by Adam Thorpe
Giuseppina didn’t look anything like Jocelyne, and yet I had that same warm feeling in my stomach. I liked lying on my stomach gazing at Giuseppina gazing back at me – thinking that, although she had been dead just over a hundred years, she could still see me and like me enough to want to marry me. And then I thought how little I knew Jocelyne (really, just a few hours’ worth) and how much less I knew this girl. In fact, not knowing much about these two girls made them even more beautiful. I didn’t know anything about girls, really. The ones my age coming out of their school in Chàtillon looked like women. They’d laugh at us through the gate: all of my year were still in short trousers. This girl, and Jocelyne – I could think of them in a different way, somehow.
I pictured them in turn in the little Austro-something village in the Coppélia story. I’d pictured this village as looking like the one in Alsace on our PTT 1968 calendar, with beams and cobbles and red flowers in the windows. I wished I could live in Swanilda’s village for real.
I heard a car stop in front of the house, and then my mother’s voice in the hallway. Relief flowed through me like a warm drink. I squirmed my way forward from the edge of the bed until I was exactly balanced, the edge of the mattress on my tummy-button, my arms out like wings. I was just keeping myself from falling with my legs pressed to the mattress. It was like finding the fulcrum point in maths.
I was on the edge of the highest cliff on Planet X.
I rocked slightly over the precipice, over the incredible yawning chasm – until half a millimetre’s shift forward had me plunging with a terrible, silent YAAAAAAAAIIIIIIII!!! all the way down onto Giuseppina Bozzacchi, creasing the page by mistake. I lay there, dead, my face horribly smashed, my legs twisted and broken, my hand gripping nothing but the purple mists of the planet.
Somebody was shouting. My eyes flickered open.
I got up, smoothed out the page, shut the book and slipped it back under the bed. Then I put the slippers back in the Meccano drawer, under the SS books and the pine twig and the lift. The lift had been good when it worked. There was a rich boy at school called Philippe whose father had gone mad on Meccano: he was building a huge shipyard with derricks and cranes in the attic that could be lit up and operated electrically. Philippe was only allowed to play with his own Meccano if his father was with him. One day, Philippe said, I could come round to his house when his stupid father was out and have a go with the shipyard.
I put the lift back and crept out onto the landing. My mother was shouting about sardines, and my uncle was shouting back. They were having a row. It rang around the house as I stood there. I was listening in case it grew as serious as some of the rows described on Menie Grégoire’s programme, when fists and chairs and even knives were thrown.
They were in the sitting-room. I was afraid for the glass table. I had read in one of my mother’s magazines about a child who’d bled to death after climbing onto the glass and falling through.
It was a bad row, too, from the sound of it. My mother was screaming and yelling, though I couldn’t hear any of the words. There were bangs and sudden silences and a low booming which was my uncle, shouting back. I stood on the landing, feeling I was part of a weird fairy story, everything seeming a bit unreal. Even the picture on the wall, of a pretty farm and some cows, that had always been there … I couldn’t make it seem normal.
I sat on the floor with my back against the wall and looked down through the bars of the banister. Suddenly there was an even worse scream and my mother appeared, rushing along the corridor to the kitchen. She was in her white exercise outfit, her white gym shoes flashing below her hair. Then my uncle appeared, striding after her. His cigarette smoke rose up towards me and then twisted suddenly as if in a wind.
‘Come here!’ he shouted.
I crept down the stairs, one by one. By craning my head over the banisters, I could just see into the kitchen. My mother and uncle were wrestling with each other. They were each holding onto a spray canister above their heads, just like children fighting over a toy.
I recognised the canister, from its red and yellow stripes, as the one my mother would clean the oven with, spraying the inside when it was still warm and then leaving it for a few minutes while a sour chemical smell filled the kitchen. Gigi said this smell was worse than mustard-gas. The spray ate away at the deposits of food and grease, lathering them into white stuff to be wiped off easily with a damp sponge. It was a ‘good invention’, my mother would say.
My uncle had a good hold on the canister, but my mother was struggling to peel away his fingers. They weren’t saying anything. All I could hear were grunts and some panting. Then there was a sudden hiss and a creamy streak appeared on my uncle’s face, across his mouth and nose. He let go of the canister and swore badly, clutching his face. The canister had sprayed him – I imagined the product eating away at his flesh, smoking and bubbling as he clutched at it. He rushed to the sink, swearing and spitting. He turned on the tap and put his face under it. My mother seemed surprised: she was holding the canister and watching him wash his face with her mouth wide open.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked.
‘Trying to kill me, is that it? Trying to fucking blind me?’
‘Stop it. Stop shouting and swearing, Alain. I wasn’t trying anything. I was only trying to clean the oven.’
‘I’ll fucking clean it! I said, I’ll fucking clean it myself!’
‘Perhaps you ought to try finishing the ceiling tiles first!’ my mother shouted back.
They looked at each other like cowboys in a draw, my uncle’s face dripping water onto his shirt as he dabbed his mouth with a tea-towel. He sat down with a thump, as if suddenly exhausted.
‘It’s only fucking sardines. It’s not worth trying to kill me over.’
‘I wasn’t.’
‘It’s only fucking sardines.’
‘I won’t have that language, Alain. You and your drink—’
He brought his fist down on the table with a crash, making the saltcellar jump and fall over. My mother jumped, too. It was violent, but it was sad as well, because he didn’t say anything, or make any other sound. At least, I thought, he hadn’t brought his fist down on Maman’s head. She tutted and righted the salt-cellar, sweeping the salt into her hand and throwing it into the pedal-bin.
‘Sardines are the worst,’ she went on, as if nothing had happened. ‘Everything’ll taste of sardines for the next eight days. It’s like herring. You have to do it straightaway—’
‘I can’t do anything, can I?’ he said, quietly, staring at the salt-cellar. ‘I can’t even have sardines for supper without you bellowing at me like a pregnant cow.’
‘Do you mind?’
She turned the chrome knob on the oven as if she was twisting its nose.
‘Somebody has to make this house run,’ my mother said, blinking rapidly. ‘Somebody has to bother. Obviously I can’t go out to work. Obviously going out to work to help make ends meet is where it all goes wrong. I can’t, obviously—’
‘If your son helped a bit more—’
‘My son? Oh, he’s just my son, is he, when it suits you?’
‘Shut up, woman, and put that thing down.’
‘Don’t you order me about! Don’t you dare order me about!’
She was brandishing the canister at him, though her thumb wasn’t on the nozzle; I could see the name Zebo above her knuckles, appearing as in an advertisement. This wouldn’t make a very good advertisement, in fact.
My uncle just sat there and stared down at the table, as if petrified in stone. Then I noticed little ripples at the end of his jaw. He was losing, but I didn’t feel sorry for him. He had suggested that I was lazy. This upset me much more than the business about me not being his son, which was at least true. I wanted to creep away, but at the same time the row fascinated me. It was the first row of theirs I had watched properly. The others, not many of them anyway, had just been muffled noises heard from my bed.
A motorcycle, w
ith its silencer removed, screamed past on the road. It did this most evenings at the same time, just when I was going to bed on school days. It made my mother look towards the kitchen door. I whipped my head back.
‘Gilles?’
I crept up the stairs and made it onto the landing as she appeared in the hallway. She again called my name, in a harder tone, as I disappeared into my room, closing the door as softly as I could, my heart beating away like a hunted animal’s. Had she seen me? Well, obviously she had.
I waited, fingering the tissue on my plane’s wings and fuselage. It was like the chrysalis of a cicada one of the boys in my class had brought back from Provence last year and which we were all allowed to touch. I realised I was grinding my teeth, thinking of how the dentist had said I would wear them to nothing if I went on like that. I could think of nothing to do, I was bored, yet it was still too early for bed.
I could do some Meccano, I thought. I could have another go at the lift.
I opened the special drawer and took the ballet slippers and the pine twig and the SS books out and pulled at the jumble of metal struts and girders and cogs and green string. Then I heard the television, suddenly, chattering from the sitting-room. My uncle would be slumped in front of it, shoes off, feet perched on the glass table next to a tumbler of something stronger than Byrrh, staring at the screen as if staring into space.
The row was over.
I found my Meccano screwdriver and started reconstructing the lift. I used my toy-cupboard’s shelves as the department store’s floors and set the lift’s shaft against them. The metal cage of the lift was supposed to be winched up and down, but the string was in knots and the cogs and wheels were all wrong. I started to get furious with myself because yet again it was not as good as I’d imagined it.
After half of an hour of this, I went out to brush my teeth in the bathroom, that everything was normal. My mother was coming up the stairs as I opened the bathroom door. I nodded at her and went into the bathroom. I unscrewed the toothpaste top and placed it as I did each morning and night over the end bit of the metal bracket that held the glass shelf: it was a superstition.
My mother’s head and shoulders loomed up in the mirror. She placed her hands on my shoulders. She smelt slightly of rubber mats and sweat from the gym, mixed up with Zebo.
‘Do try to be more helpful in the house, dear.’
I felt a sort of angry explosion in my chest. I made a face, my lips hidden in toothpaste foam.
‘I did all the washing-up,’ I said, the words splashy and unclear, like a mental defective’s. I stared into my own eyes, not hers, watching myself as if I was on television. ‘He didn’t do anything.’
‘Who’s he?’
‘The man from Planet X,’ I murmured.
I swilled my mouth out and spat, making white streaks in the basin. She let go of my shoulders. Despite the fact that what I really wanted was for her to hug me, I was quite relieved.
‘We’ve all got our worries, you know,’ she sighed.
She went across into the toilet opposite the bathroom, leaving both the doors open. I watched as she pulled on the pink rubber gloves that hung on the toilet pipe. She looked like another person in her keep-fit clothes – I wasn’t used to it. They didn’t really suit her. The toilet was so narrow that she banged the walls with her elbows, pulling the gloves on.
‘When you think what we had to put up with, at your age. Learning German, for instance. In my own country. I had to read German books and our street had a new German name and then there was the slop-bucket I had to chuck out each night, you know, Gilles, every night. And making sure my little sisters had a bit of bread to eat each day, horrible black bread worse than sawdust. Dread to think what was in it. Terribly thin, we were. Oh, but we grew up very fast. You had to, dear. No time to be children. Whether there’s enough food to eat, whether you can stay alive from one day to the next. Who to trust. Shot or bombed or starved. Kicked out of your home like Papa and the others were. Big worries, we had. Gilles?’
‘Yes.’
Her voice had calmed me down. She was changing the rose toilet freshener. It hung in a plastic cage inside the rim of the WC, and was a white pastille. The old one was as small as a sucked sweet. Perhaps that’s what she meant by helping. But I hadn’t noticed it needed changing. I’d need to go on a special course, like you did for woodwork, to notice things like that.
‘Of course, one did trust in God,’ she was saying, as if it wasn’t obvious. ‘Went to church every day, through thick and thin, even if just for a few minutes. That’s what kept me going.’
She was looking at me from the narrow toilet, blinking rapidly behind her Nana Mouskouri glasses. The used freshener between her finger and thumb looked just like a valuable jewel.
‘I used to dream of being in the Little Singers of the Wooden Cross, but I was a girl. Lovely voices,’ she went on, chucking the used freshener in the WC and peeling off the rubber gloves with a sucking noise. ‘I heard them on the radio. Very nice melodies.’
Her face had gone dreamy. I waited by the bathroom door, desperate for her to go out of the toilet so that I could have a pee.
‘You musn’t take these disagreements seriously, you know, dear.’
‘I did the washing-up,’ I said.
It sounded pathetic.
‘I know, I know,’ she sighed. She came back past me into the bathroom and started washing out the tooth-glass. ‘We’ve got all the invitations to do, you know. It’s less than a month away.’
‘Who’s coming?’
‘Oh, all the family. We’ll be far too many.’ She gave the toothbrushes a rinse, rubbing them with her fingers, and dropped them back in the glass.
‘All the people who were there for Mamie’s memorial thing?’
‘And a few more, I expect. It wasn’t a thing, Gilles. Carole’s one cost a fortune. We even had posh menus with gold lettering and look how she’s thanked us.’
She glanced at me, but I was dreaming. I hadn’t thought of Jocelyne coming to my Communion.
‘Is Carole coming?’
‘Only if she’s better. She’s getting better. She didn’t say anything funny last time, did she? Only that business about thinking twice before switching on the tumble-dryer. That wasn’t too peculiar, was it?’
‘No.’
She was giving the sink’s bowl a rub with the sponge, getting rid of my white streaks.
‘Papa saved me, you know, after Henri passed away so suddenly. I was in an awful state. Do you remember me being in an awful state?’ she asked, as if she was asking me what colour car they had.
‘Not really.’
‘You’ve put it away in some dark drawer. But he did save me.’
I nodded, still dreaming. I was worrying now, about the white alb – appearing in front of Jocelyne wearing a long white alb. It made boys look like girls, or even worse.
My mother took my face in her hands and kissed me on the forehead, suddenly.
‘Don’t let us down, Gilles,’ she said. ‘Please don’t let us all down.’
I had the weird feeling, my face almost squashed between her hands, that she was staring at a picture of me, and not at me. Then she let my face go and took down from the glass shelf a tube of her Ixennol slimming lotion.
‘I’ll come and say goodnight, dearest,’ she said.
She went out with her Ixennol.
I stood there for a moment, completely still, my face smelling of wet sponge. Then I went across into the toilet, closing the door behind me, and peed deliberately against the new rose pastille in its cage, thinking how stupid I’d look in my long white alb, clutching my candle in front of me and walking past Jocelyne and her frightening parents, trying not to let everybody down. The new pastille’s perfume was sickeningly strong, like a chemist’s shop.
My pee splashed onto the rim of the WC, leaving big drops. I decided not to clean it. Then I tore off some squares of toilet paper and wiped the rim dry. My mother now bought soft pink
toilet tissue instead of the grey sort that was like shiny greaseproof paper. This new tissue seemed to dissolve when it touched the drops, leaving mushy strands a bit like blood. I had to wipe off these with an old Kleenex in my pocket. I kept imagining my mother with the slop-bucket, the German soldiers fighting from house to house, people being shot and bombs falling – all in black-and-white. And I pictured the Alsace soldiers in our house, pissing into the fireplace that was now blocked up and trampling over vegetables in the orchard and running up and down the stairs, shouting. It must have been weird, I thought, having other people using your home.
Back in my bedroom, with the door closed, I tucked the ballet slippers under my bolster. For a long time I had missed cuddling my threadbare rabbit, when going to sleep. Now my hand found itself under the cool bolster, resting on the slippers.
The television yelped and quacked softly through the floor as I lay there in bed, with my eyes open. I was thinking about the long-ago ballerina’s bare arms and Jocelyne in her soft frilly shirt and Carole in her satin slippers dancing up to the day my father collapsed in the showroom so long ago, and how things that had actually happened didn’t always feel more real than things that had never happened but were only imagined.