No Telling Page 32

  ‘Louis! One for the road! And don’t bloody dilute it this time!’

  He lit a cigarette behind cupped hands as Louis served more Byrrh. I didn’t feel like telling my uncle not to worry – that the man had looked frightened of him, too.

  We were on our way home, half an hour later, and I was thinking how I could build up the world’s best collection of plastic drink-stirrers. I could start with the one in my pocket. We had stopped at a red light, and there were people crossing just in front of us. Among them was a woman in a wheelchair, a sight which reminded me of Mademoiselle Bolmont.

  It was Mademoiselle Bolmont. She was wearing orange trousers instead of a long skirt, and was being pushed by a grey-haired woman in a woolly coat. I hadn’t visited Mademoiselle Bolmont for about a month, and she looked plumper.

  ‘Hey, it’s Mam’selle Bolmont.’

  I was excited at the idea of seeing Mademoiselle Bolmont outside her stuffy bungalow; I’d assumed she never left it. I could ask about clipping her edges, I thought. I felt guilty at not having done any gardening for her. I leaned forward and tapped on the windscreen.

  My uncle grabbed my arm and held it tightly, so that it hurt.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ he said.

  ‘It’s her, look. Mam’selle Bolmont.’

  My uncle’s eyes refused to look. They were watery from the smoke in the brasserie, or perhaps the drink.

  ‘Mademoiselle Bolmont has left us,’ he said, pronouncing her name carefully.

  ‘Has she? Why?’

  ‘Hopeless. Head like a feather-duster. Thinks like she walks. I sacked her. Lie low.’

  At that moment, Mademoiselle Bolmont appeared at the side-window beyond my uncle’s head. Or rather, the top half of her face did. She must have wheeled herself off the crossing, leaving the grey-haired woman looking on anxiously. Now she was lifting herself higher in the chair so that the whole of her face came into view. It was sort of twisted into knots.

  ‘Come back to me!’ Her voice was muffled by the glass so that it sounded underwater. ‘Alain! Please! Or I’ll kill myself! Come back! Please to God come back to me!’

  Her hand appeared, rapping on the glass, her talced cheeks all trembly with the effort. She had false eyelashes, I saw, and an orange mouth to go with her trousers. My uncle had a little smile playing on his own lips – shaking his head and looking away from her and smiling, half at me and half at the dashboard. The older woman had started to walk towards us, and my uncle looked ahead and let the car move slowly forward even though the lights were still red. Someone behind honked. In the whole of that time he hadn’t once looked at Mademoiselle Bolmont. I had, though. The car inched forward onto the crossing and then right over, still against the lights, and turned sharp right down a side-street I didn’t know. We sped away, like bank-robbers.

  ‘Bloody woman,’ my uncle said, at last. ‘Making a scene like that. Gone right off her head, you see. It’s her illness. Starts in the legs, creeps up to the head. Actually, she drinks. Like a fish.’

  I said nothing. It wasn’t an illness that had paralysed her. It wasn’t an illness that had screwed up her face into knots.

  ‘Not her fault,’ I murmured.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  There was silence as he drove, finding his way back. Things pattered away in my head.

  The little cobbled street we were on, with old brick houses, suddenly vanished into a rough sea of mud. There were fat concrete pillars and high-up sections of road ending in bundles of rods like a construction toy. It was the new main highway into Paris, with this section up in the air, passing through on huge stilts. There were cranes dangling Meccano-like girders, a lorry tipping gravel in a loud rushing noise like a steam express, and lots of thick cable snaking about. We had to take a bumpy detour round it all, following a few red-and-white cones and the odd flapping ribbon through big puddles. The car would be very dirty, I thought, and we’d have to visit the car-wash. Things were rushing through my head, now, and when my uncle signalled left or right the loud tick of the indicator blended exactly with my pounding heart. I hid it all behind a blank mask, staring out at the works crawled over by tiny builders in white helmets, the lorries the same yellow as my Dinky tipper. I could hear in my head the upset wives on Menie Grégoire’s radio programme – except that my mother didn’t know anything about it. It was the ‘other woman’ who was threatening to kill herself.

  I felt as if the world had thrown scummy water at my face. My uncle kept swearing softly under his breath, driving badly and jerking the car so that by the time we found the way back to our road, I was becoming car-sick. It reminded me of the time we took a detour in Nanterre and met Khaled, and thinking of this made me very thirsty. We had brought the smell of the brasserie into the car, which made things worse. My uncle started on about the road project at Porte Maillot, how they were going to put the Al 4 motorway underground so you’d be able to shoot along all the way to la Defénse and then on like an arrow straight for the sea.

  ‘Six-lane interchange,’ he said, ‘after three kilometres of tunnel between Maillot and la Défense. Not bad, eh, Gilles? A bit more forethought, of course, and they’d have had it all done by now. Forethought’s not our strong point.’

  His fingers were drumming angrily on the wheel as we waited for a line of traffic to filter in from the right. Everything was stuck behind a choking lorry with huge concrete cylinders on its back – perhaps for a giant drain under the road.

  ‘In life, chum, you’ve got to think ahead. Nobody thinks ahead. Why do you think I’m franchised to Sunburst? The future’s with the Americans, let’s face it. OK, now we’re going to start building proper skyscrapers, like they did. Now we’re going to do it. Forty, fifty years late.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘La Défense, Neuilly. Around there. All over the place, in fact. Even Bagneux. Proper skyscrapers, not these stupid bloody elongated blocks of concrete, like at Sarcelles.’

  ‘They look like a skyscraper on its side,’ I said, repeating the joke I’d made on the way to seeing Nicolas.

  Lots of rubble, lots of grit, lots of nasty builders’ dust,’ he said, ignoring the joke or not hearing it. ‘Thousands of square metres of office carpet getting nice and dirty every day. Eh? All that glass flashing in the sun. Paradise, if it ever happens, if the bloody commies don’t step in. Look at the traffic. OK, they’ve got a thousand kilometres coming up, of motorway I’m talking about, earmarked for construction, apparently, by 1975. 1975! I might be dead by then! Why didn’t they think of it ten years back? You see? Backward, that’s what we French are. Too many hands in the pot. Let alone the bloody commie unions. Look at this drivelling idiot—’

  We almost went into a battered van, driven by an old man who pulled out in front of a shop without indicating, his arm hanging out of the window. My uncle squeezed on the horn so that everyone looked except the old man. I kept sighing to myself, from anxiety and sickness. My thirst grew. The face of Mademoiselle Bolmont floated in front of my eyes. The heater in the car was pouring out hot air smelling of traffic fumes, and I wondered if I could slide the knob towards the blue without asking. I let my eyes follow the speedy-looking letters on the dashboard, as if I was writing them out again: S – i – m – c – a l – 1 – 0 – 0. I tried to imagine Paris looking like New York, with clean areas of concrete and aluminium and glass instead of the wet mess that lay the other side of the windscreen. If only it could all be swept away, all the mess, all the dirt and the filth and the complications.

  ‘It’ll be like Dan Dare,’ I murmured.

  ‘What will?’

  ‘Paris. It’ll be like Dan Dare’s city, with electric cars.’

  He pushed in the lighter-knob and lit his cigarette with it a few minutes later.

  ‘I was talking to this guy at Thomson’s,’ he said, suddenly, as if he was talking to a grown-up. ‘They’re working over at Massy on an electrochemical battery, about 100 kilos. You have
this electrode sealed in plastic with a lot of carbon in it, set between two polyvinyl membranes, like a sandwich. OK? And there’ll be around a thousand of them in each battery. See?’

  I nodded. He was driving with one hand on the wheel, the other holding his cigarette and changing the gears.

  ‘Ready by 1970,’ he added. ‘If the Americans or the English don’t get there before us. Or the Japanese. They’ve got the Expo exhibition in Osaka, in 1970. Knowing us, we’ll get right in there with the first decent electric car and then the commies will get them all out on strike.’

  I frowned in a grown-up manner, my arm on the rim of the door.

  ‘It’s nice, the future,’ I said.

  ‘But we’ve got to get there first, chum.’

  We said nothing more until we bumped onto the concrete ramp in front of our garage.

  ‘Don’t mention anything to your mother,’ my uncle murmured, staring though the windscreen at the garage door. He yanked on the handbrake with a tearing sound, and looked at my face as if gauging it. ‘It’ll only get her all worried, you know. I stopped her allowance. Bolmont’s, I mean. She has to rub along herself, now. Angry, you see. OK? Between blokes.’

  I nodded, wondering what Menie Grégoire would have said to Mademoiselle Bolmont. I knew now why she was always so keen to praise ‘Alain’ to us. My mother soaking it up, all innocent.

  ‘It’s not good for her to get worried, you see. She has enough worries to be getting on with, without that very sick woman interfering.’

  ‘She’s mad, is she?’

  ‘Bolmont? Dotty as a parrot. I stop her allowance because she’s not doing a flaming thing and she reckons I’m in debt to her, owe her a whole load of money. I don’t. It’s the illness. Starts in the legs, goes up to the head. Sad, really. Only took her on out of charity. In the first place. Ought to get a medal for it. She lost a whole bloody file last month.’

  ‘Is that why the insurance people won’t pay up?’ I said, quietly, looking straight out and hardly opening my mouth to say it.

  My uncle made a spurting noise with his lips.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you why they won’t pay up.’

  ‘Why?’

  He bit his lip for a moment or two.

  ‘That bloody stupid little dirty window in the back wall.’

  ‘That window? Why?’

  ‘Because it didn’t have a lock on it.’

  ‘But it was blocked by the stock,’ I said.

  ‘Not when they inspected it afterwards, it wasn’t. Eh? I’ve got no proof it was blocked, either. That bloody little claims creep, remember him? The one with the stupid braces and fat arse? Looked all innocent, didn’t he, asking me about that stupid window? I’d thought I’d got everything covered, too. I mean, in case of a break-in.’

  ‘That’s not fair.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I told ’em. I said, the stock’s nicked and it’s because it’s nicked that I can’t claim it back on your pissing insurance!’

  He sort of cackled, stubbing out his cigarette in the car’s ashtray.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘in this world, Gilles, you rip to shreds or you get ripped to shreds. Those blokes sit on their fat arses all day and work out how to screw as much money as they can out of decent honest folk like us. Safety net, they call it, in their adverts. Well, one day you fall off the top of the ladder and suddenly their bloody safety net’s full of more holes than a slab of Gruyère. That’s what I paid my premiums for, chum. In fact, I paid my premiums to let them sit on their fatty arses and have two-hour lunch-breaks and sod off home at ten to five. Like the politicians. Only it’s not premiums with the politicians, it’s called taxes. That’s what we pay our taxes for, Gilles. We’re sweating blood for these bastards to rot behind their bloody desks and tickle their fancies every—’

  ‘But they didn’t come in through the window.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘The robbers. You could see all the cobwebs and dirt still on the window latch.’

  ‘Well, go tell the spiders to start spinning, Gilles. We cleaned it all up, didn’t we? We’re cretins. We trust people too much, do the Gobains. Wouldn’t have made any difference, anyway. It’s in the clause.’

  He unfolded a creased piece of paper from his inside pocket and showed me one of the paragraphs typed on it, next to a number. He lit another cigarette with his gold lighter. The paragraph said:

  It shall be a condition precedent to any recovery under this policy that the insured will take all reasonable care to secure the insured premises (including windows, doors and other means of access) at all times, and to prevent or deter any unauthorised access to the insured premises.

  At first it was like reading a blank page.

  ‘Secure means lock,’ said my uncle. ‘In other words, we cocked it up.’

  Then I understood.

  ‘But it’s obvious they didn’t come in through the window,’ I said. ‘They broke the kingbolt. The police saw they’d broken it.’

  He looked at me.

  ‘The kingbolt?’

  ‘That’s what it’s called. Isn’t it?’

  ‘I have heard it called that, Gilles. Though it’s not usual.’

  He sucked on his cigarette, looking at me the whole time.

  ‘You’re right, though,’ he said, letting the smoke out. ‘The kingbolt was sawn right through. From the outside. The police said so.’

  He looked at me for a bit longer, as if puzzled. I started to blush. It was the man in the homburg who’d called it a ‘kingbolt’, when he and my uncle had surprised me in the showroom. Maybe it wasn’t the normal name.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘the kingbolt. Lost its head in the Revolution. Won’t wash with the insurance people, though. Technically, you see, we’ve broken the clause, with that little dirty window of ours.’

  Then he grinned and rubbed my hair so hard he almost cricked my neck.

  ‘Bastards, that’s what most people in the world are, chum. Selfish scheming greedy bastards. Apes in the jungle.’

  ‘Maman doesn’t know about the window business.’

  ‘I haven’t told her.’

  ‘Why not?’

  He rested a hand on the steering-wheel and stared straight out.

  ‘She’ll think I’m stupid, that’s why.’

  ‘Why stupid? It wasn’t your fault.’

  ‘Yeah, it was. I should have foreseen it, had everything covered. A stupid bloody little window. Technical detail, but it’s the detail that counts. If we end up begging on the bloody streets, it won’t be that stupid little window’s fault, or those insurance bastards’ fault. It’ll be my fault. That’s how she’ll see it. Until the day I die. My fault.’

  ‘She didn’t think of the window, either.’

  ‘It’s not her job to think of it. It’s my job. She doesn’t make mistakes in the house, does she? She’s perfect. That’s why she doesn’t like being told what to do. I try and help, to suggest, and she calls it “ordering about”.’

  ‘She won’t really be like that,’ I said.

  He snorted.

  ‘She said you like things to be done properly,’ I went on.

  ‘When did she say that?’

  ‘Last Sunday. When the antler-rack nearly came off the wall.’

  He stared at me for a moment and then laughed, slapping the wheel.

  ‘She said that, did she? Jesus Christ.’

  He was wiping his eyes and shaking. I couldn’t understand why he found it funny. He suddenly stopped laughing and looked fiercely at the middle of the steering-wheel, where the horn was disguised as the Simca sign.

  ‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘it’s the robbers’ fault, if we end up begging.’

  He scratched his sideburn, hard. White bits floated from it in the air.

  ‘Yeah, that’s right. It’s all the robbers’ fault.’

  His voice sounded sarcastic. There was another silence. I just stayed staring at the garage door through the windscreen. It was getting
cold, because the engine was off.

  ‘Gilles.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  He turned to me.

  ‘We’ll do a deal. OK? Between us blokes?’

  ‘What deal?’

  His left hand was pointing at me. The thick finger smelt of tobacco, its clipped nail stained yellow.

  ‘Don’t mention any of this to your mother. None of it. She’s not in a good state. And I’ll take you fishing, or something. Or to Paris. The bright lights. We could go into the centre together, see a show. That’s a great idea. Just the two of us. How about it?’

  I nodded my head, slowly. He was shifting in his seat, excited.

  ‘Yeah. That’d be good. Man and boy. No, man and man.’

  ‘That’d be good,’ I echoed.

  ‘A deal,’ he said, sticking his hand out.

  I nodded again and took his hand, feeling I had somehow grown up in a few seconds. His handshake was so hard it almost hurt.

  My mother told us off for being late for lunch.

  ‘It’s hardly edible, now,’ she exaggerated.

  My uncle told her how we’d got ‘fouled up’ in the new highway works. She didn’t care, she said she’d gone in and out of the centre yesterday without any problem. When her back was turned, my uncle winked at me. I didn’t want to wink back, but I did.

  I now dreaded meeting Mademoiselle Bolmont in her wheelchair, and kept dreaming about her. I dreamt that I was in the nude and sitting on her lap, suffocating in her talc. In one dream I was in the toilet with her, her wheelchair lined with sheepskin so I could feel its woolliness against my quivering knees. I almost wet my bed, that time. These dreams tortured me, since I didn’t seem able to stop them.

  I felt shame, of course. I didn’t add it to my lists of sins to confess – it was too serious.

  Oncle Alain had an important meeting with our bank manager and the manager agreed a loan. Meanwhile, my uncle was ‘pulling all the strings he could’ to get the insurance people to pay up. He said they were no better than street swindlers with the three-card trick. He wouldn’t show me the trick, though.

  A week later, I was in the queue for confession. The children in the queue for the other confessional were making rude signs at us, secretly, without the verger noticing. An older girl in pigtails and clopping shoes came out of the box already mumbling her Hail Marys and I stepped into the darkness and drew the curtain behind me. I always drew it very carefully, so that no gap remained. The confessional smelt as usual of beeswax and sweaty feet – plus some sickly perfume, this time (probably the girl’s). I recited the contents of List Three, stumbling a bit. As I was reciting by rote, without thinking, a desperate need to say something about my wicked dreams rose up in me. I got to the end of the list and put my face nearer the grille.