlefield; and the cardboard woman flat on the lino, her eyes still following me underneath a footprint. It must have been a big lorry, to have taken all the stock. All the demo models. All my aliens, all my men: le Grand Caïd, Chou, Petit Jean, Bouboule, all of them gone.
‘It’s his life,’ said my mother. ‘It’s his whole life. He works so hard.’
I pictured my uncle with sweat-drops shooting from his head, hammering away at a typewriter, papers flying about.
‘Who would do this to us? So many evil people about. You only need to read the paper. I hope he doesn’t have an accident. He’ll be ever so worked up,’ she went on, between deep draws of her cigarette. ‘I ought to ring Mademoiselle Bolmont, let her know. But I can’t face it. Anyway, it’ll only upset her. Her health being fragile.’
There was a pause I didn’t feel like filling, in which I pictured Mademoiselle Bolmont looking pale and fragile at the other end of the phone.
‘Like a pack of cards,’ my mother said. ‘It can all come down in one go, you see. One thing leading to another.’
She coughed, as if the smoke had caught in her throat: she had started smoking mint cigarettes as (according to the magazines) top English fashion models did, and she wasn’t used to them.
‘Like that brand-new building, the one that collapsed. Oh, which road, you know, dear, Boulevard Lefebvre, that’s it, near my cousin’s with the load of money. Second cousin, really, with the clever daughter, the pretty blonde one, very spoilt of course. She heard it, she said. It made the hall mirrors shake in their frames, she said – Geneviève said. I phoned her up to check she was all right. I expect she’ll phone me up, now, if she’s a true Christian. That’s what I thought of straightaway, when I saw this. What she said. “All the hall mirrors shook in their frames.” Expensive, the glass in them, too. Her father’s money, Geneviève’s. Made it in zinc during the Great War. Though we don’t mention that, because we’re all supposed to believe she’s from aristocratic origins. That’s what I thought of, straightaway. You can see the zinc in her, Alain always said.’
Her voice had gone higher, her whole body faintly imitating a posh Parisienne, the type with furs and a poodle in a tweed jacket.
‘Was zinc invented then?’
‘How do I know?’ she snapped. ‘It must have been, mustn’t it?’
When I’d found the showroom completely empty, after breakfast that morning, I had thought of something the man in the homburg hat had said; It won’t be one-hundred-per-cent quiet. Now it did feel one-hundred-per-cent quiet.
It was a very bright morning following the moonless and cloudless night – very cold, too. I’d wanted to try the Dinky Simca again, in the showroom, exhilarated by having no school. Since the man in the homburg had admired the Simca, I felt less childish playing with Dinky toys, even in the day. I’d opened the door and there were blinding patches of sunlight on the floor. This was normal on a sunny morning, the patches always looking wet. The plate-glass window seemed bigger, though, streaked with dirt picked out by the sunlight. The floor was enormous, a bit like a public swimming-pool. I’d stopped dead, my hand still on the knob. There was a streak of light under the metal swing door. It was slightly open. The floor was enormous because it was empty.
No industrial vacuum cleaners. They had all run away.
For the first time in my life, I could see the back wall. It was smudgy with black cobwebs and painted roughly in pink, except for a rectangle of bare brick that must have been a cupboard, once. The pink was the same pink as the concrete porch over the front door, only not peeling. I was surprised to see a small rectangular window, grey with dirt and cobwebs, quite high up. I realised for the first time that you could see that window in the wall outside: I had never made the connection, even though there’d been a cardboardy brown just visible through the dirty glass.
The cut-out of the woman lay on the floor, like a dead body. The taste of bread and jam and hot chocolate from breakfast was in my mouth. The cleared floor would be even better for my Dinky toys, I thought. Stupidly.
I opened the door wide and it knocked against something which made a clanging noise on the tiles: an iron bar, curled at one end. Then, like a raygun fired at my forehead, it hit me. I knew that houses and shops and offices and warehouses were always at risk of burglars, just as I knew that children were always at risk of kidnappers. But these risks were nothing to do with us; they happened, as my mother would say, ‘to others’ – whom you were sorry for and prayed for in church and felt warm and nice doing so. Now we were the others, or the others were us.
The quietness was loud. The forced door, the broken plant, the papers scattered on the floor, the iron bar lying on the lino near the cardboard cut-out woman smiling away as her eyes still watched me, even these were not as loud as the stillness. It seemed to be waiting to trap me, to explode like the mines I’d read about, which were sensitive to a footfall. It had all happened in the night, silently and as if humans hadn’t been involved. That was the worst of it; I could not imagine people behind this. Only ghosts, or an evil alien race with green eyes, lasering everything out.
My mother was polishing her shoes in the kitchen when I hurtled in, panting.
‘I think you should come and see the showroom.’
‘Why?’
She looked up, already anxious.
‘All the stuff’s disappeared.’
‘Disappeared?’
‘Robbers, I think.’
‘No.’
‘Yes. It’s not a joke. It’s real.’
‘Oh my God,’ she said, after a pause. ‘No.’
‘Yes. Real robbers.’
‘Oh no.’
Her eyes were popping out of her head alr
eady – but I did feel better, saying it.
I felt excited, even. While my mother stood there in the showroom with the shoebrush in her hand like a gun, shoe-polish streaked on her face, and wondered where it would all end.
I tried to reassure her, later, as she smoked away in the kitchen and went on about my uncle not being there and saying how she’d end up like the women who phoned up Menie Grégoire.
‘In fact, I’m going to phone her up tomorrow. You’ll see.’
‘Menie Grégoire on the radio?’
‘Yes.’
‘Don’t speak in your real voice,’ I said.
‘You can’t tell the voice, it’s always a bad line or I’m sure they do something to it.’
‘You’re not really going to, are you?’
‘That’s my business,’ she snapped, getting up and dribbling Harpic onto the sink cloth. ‘I can if I want to. I don’t care, I’ll do it. See if I don’t. Just see if I don’t.’
She seemed to mean it, I thought, as she rubbed angrily at the sink’s metal.
‘I’m not in that suspended animation of yours,’ she added. ‘Oh no. Never you fear!’
I wasn’t sure if she was talking to me, or to someone else in the room. Although there wasn’t anyone else in the room.
I had listened a few times to Menie Grégoire’s radio programme, with my mother. It was about people’s problems, although it was mostly women who called. Their husbands drank too much or were unfaithful or simply didn’t care enough about them. When they mentioned ‘physical love’ or ‘sexual relations’ my mother would tut and blink quickly but carry on listening, pulling hard on her cigarette. I didn’t know what it meant to be ‘unfaithful’, or not to see eye to eye ‘on the sexual level’, but the programme was still quite interesting.
Now I wondered how she would put her own problems, and even tried to think how Menie Grégoire would help in that nice, motherly voice of hers.
I stood again in the chilly, neon-lit showroom with my mother that evening and thought: today has been what my uncle would call ‘phenomenal’. He’s on his way back from Nantes. My mother is wringing her hands, just as in a film. But he knows. He probably knows it all, like God knows. I don’t have to be Inspecteur Leclerc to work that one out. But my mother doesn’t know. And she’s suffering because she doesn’t know. Maybe she would suffer even more if she did know. I’m not suffering; I’m enjoying it, despite the fact that my army had been wiped out in one go. There must be a good reason for my uncle letting himself be robbed on purpose, I thought: he’s clever, he knows a lot about things, he wouldn’t be so stupid as to let himself be robbed without a reason.
At supper we put our hands together and my mother said a little prayer that seemed to press God against the wall.
The next day there was still no school: the ice hadn’t melted. After lunch, at the right time, I lay on my sister’s bed and switched on the big old valve wireless. I turned the dial to Radio Luxembourg. The busy voices covered those of my mother and my uncle downstairs that were flaring up into a row after he’d got back safely from Nantes. Menie Grégoire’s voice came on and my heart tightened, my face flushing as if I was about to go up and receive the Host. I was sure my mother would phone Menie. The first letter was from a seventeen-year-old girl who loved her fiancé’s brother more than her fiancé.
Madame, I love François but Marcel wants to marry me. Marcel is the brother of François. So I prefer his brother, who doesn’t know I love him. What can I do?
I tried to picture this girl but could only see, as usual, a pinkish shape in a cloud, like an angel. Then there was a real phone call, from a woman whose husband had just told her that he was a father in another house. She was in tears, of course, with a tiny voice like a little girl’s, but Menie calmed her down. The woman kept saying, So you think I should just carry on and wait for things to get better, Menie? And Menie had to say, several times, No, I didn’t say that, madame. I said that you haven’t really tried to get to the bottom of things.
So you think I should let his parents know?
No, madame, Menie said, without sounding annoyed, I didn’t say that. Anyway, he’s not a little boy, your husband, and he did actually come up and tell you all about it.
So, the woman continued, her voice like a whispering little girl’s over the bad line, you think I shouldn’t leave him because we need to talk about it, then, just me and him?
There didn’t seem to be any calls or letters that fitted my mother’s problems; in fact, since she’d been talking with my uncle for at least an hour, it wouldn’t have been possible for her to have telephoned the radio.
I listened to the evening repeats each day for the next week, just in case. She could have written, of course, but I reckoned she’d place her question by phone. The whole time I listened, I was flushed and sweaty and my heart thumped.
Only one letter might have fitted – from a woman in a southern suburb of Paris:
I am in my forties, madame, with three children. One of my children is handicapped. My husband travels all the time and he drinks to calm himself. He comes home and I desire him a lot and he desires me, but I can never make my desire concrete. I need more time. When I told him about this he got very upset.
This letter then went on about doctors and hormones and ‘sexual relationships’, which I didn’t really understand, before saying that her husband had given up and gone off last week with another woman to New Caledonia. I was very relieved that it wasn’t from my mother. I saw the husband coming home and the wife going towards him and being unable to hug him, like two magnets on the same poles, then the husband flying off through the air to New Caledonia.
It startled me to hear children’s letters and calls one day. The worst was from a boy three years younger than myself: I’m very unhappy here, Madame Menie. People only speak on the stairs. Maman doesn’t know anyone so I play card games with her on Sunday but I want to play with other boys. We don’t know where Papa is. I want to live in Paris because I can see the River Seine and have a dog. Balls are not allowed here. On the grass you pay a fine.
I thought of this boy stuck with his mother high up in a block of flats and me down here on Carole’s bed, and wished we could play together.
I listened to the show on my sister’s wireless whenever I could. I would lie back on the soft, springy bed and gaze at the poster of the Beatles on the opposite wall and at the little snapshots of Carole stuck on her wardrobe door. She was always smiling and looked much younger. There was incense, Turkish tobacco and the smell of her cotton dressing-gown still floating a tiny bit in the air – Menie Grégoire’s voice somehow mixed up with it. With a sudden jolt I realised that I could write or call, too, like the nine-year-old boy stuck with his mother in the block of flats. And I would compose the letter carefully in my head, rolling the words around until I almost made myself cry with their sadness:
Dear Menie,
I live in Bagneux, near Paris. My sister is in a mental ward because she got nervously depressed. She likes to dance in the nude, in front of people! My mother had my baby brother, but he has a very bad fault in his brain and is in a special home. My father isn’t my real father, he’s my uncle and he drinks quite a lot. He’s taken me fishing only once. My real father slipped over on a wet floor and died in 1960, when I was five. My other sister Nathalie died after one day, before I was born.
We have been robbed of all our stock of industrial vacuum cleaners, but I think it’s my uncle who’s done it.
What should I do?
And Menie Grégoire’s sweet voice would soothe me like cream on a wasp-sting or a mouth-ulcer or a cut. It was a bit like going to confession, only ten times better.
There seemed to be more things wrong with my family when I lumped it all together like that than when I just thought about it normally – like confession, again, lumping your sins together. I wondered if our family was abnormal, so I pretended I was Christophe writing a letter.
Dear Menie,
What should I do?
It sounded almost as bad as my family, so I felt better.
All I had to do was write, or even phone. Dear Madame Menie … And that made the programme even more dangerous. I liked this feeling of danger, which was one reason I kept putting off the letter. It was a little like knowing what I suspected about the robbery and finding myself next to my uncle, eating with him or watching television with him or sitting quietly in his office while he worked.
‘You’re very pensive, chum.’
‘Just thinking.’
‘Precisely. Like I said.’
When he was being asked questions by the police in the morning, after he’d driven back by night from Nantes, I felt almost as if I had no clothes on. My uncle looked terrible, of course, because he hadn’t slept, but underneath I could see he wasn’t feeling terrible at all, but nervous.
I wondered if the policemen could see this. At first they all chatted about how much better it was to drive by night. You could pass through sleeping villages in peace, there was no danger of getting stuck behind a lorry or a horse-and-cart or a herd of cows, it was much safer at crossroads. The older policeman tapped his finger on the kitchen table and said that it saved on petrol because you braked and accelerated less, at night. You could cross the country by night, he said, on less than a couple of tanks.
‘But you need a good pair of headlamps,’ he added. ‘No good without a decent pair of headlamps.’
‘And a flask of strong coffee,’ the other one smiled.
‘Cognac, in my case,’ my uncle joked, offering his cigarettes.