by Adam Thorpe
‘They had to sedate her, just after you left.’
‘Sedate her?’
‘That’s right. She had another bad fit. You don’t understand, Gilles. Her life must be a strict routine. No shocks, no surprises. I’ve told you time and again. She’s very fragile, especially on weekdays after her treatment. Anyway, you lied. You said you were in front of the main church. You weren’t, were you? You lied.’
‘What happens when she has a fit?’
‘Answer your mother,’ my uncle growled.
‘We were there by the time you got here,’ I said.
I was almost annoyed by the way they weren’t including Christophe in any of this, as if it was all my fault. He was hunched up, keeping very still, but with an embarrassed smile on his face.
‘You lied, you actually pretended to be somewhere you weren’t,’ she went on. ‘No doubt Carole said all sorts of wicked things.’
‘No.’
‘How can I believe you?’
‘She didn’t.’
Christophe suddenly broke in with, ‘She didn’t, Madame Gobain.’
There was a silence. My heart thudded away. I’d felt both my parents stiffening when Christophe had broken in, as if they’d forgotten he was there. In that moment, by the way they stiffened, I knew that the wicked things Carole was saying, whatever they were, were true.
‘Didn’t she?’ My mother had turned to face him.
‘No. She just talked about – about her fingers,’ Christophe went on, smiling despite himself, his hands under his thighs.
‘Her fingers?’
‘Being swollen up,’ I said. ‘She can’t do anything, they’re so swollen up.’
‘That’s the drugs,’ said my mother, sounding relieved. ‘Once they get the drugs sorted out, she’ll be much happier. They know what they’re doing. We’ll leave it to the experts, shall we? Leave it to science.’
‘She said she had electric shocks in her head.’
‘She does,’ my uncle said. ‘It’s very effective.’
‘And insulin, so she goes to sleep. And then she wakes up and they’re stroking her like a baby.’
‘Yes,’ said my mother. ‘Insulin treatment. You know that.’
‘It’s true what she was saying, then?’
‘Yes, Gilles. Why shouldn’t it be?’
We were stopped at traffic lights, the windscreen-wipers dully swishing to and fro. My uncle lit a cigarette for my mother on the car’s push-in lighter, and then lit one for himself. He sounded the horn by mistake with his elbow.
‘Where are your bikes?’ he asked.
‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘I could find it in daylight.’
‘So much for the kids of today,’ my uncle sighed, rubbing his nose on the stitching of his driving glove. ‘To think what I was doing at your age. Eh? Not just arsing about and smoking, I can tell you.’
‘Smoking? We haven’t been smoking.’
‘You smell like a tobacco factory, chum. The pair of you. I don’t mind kids smoking as much as I mind kids lying.’
I made a face at Christophe, hunched over his rucksack. My uncle’s eyes were watching me in the driving-mirror.
I wiped the condensation off the side window and stared into the blackness, my throat resting on my knuckles. The red from the traffic light was broken into bits on the rainy glass. I felt broken into bits like the light, into little red bits that squirmed when the raindrops rolled down. The windscreen-wipers thudded almost in time with the blood in my artery, which I could feel through my knuckles. My uncle wondered why the red light was so long and my mother murmured something back in her high voice. The backs of their heads above the seats looked ugly and pleased with themselves. There was dandruff on their collars. I noticed my mother’s hand resting on my uncle’s gloved hand on the gearstick. She gave the leather glove a little squeeze before he moved the gear into first and her hand went up for a moment to her nostrils.
17
‘Have we had any interferences these Easter holidays, boys?’
Père Phare smiled at us with his round and shiny face.
‘No, father,’ we all chorused.
‘Only some promiscuity,’ said a clever boy with staring eyes.
‘What’s that, Jean-Louis?’ Père Phare asked, his head cocked on one side.
‘Only the Promised Land, Father,’ said Jean-Louis, in exactly the same voice.
Père Phare gave the nervous little giggle that was worth ten centimes to anyone who provoked it: Jean-Louis had already accumulated a franc in half an hour. I was lying about sinful interference, of course, and asked God silently for His forgiveness. We were all lying, probably. The priest knew we were lying, I’m sure, but didn’t ever say so, letting us stew in our own guilt.
Some new pictures hung on the walls, done by little kids out of fabric, with felt palm leaves and corduroy donkeys. The old prints had been taken down. The old wooden table had been replaced by a proper Formica one, with books for children-and-young-people on it and a jar of daffodils. There was a strip-cartoon scotched to the Formica surface, about a group visit to Lourdes. I’d liked the old prints because I would travel in and out of them when bored. I couldn’t do this with the kids’ pictures: all I saw were torn-up bits of clothes. This was Père Phare’s fault. He was very modern. My conversation with him by the door, the day before the robbery, made me feel I was a bit special for him, but he hadn’t talked to me since, or treated me differently.
It was now the last Saturday in April. Two weeks to our Solemn Communion.
On the Aspiron 1968 calendar at home, with its picture of a girl dressed in a very short dress with a white collar and holding the flexible tube of a 120 model, May the eleventh had a carefully-drawn red Cross in its rectangle, with GILLES in green ballpoint. As if I’d died. When I thought of my communion, these days, I got butterflies: the red Cross was like something spiky I had to get past. I was, though, keen to be Solemnly Confirmed, to feel grown up. I wished I could do it without having to pass the ceremony on the way: supposing, at the big moment in front of the altar, I got interference and sinned viciously in my thoughts? Père Phare told us that Hell wasn’t like the Hell in the church’s oldest painting, with flames and demons and iron tongs and so on: it was more like being cut off from God inside that football. I didn’t believe him. He was just hiding the truth from us because the truth was too horrible.
Perhaps the Day of Judgement would come between now and the ceremony. There was always a tiny chance.
The one bright spot was the thought of Jocelyne being there – although I was afraid of looking stupid and girlish in the white alb. Sometimes I reckoned it would be better if she wasn’t going to be there at all. I had pretty well given up hope about being invited to Coppélia – today was Saturday and I was pretty sure the performance was next Friday.
The priest’s voice droned on about the Hand of God. I never understood half of what he said. Jean-Louis, the clever boy with staring eyes, whispered to me to put my fists one on top of the other. He pushed them apart with two fingers. Then he put his fists together and I couldn’t separate them, even with the whole of my hand. It was one of his tricks, obviously – I wasn’t that weak.
The priest was drawing a line around his hand, like a cave painting. He wrote ‘palma Christi’ underneath it. He told us this was the name for the castor oil plant, too – and chuckled.
‘I expect you all love castor oil, don’t you?’
A few in the front row with smooth, shiny hair pulled a face and groaned, as we were all supposed to. The rest of us said ‘yes’ in a serious voice. Père Phare looked lost for a moment. Then he found his smile again and told us how pain and suffering were like castor oil: horrible at the time, but ‘ultimately’ good for us. Pain and suffering were the Lord’s castor oil.
‘That’s why factory workers and peasants and poor African people will find it much easier getting into Heaven,’ he said. ‘Their hands will have callouses on them. God will be able to tell immediately, wo
n’t he? Whereas the smooth, podgy hand with clean fingernails will be very differently judged.’
We all looked at our hands. Mine seemed to me much too clean and smooth. My mother made me cut my fingernails each week. One boy among us, from a farm on the outskirts of Bagneux, put his hands up to show everyone how filthy and calloused they were. He was grinning like an idiot.
Père Phare stuck a drawing-pin into the palm of the hand on the blackboard, to symbolise the nail.
‘That’ll leave a hole, Father,’ someone said.
Père Phare had such a soft, high voice that if I didn’t sit in the third row I could never hear what he was saying, and the ones at the back usually talked all the way through. He’d always ask us this thing about sinful interference towards the end. Then he’d go red right up into his stubbled hair, shaved even higher above the ears than Christophe’s. The normally white skin above his ears was sort of corrugated, a bit like Nicolas’s skin at the back of the neck; it seemed to twitch when he got excited. ‘I’m certainly a novice, but with the charm of novelty,’ he would say every week, as if in an advertisement. He smelled of almond soap. Everyone said he wore a hair-shirt and put gravel in his heavy black shoes, and that his real age was fifty-three.
This was not true, though; one day he’d showed us a colour photograph from a Catholic magazine dated 1966 – only two years old. The picture was of himself when he was in the seminary, learning to be a priest: it showed him and some other seminarists larking about on the side of a river, stripped to their underthings and ready to dive in. It was a shock for us to see him virtually naked, and it was our turn to giggle, like girls. Père Phare’s chest, shoulders and legs had looked very weak compared to the others. He’d looked like a snail without its shell. Someone said it was because he was too intelligent.
Most of the communion class had got together and agreed not to laugh at his jokes or his ‘ironic comments’ and to pool centimes for the giggle game. It was Jean-Louis who said this thing about ‘ironic comments’, and he had to explain what it meant. We all respected Jean-Louis because he had a sort of moustache and his voice was completely broken and he was full of these clever tricks and sayings. I’d try now and again to get Père Phare giggling, but only won twenty centimes after about six months. Christophe didn’t win anything, of course, because he wasn’t really there; he’d bring in his new transistor radio, keeping it in his bag, take out an earphone from its leather pouch on his belt and listen to pop music. His head kept nodding up and down in time to the beat as if agreeing with everything Père Phare said.
Now Père Phare was telling us about Doubting Thomas saying he wouldn’t believe the risen Jesus had appeared for real until he had thrust his hand into His side. Faith does not depend on touch. Hands can mislead. As the psalm says: The idols of the heathen are silver and gold, the work of men’s hands. How does the psalm go on? (No one knew, of course, not even Jean-Louis.) They have mouths, but they speak not: eyes have they, but they see not. Without faith, he said, we are like those blind idols, we have to touch and feel everything to know it—
Jean-Louis put his hand up and said that the blind idols couldn’t feel or touch anything, because they weren’t alive, they were just dolls.
‘A very good point,’ said Père Phare, blinking a lot. ‘But I think you understand what I mean. Hands, after all, are human things. We evolved thumbs over millions of years and that makes us very clever with our hands, but cleverness isn’t enough, is it? We may talk about the Hand of God, but of course we don’t need to believe that God has hands like ours.’
Those of us who were listening were a bit puzzled. Even the back row was quiet. I had never thought of God as having anything but hands like a grown-up’s, slightly hairy on the back.
‘Are they like an alien’s hands, then, Father?’ someone asked.
There were some chuckles, but not many.
‘Did the Phar-isees think God had hands, sir?’
Père Phare shook his head. ‘Do we need to think of God as having hands at all, boys? With nails that need cleaning and chapped knuckles and so forth? Perhaps we shouldn’t think of Him as having hands at all, or even—’
‘What, like a kid whose mum took something funny when she was pregnant?’
‘Those ones don’t have arms,’ a boy in the back row said.
The class started discussing this and Père Phare had to raise his voice and then bang a book on the table.
‘We mustn’t be literal, boys, that’s all I’m saying. We aren’t like Christians in the Middle Ages, who thought the Devil had horns and a pitchfork and that angels were just young people floating about in nightdresses with big golden wings.’
‘But they do have wings, Father.’
‘Symbolically, yes. Spiritual wings, wings that are beyond our imagining, wings of the spirit. We picture them so because we all have need of pictures, do you see? We make them in our own image. But that is as near to the real angel as a child’s home-made doll is to her mother.’
Most of us were shaking our heads, not really comprehending. Someone asked him what angels really looked like, if they didn’t look like angels.
‘Boys, you must stop thinking so literally. It’s primitive. It’s childish. It’s what simple people do. For instance, think what St Thomas Aquinas said about God. God is not a thing, a being, but merely His own essence—’
‘Like your football?’
‘Father, is that what angels are like, like footballs?’
Now he had a sort of panicky expression on his face, although he was still smiling; I could see beads of sweat all over his round face. Nobody giggled or snorted: we all pretended to look very serious. He’d just started to reply when Jean-Louis put his hand up.
‘What about Madame Thiebault, Father? She makes angels. You could ask her.’
Père Phare looked as if someone had electrocuted him, except that he went red at the same time. The skin above his ears went purple, in fact. He slammed his hand down on the table and shouted. He shouted at Jean-Louis to get out. But as Jean-Louis got to his feet, Père Phare pushed back his chair and hurried out of the room, slamming the door behind him so that its pane rattled.
The class was completely silent for about a minute. It was terrifying and also embarrassing, seeing Père Phare lose his temper. Jean-Louis was pulling a face, as if he was as confused as we were.
‘Goodness,’ he said, in his usual strange way, ‘so much for empirical verification.’
‘Who’s Madame Thiebault?’
‘An angel maker,’ a boy in the back row said, chuckling.
‘What’s that?’ several of us asked.
About a quarter of the class – the older ones – whistled and hooted at our stupidity.
‘Never mind,’ Jean-Louis said. He was the only one standing up. He put one of his fists on top of the other one and separated them and then put them back together again. ‘Fifty centimes to whoever can separate them,’ he announced. ‘With the fingers of one hand.’
The biggest boy in the class, with huge hands and feet and a harelip, came forward and tried. He grunted and swore with the effort. Then he grabbed Jean-Louis round the waist and started tickling him. Jean-Louis’s fists separated and I saw his thumb slip out of the other fist. Everyone was shouting now, or I’d have given him away.
The bell chimed in the church tower. We all rushed out as usual. Even when Père Phare was there, we’d rush out before he’d given us permission or a blessing. There was no sign of him in the church.
Christophe and I made straight for our old secret place on foot. Because it had taken my uncle a whole morning to find our bikes in the ditch, even with us helping him, we were banned from using them until after our Solemn Communion. Even Christophe’s mobilette had been confiscated by his father.
The transistor was turned up loud. People passing us kept frowning.
‘Père Phare’s really truly weird,’ I said.
‘I missed it. What happened? Electric Flag were playi
ng. Bloody amazing. Weow weow …’
‘Jean-Louis said something about this woman, Madame Thiebault, making angels.’
‘OK, right. Shit.’
‘You understand it, then?’
He stopped. We were in quite an open area, near a garage and some shops and a big parking place full of vans.
‘Gilles, you don’t know what a maker of angels is?’
‘Forgotten.’
‘OK, right, mate. It’s someone you go to if you don’t want your baby.’
‘Eh?’
‘If you’re pregnant, and you don’t want it, you go along to Madame Thiebault or someone like her and she gets rid of it, OK? Before it’s born.’
‘How does she get rid of it?’
‘Er, with a sort of vacuum cleaner.’
‘That’s not funny, Christophe,’ I said, turning away.
‘It’s true, mate. OK? It’s true.’
‘But no one wants to get rid of their baby.’
‘They do.’
‘Why?’
He started crossing the road, swinging the transistor as it chattered away between songs.
‘Because they’re not married, because they’ve got too many, lots of reasons.’
‘That’s murder.’
‘Yeah, could be.’
‘So Madame Thiebault’s a murderer.’
‘She’s an angel maker.’
‘Christophe—’
‘It’s bloody true!’
‘But she’s not been arrested.’
‘No. Maybe if she was caught red-handed, all covered in blood—’
‘Anyway, you can’t get rid of a baby with a bloody vacuum cleaner.’
‘Not exactly a vacuum cleaner. Works by suction, anyway. Sort of sucks the baby out.’
‘Oh, no …’
We were walking down the normal street that led towards our old secret place, but the street was not normal any more. I looked around me, trying to make everything normal. It was a poor street, with lots of boarded-up houses and rubbish. I kept thinking of babies getting stuck in flexible tubes, and whether they used a wet head or a dry head, or even a soft-bristle brush.