Black Chalk (17 page)

Still, if I thought I'd avoid people like George by leaving the cruise ship, I quickly found out how wrong I was. The crew had been full of ignorant Antipodeans, while south-east France was a haven for British accents. For people who'd been transfixed to their screens, to their newspapers, as Hornsbury drew the nation's news outlets. Whereas I'd gone for almost two years unrecognised, I now couldn't spend a week without seeing someone's eyes widen, and a month without someone asking me outright about it. That was when I started calling myself Nathan, instead of Nate, and although it worked to some extent, I also found that it wasn't the recognition itself that bothered me, but rather, it was the idea that I owed people my story. Not everyone behaved that way. In the way they turned words, in the way they squeezed my shoulder, I learned to identify the undesirables. They were the ones who pitted everything on my answers, as if I held the key to a puzzle that had become theirs.

‘But why' – they'd start, and then they would ask me about Eric, about his parents, about the wrongs of our community, the certain evils it must have hidden, sexual, moral, or otherwise. At first, I looked at these people with refreshed horror. But soon I was as impervious to them as I was to an evening's first four pints, and I swatted them away with my sharpest contempt. When that didn't work, I feigned pain, letting my eyes go blurry and my mouth drop ajar.

Most of the people who remembered the shooting, and who linked my name to it, were kind enough not to care about what I had to say. A minute after they asked me what it'd been like to be there, after I answered with distant bravado (‘Oh, you know, you just accept it, right?'), they harked back to our previous conversation, and five minutes later, we were drinking, dancing, and laughing as hard as before. The matter was handled so casually that soon they were pointing to me, and telling their friends that I was the man who'd survived, and the friends felt satisfied enough that they didn't come to ask me anymore.

Some people, and George was one of them, think that I handled things wrongly. Victims of PTSD needed to be followed. Followed and then cajoled, medicated, drugged, treated, even confined if their situation demanded it. Perhaps because it doesn't involve practitioners, no one speaks of the benefits of distance – and yet for me, it was the best of cures. In hospital, three specialists of the mind had lectured me on how I would feel, how I should think – and with them, my memories were only ever a stab away from breaking my calm. On the road, they were as distant as home.

Had I stayed, my life would have revolved around the one incident. I could have explained all of my weaknesses on one morning of my life. The love I couldn't give, the hate I couldn't source, the dullness I couldn't outflank. But away from those who knew me, banishing the past to a foreign land, avoiding those who wanted to talk, I soon learned to spend a day without thinking of it, and a day became a week. And I loved without looking over my shoulder, and I hated just as hard. And there were weeks spent fixing skis, and weeks spent serving martinis. And slow days behind a glass counter, and manic days on my feet, rushing up and down three flights of stairs, a phone on my ear. Now, as I face the greatest of calms, I realise that for close to six years, jobs, faces, flats all blended into a trail of warm-tinted pastels. I was drifting so fast that everything was possible, so fast that happiness was rushing past.

My mother's infrequent emails tried to ground me to my past, but I brushed most of her words away. Thinking of home no longer had blood pumping unease into my limbs. It was only in what she hid that I felt discomfort. ‘Hornsbury's changed so much that we're thinking of moving.' ‘Your father and I went on a holiday to Greece last year. It was the first time we'd taken a holiday together for three and a half years.' Or: ‘I'm going on sabbatical for your brother's A-levels.'

Sometimes, the incident felt distant enough that such offhanded remarks made me doubt my reasons for leaving.

***

I enjoyed the transient nature of seasonal jobs. Love was free, and drugs weren't much more expensive. There was Naomi, with her generous breasts and loving thighs, Jennifer, with her eager mouth and droopy eyes, Maura, with her unshaved armpits and marijuana plants. There was also coke, speed, ecstasy, pills and powders, but while I was happy to dabble, I was too careful to plunge into their world.

As the weeks passed, as the seasons ticked over, I drifted towards a French crowd, drawn in by their authenticity and Marie's freckled nose. Marie was French as I'd expected the French: small, dark-haired, with a fiery brow, and a hatred of everything English.

‘Pour toi, je fais une exception, mais seulement parce que je te trouve mignon.'

I was the exception which confirmed the rule – we never spoke English, since we were in France, and French was a superior language: clearer in its diction, prettier to the ear, free of the sort of shifty vowels she hated in English. As our relationship grew, I moved away from the expat community and into hers, a loose group of true Français. The men had goatees, the women smoked like Audrey Hepburn. The conversation often turned to the hordes of tourists who descended on our fief when the sun shone hard, when the snow piled high. It was easy enough to make fun of the Germans, since they were, after all, Germans. The English were another favourite target:

‘There was an English stag party at my bar,' Marie would say, ‘and they drank and they drank—' but instead of the usual reverence an Englishman would have in his voice while relating a big night out, disdain would drip from her every word, as if I'd never had to carry her drunk and stoned back to our place.

Early on in our relationship, I'd wanted to tell her that I loved her, but feeling she would laugh at me, I'd kept quiet. Even though I was still learning their boundaries, I already knew that French words were not made to express love. And if what I was feeling was not love, then it was something strong, and the key to understanding it was in the language. In the evenings, lying next to Marie, as smoke mingled with the smell of sex, I would repeat a sentence until it sounded French.

‘You sound Belgian,' she said to me once. Holding my breath, I asked her whether I sounded Walloon or Flemish. ‘Faut pas exag
é
rer,' she said, ‘you sound Walloon, but like a dairy farmer.' I felt proud for days afterwards.

Marie was beautiful, Marie was good in bed, Marie worked the seasons with me. I liked holding her tight against my chest, I liked the words she whispered in my ear, I liked bunching her blue miniskirt over her hips and taking her from behind. Our desires were simple enough that we kept on coming back to each other for two and a half years.

***

Denret was the one who brought me to a halt. Whenever he came into our group, he became its very centre. A reputed mountain climber, a daring windsurfer, he was a giver, whether it be of the story that everyone would be repeating the next day, or of the few spare pills he always found in the pocket of his sports jacket. He had a way of standing, lightly perched on the one straight leg, his hips cocked and his head titled to one side, which seemed to suggest ease and indifference. To Marie, he was aristocratic. But his parents were honest and loving accountants, and his demeanour went beyond affectation. I came to understand it as I spent more time with him: emotions ruled him. An image, a memory, an injustice, and we'd all fade from his sight, and he'd be wagging an imaginary finger at a long-dead general, and he'd remember his first love's scent, her promises of an unbreakable bond. My French was poor enough that I stayed quiet when a memory took hold, and he stood silent in that deceptively warm and off-handed way of his, a stance he'd developed to mask his emotions. It was perhaps for my reserve that Denret sought me out.

It started in Antibes. He picked me up in his red 2CV, and drove away before I had time to close the door.

‘I'm taking you to a spot no Englishman knows about,' he said, refusing to answer any of my questions. We pulled away from the main road, and hugged the dented coastline. At one stage, he stopped in the middle of a tight turn, got out, and climbed on the parapet. His finger first indicating I should do the same, then pointed high up towards the red hills.

‘Do you see her? That's where we're going.'

‘Oh, yes,' I said, balancing on the parapet, ignoring the drop behind us, and not wanting to disappoint him. ‘How do we get there?'

He went back into his car and waved me in urgently. At some stage, he turned into a road much like many we'd passed before. In first gear, his car struggled up the hill, its frame rattling with every bump. Denret looked straight ahead, first at the bitumen road, then at the clayish track.

‘We have to walk now. Are you afraid of walking?'

He would challenge me with such statements whenever I started to feel comfortable. And an instant later, he'd be talking as if he hadn't noticed my startled look.

‘This is forgotten history, Nathan,' he said as we neared the top of the hill. ‘Notre-Dame d'Afrique. Look at her, and look at her closely. Ask yourself why you haven't heard about her before.'

I could see a weeping Madonna facing the sea, her arms outstretched. She was looking in the general direction of Africa. Around her, at her feet and all over a low wall, were hundreds of plaques. He kneeled down and tapped a plaque with his finger: ‘Bertrand Denret, Algers'. He waved at a section of the wall:

‘All of these were killed in a single massacre. You won't find it in the history books. Is that right, Nathan? Is that right?'

My mind went blank.

‘No, that's not right,' I tried to say. To my relief, he started talking about the war.

The question of what was right seemed to preoccupy him only when he was around me. He lumped our lives as we were living them now, me with Marie and a comfortable flat, him with his mysteries, on the side of wrong. On the side of right was a leap towards a greater justice.

When I tried to piece his days together, I found that the hours he spent with me were by far the most contemplative. The rest were spent in action of one kind or another. He worked, but when I asked him more about the subject, he always answered vaguely. ‘Let's talk about something else. Business isn't very exciting.' When we were on the French Riviera, he spent large parts of his days at sea, either on a boat, or if the winds were right, on a windsurf. Up in the Alps, he alternated between ice climbing and skiing. And every evening, he was out and about, sometimes with a girl in tow, but mostly alone. If spending time with him was exciting for me, it must have been a more sedate affair for him.

‘There's no need to beat around the bush, Nathan. You're smart, and I'm smart. But look at us. Shouldn't we be doing better?' he told me once, when we were sipping rosé at his friend's bar.

‘You worked sixty hours last week, and how much did you make?' he asked me another time, at another friend's bar.

‘You're almost twenty-five,' he said once as he stopped his car on the side of a Nationale. ‘I'm closer to thirty.' He put his car in neutral, and revved the engine. ‘We're not meant to be slaves, you and me. What are you going to do in September?'

Denret infused his words with his own vitality, so that everything he said sounded like a challenge. His musings over the rights and wrongs of our lives were never mere complaints. He meant to do something about them, and while he worked out what, he was using me as a sounding board. Had they come from anyone else, I would have gladly ignored them. But there was a sense of impeding action surrounding Denret, so that, after having sex with Marie, I'd cover myself up with our duvet, stare at a mouldy spot on the ceiling, and think about my life.

Those were never productive thoughts. Rather, I was concocting a brew of past and present: thoughts of home and my years on the road mingling with the day's tiredness and the echoes of an orgasm. But for the first time, I started to think about what my life would be like had I stayed at home, my mind sticking to the sort of plans I had as a seventeen-year-old. I imagined three raucous years at university ending in a 2:1 and a job in the City. Going by what my father had done, I imagined taking up a consulting job or a banking one, and earning a bonus as big as my salary.

Whenever Marie left me in my world for too long, I ended up staring at the stains on the carpet, at the dirt between the tiles. My fingers would feel the threads of our sheets and find them coarse. And every time I emerged from such depths, I looked at Marie's body in a new light: tobacco was darkening her teeth, loose skin dangled from her arm, dark veins were breaking through her hitherto smooth feet. In such moods, I found it difficult to speak to her: everything she did and said seemed tainted. My eyes were following her fingers, as they toyed with series of lit roll-ups, the cigarettes' paper drawing lines of red against the white wall, before turning ash grey and crumbling into a full tray. My ears were listening to the texture of her voice, as her words rubbed rough against the tender part of my ears. She stood between me and something out there. I didn't know what, but it gripped me tight, leaving behind only isolated images. Blackberries, honeysuckle, grass running down a hill, stone walls whitened with chalk – these appealed to the child buried deep within. A gold watch with three precise dials, a large clean room in a tidy house, leather seats and a smooth gearbox – though new, I felt these were the sort of desires a man should have.

Denret disappeared for the whole month of July 2006. In that time, I broke up with Marie. To my surprise, tears poured down her cheeks. She turned away, and covered her eyes with her palms. I came closer impulsively, but then, considering what had just happened, I stopped awkwardly and put my hands in my pocket. For a few seconds, she looked at me through her fingers, her shoulders oscillating between facing me and showing me her back. But then, just as I was becoming too tense to move, she seemed to make a decision, and using the momentum of a turn, she laced her arms around me. Holding tighter than she ever had, she dug her fingers in my shoulders, and told me she loved me. I was taken aback. In my mind, she was too smooth to let herself fall prey to her emotions. Feeling her warm body crying, I hesitated. My nose brushed her forehead, and falling back on habits, I sniffed hard. There was that faint acridity along her hair line, the trace of rose rising from her neck, and my nose skimming past her eyebrows, the muted lushness of her cheeks. Nearing her mouth, I first felt the dampness of her breath, soft on my skin, the broad, familiar spice of her cigarettes, and then, a fraction of a second later, coming from deep within her, I smelled a sharp pungent note. I inhaled again and again, letting it dispel my doubts.