by Adam Thorpe
‘Where does this woman live, anyway?’
‘Oh, round about. Ask my dad. He knows everything. No, don’t ask him. He might think you’re making inquiries.’
Christophe laughed, the transistor radio chattering between us and then breaking into a pop song. The electric guitars sounded like miaowing cats.
‘Is that a nickname? Angel maker?’
‘Of course.’
‘It’s not real, then? I mean, the babies don’t become angels for real?’
‘You can think what you want.’
I knew Christophe didn’t believe in much – certainly not in angels.
‘Did your sister have a fit because of us?’ he asked, suddenly, as we turned the corner.
‘How do I know? Why?’
‘Dunno.’
I couldn’t work out why Christophe had suddenly asked that.
‘It wasn’t our fault, anyway,’ I added.
‘Does she really think she’s made of metal?’
‘I think so, yeah. It’s not a joke.’
We’d come to our old secret place. It was still a shock to see it.
The building site was empty: the builders had all gone home for the weekend. A crane hung over at an angle, with a black hook at the end exactly like my Dinky one. In two minutes we were inside the wire fence placed all the way round. We wandered about between piles of concrete blocks, the transistor turned off. In the mud we recognised the stump of one of the pine-trees, and on the edge a broken bit of wall that must have belonged to the hospital, and next to it a heap of windows with panes that might have been broken by our stones.
A huge rectangular frame of steel beams and struts and pillars took up most of the site. These pillars seemed very thin, more like the rods in Meccano; there were only six at each end of the frame, shooting right up to the roof, with enough space between them for a full-size goal. Christophe wished we’d brought a football.
We went inside, into the shadow cast by the first floor. It wasn’t really an inside, in fact: apart from a low wall in brick on one side, the whole place was completely see-through. There was a mess of pallets, metal beams, empty sacks of cement and rough wooden planks, which forced us to walk more carefully. We came back to the stairs that zigzagged up without handrails to the third floor. We tried two flights, daring each other. Then we walked out onto the actual floor, its rough planks squeaking.
We were afraid its girders might not be properly secured. I kept well away from the edge and the spaces where the planks had not yet been laid. We had a good view of the surrounding buildings – the steeples of our church, the new tower blocks that looked as if they were standing right behind the church, and the Thomson factory’s roofs.
We switched on the transistor and sat down in the middle of the huge floor. The pop music echoed amazingly off all the metal, and Christophe turned it up even louder – so loud that the transistor’s handle started to move down by itself, vibrated by the beats. We saw one or two people pick their way along the old lane that had gone past the gates before the demolition, but they didn’t look up. They probably thought it was a builder’s transistor.
It felt very good, the pop music, as if it was playing for us and no one else. Even the huge steel skeleton was ours, right now. I realised, looking at my watch, that it was nearly time for Menie Grégoire and asked Christophe if he could find Radio Luxembourg. He was proud to show me what his Voxson Zephyr could do, passing through English and Arabic and other foreign stations before finding RTL, then adjusting the aerial when it didn’t need to be.
‘Magnetic circuit speaker,’ he said. ‘With a high-fidelity receiver.’ He stroked the radio as if it was a pet, very proud of it. ‘I’ll turn it down. It’ll use up the batteries at this volume. Three of them in there and they cost a fortune, mate.’
He turned the knob slowly anti-clockwise. The voices were still loud enough. We had to get through the news first. We listened to it as carefully as if we were adults, probably because it was on his transistor. There was some boring thing about leaders planning a meeting in Paris to stop Vietnam; then something even worse about the economy and Pompidou talking; then a report from Italy about riots, about young Italians smashing windows and fighting policemen. We could hear the smash of glass over the yelling and screaming, and it reminded me of all the windows we had broken here – and on the abandoned farm a few days ago. The foreign sirens sounded very different from our French sirens. There was a strike by millions of students in America because of Vietnam again and white people being too nasty to blacks.
‘We’re students,’ said Christophe. ‘We could go on strike.’
‘What for?’
‘I dunno. Not having the sexiest girl in my class, for a start.’
Someone called Rudi the Red had been shot and nearly killed, although we weren’t sure whether it had happened today or a few weeks ago or even this year, but it had caused a lot of rioting in Germany as well and now Rudi the Red was improving and could speak about it in a special interview. Not even water-cannons had stopped the riots. Water-cannons sounded fun, we thought. Tear-gas didn’t, though. We had an argument over whether tear-gas could kill you or not, like the gas that had killed Christophe’s grandfather in the trenches. I knew it couldn’t kill you but Christophe was sure it could.
‘It can definitely blind you, anyway,’ he said.
One of the young German students spoke French. He said, in a hoarse voice with a bad accent, that true liberty wasn’t just about having a car and a fridge and paid holidays. Christophe gave a Nazi salute.
‘Do you think,’ I wondered out loud, ‘it goes down to our age?’
‘Eh? What does?’
‘When it keeps saying “youth”. Do you think that counts us?’
‘How do I know?’ said Christophe. ‘Who cares?’ He gobbed into the huge shadowy space beyond. ‘The bloody Boche,’ he went on, his voice echoing over the tinny radio ones. ‘The bastards put my father in a camp and they had to cut down these massive great trees in the snow and just two of them had to cut about seven a day. Or maybe seventy, even. Freezing cold and they lived in a hut and the other bloke, his really close mate, died of pneumonia. My uncle had to dig for potatoes and he was really starving practically to death—’
‘Yeah,’ I interrupted, nodding, having heard this several times already. ‘At least he didn’t have hungry cockroaches put on his eyeballs and the eyelids sewn up over them.’
‘Whaaat? Who did that?’
The radio was chattering now about the daughter of the Queen of England having got her driving licence.
‘The Germans,’ I said. ‘That’s what they did to the members of the Resistance. It’s true. They tied their hands behind their back so they couldn’t break the stitches.’
Someone had told me at school; his father had seen it happen.
Menie Grégoire’s theme tune had started. Christophe imitated the agony of having cockroaches munching away at your eyeballs.
‘They must have really starved them first,’ he said, panting over Menie’s soft voice. ‘The cockroaches, I mean. Like they did with the dogs.’
‘Christophe, I’m trying to listen, mate. I miss it when I’m at school.’
He was rolling on the floor, hands behind his back, his teeth sticking out of his distorted face.
‘Aaaaiieee! You Nazi bastards!’
‘There’s some really good stuff, they talk about sexual things on it,’ I pointed out.
The floor seemed to be bouncing, and I was nervous. The whole superstructure might collapse; in some ways it looked very flimsy with those widely spaced rods. I thought of the new building near Jocelyne’s that had collapsed without warning and shivered their hall mirrors. But Christophe was deep into his mime. There was a call from a woman aged thirty-two but something interfered, buzzing nastily across, and I only heard the end of it:
I’m always nagging him, madame, but that’s because he doesn’t care about me. I get bored cleaning the house up afte
r him and he turns his back on me at night.
Menie answered carefully, and her voice made me relax. She asked the woman whether anything had happened recently to relieve her boredom. There was a little silence and then she said, I’ve met this person, Menie. Menie asked if she was having an affair with this person. The phone voice sounded, as usual, as if it was underwater:
I love this person, Menie. I keep waking in the night and seeing my husband and wishing it was this other person, and then I cry.
You cry to yourself?
Yes. I’m just waiting for this person to come and take me away. I’d leave everything.
Everything, madame?
Yes, the woman said, after a pause, as if she was deciding then and there. Menie asked her if she had any children.
Two children, Menie.
Well, here are two questions you should ask yourself, Menie said. One: this person I’ve fallen for – who is he, exactly? Two: does he really love me? Just those two questions. OK?
OK, was all the woman said, like a little girl. My picture of her had changed during the conversation. Now she was tiny, with plaits.
I was completely hooked, as usual, even though it reminded me each time of confession. Our priests – especially Père Romains – weren’t nearly as good as Menie Grégoire at making you give up your secrets. They didn’t really bother, in fact. Christophe had picked up a fallen bolt, holding it like a pistol and shooting with it through the metal poles. Then he ran almost to the other end, ducking and firing as if he was in a Western.
He seemed tiny, now, in silhouette. His pistol-shots were quite realistic, bouncing nicely off the metal so that the sounds were closer than he was. I wondered again if all the planks had been fastened properly, and imagined one suddenly leaping up and my best friend disappearing, falling to his death. It would be in the local paper and I’d be interviewed.
There was a letter read out from a woman who had lost her mother when tiny and had run away from home at sixteen and married out of despair and now stayed in bed for days on end because her husband didn’t let her go out and work. Menie commented on it and then the phone rang and there was another call. I liked the calls best, although my heart still jumped a little. It was a woman who was in love with her boss. This happened quite a lot.
Madame, I was his secretary. The job made such a difference to my life and my boss was so thoughtful.
Menie asked her why she was phoning.
Because, madame, he has let me down.
You mean he reciprocated your love?
Yes!
Is this man married?
There was a faint roar, which I knew was breath hitting the receiver. I crouched to the transistor: it was always harder to listen outside.
Yes, he is, with three children. But he and his wife, they’ve got sexual difficulties, she can never make him happy. He and I were very happy, madame, on the sexual level.
I watched Christophe pretending to be shot, clutching his arm and then battling on, very near the far edge. He was just a little silhouette against the bright sunlight, like a cartoon drawing. I wondered what sexual difficulties meant, exactly.
Both of you were happy, or just him?
Both of us, madame.
Are you married yourself?
The woman sounded as if she had burst into tears, and I had to turn the volume up to catch what she was saying. He left me in February, my boss did, just like that. He took away all the work papers, too.
You no longer work for him?
How can I? the woman cried. He won’t let me. And now I know the truth. This wonderful saint, a father of three, has lots of women. He’s got women all over the country, wherever he travels for his business. He even makes them pregnant.
Then you are well rid of him, said Menie.
But he was my only hope, madame!
That’s what you think now, said Menie, but you’ll go out and find another job and another person to love and to love you, someone much more suitable. Without, hopefully, making a kind of widow of another married woman. You must leap into life afresh.
There was a little pause. I could hear the breaths roaring down the line.
Madame, the woman said, I cannot walk.
A sudden, huge landslip happened in my head.
You can’t walk, madame?
I see life from the height of a wheelchair. This man didn’t care about me being paralysed, he said he loved me just the same. I wasn’t going to tell you.
Why not?
A singing had started in my left ear, just one high note going on and on which I thought at first was the radio.
It gives the wrong impression.
But you have told me, madame, and that’s very good, it’s a kind of leap. That’s a very good start to your new life.
I was sitting very still, cross-legged, unable to move even one finger. There was a letter from a man in Belgium who had never known his father, but I wasn’t listening. Christophe came back, panting and grinning.
‘Shit,’ he said, ‘the German bastards got me in the arm, bleeding, need a tourniquet, but I shot them to pieces. Pretend you’ve got a secret message. Gilles?’ The singing in my left ear was worse. ‘Is it good? Gilles?’
‘What?’
‘The programme.’
‘Dunno.’
‘You told me it was good.’
‘Yeah.’
I switched the transistor off as if I was twisting its nose. Something began to cloud in my head.
‘I feel sick,’ I murmured.
‘Sick?’
‘I can’t move. I think I’m going to die.’
‘Hey, Gilles, what’s up, mate? A migraine?’
It wasn’t going to be a migraine, perhaps, but the mention of the word was fatal. I vomited onto the new planks, then again halfway down the zigzag stairs, spattering my lunch over the metal. Christophe kept swearing and then laughing falsetto, holding me by the arm and urging me down the stairs with the sick-spotted tranny in his other hand. The iron ring was squeezing the inside of my head, like a shrinking crown. Black spots jerked in the liquid in front of my eyes, making it harder to see. The daylight was already becoming unbearable, anyway, by the time we made it over the fence. I had to shield my eyes with both hands, but it wasn’t enough. No migraine had ever got its claws in so fast, and it was all my friend could do to get me back home, half-supporting me by the arms. Nobody stopped to ask if we were OK.
I lay in my room for three days and three nights. My mother closed the shutter and laid a grey school sock over my eyes. I sensed light creeping in under it and through it and said that no one must switch on the landing light and that I needed a large, black sock. She came back with one of my uncle’s. I didn’t care. Blessed darkness. No darkness was too dark. Even my Dinky Simca’s luminous headlamps were too much, and the car was put in a drawer, the same drawer as the pine twig and the SS books but I didn’t care and no one noticed. The ballet slippers were under my bolster and I held them tight.
The tiniest speck of light in my brain and my brain sort of roared, the iron ring squeezing tighter and my cranium cracking along its plates. I kept seeing the skull we’d had to copy at school that separated into different parts, from the jaw to the cranium to the something whose name I struggled to remember in my nasty echoing dreams where I kept being made into an angel with filthy fingernails, trying to lift Mademoiselle Bolmont off the steel floor before the faceless murderer opened the door right at the far end, in silhouette, the footsteps clanging nearer and nearer.
The trouble was, even with no light at all getting through to my eyes there were still lots of tiny stars rushing at me and exploding over and over in the blackness, millions of them, like a shower of comets. They came from the other side of my eyes, from my brain, and I couldn’t do anything about it.
I lay with my uncle’s big black nylon sock across my face and let each second pass one by one. Perhaps it would go on forever, though. Perhaps there wouldn’t be an end. The torturer con
trolling the iron ring around my head was immortal, tightening the bolts, laughing like a maniac. In the Middle Ages they put an iron sort of rose inside your mouth that opened its petals bit by bit until your face burst. Catholics did that to heretics. Jonquille told us this, saying how much we had progressed towards reason and light. He also told us that St Augustine reckoned that evil couldn’t exist because only things made by God had being and God didn’t make evil. Migraine was evil and it existed, like Catholic torturers.
I tried to think about Jesus, to get rid of the dark dripping torture cells in my head and their screams. He stood there on a flat white roof in Bethlehem and then under a fig-tree and then in front of the Sea of Galilee, smiling kindly. I asked Him each time for forgiveness, and whether he could make my uncle a better man and my sister totally normal and Mademoiselle Bolmont happy even if she had to stay paralysed and my mother happy, too, and all the world happy and to bring peace in Vietnam and to stop the students smashing things in Italy and Germany and then I would feel the sickness rising up into my mouth and reach blindly for the bucket, my best friend the pink plastic bucket, clutching the black sock to my face with one hand and hanging my head over the smell of bleach, waiting for my body to decide on the worst moment.
Gigi and Tante Clothilde visited. They came into the blacked-out room without their bodies, and their voices refused to join up with their throats. I had long conversations with Menie Grégoire, on my own, half-whispering them – even doing some very clever and sensible replies for her. I saw beautiful hills, sometimes, and white roads. There was a nice big tree coming out of long grass. Nobody else but me was living there and I could talk to the animals. I was always disappointed when I found myself back in the room, as if I didn’t want to be Gilles Gobain but this other person in the beautiful hills, talking to the animals.
My father passed the bed, holding hands with a skeleton. No one said anything. My father smiled and the skeleton couldn’t help grinning. I saw the skeleton’s other hand turning the door-handle and they went out. They left the door open, though, and the light was coming in. I had to call out for my mother to close it. She wondered who had left it open and I told her it was the skeleton. I didn’t mention my father because it wasn’t his fault.