by Adam Thorpe
‘Eh?’
‘It was at sixty in the oven for fourteen hours,’ said my mother, quickly.
‘Right. Eh, Gilles? Between blokes.’
‘Why are you bringing that up?’ asked my mother.
‘Eh, Gilles? Sixty in the oven for fourteen hours.’
I frowned. His question did remind me of something, but I couldn’t think what.
‘I dunno.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes. I don’t know. Maybe a special sort of cake.’
My uncle snorted. ‘She said she told you to do that. The nurses said she was very worried about that.’
‘Alain …’ my mother murmured, her eyes looking sideways at him.
‘Who?’ I asked. ‘Carole?’
‘That’s right, chum. I’ve been thinking about it. Supposing, I’ve been thinking, she wasn’t just inventing it? Eh?’
All I could see was one side of his face, shiny with sweat; there were even beads of sweat in the curls of his sideburns and in the greying hair crammed into his ear. ‘Winston’ was written in tiny red letters on his cigarette, just above the filter. I wondered if they were named after Winston Churchill. He wasn’t bothering to turn his head to look at me.
‘Inventing what?’ I asked, my voice sounding as if it was outside me.
‘You know she had a fit, do you? After you visited her without our permission? They had to give her insulin. They had to sedate her. Gilles.’
‘I think she did say something about cooking something.’
My mother looked surprised.
‘For a long time?’ asked my uncle.
‘Quite a long time. I didn’t know what she meant,’ I said, trying to make my heart thud less by breathing slowly.
‘Fourteen days?’
‘Hours,’ corrected my mother.
My uncle leaned forward towards her and said, ‘I – don’t – care.’
Then he half-turned back to me.
‘Sausages, was it?’ asked my uncle, very straight in the chair. ‘Boudin blanc?’
‘Dunno.’
‘Right,’ said my uncle. The smoke from his cigarette rose straight up past the bowl of the standard lamp and exploded against the ceiling. ‘I’ll tell you, chum, what you have to cook in the oven at sixty for fourteen days—’
‘Hours, Alain—’
‘Shuddup, Danielle.’
‘Do you mind?’ she snapped, glaring at him.
He gave a little sniff and it whistled in his nose.
‘Ballet slippers, chum. Ballet. Slippers.’
‘Oh. Why?’
‘How the hell do I know?’ he said, raising his arms. ‘How the hell do I know?’
There was a silence. My throat was so dry it would have hurt to swallow. I had to, though.
‘I think it hardens them,’ my mother sighed.
‘That’s by the by, Danielle. Now, chum, because she was so worried about you not cooking ’em, she had a fit. She might have done herself in.’
‘Alain, please!’
‘You can do yourself in with twenty grammes of aspirin,’ he growled. ‘Internal bleeding. A Dutch bloke told me this. Something to do with your haemoglobin. Kind of explodes inside you,’ he said, his hands rotating in front of his chest.
‘Stop it, Alain!’
My mother’s finger was rubbing her forehead over and over.
‘We’re having it out,’ my uncle said, in a calm, sing-song voice. He waved his cigarette about, spilling ash on the carpet. ‘We’re not shoving the dirt under the carpet, we’re having it out. Beating it out. 3,200-watt power output. Loosening the dirt and grit and domestic shit on a cushion of air then sucking it up into the drum. Then we can dispose of it. Forever. Taken away.’
His hand was pretending to throw it away. Then he twisted right round in his chair. His thick eyebrows were ruffled up into points and made him look more frightening than he really was. His eyes were bloodshot and were looking straight into mine.
‘Of all the stupid bloody things to do,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘I don’t think he would have done,’ murmured my mother. ‘They’re quite dear.’
My uncle told her to shush.
‘What? What have I done?’
‘Take a long steel screw,’ he said, holding an invisible one between his thumb and his forefinger. ‘Subject this long steel screw to a certain amount of pressure. A certain amount of stress.’ He was looking at me, his hand trembling a bit. ‘Then some more, so you work that screw harder. And harder. What happens? What happens, chum?’
‘It breaks.’
He nodded, and made a jerking movement with the hand holding the invisible screw. It was a bit drunken, and didn’t look at all like a screw breaking.
‘So. Did you, or did you not, take along a pair of ballet shoes? Along to Carole?’
‘When?’
‘The last time.’
I put on a completely bewildered expression and said, ‘Ballet slippers? Why should I have done?’
‘Because.’
My face felt like an electric grill. I shook my head, as if he’d gone mad.
‘I don’t even know where to get ballet slippers from!’
My uncle drew on his cigarette and blew the smoke out immediately, not looking at me any more.
‘Papa’s right, though,’ said my mother, weakly. ‘What he’s trying to say is you’ve got to be very careful, Gilles. She’s got what they call a – neurosis.’
‘What’s that?’
‘I still think he took ’em along,’ said my uncle, resting his elbows on his knees and leaning forward. He sounded tired, now. ‘I still think he did.’
I stared at his curved back, the new mauve jacket stretched tight across it. I wanted desperately to say something about Mademoiselle Bolmont while he was tired and weak.
‘Yeah,’ I murmured, ‘so I just carried some ballet slippers along with me on the bicycle trip, of course.’
‘It’s really because it’s all got muddled in her head,’ said my mother, quickly. ‘You never forget anything, you see. It can all pop up again and get muddled with things you’re thinking now. Just because she was doing ballet when Henri had his bad fall—’
‘I know,’ I said, impatiently.
My father was staring at us all from above the glass animals, the photo’s frame like a little window. As if he was standing outside and peeping in on us.
‘I still think he took ’em along,’ repeated my uncle, scratching his hair as if it had nits and half-stopping a belch. ‘I still think he took ’em along.’ Then he took a deep drag of his Winston.
I went out of the sitting-room door without permission and stumped up the stairs to my room.
The silence continued. I stayed still at my open door, expecting my uncle to come stumping up the stairs after me, roaring for my blood. Instead the row between them started again, bit by bit. It continued in muffled booms with nothing between except a sort of beeping noise, which was my mother answering back. Whenever there was a pause, I imagined my uncle strangling her or shooting her or stabbing her. I kept hearing the thump of a body or someone trying to scream.
The inflatable chair had deflated down to a sort of wrinkled orange mouth. I lay on it, but the last of the air wouldn’t go. I tried to work out how the row had started, but couldn’t remember the beginning. I didn’t really think it had much to do with me going to Jocelyne’s ballet show; it would probably have happened anyway, because my uncle had drunk too much with the Dutch.
I took the ballet slippers out from under my bolster, carefully, as if they were two pet mice. I stroked them with my finger, then picked them up and smelt them. They reminded me of the pine-trees that had gone. I put the slippers in the Meccano drawer again, nervous in case they were discovered.
I felt bad about Carole having a fit because I’d mentioned them – but also secretly pleased, because it meant they were very important to her. If only they would let her put the slippers on
and dance. Then she would be cured. I was sure about that. But she wasn’t allowed to dance because she’d danced in the nude. They were stupid. They were completely stupid.
I reached under my bed for the book of ballet stories and turned to the picture of Giuseppina Bozzacchi. I could take the book to Jocelyne’s, to show her. Then I thought how embarrassed I’d be, walking in holding a big book. The picture took up almost the whole page, with the name on the page opposite. Then I had a very good idea.
I fished a pair of scissors out of my desk drawer and started cutting out the picture of Giuseppina Bozzacchi. I cut very close to the stitching so that no one would notice in the library. The scissors advancing through the paper made a noise exactly like someone walking in snow. It had snowed a lot when I was about seven and we had walked in the park at Sceaux, me holding Carole’s warm mitten and feeling her hand move inside it. I could fold up the photograph and have it ready in my pocket to take out and show Jocelyne, saying, ‘It’s yours.’
It was weird, having the picture separate from the book. The three lines from the story continuing under the photograph looked a bit stupid, so I cut them off, too. The book looked weird, as well. I’d completely forgotten that the story continued on the other side of the picture, so that now the story jumped a whole page, beginning again in the middle of a sentence. People would be really confused, because the missing bit was when Swanilda pretends to be the mechanical doll, dancing. But it would prove to Jocelyne that it was the Coppélia story.
The words showed through the picture, backwards, but only when I held it up to the light. I could make out ‘Swanilda’ and ‘Coppélia’ and ‘Franz’ and ‘Dr Coppélius’, quite easily. I could even read the story, slowly deciphering the words like a secret spy document. Because the dancer’s name wasn’t on the cut-out page, I’d let Jocelyne guess who she was. ‘Who’s this?’ I could say. ‘Bet you can’t guess.’
I shut the book and placed the cut page carefully in the special drawer.
I set up a hand-mirror facing the long mirror in my room and I practised my kissing mime, watching how my hands crept up and down my back and neck while trying to forget they were mine. It didn’t look nearly as good as the boy’s had on the television. It was uncomfortable, bending my knees to mime the bench, so I forgot about the bench. They were just standing, like the ones I’d seen when the American was trying to kiss Carole.
After a bit I gave up and practised being shot by the Germans, going through each of my classmates in turn and imitating how they would act being shot in a film – the stupid ones doing it very badly, as if they had a stomach-ache, lying straight out and adjusting their limbs and clearing their throats. I was the most convincing, of course, spun round by the bullet and slumping into a heap. After some groans and twitches, letting my limbs look all crooked and awkward, as I’d seen in photographs of dead people in Vietnam or the Congo, I died.
It was impossible to imagine being dead, though. The soul leaving the body, leaving your own smells and sounds and touch, leaving the damp taste of your own mouth forever and ever. Never coming back.
I got into bed and pretended that the whole room was detaching itself from the house and taking off into outer space like Saturn V was about to do. Then I realised that I felt much better. Migraines were like that; their departure from your head could happen from one second to the next, whatever else was happening around you. Even thinking about the trip tomorrow, and meeting the Despierres-something, didn’t bring the headache back.
In the darkness, while the row continued like someone grunting near my ear, I imagined my room as decorated to look like a space-ship cockpit, covered in egg-boxes painted silver and with black-and-red Camembert lids turning and turning to imitate computers. The problem was how to make the lids keep turning: batteries, perhaps, or electricity from the plugs. If I could work that out, I could make something really realistic, as real as in a film. I fell asleep trying to work it out, my mouth wide open so that when I woke up quite early in the morning, it was completely dry. I couldn’t get back to sleep again.
I had woken up in the middle of the night, too. I’d been having a weird dream. A lot of people, mostly neighbours I didn’t know at all well, were walking in and out of the front door because they had a right to. They lived in some of our rooms for part of the year and this was an age-old custom, it dated from the Romans, and there was nothing we could do about it. We were friendly to them because we were good Christians and loved mankind, but the dream was a horrible one because it made me feel I was someone else, that someone else had been dreaming in my body, using my brain, my mind. It took quite a long stretch of staring into the darkness before I felt one hundred per cent myself again, my face rumpled like the sheet.
20
There was a battle in Bagneux, during the Franco-Prussian war. It started at nine o’clock precisely in the last days of October, 1870, when the French cannon in the fort at Montrouge bombarded the first houses in the village, where the Prussians were sheltering. About 25,000 men and 80 pieces of artillery made up the French attacking forces. The 2nd Bavarian Corps, spread in and around Bagneux, were outnumbered, but were able to take up defensive positions and call on reinforcements before the attack, alerted by the clumsy movements of the French troops. The element of stealth and surprise was completely lost – the attack itself being announced by two cannon-shots, like the start of a race. Shells rained down on the village centre as the French soldiers emerged from their trenches and began to cross the thousand metres of terrain that separated them from Bagneux. They came under fire from the crenellated wall of the big park (now the cemetery where my father and grandmother lie), as well as from the village itself, but they made good use of the plaster-quarries and hedges and ditches of the verdant plain around them (where now there are aluminium factories and large blocks of flats). Despite the heavy fire, the losses among our advancing troops were not great.
Artillery shells also poured onto Châtillon as another battalion left a farm to the north-east of the village and made its way towards the park, crossing the sunken path that is now a main road (on which my house stands). The first soldiers arrived at the village, some crawling up the ditch of the track (now the D77) leading to the Route d’Orléans (now the N20), others crossing the fields and gardens to the south-east where they were sniped at from behind the railway line (which still exists); they dismantled the first barricades, occupied several houses and reached the main square in front of the present church, the streets ringing with rifle-shots that exploded from cellars, roofs, windows and loopholes. A few of the soldiers were terrified enough to try to hide, but their officer, le vicomte de Grancey, ran towards them waving his revolver and shouted that he would shoot the pack of them if they didn’t move, so they did move.
The redoubtable 2nd battalion of the 35th penetrated the village by way of the great park, smashing the doors in its walls with axes and then pouring into the church square with the other troops. The last barricades – made up of wardrobes, chairs, tables, barrels, bed-ends and chunks of plaster thrown out of the windows of the houses – were torn down. The French took possession of the remaining houses and barns, taking many Bavarians prisoner or killing them on the spot if they refused to surrender. The French had conquered Bagneux by eleven o’clock that morning. The wounded were gathered up onto carts and the dead counted. My grandfather found some bullets and a bone from this battle in our old orchard, and a bayonet-blade and a buckle. The bone came from a finger.
I was reading this in the showroom the next day, early, before breakfast. I had written it, in fact, for a school essay on local history, set for last year’s summer holidays. I tried to learn it by heart so that when Jocelyne talked about historical things I could impress her. The teacher had put a red circle around the last days of October; there was a ‘stylistic contradiction’, he explained, between the accuracy of the hour and the vagueness of the date – ‘but I couldn’t remember the date. He also wondered whether I shouldn’t have ca
lled the battle an ‘action’, because battles were usually bigger. The floppy old library book had confused me with its details and old-fashioned style, although I’d borrowed most of my essay from it. It had pages with rough edges and two fold-out maps fell out of it. Some of the pages weren’t even cut; to read them, I had to look into each one like an envelope.
I sat at the desk in the showroom and swotted. Jocelyne wouldn’t, I knew, ask me the exact date; the important thing was to pretend that I was an intellectual, that I knew interesting facts. And that there were interesting facts even about Bagneux. I could tell her that I’d dug up, in our yard, bullets and a bayonet and most of a skeleton from the battle (it didn’t sound as good, telling how Gigi had found a few rusty bits where the showroom now was). I could then go on to talk about the military hospital we’d discovered with all its rooms, about the wounded soldiers from the same war treated there, and how I and my friend had found papers and books from when people were tortured in the same building by the Gestapo or the SS. And I could tell her, after she’d got really interested, that the place had been demolished.
All this, and what I had swotted up about Coppélia, made a sort of safety net that stopped me from panicking completely. I was very nervous, though, and because of this nervousness I kept wanting to go to the toilet. I was nervous mainly about my mother coming along. She would chatter on too much in front of the posh, brainy cousins, trying to be posh herself and sounding stupid.
I felt like one of those French soldiers about to advance on Bagneux, knowing he would have to cross the fields and vegetable gardens and plaster-quarries while bullets sang around him. I was sure at least one of the soldiers, and maybe more, had been hit in the old orchard, right where I was sitting now, which was why Gigi had dug those bits up. It was hard to imagine it happening, though, looking around me at the showroom. I got up and walked between the Sunburst vacuum cleaners, trying to imagine them as bushes or fruit trees and myself as a French soldier, advancing with my bayonet.
The vacuums’ tubs had dust on them. I hadn’t been into the showroom for quite a long time and there was a dead feeling in it. The dust was the worst ever: I wiped my finger on one of the models and had a grey patch on my finger pad. The stock on the back wall hadn’t changed. The little window was showing just above the top row, as before. My uncle still hadn’t put a lock on it.