by Adam Thorpe
She stood behind me and put my head back, holding it at the temples, muttering religious swear-words to herself, just like the old lady up the road with her twenty-two cats. I sniffed up my blood and enjoyed the aluminium taste of it, trying to remember it exactly for the next time I read about blood tasting of metal in a story. I’d forgotten why I was bleeding for a moment, liking the warm feel of her hands without the rubber gloves on them, against my temples.
‘Nosebleed?’ said my uncle.
‘Yes. You get on.’
He was standing in the doorway, holding his briefcase. He looked smart and shiny, as if made out of plastic, his bushy eyebrows slicked down.
‘I used to have those, but that was after a fight.’
‘Yes,’ said my mother. ‘You get on.’
‘Don’t bleed to death,’ he joked. ‘Much too messy. Can’t vacuum it up afterwards, chum, unless you have the special murderer’s accessory. Blood’s thicker than water—’
‘You get on. You’ll be late for the Belgians, dear.’
‘The Dutch. Well, they’re all the same. Flat.’ He chuckled. ‘Just need to know how to handle ’em.’
He imitated a Flemish person speaking French, but he seemed uncomfortable, watching my mother cope with my nosebleed. I heard him kiss her behind me with a sucking sound, and felt my hair ruffled too heavily. His voice told me to drop a key down my back.
After he had left, the smell of his fresh after-shave filled the kitchen and took over from the spring air; even with the blood in my nose, I could smell it.
I regretted my rudeness, what I’d said about him. I wondered why I’d said it. I pictured a demon with a sharp nose in my ear, whispering away. My mother kissed me on the top of the head.
‘What a stupid thing to do,’ she said, ‘when you’re poorly.’
‘I think it was the migraine,’ I murmured, lying.
‘Of course, I’m sure it was,’ she said. ‘Anyway, I know you didn’t mean it.’
This annoyed me, because I did mean it. The blood had stopped filling the inside of my nose. I lowered my head and kept the tissue to my face. She took her hands away from my temples and stroked my forehead. I couldn’t stand her touching me, now. It felt like something oily.
‘Please, can you just stop blaming her for everything?’ I said, sounding like a duck, with my nose blocked by the tissue.
‘Who, dear?’
‘Carole. She’s always in the wrong. It’s always her fault, isn’t it?’
My mother’s hand left my forehead and floated over to the pan-rack and got hold of a pan’s handle and held it while the pan was filled up with water. Then it placed the pan on the cooker and left the handle and turned one of the cooker’s switches through two clicks. Then it went up to her face, just under her nose, where three of its fingers stroked the bit between her nose and her mouth. Her eyes were fixed on mine. I felt funny, emptied out by the migraine and by being slapped. The pan on the cooker was a new one, with big swirly orange flowers all around the side. The ring glowed the same orange underneath it.
‘You mustn’t think that,’ she said, her words muffled by her fingers under her nose.
There was blood on them: perhaps she was smelling my blood. But then she ran them under the tap and dried them on the tea-towel and spooned out some Nestea into two bowls. She screwed the Nestea lid back on and held the jar to her apron, watching the water on the cooker. She had tears in her eyes. The water already had wisps of steam rising from it. This very moment, I thought, must be the most important in the world because it’s now and the past is finished with and the future not yet moving in.
‘You mustn’t think that, dear.’
Again, I really wanted to tell her everything; instead, I watched the water boil. I still felt tiny and white. The best thing was probably not to think at all, in fact. The best thing was to let things float past you without thinking about them at all.
I said I felt a bit sick.
‘You go upstairs, dear. I’ll bring your Nestea.’
I went upstairs to my room and lay down. I felt more miserable than I’d felt in all my life, but I was too worn out to care. My mother came up with my bowl of instant tea and three papillotes, left over from Christmas.
‘Here’s the Nestea,’ she said.
‘I don’t want it.’
‘A Banania, then?’
‘What, with a migraine?’
She put the bowl down on my bedside table. I sat up against the pillows: I didn’t like her to see me lying down when I was not so ill, it made me feel like a baby.
‘I’ll drive you to Jocelyne’s show,’ she said, adjusting her glasses by the window.
I looked at her back for a moment. I gulped without meaning to, creasing my throat so that it hurt.
‘Really?’
‘Really, dear.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I think you’ll be iller if you don’t go,’ she said, turning round. Her hands were clasped together in front of her red slacks.
‘Probably.’
‘You’ve got to be well for the big day.’
‘Yeah.’
‘It’s only a bit more than a week away. You’ve got to be well for that. I don’t want you getting so upset that you have another crisis for the big day. I know you!’
‘I think you’re right,’ I said, hardly able to believe it.
‘We’ll come straight back afterwards, dear. After the show, I mean. You could bring along a friend, too, seeing there’s no school the next morning. You could bring Christophe along, if he dresses up a bit and washes his face.’
I shrugged, but didn’t reply, hoping she wouldn’t insist on the friend business.
‘I’m sorry I lost my temper, dear.’
‘That’s OK.’
‘I’m waiting for you to say sorry, though.’
‘Sorry, Maman.’
I unwrapped one of the sweets from its crinkly paper. I didn’t want to ask her any more details about going to the show in case she changed her mind. My mother could do the talking; I could just sit there, watching the ballet, watching Jocelyne dance about and the story go by like a sort of continual golden surprise. I glanced at the joke wrapped up in the sweetpaper, a silly cartoon with a balding dentist and a woman. The cartoon above was cut off halfway, showing only a dog’s legs. I bit the sweet in half and its orange-flavoured sugariness flowed over me, sort of coating my headache.
‘Thank you, Maman. Thank you a lot. In fact, I’m feeling better already.’
‘Now rest,’ she said, sternly. ‘You’ve taken your stand and won and now you’re going to rest.’
Christophe came round in the evening, after school. He brought some more sweets: negro-heads and lollipops and bubble-gum balls along with a bar of posh plain chocolate from his mum, which I told him to keep because of my migraine. He ate it immediately, putting four squares into his mouth at once. I was feeling so much better that I felt desperate to go outside with him into the spring air, to bicycle or even to walk. The bicycle journey into the countryside seemed to belong to some other life, not really mine – yet it wasn’t even a fortnight ago. The shutter was wound right up and the tree opposite was fully in leaf, now; it made a great goldeny-green cloud that hid almost the whole of the flats opposite and half the old end-wall with its faded advertisement saying La Plus Brillante de Brillant.
Christophe stood by the window and said there was a nice-looking girl waiting at the bus-stop with a skirt so mini she might as well not have bothered. He kept taking the Lord’s name in vain and licking his lips. Before I could stop myself, I told him I was going to see a show in the middle of Paris.
‘What show? A striptease?’
‘Oh, just a dance show. The one about the robot, in fact,’ I said. ‘That stunning girl robot.’
‘I don’t care,’ he shrugged, as if I’d made out he might, his lips black from the chocolate.
He did care, of course, and I felt bad not asking him to come along. I was af
raid he might embarrass me in front of Jocelyne, that Jocelyne might find him stupid and rough. I never thought of him as a rival. Thinking of Jocelyne now gave me butterflies each time, but they were mixed up with the nice warm feeling of before.
Christophe bounced on my inflatable chair, standing up and falling into it over and over again. When he’d gone, it looked slightly smaller. I got out of bed and poked the chair and the skin felt soft. I blew it up by the nozzle and the skin tightened, then went soft again after a few minutes. I pressed my ear to the plastic and, sure enough, I could hear a faint hiss.
19
My uncle came back late that evening waving a plain brown envelope.
‘I’ve got the tickets,’ he boomed, winking at both of us on the settee.
We were watching an interview with Catherine Sauvage and Bobby Lapointe and ‘friends’. Now and again one of them would get up and sing in front of the studio audience, the camera blurring as it swept across to follow them. My mother thought the cameraman was drunk, the way it ‘jigged about’. My uncle was certainly drunk. The smell of a hundred brasseries followed him in and his voice was too loud, as if he’d been shouting over noise.
‘Hey, is there life on Mars? I said I’ve got the tickets!’
He stopped himself swaying by putting a hand on the back of a chair, but the chair wobbled on its thin metal legs. My mother rose slowly and went past him out into the kitchen. He let her pass in an exaggerated way, arms spread wide, as if she might be electrically charged.
‘What’s up with your mother, then?’ he asked, arms still wide, swaying slightly.
‘She’s just heating up your dinner.’
I was trying to cut myself off. I tucked my hands under my thighs and leaned forward, pretending to concentrate on the television. I had thought, for about a millisecond, that he’d got the tickets for Coppélia.
‘I went to a lot of trouble to get the tickets,’ he said, dropping into the chair with a bump.
‘What are they for?’
‘For us two.’
‘I mean, what’s the show?’
I’d completely forgotten his promise over breakfast. He was watching the television, now; Catherine Sauvage was finishing a song in her long black dress.
‘That’s Catherine Sauvage,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
The singer went back to her place with a sort of rippling walk, smiling at the presenter whose hair looked like liquorice and then touching the shoulder of an older man.
‘That’s Georges Ulmer,’ my uncle said.
‘Yeah.’
‘Jesus Christ, he’s aged. Your mother and I, we went to see him once. In a café. I think it was him. He wasn’t so old, then. Jesus Christ.’
He was holding the envelope up in the air, as if drying it. His face looked swollen, covered in a film of sweat. He had really been drinking a lot, probably with the Dutch. His trousers, which were supposed to be of a special stretchable material that didn’t wrinkle, had ridden up at the knees so that his bare ankles were showing. He seemed hypnotised by Georges Ulmer in his black suit and white collar, who was telling a long story about an elephant at which everyone was laughing.
‘Jesus Christ, he’s aged.’
He looked at me – I could feel it on the side of my face.
‘Shouldn’t be allowed,’ he said. ‘Shit.’
His gaze returned to the TV.
‘What we’re going to see’ll be better than this shit,’ he said. ‘And better than what you were going to go to with them poshos, I’ll tell you that.’
I swallowed, then told him that I was, in fact, going.
‘Where?’
‘To the ballet show.’
There was a pause, in which his breathing could be heard over the television chatter. I couldn’t stop my head from twitching slightly, and my lips were pressed together like magnets. Everybody was laughing at the climax of Georges Ulmer’s story about the elephant. Their hands were blurring as they clapped and laughed. It was as though Georges Ulmer had done something magnificently clever, and he was sitting back in his chair with his fingers across his mouth, very pleased with what he’d done.
‘The ba-llet.’
‘Yes.’
‘Switch that shit off.’
I did so, the laughing faces of the studio audience crackling down to the usual white dot that always stayed for ages. I used to think there were real people inside a television, who were miniature – and that your head was like the cockpit of a space station, with a tiny crew. It was weird, suddenly being without the people on the telly.
‘How did you get that bruise?’
I fingered the spot where my mother had slapped me, next to my eye. It hurt to press it. The bruise was, I realised, in the same place as Nicolas’s bruise.
‘I hit myself.’
‘Eh?’
‘By mistake.’
He gave a shuddery sigh. I waited for him to fish out a cigarette but he didn’t. He lifted up the two sides of his smooth mauve jacket, where it went into flaps at the bottom.
‘Y’know what someone said to me tonight? “Your jacket needs resharpening, mate.” Like it’s a bloody pencil.’
I nodded, finding the idea quite funny.
‘So,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Off to the ballet you are going.’
‘Yes. She said she’d take me.’
‘Who’s she?’
‘Maman.’
‘She’s “she”, is she?’
I shrugged. Drink could make him nasty, sometimes. You had to be very careful not to give him an excuse to bring out this nastiness.
‘I can go to yours as well,’ I said.
‘It isn’t a ballet. It’s variety.’
‘Oh. That doesn’t matter.’
‘Oh, that doesn’t matter,’ he imitated, his voice high and pathetic. My face flushed and something rose in my throat which risked bursting out through my eyes. If I cried, I’d be finished. I stared down at my hands.
My mother came in.
‘If you want something to eat,’ she said, ‘it’s sitting on the table.’
The settee twitched as she sat down next to me. Nobody moved. My uncle’s breathing was like a word being whispered over and over again.
‘What’s happened to our programme?’ my mother asked.
I didn’t say anything. My hands were too pudgy, I thought. The rest of me wasn’t pudgy, it was even a bit thin. I saw in my mind the huge hands of Christophe’s father pushing ham against the slicer or felling trees in Silesia long ago.
‘I was enjoying that,’ said my mother. ‘Weren’t we, Gilles?’
‘Sort of,’ I said, wondering if I could go upstairs past my uncle without him grabbing my arm.
‘So he’s going, is he?’ he growled, as if thinking about my uncle had activated his voice. There was the click of his lighter and the air began to fill with the smoke from his Winston.
‘Pardon?’ said my mother.
‘Gilles. To the ballet.’
‘Yes. That’s right. Your dinner’ll be horrible, cold. It’s boudin blanc and endives.’
‘Why?’
‘Why what?’
‘Why’s he going?’
‘Why not?’
‘Because we said not.’
‘Well, I don’t see any harm in it,’ said my mother, looking at the television as if it was still on. You could see all of us quite well in the grey screen, in fact, seated like a talk show. The bowl of the standard lamp behind us looked like a UFO if I half-shut my eyes.
‘The second my back’s turned everything changes, does it?’
‘Alain, it’s only one thing, and not very important—’
‘Oh, not very important? One minute you’re wailing in the bedroom about it and the next minute it’s not very important.’
‘I wasn’t wailing in the bedroom, if you please. Go and have your supper.’
I looked down at my hands again. I couldn’t believe that unde
rneath the skin of each hand there was a real skeleton one, more real even than the plastic horror ones in the toyshops.
‘I’m not fucking hungry,’ my uncle shouted, as if there was a sudden loud noise to shout over. I winced and I felt my mother wince next to me.
‘Go to bed, Gilles,’ she said, in a shaky voice.
I got up and passed my uncle who didn’t grab my arm but instead held up the envelope with the tickets in and shouted, ‘What do I do with these, then, may I be permitted to ask? World-famous bloody show, two for the middle of the circle? Who’ll have ’em? Going for a doddle?’
‘Please, Alain, not so loud.’
I stayed by the door for a moment, wishing she would tell him off for drinking. She never did, though. She never really told him off at all, or not for the right things.
‘Eh? Or don’t I have a fucking say any more in this house?’
‘I’m sure Gilles would like to go,’ said my mother, ‘if you stop swearing and shouting.’
‘Christ, I have to shout,’ he yelled. ‘I have to!’
‘No you don’t. We’re not deaf—’
‘I have to, or nobody takes a blind bit of notice of me!’
‘That’s not true.’
He bounced in his seat, its coloured balls of feet skidding two centimetres and raking up the rug around them. ‘I came in, Danielle, and nobody even had the fucking politesse to look me in the fucking eye and say the tiniest little good evening!’
He was leaning right forward in his seat, now, jabbing his cigarette at my mother. She was still staring at the television screen as if it was on.
‘Go to bed, dear,’ she said.
My uncle stared at her for a moment, bewildered.
‘Gilles,’ she said, nodding her head at me.
‘Hang on, chum.’ He’d raised his hand like a policeman. I held the doorknob and waited. Without looking at me he said, ‘What d’you cook at fourteen for sixty minutes?’