All the Way (4 page)

Along the hem of little red dogs, there are dark spots. On the pristine white, there are now more little red dogs. Her mother's head falls back on the pillow. The church bell in the village sounds a single loud chime.

‘Are you sure there was only Georges?'

Yes.

Under the electric light, her underpants are also full of dark spots, and the toilet paper has spots on it, too, bright red spots.

‘Move over,' someone says. It's Georges' girlfriend, in front of her, gigantic, vomiting all of a sudden into the toilet. Her big body is all elbows and knees and she has her nose on the little dogs. ‘You've got blood there,' she hiccups.

The dodgem cars must have broken something inside her belly.

‘In Grade Six. And flat as a pancake,' her mother says to Georges' girlfriend. Drinking coffee among the oyster shells. The juice has run onto the tiles. ‘I shouldn't have got white,' (apropos of the tiles).

She's not as flat as all that. Not compared to Nathalie, for example. When she cups her hand, the nipple reaches the palm. When she bends over, her breast almost fills the palm of her hand completely, but does that count?

Why don't roosters have hands? (Raphaël's riddle.) Because hens don't have breasts.

But ‘hen' also means woman, just like ‘hooker' means ‘whore'. And ‘pussy' is the name of what's between their legs.

At the swimming pool Raphaël grabbed her breasts from behind. She struggled but he wouldn't let go. Then he bragged about it to his friends.

Her mother and Georges' girlfriend are talking among the bits of shells and it doesn't seem to be about either Georges or her father, but about her. About the fact that they don't have any
napkins
and that the shops are still shut. Cotton wool, that would slip out, but a tampon would be too difficult, wouldn't it?

Georges' girlfriend doesn't think so. What's so difficult?

‘She's clearly not your daughter,' says her mother. ‘Grade Six. That's all we need. You've got the whole picture now.' She's smoking, studying the terrace as if it has fragmented before her eyes.

‘So now she's a woman,' says Georges' girlfriend.

Her mother groans. ‘And a woman when some brute has it off with her? And when she has a kid? You never stop becoming a woman. I'd certainly like to stop.'

‘Or a face washer?' suggests Georges' girlfriend.

She's sitting in the shade with a
Peanuts
magazine. It's already hot. The terrace is rotating like a turntable in slow motion. The oyster shells stink. The juice is sticky on her feet.

‘Go and get us some aspirin!' screams her mother.

As she gets up, it dislodges the face washer in her underpants. It's scratchy.

‘In our day,' says Georges' girlfriend, seeing her all stiff and uncomfortable, ‘we used to put a kind of nappy inside plastic pants. I'm not kidding.'

The two women watch the tablets dissolve in the glasses. It's as if the house was going to stay dirty forever.

She and her father leave on the pharmacy mission. (When he finally turned up, he had all his clothes on.)

Georges' girlfriend vomited last night.

‘No way? I'm always telling your mother, you can't eat oysters in the months that don't have an “r” in them.'

May, June, July, August. July and August both have thirty-one days. Knuckles together, here is the church, index fingers pointed, here is the steeple, fingers splayed, open the doors and out come the people.

Papa, can you do this?

Hands clapped together, middle finger against middle finger, they are turning around the axis of a single weird finger.

‘I'm driving, my little chickadee.'

The after-hours pharmacy is near the marina. You have to ring and be let in. There's a sign in the window that says: HAVE YOUR BLOOD PRESSURE TAKEN HERE.

‘This is more your business than mine,' he says to the pharmacy woman with a wink.

‘What do you need, Mademoiselle?'

The word tampon comes into her mind but she knows that's not it. Tampons are for her mother and for Georges' girlfriend. The word she's looking for is an ordinary word, like pumpkin, with another word that's more complicated, more academic, or gymnastic.

There's a poster with an anatomical model drinking a syrup for constipation. A green arrow goes straight down through his guts, without passing through the loops of the intestines.

‘A packet of Modess,' her father ends up saying.

‘We don't stock Modess. Stayfree?'

‘Stayfree's fine. Now she'll stay free when she plays kiss chasey, ha, ha?'

He gives her a nudge.

She has
already lived through this scene
. It's because of the shame, but also because of the nudge, and the pharmacy woman, and the Stayfree and the staying free in kiss chasey: she's already seen this pharmacy woman, and now she'll remember this moment here between her father and the pharmacy woman for the rest of her life, she'll remember it, this moment that has come round again. Time has a hole in it. The past and the future have been connected like the mouth and the anus of the anatomical model—a hideous graft that short-circuits the twists and turns of the present.

And her father thinks he has to joke around with the woman for ages. It's just the way he gets on with people. It's his way of being polite. She'd like to pluck up the courage to ask if she can go to the toilet, to fix her underpants, and put in the
sanitary napkin
. She rocks from one foot to the other but the face washer stays stuck on one side. When she sits down in the car, a rush of warm liquid soaks her underpants.

They still have to go and buy flowers. Her father makes big gestures and speaks loudly and the florist piles everything left in her shop into the boot of the car: red and yellow roses, arum lilies, all sorts of coloured stuff, even gladioli.

‘Don't make that face, you look like your mother. You've only got one life, my little chickadee.'

Does Lulu get this as well? She vaguely remembers something about underpants for a dog. For a female dog.

It's raining. The ground is steaming and opens up beneath the raindrops. Each drop releases the smell of the grass, the smell of the bitumen. If she got caught in a shower of rain on the way to school, how would she be able to run, with this package stuck between her legs? The world unfolds in shapes, noises and colours, but she's in a glass box, separated from it all.

‘Hey, come and keep me warm!' Monsieur Bihotz calls out.

In bed with Monsieur Bihotz, the feeling of being inside glass continues. Those good strong smells, the big body of Monsieur Bihotz—the contrast is chilling. She pulls away from him. He grabs her by the foot, like a bear catching salmon. She pulls away again.

Those tadpole things inside men's dicks climb all over the sheets just like they swim around in the swimming-pool water, and they get inside girls. They swim up through the blood and make babies. Monsieur Bihotz doesn't seem to know about it, so it's up to her to be careful. Although there are also those strange times when he's writhing on the edge of the bed. Those times when he stands up, drapes himself in his dressing-gown and says, ‘I stand on my dignity.'

When she finds him in the kitchen, armed with the coffee grinder, his head beneath the lampshade, his dressing-gown belted around him, she reminds herself that the distance she has just put between herself and him is the same distance that he sometimes insists on, as if he also, in his own way, was holding something back.

There's no MY, or MUMMY tattooed on Monsieur Bihotz's dick, no get fucked to anyone. There's nothing tattooed there at all. When she was little and Monsieur Bihotz gave her a bath, he always came in and had a piss. He pisses on the hydrangeas, too. He says it makes them go blue. He has two dicks. The one for pissing, and the other one. The other one is much bigger, the colour of a turkey's comb, like the canna lilies.

Monsieur Bihotz can spend whole days in bed. Not the same way as her mother, who groans when you open the door and who needs absolute silence and complete darkness for her migraines. He has the shutters closed but the light turned on and he reads the newspaper, or listens to the radio, or goes as far as turning AC/DC on full bore, or he just lies there doing nothing, drinking lots of coffee. If he stays there too long, he tells her, ‘I'm having a coffee meltdown.'

On one of the coffee meltdown days, Monsieur Bihotz was lying on his bed with the newspapers around him, his dressing-gown open, holding his big red dick in his hand. They looked at each other for what seemed like ages, but as long as she was looking at his eyes, she was not looking at his hand. Monsieur Bihotz's face became more and more mournful and thoughtful. Then he wrapped himself up in his dressing-gown and turned on his side and he started groaning, a bit like her mother.

Under the shower the water runs red. Every now and again a little black twisty thing pops out, like it's alive, caught in the current. A maxi-plus sanitary napkin for the night. ‘The flow's heavier at night,' her mother said.

The engines of her father's plane are roaring on the tarmac. She knows the noise by heart. It gets more and more high-pitched, and then holds the note, loud. The plane flies just above the house. It's her father saying goodnight to her, on the weekends when he doesn't sleep at home. He veers off course especially for her. The lights traverse the black sky. They blink through the clouds, illuminating them, then they disappear.

She goes down the hall without turning on the light, careful where she places her feet, avoiding the lines between the tiles. Quietly she opens the door to her mother's room. She recoils because the colour is strange. It's sparkling like gold dust in the shadows. The glossy paper from the bouquets of flowers. Her mother has gathered all the flowers onto her bed and it looks like she's dead.

She gets some empty jam jars and fills them with water, and then she gives up, there are too many of them, it's so stupid, all these flowers her father bought.

‘You'll live to see the last of the animals,' her father tells her. ‘There'll only be useful animals left. Edible or ornamental. Rats and mosquitoes will survive. And seagulls.' Disgusted, he points his Dunhill towards the only thing still moving on the lake. ‘Seagulls are indestructible. They breathe any old air, they float on any old bit of water, they eat anything and everything. They've even adapted to Clèves, and that's saying something.

‘I wanted to live near the sea. But your mother didn't, because of the sea air. It rusts the shutters.

‘The only thing left at the end of everything will be cockroaches. Their shells are atomic bomb shelters. They can live under water and without food. The planet will be colonised by cockroaches crawling around in a desert. And you know what? Nothing much will have changed.

‘I'll tell you something, my little chickadee. There are enough bombs in the silos to destroy the whole planet. Right now, in the Federal Republic of Germany alone, there is a thousand times more firepower than everything that blew up in the Second World War. Enough to make the Earth tilt on its axis. The dinosaurs disappeared all right. But in our case it'll be our own fault. The first time since the advent of life that we'll be part of a total self-destruction, not only of the species, but of its whole environment.' He relights his Dunhill while he stares at the lake.

‘My big girl. My sweet chickadee.' His voice is raised, excited. He grabs her neck and jams her head under his bristly chin.

‘Because, you see, under this lake, there's a silo. Not a corn silo, right? For a long time I was sure I'd see them, from up above. You can't see the Mayan designs when you're stuck on the ground like a stupid bastard. But as soon as you fly, you can see their runways. All the little bits you can't see from on the ground. I was sure I'd see the silos from the plane. But I've never seen them.'

So
(she says)
there's a silo under the school. Or under our house.

The lake ended in a geyser and a long missile emerged from it slowly, heavily, flawlessly spinning.

He took long crackling puffs on his cigarette. A moist smacking, an inhalation, then a long breath. A white wave that disappeared into his mouth and reappeared, paler.

Monsieur Bihotz likes animals too.

He always had the same urgent gesture, the same scalded look when he flicked the butt away.

‘What are you talking about, chickadee. Monsieur Bihotz loves his dog.'

He likes hedgehogs. And ducks.

‘I don't like animals. Do you get what I'm saying? But they exist. They're there.
For real.
Not like lapdogs or hens. Not like domestic animals.

‘Can I teach you
one
thing in life? Can you listen to me? Listen to me for real? Monsieur Bihotz is just a granny with a lapdog. Like his mother. He took over from her.'

He got out of the car and walked along the edge of the lake. She didn't dare follow him.

He wasn't going to put Lulu in the Animal Protection Society,
was he
? she brooded.

He walked along the edge of the lake as if he was in an airport, surrounded by an invisible crowd, the only person with a precise destination, the only necessary person. Frowning, his eyes vacant, in permanent jet lag. A very adult adult.

She wanted to cry.

He got back in the car.

‘We're not going to cry over a whale, one whale. We're not going to bury it in the cemetery. We'd have to dig a hole as big as mother Bihotz.'

She laughed grudgingly.

‘But if it's all the whales. A planet with only battery-farmed cows and abattoirs.'

She leans closer, her nose under his ribs, right where the breathing happens. The smoke goes in and out in time with the heartbeats: a large, complex and mysterious machine. She almost feels safe and she dozes off, weary.