No Telling Read online

  I was glad Maman forgot to come up and kiss me a proper goodnight, in the end. I was too old for that, anyway.

  16

  Our bicycles ticked like watches. Christophe’s saddle squeaked. It was so peaceful you could hear all the bits of the mechanisms moving. This is because we were keeping to the quieter roads, mostly D or even C roads that were badly surfaced or not surfaced at all. We had to pedal down them sensibly, weaving around potholes or lumps of horse and cow muck.

  We ate our picnic at midday on the edge of the biggest field we had ever seen. There were little blades of grass or corn in the earth, which turned completely green like a carpet further off. A large wagon with fat tyres was being pulled across the middle by three horses led by a man in wellington boots and a blue cap. When he came near enough to us, he waved. We waved back, but exaggerating a bit. A disgusting stink of manure wafted over us, perhaps from the wagon. The wagon was joined by a bright-red tractor at the far end of the field, and they stayed together for ages as if having a long discussion.

  The weather had turned cloudy and grey, and there was a wet wind blowing over the field. But I didn’t care. It felt very good, being so far away from home. The charred sausages tasted better than usual. My mother had put serviettes into my uncle’s old khaki army pack, but we didn’t use them.

  I lay back and watched the crows swooping about above the huge field.

  ‘What do you think of ballet?’

  ‘Ballet? Looks really stupid.’

  ‘Have you ever seen it?’

  ‘Well, sort of. I know what it looks like. People waving their arms around and stuff.’

  Christophe got up and waved his arms around stupidly in the middle of the road, jumping about on his toes.

  ‘Why?’ he asked, panting.

  ‘Dunno.’

  It was the crows swooping about that had made me think of ballet again. It’d be really nice to be able to fly, I’d thought – like ballet dancers almost did, or seemed to be doing in the photographs. Carole had looked as if she was trying to fly, when she’d danced in the ward – and especially up on the showroom roof. Right on the edge, almost flying. That’s what had made it so worrying.

  ‘Ballerinas don’t wear pants,’ Christophe said, slumping onto the verge.

  ‘Don’t they?’

  ‘Not allowed to.’

  ‘How d’you know?’

  ‘Just do. I’m Einstein, mate. I’m not just handsome,’ he grinned, chucking pieces of grit at his boots.

  We were about twenty kilometres from Bagneux. We had said to our parents that we wanted to go into Paris, and Christophe’s mother had phoned my mother and together they’d decided that we should go off bicycling in the countryside instead of wasting money on films and Wimpy milk-shakes.

  Christophe’s legs were stretched out across the rough road, crossed at the ankles. His head was on his backpack, and a long stem of grass twitched away in his mouth. His eyes were open, staring up at the mixture of grey and white clouds. Now and again the sun found a slot in them and poked a ray through, like something beamed down by a flying saucer.

  A Dayan van driven by a long-haired woman in a funny sort of cowboy hat, with one of the back doors flapping loose, bumped past tooting away, forcing Christophe to move his legs up. It hit a muddy puddle and spattered its wheel.

  ‘Begging your pardon, madame,’ Christophe yelled after her.

  The van rattled off out of sight. You could hear it carrying on for ages, depending on the breeze.

  ‘Didn’t you even know they didn’t wear pants?’ Christophe scoffed.

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘I don’t give a toss about ballet. Why should I?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘Why do you, then? Fancy it, do you, mate? I know – you fancy a girl doing it.’

  ‘No,’ I said, going red.

  ‘Isn’t it what your sister did or something? When she was starkers in the loony bin?’

  ‘Yeah. Seriously, though, is it something you think is pansy, Christophe?’

  ‘Pansy? What? Being mental?’

  ‘Ballet. You know, dancing about in tights and stuff.’

  He was silent, as if considering, the grass-stem twitching about above his mouth.

  ‘Well, blokes do it, don’t they?’ he said, as if I was the one being ignorant.

  ‘Yeah. They need good muscles.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know if it’s pansy or not. My dad danced the ballet once.’

  ‘Your dad?’

  Christophe started to roll about with a laugh like a bark.

  ‘I put itching powder down his neck, that’s why,’ he croaked, tickling my face with his grass-stem. ‘Right down his bloody neck. A lethal dose.’

  I grabbed his wrist and we tussled for a moment, grunting and sweating – Christophe ending up on top as usual, his arm against my throat as he’d seen someone do on the telly, his knees digging into my thighs. Fur was on his chin, erupting here and there into gingery hairs and red rashes of spots. I felt pathetic against his big face and teeth and fuzzy scalp.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘you know what?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Let’s get pissed, mate.’

  ‘Get off my throat.’

  He rolled off me, laughing. His sweaty smell was ugly, somehow, rather than sweet as in the old days. He yanked his backpack towards him and fumbled around inside it, pulling out a sweater covered in crumbs and then a small dark bottle of Pepsi.

  ‘Oh yeah, that’s really going to get us rolling around,’ I scoffed.

  But a scent of red wine was wafting over me. Christophe was looking into his backpack again.

  ‘Shit, it’s leaked a bit,’ he said. ‘My mum’s going to smell it.’

  I watched him lever off the slightly dented cap with his teeth. He took a gulp from the bottle.

  ‘It’s straight,’ he said. ‘It’s the real thing. From my dad’s cellar. Siphoned off.’

  He handed the bottle over and I took a sip. We finished the wine in ten minutes or so. The crows became amazingly comic. A shiny blue 2CV passed, driven very slowly by a priest in a black cassock. The priest gave us a friendly wave as we started shaking with laughter.

  We lay back and gazed up at the clouds. They were moving just for us, squirming around as they rolled slowly downhill, slowly rolling down the other side of the hill to where they crashed into foam as if falling from a cliff. Some of the trees around the field were still wintry-looking, red and brown. This felt really important, as if it was the subject of a composition in school. We’d learned poems about wintry trees, about the soul and love and shrivelled brown leaves and the last petal of the white rose falling onto the ground. They started talking in my head, but all mixing up together. Christophe was humming a song by the Beatles as if it was the Marseillaise, waving his fist in time to the beat and humming it with his mouth open. The bicycle trip was revolving through my head. We’d started out from my house at eight o’clock and everything had seemed fresh and different. Then we’d left what we knew and passed huge fields with rows of plastic bottles on sticks and a load of pylons marching out of a power-station in every direction and villages mixing into blocks of flats and storage sheds and army installations and patches of wood coming into leaf as if painted with a splotchy brush and railway lines with complicated sidings and huge heaps of coal. We’d stopped at a pair of big iron gates leading into a plastics factory with hundreds of mobilettes and bicycles parked in the silent yard, their front wheels tucked into metal hoops like the ones at school. On the wall outside someone had painted, in huge white dribbling letters, SOLIDARITÉ.

  We had never gone so far on our bicycles, in fact. I imagined suddenly coming to an unexplored land of forests and bandits and wild boar, like musketeers on the run. In fact, the countryside was full of villages and farms with steaming heaps of manure and lots of geese that sounded just like the television sounded from my bedroom.

  I continued staring up at the sky as it rolled away do
wnhill. Christophe carried on his humming. The crows cawed, almost drowning out the proper singing from invisible birds all over the place. There was a tiny loud bird perched on the telegraph pole opposite us. It hopped onto the green glass of the round things the wires went into and then flew away. The telegraph pole was leaning at an angle.

  Drinking the stolen wine and sitting on a strange roadside made me feel like a criminal on the run. I enjoyed feeling like this. I wondered if I could do this all the time, or at least every weekend. I wished Jocelyne could see me now, feeling like this. My heels scraped the gritty road as I shifted.

  ‘Maybe we should run away from home, join a circus or something,’ I said.

  ‘Nah.’

  Christophe sounded half-asleep.

  ‘Do you know Mademoiselle Bolmont?’ I asked.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Mademoiselle Bolmont.’

  ‘Nah. Don’t know Mademoiselle Bolmont.’

  ‘She’s in a wheelchair. The one that was our secretary, sort of. She was Miss Miami Airport 1950.’

  ‘Beauty queen, eh? Nah. Don’t know her. Doesn’t buy meat from us, that’s why. Is that who you fancy, mate? In her wheelchair?’

  ‘No way,’ I laughed.

  ‘You’re going red, mate—’

  ‘Shuddup—’

  ‘You’re going fucking red as a beetroot!’ He started shouting as loud as he could. ‘Gilles Gobain loves Mademoiselle Bolmont! Gilles Gobain’s aching for Mademoiselle Bolmont!’

  I told him to shut up. He laughed and spat in his palm and made a rude gesture up and down with his fist. Everything went blank, except my anger. There was a singing in my ears. I stood up and leapt onto him without thinking about it, squashing him under me.

  ‘Shuddup, OK?’

  He was laughing hoarsely and whining at the same time, not resisting. He was curled on his side and my hands were pressing on his shoulders. My knees squeezed into his hip and his waist – I could feel the bone of his hip and the softness of the waist on my kneecaps. He had a hand up to protect his face. He was grinning and pleading and swearing at the same time, sort of enjoying it as I dug my knees in and pressed on his shoulders, squashing him, squashing him into the ground and grunting with the effort.

  ‘Shuddup, OK? It’s disgusting to say that, disgusting!’

  ‘OK! Sorry! I’m sorry! Pax! Yow! It’s really hurting, Gilles! It’s my innards! You’ll ruin my kidneys and my liver! Yow! I take it back! Yaiieee!’

  I got off him and went over to my bicycle and pedalled away down the road. I could hardly see for tears. I didn’t care whether he followed me or not. After about a kilometre I stopped. I was panting and feeling a bit sick and my legs were trembling; the road hadn’t changed at all, it had just gone on in the same way between the grass verges with fields and trees on both sides. There was an old wooden chair on the side of the road, as if someone sat there every evening, watching the traffic. There wasn’t any traffic – there were even tufts of grass growing in the middle of the road, as if it was a track. Perhaps someone had left the chair to be taken. I liked being on my own, with no houses or people around. My anger had changed, like something changing colour. The afternoon was quite grey now, with some low clouds moving overhead. Everything I could see was mine, because no one else was seeing it. It was very quiet, as if I’d put earphones on. There was nothing to see, really, because it was just fields and trees and the white road. The verge was creeping onto the road, like fingers. My feet scraped on the grit as I balanced myself on the bike. Everything was still moving along under me. It was very quiet. I’d like to be like this all the time, I thought.

  A bell tinkled. I heard the scrape and ticking of Christophe’s bike coming up behind me. I turned my head at the last minute. He braked hard and skidded to a stop.

  ‘You OK, mate?’

  I shrugged. He leaned on his handlebars and turned the pedals backwards a few times, as if testing something.

  ‘C’mon. It’ll take us the same time to get back. We haven’t got lights,’ he said.

  He was looking at me. His knees were as big as plates and scuffed white. He had his jersey round his neck, which made him look older. I wanted to belch but swallowed it. I didn’t like being drunk any more.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I mumbled, looking at my watch. ‘We’ll make it.’

  ‘I was only joking,’ Christophe said.

  ‘I’m not going to fancy my uncle’s girlfriend, am I?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘What I said.’

  ‘Wha—? His girlfriend?’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  ‘Oh.’

  He looked at the ground in front of his wheel, staring there with his eyes wider open than usual. He had one foot propped on the bike’s main strut and was wobbling a bit. It felt good, telling him. It felt very good, as if I’d opened a door and let something stinking out of the room.

  ‘You don’t know her,’ I said.

  ‘No. Wheelchair, you said.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘A bit weird, if he snogged and stuff—’

  ‘Yeah. Dunno. It’s stopped, now,’ I added.

  ‘That’s OK then, Gilles.’

  He didn’t say any more. I felt older, talking about it. Christophe seemed older, too.

  We headed back a different way and came to quite a steep hill and went up it by standing on the pedals and zigzagging from one side to the other, copying the Tour de France. I almost blacked out at the top and felt sick, tasting our lunch.

  A bit further on we came to what looked like an abandoned farm. It faced some kind of power installation behind electric fences. The sun was getting low; it peeped out under a line of black cloud and shone through the trees behind the farm like a nuclear explosion. We went through the gate and started throwing stones at the windows in the yard, smashing one or two. Behind the farm were about twenty rusting vans without tyres in a line down the field, as if thrown there by a kid.

  We found a way into the farmhouse and kicked at piles of ancient magazines and letters. There were old brown plates and rusty blue jugs and broken baskets and a photograph of Alpine mountains in a bamboo frame and faded snapshots of children on donkeys or next to old-fashioned cars or smiling between adults around a long table outside, all in black-and-white. We couldn’t understand why family snaps had been thrown away like this, like an old pack of cards.

  ‘Perhaps they were all murdered,’ said Christophe, ‘and no one knows. Like the Dominici Affair.’

  ‘Or died of some really deadly disease and everyone who comes here catches it.’

  ‘Yeah, it smells like there could be one. Where’s the toilet?’

  ‘Toilet? There isn’t a toilet, stupid.’

  ‘Eh?’ said Christophe. ‘There must be.’

  ‘No way. Not in the old days. My grandad said people did it in the fields.’

  ‘Disgusting.’

  Christophe stuck his bottom out and made a farting noise.

  ‘He saw turds in the churchyard,’ I went on. ‘There were human turds everywhere, like dog-shit is now.’

  ‘How nice,’ said Christophe, poshly, creasing his face up so that his teeth stuck out.

  We went up the twisting wooden stairs and discovered beds in the rooms, old wooden beds like the one Ste Thérèse died in. The mattresses were torn, the straw spilling out of them, and there was a stink of piss. Plaster hung down between the beams like blue rags.

  ‘Demagnetised aliens,’ I said, pointing to a heap of wine bottles near the chimney.

  The bigger room beyond was painted bright orange from top to bottom, including the beams. It had been scrawled over with graffiti. The words TRAVAILLEURS, LA LUTTE, VIETNAM and NON came up so often that we started to make a game of it, hiccuping every time we came to one of these words as we were reading. There was a rude cartoon of General de Gaulle with a dripping nose and Nazi swastikas on his peaked cap instead of the two stars. We wanted to add something to the graffiti but there was nothing to
write with.

  Cigarette butts were everywhere. Christophe produced his pocket lighter and managed to get one burning. I took a drag and immediately coughed, laughing it off. The tobacco stung my tongue and I couldn’t help coughing even more. I was furious with myself, but Christophe, smoking gently on his butt, didn’t mock me. I helped him collect all the butts, probably hundreds of them, to make fresh cigarettes with. We did it seriously, without talking, filling one of the main pockets in his rucksack.

  ‘I’ll open a baccy shop,’ he joked.

  We worked out that we could make a lot of money making new cigarettes out of old butts and selling them to schoolmates. We organised a timetable for collecting them and making them and got very excited.

  We were glad to be outside again. We went into the barn. There were two old wagons, a smaller one with seats for people, and an ancient red Citroën. Christophe, who knew a lot about cars, said it was a C4 from about 1929. It was covered in straw and dust and rotting rugs. We prised off the horn – I’d seen an imitation horn advertised in one of my mothers’ magazines and it was quite expensive. The horn didn’t work. There was some harness hanging from a big nail, covered in cobwebs, and I managed to swing from its two rusted horse-bits, like a trapeze artist holding onto rings. Christophe tried but he was too tall, he had to lift his legs almost up to his chin and just hung there, grinning like a mental defective. I was very pleased. We dragged out a horse collar from under some sacks, struggling with the weight, and tried to work out how we could take it back with us; I’d seen one on the wall of the restaurant in Le Bourget where we’d go sometimes for Sunday lunch with Gigi and Tante Clothilde. The collar was far too heavy, though. Instead, we slashed it with our pocket-knives, the straw spilling out like someone’s insides. Then Christophe’s knife broke against the thick leather and we kicked it instead, pretending it was a really tough Nazi.

  We threw a few more stones at the farmhouse; the sound of glass breaking was much louder here, bouncing off the walls of the yard. Something big moved in the rotting heap of straw in the corner. We waited, but it didn’t move again.