My Chocolate Redeemer (5 page)

Note the ostrich logic. The silly fool was at the mercy of the world and as if having to drag around that great black weight at the end of his withered leg were not enough, long suffering had made him simple and his wish to be loved had placed him in irons.

Uncle Claude entered at that moment and believed the evidence of his eyes. He brushed past Emile the barman, who endeavoured to cheer him up or slow him down, or perhaps (am I unworthy in my suspicions?) to ingratiate himself by offering him a ‘cup of the house' which was, I should say, a subtle blend of lime and kiwi fruit on a base of sparkling wine spiked with vodka and garnished with a sprig of peppermint, an apéritif of his own devising offered with a full heart to guests of the Priory. He needn't have bothered. Uncle Claude brushed him aside with an expression of exasperation and disgust, as one might reject the salaams of some beggar or street drunk. Just as well none of the guests in the hotel was present in the bar to witness this display of rudeness – not, I fear, that my uncle would have cared a straw if there had been – but I felt for myself, my family and the unfortunate Clovis on whom my uncle bore down with a look of puffy self-importance that made me want to shriek.

He planted himself in front of our table. ‘I'm despatched by your grandmother with instructions to escort you home.'

Clovis lifted his head from my neck at the sound of my uncle's voice and blinked with the sweet bovine glassiness of a cow lifting her head from the manger. Poor dear fellow! It is true that he pressed close to me. It's true that he was stroking my arm, but in the way that a child will do, in order to give comfort to himself not to stimulate me.

‘Good evening, Monsieur le Maire.'

My uncle ignored this salute and as he did my look of extreme displeasure mingled, I hope, with contempt. I went with him not out of any sense of obedience, but because I knew he was capable of causing a scene and Clovis did not deserve that. But I ignored the arm Uncle offered me and side by frosty side we passed out into the night. Emile the barman caught my wink and lifted a glass of the ‘cup of the house' in ironic salutation. Clovis stared after us with bloodshot eyes.

What Uncle Claude hates about Clovis is his limp. His boot. That's strange, given that my uncle laughs at the foundation of the world and stamps on the fingernails of the divine figment until blood spurts all over his shoes, and shrugs about the heat death of the universe as he blows on his coffee. The sun may expand into a red giant and cook us all, or the universe may reach the outer limits of its expansion, may go into reverse and deflate like a child's balloon popped at a party, running backwards into a point of singular nothingness – it can do all this and Uncle Claude will look on with a grin and a wink. But show him a boy bitten by a bug in his babyhood and my uncle throws his hands to his eyes and runs away like a medieval peasant faced by a leper. It makes him feel ill, unclean.

‘Nothing distinguishes us from the more primitive life forms – except perhaps the number of accidents in the replication of the genetic material over a very brief period – cosmically speaking.'

You heard him say that? You're my witness, aren't you? And I tell you, it stinks. Because it sounds like science and all it is is a complaint about behaviour.

‘Uncle Claude, does a virus have a conscience? Can it sin?'

‘Don't be silly.'

Do you understand the nature of the lie being told? Every blink of his eyes is a lie.

What drives scientists is the same thing which drove priests long ago. Power. Knowing secrets.

‘Clovis is my friend. That's all.'

‘The lad's no good for you. A fugitive from reality. So much space in his attic you could fly owls up there.'

‘The Angel thinks he could be useful.'

‘Monsieur Cherubini, if you please. The
patron
takes a wide view. Political considerations, Bella, make for unexpected associations.'

‘Strange bedfellows.'

He shivers. ‘I beg your pardon?'

‘It's an English expression.'

‘Of course. Someone said that wisdom begins with the rejection of English ideas. The point is that you're here now with us, in France. Your family. What do you think I feel if I have to go out at night and find you drinking with the postboy in the Priory, which is full of strange types. Some of the worst among the management. Closely followed by some of the guests. If you won't consider my feelings, think of your grandmama. She feels the responsibility since your mother left.'

We were walking slowly up the hill to our house at the top of the village. The air felt warm and fat and carried the smell of jasmine. In the moonlight the lake kept its large eye on us.

‘I wish you wouldn't always personalise issues, Bella. For you everything must be individualised. That's bad because it prevents clear thought. Remember that evolution only takes account of transmissable mutations, exterior forces acting by chance, over time, on strains within the population. Single deformations don't count. Freaks are a sideshow. Bad science.'

I reach up and touch his neck suddenly in the moonlight and he flinches.

‘You jumped! You're frightened of freaks, you think you'll catch something! Shame on you!'

‘Don't do that, Bella!'

‘I'm your prisoner, aren't I? Like Gloria.'

‘Gloria?'

‘You know who I mean. I know you stole and hid her. Well I'm not staying for long, I promise you. I'm just waiting.'

‘And for what might you be waiting?'

‘For Mama to come back.'

‘I don't think she will, you know. She's left for good.'

‘Then I'll wait for Papa. When he calls.'

‘From Africa? What makes you think so?'

‘I don't think so, I know so.'

I knew nothing of the sort but I said it all the same and I made it sound as if I meant it. I think I did mean it.

‘Now, Bella, don't cry,' says Uncle Claude. ‘I know it's hard to be young. I was young too.'

Another lie. My uncle purports to be my father's younger brother. By five years! What a bloody joke that is. When Uncle Claude was a boy he must have looked exactly as he does now, stooped, lined, his little sharp beetle face pecking at the world. He'd be much shorter then, that's all, a middle-aged dwarf, who went about terrifying his friends as soon as he could talk. Telling them that there was no bright heaven presided over by a loving father; instead the universe was a dead loss. It wasn't even particularly majestic, or infinite or filled with zillions of worlds. It was dark, cold, empty and probably stone dead. I saw big-little Claude jumping out of the bushes with questions about whether the universe was open or closed. When he was a young-old man they thought it was closed. Now that he's an old-old man, they say it's probably open. Big deal!

Much more important seems to me his complete misreading of Clovis. The boy is too wild, too weak-willed, to be trained for the sort of thing Uncle Claude and the Angel have in mind. His problem isn't love, it's drugs. Wherever he gets them, whatever they are, he takes them all the time and jumps on his yellow post-office autocycle and tears up and down the streets of the village like a madman, his face ice-white, the wretched little two-stroke machine bucking and coughing like the sad mechanical incompetent it is, not the modern invention the post office passes it off as. Mind you, to Clovis in his bombed-out, smashed state of euphoria, I suppose it's a celestial steed, a Pegasus, and he is Hermes, messenger of the gods. His long green hair scything the air has the sheen you see when the wind presses and polishes a patch of grass. He moves too slowly to be much of a danger, except perhaps to the hard of hearing, and the very old, as he putters through the hidden lanes, covered in clematis and ivy, climbing roses and bougainvillaea, which run between and behind the lakeside hotels, and connect the few steep roads plunging to the waterside, riding with remarkable composure, but absolutely gassed to the eyeballs. Owl-eyed, rigid with dignity, out and about on his business as if commanded by some heavenly general. There's a big number 4 on the front mudguard of his bike. This does not mean that there are three other postboys, no – there is only Clovis, rushing at heaven knows what speeds down what his stoked-up head tells him are the boulevards of his dreams. And likely to write himself off, sooner rather than later. Now the Angel has told him he is also an integral part of their new political movement and that at the very next rally he'll be in charge of the motorised communication division. What worries me is that Clovis just doesn't sniff and smoke his drugs, he injects them as well, and he has no money for fresh needles. If hepatitis doesn't get him, something worse will. Uncle Claude thinks that I make love to Clovis. This shows pretty clearly how very little he really knows about the world. Who makes love nowadays? What I give Clovis is cash intended for clean needles, because I worry about him. But he spends it on more pills and powders. It's not myself I press on Clovis, it's my money. The Angel and Uncle Claude and their Party wish to employ Clovis when they have made their revolution. He tells me that he will be dressed in ‘light' colours when they have, as they say, ‘chastened the channels of communication' of which the postal services, being the most democratic and closest to the people, deserve the fiercest attention. ‘Pornography clogs the mails just as foreigners bloat the slums' – that's the cry of the Party. Clovis and the police chief Pesché, for their own reasons, are recruits to the Party.

My father detested and scorned these dreams. If he could see how the Party has grown in strength, the rallies, the looked-for seats in the Assembly, he would turn in his grave, that's if he has a grave in which to turn. It's odd that someone should disappear so completely. His grave is unknown, his memorial service forgotten. Our apartment in the sixteenth arrondissement sold and the officials in Papa's government department shrugging their shoulders and looking blank whenever we ask them for news of what was happening to him, or where he lay buried, for Papa's disappearance from the face of the earth and from the memory of the government he served is total. He is as if he never was. ‘Lost in Africa', the shoehorn official told us after we sold the apartment and he added, as if this would encourage spiritual acceptance, ‘and Africa is a big place'.

It was with Papa's death that I discovered we had been rich. I learnt this when we suddenly became poor. The second-floor apartment in the rue Vandal with its rare collections of antelope masks from the Ivory Coast, masks with weary, hooded eyes carved of black wood; soap-stone sculptures of old men taking their ease on small chairs; Bundu masks from Sierra Leone with their funny squashed faces and helmets like knights; grave-faced Basuku masks, dreamily sedate faces with wooden birds perched on their heads and great straw beards – all sold from under our feet and the proceeds seized ‘pending investigation'. What investigation? And my mother, beside herself with worry (who could blame her?), stole away to England – as if she recognised her status had been diminished.

I was just twelve and at twelve one doesn't have many alternatives. One puzzles, wonders, weeps and perhaps learns the sounds of idiomatic English at the North London Academy for Girls even if the food was so bad that my appetite began to fail. One reads and talks to oneself, and grows up fast.

It was at about this time that I began to depend more and more on chocolates. My tastes are pretty catholic:
Praline, After Eights
and
Rolos
, as well as
Lindt Excellence, Côte d'Or ‘Extra Dry'
and
Cadbury's Bourneville Dark
. I'm not a chocolate snob, I'm a chocolate catholic. It began as a comfort but it became my salvation. Faced by the barbaric custom of feeding children at school which the English adopt, faced by little cow-pats of grey meat between buns; or the minced remainders of yesterday's lunch floating in a greasy soup covered in an elderly thatch of potato and called a ‘pie', I turned to the corner shop and there among the racks of chocolate found how to save myself.

My mother took the diminution in status quite well. She would work at becoming an independent, fully rounded human being. Once, many years before, she had been a beauty queen, she told me. This came as a surprise because she is now a short, rather squat woman with a small nose, a large mouth and no shape worth mentioning. There were one or two false starts on her way back to self-sufficiency. She laid aside her camera and became for a while a follower of the Bhagwan, dressed in purple, and came home at odd hours smelling of herbs. But that passed, I'm pleased to say, when she picked up the camera again. She did this while showing me pictures of herself in her days as a beauty. In the late sixties she had been Miss Torquay and even as late as 1969 she'd been crowned Queen of the Coast by the Mayor of Bournemouth. The photograph showed her wearing high heels, the sash of office and her crown tiered like a wedding cake. In the photograph of her enthronement as Queen of the Southern Region she is being kissed on the cheek by a man who presents his bottom to the camera while he pecks her cheek. She grins at the viewer with a frighteningly rigid smile. The man who is kissing her was apparently a well-known television personality. For what he was well known she could not remember. Even though I find a man's bottom is possibly his most revealing feature, in this case it gave nothing away.

‘That was a competition organised by the Railway Service of the Southern Region, Bella. In Britain the provinces are called regions, as you will discover.'

For a while, after leaving the Bhagwan, Mama was a feminist and when I was twelve she decided we should both attend body awareness classes. These took place in a private room in a local gymnasium. About twelve women met there and took off their clothes and examined themselves minutely in front of large mirrors while in the background Vivaldi played on tape. I found it rather dull. I saw in the mirror what I saw every morning in the mirror at home: a somewhat thin, leggy girl with nice but small breasts, boy's hips, rather flat ugly knees, body hair beginning to sprout, even then I had this early shading of hair just above the ankles, like the top half of a pair of socks! A square open face in which the eyes were possibly the best features, large and grey with lashes I'm really quite pleased with, a recurrent patch of acne around the right-hand corner of my mouth which is reflected more faintly in about the same place on the left. I have noticed that spots on one side of the face frequently have their doubles on the other side, only slightly less severe and about five millimetres or so higher. Pretty boring really. I looked at myself in the mirror but there was so little to see. The other women were older and perhaps read more into themselves. To see them stroking and cooing to their calves and elbows, and doing what were called ‘touch and appreciation sessions' was really quite eerie. There followed something called ‘naming of parts'. We were invited to give new, loving, non-abusive names to our most-loved and secret parts. The women came up with names like Daisy and Mick and Honeypot. We could write songs or poems about them. One woman composed a hymn to her breasts which she sang to us. Several of the group wept and felt deeply religious and no one was surprised when the lady told us she had once been a nun. The next phase was to be the use of the speculum to examine ourselves internally.