by Adam Thorpe
The policeman who’d kicked Helmut had a thin moustache and a hood on his raincoat. After about two minutes he tutted and went forward over people’s feet, half-stepping on Gert, and banged with his stick on the metal screen where you could see the shoulders of the driver. He chipped the dark blue paint, he banged so hard, and my ears rang. I desperately wanted to tell him about my mother left in the car but didn’t want to be hit again. As the policeman came back he kicked someone’s ankle and said, ‘Mind your fucking claws.’ There were electric shocks prickling my bottom all the time; they got worse whenever the policemen got angry. If the prickling got much worse, I thought, I wouldn’t be able to stop myself dirtying my pants.
The van did a three-point turn, making us all sway from side to side like zombies, and drove off down the street where our car was parked. It went faster and faster, vibrating the metal I was leaning back on – too fast for me to spot our car with my mother still inside. In a strip-cartoon I would probably have leapt out, I thought to myself, leapt out of the moving van with an exclamation mark above it as it sped off. I couldn’t see much now through the big windows except blurry lights and blackness. The van swayed all over the place, pressing us against each other. Everyone’s eyes were a bit too wide, looking about them, obviously scared. There were quite a few people about Carole’s age, probably students, but there was also a woman much older than my mother and a man with grey hair, his squashed trilby caught between his knees. The girl in the leather coat wasn’t the only one with a shoe missing. One of the young men had a bad cut above his eyebrow, he had to bend his head right back but the blood was running down over his eye all the way to his macintosh collar, making weird patterns on his cheek like a river-delta in Geography. My ear stung and my back and arms ached. I wondered if they were going to take us somewhere and shoot us. That’s what had happened in the war. The old man started to complain and was told to shut his fucking gob. The van accelerated, roaring almost, and I hoped we weren’t going to crash.
I reckoned the ambulance would come to the street very soon and find my mother in the car. I kept telling myself that, over and over, talking to myself in my head. I wanted to cry again, but was too shy. Gert was on his back, his eyes closed, as if fast asleep. Blood was caked in his ear. He looked as if he was about to laugh and I wondered if he was pretending. Helmut was told to put his hands behind his head, like the rest of us: they’d only just noticed. It was difficult to keep your elbows from banging the person each side when the van swayed. People released their hands when it swayed badly and then put them back again. The policemen only glanced at us every so often, otherwise they talked to each other. I couldn’t understand what they were saying, it was all slang and letters and numbers. One of them kept nodding and biting his lower lip, catching it between his teeth and chewing on it. The other one’s chinstrap completely covered his lower lip, so he couldn’t do that. It must be uncomfortable, I thought.
Now and again I’d not know where I was, for a second, as if I’d just woken up. Then I’d realise with a sort of whoosh and an instant panic would rise up in my chest when I thought of my mother. I wasn’t sure whether I was panicking about her being separated from me or about myself being separated from her: I kept telling myself that I was thirteen, but the strangeness and loneliness through the windows made me feel about five. Way behind this, though, was the excitement I was feeling, and I kept doing a running commentary for when I saw Christophe and my classmates at school. Then the van would swerve and my neighbours’ elbows would press against me each side and panic would return and the electric tingling in my bottom would get really bad. Helmut hardly looked at me, he was staring down at Gert and seemed very scared.
I started to feel car-sick.
This was worse than anything else. I couldn’t be sick here: I’d be sick all over Gert. This worry took over from any other worry: all I wanted was for the police van to stop and for me to get out. Every time the van swayed or jerked to a stop at traffic lights, my sickness went up another number, like a dial. At some point on the dial there was a red number which meant I would vomit. My face was covered in sweat. I pursed my lips and shut my eyes, concentrating on each moment. Worse than what we’d done already was to be sick in the van; I reckoned the policemen would torture me to death, if I hit the red number. Gert took up all the space at my feet: I’d have to be sick in my lap. After a while there was only my sickness existing in the whole world, like a foggy globe around my body. I tried to make the dial move down by breathing differently; I could see the dial, exactly the same as on our washing-machine. The switch was chrome. It had two fat wings like an aeroplane. You clicked it round a notch at a time with these wings. The wing with the thin red stripe down its edge was the one you looked at. That was important. My mother once confused the two wings and ruined a precious silk dress with a wash for nylons, so my uncle stuck a red strip of paper on the wing, to make it clearer. The paper was faded, now, and peeling off. The numbers were on the end of white lines shooting out from the middle of the dial. In fact, there weren’t just numbers, there were also words like LAVAGE and FRAGILE. FRAGILE was in red. If I reached FRAGILE it would be too late. I would have done the worst thing in the history of the universe. The van jerked to a halt and the dial clicked to the number just before FRAGILE. I breathed in very slowly and heard a scrape of metal and opened my eyes: the doors were opening. We all had to get out.
I stuck close to Helmut, who stuck close to Gert. Gert was awake, now, and groaning. I helped Helmut and another person to support him. We stepped out into bright floodlights that practically blinded us. It was raining properly, and the tarmac shone at our feet. I breathed in the cool air and felt better. The policemen in the van grabbed Gert from us and carried him away out of sight, dragging his feet. Helmut tried to go with them but was shoved back so hard he fell over and his camera hit the ground with a crack. He got up and studied his camera, frowning, as we went in a line into a huge building. Two of the people – the ones missing a shoe – were limping. Maybe they were injured.
There were lots of metal cupboards in the first room and a desk with a policeman behind it. We had to queue up. When we got to the desk, we had to put our personal belongings on it, everything from cameras to wallets to cigarettes. While we waited in the queue, policemen in kepis kept coming in. Each one would take off his kepi and throw it onto the top of a wide cupboard about as high as a person, without looking. The kepis landed exactly right each time, flat on their brims, without falling off. When the policemen went out again they would reach up and grab the kepi from the top of the cupboard. They must have had a lot of practice.
The man behind the desk hardly looked at me or even spoke, he just waved his hand impatiently as I emptied my trouser pockets. All I found were a couple of clean tissues. I wished I had proper personal belongings, like Helmut’s camera. The man said something too impatiently for me to understand. I walked away. He shouted at me to come back and pointed to the two clean tissues.
‘What am I supposed to do with these? Wipe my arse?’
The policeman standing next to him laughed and said, ‘Begins early, dunnit?’
I took the tissues, feeling completely stupid. Helmut was next. He handed over his camera and a thick wallet and started to say that he was Swiss and that his Swiss friend had been knocked unconscious and he wanted to know where his friend had been taken. The man behind the desk was taking no notice, just looking through the wallet and exposing the camera film. Helmut said that you can’t do this, you can’t beat up and arrest innocent people, he would tell his ambassador. His face with its droopy eyes and beard around the edge was pushing forward towards the man. Helmut was grabbed by a couple of policemen and taken into the corner of the room; because of the cupboards it was partly hidden and in shadow. About four policemen were around him, calling him names. I couldn’t really see him, but I could hear him yelping and saying things in German. This made them call him ‘Nazi bastard’ and their feet and fists came out and went
in again and he kept on yelping. No one else in the room said anything, they pretended it wasn’t happening. It was weird, because it was quiet and slow the way it was done, despite Helmut’s yelping.
A policeman, who was quite fat, came over to me and clicked his fingers and pointed up the corridor. It had a shiny lino floor and more fluorescent strips. You had to go between two rows of policemen; they didn’t have helmets on, and their sticks were white. Now and again one of the sticks lifted up and came down on my shoulders, as if to hurry me up. It was more painful because they hit my bruises, although it wasn’t as hard as in the street; it was like being beaten several times on the fingers at school, the tips already swelling from the first hit. I was very worried that the damp patch on my trousers would be seen. I found I was sort of grinning the whole time, as if I was saying thank you. The people in front of me were being hit, too, and more often than me, as they walked up the corridor. It was weird, seeing the white sticks going up and down and the people just bowing a bit as if they were sorry and carrying on walking. I wondered why these sticks were white and whether they were worse or better than the rubbery black ones. They made the same thump, anyway.
The corridor ended in double swing doors leading into a huge room full of people sitting on the floor. The walls were painted glossy mint green with about fifty fluorescent strips in the ceiling. Loads of people of all ages were sitting on the floor with their hands behind their heads. Quite a few had blood on their faces and clothes, like the ones in the van. There was the whine of an electric drill, which worried me a lot. More policemen were going around with white sticks, thumping anyone who didn’t have their hands behind their heads or who was talking or who tried to smoke. It started to feel normal, seeing policemen in black uniforms thumping people with sticks. There were doors on one side with numbers on, and people were going in and out of them. Next to one of these doors a builder was drilling a hole in the wall.
The student who’d been punched in the face sat down next to me, his nose still bleeding. His long hair looked like a wig. He hadn’t got his beret back. No one was talking in the huge room, except for the policemen. When the drill stopped whining, there was just a low rumbly noise from people moving about and opening and closing doors. It was like being in the municipal swimming-pool, in fact. The student shifted up right next to me and murmured something. He murmured it again, taking a big risk.
‘Why did the CRS give up water polo, kid?’
‘Dunno.’
‘Too many horses drowned.’
He winked at me when I smiled. He was telling me jokes to cheer me up, obviously. I was the youngest in the room, I reckoned, although some of the teenagers could have been fourteen. I hated being the youngest. I didn’t want him to tell me jokes – I was sure we’d be spotted and beaten again. My arms were getting very tired, and I let them hang by the hands from my neck, resting the elbows on my thighs. Everyone had a different way of keeping their hands behind their head. My shoulders hurt whenever I had to move.
There were a lot of men with long hair or beards, and I realised after a while that they were being hit for nothing. There were quite a few Arab men and black people, and they seemed to get thumped for nothing, too. My friend the student who’d told me the joke was hit on the head when he was just staring into space. You could hear the clunk of it on the skull. A policeman with white badges on his uniform came up with his finger wagging and said to the policeman who’d hit my friend, ‘Not on the head!’ The policeman nodded back, saying something about Trotskyites with thick skulls. My friend was rubbing his head and sucking air in through his teeth, as if he’d walked into a low door. ‘Fascist bastards,’ he whispered, when they were out of earshot, ‘you just fucking wait. Fuck.’ He was squashing his eyes with his fingers, probably to stop himself crying.
Helmut appeared at last. He limped over to me and half-collapsed. He was crying, his nose running with snot. He held his private parts with his right hand and rocked forwards and backwards. His left hand was limp. He smelt bad, of diarrhoea. Every now and again he stroked the fingers on his left hand, which were black and blue and swollen, blowing on them and wincing. The policemen didn’t bother about him putting his hands behind his head; they just looked at him and grinned. I wondered if you needed two hands to play the violin. I wanted to say sorry to him but didn’t dare open my mouth. I could smell my own wee from my damp patch, even over Helmut’s smell. He kept muttering in German and then would murmur, very quietly in French, ‘I am going to tell my ambassador.’
The policemen had given up hitting people, even in the corridor, and were standing in groups around the side, drinking coffee out of plastic cups. New people were coming in without being hit. I thought that was unfair. I kept discussing in my head whether the ambulance would have found my mother or not. I wanted to ask if I could phone home. Someone came into the room who looked just like Van, Carole’s Dutch friend. He picked his way over to our end of the room. He even had coloured ink-stains on his round glasses and jacket and on his nails. As he passed quite close, rubbing his head, I whispered his name but he didn’t hear me. Then he sat down and was hidden by heads. He’d looked as if he was crying. I wanted to tell him about the poster by Jocelyne’s house. I felt better that he was here in the same room, if it was him. Quite a few of the people here looked like Van, in fact.
After a long wait, the group of us were pointed at and told to go over to one of the doors. I went in first, on my own. The room was small and grey with smoke and hadn’t any windows. A chubby man behind a big fake-wooden desk looked up over his spectacles and seemed surprised. He was half bald.
‘You can put your hands down.’
I did so, slowly, because I was stiff all over.
‘Someone give you a clout on the ear?’
‘Yes, monsieur.’
‘That’ll teach you. How old are you, young man?’
‘Thirteen, monsieur.’
‘What the hell d’you think you’re doing, kid?’
‘Dunno, monsieur.’
He sighed and took out a sheet of printed paper.
‘I wasn’t protesting,’ I added, too quietly because he didn’t hear.
He wrote on the paper and then asked me for any identity papers. I said that my school card and my library ticket were at home.
‘So you could be anyone?’
‘Not really.’
‘How are we supposed to do our job properly?’
‘Dunno, monsieur.’
He asked me for my name, date and place of birth and current address, and the names of my parents or guardians. I said ‘France’ after ‘Bagneux’, not thinking. He chuckled and said, ‘I think I know where Bagneux is. Nice cemetery.’ I was expecting him to say that he knew my uncle, when I said ‘Alain Gobain’, but he didn’t. Then he asked me to sign the paper, scratching his forehead. He seemed very tired, with bags under his eyes worse than my uncle’s. A cigarette smoked away in the ashtray. The paper said something I couldn’t read; the words wouldn’t go into my head and stay there. I wasn’t sure where to sign it.
‘There,’ he said, pointing to a tiny pencilled cross and yawning.
‘Sorry.’
I tried to sign it, but as soon as the pen touched the paper my hand went all trembly and stiff. I couldn’t do my proper signature, which I’d been improving for ages. I couldn’t even write my name. The man watched me, leaning on his hand and blinking as if about to fall asleep, his cheek pushed up into folds. He sighed and stroked his lips and then smelt his fingers. He took a puff on his cigarette and coughed. I finally managed a sloping, trembly scrawl. He took back the paper and examined my signature, scratching the side of his neck.
‘Read and write, can you?’
‘Yes. Monsieur.’
He chuckled, and stamped the paper twice, with different stamps, then scribbled something on the top. Then he folded his hands in front of him and said, ‘That’s all, young man.’
I asked if I could phone home. He shook hi
s head. I told him about my mother being in the car. He looked puzzled, smoking his cigarette and blowing the smoke out of the corner of his mouth. He had very black nostrils. On his desk there were two snapshots in gold frames, one of a dog and the other of two children. He started to fiddle with a Tour d’Eiffel pencil-sharpener and said, ‘Listen, we’re obliged to detain you a little bit longer and then you can go back to being a street arab.’
He chuckled at his joke. I shook my head, starting to explain again.
‘Now hop it, kid,’ he went on, in a growl. ‘There are a lot of people out there and I want to go to bed at some point before dawn.’
I left the office. I’d completely forgotten to ask him where we were. I was told to go over to a group of about fifteen people standing in the corner of the huge room. They hardly noticed me; they looked very tired and miserable, which made everyone seem ugly under the fluorescent strips. There were quite a few older women; one who looked like a tramp, with a red, swollen face and missing teeth, and a smart older woman in white gloves who couldn’t stop blinking and doing funny things with her lips. I kept thinking she was about to say something, but she never did. There was also a large woman in a short white coat who kept muttering, ‘I say it reluctantly, but …’ and then nodding. Another student type was biting his nails. He came up to me and asked out of the corner of his mouth if I had a cigarette.