The golden rule, back in those days, was “Lock up your daughters, our son’s on the prowl.”
Chantal’s mother loathed me and made no secret of the fact. The son of working-class socialists, an atheist and a teddy boy! I was the realization of her worst nightmares. An antichrist on a moped who hung out in bars and played pinball during Mass. Whenever she saw us talking out on the square, she would throw up the shutters and bellow: “Chantaaaal!” in a voice like a foghorn, as though her daughter were a ship in distress and I a rocky coastline. We met in secret, which kindled the flames of passion better than a can of kerosene. The more we were forbidden, the more we wanted it. How many couples have been brought together by the lure of the forbidden and the pleasure of bugging one’s parents?
Every night, Chantal would watch from her bedroom window while I stood and kicked my heels outside the boulangerie. We had devised a system we thought was original: after her parents went to bed, she would open and close the curtains twice, this was our signal. I would go and wait for her on the street behind her house, she would silently creep downstairs, slip out into the garden and wait for me in the shadow of a mulberry tree. I would hop over the wall to join her.
Little Montague and young Capulet would feverishly map the topography of each other’s bodies and snog until they were gasping for breath. We did everything, except the most important thing, which she was saving for when she got married. Unfortunately, she was well brought up.
I panted and I pawed to no avail and ruined every pair of jeans I owned. She would leave me, her eyes shining with promises, her cheeks flushed, her skirt rumpled.
For two years we loved each other without ever sealing the deal.
Then I met Marie-Jeanne, a curvaceous blonde girl who was a little less principled and a lot more uninhibited.
MYRIAM CLEARLY finds me friendly and amenable. She is forever telling me: “If they were all like you, our jobs would be a lot easier.”
“But I never stop moaning!”
“Not at all! If you knew the drama we have to put up with from most patients…”
I can well imagine her job is pretty grim most of the time. But I tell her that the patients have a lot of drama to put up with too. And not just light comedy. They’ve got front-row seats with unobstructed views to tragedies of pain, suffering, boredom, loneliness and every other kind of unpleasantness.
And they’re not paid to be here, and they didn’t volunteer.
You can choose to be nurses, no one chooses to have cancer or be in an accident.
She nods philosophically:
“Yeah, you’re right, I know you’re right! Let me tell you something: if I was sick, I wouldn’t want to be in hospital. But, well, when you’ve got no choice… Anyway, I’ll leave you to it, I’ve got my rounds to finish. Oh, I meant to mention, the consultant won’t be coming round until late afternoon today.”
She never says “Doctor Smith” or “Mister Jones”, it’s always “the consultant”, as though he doesn’t have a name.
She says “the consultant” the way she might say God Almighty.
BEFORE I KNEW where I was, I was sixteen.
I grew up a lot during the summer of ’61. Within three months I’d sprouted into a lanky beanpole—scrawny arms and skinny legs with all the grace of a gibbon and about half the IQ.
Pépé Jean observed my growth with the intense fascination of a scientist with a laboratory full of rats. He was constantly prophesying that soon I’d be head and shoulders over my parents. His diagnosis was correct: by November I stood eye-to-eye with my mother.
The following March, I was towering over my father.
Seeing his gleaming skull from above was a lot more unsettling than what Gagarin felt looking down from Vostok 1. My father’s balding pate was my space flight.
I looked for any opportunity to stand next to him to confirm my recent rise in altitude. In a family of short-arsed, bullet-headed southerners, 5’8” was little short of a heroic achievement.
On every family outing, the neighbours would turn into a Greek chorus: “My God! Would you look at the height of him! My God, what a handsome lad he is!”
I was finally a man, give or take a few minor details. Including the instruction manual.
*
When I first broached the dangerous waters of adolescence, my father had begun to worry about my “frequentations”. In his eyes, my friends were a bunch of grade-A wankers, a bunch of no-hopers. I didn’t give a toss what he thought, and that infuriated him. There was a gang of us, Serge, Lulu, Dany, Patrice and me. All lost now to the humdrum routine of life, all except for Serge, whom I tracked down a couple of months back. We were obsessed with black leather jackets, slicked-back hair, gold-plated rings. I wore my hair like Elvis Presley. I was fanatical about weight-lifting, spending hours pumping iron so I could have bulging biceps and abs like concrete.
For two or three years my conversations with my father were reduced to long, sullen silences punctuated by arguments. By day I was petulant and moody; at night I would sneak out. If, by chance, he noticed, he would wait for me to stumble home, sitting at the kitchen table, doing his crossword, chewing the end of his pencil, while the pendulum on the clock ticked like a metronome. When I finally arrived, my breath fragrant as an oil tanker, he would bawl me out in hushed tone so as not to wake my mother. He blustered, he threatened, he raised his fist, but never carried through.
I pretended I wasn’t scared of him.
I was broad-shouldered now, my voice had finally dropped an octave, no one was going to curb my hormones or bust my balls. I wasn’t some snot-nosed kid any more, I was a man.
Pépé Jean, who got up at dawn, was a privileged witness to our matutinal slanging matches. He acted as referee, keeping score between my father and me—I was always trailing by several points. He took pleasure in tipping oil on the flames by the drumful, chiding my father for being weak and predicting a lifetime of troubles for me.
I wanted to say that the greatest millstone round my neck was him. But I never found the words to tell him.
During calmer periods, my father would badger me about my future.
He wanted me to follow him in the glorious world of French railways. He had boundless ambitions for me: I would be promoted, pass competitive exams, rise from humble train driver to conductor. Maybe even station master, who knows?
This man who had wasted his life fighting futile social battles wanted me to be on the other side, on the side of the graduates, of bosses—little or big. To “go up in the world”, this was all he could say. His working-class dream was for me to be a middle manager. He sang the praises of life on the railways, the career prospects, the job security. And the more he talked, the more bored I was already.
Me, I dreamt of adventure, of Russian roulette in seedy dives, loose women, clandestine brothels.
I wanted a life less ordinary.
IN HERE, you don’t have a fracture or an illness, you are the fracture or the illness.
I’m “pelvic fracture, Room 28”.
I don’t even want to imagine the daily humiliation if I were hospitalized with swollen testicles or a bout of haemorrhoids.
I COME ACROSS an article on male prostitution in Morocco. And I think of Camille.
I behaved appallingly.
I talked to him with the condescension of those who think themselves wise because they’re happy to say what they really think. As if being sincere were the only qualification you need to have an opinion. “If I had a kid, it would kill me to know he was doing what you’re doing.”
How could I have the gall to say something like that to him?!
Always got to stick my oar in. Me and my big mouth—and my pompous fuckwittery.
He’s had it tough, the kid, he’s been through the wringer. I remember the crack in his voice when he said “In my family, we don’t like queers…”
I’m guessing his parents were ashamed of him and booted him out, the way a disappointed customer
might send back a product.
We’ll have none of that sort of behaviour in this house, thank you very much.
In the kingdom of the blind, the one-track mind is king.
They should see him now, how brave he is. It takes a lot of guts to put up with the shit he puts up with and still have the will and the determination to succeed.
If he lived in Thailand or in some Brazilian favela, people would think he was brave, they’d make documentaries that would bring the audience to tears. Over there, he’d be seen as some kind of hero.
Here, he’s just a rent boy.
Camille is a decent guy, and that’s not something you see very often. Not only did he save my life, he went down to the police station to give a statement at the risk of having the cops question what he was doing there that night, or any night, he even took the trouble to come and visit me. And what do I do?…
I’m well placed to criticize arseholes, if there were an Arseholes United F.C. I’d be centre-forward.
“IF YOU’VE COME for the laptop, you can’t have it, I’ve got an email to write.”
“Whatever, I don’t care, it’s not like I’ve got somewhere to be.”
She sits down.
She is staggering in her brazenness, this girl.
“… Wh?… Are you planning to just sit there?”
She shoots me a jaded look, toys with a pimple on her cheek, examines the soles of her slippers, sighs, sits down, curls up and says nothing. She looks like a doughnut in a tracksuit. It has to be said that she spares no effort when it comes to watching her waistline, she’s forever nibbling something or other. To make matters worse, she’s got an MP3 player round her neck, headphones dangling, blaring out some gloomy bass-heavy beats, boom! boom! boom! boom!
I hesitate over the best course of action; do I lash out at the iPod with my crutch or call for help? I nod towards the iPod and say:
“Could you turn off the thingumajig, there? It’s doing my head in.”
She turns it off without so much as a whimper.
Out of the blue, she attempts her most winning smile and says:
“It’s my birthday.”
Hallelujah!
The effort has clearly exhausted her and she falls silent again.
I tap out a couple of words to Serge, but it’s no use, I can’t concentrate any more.
There are some people with whom silence becomes as itchy as eczema.
For one reason or another—good manners or simply sheer exhaustion—I finally ask:
“So, how old are you?”
“Fourteen.”
I attempt a cunning manoeuvre:
“Your parents are bound to come visit you on your birthday. They’re probably waiting up in your room, don’t you think maybe you should go see?…”
“Not much danger of that, yeah?”
Shit. Is she an orphan? Just in case, I say:
“Sorry…”
“Don’t be, I don’t care. So are you done or what? Cos I really need to get…”
“… on Facebook, right?”
She smiles.
“Yeah-but-no, I just want to check out something about names. What they mean, that sort of thing.”
I have no idea what she is talking about, and it doesn’t matter. I can tell I won’t get any peace if I don’t give in, and I will give in, that much seems obvious. My imminent capitulation seems inevitable. My willpower has become more rickety than a wardrobe riddled with woodworm.
A few years ago, I would have kicked her into touch faster than you can say Jack Robinson. Orphan or no orphan, what the hell do I care?
No, here I was, about to say yes to this parasite out of what? Compassion? Desperation? Woodworm?
Or worse, I’m getting soft in my old age.
MY SISTER-IN-LAW came to visit. Marie-Christine, Annie’s sister. Probably given a heads-up by my brother, not that I asked him.
We exchange a few pleasantries, helped along by current events: a glorious hurricane, hundreds of casualties, houses ravaged, terrible news for insurance companies.
Just as she is about to leave, Marie-Christine tells me to stay strong and accept this ordeal as a test sent by God. I tell her I’m a little sceptical as to the identity of the sender. She sighs mournfully.
She is a God-fearing woman, not that that bothers me, as long as she keeps it to herself. But she has to drag God into the equation at every possible opportunity, as though He were the sole possible answer to any and all questions. In her case, He is: she is a believer. I’m not.
Hence the schism.
She and I do not share the same world view. We mix about as well as oil and water. Beat us all you like, we will never form an emulsion.
Maybe it’s a family thing.
Pépé Jean reacted to baptism the way others react to vaccinations and became a virulent atheist. My father was atheist too, but without the proselytizing. He saved his harangues for strikes and the managerial classes. Each to his own evangelism.
My mother? She avoided all subjects that might be “contentious”: politics, money, religion. We had no need of them, between pépé, my father and me, we had all the material we needed when it came to squabbles and slanging matches.
Me, I’m a non-believer and proud of it. If people believe, if they don’t believe, that’s their business. Everyone has to find their own way deal with life, with death, with unanswerable questions and unavoidable doubts. But don’t come round interfering and telling me what I should believe or how I should act.
Marie-Christine is devastated, she believes it is her duty to open my eyes. I am her noble savage just waiting to be saved. She is a good Christian. She is an almighty pain in the arse.
I have no time for missionaries, with the obvious exception of the position.
Marie-Christine, like all dogmatists, cannot understand my heresy. I tell her that religion tends to bring out the worst as well as the best in mankind, a theory that is easily demonstrable, from the glory of cathedrals to the atrocities of the Crusades and the Inquisition.
It is not belief that bothers me, it is what believers do with it. People have killed and will go on killing in the name of some hypothetical God, to whom—should He exist—they attribute a plethora of mediocre human qualities. When it comes down to it, I’m not sure whom I fear more, the brutal fundamentalist or the oleaginous proselyte. Each proclaims his God, his precepts, his sacred texts to the world, like banners in a football stadium. Fanatics are just a bunch of hooligans: dangerous, aggressive and obsessive.
“I’ll say a prayer for you,” Marie-Christine tells me.
God be praised.
I’D ALMOST FORGOTTEN that my room is equipped with two beds.
I have a companion in suffering. They brought him up from surgery a little while ago. He is bristling with pipes and tubes, he has an oxygen mask, his breathing is heavy, laboured and raucous. I was in much the same state not long ago.
His hair is white, his bony hands are criss-crossed with thick blue veins, he looks very old.
Two strapping orderlies slide him from the trolley onto the bed, “You got a good grip, yeah? OK, on three: one, two…”
I’m half expecting them to toss him the way stevedores toss a sack of cement onto a quay. But, no, the transfer is effected gently.
One of them plumps the pillows, tucks in the sheets. The other flashes grins and says:
“This way you’re not on your own! It’ll be good for you to have some company.”
I give him a queasy smile and bite my tongue to stop myself saying that, personally, I hadn’t actually asked.
No sooner is the new patient installed in the room than the whole snivelling family shows up. My relative peace takes a hell of a blow. There are dozens of them, they take up lots of space, the room suddenly seems minuscule. There is an elderly woman—the wife I assume—who has to be helped into the chair next to the bed where she sobs in silence. Her pallor is grey, her eyes red. She is accompanied by three strapping guys and a
woman in her forties.
They have shrill, irritating voices, the woman especially, and they talk nineteen to the dozen.
Eventually, the woman comes and takes my chair.
“May I? You don’t mind, do you?”
The question is rhetorical, she has already plonked her arse on my chair, flattening my permission.
Two more visitors arrive, a boy and a girl of about twenty who hold hands and stand in the doorway for a moment, disconcerted, devastated.
Then the young girl gives me a vaguely exasperated look, as though I were bothering her. In this family tragedy, I am the interloper.
I can’t help it, I was here first.
Myriam comes in—God bless her!—and immediately bellows:
“Oh my Lord! It’s like a train station in here! Let the man get some rest after his operation! One or two at a time, can’t have more than that. C’mon, now, off with you…”
Myriam has a gentle knack of getting rid of people. The room empties like a lanced boil, the walls recede, oxygen rushes back.
The old lady stays behind with one of her sons, the quietest of the three. He looks at me, gives an apologetic shrug and whispers:
“Excuse us bothering you like this, I’m sure you need your rest too.”
Try as I might, my irritation instantly evaporates.
“It’s my father,” he says. “He had an accident on the stairs, a bad fall… He’s eighty-nine, so, well, you get the picture… They just operated on him, but there was no bed available in the recovery room: a car accident this morning, it was on the news, twenty seriously injured. So they’re chock-a-block downstairs.”
Get Well Soon Page 7