No Telling Read online

  We were sitting on a broken bench in the grounds of our secret place. In fact, it was our own mini-republic, now, called Noeuf. There were laws against school and correct spelling and ugly girls and so on, while anyone entering without permission was locked up in the main building – the Presidential Palace – and made to read the Bible backwards a hundred times or have their nails ripped out, starting with the little finger. Most of our teachers had already entered without permission – although only Christophe’s had refused to read the Bible, because they were secular, and thus suffered the awful fate.

  He had suddenly shot up again, just in the last few days, and his face had got longer. It was like a horse’s. He was older than me, though nearly fourteen. I was practising my mime, wrapping myself in my own arms and letting the fingers crawl up to my neck and then down again.

  ‘What am I?’ I said.

  ‘A nutter with fleas,’ Christophe replied.

  ‘A nutter with fleas is this.’

  I started scratching his back and he wriggled free, swearing.

  ‘Why should something go wrong on the sun, anyway?’ I asked, when he’d settled down.

  ‘Well, it might. There might be an explosion and a sudden loss in temperature, or the opposite. We’d have six minutes before we either froze stiff or melted.’

  I screwed my eyes up at the low winter sun winking between the pine-trees. It was shifting about on the carpet of needles at our feet, making effects just as good as on television, when dancers came on to pop music. My knees were cold.

  ‘We wouldn’t know, anyway.’

  ‘That’s the whole point, dickhead. The astronomers would see it through their telescopes and give us six minutes. That sun is really what it was six minutes ago, because of the speed of light. Don’t look at it direct or you’ll go blind.’

  ‘Like if you watch the telly.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘To do what?’ I asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Six minutes isn’t much use to do anything in.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. I can think of a few things.’ He made a dirty gesture with his hand. ‘What would you do, then?’

  His front teeth were sticking out. Christophe’s quite ugly, I thought. I realised he expected me not to say that I would pray, or run into the nearest nuclear shelter.

  I shrugged.

  ‘Dunno. Make sure my teeth were brushed and the back of my ears clean.’

  Christophe howled with artificial laughter, wanting to sweep away any chance that I hadn’t meant to be serious. His laugh sounded deep and high at the same time and I saw him suddenly becoming like one of his father’s best joints of meat, all hard muscle and huge, with stiff hairs on the skin. I wondered if it would make any difference to our friendship. The old bench rocked so much that one of its rotten slats gave way.

  ‘You know what I’d do,’ he said.

  ‘Couldn’t guess.’

  ‘Find the nearest wet open pussy and go right inside it.’

  ‘That would take about six minutes and thirty-five seconds. Bad luck.’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘Anyway, I’m sure you’d be able to fix it,’ I said, tucking my chapped hands under my thighs.

  ‘What? The nice wet—?’

  ‘The sun. When you’re an electrician in interstellar space.’

  ‘I’m not going to be that, dickhead. I’m going to be a cabinet-maker.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What I said. A cabinet-maker. OK?’

  He meant it, too. His elder brother was going to be the butcher in the shop, he told me, while he was going to be the cabinet-maker. He was going to specialise in posh cabinets for gramophones and TVs, with doors that swung open electrically when a concealed button was pressed in the side. The cabinets would be made of blue perspex and he would make a fortune. I didn’t tell him about me wanting to be a mime artist; instead I described my uncle’s plan to rig up a hidden speaker in the kitchen – it felt to me as if my family, with this plan, had entered the space age. It went with the newness of the year’s date, 1968 – still shiny and hardly used.

  Christophe was impressed; he lived in an old brick house next to the shop, with old-fashioned flaking shutters that folded squeakingly into three and rooms that smelt of soup and flea-ridden cats. The shop hadn’t changed much since his grandfather had started it (depuis 1900, it said on the sign). His father had plans to bash out a huge opening of glass and metal and cover the rough brick in smooth white cement, with the family name in perspex letters that could be lit from behind. For the moment, though, the shop looked like a fancy old wooden cupboard. It embarrassed Christophe. So did his father’s clattering 2CV van with the doors kept shut by string.

  ‘Your old man’s brilliant,’ he said. ‘He doesn’t dress like an old fart.’

  ‘He takes me fishing,’ I nodded.

  ‘What do you catch?’

  I remembered that Christophe’s grandfather took him fishing quite regularly.

  ‘Oh, everything. Salmon.’

  ‘Salmon?’

  ‘No, more trout.’

  ‘Where?’

  I waved my hand about. ‘In the country somewhere. I don’t know the name of it. About an hour from here.’

  ‘How big?’

  I showed the size of the fish we’d bought in the fishmonger’s.

  Christophe snorted.

  ‘Come off it, mate. It’s January the twelfth, not the first of April.’

  ‘Not every time,’ I said.

  Christophe looked at me with narrow eyes, his new horse face making me feel like a puppy dog.

  ‘What type of rod do you use?’

  I pulled a face, blushing. I had never blushed in front of Christophe.

  ‘I really hate liars,’ he said, in his hard, half-broken voice.

  ‘I’m not lying that much,’ I murmured.

  I felt almost evil, though.

  He stood up and started spinning stones over the soft ground, making them skip and leaving dark scars in the pine-needle carpet. His duffel was small for him, now. I felt jealous – of his breaking voice and his big close-knit family and the meaty warmth of the shop where half of Bagneux seemed to pass with their stories and gossip. I shoved my cold fingers in my pockets and felt sorry for myself, along with a kind of anger against everything.

  ‘Do you want a cat?’ Christophe asked.

  ‘My mother says they’re unhygienic.’

  ‘It’s Minou’s. She had it last month, remember? It’s really stupid, it’s driving us all mad. We drowned the other three and kept the wrong one. You know why?’

  ‘Why what?’

  ‘Why it’s stupid? Why it’s got half a brain? It’s because Minou’s son’s the dad. Cats don’t care, they do it with anyone. Even their dad or brother or son.’

  Soon afterwards he went off, running to the gates because he was late – he was always having to help in the shop. I sat in the Gestapo side-car, deep in thought, rocking it now and again. It was lined with a faded leathery material which was coming away inside, showing the skeleton of wood underneath. Maybe it really was from the war, over twenty years back, though it was hard to imagine a fat Nazi fitting into it. In front of me, the old building’s rows and rows of windows caught the setting sun and made you forget the dirt on them, like lousy hair when oiled. I pulled on my gloves (this would have been girly in front of Christophe) and rocked myself gently in the old side-car, dreaming and thinking about things.

  I returned home when it was almost dark; the bright light had just seemed to evaporate in the cold air. It was already frosty, and I could crack some of the puddles with my heel. The blue-and-green sky seemed much brighter when it was behind twigs and branches, though the ground was pitch-black between the streetlamps. I speed-walked and pretended I was Jean-Pierre Beltoise behind his goggles in his new blue Mantra – changing gear and cutting the corners like a real racing-driver does, shaving the walls with my elbow. It was a way of pushing away the lonely
feeling of the frosty night, when the world seemed to stretch on and on into outer space.

  I came out of the side-street into our long wide road at last and saw someone ahead walking slowly and revved and overtook him on the final lap, sending up a long plume of rain from the wet track. I glanced back.

  It was the man in the homburg hat.

  A lot of men wore homburg hats, of course, but I was sure it was the same man – he was passing the neon light from the Citroën garage and his face was lit up. He smiled at me and I broke into a run. His face had seemed puffy and grey, like a zombie’s, like an alien who could take over your mind.

  I ran up to the house, my back prickling. The door was unlocked and I went straight in, turning the bolt behind me just in case. My mother was in the kitchen, preparing supper. It felt hot after the clear cold air outside, even with my coat off.

  ‘I was beginning to worry,’ she said.

  ‘You don’t need to.’

  ‘No, I suppose not. How’s Christophe?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘Oh, just around.’

  ‘You didn’t go on his mobilette, did you now?’

  ‘No, I just walked. My bike’s got a puncture.’

  ‘Papa will mend it for you.’

  ‘I can mend a puncture, Maman!’

  ‘Then why didn’t you, dear?’

  I went to the toilet and then crouched by my bedroom window to check for the man in the homburg, as if I was in a film. Apart from the cars passing, the road was empty.

  I had bought some luminous paint recently; I decided to test it. I painted the headlamps of my latest Dinky, the red Simca, and then switched off the lights. The glow of the new streetlamps opposite, with their white dazzle of twin tubes, meant that I had to wind my shutter closed before swinging the car over the floor-tiles. You could hardly see the headlamps.

  I pushed the car off again. It swerved and hit the bed-leg. I checked for chipped paint on the bumper, disappointed as usual. I had imagined painting all my Dinky cars and lorries and then reproducing a main highway at night in my room. I’d imagined the headlamps reflecting off metal hubs and bonnets in the way that headlamps did in the centre of Paris, among the trees of the boulevards and the exotic shops and the sweet smell of trampled leaves and smart people in their furs and gloves.

  I switched the light back on and held the Dinky car close to the hot bulb, recharging the paint. The front-door bell rang and my uncle’s deep voice boomed out in the hallway, welcoming someone. I’d had no idea that my uncle was even in the house. I tried the car again, in the darkness, and the headlamps were definitely brighter, if a bit green, moving like a pair of Martian eyes in the black. I wondered if you could buy yellow luminous paint, to make it more realistic. The voices rumbled from the office below my floor.

  A sudden idea grabbed me: I could race my Dinky in the showroom. It was dark enough in there, and I didn’t need to worry about hitting a wall or a bed-leg. I hadn’t raced a Dinky in the showroom for three or four years – not since I’d looked up and seen an older boy grinning at me.

  He was peering in with his face cupped between his hands, having watched me as I talked to myself and moved my hands and made engine noises in my throat, imitating the drivers crashing and being thrown out over cliffs. That boy was one of the reasons I began to stay very still in the showroom, letting it all go on in my head.

  I could let myself go in the darkness, though.

  I went downstairs and hurried past the office and opened the plain white door with the Privé sign and stepped in, shutting the door behind me.

  It was pitch-black at first, and as chilly as Christophe’s dad’s meat-safe. Then my eyes adjusted: there was a bit of light from the streetlamp opposite. There wasn’t much traffic, but when a real car passed the vacuum cleaners looked as if they were moving behind their buttons and switches, each mouth stretched wide on the end of its tentacle. It was not so dark after all, in fact, and the Simca’s headlamps worked only when I cupped the bonnet with my hand – but I launched it anyway over the huge floor, the lino smooth enough to let it travel for a satisfying distance. I managed to make the car skid, imitating the squeals, and reckoned that my men were enjoying it.

  I whispered to them about it. They were so much easier to deal with than flesh-and-blood friends like Christophe. A door opened somewhere and voices sounded in the corridor, growing louder, seeming to reverberate against the showroom’s door. I don’t know why it was that I didn’t hide; I felt like hiding. Instead I froze. The voices came closer, the door opened, the neon striplights above flickered and hesitated as usual, a bit like lightning, taking their time.

  Then the whole room burst into the open. The cardboard cut-out woman looked as if she was frozen in shock.

  Neither my uncle nor his visitor saw me at first, although I recognised the man immediately – even without his homburg hat. He had gingery hair darker than his moustache, thinning on top, and thick gingery sideburns like our local grocer from Belgium. The man was nodding at what was being said, his baggy eyes flickering over the room. He was holding his hat in his hand, as if he didn’t trust our antlers in the hall. My uncle was talking softly, for once, pointing out the stock at the back and then the wide metal door that interrupted the pink and blue wall opposite – the door by which the boxes were taken in and out on the little green trolley. The Dinky car was too big to hide in my hand, its red bonnet sticking right out. I felt like someone about to be shot against a wall.

  ‘It’s always locked,’ my uncle said.

  ‘The kingbolt,’ said the man.

  ‘One big main bolt, yeah. Into a steel socket.’

  He was showing its thickness with his fingers.

  ‘It won’t be one-hundred-per-cent quiet,’ said the man.

  His voice was funny, as if coming out of his nose, and he had a strong Paris accent.

  ‘No neighbours,’ my uncle commented. ‘Warehouse and then workshop, that side. All bunk off at seven. Silent as a grave after seven, apart from the traffic and the wife.’

  ‘Snores, does she?’ said the man, grinning on one side of his mouth.

  ‘Ought to get a medal for it,’ my uncle murmured, smiling in the same way, his low voice still rumbling off the walls.

  And then he saw me, his hand staying up. His mouth dropped open in surprise. And the man saw me, too, his head jolting back as if he’d been hit. The car was digging into my palm. They must have thought I was an industrial vacuum cleaner.

  ‘What’s going on?’ my uncle snapped. ‘Eh? Bloody hell. What’s going on, Gilles?’

  He sounded helpless as well as angry – his reaction was much worse than I’d expected.

  ‘I was just playing,’ I said, my voice like a little girl’s, my face burning up.

  ‘In the dark? In the pitch-black?’

  ‘More fun in the dark,’ the man said.

  My uncle said something to him and then jerked his head at me. ‘Go off to your room, Gilles. Now. Hop it. Hop it, chum. OK? Don’t come creeping around here giving us heart attacks again.’

  His voice ended crosser than it began.

  ‘I’m allowed to play in here,’ I muttered, as I moved towards the door.

  I was hot with shame, in fact: no other kid aged nearly thirteen would ever have been so childish, I was sure. Christophe had given up playing with Dinky toys ages ago. I was abnormal, and exposed in front of a client, the toy car too big to hide completely. As I passed close to them, I smelt their scent and their cigarettes and the sweet whiff of drink – adult smells that made me feel even smaller.

  ‘Phoa, it’s scorching, maybe I’ve got typhoid,’ said the man, holding up his hands as I passed. ‘Hey, what’s that in your hand, kid? It’s not a Dinky toy, is it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What model?’

  ‘Simca 1100,’ I muttered, showing it.

  ‘That’s fast work, it’s only been on the road a few months.’

 
‘The Dinky model came out at the same time as the real car by authorisation of Simca cars,’ I said, repeating what it said on the box, knowing it by heart.

  The man took the car from me.

  ‘Nice little model,’ he murmured, turning it over in his hands as if he was thinking about buying it. He flicked the bonnet open with his thumb. ‘Yeah, there’s the engine,’ he said, showing it to my uncle. ‘Front-wheel drive. See?’

  ‘I’ve got a Simca myself,’ my uncle said, looking fed-up, ‘1000, luxury version.’

  ‘Of course you have,’ said the man. ‘But that’s not front-wheel drive, is it?’

  He bent down a bit stiffly and pushed my car across the floor, clenching his fists with excitement as it swung round and skidded, just missing a vacuum cleaner. He laughed. I felt almost proud to have the latest Simca model, and half-wished my uncle would go away and leave us to play Dinky toys together.

  The man didn’t retrieve the car, so I had to.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, messing my hair with a friendly hand as I went out past him again, ‘I’m jealous. Where did you get it, Jean?’

  ‘Gilles. By the Gare St-Lazare. That shop in that sort of tunnel.’

  ‘Of course,’ the man nodded. ‘Where else? I’ll have to find time to pay a visit.’

  He winked at me.

  I left the showroom, glowing from head to foot. How could I ever have thought he was evil? He was almost certainly a sign – if not an angel in disguise.

  My mother saw me crossing past the kitchen and asked me to lay the table. I laid for four.

  ‘We’re only three, these days,’ she said.

  ‘The client’s not staying for supper, then?’

  ‘No idea,’ my mother sighed. ‘Alain doesn’t bother me with the business, these days. Or not so much. I have enough to cope with already.’

  She placed a garlic helm in the manual crusher, blinking over it.

  ‘I’ll do that,’ I said.

  I squeezed the handles, the garlic helm resisting for a moment and then mushing through the grille in the usual satisfying way. I scraped the mush off with a knife and dropped it onto the three chops, spreading it carefully on the pulpy meat. She hadn’t said ‘Papa’, I thought, but ‘Alain’: she was treating me less and less as a child, and it made me feel better.