by Adam Thorpe
Raoul said, after a while, that they got rid of your body in acid, and chuckled. Someone said, ‘They did that in the bloody Commune, I suppose,’ but nobody else commented. Quite a few were asleep, with their heads on someone else’s shoulder or thigh. No one was singing, now. The girl with two pony-tails was asleep against Raoul’s shoulder and his arm was around her. There was a lot of snoring.
I lay curled up, shivering in my own nasty smell, and let myself cry. I just let the tears out, let them flow down my face and make a puddle on the concrete floor. I could hear echoey noises in the building, some from far away, going on and on all night, shufflings and shoutings and far-off crashes a bit like coughs. I was still crying as I imagined the place where I’d stopped on my bike, on my own, trying to picture exactly the trees and long grass and the clouds in the sky and the old wooden chair by the side of the road as if somebody was used to sitting there in the evening sunshine and the quiet.
25
I woke from a dream about Raymond making a state machine among snarling aliens with white sticks to see the cell door open and a policeman saying we could go into the next cell. I was lying on Raoul’s denim jacket. It was five o’clock in the morning. Nobody dared say anything and about half the people stumbled into the next-door cell, including the girl with two pony-tails and me and Raoul. Not Van, though. He stayed asleep, smacking his lips, even though people were going out.
I was hungry and very thirsty, but there was no food and no water. I was too hungry and thirsty, in fact, to go to sleep properly, though lying there with my eyes closed didn’t stop pictures of policemen and ballet dancers and all the rest (including Jocelyne) covering my mind in a sort of complicated mist that I kept wanting to comb and look neat.
At one point I asked Raoul why they’d taken Gert away. My own voice sounded echoey, as if my head was a church.
‘Gert?’
‘The one lying on the floor in the van, knocked out. He’s Swiss.’
‘Hospital. They’ll have delivered him in a taxi, dumped him outside the emergency unit.’
‘In a taxi?’
He took the match out of the corner of his mouth and then put it back again. It was almost like his cigarette.
‘Yeah. Or an unmarked police car, right? No one’ll know it was the pigs who did him in.’
‘You think he might die?’
‘You can die from a cracked skull. If he does, no one’ll know who killed him. Right?’
Raoul laughed. He didn’t seem to care much about modern people dying, only the ones in the Commune. His jeans jacket under my face smelt of burning things and sweat and had bumpy things inside its top pockets.
We were released at nine-thirty. We walked down the corridor, stiffly, like very old people, and into a room with nothing but a man behind a desk, who handed back identity papers and made us sign our name off. I was scared he’d keep me because I didn’t have any identity papers to be handed back, but he just waved me through. Then we went out into a huge car park with just a few police vans and cars dotted about. The sky was grey, but it wasn’t raining, and there were gusts of nice fresh wind. I ached all over, though my ear had stopped stinging, and I felt hollow inside from hunger and thirst and tiredness. We all said goodbye to each other, shaking hands and saying how we’d report what had happened. It was really weird being outside again. We were just like survivors of a shipwreck, and although my bruises hurt and I was filthy, I felt suddenly happy. The people who’d had cameras confiscated and so on had to go back round the building to the room with the metal cupboards. Some of them were too scared to go back. The girl with two pony-tails kissed us both and gave Raoul a hug and left him her address.
Van had his glasses off. He shielded his eyes and told me he was going straight to the hospital. I shrugged. He asked me if I had any money.
‘No,’ I said, just realising it.
‘Shit, neither me. What am I going to do? I have to go to the hospital. My fucking eyes. I have lesions, at any rate.’
I shrugged. His pale blue eyes stared at me. There was a gust of wind and he lifted his face and closed his eyes, as if he was already in Katmandu. I had thought he was going to lend me some money. Then he said, ‘Shit, what the fuck,’ and went off across the car park, his slippers flapping at the back.
Raoul and I were left on our own. He asked me where I had to get to and I said Bagneux. I told him I had no money for the phone.
‘Stick by me, kid,’ he said, moving the match to the other side of his mouth.
He kept shaking his long hair out of his eyes as we walked to the entrance of the police centre, his jeans jacket slung over his shoulder. He looked a real mess, like a tramp, with dried blood on his face and clothes and hair. I felt proud to walk next to him. Although he’d hardly slept, he still sounded excited.
‘We’ve been blooded. That’s when blood’s beautiful, Gilles.’
I felt warm all over when he called me ‘Gilles’.
I said, ‘I put up Vietnam posters. At night.’
‘You’re a professional,’ he said. ‘When I was your age, all I did was read Fripounet et Marisette and tie string to doorknockers.’
‘René Bailly,’ I said.
‘Yeah, the Resistance strip. How do you know? I’m talking ten years ago.’
‘I found some old ones. Are you twenty-three, then?’
‘I’m twenty-one.’
‘I’m thirteen,’ I said.
‘Shit, thirteen? I thought you were about eleven. Anyway, you’re still in there early. By the time you’re my age you’ll be commanding the revolutionary forces.’
We had to wait by the gates for about ten minutes until they were opened by the guard, who had a long gun. I tried again to explain to Raoul about my mother but he kept interrupting, talking about blood and the permanent insurrection just as the priests talked about Blood and the Eternal Resurrection. I was feeling a bit dizzy but excited at the same time. Everything seemed very fresh. I wondered if being on drugs was like this.
As we were coming out of the gates, a short fat woman with silvery hair and silvery spectacles lifted her arms in front of her like a zombie and started coming towards us, almost running.
‘Raoul! My poor darling! What have you done to yourself!’
She tried to hug Raoul but he kept saying, ‘I’m all right, Maman, calm down.’ She had on a soft brown felty coat like my mother’s (one I’d always want to stroke) that ended at her knees, and wore a silvery chain around her wrist, with a round coin-thing hanging from it. Her hair was very complicated, with a curl going horizontally across all the others and ending in a spiral. She looked much more like a grandmother, I thought, forgetting that Raoul was much older than me. She kept on acting worried and stroked Raoul’s face all the time, holding him by the arm and shoulder. Raoul gave up being cross with her and told her what had happened in a sort of sing-song voice. I wondered how she knew he was there. Why wasn’t my uncle here?
I looked out at the Nanterre street – a very wide road with hardly any cars on it – and felt horrible and lonely. The worry about my mother suddenly almost engulfed me like a tidal wave, but I didn’t show it. It all happened inside me. In the distance, over a big patch of wasteground, stood a building very like the hospital Carole had danced nude in. It probably was the hospital, I reckoned, because we were in Nanterre. Carole will look after me, if the worst thing I can imagine has happened. She’ll get better and we’ll live together in Paris. The big sweaty face of Van interfered at that point: it seemed to be laughing and sneering at me, its bloodshot eyes huge in my head.
Raoul’s mother was talking. She was very keen to take Raoul back home to Versailles and clean him up with disinfectant, but he said he had to see his friends.
‘And make more trouble?’
‘Maman …’
He told her about me. All he said was that I had to get back to Bagneux.
‘That’s almost on our way,’ she said. ‘I don’t mind a little detour, if you guide
me, Raoul my darling.’
The car was a little red R8. It was stuffy and hot inside, and a plastic ball giving off a thick sweet smell dangled in the middle of the windscreen. She drove so jerkily that I felt sick almost before we’d left the car park. She kept chattering away and Raoul, squeezed into the front, just nodded and mumbled back. His match had gone, now. He looked weird without it. The plastic ball swung like a mad thing and knocked the windscreen every time his mother braked. Because I’d hardly slept, the heat in the car made my eyes very heavy and her words started turning into nonsense and dreams. A policeman with a huge white stick woke me up with a jump by taking a slice at my elbow; in fact, my elbow was pressing against the hard plastic arm-rest.
‘You see, Raoul,’ she was saying, ‘your marquetry was always your passion and you’ve never used it.’
‘Marquetry …’
‘Just because it’s doing something with your hands, don’t despise it.’
‘I despise the term using.’
‘Everyone uses everyone else. That’s what life is. One day you’ll learn, pet.’
Her complicated silvery hair bobbed about in front of me. I felt like taking a thump at it with a stick, and hearing the skull crack.
We stopped at a shop on the way to buy patisserie and a bottle of water. Raoul wanted to have a hot chocolate in the café, but his mother said we would frighten people.
‘You are wolfing that down,’ she said, watching me eat. ‘Don’t leave crumbs in the car.’
I drank half the bottle. The water tasted like nothing I’d ever tasted before, even though it was Contrexéville. It flowed down into my chest like a beautiful stream.
We drove into the centre of Bagneux, past Christophe’s place, and I guided them to our house. Even with the worry about my mother, I felt an excited pride going down our road, as if I’d been away on a long adventure for years. The boring people at the bus-stop had no idea. Our road looked different. We pulled up in front of the house.
‘Is it a shop?’ Raoul’s mother asked.
‘My father’s a sole agent for Sunburst Inc. An American vacuum cleaner company,’ I said.
Raoul laughed.
‘America? The world’s favourite police force?’
‘He’s got the franchise,’ I added. ‘Industrial vacuum cleaners.’
The metal workshop next door had the doors open, and a rough whining came out of it.
‘Frankly,’ said Raoul’s mother, ‘I’m surprised. I thought it would be a gypsy caravan. Is there somebody at home?’
‘Oh yes.’
I couldn’t make the R8’s door-handle work. Raoul got out and opened the door for me, yawning.
‘No wonder you were protesting, kid,’ he said.
I didn’t tell him that I wasn’t protesting. I didn’t really understand what he meant, in fact.
I thanked him and shook his hand. He seemed tired, now.
‘Hey, we’ll meet on the barricades, comrade,’ he said.
‘Isn’t it finished?’
‘The party’s just starting.’
‘OK.’
He smiled and said, ‘Take your desires for reality, Gilles. No compromise with the bourgeois state machine, OK?’
His mother tooted. He pulled a face and got back in the little red car and they drove off.
I walked to our front door and rang the bell, because the door was locked. A nervous pit in my stomach opened up. I heard a scrabbling noise and someone shouting inside – it could have been Oncle Alain. The door shook a bit and I heard a woman’s voice – Tante Clothilde, it sounded like – saying, ‘It’s a funny lock!’
Then the door opened. It was Tante Clothilde. She peered at me for a second over her half-moon spectacles and then squealed.
‘Maman?’ I asked, straightaway. ‘How’s Maman?’
There was a shout of ‘Who is it?’ from the kitchen. Tante Clothilde was trembling, holding her hands up to her face. I marched straight past her and into the kitchen. Gigi was up on a ladder in the kitchen, sticking a polystyrene tile in the last space left by my uncle.
‘Ah, there you are,’ he said, concentrating on positioning the tile. ‘The prodigal son.’
‘Where’s Maman?’
He pressed on the tile. It wasn’t sticking very well. He was frowning, grunting with the effort of pressing and keeping his balance on the ladder. Each second that passed plunged me deeper into torment.
‘Hôtel-Dieu,’ he said, quietly, taking his hand off the tile very slowly.
My stomach caved in. My knees went weak. I sat down with a bump. The area around my jaw seemed to go icy. The kitchen was turning into a tunnel, crowded in by shadows.
‘Progressing favourably,’ came Tante Clothilde’s voice. ‘Cranial fracture.’
I stared at her, still not able to speak because of my jaw. Gigi came down off the ladder, jerkily because of his limp. He looked me up and down, hands on hips, his blue overalls sprinkled with polystyrene crumbs.
‘Our little hired ruffian,’ he said, and cleared his throat.
Tante Clothilde touched my ear and I winced.
‘That’s dried blood,’ she said. ‘What a mess. Look at that, Papa. We can’t even get past the mess to kiss him.’
He grunted, folding his arms.
‘Maman,’ I said, managing to get my jaw to work, ‘is just injured, then?’
‘Just injured! Hark at that!’ Tante Clothilde cried. ‘Did you expect her to be more than injured?’
The relief flowing through me meant that I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t ask whether she was going to be one hundred per cent when she came out. I had to close my eyes and breathe slowly.
‘Know better now, do you, lad?’ came Gigi’s voice.
‘Mn.’
‘We know all about it, you see,’ said Tante Clothilde. ‘Oncle Alain phoned Raymond.’
‘Mn?’
I opened my eyes.
‘Raymond’s touched, of course,’ she went on, plucking a hair off her cardigan. ‘Rabbiting on to Alain about the revolution and modern youth and how wonderful it was that he’d got wounded in it. Didn’t he, Papa?’
Gigi nodded, very straight-backed.
‘Had no doubt you were partaking in it,’ she said. ‘Claimed that you’d put up some posters outside his house. Carole’s influence, of course. We’ve no idea, naturally, what youth gets up to these days. Have we, Papa? I don’t pretend to understand modern youth at all.’
She sighed, rolling the beads of her necklace between her fingers.
‘A time and a place for everything, Clothilde,’ muttered Gigi.
‘But there was no need to drag your mother into it, even if she was tipsy.’
‘I wasn’t protesting,’ I said.
‘Oh? Then how did you get that cabbage ear and your mother get her crack on the skull?’
‘The police hit us,’ I said.
‘The police?’
‘Yes. They hit us and hit us and hit us.’
Tante Clothilde gave a short laugh. ‘Exactly!’
‘We just wanted to make a phone call,’ I said, anger rising in me. ‘OK? And they just hit us! They were hitting everybody! Tourists, girls, old men! Even fussy old hens like you!’
I glared at her, tears in my eyes. My head was going round and round very slowly. Her mouth was wide open with shock. She glanced at Gigi, as if for help, but all Gigi did was raise his eyebrows and pout his lips.
I stood up and started unbuttoning my shirt. Tante Clothilde stared at me still with her mouth open, as if I was about to do something completely unbelievable. I tugged my shirt over my head and turned round. I heard both of them, even Gigi, gasp.
‘OK? Good enough?’
‘The police did that?’
‘Yes, Tante Clothilde. They’re part of the state machine. We got lost, we got two flat tyres, we just wanted to make a telephone call to Papa from the Wimpy. OK?’
‘In the middle of a riot?’
‘We didn’t know,’ I sa
id, sighing. ‘It didn’t really look like one. People were standing about normally. It’s not what you think it looks like, anyway, a riot. They beat us with their stick things and then took me off in the van before the ambulance came. But not Maman, she was in the car. I was in a cell in Nanterre with loads of other people all night and we didn’t have any food or water—’
‘All I can say is that you must have been acting suspiciously, Gilles,’ said Tante Clothilde, drawing her cardigan close about her neck as if she was cold.
‘Fine, OK, think what you like. I’m having a shower,’ I muttered, very angry and worn out at the same time, scraping my chair back and striding out of the kitchen with my shirt over my shoulder. As I was stamping up the stairs, I heard Gigi telling Tante Clothilde to pipe down.
The mirror above the bathroom basin showed me a Gilles Gobain I’d never seen before. I liked him better than the usual one, in fact. He was filthy, with clots of dried blood and dirt, his hair was matted and wild, one ear was a swollen red cabbage, and he had dark rings around his eyes. It was a pity I had to get rid of him for the scrubbed version. I stripped slowly for the shower, each movement painful. By opening the bathroom cabinet’s little door, which had a mirror on it, and looking at it in the main mirror, I could see the blue and green and yellow bruises on my shoulders and back. Jocelyne would be impressed, I thought. I stood there, naked, and imagined Jocelyne coming in and being impressed with my bruises, touching them with her fingertips. There was a knock on the door and Tante Clothilde’s hand came in with a fresh towel hanging from it.
‘I can’t see anything,’ she said.
Our eyes met in the mirror, though. Hers seemed surprised, even shocked. She dropped the towel and closed the door. I didn’t really care, in fact.
I stepped into the shower and let the water cover me in its comforting pour, dirt and blood swirling at my feet. The heat hurt my bruises at first, and then helped them. I washed my hair and the shampoo stung my ear. I thought about Gert and Helmut. I prayed to God, as I stood there with my eyes closed under the pour of water, that they be healed in order to play their instruments as well as before (I’d forgotten the name of the instrument Gert played). I thanked God for saving my mother and asked for her to be one-hundred-per-cent cured.