by Adam Thorpe
‘She phoned up,’ I said, in a tiny little voice.
‘Oh, I won the screaming match,’ Jocelyne’s mother laughed. ‘I knew she’d invited you, I was there – and if there’s one thing, if there’s one thing I’m not having it’s my daughter failing to honour her commitments.’ She looked fierce, suddenly. ‘It’s the principle of the thing. I’m not having my daughter win on every battle, especially not when it comes to the social graces.’
‘Anyway,’ said Raymond.
We waited. I felt I’d stepped right off a cliff and was about halfway down to the bottom.
‘I have never asked for charity in my life, as a matter of information,’ said my mother, as if a conversation had been going on inside her head. ‘Charity was quite the wrong word.’
‘I didn’t say charity,’ sighed Jocelyne’s mother, rubbing her eyes with her fingers as if exhausted.
‘Yes you did, dear. Charitable organisation.’
‘I was joking, Danielle. Wasn’t I joking, darling?’
Raymond was like a statue in real clothes, except for the puffs of smoke. One hand was cupping the leather patch on his jacket elbow and the other was cupping the pipe.
‘Anyway,’ he said.
‘I meant something quite practical,’ Maman went on, getting louder and more upset. ‘Ordinary and practical. In the family. Family are very important. Especially in the hour of need. We would do the same for you. At any time. You would only need to ask. Throwing a – a wheel. One of those things, you know, off a ship …’
‘Lifeline,’ suggested Raymond.
‘You shouldn’t have made the Ricard so strong after all,’ murmured Jocelyne’s mother, leaning towards Raymond.
My heart was thudding along as if it was trying to get somewhere.
‘Charity isn’t charity in families,’ my mother went on, one cheek trembling. ‘It’s normal behaviour. Family is family. Look how Alain saved me.’
‘I’m sure he got something out of it, too,’ laughed Jocelyne’s mother.
‘He didn’t have to, did he? Take on two sorrowing children and a widow?’
‘Men usually do get something out of it, Danielle.’
‘Well, if you must always see the worst in everybody,’ said my mother, her words muffled a bit because she was wiping her nose.
Jocelyne’s mother glared at her. The pale grey eyes in the tiny face were quite frightening, like a python’s or something. Maybe she was all zinc inside, and now she was showing it.
‘I was obviously mistaken,’ said Maman, folding her handkerchief carefully and wiping her nose, ‘to think that you’d lift a finger – after my previous experience.’
‘What do you mean, Danielle?’
‘Never mind. You won’t remember, Geneviève. When my dear Henri passed away,’ she added.
‘What about it?’
There was a little pause. I felt that my real father had come in and was walking right through the room, like a sort of interference in the air. ‘Never mind Henri,’ she said. ‘I remember when that brand-new building, the one that collapsed in, which road, you know, dear—’
She was turned to me, in fact, but Jocelyne’s mother told her the name in a flat, hard voice.
‘That’s it. Thank you. Boulevard Lefebvre, that’s it. I knew it was close to you and you said it made the hall mirrors shake in their frame, you said. I phoned you up to check you were all right. That’s when you said it, in quite a trembly voice. And when we were robbed I said to myself, I expect she’ll phone me up, now, if she’s a true Christian. That’s what I thought of straightaway, when I saw the showroom empty. That’s what I thought of, straightaway.’
‘Well,’ said Jocelyne’s mother, keeping her zinc eyes in place, ‘what a peculiar thing to think of, when you’ve just had a robbery.’
‘Gilles,’ said my mother, ‘I think we are leaving.’
She got to her feet, putting her empty glass down with a clunk on the modern table. I got to my feet, too, spots floating in front of my eyes. It was all just a nasty dream. Jocelyne’s mother was frowning at us with her mouth open.
‘Oh, come on, Danielle. No need to get in a huff,’ she said. ‘All we wanted—’
‘No you didn’t!’
‘All we wanted, Danielle—’ repeated Jocelyne’s mother, as if talking to a mental case.
‘You didn’t want anything!’
‘—was to make things clear—’
‘You didn’t want anything of the sort! You just wanted—’
Jocelyne’s mother shouted at her to stop shouting and then they were shrieking together so you couldn’t hear the words properly – exactly as if they were married. Raymond was waving his hand about, standing up, saying ‘Please, please,’ over and over again and sort of bowing away, the pipe still in his mouth as if he’d forgotten it. My mother was going out of the door. I followed her. The shrieks were ringing in my ears but the words didn’t mean anything. Our reflections flashed past us in the gold-framed mirrors, like other people’s. We grabbed our coats from the chair and went downstairs without any more shouting and got to the front door. My mother couldn’t manage the latch in her state so I tried and couldn’t manage it either, it was a complicated rod across the middle with a knob on it and I kept trying to move it sideways. Raymond appeared on the landing.
‘It goes down,’ he called out, helpfully. ‘You move it down a touch.’
I moved the knob down instead of sideways and there was a click.
‘Pull it open. The door, open,’ Raymond called out. ‘You’ve got to pull it open at. The same time. That’s it,’ he cried, waving his pipe. He was like somebody waving from a ship.
We hurried towards the car. My mother muttered angrily, shaking her head. Her nose was running and she nearly tripped over on her high heels.
‘Never been so insulted in all my life. Never been so insulted in all my life. Never, never. In all my life. Never. They can go to Hell. Stay there. I’m sure they will. Charity! I don’t care. If you hadn’t insisted, Gilles—’
‘I’m sorry,’ I mumbled. I felt very bad that I had let her down during the argument. ‘I don’t remember insisting that much, anyway.’
We got to the car and it filled with the aniseed smell of Ricard. My mother took off her high heels and put her slippers back on. We drove away badly, the car juddering.
‘We’re going straight back,’ she said. ‘The way we came. Please help me for once, Gilles. Good God. I should have known better. I should have. Awful people. I should have. Now my glasses are misting up.’
‘Don’t crash, Maman. Please. OK?’
We got lost within two minutes in a lot of narrow streets. It was hard to read the map at night, even though the car had an inside light, and the spitting had turned into drizzle. It wasn’t drizzling enough to have the wipers on all the time, because they started squeaking. I creased my eyes up to read the street-names but the drops on the glass made it impossible. I wound down the window and the cool drizzle wet my face. Paris smelt different at night. We were trying to get up to the Boulevard St Germain but ended up being forced to go downwards by a one-way street and finished in a square by the Jardin du Luxembourg. There were some people running past us and a lot of mess on the road, including chairs from a café thrown all over the place, which meant we had to take another street going up. It was the protests. My mother was driving so badly that I was sure we would hit someone. She wasn’t concentrating on my directions and started going on about the Despierre-Chéronnets.
‘Her father’s money, Geneviève’s. Made it in zinc during the Great War. Though we don’t mention that, because we’re all supposed to believe she’s from aristocratic origins. If she was a true aristocrat she would have manners. But she’s vulgar, in fact. You can see the zinc in her, Alain always said. He’ll say I was a mental case to trust them but of course he mustn’t know about it. He isn’t to know about what happened. The whole point is, he wasn’t to know. About my little plan. Of course, if you hadn’t insisted on goin
g—’
‘You agreed to go,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t going to go and then you agreed.’
‘Why do you think I agreed?’
I kept silent. She’d wanted this private word with Raymond, that’s why she’d agreed.
‘I hope you don’t think it was because of what I think you think it was.’
‘Eh?’
‘Don’t say eh? like that.’
‘You nearly hit that bloke,’ I said, pointing.
‘Man, not bloke. It was nothing to do with my little plan. I know you with your migraines, Gilles. You’d go having another migraine and what with the big day coming up—’
‘What plan?’
She didn’t say anything, pretending to fiddle with the lever for the windscreen-wipers.
‘I don’t understand what happened,’ I said. ‘When I was upstairs.’
‘They were very rude. Not Raymond, he never gets involved. Geneviève. Awful woman. Awful woman.’
‘How was she rude?’
A group of young men were walking towards us in the middle of the road, shouting. I wound my window up.
‘She said they weren’t a “charitable organisation”. Laughing about it.’
‘Is that rude?’
‘What do you think?’
‘Dunno.’
‘Very rude.’
‘Why did she say that?’
The men parted to let us through, waving their fists and slapping the car. In fact, they looked like teenagers, one of them not much older than me.
‘Drunk, I suppose,’ she said.
‘Jocelyne’s mother?’
‘Those boys. Though I’m sure she does drink. I simply asked them, Gilles, for a helping hand.’
‘Helping hand?’
‘Financially.’
‘Oh.’
‘They did nothing for me when Henri died,’ she went on, quickly, the car moving very slowly down a long dark street without shops. ‘I wanted a private word with Raymond, of course, but Geneviève asked me how things were, prying as usual, she’s never liked Alain – you’d gone upstairs, dear. So I found myself saying it. I found myself just saying it.’
‘You asked them to lend you some money?’
‘Gilles, I have to tell you something.’
‘What?’
‘The insurance isn’t going to pay up.’
‘Oh.’
I was having a drops race, watching the raindrops slide at an angle down the glass of the passenger window, at the same time as I was listening.
‘Papa wouldn’t tell me why, dear, but now I know why. I was worried, so I phoned them myself. It’s because of that window, the one in the showroom, the little one, the little dirty stupid tiny one that none of us even remembered was there. You know the one I mean?’
‘Of course.’
‘You can see it from the back, but I’d forgotten about it. It was just a little window, I didn’t even think it gave onto the showroom, it was just a little window in the back wall. Stupid, the way one doesn’t think. And Papa does usually like to do things properly, doesn’t he?’ She was leaning forward, her creamy gloves tight round the wheel. ‘Just one little lock missing, that’s all.’
She was going too slow for the gear. We juddered and stalled. She waited a minute and then turned the ignition on again. There were no other cars in the road, except for the parked ones. We started off again, and I looked at the map, light from the streetlamps criss-crossing it with weird distorted patterns through the wet windscreen. The wipers thudded a few times, then squeaked so that she had to stop them. Then the glass got spotty again until we almost couldn’t see through and I leaned across and flicked down the lever.
‘They’d have probably found something else,’ she said. ‘We’re in a very bad way, anyway. Financially. And the Americans are being horrible with this franchise business. That’s what comes of being an ordinary honest person, Gilles. The criminals have got away with it again. Not just the robbers, dear. I mean the insurance people. They’re criminal. Everyone’s criminal, if you ask me. Except for nuns and monks. It’s a wicked, fallen world where the unrepentant thief on the Cross is rewarded and where the ordinary righteous—’
‘Watch that cyclist, Maman!’
The cyclist disappeared down the side of our car but when I looked back he was still there, cycling along happily with his flickering back lamp. My mother kept pushing her glasses back up her nose, her hand returning to the wheel quickly as if it was stopping her drowning.
‘They’re rolling in it, Geneviève and Raymond are, but they pretended they weren’t, you see. It’s all tied up in property, they said. Well, why can’t they sell the property? Because, they said to me, who wants a tumbledown château in the Corrèze? Imagine, they actually tried to tell me they were poor! You see? That’s people for you. Liars and fraudsters!’
‘Maybe it was a joke, the charity thing. Turn right here, I think. It’s in the right direction, I think. Here.’
‘Jokes can be very ill-willed, you know, Gilles. Shooting children can be a joke, to some people.’
‘Shooting children?’
We’d turned now into another long narrow street with cars parked either side. I was winding down my window, trying to catch the name of the street, and didn’t even see the smashed bottles. The street bent round and the smashed bottles were just after the bend. There were two bangs and the car suddenly felt bumpy.
‘What’s going on?’ asked my mother.
‘I think we went over some glass, Maman. I think we’d better stop.’
My mother pulled into the side at the first free space and scraped along the kerb. I got out of the car. The two front tyres were going down: the white part of the tyre around the hub was already pressed to the ground. I could hear the hiss, even though it was quite noisy outside.
My mother got out in her slippers and stood behind me. ‘Can’t we drive back?’ she said, her hands clasped in front of her chin.
‘No. We’ve only got one spare tyre.’
‘People are so wicked,’ she said. ‘What are we going to do? And it’s starting to rain properly.’
‘I think it’s the protests.’
‘I don’t care what it is, people are so wicked and selfish. Won’t the garages all be closed? Oh dear God. We must phone Alain.’
The street ended in a big road about fifty yards away. It was well lit up. A big dark vehicle a bit like a coach was parked at the end of our street, blocking it. It had a white bumper on the front, like a police van. It probably was a police van – what my uncle called a ‘salad basket’.
‘Perhaps that’s the Boul’Mich’,’ I said.
I had no idea what street we were in, as I hadn’t been able to read the name. A group of policemen suddenly appeared next to the van, their raincoats as black and shiny as the vehicle. They were silhouetted; all you could see of their helmets were the white crests on top, moving about.
‘We need to find a telephone,’ my mother said. ‘We need to phone Papa. I’ll ask those policemen.’
‘They look like CRS,’ I said.
‘All the better, dear.’
She started walking fast towards the bigger road with her handbag on her arm. I overtook her and trotted along slightly in front. We could hear shouts and car-horns and bangs, with groups of people walking or running across the end of the street. This could have been normal, though. I wanted to get there first in case the protests were happening, so as to warn her.
The policemen didn’t notice us. I was almost next to them, my mother quite a way behind me, when one of them turned round. He had goggles resting over his chin; they flashed the light off the streetlamp and made it look as if they were his eyes very low down, like a weird kind of fly. The other policemen were moving their heads about, talking. The shiniest bits of them were their helmets, now, under their white crests; they were like the black bonnets of cars I’d always liked when visiting Carole, all spotty with rain. Two men in pale raincoats were smoking and chatti
ng to the policemen. I saw the Wimpy sign the other side of the boulevard and realised where we were. There were people standing in front of the Wimpy, but no traffic at all. I heard shouts and a siren going, although the people in front of the Wimpy were just standing normally.
I ran back to my mother and said that the Wimpy was opposite and that there was a public telephone inside.
‘Are you sure? I’m sure these policemen would know what to do.’
‘I’m sure, Maman.’
We hurried towards the policemen and the one with the goggles on his chin turned round again. He was holding one of those long sticks. He looked quite young. He shouted at us to get the fuck out of it or else. My mother stopped. He shouted at her again to get the fuck right out of it and my mother replied, in an angry voice, ‘Do you mind?’ and stepped forward again and the policeman’s stick went up in the air and he ran towards her a couple of paces and brought the stick down on my mother’s head. The stick seemed to be bendy as it came down. Two of the other policemen saw what was going on and ran forward to stop him. Then their bendy sticks went out more to the side and came swishing back onto my mother’s head and shoulders. One arm was up right over her hair, her hand gripping her head as if she was trying to wrench it off her neck. The white handbag dangled from her elbow so that all I could see of her face was a wide-open mouth.
I started dancing around them. The two men in pale raincoats were just watching what was going on, their cigarettes in their fingers, with four or five other policemen next to them, also watching.
‘Stop! She hasn’t done anything,’ I was yelling. ‘She’s not protesting! She’s not protesting! Stop! Leave her alone!’
My voice was too high and small and was completely drowned by the thumps of the sticks on my mother’s body and the other noises from the boulevard. I shouted again. She was bending over, now, not making any noise, the whiteness of her handbag even whiter because the policemen’s raincoats were so black and oily-looking. One of them had stopped hitting and was rubbing his arm. The two other policemen were grimacing, showing their teeth, as if it was very hard work hitting my mother.
I tried to approach nearer with my arms protecting me but it was difficult. I kept shouting and managed to get a hand on the edge of a raincoat, then felt a sort of ache on my shoulder and something yanking on my jacket at the back. I let go of the raincoat and pulled away. I heard the jacket tear. I covered my head because I realised that the sharp ache I felt on my shoulder was because I was being hit like my mother. My arms and back were being hit, now, and I could hear the grunts from the policeman doing it. There was a bad sting on my ear and I was yelling out of my body through a buzzing noise.